The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (16 page)

There were some romances between American servicemen and the local women, and at least a hundred marriages resulted. But there were many women selling themselves. In Musto’s memory, “There were too many girls doing what they should never have been doing. There was a terrible degradation of morality.” There were many Italian-Americans in the AAF, most of whom spoke Italian. But not well, at least according to Musto. He said “they spoke some horrible dialects that we couldn’t understand. They were dialects used more than a century previous.” As for food, “The first thing that the Americans brought was the very white bread, white, incredibly white, white like milk.” The second thing that impressed Musto was “the variety.” The people of Cerignola were accustomed to dried fava beans with chicory and a little bit of olive oil, and sometimes fish from the sea. But the Americans brought in Spam, peanut butter, chocolate, and so much more. As far as Musto was concerned, “This was modernity. The new world was this one.”

The local residents went to work for the Americans, another miracle. First, the Americans would hire women to clean, wash clothes, prepare food, and so on, and pay them for it. Second, the men could get almost any kind of work, on the airfields, in the barracks, everywhere. Best of all it wasn’t day work, as they were accustomed to - one day on, many days off - but steady. Three months. Four months. More. Along with the work for women, this was “an incredible novelty.”25 According to Gionanna Pistachio Colucci, a twenty-five-year-old married woman and mother in 1944, everything about the Americans was “fantastic, marvelous.  When the Americans arrived it was a joyous celebration. The Red Cross was here.  The children got covers for their beds. They had clothes, jackets. The Americans also brought medicines.” She recalled that the day before the Germans fled and the Americans moved in, a group of Italian soldiers, deserters, unarmed local boys, appeared in Cerignola. The Germans killed them all and put their bodies into one of the Roman granaries. Today, the Cerignola cemetery has a monument to these boys. Many local people can never forgive the Germans for the atrocity.  But, Colucci said, “We have a beautiful memory of the Americans.”26 Michele Bancole, a sixteen-year-old boy who worked at the airfield, recalled that he had keys to the American warehouse. Unbelievable. “But they trusted us.” He added that a “typical characteristic” of the Americans was that “they were handsome.” He was especially impressed by their physical appearance and the way they played sports, such as softball, or engaged in boxing matches. He and other boys would watch. Bancole was impressed because “the Americans knew first to enjoy life and then after that to go to work.”27 Mario Carpocefala was a ten-year-old boy when the Americans came. He went to work for them, doing whatever needed doing, sometimes for money, other times for cigarettes. When the German soldiers had occupied Cerignola, Mario remembered seeing a loaf of black bread on a truck. The German driver had stopped to be shaved. Mario had to have that bread. He grabbed it. Just then some other German soldiers came down the street and one of them shouted. Mario tried to hide behind a Roman milestone. A soldier aimed his rifle at him. Mario threw the bread down the street and took off running. Decades later, he would show the spot to his children and comment, “Look, there for a loaf of bread I almost lost my life.”

The Americans were different. Once Mario was scrounging around a garbage pit, gathering food. Nearby were some crushed cigarette butts, which Mario was also pocketing. An American sergeant grabbed him. “Kid, what are you doing? You’re too young to smoke.” With his broken English, Mario said he was taking the cigarettes for his father, the food for his mother.  “Throw that shit away,” the sergeant said. “Come with me.” He took Mario to the supply tent and gave him some rations and packs of cigarettes.  One of the bombardiers stationed in Cerignola, Major Riccardi, was the child of immigrant parents from Italy. He had four brothers in the service during the war. He took Mario under his wing. Each day he taught Mario English words and after missions would review them with him. Mario learned the language and later said that had it not been for Riccardi’s influence and English lessons, “I would have been a bum.”28 As for politics, there was little discussion by the people of Cerignola. Many who had been Fascists in the 1930s changed their minds. The one topic everyone agreed upon was how crazy Mussolini must have been to get into the war. Look at Spain, people would say. It is a Fascist country. But General Franco keeps Spain out of the war. Why didn’t Mussolini? According to Musto, “Italy made two mistakes. First, entering the war. Second, entering on the wrong side.”29 The Americans were not in Italy to sightsee or romance or drink or otherwise have fun. They were there to engage the Germans in combat. Not on the ground or at sea, but in the air. That gave them some privileges, such as cots to sleep on, hot - if not very good - food prepared by cooks, time off, faster promotions, and more. They were grateful that they were not in the infantry, sleeping in foxholes and being shot at, or in the Navy, cooped up on a ship for interminable voyages, going wherever the captain directed, almost never seeing the enemy except in the air yet still taking great risks that, when a ship got destroyed, led to the death by wounds or drowning of almost every one of their mates. (Except for a tiny number of volunteers no one wanted to be in a submarine.) But it was the case in World War II that the U.S. servicemen in the Navy were glad they were where they were, instead of in a foxhole or a bomber, while those in the infantry wanted no part of flying - they liked keeping their feet on the ground. Virtually every sailor or soldier shuddered at the thought of being in an airplane when it got hit by enemy fighters or flak.  McGovern met two infantry officers after the war and said to them, “Whenever I’d fly over you guys I thought it must be terrible to be down there in the mud, hand-to-hand fighting, all that shelling.” And the infantrymen told him, “Seeing you guys overhead and the Germans shooting away at you, we thought you didn’t have a chance if you take a direct hit.” To McGovern’s surprise, “They were feeling sorry for us.” For himself, McGovern said, “I always knew that it would take infantry to win the war, but I also thought that the bombers and the fighter planes were essential too, that without those planes the infantry could not prevail against the Germans.”30 For the men of the AAF flying the planes, death was a constant threat.  Lieutenant Capps of the 456th Bomb Group arrived in Cerignola in January 1944.  That month he celebrated his twenty-first birthday. There were three other young officers with him, Lts. Douglas S. Morgan, Gail J. Scritchfield, and Edward J.  Heffner. Morgan and Scritchfield were fellow pilots, Heffner was a bombardier.  They shared a camaraderie. “We were all very young, eager, patriotic, and anxious to begin the great adventure of flying combat missions.” At first they were fed by the 301st Bomb Group mess kitchens. Capps never forgot the faces of the 301st crew members when they arrived in the mess tent where he was eating, after returning from a mission into Germany. “They all looked stunned, strained, emotionally drained, and very fatigued. They talked amongst themselves about how their buddies had been shot down on the mission, the number of parachutes they had seen coming from the falling planes, and planes that had blown up without any chance of men bailing out.” The looks and talk of the returned crew brought a sense of reality to Capps, but still “I didn’t believe that I was going to be one that was shot down and I couldn’t wait to get into combat.”

