The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-1945 (28 page)

“It was terrible,” McGovern said. “Linz was tougher on my last mission than it had been on my second as pilot. Hell can’t be any worse than that. And remember, the people flying the plane or shooting the guns are children.” Rounds and Higgins were twenty years old, and except for Cooper and engineer Valko the others were nineteen. Valko got into the cockpit and stood between McGovern and Rounds. “You could look at him and he seemed petrified,” McGovern recalled. “Not just paralyzed, but petrified. Just sheer terror.”4 “The first thing that I remember,” said Cooper, “is this whomping. They had zeroed in on us. We were in their box right in the middle.” A piece of shrapnel came through the nose. It passed through Cooper’s map. On it he had made a “real tiny little pencil mark indicating our base at Cerignola, and I’m damned if those Germans didn’t just put that piece of flak right through Cerignola.” Another piece of flak hit the hydraulic lines. The red fluid began spurting out.  It looked like blood. Cooper took off his flak helmet to attempt to catch some of that fluid so they could use it after patching the line, but he was “slipping and sliding around in that stuff.” The nose gunner saw him floundering around in what he thought was blood and cried, “Oh, no!” He tried to help, but Cooper shook him off. But the hydraulic lines were so mangled they were beyond repair, so the fluid Cooper had caught was useless.5 One piece of flak hit Ashlock. It traveled up his leg from the knee to lodge in his butt. Higgins went to apply first aid. Ashlock was hollering, Cooper was hollering, so too everyone else. McGovern got on the intercom. His voice was calm as he told everyone to be quiet. That quieted them down. Then he ordered Valko to check the airplane to try to see how much damage had been done. He did, and except for the loss of the hydraulic lines, Valko said the plane was more or less okay. McGovern then asked each crew member to check in. Except Ashlock, they said one by one that they were okay. As he turned away from the target, McGovern saw that the number three engine had been damaged and he feathered the prop.

Higgins ripped open Ashlock’s pants. He examined the wound and told Ashlock it wasn’t too bad. Because of the altitude and the cold, the blood had coagulated.  Higgins poured powdered sulfa on the wound, then put a bandage around it.  Higgins recalled that his patient “was making quite a racket on the intercom, so I finally just unplugged him.” He gave Ashlock a shot of morphine and he lay down on the floor, where he stayed.

TheDakota Queen had slowed and lost altitude. It was now behind and below the formation. McGovern and Rounds got Cooper on the intercom and they discussed their alternatives. There were two: try to get back to Cerignola or turn east and try to land behind the Russian lines. With the hydraulic system a wreck, they had no brakes. The flaps were inoperative. An engine was missing.  Nevertheless, they decided to head home.

As they got close, McGovern got on the radio with the tower, to describe his situation. The last squadron from the formation was landing - one plane at the far end of the runway turning off, another rolling halfway down the runway, and a third touching down. The officer in charge at the tower was glad to hear from theDakota Queen, which had already been listed as missing in action. He told McGovern he had a number of choices: he could go out over the Adriatic shoreline and attempt a crash landing, or ditch in the sea, or bail out, or try to land on the runway. McGovern decided to accept the last alternative. On the intercom, he told the crew that if any one of them, or all of them, wanted to bail out they should feel perfectly free to do so. There would be no reflection on them: “If they felt safer bailing out it was fine with me.” What are you going to do, the men asked. “I’m going to land this airplane,” he replied. So they all decided to stay. As they approached the field, Higgins fired a red flare to indicate an ambulance should be ready to receive a wounded man.

McGovern ordered Higgins and McAfee to attach a pair of parachutes by their harnesses to the yokes supporting the waist guns. They were to throw them out the windows when he told them to, then pull the rip cord. That would slow the plane, which had no brakes. It was a technique that McGovern had not previously used, but had heard about (and indeed another B-24 from the group used the parachute method of stopping that day).

