The Bomber Boys

by Travis L. Ayres

  Getting booted from flight school was a disappointment, but Art shook it off with the resiliency of an eighteen-year-old. Within days he was offered admission into the Army Air Corps navigation school in Monroe, Louisiana. He gladly accepted the chance to become a combat navigator, which was what he really wanted from the beginning. It also provided some good news to write in a letter to his father: “Dad, sorry to report I washed out of flight school, but I’m going to become a navigator.” Art left out the details of why he had “washed out.”

  After graduation from navigation school, it was off to Tennessee, where Art joined a replacement crew commanded by pilot Lieutenant Elliot Butts. Butts’s new crew went through two months of intensive combat training before heading to Lincoln, Nebraska, to pick up a new factory-fresh B-17 bomber. About a week later, the crew was aboard the Fortress, flying it to Italy for assignment with the 301st Bomb Group.

  Their route hopped from Lincoln to Bangor, Maine; Newfoundland; the Azores; Marrakech in North Africa; and finally to Gioia, Italy. By the time they landed in Italy, the new crew had chalked up almost thirty hours of flying time, and Art had gained plenty of valuable navigation experience before being plunged into the pressure of combat missions.

  It was at Gioia that Butts’s crew discovered the cruel joke the Air Corps played on most of its replacement crews. Their shiny new B-17 was taken away from them, and they were placed aboard an old battle-worn bomber for the trip to their new air base. The base, like several other United States air bases in Italy, was near the city of Foggia. Art had heard descriptions of the conditions at Eighth Air Force bases in England. Surely the barracks were cold, but there were good points: liberty in nearby London, local pubs and friendly English girls. Art knew at first glance that life with the Fifteenth Air Force at Foggia was going to be much more unpleasant than a similar assignment in England.

  There were few buildings at all. Several Quonset huts housed the operation facilities of the 301st and a dismal structure built from lava rock was designated as the Officers’ Club. Officers and noncommissioned crew members alike lived in army tents amid a sea of mud.

  It was October 1944 when Art reached the Foggia base, and there was already a chill in the air. His tent mate, a navigator from another crew, gave him the short tour of their home. There was a brick floor, which was a luxury since Art would later learn many of the other tent floors were simply packed dirt. For heat, a homemade burner had been fashioned from a metal spray bottle in which holes had been punched to serve as flame jets. The burner was fed by a line that ran underneath the tent to a one-hundred-octane gasoline tank outside.

  Art concluded his new home was a firetrap, and during his first week there was tangible proof of it. Early one morning, Art heard a commotion outside. He stuck his head out of the tent flap to see members of a nearby tent scurrying about in their underwear. They were desperately trying to extinguish the fire that was quickly consuming their tent. It was a losing battle.

  “That happens about once a week,” Art’s tent mate informed him before going back inside to make coffee.

  On November 22, Art flew his first combat mission as a B-17 navigator. It was nothing like he had expected. At seven fifty a.m., the first of the 301st Bomb Group Fortresses lifted off the runway. The target for the day was the marshaling yard at Regensburg, Germany. By the time the formation was over enemy territory, the weather was turning bad. Snowflakes blew in the side openings and began to build up on the gunners and their weapons.

  In the nose, the bombardier motioned for Art to look down through the Plexiglas. Through a break in the clouds, he spotted what his crewmate wanted him to see. They were flying directly over a German airfield. Art could see the enemy fighters lined up neatly along the sides of the runways. There was no activity down there. Not one fighter was taking off to confront the American bomber force. In a few more seconds, the airfield disappeared as the snowstorm intensified.

  Art guessed the weather conditions were going to get much worse. If the Luftwaffe was not going to risk flying, what chance did the B-17s have of hitting an unseen target? By the time the bombers reached Regensburg, the crew members could barely see the airplanes flying right next to them. Midair collisions became a bigger worry than the German defenses. However, the enemy antiaircraft gunners soon gave the Americans a hot welcome.

