There are many things with which a bombardier must be thoroughly familiar in order to release his bombs at the right point to hit this predetermined target.
He must know and understand his bombsight, what it does, and how it does it.
He must thoroughly understand the operation and upkeep of his bombing instruments and equipment.
He must know how to set it up, make any adjustments and minor repairs while in flight.
He must know how to operate all gun positions in the airplane.
He must be able to load and fuse his own bombs.
He must understand the destructive power of bombs and must know the vulnerable spots on various types of targets.
He must understand the bombing problem, bombing probabilities, bombing errors, etc.
The bombardier should be familiar with the duties of all members of the crew and should be able to assist the navigator in case the navigator becomes incapacitated.
After releasing the bombs, the pilot or bombardier may continue evasive action -- usually the pilot, so that the bombardier may man his guns.
—Duties and Responsibilities of the Airplane Commander and Crewmen, 1943
***
Seymour ‘Sonny’ Segan
In Maxwell, Nebraska, there’s a separate cemetery just for group burial—lots of men are buried there. There were ten of us on that plane. Three of us survived. One got out before the plane went into the dive—it was in a straight dive from about 13,000 feet—one was blown out of the plane when half of the plane blew up on the way down—and I got out just before it hit the ground, maybe a second or two; I think I was pushed out. I have a 1947 [area search investigation] report that says, ‘Were finger prints taken?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘No hands!’ You know, that type of thing where they bury thirty-five pounds of a guy that weighed 200 pounds.
*
I was one of the original 485th Bomb Group. We trained in the United States, in Nebraska. We went overseas; we flew from Nebraska to Florida, then we flew down to Trinidad, and then we flew to Brazil. And from Brazil, we flew across to Dakar. Then we came up to Marrakesh where we lost a crew in the Atlas Mountains—they flew right into them.
When we flew the group over, the ground crew came by ship. One squadron lost their ground crew because the ship was one of the largest [troop carriers]; the Germans got them in the Mediterranean and sunk the delivery ship. We were in Tunis for about four or five weeks, and then flew across to Venosa, Italy, where we started our missions.
The first mission to Yugoslavia was a ‘milk run’. A milk run is an easy mission where you don’t run into fighters and have little to no flak. It was probably planned that way, because at the time the group was a whole bunch of neophytes. Later on, when you have a mixture of [more seasoned crews] and replacements, and that’s where it gets tougher. When I was in North Africa [before the missions in Italy], we’d go into Tunis, and you’d run into some guys who had already finished their fifty missions. You got a hold of them right away and you would try to pick their brains the most you can. And the usual question we always asked was, ‘How many guys made it all the way through?’ It was usually two, three, and occasionally four crews or so. Out of eighteen planes in a squadron. There were four squadrons in a group. We were the 828th, 829th, 830th, and 831st. The group commander was Colonel [Walter] Arnold, a very famous leader at that time. His uncle was Hap Arnold, the head of the United States Army Air Corps in those days. He got shot down, too; he was shot down after I was.
We were there for about four or five weeks. You hear of two, three, four, crews coming through. And I got cocky. Because you go on a mission, and you lose one, you lose two, sometimes three or four planes. You start to look out when you’re flying and…
By the way, we flew to Africa in the planes that were [painted] ‘ODs’. You know what OD is? Olive drab. Our planes were all painted that dark green, but later on they found out that the paint was hundreds of pounds of weight, and also the friction against the rough paint was reducing the air speed. So they would start to leave them straight shiny aluminum. But it really didn’t change things; the Germans found you either way. [Laughs] Olive drab was not camouflage, not while you’re up there.
We’d be in the air and I would look out and I would see all these silver planes around me. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m one of the ones that’s going to make it’; there’s always a few that make it all the way through. You look around at all the replacements and you’re one of the originals! You know some of the originals are going to make it, it’s a good chance it’ll be me. After 25 missions, we were down to that. That was the mission before my last mission. It was a false sense of security I had.