The crew used the hand crank to lower the wheels - an exhausting process, but between them Valko, Higgins, and Cooper managed to get it done. A little yellow signal came on to tell McGovern that the wheels were locked.  The tower waved other planes off and told McGovern to come right on in. He was afraid to come in slow “because if we were short of the field I didn’t think we could go around again. We were low on gas and I had one engine out.” He came in too high “because of my fear of falling short of the field. I thought the worse thing that could happen was if I had to accelerate at the last minute. So I came in on a kind of flat landing, but considerably above the stalling speed.” When theDakota Queen touched down, McGovern cut the throttles and ordered McAfee and Higgins to throw out the parachutes and pull the rip cords. When the chutes billowed open, McGovern could feel the plane slow down. Instinctively, he and Rounds were pushing as hard as they could on the brake pedals, even though they had no brakes. But the engines, without power, provided some drag.  McGovern had ordered the crew to go to the tail of the plane when it touched down, in order to bring the tail down so it would provide drag. Led by Cooper, they did. Seven of them, all but Ashlock and Rounds. McGovern thought the weight would bring the tail to the ground and stop the plane, but it didn’t work. He later commented, “That B-24 was just too big and massive for even seven guys sitting in the tail to dump it back.” The plane’s nose at the end of the runway did a little plunge into a ditch. Then it started up on the other side of the ditch, and the tail went up, then crashed down. “It was quite a jar,” Cooper recalled. But it stopped the plane.

“It wasn’t one of my better landings,” McGovern said. “It was too hot. I came in too fast. But I didn’t want to take any chance on stalling out. I wanted to make sure that we got that plane on the ground without any screwup.” Shaking his head at the thought, he added, “If I ever made that landing again, I would have made it slower.”

The ambulance was there. The crew lifted Ashlock off the plane and put him on a stretcher. Cooper limped off - he had sprained his ankle at the jolt when the tail dropped down. Otherwise, everyone was okay, although Valko was so badly shaken that he was confined to a hospital with battle fatigue for some months thereafter.

TheDakota Queen had 110 holes in its fuselage and wings. McGovern said, “I couldn’t believe it. If you had looked at that airplane, you would not have known how it stayed in the air.” But he had brought it in. Ken Higgins summed it up: “I always said George brought me home. He did that day.”6 The following day, Cooper wrote his fiancÈe. He had retrieved one of the parachutes, and told her, “Your worries about a wedding dress are over - that is, if you want one made of white silk.” He described the mission, then said, “Actually I was too busy to be scared so it was all o.k.”7 Another mission to Linz was scheduled for April 26. McGovern would not be going on it, as he had completed his thirty-five missions, but others would. They woke, went to the briefing, got into their Liberators, and hoped for a red flare from the tower signifying that the mission was canceled. Pilots started their engines. Then shouts of joy could be heard all over Cerignola - the red flare had been fired. As it turned out, the war was over for the combat crews.  It was over for every member of the Eighth and Fifteenth and Twelfth and Ninth Air Forces. No more missions. Less than two weeks later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. It was a hot, sunny day in Cerignola. Very little celebrating was done. Most of the men just took it easy, getting a suntan and listening to all the notables on their radios. Somehow, the accolades sounded hollow, as praise often does. It was a poor replacement for the thoughts of those who had made the supreme sacrifice with their lives.8 The group had started 1945 with sixty Liberators. In the next four months it had flown 1,434 sorties. In that period it lost eight B-24s to flak and another thirty-four received flak damage. A total of seventy-four crewmen were missing in action, plus twenty wounded and sixteen killed. In its fifteen months in action, the group had flown enough miles on combat missions to circle the earth over ten times with a thirty-airplane formation. It had flown altogether a total of 252 combat missions, lost 118 Liberators. It had suffered nearly 1,000 casualties - men killed in action, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner.  The best news was, of course, that the Allies had won the war. A close second for the airmen was the release of the POWs. That was a joyous occasion. Lt. Col.  Thomas Ramey of the 743rd Squadron, himself a POW, related: “We had 179 airmen lost from burning planes, ditching in icy cold water, crash-landing on rugged mountain terrain, often times wounded, only to become captured American POWs.  [What they endured included] starvation diets, deprivation, abuse, humiliation, vermin-infested quarters, forced marches in sub-zero weather, considerable weight loss, inadequate or no medical attention, infamous German box car rides, and in many cases, torture.” But then “the sounds of war came closer and closer until one day when armored tank columns overran the camps and the American flag flew once again.” That was a joyous occasion.9 Fifty-four years after the end of the war in Europe, Ken Higgins - who was nineteen years old in 1945 - spoke for many of his fellow airmen, and for many other veterans of all the armed services, when he said, “The war time was kind of unreal when I look back on it. It’s hard to imagine that we went through all that.”10 McGovern and his fellow men of the 741st Squadron had played a small role in one of mankind’s greatest triumphs, the defeat of Nazi Germany. They had been a part of one of history’s greatest undertakings, the Army Air Forces of World War II.  After the war, there were disputes and arguments over which American service had done the most to bring about the victory. The ground forces, the Navy, and the AAF each asserted that “without us, it couldn’t have been done. We were indispensable.” The Army Air Forces claimed that they could have won the war alone. But then, so did the Navy. The Army ground forces replied that the AAF’s power to destroy was not the power to control. To control, it is necessary to put a man on the spot with a gun in his hand.

