The Bomber Boys (32 page)

The flying techniques for joining a bomber formation had changed very little throughout the war.
The Stork Club
was flying about thirty seconds behind one B-17 and thirty seconds ahead of another. As the bombers disappeared into the cloud cover, they began their circling ascent. Bob and Hydecker sat silently, peering out the Plexiglas nose. They could see nothing. Formation assembly was mostly a matter of trust—trusting that the other squadron pilots were flying the correct pattern and trusting your own airplane’s radio compass.

The B-17 pilot used the radio compass readings to guide his turns until his aircraft lifted above the clouds, where he could once again visually locate the other bombers in his squadron or group. At that point, it became the navigator’s responsibility to guide his pilot to the target.

Bob checked his watch—more than twenty-five minutes since takeoff.
We should be breaking into blue sky any minute now,
he thought
.
Bob had heard the veteran airmen talk about the thrilling feeling of rising above the clouds and seeing sunlight reflect off the wings of dozens of other bombers. Everyone on board
The Stork Club
was anticipating the glorious moment that would signal an end to blind flying.

As the final wisp of cloud vapor disappeared across the bomber’s nose, Bob gazed on the scene in amazement. Before them was endless, empty blue sky, as beautiful as any he had
ever seen. With the exception of
The Stork Club,
there was not an airplane to be seen.

Bob and Hydecker looked at each other, and then without speaking they scrambled to the nose compartment’s side windows. Bob could see nothing beyond the bomber’s right wing but sky. Hydecker shook his head. Nothing to the left either.

The interphone was strangely silent as the other members of the crew searched their sections of sky in disbelief. Finally the silence was broken by Mike Swana’s voice: “Charlie, can you see anybody back there?”

The tail gunner quickly reported back, “Not a thing, Mike.”

“Anybody else? Anybody see any planes?” Swana asked in a calm that belied his mounting concern. The interphone jumped alive with chatter as everyone reported all at once that they had nothing to report.

“Okay. Quiet down now,” Swana said firmly. Then to his navigator: “Bob, do you have any idea where we are?” Bob thought he just might; at least he felt he knew where they weren’t. Swana’s bomber should have been over the eastern English coast-line of the North Sea, but moments before, the clouds below
The Stork Club
had opened. Looking at the terrain thousands of feet below, Bob sensed they were flying in the wrong direction.

The navigator checked the airplane’s G-Box radar unit and his map before he keyed onto the interphone and informed Swana they were indeed headed the wrong way.

There was a short period of silence. Bob knew the pilot was considering his options. There were only two courses of action. He could turn
The Stork Club
around and try to catch the lost bomber formation before it reached enemy territory. If they could not locate the other bombers or if they could not catch up in time, it would mean flying into German airspace alone.

The second option was not really much of an option at all, not for Swana. Aborting the mission and returning to their base
was a humiliation the pilot was not about to put his crew or himself through. Even if the investigation proved, as he suspected, a faulty radio compass had led them drastically off course, the rookie crew would never live it down.

“Bob, we need to find the group. Can you give me a direction?”

“Mike, just turn around 180 degrees, and barrel-ass as fast as you can. I’ll get back to you with a course adjustment.”

“All right,” the pilot acknowledged. Almost immediately, Bob felt
The Stork Club’s
left wing dip as the bomber began a long turn back to the east.

Loaded with bombs, ammunition and a full crew, a B-17G model could still reach an impressive top speed of just over three hundred miles per hour. Swana pushed his Fortress to her limits. He estimated the rest of the bombers in the 385th Bomb Group would be cruising to the target at a speed somewhere below two hundred miles per hour.
The Stork Club
had a chance of closing the gap in time, if her young navigator could find the missing formation.

Like most rookie navigators, Bob had taken comfort in the knowledge that the navigator on board the group’s lead bomber would be guiding the rest of the B-17s to the target. Now, on his very first mission, Bob was being asked to recalculate his own bomber’s position and then plot an intercept course for a moving target—a challenging task for even a more experienced navigator.

