To Kingdom Come (16 page)

Staring into his eyepiece, Jack Fawcett couldn’t believe it. If anything, the cloud cover was thicker than before. He continued to try to acquire the target until he was sure they had again passed over the Bosch Works, and then reported the news.

This time there was little hesitation on General Travis’s part. No one would ever accuse him of lack of determination.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s do it again.”

Major Lyle swung
Satan’s Workshop
into another banking turn to the left. The planes coming behind turned to follow him, all of them with their bomb bay doors still open.

Now that the flak batteries around Stuttgart appeared to be zoned in on the formation, Major Lyle began to take some evasive action. He put the bomber into a steep dive.

Bud Klint watched in amazement as
Satan’s Workshop
headed down. All the planes in the combat box attempted to follow it as the lead Fortress dropped several hundred feet before leveling off.

Close behind
Old Squaw
in the last position of the high squadron, Lieutenant David Shelhamer was piloting
S for Sugar
. On the Schweinfurt mission, he had led an element of coffin corner. This fiasco was even more horrendous, he thought. They had circled three times with their bomb bay doors open, and were now being forced to do acrobatics over the target.

After making a turn to the left,
Satan’s Workshop
banked into an extreme turn to the right. Shelhamer couldn’t see into the lead cockpit, but he was certain that General Travis had to be flying the plane. Major Lyle had never done anything like this before. How the hell could they all follow him through extreme evasion tactics and still stay in the combat box?

Shelhamer had seen enough. They had now been over the target nearly thirty minutes. He ordered his bombardier to make certain there were no B-17s below them and to then salvo their payload of ten five-hundred-pound bombs. The bombs went out a few moments later, and the plane was suddenly much easier to handle. No one knew where the bombs had gone.

When
Satan’s Workshop
began its fourth bomb run, Lieutenant Fawcett again took control of the plane and crouched over his bombsight. Through the dense mist, he thought he could see several oil tanks. He was turning the bomber onto a heading that would take them over the tanks when for some reason Major Lyle retook control of the plane.

Lieutenant Fawcett immediately turned on his cushioned bombardier’s stool to flip off the rack switches that would prevent an accidental release of their bomb load. Unfortunately, he had left the bombsight switch on. Before he could reach the rack switches, the bombsight toggled the bomb release, and his bombs began to fall.

It was the signal that the rest of the bombardiers had been waiting for after flying thirty minutes with their bomb bay doors open. Most of the planes following
Satan’s Workshop
dropped at the same point.

Lieutenant Fawcett was disconsolate. Sergeant Nordyke, the radio operator, had been looking through the open bomb bay after the release, and Fawcett asked him if he had seen where they went. Sergeant Nordyke couldn’t be sure, but he said it looked like a town of some kind.

In
Old Squaw
, Bud Klint was watching a straggler trying to keep up on the outer edge of the circling formation. They had gone around so many times that many of the groups were now mixed up together. There was a sudden yellow burst of fire underneath the straggler as an 88 exploded. It began spiraling downward.

“Fortress going,” someone called out on the intercom.

In one of his mission briefings, Bud and the other flight officers had been assured that just one flak burst in a thousand ever hit a Fortress, and that with the odds so greatly in their favor, it made no sense to take evasive action. It also made no sense that they would be required to circle so many times over a concentrated flak belt.

Bud found himself silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .”

Then it was
Old Squaw
’s turn
.
Bud never heard the burst that hit them, but shrapnel ripped through the right wing and severed a fuel line to the right inboard engine. From the copilot’s window, he could see precious gas seeping out along the lower edge of the wing.

In
Yankee Raider
, Jimmy Armstrong watched the planes ahead of him dropping their bombs, and ordered Wilbert Yee to get rid of theirs. He no longer cared if the bombs landed on the Bosch Works. At least they would fall on enemy territory, and then they could head for home.

What remained of the 384th’s formation turned onto a northwesterly bearing toward France. They still had six hundred miles to go to reach their base at Grafton Underwood.

A few minutes later, the right inboard engine on
Yankee Raider
began to falter. Jimmy knew right away what had happened. With all the strain on it, the engine’s supercharger had frozen up. He had no alternative but to throttle back. Down to three engines, he began losing ground to the rest of the group. His first opportunity to fly as an element leader had come to an end.

Jimmy’s wingman, Lieutenant Russ Faulkner in
Lucky Thirteen
, slowly moved past him to join the next echelon of the formation.
Lucky Thirteen
was peppered with flak holes, but all four engines were still operating. Jimmy hoped Faulkner knew that he had tried his best in leading the element.

From his position in the left waist, Reb Grant had no idea they had been flying in circles, but he knew they had been over the target a long time. Although the flak was no longer as intense, occasional bursts were still exploding in the sky around them.

He had watched as one of the Fortresses in the formation above them exploded in a sudden bright orange cloud, just like a clay pigeon on a skeet range. Parts of the shattered bomber, hatch covers, guns, and bodies had fallen past
Yankee Raider
.

