The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (14 page)

Morale was so low that rumors were widespread in the AAF about pilots and crews landing in neutral Sweden or Switzerland, not because their bomber was so badly damaged that it could not return to base but just to get out of the war. The stories said the men who had thus opted for safety over risk were enjoying a comfortable sojourn while they were interned. Investigation revealed that such reports were almost wholly inaccurate. The bombers that landed in the neutral countries had indeed been so shot up that the pilots had no choice.25 That many airmen nevertheless believed the rumors was an indication of how low morale had sunk. This was the situation into which George McGovern and his crew, along with all the other replacements and reinforcements, were headed.  McGovern would be joining the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group in September 1944. The group also included the 740th, 742nd, and 743rd Squadrons. It was based at San Giovanni Field, near Cerignola, Italy, a bit south of Foggia. The 455th shared the base with the 454th Bomb Group, both being part of the 304th Bomb Wing. The 455th’s emblem was the “Vulgar Vulture.” Walt Disney Studies in Hollywood did the artwork. It was a vulture with a bomb in its talons. The emblem, often called a patch, was worn on the left breast of flight jackets by the crews. The group’s tail marking had a black-colored diamond shape on the upper half of both vertical stabilizers and yellow-painted lower stabilizers and rudders. The squadron symbols were on the upper rudders - a black rectangle for the 740th, a black four-leaf clover for the 741st, a black diagonal stripe for the 742nd, and a black horizontal stripe for the 743rd. The aircraft had their numbers painted on both sides of the rear part of the fuselage. These markings were necessary during rendezvous to insure that the plane joined the proper group formation.26 The 455th’s first commander was Col. Kenneth A. Cool. He was an experienced airman, with over sixteen years of flying experience. He had flown B-24s for the Eighth Air Force over Germany, then flown in North Africa and from the Libyan desert. His sense of humor, along with his competence, endeared him to his men.  So did his continual puffing on his pipe. His expression when a piece of information surprised him was, “Well, I’ll be dipped in gravy.” His group headquarters B-24 was namedBestwedo, after another of his common sayings. He often led the group into combat. When it was announced during premission briefings that Colonel Cool would lead the formation, whispers of approval could be heard from the combat crews.27 The 455th flew 139 missions before November 1944. May was its busiest month, with 21 missions. The group put 745 B-24s over targets, dropping over 1,630 tons of bombs. Losses were severe, but the group kept at it. At least enemy fighters were, by late August, no longer much of a threat, but accidents and even more German anti-aircraft batteries (usually 88s, sometimes including 105s) were more dangerous than ever.

Once at least, in April, the flak that hit one plane brought down two of the B-24s. Lt. Jerome Slater was the pilot of one of them, Lt. Michael Callen had the controls of the other. After completing a bomb run over Porto San Stefano, Italy, flying in a diamond formation, Callen had Slater’s B-24 and another bomber tucked up under each of his wings. Slater’s plane was hit by a flak burst on its number one engine. It severed the wing and his plane immediately went out of control. It rolled to the left as it flipped over on its back and struck Callen’s plane back to back. “Debris was flying everywhere,” reported the six-plane flight leader, Lt. Eugene Hudson. “Only one parachute was seen to open.” The twenty crewmen were listed as missing in action. Callen’s regular navigator, Lt. Guy Kuntz, was flying with Hudson that day. He wept all the way home after witnessing his crew lost.28 In August 1944, after the 455th’s one hundredth mission, Colonel Cool was transferred to 304th wing headquarters as operations officer. Lt. Col. William L. Snowden of Oakland, California, a graduate of the University of Texas, replaced him. Like Cool, Snowden was immensely popular.  McGovern would become part of a war that, after Rome was liberated on June 5 and after D-Day in Normandy on June 6, every participant in Italy - whether on the ground, at sea, or in the air - would call “the forgotten war.” For the men of the Fifteenth, what they resented most was the maximum publicity given to the Eighth Air Force. This was not only because it was bigger, and had more of the glamour bombers - the B-17s - but also because reporters preferred England to the Italian campaign. Movie star Jimmy Stewart flew as a squadron leader in a B-24 for the Eighth (and was generally regarded as an absolute top pilot). Clark Gable also flew with the Eighth, as did many youngsters soon to be famous, including reporters Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite. This led to even more publicity for the Eighth.

