The Bomber Boys

by Travis L. Ayres

  As welcome as letters from home were, he regretted not having a girlfriend with whom he could correspond. He had dated several girls during his senior year, but because of his quick departure there had been little time for any serious relationship to blossom. Now, as fellow airmen received letters and packages from girlfriends and wives stateside, George was envious.

  A few of his friends had managed to meet English girls but the opportunities were rare, and the competition was fierce. Nineteen-year-old George was experienced beyond his years at warfare, but even he had to admit, he was no smooth operator when it came to women. One day at mail call, his luck changed.

  The letter was postmarked Hamden, and the handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar. George opened it carefully but still had to react quickly to keep a small photo from falling to the ground. The girl in the photo was pretty . . . very pretty, George thought. And if it was a recent snapshot, she was just a teenager. He tucked the picture back into the envelope and found a quiet place to read the letter.

  Her name was Marie. She was just eighteen but lived on her own at the YWCA in Hamden, Connecticut. That is where she met George’s sister Betty during a dance the Y had hosted for cadets from nearby Yale. Betty was certain her brother would enjoy being pen pals with the new friend. Marie hoped it was okay. George tacked her picture on his bunk. It was more than okay.

  Once he had replied, Marie’s letters came regularly. George read each one over and over. He made sure to answer every letter Marie sent. The text of her letters was light and sometimes funny, and each one revealed a little more of a young woman George was growing anxious to meet.

  Marie Spilane had grown into an independent adult quicker than most girls. At the age of eleven, her mother had died and an absentee father allowed little Marie to be taken in by her mother’s sister, Aunt Helen, who Marie called Nell. By the age of seventeen, Marie was employed as a bookkeeper at a corset company that had been converted to parachute manufacturing. When she turned eighteen, Marie moved into the YWCA.

  One evening at a dance she met Betty Ahern. When Betty proudly produced a picture of her brother “serving with the Eighth Air Force in England,” Marie’s reaction was, “He’s so cute.” He seemed much too young to have already seen combat over Germany.

  Weeks later, back in England, George returned from every bombing mission hoping there would be a letter from Marie waiting for him. One day an airman passing his bunk asked, “Who’s the pretty girl?”

  Instead of answering, “My pen pal,” George surprised himself by saying, “That’s my girl.” After a few more letters back and forth across the ocean, the answer to the question became, “That’s the girl I’m gonna marry when I get home.”

  He was careful to make no such declaration in his letters to Marie, and he took considerable good-natured razzing from his crewmates.

  “Marry her? George, you haven’t even kissed her yet!” one would say.

  “Hell, he hasn’t even met her!” another would add.

  George knew they still thought of him as an impulsive kid. The stunt of riding the ball turret down through a landing had done little to dispel the image. But George was sure about Marie. He could tell from her letters that she was someone special. Since he had begun flying bombing raids in early July, he had only allowed himself to live mission to mission. Now he could not help but think about the day he would fly his last bomb run. He had a long way to go.

  By September 1944, George had completed twenty of his required thirty-five combat missions. Fatigued in body and mind, if not in spirit, he welcomed the news that the Torchy Tess crew was getting four days of rest, including liberty in London. Once again the entire crew took the train into the city, each man determined to have some fun and forget about the war. No one could say they had not earned the break. Over Munich, Stutt gart, Schweinfurt, Merseburg and Berlin, the enemy had thrown all the fighters and flak it had at them. They had fought and survived as a crew and were now as close as any blood family.

  At the very time George and his crewmates were arriving in London, somewhere behind enemy lines in the Netherlands, German technicians were painstakingly checking every step in the launch procedure of a revolutionary new weapon. It was a fourteen-ton ballistic missile that Adolf Hitler believed would be “the decisive weapon of the war.”

