Christmas Dinner

By Clevis O. Laverty

The Air Transport Command’s DC-4, a symphony of power and gracefulness, fled eagerly down the sun-baked runway at Khartoum and was airborne. The junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile faded behind the airplane as it rose to meet the rising sun.

The crew of four, working together in a harmony of specialized services, busied themselves with their individual tasks. The pilot, efficient and confident, was at the controls trimming the aircraft; the copilot, young and inexperienced but well-trained, performed the routine motions of raising the landing gear, the flaps, and setting the gyrocompass. The radio officer loaded his transmitter by reeling out the antenna until resonance was achieved on the control frequency. He wondered if the British at Khartoum had given him the correct code for the day. His last trip through here had been otherwise, and they had been fired upon when challenged by a ground battery. The engineer checked over an impressive array of steady and flickering meters on his instrument panel. He too wondered; he wondered about the new piston that had been installed in number three engine by a motley crew of mechanics at Khartoum.

Different as their jobs were, these men had similar thoughts about this flight to Gura far from home on Christmas Day, traveling inside recently captured territory, and prospects of Christmas dinner at Gura.

Christmas dinner, it was reported, would be served by Italian prisoners of war. The crew conjectured about the quality of the food, the attitude of the prisoners, and joked about the possibility of finding strychnine in the coffee. Many fanciful observations concerning the bill of fare were voiced.

“May be we’;; get an extra large portion of Spam.”

“We’ll probably find some of these odd looking birds we’ve been seeing around here, belly up on the platter.”

“Don’t forget, you guys,” observed Sparks, “the old standby in this area is horsemeat.”

The second guessing was cut short by the copilot’s, “There’s Gura on the horizon!”

A sudden radio challenge by the ground battery awakened the radio officer from his reverie.

From the air, Gura was not very pretentious. These was a miscellaneous scattering of unplanned buildings, stunted vegetation, and an elevated airport with one long single runway that fought its way between jagged black rocks and ended with a sudden sheer precipice that dropped into the misty Red Sea.

The DC-4 came in cleanly and surely for a swift, uneventful landing.

The four men were met by a laughing group of Americans. Mechanics, soldiers, airport workers, and officers plied their new guest with machine-gun rapid fire questions about stateside as the crew washed and refreshed themselves in the hanger locker room. Then this excited group escorted their visitors to a low, square, unpainted frame building and ushered them through the door.

The four halted in amazement. Orderly rows of tables with clean white table cloths and gleaming silver, platters of succulent turkeys and bowls of steaming vegetables gave lie to the conjectures of the previous six hours.

A banner with the words A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO THE ALLIED OFFICERS FROM THE ITALIAN PRISONERS completely covered the four walls.

The visitors experienced simultaneous reactions. Their relief was overwhelming. Shame touched their hearts for a fleeting moment. Their appetites...trebled.