The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  In the third element’s number three slot closest to Harmful Lil Armful, B-24 pilot Lieutenant A. L. Northrup, wrote in his postmission report that he could only watch helplessly as “[Chase] kept straggling back out of formation. His #3 engine was seen to be smoking, probably from a flak hit, and two Me 109’s were seen to be making determined attacks from below.”

  Gefreiter (corporal) Siegfried Schulmeyer, one of the two Me 109 pilots, would be credited with downing the B-24.

  According to Northrup, crewmen in other B-24s within view of Harmful Lil Armful “report[ed] seeing [her] go into a steep dive, then climb, stall and then dive. Several (4–9) chutes were observed when last seen.”

  Arthur unstrapped himself, grabbed his chute, and slid from the bullet- and shrapnel-pocked turret into the cabin.

  He crawled through the black smoke toward the tail, still seething that the two pilots “hit the silk” before anyone else. He shoved aside his anger and kept crawling toward the tail. He felt like he was moving as fast as he could, but had barely reached the halfway point when the heat in front of him increased.

  He shouted as loudly as he could, “Is anyone still here?”

  Through the smoke and noise came McNamara’s voice, faint, nearly a groan:

  “Help! Help!”

  Arthur crept along the catwalk, blinded by smoke as he felt the steel-ribbed walls of the fuselage. The heat burned him right through his leather gloves. As he reached the waist-gun port, McNamara moaned. Still strapped behind his Browning, bleeding from the shrapnel that had ripped into his stomach, he was completely entangled in wires.

  Arthur tore at the snarled wires, which sliced through his gloves and slashed his fingers. He kept pulling, but could not pry them off.

  Above the thunderous vibrations of the plunging bomber, McNamara screamed, “Get outta here, kid! I’m done for!”

  “No way!” Arthur yelled back, straining to free him.

  McNamara cried, “You gotta get outta here, Arthur!”

  Arthur calculated that the B-24 had descended to about twenty thousand feet. Once her wings buckled and folded upward and her nose turned straight down, she would plummet the rest of the way, too fast to attempt a jump from the bomb bay.

  For a moment, through a gap in the smoke, the two men’s eyes met. With his one free hand, McNamara pulled Arthur’s hands away from the wires. He nodded at Arthur, who could feel the rosary beads entwined around McNamara’s fingers. “Make sure Dunham got out,” McNamara rasped. “The kid panics sometimes . . .”

  Fighting back tears, Arthur turned and crawled back the way he had come.

  The bomb bay offered his only hope to escape burning to death. As he reached the opening, he was met by a blast of freezing air. George must have opened the doors when Chase had ordered them to abandon ship. The other waist gunner, Dunham, was perched at the bomb bay and clutching a railing at the open doors’ frame.

  “Let’s go!” yelled Arthur.

  Dunham did not stir. Arthur lunged at him and cried, “Go!”

  Dunham stepped aside and shoved him away. As Arthur stumbled to his knees, Dunham tried to push past him toward the waist-gun port where McNamara was trapped. Arthur grabbed one of Dunham’s ankles and held on.

  The plane shuddered again, and her nose turned sharply downward, both men sliding closer to the gaping bomb bay.

  Arthur snatched at Dunham’s parachute harness to haul the man with him through the opening. At the same instant Dunham unclipped his harness buckle, and it slipped from Arthur’s hand. Dunham’s parachute dropped to the floor. Arthur grabbed one of Dunham’s ankles again, and Dunham kicked at him with the other foot, loosening Arthur’s grip. Arthur lunged at Dunham’s ankle again, but suddenly Dunham kicked him out of the plane.

  As he fell backward, Arthur stared back up for a fleeting moment at Dunham, who was holding fast to a strut near the bomb bay and looking back at him. Then Dunham vanished back inside the plane. The sight would haunt Arthur’s dreams for the rest of his life. 3

  CHAPTER 3

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  HIT THE SILK!

