The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (19 page)

McGovern flew again the next day and it was no milk run. The target was a refinery near Vienna. Because of cloud cover, the lead plane used its Mickey and no results were seen, but dropping bombs by radar instead of visually meant few of them hit what they wanted them to hit and the damage was minimal. Flak was intense but inaccurate and all planes returned to base.  On November 20, on McGovern’s final mission as a co-pilot, the target was factories at Zlin, Czechoslovakia. It was a secondary, or alternative, target, but the original objective had been obscured by clouds, so the lead pilot took the group to Zlin. There the weather was clear and the bombing was done visually, with excellent results. Best of all, there was no flak over Zlin. All planes returned safely.19 After debriefing, McGovern would meet with Rounds, Adams, and his crew. They fired questions at him about what it was like, most of all the flak. “They were filled with questions every day,” McGovern recalled, “waiting for me when I came back.”

Once the session was over, McGovern would steer his way into the officers club for a Coca-Cola or a beer. There he would listen to the veteran pilots talk and ask his own questions. It was shoptalk. From almost every one of the discussions he would absorb information. The topics were the B-24s, the crews, the Germans.  What rpm at what altitude? Why was this gauge or that instrument malfunctioning?  Is there any way to stay straight and level over the target and still avoid the flak? How long can an engine be on fire before it detonates the gas tank? What can you do when a bomb gets stuck in the bomb bay? How does the plane fly with only three engines operating? With two? When the hydraulic system has leaked or been shot out, how do you get the wheels down?

McGovern had flown four missions in four days. These consecutive missions were about the absolute limit. They left the pilot and his crew haggard, worn, jumpy, frazzled, and spent. But each one counted toward the thirty-five missions that, when completed, would allow McGovern to return to the States. When he had time to write to Eleanor, McGovern noted the number in his letter - number five after the mission to Zlin.

“I worried, as any wife would,” Eleanor said three decades later. “I would feel a stab of fear whenever someone knocked at the door or the telephone rang. The first thing I would do when I got a letter from George was to scan through it for a number - the number of missions completed. That was the first thing I wanted to know. Then I’d go back to read the letter.”20 On December 16, radio operator Sgt. Mel TenHaken flew his first mission, against a refinery at Brux, Czechoslovakia. Because the crew were new, the pilot, Lieutenant Cord, was a veteran of thirty-one missions. TenHaken’s regular pilot flew as co-pilot that day. There was another newcomer, a photographer on his seventeenth mission. Theirs would be one of the last two planes on the bomb run and his photos would be among the official records of the raid’s effect.  When the group formed up and headed toward the target, Ten-Haken saw “a seemingly endless line of planes. I had never seen this many in one place at one time.” He thought that “obviously Rosie the riveter back home had been very busy.” The bombers were at 25,000 feet, just below the 26,000-foot ceiling for the craft.

On his B-24, TenHaken was in charge of the chaff, what he had called “Christmas tree tinsel” back home. Its purpose was to confuse German radar, which otherwise would lock on to the group and know what altitude to set the fuses for the shells to explode. The chaff was in packets, each one wrapped and tied with a plain brown band, each one crimped to open in the wind and allow the foil to drift down in individual pieces. Most veterans thought the chaff didn’t do much if any good, but they tossed it out of the plane with great gusto anyway.  When his plane got to the initial point and turned, then straightened for the bomb run, TenHaken saw “numerous little puffs ahead forming a black cloud shaped like an elongated shoe box.” The leader of his squadron was flying through it.  Those behind were about to enter the German box. It was time to pull the flak jackets on. These were for the crew, whose members did not have the cast iron protection the pilot and co-pilot did. The jackets consisted of irregularly shaped metal plates stitched between two sheets of canvas to form a vest. To TenHaken, “their purpose seemed primitive, identical to that of suits of armor.” They weighed about twenty pounds each. Most veterans decided early on not to wear them, but to put them between their seats and their butts, thus protecting the most important part.

Over the target, with flak bursting from the shells all around his plane, TenHaken started dropping the chaff packets through one of the waist windows.  After dropping one, he tried to count to ten as he had been told before letting the next one go, but in the midst of the flak he seldom got past two or three.  Then the plane to his right got hit. “A flak explosion at its number three engine had blown the right wing from the body. The scene was incomprehensible - the wing tumbled over and down, and the fuselage was nosing into a dive.” There were no parachutes. “The bam-bam-bams and poof-poofpoofs were exploding everywhere; it was inconceivable to fly through this unscathed.” The bomber lurched. Have we been hit? TenHaken wondered. Through the intercom, he heard the bombardier say, “Bombs away.” (“The most beautiful words in the English language,” according to one pilot.) Then the bombardier continued, “Now let’s get the hell out of here.” After a pause, he came on the intercom again to say, “I wasn’t supposed to add that last part.” Lieutenant Cord banked the plane into a steep dive to the right. TenHaken thought, Thank you, God. Cord came on the intercom to ask each crew member to report any damage. None. When they were out of the flak, TenHaken lifted his oxygen mask and shouted above the engine noise to the photographer, “You’ve been through seventeen of these now. Was this flak typical, lighter, worse, or what?” The photographer grinned and shouted back, “It wasn’t light. Each mission seems to get worse, but I can’t believe they could get more up here than they did.” Over the intercom, Cord asked, “Flight engineer back there?” He wanted to know what the trouble was with the gas gauges. Number three engine sputtered and quit. “Get something to three,” Cord ordered.

