A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

by Adam Makos

  Ten minutes later, it was The Pub’s turn. Charlie pushed all four throttles forward. The bomber vibrated, fighting her brakes. She shook like a jackhammer from nose to tail, wanting to run. Pinky kept his eyes on his watch. He raised his hand. When thirty seconds had passed, he dropped his hand. Charlie lifted his feet from the brakes and let the bomber loose. With a roar she tilted her nose slowly downward as she ran.

  Charlie felt the vibrations from the wings course through the ribs of the fuselage and through his seat. He had never flown a bomber so heavy or felt the runway so rough through his foot pedals. The engines roared louder. The props bit the air. Charlie knew that when he pulled back on the yoke, the lives of nine men would be in his hands.

  The Pub raced past the fields and past the fire truck and ambulance that waited halfway down the strip. When the bomber’s nose broke one hundred miles per hour, Charlie slowly pulled the control column toward his chest, until an invisible gust of air rushed beneath the wings and broke the suction of the earth, lifting the bomber into the sky. In an instant, Charlie felt the machine calm from vibrating to humming. With the bomber’s propeller blades clawing for altitude, Charlie tapped the brakes to clench the wheels and stop their spinning. A glimpse out his window revealed the balloon tires were unmoving.

  “Gear up,” he ordered.

  Pinky toggled the gear up, right side first, then left. The voice of one of the waist gunners crackled over the radio, “Tail wheel, up.” Charlie swore he could feel his gunners’ footsteps through the controls as they left their takeoff positions in the radio room to man their stations. Charlie banked into a gentle turn to follow the plane ahead of him. By 7:45 A.M. the quietness of a winter’s morning had again descended on the base.

  ABOVE KIMBOLTON, THE bombers of the 379th corkscrewed upward through dark clouds. Their plane blanketed in the haze, Charlie and Pinky gripped the control yokes tightly, although only Charlie steered. Pinky kept an eye out for the tail guns of the bomber in front of him. Charlie focused on his instruments, flying by blind faith. He feared ascents like this, the perfect setup for a midair collision.

  From twenty-three bases across the breadth of England, nearly 475 bombers climbed through the clouds. Making matters more harrowing, as part of the “Round the Clock” strategy, the Americans were going out at the same time the British bombers were coming home from their night raids. It’s a sky full of terror, Charlie thought.

  Through a cloud, Charlie saw the bomber ahead of him appear briefly then disappear. The mist around his canopy parted, and The Pub popped into the clear air at eight thousand feet. Above him, Charlie saw the planes of the 379th spiraling upward. They seemed to fly around an invisible pole. Glancing across England, Charlie saw other bomb groups popping from the cloud’s orange roofs, leaving purple holes in their wakes.

  From one end of the sky to another, the bombers’ radiomen fired flares from their rooftop hatches, signaling the groups to assemble into combat boxes. Colonel Preston flew onward, straight and steady, trusting everyone to follow him. In a B-17 there was no rearview mirror, just the tail gunner’s voice.

  As the 379th bombers slid into formation, the 303rd and 384th bomb groups latched on behind them. Together, the three groups comprised the wing that would lead the other wings of the 8th Air Force. In the lead, Preston steered gently to avoid a column of magnificent clouds. Slowly, the other wings fell into formation behind Preston’s, forming a stream of bombers. From the forefront, Charlie looked out his side window during the turn. Behind him, he saw the long string of nearly five hundred bombers, which made him smile in awe.

  At the tip of the spear, Preston’s navigator set a new course as the flock of bombers turned toward Germany.

  Climbing steadily through twelve thousand feet, Charlie and his crew donned their oxygen masks. A little rubber bag like a tiny lung dangled from each man’s mask. The lung expanded and contracted with each breath. Charlie addressed the crew and ordered an oxygen check. Each man wore a throat mic, and to talk, all he needed to do was squeeze a button on a clicker that was wired to a wall outlet. One by one the crew checked in, each confirming that his mask was working. If flak severed a man’s oxygen line, he would become sleepy and drunk before he passed out from “anoxia,” as it was known. Charlie had heard stories that more than a few gunners had bailed out of perfectly good planes, drunk with anoxia. Waist gunners under anoxia were once found singing and toasting each other in the back of the plane, thinking they were already at the bar.

