Flight19v06

							                               Flight 19 to Magdeburg
                           A Non-canon Naval Aviation Story
                                   By Jose J. Clavell

Lawrence Wild Naval Air Facility, US Navy Yard
Magdeburg, Thuringia, USE
Early summer, 1634
1035 hours

John Chandler Simpson was not a happy camper this morning. The Admiral and Chief
of Naval Operations had stood waiting impatiently by the side of the hard surface
runway for the arrival of Colonel Jesse Wood for already the better half of an hour.
Wood, the Chief of Staff of the fledging Air Force, was flying from Grantville to attend
the first meeting of the Combined Chiefs of the USE Armed Forces. The meeting, long
in the planning, was finally scheduled for the early afternoon.

Simpson, as a courtesy to a fellow service chief, had decided to meet him at the airstrip.
In truth, he also wanted an opportunity to talk to him in private before the meeting. That
was a decision that he started to regret as he looked down again at his very expensive
and now one-of-a-kind wristwatch, confirming that Wood was already ten minutes late.
At least the flash and thunder that had greeted his arrival to the strip was not the
prelude to the summer thunderstorm that he had feared -- though he still wondered
about it in the back of his mind, seeing nothing that could have caused it.

His aide-de-camp, Marine Second Lieutenant Brigitte Strausswirt, stood calmly by his
side, a good counterpart to his impatience. After a two-month association, he now knew
that her outward calm was one of the intrinsic trademarks of her personality. That, and
her bearing, which occasionally made him forget that she was not a product of the US
Naval Academy at Annapolis like him, but one of Duke’s ninety-day wonders -- albeit
one of the better ones. Her calm and assurance also reminded him, by painful contrast,
of his former aides Eddie Cantrell and Larry Wild and their endearing awkwardness.

As usual, a brief moment of grief tightened his throat as he thought about the two young
men. He wished again that they could stand by his side once more. But, of course, that
was impossible. Larry had died at Wismar together with his one-seaman crew and Air
Force Captain Hans Richter in what everyone now considered the first engagement in
the new Navy and Air Force history. An old-fashioned great pyrrhic victory for both
services that still smarted. Eddie barely survived but was now a POW at the Danish
capitol of Stockholm. There, he demonstrated a remarkable ingenuity by turning his
situation around and becoming a valuable source of information under their captors’
noses. A noteworthy feat, considering that he had lost his lower left leg during the battle.

As part of her duties as one of the Marine battalion’s -- soon to be officially a regiment --
most junior officers, Brigitte served as the Airfield Officer of the Day, in addition to being
his aide. Normally that would not have been required of her, as being an Admiral's Aide
was in itself a full-time job, but with the increased need for more male officers to support
the Marine infantry platoons here and Cavalry details in Grantville, everyone was
carrying more than one set of responsibilities. Of course, for Brigitte in particular, that
was not a problem. She was one of the most organized and capable officers that
Simpson had ever seen. And truthfully, being the AOD was not as imposing a task as
the title might imply. The strip saw an average of one plane a week.

Simpson suspected that she would not have minded much if there had been a hundred
arrivals a day. Brigitte had been bitten hard by the flying bug after watching her first
Belle flying overhead last autumn. He suspected that by now she probably had one or
two hours of bootleg flying under her belt. Her interest had become one of the multiple
items that he wanted to discuss with Wood before the meeting. Simpson believed it was
high time to start cycling a few selected naval personnel through the available flight
training slots. Aviation support could be as important to naval operations as it was to
land operations. In fact, he already had in mind his first candidate for training: Brigitte.

That last thought passed through his mind as Strausswirt received the report of the
petty officer in charge of the smoke signals. Simpson had ordered them lit after he was
informed that Wood allowed one of his fledging aviators to navigate their flight all the
way from Grantville. Hopefully, it would help them find their way to Magdeburg. He
found it commendable that the Air Force Chief took any and every opportunity available
for training, but he had started to wonder how long the Colonel planned to let his surely
lost-by-now eaglet wander around the countryside. So, it was with great relief that he
finally heard the expected sound of an engine in the distance.

Simpson watched the growing dot in the distant sky and looked at his wristwatch again.
Only fifteen minutes late this time, he thought, grudgingly accepting that Wood’s kids
were improving every day and that maybe someday in the far-distant future they would
make passable aviators. Suddenly something strange in the rumbling of the engine
made him look up again in surprise: it was strange, but achingly familiar. The sound was
unlike the trumped-up lawnmower-engine buzz of the Belles or the growl of the more
powerful Gustav. A memory from childhood hit him like a hammer as he finally
recognized it. It was the sound of a radial engine and it was not alone. Stunned, he
watched as the lone dot in the distant sky become four; as the dots grew nearer, they
sprouted wings.

“It looks like the Air Force is planning a show, sir,” a clearly delighted Strausswirt
observed.