“I’m trying,” the engineer answered. “I’m trying.” Cord realized what had happened. On the intercom he said, “The bastards hit our gas lines over the target. They’ve just vibrated loose.” The number two engine quit. The engineer repeated that he was trying to transfer the gasoline flow. He could not.

“We’re losing altitude and control,” Cord yelled. “We’re at sixteen thousand; a couple seconds back, we were at eighteen.” He added, “Stand by to bail if necessary.”

Then number four engine quit. Then number one. There was a long moment of quiet, only the sound of the wind that buffeted the plane about in the glide. Then “the terrible clanging of the bail-out bell crashed the quiet.” Everyone got out okay, landed safely, and became POWs.21 For TenHaken, the co-pilot, and the rest of the crew, it was their first mission. It was number thirty-two for Lieutenant Cord. For the photographer, number seventeen. For all of them, it was the last.

“Anon” made up words to sing to the tune of “As Time Goes By”:

You must remember this

The flak can’t always miss

Somebody’s gotta die.

The odds are always too damned high

As flak goes by . . .

It’s still the same old story

The Eighth gets all the glory

While we’re the ones who die.

The odds are always too damned high

As flak goes by.22

Once in the fall of 1944 McGovern went up in a practice run, with only his co-pilot, Bill Rounds, and his navigator, Sam Adams, along. McGovern was upset with Rounds because while McGovern was flying co-pilot with Surbeck, Rounds used his free time to go into Cerignola to find a girl. He contracted VD and had to be treated with sulfa powder. McGovern was about ready to kick him off the plane. But on this practice mission, which was done primarily to give the co-pilots who had not yet been flying some experience, Rounds did most of the flying. “He took that plane as if he’d been doing this all his life,” McGovern said. “I think I could’ve done as well, but I couldn’t have done any better and I had a lot of practice.” Rounds just tucked into position and held it there.  That night, the pilot of the lead plane, a captain, came to McGovern in the officers club to say, “You know, George, you’ve got one hell of a valuable co-pilot. He flies the best formation of any co-pilot I’ve seen. That guy is tremendous - you better hold on to him with both hands.” Right then, McGovern decided to forget about Rounds’s VD. He figured he had better let the man do what he wanted on his off hours.

Lt. Donald Currier was a part of one of the first B-24 squadrons of the Fifteenth Air Force to arrive in Italy and thus flew his first mission in January 1944, one of the first of his group. It was two days after his squadron had arrived in Italy. The target was the railroad yards in Perugia, just off the Tiber River, in support of the ground troops. But when the bombers arrived, it was snowing. Landmarks were obscured. The lead navigator, having no radar (which only came nine months later), was unable to see anything but clouds. Currier was the navigator flying in the B-24 on the wing of the lead plane. “I looked desperately for something I could see and recognize,” he recalled, but he saw nothing.

The lead plane opened its bomb bays. The bombardier in Currier’s plane followed the leader. He put his finger on the toggle switch. When the leader dropped his bombs, he and the other bombardiers did the same. Currier saw the bombs fall in open countryside. He saw some bursts of flak on one side and far away and thought, I don’t know why the Germans bothered. We certainly didn’t do them any harm. He and the pilot and crew resolved “we would go again and again until we got it right.”

Currier would go on to make a career in the Air Force. Looking back four decades, he said that in his experience “it seems incredible that we would be flying a combat mission with so little training or experience.” But that was how badly the Fifteenth needed pilots and crews in January 1944.23 It was because of that need that the AAF instituted the policy of requiring just-arrived pilots to fly as co-pilots for five missions before taking up their own plane and crew, since the men had gone through the speeded-up training program in 1944. In 1945 the commanders changed policy again, putting new pilots and their crews into action as soon as they arrived in Italy. And it was the casualty list that forced the commanders of the bomb groups to keep demanding more replacements.  Bombardier Lt. Donald Kay arrived in Italy in May 1944 and was assigned to the 783rd Squadron, 465th Bomb Group. Of the three classmates in bombardier school who came over with Kay and were close friends, two were killed in the air and the other became a POW. Overall, Kay recalled that of the seventeen original crews that started the war with him, only six finished.24 Sgt. Anthony Picardi of the 455th Bomb Group’s 742nd Squadron (who had visited his family’s village and met his grandmother) saw a B-24 crash on the runway while trying to take off for a mission. It blew up on impact. Nine of the ten crew members were blown to bits. But one had “his arms blown off from the elbow down and his legs blown off from the knees down. He was actually crawling away from the inferno. He was digging into the dirt with the stubs of his elbows, trying to survive. Right then and there, I realized just how precious life is.

