THE MAN:
CAPTAIN HEFFNER'S OWN STORY
ABOUT THE SALVAGE OPERATIONS
PART I
THE MAN:
CAPTAIN HEFFNER'S OWN STORY
ABOUT THE SALVAGE OPERATIONS
PART I
This is a reproduction of an article written by S/Sgt. James Winchester,
probably in 1947, published in a Collier's magazine that is now unknown.
DURING the early days of lend lease, before Pearl Harbor, an American made
Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was shunted to one side of the runway at Kano Nigeria,
in Central Africa, to await repairs for a cracked cylinder head.
For some reason the repair crew never got around to working on the ship a brand new one
and, as week after week passed, lt became a stripped down skeleton of its former self
. Crew chiefs and pilots' on other aircraft being ferried to the British fighting fronts would help
themselves to a needed part here and there.
One day a tall lean Lincolnesque pilot by the name of Captain (now Major) Charles Heffner,
a former Cairo, Illinois, garageman on lend lease as a pilot from the U. S. Army Air Forces
to Pan American Africa Air Ferries, Ltd., became interested in the plane.
He stationed a couple of native guards on day and night duty to stop the pilfering,
and then, working in his spare time between flights, he started a four months job of repairing the craft.
Spare parts in Africa for any type of aircraft then were scarcer than T-bone steaks in New York City
now, and he had to engage in a little high class "borrowing" of his own.
He had every wreck within a hundred mile radius of Kano spotted,
and spent many a weary dusty hour in a jeep rounding up usable parts from these derelicts of the desert.
Finally the repairs were finished--or so he thought.
The night before the test flight one of the native guards rose up suddenly
and jammed his bayonet through the tail surface. Another two days.
Then a mechanic spotted some ants pouring out of a hill under the tail surfaces.
He filled a tobacco can with 100-octane gasoline from the plane's supply,
poured it on the ants, and applied a match.. The blaze destroyed both elevators.
"Right then," Major Heffner relates, "is when the fable of Missouri mule skinners
being the world's most accomplished cusser began to fade."
Next, the pilot assigned to fly the plane from Kano to India came down with malaria
and Heffner had to fly it himself. For this job of desert salvage
Heffner received personal commendations from Juan Trippe, president Of Pan American Airways,
and from Major General Harold L. George,
head of the then rapidly expanding U.S. Army Air Forces Air Transport Command.
The citations commended him for starting and carrying out the repairs of the plane during his off-duty hours
without any suggestion or direction from superior officers,
and also for doing 80 per cent of the repair work himself.
Almost a year later Hefner saw this same reclaimed Fortress at an airport in Palestine.
Painted on the fuselage under the cockpit window
were twenty six miniature bombs
-the symbols of twenty-six bombing missions.
When the privately operated Pan American route for lend-lease was absorbed by the Air Transport Command,
Heffner was recalled to active duty with the Army in September, 1942,
and assigned as salvage officer for the Air Depot, Air Service command, operating under the A. T. C.
out of Accra, Gold Coast, Africa.
During the ten months he held this job, he personally salvaged more than 100 aircraft.
Their total value in dollars and cents would range into the millions.
Their value to the Allied cause is too great to be computed.
When he returned to the States he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Heffner, now operations officer for A.T.C's Brownsville-Panama route,
had a special salvage plane developed by himself and the Army Air Forces Experimental Division
at Wright Field, Dayton. It was a Douglas C-47, but had been converted to a flying machine shop.
It was equipped with all kinds of spare parts and tools for manufacturing them-
-lathe, drill press, welding outfit, generators, portable air compressor, and special propeller and engine tools.
Heffner also built a two-cylinder tractor weighing 785 pounds and a small trailer he could transport in the plane.
The tractor and trailer could go where heavier equipment would bog down in the sand.
The plane,
"the Pelican" ,
also carried food, water, and emergency equipment of all kinds, and it was Heffner's proud boast
that he could take the Pelican into the desert with a crew of six men and be self-sufficient for at least thirty days.
Each salvage job was high adventure in itself.
Most of the time Heffner would repair the planes only to hold together until he could deliver them
to the mechanics and repairmen at the sub-depot in Accra. More than once the engineering officer would
greet him with:
"Holy cow, Heffner if you don't stop bringing us this junk
we're are going to chase both you and Seddich
so far into the desert you will never find your way home."
Seddich was Heffner's native house-boy at Accra,
and a fabulous character in his own right in the officers quarters there.
He really made his mark the day he took advantage of Heffner's absence
to lay everything in his quarters out for sunning.
Among the items stretched out for public consumption were some thirty or forty love letters
Heffner had received from his wife.
Some of the passages thus publicly aired are still being quoted in various African messes,
but to this day Seddich can't understand what he did wrong.
HEFFNER'S most spectacular salvage began in early March, 1943.
A Douglas C-47 of the Air Transport Command, carrying a load of wounded French soldiers from Tripoli,
was forced down at night on the desert in French Equatorial Africa.
A rescue plane from Fort Lamy discovered her a week later, and the wounded soldiers and crew members,
none of whom had been hurt in the crash landing, were soon on their way to civilization.
Then a call was put through to Heffner at Accra.
(please use Arrows to view the additional story)
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