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

Link from 10 to 11 tonight. Then get up pretty early in the morning so you can see that sleep doesn’t mean anything around here. All you do is work and if you don’t work there’s nothing else to do so you just work.”
    The AAF did not have enough B-24s for the demand. February 10: “When we are scheduled to fly we have trouble getting an airplane that will fly. There are plenty of planes here, but they are old and over half of them are always on the ramp being repaired. We had a nice scheduled cross country flight all fixed up to go to Santa Maria yesterday, but one of the engines was throwing so much oil that we wouldn’t take it up.” Still the crew kept busy. February 11: “Every third day we go twenty hours straight and the two days in between are seventeen hours long. . . .We fly every day and sometimes we don’t get home ‘til 3 A.M.  but we still get up and go again. I believe combat will be a rest after this.” On March 2 he wrote: “We are winding up our training here and the last part will be almost entirely devoted to formation flying. When you get to combat if you can’t fly formation you are just a ‘dead duck.’” As Consolidated, Ford, and the other makers of the plane began to turn them out in record numbers, Baskin’s craft improved. He was glad to tell his parents, “This ship is brand-new and has just twenty-eight hours of flying time on it. It is going to carry us a long way and then bring us back, so it gets first consideration in all cases.” He liked his fellow officers. Baskin came from a Mississippi cotton farm. The pilot, Lt. Russell Paulnock, was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner. Baskin described Paulnock as “a good boy and a cautious pilot.” The bombardier was Lt.  James Bartels, from Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a preacher. He was married and his wife was at Blythe with him. The crew had been practicing dropping bombs and Bartels was “a right good bombardier.” The navigator was Lt. Earl Barseth. “He is from New England and a typical Yankee,” Baskin wrote.  In mid-March, Baskin’s B-24 made cross-country trips. He wrote his parents on March 13, more or less unbelievingly, “Last week we flew over the Grand Canyon and Boulder Dam and that is really a beautiful sight. We flew for hours over stretches of desert and waste land wherenobody lives.” In one letter, Baskin declared that “this B-24 is not my dream ship,” but he confessed “it certainly packs a wallop.”
    In April, his training completed, Baskin joined McGovern at Lincoln, Nebraska, where his plane was weathered in for a few days. Then in the middle of the month the sky was clear, so it was off to Florida in formation with his bomber group on its way to Europe. Co-pilot Baskin was flying when the plane passed over his farm near Vaiden, Mississippi. Baskin pealed his Liberator out of formation and buzzed the place. He scared the wits out of all the chickens, cows, pigs, and mules and saw his dad standing in the backyard, puffing on his pipe, watching.  Then he buzzed his school, practically at window level, to give Bobby, his little brother, a big hello. Bobby, hearing the plane roar, jumped up from his desk saying, “That’s my brother,” and ran out to the playground to wave goodbye to his big brother as Baskin flew off on his way to combat. The chickens didn’t lay and the cows went dry for a week, and Bobby got suspended from school.  For Baskin it was fun, but it wasn’t like being the pilot of a fighter airplane.  As he wrote his parents, “This co-pilot job is not what I was raised to be.”19 Ken Barmore had his first look at and ride in a B-24 on December 30, 1943. He was a co-pilot. His pilot was Lt. Jim Connelly, from Texas, “who was just the greatest guy.” Riding with them at first was an instructor who was an American but had joined the Royal Air Force before Pearl Harbor and flew a Wellington bomber over Europe. After America entered the war he came home to join the