It was while Rooney was attached to the 8th that he witnessed a death terrible in its inevitability. A call came in that one bomber's ball turret gunner was trapped. Operating in the bomber's belly, ball turret gunners rotated their plastic "cages" for maximum target capability. On this particular aircraft, the rotational gears had jammed and the gunner could not return to a position where he could exit into the plane.
The bomber was losing altitude fast and would have to make a crash landing. Everyone --crew, observers, and especially the ball turret gunner -- knew what was going to happen. The pilot ordered the crew to ditch everything to keep the plane in the air for a few more precious minutes, but still the wheels could not be brought down. "We all watched in horror as it happened," Rooney writes in "My War." We watched as this man's life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber."
And then young Sgt. Rooney went back to his city desk and his work. "I returned to London that night shaken and unable to write the most dramatic, the most gruesome, the most heart-wrenching story I had ever witnessed," he recalls. "Some reporter I was."