Counting The Planes

Interviewer: I also understand that one of the things that you fellas used to do, when the bombers would go out, you’d wait for them and count them coming back?

Yeah, our, our Tiffies would go out, say, I remember at one time, twelve went out, and you had a pretty good idea where they were going and when they’d be coming back and maybe an hour into the journey you’d start wandering down in the airfield and you’d just sit and wait, and you’d wait then all of a sudden you’d see one come in then you count, one, two, three. And if twelve went out, you wanted twelve back. Well the one instance there was one guy was late getting back, he was about twenty minutes late, we were just waiting, he finally made it. But another day, twelve that went out, only seven came back and something like that happened, you felt pretty bad about it and you just sat there and the CO just, “Okay, shut ‘er down.” And he shut the thing down for a couple of days and that was it. Nobody talked about it. There was nothing you could do. You lost five aircraft, you lost five good people