  Earlier in the war, the German leader had sent waves of Luftwaffe bombers over England in preparation for a planned invasion of the island nation. Only the bravery and sacrifice of its Spitfire and Hurricane pilots allowed the RAF to defeat the German bombers and win the Battle of Britain. The heroism of the English fighter pilots prompted Winston Churchill to pay tribute: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  With its own offensive bomber forces severely damaged, Germany soon found the table turned. Her major cities suffered devastating nighttime raids by British bombers and later what had once been unimaginable—daylight bombing by the Americans. Hitler looked to German technology to execute his vengeance on England and perhaps turn the tide of the war again in his favor.

  The V-1, the jet-propelled flying bomb, was the first of the advanced weapons to strike London in June 1944. Throughout the summer, thousands of V-1s were launched against England. British fighter pilots and antiaircraft gunners managed to shoot down almost half of them. The V-1s that exploded inside London and other English cities caused much death and destruction; however, they only served to strengthen the resolve of the British citizens and did little to slow the Allies’ prosecution of the war.

  But now Hitler had a larger, faster “vengeance weapon” named the A-4. The Allies would call it the V-2. The A-4 ballistic missile was forty-six feet long and housed a full ton of explosives. After launching, the A-4 would climb to an altitude of sixty miles above the earth and then fall on its target at a speed of thirty-six hundred miles per hour. No Allied fighter or antiaircraft battery was designed to bring down anything as fast as the new German rocket. In fact, it was so fast and silent, its victims would never see or hear it coming.

  On September 7, Duncan Sandys, the British government’s leading authority on the German rocket program, had tried to reassure the public. Mr. Sandys had told the press that while a few more V-1 bombs might straggle into English airspace, the Allies had essentially ended the threat of the German vengeance weapons.

  The British and American authorities certainly had reason to brag. V-1 launch sites in France had been pounded again and again by heavy bombers, and after the D-Day invasion, most of the remaining launch sites had fallen into the hands of the Allied ground armies. In truth, the Allied leaders were not telling journalists and British citizens the whole story. They had known since December 1942 that the Germans were working on an advanced missile weapon. By the spring of 1943, Allied intelligence agents had discovered the location of both V-1 and V-2 development sites—Peenemünde, off the German Baltic Coast.

  When a test-firing sent one of the German V-2s out of control and smashing into neutral Sweden, secret negotiations resulted in the British obtaining the wreckage of the rocket. Their experts soon concluded the V-2 packed a one-ton warhead, traveled at enormous speed and could be launched at England from more than two hundred miles away.

  After receiving this information, Churchill ordered a heavy attack. On the evening of August 17, almost six hundred British bombers took off for Peenemünde. Earlier in the day, sixty American bombers had been shot down during a combined raid on Schweinfurt and Regensburg. The British would lose another forty bombers over Peenemünde. However, the bombing destroyed many of the facilities at Peenemünde, killed several top German scientists, and delayed the German rocket program by several months.

  The V-2 ballistic missile program might have collapsed after the Peenemünde raid, except that the most important of Germany’s scientists was still alive. His name was Wernher von Braun. Von Braun, who as a boy had dreamed of space travel, cared less about vengeance against the English or wonder weapons than h
e did about advancing rocket technology. Still, the brilliant scientist designed and developed the first successful version of the ballistic missile of the future, and he put it in the hands of Adolf Hitler.

  On September 8, just one day after Mr. Sandy’s optimistic prediction, the first V-2 rocket ever fired at England exploded in the Chiswick section of London, killing three and wounding twenty. Every piece of debris that was suspected of being part of the German rocket was removed from the crater and taken away to a reassembly site. The British authorities soon had an amazingly accurate understanding of the workings and capabilities of the new vengeance weapon. A cloak of secrecy was thrown over everything concerning the V-2.