  After counting to ten, Arthur, surprised by how quickly the distance was increasing between him and the plane, “hit the silk”—pulling his rip cord. The chute jerked out of its pack and snapped him upward for a few seconds. A tight pull and then pressure against his armpits and thighs almost took his breath away. If he had counted too fast, he might not have put enough distance between himself and the blazing B-24. His chute billowed fully open, and he hovered for several seconds. Then, as his slow descent into Occupied France began, relief flickered through him. A lot of airmen’s chutes failed to deploy. That relief vanished just as fast with the realization that the cumbersome chute responded poorly, if at all, to a jumper’s tugs on the lines.

  He knew that maybe three other men—Chase, Thomas, and Defranze—had gotten out of Harmful Lil Armful and were drifting down in the afternoon sky among dozens of other chutes from doomed bombers and fighters. A hellish but spellbinding and surreal scene unfurled around him, a savage tapestry of Allied and German planes splintering into pieces in midair, plunging toward the snow-shrouded French woods and countryside, the dark smudges and orange explosions of flak everywhere. He suddenly noticed that his gloves were scorched, with dark red stains on the discolored leather. The spots were blood—he didn’t know if they belonged to him or to McNamara.

  Though terrified as he descended, Arthur thought about his parents, Seymour, and Esther. As he floated ever downward, his thoughts raced back to what lay below him. Would the wind carry him into trees where the Germans would find him dangling in his harness and shoot him on sight? Even if they took him prisoner, the Gestapo executed many Jewish airmen on sight. Sometimes, if regular German Army troops were the first on the scene, they treated Jewish Allied airmen and soldiers according to the Geneva Conventions and took them to standard POW camps. Other times, however, soldiers treated them no better than the Gestapo or the SS did.

  None of that would matter if he landed awkwardly against the trees and the impact snapped his neck or broke his back. Even worse, if he was injured on touchdown and lay there in the brush, he could freeze to death. His family and Esther would never know what had happened. He would literally vanish.

  As the wind pulled him closer to a stand of pines, he decided that the trees were still a better option than touching down in an open field or too near a town. He steered toward them. Chase’s words—“This is a milk run”—rushed back to him just seconds away from the trees. Then, with a harsh tug, his lines snagged on a limb, ending his jump. He hovered some thirty feet above the ground. Somewhere—perhaps close by—the Gestapo and Vichy police, who collaborated with the Nazis in the southern regions of France, certainly had seen the B-24 going down and were converging on the crash site and then fanning out in all directions to round up any survivors. He could only pray that if anyone found him, they would be French Resistance or even the German Army. Anything but the Gestapo or Vichy police.

  In the distance, the shouts of German patrols echoed. Fighting panic that Germans would arrive to find him trapped in the trees, he fumbled for the Army-issue knife strapped to his right boot, yanked it from its sheath, and sawed away at the thick leather harness and the limp cords. The blade cut through the first strap. He slipped down just a few feet, still hanging from the chute for a moment. He hesitated before cutting the other strap and the cords, pondering how hard the fall would be. He took a deep breath and started to saw again. Suddenly he slid from the harness, plunged straight down, and slammed against a frozen patch of ground peeking through the snow. The jolt sent a searing pain through his lower back, and for an instant he thought he had been shot. Then, for another instant, he lay there afraid to move, praying that he had not shattered his spine.

  He gingerly forced himself to his feet, and his legs nearly buckled as new waves of p
ain tore through his back. He somehow stifled a scream. As he had been trained to do, he climbed the tree to cut down his chute despite the endless waves of agony. Then he slid down the trunk, nearly passing out. He buried his chute and harness in a snowbank to conceal his landing and staggered deeper into the woods to hide. His uniform and boots were already sodden with nearly frozen water.

  Shivering, Arthur dug a hole in the snow behind a tree-flanked road, his bare knuckles getting redder by the second through his shredded and bloodied gloves. He looked at his watch again. It was 3:30 p.m.

