A Raid in France

After the D-Day invasion of Europe began, US forces had trouble moving sufficient fuel from the coast to the war front. The Air Force began transporting gasoline in bombers. Long-range belly tanks used by fighters were loaded into the bomb racks, filled with gasoline, and flown close to the front lines. Sometimes the captured airfields were still burning when my father’s crew landed. Those flights did not count as combat missions.

Here is another event he recorded, in a somewhat lighter vein than the crash described previously:

One time when we were ferrying gasoline we landed on an airbase in France and they didn't unload us; we had to stay all night. So we got to poking around that afternoon, and we found out it was a fighter base and the fighter pilots were living in tents out there on the field.

We got acquainted with one pilot and he showed us his pile of wine. He had been fooling around outside in the town and he found a cellar full of wine that had been just left - everybody left it. And it was bonded wine packed in wooden boxes, packed with straw. So he commandeered a truck and he went out and liberated a load of it. He had it stacked head high behind his tent.

Well, we decided that for his own good we needed to relieve him of some of that wine, and we went back after dark that night. It was pitch dark and each of us got a case of wine over our shoulder and we started back to the airplane with it. And we were walking across the center of the field. The center of the field was kind of pockmarked with shell craters. Most of them weren't very big. They were just kind of round and big like a basket, but a lot of them weren't even big even to make a decent foxhole.

But I walked off into one of them and this thing was different from the rest of them. It went straight down about, probably at least 6 or 7 feet. And it was narrow, so narrow that I couldn't do much there, just stand on my feet. And there I was with that case of wine up over my head and I couldn't reach high enough to push it over the side. I had to holler for help, and my buddies. And they came back over there and found me, and pulled the wine off my head, and lifted me out of the hole. That was that. We got the wine back to England and had quite a time with it. But I never did hear the end of that till the crew was broken up. That was quite a joke amongst the gang.