The boys got out and they started counting up the holes in the airplane—we had well over a 100 holes in the airplane. Most of them were small holes, but one of them was as big as a bushel basket. And there wasn’t one of us who was scratched, but the medical people showed up and they grounded us right there, and they said, ‘You boys are going to a rest camp for a week.’ So went down to some place in southern England, it was old and a real big place where they had a lot of bedrooms. The Red Cross people were running it and we had to come to dinner every night in Class A uniforms; other than that, we could wear what we wanted. They had bicycles you could ride out in the country with, and so on and so forth.
The Final Mission
Earl and his crew rested their nerves. When they returned to base after a week of much needed relaxation, they were briefed on the next mission—a heavily defended target that would test their abilities yet again and end in disaster.
We found out we going to Merseberg, which is a synthetic oil plant, and it was a rough one. And when you went down to breakfast in the morning and you got fresh eggs, you knew it was going to be a rough mission. If you got powdered eggs, you knew it was going to be a ‘milk run’, but I never did get one of those milk runs.
This was my 17th mission. So we knew we’re going to Merseberg—we’ve been there before and we know it’s going to be rough. We took off and we got over there, and there was [heavy cloud cover over the target area]. We dropped our bombs on what we thought was the synthetic oil plant, and then there was some mix-up—I don’t think anyone really knows what happened for sure, but for whatever reason after we dropped our bombs, our group was going one way [gestures towards the right with one hand, points towards the left with the other hand] and the rest of the strike force started turning the other way! Nine hundred and some airplanes turned right, and thirty-six turned left, and which one’s do you think the German fighters going to hit? They picked us, and they pulled our fighters, who were supposed to be protecting us, off in a dogfight. I told the guys, ‘Keep your eyes open, we are about to be hit!’ And sure enough, they came down in groups of fifteen right behind us—I never saw a fighter at all—and they started pumping 20mm rounds into us. After they started to run out of ammunition or whatever, they would just peel off underneath our planes.
The crew told me my rudder, my vertical stabilizer was gone. I could hear the shells exploding in the back of the airplane and I could feel the hits, but we never saw the fighters from where we were in the front—I’m flying formation, that’s my job. The next group of fighters came in, and I saw about six or eight feet go off my left wing, and again I could feel the shells exploding in the back. The third group came, but kind of missed us. The fourth group came in, and we got two 20mm rounds right in the cockpit besides my co-pilot. I didn’t know if he was hurt real bad or what, but now the plane was on fire, so the top turret gunner came down and grabbed the extinguisher and he put the fire out. We thought it was out, but it flared up again, so now the only thing to do was to get out. I rang the ‘bail-out’ signal, and I reached out and grabbed William out of his seat, yanked him out. I didn’t know whether he was hurt bad or what. The top turret gunner bailed out and went down.
I got out of my seat, grabbed Bill, and started down the gangway. But I felt the airplane climbing, and I thought to myself, ‘If this thing stalls out, and starts falling down backwards, no one is going to get out.’ So I crawled back up—I didn’t get into my seat, but just pushed the controls back forward enough to get the nose down. So I went back down to jump clear and Bill was sitting down there with his feet hanging out. I just put my foot in the middle of his back and kicked him out—and then I sat down there and rolled out, and just as I dropped clear, the plane exploded! I could hear it and feel it, but did not see it; when you jump out like that, your eyes automatically close. You’re jumping out and you’re moving 160 or 170 mph, so your eyes aren’t going to stay open.
‘How to bail out of the Flying Fortress.’ B-17 training manual, US Government. Source: www.cnks.info/b17-flying-fortress-interior
So now I was out there in the clouds and I’m thinking, ‘What’s going to happen if I rip this cord and I get pulled up into everything, with the updrafts in these clouds?’ I was falling and had the wind on my face, trying to look down, so when I broke out of the clouds I could know how far I was above the ground. I figured I was above ten thousand feet when I broke out, but in fact I was well below that when I did break out—I was pretty close, and I ripped my cord [motions across his waist with his hand] and the parachute worked perfectly, and I swung over one or two times and I was on the ground. I almost stayed on my feet, but the chute dragged me and I went over on my behind.
Prisoner
I was trying to get out of the chute as fast as I could, because about thirty feet away were three women with pitchforks coming toward me and they weren’t friendly, so I had to get out of that harness as fast as I could. I had a .45 strapped against me. I didn’t take it out, but as they got closer I unbuckled it, and they backed off. I was real close to a road so I ducked down onto this road below me and ran up to the other side and started to cross this field. And German civilians were coming with rifles, so I just sat down and put my hands up.
