They were down to two hundred feet when the last engine died.
After more than six hours of continuous, ear-splitting noise, the plane fell eerily silent. Only the keening moan of the wind accompanied them as Bud feathered the last propeller and they glided down to the sea.
The Fortress was still making 80 miles an hour when it plowed into the top of a wave, shattering the Plexiglas nose and bringing Old Squaw to an abrupt stop. Seawater gushed into the open nose, surging straight through the forward compartment and up toward the flight deck.
With its gas tanks empty, the plane remained buoyant for a minute or two before it began to sink. The crew members crawled out of the top hatch of the radio compartment and out onto the fuselage. By the time the last man was through the opening, the water in the radio compartment was waist-deep.
Bud had climbed out onto the right wing to retrieve one of the plane’s two rubber life rafts. Each one held five men. After inflating his life jacket, he opened the small bay where the starboard raft was stored and pulled it out. The raft was supposed to automatically inflate, but its CO2 cartridge malfunctioned, and the raft was only partially full when he launched it in the water.
The sea was rough. Five-foot-high waves were breaking over the raft. When it got away from him, he had to jump into the sea to go after it. One of the crewmen, Pete Fullem, had fallen in the water and was rapidly tiring as he fought to keep seawater out of his lungs.
Bud was fighting the same swells, rising over the crest of each wave and then sliding fast down the trough behind it. When he saw Fullem drifting away, he swam after him, finally catching up and then slowly dragging him back to the raft. Norman Sampson, the ball turret gunner, thought it was one of the bravest things he had ever seen.
The men were in the rafts when Old Squaw’s tail section rose vertically up from the sea. Moments later, the ship slid down nose-first and disappeared under the roiling waves.
Unlike the many other Fortress crews that were ditching in the channel up and down the English coast, they were lucky. A rescue launch from Newhaven was patrolling the Beachy Head area where Old Squaw went down, and it arrived less than fifteen minutes later.
The entire crew was safely aboard by 1245. The captain of the rescue boat had orders to continue patrolling the same area for several more hours. While waiting for the rocking boat to head in to shore, Bud wondered how many planes in the 303rd group had made it home.
Molesworth, England
303rd Bomb Group
Satan’s Workshop
Brigadier General Robert Travis
1320
The ground crews were all at their concrete hardstands, nervously awaiting the familiar roar of the approaching Wright Cyclone engines that would signal the return of the group. According to the projected return time in the operational orders, the planes were already late.
The 303rd’s ground crews had sent off nineteen bombers in the maximum effort. Two of them had been forced to abort before reaching the French coast. Seventeen had gone on to the target.
They first appeared as tiny specks on the eastern horizon. When the specks in the traffic controllers’ binoculars slowly grew into Flying Fortresses, a siren began wailing, and ground personnel in crash trucks and ambulances rapidly took up stations along the perimeter tracks near the runways.
As the bombers approached the field, seventeen ground crews anxiously scanned the sky looking for their planes. The ground chiefs would only breathe a sigh of relief after their birds were back in their nests.
There were five Fortresses in the gangly formation. At first, they thought it might be a squadron, the first one to return. The bombers circled over the field and began to come in. Major Lew Lyle landed first, followed by two of the four squadron leaders, Captain George Stallings and Lieutenant Don Gamble.
It was the entire group.
Fears of a catastrophe were dispelled when Captain Stallings arrived at the briefing hut. Most of the group had survived, he assured the group commander. With many of the pilots running low on gas, they had been forced to land elsewhere.
“There were quite a few stragglers before we reached the French coast,” Captain Stallings reported. “On the route home, everyone seemed to spread out and head for England.”
Stallings’s B-17 had only sixty gallons of gas in the tanks when he touched down.
In his own report, Lieutenant Gamble focused on the fuel situation as well, stating that he had eighty gallons left when he landed. “Everyone took off on his own making for the nearest airdromes,” he said.