General Eisenhower, who commanded all three services in the campaign in northwest Europe, knew that it took all three to win. His ground forces could not have gotten to the battle without the Navy. Nor could they have driven through France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany without the Army Air Forces. As the supreme commander of the Army, Navy, and AAF in the campaign, he became so concerned with the service rivalries that at one time - this was before the establishment of the Air Force Academy in Colorado - he wanted midshipmen and cadets to attend the other service’s schools during their second class years. He talked about having them wear the same uniforms. He even proposed a single service academy. What he proposed never came to be, but it illuminates the answer to the question of which service was indispensable. They all were.  Critics of the AAF, while praising the tactical airplanes for their role in supporting the ground offensive, argued that the strategic bombing campaign was an unnecessary waste. All the production devoted to building the bombers, the enormous effort to train men to fly and maintain them, could have been better spent on fighters, ground troops, and the Navy. And it would have avoided the worst accusation of all, that in World War II the United States used a method of making war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroyed uncountable historic buildings, factories, and residences, without doing much of anything to win the war while creating the worst legacy of the war, made much more frightful with the development of the atomic bomb and the beginning of the Cold War - making civilians into targets. Perhaps 305,000 Germans were killed in the bombings, another 780,000 seriously injured. About 25 million Germans had been subjected to the terror of the bombings.

The bombs hit residences as well as factories, deliberately on the part of the RAF Bomber Command’s night bombing, but also from the American precision bombing. The accuracy of free-falling bombs was far below the accuracy of artillery fire, not to mention rifle or machine gun fire. Most bombs fell considerably outside the target. After the war, a Polish officer who had been captured in 1939 by the Germans and spent the war in a POW camp near Munich, then immigrated to the United States, was talking to B-24 tail gunner Sgt. Art Applin. The Polish officer said, “You know, when you guys would come over we would all run out of the barracks and start waving, screaming, and cheering and the German guards were trying to shut us up and get us back in the barracks.” He then asked Applin, “Did you guys ever hit anything?” Applin’s reply was, “Yeah, we always hit the ground.”11 They did a lot better than that. In the last chapter, “Mission Accomplished,” in the official history of the Army Air Forces in Europe, editors W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate give their assessment. Like all their work, it is judicious and authoritative. Much of the chapter is based on interviews conducted with German personnel after the unconditional surrender. The AAF wanted to know what they had done right, what was done wrong. The Germans were eager to talk, most of them. They knew there was little to be gained from withholding information. They were professionals in the art of war and wanted to discuss what had happened, and why. Some of them, no doubt, hoped to win better treatment for themselves by being cooperative. But whatever their motivations, they provided a unique glimpse of the other side of the hill.

