Bomber Pilot

by Philip Ardery

  I walked from ship to ship noting the damage. Much of it could be repaired in England. Jobs of patching holes in most cases, if they were just holes in the airplane skin, wouldn't be done here. New fuel cells had to be put in several ships because the Wiener Neustadt guns had let too much sun into the old ones. On my tour of inspection I picked up two more pieces of flak which had come out of the airplanes and which I wanted as additional mementos of hell over Austria.

  In a very few days we had the first ships ready to go. The rest were just about ready. This time I decided to fly with Wright on the trip back. Sergeant Peterson told me Ed Fowble's ship would probably be ready to go the same day as the rest of them, but for a later takeoff. If not it would be no more than a day late. And so we planned takeoff of the first ships for early one morning about a week after the trip to Austria. We were given a forecast of good weather to Marrakesh. The moment seemed propitious, and with the sharp edge of dawn we were warming up engines. I had said goodbye to Ed and received his unnecessary assurances that he would not be far behind. No one would ever leave Ed far behind. When I got into our ship I didn't even look back at the field where we had been so singularly uncomfortable for the month past. We didn't circle, we just turned on course to Marrakesh and kept going.

  Arriving in Marrakesh, I was suffering from a virulent case of dysentery. I had had a touch of it at the time of takeoff, but upon landing my tummy was sending signals one right after the other which were unmistakable. This was my first attack out of two trips to Africa, and it was starting out to make up for my past immunity. My intestines were writhing like a basketful of snakes and occasional flashes of pain made me think of harakiri. I reported directly to the infirmary where I found a doctor busying himself with a patient. He looked at me and, without even asking me what the trouble was, he said, “I'll be with you in just a minute; I've got just the stuff to fix you up.” He put a bottle of white liquid and some pills in my hand. “Take these according to direction,” he said. I must have looked decidedly green to make diagnosis so simple because I hadn't said a word. I took the medicine and tried to eat a little. After that I lay on a cot I found in one of the buildings kept for transient officers until the time for the briefing for the night takeoff.

  I must have slept an hour or so before Bob Wright came in to wake me. We walked over to the briefing room together. I was weak but happy and confident that in a few hours I would shake the dust of Africa from my shoes for the last time. Ted's Flying Circus was about to wind up its last road show and go back to the big town for keeps. I sat in the briefing not listening to much that was said. Yes, the weather would be bad part of the way— nothing to worry about—this is the route you follow, etc., etc. Then Lieutenant Colonel Bob Miller, our group air executive, wormed his way through the seated crewmen to my chair. “I want to see you,” he said and walked out. I followed him.

  Outside he turned and said, “Did you hear about Fowble?”

  “What is it?”

  “He just crashed. A few miles north of the field. Out of gas. Men in the tower saw his landing lights go on and saw him glide in trying to make a dead stick landing. The ship burned. All of them were killed instantly except Sergeant Mike and Sergeant Le Jeune. They are in a serious condition but have been able to tell a little bit of the story.”

  Ed had been unable to get properly gassed up at Tunis. He also had a slight fuel leak in addition to the ones that had been discovered and repaired after the ship's last mission. Being given a good weather report, he had taken off with less than a full load of fuel. He would not be left behind, and waiting for more fuel made a difference of enough hours so that his flight would have been delayed until the next day. Bad weather, plus a slight variation from course, plus the slight fuel leak combined to make the plane run out of gas within a mile or two of the field. And now, except for two, they were all dead. I thought of Ed and Byrd, his copilot, and Phifer and Sollie, the bombardier and navigator, and little Pete, the tail gunner, and all the others. I prayed that Sergeants Le Jeune and Mike might live, but the later news was that they lingered only a short while and died.

  The news of this incident hit me with soul-shaking impact. “Please tell Wright I'll wait for him in the ship,” I said. I left the building where the briefing was going on and wandered through the desert darkness the mile or so out to where our plane was parked. I crawled into it and curled up on the flight deck. I don't think I really went to sleep. I think I sank into a kind of morose stupor.

