(that is, from the other direction, into the wind).
Another of his examiners, to Darmstadter’s considerable surprise, had taken the position that since no one was with him in the cockpit, they didn’t know what had happened, and that it wasn’t really fair to assume that he had done what he had done from panic; that he was entitled to the benefit of the doubt; and that Darmstadter’s best judgment had been to do what he had done.
There had been seven officer pilots on the elimination board. The vote—it was supposed to be secret, but the president of the board told him anyway—was four to three not to eliminate him. He would be permitted to graduate and to transition to Douglas C-47 aircraft.
The C-47—the Army Air Corps version of the Douglas DC-3 airliner—was supposed to be the most forgiving aircraft, save the Piper Cub, in the Army Air Corps. Douglas was building them by the thousands, and each of them needed two pilots. They were used as personnel transports and cargo aircraft. Most of the C-47s being built would be used in support of airborne operations, both to carry paratroopers and to tow gliders.
Hank Darmstadter had understood that his glamorous service as an Air Corps pilot would be in the right—copilot’s—seat of a C-47 Gooney Bird. He would work the radios and the landing gear and the flaps, while a more skillful pilot would do the flying.
And that’s what he had done at first when he’d come to England. But then the system had caught up with him. He had received an automatic promotion to first lieutenant, based solely on the length of his service. It was the policy of the troop carrier wing commander that the pilot-in-command, whenever possible, be senior to the copilot. And Darmstadter had picked up enough hours, and enough landings and takeoffs as a copilot, to be qualified as an aircraft commander.
Ten days before, when his squadron had returned from a practice mission—in empty aircraft practicing low-level formation flight as required for the dropping of parachutists—the troop carrier wing commander had gathered the pilots in a maintenance hangar and told them Eighth Air Force was looking for twin-engine qualified pilots for a “classified mission involving great personal risk” and that those inclined to volunteer should see the adjutant.
Only three Gooney Bird pilots had volunteered. The other two were pilots who desperately wanted to be fighter pilots, and believed that unless they did something, anything, to get out of Gooney Birds, they would spend the war in a Gooney Bird cockpit.
Hank Darmstadter, who himself would have loved to be a fighter pilot, didn’t think there was any chance at all of getting to be one by volunteering for this “classified mission. ” He could think of no good, logical reason for his having volunteered. Without false heroics, he understood that there was hazard enough in either towing gliders or dropping parachutists when there were a hundred Gooney Birds all doing the same thing at the same time in a very small chunk of airspace.
The one reason he had volunteered was that he had wanted to, and he was perfectly willing to admit that it was probably a goddamned dumb thing to do.
When he saw the adjutant, there was a short questionnaire to fill out. It asked the routine questions, and a couple of strange ones. One question was to rate his own ability as a pilot, with five choices from “completely competent” down through “marginally competent.” Darmstadter had judged himself in the middle: “reasonably competent, considering experience and training.” Another question wanted to know if he spoke a foreign language, and if so, which one and how well. And the last question was whether or not he had any relatives, however remote the connection, living on the European continent, and if so, their names and addresses.
He was tempted to answer “no” to both questions, but in the end, he put down that he understood German, and that he had a great-uncle, Karl-Heinz Darmstadter, and presumably some other relatives, in Germany but that he didn’t know where.
He hadn’t quite forgotten about having volunteered, but he had put it out of his mind. For one thing, he felt pretty sure if they were making a selection of volunteers, they would probably have a dozen better qualified people than a Gooney Bird driver to pick, and for another, considering the Army Air Corps bureaucracy, it would take three weeks or a month before they told him “thanks, but no thanks.”