The Bomber Boys (9 page)

Later that evening, John Cuffman would open his diary and write about the Berlin mission of February 3, 1945: “Couldn’t drop right side of bombs because we were all shot up. Saw 5 B-17s blow up and go down. Boy it was horrible. God, I’m glad it is over.”

 

 

 

The massive American air raid of February 3, 1945, was the worst yet for Germany; the bombers dropped almost twenty-three hundred tons of bombs on the city of Berlin. For nearly two solid hours, the German capital was pounded by wave after wave of American bombers. Soldiers and citizens unlucky enough to have been caught in the center of their city that Saturday suffered the hardest blow. There, government buildings that had been specific targets of the American high command were struck again and again. The Reich Chancellery, including Adolf Hitler’s personal residence, received heavy damage. Unfortunately for the Allies and the German people, the
Führer
survived the bombing raid unharmed in his bunker beneath Berlin.

The average Berliner had no personal bunker in which to hide. Individuals and families sought refuge in the basements of their buildings. Thousands were already homeless from previous
raids, and they tried to find protection in the crowded public shelters. Overhead, they could hear the bombs exploding, at first in the distance and then seemingly right on top of them. Even the buildings that were not hit shook, windows shattered, and smoke and dust choked the lungs of the inhabitants.

When it seemed the bombing would never end, it finally did, but the surviving Berliners emerged from their shelters to find their capital in flames. Even the buildings that had been left untouched by the bombs were at great risk from the fires that were spreading almost unhindered. Earlier in the war, Hitler’s bombers had killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in cities such as Rotterdam and Warsaw, and now the Nazi leader was sentencing the German population to destruction by continuing a war that their country no longer had any hope of winning.

At Chelveston, the 305th repaired its airplanes and counted its blessings. The bombers John Cuffman had seen “blow up and go down” had been part of other bomb groups involved in the Berlin mission. Amazingly, the 305th suffered no loss of aircraft on the February 3 raid. Most of the airmen under Lieutenant Jerome Chart believed that without his quick thinking and composed flying, the 305th would have had at least one missing bomber and crew that day.

For Tony Teta, the memories of the Berlin mission, and the men who shared its perils, would stay with him for a lifetime. Yet it was only mission number twelve, and there would be many more dangerous raids for the young navigator from Hamden, Connecticut. For years in his sleep he would see flashes of those missions—like the time the 366th Squadron encountered another American bomb group during a bomb run. Approaching the target from different headings, the Fortress formations sliced through each other’s airspace, and the pilots flew “by the
seat of their pants,” trying to avoid midair collision. Tony later recalled the frantic warnings Jerry Chart received over the interphone from his crew: “Jerry, there’s one over us!” Then another crew member shouted, “Go to the right!” A third reported in, “Skipper, there’s one underneath us!”

During the nervous few minutes of this midair traffic jam, the young navigator looked up through the clear Plexiglas nose cone and was startled to see another B-17 flying just a few feet above them, its bomb bay doors open in preparation for the release of its deadly payload. Tony recalled the moment forever frozen in his memory: “I’m looking at their bombs! If they had released, they would have gone right through us.”

Also, he would remember the mission he never completed because his B-17 blew a tire during takeoff. Tony was flying with a different pilot that day, and for once he regretted being in the nose of the aircraft as the Fortress skidded down the runway, the metal and Plexiglas scrapping the surface the entire way.

“With the angle that we were tipped,” Tony remembered, “it was like running and sliding on ice. A lot of noise like thunder and sparks flying, and we had a fire on the wing.”

Tony, who had deposited himself as far to the rear of the nose compartment as possible, was the closest to the front escape door when the bomber finally came to a stop. The door was jammed. Behind him other crew members, fearing an explosion, were yelling, “Hurry up! Get the door open!”

Luckily for Tony, the jammed door did not open too soon. When the airplane had stopped moving, the pilot had left the cockpit without remembering to switch off the engines. Had the escape door in the nose section opened immediately, Tony could very well have jumped or been pushed directly into the spinning propeller blades of engine number two. As it happened, when the door jammed, enough time elapsed that flight engineer
Carl Robinson noticed the pilot’s error and killed the engines himself, very likely saving his navigator friend’s life.

