Mosquito: Menacing the Reich: Combat Action in the Twin-engine Wooden Wonder of World War II (38 page)

On 7 August a 654th Squadron Mosquito flown by 1st Lieutenant Walter W. Thompson and 2nd Lieutenant Carl C. Edgar failed to return from an H
2
X (Mickey) photography mission to Salzbergen, Germany. Two weeks later, on 19 August a 654th Squadron Mosquito with pilot, 1st Lieutenant Ray L. Musgrave and navigator, 1st Lieutenant Harold F. Fordham took off shortly after 23.00 hours. Their mission was an H
2
X (Mickey) to photograph a radar approach to Bremen from an initial point about 20 miles north-north-east of Bremen. The aircraft failed to return, as Fordham explains:

After becoming airborne we climbed for altitude over the North Sea. We entered Germany near the mouth of the Elbe River and then cut back south and west toward Bremen. From the initial point we began a series of H
2
X photos toward a military industrial target. Shortly before I completed the series of photographs, however, sudden and erratic movements seized the aircraft. Erratic movements spoil approach photos and I immediately called the pilot and asked what was happening. He replied, “I don’t know. We’re caught in the lights.” Though confused, I had to accept his explanation for the moment. Being in a closed, dimly lit cubicle in the rear fuselage, I was oblivious to external conditions. Still, when the aircraft fell off on a wing and went into a slow downward spiral, I became concerned. The action was not a normal evasive tactic. I glanced at the altimeter and the needle reflected our fast descent. I attempted to contact the pilot on the intercom but received no response or reply. As the centrifugal force from the spiral grew more intense and the altimeter needle continued to drop I concluded we were going to crash.

I was buckled in my backpack parachute and sitting on my flak suit. We had a dim light inside the fuselage and the escape hatch was on my right hand side. I released the escape hatch and eased the lower half of my body through the cramped opening. I tried to squeeze further through the hatch but the parachute snagged on its rim. I was stuck halfway out of the hull with my legs in the slipstream, banging against the outside fuselage. After rocking and squirming over the opening I fell clear and immediately pulled the D-ring of my parachute. It opened with a jolt. We had lost a considerable amount of altitude. Though we had been flying at around 25,000ft for photography I baled out below 10,000ft. As I fell away I could neither see fire or flames nor other indication that the Mosquito had been damaged in flight. Neither was there a later explosion or fire to indicate the crash of the aircraft. Musgrove had said, “We’re caught in the lights.” Now, suspended in the descending parachute, I could not see any searchlights nor anything to indicate a source of blinding lights. Except for the stars above I could see nothing. I was in complete blackness and swinging like a pendulum. This oscillation became a major concern. Oscillating about 1° to each side could make landing difficult. Below was black featureless void that gave no hint as to distance to the ground. Until I struck the ground I had no indication of its proximity. I landed in a field, fell over backwards and lay there dazed for a minute or two. In the distance I heard soldiers singing and for a moment considered a possible connection between the singing and my stunned condition. I tested each body part for damage as I gathered myself from the ground. I snagged the pan chute to shreds on the barbed wire of a fence, dug a hole and buried it. Taking stock of my situation I had parachuted a short distance west of Bremen from a clear starlit sky. Using Polaris, the North Star, as a guide I sought to travel in a westerly direction: I hoped, thereby, to reach the border with the Netherlands and perhaps find a friendly resident. My boots were conspicuous and I tore the tops off them to make them look like black Oxfords similar to those worn by German males. This proved to be a serious mistake. Without the tops, the shoes were loose and shapeless. My feet blistered and became badly swollen. I travelled at night and, during the day, concealed myself in haystacks or in whatever screening shelter I could find. I avoided villages and their inhabitants where possible but could not avoid the numerous canals and channels. At each waterway I gathered the branches from trees and made a raft. I undressed, placed my clothing on the raft and swam across. I redressed on the other side. Though the routine was time consuming it was much too cold to wear wet clothing. For ten days I roamed free but without a bite to eat. My escape kit had been kept in a pocket of my B-3 jacket. The pocket was not snapped shut. All the contents, including food, were lost when I pulled the ripcord of my parachute.

