The Bomber Boys Read Free Page B

twelve feet in diameter. Raising a hand to his forehead to shade his eyes, Tony searched the cloudless sky for the plane. There it was—just a yellow speck against the sun’s glare.
    The boy felt an unusual lightness in his stomach. “Butterflies,” his mom had called it. The yellow bi-wing airplane was lost in the sun for a few seconds, but the changing sound of its engine told Tony it was beginning its dive.
    He could see it free-falling like a roller coaster that has just passed a crest in the track.
    In a few more seconds the yellow plane was in a hard dive at a forty-five-degree angle, the engine roaring. Nervous laughter escaped from some in the crowd, while the majority watched in awed silence. Everyone waited anxiously for the pilot to begin pulling out of the dive, but still the yellow plane plummeted toward the airfield. A few in the audience began to look around for possible exit routes. Tony smiled and remembered what his dad had told him. The pilot was giving them “their money’s worth.”
    The pilot held the little biplane in the dive so long that even Tony began to wonder if he was too low. At last the plane began to pull out. From the sound of its engine, it was clearly straining.
Some parents tried to cover their children’s eyes when it seemed there was going to be a deadly crash, but the plane’s path flattened out and it became a yellow streak as it passed just a hundred feet above the field.
    Tony could see the pilot clearly as the plane passed overhead, and he watched with fascination as a white object fell from beneath the aircraft. It was, Tony would find out later, a ten-pound sack of Pillsbury’s Best Flour. The bag tumbled only twice before it smashed into the ground and exploded into a curling white cloud. When the flour dust finally settled, Tony saw that the pilot had scored a perfect hit inside the target circle.
    From that day, Tony’s imagination became fixed on airplanes and flying. Much of his chore money was converted into model airplane kits, which, once constructed, were hung with string from the rafters of his attic hideout. His model planes shared the attic with Tony’s other hobby, homing pigeons.
    The pigeons were both entertaining and frustrating for young Tony. Purchased from an older neighborhood kid, the birds flew right back to their original residence when they were first released. Tony had to buy them back more than once before the pigeons finally adjusted to their new digs.
    Pigeons were only part of Tony’s childhood menagerie, which on occasion included a fox and a troublesome snake. Actually it was young Tony who caused the trouble when he released the harmless serpent on a crowded school bus. The bus driver, who had to stop and evacuate dozens of hysterical children, was not amused.
    Tony meant no harm—he just loved animals, and he loved to have a good time. As a teenager, he worked at a local stable and earned enough money to purchase a horse. The animal had previously been owned by a traveling circus, and Tony discovered that his new horse was extremely well trained, not only for riding but for doing tricks. Soon Tony was entertaining the
neighborhood, racing up the street on the back of his circus horse, stopping now and then to allow the spirited animal to do a spin or rear up on its hind legs.
    Even with schoolwork, his part-time job and his pets, Tony still had plenty of energy to devote to his interest in aviation. By the time he was in high school, he was writing letters to a Missouri flying college for course information and reading any available books or articles about flying. When American bombers began flying missions into German territory in 1943, Tony was only seventeen years old, but he was already certain what branch of the service he would volunteer for, when he came of age.
    His parents knew their son would have to go to war, but they were less than enthusiastic about Tony’s preference for the Air Corps. A letter from a young relative