To Kingdom Come

by Robert J. Mrazek

  The only other thing he found in the coveralls was a single stick of Beechnut gum. He removed the wrapper and began to chew. Wouldn’t this make a good Life magazine ad? he thought. The simple pleasure of chewing the sweet stick of gum actually began to calm his nerves.

  He checked his wristwatch. It was close to noon, and he imagined the 388th was probably nearing the French coast on their way home to Knettishall. There, they would go through a quick debriefing with the intelligence team, take a hot shower, and maybe get an evening pass to London. From past experience, he knew that his own bunk would be stripped, and his personal possessions boxed up by the headquarters staff before they got back.

  It was time to move out. From a mile high in the air, the forest had looked pretty sizeable. Using the sun as a guide, he decided to head all the way across it and see where he came out.

  After finding a stout wooden stick to help ease his back pain, he began walking west. The forest was overgrown with vines and creepers and grew increasingly dense as he made his way through. It would be hard for the Germans to find him unless they had dogs, he thought.

  Hobbling along, the Greek began replaying the Stuttgart mission in his mind. It was definitely one for the history books, he decided, remembering the famous words from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:Someone had blundered: Theirs not to make reply,

  Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.

  To the Last Beat of the Heart

  Mailly-le-Camp,

  Champagne-Ardenne, France

  Jagdgeschwader 2 “Richthofen”

  Major Egon “Connie” Mayer

  1110

  The prospect was astonishing.

  In almost a full year of combat against the American heavy bombers, Connie Mayer had never seen anything like it. Three hours earlier, he had watched the massive bomber train passing over on its way to Germany, a seemingly indestructible, twenty-mile-long formation of tightly knit combat boxes.

  Now, as the Americans made their way back across France, the air controllers of the Luftwaffe air defense command vectored Jagdgeschwader 2 into an excellent position to intercept the returning Fortresses.

  It was no longer a bomber train.

  To the pilots of JG 2, it looked more like an African elephant stampede, with ragged formations of bombers strung out across the sky. Even during the Schweinfurt battle, the American bomb groups had maintained formation integrity while enduring the worst beating the Luftwaffe had ever dealt them.

  Whatever had caused this force to disintegrate, it gave the fighter pilots an opportunity to inflict maximum damage on the strays and stragglers. Given another hundred fighters, they would have had a feast.

  Three days earlier, Connie Mayer had enjoyed one of his best days in the air, single-handedly shooting down two Fortresses in less than an hour. Those two engagements had brought his victory total of American multiengine bombers to seventeen, but the stoic Mayer wasn’t counting.

  No matter how many B-17s he and his fellow pilots shot down, increasing numbers of them were attacking the Fatherland every month, and it was only a matter of time until the Americans had long-range fighters with belly tanks to escort them all the way to Germany and back. Mayer would do his best as long as he lasted.

  At 1110, he was leading a staffel of Jagdgeschwader 2’s Fw 190s ten miles northeast of Troyes in the Champagne-Ardenne when he waded into a cluster of bombers approaching from the southeast.

  Attacking from twelve o’clock high, he rolled over and headed down toward his first quarry. Opening fire at a distance of thirty meters, he watched the tracer rounds from his drum-fed 20-millimeter cannons disappear into the bomber’s cockpit before he passed beneath it.

  By the time he had turned for a second attack, the stricken bomber had already nosed over in a dive, blowing up when it hit the ground near the village of Mailly-le-Camp.

  He had posted his eighteenth bomber kill. He went looking for more.

  Troyes, France

  388th Bomb Group

  Patricia

  Ted Wilken

  1117

  Ted and Warren could see them coming.

  It was a big swarm of fighters, twenty at least. They had inline engines. Warren hoped they were Spitfires, the ones promised in the premission briefing that would meet the returning bombers over France to escort them home.

  They weren’t.