  Black pocks of smoke punctured the pure white sky as the B-17s blindly released their bombs. Art doubted the marshaling yards were suffering any damage at all. The 301st was more likely plowing some German farmers’ fields.

  Before the empty bombers could find their way out of the danger area, the air became filled with almost as much flak as snow. One burst just ahead of Art’s aircraft sent shrapnel flying into the Plexiglas nose. Some of it blasted clean through and ricocheted around the bombardier-navigator compartment. One piece, almost spent, bounced off Art’s flak vest.

  Those people are trying to knock me down! Art thought. Reason told him the German antiaircraft batteries were firing blindly into a snow-filled sky, but to Art the war had just become very personal. It was a long and cold flight back to their base for the airmen of the 301st, knowing their efforts had accomplished little on that miserable day.

  Art soon learned the weather was going to be a constant problem for the Fifteenth Air Force crews flying out of the Foggia region of Italy. After completing his second mission into Germany on December 2, Art’s crew took off with the 419th Bomb Squadron the following day. They were forced to return with an incomplete mission. On the sixth the results were the same; and again on the tenth, another “incomplete.” Finally on December 11, Art navigated his B-17 crew to a bomb drop on an oil refinery in Austria and received credit for his third mission.

  Of course, bad weather was not the only thing that could force a bomber still fully loaded with bombs back to base. Mechanical problems were also common. On one mission, Art was the navigator for a B-17 when it lost oil pressure in one of its engines. Since they were not that far from their target, everyone hoped to finish the mission, but when it became apparent the aircraft could not keep up with the rest of the formation, the pilot reluctantly turned back.

  Within minutes, the pilot was on the interphone requesting that Art find an alternative target where they could unload their bombs and get credit for the mission. Zagreb, Yugoslavia, was on the alternative list and pretty much on the route home. Art gave the pilot coordinates for Zagreb, and the lone bomber headed off for its new target on just three engines.

  Since the crew had not been briefed for Zagreb, they did not know much about it, beyond the fact that it was occupied by the Germans. Art’s maps indicated a bridge spanning the Sava River. His pilot liked the idea, perhaps for no other reason than the challenge involved in a single heavy bomber trying to hit such a small target.

  As they approached Zagreb, luck was with them—both good and bad luck. The weather around the city was beautifully clear. The bridge stood out like a bull’s-eye as the B-17 started its bomb run. Art soon realized that his bomber also stood out like a bull’s-eye too. Zagreb, it turned out, was strongly defended with numerous antiaircraft batteries, and all of them were trying to train on a crippled B-17 that had appeared out of nowhere.

  Now as black flak explosions with fiery red centers began to appear all around his bomber, Art felt foolish for having thought the war was personal on his first mission. This was personal! These German ground gunners were not putting up a wall of flak, hoping to hit any American bomber formation. These gunners were specifically trying to blast Art and his nine crewmates out of the sky.

  It was the most concentrated flak Art would ever see, but somehow they flew through it completely untouched. As soon as the last bomb fell from the bay, the B-17’s pilot turned sharply away from the city. The first few bombs fell short of the bridge, producing harmless geysers in the river, but a few seconds later the Zagreb bridge was rocked with devastating explosions. Art’s crew had scored an improbable direct hit.

  Fo
r the American bomb groups flying out of the air bases around Foggia, the Adriatic Sea was the pathway to their targets. After six missions, Art knew the route well. The formations flew northwest up the length of the Adriatic, with the backside of the Italian boot (the eastern coast of Italy) visible to their left. They crossed the Gulf of Venice into northern Italy, where the Germans still held on stubbornly; then they flew across the breathtaking Italian Alps into Austria. If the target was in Germany, the American bombers would usually make a turn over the Austrian Alps.

  As Art saw it, this route had its advantages and a major disadvantage. The upside was that more than half of the U.S. bombers’ route was over water, which meant there was no threat of enemy antiaircraft fire. Also, there was little chance the depleted Luftwaffe would risk venturing very far over the Adriatic, where American fighters ruled the skies and where a clear view of the eastern coast of Italy made navigation uncomplicated. The downside was the predictability of the bombers’ route. The Germans in Austria and northern Italy knew in advance the path of the American formations, and they positioned their antiaircraft batteries accordingly.