Suddenly, Reb heard a sharp crack, as if someone had hurled a rock against the side of the ship next to his gun port. A moment later, he felt a stinging pain in his upper left arm. Numbness began to spread down past his elbow.

Jimmy Armstrong came on the intercom to say that a flak burst had hit the plane, and that it had ruptured one of the fuel tanks. Reb found that he could still move his fingers. With all the other problems, it didn’t seem important to report he had been hit, too.

At that moment, Lieutenant Carlin, the navigator, checked in on the intercom.

“Let’s go to Switzerland,” he said. “I can see the Alps from here.”

Jimmy had no intention of going to Switzerland. There was plenty of life left in the old crate, he thought. He remembered the fuel transfer valves that were mounted on the front bulkhead of the bomb bay.

“Go back to those transfer valves and see if you can salvage the rest of the gas from the punctured tank,” he told Rocky.

Silence resumed on the intercom as
Yankee Raider
slowly headed west in company with several other stragglers, all with different group markings, and all with feathered propellers or obvious flak damage that was slowing them down.

They were no longer part of the air armada. They were in the band of cripples.

Andy Andrews had also fallen farther and farther back in the bomber stream. Like most of the other bombers,
Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti
had been hit by flak numerous times, but the damage hadn’t been serious, and no one was wounded.

The plane was still carrying a full bomb load. Andy asked his bombardier, Bob Huisinga, if he could see anything through the clouds. Huisinga reported that he thought they were over a forest. Andy ordered him to jettison the bombs.

By then, he knew they weren’t going to get back to England. He wasn’t sure there was enough gasoline left in the plane to get back to the French coast. He discarded the idea of flying back at treetop level. The crew wouldn’t be able to parachute out that close to the ground.

There were two options left. One was to fly as far as possible into France and bail out with at least some hope of escaping. The second was to head for Switzerland, which was less than a hundred miles to the south. But that still seemed to him like quitting. He decided they would head for France and get as far as they could before bailing out.

His decision was punctuated by an urgent cry on the intercom. It was his tail gunner, Henry Hucker.

“Number-four engine is on fire,” he called out.

And the Sky Rained Heroes

Strasburg, Germany
388th Bomb Group
Gremlin Gus II
First Lieutenant Henry Dick
1010

L
ead bombardier Henry Dick sat hunched over his bombsight and wondered what could go wrong next. After being unable to find the primary target at Stuttgart, he had turned control of
Gremlin Gus II
back to Major Jarrendt, and the 388th had reconnected with the 96th Bomb Group southeast of Stuttgart.

Upon leaving the primary target, the 96th had swung around on a westerly heading that led to the secondary target, a complex of armament factories near Strasburg, Germany. The 388th and the five bomb groups behind it followed in staggered formation at twenty-three thousand feet.

The stratus clouds appeared to cover most of southern Germany, but Henry Dick continued using his bombsight’s telescope to try to identify ground features that would give him a clue to where they were.

Captain Thomas Hines, who was the lead bombardier of the 96th, was attempting to accomplish the same purpose. When his navigator indicated that he thought they were approaching Strasburg, Captain Hines fired a flare. The rest of the planes in the group opened their bomb bay doors.

The flak batteries at Strasburg began throwing up flak as they came over the area. Through a small break in the clouds, Hines spotted a topographical feature that looked familiar enough for him to set a course for the initial point of the bomb run. He hoped it would lead to the backup industrial target they had come to destroy.

In
Gremlin Gus II
, Henry Dick still couldn’t see anything through the clouds. The 388th was beneath and to the right of the 96th as they headed in. He assumed that Captain Hines had been lucky enough to have found a break in the clouds and was now locked on to the target.

Henry Dick looked up through the Plexiglas nose window and saw the lead plane of the 96th make a hard turn to the right. This was unusual. Once a formation was in the last seconds of a bomb run, it usually went straight down the alley with no evasive turns. Henry Dick wasn’t sure if they were still on the bomb run as the 96th group suddenly moved into a position directly above the 388th.

Major Jarrendt, seeing what was happening, made a sharp right turn to avoid a possible catastrophe. The 388th and all the groups following behind it turned with him, breaking up the formation.

As the lead pilots maneuvered to get back onto the bomb run, Henry Dick attempted to discern what Captain Hines was aiming at. Through a fleeting break in the clouds, he caught a glimpse of open terrain. He couldn’t see anything that approximated an industrial target.

Captain Hines released his bombs a few moments later, followed by the rest of his group. Henry Dick then dropped his bombs in the center of the 96th’s pattern. The groups coming behind them followed suit.

It was only as they were leaving the target area that the cloud cover broke long enough for Captain Hines to see what they had bombed. They hadn’t hit Strasburg. It was someplace surrounded by a forest. As he scribbled his mission notes, he wondered what town it might be.

Strasburg, Germany
388th Bomb Group
Slightly Dangerous II
Second Lieutenant Demetrios Karnezis
1020

The 388th had barely finished jettisoning their bombs when the Greek glanced down and saw a staffel of ME-109s coming up through the haze. As always, their rate of climb seemed astonishing.