“In the presence of danger,” Lord Moran observed, “man often finds salvation in action.” There was no such salvation in a flak field. “I can still see and hear the flak bursts as clearly as when I was in the plane,” Eighth Air Force tail gunner Sherman Small admitted sixty years after the war. “At the time, I successfully blocked out the fear by pretending that I was an actor in a Hollywood action movie. That fiction ended with the end of the war. Then the excruciating memories of the fear pulled me down and I had to be sent to an Air Force mental hospital.”
