The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  At other airstrips all across England, Wales, and Scotland, a similar scene unfolded as B-24s, B-17s, and squadrons of P-38, P-47, and P-51 fighter planes began rising one by one at minute intervals into the dense winter clouds and starting the dangerous process of forming the “box” that would stretch some 150 miles at altitudes of eighteen to twenty-eight thousand feet.

  As Arthur and every bomber crewman understood, stacking bombers in murk so thick that pilots could literally see only the plane in front of them caused deadly collisions; on Arthur’s first mission, on December 24, two planes had clipped each other but had managed to land safely. Only when the formation pierced through the cloud ceiling did crews feel safe. That relief was fleeting. It ended the moment that the formation banked on its flight path toward the waiting Luftwaffe and the 88-millimeter antiaircraft cannons on the ground.

  Arthur tensed as the B-24 in front of Harmful Lil Armful rattled down the strip and took off. Harmful Lil Armful shuddered the moment that Lieutenant Chase pushed the bomber’s four throttles forward, her wings vibrating and shaking every inch of the fuselage. Adrenaline surged through Arthur. Chase took his foot off the brakes, and the B-24 lurched forward and picked up speed. She hurtled down the six-thousand-foot runway and, at seemingly the last moment, climbed above the ambulances parked near the strip’s edges. Arthur glimpsed the control tower, three runways, and snow-swathed pastures and farmland for a few instants. Then a wall of gunmetal-gray clouds enveloped the plane.

  “Gear up!” Chase barked to Thomas. 1

  Arthur’s second mission—a flight he was not supposed to be on—had begun.

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  The B-24s and their escort took nearly an hour to stack up in formation, banked southeast over the English Channel around 9 a.m., and set course for the southwestern coastal region of France. Harmful Lil Armful’s target, La Rochelle Laleu Airfield, lay some 600 miles southeast of Seething, and at a cruising speed of 215 miles per hour, the bomber would reach the drop zone close to noon.

  Harmful Lil Armful maneuvered into the “Purple Heart Corner,” the number two position of the stack’s third element, the uppermost and most vulnerable part of the formation. Aware that his bomber’s spot exposed her to increased flak because German gunners always aimed their first salvos at the highest part of formations and worked their way down the stack, Chase was taking a huge gamble that the damaged number three engine could withstand the relentless concussive waves from German antiaircraft cannons. In the third element, machine-gun fire from the two lower elements could hit the bombers as the first and the second fired upward at German fighters.

  At first, Arthur took comfort in the drone of the bombers and at the presence of their fighter escort, as if nothing could blunt such a massive collection of force. Soon, though, he thought about the questionable engine. A B-24 could fly on three engines, but had no business beginning a mission with an engine that could quit at any instant and force the bomber out of the stack. The third element was vulnerable to enemy fighter planes able to strike from above without worrying about defensive fire from the first and second elements below. German fighters would pounce on a bomber with an engine suddenly acting up over German airspace and force a B-24 to drop out of an already susceptible spot in the formation.

  For the moment, Arthur immersed himself in his flight engineer’s duties to tend to the aircraft’s many electrical and hydraulic systems. As soon as Harmful Lil Armful reached its position, he and the other flight engineers in the formation moved to a position on a pedestal behind the pilot and copilot and remained there until the bombers reached Nazi airspace. Arthur served as the third set of eyes scanning the dials and instruments on the cockpit’s front panel. He also had to use a series of switches to move fuel between tanks, as needed, to keep the plane balanced.

  As the formation neared the French coastline, Arthur communicated constantly with Chase and Thomas to update them on the flight engineer’s required readings of engine and navigation instruments, reporting that the engines were not showing any signs of malfunction. The pilot and copilot merely nodded at his words, or ignored them. They were paying little attention to Sergeant Glevanick’s temporary replacement.

  Despite the front panel’s initial indicators that the plane was functioning smoothly, Arthur continued to worry about number three, checking its performance over and over. He was concerned that if the engine’s propeller sheared its weakened shaft, it could be flung through the plane’s fuselage. Just because number three thrummed steadily on the crossing did not mean it would stand up to Nazi flak.