  The first waves of fighters were ME-109s. Several of them peeled off from the pack to attack Patricia. They each made only one pass before moving on to attack the formations coming behind. None of the cannon fire struck home.

  The ME-109s were quickly followed by a staffel of Fw 190s. Warren counted at least fifteen of them, some with silver and black crosses on the fuselage, others with yellow and black checker markings.

  Connie Mayer led the first element.

  He closed on Patricia at 400 miles an hour and opened fire with a short burst from his cannons, passing beneath the bomber a few moments later. An immediate explosion rocked Patricia’s nose as one of the shells demolished the bombardier’s plexiglass screen. Another shell ignited a fire in the compartment.

  When Ted used his throat mike to ask for a damage report in the nose, Swede Johnson, the young navigator, said that the new bombardier was dead and that he was badly wounded.

  Lyle Merrill, the top turret gunner, started down to the nose compartment to help Swede, but Warren told him to get back in the top turret and keep firing until the attacks ended. Desperate for more speed, Ted told Warren to take over the flight controls while he adjusted the mercury levels of the four superchargers to maximize their engine power.

  Connie Mayer made his next attack on Patricia from below and behind.

  With practiced dexterity, he raked the bomber’s fuselage from the waist section to the nose. One of the 20-millimeter shells exploded behind the armor-plated seat backs in the cockpit.

  A piece of shrapnel hit the ship’s compass, spattering flammable fluid around the cockpit. One metal shard sliced into Warren’s left arm. Another took off a small section off his finger.

  “I’m hit ... I’m hit,” cried out Johnny Eichholz, Patricia’s eighteen-year-old ball turret gunner, on the intercom.

  Ted called down to ask him if he could continue to man the gun, but no answer came back. In the radio compartment, Joe Schwartzkopf noted that the waist guns had also gone idle. Looking back along the interior of the fuselage, he saw that the two machine gunners were both down.

  As acrid smoke began filling the flight deck from the fire in the nose compartment, Connie Mayer drove into them again with another frontal attack. One of the shells blew out a large section of the cockpit windshield in front of Ted, severely wounding him in the hands and face.

  Behind him in the top turret, Lyle Merrill was hit in the chest by another round, killing him instantly. Warren turned to see his body collapse onto the floor of the flight deck behind the cockpit.

  Ted’s face was covered with blood. Icy wind flooded the cockpit through the shattered windshield, sending a foggy red mist through the air. The already wounded Warren found himself wondering how much of it was his and how much was Ted’s.

  Along with the blaze raging in the nose compartment, something ignited the fluid that had spattered the instrument panel, and the cockpit began filling with smoke. Mingled with the smell of melting rubber was the odor of burning flesh.

  When the fire began to burn the back of his feet, Warren reached down for his parachute. He kept it under the copilot’s seat so that he could occasionally kick it during the course of the missions to make sure it was there.

  The fourth and final pass by Connie Mayer had severely damaged Patricia’s control levers and rudder cables. Fire was now all around them, burning Ted’s hands as he clutched the steering column to try to keep the plane under control. Patricia began sliding over into a flat spin.

  “Get out, she’s going,” Ted called to the crew over the intercom.

  In the radio compar
tment, Joe Schwartzkopf grabbed his parachute from the deck and clipped it to his chest harness as Patricia slid over. The overhead escape hatch was directly above him, and he pulled the emergency lever.

  The hatch dropped away, and with the strength of desperation he climbed through the narrow opening. The force of the wind slammed him into the vertical radio antenna. He held on to it for dear life.

  For Joe, the stricken plane still seemed more solid and reassuring than the idea of falling through three miles of space by himself. The two-hundred-pound giant also had a distrust of parachutes, and had heard numerous stories of them failing to open. He decided to stay with the plane as long as he could.

  Flames and smoke were belching out of the top turret when he lost his grip on the antenna rod and fell away, careening into the right wing before skidding off and falling into space.

  After plummeting several hundred feet, he pulled the rip cord on the chute pack.

