SLEEP WAS AT THAT MOMENT THE LAST THING ON KEE HARRISON’S MIND—IT was his aircraft that Templeton had seen at low level and being pursued by a gaggle of Fw 190s.
Having made the decision to crash-land the Fortress, Harrison lowered the aircraft’s landing gear as a sign to the German fighters that he was giving up the fight and that they should stop their attacks. He passed the word that his gunners should also cease fire, unaware that the intercom had been knocked out soon after he’d told the crew about his plan to land the bomber. As a result, the tail and waist gunners continued to throw rounds at the attackers and they, in turn, continued to pound the B-17 with cannon and machine-gun fire. Harrison realized that he needed to get the plane on the ground as soon as possible if he and his crew were to have a chance of surviving, so he retracted the airplane’s gear, picked out what looked like a suitably flat and unobstructed field, and took the ship down for a belly landing. Within minutes the Fortress was bumping along through a wheat field, its props bent backward at odd angles and the now vacant ball turret crushed upward into the fuselage. The B-17 had come to earth just under a mile to the southwest of the hamlet of Bérengeville-la-Campagne, just off the 94th Group’s flight path and about three and a half miles northwest of where the remains of Salty’s Naturals still blazed.5
As soon as Harrison’s aircraft slid to a halt, all those still aboard scattered into the surrounding countryside. The pilot stayed with the bomber only long enough to push the buttons in the cockpit that were supposed to initiate the aircraft’s destruction, then removed his parachute harness and life vest and clambered out through the cockpit window—quite a feat of agility, considering Harrison’s fire-plug physique.6 Once on the ground outside the Fortress, he ran into a nearby stand of trees and burrowed into a thicket. He lay there for five hours as German troops moved through the woods around him, obviously searching for downed aviators. And though Harrison wasn’t aware of it, the failure of the bomber’s self-destruct mechanism had made it possible for another German to take a personal interest in the crash-landed B-17—Egon Mayer had driven out from Beaumont-le-Roger to personally inspect the aircraft, which he had claimed as his fourteenth Viermot.7
Once Harrison was sure the German searchers had moved on, he slowly left his hiding place and moved some two miles across several cultivated fields to another small wood. He had just settled in under a tangle of brush when he saw a group of French civilians running in the direction of his downed aircraft. After taking a deep breath to steady himself, he carefully straightened up so they could see him. The people noticed him but kept moving, so he returned to his hide. Not long afterward a teenaged boy arrived, located Harrison, and gave the American some food and civilian clothing. The stocky pilot quickly changed out of his flying outfit, and he and the boy settled down to wait for dark.
“SALTY” SALTSMAN’S MISJUDGMENT ABOUT HIS ALTITUDE AFTER LEAVING Good Time Cholly II had caused him to pass out from anoxia soon after his canopy opened—and he only regained consciousness when he landed with a “terrific jolt” in a large patch of flowers in the middle of a field surrounded by woods. Slightly disoriented, it took him a moment to realize that his now collapsed parachute was streamed out behind him, rustling in the breeze. Knowing the canopy’s movement might well attract unwanted attention, he unbuckled his harness, gathered his chute in a bundle, and then lay atop it while he dug a hole using the blade of his small penknife. After pushing the chute and life jacket into the hole he covered them with dirt, then crawled to an adjacent wheat field he hoped would offer better concealment.8
After settling himself in a furrow surrounded by tall wheat, Saltsman realized that he had a small shell fragment embedded in one arm, and that in the cockpit fire he had suffered minor but irritating burns on his forehead and around his eyes. He pulled a tube of milk paste from his first aid kit and applied the creamy substance to his burns, then wrapped his silk aviator’s scarf around the affected area. The pilot then swallowed a Benzedrine tablet to keep himself from falling asleep in the warmth of the morning sun.
Knowing that it was a French holiday, Saltsman was surprised about an hour later to see two teenaged boys on a spray wagon, moving slowly through the field. Once they neared his position he whistled to attract their attention, but they motioned him to stay down and moved off. Thirty minutes later one of the boys came crawling through the wheat to where Saltsman lay, and with hand signals indicated that there were many Germans in the area and that someone would come back when it was safe.
