four o’clock this morning, the charge of quarters had come to his Quonset hut, and told him the adjutant wanted to see him. The adjutant had handed him a teletype message:
PRIORITY
HQ EIGHTH US AIR FORCE
COMMANDING OFFICER 312TH TROOP CARRIER WING
1ST LT HENRY G. DARMSTADTER 03434090 2101 TROOP
CARRIER SQUADRON TRANSFERRED AND WILL
IMMEDIATELY PROCEED FERSFIELD ARMY AIR CORPS
STATION REPORTING UPON ARRIVAL THEREAT TO
COMMANDING OFFICER 402ND COMPOSITE SQUADRON
FOR DUTY. OFFICER WILL CARRY ALL SERVICE RECORDS
AND ALL PERSONAL PROPERTY. CO 312TH TCW DIRECTED
TO PROVIDE MOST EXPEDITIOUS AIR OR GROUND
TRANSPORTATION.
BY COMMAND OF LT GENERAL EAKER
A.J. MACNAMEE COLONEL USAAC ADJUTANT GENERAL
At 0400 there was soup thick enough to cut with a knife, and the weather forecast said “snow and/or freezing rain,” so the most expeditious air or ground transportation had been a jeep. It had been a five-hour drive, and Darmstadter had been stiff with cold when they were passed inside the Fersfield gate by an MP wearing his scarf wrapped around his head against the cold.
“The 402nd’s way the hell and gone the other end of the field, Lieutenant. When you see a B-17 graveyard, you found it,” the MP said.
As they drove down a road paralleling the north-south runway, past lines of B-17s in revetments, Darmstadter was surprised to hear an aircraft approaching, engines throttled back for landing. He stuck his head out the side of the jeep and looked at the sky. It was neither raining nor snowing, but conditions were far below what he thought of as minimums of visibility.
And then he saw the airplane. It was a B-25, and for a moment he thought the pilot had overshot the runway and would have to go around. But the pilot set it down anyway.
Damned fool! Darmstadter thought, professionally.
They reached the end of the runway. There was, as the MP had said, a B-17 graveyard: fifteen, maybe twenty, battered and wrecked and skeletal B-17s, some missing engines, some with no landing gear, their fuselages sitting on the ground. Three battered B-17s, Darmstadter saw with confused interest, were still flyable, to judge by their positions near the taxi ramp and by the fire extinguishers and other ground equipment near them. But the tops of their fuselages, except for portions of the pilots’ windshields, were gone, as if someone had simply taken a cutting torch and cut them away. Someone, for reasons Darmstadter could not imagine, had turned three B-17s into open-cockpit aircraft.
There were half a dozen Quonset huts and a homemade arrangement of tent canvas and wooden supports that obviously served as some sort of hangar, or at least a means to work on engines out of the snow and rain.
As the jeep approached the area, the B-25 he had seen land taxied down a dirt taxiway, turned around with a roar of its engines, and stopped. Three sailors—it took Darmstadter a moment to be sure that’s what they really were— trotted up to the B-25 and started to tie it down and put chocks in place. The crew door dropped open and an Air Corps officer jumped to the ground. Darmstadter waited for the rest of the crew to come out, and then, when the pilot turned and pushed the door closed, he was forced to conclude that, in violation of regulations—and, as far as he was concerned, common sense—the B-25 had been flown without either a copilot or a flight engineer.
The jeep, all this time, had been moving.
“This must be it, Lieutenant,” the jeep driver said, and pointed to a small sign reading simply ORDERLY ROOM nailed to the door of one of the Quonsets.
“I’ll see,” Darmstadter said, and got out of the jeep and walked to the Quonset.
He knocked and was told to come in. Inside were two Navy enlisted men, three Air Corps enlisted men, and three naval officers, all three of them wearing gold naval aviator’s wings. Two of them were wearing USN fur-collared leather, zipper jackets. The third wore a navy blouse, with pilot’s wings, the gold sleeve stripes of a lieutenant commander, and an impressive row of ribbons. Some of them Darmstadter had never seen before, but he recognized both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart.
Darmstadter saluted.
“Sir, I’m looking for the 402nd Composite Wing.”
“You’ve found it, Lieutenant,” the Navy flyer with the DFC said. He offered his hand. “I’m Commander Bitter.”
“How do you do, Sir,” Darmstadter said.
“You must be Darmstadter,” the lieutenant commander said.
“Yes, Sir,” Darmstadter said. He handed over a Certified True Copy of the teletype message from Eighth Air Force.