To Kingdom Come by Robert J. Mrazek

the beginning consonant of each word was transposed to the end. At the next stop, he was taken off the train and interrogated as a possible enemy spy. The telegraph operator had alerted the military police after reporting that he had used “a secret code.” It took him several hours to convince the police it was harmless.
    At Spokane, Ted was assigned a crew and they began training together. He began using the same principles he had employed as the captain of his championship teams to mold his flight crew into a solid fighting unit. Although air force regulations prohibited fraternization between officers and enlisted ranks, Ted quickly broke the boundaries.
    Every Friday night, he would rent a hotel suite in Spokane for the crew to get together informally and play poker over drinks and dinner. If they were going to be fighting together, he told them, they might as well enjoy being together as friends whenever they had the opportunity. Once inside the suite, it was all on a first-name basis.
    Ted also made sure every member of the crew had his personal affairs in order. He didn’t want them to leave for England with any serious worries. Some of them needed money for their families. He lent it to them. Whatever the problem, he was there with advice and support. All for one. One for all.
    Ted and Braxton spent his final fifteen-day embarkation leave together in Bronxville. The days went by in a blur, and then he was gone. She settled in for the long wait before he came back.
    In England, Ted’s crew was assigned a new Fortress. Together, they decided to name it Battlin Betsy . Ted wrote her that he thought he had the best-trained and most confident crew in the squadron. His copilot, Warren Laws, was very good in the air, calm and competent, and deserved his own ship. The rest of the men not only knew their jobs but could count on one another, no matter how tough things got. His training methods might have been unorthodox, but he thought they had worked out well.
    On August 3, Braxton gave birth to their baby, Katherine Ann. They had already agreed on the name if it was a girl. Less than a week later, a letter was delivered to Ted at Knettishall. Included with it was a photograph of Braxton and their new daughter.
    Dressing in the darkness of his Quonset hut for the Stuttgart mission, Ted put the photograph in the breast pocket of his flight suit over his heart. It would be his sixth mission.

    Jimmy
    Monday, 6 September 1943
384th Bomb Group
Grafton Underwood, England
Second Lieutenant James “Jimmy” Armstrong
0300
     
     
     
    “ L ieutenant Armstrong?” came the disembodied voice behind the flashlight beam. “Briefing in half an hour.”
    The big man slowly hauled himself out of the narrow bunk. His copilot slept in the bed on one side of him, his navigator on the other. He made sure they were awake, too. Still groggy, he had to remind himself of which men remained from the original crew he had been assigned back at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho.
    His flight crew’s confidence was at low ebb, and he wasn’t sure what more he could do to bolster their spirits. Morale in the rest of the 384th Bomb Group wasn’t much better.
    Recent losses had cast a pall over the whole base. The group had lost ten Fortresses in June, and another twelve in July. Jimmy wasn’t worried for himself. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to make it through, but it was hard to maintain crew cohesion with so many men coming and going.
    At times it seemed like his own constantly rotating crew was being sent by the League of Nations. Wilbert Yee, his new bombardier, was Chinese. James H. Redwing, the ball turret gunner, was a Hindu whose family came from India. He spoke English like some professor at Oxford.
    Jimmy’s former copilot, Luke Blanche, was a full-blooded Cherokee from Broken Toe, Oklahoma. The machine gunners included Presciliano Herrera, a Mexican kid, and William Deibert, whose family was German. Sid Grinstein, his