Then there were the extraordinary missions over Germany by the 305th, armed with “Disney” bombs. Developed by the British, two of the top secret experimental bombs weighed nine thousand pounds, while the B-17 was designed to carry a maximum bomb load of only seven thousand pounds. These mammoth bombs were so large they would not even fit inside the Fortresses’ bomb bays. They had to be strapped underneath the bombers’ wings.

The veteran air crews of the 305th quickly named the new weapon the “Disney” bomb, because they looked like something only the imaginative cartoonist could have dreamed up. The general opinion of the combat airmen was that a B-17 would never even get airborne with two of the silly-looking bombs weighing it down.

Tony later recounted the test run:

“Our hotshot colonel . . . a young guy, about twenty-seven years old . . . they strapped two of them on his plane. He took off that morning. He used the whole runway and just about bounced off the end of the runway. Went over the English Channel . . . he dropped them off into the channel. He (then) said: ‘That’s it, now we can do it!’ As long as he could do it, we all had to do it. We did it.”

The hotshot colonel was Henry MacDonald, and his example, while daring and inspiring to his aircrews, was not very comforting. The airmen of the 305th had watched MacDonald’s takeoff with the Disneys beneath his B-17’s wings. He had indeed been able to get the aircraft in the air, but they had also noted that as the bomber left the ground the tail fins of the Disney bombs actually scraped on the runway, sending sparks flying. One little slip or miscalculation by a pilot and a Disney bomb mission would be over before it began.

During March of 1945, the 366th Squadron carried the heavy Disney bombs to Hamburg, trying to bust open the thick concrete submarine pens there. It was on this mission that Tony witnessed the debut of a new German weapon and got an early look at the future of aviation.

“We’d heard they had jets, but we had never seen them. We saw those jets coming through our formation one day . . . unbelievable! One went right through and you could never shoot them.” Tail gunner John Cuffman fired about one hundred fifty rounds at two streaking German jets and other propeller-driven fighters, while Chart’s other gunners were kept equally busy. American P-51s finally swooped in to chase the jets away.

The new technology of the German Luftwaffe was impressive, and despite the constant bombardment of its industry, Germany still managed to produce the jets and traditional fighter aircraft to defend its skies, even during the last days of the war. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the men of the 366th Squadron, the 305th Bomb Group and the thousands of other brave Eighth Air Force airmen of other proud bomb groups, the Luftwaffe finally ran out of pilots. The gunners of the American B-17s and Liberators, and their escorting Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Lightnings (along with the RAF), had simply shot all their enemies out of the sky.

In fact, Tony and his crewmates had become as much decoys as attackers during the last weeks of the war, as the American high command baited the last defending German fighters with the American bombers. Yet somehow all of the men of Chart’s original crew survived the war. Chart, Wisniewski, Hall, Stiles, Robinson, Goetz, Christenson, and Cuffman, as well as a young navigator named Teta, beat all the odds against them and became Lucky Bastards.

By the end of their tour of duty, both Chart’s and Teta’s skills and experience had been recognized by the squadron command.
Chart had been picked to fly several missions as lead pilot of the 366th. Tony’s reputation as an accurate and reliable navigator had resulted in his assignment as deputy lead navigator four times and lead navigator for one mission. Since flying lead or deputy lead was considered more hazardous, Tony received an extra credit for those five missions. Thus in the end, he had completed thirty-four combat missions over Germany, yet received credit for thirty-five missions.

When the war officially ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Tony was a decorated veteran air combat officer and a proven navigator—he would be nineteen for one more week. The war that had accelerated a boy’s entrance into manhood had not extinguished Tony’s lust for adventure. Following his return to the United States, Lieutenant Teta volunteered for service with the U.S. Army Air Force in China. He served there as a navigator and backup copilot on humanitarian flights for eight months.

Flying C46 and C47 cargo airplanes, the American aviators supplied oil, food and other vital materials to both the Communist forces and the Nationalist forces, which had fought to defeat the Japanese in China and had then turned on each other. While there was no one shooting at the American airmen, flying the missions over China proved to be both challenging and dangerous.

