The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (18 page)

“Booster pumps” - “On”

“Mixture” - “Auto rich”

“Props” - “Full high”

“Superchargers” - “Set”

“Half flaps” - “Set”

and so on.6

Surbeck lined his plane up on the taxi strip, behind some planes and ahead of others - there were twenty-eight in the group, seven in each squadron. The 454th Bomb Group was on the other side of the runway, parallel to the 455th, so that the planes from each group could take off side by side. Setting the brakes, Surbeck pushed the throttle to get the engines running at maximum. When his turn to take off arrived, the roar was almost deafening. The plane vibrated as every nut and bolt, every rivet and tube rattled and shook.  Twenty or at most thirty seconds after the plane ahead of him began to roll down the runway, Surbeck released the brakes. A modern air traffic controller, or a pilot of a commercial airliner, would be appalled at the sight, but for the bomber pilots of World War II that was how close to each other they were. Down the strip Surbeck started rolling, picking up speed until he reached 160 miles per hour. He had his flaps set at 20 degrees, brought the engines to maximum power, and at the end of the runway he pulled the nose off the ground and became airborne. With the bomb load, the full tanks of fuel, the weight of the crew and their equipment, including the .50 caliber machine guns and ammunition for them, Surbeck had to fight to gain altitude. It seemed to McGovern that he would not get the plane above treetop altitude, but he did. Barely, but he did. Once the plane was in the air, even if only just, McGovern as co-pilot had the task of raising the landing gear and bringing up the flaps.7 Surbeck circled, as did all the other pilots, their planes looking rather like hawks over a marsh. And he climbed. The gunners tested their guns. They were Browning M-2 .50 caliber machine guns. Each gun had about 150 working parts and the men had been required to strip and reassemble it blindfolded wearing gloves.  The guns weighed sixty-four pounds and fired 800 rounds of ammunition per minute to a range of 600 yards. Sgt. Louie Hansen, a tail gunner in the 743rd Squadron, once discovered that both his guns were jammed - the cocking levers had been put in backward after the guns had been cleaned after the previous mission. He described what he did. “There was only space in the turret to get one hand through to a gun. I did one with my right hand, the other with my left. Sweat started to trickle down my back, my goggles steamed over which made no difference as there was no way to see what I was doing. The intense cold made me afraid to remove my gloves. But I got the job done and, as most combat crew members know, one can sweat at 50 degrees below.”8 Fortunately for Surbeck and McGovern, the guns on their Liberator tested okay.  After an hour or so, Surbeck’s plane had become a part of the formation. It was a squadron box of seven aircraft. There were two three-plane echelons. The lead plane had a wingman just behind and on either side. Surbeck was one of those on the wing of the leader. The second echelon was forty feet below and forty feet back of the lead echelon. The seventh aircraft, known as “Tail End Charlie,” was behind the second echelon. Flying the wing, even for Surbeck, was more difficult than being in the lead, but easier than flying Tail End Charlie. As the last plane in the squadron, Tail End Charlie was the most vulnerable if German fighters attacked, and it was the hardest position to hold. Usually new pilots and crews got that assignment. On the wing, Surbeck wanted to stay close to the plane he was flying on so as to make as small and infrequent power changes as possible, to save the engines and save fuel. Pilot Lt. John Smith said that “in due course flying formation became a reflex like driving a car.” The group consisted of four squadrons, the lead box, the high box, the low box, and the middle box.9 More climbing, to 20,000 and eventually 25,000 feet over the Adriatic. Then off for the target. When the group got to the initial point it turned. But clouds had moved in over Linz and the lead pilot decided to abort. He turned, so did the others, and returned to base, still fully loaded with the bombs.  McGovern’s first mission went better than that of Lt. David Gandin, a navigator in a B-24. In his war diary, Gandin reported that when his Liberator, called theSnafu, was over the target a piece of flak came through the cockpit window.  The pilot, Lt. Bill Marsh, lost the top of his head. The co-pilot, Lt. Hilary Bevins, was on his first mission. He called to his radioman, who came to the cockpit wearing a walka-round oxygen bottle “and removed Marsh from the pilot’s seat. Bevins couldn’t stand it with Marsh in the seat and all the blood flowing around.

