As the five airmen huddled around the escape door, it somehow opened up before the hinge pin was completely removed. The outside air currents jerked the door rearward and Martinez’s parachute harness became caught. The ball turret gunner was half in and half out of the airplane, with the wind pinning him against the door. If they could not get the hinge pin loose and release the escape door, each of them was going to have the same difficulty that Martinez was encountering.
Suddenly Martinez was gone. Two seconds later, Ruben gave the release pin a powerful kick—the pin popped out and the escape door fell away. Peter never saw it happen. He had been helping Ruben, trying to release the door when everything went blank. The walk-around oxygen bottle had reached empty several minutes before, but in the excitement Peter had not even noticed. Ruben bailed out and Peter, right behind him, fell out of the bomber—his crewmates never even realizing the left waist gunner was totally unconscious.
At twenty-six thousand feet, a temperature of minus thirty degrees could be an airman’s friend, especially if the shock of cold air awakened him from a deadly free fall. Peter did not know up from down when he came to. He was tumbling through the air end over end. He pulled the ripcord, and for a second or two nothing seemed to happen. The jolt that followed almost pulled the breath out of him.
There was no way to judge how far he had fallen before his chute finally opened, but looking up Peter spotted three tiny parachutes. He assumed the others pulled their ripcords right away. He, on the other hand, had dropped like a rock—apparently for several thousand feet.
Drifting down over Germany, Peter knew he was lucky to be alive. One mistake and that could change. He tried to analyze his angle and rate of descent and to picture in his mind where he might land. It was a guessing game, but the wind seemed to be taking him directly over a small village. The stories he had heard of German civilians assaulting and sometimes killing downed Allied airmen made the thought of landing in the village extremely unappealing.
During his last couple of minutes in the air, Peter was relieved to find the air currents were carrying his chute past the village and over what appeared to be an area of small farms. In his first and only parachute jump, he made a rough but safe landing in a large, freshly plowed field.
While he was gathering his chute to his chest, Peter took a quick look around. There was nobody, neither civilian nor military in sight. He was certain that would change quickly enough. Where could he hide?
A small gully close by seemed to be his only immediate option. When he scrambled over its edge, he tumbled into a shallow stream. He pushed his chute into the water, weighed it down with several rocks and then climbed back up the stream bank, being careful not to expose himself. He spotted someone immediately.
The man was armed with a shotgun and from his clothing, Peter surmised he was probably a farmer. Very likely, he owned the field Peter was hiding in. Farmer or not, if the man continued walking in his direction, Peter decided he would have little choice but to kill him. He reached down to his side for his .45 automatic pistol and found it was not there. No pistol and no holster. Peter silently cursed himself for his thoughtlessness in leaving his sidearm on his bunk that morning. What now? The man continued walking in Peter’s direction, finally stopping no more than fifty feet away.
A noise had caused him to stop—the sound of a small machine gun. It was just a short burst, but when Peter looked to the east, he spotted four German soldiers emerging from the woods. They were close to a hundred yards away, and they began yelling to the farmer in German. He responded, waving his arms and yelling back to them. Of course, Peter could not understand any of it but he was certain his whereabouts were the main subject of the conversation. If any of them reached the edge of the gully and looked down the streambed, they could not help but spot the American flyer.
Surrender became a possible solution in Peter’s mind, but he quickly shoved it aside as a last-resort alternative. He could not discount being shot by the German soldiers or even the farmer if he tried to surrender. Even if he was not shot, spending months and perhaps years in a prisoner of war camp seemed only a slightly better fate. The airman took a deep breath and tried to keep his head so he would be ready for his chance if it came.
When the man with the shotgun began walking to meet the German soldiers, Peter knew he had to take a risk. On the other bank of the stream was a lone but rather large tree. It was the only cover in the field other than the gully. Peter slipped across the stream, climbed up the opposite bank and, hugging the ground as close as possible, he slowly crawled behind the tree.
Sitting with his back pressed against the trunk and his knees up against his chest, Peter stayed motionless when the farmer returned to the area, now accompanied by the soldiers. He could tell from their voices and movements that the Germans were checking the streambed. He prayed his parachute remained wedged beneath the rocks.
The Germans stayed close by for several minutes, and when they moved to the north, Peter quietly slipped around the tree to the south. If they had spread out or even crossed the stream, his location would have been discovered. Luckily his pursuers went off in another direction. Peter remained frozen in position, his back to the tree. The searchers came back one more time before deciding the American must by then be far away. Dusk was beginning to fall when they left for good.
Peter had not been idle while he was clinging to the big tree. He had used the time to decide on his route of escape. When it was dark enough, he crawled on his stomach for almost a hundred yards to the protection of some woods to the west—the exact opposite side of the field from where the German soldiers had disappeared.
Peter stayed in the small woods until it was completely dark, and then he walked until he came to a road. It seemed to run north and south. Not knowing where either direction led, the downed airman headed north on a whim. He still held on to the diminishing hope of finding one or more of his crewmates but realized now it would be a miracle. If any of the others had managed to avoid capture, with the coming darkness they would be on the move trying to get as far away as possible. The truth was, as Peter Seniawsky walked along the German road that night, he was the only member of his crew who was still free.
