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Dick Canidy had sensed in his gut the very early sign that the Douglas C-54, one so new that it seemed right off the assembly line, was going to have problems with one of its four Twin Wasp radial engines.
The Air Transport Command flight had been eight hours, ten minutes, and fifteen seconds out of Prestwick, Scotland—Canidy had immediately checked his chronometer, which he had reset to zero and activated as the bird had gone wheels up—when he detected an odd faint vibration that his aeronautic training had immediately told him was more than a mere aberration.
Not a minute later, it manifested itself again, louder this time, and one of the engines on the left wing of the Douglas C-54 began to shake the plane violently. Then a great cloud of black smoke erupted out of the outboard Twin Wasp, and the pilot rushed to shut it down, feather its props, and adjust throttles and trim to rebalance the aircraft.
This took a few minutes, what to many passengers seemed like hours, but soon afterward they were informed that everything was fine, that the cause of the engine failure was a common oil pressure problem, that the pilots had absolutely no doubt that the aircraft could make this leg’s intended destination—the refueling stop of Gander—and that the only inconvenience was that they would just be a bit delayed.
Canidy knew that “a bit delayed” was a huge understatement. Down one engine, they were going to be flying slower than the 250 miles per hour or so that the aircraft had been making.
But he of course knew the rest to be true. The excuse of an oil pressure problem was plausible. And the aircraft was more than capable of cruising along at an altitude of seven thousand feet on the power of the remaining three 1,450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines.
That had been the view of Canidy the Professional Aviator.
Canidy the Bus Passenger, however, became miserable after hours of looking at the dead engine with the Atlantic Ocean in the background and was grateful to finally see the coastline of Newfoundland on the horizon, and then the snow-covered airfield itself, a welcome way-point carved out of the wilderness on what not five years earlier had been an uninhabited plateau of Gander Lake’s north shore.
As the Air Transport Command C-54 pilot turned on final, the only sounds in the cabin were the hum of the Twin Wasps and the rush of air over the flaps extended from the wings. The next sounds heard—the chirp-chirp of the aircraft wheels gently touching down on the runway—were followed by the raucous applause of the nervous passengers now greatly relieved to have cheated death again.
Canidy loo
ked out the window, trying to avoid getting drawn into the mindless jabbering of the other passengers.
Just before touching down, his field of view allowed him to see hundreds of warbirds parked in neat lines—Douglas Boston light bombers with Canadian Air Force markings, U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchells and B-24 Liberators, and more—all apparently waiting to be ferried eastward to battle.
They came through here, Canidy knew, because the shortest route between North America and Europe was Gander to Prestwick. He remembered being told that the population of this godforsaken frozen outpost had swollen to some fifteen thousand—a mix of Royal Air Force, Canadian Army, and U.S. Army Air Forces, heavy on the Canucks.
Canidy could not see the warbirds now. All that was visible was a wall of snow that had been plowed off of the runway. He looked across the airplane and saw that there was a wall on either side of them and it appeared as if the plane was traveling along in some kind of winter canyon.
The aircraft came to a gap in the canyon wall—a ramp to the taxiway—and as the C-54 turned into it, Canidy could see that a yellow truck with a FOLLOW ME sign had been waiting there, and now was leading the way.
A moment later, Canidy began to see a row, then two and three rows, of bombers. The C-54 rolled past them, then past two hangars that looked full of aircraft in for repair, then up to the Base Operations building.
Ramp personnel wearing remarkably heavy winter outfits and carrying wands waved the C-54 to a parking pad next to two other C-54s, and the pilot shut down the three good engines.
After a long visit to the gentlemen’s facilities, Canidy attempted to get a status report on the aircraft and—though appreciative of having made it alive and well to Beautiful Downtown Gander—an idea of when the hell he could expect to be airborne out of this icebox of an outpost, en route to Elizabeth City, New Jersey, and connections from there to anywhere else but here.
He tried at first to go through channels.
Start with the little guy, he thought. Be nice. Don’t make waves.
That had been a disaster.
At every step, they gave him a variation on the same bullshit line: “It’s going to take more than a little time to pinpoint the problem—a day, maybe longer—then fix it—did you see the full maintenance hangars as you came in?—or arrange for an available backup aircraft and get it in the air, or failing all that, find everyone an empty seat here and there on various other aircraft. We’re sorry, Major. It’s the best we can do. We didn’t break the aircraft on purpose.”
And the more Canidy pushed, the more resistance he encountered.
To hell with this, Canidy thought.
He made a direct path to the airfield’s Flight Operations.
There he learned from a clerk that another C-54—this one freshly refueled and headed for Washington—had just about finished embarking its passengers.
“As the major might expect,” the clerk added, in what he thought was a helpful manner, “the aircraft is completely full. The passenger manifest is closed.”
With some effort, Canidy tracked down the Air Officer of the Day and explained his situation. This of course could not have fallen on less sympathetic ears.
“Everybody’s in a hurry to get home, Major,” Canadian Air Force Group Captain Pierre Tugnutt said.
Tugnutt was an officious prissy type, tall and slight, with a meticulously trimmed pencil mustache and thin strands of hair combed over an enormous bald spot, who practically sniffed with contempt as he handed back Canidy’s USAAF travel orders.