A number of news correspondents had come to Molesworth to interview General Travis after he led his first combat mission to Germany. Although he had been in the air for seven hours and twenty-five minutes, the young wing commander appeared to one of the newsmen as calm and relaxed, as if he had just finished a solid round of golf. In his spontaneous remarks, General Travis was highly complimentary of the mission and the men who flew it.
“If the weather had been better,” he said, “it would have been a perfect mission. Despite that, we had to circle the target several times. Major Lyle did a wonderful job of flying that plane. I can’t commend him enough for it. He was constantly talking to all crew members, pepping them up and reporting enemy fighters that were coming within range of our plane. He kept them on their toes all the time.
“It could have been a lot worse but those gunners of ours just raised hell with those fighters. Two of them just disintegrated in the air in front of us. The fighters were attacking us all the way to the target and back out, but our boys kept them out there pretty well. The flak was quite intense over the target, but Major Lyle took evasive action when it was necessary, and it didn’t bother us much.”
Major Lyle was asked about his own view of the mission.
“It was not really as rough as I thought it would be,” he responded.
As to the bombing results, he said, “We dropped the bombs where they will do some good ... I am sure of that. We had to take three passes at the target to do it.”
The Last One Left
Etrépagny, France
384th Bomb Group
Yankee Raider
Lieutenant Jimmy Armstrong
1320
After more than seven hours in the air, they were on the final leg home.
They had been flying on three engines since the turbocharger on their right inboard engine had frozen up. According to the navigator, Creighton Carlin, they had already crossed a good chunk of Normandy and were definitely in range of the Allied fighter escort that had been promised in the premission briefing.
The French coast was less than fifty miles off to the northwest. If they could avoid enemy fighters the rest of the way, there should be enough gas to make it to the channel.
Jimmy had seen plenty of enemy fighters since leaving Stuttgart. He had watched two Fortresses go down under their cannon and machine-gun fire. Several fighters had made passes on Yankee Raider, and had scored hits, but none had been mortal. So far the venerable Yankee Raider had led a charmed existence.
After crossing into France, Jimmy had begun cloud-hopping along their northwesterly route to England. Clusters of big cumulus clouds were all over the sky, and they provided perfect cover as he hopscotched between them.
In the nose compartment, Wilbert Yee, the Chinese bombardier from Hawaii, gazed through the Plexiglas dome at them. Aside from being good cover, they were gorgeous, creamy white, and sculpted like marble. Each time the plane was enveloped inside one, he couldn’t see anything but white mist.
Jimmy felt bone weary after the frustration of running at full throttle around and around the target with the bomb bay doors open, never knowing when the lead plane would drop its bombs, while he tried to maintain a tight formation with Higdon and Faulkner behind him on each wing, followed by the ferocious attacks from the German fighters.
The twenty-one-year-old knew it wasn’t a good idea to dwell on the gloomy side, but it was hard not to on this
mission. Jimmy’s grandfather had been with General Custer’s Michigan cavalry. On the Schweinfurt mission a few weeks earlier, he had wondered if the men who followed Custer to the Little Big Horn had felt as clueless as he did about the strategy for winning the aerial war against Germany.
He moved on to the next cloud.
Standing at his left waist gun, Reb Grant gazed out at the vista and wondered how long it would be until they got back to Grafton Underwood. He was hungry. The last thing he had eaten was the fish and chips meal he had wolfed down in Leicester before meeting Estella the previous afternoon.
His left arm was still numb from the flak wound over Stuttgart. Blood continued to trickle out of the blue heat suit he was wearing underneath his sheepskin-lined leather flight jacket. He hoped he would still be able to handle the kick of his machine gun if there was another fighter attack.
“Fahhghters at six o’clock high,” drawled Clifford Hammock, the tail gunner from Arabi, Georgia, on the intercom.
The next round in their battle for survival had begun.
There were only two of them this time, both Fw 190s. Jimmy was almost relieved. Around Stuttgart, the fighters had been flying in packs of a dozen and more. As tired as he was, he felt confident they were going to make it. They had come a long way.