The nine other men of Giles Kauffman’s crew, including the pilot himself, had been captured within minutes of their parachute landings. Paul Spodar was almost glad to see the German soldier who showed up to take him prisoner. On the way down, Spodar had barely avoided being killed by a civilian who took several rifle shots at him. The right waist gunner was sure he would not have been given the chance to surrender had that civilian been the first to reach him.
Spodar was taken to a farm shack and locked in. About fifteen minutes later, another prisoner was shoved into the shack. It was Stanley Ruben. The tail gunner produced a couple of Camel cigarettes, and they smoked to celebrate being alive.
William Jarrell got out of his parachute harness quickly after landing and tried to make it to the cover of nearby woods. A German soldier’s bullet brought him down on the run. Jarrell felt his left leg collapse and watched his chance for escape disappear. The wound in his thigh would make the long walk to prison camp even more miserable.
Giles Kauffman landed and immediately reached for his .45 automatic. Several German soldiers were running toward him as he pulled the pistol from its holster. The pilot knew there were too many. He might have been able to shoot one, perhaps two of them before the others shot him down. He let the .45 fall to the ground and slowly raised his hands above his head.
As the sun set on Thursday, October 14, 1943, the Germans were rounding up hundreds of downed American airmen from Schweinfurt to France. Only a handful avoided capture on that Black Thursday to stay free for even one more day.
The temperature was falling quickly, and Peter was more occupied with keeping warm than concentrating on where he was going. He had left his heavy flight jacket hidden in the woods. Its loss was regrettable but necessary. If anyone spotted him wearing
that jacket, it would be a dead giveaway to his occupation.
Pulling his Army issue sweater up over his ears and head gave Peter a little relief from the cold as he trudged along in the darkness. Without even noticing, he walked right up on a German antiaircraft installation. He could see enemy soldiers behind a camouflaged fence, perhaps some of the same soldiers who had earlier searched the farmer’s field for him. Peter carefully turned and walked back in the direction he had come, praying that he had not been spotted. With each step, he expected to hear a German voice commanding him to stop, or worse, the sound of a rifle firing.
When no soldiers followed him, he just kept walking. In about an hour he spotted something shining through the trees. Leaving the road to investigate, he discovered the source was moonlight reflecting off a large river. It must be the Rhine, he thought. The wide river was beautiful under the moon’s glow, and it was possibly disaster for him. If he had landed on the eastern side of the Rhine, he was as good as done.
Dejected, the young American airman sat down and opened the small escape kit that the Army Air Force had provided. He had to take stock of his situation, evaluate it and work out a plan for survival. Before any of that could be accomplished, he had to stop his mind from racing. Clear, logical thought was what was needed now. Carefully, he placed each item of the escape kit on the ground in front of him.
There were only a few items he felt would be useful. Peter picked up the small compass. Three greenish dots glowed in the moonlight. Two of the dots at the end of the compass needle indicated north. The single dot at the other end of the needle stood for south. He tucked the compass into his pants pocket, aware that nothing in the escape kit was more valuable to him.
Next, he unfolded a silk handkerchief. On one side was a map of Germany, and on the opposite side was a map of France. Major cities, towns and larger roads were included on the maps. Missing were numbers for the roads. Peter failed to notice this omission, but later it would cause him to curse the men who designed the escape maps.
There was a photo of Peter in civilian clothing—white shirt, tie and an ill-fitting jacket. Soon after he had sat for the photo session, someone had explained that the “escape photo” was useless. It was meant to help convince any enemy authority who might conduct a personal search that a downed American aviator was simply a harmless civilian. The Germans had taken so many of the pictures off captured American airmen that they could guess the number of the bomber group just from looking at the clothing in the escape photo. Peter tucked it back into the kit.
When he found a chocolate candy bar among the kit’s contents, he was tempted to eat it right then. Instead, he broke off a small section to nibble on and put the remainder in his shirt pocket for later. He had no way of knowing how long it would be before he could find any other food.
As for the rest of the things in the escape kit, only five French notes struck Peter as being of any eventual use to him. Each note was one hundred francs. So that’s it, he thought, a compass, a map, some French money and a candy bar. Then he remembered the hunting knife that he always carried in a scabbard on his belt. Still, it was not much. He could speak neither German nor French, and he was wearing olive drab clothing that could hardly be mistaken for anything but a military uniform.
Little could be done about his language limitations. Perhaps he would pick up a few necessary words if he avoided capture long enough, but in order to do that, he would have to find some civilian clothing as soon as possible. Until then, he would travel by night, and hide and sleep in the daytime. His first objective had to be getting out of Germany. France was somewhere to the west. If he traveled the roads leading southwest or northwest but always in that general direction, he had to come to France eventually—that is, if the river did not block his way, if he were not spotted by a German civilian or picked up by a military patrol.
