The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (25 page)

“Who that? Who say that?”

The colonel in the lead B-24 cut in: “Get off the radio. No speaking on the radio. Get off.”

The fighter pilot came back on: “Who that?” he asked. In Higgins’s view, “That would keep you going, you know. A little levity here and there didn’t hurt.” Like Pepin and everyone else in one of the bombers, Higgins had the deepest respect for the men of the 99th. He pointed out that, among many other things, “they made it a point when they were in a town, they were dressed immaculately.  I mean their brass was polished and their clothes were pressed. They were really sharp. They made it a point to be that way.” Higgins added, “There was a lot of talk during the war about blacks being cowards and stuff like that. I never saw any of that. Never did I see any cowardliness.”9 Neither did anyone else. Sgt. Erling Kindem of the 742nd Squadron was on a February mission against Vienna. He later wrote in his war diary, “Before reaching the target, a ‘phantom’ B-24 joined our formation.” It was a downed bomber the Germans had restored and were flying to radio back to base the formation’s altitude, speed, and direction. Fortunately, the Tuskegee Airmen were flying as escort. Kindem’s pilot reported to the black pilots in their P-51s the information. The leader responded, “I’ll go scare him out but you tell your boys not to point their guns at us.”

Kindem’s diary went on: “The P-51s came in and over the radio the German phantom pilot said he was from the 55th Wing and got lost. But the 55th Wing wasn’t flying that day and the plane had no tail markings. The fighter pilot squadron leader gave him some bursts from his guns and warned the phantom to turn back.  He added, ‘You will be escorted.’ The German pilot replied that he could make it alone. The P-51 pilot said: ‘You are going to be escorted whether you want it or not. You’re going to have two men on your tail all the way back and don’t try to land in Yugoslavia.’ The phantom protested and said he wanted to drop his bombs.  The response from the fighter pilot was: ‘You ain’t gonna drop no bombs.’ The phantom left with his escort and we heard nothing further from the event.”10 Back in October 1944, Lt. C. W. Cooper - the “old” infantry officer (he was twenty-eight years old) who had after some time with the troops volunteered for the Army Air Forces and trained as a navigator - shipped over to join the 741st Squadron at Cerignola. It was a long trip by a leaky cargo ship. He was in command of fifty-five replacements, all soon-to-be crew members of the B-24s.  “They were hell to take care of,” he recalled, not like the infantry enlisted men he was accustomed to leading. After disembarking at Naples, Cooper and his men traveled by truck to a staging base in southernmost Italy. They arrived in November. The first officer he saw was “a big, raw-boned second lieutenant, with red hair and a red beard. I said, ‘Golly, that guy’s still a second lieutenant, he must be thirty-five years old.’” Cooper and his crew boarded the lieutenant’s B-24 and flew toward Cerignola. As they were landing, Cooper heard the lieutenant say to his co-pilot, “Have you got runway on your side?” The co-pilot said,”Yeah.” The pilot said, “I’ve got some over here too,” so he set the plane down. Later when the pilot had completed his missions he shaved and to Cooper’s astonishment, “He was an eighteen-year-old kid!” Cooper and the crew lined up for their first meal at Cerignola. The man in front of Cooper asked, “You haven’t eaten here before, have you?” “No,” Cooper replied.

“Well, we’ve been eating here quite a while,” the man said. “Tell you what you’re supposed to do. If you have a bug in your food when you get it first, you throw the food out. After about a week though, if you have a bug in your food, you go ahead and eat the food. And then the third week, you look and there’s a bug in you food, you make him stay and don’t let it get away because it’s good, it’s got nutrients.”

On an early mission Cooper’s plane climbed well above freezing altitude. “I think our bombardier may have been reading a comic book or sleeping back there.  Anyway when you go through the level where things will freeze, you keep working the bomb bay doors so that they won’t jam on you, they won’t ice up.” Cooper’s plane got to the target “and the bombardier hadn’t done what he should have done going to that level, and the bomb bay doors had frozen. He couldn’t get them open. So he dropped the bombs through the bomb bay doors.” In other words he hit the toggle switch and the bombs just broke through the aluminum. The wheels, when let down, were below the now broken bomb bay doors flapping in the breeze.  “We didn’t know whether it would be enough room or not. If those things hit the runway, they may cause a spark and there may be a buildup of gas in the bomber and bloody, we would’ve had it.” Fortunately the plane landed safely.  Cooper was so good as a navigator that he soon was flying on the lead plane on his missions. He did so on six missions. “The pressure was really on then, because you had to be absolutely right where you were supposed to be at all times. I wasthe navigator.” He was struck by the difference between being an infantry officer and a pilot. “The pilot didn’t exercise command like an infantry platoon leader,” he felt. “In the infantry, you’re under pressure all the time. For us, we were only under pressure when going on a mission.” In the infantry, a lieutenant told his platoon what to do and how to go about it. But “the pilot had to recognize the role of each air crew member and not get in the way.” Cooper thought the biggest difference between the infantry and the Army Air Forces was that “you are individuals when you’re on a crew. The pilot’s not going to tell me how to navigate, he’s not going to tell Ken Higgins how to run his radio. Those were our specialties and we did our job.” Cooper added, “It was a whole different situation than it was in the infantry.” B-24 crews socialized together, mixing regardless of rank. Never had Cooper seen such a thing in the infantry.

