The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (26 page)

“A second aid to good spirit is to refuse to let our bitches and troubles get us down.” He concluded that “our primary source of satisfaction comes from being true to ourselves and the best that is in us. The finest praise any man can receive is to be satisfied himself with what he has accomplished. . . . Combat may be rough, but it won’t be half as rough if we go through it in the right spirit. Let’s make it easy on ourselves!”18 February 12, 1945, was the first anniversary for the 455th Group flying out of Italy. On February 22, it flew its 200th mission. It came at the end of thirteen consecutive days of combat flying - theDakota Queen had gone out on five of them. Group commander Col. William Snowden led the wing over Linz. It was a common practice in the 455th for a major or a colonel, sometimes even a general, to fly the lead.Ole Tepee Time Gal flew her 100th mission over Linz. By early 1945, she plusGlamour Gal andBestwedo were the only B-24s left out of the original twenty-four.

Despite the losses, in its second 100 missions the 455th dropped 4,412 tons of bombs in 2,521 sorties. Bombing accuracy was improving. In the period from December 1944 through February 1945, the group greatly exceeded the average performance of the Fifteenth Air Force as a whole. But a total of forty-seven bombers had been lost, mostly to flak. Considering that the group put up sixty B-24s for its 101st mission, those losses were high.  Shortly after the 200th mission, the group had a party to celebrate. Italian laborers put up tents and bandstands. Entertainers were hired to perform. The airmen pitched in to do their specialities. There were shows of all types, contortionists, muscle acts, rifle ranges, ring games, and variety shows. Four different movies were shown in the wine cellar used for the mission briefing room. There was plenty of beer. It was a chance to relax, eagerly seized by these airmen far from home and living dangerous lives. For that day, at least, they could be the boys they were.

February was over. The 455th Group had flown twenty-six missions, seven aborted.

It had put 505 aircraft over the targets and dropped 840 tons of bombs. It lost

five B-24s that month and had forty-one men missing in action, one man killed in

action in a plane that got back to base, and sixteen severely wounded. The

history of the group comments,”With weather conditions as they were, it speaks

highly of the support given by the ground echelon as well as the effort put

forth by the crews. With better weather on the horizon, things would only get

better.”19

According to Francis Hosimer, “It was a standard procedure to fasten parachutes to the waist guns and throw them out after landing whenever your hydraulic fluid was gone.”

CHAPTER TEN - Missionsover Austria

March 1945

BUT THE APPROACHING END OF WINTER brought little improvement in the weather. In the first two weeks of March, the 455th flew thirteen missions, five of them aborted due to weather. On another three, the bombers went after alternate targets when the primary was socked in. Marshaling yards were generally the target; occasionally the bombers went after refineries. TheDakota Queen was part of the force on March 4, when the target was marshaling yards at Wiener Neustadt, Austria. On this mission, McGovern saw a B-24 flying on his wing “just peel off in flames. The plane took a hit right near the fuselage and the number three engine broke off. The plane just went into a spinning fall. Didn’t see any chutes.”1 On that mission, ball turret gunner Sgt. William McAfee, who had just turned twenty-one, got unplugged from his electric suit. McGovern called on the intercom to check on the crew and McAfee informed him that he had no heat. He told McAfee to come up to the cockpit because “you’ll freeze to death back there.” Hesitant to get into the cockpit, McAfee instead changed shoes with waist gunner Ashlock and radioman Higgins. “I’d just stick my foot in their shoes long enough to get it thawed out a little bit, then I’d give it back to them.” McGovern kept checking on him until assured that he was okay. In a 1999 interview, McAfee recalled the incident, then commented, “McGovern took good care of me. That was one thing he did. He was like an old mother. He was supposed to bring us back in one piece and he did.”

McGovern, at age twenty-two, was a year or more older than everyone on the crew

except Cooper and Valko. But he was responsible and he knew and had learned to

respond to that. As McAfee said, “We were much, much too young to even know

anything about what was going on or anything. We did what McGovern told us to do

and that’s all.”2 McGovern, in his autobiography, Grassroots, wrote: “The members

of my crew were boys when we entered combat. They emerged as serious men.” He felt that they, “like hundreds of others, were welded into a highly competent team by their common yearning to survive.”3 McGovern had his own special reason to survive. On March 5, Cooper wrote a letter home. “My new crew and I get along swell,” he said. “Mac is still sweating out a cable telling of a new son or daughter. Still sweating out his missions so’s to get home.”4 About this time, McGovern had a snapshot taken of himself standing outside his tent. C. W. Cooper sent a copy back to his fiancÈe. On the back of the picture, he wrote, “The best B-24 pilot in the world.” McGovern never would accept such a judgment. He knew there were better pilots than he in the 741st, starting with Lt. Charles Painter, and certainly in the 455th. Painter, McGovern said, was a “big guy. One thing I remember about those pilots is that most of them were big and had been athletes. I was one of the few skinny debaters who had never been an athlete.” Still, it was good to have the approval of one of the old men of the crew, especially when Cooper was a former infantry officer and now one of the top navigators in the Army Air Forces.

