A Flight to Denmark

By

GEORGE WINDBURN

May 7th has come and gone. Its passing wasn't even noted by any newspaper, story that I could find. Not that I looked very hard, but I was aware there was not a ripple of remembrance. In its day, it created the epitome of answered prayer as indeed it did. It was, and is, the date of VE Day.

For me, May 6th, with orders to fly in Class A Uniform that day with the commanding officer of the 492nd Bomb Group in a C-47, set the stage to have me miss VE Day with my crew and friends at Harrington Air Field. For on May 6th, I would fly the Danish ambassador and passengers, including one jeep, back to his country, landing at the civilian airfield in the capital city, Copenhagen.

There were a couple of things about the flight itself which were different for me. In the first place I had never flown a C47 before. And I had never crossed the Channel into enemy territory in daylight before. And I could, say in passing that a captain was our flight engineer, a. major was our navigator, not one enlisted man on board. The colonel was airplane commander.

One of the passengers, a wax correspondent for Readers Digest, gathered the material for his rather long story of the 492nd. This was published at a date after our secrecy classification was dropped.

The in flight memories I have are of passing Holland and seeing the fields
of broken gliders left behind after an airborne Allied attack of many months passed. Next would be the little, and I mean little, stubby German attack planes left behind on a German airfield. These little planes had no wheels, took off from a dropable wheeled skid. They were powered by an experimental exotic fuel jet-type engine. They probably were intended to make just one flight.

The airfield at Copenhagen was covered with British planes and soldiers.
We were met by people of the Danish underground for whom we had flown many supply and. agent-drop missions. These missions are called Carpetbagger missions in the Readers Digest story.

The brief ride into town was memorable in that we could see just about every civilian was carrying a wire-stock machine gun which looked very much like a water pistol in construction. I have no idea how many of these things we had probably dropped.

When we were on foot we could hear gunfire every once in a while as there were little pockets of resistance still being overcome. These were the only gunshots I heard for my entire combat exposure in WW2. And by the way, it is pure bunkum that from the flight deck you could hear the waist guns firing. .And you do not hear any sounds when bombs are on their way down, nor do you hear their ground impacting explosion. Pure Hollywood.

We were registered into a hotel and then proceeded to have our evening meal. That was another special memory. It was like culture shock to sit down in a totally civilian setting, with an unheard of menu offering, music, from a small ensemble, flowers around the room. From the lifestyle at Harrington to this fine Copenhagen hotel in one short day was too much to forget.

What a difference. I certainly never ate with the colonel before. Each of us were• at the same time called upon to elevate ourselves to be and to be seen as cultured gentlemen who were incidentally combat airmen of the United States Army Air Force. We were the only uniforms in the room as I recall.

We were far from being taken lightly. The small orchestra stopped at an appropriate time so that their leader could address the dining room in English (for our benefit) telling all present that we were Americans who had participated with their resistance fighters in liberating Denmark. There was polite applause.
Next the music was American for some minutes.

The main thing I remember of the meal itself was the Schnapps and the strawberries for dessert. But besides the food the other event was the young lady who came up to us during the meal. She was in her twenties, wore a striking (or should I say, noticeable) red, white, and blue dress.

Most likely she was there to say something nice about us, but what I do definitely remember was the Colonel telling her I was the ranking officer of the group. Tongue in cheek, of course.

This same lady in the same dress was to later appear as a front page photo and side-bar story in a British daily a day or two after VE Day.

One of the underground people invited me to have lunch in the famous Touilery Gardens the next day, May 7th. Because of the war the gardens as I saw them had none of the features which are world renowned. Merely a pleasant grass and trees park.

Looking back today I aJ1l struck by several things. 'First, I really would have preferred to have stayed at Harrington and celebrated with my friends and crew. The people on the Copenhagen trip were really strangers to me and we had had no previous social contacts.

Another thing I see as strange is the total lack of sophistication of those times and of myself. I actually had no idea on May 6th that the next day was going to be the end of the war. While that may make me sound dense, I can only attribute that to the level of access to real news.

Transistor radios will probably go down in the history books as one of the prime change agents of our days. The depth of news, opinions, and pure trash compete vigorously for the minds of all people. It wasn't like that, on that scale or with readily available equipment in those days.

For me the real end of the European War was going to come just after my 25th combat mission. This was the magic number which rotated you back to the States. May 6th was my twentieth mission. Only five to go.

May 8th and the days following should not be left out of the telling. After all, if there hadn’t been VE Day on the 7th, what was to follow wouldn’t be what it was.

It was just plain strange. You knew, but it just didn't seem right, you weren't going to be posted for another mission. You wouldn't fly another bomb load at night. You wouldn't be doing evasive maneuvers to look for fighter planes. There would be no more Carpetbagger flights, just skimming over the tops of the waters of the North Sea on your way to Norway or Denmark. No more friendly moon or stars to keep you company and to give you aid and comfort for hour after hour as the engines droned on.

How many times on those long flights did I find myself the only person awake or alert in my crew at some point on our return leg? We considered the North Sea as friendly territory only on our return flight. Tensions would be reduced, safety seemed assured, and shut eye was too much to resist. After all, they knew we might be posted to go again in less than eight hours. Then the whole scenario of tension would set in again.

Where would my crew go? Where would other friends go? We had been together since phase training in Walla Walla. I wasn't ready to say good-bye. It wasn't right for this abrupt cut off. I didn't want any more of war, but I did want something.

"I was unplugged. It was unsettling. But most of all we got our VE Day.

Footnotes:

1) “They Flew by Night”, author – Col. Robert W. Fish (Ret.) – Pages 266 thru 268