In the little less than a year and a half that the Fifteenth was in operation,

it had 3,544 B-24s and 1,407 B-17s. Of these, 1,756 B-24s and 624 B-17s were

shot down in combat.29

The total was up to thirty-five by this time.

CHAPTER FIVE - Cerignola, Italy

IN 1492 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS became the first Italian-born man to set foot in the New World. Over the 450 years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Italians

came to America in his wake. From 1943 to 1945, a million and more Americans, many from Italian-American families, others whose parents or grandparents or ancestors had been born elsewhere in Europe or in Asia or Africa, came to Italy.  They were mainly young men, overwhelmingly in the armed services of the United States. They came not to settle and start a new life, not to conquer, but to undertake an air offensive against Germany and its satellites, to drive the German occupiers from Italy, to liberate the country and allow it to choose its own government.

They came to the mainland right after the Italians had overthrown Benito Mussolini, but evidence of his two-decade rule was all about them. Italy was in ruins. Mussolini was no Hitler or Stalin, but he was nevertheless a disaster for North Africa and a catastrophe for Italy. He had turned a country of skilled artisans and expert farmers, full of so much life and spirit and art and fine food and wine as to be an object of envy to much of the rest of the world, into a country virtually without young men, a country that made almost nothing, a country on the verge of widespread starvation. He had gathered up nearly all the young men and forced them into his army, which he hoped against all reason would make Italy into a major power. By 1943 it was a country of old men, women, and children, almost all of them hungry, ill-clad, suffering medically and in nearly every other way. The American servicemen had grown up believing that Italy was poor, a place to escape from, but they had no idea until they arrived that Mussolini had made the country destitute.

What Mussolini had not done, the Germans did. In their retreat north after the Allied invasion of the mainland in September 1943, the Germans had taken with them damn near everything - virtually all food, wine, vehicles of every type whether horse-drawn or machine-powered or pushcart, artworks, whatever they could carry.

One afternoon in September 1944, George McGovern and his shipmates arrived in Naples harbor. From the deck they could see dozens of little boys lined up on the wharf, holding out their hands and yelling in broken English, “Babe Ruth,” or “Hershey Bars,” or “gum.” Just as the Americans began to reach into their pockets, the ship’s loudspeaker came alive and the captain said, “Now look, nobody throw anything to these children. These kids are starving and a couple of days ago an American ship came in here and the soldiers started throwing candy bars and the kids jumped into the water to get some and several of them drowned.  We don’t want to repeat that. We came to help these people, not to drown their kids. Don’t throw anything. I mean anything.” McGovern recalled them as “spindly-legged kids with pale faces,” and he admitted, “This was my first exposure to people on the edge of starvation.” Outside Naples that night, in an AAF base, he could hear “mothers scrounging around in the garbage cans looking for scraps of food that they could take home to their kids.”1 The American soldiers had come out of the Depression. Many of them had been deprived. But none of them had ever known anything like this. To the Italians, they were incredibly rich. Their uniforms were far better than those of the Italian army and much superior to those of the German army. They had what seemed to be unbelievable quantities of food, gasoline, weapons, trucks, jeeps, airplanes, tents, medical supplies, cameras, money, movies and projectors, and more.