“The navigation charts we were given were bad,” Tony recalled. “The chart would say a mountain was ten thousand feet high. . . . We would be flying at fifteen thousand feet, and we’d still have to pull up to get over it.”

Although the Chinese charts were inaccurate, Tony adjusted and improvised when he had to. “The Chinese railroads and the Great Wall of China were helpful navigation landmarks,” said the man who had so many times before faced tougher challenges in the sky over Germany.

The completion of thirty-five combat missions (or twenty-five combat missions in the early stages of the war) in the European Theater of Operations is a heroic achievement for any man who can claim membership to that fraternity of warriors. To don the heavy flight gear and climb aboard an aircraft adorned with fresh patches of the previous day’s flak damage, and to do this not once but again and again and again required resolve, dedication to duty and a special kind of courage. Later, when asked how and why they did it, many Eighth Air Force airmen would modestly reply, “I was just doing my job.”

For Tony Teta, sometimes the missions had been back-to-back for two or three days in a row. Sometimes there had been enemy fighters—and almost always deadly flak. The danger of collision had been a constant presence. After his first mission, Tony had learned to look only to the end of the next. He had placed his trust in God, his crewmates and himself—in the end, it had been enough.

Anthony Teta
returned home to Hamden, Connecticut, in September of 1945 with his body and spirit whole. Not long after the long-awaited reunion with his parents, Alex and Mary, and his brother and sister, John and Josephine, Tony’s attention was stolen by a pretty local girl. Her name was Rosalie Sazano.

Tony and Rosey became inseparable, but in August 1946, military duty once again took the young lieutenant to a foreign land. By April of the following year Tony was back in the States, and he became a civilian two months later. The couple’s relationship was rekindled, and on October 27, 1951, Tony and Rosalie were married.

Tony tried a range of occupations in the early years of marriage,
including produce retailer and long-distance truck driver, but eventually he was fortunate to land a job with the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Company. His natural enthusiasm and his organizational and problem-solving skills propelled Tony up the ranks at NY, NH & H. He spent thirty-six years with the company (which became Penn Central and part of Conrail), most of his career as a train master responsible for a large area of track encompassing New Haven, Danbury, Hartford and much of eastern New York State.

Retiring from the railroad business in 1991, Tony spent his days caring for the horses, ponies and various other creatures that inhabited the Tetas’ small ranch in Northford, Connecticut. He and Rosalie felt blessed to have their two daughters, Mary Ellen and Dora Ann, sons-in-law, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild living close by. Rosalie was always quick to say her husband had lost none of his sense of adventure, and she marveled at his energy as he went about his ranch chores. The couple had enjoyed fifty-six years of marriage when Rosalie passed away in January of 2008. Nowadays, Tony still stables a few neighbors’ horses and enjoys attending the University of Connecticut Women Huskies basketball games with his good friend and fellow Bomber Boy George Ahern.

Jerry Chart
became a research biologist and pharmacologist after his return to civilian life. He spent most of his working career with Ciba in New Jersey and New York. He fell in love with a pretty girl named Therese, and the couple married in 1953. Jerry and Terri became parents in 1954 when their daughter Kate was born. Five sons (Greg, Tom, Joseph, Geoffrey and John) followed and then eight grandchildren. After retirement in 1985, Jerry and his wife, Terri, lived in the New York- Connecticut-New Jersey area for ten more years before moving to Helena, Montana, at the urging of two sons who already
lived there. Jerry enjoys fishing in the cold clear Montana streams and wishes they had moved to the state even sooner.

John Cuffman
returned to his beloved Tennessee after the war. He attended George Peabody University in Nashville and attained a Bachelor of Science degree. The former tail gunner’s main civilian career was as a longtime agent for the National Insurance Company (which owned WSM-AM radio and
The Grand Ole Opry
). He and his wife, Virginia, had two sons, one daughter and five grandchildren. Through the years, John Cuffman and Tony Teta maintained a long-distance but close friendship that continued until John’s death in 2003.