  At twenty thousand feet, Charlie plugged his heated suit into the outlet by his left thigh and ordered his men to plug in as well. The frost on his window told Charlie that the temperature outside had plummeted far below freezing. He piped over the intercom a reminder for the men to keep their gloves on. The aluminum that separated them from the open sky was only a few centimeters thick and so cold that if they touched the metal with bare skin, they would stick.

  Passing through twenty-four thousand feet, the stream of bombers crossed over the English coastline above the city of Great Yarmouth and departed friendly territory. Charlie felt a sinking feeling in his gut when he realized that the freezing North Sea lay below his feet.

  Charlie told the gunners they were free to test their weapons. Charlie heard the burst of their .50-calibers from over his shoulder as the noise traveled up the centerline of the bomber and into the cockpit. He knew that behind them, his men were firing with vigor toward the sea, a cathartic outpouring of angst. He smelled the acrid odor of gun smoke when Doc and Andy fired from the nose.

  “Permission to arm the bombs?” Andy asked from the nose.

  “Granted,” Charlie replied.

  Andy carried a yellow portable oxygen tank back to the narrow catwalk and crossed the bomb bay like a tightrope walker. Delicately he pulled the arming pins and brought the bombs to life. After returning to the nose, he reported to Charlie, “Bombs armed.”

  Ye Olde Pub was off to war.

  * * *

  * Preston would remember, “I enjoyed in WWII the biggest success I have had in my day, in my time, in my life. One always enjoys what he is successful at.”3

  * Eighth Air Force historians Philip Kaplan and Rex Smith would describe precision daylight bombing with this comparison: “Consider that trying to drop bombs into a 2,000-foot circle while speeding past at an altitude of 25,000 feet in a bomber under fire was much like trying to drop grains of rice into a teacup while riding past on a bicycle.”4

  14

  THE BOXER

  THREE AND A HALF HOURS LATER, 11 A.M., HIGH OVER THE NORTH SEA

  EVER SINCE TAKEOFF, bombers all around Charlie had been turning home for mechanical reasons. Three of the seven planes in his flight had departed, an unusually high number considering that a 10 percent abort rate was normal. Charlie’s flight leader, Walt, got on his radio. “Goldsmith two-zero,” he said, using Charlie’s call signal. “Close up on my left wing.”

  Charlie eased the bomber into her new slot tight to Walt’s plane. Together, they glided at twenty-seven thousand feet above the icy sea.

  A white fleck fell onto the brown sleeve of Charlie’s jacket. Then another fell and another. He risked a glance upward. Frost had formed and spread across the ceiling. The moisture that had been in the plane on the ground had now risen. He ran his gloved hand across the ceiling. White flakes cascaded like snow inside the cockpit. “Well how about that,” he said with awe.

  “It’s going to be a white Christmas after all,” Pinky joked, smiling behind his mask.

  Charlie chuckled. He knew Pinky and the crew had been looking forward to the Christmas party that the group would be hosting for the children of Kimbolton Village the next day. Despite his hangdog demeanor, Ecky was actually looking forward to Christmas the most. All the chocolate bars he’d been scrounging and hoarding weren’t actually for him. Blackie had told Charlie that Ecky had been saving the chocolate rations for weeks, wrapping them up as presents for the kids at the party. Christmas itself w
as on a Saturday, just four days distant.

  The bombers passed over the coastline and onto the European continent. A swatch of cold gray-green fields appeared below. “That’s Germany below, boys,” Charlie told his crew. “Keep your eyes peeled for fighters.” Preston kept the 379th on its southeasterly path. They had thirty miles to go before the turn toward Bremen followed by a thirty-mile bomb run.

  It was 11:05 A.M. Charlie knew that if he could see Germany, then German radar and ground spotters could also see him. At that very moment enemy soldiers were calculating the bombers’ speed, course, and altitude and feeding it to flak gunners ahead. Even up so high, Charlie could feel their weighty stare.

  “Little friends at two o’clock,” Frenchy radioed from the top turret. The brown specs out Pinky’s window were P-47s, their fighter cover. The fighters flew parallel to the bombers and were easy to see with visibility ranging ten miles and scattered clouds below. The P-38s and P-51s that Preston had promised were nowhere in sight, but Charlie knew they could be anywhere along the eighty-mile-long bomber stream.

