The Bomber Boys (20 page)

Of course, bad weather was not the only thing that could force a bomber still fully loaded with bombs back to base. Mechanical problems were also common. On one mission, Art was the navigator for a B-17 when it lost oil pressure in one of its engines. Since they were not that far from their target, everyone hoped to finish the mission, but when it became apparent the aircraft could not keep up with the rest of the formation, the pilot reluctantly turned back.

Within minutes, the pilot was on the interphone requesting that Art find an alternative target where they could unload their bombs and get credit for the mission. Zagreb, Yugoslavia, was on the alternative list and pretty much on the route home. Art gave the pilot coordinates for Zagreb, and the lone bomber headed off for its new target on just three engines.

Since the crew had not been briefed for Zagreb, they did not know much about it, beyond the fact that it was occupied by the Germans. Art’s maps indicated a bridge spanning the Sava River. His pilot liked the idea, perhaps for no other reason than the challenge involved in a single heavy bomber trying to hit such a small target.

As they approached Zagreb, luck was with them—both good and bad luck. The weather around the city was beautifully clear.
The bridge stood out like a bull’s-eye as the B-17 started its bomb run. Art soon realized that his bomber also stood out like a bull’s-eye too. Zagreb, it turned out, was strongly defended with numerous antiaircraft batteries, and all of them were trying to train on a crippled B-17 that had appeared out of nowhere.

Now as black flak explosions with fiery red centers began to appear all around his bomber, Art felt foolish for having thought the war was
personal
on his first mission.
This
was personal! These German ground gunners were not putting up a wall of flak, hoping to hit any American bomber formation. These gunners were specifically trying to blast Art and his nine crewmates out of the sky.

It was the most concentrated flak Art would ever see, but somehow they flew through it completely untouched. As soon as the last bomb fell from the bay, the B-17’s pilot turned sharply away from the city. The first few bombs fell short of the bridge, producing harmless geysers in the river, but a few seconds later the Zagreb bridge was rocked with devastating explosions. Art’s crew had scored an improbable direct hit.

For the American bomb groups flying out of the air bases around Foggia, the Adriatic Sea was the pathway to their targets. After six missions, Art knew the route well. The formations flew northwest up the length of the Adriatic, with the backside of the Italian boot (the eastern coast of Italy) visible to their left. They crossed the Gulf of Venice into northern Italy, where the Germans still held on stubbornly; then they flew across the breathtaking Italian Alps into Austria. If the target was in Germany, the American bombers would usually make a turn over the Austrian Alps.

As Art saw it, this route had its advantages and a major disadvantage. The upside was that more than half of the U.S. bombers’ route was over water, which meant there was no threat of enemy antiaircraft fire. Also, there was little chance the depleted
Luftwaffe would risk venturing very far over the Adriatic, where American fighters ruled the skies and where a clear view of the eastern coast of Italy made navigation uncomplicated. The downside was the predictability of the bombers’ route. The Germans in Austria and northern Italy knew in advance the path of the American formations, and they positioned their antiaircraft batteries accordingly.

Beginning on December 21, Art got four days off from flying. He was bored by the second day. In Foggia, the Italians were not friendly to American aviators and soldiers. There was little to do on the air base but talk, play cards and drink gin. By the time Christmas Day arrived, he was not so disappointed when he got an early wake-up. He was very aggravated when an hour and a half into the mission the bombers were called back to base because of bad weather. He had by now flown twelve missions and half of those had been aborted, most due to weather conditions. After being credited with only six combat missions for a month’s worth of flying, Art was eager to get on with it.

The sky cleared on December 26 for the 301st to make a bomb run on an oil refinery in Blechhammer, Germany. The following day, the unit struck the marshaling yards in Linz, Austria. On December 28, it went back to bomb Regensburg again.

Art and the rest of the men of the 419th Bomb Squadron had flown three straight days of combat missions. They had been long and cold flights, each one lasting eight hours or more. After Regensburg, Art went to bed that evening expecting there was little chance of being called on to fly the next day. To his surprise, the duty sergeant woke him with the news before dawn. There was yet another surprise in store for the young navigator that morning—he was assigned to fly with a different crew.

