When Heroes Flew

by H W Buzz Bernard

  Beneath them, the tops of haystacks flew open, revealing yet more antiaircraft guns. Machine guns sprouted from pits dug in alfalfa fields. A stream of bullets ripped into Oregon Grinder, leaving a gash of shredded metal in the thin skin of the plane just to the rear of the cockpit.

  Vivian screamed.

  Now the interior of the plane reverberated not only with the bellow of its engines but with the deafening clatter of its fifty-calibers opening up not on enemy fighters—they wouldn’t attack with the B-24s so low and approaching the city—but on ground targets.

  Streams of fire belched from the waist positions, and presumably the tail gun, though Al couldn’t see it. His gunners blasted away at Romanians and Germans only yards away from the bomber.

  An antiaircraft shell blew up so close to Oregon Grinder it rocked the plane and spiderwebbed the plexiglass cockpit. Ahead of the Liberator, pink and orange muzzle flashes, gunfire from dozens of antiaircraft cannons, bore through the dark curtain of flak already draped over the landscape. To Al, it seemed they had embarked on a death run. Still, he held the bouncing bomber on course, picking out a set of tall smoke stacks as his target. Maybe three minutes down range.

  “Going for the smoke stacks,” he yelled, informing his bombardier.

  Again, two quick clicks in response.

  “Up, up,” Vivian yelled.

  Al had been so focused on the stacks, he’d failed to notice a hedgerow that had materialized seconds ahead of them.

  In a desperate motion, he and Vivian yanked back simultaneously on their control wheels, vaulting Oregon Grinder over a bushy green windbreak sheltering a country road.

  Baker, in Hell’s Wench, had done the same. Now he pulled slightly ahead of the other Circus aircraft, determined to fulfill his promise of leading them to the target.

  A cacophony of noise—engines, gunfire, flak—filled the furiously vibrating Oregon Grinder as it thundered toward its chosen refinery, Al no less committed than Colonel Baker to reach it.

  Around them, streams of smoke trailed from several B-24s whose engines had been blasted away. Still, they pressed on.

  Al glanced down as he passed over a bare-chested flak gunner jamming a shell into the breech of an antiaircraft weapon. The gunner glanced up, wide-eyed, then disappeared in a flash of blood and flesh as the fifty-cals from another Liberator cut him in half.

  The first Circus casualty came two seconds later. To the right of Oregon Grinder, a brutal explosion ripped through a B-24 as it took a direct cannon hit in its bomb bay. It instantly became a flying torch. Ruptured fuel tanks spit out gushers of fire that streamed out on either side of the Liberator. They abruptly morphed into a single blazing river roiling out behind the condemned ship.

  The pilot attempted to climb to allow his crew a chance to parachute. But the bomber stalled, hanging in the air like a flaming fountain. Still, two figures tumbled from its nose-wheel hatch, though only one ’chute blossomed. Two more followed out a waist gunner’s window. Then the aircraft plunged to earth, ending its life in a funeral pyre on the edge of a tiny Romanian village.

  A pungent odor filled Oregon Grinder’s cockpit. Al recognized it instantly. He glanced over at Vivian, then dropped his gaze. A stream of light yellow liquid ran down her leg, puddled on the floor. She didn’t acknowledge his gaze, instead stared straight ahead, intent on holding the aircraft on the target. Her arms vibrated with the effort as she battled the shimmying plane . . . and her own fears. Al couldn’t help but admire her.

  “We’re on target, Viv. Almost there. Hang on, hang on.” He intended his words for himself as much as Vivian. The sky had become filled with what seemed a solid blanket of flak, a shroud of death. A flash flood of doom washed over Al. He ignored it. He focused instead on the stacks of the refinery coming up fast. Two minutes.

  Two plane-lengths ahead, Hell’s Wench clipped a balloon cable. The balloon, now untethered, wobbled skyward like a runaway dirigible. Hell’s Wench shuddered. Then a series of devastating blasts from ground fire struck it, ripping into its wing, wing root, and finally the cockpit. Flames exploded from the fuel tanks.

  “God, no,” Al bellowed.

  In the burning aircraft, Baker and Jerstad jettisoned their bombs.

  Al spotted an open wheat field in front of the burning bomber.

