The Night of the Premiere

In December 1939 a brand-new second lieutenant from Ecru, Mississippi, drove off to catch a ship to Panama and his first assignment. His very first night on the road, he landed in a city losing its mind — and the man at the center of the frenzy would, four years later, fly a combat mission in his bomb group.

Agog

Bob had just been commissioned and put on flying status. He left Ecru for Charleston, where a troop ship would carry him to the Canal Zone, and stopped the first night in Atlanta. He could not have picked a wilder week to pass through.

“My first night after leaving Ecru, was in Atlanta which was agog with the premier of ‘Gone with The Wind’ with Gable and the rest of the cast in town.”

The premiere of Gone with the Wind at Loew’s Grand Theatre was one of the great public spectacles of the age — torchlight parades, a crowd of hundreds of thousands, the governor declaring a holiday, and Clark Gable, the most famous man in the movies, at the absolute peak of his fame. The next morning Bob checked in at the port, left his car to be forwarded to Panama, and sailed for the Atlantic side of the isthmus.

Before They Ever Met

He didn’t meet Gable that night, of course — an anonymous lieutenant and a movie star, sharing nothing but the same crowded city. But the coincidence is too good to leave alone, because of what came next. In 1943, Clark Gable arrived at Polebrook, England, attached to the 351st Bomb Group — Bob’s group — to make a gunnery film, and flew a handful of real combat missions to get his footage. One of them was the Nantes raid of September 1943, the mission that earned Bob the Silver Star, with Gable down in the nose of his airplane handling a gun.

So the boy from Ecru and the King of Hollywood were, by pure chance, in the same Southern city on the same December nights in 1939 — and then, by the strange arithmetic of war, in the same Flying Fortress over occupied France. He passed through Gable’s biggest night a nobody; he came home from the war having flown with him.