Cooper had eleven missions behind him. Compounding the tension of navigating the lead plane, with six other navigators watching in their following planes, was the reality of flak. On nearly every mission, his plane took various hits, losing power on one or two engines, and in other ways making what he was doing in the most dangerous place in the world even more fearful. So was the possibility of accidents. One time Cooper saw a B-24 drop its bombs right on top of a plane flying below, setting off a flashing explosion that destroyed everything except the engines. Cooper watched as they fell.  A few days later, Cooper flew a mission, got back to Cerignola, and was told to make up a route for the mission the next day. “I noticed that one of the turning points they gave us was right over a flak-up area in northern Yugoslavia. So I thought, That’s no good.” He called Wing Headquarters: “Say, you gave us a wrong turning point -“ “Don’t say any more,” the officer at Wing shot out. “Don’t say any more. Our telephone lines are bugged all the time so no more. We will get you a correction.” The men at Wing Headquarters had already spotted the error, which had come about because two towns in Yugoslavia had the same name. One had heavy flak, the other nothing. The turning point was changed.  Radiomen on the B-24s kept changing their frequencies so that the Germans would have a hard time listening. Occasionally, they could pick up and get on the German frequency. On one of Cooper’s missions, a German-speaking radioman came along. Cooper listened as he went to work: “He got on the radio, on their frequency, and he heard a German commander talking to his fighter planes, directing them toward our formation. So the American, identifying himself in German as their ground control officer, ordered them, ‘Return to base, immediately.’ So these fighter planes took off to go back to base, and before their real commander could get it corrected, they were already gone, and couldn’t get back up there to us.” Cooper added to the story that he knew of at least one other native German speaker in the 455th Group who used that technique.

One of the pilots Cooper flew with was, in his view, wishing he were up in the sky in fighter planes, not B-24s. He took chances, in turns, wagging his wings, climbing or diving. One February day, when Cooper was not on the plane, that pilot took it up for a practice run. As a stunt, he began buzzing Wing Headquarters. Wing called Group Headquarters on the radio to say, “There’s a plane buzzing us and it’s your plane. Get this damn plane out of here.” The group commander, furious, ordered, “Ground that pilot when he gets back to base.  Nobody in his right mind would do that.” Even before the B-24 landed, there was a jeep waiting for the pilot. Cooper recalled that “they took him into headquarters and grounded him right there on the spot. And they kept him grounded for quite a while and then when they did let him fly again on a combat mission, they gave him a plane that was doubtful whether it’d get up there or not.”11 The day the pilot was grounded, Cooper was moved out of his tent and out of his crew and sent to George McGovern’s tent. From now on he would take Adams’s place permanently, as McGovern’s navigator. The next night, February 19, he wrote his buddy, Lt. Joe Prendergast with the 4th Infantry in Germany. He told Prendergast, “My new pilot is a honey - very sincere, a mature man, and a good pilot. He’s married and expecting a baby in three weeks so he’ll add a thousand feet for safety.” As Cooper signed off on the letter, McGovern came into the tent. He had just been promoted to first lieutenant. Cooper added a postscript:

“Mac, my new pilot, just came in and let me pin his thirty-minute-old silver bars on him. I’m sure glad ‘cause he rates.” Sometime after sending the letter, Cooper got the V-Mail back. Scribbled on the front beside Prendergast’s name was a note: “Killed in action. J. A. Wesolowski, Capt., 4th Inf.”12 When Cooper met McGovern and Rounds, he knew he had joined an experienced pilot and co-pilot. He went through details of what he had done up to that point, then listened. He was impressed by McGovern, “serious without being obnoxious.” Rounds had more of a wait-and-see quality to him. Cooper later said that Rounds “would go in all directions at once. I quickly called him ‘Rounds the Rounder.’”13 On February 20, McGovern and his crew stood down. The next morning, at 4:00 A.M.  they were up, getting ready. The briefing officer informed them the target that day was the marshaling yards in Vienna. He was answered with groans. Vienna still had one of the heaviest flak concentrations in Europe.  Among the bomber crews in the formation was one with Lieutenant Hammer as radioman. He had had a dream the previous night, which he related to his crew as they were waiting to take off. He had dreamed that the target would be Vienna.  And it turned out to be true. The other crew members, Hammer confessed, were “amused - in a sickly sort of way.”14 Off they went anyway, along with twenty-six other B-24s. TheDakota Queen was in the middle of the 741st Squadron’s box. The flak over Vienna was, according to the 455th Group’s account, “intense and accurate.”15 Some fourteen of the bombers were hit out of the twenty-one that got over the target.  Hammer was in one of them. As the plane pulled away from Vienna, number three engine quit. Lt. Ray Grooms, the pilot, and Lt. Jim Connelly, the co-pilot, tried unsuccessfully to feather the propeller. The windmilling prop cost the plane altitude and speed and it dropped behind the remainder of the squadron.  Grooms ordered the crew to jettison everything possible, but still the plane lost altitude and just did get over the Yugoslavian mountains. Grooms decided not to try to cross the Adriatic; his navigator told him there was an emergency landing field under American control at Zara, just ahead. He headed for it, but as he checked his systems he discovered that the hydraulic system had been damaged. He had no brakes.

