Excerpt from
Cabin in the Sky Crew Stories
By R. D. Brown THE NERVOUS “P” I was the skipper of the Cabin in the Sky crew. I had a malady at the start of my tour that I called my 16,000 foot nervous Pee. It didn’t make any difference that I had that last call, before engine start; come 16,000 feet on the climb I had to go!! And I mean go!! Well all the guys know what that involved. Unbuckle, pull the connections to the oxygen, head phones and heated suit, crawl past the top-turret gunner and back to the bomb-bay to the relief tube (with walk-around bottle yet.) So, after getting the word on my problem, our ground crew decided to do something about it. (God Bless them they were something of a wonder.) They put an additional relief tube in the aircraft, right next to my seat and of course a venturi tube on the outside to provide the necessary vacuum. Beautiful? Not quite. We made no arrangements for testing this new system. A boon to all aircraft commanders. So off we go on our next mission, which one I don’t remember, somewhere between the fifth and the eighth. We hit 16,000 feet and here comes the call. Gotta go! No problem: Just doing great until a yell from the ball turret gunner (Davidoff) “D — — N you, Skipper, you’ve just — — — all over the front of my turret; it’s frozen and I can’t see a thing”. Now what do you do? You can’t abort. How would that look on the abort report. So on we went. We got jumped by fighters and all poor Duke could do was track the calls and bad mouth me. Now, that’s not the proper relationship. But what can you say when your bladder has effectively wiped out one of your best gunners. We got back OK (as well as the rest of the Group) and Duke grabbed a maintenance stand and pulled that venturi tube out with the greatest of satisfaction. I couldn’t fault him. P.S. I never had the 16,000
feet “bladders” after that HONEST! |