  “Go down, go down,” he screamed, not that the doomed crew could hear him.

  “Why doesn’t he mush it in?” Vivian yelled.

  Al knew. Baker had promised. Promised to lead the Circus to the target. Gentlemen, I’m going to take you to this one even if my plane falls apart.

  Hell’s Wench, fire streaming from its tanks, didn’t waver. Baker aimed it between the two stacks. A figure tumbled from the nose-wheel hatch, blew back toward Oregon Grinder, a white parachute blossoming in the black hell. Al could see the burned legs of whoever had bailed out as Oregon Grinder missed him by mere feet.

  Hell’s Wench took another direct hit.

  Oregon Grinder reached the target, barreled between the twin stacks.

  “Bombs,” Al yelled.

  Kenny released them. Oregon Grinder, freed of almost two tons, sprang upward.

  On either side of them, other Liberators triggered their weapons. Some bombs skipped along the ground, arcing into and through buildings like earth-bound porpoises. With delayed fusing, the weapons didn’t explode immediately upon contact.

  Just ahead of them, the blazing Hell’s Wench canted over on its right wing, then attempted to climb. Al couldn’t see how. Flames engulfed it. It staggered upward a couple of hundred feet. Three or four more men dived from the airborne holocaust. But the Wench could no longer fly. It fell off on its right wing, plunged past Oregon Grinder so close both Al and Vivian reflexively ducked. The dying bomber disappeared beneath them in a trail of fiery black smoke.

  Colonel Addison Baker and Major John Jerstad had literally flown their ship to pieces leading Ted Timberlake’s Traveling Circus to the refineries of Ploesti. Their fate jabbed a wrecking ball of a fist into Al’s gut.

  A second phalanx of smoke stacks and cracking towers materialized in front of Oregon Grinder.

  “Not gonna make it,” Vivian screamed.

  Al knew why. The wing span of a B-24 exceeded a hundred feet. The stacks stood only about fifty feet apart. No time to climb.

  “Roll it right,” he bellowed.

  Together they cranked their control wheels, banking the craft to the right. The left wing lifted, the right dipped. But not quick enough. The left wing tip blew apart as it nipped a stack. But Oregon Grinder flew on.

  “Level!” Al commanded.

  He and Vivian rolled the plane back to level flight.

  Vicious volleys of flak continued to erupt all around them. An exploding shell struck the craft, shaking it from stem to stern.

  “Where?” Al shouted, hoping one of the gunners would respond.

  “Right vertical stabilizer. About two feet missing.” Al assumed the call came from the right waist gunner, Ned. He’d have the best angle of sight.

  “Everybody okay?”

  “Right waist here, Pops. Okay.”

  One by one, the crew reported. Except for Sergeant Cummings, the tail gunner.

  Al feared they’d lost him. But he couldn’t scramble back to check, or send anybody else. Not in the middle of a battle.

  “Get it lower, Viv,” Al said. “If we come out of the city too high, the fighters will nail us.”

  They dropped the nose and thundered down a wide boulevard mere feet above the road, eye-to-eye with rooftop gunners. Streams of red, orange, and white tracers interlaced the thoroughfare as continuous blasts of gunfire, from both the enemy and Oregon Grinder, filled the space between them in what had become a great air-ground battle.

  “Hell of a lot more guns here than we were briefed on,” Al snapped.

  Vivian only nodded.

  A burst of shells caught the Liberator in the right wing, ripping apart the number four engine—the outboard
engine—and taking a section of the wing with it while launching a spray of shrapnel into a fuel tank.

  “Damnit,” Al exclaimed. “Three engines now.”

  “We can fly it on two,” Vivian shouted.

  “We’re gonna have fighters after us.”

  Vivian didn’t respond to that statement. Instead she yelled, “Ahead!”

  Al saw it, some sort of wire, maybe a radio antenna, draped across the street between buildings. Too late. They ripped into it, through it, and beyond it.

  They reached the end of the street, climbed. On a parallel avenue, a B-24 in full flame, both wings sheared away, careened down a street like a speeding locomotive engulfed in a blast furnace.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Al barked.