  He had no idea where his crewmates were, no idea if they had made it. Still, he was trained not to search for them. His chief task was to evade capture on his own unless he happened upon one of the other survivors, and to seek help from locals, as risky as that was. He only knew the fates of McNamara and Dunham. Tears came again, and he brushed them away.

  As he lay in the hole, his teeth chattering, pain punctuating even the slightest movement, he wondered if fate had put him on Harmful Lil Armful or whether it was just bad luck. Maybe McNamara and Dunham were the luckier ones, he thought with anguish before chasing away that thought.

  Arthur lost track of time, not certain if he passed out several times from the pain, only to awake wet and shivering in his hole. As gray twilight gave way to darkness and the temperature dipped to freezing, he was startled by the thrum of bombers’ engines high above him and the all-too-familiar thumps of the 88s. The Brits’ nighttime strikes were under way.

  He rolled over to take a look at the night sky flaring with powerful German searchlights and arcing yellow trails from the muzzles of antiaircraft batteries. Gasping as hot spasms ignited throughout his lower back, he spotted smaller, multihued explosions, lots of them, beneath the torrents of flak. He was transfixed, not sure what they were. Then he suddenly remembered that it was New Year’s Eve and that the more diminutive blasts must be fireworks set off by French families in stark defiance of the Nazi blackout. If the locals had the guts to set off banned incendiaries in plain view, maybe, he thought, they would have the same courage to help downed Allied airmen.

  The sight of those fireworks unleashed an anguish he could not hold back. Checking his watch again, he realized that in less than six hours, it would be New Year’s back in the Bronx, where Arthur’s extended family and Esther had undoubtedly gathered. In Manhattan, no fireworks would burst above the skyline. No crowds of revelers would gather in Times Square or anywhere else; there would be few vehicles on the city streets. Few restaurants were open, as curfews were enforced by air wardens even though the prospect of German bombers appearing over New York was virtually nonexistent. The blackout restrictions’ chief aim was to prevent German U-boats from honing in on American ships that would have been illuminated by the city’s lights, making them easy targets for the submarines. On New Year’s Eve of 1943, the entire Atlantic seaboard was darkened.

  For the Meyerowitz family and the Loews, Esther’s family, wartime strictures would mute the New Year’s celebration, but without any idea of whether Arthur was on base, in the air, or even alive to see the first day of 1944, he knew that the family gathering would be somber. He was certain, though, that they were thinking of him and would certainly raise a toast to him at midnight and pray for his safe return. Arthur was alone.

  He reached for the survival kit, called the “aids box,” that every pilot and crewman was ordered to fasten to his belt if he had to parachute from a doomed plane. Taking inventory in the snow, he ate several of the chocolate bars in the kit as he checked the rest of the contents: Benzedrine tablets, an amphetamine to stay awake; matches; water-purification tablets; and white medical adhesive tape to bind any cuts or wounds. Arthur thought that a few Band-Aids would have worked better than the tape if he had been cut.

  He could use the chewing gum and was glad to find a large compass that he fully intended to use, but did not think he would find the sewing kit in the bag much of a help. Examining the box further, he found a large red purse containing small, folded maps and several thousand French francs. He tucked the purse into one of his pockets and the Benzedrine, water-purification tablets, gum, and compass into another. 1

  Again, he exhorted himself to stay calm, to think. He had never been the sort of person who panicked, and prided himself on keeping a cool head no matter how much pressure he faced. Those were the attributes that had earned him a spot—all too briefly—as an aviation cadet. Now he had to rely on those traits more than he could ever have imagined.

  CHAPTER 4

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  “WHAT’S IN HIS HAND?”

  As Arthur pondered his next move in his snowy hiding place, Chase, Thomas, Peck, Farrell, and George had touched down the previous afternoon to find themselves in a nightmarish spot. The other survivors of Harmful Lil Armful had landed within a few hundred yards of each other near the town of Lesparre on December 31.