  Nothing happened. He looked down to make sure that he had pulled it all the way out. The cord was no longer connected to the chute, but the canvas pack remained tightly sealed as he continued to drop through the sky.

  The ground was rapidly getting closer when he used his hands to rip the canvas cover open, and its white silk innards escaped into the sky. He felt a surge of relief when the parachute blossomed above him.

  Ted remained at the controls of Patricia, trying to keep it in the air long enough for the others to all get out. When Warren started down toward the forward emergency hatch, the catwalk between the flight deck and the nose compartment was a mass of flames.

  No one could be alive in the compartment now. Groping across the deck in the smoky haze, he found the emergency lever and pulled it. The hatch dropped away from the plane.

  Joe Schwartzkopf was staring up at Patricia as he slowly fell earthward. The ship was now in the grip of a flat spin, and he wondered if anyone else had made it out. Suddenly, he saw the forward escape hatch door come sailing past him. A few moments later, a man came out of the forward belly hatch headfirst.

  Warren pulled the rip cord as soon as he was out of the plane. There was a tremendous jolt as it filled with air, and he immediately slowed down. For the first time, he realized how badly injured he was. Along with the burns to his face, long shreds of skin hung loose from his fingers and hands.

  Still inside the cockpit, Ted knew he had only moments to get out. The heat was excruciating. Like Warren, he had already suffered burns to his face and hands. Fighting centrifugal force, it took all his athleticism and endurance to reach the open belly hatch from the cockpit in the spinning plane.

  Olivier Mauchamp, a young French farmworker, was plowing a field at the edge of the Grange-l’Évêque near Montgueux when his horse suddenly took fright. He looked up to see an American bomber falling out of the sky. The plane was trailing fire and black smoke.

  As he watched, an aviator dropped through an opening in the forward part of the plane. A few seconds later, the aviator’s white silk parachute opened like a gigantic umbrella, and he began to drift earthward.

  Above the man in the parachute, the flaming bomber was skewing crazily as it came down, slowly closing the distance to the man who had just escaped it. Olivier watched as the bomber caught up with the parachutist, narrowly passing over him.

  One of the plane’s propellers appeared to hook the shrouds of the parachute. A moment later, the air was gone out of it. Olivier could only watch with mounting horror as the bomber slammed into the ground, towing the aviator behind.

  He grabbed his bicycle and rode straight to the scene of the crash. The plane was on fire when he reached it, and unexpended bullets were still going off. Ted Wilken was lying dead on the ground near the plane, his parachute still attached to the propeller root.

  A mile away, Warren landed in an open field of hard-packed dirt. He was attempting to remove his parachute harness with his burnt fingers when he heard the roar of an approaching fighter plane, and looked up to see an Fw 190 diving toward him.

  Pulling up at the last moment, Connie Mayer roared past him at a height of twenty-five feet. Warren could see his face before he disappeared into the distance a few moments later.

  At first, he thought the pilot had been planning to machine-gun him and had run out of ammunition. Then, Warren wondered if he might have been performing some kind of chivalrous act after shooting them down.

  After shredding the loose skin from his fingers, he was finally able to remove the parachute harness. Leaving the chute on the ground, he began running toward a wooded area that might hopefully provide temporary cover.

  He had reached the edge of the thick undergrowth when he saw a man in a green uniform lumbering toward him. If it was a German soldier, Warren knew there was no point in trying to hide. He stood and waited.

  When the man came closer, he saw that it was Joe Schwartzkopf.

  With Joe leading the way for the wounded Warren, the two of them crept through a thicket of bramble bushes on their knees. Behind them, two trucks full of German soldiers arrived. The two men continued crawling deeper into the undergrowth until it completely closed in around them.

  There were more than a dozen German soldiers, enough for them to fan out in a long line and begin to search methodically through the wooded area where the Americans had hidden themselves. At one point, a soldier came within a few feet of their hiding place, but the bushes were so thick he didn’t see them.

