The Army bus rattles over the rough road and
through a patch of woods. In the distance there are a few squat brown buildings
and a flagstaff flying the American flag. This is a bomber station. England is Uttered
with them. This is one of the best. There is no mud here, and the barracks are
permanent and adequate. There is no high concentration of planes in any one
field. Probably no more than twenty-five Flying Fortresses live here, and they
are so spread out that you do not see them at once. A raider might get one of
them, but he would not be likely to get more than one.
No attempt is made to camouflage the buildings
or the planes—it doesn’t work and it’s just a lot of work. Air protection and
dispersal do work. Barbed wire is strung along the road, coils of it, and in
front of the administration building there is a gate with a sentry box. The
bus pulls to a stop near the gate and the men jump down, adjusting their gas
masks at their sides. No one is permitted to leave the place without his gas
mask. The men file through the gate, identify themselves, and sign In back on
the post. The crews walk slowly to their barracks.
The room is long and narrow and unpainted.
Against each side wall are iron double-decker bunks, alternating with clothes
lockers. A long rack in the middle between the bunks serves as a hanger for
whiter coats and raincoats. Next to it is the rack of rules and submachine
guns of the crew.
Each bunk is carefully made, and to the foot of
each are hung a helmet and a gas mask. On the walls are pinup girls. But the
same girls near each bunk—big-breasted blondes in languorous attitudes, child
faces, parted shiny lips and sleepy eyes, which doubtless mean passion, but
always the same girls.
The crew of the Mary Ruth have their
bunks on the right-hand side of the room. They have had these bunks only a few
weeks. A Fortress was shot down and the bunks were emptied. It is strange to
sleep in the bed of a man who was at breakfast with you and now is dead or a
prisoner hundreds of miles away. It is strange and necessary. His clothes are
in the locker, to be picked up and put away. His helmet is to be taken off the
foot of the bunk and yours put there. You leave his pin-up girls where they
are. Why change them? Yours would be the same girls.
This crew did not name or come over in the Mary
Ruth. On the nose of the ship her name is written, and under it “Memories
of Mobile.” But this crew does not know who
