To Fetch a Grunt

On a Dutch airfield 150 Nazis in full flying kit were drawn up as though for pay-day parade, unmindful that July 4 was a special day in the non-Nazi world, a day when something extraordinary might happen. It did. The Nazis were caught flat-footed on their airfield by a tight-flying contingent of twelve Douglas twin-motored bombers, half of them manned by Americans, half by Britons, which sent the Germans scuttling for cover amid bomb bursts and the firecracker chatter of machine guns.

By more than coincidence, on the 166th anniversary of Independence the U.S. had struck its first blow at Nazi-occupied western Europe. In truth it was a token raid of things to come, but a token with a sting. The raiders bombed three Dutch airdromes in all, at Haamstede, Valkenburg and Alkmaar, damaging grounded planes, hangars, other installations.

Out of the melee emerged the first hero of U.S. action in Europe, Captain Charles C. Kegelman of El Reno, Okla., who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for cool daring. Kegelman's plane lost a propeller and a nose section at near-zero altitude. One motor caught fire and then the bomber scraped ground, damaging a wing and punching a hole in the fuselage. Kegelman regained control of his plane and flew on from the target area, only to be faced a few moments later by intense fire from a nearby anti-aircraft tower. He dove straight at the tower, silencing it with his forward guns, then took his crippled ship back to base.

That was the kind of flying meant by Britain's Air Marshal Harris when he wrote to Major General Eisenhower on the eve of the raid: "I wish you luck . . . I know your magnificent youngsters will fetch a grunt out of the enemy with the first punch."

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