The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 by Stephen Ambrose

and played together. We would share our lives until death or the war’s end.” Nineteen-year-old Pepin was the youngest member. Lieutenant Duncan was twenty-six years old. To Pepin that seemed “ancient,” but the two men formed a close bond. “Duncan liked to drink,” Pepin recalled, “and I didn’t, so I made sure he kept out of trouble.” They flew training missions all around the California coast and out over the Pacific. All the crew practiced their individual skills, bombing runs, takeoffs and landings, air-to-air gunnery, navigation, radio work, and whatever else it took to make them combat-ready. After some months of this they got orders to go to Europe. First, though, they had a ten-day leave. Eight of them pooled their money and went to a resort at Lake Arrowhead, where Pepin said they “had a first-class bang-up time. We lived as kings and crammed all the pleasures one could have into our last fling before joining the battle. Duncan, who had a lot of manly experience, rewarded his young watchdog (me) by making sure I learned about life quickly. I fell in love at Lake Arrowhead. I fell in love several times in California before it was time to say goodbye to Chris, Susan, Lori, and Amy.”17 It was critical for each crew to develop and maintain a close bond. They lived together, sergeants in one place, the officers in another. Irritating habits could magnify and ruin their relationship, things like their accents, the music they liked, the curse words they used, their taste in women and liquor and books or comics, their politics, their bragging or their being unusually modest, their way of washing or brushing their teeth, the way they wore their clothes, the packages they received from home, how they played sports or which sport they liked, their jokes, what made them laugh or cry, anything and everything.  They were on their way to being men at war. They would need to have a closeness unknown to civilians, no matter what the civilians did. Their lives would be at stake. Every one of them had to depend, absolutely, on everyone else doing his job right. They had to not only get along with one another but also to have unquestioning faith in each other. Yet they were thrown together. Before being assigned to their crew, most if not all of them had never known anyone else in their airplane. All they had in common was being in the AAF, an unquenchable desire to fly, a never or seldom spoken patriotism, and - overwhelmingly - being young. Most were twenty-two years old or younger.  Lt. Donald Kay, a bombardier, met his crew at Biggs Field, El Paso, Texas, in April 1944. The co-pilot assigned to the plane was a married man but “he was trying to set a record for sex in his first week and scared the hell out of the rest of the crew.” The sergeants got together and came to Kay and the navigator to ask them to tell the pilot that the co-pilot had to go. They gladly did so and shortly thereafter he was replaced. One of the waist gunners was an alcoholic “and we dumped him too.” The crew, as finally assembled, came from Kansas (pilot), Illinois (co-pilot), Indiana (navigator), Connecticut (Kay, the bombardier), and the sergeants from Wisconsin, Mississippi, New York, West Virginia, and New Jersey.
    Of the seventeen original crews that began training when Kay’s crew did in May 1944, only six finished the war. In Europe, his 465th Bomb Group lost thirty-five crews. His was the only one of the four crews that arrived in Europe on July 22, 1944, to finish. Of the other three bombardiers, two were killed in action and the other became a POW.18 Lt. Walter Baskin had hoped to be a fighter pilot, but to his dismay was assigned to a B-24 as a co-pilot. Beginning in January 1944, he trained at the air base in Blythe, California. His letters home reveal how tough it was.  January 3: “We have been flying this B-24 day and night since we got here and they keep us pretty busy. It’s 9:00 P.M. now and I have to go to