After the March 4 mission, McGovern stayed on the ground for nine days. There was little to do but wait, “and yet you had to be available to fly every day even though you didn’t get off the ground. You had a lot of time to think.” For one thing, he wondered why the Germans didn’t surrender. He knew they had been beaten, if only because “they did not have sufficient fuel to keep their fighter planes in the air.”

When you were on missions you had no time to think. “You’re so busy handling that plane and staying in formation and watching the fuel supply - making sure the gauges are not giving any trouble - that it really kept you occupied. You had to keep all four of those engines working, synchronized, proper oil pressure, temperature, and keeping that big bomber in formation at all times - you had about all you could handle. In a sense the pilot was insulated from the war. You had a perfect view of the flak - you could see the puffs out in front of you, the flashes of red and black. You could feel the plane shudder better than anyone else. So you knew there was a war going on but you had only an indirect relationship to what was being done by the bomber-you couldn’t see the target and you were 25,000 feet away from the action on the ground. There was the explosion of the flak shells all around you, but you had no weapon to shoot back with and you didn’t have the toggle switch. You didn’t have the navigator’s view of where you were going.”

Recalling his mission over Vienna on February 21, McGovern said that until then he had felt “a sort of nagging and anxiety on takeoffs and turbulent air and hoping that all the mechanics were working right. But on that day everything seemed to go smoothly - and it just dawned on me that I had largely overcome any fear that I had previously had about flying.”5 As Cooper had remarked, and as every crew member of theDakota Queen later testified, McGovern was a serious, mature officer. The responsibilities he carried on every mission - for that big, expensive plane, for getting it over the target tightly packed into the formation, for the lives of his crew - were much bigger and more serious than twenty-two-year-old men ever carry in civilian life. But there was a war on, and those were his responsibilities.  Lt. Cmdr. Edgar D. Hoagland, USNR, a PT boat skipper and later commander of a squadron of PT boats at an age when he should have been going to college, spoke for all pilots, infantry company and platoon leaders, and naval skippers when he wrote in his war memoir, “A destroyer of anxiety and fear is the fierce, overwhelming desire to take care of your men. The more responsibility you have in a combat situation, the easier it is to remain cool and resolute. . . . Fear is more than balanced out by the exhilaration of danger, which puts every sense on full alert and makes you feel supremely alive. Then, after conquering a dangerous situation, you are left fulfilled and confident beyond description.”6 Eleanor was due to have her baby in mid-March. McGovern wrote her, and she him, every day. But it took more than a week for the letters to be delivered.  On March 14, McGovern and his crew were awakened at 4:00 A.M. The stars were out. It promised to be a clear, bright day. After breakfast, they walked over to the briefing room and joined about 300 other airmen to sit on the planks laid across cinder blocks. The target that was marked this time was Vienna. The alternate target, also marked, was Wiener Neustadt. If Vienna was clear, the bombs should be dropped on an oil refinery. If it was not and Wiener Neustadt became the choice, the target was marshaling yards.  The weather officer took over. He described the likely conditions between Cerignola and Vienna and what to expect over the target. He said there could be a storm over the city or on the way to it, and the clouds might build too high for the formation to fly over them. If that proved to be the case, the alternate would be bombed. He thought the weather conditions over Wiener Neustadt might be better. He described the weather conditions to expect on the way home.  Another officer mounted the platform to tell the airmen what they were going after and why. He explained the need to hit the refineries or, if necessary, the marshaling yards. If it was Vienna, he told them to stay well away from St.  Steven’s Cathedral, the Opera House, the Palace and other historic buildings, and schools.* At Wiener Neustadt, the marshaling yards carried north-south rail traffic moving to Munich, Vienna, or elsewhere. Group commander Col. William Snowden would lead the mission, which was about the first piece of news that morning that pleased everyone. The last briefing was on how to form up.  At the hard stand, McGovern inspected his plane as his crew got in. Then he pulled himself up and climbed into the pilot’s seat. TheDakota Queen taxied, took off, began to climb and circle over the Adriatic, and after an hour of flying, having reached 20,000 feet, got into formation. There were forty-two B-24s, twenty-one from the 455th Bomb Group, twenty-one from the 454th. They flew as squadrons, seven planes in each, in a diamond formation. They set off for Vienna, still gaining altitude, to 25,000 feet.  The day was clear until the formation started to approach Vienna, but over the city the weather had built up into a storm and Colonel Snowden decided it was too dangerous to risk losing his bombers when he couldn’t see the target, which also added the additional hazard of possibly hitting the monuments in the city, or schools and hospitals. He began a slow, 180-degree turn toward the alternate.  That made every pilot and his crew following Snowden happy - Vienna, as usual, meant heavy and accurate flak, while there would be none at Wiener Neustadt.  There was some cloud cover at Wiener Neustadt but Snowden’s radar could pick up the marshaling yards. Everyone dropped their bombs right after he did, and the formation turned for home. It would be a milk run.  But in the middle of the turn, Sergeant Higgins called up to Lieutenant McGovern on the intercom. The last of the ten 500-pound bombs they were carrying had lodged in the bomb rack. McGovern thought about it for a minute. Landing theDakota Queen in that situation would be suicide. “Well look, we can’t land this way with a live bomb in the rack. Either you guys gotta get rid of the bomb or we’re going to have to bail out when we get back within reasonable distance of Cerignola. I’m not going to take this bomber down with a bomb in the rack.” The crew left the bomb bay doors open and Sergeant McAfee and Lieutenant Cooper went to work, trying to trigger the little steel catches on each end of the bomb, hoping to pry them open so the bomb would drop. McGovern remembered: “It was scary as hell. If the plane suddenly made a lunge when the 500-pound bomb dropped . . .”

