* The men who did these things are not known. The incidents are recorded in secret morale report to Washington by the Office of Theater Censor, drawn from letters by survivors, none identified. Other acts of heorism were lost to record or award by the deaths of whole crews, the incredulity of base officers about what had taken place, and the traumatic state of the airmen when interrogated. One of the five Medals of Honor given for Tidal Wave, that of Lloyd Hughes, was awarded only because of the persistence of a man from the Office of War Information who took the trouble to collect eye-witness evidence of Hughes's deed.
Old Buster Butt, completely undamaged, ran away from Ploesti across the harvest fields. From the nose McClain called, "Smoke over the treetops at eleven o'clock. Top turret and left waist get ready." As the plane jumped the trees, the guns rattled. "Cease fire!" yelled pilot Wright. The smoke was rising from a locomotive pulling a holiday passenger train with people riding on top and clinging to the sides of cars.
The tail gunner reported, "There's a ship behind us with an engine feathered." Wright said, "Maybe we ought to give him some help, hey?" Co-pilot Fred E. Sayre said, "Why not?" Old Buster Butt circled back. McClain said, "We had a lonely feeling as we saw the other planes in our formation disappear in the southwest. We came up on the straggler's wing. It was Frank McLaughlin from our group. We felt good that we decided to go back. We slowed down and escorted Mac."
Racing across the fields, a shout went up on Colonel Posey's intercom, "Hey, look on the ground at one o'clock!" A farmhouse door burst open and a peasant in red flannel underwear ran out and fired a shotgun at the bombers. None of the air gunners replied. They were laughing too hard. Anyway, they were under orders not to harm civilians.
K.O. Dessert brought Tupelo Lass out with hardly a scratch. This was the ship in which the grounded mission planner, Jacob Smart, was to have flown. Tupelo Lass crossed a village in which the inhabitants were out in their Sunday best, waving gaily to the planes. K.O. appreciated their attitude and could not resist an acknowledgment in kind. He made a tight 180-degree turn and scribbled: "This food is from the United States Army Air Forces who came to Romania to destroy German installations and not to harm Romanians." The crew fastened the note to the plane's K-rations and dropped them into the village square. Tupelo Lass resumed the return voyage. K.O. had added his bit to the larder of the best-fed people in Europe.
Winging away from Red Target, John Brooks saw a Liberator hit a haystack, blow it "all over hell and gone," and continue its flight.
The first Tidal Wave bomber to escape Axis territory and land safely was that of Hughes and Hunn from the last wave of the Eight Balls. They came into a Turkish air base at Chorlu without hydraulic power. The pilots landed nose-high to brake her by dragging the tail. The tail stayed on but the runway collapsed under it. People ran along the furrow of broken concrete to admire the monster that had made obsolete the specifications of Turkish airdrome engineers. A Turkish general greeted the pilots effusively with, "Soon I hope we can join you in an attack on Bulgaria!" The exhausted Americans noted that he did not mention accompanying them to nasty places like Ploesti.
Along the Turkish distress route Sweet Adeline came upon a badly shot-up pink ship, dragging along alone. Pilot Podolak phoned, "Hey, you from the 98th. What's your situation?" There was no reply. Co-pilot James Case flashed a lamp signal: "Heading Cyprus. Come on radio." The pink one winked back, "Radio shot out. Will you stay with us?" Podolak said to Case, "Tell 'em we sure will." Sweet Adeline slowed down and the two ships crossed the Turkish border, wing to wing. Three U.S.-built Warhawks, wearing star-and-crescent livery, climbed alongside and radioed, "You come land with us." Podolak told his crew, "To hell with landing in Turkey. Everybody level guns on them but don't shoot. You okay, Junior?" From the ball turret young Private McGreer replied, "Yeah. Got 'em right in my sights." The Turkish pilots saw the guns and dived away. Sweet Adeline and the pink cripple continued toward Cyprus, where they landed safely.
Another pair on the southern heading were Harold James's Liberator and that of the dead Captain Mooney, whose co-pilot, Henry Gerrits, was flying the machine beside the empty seat. James asked radioman Earl Zimmerman to code a message to Benghazi saying they were heading for Turkey. Before sending it Zimmerman warmed up on the group frequency and phoned the pilot, "I hear an S.O.S. and another ship calling for a QDM [bearing]." James said, "Turn it off. Don't send anything. It would interfere with planes in worse shape than we are."