  When next I remembered anything we were winging our way out over the ocean. Someone had thrown an Army blanket over me. I could hear the drone of the engines and the noise of the radio man at my feet pecking out his message to Casablanca radio hundreds of miles to the rear. And I could see a star out the little bit of window visible from where I lay.

  * * *

  * A fine example of the attitude of Romanians was Princess Caterina Caradja, who protected a number of American airmen on her estate near Ploesti until their liberation by friendly forces.

  5

  The Air War of Western Europe

  Once again in England there was much rearrangement work to be done in order to get the group in shape to fly as a proper part of the Eighth Air Force. It was evident that the days of Ted's Flying Circus were gone. The group was merged into a large bombing organization that would not permit operation as a small strike force moving wherever current need directed. The circus was through, though the blood and spirit of its men had marked the progress of the war from El Alamein to Bizerte and from the Carpathians of Romania to the Alpine foothills of Austria.

  I was glad to see my friends of the old group who had been left behind us at the base in England. I was sick and weak from dysentery and loss of weight, and there was still the pain aching inside me at the loss of Fowble and his crew. Four months before they'd been a bunch of kids, and since that time they had lost completely the youthful facade which tears so easily in combat. Now their lives were ended, but they had inflicted grievous damage on the enemy and paid a thousandfold interest on the labor and expense of their training. Circumstances had doubtless combined in similar ways many times during this war. But to me the case of this crew was different. At the least it was in the highest category of magnificent and patriotic behavior.

  The days succeeding my arrival brought in the stragglers. Captain Frank Ellis and his crew had still not arrived. Frank had brought home a ship on one of the last raids in Africa that was so shot to pieces he had to leave it where it landed. Consequently, he had to depend on Air Transport Command to get him and his crew back. His old ship had borne the letter E—E for Ellis, we called it. It had hurt Frank to leave that ship. “Never mind,” I told him. “When you get back to England you'll have a new E for Ellis; I promise you the next new airplane we get.” When I got in there was a new Liberator waiting for delivery to my squadron. I gave the order to paint the large E on the tail. It was parked in Frank's old parking place, where I knew he would be glad to see it.

  The other ships were cleaned up in a hurry. We had to get right into operations because bad weather for flying is the normal thing in the English winter, and we had to take fullest advantage of the remaining good weather of late fall.

  In the time we had been operating in England before the group had bombed a couple of airfields in France, but we had never crossed the border of the Reich. Now we were excited and nervous about the prospect of carrying the fight home to Germany. It was just the normal feeling about getting our feet wet for the first time. We knew until we did we couldn't fully consider ourselves a part of the air war of Western Europe.

  One morning just before dawn we were rolled out of our sacks to go to the briefing room. The layout as to who would fly the mission had been planned the day before. Lieutenant Colonel Miller, group air executive, was to lead as air commander and would fly in the number one plane. I would be deputy lead and fly on his right wing to take over in case anything happened to him. We were briefed to go to Vegesack, Ge
rmany. It seemed at that time a long way to go over hotly defended enemy territory. About three months later when we had friendly fighter cover it wouldn't have seemed half so far. When the target for the day was announced to the crews in the briefing room and they knew that we were really hitting Germany for the first time, there was no chorus of cheers. I have heard much about cheers from combat men upon such momentous occasions. I'm sure such responses don't come from units whose combat losses are anything like ours were. We were going to Germany and, with no support from friendly fighter planes and unlike heroes of fiction, we did not cheer. We sat in grim silence. We were all cowards at heart. We had come too far along in combat to kid ourselves about that. But we knew how to control our cowardice and, by controlling it, how to draw much blood from the enemy. There was no reason to cheer. You wouldn't fool anybody. The guy next to you knew the way you felt about it just as he knew his own feeling.