  Beginning on December 21, Art got four days off from flying. He was bored by the second day. In Foggia, the Italians were not friendly to American aviators and soldiers. There was little to do on the air base but talk, play cards and drink gin. By the time Christmas Day arrived, he was not so disappointed when he got an early wake-up. He was very aggravated when an hour and a half into the mission the bombers were called back to base because of bad weather. He had by now flown twelve missions and half of those had been aborted, most due to weather conditions. After being credited with only six combat missions for a month’s worth of flying, Art was eager to get on with it.

  The sky cleared on December 26 for the 301st to make a bomb run on an oil refinery in Blechhammer, Germany. The following day, the unit struck the marshaling yards in Linz, Austria. On December 28, it went back to bomb Regensburg again.

  Art and the rest of the men of the 419th Bomb Squadron had flown three straight days of combat missions. They had been long and cold flights, each one lasting eight hours or more. After Regensburg, Art went to bed that evening expecting there was little chance of being called on to fly the next day. To his surprise, the duty sergeant woke him with the news before dawn. There was yet another surprise in store for the young navigator that morning—he was assigned to fly with a different crew.

  Until December 29, Art had flown most of his missions with pilot Lieutenant Elliot Butts. This day he would be flying as the navigator for Lieutenant Lyle C. Pearson’s crew. Art knew Pearson, but not well. The two men had run into one another at the Officers’ Club. In fact, Art had also met Pearson’s copilot, Sam Wheeler, and the bombardier, William Ferguson, at the club.

  Art knew little about the officers, except that Pearson and Wheeler were married men and Ferguson was single. The pilot was from Minnesota. The copilot and bombardier both had Southern accents. Art seemed to remember that Wheeler was from Alabama and Ferguson came from Missouri. Though he had seen some of their faces around the base, Art had not really met any of the enlisted crewmen until the morning of December 29. He soon discovered that Pearson was also unacquainted with these airmen.

  Lyle Pearson had grown up in the small town of Montevideo, Minnesota, the son of a mechanic. He enlisted in the Army in May 1942 at the age of twenty-one. When four months passed and Lyle had not been called to active duty, he and the pretty Katherine Fuller were married. The newlyweds enjoyed five blissful months together before Lyle’s orders arrived in February 1943.

  By the summer of 1944 the young pilot had completed his training and was flying a new B-17 overseas. Trouble brushed Pearson and his crew before they could even reach the war in Italy. While taking off from a base in the Azores, Pearson’s bomber suffered a mechanical failure that prevented the aircraft from gaining sufficient altitude. The fuselage of the Fortress barely cleared an embankment at the end of the runway and the landing gear was sheared off completely, sending the B-17 skidding across an open field. Miraculously, every member of Pearson’s crew walked away uninjured. It was a rocky start for a young man who would go on to become one of the 419th Bomb Squadron’s most reliable pilots.

  Pearson’s very first combat mission was a brutal lesson for the rookie pilot. For months, the bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force had been attacking the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania, which supplied the German war machine with much of its fuel. Before Ploesti’s oil production was knocked out in August 1944, 223 American bombers and crews were shot from the sky. Pearson made the round-trip to Ploesti on July 31, through some of the most intense antiaircraft defenses of the war.

  By December, Pearson had gained a reputation as a pilot who looked out for his men but one who was also determined to get the job done. During one mission, his aircraft had lost power in one of its engines while approaching the initial point of the bomb run. With reduced power, the bomber soon fell behind the rest of the formation, but Pearson refused to turn back. He took the lone Fortress over the target with only three working engines and dropped his bombs. After weaving through the flak area, Pearson and his crew flew the long and lonely route back to their base in Italy and landed safely. For this action, Lieutenant Lyle Pearson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  In fact, many times Pearson had landed at Foggia, his B-17 riddled with flak holes (fifty-seven hits on one mission), but never had one of his airmen been injured. They loved and respected him for that.

