Although there were no maps of Switzerland aboard the plane, Bowers was carrying an escape kit in the pocket of his flight suit. Along with a small pocketknife, a compass, and a bar of concentrated chocolate, it included a folded handkerchief that had a map of Europe printed on it.
Switzerland made up only a tiny section of the map, but as Bowers studied it, he became convinced that if they turned right over Lake Constance, they would end up over Germany again. After listening to his conclusions, Andy continued flying south.
As Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti approached the foothills of the alpine range, he saw that they were going to have very little clearance over the tops of the peaks. Andy ordered the two waist gunners to lighten the plane by jettisoning all the machine guns and remaining ammunition into one of the snow-choked canyons. He told Bob Huisinga to destroy their Norden bombsight.
With a torrent of black smoke still streaming from the right outboard engine, the crew became nervous that they wouldn’t make it over the high peaks. Vernon Scott, the radio operator, called Andy to ask if it would be all right for the crew to bail out.
“You guys could get killed doing that,” he told them, immediately realizing the absurdity of his words after everything they had already come through. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it.”
After clearing the alpine divide, they emerged over a broad grassy plain. In the distance, Andy could see a control tower and the intersecting runways of an air base. Soon, he could see planes parked on the aprons. From the nose compartment, Bob Huisinga scanned the base through his binoculars.
“There are swastikas all over the place,” he called out excitedly on the intercom.
Andy was now sure they were in northern Italy. Banking quickly to the right, he asked Gordon Bowers to come up to the cockpit with the handkerchief map. While he waited, Keith Rich informed him that the gas gauges had all reached empty. Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti’s engines would run out of fuel at any moment.
When Bowers arrived with the map, Andy spread it across one knee and examined it closely. From their position just south of the alpine range, it looked like there ought to be another large lake off to their right. The northern end of it appeared to be inside the Swiss border. He turned the plane onto a northwesterly course to find it.
“Fighter at six o’clock low,” called out Henry Hucker from the tail.
With a sinking heart, Andy concluded that it must have been scrambled from the base in northern Italy. He berated himself for having ordered the machine guns thrown out to lighten the plane. Now they had no way to defend themselves.
As he watched, the fighter flew up alongside them on the left. Instead of a swastika on the fuselage, he saw a white cross on a red field. Swiss markings. The pilot gestured at Andy with his finger, repeatedly pointing down.
Ahead of them was the lake he had seen on the map. At the northern end of it was a small grass-covered field. Andy had never landed a Fortress on grass before, but with nearly all their fuel expended, and with their bombs and weapons already jettisoned, the plane was very light. He could come in low over the lake and use every bit of the field. With their tanks on empty, he had no choice.
In one of Andy’s first briefings back in England, the pilots had been instructed that if they were ever to land in a neutral country, it was incumbent on the pilot to destroy the plane.
They had four thermite bombs aboard to do the job, each one the size of a fruit can. The bombs had been manufactured for use by the Royal Air Force, and were simple to detonate. One struck the cap against a hard object, and within a few minutes the contents would burn white hot.
On the intercom, Andy told the navigator to set one off in the nose compartment and the radio operator to set off the second one behind the bomb bay. Keith Rich was to detonate the third one in the cockpit. Andy planned to climb out onto the left wing to ignite the last one over the gas tanks.
Coming in at lake-top level toward the grass-covered field, he saw that the place was ringed with troops, all carrying rifles. For a moment, he worried that the whole thing might be a German ruse, and that the Luftwaffe was looking to capture an intact B-17.
He was relieved when he saw they weren’t wearing German uniforms. He got on the intercom for the last time to say, “I see soldiers everywhere and they all have guns. Go out with your hands in the air!”
With the dexterity of a former flight instructor, he brought the big Fortress’s front two wheels down within a few feet of the lake’s edge and brought it to a stop before running into the cordon of soldiers. Two more trucks filled with soldiers raced up to the plane.
The first three incendiaries had already been ignited and Andy was crawling out the side window of the cockpit to deploy the fourth one when one of the soldiers began screaming at him from the ground. Swiss German was a dialect Andy found incomprehensible, and he had no idea what the man was yelling.
Seeing so many rifles pointed at him from point-blank range, he thought better of igniting the bomb on the wing. Instead, he clambered back into the cockpit and set off his bomb next to the one set by Keith Rich. He used the forward belly hatch to reach the ground.
As Andy and his crew advanced toward the soldiers with their hands in the air, the scene was being witnessed through binoculars by a man standing on the balcony of a nearby lakeside hotel. Andy had brought Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti down at Locarno on the edge of Lake (Lago) Maggiore.
The man on the balcony was portly and gray-haired, with a well-trimmed mustache. His name was Allen Dulles, and he was the station chief of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American spy network.
Dulles told an aide to arrange a meeting with the pilot of the Flying Fortress.
Theirs Not to Reason Why
Champigny, France
388th Bomb Group
Slightly Dangerous II
Second Lieutenant Demetrios Karnezis
1055
They were alone in the sky.
The Greek had no idea what had happened to the rest of the lead squadron, much less the rest of the 388th, or the other fifteen bomb groups in the once massive bomber stream.