His mom’s rosary beads swayed above his head as Bob worked over his charts. Once he was confident that he had the right coordinates, he gave Swana the course correction. Bob was not so confident that he neglected to say a silent prayer that he
was
right. After that, there was nothing to do but watch and wait. He and Hydecker sat together in the nose compartment, peering into the sky ahead, searching for any speck in the distance that might be a B-17.

Somewhere short of German airspace, someone on Swana’s bomber spotted a flight of aircraft. The gunners test-fired their weapons and prepared for the possibility that the mystery airplanes could possibly be Luftwaffe.

Swana soon reassured his crew: “That’s an American bomber group ahead of us,” he said. Hydecker slapped Bob on the back as they listened to the cheers of their crewmates over the interphone.

Swana knew that somewhere ahead, lost in the distant sky, was their own 550th Bomb Squadron and the rest of the 385th Bomb Group. He was also aware that he was burning precious fuel and straining
The Stork Club
’s engines by continuing to fly at pursuit speed. Under their present circumstances, one bomb group was as good as another—at least they would not have to fly over the target alone.

“We’re going to join up with this group in front of us,” the pilot announced to his men. The words had barely left Swana’s lips when Bob identified the group by the tail markings of its bombers.

“Mike, that’s the 100th Bomb Group!”

“Are you sure?” Swana asked.

“The Bloody 100th?” another crewmate wanted to know.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Bob said.

“Keep going, Mike!” urged another member of the crew. Quickly, everyone else chimed in. It was unanimous. Their first mission had started off on the wrong foot. Nobody wanted to compound their problems by joining the bomb group that had the worst reputation for bad luck in the entire Eighth Air Force. Swana was the aircraft commander and it was his decision to make. He was not superstitious by nature and did not intend to allow his crew to believe that his bomber command operated as some kind of democracy. Still, his gut told him to keep going.
The Stork Club
flew on past the 100th Bomb Group.

When his bomber finally caught up with the 385th Bomb Group, Swana cheerfully commended his navigator.

“That’s pretty good navigation, Bob.”

“Well, I figured we’d better find them,” Bob replied as if it were no big deal, and then he reached out and rubbed the rosary beads.

 

 

 

The jubilant atmosphere on board
The Stork Club
lasted until the bomb group began its run on the day’s target. There was flak, but the rookie airmen all knew their pilot could not take evasive action until the bombs were dropped. Time dragged by until everyone heard the words, “Bombs away!”

Swana began evasive flying immediately, and soon his Fortress had cleared the flak area. Her gunners scanned the sky for enemy fighters and were encouraged that the depleted Luftwaffe had remained invisible thus far. But their first combat mission, which had begun in such an unusual and dangerous way, was about to get even weirder.

It was the tail gunner Charles DuShane who made the incredible report. “Mike, there’s a B-17 firing at us!”

“What are you talking about, Charlie?” asked Swana.

“There’s a B-17 right behind us and they are firing at us.” DuShane sounded perfectly sane to Bob as he listened to the tail gunner’s seemingly illogical statement. If
The Stork Club
’s pilot had any doubts about his tail gunner’s report, they remained unspoken.

“Well, fire back at them,” Swana ordered, and DuShane did so.

Crewmen on other 385th bombers watched in bewilderment as the two B-17s engaged in a short gun battle. DuShane could not be certain if any of his bullets actually hit the other Fortress,
but he made it hot enough that the mystery bomber soon backed off and then disappeared.

Bob and his crewmates swapped speculations about the aggressive B-17 all the way back to Great Ashfield, where Swana landed his bomber safely. The pilot’s suspicion of an equipment failure was quickly confirmed by his ground crew mechanics—a faulty radio compass had led Swana off course at the beginning of the mission. The crew was also informed that Charles DuShane had not imagined the attack by another B-17 (something he knew all along). The mysterious Fortress had been captured by the Germans, repaired and then flown into the American bomber formation by Luftwaffe airmen. Bob felt this was an extremely underhanded tactic, but he also saw it as an indication of just how desperate the enemy had become. The end of the war was on the horizon.

