The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (21 page)

The concussion was stunning. The plane that dropped the bomb had its bomb bay doors open when the blast took place. The explosion came straight up and into the plane. The pilot, Lt. Vincent Isgrigg, lost control and slipped out of formation, narrowly missing the plane on his wing and plunging toward the earth.  Isgrigg punched the bailout button and some of the crew got out. But Isgrigg regained control and sent his co-pilot back to assess the damage. The co-pilot took one look at the broken hydraulic lines and bailed out himself. Isgrigg and his one remaining crew member, the engineer, somehow managed to nurse the airplane back across the Adriatic to the AAF airfield at Grottaglie and crash-landed. For that feat, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross.  Currier thought no one could have escaped from the plane that had disintegrated, but forty-one years later he discovered that two guys did get out. They were the tail gunner, Sgt. Robert Hansen, and a photographer who had come on the mission.  Hansen explained to Currier that the whole tail section of the B-24 broke off at the waist windows and began floating down like a leaf. The two men had time to jump. They were captured when they hit the ground and spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp.13 From Brux it was a long way back to Cerignola. The mission took eight hours, plus an hour to get into formation. When he turned for home, McGovern used the intercom to check on the crew. He recalled that each man responded with something like, “I’m here. Thank the good Lord!” Sgt. William McAfee was the ball turret gunner. “We never thought enough of him just sitting down there,” McGovern confessed. “Nothing to hang on to, hunched over, cramped.” But he was the one who was cheerful when McGovern asked how he was doing. McAfee was always upbeat, with a smile on his big red face. McAfee, who could barely move in the turret, had “nothing to do, no one to talk to, nothing.” And he could see more than anyone else, all of it. On clear days he would watch the bombs dropping until they hit. “It was awful,” he said, seeing the explosion and the fires. But he was eighteen years old, and in his words “not smart enough to be afraid.”14 Everyone on board theDakota Queen was exhausted emotionally. “You can’t go on indefinitely being terrified,” however, and the crew recovered somewhat.  McGovern helped. He had been “sweating blood,” but during the bomb run he did not have to think about morale or anything else; he worried about doing his job.  But, as he said, “the crew would sit back there and bite their fingernails.” If he could he would give them something to do so that “they felt caught up in the action and had less time to quiver in their boots.” For the gunners, there was nothing except to watch for enemy fighters, but there were none - only flak.  McGovern was also exhausted physically. “It just seemed to me that it was too much.” But the bomb run had been successful, the German transportation system disrupted. The men of the AAF took some satisfaction from that, hoping that what they had done would take some of the pressure off the Russians and help the Americans fighting the first day of the Battle of the Bulge.  On his way to the officers club after the debriefing, McGovern stopped by the enlisted men’s tent. He thought, I hardly knew they were along on the mission, but they knew it. He got “quite sad and emotional looking at them sitting on their bunks drinking a can of beer. I just had a real sense of compassion for them.” Valko was having a “terrible battle emotionally.” He was throwing back the beer and reaching for another can. He was drinking himself drunk. McGovern concluded that all of them, but most of all the gunners, “were entitled to every dollar they got in pay and every decoration they got and they were entitled to more praise than they got from me.”15 The officers club provided some relaxation. The pilots were young* - the average age was twenty-one or twenty-two - and had been through a gruesome experience.  Like almost any young men who had experienced what they had, they needed a chance to relax. Officers in the infantry, or on warships engaged in combat, seldom had the opportunity, but those in the AAF did. There was little, maybe even no, chickenshit on an airfield. No saluting. Casual dress - sweatshirts from their high school or college days. Nearly everyone answered to his first name, or nickname. This was not Gen. George Patton’s Third Army.  McGovern loved the club, not so much for the drinking opportunities as for the chance to sit in a real chair and do some reading and even more to have a serious conversation. The man he developed the closest relationship with was the flight surgeon, Dr. Harold Schuknecht.† “He was terrific,” McGovern recalled.  “If Hollywood was trying to design the most handsome Air Force officer they could, they would have copied him. He was as good-looking as Robert Taylor or Clark Gable.” He was smart and had a constant, slight smile. When McGovern entered the club, exhausted, “he was the best guy in the world you could talk to.” McGovern never got sick, never missed a mission, but had he done so he would have gone straight to Schuknecht for treatment. “He could turn you around better than any other doctor.” McGovern called him, as did everyone else, “Doc.” Doc took to McGovern as much as McGovern took to him. Partly, that was because Doc also came from South Dakota, near Sioux Falls. Mainly it was because their personalities were compatible. When McGovern came into the club, Doc would go right over to ask how things were going. “We’d sit there and talk,” McGovern recalled.