It was every plane for itself.
The Greek felt played out. He had been piloting the plane more than five hours, first through the tedious process of assembling the bomber train, then the effort to find the primary target, followed by the meandering route to the secondary target, all the while trying to stay in close formation. Of course, it was no different for all the other pilots of the 388th, at least the ones who had survived so far.
He knew that the German fighters must have eaten their way straight up the food chain, starting with the low squadron, just as they usually did. He thought of Earl Melville, Beecham, Mohr, and the others who had gone down under the enemy fighter attacks. He could only hope that Slightly Dangerous II wasn’t going to be one of the “Did Not Returns” in the postmission missing crew reports.
“Fighter . . . two o’clock high,” his copilot, Jack George, called out on the intercom.
A fresh burst of adrenaline kicked in as the Greek saw the first Fw 190 coming at them. It opened fire with its cannons, but passed beneath them without inflicting any obvious damage.
When the next one began its attack from the same quadrant, Jack George grabbed the hand grip of the copilot’s window and slid it back. Pulling his Colt .45 semiautomatic out of his hip holster, he stuck it through the opening, aimed at the oncoming fighter, and began firing.
Against the noise of the wind and engines, the shots sounded like firecrackers, and the Greek burst out laughing at the sheer idiocy of it. By the time the fighter had rolled over and disappeared, the .45’s magazine clip was empty. Jack turned and saw the incredulous look on the Greek’s face.
“What? I had to do something!” he said.
If they made it home, the Greek looked forward to repeating the crazy story to the rest of the pilots back at the officers’ club in Knettishall. If they made it home. At least six fighter
s were stalking Slightly Dangerous II as it continued its escape across France.
The Greek never saw the enemy pilot who put the next wounds into them.
Attacking from below, he fired directly into the Fortress’s belly, raking it fore to aft with a full volley of cannon rounds. Over the engine roar, the Greek heard a loud hammering crash in the accessory section behind the cockpit, and the flight deck immediately filled with the sulfurous stench of an exploding shell.
A moment later, the steering yoke went dead in his hands. One of the rounds had severed the cable from the steering column to the hinged ailerons on the trailing edges of the two wings. The Greek could now only fly the plane using the elevator trim tabs and power controls. He put the Fortress into a steep dive as choking smoke began to fill the flight deck.
The top turret gunner had been standing behind the cockpit, his ammunition long gone. Seeing the steering column flop over, he grabbed Jack George’s parachute, which was tied with a slipknot to the back of the copilot’s seat. Dropping behind the flight deck, he crawled to the forward escape hatch, released the lever, and bailed out.
“We’re going down to the deck,” the Greek called out to the crew on the intercom. “Navigator, give me a heading.”
“Two hundred seventy degrees,” Lieutenant Frazier came back from the nose compartment.
Glancing across the cockpit, the Greek saw that Jack George’s steering column was still upright and realized that his aileron controls must still be intact. He motioned to Jack to change seats. From the copilot’s seat, he pulled the ship out of its dive and banked to the left to throw off his pursuers.
The next two attacks came in from the side and tail. Within a few moments, the machine guns in the waist and rear went ominously silent. With the forward machine guns already out of ammunition, the plane was defenseless.
Lieutenant Dick Loveless, the bombardier who had already shot down at least one enemy fighter with his .30-caliber machine gun, crawled up behind them in the cockpit. With his ammunition expended, it was safer on the flight deck than in the exposed nose compartment.
They were down to sixteen thousand feet when Slightly Dangerous II was nailed again by a fighter attacking from below. A cannon round ruptured the plane’s hydraulic lines and pierced the oxygen tank behind the pilot’s seat.
The combustible mixture exploded, and the Greek was suddenly breathing fire through his oxygen mask. Feeling his skin burning, he ripped the mask off, along with the rest of his head gear. As the fire began to spread through the accessory compartment, he knew it was time to go.
Without his earphones and throat mike, he was unable to verbally give the order to bail out. He ordered Loveless to find the navigator and for them to bail out together. He told Jack George to get out, too.
The Greek flipped the spring-loaded switch that set off continuous alarm bells throughout the aircraft, the signal for anyone still alive in the plane to bail out. Standing up in the smoke-filled cockpit, he turned to reach for his parachute. Like Jack George’s, it was tied with a slipknot to the back of his seat.
The chute pack was smoldering, apparently hit by one of the shell bursts. He saw that there were three shrapnel slits across the front of the pack. He had never used a parachute before, and hadn’t received any training in how to jump or when to pull the rip cord.
None of that would matter if the silk chute was fatally compromised. He forced the horrible image of free-falling three miles to earth out of his mind, and clipped the slashed chest pack onto the d-rings of his parachute harness.
He was about to leave when Jack George appeared through the smoke, returning to the flight deck after a frantic and unsuccessful search for his parachute.
“We’ve got to get out,” shouted the Greek.
Jack George began yelling back at him as the Greek headed toward the forward escape hatch. With all the noise and smoke, the Greek thought he was telling him he was afraid to jump.
“Just follow me,” shouted the Greek, heading for the open hatch.
