To Kingdom Come (17 page)

Like a school of darting fish, the fighters swept past the slowermoving bombers, all of them keeping out of machine-gun range. They were ME-109s. He knew what would happen next. The fighters would make their base leg turn a few miles ahead, and turn back to hit them head-on.

The frontal attacks resumed with deadly ferocity.

In one of the first waves, three ME-109s came in together at the lead squadron, cannons blasting. The Greek’s bombardier, Dick Loveless, fired a solid burst at one of them, and it blew up.

As they waited for the next pass, the Greek looked up at the plane ahead of him in the first element of the formation. It was
Shedonwanna?,
flown by Earl Melville. He saw a spurt of yellow flame blossom on the outer edge of its right wing. One of the fighters had done some damage.

“Mel . . . your number four’s on fire,” the Greek called out to him on the radio.

Earl was one of his good friends in the squadron. There wasn’t time to get to know too many of the pilots. They came and went quickly, but Earl Melville had made it through the toughest raids, including Hannover, Kassel, and Regensburg.

He had that kind of “aw shucks” Jimmy Stewart personality, and it was real. He was always trying to help some other guy, particularly if he was having a hard time with combat. When the 388th had landed in Algeria at the end of the Regensburg mission, Earl had even befriended two Arab boys who begged him to take them back to England.

So far,
Shedonwanna?
was keeping up with the rest of the formation in spite of the engine fire. The Greek radioed him again, but Earl didn’t respond. Inside his stricken Fortress, it was chaos.

Cannon rounds from the enemy fighter had not only set his outboard engine on fire but had shattered the nose compartment, setting off a second fire there. The nose gun was still functional, but the bombardier had bailed out without waiting for orders.

Earl Melville asked the radio operator, Sergeant Frank Aldenhoevel, to come up to help put out the fire and to man the nose gun. Aldenhoevel was in the midst of extinguishing the fire when the next wave of fighters came through, blowing off his foot and wrecking many of the ship’s cockpit instruments. Trailing flame and smoke, Earl banked away from the rest of the squadron, and headed down.

Shedonwanna?
quickly absorbed two more attacks. In one pass, the tail section was destroyed by a cannon round, killing Walter Creamer, the tail gunner. Knowing his plane was doomed, Earl ordered everyone to bail out, remaining at the controls long enough to give them a chance before the plane went into a spin.

The navigator tied a tourniquet around the thigh of Sergeant Aldenhoevel, pulled the rip cord of his parachute, and pushed him out the forward escape hatch. As he dropped through the sky, his body was rammed by one of the enemy fighters.

Earl Melville had waited too long. When the plane went into an uncontrollable spin, centrifugal force kept him pinned in the cockpit. He rode down in the burning Fortress.

The fighter attacks kept coming in regular waves of three or four as the Luftwaffe pilots vigorously attempted to break up the 388th’s formation.

“Beecham’s gone,” said the Greek’s copilot, Jack George, over the deafening racket of the machine guns. Bill Beecham had been flying alongside them on the right in
Impatient Virgin.

Beecham was another good friend, and he had already seen enough combat action to last a lifetime. Over Hannover, he had been wounded when a 20-millimeter cannon round slammed into his cockpit. While his copilot was attempting to aid him, their plane had collided with the Fortress above them, shearing off the vertical fin of
Impatient Virgin
’s tail section. Beecham couldn’t bail out because his parachute had been shredded by the cannon shell. It was a miracle that they made it back.

Now he was gone, too. The Greek moved up into Beecham’s number-two slot behind Roy Mohr, Jr., in
Shack Up
as the German fighters continued their all-out assault on the formation.

The gunners in
Slightly Dangerous II
were almost out of ammunition. One by one they reported in as their belts ran out, the top turret gunner, the bombardier, and the navigator. How were they going to make it across France? the Greek wondered.

Up ahead, a cannon round suddenly exploded on
Shack Up
’s right wing, opening up an eleven-foot hole and setting the inboard engine on fire. Another round from a fighter attacking from the side killed the ball turret gunner and wounded both waist gunners. As the plane lost power and began to fall away, Roy Mohr ordered everyone to bail out. Like Earl Melville, he and his copilot were trapped in the cockpit as the plane plunged to earth.

The Greek moved up to take Roy Mohr’s position behind Ralph Jarrendt in the group’s lead plane. Between attacks, he glanced down through the side window. The 388th’s low squadron wasn’t there anymore.

The Luftwaffe pilots had succeeded in breaking up the lead combat box.

The low squadron, or what was left of it, was now on its own. After the destruction of
Silver Dollar
and
Sky Shy,
only four bombers remained in the ragged formation. With each loss, one-sixth of the original firepower from the bombers’ massed machine guns went with it.

Lew Miller, who had been leading the second element of the low squadron, was shot down next. He was halfway through his twenty-five-mission combat tour. Lew was from Colorado Springs and loved the high country.

The plane had absorbed several direct hits in the frontal attacks. Everyone up front, including the copilot, navigator, and bombardier, were dead or dying. Four chutes emerged from the back of the plane as it went into a steep dive. Lew would never see the high country again.

The last three Fortresses in the low squadron,
Lone Wolf, Patricia
, and
In God We Trust,
were still holding together when
In God We Trust
began falling away. After losing an engine, Dick Cunningham’s bomber became easy prey for the swarming fighters.

In the top turret of
Patricia
, Joe Schwartzkopf was firing at a fighter coming in from one o’clock high. After it passed below them, he swung the turret around and saw that Cunningham’s plane was missing. He reported the news to Ted Wilken.

