Target for the Night

ARMED FORCES

Ever since dusk the ground-crew men had been tending the long, silvery B-29 like acolytes, running their flashlights along her vulnerable joints, pumping her broad wings full of 8,000 gallons of high-test gasoline, gently hoisting a dozen 500-lb. demolition bombs into her wide bays. By 11 o'clock pilots, navigators, radarmen, engineers and gunners tumbled aboard for a 2,400-mile training flight. With them went Brigadier General Robert F. Travis, the handsome, battle-tested commander of the air base and "old man" of the Ninth Bombardment Wing, to keep a sharp eye out for mistakes.

Heavy with her warlike load, the huge plane ate up most of the mile-and-a-half Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base runway before she was airborne. Seconds later, Plane Captain E. Q. Steffes radioed that he was in real triple trouble: two of his engines were roaring faster & faster out of control, would probably soon tear themselves from the wings. And he was fighting the drag of a landing gear that wouldn't retract. He banked the B-29 in a steep semicircle, skimmed close to the lights of Fairfield-Suisun's sprawling trailer camp, and crash-landed--left wing first--into an open field, a mile short of the runway.

Bombs Away. In the first, long moment of silence, wisps of smoke began to curl out of the mangled metal. Then, as ambulances and fire trucks roared down from their ready stations, one of the crew jumped out of the wreckage and circled dazedly until a sergeant ran from the trailer camp to lead him away. Miraculously seven others, including Captain Steffes and his copilot, managed to drag themselves free. "Let's get out of here," one of them mumbled. "There are bombs on there."

First the gasoline erupted into a tall, twisting pillar of bright flame. In its glare, the 200 families in the trailers, little more than a B-29's length away, stumbled out of their homes and back into the darkness. Then, while seven fire trucks pumped Foamite into the flames, the bombs went off, blasting a crater as big as a bungalow. Bodies were blown back across the field, the fire trucks rolled up like the tops of sardine cans, the trailers and their little picket fences were smashed, as one witness put it, "like a giant had stepped on them."

The neighboring towns of Vacaville and Vallejo heard the explosions, dispatched hearses, doctors, ambulances and more fire trucks to the base. These threaded their way through the refugees who swarmed dazedly out of the post gates and clogged the highways.

Lucky Warning. By dawn, the acting base commander could add up his night's grim work. Of the plane's crew of 20, twelve were dead or missing, including General Travis. Seven other blasted bodies were believed to be those of the base fire men. Sixty men & women of the trailer camp had been treated for injuries. Had there been no warning before the bomb explosions, the fatalities would have been catastrophic, for the mangled corner of the Fairfield-Suisun air base looked exactly as though it had been the B-29's target for the night.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.