We had been told to get under military control if we could, [as soon as possible, if there was no opportunity to escape]. Men, women, and children came up to me; the women were spitting in my face and the little kids were throwing stones at me. I saw a guy in the distance that I thought looked like he was in uniform and I tried to tell them that was where I wanted to go and I pointed. I couldn’t speak German, [although I think the kids at least knew some English]. I got knocked down three or four times before I convinced them I wanted to get over there. The Germans then took me into a small town and the first person I saw from my airplane and crew was my tail gunner. He was so glad to see someone else from the plane, because you see he came out of his turret, way at the back end of the plane.
The tail gunner had got out, and he told me that the escape door was gone. Now little Joe Salerno was the waist gunner and he was a little 18-year old kid. He was standing there [as the plane was going down], my tail gunner motioned for him to go out, and he shook his head, ‘No.’ And that’s not Joe; Joe wasn’t afraid of anything. When he told me that, I realized real quickly what Joe was doing. He was in the waist gun and Bob Koerner was in the ball turret, and they had this agreement that if Bob was in the ball turret, Joe would wait until Bob got out, and Bob didn’t get out, and Joe just lost it. And we think that because the main door was gone, that possibly the radio operator might have gotten out. Later, while we were on the ground, I was informed by some Germans that one of my ‘comrades’ was bleeding, but they wouldn’t let me go to him. I got the feeling that it could have been my radio operator. But those are three boys who were killed from my crew[17]. I didn’t see my co-pilot until three or four days later.
They had us in [what seemed to be the] backyard of a house for some time. The count in our squadron was twelve airplanes, and we lost nine that day. Now that’s 81 men, and I only saw thirty-something of us alive.
The two Germans [who took me into custody] must have been on sick leave, though they both had rifles. One had a patch over his eye, and the other had his arm in a sling. They took me and another one of our boys who I never knew before; his name was Jerry Silverman.[18] They put us in a car and we started cross country, we had no idea why or where we were going. I didn’t realize that Jerry was Jewish. They drove about 10 minutes and then the car quit. They got out, opened the hood, pulled the wires, cleaned them out real good, and we went another 10 minutes. Now at the next stop one of these guys turned around and he wanted my pilot’s wings. He reached out and started to touch them, and I slammed his arm down on the seat! And Jerry was sitting over there yelling at me to give them what they want, saying, ‘You’re going to get us both killed! Just give him anything he wants.’ But you see, what I had been told before was that if you stand
up to the Germans, you’ll do a lot better than if you cater to them. So I’m just playing the game—that’s not the way I really am—but I got away with it—I slammed his arm down on the back of the seat.
So they got out and cleaned their plugs again and we went on to the town, so their families could see that they had captured us. That night they took us out and put us in something like a one-room schoolhouse and there were two guards there for about thirteen of us. One of the guards would take a couple of us and go into town to get food; we had a little kid’s wagon. I might be pulling the wagon, and the other guy would be back there pushing the wagon, and we would argue with the guards. When one of us was arguing with the guard, the other was sticking everything he could in his pockets, for the other guys who were sick—we were manipulating the guards the whole time, so we could get the food for the guys who were really in bad shape. One boy, a tail gunner, his back was broken in three places; one of the other pilots had his head severely burned going out of his airplane. I don’t know what actually happened to these people who were hurt so badly.
We stayed there about three days, and they brought my co-pilot into me while we were there. He said that a farmer and his daughter had picked him up and hid him for a couple of days, but they got scared and they turned him in. He was not bleeding, but he was in bad shape.
The Germans wound up moving us out of there on a train and I don’t know where they took him, but they moved the rest of us to Frankfurt to an interrogation center.
I think the reason we got away with [our uncooperative behavior toward our guards] was because they were under orders to make sure we got to interrogation—the Germans wanted us over there badly, so they could find out what was going on. So we rode this train and we got into Frankfurt, and we had to run/walk from one end of Frankfurt to the other side to catch another train to take us out to the interrogation center. Now I never saw a full building standing; everything was shattered in that town of Frankfurt. We got over to the other station, and there was a little while before the next train, and there was a good looking German gal there, but she got a rioting crowd rounded up around in a hurry, ready to come after us. The guards finally locked us down in a room in the basement because they couldn’t hold the crowds off. But eventually the train came in and it was just a short ride to the interrogation center. We were there about three days and we gave nothing but name, rank, and serial number. About the third day in, the interrogator said, ‘Well, if you won’t tell me, I’ll tell you.’ He proceeded to tell me things that I didn’t think my parents even knew. He told me that when I was in fifth grade, I was sent to the principal’s office! They knew that our bombardier had made major, which we didn’t know. They had [an intelligence] system and they were working on it a long time, and the only way I can figure out how they got this information is my folks would be sitting up there on the farm, and the college kids would come through selling magazines. Mother would invite them in for dinner, and then she’d sit there and talk to them all afternoon. I think that they were spies—that’s the only way I can figure out how they got this information, but I didn’t think my dad or my mother knew that I had gone to the principal’s office for a little offense like going down the slide head first; they seemed to know everything. But I just told the guys just don’t talk; name, rank, serial number, and that’s it.