  As the B-24s drew ever closer to France at high altitude, Arthur had to take longer to garner accurate readings from the cockpit panel because the frigid temperatures inside the unheated bomber frosted over gauges and dials. He wiped the frost off the glass surfaces and tapped them gently in case the indicator needles had become stuck.

  Chase’s voice burst across the intercom: “Entering enemy airspace!” 2

  Arthur climbed into the top turret and strapped himself behind the Martin Electric Upper Deck top ball turret’s twin .50-caliber machine guns. Surprisingly, he had found that the bubble’s seat and footrest were roomy enough to prevent cramping. The top turret was more comfortable than the bottom bubble, which gunners dubbed the “hell seat.”

  He adjusted his oxygen mask and plugged the cord of the airman’s standard-issue twenty-four-volt rheostat flight suit into one of the outlets along the inside of the fuselage just beneath the turret to ward off the cold at twenty-eight thousand feet. Underneath, he wore a pair of long johns. Because a short in the plane’s electrical system could ignite the flight suit, pilots and crewmen would yank out the cord at the first sign of flak.

  All the while he braced himself for the dizzying and gut-churning duels with German fighters and the lethal wall of flak from one of the war’s most fearsome and accurate weapons: the German 88mm antiaircraft cannon. In lecture rooms, Arthur had learned that the Acht-Acht Flak 18 cannon could hurl fifteen to twenty shells per minute up to thirty-thousand feet high, but until he had experienced the weapon above La Broye on his first mission, he had not grasped just how frightening the 88 was.

  As every mile brought Harmful Lil Armful closer to the 88s, Arthur’s head was low in the turret, his field of vision limited at the turret mechanism’s bottom rim. He wore tinted goggles to ward off the constant glare of sunlight against the Plexiglas, but other than those hindrances, he had sweeping views from the frameless cocoon.

  Arthur peered down through occasional breaks in the clouds at distant, murky gray-and-white patches—glimpses of Nazi-occupied France. Beneath the formation, German radar and “spotter stations” were picking up the oncoming bombers. They were tracking their speed, course, and altitude so that the German gun crews could swivel their 88s skyward, lay in their settings, and wait for the right moment to pull the dreaded cannons’ lanyards. Every now and then Arthur spied silvery shafts rising from “chaff,” strands of Christmas-tree tinsel cut into varying length and dangling from the open ports of the bomber’s waist guns. The tinsel sent confusing readings to German radar operators, designed to buy formations just a few more minutes before flak gunners found the range.

  The gunners patiently awaited just the right moment to hurl twenty-pound shells above, below, behind, and in front of the formation to create a “kill zone.” Allied bomber crews dreaded the 88s even more than the Luftwaffe fighters—with good reason, as Arthur had learned on his first mission. The 88 shells burst in a spray of metal that tore through planes and men alike, with skilled gunners “leading” their shells to detonate in front of bomber cockpits and kill the pilots. Brilliantly designed, the antiaircraft cannon ejected fired shells quickly and recoiled smoothly. A gunner simply had to insert a new shell into a firing tray again and again. Unlike almost every other antiaircraft gun used by either the Allies or the Japanese, the 88 rarely, if ever, jammed.
Its crews could go about their lethal business with total confidence and efficiency. An English pilot called the 88 a “semiautomatic cannon.”

  The German antiaircraft crews knew that Allied bombers locked on to their target runs thirty miles out. At that point, experienced flak gunners zeroed in on the formations.

  Approaching the primary target, La Rochelle Laleu Airfield, the formation found the site obscured by heavy cloud cover. The lead command pilot, Captain Heber H. Thompson, ordered the bombers to head for the secondary target, Châteaubernard Airfield. Second Lieutenant Chase always tried to exude coolness, but this was only his second time in combat. His voice quavered when he switched on the intercom as the formation neared the target. He ordered the bombardier, Flight Officer Edward George, to “take her in” for the target run. George’s task was to fix his Norden bombsight on the airstrip twenty thousand feet below, and drop some eight thousand pounds of bombs. Every other bomber pilot in the dense stack did the same. Far beneath them the Gironde River looked like a twisted silvery path in the snow, a trail leading the bombers straight to their targets.