TheLuftwaffe commander, Hermann GÕring, was voluble. His overall conclusion was that the Allied selection of targets had been excellent. He insisted that precision bombing was more effective than night raids. Still, he concluded that Germany could never have been defeated by airpower alone. But Nazi Germany’s second and last fÛhrer, Grand Admiral Karl DÕnitz, said that airpower was the decisive element. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt believed that air-power was the first of several ingredients in the triumph of the Allies. Colonel General Alfred JÕdl of Hitler’s staff said the winning of air superiority altogether decided the war and that strategic bombing was the most decisive factor. Albert Speer, the minister of production, emphatically stated his opinion that the strategic bombing could have won the war without a land invasion.  The German leaders said that the Allies had underestimated Germany’s industrial capacity. It was so huge that Germany had been able to mobilize at a leisurely pace. Her war production continued to increase until it reached its peak in mid-1944. But it was then that the strategic bombing campaign intensified. Of all the bombs that struck the Reich during the war, 72 percent fell after July 1, 1944. In the following nine months the bombing campaign wrecked the enlarged German economy until it could not support military operations or supply the basic needs of the population. By January 1945, Germany had been almost paralyzed economically, and by April she was ruined.  In Craven and Cate’s view, “Of all the accomplishments of the air forces, the attainment of air supremacy was the most significant, for it made possible the invasions of the continent and gave the heavy bombers their opportunity to wreck the industries of the Reich.” And of all the multitudes of payoffs from winning air supremacy, the most significant was the strategic bombing campaign against oil refineries. This “deprived the German Air Force of aviation gasoline so that operations were possible only on rare occasions. German bombers practically disappeared from the air, and whenever fighters tried to interfere with Allied air fleets they invariably got the worst of the battle.”12 In April 1944, Germany had adequate supplies of oil. Over the next year, the Eighth Air Force dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on the refineries, the Fifteenth Air Force some 60,000 tons. By April 1945, Germany’s oil production was 5 percent that of the previous year. Toward the end, even the most senior Nazis in the hierarchy were unable to find gasoline for their limousines. German industries were badly crippled or gone. This despite an enormous amount of effort put into defending and rebuilding oil installations.  The second major effect of the strategic bombing campaign, in this case aided by the tactical air force, was transportation. The Allied planes attacked bridges, highways, trucks, tanks, or anything that moved, but most of all the bombers went after railroad marshaling yards. By the spring of 1945 the German transport system was so badly wrecked that only the highest-priority military movements could be started with any prospect of getting to their destination. In Craven and Cate’s words, “The bombings of rail centers leading to the Russian front, attacks on marshalling yards in all parts of Germany, the Fifteenth Air Force missions against southern European railways piled up calamity for the Germans.  If they produced they could not haul. Their dispersal programs strangled, and the country became helpless.”13 The price of the transportation victory had been huge. The Eighth Air Force had dropped one third of its bombs, 235,312 tons, on marshaling yards. The Fifteenth Air Force put almost one half its total bombs, 149,476 tons, on them.  Along with their acknowledgment of the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign, the German leaders being interrogated had criticisms. For example, they thought the Army Air Forces’ conviction was wrong that there had to be one critical German industry that, if destroyed, would bring the country to ruin.  The great raids on Schweinfurt, for example, designed to deprive German vehicles of ball bearings and thus bring their army to a standstill, caused some destruction and problems, but they were carried out at great risk and high cost and still hardly slowed Germany down. The Germans were able to use ball bearings already in the plants, or on their way there. They dispersed the industry. In the end, the German leaders declared, German armaments production suffered no serious effects from a shortage of ball bearings.  Göring and Speer believed that going after electric power stations, which were highly vulnerable to air attack, would have benefited the Allies more. Or the Allies could have weakened Germany, perhaps brought her to surrender, by going after powder and explosive plants - in fact, the Germans said they would have rated such plants second only to oil. Another possibility, generally ignored, was the chemical plants that produced nitrogen and methanol. But whatever their criticisms, and there were many more, the German leaders knew that the tremendous requirements of air raid defense had absorbed much German manpower, scientific energies, and guns and ammunition - an effort that, if applied to the ground forces, might have been decisive for them.  We will never know because it was not done that way. We do know that what the Allies did won the war. What McGovern did, what the 741st Squadron did, along with the rest of the 455th Bomb Group and all the Fifteenth Air Force, and the Eighth Air Force, most especially in their attacks against oil refineries and marshaling yards, was critical to the victory. McGovern, his crew, and all the airmen had spent the war years not in vain but in doing good work. Along with all the peoples of the Allied nations, they saved Western civilization.  Bernard Baruch quoted Clemenceau, who wrote, “They were kittens in play but tigers in battle.”