Startled out of his stupor, Simpson looked down at her. Yes, that certainly made a heck
of a lot more sense than what he had been thinking. “It looks like that, Brigitte,” he said,
smiling, before looking back at the approaching aircraft. “However, Grantville never
mentioned any planes other than the Colonel and his wingman on this trip. In fact,
Wood… wait a minute.” Simpson felt his jaw fall open as he saw the airplanes clearly for
the first time, before shouting, “THOSE ARE NOT OUR PLANES!”
Simpson immediately regretted his uncontrolled outburst and just as quickly forgot
about it. Speechless, his eyes took in a sight seemingly out of a World War II history
book as he recognized the planes now circling overhead. His mind went automatically
through the aircraft recognition chart that he memorized as a child so long ago. The mid
wing, barrel fuselage with a large Wright radial, powered turret aft of the greenhouse
canopy and large star-and-bars national emblem: an Avenger Torpedo Bomber. It was
the same type of aircraft that his late Uncle Larry — who gave him the chart as a
birthday gift — learned to fly as a naval aviator in WWII, off the deck of the jeep carrier
USS San Jacinto with his best friend and wingman, Ensign George H. W. Bush.

As those memories ran through his mind, the first Avenger turned onto final approach.
The rest of the small formation followed closely on its tail as it descended, landing gear,
tail hook, and flaps fully deployed, Carrier style. They must be running on fumes,
Simpson thought as he watched their eagerness to land with such a minimal interval
between planes.

How in the world is it possible that I have these antique airplanes landing on my
airstrip? He began to put the pieces together in his mind, and suddenly he realized that
the solution to one of aviation's greatest mysteries lay before his eyes.

Simpson remembered a long-ago late-night conversation with his first-division CPO
during his nugget cruise in the Caribbean. They had been leaning on the fantail,
laughing and shooting the breeze while watching their destroyer’s wake as they had
done so many times before. After he made an idle inquiry about the Bermuda Triangle,
Chief Hawkins had grown serious and after a moment's pause started telling him about
the first of his many experiences in the area.

The Chief, then an 18-year-old Seaman Apprentice, had participated in the search for
Flight 19 in late 1945. The five-plane Avenger formation had disappeared during a
training bombing mission after reporting failure of their flight instruments and
compasses. One of the aircraft participating in the search, a PBM Mariner flying boat,
had also disappeared without a trace -- another unexplained loss in the long history of
disappearances that had made the whole area synonymous with mystery. At the time,
Simpson thought that Hawkins had been bullshitting him with tall sea tales but took it
with the grace befitting a junior mariner learning at the feet of a master -- after all, the
Chief’s lessons stood him well during his time in Viet Nam and provided good guidance
after the loss of his left lower leg forced him to change the path of his naval career and
move onto the corporate ladder.

Anyway, the point was, Hawkins had told him that in their final transmission before
disappearing, those ill-fated pilots had reported that they were low on fuel and preparing
to ditch at sea. If these were the very same Avenger pilots, that would explain why they
were now trying to land in such a hurry. Simpson looked on with admiration at their
flying skills. Wood would kill to see his fledgling aviators exhibit a fraction of these
talents, he thought. As he continued to watch them go about the business of getting
their aircrafts down fast and in one piece, an idea started to bubble in the back of his
mind and a smile creased his lips.

The petty officer who was trained as a plane captain got his work detail into action and
with hand signals provided directions to the parking apron to the first plane now leaving
the active runway. Simpson was glad that all their practice runs handling plane mock-
ups and the occasional Air Force flight now paid dividends as other sailors jumped in to
help. The availability of trained ground crews was one of the selling points that he had
planned to use on Wood to get him to assign dedicated aircraft to Magdeburg under his
control -- that and the lengthening of the runway and other facilities using sorely needed
Navy funds.

However, his plans were for the much smaller Belles and Gustavs, not something as
large as an Avenger. For a moment, Simpson feared that the available parking area
was not going to be able to take all the planes. But, as the lead aircraft approached the
designated spot, his pilot saw the same problem and took action. The Avenger wings
started to automatically rotate and fold along its fuselage, reminding a startled Simpson
that the plane was originally designed for the confined spaces of a carrier. The other
pilots, imitating their leader's example, folded their wings as they followed the directions
of the ground handlers to the remaining parking spots on the apron. Although the last
one ended with his main port wheel too close to the edge of the hard surface for
comfort, the process went beautifully.

John Simpson smiled as their propellers finally came to a stop. In the relative quiet that
followed, he took a second to ponder why he was not more surprised. He finally decided
that after being whisked back in time to seventeenth-century Germany with a town full of
hicks and their darn President Stearns, it would take a lot more now to amaze him. He
mentally shrugged.

The Flight 19 men were now joining his lost-in-time crowd -- misery does love company.
Simpson turned towards the wide-eyed lieutenant beside him. “Brigitte, please give my
compliments to the flight commander, and would you ask him to join me here?”

