To Kingdom Come (20 page)

The ground was rapidly getting closer when he used his hands to rip the canvas cover open, and its white silk innards escaped into the sky. He felt a surge of relief when the parachute blossomed above him.

Ted remained at the controls of
Patricia
, trying to keep it in the air long enough for the others to all get out. When Warren started down toward the forward emergency hatch, the catwalk between the flight deck and the nose compartment was a mass of flames.

No one could be alive in the compartment now. Groping across the deck in the smoky haze, he found the emergency lever and pulled it. The hatch dropped away from the plane.

Joe Schwartzkopf was staring up at
Patricia
as he slowly fell earthward. The ship was now in the grip of a flat spin, and he wondered if anyone else had made it out. Suddenly, he saw the forward escape hatch door come sailing past him. A few moments later, a man came out of the forward belly hatch headfirst.

Warren pulled the rip cord as soon as he was out of the plane. There was a tremendous jolt as it filled with air, and he immediately slowed down. For the first time, he realized how badly injured he was. Along with the burns to his face, long shreds of skin hung loose from his fingers and hands.

Still inside the cockpit, Ted knew he had only moments to get out. The heat was excruciating. Like Warren, he had already suffered burns to his face and hands. Fighting centrifugal force, it took all his athleticism and endurance to reach the open belly hatch from the cockpit in the spinning plane.

Olivier Mauchamp, a young French farmworker, was plowing a field at the edge of the Grange-l’Évêque near Montgueux when his horse suddenly took fright. He looked up to see an American bomber falling out of the sky. The plane was trailing fire and black smoke.

As he watched, an aviator dropped through an opening in the forward part of the plane. A few seconds later, the aviator’s white silk parachute opened like a gigantic umbrella, and he began to drift earthward.

Above the man in the parachute, the flaming bomber was skewing crazily as it came down, slowly closing the distance to the man who had just escaped it. Olivier watched as the bomber caught up with the parachutist, narrowly passing over him.

One of the plane’s propellers appeared to hook the shrouds of the parachute. A moment later, the air was gone out of it. Olivier could only watch with mounting horror as the bomber slammed into the ground, towing the aviator behind.

He grabbed his bicycle and rode straight to the scene of the crash. The plane was on fire when he reached it, and unexpended bullets were still going off. Ted Wilken was lying dead on the ground near the plane, his parachute still attached to the propeller root.

A mile away, Warren landed in an open field of hard-packed dirt. He was attempting to remove his parachute harness with his burnt fingers when he heard the roar of an approaching fighter plane, and looked up to see an Fw 190 diving toward him.

Pulling up at the last moment, Connie Mayer roared past him at a height of twenty-five feet. Warren could see his face before he disappeared into the distance a few moments later.

At first, he thought the pilot had been planning to machine-gun him and had run out of ammunition. Then, Warren wondered if he might have been performing some kind of chivalrous act after shooting them down.

After shredding the loose skin from his fingers, he was finally able to remove the parachute harness. Leaving the chute on the ground, he began running toward a wooded area that might hopefully provide temporary cover.

He had reached the edge of the thick undergrowth when he saw a man in a green uniform lumbering toward him. If it was a German soldier, Warren knew there was no point in trying to hide. He stood and waited.

When the man came closer, he saw that it was Joe Schwartzkopf.

With Joe leading the way for the wounded Warren, the two of them crept through a thicket of bramble bushes on their knees. Behind them, two trucks full of German soldiers arrived. The two men continued crawling deeper into the undergrowth until it completely closed in around them.

There were more than a dozen German soldiers, enough for them to fan out in a long line and begin to search methodically through the wooded area where the Americans had hidden themselves. At one point, a soldier came within a few feet of their hiding place, but the bushes were so thick he didn’t see them.

When the Germans had finally suspended their search and driven away, the two men sat up in their rabbit lair. Joe helped Warren remove his Mae West life jacket and his throat mike.

When Joe asked him about the fate of the rest of the crew, Warren said that he didn’t think anyone else had gotten out, telling him that Ted had remained at the controls in order to give the rest of the crew a chance to bail out.

It was hard for them to believe that Ted was gone. He had seemed so indestructible. Unashamed, Warren began to cry. When he looked up, the big man was crying, too.

Hard Landings

Normandy, France
303rd Bomb Group
Old Squaw
Second Lieutenant Bud Klint
1150

B
ud knew they weren’t going to make it.

Their fate had been ordained by the flak burst that ripped through the right wing of
Old Squaw
while they were making their third sightseeing trip around Stuttgart. The shrapnel holes in the right inboard feeder tank now meant there was no chance to reach England.

Heading away from Stuttgart at twenty-five thousand feet, they had been attacked by Fw 190s and ME-109s. Bob Hullar,
Old Squaw
’s pilot, took aggressive evasive action during the attacks. His superb flying probably prevented more serious damage to the plane, but the maneuvers ate up fuel at an even higher rate.

When their right inboard engine ran out of gas, the Fortress began lagging farther behind the bombers still left in the 303rd’s original formation. The navigator estimated they were nearly halfway across France.

Bob Hullar told the crew to begin jettisoning any superfluous equipment to lighten the plane. The machine gunners retained enough ammunition to defend the plane in the event of more fighter attacks. The rest of it went over along with clothing, spare radio parts, and other gear.

