The Bomber Boys (19 page)

Crew Reunion
: It seems that Lieutenant Kauffman’s crew members lost contact with each other after returning to civilian life. Very likely some members of Kauffman’s crew may have bumped into each other at Army Air Force or Bomb Group reunions over the years. There are at least three known instances of crew contact.

Paul Spodar visited several times with Frank Pogorzelski in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, and he also paid a visit to his old pilot and commander, just before Giles Kauffman Jr. died in 1999.

Through the research efforts of the author, in April 2002 Peter (Seniawsky) Scott and Spodar were reunited in a long-distance phone call. The two former waist gunners, who had fought side by side during violent air combat and who had survived nearly drowning following the ditching of the Fortress
Ruthless,
reminisced and made plans for an in-person reunion. In 2003, Peter visited Pogorzelski at his home and later that year met with Spodar. It was the first time he had seen either of his wartime comrades since they had bailed out of a burning B-17, fifty-nine years before.

Without a Parachute

 

301ST BOMB GROUP

 

419TH BOMB SQUADRON

 

 

 

 

 

Art Frechette was falling through a cold December sky, not so much like a rock as like a rag doll, arms and legs loose and useless. His fall had begun at around fifteen thousand feet, when his B-17 bomber exploded into flames. The blast hurled the young navigator clear without leaving a scratch. His parachute was undamaged and in perfect working order—yet, it remained unopened as he fell toward the Italian Alps at the rate of 150 miles per hour. Art Frechette was totally unconscious.

If he did not wake up, he would crash into the mountains in less than two minutes. Even if he did regain consciousness, he would still need to be five hundred to a thousand feet high for the parachute to significantly slow his fall.

Art sailed past one thousand feet. Now, because of the cold air that was stinging his face or for who knows what reason, he began to awaken. He had only a few more seconds to realize his situation, a few more seconds of paralyzing shock. He could see the earth right below him—just a blur of green and white.
His right hand grabbed for the parachute ripcord and found it. Too late.

 

 

 

Only two years before, at the age of eighteen, Art had dropped out of the University of Connecticut and joined the Army. He volunteered for the Air Corps, hoping to be trained as a navigator. Fate stepped in and took him in another direction.

“How would you like to be a pilot?” the officer asked Art after he had successfully completed several days of difficult testing. Normally the Army Air Corps was overstocked with pilot candidates, but in the fall of 1942, it was the navigation schools that had no vacancies.

“Okay,” Art replied, thinking it was what was meant to be. It was not. At pilot training school in Camden, Arkansas, Art did the one thing that was almost certain to get an air cadet kicked out—he crashed an airplane.

Actually, his initial weeks of pilot training had gone extremely well. He passed primary training with ease and then soloed in a cumbersome bi-wing trainer that the cadets had nicknamed the “Yellow Peril.” Despite the shortcomings of the airplane, his maiden solo flight went smoothly. Soon he was flying daily training missions over the Ouachita delta. He loved being up there all alone. It was a dreamlike world, but Art never forgot that the purpose of every mission was to make him a better pilot. Ultimately it was his dedication to improving his skills that got him into trouble.

On one particularly gusty day, he decided to make an unauthorized landing at a seldom-used airfield. His instructor’s orders before takeoff had been clear. “Fly to this point, turn, fly to here, and then return to base.” Art was not one to willfully disobey orders, but the winds that day provided what he saw as a rare opportunity to learn more about flying.

He assumed correctly that weather conditions in Europe might not always be ideal. One day he might be called on to land his aircraft in strong crosswinds. Art reasoned that it would be better to learn how now rather than later, when it could cost more lives than his own. What he did not know was that the Yellow Peril was a bear to land in a crosswind situation.

The landing approach that day seemed little different from any other he had made, with the exception of an occasional burst of wind buffeting the airplane. Art kept both hands firmly on the controls and brought the biplane down purposefully. A satisfied smile crossed his face as his airplane sailed only a few feet above the runway, in that wonderful period of anticipation just before the wheels make contact. Seconds later, the airplane crashed nosefirst into the runway.