When and if he reached France, what then? From Air Force briefings, Peter knew the northern two-thirds of the country was occupied by the Germans, and the lower third was under the rule of the Vichy government, which had a policy of total collaboration with the Germans. His only hope would be to connect with a member of the French resistance. How he could accomplish this, he had no idea, but that was not his problem at the moment. Reaching France was what mattered first. Peter stuffed the escape kit into his back pocket and checked his compass. He walked for the rest of the night, always heading west.
As Peter Seniawsky stumbled along a lonely German road on the evening of October 14, the survivors of the Schweinfurt raid were relating the gory details of the day’s combat and praying their missing comrades would somehow miraculously return. As the reports from the various American bases in England began to be compiled and evaluated, the full cost of the great air battle became clear.
That morning, 291 B-17s had departed for Schweinfurt. Mechanical, engine and formation problems had reduced the American bomber force to 257 aircraft by the time the formation had crossed into German territory. Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf fighters along with twin-engine rocket planes had swarmed the Flying Fortresses, knocking twenty-eight of them from the sky before they could reach Schweinfurt.
Intense flak over the target and almost constant enemy fighter attacks on the return trip had destroyed another thirty-two B-17s. Sixty American bombers were lost! Another five bombers crashed after making it back to English airspace. Of the returning Fortresses, 138 suffered some kind of battle damage, and seven of those would never fly again. Some of the aircraft that made it back carried dead or severely wounded airmen.1
There were 594 American airmen missing in action. When the surviving crews began to relive the mission during their interrogations, it became apparent that many of the missing were most likely dead. Too many explosions and burning bombers, and not enough parachutes spotted. Friends were gone, many forever.
The target, the three ball bearing plants in Schweinfurt, had indeed been hit and badly damaged. Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, estimated that 67 percent of German ball bearing production had been lost as a result of the Schweinfurt raid. Speer and the surviving Schweinfurt factory workers braced for the follow-up American raid that would bring the German ball bearing industry and perhaps its military mobility to a halt. But the shaken American Eighth Air Force could not follow up. American newspapers were soon telling the story of the second air raid on Schweinfurt, a city that had spelled disaster to more than one hundred twenty B-17 crews in just two months.
The American bomber airmen in England would gladly wait until the new P-51 long-range escort fighters arrived before resuming their missions deep into Germany. In the meantime, fathers, mothers, families and fiancées waited anxiously for some word from their dear airmen. A letter saying, “I’m alive and okay,” was an answered prayer. Helen had managed to land a job with the telephone company, where war news and gossip was always plentiful and often unreliable. She heard the rumors of the great losses the American Air Force had suffered at a place named Schweinfurt and tried to tell herself that the numbers were too outlandish to be true. Soon she was reading the front-page newspaper headlines that confirmed what would be called Black Thursday.
Had Peter been on the raid? Had he survived? Helen waited for word from England. A V-letter (censored photocopy) arrived in the last week of October. It was from Peter. Tears of joy began to slip down her cheeks. Then she noticed the date on the letter—October 14, 1943. She guessed Peter had written the letter just before takeoff to Schweinfurt.
Helen touched a fingertip to the “I love you” at the bottom of the page and whispered a prayer. A few days later, on October 28, as her family gathered to celebrate her father’s birthday, the bad news arrived. Peter’s sister Margie had received a notice from the War Department. Peter was “missing in action.”
The sun rose behind Peter on the morning of October 15, casting a soft orange hue across the roofs of the little German village. He had walked through the night and was not sure where he was, b
ut he was at least confident that he was far from where his bomber had gone down. His encounter with the Rhine had not proven insurmountable. What he had seen was merely a bend in the majestic river. Luckily he had landed on the western side of the Rhine.
A few vehicles had passed along the road during the night, forcing him to scurry into the woods. Thankfully none of the cars and trucks had borne any military markings.
The village, a half mile ahead of him, was comprised of a dozen or so houses, all clustered close together on either side of the road. Pastureland covered the remainder of the immediate area. Peter was still damp and almost completely exhausted. Sticking to his plan, he looked around for someplace to hide where he could sleep through the day. A comfortable-looking haystack in an adjacent field seemed perfect. He could get out of his damp clothes and let the sun dry them while he slept.
The side of the haystack opposite from the village would be best, Peter decided. He soon discovered that although the haystack was soft and dry on the outside, it was wet and firmly packed underneath. Simply sleeping on top of the hay risked a visibility he could not afford. He had no choice but to burrow into the damp hay and cover himself as best he could. He ate a meal of another small piece of the chocolate bar and a condensed-milk cube that he had discovered in the escape kit, and then the weary airman tried to get some sleep.
As tired as he was, sleep came only in short intervals that day. Still in his wet clothes, he was cold and miserable. As dusk began to fall, Peter spread his handkerchief map out and tried to figure out where he might be. It was a hopeless effort. Without numbers for the routes, the road signs he had encountered meant nothing. Keep heading west, he thought, as he crammed the handkerchief back into his pants pocket and climbed out of the haystack.
The Bomber Boys Page 10