Al Kramer, the lanky, easygoing pilot from Kew Gardens, New York, had led the low squadron all the way across France and Germany. Since leaving Strasburg,
Lone Wolf
had sustained heavy damage from both machine-gun and cannon rounds.

They had just crossed into French airspace when one of the enemy fighters delivered the coup de grâce, shooting out his cockpit instruments and setting the nose compartment on fire. While desperately trying to keep the Fortress from going into a flat spin, Kramer ordered his crew to bail out.

Warren Laws saw
Lone Wolf
plunge over into a steep dive. Several men emerged from the hatches of the plane and immediately pulled the rip cords of their parachutes. As the crew members slowly descended earthward, one of the ME-109 pilots flew toward the parachutes, firing his machine guns at the descending men.

Patricia
was the last plane left in the squadron.

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Stuttgart, Germany
306th Bomb Group
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Andy Andrews
1030

“
N
umber-four engine is on fire,” tail gunner Henry Hucker had shouted out on the intercom, and Andy looked past his copilot, Keith Rich, to gauge the extent of the new damage.

Billowing clouds of black smoke were pouring out of the cowl flaps. The engine had probably been hit by flak at some point. Whatever the cause, it was now overheating and he had no alternative but to throttle back on it.

The last Fortresses in the long bomber train had already disappeared in the distance.
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was alone in the sky over Germany, a two-engine cripple.

His original plan had been to get as far into France as possible, but after circling Stuttgart three times at full manifold pressure and maximum rpms, Rich was no longer sure they had enough fuel to make it to France. Andy didn’t want to go down over Germany.

He made his decision, telling the crew on the intercom that he was heading for Switzerland while they still had a chance to get there. He asked the navigator, Gordon Bowers, to give him his best compass bearing, and turned
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south.

“Fighters . . . twelve o’clock high!” called out Bob Huisinga from the nose compartment.

There were four of them, all Fw 190s, heading northwest to intercept the retreating bomber train. They reminded Andy of feral birds, as impersonal as eagles searching for prey. He knew how tempting a target
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must be with one propeller feathered and another engine trailing thick clouds of black smoke.

They came in one by one, rolling over with their bellies up to fire at the stricken bomber. Andy could see the tracers from the first Fw 190’s guns arcing toward them. One round hit the propeller of the left outboard engine, but the engine continued running true as the fighter disappeared below them.

Andy remembered a poster that someone had once put up in the 306th’s officers’ club back at Thurleigh. It was designed to improve the morale of the pilots after several missions with heavy losses. The poster showed a ruggedly handsome actor uniformed as a B-17 pilot smiling into the camera. Below him were the words “Who’s afraid of the new Focke-Wulf?”

One of the pilots in the 306th had taped a piece of paper to the bottom of the poster with the words “Sign here.” Every flight officer in the group at the time had signed, including the group commander.

The second Fw 190 came at them using the same frontal approach. Again there was a burst of machine-gun fire and 20-millimeter cannon rounds, but this one failed to score a hit. The third and fourth fighters followed him in. Their aim was better. Several rounds hit home in the guts of the instrument panel, shattering several of the gauges.

If the fighters came back to play with them again, Andy knew it was the end of the line. Another hit to one of the remaining engines, and they were going down. But as the seconds turned into minutes, none of the four came back.

Maybe they were inexperienced pilots, Andy thought. Or possibly saving their ammunition for the bomber train up ahead. Whatever the reason, he was grateful for the reprieve.

To save gasoline, he put the plane into a power glide, and they began shedding altitude. When they arrived over the German city of Friedrichshafen at an altitude of ten thousand feet, its Luftwaffe antiaircraft batteries began hurling up a new barrage of shells.

This time, the welcome was focused solely on
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. Again and again, the deadly black puffs exploded around them and the plane was buffeted upward.

Once more they made it through a concentrated flak storm.

As they passed over Friedrichshafen, Andy saw a deep blue lake stretching out to the west and south of it. He thought it might be Lake Constance. If so, part of it had to lie in Switzerland. But which part? From grade school geography, he seemed to recall that the most level part of Switzerland was in the northwestern part of the country.

He could see the gleaming snow-covered Alps looming up in the distance to their south, and called Gordon Bowers over the intercom to tell him that he thought they should turn right on a westerly heading.

Although there were no maps of Switzerland aboard the plane, Bowers was carrying an escape kit in the pocket of his flight suit. Along with a small pocketknife, a compass, and a bar of concentrated chocolate, it included a folded handkerchief that had a map of Europe printed on it.

Switzerland made up only a tiny section of the map, but as Bowers studied it, he became convinced that if they turned right over Lake Constance, they would end up over Germany again. After listening to his conclusions, Andy continued flying south.

As
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approached the foothills of the alpine range, he saw that they were going to have very little clearance over the tops of the peaks. Andy ordered the two waist gunners to lighten the plane by jettisoning all the machine guns and remaining ammunition into one of the snow-choked canyons. He told Bob Huisinga to destroy their Norden bombsight.

With a torrent of black smoke still streaming from the right outboard engine, the crew became nervous that they wouldn’t make it over the high peaks. Vernon Scott, the radio operator, called Andy to ask if it would be all right for the crew to bail out.

“You guys could get killed doing that,” he told them, immediately realizing the absurdity of his words after everything they had already come through. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it.”

After clearing the alpine divide, they emerged over a broad grassy plain. In the distance, Andy could see a control tower and the intersecting runways of an air base. Soon, he could see planes parked on the aprons. From the nose compartment, Bob Huisinga scanned the base through his binoculars.