  Arthur’s heart started to race, his breath quickening in his oxygen mask. He checked the belts on his .50-caliber and fired a quick burst into the gap between Harmful Lil Armful and the bomber on its left to make sure the weapon would not jam. The other machine gunners on each bomber did the same. They all knew what was coming—clumps of black smoke swirled beneath the formation. The 88s were almost in range. The Luftwaffe’s Me 109s and Focke-Wulfs were not far behind.

  Again, Arthur thought “shit luck” to be flying out on December 31 instead of getting ready to toss back a few beers and know he would actually see the dawn of the New Year.

  Within minutes, flak erupted everywhere in blinding bursts, pilots straining to hold their rocking bombers steady. Metal shards hissed in all directions around Harmful Lil Armful. Arthur instinctively ducked as shrapnel smacked into the thick laminated glass-and-plastic canopy of his top-turret gun. The metal did not penetrate this time, but if a shell burst closer, he was a dead man.

  Pushing down the thought, he scanned in every direction. As several grayish-brown specks appeared in the distance and grew bigger fast, he plugged the jack of the small microphone fastened to his flight suit’s collar into the intercom box just below the Plexiglas bubble and clicked it on. He shouted, “Bandits—three o’clock!”

  All anxiety drained from Arthur as his reflexes and training took over. From the hundreds of Luftwaffe fighter planes converging from every direction, he spotted an Me 109 knifing through the blur of dogfights. He had immediately identified one of the Luftwaffe “killers”—pilots selected for both their marksmanship and nerve to head straight for the bombers. Training his sight on the 109, he poured a long burst at the German’s engine and the cockpit.

  As his .50-caliber Browning roared to life, Arthur was already braced for the machine gun’s tremendous kick and noise in the turret. The longer he fired, the more smoke would pool at the top of the turret and cloud his vision, so he had to take brief breaks to try to disperse the cloud with a gloved hand.

  As the Messerschmitt peeled away, Arthur kept firing—another Me 109’s silhouette rose from behind the B-24’s tail with its machine guns flaring. The German pilot darted off to the left of the bomber and then angled in at the bomber’s cockpit. Arthur swiveled his turret and raked one of the fighter’s wings. The Me 109 burst into flames and spun down. In an instant the plane exploded. Only falling bits of metal and smoke remained—no sign of the pilot or a parachute.

  Arthur felt nothing; he just kept firing in all directions at swooping fighters. Harmful Lil Armful’s nine other .50-caliber Browning M2 machine guns chattered away at Me 109s and Focke-Wulfs.

  Arthur winced as incoming 88 shells detonated faster and faster above and around the B-24. He tried to ignore the increasing slaps of shrapnel against his turret’s canopy. He continued to fire bursts at fighters he could barely see through the smoke and flak. If his turret took a direct hit from an 88 high-explosive shell, the Plexiglas, his head, and upper torso would disintegrate. This was the nightmare that top ball-turret gunners called the “Headless Horseman.”

  As Arthur fed one belt after another into his Browning, Flight Officer George strained at his throttle to hold the plane level, trained never to break formation unless the bomber was hit and going down. In the second element, beneath Arthur’s plane, the lead B-24, commanded by Lieutenant M. R. Jordan, took a direct hit from flak and exploded, virtually disintegrating in one bright flash. No one had time to jump.

  Suddenly another flash, to Harmful Lil Armful’s starboard side, blinded Arthur for a few moments. As he shook his head hard to try to clear the yellowish-orange haze from his eyes, a sound like hailstones slamming against a car’s metal roof echoed throughout the plane. Shrapnel ripped through the fuselage. The impact of the 88 shell’s detonation violently shook the starboard wing, and just as Arthur had feared when he had inspected the damaged number three engine, the wallop proved too much for it. In the cockpit, the bomber’s oil-pressure warning light flickered on the control panel and blinked steadily. The number three engine was sputtering. As Arthur had told Chase and Thomas, Harmful Lil Armful never should have taken off that day.