He crawled right up to us, looked us straight in the eyes, and then closed his

eyes forever.”25

For McGovern, on his first five missions as Surbeck’s co-pilot, things were not

so rough. He saw some flak, went through it, and got out of it safely. The B-24

did not take one hit. “I felt rather secure after flying those missions,”

McGovern said. He summed up what he had learned from observing Surbeck: “I heard

through the earphones how he handled the radio transmissions to the tower and to

the lead plane. I saw how he brought the plane into formation, how slowly or

swiftly he got that done, I watched him to see what he was looking at and

listened to the way he was handling the crew - everything he said, I could hear

through my earphones. . . . I saw how he flew formation in various positions, on

the left side one day and the next he might be in the middle, the next day on

the right wing. I could observe all those things without having the

responsibility of handling the plane myself. I picked up a lot of touches.” This

was not practice flying in Idaho. This was Europe and the formation was much

bigger - sometimes 500 or 600 planes. After completing his five missions as

Surbeck’s co-pilot, McGovern said, “I felt comfortable to take that plane up

with my own crew and get it into formation and get off on a combat mission.”26

CHAPTER SEVEN - December 1944

THE LIBERATORS IN ITALY had a distinctive name, usually assigned by the pilot, often after consultation with the crew, painted below and slightly to the front of the flight deck. Many had nose art, some of it quite good, much of it showing scantily dressed, buxom, and gorgeous girls. Frequently, however, the name was the pilot’s hometown or home state or the name of his mother or wife. When the pilot and crew completed their missions and went home, the men who inherited the aircraft would sometimes change the name, but that was generally considered to bring on bad luck.

McGovern and his crew came over by ship and were assigned planes on a “ready-to-go” basis, usually a different plane for almost each mission. Most of them already had a name and nose art. McGovern dubbed any plane he flew the Dakota Queen, but never painted it on the side. He picked the name to honor Eleanor. That way, he said, “we got double good luck - the name of the plane that was painted on there and a plane named for Eleanor.” He had a picture of her he would put on the console. The plane’s painted name might be Yo-Yo, or whatever, but to McGovern and his crew it was Dakota Queen.  The idea may have come from a saying popular with the pilots and crew at the airfield. Planes that had been in combat, as nearly all of them had, often had to be patched up by the ground crews. The B-24s that had been badly mauled and repaired and then pronounced ready to fly were called, derisively, “hangar queens.”1 The ground crews that did the repairs were superb. Sometimes they would work right through the night, if necessary, using a crane to put in a new engine, patching up the flak holes in the wings and fuselage, adjusting the instruments, loading in the bombs, fresh oxygen tanks, .50 caliber ammunition boxes, and other equipment. Each plane had its own ground crew. Most of the members had been mechanics before they joined the AAF. They loved the plane they worked on and watched for it as the group returned to base. It wasn’t only the pilot and crew they were concerned about; it was the plane as well. Those ground crews, in McGovern’s words, “were well trained and well motivated. We couldn’t have kept anything as complicated as a Liberator functioning very long without their superb attention.”2 Lt. Henry Burkle, in command of the ground crews, recalled that they would line up beside the runway “waiting for their airplane to come in and hoping that it came back and be there to meet the flight crew and ask them all about the flight in order to find out what maintenance had to be done.” Burkle had a crew chief for each plane. Each crew chief had three mechanics under him. “Then I had three flight chiefs, they were master sergeants, each with three flights under him.  Then I had a line chief, big old fellow from Campbell, Nebraska, named Al Haggaman. He was a dandy. A big old slow farm boy, but he was sincere and he knew his work, knew his business.” Each evening, Burkle would find out “how many airplanes the commanders wanted the next day. And about ten out of every ten days they wanted every airplane that could fly put in the air. It was always maximum effort. We didn’t know what sleep was.”3 B-24 pilot Vincent Fagan of the 450th Bomb Group recalled that he “never went out to the flight line at any hour of the day or night that the mechanics were not out there working. These mechanics were the most dedicated people I ever saw. They’d break down and cry when their plane went down. It always seemed they thought there was something else they could have done to make the plane more airworthy.”4 There was one other thing that many ground crews did. They could purchase six or seven bottles of beer a week, but there was no ice or refrigeration available.  So some of the crews would slip their beer aboard the B-24s just before they took off on a combat mission. Flying at 20,000 feet of elevation for six to eight hours would cool the beer. The crews were always anxious for the safe arrival of their planes to Cerignola. The pilots would accuse them of being more anxious to see that their beer was safe than that the pilot and his crew were.  Pilots were called aircraft commanders. Like captains on a ship, their word was law. The sergeants called McGovern “lieutenant” or “sir” whether on the ground or in the air. But not Rounds, who was called “Bill.” Lieutenants Rounds and Adams called their pilot “Mac,” but just as the enlisted men they knew perfectly well who was the captain. McGovern called everyone by his first name. On the assignment sheet, the crew was referred to by the pilot’s name; thus it would state, “McGovern’s going to be flying number three today.” Never “McGovern’s crew.”