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

AAF, and Barmore felt “we were real lucky to have him, he was a neat guy.” To Barmore’s discomfort, he didn’t get to do much of the flying: “They just threw the co-pilots in the right seat and learn as you can.” He tried and tried again to move over to the left seat, but he had not gone through transition school so his chances “were practically nil.” He did a lot of formation flying and bombing practice. “I got to feeling pretty comfortable in the airplane” but Connelly would seldom allow him to take off or land.20 Radioman Sgt. Robert Hammer met his fellow crew members at Mitchell Field, New York, then went with them to Georgia for flight training on their B-24.  Formation flying for his pilot and indeed all the other pilots was difficult.  Much of the air time was devoted to learning how to do it, despite a high accident rate. Three B-24s were lost during practice, killing thirty men. On one occasion while flying in formation, Hammer was sending blinking signals from the waist window to the radio operator in the plane to the right. He had just signed off when another plane was sucked into that plane by the prop wash. It tore the fuselage in half. Hammer saw men, including the radio operator he had just communicated with, flying in one direction and their parachutes in another. All ten were killed, but the other plane managed to land safely.  After Hammer’s plane landed, and just before debriefing, his pilot came up to him with tears in his eyes. He asked if Hammer didn’t think they were making the planes fly too close together. After the debriefing his pilot was grounded for his emotional response. Other men were lost, including the originally assigned navigator, who took the plane into a gunnery area on the East Coast on a night mission. Hammer commented, “We had been shot at before even getting out of the States.” With the replacements, the crew flew to New Hampshire, got a new B-24, and flew it to Gander Field, Newfoundland, then off to Europe.21 Sgt. Howard Goodner, a radioman, was sent to Buckley Field, Colorado, to be assigned to a crew. There he took refresher courses in communications, target identification, and first aid, but they were mainly to kill time. In June 1944, his orders arrived, sending him to Westover Field, near Springfield, Massachusetts, a long train trip. There he met his fellow crew members.  Goodner’s pilot was Lt. Richard Farrington, from St. Louis, a tall man who exuded self-confidence. Farrington had enlisted when he was nineteen years old and had not yet reached twenty-one. The co-pilot, Lt. Jack Regan, was twenty.  From Queens in New York City, he was nicknamed Abe because of his deep voice and uncanny resemblance to the young, beardless Lincoln. The bombardier, Lt. Chris Manners from Pittsburgh, was twenty-three. The sergeants came from all over and ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-eight. Eighteen-year-old Albert Seraydarian, an Armenian-American, was from Brooklyn. His “dem’s” and “dose’s” and other Brooklynese were so thick the southern-born Goodner could barely understand him. His nickname, unsurprisingly, was “Brooklyn.” Another gunner was eighteen-year-old Jack Brennan from Cliffside Park, New Jersey. The nose gunner was Harry Gregorian, like Seraydarian an Armenian-American, but from Detroit.  The flight engineer, Jerome Barrett, twenty years old, came from New York City.  His father owned a chemical company that occupied two entire floors of Rockefeller Center and his next-door neighbor was Broadway star Ethel Merman.  Goodner liked him at once - the two boys, one from Central Park West, the other from Cleveland, Tennessee, hit it off at once. Bob Peterson, the ball turret gunner, was the “old man,” married with two kids.  In this way Americans from all over the country, from far different backgrounds, got to know one another. For every one of them, as for McGovern and his crew, or Baskin and his, or Barmore and his, it