The Bomber Boys (2 page)

I interviewed Peter in his home on four occasions. After the final session, he walked me to my car and shared a secret with me.

“I tried for years to forget about all of this stuff. It was pretty rough for the first year or two after I got back. Now, lately I’ve been having those nightmares again.” Then as he apparently saw the guilty expression on my face, he smiled and added, “Well, maybe this will finally give me some closure.”

Peter was the last of my airmen to be interviewed. With the completion of the interviews, I knew I had five interesting and deserving stories to tell. In truth there was a sixth story I would have liked to include. John Conners was gone, and I had not known him long enough to gather very many details about his time with the 305th Bomb Group. His widow, Helen, kindly granted my request to interview her and provided much information about his life. However, like the other air vets, John had told his wife little about his life as a B-17 gunner. Finally I was forced to conclude there simply was not enough available information to write John’s story at the present time.

Although John Conners’s story is not part of this book, his memory and spirit are. He was an inspiration for the project from the beginning, and in my mind he will always be the sixth Bomber Boy.

Teta, Scott, Frechette, Ahern and Valliere all lived within forty miles of each other when I was writing their stories. Conners’s home was also in this same small area. It was here in this little section of Connecticut that I stumbled across two B-17
airmen who led me to the other Bomber Boys. As much as I respect and admire the character and accomplishments of these six remarkable men, I am not inclined to think the Connecticut River Valley has a monopoly on this vanishing breed of American. Go to Texas, Illinois or Utah, ask the right questions, do a little digging, and I suspect you will discover aging air veterans who once manned the Flying Fortresses, Liberators, Marauders and Mitchells. If you do, urge them to write or record their wartime experiences.

I wrote
The Bomber Boys
to document the war experiences of five men, and during two years of research, I located numerous other airmen who were crewmates of the original five. Unless you yourself are an air-combat veteran of World War II, you and I can never really know what it felt like to be one of them, when they were just eighteen to twenty years old and facing death on every mission—but with their own words I have tried to put the reader in their shoes. It is an honor to tell their stories.

—Travis L. Ayres

Prologue

At the end of the only parachute jump of his life, Peter Seniawsky landed hard in a German farmer’s field. He was not even sure he had actually jumped from his crippled B-17 bomber. He only remembered waking up in midair and pulling the ripcord. As he gathered his parachute to his chest, his eyes scanned the surrounding area for a place to hide from the enemy soldiers that he knew would already be searching for him and the rest of his crew.

A small gully close by seemed to be his only immediate option. He scrambled over the edge of the gully and tumbled into a shallow stream. After pushing his parachute under the water and placing several stones on top of it, Peter climbed back up the stream bank to chance a look. He spotted someone immediately—a farmer armed with a shotgun.

The man was walking in Peter’s direction. The young airman had never before thought of having to kill someone. It was almost a certainty that the bombs his B-17 crew had dropped on German cities had killed people. But the targets had been military and industrial sites, and the dead were unseen and abstract. This was different. Peter could clearly see the farmer’s face as he walked across his own field.

Peter knew he could not hesitate. He had heard the stories of how German civilians sometimes shot downed Allied airmen before the German soldiers could reach them. If the farmer kept
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walking in his direction Peter would have little choice but to kill him. He reached down to his side for his .45 automatic pistol. It was not there. No pistol and no holster. Peter silently cursed himself for his thoughtlessness in leaving his sidearm on his bunk that morning.
What now?

The man continued walking in Peter’s direction, finally stopping no more than fifty feet away. A noise had caused him to stop—the sound of a small machine gun. It was just a short burst, but when Peter looked to the east, he spotted four German soldiers emerging from the woods. They were close to a hundred yards away and they began yelling to the farmer in German. He responded, waving his arms and yelling back to them. Of course, Peter could not understand any of it, but he was certain his whereabouts were the main subject of the conversation. If any of them reached the edge of the gully and looked down the streambed, they could not help but spot him.