‘Controlled Fear’
Still, it might sound funny, but you always accepted the fact that you might not make it; you were stupid if you didn’t. You flew with what I would call ‘controlled fear’. You were scared stiff, but it was controlled. My ball turret gunner—he couldn’t take it anymore. As a matter of fact, he tried to shoot his leg, but he didn’t hit his foot; he just took a piece of skin off it. He didn’t want to fly anymore; but they wouldn’t ground him. I guess he was right. He’s dead now. But he had lost control of the fear. Ball turret is a tough place to be, too. He never got out of that ball turret; he died in that ball turret. You have to depend upon somebody else getting you out. You got to crank it up [makes hand motions]. It goes down below the plane and you can’t land with the turret down, otherwise, you’ll be scraping along the runway. Somebody has to crank him up and then you turn yourself around to be able to come out the hatch.
But I really thought I would complete the fifty missions. You’d get to go home. [But] the fifty missions is a fallacy. The reason they called it ‘fifty missions’ was because anyone who had 25 missions in the Eighth Air Force was okay. The reason we had fifty is because on some missions we got credit for two, depending on the severity of the mission. Ploesti was two. Wiener-Neustadt, Austria was two. Neunkirchen, Austria was two. Munich was two. But when you hit like, Bologna in Italy… [to wife] Should I tell him the story about Bologna? [to interviewer] You know the [local Italian-American restaurateur family]? She had her Italian restaurant, one night we went in with another couple, and on the wall was a pictorial map of Bologna, Italy. I looked at it and I said, ‘Oh! Bologna! I bombed that in World War II!’ And she said, ‘My father was killed that raid.’ She wasn’t upset or anything; there were quite a few raids on Bologna, it was hit quite a few times. Anyway, that was a shorter run, and would be credited as one mission.
The worse targets were in Ploesti and Budapest, where the oil refineries were. Those were the worst, in the same category as Wiener-Neustadt in Austria, which was where aircraft factories were. Those were rough. There was heavy, very heavy anti-aircraft flak and fighter planes.
On D-Day, we were sent to Ploesti early in the morning. We were like a diversion to pull fighters to the east instead of to Normandy and that area, on June 6th. Your Tuskegee Airman, is he coming [to the air war symposium]?[30] They were great; they were great. I want to compare notes with him about missions we were on. Any time we saw our American fighters coming in, it was one of the greatest sights.
The problem was, on our long missions, most of the time our fighter planes couldn’t go all the way [to the target with us]. A fighter plane usually had a belly tank [with extra fuel]. But they couldn’t fight in combat with the German fighters with their belly tanks on—it would decrease their maneuverability. So the minute they would come in contact with any fighters, they had to drop their tanks. [They were with us] in Italy, depending on what the mission was. We even went to Munich [together], which is a long mission. And we went to Czechoslovakia, you know, those types of places. These were long missions, in those days. Today it’s not. Our airspeed wasn’t that high, maybe 150, 160, sometimes 170 mph, you know. The fighters can go much faster. But they couldn’t use their belly tanks; they’d have to jettison them for combat.
‘Maximum Effort
’
The missions to Ploesti, Romania had begun in earnest in midsummer 1943, when in the first disastrous low-level raid flying out of Libya, 54 bombers were destroyed by German fighters and flak; over 660 men were killed or shot down and taken prisoner. As strategy was refined, sustained attacks on ‘Hitler’s gas station’ over the next fourteen months crippled the flow of oil from what had once supplied at least a third of the Reich’s supply.[12]
On the day we were shot down, we were not even in our own plane. Our plane had been badly damaged in the mission before this one, badly banged up from flak and needed a lot of repair. They wanted the maximum effort on this mission so they sent us up in an old plane from the 831st Squadron. I was the 829th. That plane should not have been flying. We had trouble with one of the plane engines, it started to go out, that #3 engine. Later, when I was brought out of Romania back to the hospital in Bari, Italy, one of the crew members of that ship said, ‘We would not fly in it, I don’t know why they sent you up in it, that plane was not in a condition to fly.’ That’s why we got shot down.
The day we were shot down, the target was the oil refinery in Bucharest. Normally it would have been about seven to eight hour mission; you lose a lot of time getting off and then you have to circle until you get into formation. Don’t forget we were taking a lot of ships up; you have to get into the other groups’ formations, the whole concept of that type of combat we flew in was to have as many planes as possible all bunched together.
