The Secret Rescue by Cate Lineberry Read Free Book Online

most vital pieces of military equipment used in the campaigns in Africa and Europe. The aircraft served in every theater in the war. Almost identical to the C-47, the C-53 was designed specifically to carry paratroops and tow troop-carrying gliders and, as a result, lacked the C-47’s large cargo door and reinforced floor.
    Since the War Department had been given the responsibility of evacuating sick and wounded men to the AAF, the AAF had used C-53s and C-47s, among a few other planes, to pick up patients and medical personnel on their return flights from forward areas. Thousands of C-47s were built during the war, but only a few hundred of the C-53s were ever constructed. Both versions lacked firepower; and, if attacked by the enemy while traveling without an escort, the pilots knew their only chance was to try to outwit the enemy.
    The four-man flight crew waiting near the plane had never flown together before this mission but were all members of the 61st Troop Carrier Squadron of the 314th Troop Carrier Group, which had dropped paratroops into Sicily during the invasion in July. The crew had flown the plane from their new base in Castelvetrano on the other side of the island to Catania the day before, expecting to transport the 807th personnel. The pilot, First Lt. Charles Thrasher, had canceled the trip, however, because of bad weather and reports that a B-25 pilot had been forced to turn back.
    A dark-haired twenty-two-year-old, Thrasher was from a prominent Daytona Beach, Florida, family and had attended Bolles Military Academy, where he was one of its top athletes and was known for his jitterbug moves on the dance floor. He had enlisted in 1941 and had just been promoted the previous month from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, which made him the senior officer on board that morning’s flight—despite also being the youngest officer.
    His copilot was 2nd Lt. James Baggs, a charming and outgoing twenty-eight-year-old from Savannah, Georgia, who enlisted in 1942 and kept a photo of his five-year-old nephew Hunter in the cockpit whenever he flew to remind him of home. Like Thrasher, Baggs had also attended a military school, the Academy of Richmond County, in Augusta, Georgia. He later trained as a fighter pilot at Foster Field in Texas before being selected for special training as a troop carrier pilot and had already flown one hundred missions.
    Sgt. Willis Shumway, a six-foot-tall, twenty-three-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, who dreamed of becoming a photographer, filled in for the plane’s regular crew chief. Sgt. Richard “Dick” Lebo, another twenty-three-year-old from Halifax, Pennsylvania, an avid athlete who raced pigeons and liked to write in his spare time, served as the radio operator.
    Jens was the first of the medical personnel to board the plane, and she sat toward the front in one of the metal bucket seats lining each side of the aircraft. Headstrong and independent, Jens had been looking for adventure when she left her nursing job at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and joined the Army in February 1941, ten months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Army immediately sent her to work at the station hospital at Fort Benning, a sprawling post near Columbus, Georgia. She’d never flown before and had paid extra to travel by plane instead of by train from Michigan just for the experience. She liked it so much that she and a fellow nurse had taken advantage of loose regulations to hitch rides at Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning during training flights, making sure they were back on base before anyone noticed their absence.
    When she began her duties at the Army hospital, Jens did so without any military training. The training of ANC nurses at the time defaulted to whatever instruction their chief nurse could provide. As the Army’s nursing recruitment efforts to remedy a major nursing shortage began to pay off, chief nurses became overwhelmed with the demands of training the newly