The boy himself returned an hour later, and motioned Saltsman to follow him. They crawled about two hundred yards to a small wood, not far from a farmhouse near the village of Houlbec-Cocherel. There Saltsman was delighted to find Cholly’s radio operator, Technical Sergeant Robert Mabie, who had landed near the house, which belonged to the boy’s family, the Girardels.9 The two Americans were given bread and some wine, and directed to hide in a tangled thicket until further assistance arrived later in the day. Despite their best intentions to stay awake and alert, the exhausted aviators soon drifted off to sleep. About four thirty in the afternoon members of the Girardel family returned with bread, milk, and raw eggs, and Saltsman and Mabie crawled out of the thicket to the base of a large tree to enjoy the impromptu meal.
Later in the evening the sound of movement on a nearby road caused the Girardels to hurriedly disperse in all directions. The Americans moved farther into the woods, and about ten minutes later they were suddenly surrounded by German troops. As they were being searched the officer in charge smiled at them and said, “For you, gentlemen, the war is over.”
Saltsman and Mabie were put aboard a truck that already contained Willis Frank and Cholly’s tail gunner, Warren Jones. The aviators were taken to the Luftwaffe airfield at Évreux, where Saltsman’s injuries were treated and he was told that four other members of his crew had also been captured. After spending the night in a civilian prison in the city, on the morning of July 15 Saltsman, Mabie, Frank, and Jones boarded another truck, this one ultimately bound for a Luftwaffe-run POW camp for Allied aviators. As Saltsman settled in for the ride into captivity, he was at least able to take heart from one thing: two members of Cholly’s crew were apparently still free.
Those men were Dick Davitt and Harry Eastman.
THE TWO GUNNERS HAD LEFT GOOD TIME CHOLLY II WITHIN A FEW MINUTES of each other, though Davitt was unaware he’d done so until he came to, suspended beneath a canopy he had no memory of deploying. His head pounding from a combination of anoxia and the thump that had knocked him out, he looked quickly around and noticed two other open parachutes above him and off to what he assumed was the east. Davitt also noticed that his own chute had a half-dozen dinner plate–sized holes in it—German cannon rounds the likely cause, he thought—and he was descending faster than normal.10
As a result, the top-turret gunner landed hard, rolling over several times in a grain field. When he came to a stop, it felt as if he’d broken several ribs, one of his knees was painful, and he had badly sprained an ankle. As he was taking stock of his situation he noticed a greasy plume of black smoke rising into the morning sky about three quarters of a mile away, obviously emanating from a crashed airplane, though he couldn’t see it clearly enough to determine whether it was Cholly, another Fortress, or a downed German fighter.
Davitt knew he had to get rid of his chute, but the residual effects of his concussion and the pain from his other injuries sapped his motivation. He slowly and painfully gathered the folds of nylon into his arms, then flattened the bundle out and rolled onto it as carefully as he could. He lay on the makeshift mattress for two hours, slipping in and out of exhausted sleep until he eventually felt strong enough to move. Like most engineer-gunners, he always carried a few tools with him on missions in case he needed to make in-flight repairs. In Davitt’s case the implements were a small screwdriver and a pair of needle-nose pliers, and he now used them to scrape out the shallow hole in which he buried his Mae West, harness, and ch
ute. He then crawled further into the field, where he lay for several hours.
In the early afternoon the noise of movement on a nearby path caught Davitt’s attention. He risked a look, and seeing that it was a young Frenchman whistled to attract his attention. The man asked if Davitt were American, and when the airman replied in the affirmative the Frenchman told him to wait there, and that he would return as soon as he could. When he came back an hour or two later he was accompanied by a second, younger man, who in good English asked to see Davitt’s escape kit and queried him about his family and his background—both ways of vetting that he was really an American. The two men then left, and Davitt spent the night in the field.
