Learning to Fly in Combat
...from The Wild Blue (Chapter 6) by Stephen E. Ambrose
Learning to Fly in Combat
The AAF policy in the Fall of 1944 was 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 Captain 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 25 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 sub-zero 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 draw string. 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 antiaircraft 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 materiel 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 mummer their approval. The briefing would conclude with the group chaplain leading them in a prayer.
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 co-pilots, 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 pistols 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."
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 electric 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.
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 cat walk 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 clothes was always cumbersome, as the men waddled ponderously. They carried flak jackets, mandatory since Ploesti. The crew members had difficulty getting themselves into and 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."
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.
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:
"Booster pumps" — "On"
"Mixture" — "Auto rich"
"Props" — "Full high"
"Superchargers" — "Set"
"Half flaps" — "Set"
and so on.
Surbeck lined his plane up on the taxi strip, behind some planes and ahead of others — there were 28 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 mph. 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 tree-top 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.
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 at 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 from 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." 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.
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 the Snafu, 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 radio man, who came to the cockpit wearing a walkaround 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’ eyeball was scratched and Marsh’s blood was frozen on his hands."
When darkness descended, Blevin’s flew opposite the North Star. Finally Snafu 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."
Learning to Fly in Combat（2）
On November 17, McGovern flew his second mission as Surbeck’s co-pilot. The
target was marshaling yards in Gyor, 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."
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-24's 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.
When the bombs dropped the plane jumped a few feet. "Everything 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."
____________________
One didn’t always get out of the flak. On his first mission, October 7, 1944, B-24 pilot J.I. Merritt, in Liberty 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.
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.
________________
On his first mission, navigator Pepin of the 741st saw a lot of flak, saw some B-24's 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 home-bound 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-wracking flying, the mission was over."
________________________
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-24's 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."
__________________________
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-24's, 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-24's 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.
_____________________________
On November 18, McGovern was Surbeck’s co-pilot on another milk run. The target was the German airfield near Vicenza, Austria. The weather was fair and the bombing was visual. Over 50 per cent 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.
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 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.
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 officer’s club for a Coca-Cola or a beer. There he would listen to the veteran pilots talk and ask his own questions. It was shop talk. From almost every one of the discussions he would absorb information. The topics were the B-24's, the crews, the Germans. What rpm at what altitude? Why was this gauge or that instruments 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 on 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 of the attacks 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."
___________________________
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 ofthirty-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, TenHaken 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 haff, what he had called "Christmas tree tinsel" back home. Its purpose was to confuse German radar, which otherwise would lock onto 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 them 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-poof-poofs 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. 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.
Learning to Fly in Combat（3）
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 officer’s 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 onto 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 plan opened his 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. 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.
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."
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. 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 an He summed up what he had learned from observing Surbeck: "I heard through the ear phones 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."