Read The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 for Free Online Page A

didn’t mention his mother. Although not a pacifist, and very much opposed to Hitler and the Nazis, she hated to read of the losses. When the local paper reported that the Red Army had killed 60,000 Germans at Leningrad, or more than at Stalingrad, she read it and moaned. “Oh, dear,” she would say, “isn’t that awful. There must be so many sad homes in Germany tonight.” When the report noted so many thousand Russians killed, she would cry out, “How do those Russian fathers and mothers stand it. . . . All those young boys. Isn’t there some way that the heads of governments can get together and stop this slaughter?”
    A few days after returning from the debate tournament, McGovern and Kriman
    packed a bag each and went to the Milwaukee depot to board the 6:00 P.M. train
    to Minneapolis. At the station, the student body from Wesleyan was gathered,
    along with the entire faculty. The cheerleaders were there, in their uniforms,
    along with the school band. “It was really an uproarious send-off,” McGovern
    remembered. He felt it was a “joyful occasion,” but only “if I could keep my
    eyes off my mother, who looked as though she were at my funeral. She could not
    believe that they were going to take her son off to this miserable war.”18

    CHAPTER TWO - TRAINING

    McGOVERN RODE THE TRAIN DOWN to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, where the following morning he was sworn into the Army. He took the oath and became a buck private.  After a couple of days of just waiting around, it was south to Jefferson Barracks just outside St. Louis. The men called it JB. It was located in a series of ravines and hills. It was cold. When it wasn’t snowing, it was raining. Mud was everywhere. JB, like most other AAF bases built during the war, was constructed according to Army Air Forces Chief of Staff General H. H. “Hap” Arnold’s insistence that the bases be models of “Spartan simplicity.” There were two dozen want-to-be air cadets in each tar-paper barracks. Their average age was nineteen.1 They were issued their uniforms, shoes, mess kits. For many of them it was their first time away from home, which made them susceptible to diseases. Illness became so prevalent that the cadets took to calling one street Influenza Valley, another Pneumonia Gulch. Nevertheless they were there to learn the difference between the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way of doing things, so they had little time to get acquainted. Instead they drilled.  The old sergeants were there to teach them how to keep their barracks clean, their uniforms ready for inspection at any time, how to march, shoot a rifle and a pistol, march some more, obey verbal commands. To the sergeants they were just another bunch of buck privates that needed to be shaped up. “And so the yelling and hollering began,” McGovern said, “and the nonstop four-letter words.” The drilling was nearly continuous. If a man reported for sick call, and many did at first, the sergeants regarded him as - and called him - “a f - k off.” McGovern was lucky. He was in good health, and his sergeant, named Trumbo, although he enjoyed drilling all the men - he called them “you smart college guys” - still had a streak of kindness in him. Sergeant Trumbo taught them close-order drill. He taught them to run as fast as they could, then throw themselves down behind a fence, a rise in the ground, or into a hole. How to put on a gas mask. And more. From dawn to dusk and into the night. They ate, then collapsed on their bunks. They woke up to reveille and started over again.  One Saturday night McGovern had the only experience he enjoyed at JB. He hopped a bus for the thirty-minute drive into St. Louis. Walking around alone, he found himself in front of the St. Louis Opera House. A uniformed attendant grabbed his arm and said, “Soldier, how would you like to hear a great American sing?” “Who?” McGovern asked.
    “Marian Anderson,” the attendant replied. McGovern knew