The newly arrived Americans were discovering the vast difference between their country and others, even their closest ally, Great Britain. Lt. Roland Pepin, assigned as navigator to the same 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group as McGovern had been, also came to Italy by ship, but Pepin’s “rusty old tub” had deposited his crew in Tunis, where they transferred to a British luxury liner for the journey across the Mediterranean to Naples. That sounded nice, and it was - for the officers, not for the enlisted men. Pepin found that “the British have an entirely different approach than us to the separation of officers and enlisted men.” As an officer, he was in a stateroom with one other man “with all the luxury usually granted first-class passengers.” The enlisted men were in the bowels of the ship packed like sardines, sleeping in hammocks. Sanitary facilities for the enlisted “were a disgrace, causing a stench that was inhumane.”2 McGovern, Pepin, and the hundreds of other AAF reinforcements and replacements boarded trucks for the drive across Italy, almost straight east to the airfield some five miles outside Cerignola, about twenty miles southwest of Foggia.  Cerignola was reputed to have been a center for Mussolini’s Fascist party and had become a place of refuge for Italians fleeing the frequent Allied bombing of Foggia. Before the war it had been a town of 25,000 but by 1944 it contained about twice that, none of them young men. The name Cerignola meant land of cereals, and it was thus the origin of the word “Cheerios.” It grew hard wheat, the best in Italy and possibly the best in the world for making pasta. The Romans stored the wheat in the ground, silos in reverse. They covered the holes with wood that kept the water out when it rained. There are still 600 such storage places in and around Cerignola today, all with Roman numbers on them.  According to local people, this is the only place in the world where hard grain was preserved in this way. Mussolini, however, had sapped Cerignola’s resources for his army and in 1944 one could not tell that it once had been a major agriculture center for the Romans. Although it was generally flat and fertile, with plenty of rain, by 1944 almost nothing was cultivated there. The olive trees were neglected. The people were even worse off.  An AAF medical officer wrote a description: “The town was a reservoir of malaria, venereal disease and dysentery with flies and mosquitoes to insure spread. The streets were filled with pot-bellied bambinos openly defecating in emulation of their elders because there was no sewer system or toilets. They ate food when they could get it on the black market obtained from fly-infested fruit stands and vermin-filled butcher shops where rotten meat was the rule. There were no medicines, the death rate among children was appalling, the splenic index was 40 per cent and malaria was a children’s disease - all the adults had it long since. Avitaminosis, tuberculosis, and frank starvation were everywhere.  The only music to be heard was the sound of a passing funeral, and that band had a full-time job.”3 Cerignola was an ancient city. On June 29, 1863, its modern cathedral had its first stone placed as the American Civil War was being fought, even as Robert E.  Lee’s army was marching into Pennsylvania for what would be the battle of Gettysburg. The cathedral’s dome stood out. Pilots could see it from ten miles away. “Many times I was reassured that I was on course when that dome loomed up ahead of us,” McGovern recalled. It is still there in the twenty-first century, upgraded and active.4 Nearby were the ancient ruins of Cannae, site of one of the most famous battles ever fought. In 216 B.C. Hannibal of Carthage set up his base at Cerignola, because of the grain stored there. Eleven miles away, at Cannae, Hannibal’s force encircled Roman troops that outnumbered his army by two to one and, in a single afternoon, destroyed them. Most of the Americans had never seen a building as much as a hundred years old nor a battlefield that went back as far as the mid- eighteenth century, much less two millennia. One AAF pilot of the 456th Bomb Group, Lt. Robert S. Capps, was so intrigued by Cannae that he visited the site and later wrote a biography of Hannibal.5 When the Germans retreated and the British Eighth Army swept past, the people of Cerignola hoped they were out of the war. They were not. In January 1944, when the AAF arrived to transform the area around Cerignola into a major airfield, an incredible storm of activity began. Massive numbers of ground support vehicles and huge amounts of matÈriel arrived. There were more than 2,000 young men at the base from the 455th and the 456th Bomb Groups. Army olive-drab tent cities sprang up among the olive groves, along with massive amounts of ground support equipment, fuel, bombs, ammunition, food, medicines, and other supplies, which continued to arrive daily. The people of Cerignola began to learn about the way Americans made war. They had never seen anything to match it.6 Lt. Colonel Horace W. Lanford, twenty-five years old, was the first commander of the 741st Bomb Squadron.* He arrived in Cerignola early in 1944. At that time the town was only sixty miles south of the front lines. The airfield, bombed by the Fifteenth Air Force in 1943 and then abandoned by the Germans, was in poor condition. The group had sixty-four B-24s; Lanford had flown in with them. There were no hard stands (parking ramps), so the group had to line up the bombers either wingtip to wingtip or nose to tail on what little runway there was.  Still, the pilots managed to take off and land. On their early missions, to help morale on the stalemated beachhead at Anzio on the western coast of Italy, the Cerignola-based bombers formed up with other groups. The B-24s and B-17s flew directly over the beachhead to let the American infantry see their awesome power. Lanford remembered it as “an exciting, unforgettable sight.” The bombers stretched “as far as you could see in front and as far as you could see in back.”7 To provide adequate space and runways for the B-24s and B-17s, the Americans brought in bulldozers. They leveled what had once been wheat fields. Engineers laid down steel matting for the 4,800-foot runway, and made taxiways and hard stands. They did not bother to make hangars - all maintenance, repairs, and other work on the bombers was done in the open, from the first and until the end of the war.