He snapped out orders to his waist gunners. Remove the waist windows. Tie a parachute to each waist gun. Be ready to toss it out and pull the rip cords on my word. They acknowledged. In Hammer’s words, “Shortly after the wheels made contact with the ground we got the word and threw them out and pulled rip cords.  The one on my side opened first and we veered crazily in that direction until the pintle holding the waist gun to its mounting was sheared cleanly in half.  The pintle, made of solid steel, measured two inches in diameter at the point of breakage. The other parachute finally opened and braked us down.”* Once out of the plane, the crew members told Hammer “that I could, in the future, keep my dreams to myself.” GIs in trucks and jeeps picked them up and took them immediately to a C-47, which was soon in the air. Hammer and his buddies got to sleep in their own bunks that night, back in Cerignola.16 TheDakota Queen had taken only a few hits from shrapnel, which made holes in the wings, but McGovern was on the ground to welcome Hammer back.  On February 24, McGovern, Rounds, Cooper, and the crew flew a mission headed toward the marshaling yards in Vienna, but bad weather forced them and the other planes to abort. On the twenty-eighth it was back into the air, with the target the marshaling yards in Isarco Albes, in northern Italy. The flak was not as heavy as over Vienna, but it was there. They returned to Cerignola safely.  In the winter of 1944-1945, the 741st improved its living conditions. By then every tent had either a wooden or a concrete floor. The food was better and had come to include steak, fresh chicken, real eggs, and ice cream. Squadron officers started to give classes in algebra, business administration, aircraft maintenance, history, and the Italian languages. The ground crews flocked to the Italian instructions, as they had come to the conclusion that since there was no hope in their going home before war’s end, they might as well understand what the natives were talking about.

Still the rain came down. It created much mud, especially around the new mess hall. Two GIs were heard discussing the mud. One said he had stumbled into it and had sunk in ankle deep. The other GI said he had gone in as well, but the mud was up to his knees. The first GI said, “Yeah, but I went in head first.” The men put out a group newspaper, called theJournal, and each squadron also had one. The 740th Squadron’s was calledIl Castoro Ardente, meaningEager Beaver. The 741st called its paperStagrag. The papers were typed and run off on hand-cranked mimeograph machines. The January 1945 issue of theJournal carried an article written by Maj. Al Coons, the group intelligence officer. One year had passed, he opened, “a year that most of us would rather not have lived as we did, had the world we inherited been one in which free choices were possible. At the same time, it is a year most of us would not have spent otherwise, given the world as it was in February 1944.” He then wrote of all the territory liberated in Russia, France, Belgium, and elsewhere, and noted that the Fifteenth Air Force had made its contribution to the victories. He gave credit for this accomplishment to the pilots and their crews, to the ground crews, to the clerks, cooks, communications personnel, “and all the rest.” But, Coons went on, “all of us have a responsibility for the failures - the briefings that were inadequate, the truck drivers who were late in getting the crews to their briefings, the crew members who stayed in the pad when they should have been familiarizing themselves with their planes or their guns or their targets, the cooks who didn’t have breakfast on time and the linemen who failed to check the plane carefully. These failures have softened the blows against the enemy, they have cost the lives of Americans and our Allies.” Coons concluded, “All that we have learned in one year of combat can be used to insure that the second year will be a short one.” TheJournal carried one article about Demo, who was the first mascot of the 742nd Squadron. Demo had flown from Africa when he was just a puppy. “Demo refused to leave the empty tent when his masters failed to return from their mission . . .  brokenhearted . . . waiting. Demo never went hungry. Someone always remembered and carried food to the little soldier on guard.”17 McGovern wrote an article called “This Thing Called Spirit” for the second issue ofStagrag. He gave various tips on how to keep morale high. “First of all,” he wrote, “we can make sure that we don’t go stale on life. We can keep alive and interested in what is going on around us. The army already has plenty of Joes who exist just to eat, sleep and bitch.” He urged his readers to keep posted on the war fronts and on developments in the States, to read best-sellers, “of which the squadron is well supplied,” try to improve personalities by “using a little tact and thought in our relations with others,” plan postwar careers, and even write forStagrag.