By Andrew A. Rooney, Stan and Stripes Staff Writer
March 27, 1943

A USAAF RECLAMATION DEPOT, England, Mar. 26 — This place is a bone yard for bombers. The cigar shaped skeletons of big U.S. ships which have carried crews of ten over Germany and France countless times are scattered through the shed. They will never get into the air again except as their parts are grafted onto other ships which return damaged.

There aren't many bones in the bone yard yet, because not many Forts and Libs are old enough for retirement.

Remember The Thumper? The Thumper was the B17 which brought its crew back to England after a shell exploded in its bomb bay, and two engines were knocked out.

Now I/ Lt. John A. Castle, of Seattle, Wash., and the crew are bombing U-boat installations from another Fort which they have named The Thumper Again. Forts aren't turned out to graze when their work is done; if they were The Thumper would be in clover. Instead the old bomber is being torn down for parts.

Here's What Happens

When a bomber or a fighter comes back from a raid badly shot up and crash lands one of three things happen to it.

1. It is repaired and sent back over the channel on the next raid a couple of days later.

2. It is taken to the station it came from and used as a hangar queen. (That's what happened to the original Wahoo.)

3. It is piled on a "Queen Mary" truck trailer and brought to this depot for salvage.

That is where Joe Bechtel comes in. Joe is a master sergeant from New Orleans who probably knows more about the parts that come out of American planes than any man in England.

A mechanic on the line is a "doctor." Joe's a "mortician" and every corpse he gets is an "autopsy job." With a crew of about 30 men, he takes apart the planes that come to him whether they are Forts, Libs or fighter planes. He classifies the thousands of parts out of the ships and hands them over to a supply depot, where they are checked and reissued as class B material.

They're All Experts

Taking a plane apart is not a job for a fire axe. The men who work under Sgt. Bechtel are experts.

There are no specialists for most of the jobs. Hundreds of feet of tubing and miles of wire have to be torn out and separated. The rigid surface has to be torn off the skeleton of a bomber, the wings must be taken apart, the gas tanks salvaged and the instruments removed from the panel board.

There are specialists for the instrument work. T/Sgt. William Fields, Surrency, Ga., and Sgt. Thomas Purdy, Cranden, Wis., are the instrument experts.

"There are about 105 instruments in the average fighter plane, and there must be 125 on a Fort," Sgt. Fields says.

Joe has one complaint. He has to dismantle completely the planes no matter what shape they are in.

"Look at that wing section over there," Joe says, pointing to a giant piece of plane hanging from a heavy crane, where the men can get at it. "It's in good shape, but the supply depots won't take the whole thing, we have to take it apart and ship it to them in pieces."

Despite the complaint Joe knows the reason. The large wing section might wait months before it was needed, while the smaller parts are used every day.

The men under Bechtel. have had various experiences before they came in the army, but they all hope that their work on dismantling planes will help them get better jobs when they get back.

Some of them worked for airlines as civilians. Cpl. Frank P. Krofinger, of New York, was with the fleet service section of the American Airlines. It amounted to being a glorified gas station attendant, but with what he knows about planes now he doesn't plan to go back to his old work.

Ready for Better Job

Similarly with Cpl. William L. E. Smith, of Denver. He used to work with the Air Craft Painter Co. at home. Now he knows what goes on inside a plane, and will be ready for a better job.

Not all the men were working with planes before they came in the army. S/Sgt. Person L. Wright, of Ft. Gibson, Miss., was a grocery clerk.

When bigger and better American planes are taken apart for salvage, Joe Bechtel and his crew will take them apart. But for the time being at least pickings are slim enough, so that there is no need for a moving disassembly line.

The boys who tear the planes apart say they can't afford to have much sentiment about the ships they are working on, but it would break the crew's hearts if they could see the old plane that brought them home safely so many times, including the last, being torn wing from wing.

There are often vestiges of sentiment left on the planes when they come in on the "Queen Marys." Several of the planes that have come in have had the "battle stripes" carved out by their crews as mementos. A bomber's "hash marks" are the number of bombs and swastikas painted on its side. The bombs represent each raid the ship has been on, and the swastikas represent the number of German fighter planes the crew has destroyed.

Occasionally, when one comes in that hasn't been stripped of its markings, one of the reclamation men cuts them out and hangs them on the wall over his own bunk, which sort of belies the claim of no sentimentality.