  I was going to ride with Bob Wright. Bob was the last remaining pilot of my once magnificent C Flight. He was a tall, lazy looking Texan from Austin who had a broad streak of Pete Hughes and Ed Fowble running through him. His one-engine landing on Sicily the day the invasion began proved that.

  There were three groups of B-24s going to Vegesack. The B-17s of the Eighth Air Force were also going out that day, but they were bombing targets in another area. They had all the friendly fighters assigned to cover their operation.

  After the briefing we all went to the equipment room to get our flying gear. We collected a veritable mountain of electrically heated suits with gloves and boots which plugged into the suits. The suit was connected by a wire and plug which led to a power outlet in the ship. I always called the electric cord which joined the suit to the socket in the ship an “umbilical cord.” Whenever I asked for that item of equipment by that name, the men checking out gear would be confused. Finally, they came to know what I meant, and because the cord had no particular name, my name for it was generally used as the proper one.

  Besides the suits we got oxygen masks, flak suits, steel helmets, escape kits, and many other things. And with all this load of equipment we went to our ship. I chatted with the crew chief—that is, the chief ground crew mechanic assigned to our plane—until time to fire up the engines. Then Bob Wright and I donned our pile of gear and climbed laboriously through the bomb bay, past the load of big eggs all fused and ready for the Krauts, and onto the flight deck.

  Sergeant Kelly Altshuler, the dark-eyed Chicagoan riding as our engineer, yelled “clear!” as I turned switches on. One by one the big props turned over, as one by one engines spat, hesitated, and then broke out in a roar as they caught. We saw Colonel Miller taxi by to take the place at the head of the takeoff runway, where he waited for the other ships to line up back of him. There they would wait in a given order of sequence for takeoff. As he went by us we pulled out of our hard stand and waddled down the taxi strip behind him.

  Those moments of waiting for takeoff have been called anxious, uncertain, or tense by those who write about them, and they are all of that. When I reported to a ship before a mission I always tried to get the serious job of checking ship and equipment done thoroughly but quickly. After that I would try to fill any spare moment with light banter in order to get a laugh if I could. At that moment a laugh means everything. Signs of nervousness on the part of the ranking officer immediately infect all others, and so I tried to play clown.

  After a little while we got our signal for takeoff. We rose above the end of the runway and circled behind the lead ship as the group formed over the field. We formed up the group and joined with the other two groups leading on ahead of us. This much was accomplished without incident. Then the three groups of Libs struck out across the North Sea in the direction of the Dutch coast. During the crossing our heavy load of bombs and gas made our planes labor as we reached altitude. I watched the lead ship on whose wing we were flying and also continually checked the rest of the formation. At any time I might be called upon to take over the lead, and I wanted to anticipate that eventuality.

  When I saw the coast of Holland ahead I called the navigator, McClain. “Mac, are we hitting the coast at the briefed point?”

  “Yes, sir. Just about. Maybe a mile or two south, but it's okay.”

  “Keep checking our navigation. Don't rely on the lead ship.” “Right.”

  Just as I finished talking with Mac I noticed the lead plane wavering. I couldn't tell what was wrong. It was weaving about, not behaving at all as a ship leading a formation is supposed to. I switched from interphone back to radio. Colonel Miller was calling me.

  “We're having engine trouble. Don't know what it is yet. You may have to take over. Stand by.”

  “Roger, wilco,” I said.

  Just as we crossed the enemy coast the lead airplane began a series of zooms indicating it was aborting. It peeled out of formation in a diving turn to the right and passed under us heading back to England. Well, I thought, it looks like I have the honor of taking the boys on their first trip to Germany. The weather was clear and I could see the two groups ahead of us leading the way in. I got on my radio. “Attention all ships of Bourbon Blue formation. Deputy leader taking over. Stack it in.”

