The Pittsburgh Press (May 23, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A B-26 base, England –
Lt. Bill Collins, who goes by the name of Chief, is what is known as a “hot pilot.”
He used to be a fighter pilot, and he handles his Marauder bomber as though it were a fighter. He is daring, and everybody calls him a “character,” but his crew has a fanatical faith in him.
Chief is addicted to violent evasive action when they’re in flak, and the boys like that because it makes them harder to hit.
They’ve had flak through the plane and within a foot of them, but none of them has been wounded.
When they finished their allotted number of missions – which used to give them an automatic trip to America, but doesn’t anymore – Chief buzzed the home field in celebration of their achievement.
He got that old B-26 wound up in a steep glide, came booming down the runway, leveled off a foot above the ground and went screaming across the field at 250 miles an hour – only a foot above the ground all the way. And at the same time, he had to shoot out all the red flares he had in the plane. They say it looked like a Christmas tree flying down the runway.
Chief used to be a clerk with the Aetna Life Insurance Company back in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. He is 25 now and doesn’t know whether he will go back to the insurance job or not after the war. He says it depends on how much they offer him.
Lt. Jack Arnold is the one they call Red Dog. He is only 22, although he seems older to me. He enlisted in the Army almost four years ago, when he was just out of high school. He was an infantryman for a year and a half before he finally went to bombardier school and got wings for his chest and bars for his shoulders.
He figures that as a bombardier he has killed thousands of Germans, and he thinks it is an excellent profession. He says the finest bombing experience he has ever had was when they missed the target one day and quite accidentally hit a barracks full of German troops and killed many of them.
Red Dog is friendly and gay and yet he is fundamentally serious man who takes the war to heart. The enlisted men of the crew say that he isn’t afraid of anything, and that the same is true of Chief Collins. They are a cool pair, yet both are as hospitable and friendly as you could imagine.
The plane’s engineer-gunner is Sgt. Eugene Gaines of New Orleans. He is distinct from the rest because he married a British girl last December.
They have a little apartment in a town eight miles from the field. Every evening Gaines rides his bicycle home, stays till about midnight, then rides back to the airdrome. For you never know when you may be routed out at 2:00 a.m. on an early mission, and you must be on hand.
It takes him about 45 minutes to ride the eight miles, and he has made the roundtrip nightly all winter, in the blackout and through indescribable storms. Such is the course of love.
Gaines is a quiet and sincere young man of 24. He was a carpenter before the war, and he figures that will be a pretty good trade to stick to after the war. But if a depression does come, he has an ace in the hole. He has a farm at Pearl River, Louisiana, and he figures that with a farm in the background you can always be safe and independent.
Gaines wears a plain wedding ring on his left hand. I’ve noticed that a lot of the married soldiers over here wear wedding rings.
In flight, it is Gaines’ job to watch the engine temperatures and pressures and to help with the gadgets during landings and takeoffs. As soon as they reach the other side of the Channel he goes back and takes over the top turret gun. He has shot at a few planes but never knocked one down.
The radio gunner is Sgt. John Siebert of Charlestown, Massachusetts. He learned to fly before the war, although he is only 23 now. He had about 800 hours in the air as pilot. Yet because of one defective eye, he couldn’t get into cadet school.
He had two years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he hopes to go back and finish when the war is over.
Siebert too is quiet and sincere. His closest escape was when his waist gun was shot right out of his hand. The thing just suddenly wasn’t there. Yet he didn’t get a scratch.