In a seemingly hopeless situation, Peter looked around again for even the slightest opportunity for escape.
Escape
. That was too grand a word for what he was trying to do. He was somewhere deep in Germany. Where, he did not know. How many miles to the French border to the west? He did not know. Which way
was
west? He did not know. Even if he could miraculously reach France, what then? The entire country was occupied by Germans and French collaborators.

He had no weapon and only a candy bar for food. He did not speak German or French and was dressed in an American aviator’s uniform. Escape
was
too grand a word. Peter Seniawsky was trying to survive—to evade capture, whether it be for a day, an hour or just five more minutes.

He spotted a lone tree on the other side of the stream. If he could reach that tree without being seen and if the farmer and soldiers did not search past the stream . . . if he was really lucky. He eased down the bank, crossed the stream, climbed the other
bank and began slowly crawling toward the tree. Although he could not know it at the time, Peter was beginning one of the most amazing escape adventures of World War II.

 

 

 

Every American bomber airman of the European Theater during the Second World War shared one thing with Peter Seniawsky—the desire to survive against very long odds. For most of these Bomber Boys (the majority only in their late teens or early twenties), the will to survive ranked a close second to doing their job. Once their bombs were dropped over the day’s target, survival was priority one. They flew to the target for Uncle Sam and flew back to base for themselves. There were many ways to die—flak, Luftwaffe fighters, midair collision, weather, engine failure.

Tens of thousands did not survive. Many who did survive wondered
how
, as they landed at their air bases in Flying Fortresses riddled with flak holes or missing what everyone assumed were essential parts of an aircraft. The ones who came home were the first to say the real heroes were the ones who did not. But to the survivors belong the sometimes painful memories that must be stirred if the true stories are to be told.

The Lucky Bastards Club

 

305TH BOMB GROUP

 

366TH BOMB SQUADRON

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Teta tossed his canvas duffel bag to the ground and climbed out of the back of the mud-caked army truck that had carried him on the final leg of his long journey. What he saw, as he got his first look at his new home, did not impress him. Chelveston was no more dismal than the dozens of other American air bases sprinkled across the English countryside surrounding London, but it was dismal enough. Except for a small tower building, most of the base structures were simple sheet metal huts, some rectangular and some resembling barrels lying on their sides, seemingly half buried in the earth. In the distance, B-17 bombers belonging to the 305th Bomb Group were parked around the perimeter of three intersecting runways.

Tony pulled up the zipper of his leather jacket. The December air was cold and damp.

“Lieutenant, don’t forget your briefcase.”

It took Tony a few seconds to realize the enlisted man was talking to him. The rank and silver wings on his jacket were still new enough that Tony found himself amazed he was actually an
officer and a B-17 navigator—after all, he was only nineteen years old.

“Thanks,” Tony said, taking the case that contained his navigation charts and instruments. The other members of his crew wandered off to find their barracks, the enlisted men heading in one direction, the pilot and copilot going in another. Someone pointed Tony in the direction of the Navigators Barracks.

Walking through the doorway, Tony noticed little difference in the inside temperature and the winter chill outside. He dropped his bag and gently placed the navigator’s case on the rough plank floor. A row of over/under bunks lined each wall of the hut. In the center of the room, a few veteran airmen were warming themselves in front of a blackened metal stove. A box of coal nearby was nearly empty. Tony guessed correctly that the one little stove could never adequately heat the entire room.

When no one seemed to notice his arrival, the new navigator walked over to the group at the stove.

He introduced himself with his usual friendliness. “Hi, I’m Tony Teta.” A couple of the men nodded acknowledgment, but nobody spoke. Tony ended the uncomfortable silence:

“Well, can you tell me which bunk is mine?”

With an expression that was neither a smile nor a frown, one of the airmen stopped warming his hands and turned to point to an empty bunk.

“You can take that one, if you want.”

Tony was about to thank him when the man motioned to another bunk.

