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The 513th Comes Home

Discussion in 'Air War in the Pacific' started by Falcon Jun, Aug 7, 2008.

  1. Falcon Jun

    Falcon Jun Ace

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    This is a news article from the Times archive

    Monday, Apr. 26, 1943
    The 513th Comes Home


    Back in the U.S. last week were the combat crews—28 officers and 81 enlisted men—of a heavy bombardment squadron that called itself, not without reason, the "Bastard 513th." It was never formed; it just fused in the fire of war. Sometimes it called itself the "Bengal Bombers," sometimes "Major Toomey's Flying Circus," but mostly "us bastards." Not until a year after Pearl Harbor did the War Department give it a numerical designation. Meanwhile it had set some astonishing records in more than a year of war without relief.
    > In an average of 45 missions per plane against Japs, Germans and Italians, the 513th's ten Flying Fortresses were riddled by ack-ack and enemy pursuit, but not one was shot down and not one was cracked up.*
    > Copilot Victor Bartholomei was the squadron's only casualty. He lost an eye to German shrapnel over Bizerte. (Major John Toomey, one of three successive squadron commanders, was shot down near Naples and probably captured, but that was after he left the 513th.)
    > Every airman in the squadron has flown 150,000 to 200,000 miles. Once the squadron had to take a month off to have its battered planes repaired. Only other vacation was a week on Cyprus.
    India, Burma, China. The 513th was spawned of confusion when 430 men of a bomb group's ground crews and six pursuit pilots turned up in Melbourne, Australia without planes. Mostly destined for the Philippines, they were started for Java in February 1942, but Java fell first and they went instead to Karachi, India. There they found ten B-17s, picked up some dislocated combat crews who had come out of Java and the Philippines, and from the U.S. via Africa. At last the Bastards were ready to fly. They started by bombing Rangoon and the Andaman Islands, and ranged across China to Hankow.
    Palestine, Egypt, Tripoli. Last July, when Rommel was knocking at the Alexandria gate, the Bastards were sent to Palestine to help. They could take only twenty of their ground crew with them, never got any more. They bombed Bengasi, Crete, Tripoli, the Dodecanese Islands and Axis convoys in the Mediterranean. In November they moved to Egypt, helped the Eighth Army's offensive by blowing up Rommel's oil dumps and two tankers at Tobruk. Thereafter Rommel's supply of oil came only by air transport. The 513th hit Tobruk ("the milk run") nearly every morning. Their biggest flop: once they set out for Tripoli, got lost looking for Sousse, finally reached Gabes, where they dropped their bombs and killed only a mess of fish.
    Algeria, Tunisia, Home. They moved to Biskra after the Americans invaded North Africa. Because the mountains over the Kasserine Pass were high, they could get only 12,000 ft. above heavy German ack-ack (they usually flew at 25,000 ft.). When intelligence officers asked Bombardier Milton Stevens about the anti-aircraft strength he replied: "Heavy to unbearable."
    In March, the 513th, by now wearing 555 decorations, was ordered home—all except the hard-working ground crew, who had installed 240 motors in the ten B-17s, done other prodigious repair jobs. In the U.S. the 513th will be dissolved, its personnel probably set to training new groups who can hardly hope to see so much of the confused world.
    * Of the first 90 Flying Fortresses put out of action in the Pacific, 13 were shot down; the rest were cracked up or caught on the ground.
     

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