  The Americans had removed themselves from their chutes and buried them in the snow, as Arthur had done. Gestapo and French Vichy police who had been alerted by the B-24’s fiery crash had rushed to Lesparre and rounded them up. The Germans stripped the prisoners of their flight suits, gloves, caps, jackets, wool shirts and pants, and boots and bound their hands behind their backs. Then they shoved the Americans against the stark stone wall of the local Gestapo headquarters and forced them to sit on the icy ground.

  An hour crawled by, then another. The men sat, shivering, with no idea if Arthur, McNamara, and Dunham had made it out and where they were now or if they were even alive. Farrell tried to say something to Chase. A German guard cursed and slammed his rifle butt against Farrell’s skull with a sharp crack. “No talk!” the guard shouted.

  Blood trickled from Farrell’s hairline, the drops freezing before they even reached his eyebrows.

  As the skies darkened, the Americans languished in the cold in just their T-shirts, skivvies, and socks, teeth chattering too much to even think of defying the sentry’s order. Farrell was slumped against the wall, groaning intermittently as he lapsed in and out of consciousness.

  Shortly after nightfall, an open-backed transport truck pulled up in front of the prisoners. An officer jumped from the passenger seat and strode over to them, his hobnailed boots crunching against the snow and ice.

  Peck leaned toward George and whispered, “What’s in his hand?”

  The Gestapo officer snarled for silence. He loomed over the prisoners and halted directly in front of Chase. In passable English, the German asked if Chase was the pilot.

  Chase nodded.

  The German leaned down, opened a clenched, gloved fist, and waved two sets of charred dog tags in Chase’s face. In the glint of the truck’s headlights, Chase could make out the names—S/Sgt. William B. Dunham and S/Sgt. Thomas M. McNamara.

  Chase said nothing to the officer and looked away. The crewmen against the wall all knew that their pilot and copilot had hit the silk first, and all likely blamed them for not sticking with the crippled B-24 until the crew had a chance to bail out. Some five miles away, Arthur, alone, injured, and unable to get McNamara’s and Dunham’s faces out of his mind, “was mad enough to kill Chase and Thomas if he ever got the chance.” 1

  Over the next hour, the officer interrogated each cold and dazed prisoner except for the semiconscious Farrell. Finally, he gestured to several guards. They prodded the Americans to their feet, their cold limbs and muscles flaring with pain after hours on the ground. Then the Germans dragged them over to the truck and shoved them into the back for transport to a POW camp, Stalag Luft 1, Barth-Vogelsang, in Prussia. They huddled together under several foul-smelling, threadbare woolen horse blankets that the guards tossed at them.

  CHAPTER 5

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  MARCEL

  Arthur crawled from his hiding spot shortly before dawn on New Year’s Day 1944. He straightened for a few
moments, testing his back. Still hurts like hell, he thought, but at least he could move. He began to brush snow and caked ice off his clothes. Suddenly he ducked as a truckload of prisoners guarded by the Gestapo clattered past him and down the road.

  He could not see the faces of the slumped captives.

  To get a better view of the landscape, he climbed a tree, no easy feat with his nearly frozen fingers and the searing stabs of pain throughout his back. He clutched a massive limb, his eyes watering from the effort and agony, and gauged the terrain—a small town (Lesparre) in one direction, open fields and scattered farmhouses in another. He decided quickly that the town was out of the question, likely teeming with Gestapo and French police.

  From the direction of the farms, a dog was barking. Arthur’s breath caught for a few seconds as he wondered if the Gestapo was prowling the area with a search dog. He listened more intently and decided that the bark did not sound like the deep-throated voice of a German shepherd or a Doberman, but could be a farm dog. He could not stay in the tree much longer and made a choice. If the dog did belong to a farmer, he thought, perhaps the farmer might be one of the locals who had set off New Year’s Eve fireworks in defiance of the Nazis.

  He struggled down from the limb and back to the ground, every movement excruciating. He crossed the narrow road as fast as his back would allow and gingerly lowered himself over a four-foot-high stone wall he could crouch behind to hide if necessary. He limped in the direction of the barking dog, toward a secluded farmhouse down the road and away from the town.