The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (17 page)

Whether in the officers club or the airmen’s club for enlisted men, the newcomers would sit quietly and listen to the talk of the veterans who had just returned from a mission. McGovern listened hard and thereby picked up tips on flying a B-24 in combat. The talk was about what had happened, how the plane performed, what the German flak was like, and other details. Always they discussed how many parachutes they had counted coming from a plane going down, but not about who had made it out of the doomed craft and who had not. They assumed that a parachute meant the man had landed safely, but they had no idea whether he had escaped and was on his way back to Italy or had been made a POW or had been killed on the ground. Shostack’s name never came up.  Sgt. Mel TenHaken, a radio operator in the 455th Bomb Group, remembered the talk as both enlightening and frightening. It was unlike the talk one usually heard from young men after an examination or a football or basketball game. “There was no pride of individual accomplishment here, or boasting about comparative achievements.” Further, “There was no jesting about those [like TenHaken, McGovern, and the other recent arrivals] who hadn’t been up yet because everyone knew that would happen tomorrow or a day after.” Ten-Haken also noted that “there was no overt elation by those who had completed thirty-four missions,” because everyone remembered “the one who got his on his thirty-fifth.” No one talked to impress. Experiences were shared only because better understanding of techniques and tactics would improve the odds for survival.36 Sergeant TenHaken had arrived at Cerignola with two other crews. One of those crews was the first to go on a mission. It was a long one. Their plane returned safely, but with holes caused by flak in its wings and fuselage. That evening, after they had finished their postmission interrogation, they were withdrawn and did not want to talk. “They felt it might be better if we discussed feelings later, maybe after we had all completed some combat missions.” As for TenHaken and his crew, “We wondered if they’d ever again have the optimistic, cheerful, normal personalities we had known.”

A day later the second crew flew its initial mission. The plane was two hours late getting back to base. Suddenly, in the darkness along the row of tents, one of the gunners appeared, panting, with some of his parachute gathered over his arm and the rest of it dragging behind. He was frightened. He demanded to know where the rest of his crew was. Told that no one knew, he explained that his B-24 had been hit over the target. He could not assess the effect of the damage but related that his pilot had gotten the plane to the airfield, where he circled to test the controls and to burn the remaining fuel - crash-landing a B-24 was always hazardous, but especially so when there was fuel in the wings.  The pilot was unsure of whether or not the landing gear would operate, as his hydraulic power was gone. He told the crew to bail out. He would stay with the plane and try to bring it down.

A messenger came running in from the flight line. He said the pilot had made it safely but the plane had broken up on landing. Had the crew still been on board, many of the men would have been injured or killed. Over the next two hours the rest of the crew straggled in, dragging their parachutes. There was no celebration and precious little discussion, but the men sure were grateful for the pilot’s action.37 The AAF had a rule that enlisted men and officers were not allowed to fraternize, which was why the officers had their own club at Cerignola, the enlisted men another. But their tents were next to each other. They ate together. Most of the time, they went into each other’s clubs. The clubs had beer, usually warm, and soft drinks. The vast majority of the men did not indulge in even the beer on the night they were listed for a mission in the morning. Most officers and the sergeants considered the nonfraternization rule absurd. “Our crew was one family,” Lieutenant Shostack said, “and we fraternized all the time.”38 The crew went wherever the pilot took them, and he went wherever the bomb group commander told him to go. It was the same with an infantry platoon or a naval crew on a destroyer or other ship of war. They had the need for togetherness to bind them. On the ground as in the air, they shared. Whatever the pilot’s age or number of missions, they all looked up to him, trusted him, would do whatever he told them to do. As with the pilot who had his crew bail out over Cerignola, then landed the plane himself. That was, after all, his first mission.  On the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day, I was with Joe Heller, a bombardier with the Twelfth Air Force, and the author ofCatch-22. Heller told me, “I never had a bad officer.” Astonished, I said, “Joe, you created Major Major Major, Colonel Cathcart, General Dreedle, Lieutenant Minderbinder, and so many others.  Everybody in the world knows about them. How can you tell me you never had a bad officer?”

“They are all invention,” he replied. “Every single officer from when I went into the service to going over to Italy to flying the missions to when I got discharged, every one of them was good.”