The crosswind had tossed the twin-winged little aircraft as if it were a mere leaf. There was no time for Art to make any attempt to right the airplane. Any such effort would have been useless anyway at almost zero altitude. The aircraft skidded a short distance along the runway with its nose down and its tail up, finally coming to a rest at an almost perfect ninety-degree angle to the ground. There was hardly time to be afraid. It crossed Art’s mind that he had just come close to dying, but the thought was only a matter-of-fact conclusion.

After lowering himself out of the aircraft, he began to assess his situation. To his amazement the airplane did not look that bad. In fact, it looked about as well as an airplane could look while standing on its nose. Maybe there was a glimmer of hope that he would not be kicked out of the pilot program.

Art thought of his father back in Groton, Connecticut. What would his dad think if he was booted from pilot training? Arthur Frechette Sr. was a tough man. As a child, Art had sometimes found him hard to please. He had always tried to live up to his father’s high standards. He had never felt those standards were
unreasonable, but they weighed heavy on his mind as he stood next to his damaged trainer.
What will Dad think of this?

Arthur Frechette Sr. and his wife, Margaret, were proof that different personalities and backgrounds could make a good marriage. Arthur Sr. was French and Jewish. His wife, a Hogan by birth, was Irish. She had a wonderful sense of family, visiting several days a week with various members of the Hogan clan who lived in the Groton-New London area.

Art’s father was more reserved—no less caring than the mother but always the seemingly unemotional head of the Frechette family. Later, in December 1944 when the news came that his son had been shot down over enemy territory and was missing in action, it would become clear to everyone how emotional Art Sr. could be.

For the time being, any concern about what his father would think about his crashing the trainer plane was shoved aside. Air Cadet Art Frechette had bigger problems. In the distance, he could see a Jeep speeding in his direction. The vehicle was still too far away for Art to identify any of the passengers, but he knew one would be a very angry flight instructor.

Art was not automatically booted out of the pilot training program, but he certainly had two strikes against him. One: He had crashed his airplane. Two: He had done it during an unauthorized landing. He had little doubt that the latter upset his superiors more than the former. This was the Air Corps, but it was still part of the old Army. Army training was not about initiative, it was about following orders.

A few days following the crash, Art was informed he would be given a “check flight” by the chief pilot. Art knew it would be strike three unless he flew perfectly. He made up his mind to do just that. Soon into the flight, it became apparent someone had already decided that the Air Corps could do without the services of Art Frechette as a pilot. During every maneuver of
the check flight, the chief pilot chewed out the young cadet pilot. When Art touched the airplane down for a landing, he knew it would be his last.

Getting booted from flight school was a disappointment, but Art shook it off with the resiliency of an eighteen-year-old. Within days he was offered admission into the Army Air Corps navigation school in Monroe, Louisiana. He gladly accepted the chance to become a combat navigator, which was what he really wanted from the beginning. It also provided some good news to write in a letter to his father: “Dad, sorry to report I washed out of flight school, but I’m going to become a navigator.” Art left out the details of why he had “washed out.”

After graduation from navigation school, it was off to Tennessee, where Art joined a replacement crew commanded by pilot Lieutenant Elliot Butts. Butts’s new crew went through two months of intensive combat training before heading to Lincoln, Nebraska, to pick up a new factory-fresh B-17 bomber. About a week later, the crew was aboard the Fortress, flying it to Italy for assignment with the 301st Bomb Group.

Their route hopped from Lincoln to Bangor, Maine; Newfoundland; the Azores; Marrakech in North Africa; and finally to Gioia, Italy. By the time they landed in Italy, the new crew had chalked up almost thirty hours of flying time, and Art had gained plenty of valuable navigation experience before being plunged into the pressure of combat missions.