“Bevins moved over to the pilot’s seat and kept in the formation until it headed off. All the compasses were out, so Bevins flew the opposite direction of the setting sun. All the men were freezing because of the hole in the top of the cockpit. The engineer was sick to his stomach from all the blood. Bevins’s eyeball was scratched and Marsh’s blood was frozen on his hands.” When darkness descended, Bevins flew opposite the North Star. FinallySnafu got back to base - but Bevins had never made a night landing before. “As he came in, he banked too far to the left and knocked off the left landing gear, bounced over and did the same to the right one; the ship crash-landed and caught on fire.

“Thank God all got out okay, though Bevins wouldn’t leave till they took Marsh’s body out also. The plane burned to a crisp.”10 On November 17, McGovern flew his second mission as Surbeck’s co-pilot. The target was the marshaling yards in Györ, Hungary. Over the target the flak began. It was heavy and accurate. Sticking tight to the formation, his plane and the others could achieve a better bomb pattern but it also made a concentrated target for the flak gunners. “It was just solid black except for flashes of red where shells were exploding,” McGovern remembered. The Germans were using a box-type defense. Each of the 88s fired into an area as the bombers approached, the shells traveling faster than the speed of sound and set to explode at the group’s altitude. “They just boxed it.” The boxes were 2,000 feet deep and 2,000 feet wide, sometimes more. The German antiaircraft units employed almost a million personnel and operated over 50,000 guns, most of them the dreaded 88s.  The shells were time-fused to explode at 20,000 feet, or above or below that altitude according to the flight pattern. As the shells exploded, sending out hundreds of pieces of steel shrapnel that had a killing zone radius of some thirty feet, the bombers flew into them. “Well they had filled that box,” McGovern said. A standard expression from Surbeck or crew members was that “the flak was so thick you could walk on it.” McGovern “often wondered if that’s the way hell looks.”11 Another pilot, Lt. Robert Reichard, recalled that “the barrage was so intense that the daylight disappeared and it was as if someone had cut out the sun.” The B-24s had nowhere to hide and with the ground 25,000 feet below, there was no place to dig in. The bursts around them posed a threat to the airplane, as it had ten 500-pound bombs and over 2,000 gallons of 100 octane gas on board.12 When the bombs dropped the plane jumped a few feet. “Every-thing improved when they went away,” Lt. Vincent Fagan remembered. “The plane was 5,000 or 6,000 pounds lighter, we were leaving the flak instead of going into it and we could take evasive action - usually a diving turn towards the shortest escape route from the flak area.”13 One didn’t always get out of the flak. On his first mission, October 7, 1944, B-24 pilot J. I. Merritt, inLiberty Belle, flew over Vienna to hit an oil refinery. After dropping the bombs, he banked steeply to the left and headed toward the rally point and home. Sgt. Art Johnson, a waist gunner and assistant engineer, was on his twenty-sixth mission. He recalled, “We had flown through the worst of the flak. I sighed a bit, for this was my third time in the vicinity of Vienna and I knew about where the flak began and ended.” Just then, there were four explosions in quick succession.  Johnson’s oxygen hose pulled apart, his gun was knocked out of his hand, and he hit the floor, hard. Luckily his headset stayed connected and he heard Merritt ask, “Is everyone okay?” Johnson checked the tail gunner and the ball turret gunner, then pressed his mike. “Pilot from left waist - everyone okay back here.” But he added, “Number three engine throwing oil and smoke, number four dead, holes in flaps and wings. Over.”

Johnson later found out that the first burst had exploded directly in front of the plane and the force of it took the top off the nose turret. The second burst came through and cut the nose wheel and tire in two, cut the interphone lines to the nose and also the oxygen lines. The third burst ripped up the underside of the right wing and exploded in number four engine. The gunner in the top turret, Sgt. Nick Corbo, had just breathed easy and said to himself, “We’ve made this one,” when the bursts came. One piece of shrapnel exploded through the flight deck.