McAfee and Cooper were doing their work standing on the cat-walk, less than a foot wide, hanging in the center of the bomb bay. McGovern looked behind him to see how they were doing, “but about all I could see was the top of their heads and their backs.”7 The danger was acute. McGovern had heard the story told by Sgt. Art Applin, a tail gunner on a B-24. Once after turning away from a mission over Munich, Applin had seen a Liberator on his wing. The bomb bay doors were open. As Applin related, “One of the crew was standing right at the end of the catwalk relieving himself out of the bomb bay and an 88 shell exploded below him and it cracked the cat-walk and he fell out. When he did, the heel of his foot got caught in this crack and I saw him dangling there and I called the pilot on the intercom.  I couldn’t communicate with the plane on the wing but our pilot could. I told him about the situation and he called the pilot on the other plane and his crew pulled the fellow in. Naturally he didn’t have his parachute on. He was lucky he made it that day.”8 As McAfee and Cooper labored, McGovern throttled back to slow down theDakota Queen and they began to lose altitude. “I didn’t want to drop a bomb in front of other airplanes,” he explained. “Also, I wanted to give McAfee and Cooper undivided time. I didn’t know how long it would take to get rid of the bomb.  Keep in mind that I had to know all this stuff to survive. Whereas the other guys, their feeling was, ‘George will take care of us.’” TheDakota Queen descended to 12,000 feet, several thousand feet below the formation, which was pulling ahead in any case. Then Cooper yelled something “and all of a sudden the plane jumped and I knew the bomb had been cut loose.” They were approaching the Austrian-Italian border. McGovern watched the bomb descend, “a luxury you didn’t have at 25,000 feet. It went down and hit right on a farm in that beautiful, green part of Austria. It was almost like a mushroom, a big, gigantic mushroom. It just withered the house, the barn, the chicken house, the water tank.Everything was just leveled. It couldn’t have come in more perfectly. If we had been trying to hit it we couldn’t have hit it as square.  You could see stuff flying through the air and a cloud of black smoke.”9 Sergeant Higgins watched the bomb descend. He commented, “It just blew that farm to smithereens. We didn’t mean to do that, we certainly didn’t try to do that.”10 McGovern glanced at his watch. It was high noon. He came from South Dakota. He knew what time farmers eat. “I got a sickening feeling. Here was this peaceful area. They thought they were safely out of the war zone. Nothing there, no city, no railyard, nothing. Just a peaceful farmyard. Had nothing to do with the war, just a family eating a noon meal. It made me sick to my stomach.”11 Navigator Lt. Roland Pepin had a similar experience. On a bombing run over Munich, the last bomb in his plane got stuck. “We were on our return, flying over the Alps. The crew chief and the bombardier were successful in releasing the bomb. I viewed it descending and watched in horror as it landed in the center of a small village and destroyed it. It was a Sunday, midmorning, and I could not help but feel the deepest remorse and shameful guilt for the people of the village. Following this mishap, I couldn’t sleep. I was in a stupor and couldn’t get these innocent people out of my mind. I was cracking up and didn’t know it. My pilot, Lieutenant Barnhill, ordered me to drink about half a bottle of whiskey. I passed out and slept for eighteen hours. Other members of the crew felt as I did. We were all getting jumpy and tired. The surgeon ordered us to take ten days off on the Isle of Capri.”12 After the bomb fell, McGovern closed the bomb bay doors and headed home. On the intercom, he and Cooper talked. McGovern asked, “What’s the highest elevation between here and where we are going?”