  Arthur heard the straining engine and muttered, “Son of a bitch—I warned him . . .” He swiveled his turret to open up on another Me 109 pouring machine-gun rounds at the bomber.

  Flight Officer George guided the plane in on three engines and alerted the pilots and crew that he was opening the bomb-bay doors. Arthur had to stop firing immediately because the bomb-bay hatch was directly below his turret. If his hot empty shell casings dropped into the stacked five-hundred-pound bombs beneath the hatch, Harmful Lil Armful would disintegrate. As he sweated it out, George dropped the payload on the target and returned control back to Chase and Thomas. Arthur opened up again on the German fighters.

  Thirty seconds later near-blinding yellow explosions ignited the target, Châteaubernard Airfield, far beneath the formation. Chase held the bomber steady in the formation as the B-24s made a slow, wide turn and set course back to England. The Germans promised to make every mile back a nightmare. Arthur just hoped they made it.

  He and his fellow gunners continued to unleash withering blasts at the fighters swarming all through the formation. Volleys ripped into Harmful Lil Armful as flak shook the bomber with teeth-rattling thuds. Razor-sharp bits of shrapnel tore through the fuselage and hissed through the open ports of the waist gunners. Several shards ripped through McNamara’s thick leather flight jacket, slicing through flesh and bone along his rib cage and opening his abdomen. Across the intercom, he groaned, “I’m hit . . .”

  Arthur heard Dunham, the other waist gunner, shout to McNamara, “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” McNamara grunted, as he kept firing.

  In the top turret, Arthur grimaced, hoping that McNamara was not hurt badly, and kept on firing his Browning at the seemingly endless swarm of fighters dogging the B-24 and separating it from the formation like a hobbled animal from the herd.

  The plane lumbered along for an hour and a half. Then a sudden jolt nearly pulled her out of the formation. Arthur knew instinctively that this jolt was different, the harsh crash of an 88’s direct hit. The number three engine stalled and sputtered for an instant. As oil poured from the casing, small flashes flared across the slowing propeller. Flames engulfed the engine within seconds. Moments later, another engine, number four, began to fail as the manifold oil pressure plunged, and its propeller slowed and then stopped. Arthur was gripped by nausea for a moment, and then rage. He wanted to shout: You stupid son of a bitch, Chase!

  It did not matter now. Arthur had to keep his head.

  Chase’s voice crackled across the intercom: “Number three’s out. We’ll try to hold the plane in formation and make an emergency landing once we cross the English Channel.�
� Every crewman heard the tremor in their pilot’s voice, his words raspy, even his rapid breathing audible, not a comforting sound.

  Within a minute or two, thick, acrid smoke from the engine billowed into the cabin. Chase and Thomas started coughing and were nearly blinded. Flames immersed the right wing. The bomber shuddered, stalled again, and, slowly, fell out of and behind the formation. Harmful Lil Armful was losing altitude and becoming vulnerable to fighters from beneath as the distance between her and the third element steadily increased.

  Chase realized that the plane was finished. “Abandon ship!” he croaked across the intercom of the smoke-clotted bomber. There was no mistaking the terror in his voice now.

  Two Me 109s appeared above the bomber, dove past her, and climbed back up to make a pass at the plane’s underside with machine-gun blasts, rounds shearing through the plane’s thin skin with a sound like scissors tearing at curtains. Bullets clanged against the bomber’s aluminum-and-steel ribs with deafening clangs. Aware of sudden movement beneath his turret, he looked down to find Chase, Thomas, and the radio operator, Defranze, staggering through the shaking plane to the sole escape exit, in the tail.

  “Where are you going?” Arthur shouted.

  A few moments later they leaped into the frigid sky, followed by the bombardier and tail gunner, Arthur spying their chutes amid orange bursts of flak. The B-24, with no one in the cockpit and just two engines functioning, jerked every which way as its nose turned downward. At that moment, Arthur would not have cared if an 88 burst ripped apart Chase’s and Thomas’s chutes—any pilots who jumped before their crew deserved the worst. If he got out, Arthur vowed to confront both men on the ground, insubordination be damned. They were cowards, not worthy of leading a crew.