It was at Gioia that Butts’s crew discovered the cruel joke the Air Corps played on most of its replacement crews. Their shiny new B-17 was taken away from them, and they were placed aboard an old battle-worn bomber for the trip to their new air base. The base, like several other United States air bases in Italy, was near the city of Foggia. Art had heard descriptions of the conditions at Eighth Air Force bases in England. Surely the barracks were cold, but there were good points: liberty in
nearby London, local pubs and friendly English girls. Art knew at first glance that life with the Fifteenth Air Force at Foggia was going to be much more unpleasant than a similar assignment in England.

There were few buildings at all. Several Quonset huts housed the operation facilities of the 301st and a dismal structure built from lava rock was designated as the Officers’ Club. Officers and noncommissioned crew members alike lived in army tents amid a sea of mud.

It was October 1944 when Art reached the Foggia base, and there was already a chill in the air. His tent mate, a navigator from another crew, gave him the short tour of their home. There was a brick floor, which was a luxury since Art would later learn many of the other tent floors were simply packed dirt. For heat, a homemade burner had been fashioned from a metal spray bottle in which holes had been punched to serve as flame jets. The burner was fed by a line that ran underneath the tent to a one-hundred-octane gasoline tank outside.

Art concluded his new home was a firetrap, and during his first week there was tangible proof of it. Early one morning, Art heard a commotion outside. He stuck his head out of the tent flap to see members of a nearby tent scurrying about in their underwear. They were desperately trying to extinguish the fire that was quickly consuming their tent. It was a losing battle.

“That happens about once a week,” Art’s tent mate informed him before going back inside to make coffee.

On November 22, Art flew his first combat mission as a B-17 navigator. It was nothing like he had expected. At seven fifty a.m., the first of the 301st Bomb Group Fortresses lifted off the runway. The target for the day was the marshaling yard at Regensburg, Germany. By the time the formation was over enemy territory, the weather was turning bad. Snowflakes blew in the
side openings and began to build up on the gunners and their weapons.

In the nose, the bombardier motioned for Art to look down through the Plexiglas. Through a break in the clouds, he spotted what his crewmate wanted him to see. They were flying directly over a German airfield. Art could see the enemy fighters lined up neatly along the sides of the runways. There was no activity down there. Not one fighter was taking off to confront the American bomber force. In a few more seconds, the airfield disappeared as the snowstorm intensified.

Art guessed the weather conditions were going to get much worse. If the Luftwaffe was not going to risk flying, what chance did the B-17s have of hitting an unseen target? By the time the bombers reached Regensburg, the crew members could barely see the airplanes flying right next to them. Midair collisions became a bigger worry than the German defenses. However, the enemy antiaircraft gunners soon gave the Americans a hot welcome.

Black pocks of smoke punctured the pure white sky as the B-17s blindly released their bombs. Art doubted the marshaling yards were suffering any damage at all. The 301st was more likely plowing some German farmers’ fields.

Before the empty bombers could find their way out of the danger area, the air became filled with almost as much flak as snow. One burst just ahead of Art’s aircraft sent shrapnel flying into the Plexiglas nose. Some of it blasted clean through and ricocheted around the bombardier-navigator compartment. One piece, almost spent, bounced off Art’s flak vest.

Those people are trying to knock me down!
Art thought. Reason told him the German antiaircraft batteries were firing blindly into a snow-filled sky, but to Art the war had just become very personal. It was a long and cold flight back to their
base for the airmen of the 301st, knowing their efforts had accomplished little on that miserable day.

Art soon learned the weather was going to be a constant problem for the Fifteenth Air Force crews flying out of the Foggia region of Italy. After completing his second mission into Germany on December 2, Art’s crew took off with the 419th Bomb Squadron the following day. They were forced to return with an incomplete mission. On the sixth the results were the same; and again on the tenth, another “incomplete.” Finally on December 11, Art navigated his B-17 crew to a bomb drop on an oil refinery in Austria and received credit for his third mission.