Exhausted, Fordham was finally apprehended by a
Luftwaffe
officer in a Dutch church on the edge of a village where he had sought a short, comfortable rest. Fordham was driven to a
Luftwaffe
airfield. After two days a train took him to
Dulag Luft
interrogation centre in Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt. Each day for the ten days he was there Fordham was interrogated. After the tenth day he was transferred to
Stalag Luft
III. Musgrave, who had been killed, was buried at Cambridge American Cemetery.

In September 1944 the Allies attempted to capture bridges on the Rhine in Holland at Veghel, Grave, Nijmegen and Arnhem, using Britain’s 1st and America’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Operation Market Garden was planned to cut off the Germany Army in the Belgian sector and save the bridges and the port of Antwerp for the American army units and British XXX Corps advancing north from the Dutch border. First Lieutenant Claude C. Moore, a Mosquito navigator, recalls:

On the night of 16 September three Mossie crews were called in and told that we would go out early next day at staggered intervals. No details. One plane was to take off at 2 am, one at 4 am and one at 6 am. Next morning, just before take-off, we were given the details: the Nijmegen-Arnhem area. Find the base of the clouds in the area. How thick and how low. Go down to the deck if necessary. Radio back that information. We were the last flight, at 6 am. Jimmy Spear was the pilot. The sky was already light when we left. It was only a matter of minutes from Watton to Holland. We skimmed across at 2,000–3,000ft. Soon we were at the target area, which, I learned later, was where the parachute drops were made and the glider-borne assault troops were landed. There were large clouds, intermittently broken, so we descended. At around 500ft we were finding the base of the clouds. Apparently High Command was not waiting for our information; there were planes everywhere. I had never seen so many fighters up close. Below us, above us, around us, on every side they were climbing, diving, milling like a swarm of angry bees. They were really beating the place up. We reported thick, low, occasionally broken, white clouds and smaller, grey puffs of clouds and gave the cloud base as approximately 400-500ft. The smaller, grey puffs of clouds were spaced all around. Only, I finally realized, they weren’t small clouds. They were shell bursts. We were being shot at!

I was startled to see a plane coming off the deck, climbing straight at us and closing; a snub-nosed, radial-engined plane. From the markings and the silhouette I took it to be from Hermann Goering’s own elite group: the cowling painted in a distinctive yellow-and-black checkerboard pattern. ‘Focke-Wulf 190’ flashed through my mind. ‘Damn’, I thought. ‘This is it!’ I’m sure that, mentally, I was frozen in space. But the next thing I knew, the snub-nose had zoomed past us. I did a double take. It was a P-47 Thunderbolt. We stayed in the area a little longer, made a few more weather reports, then headed back to Watton. At the base we were debriefed. We went over to the Combat Mess for breakfast and settled into the day’s routine.

On 18 September the Germans counter-attacked and forestalled an American attempt to capture the bridge at Nijmegen. Just over 100 B-24 Liberators dropped supplies and ammunition to the American Airborne forces at Grosbeek, in the Nijmegen-Eindhoven area. Five Mosquito weather scouts were despatched to Holland. 1st Lieutenant Robert Tunnell and his navigator-cameraman, 19-year old Staff Sergeant John G. Cunney, failed to return. They appeared over the German airfield at Plantlünne far from their objective and were caught in a searchlight, which blinded the pilot. Tunnell took evasive action, hit an oak tree and crashed on a hillside near Lignin on the Dutch-German border. The Mosquito exploded killing both crewmembers. They are now interred in the American War Cemetery at Neuville en Condroz, Belgium.

Bad weather during Operation Market-Garden made regular air reconnaissance over the Arnhem bridge impossible, so on 22 September three 25th Bomb Group Mosquitoes were despatched. Lieutenant ‘Paddy’ Walker’s navigator, Roy C. Conyers, remembers:

We were to dip as low as possible to try to establish by visual observation who controlled the bridge, the Germans or the British. I thought that this regularity was crazy and mentioned it to Edwin R. Cerrutti, 654th navigator. His only comment was that the German Command wouldn’t believe that we were that stupid.