 

 

 

The working relationship between a bomber’s navigator and bombardier was as intimate as the relationship between pilot and copilot. The navigator and bombardier spent hours together in the cramped nose compartment. During bomb runs, when flak bursts were shoving their B-17 around and shrapnel fragments were noisily glancing off the Plexiglas, the two airmen could see the fear on each other’s faces. They shared an understanding of the demands and pressures their combat assignments placed on them—one was responsible for getting his crew to the target and back to their home base; the other, with actually hitting the target. Their important and dangerous work was a little more tolerable if the two men became friends.

It was on his second mission that Bob realized what an inventive and entertaining crewmate Marvin Hydecker could be. There was an immediate bond due to common backgrounds. Hydecker
had grown up in New York City, just across the East River from Bob’s Brooklyn home. Off duty,
The Stork Club
’s bombardier was a cutup who enjoyed making his friends laugh. In fact, when Hydecker began some extensive redecorating just before takeoff, Bob at first thought his pal was just fooling around.

Bob arrived at his navigation station to find that Hydecker had smuggled five extra flak jackets on board, in addition to the two jackets already in the nose compartment. The bombardier said, “Hi, Bob,” but never looked up from his work, which seemed to be an attempt to carpet the floor with unauthorized flak jackets.

“Hi, Marv . . .” Bob stopped himself from asking the bombardier what he was up to. A gut feeling told Bob that it might prove convenient later if he could plead no involvement in Hydecker’s scheme. The five extra flak jackets would add from two hundred fifty to three hundred pounds of weight in the nose of the aircraft, the equivalent of carrying two additional crewmen.

It should be an interesting takeoff,
Bob thought.
On the other hand, if we’re able to get into the air with all the extra weight, it will be nice to have some flak protection under our butts.

As Mike Swana taxied
The Stork Club
onto the runway to begin his second mission as an aircraft commander, he was confident he could handle whatever the day might bring. His crew’s maiden flight had proven that strange things could happen on any mission—things that were not covered by the pilot training manual. A good pilot had to be prepared for the unexpected.

He pushed the throttle forward. The bomber seemed a little sluggish in reaching takeoff speed. Swana had to use most of the runway to get the Fortress airborne. He could not understand why he had to struggle with the flight controls. When he finally got the aircraft into a steady ascent, the pilot had a question for his bombardier and navigator: “What the hell is in the nose?”

Hydecker confessed immediately. Swana ordered the offending
flak jackets moved to the radio room, midship. Nothing else was said about the matter, at least until the mission was over, when Swana called Hydecker over for a private conversation.

Bob imagined that the pilot threatened the bombardier with dismissal from the crew if he ever pulled another risky stunt. Hydecker would not say what the pilot had actually told him, but from then on he went by the book on bombing missions. That did not mean he gave up his quest for something to increase the odds of survival. At the beginning of their third mission, Hydecker asked: “Bob, do you think your mother could send me a string of those rosary beads?”

 

 

 

By the third week of April 1945, Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s Russian army was hammering its way through the suburbs of Berlin. With the German capital and its military command structure doomed, the American and British air forces ended offensive combat operations in Europe. The airmen who had flown the Fortresses, Liberators, Lancasters, Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Lightnings, Spitfires and all the other Allied aircraft had destroyed Germany’s fuel supply, her once mighty Luftwaffe and many of her cities. There was simply nothing of importance left to bomb.

During these climactic days, one nation still suffered under German occupation. The Netherlands had been under the Germans’ harsh control since May 1940. In western Holland, an isolated German command now held on stubbornly, waiting for word from Berlin. Although posing no immediate military threat to the Allies, these German ground forces were a deadly curse on the Dutch people.

After nearly five years of occupation, the Dutch had not lost their will to resist the invaders. Holland’s underground forces blew up bridges and railroads. The Germans retaliated by destroying
dams and flooding much of the lowland country’s farm-land. Dutch workers went on strike. Railroad and seaport activity came to a halt. Food and fuel shortages and rationing soon followed. Then came the cruel winter of 1944.