They would talk for hours. About Italy, about Germany, about the origins of the war, how it might have been averted, how well President Roosevelt was handling it, what the Russians were doing. “We talked about things you wouldn’t expect GIs to talk about.” As a consequence of the conversations, and as a result of the reading McGovern was doing in books he had brought along and from the AAF library at Cerignola, he made a decision: “If I survived the war I would become a history professor. I knew that I wanted to be a teacher and history was the field.”

Doc wanted to go on missions, and did, a number of times. He asked to go with McGovern, but was refused. The commanding officer decided he did not want one of his surgeons taking such risks and ordered him to cease and desist. For his part, McGovern thought Doc was crazy for wanting to go.16 Ball turret gunner Sgt. Henry Paris related that when his B-24 landed at Cerignola, all shot up, most of the crew managed to make their way through the hatch, but the cockpit began to flame. Ammunition was exploding, adding the danger of the gasoline tank blowing up. The pilot, Lieutenant Cook, had his hand pinned around the control wheel. His clothes caught fire. He jerked free his hand, but his feet were trapped. At this point Dr. Schuknecht, who had been waiting with an ambulance, climbed up to remove the pilot. The fuselage was enveloped in flames and fire was spurting out the waist windows and the cockpit.

Schuknecht grabbed Cook and yanked him out.17

In 1972, when McGovern was running for president and the far-right press charged that he had been a coward during World War II, Schuknecht - himself a Republican - told an inquiring reporter, “McGovern showed great skill and sensitivity and concern toward his crew. They felt safe with him. He instilled confidence.”18 McGovern was on the assignment sheet for the following morning, December 17. At the predawn briefing he learned the target was an oil refinery at Odertal, Germany. McGovern taxied out to the runway, called the tower, got his clearance, opened the throttles, and began speeding down the runway. Suddenly, just like that,bang. The right-hand wheel had blown.

“I had to make an almost instantaneous decision,” McGovern said, “whether to cut the throttles and try to get stopped before the end of the runway or whether to hold them wide open and pull that plane off the ground. I made one quick look and decided I couldn’t stop.”

He kept the throttles wide open and just did get up. “We had a full bomb load,” McGovern recalled. “We skimmed not just the treetops but the fence post tops.” He glanced at Rounds, whose “face was as white as that chair.” As for McGovern, “it certainly scared me more than any enemy fighters ever did.” The question became, abort or continue the mission? Whichever alternative was chosen, the plane would be landing on one wheel, or crash-landing with no wheels. McGovern called the tower to explain his predicament. The tower said, “Lieutenant, it’s up to you. You’re the pilot. We’re not going to tell you what to do . . . but there have been B-24s that landed on one wheel and it’s not going to be easy, but if you want to do it we’ll have the emergency vehicles out there.” Or, a third alternative, have the crew bail out and bring the plane in by himself. McGovern flew a couple of circles around the airfield to give himself time to decide.

McGovern thought, We can fly this mission just as well on one wheel as we can on two and we’ll get rid of the gasoline that way and we’ll get rid of the bombs over the target, which is what we’re supposed to do. He turned on the intercom and told the crew what he had decided and then added that anyone who wanted to bail out could do so right now. None did.

McGovern got his plane into formation. Catching up had been an effort, but there was a substitute navigator that day, a man from Wichita, Kansas, Lt. Marion Colvert. McGovern said flatly of him, “He was the best navigator I ever flew with.” He was an old man, twenty-seven years of age, a big guy who had played football at Kansas State. He had been Howard Surbeck’s navigator. He gave McGovern a course that worked.

The mission took seven hours, thirty minutes, not counting the hour to form up.  Flak was heavy but the Germans only shot down one B-24, while inflicting damage, not crippling, on many others. McGovern came through unhit.  Coming home was the time of worry. He was going to do what he had not done before, land a B-24 on one main wheel plus the nose wheel. He thought, I just can’t screw this up in front of Marion Colvert. Colvert was standing up on the flight deck between Rounds and McGovern.