In the course of interviewing George McGovern for this book, I told him what Heller had told me. McGovern agreed. “That’s my experience,” he said. “I was impressed by the pilots, the bombardiers, the navigators, right across the board and with the operations officers and our group commander. I thought they were a superior bunch of men and I can honestly say I don’t recall a bad officer. All through combat I had confidence that our officers were doing the very best they knew how - if they made mistakes they weren’t foolish mistakes. Our officers were superb.”39 Obviously there were some weak, some poor, some inefficient or ignorant, and some absolutely terrible officers in the U.S. armed services in World War II.  But if such men ever got into combat positions, the AAF, the Army, the Navy, or the Marines got them out. At once. Men’s lives depended on them, after all. The combat officers knew it and acted accordingly. Ask the Germans who opposed them how good they were. Or the Japanese.

The American officers were superb. And that is the way it was in the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group, in Cerignola, Italy.

Lanford had been in the AAF for four years. Once in Italy he ran into a West Point graduate who was also a lieutenant colonel. “Horace, how old are you?” Lanford gave his age. The West Pointer smacked his head and said, “I used to think I was a young lieutenant colonel at twenty-seven.”

CHAPTER SIX - Learning to Fly in Combat

THE AAF POLICY IN THE FALL OF 1944was to have the pilots fly their first five combat missions as co-pilots with a veteran and an experienced crew. McGovern was, in his words, “lucky,” because his pilot was Capt. Howard Surbeck of Washington state. He was older, twenty-four years old to McGovern’s twenty-two, “and he had circles under his eyes and he was obviously feeling the strain of combat.” He had flown twenty-five missions when McGovern flew with him. It was his tent that Rounds, with McGovern on board, had torn in half with his jeep, but Surbeck never mentioned it to McGovern.

Surbeck let McGovern do quite a bit of the flying from his co-pilot’s seat, sometimes half the mission. The experience taught McGovern “more about what it’s like to have all that gear on and to go to 25,000 feet in subzero temperatures and stay in formation and get shot at and all the other things that go with combat missions.” Surbeck “brought me along.”

McGovern’s first mission was November 11, 1944 - Armistice Day. The night before he checked and saw his name on the assignment sheet. The morning began for him when the operations sergeant came into his tent at 4:00 A.M. to wake him. On his first five missions, Rounds and Adams could stay in the sack, as they were not going. McGovern went to the mess hall for a powdered egg breakfast. Then he climbed into a truck for the drive to the group’s operations room for the briefing. At the door, an MP examined his identification and checked his name on the assignment sheet, then opened the door so McGovern and those from his truck could enter.

Inside, the 300 or so crew sat on planks placed over cinder blocks. When a staff officer announced that they were all present and accounted for, the door was locked. The group commander by the fall of 1944 was Col. William Snowden. He was in his mid-forties, a “grandfather” figure to the pilots and crews. He had gray hair but a commanding presence. McGovern said he had “the total confidence of everyone in our group. A good man and a good leader. Just the way he moved around, he was reassuring without being condescending.” When Colonel Snowden strode in, everyone stood at attention. Snowden climbed onto the platform, put the men at ease, and after saying good morning motioned to a member of his staff to pull a drawstring. Behind the curtain was a large map of southern and central Europe. The pilots and crew members saw their route and the target drawn on the map with erasable marks. When it was Vienna, or Munich, or any other target known to be well defended by antiair-craft guns, or if it was four or more hours flying time from Cerignola, a dismal groan slowly became audible, but on this occasion there were murmurs of approval because the target was Linz, Austria, not so terribly far away, without any known antiaircraft batteries to fly over, and not so well protected itself. It could be what the men called a “milk run.” Later in the war Linz would become one of the most heavily defended targets in Europe.

Colonel Snowden got the men to quiet down and gave way to the weather officer, who described what the cloud cover and winds were likely to be like over Linz.  Then he went over conditions on the route and what to expect on the way home and what it would be like over Cerignola when they got back. Next the operations officer described the nature of the marshaling yards they were going after and explained that the mission was important because the Germans were moving men and matériel through Linz on their way to the Italian front. He warned the pilots and bombardiers to make every possible effort to avoid hitting the cultural sites and educational buildings. By this stage of the war, the bombardiers in the squadron would toggle their switches when they saw the lead plane, with the best navigator and bombardier, drop its bombs.

Next the men were told who would be the pilot of the lead plane. He was always a good pilot. Sometimes he was a major, but often Colonel Snowden would lead the missions - when that happened, the men would again murmur their approval. The briefing would conclude with the group chaplain leading them in a prayer.1 Dismissal came from Snowden, but only after he had the men “hack” their watches.  They would pull the stems of their watches when the second hand reached 12.  Snowden would have them set the minute and hour hands to correspond to his, then count to ten and call “hack,” and they would push the stems back in. They filed out of the briefing room, to go to another briefing - one for pilots and copilots, another for radio operators, another for navigators and bombardiers, still another for gunners.