North of Paris, the left inboard engine suddenly lost power. With two engines out, they could only drone along while the machine gunners scanned every quadrant of the sky for enemy planes. The minutes passed with agonizing slowness. Bud found himself reliving everything that had happened over Stuttgart. There was no excuse for it. The new general had run them out of gas.

He was staring west into the sky ahead of them when a squadron of fighters materialized out of the distant haze. The planes all had inline engines. His fear that they were ME-109s turned to elation when he saw they were Spitfires.

Two of them moved into formation alongside
Old Squaw
and radioed their willingness to mother the damaged bomber home. The offer was gratefully accepted.

When the French coast appeared ahead of them in the distance, it gave some of the crew members hope that they might make it to Molesworth.

Bud knew better. They had been rapidly losing altitude and were now down to a few thousand feet. Bob Hullar ordered the crew to jettison the remainder of the ammunition, along with the machine guns.

Out over the channel, the gas gauges reached empty.

There was an important decision to make. Should they bail out while there was still time or attempt to ditch the plane in the sea? If they did ditch, the plane might break up in the crash. If they ditched too close to France, they might get picked up by a German patrol boat and spend the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.

The plane’s radio suddenly came alive with SOS messages from other B-17s.

“Mayday ... Mayday ... Mayday.”

A lot of the B-17s on the Stuttgart mission were obviously facing the same critical fuel situation, and they were now jamming the assigned radio frequency with distress calls. The crews reported their positions and compass headings so that the English rescue boats would be able to locate them after they went down.

The decision of whether to ditch or bail out was settled in
Old Squaw
when the radio operator discovered that his parachute had been mistakenly jettisoned by one of the waist gunners, along with some spare radio gear.

A few minutes later, their third engine ran out of gas.

Neither Bud Klint nor Bob Hullar had ever ditched in the sea before, much less landed on one engine. As they dropped below five hundred feet, Bud remembered being told that if the plane hit a wave broadside, it was like flying into a concrete wall. He looked down at the sea. It looked anything but calm. The water was gray and rough, with long angry swells.

The crew carried out the prescribed ditching procedures, and then assembled in the radio compartment. The top escape hatch had been removed and stowed in the tail compartment. From the copilot’s seat, Bud kept them informed on how soon they would be hitting the sea.

They were down to two hundred feet when the last engine died.

After more than six hours of continuous, ear-splitting noise, the plane fell eerily silent. Only the keening moan of the wind accompanied them as Bud feathered the last propeller and they glided down to the sea.

The Fortress was still making 80 miles an hour when it plowed into the top of a wave, shattering the Plexiglas nose and bringing
Old Squaw
to an abrupt stop. Seawater gushed into the open nose, surging straight through the forward compartment and up toward the flight deck.

With its gas tanks empty, the plane remained buoyant for a minute or two before it began to sink. The crew members crawled out of the top hatch of the radio compartment and out onto the fuselage. By the time the last man was through the opening, the water in the radio compartment was waist-deep.

Bud had climbed out onto the right wing to retrieve one of the plane’s two rubber life rafts. Each one held five men. After inflating his life jacket, he opened the small bay where the starboard raft was stored and pulled it out. The raft was supposed to automatically inflate, but its CO
₂
cartridge malfunctioned, and the raft was only partially full when he launched it in the water.

The sea was rough. Five-foot-high waves were breaking over the raft. When it got away from him, he had to jump into the sea to go after it. One of the crewmen, Pete Fullem, had fallen in the water and was rapidly tiring as he fought to keep seawater out of his lungs.

Bud was fighting the same swells, rising over the crest of each wave and then sliding fast down the trough behind it. When he saw Fullem drifting away, he swam after him, finally catching up and then slowly dragging him back to the raft. Norman Sampson, the ball turret gunner, thought it was one of the bravest things he had ever seen.

The men were in the rafts when
Old Squaw
’s tail section rose vertically up from the sea. Moments later, the ship slid down nose-first and disappeared under the roiling waves.

Unlike the many other Fortress crews that were ditching in the channel up and down the English coast, they were lucky. A rescue launch from Newhaven was patrolling the Beachy Head area where
Old Squaw
went down, and it arrived less than fifteen minutes later.

The entire crew was safely aboard by 1245. The captain of the rescue boat had orders to continue patrolling the same area for several more hours. While waiting for the rocking boat to head in to shore, Bud wondered how many planes in the 303rd group had made it home.

Molesworth, England
303rd Bomb Group
Satan’s Workshop
Brigadier General Robert Travis
1320

The ground crews were all at their concrete hardstands, nervously awaiting the familiar roar of the approaching Wright Cyclone engines that would signal the return of the group. According to the projected return time in the operational orders, the planes were already late.

The 303rd’s ground crews had sent off nineteen bombers in the maximum effort. Two of them had been forced to abort before reaching the French coast. Seventeen had gone on to the target.

They first appeared as tiny specks on the eastern horizon. When the specks in the traffic controllers’ binoculars slowly grew into Flying Fortresses, a siren began wailing, and ground personnel in crash trucks and ambulances rapidly took up stations along the perimeter tracks near the runways.

As the bombers approached the field, seventeen ground crews anxiously scanned the sky looking for their planes. The ground chiefs would only breathe a sigh of relief after their birds were back in their nests.

There were five Fortresses in the gangly formation. At first, they thought it might be a squadron, the first one to return. The bombers circled over the field and began to come in. Major Lew Lyle landed first, followed by two of the four squadron leaders, Captain George Stallings and Lieutenant Don Gamble.