Just after dawn on the morning of July 15 a young girl brought the injured aviator a bottle of hot coffee and some bread, and motioned for him to remain still. Davitt stayed in the field for the rest of the day, and soon after dark four men appeared and helped the limping airman to move into a more concealed location in a nearby wood. They gave Davitt more food and said they would return for him in the morning. True to their word, the quartet reappeared soon after dawn on the sixteenth, and the English-speaker proffered a note to Davitt that turned out to be from Harry Eastman. The hastily written missive said that Eastman was well, and that Davitt should trust the men bearing the note. They then helped Davitt into a car, and he was driven away to meet his crewmate and fellow member of the Gunner Trio.
The friends’ reunion, at the home of the Quérolle family, was an understandably happy one.11 Eastman related that he had delayed pulling his ripcord until he reached breathable air, and that he’d seen six open parachutes in the sky above him. He told Davitt that he had watched as an Fw 190 circled one of the jumpers a few times, but the German fighter had taken no hostile action and eventually just flew off. Eastman had landed in a field about fifty yards from a road, he said, and after dumping his equipment he’d started walking. Within a few minutes a man coming down the road on a bicycle had motioned the American into a nearby wood line, apparently because there were German troops coming along the road. But when Eastman hurried into the trees he’d encountered four men who frantically waved him back the way he’d come. Assuming that enemy troops were approaching from two directions, Eastman had run to the center of a second wheat field and scrambled into a ditch that was overhung by a thorn-studded hedge. He’d stayed in his hiding place through the night, he said, and twice civilians had brought him food, both times using sign language to remind him not to stir. On the morning of the fifteenth, a young French priest—the same English-speaker who had quizzed Davitt—had come and led him to a large patch of trees, Eastman said, and showed him a well-concealed hide within some tangled brush. The clergyman had explained that an injured flyer named Davitt had been found only a short distance away, and asked if Eastman wanted the man brought to him. That’s when the gunner had written the note, though it took until just that morning to arrange the logistics.
While the two gunners were catching up, a female physician from Évreux examined Davitt, finding that his ribs were bruised rather than broken. He’d badly twisted his knee and his ankle was indeed sprained, so the doctor gave him a handful of aspirin and told him to stay off his feet as much as possible for a few days. That turned out to be easily accomplished, for the priest said he and his friends would need some time to set up the Americans’ onward travel. The two airmen then spent the following three days in a different, thicker stretch of woods, being well cared for by the French and—in keeping with the escape and evasion lectures they’d received back in England—pointedly not asking the helpers their names or that of their organization.
The priest, the doctor, and a second man who had referred to himself as “Merlin” were, in fact, members of the Normandy branch of a Paris-based resistance network, or réseau, known as Turma-Vengeance.12 In addition to gathering intelligence on German activities in the region and facilitating the covert aerial delivery from England of arms, ammunition, and agents, the network also helped Allied aviators evade capture. As part of the latter task, members of the group created false identity documents for the evaders, provided civilian clothes, and organized their travel to Paris and, eventually, from there out of France. It was these preparations that kept Davitt and Eastman in the woods for three days. On July 19, with the groundwork apparently completed, the two aviators were driven to a house in Les Baux-Saint-Croix, a southwestern suburb of Évreux, where to their surprise they found David Turner awaiting them.
The young pilot told the gunners about Kee Harrison’s decision to crash-land their damaged B-17 in a field, and said he didn’t know what had become of the other crew members because everyone had scattered in different directions as soon as the Fortress had ground to a halt.13 Other than receiving some directions and a civilian coat from a friendly farmer, Turner had been on his own until the morning of the sixteenth, he said, and had put about four miles between himself and the downed bomber when he saw an older woman walking along a road through a small village and decided to take a chance. The woman was somewhat startled, but when Turner had pulled his pilot’s wings from the pocket of his civilian coat she’d smiled and motioned for him to follow. She’d led the young aviator to her daughter’s home in the adjacent village of Verdun-la-Vacherie. The younger woman had introduced herself as Henriette, and Turner had stayed with her until that morning, when a car had brought him to the Les Baux-Saint-Croix house, which belonged to Hubert and Reneé Renaudin.14
Davitt, Eastman, and Turner remained at the house until the morning of Thursday, July 22, when they were given fresh civilian clothes, forged identity cards, and work documents. The three airmen were then driven to the Évreux-Embranchement train station by the Renaudins, who bought third-class tickets to Paris for themselves and the young Americans. As the group sat in the station, nervously eyeing the German military police soldiers walking back and forth near the departure gates, Davitt and Eastman simultaneously stiffened as if they’d seen a ghost. Coming through the station’s main entrance was a man both aviators had thought they’d watched die just days earlier.
