The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (22 page)

McGovern was in the number three position for the 741st. He put on his earphones and heard the tower telling him to taxi. He pulled onto the taxi strip. The strip was slippery due to the mud and rain. McGovern listened for directions from Valko, standing in the top hatch, but none came. McGovern felt a slight tug on the right. Before he could correct the plane, its right wheel had slipped into the ditch beside the taxi strip. McGovern increased the power to the right engines, eased off on the left side, and tried to get the wheel to climb back onto the strip. Instead, it just dug deeper into the ditch. No matter what he tried, nothing worked.

Behind theDakota Queen there were four other B-24s, waiting for their chance to get to the runway and take off. But McGovern blocked them. He talked to the tower, explained the problem, and then heard an order to him and the other four pilots - scratch the mission. The others shut down their engines and got out of their planes. So did McGovern (whose bomber was pulled out by a tractor).  McGovern was chagrined. Those four pilots were close to their thirty-fifth mission, the Going Home Mission. He thought, he later said, that they were “just going to shoot my ass.” But instead they came over “and practically kissed me.” They couldn’t thank him enough. No Munich!

For McGovern, “that was the first time that it occurred to me that people had any motives other than just defeating the enemy. These guys wanted to survive.” At the officers club that evening, they talked. They didn’t blame McGovern, they said it was the engineer’s fault. But they did tell him that he was taking an unnecessary risk in gunning his engines, that he should never try to power his way out when stuck in mud. Beside the wear on the engines, they told him that his actions had caused a dangerous situation because of the possibility of fuel spilling on the ground and catching fire.

McGovern learned. But though the people who knew the best told him it wasn’t his fault, he never forgot the incident. He had wanted to go, to get another mission under his belt. “But I tied up the other planes so I didn’t have any feeling of exhilaration at all. I was embarrassed - my crew and I had screwed up in front of the whole squadron. I found it enormously embarrassing. It still pains me after all these years [more than a half century] to think about it.”21 That night, McGovern’s name was on the assignment sheet. In the morning, December 20, he learned that the target was the Skoda works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. It too was heavily defended because it was a principal manufacturer of arms for the Germans.

An hour away from the Skoda works,Dakota Queen ‘s number two engine (inboard on the left wing) quit. McGovern feathered the prop, that is, used a flight deck button to turn the propeller into a perpendicular position to keep it from windmilling and acting as a drag or brake on the plane. With only three engines functioning, McGovern had to struggle to keep up with the formation.  “Any time you lost an engine up there,” Rounds said, “there was no trouble back at base if you dropped out and returned. A lot of guys did it.” McGovern could have done it, but instead he told Rounds, “So we’re minus an engine. Let’s keep going.” They did. But after turning at the initial point and heading over Pilsen, when they were only thirty seconds or so away from the drop point, flak hit the plane.

In his diary, Rounds described what happened. “All at once No. 3 [engine] began throwing oil and smoking badly.” The engine lost oil pressure so rapidly that McGovern was unable to feather the propeller. It became a windmill, creating enormous drag and reducing the effective power of the plane to about one and a half engines. McGovern ordered the bombs dropped and turned away. But, Rounds wrote, “One minute later, she began vibrating fiercely. We tried to feather it again but it wouldn’t and just kept windmilling. We lost altitude rapidly and No. 3 burst into flame.” Radio operator Ken Higgins recalled that “oil streamed out of the runaway engine and flame was belching out of the thing. It looked real bad.”22 McGovern had read in the B-24 manual for pilots that in five minutes the flame would break through the wall and explode the gas tanks. He began descending rapidly and the increased speed put out the fire. But the prop continued to windmill. McGovern tried the feather button once more. No response. He tried again. Still nothing. “Prepare to bail out,” he called over the intercom. Waist gunner Tex Ashlock was ready to leave. “I sat with my legs dangling out the escape hatch,” he said, “waiting for the word to parachute out.”23 Neither Ashlock nor any other man in the plane had ever used a parachute. Or been trained on how to do it. McGovern had said to a veteran pilot at Mountain Home, Idaho, “Colonel, we’re about through with our training and none of us have had a parachute jump. Shouldn’t we be trained in that?” The colonel replied, “Son, let me tell you something - when you get into combat you don’t need any training on how to get out of that plane. What you need is good judgment on how long you can stay in. You’re going to want to get out if it’s on fire, if half the wing is broken off, if it’s in a spin. What you need is the discipline to stay with it as long as it’s safe. We don’t have to teach you when to jump. You’ll find a hole that a cat couldn’t jump through if you have to get out of that plane.”