Johnson and the other crew members began throwing everything that was loose out of the plane. Ammunition, guns, flak suits, anything and everything that was loose except themselves. Merritt fought the wheel as the plane heaved and slowed to the brink of stalling. Then it began dropping. Gasoline streamed from the riddled wing tanks, filling the plane with the reek of the fuel. Only one engine was still working, and that one hardly was. The plane had dropped from 25,000 feet to 12,000 and was still going down. Merritt managed to get up some speed and cross into Yugoslavia. Down to 2,000 feet and almost out of fuel, he called out over the intercom, “Bail out and good luck!” Johnson recalled that the right waist gunner was the first out, followed by the tail gunner and the ball turret gunner. “I was alone in back. I faced the front of the ship and put my head between my knees and out I went. The slipstream caught me and I went end for end. By the time I had slowed down a bit I had pulled my rip cord. One long pull. I was jerked straight up and down as the silk billowed open and I breathed a prayer of thanks.” Johnson and the others, including Merritt and the co-pilot, landed more or less intact. They were picked up by partisans who managed to get them back to Italy, but not until November 26.14 Lt. Glenn Rendahl, a co-pilot from Hollywood, California, with the 514th Squadron, said that on his first mission, the flak “exceeded whatever we expected.” On McGovern’s second mission one bomber of the group was lost. Again there were clouds, but the lead bomber had the Mickey radar and used it to find the railroad and dropped his bombs. The twenty-seven planes following did also.  But because of the clouds, no observation of results could be made.15 On his first mission, navigator Pepin of the 741st saw a lot of flak, saw some B-24s get hit, but his plane managed to drop its bombs successfully. He felt a sense of joy as the plane headed home. The bomb bay doors were closing and the aircraft’s speed was increasing. “The going-home sight of the Alps in the early afternoon was far more beautiful than the morning one.” The radiomen tuned to the Armed Services Radio station in Foggia and over the intercom the crew listened to the latest hit records. Both danger and the crew’s stamina diminished on the homebound run and “our elation and silliness increased.” Everyone was “tired, hungry, and thirsty,” as their breakfast and coffee had been hours ago. Finally Pepin could see Cerignola and his plane circled the field. Then, and on later missions, “My favorite sight and sound was hearing the tires touch the steel mat on landing and seeing the props come to a halt.” After nine hours of “grueling, horrendous, nerve-racking flying, the mission was over.”16 For Sgt. Robert Hammer, now a radio operator with the 742nd Squadron, his first mission was in late September: target, the airfield outside Munich. Two of the men in his crew, a bombardier and a flight engineer, were on their last missions before going home. A fighter escort joined them “and we were bouncing gaily along in the blue” when dead ahead a thick, coal-black cloud appeared. “Take a good look at it, fellows,” the veteran bombardier called over the intercom, “because it’s flak and you’ll be seeing plenty of it from now on.” Hammer was appalled to see the squadron of B-24s ahead fly directly into the stuff. Fools, he thought. Why don’t they just fly around it? He saw two planes get hit and start down. Shortly after, “we were heading for that same suicidal cloud.” The plane started “bucking like a rodeo bronco.” There was a crack. Hammer looked quizzically at the veteran engineer, who pointed to a hole an inch long and a quarter-inch wide made by shrapnel. After what seemed an eternity that in fact had lasted for less than ten minutes, the bombs were away and Hammer’s plane turned for home. “We were combat veterans now.”17 Radio operator Sgt. Howard Goodner flew his first mission in October 1944. His plane was a B-24 flown by Lt. Richard Farrington, his squadron was the 787th, a part of the 466th Bomb Group, Eighth Air Force. Low clouds covered the airfield and when Farrington got his craft off the ground, he could not see. Flying blind as he climbed, relying on his instruments, following his heading, Farrington was quickly covered with sweat. Up, up, up he went, until he got above the clouds.  No amount of practice could have prepared the pilot and crew for what they encountered - B-24s, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds over here, over there, everywhere. They formed up and straightened out for the target. Farrington called out over the intercom, “This is it, boys. We’re on our way to the war.”

Ahead shells were bursting all over the sky, sending out shards of shrapnel. The lead squadron of B-24s penetrated the flak. “Mary, Mother of God,” one crew member mumbled into the intercom. “Mary, Mother of God, get me out of this.” Farrington took them right into it. Jarring detonations erupted around them. The plane bumped and shuddered. But it kept flying straight and level, until the bombs were released. Farrington banked, got away from the flak, and headed home.  Sergeant Goodner reached into his jacket pocket for the Tootsie Roll he carried with him. It was frozen solid. When the plane landed, Goodner had his first mission behind him.18 On November 18, McGovern on decemberwas Surbeck’s co-pilot on another milk run.  The target was the German airfield near Vicenza, Italy. The weather was fair and the bombing was visual. Over 50 percent of the bombs fell in the target area causing extensive damage to the installation. Flak was light and generally inaccurate. No German fighters were seen. The group returned to Cerignola without casualties.