Two Turkish Warhawks came alongside and lowered their landing gear, the summons to surrender. Gerrits and James were very low on fuel. They dropped their wheels. Gerrits landed his dead and wounded in a wheat field. A Turkish fighter came in with him, hit a ditch, and broke up. The pilot got out, but he was court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years for destroying government property.
James landed on a fighter strip and burned his brakes out on the short run. His crew was surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. A Turkish officer arrived, gave the Americans a smiling hello, then turned and knocked the nearest soldier flat on the ground. Turkish officers got into the plane, berserk with curiosity. They pulled the rip cords on the parachutes, emptied the first-aid kits, and unrolled the bandages. "They even squeezed the ointment from the tubes," said Zimmerman.
Crossing Turkey, the engineer of Vagabond King, the last plane to bomb during the mission, was transferring gas when all four engines cut out at once. Pilot McCormick said, "Ringing the bail-out gong was out of the question because of Van Buren's shot-up parachute. We just stuck with it. The motors came back in. We landed at Cyprus on an uphill runway, feeling very good. I turned off to find a place to park and a truck hit us. We were on a highway." *
* McCormick and his crew were shot down three months later in the North Sea.
On the southern route Killer Kane was trying to lift his airborne wreck over the lowest pass in the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria. Hail Columbia was 200 feet too low. The controls were pulling the pilots' arms out of their sockets, and the harness was binding into their chests. Kane gasped, "Hey, navigator, what's the altitude?" Whalen replied, "I guess we'll get over it." Kane howled, "Guess, hell! You'd better be right or it'll be everybody's ass!" The sluggish moloch sailed slowly toward the peak.
There was a tiny favor of weather. A small thermal flicked up under Hail Columbia. She was over the top and free. The tail gunner said, "Killer, I swear I felt the belly scrape the mountain." White Four Leader replied, "You can get good and plastered, boy, when we land. And that goes for all of you." He kept the intercom open to pay tribute to the Kane-deafened Whalen: "That was one hell of a swell job of navigation, fella." Kane was bluffing to give his men hope. He thought, "we have about as much chance as a snowball in hell to come out of this." He was short on gas, with one engine gone and another turning a buzzing prop with two shot-up tips. He had a warped main spar and hundreds of flak holes. Yet the astonishing B-24 still flew.
Fred Weckessler, the flight engineer, phoned Kane, "There might be some gas in the left bomb bay tank. She indicates zero. All the same I think there's juice left in her." Kane said, "Get to work." Weckessler cleared a clogged outlet and pumped the bonus into a wing tank. The corporals dropped the auxiliary tank through the bomb bay, hoping not to go down like that.
Kane clattered across Turkey, eking out the miles to avoid internment and reach Cyprus, a half hour beyond the Turkish coast. He radioed his position to Benghazi via the R.A.F. stations at Cyprus and Cairo. R.A.F. Station 73B at Nicosia, Cyprus, called Kane: "We can receive you. If after dark, we shall make a green light. Reply with same and we'll give you a flare path." The Liberators crossed the last mountains of Turkey in the setting sun and sighted the twilight blue of the Gulf of Antalya. Hadley's Harem phoned Kane, "We've lost another engine. Going to try landing on the beach."
Gilbert Hadley still had a mile-high column of air between his plane and the wine-dark sea. His last two engines started to kick. He polled his crew: "Do you want to bail o
ut or ride her in?" They voted for a crash-landing. Radioman William Leonard broadcast their position as Hadley banked around, and the Harem faltered toward the Turkish shore near Alanya. The crew removed clothing and opened the top escape hatch in the radio compartment. Hadley tried to will his ship as far as the beach. He pushed up all the power he had. The last two engines failed. A wing hooked into the water. The plane sprawled and sank. A wave slapped shut the escape hatch. The pilots and engineer Page shoved at the hatch, but water pressure sealed it beyond their strength. The pilots swam toward the hole in the nose. Page popped back up in his turret and breathed from a sweet pocket of air. He filled his lungs and dived again, feeling his way back to the crash opening. He bobbed out to the sea surface. The world was pink and glorious and he heard angel voices. Afloat in the still, warm water were the wounded navigator, Tabacoff, radioman Leonard, and Sergeants Pershing W. Waples, Leroy Newton, Frank Nemeth and Christopher Holweger. The wreckage sank, sucking and gurgling, carrying down Hadley and his co-pilot Lindsay and bombardier Storms's body.
The survivors inflated their life vests and swam for the darkening shore. Hadley had stretched his last flight to within a half-mile of land. The seven castaways fell exhausted on the Turkish beach. Fisherfolk coming with ancient rifles recognized them as miserable, harmless souls and built a driftwood fire. The naked airmen crawled to the warmth, and the fishermen squatted around all night watching them.
Air-Sea Rescue at Cyprus had heard Hadley's last position on the radio. In the morning a Wellington spotted the beach bivouac and dropped a note. The survivors confirmed that they were U.S. airmen by spelling out a message on the sand with stones. A high-speed rescue launch arrived from Cyprus, anchored offshore, and its captain and an interpreter came to the beach in a dinghy. The British skipper addressed the local pasha: "These men cannot be interned. They sank at sea. Is that not so?" The fishermen nodded. "Therefore they are shipwrecked mariners! And we have come to rescue them." This invocation of Admiralty Law touched the Turkish sense of justice and humor and Air-Sea Rescue was allowed to take them off.
After Hadley's Harem sank, Killer Kane's trio continued for Cyprus in complete darkness. Kane saw a green dot -- the promise of Nicosia -- and saluted it with a green flare. R.A.F. men lighted the runway flare path. Unknown to Kane, at either end of the runway there were ditches, which the R.A.F. customarily placed to encourage precise landings. In the feeble light, "exhausted, too tired to fight the unbalanced pull of the engines any more," Kane saw that he was landing too short, his wheels headed for the ditch. "I tried to stretch the glide and float the plane those extra yards," he said.
Hail Columbia's undercarriage snagged the ditch and she bounced with her tail rising. Kane saw the flare path climbing his windshield and glowing through the astradome. He was coming in standing on his nose. He and Young braced their feet on the instrument panel and pulled the control columns hard against their chests. Slowly the tail fell back and hammered the ground. In the B-24's landing beams Kane saw "amazing things rolling ahead of us -- the prop from the dead engine and our two main wheels." Hail Columbia screeched along the tarmac, slewed around, and stopped, facing backward. The tower shot a red flare to warn the other incoming B-24's of a ship wrecked on the runway. The light glared into Kane's flight deck. Young yelled "Fire!" and leaped for the top hatch. Kane switched off the engines and electricity. Young dropped back and said apologetically, "After you, sir." Kane shoved the co-pilot's rump through the escape hatch and unbuckled his seat belt. He got up, and fell back into the seat. His legs were numb after thirteen hours of pedal-tramping. On the second try he gained his feet. He climbed out on top of Hail Columbia and sat there, a red man in the dying flare. Below, his men were kissing the ground and contentedly sifting handfuls of sand over and over. Kane slid down and pawed the earth.
The R.A.F. brought LeBrecht and Banks in on a transverse runway, followed by five more Liberators. Two had arrived ahead of Kane. An R.A.F. flight surgeon said, "We didn't know you were coming, Colonel, and our mess is closed. Could I give you dinner in town?" Through the blackout curtains of a Nicosia night club, into a brilliantly lighted foyer, came the crew of Hail Columbia. Killer Kane caught sight of himself in a pier glass. One arm was sooty from the fires of White Four. His suntans were lace-white with encrusted sweat. Red eyes stared at him from a harlequin face caked with salt and soot. At dinner the crew fell asleep with their heads on the table, oblivious to flimsily clad Cyprians kicking high.
While Killer Kane and the Cypriot and Turkish refugees were unwinding their destinies, the majority of ships, still widely strewn over the sky, were crossing western Bulgaria on the planned withdrawal course. Lewis Ellis, who had felt "enormously tired" on the way to Ploesti, suddenly felt "fresh and almost completely rested. In spite of everything that happened, I thoroughly enjoyed flying." Crossing low over a village, he glanced at the plane at his side. "I was horrified to see the bombardier fire his nose gun, knocking two men flat," said Ellis. "We had been specifically briefed against firing at civilians." *
* Later, during interrogation, Ellis hung around the bombardier to see if he would report the incident. The bombardier said, "Oh, yes, on the edge of a town there were two German soldiers firing at us with rifles, and I knocked them out." "Furthermore," said Ellis, "his crew had taken pictures of the two men that proved they were soldiers."
