The sun is just below the horizon now and there
are fine pink puff clouds all over the sky. The captain looks at his watch. “I
guess we better get going,” he says. The other Brown, the tail gunner, runs
over. He hands over two rings, a cameo and another. “I forgot to leave these,”
he says. “Will you put them under my pillow?” The crew scramble to their places
and the door is slammed and locked. The waist doors are open, of course, with
the guns peering out of them, lashed down now, but immediately available. The
long scallop of the cartridge belts drapes into each one.
The captain waves from his high perch. His
window sits right over the ship’s name—Mary Ruth, Memories of Mobile.
The engines turn over and catch one at a time and roar as they warm up. And
now, from all over the field, come the bursting roars of starting engines. From
all over the field the great ships come rumbling from their dispersal points
into the main runways. They make a line Like giant bugs, a parade of them,
moving down to the take-off stretch.
The captain signals and two ground-crew men
dart in and pull out the chocks from in front of the wheels and dart out again.
The Mary Ruth guns her motors and then slowly crawls out along her
entrance and joins the parade. Along the runway the first ship whips out and
gathers speed and takes the air, and behind her comes another and behind
another and behind another, until the flying line of ships stretches away to
the north. For a little while the squadron has disappeared, but in a few
minutes back they come over the field, but this time they are not in a line.
They have gained altitude and are flying in a tight formation. They go roaring
over the field and they have hardly passed when another squadron from another
field comes over, and then another and another. They will rendezvous at a given
point, the squadrons from many fields, and when the whole force has gathered
there will be perhaps a hundred of the great ships flying in Vs and in Vs of
Vs, each protecting itself and the others by its position. And this great
flight is going south like geese in the fall.
There is incredible detail to get these
missions off. Staff detail of supply and intelligence detail, deciding and
briefing the targets, and personnel detail of assigning the crews, and
mechanical detail of keeping the engines going. Bomb Boogie went out
with the others, but in a little while she flutters back with a dead motor. She
has conked out again. No one can know why. She sinks dispiritedly to the
ground.