  A day after the Chiswick explosion, ten American airmen shared a jovial midday meal at the Mayfair Hotel restaurant. Present at the table were pilot Lieutenant Marvin R. Walker; copilot Flight Officer Maurice E. Joncas; bombardier Lieutenant Daniel L. Rader; navigator Second Lieutenant Donald E. Knuepple; flight engineer and top turret gunner Staff Sergeant William R. Schneider; radio operator Staff Sergeant William W. Weaver; waist gunner and backup flight engineer Staff Sergeant Charles S. Armstrong; waist gunner and backup radio operator Sergeant Philip Duke; tail gunner Sergeant Paul A. Schrader; and ball turret gunner Sergeant George E. Ahern.

  After lunch, the four officers of Torchy Tess said goodbye to the noncoms and went off on their own as officers were inclined to do. The sergeants were in a lively discussion about their afternoon plans when an enterprising cabby approached. His taxi had the room, and for a reasonable sum he promised he would drive them on a tour of London that they would never forget.

  At the V-2 launch site in Holland, the German technicians were readying another rocket for firing. Their morale was high. Despite any official English confirmation, spies had informed the German military that their rocket had indeed reached London on the previous evening. Now, assured of the rocket’s range and accuracy, they could strike back at the country that was the primary source of bomber raids on German cities.

  George and his crewmates were crammed uncomfortably inside their taxi, but none of them complained as the driver swerved along busy London streets while pointing out historic sites and his favorite pubs with equal enthusiasm. The September sky was cloudy, but the weather was otherwise pleasant. It was a great day to be in London and away from the war.

  The driver’s tour route took them past the majestic landmark Big Ben. Most of them had seen the famous clock tower on their previous visit to London, but as they passed Big Ben an old man caught their attention.

  “Hey, pull over,” one of the airmen said.

  The old man had positioned his camera on a tripod across the street from Big Ben to assure photographs with a striking composition, and he was open for business. One of the Torchy Tess airmen was interested.

  “Hey, guys, let’s get a picture of the crew!” There was some discussion of the matter. The old man adjusted his camera in hopeful anticipation that the decision would go his way. George thought Marie would enjoy getting a photo of him and his pals in London. He voted with the majority to take the time so they could all have a picture with Big Ben.

  “It will only take a few minutes,” the old photographer said as he motioned for the six airmen to close in shoulder to shoulder. They stood there on a London street—Duke, Armstrong, Schneider and Ahern, all in a relaxed at-ease position and Schrader and Weaver with their hands at their sides. Behind them the Big Ben clock tower loomed protectively.

  The camera’s shutter clicked, preserving forever the image of six friends and comrades in arms. The old man thought it was a nice shot. He would never know the impact of the photo fate had chosen him to take. The airmen waited as he began the development process.

  More than two hundred miles away, a V-2 rocket was climbing straight into the sky, in the first stage of a flight that would take only a few minutes.

  The development of the finished photograph took a little longer than the photographer had promised. The seven American flyers were in no particular hurry. They passed a couple of minutes in the type of idle talk that flows so easily between close friends. Nearby, their tour guide and driver leaned impatiently against his taxi.

  Sixty miles into space, sunlight reflected off a black-green missile at the very crest of its trajectory. Below, the earth waited like a blue and white marble.

  Finally the photo of the Torchy Tess gunners and Big Ben was ready. Everyone was pleased. They all agreed it had been worth the wait.

  The picture was still being passed around when the explosion shook London. The sound was almost deafening and quite unique—it sounded like two explosions. Boom. Boom. Few in London were privy to the knowledge that the double boom was caused by the V-2 traveling many times the speed of sound. First came the sonic boom and then the sound of the explosion itself.

  George and his five friends were as startled as everyone else. There had been no air raid sirens and no sound of the jet that propelled the V-1 flying bomb. No enemy bombers could be seen in the sky—nothing, except the birds that had been frightened from the trees.

  Pedestrians were running for cover and soon someone pointed out the dark smoke that was beginning to appear above the London skyline. Instinctively the airmen headed in that direction. The sound of ambulance and fire sirens became continuous.