“Or you can have that bunk there . . . and there’s two more over there. Take any of them that’s empty. None of those guys are coming back.”

The new navigator looked around the room. He counted eleven empty bunks. The 305th had, in the past few weeks, made raids on Schweinfurt, Cologne, Hanover and Berlin, four of
Germany’s toughest targets. The bomb group had lost eleven of its aircraft, almost a full squadron, and nearly one hundred of its airmen had been killed or were missing. Eleven of the casualties were navigators.

Somehow the room seemed even colder to Tony now. He mumbled, “Thank you,” picked up his gear and stored it next to the closest available bunk. It had been a cramped and slow voyage across the Atlantic, followed by a long and bruising ride in the troop truck from Scotland to Chelveston. He was dead tired. When he lay down in his bunk and finally rested his head on the pillow, Tony should have felt relief. All he felt was alone.

 

 

 

It was more than fate that had brought Lieutenant Anthony Teta to the cold and lonely barracks of Chelveston, England. It was a desire to fly that had been inside him for as long as he could remember. As he lay in his bunk, he recalled a warm summer day in 1935.

He was barely nine years old that summer, but he told everyone he was ten. The sand felt hot and comforting beneath his bare feet as he ran at full speed along the little road that led to the Hamden, Connecticut, airfield. Most of his friends were choosing up sides for a pickup game of baseball about then, and on most Sundays Tony would have been there too. He was a small kid, with a small strike zone. He drew a lot of walks, but he could also hit. And he was fast—a good base runner, especially in the late innings when the other boys were getting tired. Tony never seemed to get tired. His constant energy amazed everyone who knew him, including his mother and father.

On this Sunday, Tony would miss the baseball game without the slightest regret. Somewhere far overhead he could hear the sound of an airplane engine, and it heightened his anticipation. This was one of those rare Sundays in Hamden when the barnstorming
biplanes came to town. Tony had seen them once before. There were two planes, one bright red and the other yellow. His dad had even paid to take a ride in one of them. Tony had been simultaneously proud and jealous of his old man.

Finally Tony reached the edge of the airfield and slowed his pace to a fast walk, once he realized he was on time for the show. A large crowd of people of all ages was scattered along the edges of the field, which was perhaps a thousand feet long and a hundred feet across. Climbing into the bed of a nearby pickup truck, Tony got a good view.

In the center of the field someone had made a circle with lime chalk. The circle was no more than twelve feet in diameter. Raising a hand to his forehead to shade his eyes, Tony searched the cloudless sky for the plane. There it was—just a yellow speck against the sun’s glare.

The boy felt an unusual lightness in his stomach. “Butterflies,” his mom had called it. The yellow bi-wing airplane was lost in the sun for a few seconds, but the changing sound of its engine told Tony it was beginning its dive.

He could see it free-falling like a roller coaster that has just passed a crest in the track.

In a few more seconds the yellow plane was in a hard dive at a forty-five-degree angle, the engine roaring. Nervous laughter escaped from some in the crowd, while the majority watched in awed silence. Everyone waited anxiously for the pilot to begin pulling out of the dive, but still the yellow plane plummeted toward the airfield. A few in the audience began to look around for possible exit routes. Tony smiled and remembered what his dad had told him. The pilot was giving them “their money’s worth.”

The pilot held the little biplane in the dive so long that even Tony began to wonder if he was too low. At last the plane began to pull out. From the sound of its engine, it was clearly straining.
Some parents tried to cover their children’s eyes when it seemed there was going to be a deadly crash, but the plane’s path flattened out and it became a yellow streak as it passed just a hundred feet above the field.

Tony could see the pilot clearly as the plane passed overhead, and he watched with fascination as a white object fell from beneath the aircraft. It was, Tony would find out later, a ten-pound sack of Pillsbury’s Best Flour. The bag tumbled only twice before it smashed into the ground and exploded into a curling white cloud. When the flour dust finally settled, Tony saw that the pilot had scored a perfect hit inside the target circle.