Borrowed Aircraft

The chapter that follows is about the break in that pattern, and about the airplane that carried their town’s name.

Mission sixteen was Hamburg, and the target was the Blohm+Voss shipyards — U-boat construction, still a priority target this late in the war because the submarine threat, though diminished, had not been eliminated. The family’s clipping, “Heavies Hit U-Boat Works,” matches the target. An aerial photograph in the collection shows smoke rising over the yards, the kind of image the Eighth Air Force produced by the thousands that spring to document what a mission had or had not accomplished.

Two days later, mission seventeen struck the Luftwaffe airfield at Ahlhorn. The family’s clipping — “Few Enemy Planes Up, 22 KO’d” — describes a mission that met little aerial opposition, consistent with the German fighter force’s collapsing capacity by this point in the war. Fields like Ahlhorn had begun to host the first operational jet aircraft, the Me 262 and the Arado 234. Bomber crews at this stage mostly heard about jet encounters rather than fought them. The aircraft were too fast and too few to intercept a bomber stream in numbers that mattered.

Between Ahlhorn and the week the Spirit went down for her engine change, the crew record shows six more missions. March 23, Unna. March 24, Ziegenhain. March 28, Hannover. March 31, Zeitz. Then April 3 and April 4, two consecutive days at Kiel.

Two of the six drew a clipping. The Hannover raid is “1,250 Heavies Strike Tank, Gun Factories Near Hanover,” describing two tank plants and a factory making half-tracks hit in the city and at Hildesheim, with oil refineries at Misburg and Nienhagen and E-boat pens at Ijmuiden on the Dutch coast. The second Kiel day is “Heavies Rock Kiel for 2nd Day, Pound Hamburg and Airfields,” which reports nine bombers and four fighters lost across the Eighth Air Force that day, and fifteen German aircraft claimed by escorting fighters, eleven of them jets.

The rest have a number in the scrapbook and nothing else. Unna is the eighteenth, in a dispatch on the Ruhr that names the Unna-Dortmund yards among a dozen other targets. The pages for Ziegenhain and Zeitz have not been found, though the sequence requires them — for Zeitz there is only a wire report recovered from a newspaper archive rather than from the family, which records the March 31 raid on the synthetic oil plant alongside Brandenburg, Brunswick and the Halle freight yards. No photograph, no letter, no mark of any kind setting any of them apart. They are three more dates in a run that, by early April, had gone on long enough that not every mission could be a story worth telling.

Martinez earned the right to name a bomber the way war bond drives usually earned such things: by exceeding a quota. The city put up eight hundred fifty-five thousand dollars toward its Sixth War Loan Drive target and doubled it, and the aircraft assigned in return was 44-6838, formally christened Spirit of Martinez in a ceremony that came well after the fact — by the time Frank stood under the nose for the photograph, with Col. Jack Shuck and Capt. David Olsson beside him, the crew had already flown the ship nine times under the name themselves. The Army caught up to what the men had already decided to call her. Olsson’s presence in that photograph was not simply official; the caption the family kept notes him as another Martinez man, standing in a field in Suffolk under a nose someone from his own town had painted.

A retrospective feature published decades later in the News-Gazette, built on an interview with Joyce, fills in how the name reached Frank in the first place. That article is used carefully here and in Chapter 13. Its handling of the operational record is unreliable — it misstates where Frank formed his crew, inflates both his mission count and the aircraft’s, and describes him in 1944 as the father of two when his first son was two months old — and every such figure in this book comes from the orders and crew records instead. What the article carries that nothing else does is Joyce’s own memory of things she was present for, and the committee’s correspondence, which she kept. A widow’s account of what her husband told her about the day he landed is a different kind of evidence from a reporter’s grasp of how many missions he flew, and it is treated differently here. The surplus from the bond drive was meant to buy a B-29 to carry the city’s name; the War Finance Committee, chaired by Ray S. Taylor, learned instead that a newly commissioned local pilot was forming a crew, and wrote to him directly. The committee’s letter is quoted: “We learn from one of your brothers that you and your crew have completed all training and are awaiting assignment of a B-17.” Somebody, the letter went on, had suggested it would be wonderful if the city had one of its own boys piloting a ship bearing its name, “so it could watch the ship’s exploits with pride and hope and feel true community kinship with the pilot, ship and crew.” Frank agreed. When the aircraft was delivered, the article states, he and the crew chose the name themselves — which is consistent with the nine missions they flew under it before the Army held its ceremony.

One detail in that account sits oddly against the photograph. The committee, the article reports, was disappointed to learn that the “name” consisted not of nose art “big enough for enemies to read without their glasses” but merely a small plaque mounted under the instrument panel. The surviving photograph of Frank beside the aircraft shows the name painted across the nose in script a good deal larger than a plaque. Both may be true in sequence — a plaque first, paint later, once the crew had adopted the name in earnest — but no document in the collection dates the painting, and the two accounts are not reconciled here.