Since his mortification in the forenoon, which found his best pilots off post, Colonel Vulkov, commanding the Bulgarian Sixth Fighter Regiment, had pulled his four bases into readiness for the return voyage of the bombers. From Karlovo and Asen, 46 Avias and six Messerschmitts climbed to intercept the south-bound American convoys, while the two squadrons of Avias near Sofia went up to block the bombers in the Osogovska Mountains. This time the B-24's were low enough to be reached by the oxygenless Avias.
Climbing between Pleven and Sofia, Daisy Mae was passing through dark thunderheads when top turret gunner Owen Coldiron called, "Fighters at three o'clock and a little high. I think they're Italians." Lieutenant Rusev of Squadron 622 drove at Ellis. The B-24's threw brilliant tracers across the somber clouds and collected a few more rents in their hides. The Bulgarian fighters got on Ned McCarty's Pyramider Liberator and hit him hard in both left engines. They streamed white smoke, but he kept them turning. His plane sank, threading its way through the hills, barely matching the air speed of the formation. The Bulgarians had only one sting in them. After one pass their old machines could not overtake the bombers. Rusev broke off with little result.
As the brush ended, Ellis was overjoyed to see his close friend, Julian Darlington, sailing along in The Witch, close to the wing of James A. Gunn in Prince Charming, both planes seemingly in good fettle. The three formed a diamond with another plane. As they ascended through clouds, Lieutenant Petrov's Bulgarian Squadron 612 located the diamond and attacked. Again the Bulgarians failed to inflict serious damage. The Liberators disappeared in a cloud, and the second Bulgarian squadron had lost its chance.
At that point the Bulgarian fortune improved. By an eerie, intuitive stroke, Lieutenant Stoyan Stoyanov showed up leading the Karlovo Messerschmitts, the only six planes in the Bulgarian polk that were faster than the bombers. Stoyanov drilled into a cloud top and destroyed the No. 2 and No. 3 engines on The Witch. In the next patch of visibility, Stanley Horine, the tail gunner of Prince Charming, phoned his pilot, "The Witch has been hit bad. She's falling behind." Without temporizing, James Gunn throttled back to take Darlington's side against the foe. As he drifted back, the Bulgarians struck Prince Charming, which began to emit white smoke. By the time Gunn had come abreast of Darlington, flame was coming out, of his waist windows.
The Messerschmitts swooped again on the pair of cripples. Lieutenant Peter Bochev gunned Prince Charming and saw Gunn turn over and fall in flame. Several burning parachutes came out of the ship. The fighter pass wounded four men in The Witch and fatally damaged her mechanisms. Darlington nosed down, rang the emergency bell, and looked fo
r a place to crash-land. Three of his sergeants bailed out on the way down. Darlington skidded The Witch into a mountain wheat field without further injuring anyone. His conscientious bombardier, Lieutenant Major R. Gillett,* destroyed his ten-cent bombsight, while the others lifted the wounded engineer, Lloyd M. Brisbi, from the turret. Bulgarian border guards seized Darlington and navigator Joseph N. Quigley while they were assisting the wounded man. Darlington's other four men -- co-pilot Daryl Epp, bombardier Gillett, and gunners Dale G. Halsey and Walter D. Hardiek -- ran for the woods. The Bulgars sent a corporals' guard to chase them. Epp's bolters had little chance. They were in a heavily patrolled border area; Hitler's Bulgarian ally claimed that part of the woods from indomitable Yugoslavia.
* His Christian name was Major.
Darlington's trio was decently treated and taken to jail in Sofia, where a surprise awaited them: three living men, the parachutists from their plane -- Ned A. Howard, Anthony J. Rauba and Joseph J. Turley. Presuming that co-pilot Epp and the other three runaways had not been slaughtered in the forest, Julian Darlington's entire crew was alive!
In the morning the Bulgars brought in a burned man with bandaged head and hands. He was Stanley Horine, the tail gunner from Prince Charming, who had reported the plight of The Witch, bringing the gallant Captain Gunn back to his doom. Somehow Horine had bailed out of a ship spiraling down in flames. He was the only survivor. In the crew of many a crashed plane there was this tithe of one living man.
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