He put Yankee Raider into a dive toward the nearest cloud cluster as the fighters split up to make separate attacks. At least they weren’t going to run out of ammunition, as had happened on the Schweinfurt mission. Jimmy had made sure of that before takeoff. Extra crates of .50-caliber belts were stacked both forward and aft.
At the nose gun, Wilbert Yee tried to remember the things they had taught him in gunnery training, angle of deflection, trajectory, and all the rest. He could see the enemy tracer rounds lighting up the wings of the first fighter as it came in. He tried to lead it with the barrel of his machine gun, but it was only in his field of fire for a few seconds before it disappeared.
Jimmy was barely inside the first cloud cluster when the second fighter made its attack, weaving and turning as it raked Yankee Raider from the tail to the nose. This Luftwaffe pilot was good.
One of the cannon rounds exploded in the nose compartment, wounding Wilbert Yee. He felt the shards of hot metal slashing into his thighs and buttocks, narrowly missing his most important appendage. Blood began seeping through his pants as he waited for another chance to fire back.
Another 20-millimeter shell slammed into the left wing. Through the side window, Jimmy saw an eight-foot-long section of metal sheeting on top of the wing begin flapping up and down like a gigantic flag.
He tried to burrow deeper into the cloud cover, but the first enemy pilot seemed to divine exactly where he was going as the next attack came in from the other side of the plane.
In the top turret, Bruno Edman was blasting away at the twisting enemy machine with his twin .50s. The muzzles of his guns were just a few feet above Jimmy’s head and the din was incredible. He kicked the rudder and put the plane into another dive in an attempt to throw off the enemy pilot’s aim.
Reb Grant and Eldore Daudelin, the right waist gunner, were standing back to back in the waist compartment, firing at the fighters as they darted in and out of the clouds. Both men had fought in close quarters before, and had learned to move in synch like tango dancers, swinging their machine guns up and down, back and forth trying to make a kill.
The second Fw 190 again raked Yankee Raider’s fuselage with 20-millimeter cannon rounds. One of them exploded in the accessory compartment behind the cockpit, setting off a fire in a fuel line that crossed the fuselage in front of the bomb bay. A sheet of flame quickly spread from the bomb bay toward the flight deck.
Glancing out the window, Jimmy was startled to see one of the fighters coming up alongside them off the left wing, almost as if he was flying escort. Normally, fighters stayed far out of range, but this pilot must have been cocky. He was too far forward for the left waist gun to reach him, but perfect for the navigator’s gun on the left side of the nose compartment.
“Carlin ... open fire,” he demanded on the intercom.
There was a pause before he heard Yee’s voice.
“He’s gone,” said Yee. “He bailed out.”
Jimmy felt a quick surge of anger. He had given no orders to bail out. How could Carlin have abandoned the crew? There was little time to dwell on it. The fighter was swinging around to make another attack.
Bruno Edman had left the top turret to try to quell the flames with a fire extinguisher. It was rapidly spreading toward the cockpit. There was no way to control it.
Jimmy could feel the heat of the flames searing the air behind his seat. It was time to get out. He called Redwing on the intercom and told him to come up out of the ball turret.
“Bail out,” he ordered the rest of the crew on the intercom. “Bail out.”
In the waist compartment, Reb waited for another chance to fire at the Fw 190s. He gripped the handle of the machine gun as tightly as he could with his numb left hand and fired another burst as one of the fighters hurtled past.
He felt someone poking him in the back. When he turned, Daudelin was pointing at his headphones and saying something to him. Reb couldn’t hear anything. His earphones were dead. Daudelin then pointed at his chest harness, and began heading back to the rear of the compartment, where he had stowed their parachute packs.
Reb could hear the roar of a fighter coming in again from the other side, and waited for his opening to fire as it passed above or beneath the plane. A moment later, there was a sudden, blinding flash, as if someone had exploded a bomb in his right ear.