Within four months of his arrival at Cerignola, all three of Capps’s friends - Morgan, Scritchfield, and Heffner - were gone. Each had a violent death in crashes in their B-24s. Later a tent mate of Capps’s, Lt. Nicholas Colletti, a bombardier, was shot down and killed. When Capps completed his missions - fifty-one of them! - on July 7, 1944, his co-pilot, Lt. Sydney Brooks, became the B-24’s pilot. Two weeks after he took command of the plane, Brooks had a wing knocked off by enemy fire and his plane collided with another B-24 in the formation. Brooks spun violently to the ground and was killed. The other plane exploded.31 As with the other squadrons, the 741st was taking heavy casualties and losses.  Commander Lanford was one of them. He had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for leading a mission over Vienna on March 17, 1944, but on July 21 his plane was shot down on a mission against Brux, Czechoslovakia. The flak bursts severed the control cables. Lanford attempted a hard right turn, but “the control wheel spun like a roulette wheel.” The plane was losing altitude fast.  He ordered everyone to bail out. Lanford landed safely, got in contact with Tito’s partisans, and managed to return to base, where he went into the mess hall to be greeted by the operations officer, who exclaimed, “My God, I thought you were dead!” Lanford went back to flying in combat and completed his tour.  But the squadron historical diary noted the destruction of his and other B-24s and declared, “Replacements are sorely needed as our status at the moment could aptly be called quasi-operational.”32 Beyond the many B-24s shot down there was sudden death from accidents. Shortly after arriving in Italy, Sgt. Kenneth Higgins, McGovern’s radio operator, saw one. Right after taking off, the pilot was supposed to hit the brake pedals to keep the landing gear’s wheels from spinning as they retracted. But on this occasion, the Liberator was not yet airborne when the pilot hit the brakes and the plane nosed over and plowed into the ground. All the men in the front of the aircraft were killed. Another time, a B-24 came in to land. It had a bomb hung up in the bomb bay but the pilot, who should have checked to make sure all the bombs had dropped, had not. The bomb fell out when he landed, went off, and blew the whole plane into pieces. “The whole crew burned,” Higgins recalled. “I mean they were just charred ashes.”33 Pilot Lt. Guyon Phillips saw a similar accident. Just before liftoff, the pilot hit the brakes. “A B-24 with a full load of gas and bombs just won’t get in the air without full power,” Phillips commented. This time the plane was at the end of the runway. The nose gear sheared off and the nose of the plane ground into the earth with such force that it chewed off the front of the plane, right up to the engines. All the men in the front were instantly killed.34 Once a bomber gained altitude, the crew had some chance of survival when things went wrong. Some managed to get out of a doomed Liberator, pull the rip cord on their parachute, and land safely. Some of them managed to bail out over neutral Switzerland or Yugoslavia, where if they were lucky enough to join with Tito’s partisans they could return to Italy. But many, perhaps most, became prisoners of war. Until the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, the Germans held far more AAF men as prisoners than they did American infantry.  The AAF knew that the capture of men who had bailed out was always a possibility. To prevent this, it gave each member of a crew an escape kit, consisting of some candy bars, a shot of morphine, a silk map of Europe, and a compass. That wasn’t much. The men were also instructed that the only information they had to give their captors was their name, rank, and serial number. Generally, they gave out more than that, not necessarily willingly but sometimes to avoid torture, more often in what they regarded as casual conversation. The German interrogators were young men, good in English, usually former fliers themselves, now without an arm or otherwise injured, and they would get the POWs to chatting, almost like shoptalk. Like most people their age, the prisoners were willing to brag about such matters as “How fast does your plane go?” or “Can you do a roll in it?” and so on. Further, the Germans already had excellent information, such as the base of the squadron or the name of its commander. A vast majority of POWs insisted, after the war, that they had never told the Germans anything of value. The Germans, however, said they got everything they wanted from the prisoners. The men on both sides were stretching the truth pretty considerably.