Until December 29, Art had flown most of his missions with pilot Lieutenant Elliot Butts. This day he would be flying as the navigator for Lieutenant Lyle C. Pearson’s crew. Art knew Pearson,
but not well. The two men had run into one another at the Officers’ Club. In fact, Art had also met Pearson’s copilot, Sam Wheeler, and the bombardier, William Ferguson, at the club.

Art knew little about the officers, except that Pearson and Wheeler were married men and Ferguson was single. The pilot was from Minnesota. The copilot and bombardier both had Southern accents. Art seemed to remember that Wheeler was from Alabama and Ferguson came from Missouri. Though he had seen some of their faces around the base, Art had not really met any of the enlisted crewmen until the morning of December 29. He soon discovered that Pearson was also unacquainted with these airmen.

Lyle Pearson had grown up in the small town of Montevideo, Minnesota, the son of a mechanic. He enlisted in the Army in May 1942 at the age of twenty-one. When four months passed and Lyle had not been called to active duty, he and the pretty Katherine Fuller were married. The newlyweds enjoyed five blissful months together before Lyle’s orders arrived in February 1943.

By the summer of 1944 the young pilot had completed his training and was flying a new B-17 overseas. Trouble brushed Pearson and his crew before they could even reach the war in Italy. While taking off from a base in the Azores, Pearson’s bomber suffered a mechanical failure that prevented the aircraft from gaining sufficient altitude. The fuselage of the Fortress barely cleared an embankment at the end of the runway and the landing gear was sheared off completely, sending the B-17 skidding across an open field. Miraculously, every member of Pearson’s crew walked away uninjured. It was a rocky start for a young man who would go on to become one of the 419th Bomb Squadron’s most reliable pilots.

Pearson’s very first combat mission was a brutal lesson for the rookie pilot. For months, the bombers of the Fifteenth Air
Force had been attacking the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania, which supplied the German war machine with much of its fuel. Before Ploesti’s oil production was knocked out in August 1944, 223 American bombers and crews were shot from the sky. Pearson made the round-trip to Ploesti on July 31, through some of the most intense antiaircraft defenses of the war.

By December, Pearson had gained a reputation as a pilot who looked out for his men but one who was also determined to get the job done. During one mission, his aircraft had lost power in one of its engines while approaching the initial point of the bomb run. With reduced power, the bomber soon fell behind the rest of the formation, but Pearson refused to turn back. He took the lone Fortress over the target with only three working engines and dropped his bombs. After weaving through the flak area, Pearson and his crew flew the long and lonely route back to their base in Italy and landed safely. For this action, Lieutenant Lyle Pearson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In fact, many times Pearson had landed at Foggia, his B-17 riddled with flak holes (fifty-seven hits on one mission), but never had one of his airmen been injured. They loved and respected him for that.

Since individual crewmen would occasionally be assigned to fly with other crews, fate played a strange trick on Pearson and his boys. By December 29, eight of his crewmen had finished their required fifty missions. Unlike the Eighth Air Force, which required thirty-five combat missions of its airmen, the Fifteenth Air Force required fifty missions, but an airman was given credit for two missions on longer raids. Only Pearson and his bombardier, William “Jack” Ferguson, had one more mission to fly before they could go home.

Pearson and Ferguson were tent mates and close friends. When Ferguson was assigned to complete his rotation with a different
pilot and crew on December 28, he pulled strings to be reassigned to the December 29th mission instead. The bombardier was determined to finish up the war with his pal Lyle Pearson. Every bomber returned safely from the target on December 28.

Pearson was not all that edgy about his pickup crew. Although he had not previously flown with his new copilot, he knew Sam Wheeler had a good reputation around the base. His buddy Jack Ferguson would drop the bombs on target. Pearson knew and liked his new navigator. Art Frechette, with nine combat missions under his belt, could be trusted to find the way back home. When the day’s target was announced during the early-morning briefing, Pearson felt even better. Their target was the rail yards and workshops of Castelfranco, in northern Italy. They would not be flying into German or even Austrian airspace. There was no doubt there would be some flak, as there always was, but it should be light.

After his crew assembled at their bomber, Pearson took time to introduce the officers and then asked the enlisted crewmen to introduce themselves and say where they were from.