  When the Germans had finally suspended their search and driven away, the two men sat up in their rabbit lair. Joe helped Warren remove his Mae West life jacket and his throat mike.

  When Joe asked him about the fate of the rest of the crew, Warren said that he didn’t think anyone else had gotten out, telling him that Ted had remained at the controls in order to give the rest of the crew a chance to bail out.

  It was hard for them to believe that Ted was gone. He had seemed so indestructible. Unashamed, Warren began to cry. When he looked up, the big man was crying, too.

  Hard Landings

  Normandy, France

  303rd Bomb Group

  Old Squaw

  Second Lieutenant Bud Klint

  1150

  Bud knew they weren’t going to make it.

  Their fate had been ordained by the flak burst that ripped through the right wing of Old Squaw while they were making their third sightseeing trip around Stuttgart. The shrapnel holes in the right inboard feeder tank now meant there was no chance to reach England.

  Heading away from Stuttgart at twenty-five thousand feet, they had been attacked by Fw 190s and ME-109s. Bob Hullar, Old Squaw’s pilot, took aggressive evasive action during the attacks. His superb flying probably prevented more serious damage to the plane, but the maneuvers ate up fuel at an even higher rate.

  When their right inboard engine ran out of gas, the Fortress began lagging farther behind the bombers still left in the 303rd’s original formation. The navigator estimated they were nearly halfway across France.

  Bob Hullar told the crew to begin jettisoning any superfluous equipment to lighten the plane. The machine gunners retained enough ammunition to defend the plane in the event of more fighter attacks. The rest of it went over along with clothing, spare radio parts, and other gear.

  North of Paris, the left inboard engine suddenly lost power. With two engines out, they could only drone along while the machine gunners scanned every quadrant of the sky for enemy planes. The minutes passed with agonizing slowness. Bud found himself reliving everything that had happened over Stuttgart. There was no excuse for it. The new general had run them out of gas.

  He was staring west into the sky ahead of them when a squadron of fighters materialized out of the distant haze. The planes all had inline engines. His fear that they were ME-109s turned to elation when he saw they were Spitfires.

  Two of them moved into formation alongside Old Squaw and radioed their willingness to mother the damaged bomber home. The offer was gratefully accepted.

  W
hen the French coast appeared ahead of them in the distance, it gave some of the crew members hope that they might make it to Molesworth.

  Bud knew better. They had been rapidly losing altitude and were now down to a few thousand feet. Bob Hullar ordered the crew to jettison the remainder of the ammunition, along with the machine guns.

  Out over the channel, the gas gauges reached empty.

  There was an important decision to make. Should they bail out while there was still time or attempt to ditch the plane in the sea? If they did ditch, the plane might break up in the crash. If they ditched too close to France, they might get picked up by a German patrol boat and spend the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  The plane’s radio suddenly came alive with SOS messages from other B-17s.

  “Mayday ... Mayday ... Mayday.”

  A lot of the B-17s on the Stuttgart mission were obviously facing the same critical fuel situation, and they were now jamming the assigned radio frequency with distress calls. The crews reported their positions and compass headings so that the English rescue boats would be able to locate them after they went down.

  The decision of whether to ditch or bail out was settled in Old Squaw when the radio operator discovered that his parachute had been mistakenly jettisoned by one of the waist gunners, along with some spare radio gear.

  A few minutes later, their third engine ran out of gas.

  Neither Bud Klint nor Bob Hullar had ever ditched in the sea before, much less landed on one engine. As they dropped below five hundred feet, Bud remembered being told that if the plane hit a wave broadside, it was like flying into a concrete wall. He looked down at the sea. It looked anything but calm. The water was gray and rough, with long angry swells.

  The crew carried out the prescribed ditching procedures, and then assembled in the radio compartment. The top escape hatch had been removed and stowed in the tail compartment. From the copilot’s seat, Bud kept them informed on how soon they would be hitting the sea.