As ‘Paddy’ Walker flew over the north end of the bridge just below the fog, at under 500ft, he and Roy Conyers could see Germans running for their anti-aircraft guns. Walker states:

Ground fire began almost immediately. This continued as we flew over and past the other end, on towards the coast. Tracer fire could be seen coming up around us and the plane was hit. I saw the left wing drop-tank disintegrate and jettisoned both. The right engine was shut down and the propeller feathered. The fire went out, but the engine was inoperative. I was flying as low and as fast as possible to get out of range. As we crossed the coast additional fire was received, spurts of water coming up near the plane from the barrage; however, we were not hit. After we got out of range, I climbed up into the weather to gain enough altitude to make an emergency Mayday radio call, to get a ‘steer’ to the nearest base where the weather was suitable to land. We steered to Bournemouth. My Mayday call was answered by the sweetest girl’s British accent: ‘Tommy’ Settle, a beautiful blonde WAAF at Tangmere. During the days that it took to repair the plane she and I became better acquainted and after the engine change and other repairs I took her on the test flight. It was her first airplane ride and in a Mosquito. Unfortunately, I was at Tangmere for only a week.

On 25 September another Bluestocking mission was launched as evacuation of the surviving paratroops from Arnhem began. 1st Lieutenant Clayborne O. Vinyard and his navigator, 1st Lieutenant John J. O’Mara, took off at 01.26 hours in poor visibility. Vinyard recounts the mission:

The fog was thick. We climbed to 30,000ft but were unable to rise above the overcast. We were depending on our LORAN equipment for navigation and flew beyond our Netherlands objective. We reached the outskirts of Frankfurt before turning back. Returning toward our objective, we descended to 18,000ft where a
Luftwaffe
night-fighter picked up our presence with his radar. Near 04.30 hours our aircraft was struck by cannon fire. Tracers set the right engine ablaze and rounds penetrated the fuselage. I immediately banked the aircraft to the left and dived in a spiral dive to 12,000ft, hoping, thereby, to lose the night fighter and coincidentally extinguish the blaze. The German fighter did not follow me in the dive but the engine fire would not extinguish. I levelled the flight of the aircraft in preparation for parachuting. John O’Mara pulled away the inner door of the hatch but the outer door would not open. Getting out of my seat and leaving my controls, I stamped my foot on the outer door. It released and I moved back to the controls. O’Mara pulled himself through the open hatch and without hesitation I followed. The air stream blew off my English flying boots as I stuck my feet out the exit. I fell into the darkness and slowly counted to fifteen. There was no sound in the dense, moist air until I pulled the ripcord of the parachute. Drifting down in the clouds, however, I could hear the wind in the risers.

The cloud layer opened up above a farming community and I landed in the tallest of pine trees. Fragile and brittle limbs covered its upper section. I grasped the trunk of the pine, released the parachute and slipped down a very long, limb-less trunk. I had landed on a hill, in woods, somewhere in western Germany. In these tall pines there is no underbrush. I enjoyed my freedom for perhaps four hours but after daylight I was located by a group of civilians, one of whom carried a gun. They had been alerted by the crash of the aircraft and had located John O’Mara. I was taken to Erlangen, a small town of perhaps twenty houses and held for the arrival of a military guard. The military guard took me to a neighbouring town where I joined O’Mara, the navigator. Together we were taken by bus and by train to an air base and placed in a cell. The next morning we boarded a train for Frankfurt. The railway station on our rail line at Frankfurt had been bombed out and we had to walk several miles through the ruined city to another railway station. O’Mara was wearing his wool-lined flying boots over his GI shoes. This was burdensome and he gave the flying boots to me to wear. They were much too large for stockinged feet and I had to drag them to keep them from sliding off. Angry civilians followed us during our march through Frankfurt. Our young guards spoke some English and cautioned us. We could talk with the civilians but should they attack there was nothing the guards could do to protect us. We walked fast, looked straight ahead and disregarded the insults and missiles that came our way.

From Frankfurt we went by train to an interrogation centre, where we were placed in separate quarters for perhaps a week. Each day we were taken into the office of a military officer for interrogation. Once the interrogation was over, O’Mara and I were lodged in a compound together. Shortly, we were entrained for imprisonment near Barth. Approaching Berlin we found ourselves near the target area of a massive air attack. The train stopped while the guards sought the protection of the woods. We, of course, remained locked in the railroad cars. There were seven or eight of these coaches, filled with prisoners of war. Though they carried no PoW identification, they were not attacked. After the attack the train continued its journey, taking us to
Stalag Luft
I and we remained there for the duration.
²⁰⁵