  “Bandits!” Ecky called out. “High and distant, on our six.”

  “How many, Ecky?” Charlie asked.

  “Can’t tell,” he replied. “But they’re jumping somebody back there.”

  “More of them to port,” the left waist gunner, Jennings, said. “Eleven o’clock.”

  “Our fighters are moving to intercept,” Frenchy announced with relief as the P-47s crossed over the formation to chase the enemy.

  “Keep an eye on them,” Charlie told the crew.

  Preston’s bomber gradually banked left and so did the others. Doc told Charlie and the crew what they already knew, that they were turning onto the Initial Point, the start of the bomb run. Seeing the bombers operate in unison, Charlie felt a warm, safe feeling, knowing that the others were there to “share the misery.”

  Charlie looked at his watch and saw it was 11:32 A.M. They were thirty miles from the target and “on rails,” locked into flying a straight course for ten long minutes.

  Through his windscreen, Charlie saw an oily black puff of smoke. Then another. Then another. Quickly the sky frothed with a man-made storm. Far below, the 250 flak gunners had begun pulling the lanyards of their 88mm cannons while their comrades cranked handles that traversed the guns, tracking the bombers between earsplitting blasts. Every three seconds the cannons kicked, sending twenty-pound shells skyward. Each gun and its crew operated in a four-cannon battery that fired together to create a “kill zone”—each shell fused to explode at a slightly different altitude in order to embrace a target.

  From the lowest position in the lead formation, Charlie had an unobstructed view ahead. He saw the black flak cloud hover like fog along a country road. That “fog” marked his path through the open sky, a trail where angry shells lit the way.

  The flak puffs floated past Charlie’s window, mesmerizing him.

  A flash of orange lit up the cockpit and shook his gaze. Then another. The veteran pilot had told Charlie not to worry about the black smoke puffs but to be afraid if he saw the red flash of a bursting shell. The explosions came closer. They now had color to them and reminded Charlie of “black orchids with vivid crimson centers.” At once, four separate explosions burst like lightning just ahead of The Pub, on Pinky’s side. Charlie heard the smack of shrapnel and felt the yoke go momentarily limp as the bomber bucked upward then settled down hard. He saw that Walt’s bomber, too, had been tossed by the blast and was bobbing for stability.

  “We’re hit!” Andy yelled through his throat mic, his voice overlapping Doc’s cursing.

  “There’s a big hole!” Andy reported, “We’re hit in the nose!”

  “Feels like a hurricane in here!” Doc shouted.

  Up front, flak had sheared away a large swath of the bomber’s Plexiglas nose, allowing subzero wind to howl in through the jagged hole. The two-hundred-mile-per-hour gale pushed the interior temperature down to seventy degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But Doc and Andy knew they were lucky. The nose of a B-17 had little structural support. It was a delicate part of the plane, and if hit hard enough, it was prone to falling off.

  “We’re losing oil pressure on number two!” Pinky told Charlie, his eyes fixed on the engine’s gauges. Glancing out the window to his left, Charlie saw the inboard engine smoking, punctured by shrapnel. He told Pinky to shut the engine down. Pinky reached to his left and pulled back on the turbocharger and throttle levers for the damaged engine. Charlie knew Andy and Doc were watching because he heard their excited voices lowering as if synchronized with the turning propeller as it revolved slower and slower. The propeller and their voices stopped together in silence. Pinky flipped a switch and “feathered” the propeller, turning it knife edge against the onrushing air to minimize drag.

  Reduced to flying on three engines, Charlie kept pressure on the control yoke, pulling back ever so slightly to hold the bomber up and in position. To his right, he saw smoke trailing from the outboard engine of Walt’s bomber, a result of the same flak bursts that had hit The Pub.

  “Doc!” Charlie said. “How far to the drop?”

  “One minute,” Doc replied.

  “Oh shit,” Pinky muttered, pressing his face to his window. “A shell passed clean through the wing! It didn’t explode, but we got a helluva hole!” Charlie leaned against his straps but saw nothing, so he asked if they were streaming fuel. Pinky told him somehow the shell had missed the fuel tanks.