  The other ships of the formation seemed to show momentary indecision when the leader pulled out. But I told Bob to pull off some power to make it easier for them to close in on us. We slowed up until we were creeping along at a bare 150 miles per hour indicated airspeed. When the other ships closed in on us we put on a little more power. Then I switched again to interphone. “Mac, keep on the ball down there. We will follow the leading formation ahead of us, but let's know where we are.” And then to the bombardier, “McSween, you are now holding the baby. Try to get as much dope set in your bombsight as you can while we're going along.”

  “Roger, roger,” came the answers over the interphone.

  The formation ahead of us turned south and we followed them at proper interval. As yet no sign of any enemy fighters. Where are they? I wondered. They know exactly where we are. The German ground sector control system plots us perfectly. They must be waiting for the perfect moment to make the “bounce.” There was some scattered flak off to our left, but we would get none of it.

  “Sir, the formation ahead has missed its turning point.” Mac was keeping on the ball.

  “That's all right,” I said. “We'll follow them for a while. Maybe they will turn shortly.”

  On they went, not giving a sign that they knew they were off course. I switched to another radio frequency and called “Bourbon Leader” in the lead group. I got no answer, though I made several attempts to get him. Then at last they turned east. They were far south of where they should have been. Before long the lead group turned again heading northeast, which, according to our plotting, was just about the heading to take us over Vegesack. The second of the three groups, immediately ahead of us, did not make this second turn but kept going straight east.

  “What do you want to do?” asked Bob in his typically casual manner.

  “We'll follow the lead group. To hell with those other fellows. If they don't know which way to go to get to the target, we'll just let them go.”

  We turned to the northeast. The formation now ahead of us, which was the lead group of the three, was almost out of sight. We could see them obviously on their bomb run. Then they turned north, apparently having bombed and now on their route out to the North Sea. As we approached our briefed target area we saw it was covered by an extremely effective smoke screen. The wind was blowing just right to carry the smoke over the target. In those days we didn't have any real method of bombing on instruments, and so smoke constituted quite a problem. Sometimes when you make a run into a target directly up-or downwind the streamers of smoke from smoke pots function less effectively, and it is possible to see parts of a target through channels in the smoke. That day we could see nothing. A heavy haze added to the difficulty.

  Finally, McSween called me: “I've got a target in the sight
. Steady now. I'm not sure it's the one we are supposed to hit, but it is the only one I can see.”

  We held the course prescribed by the bombardier for a seeming infinity until at last we saw the indicator lights on the instrument panel flashing their message that the bombs were falling.

  “Bombs away,” called McSween.

  We had just entered the flak defences of Vegesack and bursts were blossoming on all sides of us. Occasional shells kicked the ship around, and again I could hear the menacing “wuff, wuff, wuff” as the bursts centered close to us. The fuss over my radio was terrific, but I could hear the flak bursts. That meant we were getting hit.

  We turned north and headed out of the flak area. I looked off to my high right. There red-headed Smitty was leading a flight of three ships. He was flying Frank Ellis's brand new E for Ellis. His own plane was in the shop, and I had to give him Frank's plane for this trip, though Frank had not yet arrived from Africa to consent to the arrangement. I saw two extremely close bursts ahead of Smitty. I saw the wing of the Lib split the black clouds of smoke left by the bursts, and then I saw it yaw and dip a little. He was hit; I hoped not hard. How I hoped! He was trying to hold position, but the plane was wallowing, and I saw a rope of greasy black smoke start from his number three engine and grow into a great, black streamer. Then Smitty called me.

  “I'm hit pretty hard. Lost number three. Oxygen lines out. Can't stay with you, so I'm letting down.”

  “Good luck, Smitty. I'm praying for you. Take it easy.”

  At that time our instructions were that a leader could not jeopardize his formation for one crippled bomber. The absolute rule was not to deviate from the plan of attack or withdrawal to aid stragglers. Later it was a little different because it was proved possible for a formation to alter its plan of flight in such a way as to save some of the cripples. One factor in the change was that on later missions there was generally friendly fighter support. We had no friendly support, and were ordered not to risk an entire formation in attempting to save one or two stragglers.