Assigned to 327BS, 92BG, 8AF USAAF. 25 x combat missions. ETD



Awards: DFC, AM (2OLC), WWII Victory, EAME.



The Two Egg Raid

by Leslie Erganian, Captain Alex M. Erganian’s Daughter



Numbers are everything when you’re telling any story about a war, so here are some of the numbers I know. My father was a WWII bomber pilot flying raids out of England with the 327th Squadron of the 92nd Bombardment Group of the United States 8th Army Air Force; Captain Alex M. Erganian, born May 15th, 1919. He flew his twenty-five-mission tour of duty between June 1943 and March of 1944. For his first and forth missions he flew a YB-40, the Flying Fortress. For the other twenty-three, he piloted a B-17. That’s a lot of numbers if you think about it, but in the case of war, this war, any war, numbers assume a significance they don’t always have in other circumstances, they become coordinates that pin an action and a person to a place and a time, and their knowledge becomes essential to the reconstruction in the collective memory of just what happened and where and when and with whom so many years ago.





One of the stories Dad loved to tell was about how one morning at mess, instead of getting the usual one egg for breakfast, each of the men was served two eggs. They couldn’t believe their good fortune, and surmised that for whatever reason, it had been a busy week for local egg-laying, and that he and his crew were the lucky beneficiaries by chance. It wasn’t until breakfast was done and they were all assembled in the briefing room that they realized the real reason for the extra egg. The mission before them was a bombing raid with the target of Gdansk, Poland. That second egg was to supply each of them with the extra sustenance they would need to fly the extra-long mission and survive. My father dubbed it a “two-egg raid”, with all the shorter ones that had proceeded it becoming in retrospect “one-egg raids.” A two-egg breakfast from that day forward, would be a early sign of the kind of mission to come, a mission that was doubly long and doubly dangerous.



That day’s mission, flown on the 9th of October in 1943 out of Podington airfield, would at 1500 miles become known as the longest mission of the war. For my father, it was the first of many two-egg raids to follow, one of which would earn him the Distinguished Flying Cross. For me, there isn’t an egg breakfast that goes by in which I don’t consider how much one extra egg sticking to my father’s ribs might have been responsible for getting him through the war alive. As I said before, numbers are everything when you’re telling any story about a war.