The flight engineer, Sergeant Farrell B. Haney, was a Texan. Radio operator Staff Sergeant Robert J. Halstein was from Meriden, Connecticut, not far from Art’s hometown of Groton. Staff Sergeant Charles A. Williams was the ball turret gunner; Panama City, Florida, was his home. Waist gunner, Sergeant Mitchell Vuyanovich came from Pennsylvania. The other waist gunner, Sergeant Charles T. Lyon, was from Iowa. The crew’s tail gunner was Sergeant Grant M. Dory; his hometown was Seattle.

Art thought they seemed like a good bunch of boys, but he surmised they were feeling the same way he was—as though he had been yanked away from his family. His new pilot and commander, Lyle Pearson, made things easier on everyone. They were all aware of his record of bringing his crews back unharmed.
Pearson was confident, even cheerful as he chatted with them before takeoff.

As Pearson was preparing to get his crew on board, a Jeep drove up with an officer in the passenger seat. Pearson smiled as he recognized his regular copilot, Lieutenant Harry Livers, who had come by to see his old friend off. The men talked briefly, shook hands and then as Livers climbed back into the Jeep, he yelled back to Pearson, “See you when you get back, Lyle!”

Pearson smiled again and waved goodbye to his friend:

“Harry, I’ve got it made!”

 

 

 

The weather was beautiful, with maximum visibility. There was still lots of chatter on the interphone as Pearson’s bomber left the Adriatic behind and entered the airspace of northern Italy. The boys were getting to know each other, so Pearson decided to let them talk until they reached the initial point. Seated at his navigator’s desk in the nose compartment, Art could see the magnificent Alps in the distance. The mountain range never failed to leave him in awe, but on this clear morning, the Alps were especially beautiful—their peaks a brilliant white under the morning sun, their valleys deep, green and welcoming.

Pearson’s aircraft was a B-17G, serial number 44-6652. She was in the deputy lead position, just to the left and rear of the lead aircraft. There were seven silver B-17s in the 419th Bomb Squadron diamond formation. Art notified Pearson when they reached the initial point. Seconds later, Art watched the lead bomber turn slowly, signaling the beginning of the bomb run. He began to store away his navigation instruments, in anticipation of encountering flak within five to ten minutes’ time.

“Flak! Nine o’clock!” the tail gunner, Grant Dory, yelled over the interphone. No sooner had he given the warning than an explosion shook the aircraft violently. Art knew instantly they
had been hit, but he still found it hard to believe. Reality sank in quickly when he heard Pearson order Ferguson, “Get rid of those bombs!”

Ferguson hit the salvo switch but the bombs would not release. The bomber was shaking and seemed out of control. Art scrambled up to the cockpit to see if he could help. He found Pearson and Wheeler fighting a losing battle to regain control of the aircraft. With the big
thud
that signaled the bomber had been hit, the flying controls had gone dead. The pilot knew what the problem was. The control cables, which ran the length of the airplane, had been severed by the flak explosion.

Art looked toward the bomb bay and saw nothing but flames and smoke. Wheeler climbed out of his seat and grabbed a fire extinguisher, but when he pressed the handle, it only dribbled out its contents uselessly. Art remembered the fire extinguisher in the nose compartment and he headed back down to retrieve it.

The bomber was already sliding into a flat spin by the time Pearson climbed out of the pilot’s seat. He hit the bail-out alarm and then snapped his parachute onto his chest harness. Looking back at the bomb bay he could see a wall of fire that reminded him of a flamethrower:
Fed by a fuel line,
the pilot reasoned. Smoke was rolling into the cockpit area. How many of his crew were still alive, he could not know—perhaps only Frechette and Wheeler, who was standing next to him. The bomber was spinning faster now. Pearson saw a view of the Alps flash across the cockpit windshield.
That’s where we’re going,
he thought.

On the other side of the bomb bay fire, Robert Halstein was forced out of his radio room by the thick smoke. He fastened his parachute onto his chest harness and headed for the rear of the bomber. Right waist gunner Charles Lyon saw the young radioman attach the chute, and it reminded him to do the same. He snapped the parachute onto his harness just in time.