Aviation Ghosts
The chest sits at the end of my bed, made by my seventeen year-old father in a shop class at Western High School in the District of Columbia. It was 1939 and it was made as a gift for his mother, my grandmother. As he carefully cut, nailed and sanded the wood, he would have had no idea that he had only five more years to live.
The world war that would kill him was only a shadow on the consciousness of the United States in that year, but it would grow in importance until that December day in 1943 when the naval fleet at Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. During that time he graduated from high school, won a Presidential appointment to West Point, and spent half of his last year at flight training before graduating as a Second Lieutenant into what was, before the creation of the United States Air Force, the Army Air Corps
My father was young, even in that arena of young men. He had graduated from high school early, and then gone to West Point at 17. Even his time at West Point was shortened as the Class of 1943 understood, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that they would graduate into war. As an aviation cadet he was sent off for training for six months in California returning to West Point in January of 1943 where he graduated, third in his class, wearing his wings.
Lieutenant Benedict had a passion for flying which had been formed early in life. His father had also been a graduate of West Point and had flown in World War I in the early days of military aviation, returning safely to home, marriage, and three children only to die in a crash diving at a barrage balloon during a training run in a maneuver that was later found to be unsafe for the aircraft to perform. Benedict Avenue at Langley Air Force Base is named in his honor.
From the first, the young lieutenant wanted to fly the “heavies” as the B-29’s were called. He was trained on the B-17, but in every letter home he yearned for a chance to fly the new, huge bomber. “I still like to hear about the really big bird, the B-29. This B-17 is still OK though, until the real thing comes along.” As yet he had not even seen the “real thing” but all that changed on a cross country ferrying job. On his way home he was flying over an air base at Salina, Kansas when smoke started coming out of the number one engine. He was forced to land for repairs and there, sitting on the runway next to him, was a brand new B-29.
He found a sympathetic engineering officer who let him spend most of the night crawling through the plane in, as he described it, “7th heaven.” It was October of 1943 as he went from one end of that plane to another. From then on it was as if a slow inexorable hand was pushing him towards his destiny. A deliriously happy transfer to the B-29s, a severe disappointment as he was too junior to ferry the B-29s to their base in India, followed by a trip across a dangerous sea to North Africa, and then on to India reaching his destination in June 1944.
He was assigned to XX Bomber Command, which was located in Karagphur on the east side of India, near what would now be the border with Bangladesh The forward base for this unit was in Pengshan, China with the towering Himalayas between the two bases. Going over these mountains was known as ‘flying the hump,’ the planes landing in China to refuel before beginning the flight to bomb Japanese held Manchuria to the north. To get fuel to the forward base in China it had to be ferried up from India, taking two round trip flights of fuel to enable one plane to go on a bombing run.
At first, as a junior pilot, he worked on maintenance and flying cargo ships over the Hump into China. But at last he got a bomber of his own which he and his crew named “The Old Campaigner.” As they flew more and more missions the nose of the plane became decorated with a series of camels representing each flight over the hump, and bombs for the number of bombing runs in raids on Anshan, Yahata, Kaifing, Hankow, Shanghai, and Singapore. Then on December 21, 1944, six days after his twenty-third birthday, on a raid over Mukden, Manchuria (modern day Shenyeng) it all came to an end. A kamikaze, already hit by the guns of the Old Campaigner, threw itself on their plane as it fell. The bomb load exploded, and the plane plunged to the ground, only the radio man escaping by parachute. And then the telegram “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that Captain Charles C. Benedict has been reported missing in action since twenty one December in Asiatic area.”
Now seventy five years later I was sitting behind the pilot’s seat in a B-29, part of the Commemorative Air Force Ghost Squadron, my airshow seat a gift from my family. I looked out the window at the Pennsylvania countryside spread out below, verdant and lushly green after a cool, wet spring. The plane gently banked, the four propellers vibrating steadily as the volunteer pilots in the cockpit checked incomprehensible dials and adjusted pedals and wheels with relaxed proficiency. The plane, named Fifi after the wife of the man who sponsored her restoration, was found after a long search, sitting derelict on the California desert at the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station where it was being used for bombing practice. By cannibalizing parts from the other more dilapidated B-29s surrounding her, she was able to make the flight to the CAF headquarters in Texas where a four-year long, multi-million dollar restoration brought her back to complete flying form. Between 1943 and 1946 4,000 B-29s had been built but now only 26 airframes remain either in museums or undergoing restoration. Alone among this small group Fifi stood out as the only B-29 that could still take to the air.
When I had boarded a few moments before, the plane had sat on the runway grey, squat and powerful. It dwarfed the other planes from its era gathered around it in preparation for a flying demonstration of aircraft from the Second World War. It had been the giant of its time--- the B-29 Super Fortress, one of the largest in the world. It had carried a crew of ten and a bomb load of 20,000 pounds. It must have struck fear in the hearts of the enemy as it and its fellows blackened the sky --- the low rumbling roar of its 2,200 hp engines heralding the destruction of its bombs. It was the wonder of its day with features such as a pressurized cabin, an electronic fire-control system, and remote-controlled machine-gun turrets.
I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to picture that other plane in that other long-ago time. Instead of taking off from a regional airport runway, that B-29 would have taken off from an airstrip carved out of the Bengali desert in India. It was a time and place of extremes. The most modern aircraft of its day would have taken off from a base literally hand made by thousands of Indian workers. The crews would leave for their missions from a location routinely over 100 degrees, where tools used to work on the aircraft had to be kept in buckets filled with water as they would otherwise become too hot to hold in the intense heat. They would then climb steadily up to the frozen airspace over the snow capped Himalayas, the highest mountain range in the world. They would leave the relative safety of an airbase in Allied held India to fly over the Japanese held territories in Burma, China, Malaysia, Singapore and eventually Japan itself. The leading figures of this world-wide war were all over fifty --- Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, but there on the front lines it was a young man’s war, a pilot at twenty-five being an old man.
In my pocket was a picture of a young man in a flight suit, the father I had never met, with his head out of the window of a plane when it had been a marvel of modern aeronautical engineering, not the lone remaining flying B-29 in the world. As my plane thundered down the runway for takeoff, I thought of that long ago plane with a full bomb load laboring into the air from its Indian runway, flying to face an implacable enemy. The stress on that pilot must have been severe. Yet as my plane lifted into the air, my primary thought was of the joy of that eternally young captain at the helm of his own aircraft, his B-29 lifting off into a never-ending deep blue sky.