McGovern came to agree. “There were lots of times I thought it’d be a lot safer to jump out,” he recalled.

On the flight deck, McGovern tried yet again to bring the prop under control. He pushed the button and this time it worked. “Resume your stations,” he ordered over the intercom. “We’re going to try to bring her home.” He looked at his map, however, and decided they would not get home. The airplane “just couldn’t go that far, it wouldn’t stay in the air that long.” The gas supply was low and the fuel was leaking. McGovern got on the intercom to his navigator, Sam Adams, to ask if Adams knew of any landing strips between where they were and Cerignola. “I’ll call you right back,” Adams replied. “The best bet is a little fighter strip on the isle of Vis out on the Adriatic,” Adams told him, “but it’s only got a 2,200-foot runway and we need 5,000 feet to land.  Do you think you can bring it in on a 2,200-foot runway?” Well, McGovern thought, that’s better than our being up here with two engines out and one windmilling. “How far is it?” he asked Adams.  On such and such a heading, Adams replied, “we can make it in less than an hour.”

TheDakota Queen was losing altitude. The alternative to Vis was to crash-land in the sea. That had no appeal. The B-24s were not built for crash-landing in the sea. Only about 25 percent of those who tried made it. The others broke up on impact, killing everyone. Besides, it was winter and that water was cold. “I didn’t think we’d survive,” McGovern explained later, “and bailing out didn’t appeal to me.”

He ordered everything loose thrown out of the plane to lighten it up. So most everything went - not the radio, but the machine guns, the oxygen tanks, all the ammunition, flak jackets, chart table, and more. That helped, some. McGovern said on the intercom that anyone who wanted to bail out could do so. None did.  Vis was a fifty-eight-square-mile mountainous island some forty miles off the Dalmatian coast. Marshal Tito’s partisans had taken it from the Italian army in September 1943, and the British RAF had built a runway there for their Spitfires. It was also Tito’s headquarters. A number of B-24s and B-17s had used it as an emergency strip. For the morale of the B-24 crews, knowing that Vis was there was important. “It was an unsinkable island in the Adriatic with a landing strip and medical attention,” said Ed Brendza, a technical representative for the Fifteenth Air Force sent to the island to work on the planes that landed there. “For them it was another chance at Mother Earth.”24 The island came into view. The approach required coming in over a mountain and dropping suddenly down to sea level. The number three engine caught fire, again.  McGovern cut back on the gasoline to make the final approach, which had the benefit of putting out the fire.

“Both of us were on the controls,” Rounds recalled. “I was helping Mac hold it.  The two good engines throbbed a little but they were being overtaxed. But when we saw that strip we weren’t worried.” Rounds raised the Vis tower by radio - its call sign was Sand Sail - and said that a B-24 with one engine afire and another dead was coming in for an emergency landing.  McGovern was worried. At the far end of the runway a mountain rose up and he could see “carcasses of half a dozen bombers beyond the field.” He figured he had only one shot at the thing. If he came in too high and tried to pull up, he doubted he could do it on two engines. If he failed to bring theDakota Queen in on the first pass, “we would have all had it.”

He brought the plane in as slow as he could without stalling. He couldn’t land short of the runway because of the mud. He had to hit it exactly. He told Rounds, “When you hear those wheels touch that runway get on those brakes just as hard as you can and I’ll do the same.” He sat it down on the far end so as to have all those 2,200 feet of runway.

McGovern and Rounds pressed the brakes in just as hard as possible. “They were on the brakes all the way down the strip,” waist gunner Ashlock recalled. The tires screeched and smoked. “We just kind of wheeled off at the very end of the runway, going pretty fast. We bogged down in the wet clay and stopped.” From where he sat, McGovern could see the mountain just ahead of him. A British foam truck was already spraying the smoldering engine.  The men piled out of the plane. Half of them threw themselves on the ground and kissed it. That was the only time McGovern ever saw them do that. McGovern and Rounds hugged each other.