Joyce’s own description of her husband, given to the same reporter, is four words long and does not elaborate: “Frank was serious, steady.” She added what she took to be the consequence: “They take the serious, steady men for the bombers.”

Frank’s own account of the honor, written to Ray Taylor a week before the engine change grounded the ship, reverses the direction the ceremony photograph suggests. “We should be the honored ones,” he wrote, “in having the people at home asking us to name it after our town.”

He wrote to Taylor about the airplane itself in the same register, and the boast he allowed himself was a narrow one. “We can brag about her, Ray,” he wrote. “In all those missions; not once did we or those others who were fortunate to fly her have to turn back; abort as we call it.” Not that she was lucky, or that the crew was — that the ship had never once failed to reach a target she was sent to.

There is a fact underneath the name that the ceremony had no way of marking. The town Frank Calicura was flying a bomber for had no airfield at all until 1939, when his own eldest brother helped drag one out of the waterfront fill, trucked in a hangar, and taught him to fly on it. Sam Calicura Jr. was thirty-six in 1942, a decade past the ceiling for aviation cadet training and born in Italy besides. He did not fly this war. The two brothers he had taught did.

For twenty-three missions, Frank Calicura’s crew flew the same aircraft. On the twenty-fourth, they did not.

The traffic ran the other way as well. On March 17, 1945, on a mission to Ruhland, the Spirit of Martinez flew to Germany without any of the nine men who thought of her as theirs. The crew record puts John Bradley’s crew in her that day — the same crew that had lent Frank Calicura a co-pilot on his first morning — while Frank’s own crew did not fly at all. An aircraft in good order did not sit on the ground because the men usually in it were resting.

Joyce Calicura remembered him talking about this. Frank said the crew worried every time the back-up crew took her out, she told a reporter decades later, until she came back. The crew record supplies the date he was worrying about.

The 95th Bomb Group’s crew record shows a break in the pattern on April 5, a mission to Nuremberg: the aircraft listed is not 44-6838, Spirit of Martinez, but 44-8269, a B-17 named The Red Fox. Two days later, on April 7, a mission to Kaltenkirchen shows a third aircraft again — 43-38942, Belligerent Beauty. By April 9, on the mission to München-Riem, the crew was back in the Spirit. That mission has its own clipping in the collection — the companion to the Munich piece from February, and the one that actually belongs here: “1,250 Heavies Strike Munich,” describing more than 1,250 Fortresses and Liberators, protected by some 750 fighters, hammering ten airfields in the vicinity of the city, all of them believed to be bases for the jet-propelled fighters that had become the bomber force’s greatest source of trouble in recent weeks. It was the third straight day the Eighth had put more than a thousand bombers in the air, and the third day of a run that had by then hit twenty-seven airfields. Frank Calicura’s crew, flying the Spirit again for the first time since the engine change, took part in the kind of mission the closing weeks of the air war had become: not cities anymore, but the airfields the Luftwaffe’s last serious aircraft flew from.

Frank’s own account, in a letter written from England on April 21, 1945, to a friend named Ray Taylor and later published under the title “If the People at Home Only Knew,” explains the gap without meaning to. He wrote that the Spirit had been stood down for an engine change — her third — after nearly fifty combat missions and more than four hundred combat hours. The dates align exactly: an aircraft flown that hard, pulled for maintenance in the first week of April, would put a crew into whatever airplane was available for a mission or two before their own ship came back on the line. Frank Calicura flew two combat missions in airplanes that were not his, in a week when the machine he trusted was somewhere on the ground at Horham with her cowlings off, and then he went back to her.

This is very likely the origin of a number the family has carried without fully being able to explain: thirty bomb symbols painted on the B-15 flight jacket in the collection, against a total logged count of twenty-eight combat missions and three humanitarian ones, thirty-one in all. Subtract the two missions flown in borrowed aircraft — April 5 in The Red Fox, April 7 in Belligerent Beauty — and the 95th Bomb Group’s own crew record puts the number flown specifically in the Spirit of Martinez at twenty-nine, not thirty. The jacket and the database disagree by exactly one symbol. It may be an extra mission the crew record simply doesn’t carry under 44-6838’s tail number, a training or ferry flight painted on alongside the combat count, or a man who miscounted his own jacket by one bomb in a hangar in England. What the arithmetic confirms is the shape of the count itself: a tally kept of an airplane rather than a man, accurate to within a single bomb.

Sometime in this stretch — the collection dates it only broadly to the spring — Frank Calicura’s crew was sent to one of the Eighth Air Force’s rest homes for a week.

The system was real and specific: roughly twenty houses and hotels requisitioned across England, jointly run by Air Service Command and the American Red Cross, offering aircrew a week away from the base with no return home possible. Rank did not apply there. Men were issued civilian clothes for the stay, with uniforms required again only for dinner. It was, by design, as unmilitary an experience as the Army Air Forces could construct for men who had spent months being nothing else.

The family’s clipping records it plainly: “Spirit of Martinez Crew Takes Rest.” It is one of the only points in this entire chronology where the record shows the war stopping, briefly, rather than continuing.