  Another burst of orange rocked the bomber. At the end of the right wing, engine four began running wild, accelerating as if the throttle controls had been severed. On the ground, Shack had warned Charlie about this finicky engine.

  “She’s going to rip right out of the wing!” Pinky shouted.

  Charlie told Pinky to begin the shut-down procedures but not to go all the way or else the engine might not restart. Pinky began to shut down the engine while Charlie gripped the yoke tightly to hold the bomber level as shrapnel rattled like hail. Charlie normally liked the sound of hail and thought it comforting, a reminder of his boyhood when he would lie in his bed at night, listening to hail strike the roof of his family’s farmhouse. But that type of hail wouldn’t punch through the ceiling.

  “Bomb bay doors opening,” Andy said.

  Pinky restarted engine four just before its prop stopped spinning. The engine returned to life and hummed steadily. Charlie told Pinky to keep an eye on the engine and to repeat the procedure if necessary.

  “Pilot, hold her steady,” Andy said. “Steady. Steady. Steady.”

  Charlie saw the first bombs tumble from Preston’s plane far ahead, and then, like heavy acorns shaken from a tree, bombs showered from the other planes.

  “Bombs away!” Andy shouted as he clicked the bomb-release button. He and Doc turned to each other and shook hands, as they always had on the practice range. With a click, click, click, the twelve five-hundred-pound bombs were released from their shackles in the bomb bay behind Charlie, each falling a millisecond apart to prevent them from colliding. A fading whistle howled as the bombs plummeted toward the Focke-Wulf plant five miles below. The Pub leapt skyward as if overjoyed to have shed three tons of unwanted cargo. From the ball turret, Blackie turned his guns downward to watch the bombs blossom in bursts across the landscape like a malevolent string of firecrackers.

  Their duty fulfilled, Preston led the group in a left bank away from the target, leveling his wings to the north. The strategy was to escape Germany as quickly as possible. Behind them, the 379th had deposited their share of the 2.6 million pounds of iron that the 8th Air Force would drop that month, the first month that the 8th Air Force out-bombed the British Bomber Command.

  Like the men in every other plane, the crew of The Pub began scanning the skies for enemy aircraft and their own fighter cover. But neither could be seen. They did not know it, but their friendly fighters had departed early, “because of excessive headwinds they had to buck on the way home,” the group’s
lead navigator would note.

  At a horrible time for anything to go wrong, the bomber’s engine four began running wild again. Pinky renewed the restart process, but with engine two silent and four winding down, the bomber lost speed and slipped behind the group. The Pub was not alone. Walt’s bomber was also wounded, and bleeding fluids from its left wing. Walt dropped from formation and stayed on Charlie’s wing. Under reduced power, Charlie and Walt watched helplessly as the silhouettes of their buddies’ planes shrunk and converged in the distance. Slowly, the rest of the 8th Air Force passed overhead, their shadows darkening Charlie’s cockpit. Charlie knew that gunners on the other bombers were looking on his plane and Walt’s with pity. They had become stragglers.

  Charlie followed Walt as he steered onto a course that would take them out of Germany. Pinky tugged Charlie’s arm, drawing his attention to Walt’s plane. Smoke trailed from both engines on the left wing, those closest to The Pub. The smoke grew thicker by the second.

  Charlie heard Walt radio a distress call as his bomber lost speed and height. Charlie leaned forward, tracking the bomber as it slipped back past Pinky’s window.

  “Keep your eye on her,” Charlie told his men.

  In the ball turret, Blackie had a ringside seat. His ever-present grin faded as he watched Walt’s plane dive in an effort to extinguish its burning engines. The plane faded into a cloud bank just behind The Pub. Walt’s radio cries rang out. Fighters were attacking him. Charlie looked frantically around.

  Then Charlie heard Walt shout, “Everybody, bail out!”*

  In the ball turret, Blackie saw an orange flash through a gap in the clouds. “Something bad just happened!” Blackie reported to Charlie. Charlie knew this was true because silence had replaced Walt’s radio cries. Charlie held the bomber on course and gazed out the windscreen at the empty sky where Walt’s plane had been.