McGovern shook hands with a man named Anton Sever, who had been on the ground giving signals to McGovern telling him to stay in the center of the runway.  McGovern embraced him and thanked him for his assistance. Then he noticed that Sever had on English overalls with RAF insignia on it, plus a cap with a red star. “What are you doing here?” McGovern asked.  “I’m a partisan squadron aircraft mechanic, Section B,” Sever answered.

“Good boy,” McGovern replied, shaking his hand once again.25

A truck picked them up. As they were driving to headquarters, another stricken B-24 came in to land. Ashlock watched. It “went right into the mountain and everyone was killed.”26 McGovern did not know that Tito was on the island and never got to meet him, but more than three decades later, President Jimmy Carter had a reception for Tito in the White House. McGovern, who was a senator at the time, was there. In his remarks, Tito expressed his appreciation for the American people and then added, “At least one of you, Senator McGovern, came to see me in World War II and now I’m returning the favor.”

At the time McGovern hoped the British could repair his plane and he could fly it out the next day, but the ground crew said no, this runway is not long enough. They added that every four-engine bomber that had come to Vis was still there, and would be forever. The next day Cerignola sent a DC-3 to pick up McGovern and his crew.27 Some months later, the AAF awarded McGovern the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions that day at Vis. The citation praised him for his “high degree of courage and piloting skill.”

McGovern got back to Cerignola on December 21. On Christmas afternoon, he saw his name on the assignment board. The target was a refinery in Oswiecim, eastern Poland. Twenty-six B-24s of the 455th Bomb Group dropped fifty tons of bombs.  Flak was intense and accurate. One B-24 was seen with a feathered engine heading toward an emergency landing field in Russia, then another was seen jettisoning equipment and heading east. A third bomber landed at Vis.28 On the way out, McGovern asked Rounds to fly the plane for a while. Rounds was so good at it that McGovern began increasing his time in control. The mission took the bombers very near Auschwitz. Later, McGovern wondered why the concentration camp had not been the target. Neither he nor anyone else at Cerignola knew much about Auschwitz, but by that stage of the war rumors circulated about the mass killing going on there.  President Roosevelt had been urged by Jewish leaders to bomb the place, but he refused. He said the United States had not built those bombers in order to hit concentration camps, that they were built for a strategic function. Besides, bombing Auschwitz would have killed many Jews as well as Germans. His attitude was that the best thing America could do for Europe’s Jews was to win the war sooner, that the quicker it was won the fewer Jews would be killed.  Over the next four days, weather prevented any missions. Thus did 1944 come to an end. In December, the 455th had flown a total of sixteen missions with 359 aircraft deployed over target. They had dropped a total of 650 tons of bombs.  The losses were fifteen aircraft, 111 crewmen reported missing in action, and thirty-two reported killed. It had not been a good month. The men at Cerignola looked forward to the new year, the one that they hoped would end the war.

So were the Germans shooting at them. Manfred Rommel, son of the field marshal, was an antiaircraft gunner at age fourteen. The others in his battery were about the same age. Rommel after the war became the mayor of Stuttgart, a post he held for many years. When I would bring in veterans to meet him in his office, he would always assure them, “We always missed.” That reassured them, but it wasn’t true.

† After the war, Dr. Schuknecht joined the Harvard faculty and became one of America’s leading ear specialists.

CHAPTER EIGHT - The Isle of Capri

“TONIGHT IS NEW YEAR’S EVE, “McGovern opened a letter to his co-pilot’s parents.  Their son had been hospitalized with pneumonia and McGovern wanted to reassure them. Lieutenant Rounds was recovering, McGovern wrote, then promised to “get him back to his usual top form in a few days.”

“We are experiencing our first Italian snowfall,” he noted. “I’m finding it pretty easy to get homesick tonight for those old snow-covered plains of Dakota.” He added, “We haven’t been doing a whole lot of flying lately” because of the weather. It “promises to be even worse.” Another promise: “We’re expecting to see you next spring, regardless of mud, rain, flak or what have you.”1 Although there had been that mission on the day after Christmas to Oswiecim, Poland, that the Dakota Queen had participated in, because of the weather on New Year’s Day there was no mission to fly. On New Year’s Eve and again on the first of January, 1945, there were parties in the officers and enlisted men’s clubs, where records were set for sales. The dispensaries had the fewest number of men on sick call for more than three months.