  They continued to hurdle multi-story buildings and smoke stacks as they stayed low, abusing the three engines that still functioned, but they’d lost speed. Other bombers raced ahead of them. They executed a ninety-degree pivot and struggled toward the northwest edge of the city. There Al meant to turn toward the southwest and retrace, in the opposite direction, their approach to Ploesti, now their escape route.

  Al glanced back at the refineries they’d struck. Orange flames and obsidian smoke billowed skyward as the delay-fused bombs reached the end of their forty-five-second countdowns. Storage tanks exploded in mammoth fireballs, their steel tops spinning into the air like flying dinner plates.

  Al wanted desperately to scramble rearward and check on his tail gunner, but had no opportunity. Black balls of flak continued to explode all around them. And he knew that the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts lurked, waiting for the bombers to exit the city, waiting to feed on the cripples. Like Oregon Grinder.

  “On the right, aircraft coming hard and low,” Vivian exclaimed, pointing.

  19

  Over Ploesti, Romania

  August 1, 1943

  Al peered through the cracked plexiglass of the cockpit, trying to spot the aircraft Vivian had indicated. He saw them instantly. Five of them, big planes, hugging the ground, bearing down on Oregon Grinder’s flight path.

  “Liberators,” he said. “Ours.”

  “Where’d they come from?”

  In the wake of the approaching B-24s, fire and smoke billowed from a refinery on the northeast side of Ploesti. Much farther east, well away from the city’s petroleum facilities, a score of bombers barreled northward, dropping bombs and triggering columns of black-gray smoke. Al realized instantly what had probably happened.

  “It’s the Liberandos,” he said, “from the bomb group that headed toward Bucharest.”

  “They came back!”

  “Some did. Looks like most of them are scooting around the city well to the east. They’re hitting targets of opportunity, not refineries.”

  “Who the hell ordered that?” snapped a voice over the interphone. Al guessed it belonged to George.

  “Dunno. Maybe Compton. Maybe General Ent. He was riding in Teggie Ann with Compton.”

  “Who’s General Ent?” Vivian asked.

  “Commander of all these bombers, 9th Bomber Command,” Al answered. “I think the Liberandos turned around when they realized they were headed toward Bucharest. Then they saw that wall of flak over Ploesti and decided—either Compton or Ent did— it would be certain death to attempt an attack.”

  “All except for these guys, apparently,” Vivian said. The group of five Liberandos appeared only seconds away from Oregon Grinder.

  “Stay low, stay low,” Al cautioned. “Damn, I hope they see us.”

  The five B-24s roared over the top of Oregon Grinder with only feet to spare.

  “Guess they did.” Vivian spoke calmly.

  Oregon Grinder, already shaking like it had the palsy, vibrated even more violently in the wake turbulence of the rogue Liberandos, whoever they were.

  “They deserve medals,” Al said.

  Flak continued to erupt on all sides of them. Al knew with their reduced speed, the antiaircraft gunners had to be licking their chops.

  “Keep ridin’ the treetops,” he urged, “it’s hard for the ack-ack guys to depress their guns that low.”

  Off to the left, a B-24 without a tail section splattered into a corn field and erupted in flames. Five men scrambled from the wreckage and dove into a drainage ditch as the Liberator exploded. Well out in front of Oregon Grinder, a Liberator with smoking engines lowered its landing gear and plopped down in a wheat field. A wing clipped a mound of earth and the bomber ground-looped but didn’t burn. The crew evacuated in a matter of seconds and waved at Oregon Grinder as it rumbled by overhead.

  Al dipped a wing, very slightly, in acknowledgement.

  “God bless ’em,” he said. Then, “Hey, Kenny, you see who that was?”

  The bombardier responded, “Looked like Honky-Tonk Gal.”

  “Thank you, Lord,” Al muttered. The guy in the bunk next to his at Benghazi, the guy he’d made plans to grab a beer with after they got back from Ploesti, was Honky-Tonk Gal’s bombardier.

  “Pops, Pops, hey, what happened?”

  “Rhett?” Al couldn’t hide his surprise, and relief, at hearing the voice of what sounded like his tail gunner.

  “Yeah, it’s me. I guess I, well, I dunno. Took a nap.”

  “Took a nap?”

  “All I remember is a big explosion right over my head. Everything went black. Knocked me silly. Knocked me out, I reckon. Woke up just now. Got a bitch of a headache. Cuts on my face. The plexiglass is shattered.”