  The V-2 rocket had landed only a few blocks away from Big Ben. As they arrived at the scene of the explosion and looked at the great smoking crater and the surrounding area, strewn with street and building debris, the airmen could not imagine what could have caused such destruction.

  “We are all lucky to be alive.” The voice came from behind them. George and his buddies turned around. It was their taxi driver. His eyes looked empty. His face was pale white. “I always take the same route on my tours. After passing Big Ben, I always head down this very street. If you lads had not stopped me to have that photo made at Big Ben, we would have been here.”

  The Torchy Tess crewmen glanced at one another and then back at the cabby. His expression was familiar to them. They had seen it often on each other’s faces after returning from a particularly difficult mission. It was the expression of someone who knew he had just cheated death.

  The following morning, George awoke and immediately went to the hotel lobby for an early-edition newspaper. The mystery explosion in London was the subject of much of the front-page coverage. No one claimed knowledge of what had caused the explosion. Newswriters sought information from government and military authorities. Many of them confessed honest bewilderment, while others made themselves unavailable for comment.

  Those members of the press who were in a position to know the truth about the terrible new German weapon kept it to themselves in the name of national security. Even as the public began to guess that the new mystery explosions that followed were caused by a rocket of some kind, there was still a general attitude of secrecy about the matter. The English saw little use in publicly complaining about their latest plague, lest they give encouragement to the Germans.

  Winston Churchill would not make any public mention of Germany’s new ballistic missile until November 10. By that time, the average British citizen was well aware of the silent and deadly V-2s. During the final months of the war, almost twelve hundred V-2 rockets would strike London.

  In his postwar book, Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill would write: “The total casualties caused by the V-2 in England were 2,724 killed and 6,467 seriously injured. On the average each rocket caused about twice as many casualties as a flying bomb. Although the warheads were of much the same size, the strident engine of the flying bomb warned people to take cover. The rocket approached in silence.”

  The six gunners of Torchy Tess had escaped becoming part of Churchill’s cold statistics and not one of them could say why. Why, after surviving so many combat missions, had they almost been killed on a liberty in London? Why had a spur-of-the-moment decision about something so trivial as a photograph proved to be the difference betwe
en life and death?

  George gave the question considerable thought. He had witnessed the randomness of death on many missions. Why was one bomber struck by flak and destroyed, while another, flying mere seconds behind it, was left untouched? Was it really random, or did fate or even the hand of God intervene? If it was fate, then the fate of each man on Torchy Tess seemed to be intertwined. They would all live or die as crewmates, George concluded.

  On the day following their close call in London, Marvin Walker’s bomber crew was back dodging flak in the sky over Germany. They flew three missions on three straight days. During the second half of September and throughout October, Torchy Tess and the other B-17s of the 351st challenged the dangerous air defenses of Germany’s major cities—Frankfurt, Cologne, Cologne again, Hanover, Münster and then back to Frankfurt. On November 6, Walker brought his crew back from a raid on Hamburg. For George Ahern it was mission number thirty-four. He had one mission left to fly.

  George and Marie had continued their exchange of letters. He wrote about what he saw in England, about the men of Torchy Tess, and of the little ways they found to relieve the boredom at Polebrook. One of his favorites was sharing fresh fruit and ice cream with the kids who hung around the air base gates. He never wrote to Marie about his missions. He did not want her to know how bad it really was, and military censorship would have prevented such disclosures anyway.

  Now with a single mission remaining, George wanted to let Marie and his family know he would soon be coming home. Once again he enlisted the assistance of his pilot, Marvin Walker, who had been promoted to first lieutenant. As an officer and aircraft commander, Walker was not subjected to the same strict censorship as his crew. On November 8, 1944, Walker penned a thoughtful letter to George’s father: “Dear Mr. Ahern, Your son George, is the ball turret gunner on my crew. I told him I’d write you giving you a little information he can’t get past the censors, namely: his number of missions. To date, he has completed thirty-four missions and has one to go. We feel we’ll finish by the fifteenth of November.”