Left behind on the flight deck, Jack George continued his desperate search for his missing chute. Surmising that the top turret gunner might have taken it, he began sifting through the large mound of spent brass shells and ammunition belts beneath the top turret. He found the gunner’s chute buried under the litter.
Clipping it to his chest harness, he dropped through the belly hatch and immediately pulled the rip cord. The parachute billowed out above him, and he began gently floating downward. Below him, he saw four other parachutes, which meant that at least some crew members in the rear section of the bomber had also gotten out.
One of the enemy fighters was still circling. It suddenly dived toward the parachutes below him and the pilot began firing. With mounting horror, Jack George saw two of the crew hit by machine-gun fire, going limp in their harnesses. After a single strafing attack, the fighter disappeared.
Far below them all, the Greek was still in free fall, dropping at a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour. With each passing second, he wondered what would happen when he finally pulled the rip cord. Was the silk torn by shrapnel? Would it open cleanly?
He decided to postpone pulling the rip cord until the last possible moment. If he waited until he was closer to the ground, the rig would hopefully hold together long enough to give him a safe landing. If it didn’t open, he would have but a few seconds before meeting eternity.
The Greek had studied enough physics to know that he had reached terminal velocity when the air began making a kind of cushion beneath him. By then, he was on his back with both legs above his head. The unzipped sheepskin-lined “bunny boots” he was wearing over his GI brogans were flapping wildly in the wind.
With less than a mile to go, the Greek decided it was time for his moment of truth. With the painted icon of his namesake and patron saint, St. Demetrios, snug in the breast pocket of his flight suit, he pulled the rip cord.
The white silk bundle burst out of the canvas chest pack and its shroud lines twisted upward. As the panels of the parachute filled with air, he could see that one of them was badly slashed, and several of the shroud lines were severed. Instead of the expected sudden jerk, he felt a mild jolt when the parachute opened, and he began slowing down.
Hearing the sound of airplane engines, he looked up to see the approaching bulk of Slightly Dangerous II. As it descended earthward, the derelict ship was still turning in a broad circle. At one point, it appeared to be heading straight for him, as if not wanting to be left behind.
The plane’s bomb bay doors were still open. A cloud of black smoke was trailing out of the gun openings. The twin .50s in the ball turret were pointed downward. There was no sign of life in the waist area, and he wondered if the rest of the crew had made it out. Over the noise of the engines, he could hear the continuous sound of the alarm bells as the plane swept by him in its final death dive.
When Slightly Dangerous II hit the ground, there was an initial flash of light followed by an orange ball of flame. He slowly counted the seconds until the sound of the explosion reached him. Five seconds, which meant he was about a mile from the crash site. He reasoned that the Germans would probably head there first unless they had seen the parachutes and were following them instead.
In the distance, he could see a paved road, a winding blue river, and a small town lying beyond it. To his right, the gently sloping terrain ended in what appeared to be dense forest.
As the green earth loomed up below him, he knew he was traveling faster than he should be. He wished there was a shallow pond to welcome him, but it looked like a rock-strewn pasture.
He hit the ground so hard that he bounced, immediately knocking the air out of his lungs. For a minute or two, he lay on his back gasping for breath. When he could finally breathe again, he realized his back was throbbing with acute pain and he thought he might have cracked his spine.
In spite of the pain, there was no time to waste. Using his hands to gain support, he slowly got to hi
s feet. After removing the parachute harness, he rolled the silk into a big bundle with his bunny boots and stuffed it all under some shrubbery.
Glancing around, he saw an old man standing at the edge of a country lane about fifty yards away. The man had a small child with him. They were both staring at him. Neither one made a move. It took the Greek a minute or two to hobble over to them. “Bosche ... Bosche here?” he asked.
The Greek didn’t speak French, but he knew that “Bosche” was a French slang word for Germans. In response, the old man shrugged and shook his head, no. The boy just stared up at him with wonder in his eyes.
He decided to head for the forest that he had seen from the air. With his coccyx bruised or possibly fractured, it took him several minutes to cover the distance with a slow shambling gait. Reaching the tree line, he turned to look back. The man and the boy had disappeared, but a German light weapons carrier was coming fast up the lane a couple hundred yards away.
He knew they had seen him as he struggled through the undergrowth of the woods, angling off to the left as he went. He heard the truck grind to a halt and stopped to look back through the foliage. Two German soldiers were walking toward the tree line, their rifles at the ready.
When he felt he was deep enough into the woods to avoid immediate capture, he used his hands to carefully lower himself to the ground. Fortunately, there was a dense thicket to mask him from view. He could hear the soldiers shouting to one another, but they weren’t close. Ten minutes later, he heard the truck moving off.
The Greek knew he needed to make a decision before the soldiers in the weapons carrier returned with enough men to make an organized search of the woods. He spent a few minutes taking stock.
He was wearing his leather A-2 jacket over flight coveralls, and he emptied all the pockets on the ground. It wasn’t much of a haul. Along with the St. Demetrios icon, he had a book of matches, a fingernail file, and two passport-sized photographs of himself in civilian clothing that were supplied by G-2 so identification papers could be more easily forged if he was lucky enough to connect with the underground.
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