Once a man was captured he was out of the control of the AAF, but he was still in the military and subject to military discipline. The POWs hated the experience, but most of them managed to live through it without compromise.  Pilot Lt. Walter Shostack of the 741st Squadron was one of them. He was on his fourth mission, over a refinery in Austria, when the plane he was flying took a direct hit from a flak shell that exploded on the B-24’s nose, killing the bombardier and nose gunner instantly. The plane began to lose altitude so badly that it was about to crash into a mountain. Shostack ordered the crew to bail out. They were now over Yugoslavia and all of them, including Shostack, parachuted down safely, but three of them were shot on the ground by SS troops who claimed they were terrorists. “They didn’t give them a chance.” Alone, Shostack managed to hide for a week. He hooked up with some of Tito’s partisans and they were helping him to escape, but unfortunately they stopped at a farmhouse and a boy ran to tell partisans fighting for the Germans. They found Shostack in the attic. When they discovered that he was an American, they gave him an apple. Shostack had grown up speaking Russian, which is similar to Serbian. The Serbians said they were not fighting the Americans, they were fighting the communists. That was a bit ironic to Shostack, whose family had left Russia to get away from the communists. As he noted, “You really couldn’t tell who was who in that war without a program.” Eventually Shostack was taken to Frankfurt, where he underwent interrogation.  The German asking the questions was, of all things, a former used car salesman from Detroit. It was mid-1944 and, as Shostack put it, “He knew by then that the war was lost so he gave me some tea and cookies.” The German really was hoping to loosen Shostack’s tongue, “but unfortunately for him having been shot down on our fourth mission I didn’t know anything.” Shostack was sent to Stalag Luft 3.  It was a large camp. Prisoners in it before Shostack arrived had dug a tunnel and some sixty of them managed to wiggle through it and escape, but unfortunately for them, the Germans rounded up most of them, brought them back, and shot them in front of the other POWs. So they stopped digging tunnels, and for Shostack there was nothing to do except play cards, wonder when the next meal was coming, and wait for the end of the war.  Because of the German respect for rank, Lieutenant Shostack and the other officers had “a little easier time of it” as compared to the enlisted men.  Officers were not made to work. The prison barracks were divided into twelve tiers, each tier had twelve beds, four beds three layers high. There were 144 men in Shostack’s barracks, one stove at one end and one faucet with cold water at the other. That faucet was the sanitary facility. There was a latrine outside, but the POWs had to get permission from a guard to use it.  Rations were miserable. The bread was made, apparently, from sawdust and there was only one piece of it per man. The guards would set the ration down outside the door. The Germans did hand out coffee, but as far as Shostack could tell it was made from ground-up acorns. Once a week, if he was lucky, he got a piece of horse meat. Occasionally the American POWs received Red Cross parcels with food, but there was a contingent of Russian prisoners next to Stalag Luft 3 and if the Americans thought they had it bad, all they had to do was look at the Russians to know what true misery was. So they would divide their Red Cross parcels and throw half of the food over the fence to the Russians.  The Red Cross also sent cigarettes, which “did a world of good when it came to trading for food.” The Germans would barter anything they had for American cigarettes. The POWs had a radio hidden in a tin can, which allowed them to keep aware of what was going on. The main thing they wanted to know was, How close are the Allies to our camp? On April 29, 1945, just as they were being liberated, they got the American Armed Forces Network on the radio. The first thing they heard was a popular song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” Given where he had been for almost a year, Shostack thought the words were “kind of comical.” Shostack’s final judgment was, “War is a terrible thing and anybody that tells you otherwise was probably a supply sergeant somewhere in the middle of Kansas who had no idea what combat is about.” As far as he was concerned, “It was just something we had to go do.” In the end, “I loved my crew and that’s about all I loved. War is not a joyful experience.” Decades later, he enjoyed watching war movies. His wife asked him how come he did, as he hated war so much. “I explained that while watching a war movie there is no danger of getting shot and you can concentrate on the story line and not worry about a piece of flak coming through the windshield.”35 In the 741st Squadron there were twelve B-24s and twenty-three crews. That meant forty-six pilots and co-pilots, plus more than fifty other officers. When McGovern arrived, many had been in combat, while others like himself were waiting to go. Whatever their status, every one of them knew the dangers of getting shot down or being forced to bail out or how likely it was that they would have a fatal accident. Death or the possibility of captivity was all around these young men.