He found himself sitting on the deck, his back slumped against the curvature of the fuselage, his legs splayed out in front of him, surrounded by brass shell casings. Everything was suddenly quiet. He could see out of his left eye, but he couldn’t feel anything. There was no pain. He wondered if he might be dead.
Walter House, the radio operator, glanced back from the radio compartment and saw him go down. He didn’t know Reb’s name, but called Jimmy on the intercom to tell him the new left waist gunner had been hit by a cannon round. It looked like half his head had been blown off.
In the copilot’s seat, Rocky Stoner clipped on his chest pack and picked up his survival satchel from under the copilot’s seat. The flames were right behind them. Jimmy told Stoner he would keep the plane steady until they were all out.
Stoner dropped down to the tunnel of the nose compartment. The belly hatch was already open. Bruno Edman had bailed out. Wilbert Yee was putting his chute on. Stoner went out next. Yee followed him.
In the tail section, Cliff Hammock had heard the order to bail out and was trying to get back into the waist compartment, but the compartment door was blocked by the two crates of .50-caliber ammunition Reb had stacked there. Hammock finally gave up and squeezed out of the emergency hatch in the tail.
Daudelin had clipped on his parachute and was returning with Reb’s when he saw him sitting slumped on the deck, motionless. Looking down at his face, he was horror-stricken.
The cannon round had hit him in the right temple and come out through the front of his face, blowing out his right eye and most of his cheekbone. The eye was hanging out of its socket and resting on what was left of his cheek. Blood from the gaping wound had flowed down his chest and was coursing along the deck to the ball turret.
He began trying to clip on Reb’s parachute, but his fingers kept slipping on the bloody chest harness. A few moments later, Walter House pressed past them from the radio compartment. His chute was strapped on, and he didn’t linger. Right after he bailed out the side door of the waist compartment, the plane nosed over into a shallow dive.
“Get out,” Reb grunted. “I’m done.”
It was clear to Daudelin that Reb wasn’t going to make it. Nodding, he left Reb’s parachute pack next to him and followed Walter House out the side door, pulling the rip cord as soon as he exited the plane.
In the coc
kpit, Jimmy trimmed the plane one last time to keep it from going into a flat spin before he bailed out. He could feel his face and hands burning as he dropped down behind the cockpit and headed to the forward escape hatch.
He had done everything he could, he thought, dropping through the hatch feetfirst. When he looked up again, Yankee Raider was headed away from him, hurtling toward the ground trailing fire and smoke.
In the waist compartment, Reb was conscious, but too weak to move. He was sitting opposite the ball turret when it suddenly began to move through its retrieval rotation. The turret stopped and he watched the ball turret gunner climb out.
It was the little Hindu guy with the Lord Haw Haw accent. Like Reb, he had apparently never heard the order to bail out. When Redwing tried to stand, he slipped on the bloody catwalk and fell forward on his hands.
Taking in Reb’s gruesome wound, Redwing’s eyes registered the same shock as Daudelin’s. It didn’t last more than a few moments. Seeing the parachute pack lying next to Reb, Redwing clipped it to his chest harness, and pulled the rip cord on it. The parachute would open on its own as soon as he dropped Reb out of the plane.
After putting on his own chute, Redwing began dragging him across the compartment to the open doorway. Reb tried to tell him to get out, to save himself, but his voice was gone. He knew Redwing was trying to give him a chance to survive. He deserved a medal.
Redwing had reached the doorway when one of the Fw 190s came back for another pass, spraying the fuselage with machine-gun fire. Redwing jerked upward, hit in the chest. Letting Reb go, he collapsed to the deck. The bomber was pitching and rolling as it continued its final plunge to earth. As Reb watched, Redwing rolled out into space.
Reb was now closer to the doorway, but it was still too far to make it. There were only seconds left before the plane went down. He felt himself going. I’m going to die, he thought. He discovered he wasn’t afraid. He would go down with the plane. That would be the end.
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