It was Joe Cornwall, and the third member of the Gunner Trio was doing his best not to laugh out loud at the stunned expression on his friends’ faces.
JOE HAD AWAKENED FROM HIS UNINTENDED NAP IN THE WOMAN’S BARN ON July 14 to find that the sun had gone down. He’d been eager to put more distance between himself and the Salty’s Naturals crash site, so he left the barn and headed eastward, toward Paris. He’d been walking for about a half hour when he saw a small farmhouse set back in some trees. Joe had knocked on the door without taking the time to observe the building first, but he was in luck. The residents had given him civilian trousers, a shirt, and a light jacket. They would not let him stay, however, so he’d walked on for another three and a half hours, finally stopping at about 1:30 A.M. on July 15 at another farmhouse that had lights burning. After questioning him closely in broken English the owners had taken him in, and in exchange he’d given them his escape purse and the francs it contained.
Joe had spent the night in the house, and the next morning his hosts had contacted someone in Turma-Vengeance. Late that afternoon two men had shown up in a battered truck. They’d taken the airman to a farmhouse in the hamlet of Le Hamel, just northwest of Sassey, where he was left in the care of Elie Rebours, his wife, and their several children. Though happy to have connected with a resistance group, Joe had been more than a little anxious about his hiding place, for the Rebourses’ home was just a mile north of the sprawling Luftwaffe fighter base at Évreux-Fauville.15 Indeed, the American’s anxiety seemed justified when, the day after his arrival at Le Hamel, two trucks bearing German troops had suddenly driven up to the Rebourses’ home. The officer in charge of what was obviously a search party had closely questioned Elie Rebours about whether he had seen any Allied airmen. Not only did the farmer convince the officer that the family members had not encountered any aviators—and certainly would not harbor them if they had—Rebours had
sent the soldiers off on a wild goose chase.
Joe had spent six days in Le Hamel, and daily visits to the farm by an English-speaking woman everyone simply called “Madame” helped the American and his hosts to communicate on a deeper level than sign language alone allowed.16 The Rebourses had taken very good care of Joe, and in return—when no Germans were in the area—he had joined Elie and his young sons in the fields. He’d enjoyed pitching in—even though too much physical effort brought back the burning pains in his back and shoulders—both because he liked the family and because their small, neat farm reminded him in many ways of his grandmother Mollie Campbell’s place in eastern Washington. And while Joe and the Rebourses were working, so were the Turma-Vengeance helpers.
The resistance members had carefully crafted false identity papers and a work certificate for the American aviator, though they’d run into a temporary snag when the photos of Joe in civilian clothes taken in England turned out to be too large to use on either document. New photos had been shot—in the home of the mayor of nearby Sassey—and early on the evening of July 20 a Turma-Vengeance member whom Joe had not previously met had arrived at the Rebourses’ home on a tandem bicycle.17 Tied to the rear fender was a small, suitably worn suitcase bearing a pair of scuffed shoes and two changes of equally worn clothing. In halting English the man had explained the items had been somewhat difficult to obtain, given that American aviators tended to be taller, heavier, and have larger feet than the average Frenchman. After Joe had changed into one set of clothes, topped by the light jacket he’d been given on the night of the fifteenth, the man had asked for the aviator’s watch and cigarette lighter. Seeing Joe’s puzzlement, the courier had explained that both items were obviously of American manufacture—something a keen-eyed policeman or Gestapo operative would immediately notice.
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