The third day there, they pulled us out and put a gun on a train with us. We went to the town of Sagan, southeast of Berlin. That was the camp, if you saw the movie ‘The Great Escape’, that’s the camp that the movie took place in. And all the time that we were in there, we were working on escape deals. But the commanding officer in there made rules—we had our own government in there, and if you wanted to escape, and you had have a plan, then you took it to them and told them what it was, and then the whole camp would work on it. And they made it a court-martial offense to try and escape on your own. There were two or three escapes that went on when I was in there, and one of them failed because of exactly what I said. There was a [guard] tower with search lights and machine guns on it, and then they had a barbed wire fence and a warning fence inside of that. You didn’t go over the warning wire, never. So it was winter, and we had eleven guys dressed up in clothes they had made out of white sheets, and they were hiding in the latrine, and they knew there was a space right under that tower that [the guards in] the tower couldn’t see. So they went out that night and got out clean and free, and made it out. But two other guys decided they were going to try it, and they got caught. So immediately the Germans were looking for a count, knowing that some were gone. So these other guys totally screwed up the deal for the eleven that got out.
[They got recaptured], but what happened to them, I don’t know.
When you first get in there, no one will talk to you, until someone identifies who you are. They figure you might be a mole or a spy. I ran into my roommate from basic training, and he okayed me and then I okayed the rest of my crew.
These were all officers in the camp I was in. The enlisted men went to another camp somewhere else, and they were staff sergeants so the Germans couldn’t make them work. But we were in there and we were in barracks. And my barracks commander was Colonel Gabreski, you’ve probably heard of him—fighter ace in World War II, and then a jet ace in later wars; he passed away just a short time ago.[19] But every evening they would put us out on the parade ground by the barracks, and the old German major commander from the camp would come around and give the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and [Colonel Gabreski] would give the accountability report, ‘one’s in the hospital’, so on and so forth.
Death March
[It got to be January, [1945], and we began hearing guns, the Russians were getting close. Around January 10th, I didn’t know exactly what day it was, but one morning they routed us out of there. There were ten thousand of us in that camp, and one o’clock in the morning they rousted us out of there and put us out on the road, running. They had guns and they had dogs, so when they said, ‘Run!’, you ran. Blizzard, thirty degrees below zero, and we would run ten minutes and walk ten minutes, run ten minutes and at the end of the hour they would give us a five-minute break. And this kept up all day, and somewhere on the route down there machine guns started going off, and I just dove into a snowbank until things quieted down –never did find out what it was about. Now they put the word out that if we fell out for any reason, they would run us through with the bayonet. And as we left the camp they ran us through a warehouse and threw us a Red Cross parcel that had food in it. Well at thirty below zero we didn’t have gloves and couldn’t carry it, so I just busted mine open and stuck everything I could in my pockets, drove my hands in there and proceeded on down the road. We had a break at 5:30 in the morning; I had a clean pair of socks in my pocket and I thought it would be a good idea to change them, so I did, but while I tried to change them, my shoes froze and I couldn’t get my feet back in. So I had to try to walk around for a while to heat them up enough until I could get my feet back down in. We started walking again, and it was still dark and well I was just so tired I figured if I just sat down I’d fall asleep and that would be it—I just felt like I couldn’t go any further. So I sat down.
We had two guys who were up and down that line; one was a Lt. Col. West Point graduate. The other played football for Penn State—big guy, Polish guy, and we couldn’t pronounce his name so we just called him ‘Smitty’. And Smitty got to me, and he’s just slapping the daylights out of me and cursing at me, ‘Get your ‘blanket-blank’ up and get moving!’ So I thought to myself, I have to get up to get away from him, so I got up and started moving again. Well, then they brought my bombardier, Sam, to me, and Sam was completely out of it. He had no idea where he was or who he was, so they wanted somebody who knew him to take him. I got well in a hurry—I snapped out of it because now I had to take care of Sam. And you’d be surprised how well it worked. So I grabbed Sam by the shoulder, and we kept him going down through [that part of the ordeal]. We stopped again, an
d he looked up at me and he said, ‘I know who you are. You’re the best damn pilot in the world!’ I never let him forget that—I told him later that when you’re really down and out, the truth comes out. [Laughs]
But if you think about it, it was Sam who really saved my life, because up until then I was just bound and determined that I just couldn’t do it. When you see somebody else who really needs your help, it really makes a difference; when you have to do it, you just do it.
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