Because McGovern had plenty of gas after the relatively short mission, the tower decided to have him circle the field and then land last. Now, McGovern thought, I have to land this plane with all these other pilots watching. The pilots were hovering around the runway. So, McGovern said, “We came down and I made the best landing I’d ever made in my life. I never made a landing like that before or since.”

He brought the airplane in “just barely floating.” He could hardly tell when the left wheel touched down. He advanced the throttles on the right side, cut them on the left side, “and that bomber went right straight down the runway. It never wavered.” As the plane lost airflow, the right wing settled down. McGovern had her slowed down enough by then that he just turned her off the runway.  Lieutenant Colvert said, “Lieutenant McGovern, that’s the best landing I have ever seen in a B-24.” McGovern said that was “a compliment I’ll take to my grave.” At the officers club that night, the other pilots cheered. “That particular incident elevated my status for good in that group,” McGovern recalled.19 In his diary, Rounds recorded that McGovern was recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross on that mission. For the 455th Bomb Group, the losses weighed heavily, but there was some pride in what had been accomplished.  Thirty-four B-24s dropped sixty-six tons of bombs on the refinery.20 Hearing praise from Lts. Charles Painter or Ed Soderstrom, both pilots in the 741st Squadron, was good for McGovern’s emotions. He thought Painter was the best of all the pilots; big and muscular, he was to McGovern “one of my heroes.” Another was Soderstrom, a slender guy about six foot one, “who did something that the rest of us didn’t do,” according to McGovern. He was given an assignment of going out at night, alone, and bombing carefully selected targets, such as a bridge. One bomber at night would be a surprise to the Germans, it was thought, and Soderstrom was the pilot for the job. So McGovern was glad to receive their praise.

Encounters in the club were not always pleasant. Once McGovern started talking to two fighter pilots. The two pilots got to talking about strafing two Italians fishing on a bridge. The pilots machine-gunned them and they had dropped into the water. “Did you see those I-ties drop,” one pilot enthused. “Yeah!” the other answered. He grinned and declared, “They won’t fish again.” That chilled McGovern. “My blood just ran cold. How could they do that to two innocent guys who were just fishing. . . . I was embarrassed. . . . They seemed to me like a disgrace to the country, disgrace to their humanity.” He thought that was what Hitler and his gang did.

Yet he was a bomber pilot. Almost certainly he was responsible for more civilian deaths than the two fighter pilots. But he was bombing Austrians, Germans, Germany’s allies, from high up, and couldn’t see the effects of the explosions, not at all like the pilots who had shot the Italian fishermen. He felt that as the casualties were Hitler’s followers he did not need to exercise his conscience about bombing them. In a sense he thought they needed it, because of what they had done throughout Europe. He wanted to show them, “You can’t get away with this kind of conduct.”

At the base, he had a lot of time to think. Sometimes he would go for days without flying because planes could not get off the ground. There was little, or even nothing, to do - no planned recreation, no physical training exercise, occasionally a softball game, depending on the rain - and yet he and his crew had to be there every day, available to fly.

After the Odertal mission, McGovern saw on the assignment sheet that he was flying again the next day, December 18. It turned out to be almost a milk run.  The target was in Germany, but weather forced the lead pilot to turn away and set off for the alternative target, the marshaling yards at Sopron, Hungary.  There was no flak, none at all. All planes returned to base safely.  Three consecutive missions surely required at least a day of rest, but that night on the assignment sheet there was McGovern’s name again, along with many others. At the briefing in the morning, McGovern noted that most of the pilots looked “like old men, with deep circles under the eyes.” He thought they were ready for a rest camp, or being sent home, not another mission. Instead, they were flying. The officer on the platform pulled the drawstring. The target was Munich, one of the two or three most heavily defended German cities.  One of the men in the audience gave out a sort of scream: “AHHHHHH!” For some that broke the tension and they managed to laugh. But McGovern looked at the pilot beside him. “I thought when he saw Munich on there that he was going to collapse.” The briefing officer assured the men about the importance of Munich, a major industrial site that had been bombed repeatedly but still needed more.  It had been raining all night. It still was. Off they went anyway, to get into their planes. McGovern could almost see some of the pilots thinking, This is the last one, we’ll never make it home.