As he expected, the young woman immediately recovered her usual aplomb and, with a
salute and a cheery “Aye, aye, Admiral,” departed to do his bidding. Her eyes fixated on
the Avengers, glowing with a lust that would weaken young men’s knees. Smiling,
Simpson betted to himself that she would find her way into a cockpit within the next
thirty minutes. He signaled to one of the horsemen trying to keep their horses under
control to come closer. They were members of the combined mounted shore patrol and
military police roving detachment. The able seaman, one of his new Masters-at-arms,
and his partner, a Marine MP PFC, forced their skittish mounts to approach the Admiral
before saluting. Simpson returned their salutes. “My compliments to Major Von
Brockenholz and First Sergeant Hudson. I require both of them here on the double. And
Schneider, tell them to bring an armed guard detail.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the seaman replied before he and his partner kicked their mounts to full
gallop in the direction of the new Marine barracks. As he turned around, Simpson
caught the moment when the seventeenth-century met head on with the twentieth:
Lieutenant Strausswirt snapping a salute to a taken-aback Marine Aviator still wearing
his flight gear. The admiral shook his head at the sight and turned away to hide his grin,
trying to decide which element of the surrounding scene the poor man was going to find
the strangest: that the German, Swedish, and American soldiers, sailors, and yard
workers were in a mixture of clothing both modern and antique, seemingly out of a
museum, or that the pretty redhead in the camouflage utilities professed to be both a
Marine officer and an Admiral's aide.

He sobered up when he remembered their personal losses. Like all the citizens of
Grantville and his son’s wedding guests, the aviators had just lost everything that was
familiar and dear to them and he would have to be the one to break the news. He
sighed. That responsibility came with the job. Some things had not changed since his
Viet Nam days.

Simpson put that matter aside for the moment and watched Strausswirt leading a
Marine Captain in his direction. A Navy Lieutenant trailed a short distance behind. The
aviator seemed pissed off with the whole situation and walked towards the admiral with
an almost visible chip on his shoulder, and probably a seabag full of questions.
However, he did a double-take and slowed down as he saw the silver stars on
Simpson’s collars.

Strausswirt made the introductions in unusually clear English, albeit with a slight
German accent. “Admiral, may I present to you Captain Powers and Lieutenant Taylor.
The Lieutenant was the instructor pilot but the Captain is the senior officer present.”

Simpson returned both men’s salutes before shaking their hands. “Gentlemen, my
name is John Simpson. Allow me to welcome you to Wild NAF -- no, make that Wild
NAS -- in Magdeburg. I am certain that you have tons of questions but before we start, I
would like to know what happened to your fifth plane.”

Obviously surprised at the question, Lieutenant Taylor replied, “Admiral, we were
preparing to ditch at sea when there was a big flash and thunder and we found
ourselves over land. They only had enough fuel left to belly-land in a field ten to fifteen
minutes from here. We decided to keep going on, hoping to find an airfield. When we
left the area, they were standing beside their aircraft apparently unhurt, sir.”

“I am very glad to hear it, Lieutenant. We are going to send a mounted rescue party out
in the next thirty minutes and if any of you can ride, you are welcome to join and show
them the way. Meanwhile, we are expecting some air support at any moment … and
here they come.” Simpson pointed to the two growing dots on the horizon coming from
Grantville’s direction. He felt petty, but he could hardly wait to see Wood’s face when he
found out about the new ‘naval assets.’
Fact was, Simpson had decided at that moment that these aircraft and their crews were
now naval, well, marine property, and the idea in the back of his mind finally came to full
fruition. He would not relinquish any control to the ‘Air Farce,’ Stearns or no Stearns,
until he obtained a good deal in return. He had been planning to beg and cajole for
aviation capabilities but now wondered how much more he would be able to get out of
Wood in trade for parts of the unexpected bonanza. But that could wait -- there was
urgent business pending and some bad news to give.

“Gentlemen, I have an incredible tale to tell you but I would prefer if you gather all your
men here first so I don’t have to repeat myself.”

“Sure thing, sir. We’ll be back in a second.” Powers saluted and then he and Taylor
walked back to where the rest of their curious aircrews now waited.

“Admiral? Where did they come from if they are not part of our Air Force? What does all
this mean, sir?” a confused Strausswirt asked him.

Simpson took a second to reply, enjoying the show on the runway. Wood and his
wingman had stopped their aircraft in the middle of it and just stood there staring,
unable to believe their eyes at the incredible sights that had taken their parking spaces
on the apron. Simpson shook his head once again, amused, before turning towards her.
“What it means, Lieutenant, is that this is the beginning of Naval Aviation. How would
you like to learn to fly?” he asked, smiling down at her.

Her answering grin was all the answer that Simpson needed.

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