would in desperation have squeezed the triggers of his Vickers machine guns. And kept down the trigger handles, spewing fragments of death in all directions, friend or foe notwithstanding.
What the Germans could not do, a spindling youth in terror managed quite well, placing three of his bullets into the legs and one arm of Willard Cromwell.
He made it back to his home field only moments before he passed out from loss of blood. Four months in hospital, every single day of that time cursing the unknown blithering idiot who'd brought him down. Cromwell didn't know if that madman survived the battle. 'Bloody good luck if he didn't, because I'd like to finish him off with my bare hands,' he snarled at his visiting fellow pilots.
Cromwell earned goodnatured laughter for his toothy profanity, but he accepted the laughter along with the whiskey smuggled into hospital to him. Then he could walk again, a bit stiffly, and he had a magnificent long burn scar on his arm from the incendiary bullet that had nearly done him in. He insisted on returning to the fight, but fighters were out. 'You're rather scrunged up, you know,' his squadron commander told him. 'A bit sticky trying to match the young men in maneuvering, eh? But I'm with you, Willard. I'm posting you to the navy.'
Cromwell nearly choked. 'You're putting me aboard a bloody ship?' he howled. He smashed his cane across the other man's desk, scattering papers and personal items throughout the office. 'Never!'
'Come off it,' his commander said affably. 'No warships or ground duty for you, old man. You're being given command of a flying boat. It's an important job, Captain. You may not shoot down many aeroplanes, but see what you can do with a few of the Hun submarines, would you?'
Off to Coastal Command, to special training for the cumbersome huge machines. Not one to wallow—like his seaplane bomber in the air—in his own rotten luck, he applied himself to what could be either a lump of an assignment or, he judged well, a rare opportunity. No need to hone his piloting; he was one of the best. But now he learned the idiosyncrasies of heavy machines and the special touch they required. He spent his ground time with the mechanics and became as adept as any man with a wrench and wiring. He learned to repair and rebuild and in the process he became the equal of any aeronautical engineer.
All this, of course, to 'see what he could do with a few of the Hun submarines.' Most attacks against German Uboats were made in a careful, level approach for bomb dropping, which had the unfortunate result of providing the German gunners on the sub deck with an excellent steady target for their weapons.
The casualties were horrific.
Willard Cromwell considered all aspects of the situation, and at the conclusion of his survey, Madman Cromwell came into being.
He modified his own flying boat. With mechanics and his own flight crew working together, they strengthened the struts and wires and rigging of their machine, finetuned their engines for extra power, and stole stove lids from wherever they could be found to surround their crew positions with armor plating. Then they mounted a longbarreled 37mm recoilless cannon in the nose gunner position, doubled the number of machine guns on the flying boat, and went hunting.
No one had ever attacked a submarine before with a screaming plunge in an aircraft infamous for its plodding gait and painfully clumsy response. Infamous the other machines were; not this widewinged bird. As Cromwell dove against his target, the forward gunner pumped heavy shells against the submarine, supported by three men hammering away with machine guns.
Cromwell aimed to drop his bombs right into the conning tower of his target if at all possible, and the only way to do that was to go right down to the deck in a steep dive so that the bombs would follow a properly curving ballistic arc and explode inside the submarine.
He sank two submarines, fought off several more, saved ships and lives, and met his comeuppance once again through no direct action of the enemy. Attacking a German sub on the surface in his usual brash dive, his bow gunner pumping shells at the enemy machine gun crews on deck, he was short of his aiming point for the conning tower. One bomb struck the flat deck and bounced wildly back into the air to smash into the tail of Cromwell's flying boat. By the good graces of the angels who look after such madmen, the bomb fuse failed to trigger, but the heavy bomb ripped through the airplane's structure, severing the controls to the tail surfaces. Cromwell and crew tore past the submarine just as his first bomb exploded within the Uboat.
The explosion not only ripped outward from the submarine hull, but also struck the flying boat like a giant hand slapping a mosquito. Into the water they crashed. The airplane shed pieces in a rapid but steady progression, each structural collapse easing the shock of deceleration.
When the moment ended, the submarine was sinking in a spume of steam, smoke and spreading oil, and Cromwell and crew in life jackets were clambering onto a section of the hull still floating as a somewhat leaky lifeboat.
A British destroyer raced to their aid and hauled everyone from the sea.
Cromwell ended up in another hospital, this time with a broken shoulder, minor burns, and many lacerations about his body that produced scars he would spend years displaying to awed friends. In the years that followed, Cromwell added to his already distinguished abilities by becoming expert in weapons and demolition. Judged by his superiors to be the recipient of a charmed life, he was sent on missions to trouble spots where British control slipped into disrepute and no small danger. He was as adept in learning languages as he was blessed with an extraordinary memory, and he became as much at home in dark alleys and back streets as he was in the cockpit of any flying machine.
By now, with the war years well behind him, Cromwell was a portly man of large stature and a huge handlebar mustache, assuming the appearance of the typical
'Colonel Blimp' of colonial England. And it was all appearance, for Cromwell beneath his outer flab was massively muscled, adroit, and flexible, and a dangerous man indeed with weapons of any kind, as well as with his powerful hands. He had spent two years in Turkey training with their professional wrestlers, a field exalted and held in honor for multiple generations. They taught him well, soaking his hands and much of his skin in stinging brine so they became tough and as hard as boards.
This was the man Indiana Jones had selected as his 'shotgun,' able to perform duties as a mechanic or weaponeer, a pilot or a skulker among the alleys of almost any city in the world. He was lethal in handtohand combat and yet, strangely, well steeped in academic lore, master of a dozen languages and with a memory that forgot nothing. Those people who thought they knew Indiana Jones well found it hard to comprehend his friendship with the harddrinking, unpredictable Cromwell. But Indy had chosen very well indeed. Cromwell was worth a dozen men.
And at this moment, in this remote farmhouse, amid wide fields in every direction, Cromwell was thick with whiskey and impatience. He brought shudders to the others in the room with another gutwrenching belch. 'When in the blazes is Indy getting back here!' he thundered, a question they all knew to be rhetorical.
Indy would return from Chicago when he had accomplished the needs of his trip, and he had insisted on going it alone. Something very special and secretive had them on edge. Even the powerful and tough Ford Trimotor hidden alongside the biggest barn nearby seemed chained to the ground. They wanted to do something. Waiting scraped against their nerves, and they would have been surprised to know that this was precisely the situation Indy had