  Since individual crewmen would occasionally be assigned to fly with other crews, fate played a strange trick on Pearson and his boys. By December 29, eight of his crewmen had finished their required fifty missions. Unlike the Eighth Air Force, which required thirty-five combat missions of its airmen, the Fifteenth Air Force required fifty missions, but an airman was given credit for two missions on longer raids. Only Pearson and his bombardier, William “Jack” Ferguson, had one more mission to fly before they could go home.

  Pearson and Ferguson were tent mates and close friends. When Ferguson was assigned to complete his rotation with a different pilot and crew on December 28, he pulled strings to be reassigned to the December 29th mission instead. The bombardier was determined to finish up the war with his pal Lyle Pearson. Every bomber returned safely from the target on December 28.

  Pearson was not all that edgy about his pickup crew. Although he had not previously flown with his new copilot, he knew Sam Wheeler had a good reputation around the base. His buddy Jack Ferguson would drop the bombs on target. Pearson knew and liked his new navigator. Art Frechette, with nine combat missions under his belt, could be trusted to find the way back home. When the day’s target was announced during the early-morning briefing, Pearson felt even better. Their target was the rail yards and workshops of Castelfranco, in northern Italy. They would not be flying into German or even Austrian airspace. There was no doubt there would be some flak, as there always was, but it should be light.

  After his crew assembled at their bomber, Pearson took time to introduce the officers and then asked the enlisted crewmen to introduce themselves and say where they were from.

  The flight engineer, Sergeant Farrell B. Haney, was a Texan. Radio operator Staff Sergeant Robert J. Halstein was from Meriden, Connecticut, not far from Art’s hometown of Groton. Staff Sergeant Charles A. Williams was the ball turret gunner; Panama City, Florida, was his home. Waist gunner, Sergeant Mitchell Vuyanovich came from Pennsylvania. The other waist gunner, Sergeant Charles T. Lyon, was from Iowa. The crew’s tail gunner was Sergeant Grant M. Dory; his hometown was Seattle.

  Art thought they seemed like a good bunch of boys, but he surmised they were feeling the same way he was—as though he had been yanked away from his family. His new pilot and commander, Lyle Pearson, made things easier on everyone. They were all aware of his record of bringing his crews back unharmed. Pearson was confident, even cheerful as he chatted with them before takeoff.

  As Pearson w
as preparing to get his crew on board, a Jeep drove up with an officer in the passenger seat. Pearson smiled as he recognized his regular copilot, Lieutenant Harry Livers, who had come by to see his old friend off. The men talked briefly, shook hands and then as Livers climbed back into the Jeep, he yelled back to Pearson, “See you when you get back, Lyle!”

  Pearson smiled again and waved goodbye to his friend:

  “Harry, I’ve got it made!”

  The weather was beautiful, with maximum visibility. There was still lots of chatter on the interphone as Pearson’s bomber left the Adriatic behind and entered the airspace of northern Italy. The boys were getting to know each other, so Pearson decided to let them talk until they reached the initial point. Seated at his navigator’s desk in the nose compartment, Art could see the magnificent Alps in the distance. The mountain range never failed to leave him in awe, but on this clear morning, the Alps were especially beautiful—their peaks a brilliant white under the morning sun, their valleys deep, green and welcoming.

  Pearson’s aircraft was a B-17G, serial number 44-6652. She was in the deputy lead position, just to the left and rear of the lead aircraft. There were seven silver B-17s in the 419th Bomb Squadron diamond formation. Art notified Pearson when they reached the initial point. Seconds later, Art watched the lead bomber turn slowly, signaling the beginning of the bomb run. He began to store away his navigation instruments, in anticipation of encountering flak within five to ten minutes’ time.

  “Flak! Nine o’clock!” the tail gunner, Grant Dory, yelled over the interphone. No sooner had he given the warning than an explosion shook the aircraft violently. Art knew instantly they had been hit, but he still found it hard to believe. Reality sank in quickly when he heard Pearson order Ferguson, “Get rid of those bombs!”