"Why did you do that?"
"Two reasons," he said.
"To remind you that you're a woman. And because I love you."
"Damn you!" Cynthia said, fighting an infuriating urge to cry.
"Now, just a minute here! "the senior trainee said.
"Greg, don't!
"Cynthia called quickly.
"He's crazy. He'll kill you!"
The trainee looked at him warily and with great interest.
"Relax," Whittaker said.
"I'm a lover, not a fighter. "Then, feeling very pleased with himself, he walked over to the Packard, got in, and started it up.
Rank hath its privileges. In this case that meant that the commanding officer of the 344the Fighter Group was driven in a jeep from the final briefing to the revetment where his aircraft was parked. The other pilots rode jammed together in the backs of trucks.
The commanding officer of the 344the Fighter Group, Eighth United States Air Force, was Lieutenant Colonel Peter ("Doug") Douglass, Jr." USMA '39, a slight, pleasant-appearing officer who looked, until you saw his eyes, much too young to be either a fighter group commander or a lieutenant colonel. He was, in fact, twenty-five years old.
He was wearing a horsehide A-2 jacket, which had a zipper front and knit cuffs. On its back was painted the flag of the Republic of China and a legend in Chinese stating that the wearer had come to China to fight the Japanese invader, and that a reward in gold would be paid for his safe return in case he fell from the sky.
Doug Douglass had been a member of the American Volunteer Group in China and Burma, a "Flying Tiger," one of a small group of pilots who, before the United States had entered the war, were recruited from the Army Air Corps, the Marines, and the Navy to fly Curtiss P-40 fighters against the Japanese.
On the nose of his P-38F there were painted ten small Japanese flags, called "meatballs," each signifying a Japanese kill. There were also painted six swastikas, representing the kills of six German aircraft, and the representation of a submarine.
While attacking the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare, then-Major Douglass had attempted to skip-bomb a five-hundred-pound aerial bomb into the mouth of the pens. He hadn't made it. But his bomb had struck, literally by accident, a U-boat tied to a wharf just outside the mouth of the pen. It had penetrated the hull in the forward torpedo room, and what was known as a "sympathetic explosion" had occurred. The explosives in the bomb and in Godalone-knew-how-many torpedoes had combined, and the submarine had simply disappeared, leaving few recognizable pieces.
Douglass and his group had been accompanied on the mission by photo reconnaissance aircraft, and there was a motion picture record of the five hundred-pound bombs dropping from Douglass's wings, and of one of them striking the submarine, and of large chunks of the submarine hull floating lazily through the air. There was no question about it, mistakes counted, it was a confirmed kill.
Newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Douglass had given in to the "suggestipn" by his division commander that he paint a submarine on the nose of his P-38F not because he considered it a victory but because it signified that he had been on the Saint-Lazare raid. He had lost forty percent of his aircraft-and his pilots--on that raid.
A story made the rounds that after the raid Douglass had walked into Eighth Air Force Headquarters and decked the Plans & Training officer who had ordered the mission. And that the bloody nose he'd given the chair-warmer had given the brass a choice between court-martialing a West Pointer who was a triple ace or promoting him, and they'd opted in favor of the promotion.
Today, there was with him in the jeep as it made its way down the parking ramp at Atcham another pilot wearing an identical A-2 jacket with the Chinese flag and calligraphy painted on its back. He was taller and heavier than Douglass, and, at twenty-six, a year older. His name was Richard Canidy, and he had been It. Col. Douglass's squadron leader in the Flying Tigers.
He was not a member of the 344the Fighter Group, nor, despite the gold leaves of a major pinned to his A-2 jacket epaulets, even an officer of the Army Air Corps. Canidy (BS, Aeronautical Engineering, MIT '38) had first been recruited from his duty as a lieutenant junior grade, USNR, instructor pilot to be a Flying Tiger, and from the Flying Tigers to be a "technical consultant" to the Office of the Coordinator of Information.
The Office of the Coordinator of Information had been re designated the Office of Strategic Services, and Canidy was now officer in charge, Whithey House Station, OSS-England, which made him the third-ranking OSS officer in England. Civilians, in a military environment, attract attention. But little attention is paid, particularly at the upper levels of the military hierarchy, to majors.
It had been arranged with the Army Air Corps to issue "Technical Consultant Canidy" an AGO card from the Adjutant General's Office, identifying him as a major, and to ensure that if inquiries were made at Eighth Air Force or SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) there would be a record of a Canidy Major Richard
M." USA AC
Canidy was not supposed to be flying with the 344the Fighter Group on this mission. Indeed, if either he or It. Col. Douglass had asked their superiors for permission for him to come along, the request would have been denied.
Douglass wasn't sure why Canidy wanted to go. He guessed that it had something to do with Jimmy Whittaker getting his ass shipped to Australia, and with Eric Fulmar and Stanley Fine having disappeared suddenly from Whithey House, destination and purpose unspecified. Canidy's old gang, with the exception of It. Commander Eddie Bitter, USN (another ex-Flying Tiger), and of course Douglass himself, had been broken up. A deal like that, being with your buddies, was of course too good to last.
Once, at Whithey House, Douglass with most of a quart of Scotch in him, had looked at the others with a sudden wave of warmth: They were good guys, the best, and they were his buddies; he would never, as long as be lived, have better friends. And then he had made what had seemed in his condition to be a profound philosophical observation: "War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows."
The undisputed leader of the gang, the best natural commander Douglass had ever seen--and the test had been combat--was Canidy. And Canidy was not, like Douglass (West Point) and Bitter (Annapolis), a professional warrior, but almost the antithesis, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who made no secret that he found most of the traditions sacred to the professional military hilarious.
The wise man, the philosopher so to speak, of the gang was Captain Stanley S. Fine, a tall ascetic Jew who had been a Hollywood lawyer before he had been recruited for the OSS from command ofaB-17 Squadron. If closing with the enemy and killing him with bare hands was the ultimate description of a warrior, then the gang's most ferocious members were unlikely warriors. Eric Fulmar was the son of a movie star and a German industrialist, and Jimmy Whittaker was a wealthy socialite who addressed the President of the United States as "Uncle Franklin."