Mission One
During the crew’s breakfast this morning, my co-pilot, Lieutenant Mangual, asked me, “What’s on the agenda today, Captain?”. To be honest, I had no idea. I mean, I knew that an airfield in Cherbourg was our mission, but I had never flown over France before, never flown a bombing mission, hell, I’d never been in combat before. How could I imagine what would await me and my crew over France? Not wanting to let on my own doubts, I replied, “the first of our 25 missions, and then we get to go home.”
I knew how unlikely it was that any of us would return home, but as Captain of the Action Team Annie, it’s my job to lead, keep morale high, fly the plane, and cross my fingers…
Bomber command tries to treat their new planes and crews somewhat gingerly, so we were fortunate to be sent on a mission with plenty of fighter escorts, and we were also kept well to the interior of the formation with a nice buffer of more experienced planes to keep the enemy fighters off of us.
Our first contact with the enemy came over the English Channel. Lieutenant Nikisch, our radio operator, notified me of a small flight of ME109’s made it through the layers of planes protecting us on all sides. However, before any of the crew were able to take a shot, our escorting Hurricanes chased them off.
As we made landfall over France, we made contact with another flight of enemy fighters, this time we were not be so lucky and it would be up to the crew to keep these fighters off of us. 3 ME109’s came at us from our 12 and 3 o’clock. Lieutenant Anderson opened up with the nose gun, Master Sergeant Munro with the top turret, Sergeants Petersen, Killen, Takara, and Walsh with the Ball Turret, port and starboard waist guns, and tail gun. Under the hail of fire, one fighter was hit and was forced to turn off the attack, but another fighter made it through, and unleashed hell on my plane and on my crew.
When it was all over, my starboard wing flap had ceased functioning, and Sgt. Killen had taken a nasty ricochet, tearing open a gash across his forearm. Fortunately, Killen was able to bandage his own wound and continue fighting. Then the flak started as we neared our target.
Though none of the flak hit us with any significant force, I did see the Southern Belle, who had been on our starboard wing the whole mission, go down in a ball of flame. I saw no one bail out before they dropped from formation and out of sight.
At least the skies were clear and Lt. Andersen had an unobstructed view of the target. So clear in fact, that he reports in the range of 92% of the bombs hit the target!
As soon as the bomb bay doors had closed, the formation turned around and headed home with surprisingly little to no resistance from the Germans. Over the English Channel we had a brief run in with a lone ME109 who had snuck through the defenses, the crew missed with all their shots, and fortunately, the 109 missed and peeled off as well.
The skies were clear over England and enabled us to make a safe landing. I called over the radio, “Congratulations on a successful first mission, gentlemen. One down, and before we know it, we’ll be going home.”
We were all a bit rattled from the day’s events and needed something to take the edge off. Walsh had been keeping a bottle of Champagne in his footlocker since we arrived in England, and the crew felt a little celebration in order. We toasted to the maiden flight of Action Team Annie, and promised ourselves we would throw ourselves a proper bash when we finished our 25th.
I really hope we are all around for that party.