  “Ack-ack hit the right vertical stabilizer. We only got half of it left. That’s what blew out the glass in your turret and put you outta commission. Probably gave you a concussion.”

  “Feels like somebody took a hammer to my noggin.”

  “Soon as things quiet down, I’ll get somebody back there to look at you.”

  “Thanks, Pops.”

  “You okay to shoot?”

  “Can’t see shit through the cracked glass, but I think my guns are okay. Yeah, I’m ready.”

  Oregon Grinder continued to vibrate and shake, but it seemed controllable, albeit unable to exceed two hundred miles per hour. Fighter bait. The fuel leak at least seemed minor, with more of a spray exiting the plane than a solid stream. Still, Al realized, their odds of making it back to North Africa had plummeted. In all probability, they wouldn’t have enough gas. Not that they wouldn’t fall prey to a fighter before they had to worry about that anyhow.

  Al rolled the plane gently to the left and took up a course toward the southwest. They’d soon be out of the flak zone, but in what the guys called Indian Territory, the area outside of Ploesti where the fighters would be waiting to ambush them.

  “More bombers, lots of them, about two o’clock, down low!” The call came from Tech Sergeant McGregor in the top turret.

  Al swiveled his head to look slightly to his right.

  “Holy cow,” Vivian said, “is that the rest of the force?”

  Two echelons of B-24s swept toward Ploesti from the northwest, charging hard from the direction of the third IP.

  “It’s Killer Kane and Leon Johnson,” Al responded. “The Pyramiders and Eight Balls.”

  “Late to the party,” Vivian said.

  “Yeah, and they’re getting cut to pieces. Shit, look at that.”

  The Pyramiders and Eight Balls, hugging the earth and following a set of railroad tracks, screamed toward the refineries. A freight train, or at least what looked like a freight, rolled along the rails in tandem with the Liberators. But the sides of the freight wagons had been folded back, revealing batteries of antiaircraft guns that now ripped into the attacking planes at almost point-blank range. A deadly trap.

  Enfilades of exploding steel tore into the bombers as they barreled southeastward on both sides of the tracks, the Pyramiders on the left, the Eight Balls on the right. The Liberators’ fifty-cals returned the fire in almost continuous streams of lead. The space between the planes and the train had become a virtual wall
of red and white tracers. The locomotive tugging the flak train exploded. The cars behind it accordioned to a sprawling halt.

  But the damage had been done. Almost two dozen Liberators either lay in smoking wreckage on both sides of the tracks or continued to limp toward their targets with shot-up engines and wounded crew members.

  The surviving bombers thundered across Oregon Grinder’s path, their bomb bay doors open, only feet above the ground.

  “They gotta be confused as hell,” Al said. “Their targets are already burning and exploding.”

  “The ones we hit?” Vivian asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What a mess.”

  “An understatement.”

  “Hey, where are the Sky Scorpions?”

  “Going for a target north of Ploesti.”

  Oregon Grinder exited the flak zone, but Al knew the fighters would now come for them.

  “Heads up, everyone,” he announced over the interphone, “eyes peeled for fighters.”

  No sooner had he spoken than someone yelled, “Bandits, bandits. On the right, two o’clock high.”

  Kalamaki, Greece

  August 1, 1943

  In the enervating Mediterranean heat, Egon dozed off in the alert hangar, his head nodding to his chest as he sat in a rickety chair. His daydream drifted away to Germany, to the green banks of the Mosel on a summer day with a soft breeze. To a time before men soared through the beauty and vastness of European skies intent on destroying one another with bullets and bombs.

  He and Inge and their infant daughter, Christa, rested on a cotton blanket in velvety grass. While Christa giggled happily with a rag doll clutched to her chest, he and Inge sipped cold Schwarze Katz and nibbled on thick black bread topped with chunks of Leberwurst. In the center of the river, a small passenger boat slid downstream toward Koblenz and the Mosel’s confluence with the Rhine.

  “I wish we were aboard,” Inge said. “It would be such an adventure.”

  Egon smiled. “Ah, yes.” He stared at the vessel weaving through the narrow, serpentine valley with its steep slopes quilted in verdant vineyards. “But our life will be an adventure. A good one, I think.”