The men climbed into trucks for the ride to the storage sheds just off the runway where their flying equipment and parachutes were located. Each crew got out and dressed for the mission. They were going up to 20,000 feet or even higher and it was going to be cold up there, between 20 and 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. McGovern and the others pulled on heavy winter underwear. Next they put on long wool socks and a wool military uniform, slacks and shirts - olive drab. Then a leather jacket and leather trousers, both lined with sheepskin, then sheepskin-lined heavy boots. Big, heavy silk-lined leather gloves followed. The sheepskin-lined helmet came down over the ears. Surbeck and McGovern wore Colt .45 automatics in a shoulder holster, then put on backpacks containing their parachutes. The other crew members picked up their parachutes in chest packs, which they carried into the plane by hand. They could snap them on if needed. The parachute packers made their standard joke when giving them out, “If it doesn’t work, bring it back and I’ll give you another.”2 Dressed, they walked to their plane on its hard stand. Surbeck, accompanied by the chief of the ground crew, walked around the B-24, checking it out visually.  The navigator, bombardier, radioman, and gunners would check out their equipment.

Later, when the plane had gotten up to 10,000 feet, the pilots and crew put on their oxygen masks. It covered the nose. They plugged cords from their electrically heated flight suits into an outlet on the plane - the four engines created the power for the electricity. They could adjust the heat, turning it down a little or up a bit as needed. Below 15,000 feet the crew took off their oxygen masks. Surbeck and McGovern kept theirs on until they were down to 10,000 feet. At that altitude, all the smokers lit their cigarettes. The smoke was so thick it looked like there was a fire.3 The bombs had been loaded during the night into the bomb bay by the ground crew led by an ordnance officer. They assembled the bombs by taking the stabilizing fins, stored in a separate box, and screwing them on the bombs. Using winches and tractors, the ground crews had hoisted the unwieldy, blunt-nosed 500-pound bombs into their racks. They were inserted into the B-24’s womb in a horizontal position and attached to the metal racks. They had a cardboard tag between the bomb and the nose fuse, and at the back end a wire arming pin. The tail gunner would crawl out on the catwalk over the bomb bay door to pull the tag and then the pin.

Climbing into the B-24 with those big heavy boots and the layers of clothing was always cumbersome, as the men waddled ponderously. They carried flak jackets, mandatory since Ploesti. The crew members had difficulty getting themselves into and then adjusted in their cramped positions, especially the nose turret and the tail gunner. The belly turret gunner waited until they were in the air before squeezing - with the help of the waist gunner - into his bubble. Surbeck and McGovern settled into their seats, with their parachutes serving as a sort of back rest. The seats were encased in cast iron. The iron came up to the knees, then under the seat and up the back. It was there in the event that flak hit the plane on the bottom side so that, in McGovern’s words, “the pilot and co-pilot would have some chance of survival because somebody has to fly the airplane. It wasn’t that they were worth more than anybody else on the crew, but if both got killed or badly injured, that plane is going to go down.”4 The moment Surbeck got into the plane, went to his seat, and put on his earphones and mike - attached to his helmet - he was, in McGovern’s words, “totally in command, of the officers and sergeants.” McGovern already knew that, but watching Captain Surbeck go through his routine reinforced the point.  McGovern explained, “It had to be that way because the pilot was the only one with his hands on the controls that determined where the plane was going to go and how it was going to be flown.” Of course he had help, especially from the navigator and bombardier, the radio operator and the flight engineers, “but the request for their help came from Surbeck.” It was his job to check on the crew, frequently. He needed to make sure that nobody’s oxygen hose had come unhooked; if a tail gunner or someone else failed to answer when the pilot called to him on the intercom, he might well have passed out from a lack of oxygen or frozen because his electric plug had come out, without ever noticing that his hose or wire was unhooked. These and other things Surbeck did as a matter of routine, McGovern noted.5 To get the engines started, Surbeck would signal to the flight engineer, who would start the single-cylinder gasoline-powered unit on the B-24. It was called the “putt-putt” and gave a boost to the batteries. Engine number three, the one nearest McGovern, started first. It powered the generators, which helped start the other engines. When all were operating, Surbeck did a “run-up,” checking on each engine’s performance, magnetos, temperature and pressure checks of fuel, oil, and hydraulic systems. When a flare went up planes began to move out of their hard stands over the taxiway and onto the runway, looking like elephants getting ready for a circus parade. Surbeck called out the final checklist to McGovern: