Damn. Cahill's dead. Seventeen missions, and Cahill's dead. After our fifteenth, the halfway point, he started talking about having beaten the odds, cheated death, for too long. Not like he'd had a premonition, more … fatalistic. You could hear it in his voice, see it, in the way he climbed into the hatch. He was just trying to hang on until the bright period. He knew that too much was being asked of him, of us. A couple weeks of navigation exercises and walking into town would have done him a world of good, would have refreshed … not his spirit, but his luck. But this damn war won't wait. Not for him, not for us.
If he could have had last words, I know what they would have been. That he was glad it was him, and not any of us. And that he was glad it was just him, and not all of us.
Damn.
Flying Officer Thomas Dahlgren
Bomb Aimer, Alcyone
November 30, 1943
This was my first trip, and a hell of a first trip it was! German night-fighters started hunting us well out over the North Sea. The first one wrecked out bomb-release mechanism, so the whole rest of the trip was in hopes of a lucky manual drop. Danforth was able to give us some warning of the second one, and after some cat-and-mouse, Eagan set it afire from the mid-upper turret.
Danforth spotted the next one, too. Cahill had started a corkscrew when a shell took his head right off. It was a hell of a mess, but there was no time to worry about that. I'd had a few weeks of flight school, and it had to be done, so I moved into his place. I could fly straight and level, and take directions from the navigator forward just as well as back, so we kept going toward Berlin.
Danforth spotted the next night-fighter, too, and shot it off our tail before it had a chance to open up on us. Another one latched on as we approached Berlin. Fortunately, he was a bad shot, since I wasn't about to try anything fancy to shake him off. I could have put us right into the ground, so we were just going to have to take it and trust to luck.
We got coned by searchlights over the target. The flak didn't seem to take advantage of it, but we did attract a Me-109 that hammered us pretty good. Dahlgren was wounded as he tried to line us up on the TI's, and the cockpit filled with flames from the oxygen system. Chalmers was able to put them out pretty quickly, though.
I took us down to breathable air and headed for home. We were tracked by one night-fighter that used us for target practice for a while before giving up, and some searchlights picked us up near the coast but the flak didn't hit us.
I had quite a while to think about it, so by the time we got to England, I knew I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of setting a heavy bomber down in one piece. So I ordered the crew to bail out, pointed Alcyone back to the East, set the autopilot, and followed them down.
Flight Sergeant Richard Davis
Flight Engineer, Alcyone
November 30, 1943