To Kingdom Come by Robert J. Mrazek Page A

original flight engineer and top turret gunner, was Jewish.
    After ten missions, Jimmy had reluctantly concluded that combat leaders in the air force were made, not born. He had come a long way in a short time from the athletic fields at Georgia Tech.
    He was finishing the first semester of his sophomore year when he returned to his dorm room one Sunday afternoon and learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Like his roommates, he was ready to fight. When he signed up for the air corps, the fun-loving giant was also looking for adventure. Ten months later, he was awarded his wings.
    Jimmy was just nineteen years old. Someone told him that he was probably the youngest pilot in the whole air force. His next assignment as a newly minted B-17 pilot was at Hendricks Field in Sebring, Florida.
    To celebrate winning his wings, he flew a Fortress to his hometown of Bradenton, Florida, where he dove down to an altitude of fifty feet before thundering over his parents’ home at two hundred miles an hour, clipping the tops off the Australian pine trees that surrounded the property. The terrified officer flying with him in the copilot seat thought they had blown the roof off the house.
    He came from a clan of warriors. The first Armstrongs in the colonies had arrived from Scotland in the mid-1700s. Two of his ancestors had fought against the British in the American Revolution. During the Civil War, both his great-grandfather and his grandfather rode with Custer’s Michigan Cavalry Brigade. His father had battled German U-boats in the North Atlantic in the last war. After Pearl Harbor, his father had reenlisted to fight the Japanese.
    In spite of his commanding physical presence, his tender age led to many awkward moments. As he tried to explain to his crew, all of whom were much older, he was not only big, but he was “rough cut.”
    The crew had begun flying combat missions in a B-17 named Sad Sack II . The figure of Sad Sack, a cartoon character in Yank , the army newspaper, had been painted on the plane’s nose.
    Things began to unravel for them on their fifth mission, which was the August 12 attack on Gelsenkirchen, Germany, in the Ruhr Valley. In the preflight briefing, the flight crews had been told they would attack the target at an altitude of thirty-one thousand feet, which was far above the range of the German 88-millimeter cannons.
    The briefer was wrong.
    Of the seventeen planes in the 384th that reached the target, five were shot down by 88s. To complicate matters, the air temperature at thirty-one thousand feet was 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Presciliano Herrera, the left waist gunner, had come back with frostbitten hands and was no longer able to fly.
    On August 16, John Heald, Jimmy’s original bombardier, and Sid Grinstein, his flight engineer, were ordered to join another crew as last-minute substitutes on a mission to Paris. The 384th Bomb Group lost only one plane that day, but Heald and Grinstein had gone down in it.
    One day later, Jimmy had flown the Schweinfurt mission.
    Sad Sack II was about a hundred miles into Belgium when the German fighters began coming up from the airfields along their route to intercept them. The attacks were the most intense he had ever encountered.
    Another pilot in the 384th had once claimed to Jimmy that whenever he saw enemy fighters coming, he gave out with a Sioux war whoop on the intercom to inspire his crew. He had died with his crew over Germany back in July. Jimmy didn’t believe in war cries. He just hoped his gunners shot well.
    As Sad Sack II approached Schweinfurt, the bomber directly above them in the formation was hit by cannon fire, and its right wing burst into flames. Jimmy’s waist gunners began screaming frantically on the intercom that the stricken Fortress was descending straight toward them. Jimmy managed to avoid the other plane, now engulfed in a ball of fire, as it plummeted past them in its death spiral.
    After Wilbert Yee, his new