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Masters of the Air Recap: The Dirty Baker’s Dozen
Harry Crosby lives, but the worst is yet to come.
On those two missions — plus another raid on a pair of Germain aircraft plants near Marienburg on October 9 that Orloff hasn’t dramatized — the 100th Bomb Group earned its morbid nom de guerre, losing nearly half its airmen in just three disastrous days. Sergeant Lemmons, the reliable crew chief, asks if he’s okay, and Bucky gives the kid the same obvious lie he spouted back in Chapter Two to his now-dead friend Curt Biddick after 30 of their comrades perished on their very first mission: “I don’t even feel it!” In his book, Crosby does recall the shock of his return to Thorpe Abbots with Blakely and Douglass after their belly-landing on the way back from Bremen, saying that the trio “learned that of the 140 pilots, copilots, navigators, and bombardiers who had flown across the Atlantic to England on May 31, just four months and ten days before, we were the only three left on flying status.” The weight of all those deaths is accumulating, and it’s about to grow heavier still.
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