Albert Story Narrative Chapter 2

Going Over

We all left Ft. Myers on the same day, May 23, 1942. Our first stop was Miami Air Force Base. There I first suspected we were headed for Japan when we were told to exchange our tracer ammunition for incendiary. The only use for incendiary bullets is for starting fires and we all had images of Japanese houses made of paper. Next morning we headed out for Puerto Rico. We flew low over the Bahamas and other islands along the way. From the side windows we saw not only the low- lying islands but also scores of rusting hulks of commercial ships washed ashore, presumably sunk by German submarines. We made it to Puerto Rico that evening. We stayed overnight in large brick Barracks- quite a change from the tents to which we had grown accustomed.

 Next morning we were off again for Georgetown, British Guyana. The main thing I remember about this part of the flight was that we flew mostly through very rough weather, thunder and lightening, with up and down drafts and the rough weather was at night. I was required to sit in the tail turret (Fig. 1) through all this because our route took us near the Island of Martinique. This was a French possession and we had to guard against attacks by French fighter planes from there. By this time the French had sided with the Germans so this was a concern. Other than the rough weather, everything was routine. We landed at the airfield near Georgetown early in the morning. We spent the day and night there and were on our way next morning over the South American jungle heading for Belem in Brazil. We refueled there and headed on out for Natal, a small city on the easternmost tip the country. This leg of the flight was particularly interesting because we flew low over the jungle and looking down, we could see, among other things, Indian villages and huts in clearings carved out of the forest. We also crossed the Amazon here and it was impressive. It seemed to be at least twenty miles wide where we crossed it. We landed at Natal in late afternoon and spent the night there. Next afternoon we headed out over the Atlantic on our way to Accra in what was then called The Gold Coast. The plane droned on all night and sometime after the sun had risen we could see land. It was the Gold Coast and there was a city. It was Accra!  Our navigator hit it right on the nose. Once again, as we approached the African Coast, we had to on guard against the possibility of attack be French fighter planes stationed at an air base at Dakar in Senegal. Nothing happened though, and we landed without incident. Figure 2 is a map of our route from Georgetown to Accra.