A B-24 flying over a burning oil refinery at Ploesti, Romania, 1 August 1943. United States Army Center of Military History, public domain.
You have an upper box, a middle, and a lower box of planes together. When you have the firepower of all those .50 caliber machine guns concentrated, a Me 109 or Fw 190 will not come in on you. Each ship has a nose turret gun which is two .50 caliber machine guns; a top turret, two more; a ball turret gunner, two more; two waist gunners, one each—they would hold them out the waist window; you also had the tail gunner. So you have got 2,4,6,8…10. Ten .50 caliber guns, but when you’re flying in a formation of 18 planes, and close by that is another formation of 18 planes, that is multiplied. There are 180 machine guns from that one box, and you have those three boxes, one right there with the other one. We flew formations so close that you could see the faces of the guys in the plane off-setting you. It took flying skill, it took coordination over the radio and everything like that, and that was the best protection you had from enemy fighters.
From flak you had no protection. The only way we had protection from flak was we would throw out tinsel to try and screw up the radar that they had, so the air would be full of metal. But still you know, [in daylight] they more or less could figure out us out. Flak was a deadly, deadly thing.
Once you go up to your ‘IP’, the initial point to begin the bombing run, the plane cannot veer or take evasive action from the flak. As a matter of fact, the pilot is not even flying the plane at that point; it was my job as the bombardier, taking over. When we made that turn to the target, we have to stay in that course until I dropped the bombs. Then we had to [turn, in formation] as fast as we could to get out of the flak.
Now their fighters would be ready. They did not want to go into their own flak, most of these German fighters. So, one good thing was, when you were over the target with all of that flak, you were not being hit by fighter planes. Although on some missions they did come in to attack us through their own flak, but majority of times they did not. When we began the group turn, after we dropped our bombs and started to turn to go home, that’s when we lost our group. That is when fighter pilots attacked us. They will always go after the stragglers.
We could not keep up with the group; we had that one engine out, and another one was not in good shape. We had also lost our radio communication as we were being attacked by the Me 109s. We had lost altitude from about 22,000 feet to 13,000 feet when they hit us. Some reports say nine, some reports say seven; I remember that there were a lot of them coming in. I was dry in the mouth. I was in my bombardier compartment, there was a nose gunner in front of me and then there was a bubble over the top of it that I could put my head up in to call out the fighters: ‘At twelve o’clock, ‘three o’clock’, ‘two coming in at three’, ‘two coming in at two’, you know, that type of thing. The ironic part about it was that I was the best gunner in my crew. I had gone to gunnery school and I was an excellent machine gunner prior to going to my advance training as bombardier. That’s a frustrating feeling, not having a gun.
I had to give testimony when we got back. [Reads from an official ‘Reports of Death’ identification memorandum dated June 10, 1949]:
Date: June 28, 1944
Time: 10:30 AM
The location was approximately 35 miles southwest of Bucharest, Romania. The plane was in a dive when I bailed out. It went into a dive at 13,000 feet stayed in it all the way down.
I was hanging out the escape hatch when it went into the dive and managed to bail out just before it hit the ground. I bailed out approximately 300 feet from the ground. To my knowledge, none of the crew were killed or wounded before she crashed.
The plane was on fire when it went into the dive. The fire was in the bomb bay command deck and waist. All engines were shot out. In the dive, the tail blew off. While on the ground, I saw part of the stabilizer floating down. This was confirmed by radio operator, Tech Sergeant Scott, who was blown clear when she blew. Lieutenant M. J. Hirsch, Navigator, Tech Sargent Scott and myself bailed out and our chutes opened. The plane exploded and smeared all over the ground when it hit.
After reaching the ground I saw Tech Sergeant Scott, whose parachute came down after me. He came over to me and tried helping me with my leg, which was injured upon hitting the ground. Near the fire of the plane was a parachute and Romanians who picked Scott and I up told us that this man was dead. I did not see who it was but I have reason to believe it was Sergeant Peterson, who had been the only one reported killed.
While in the prison camp I heard from Lieutenant M.J. Hirsch, whom I later saw being freed. As for the rest of the men I heard nothing. I did not examine the wreckage, and all I could see was fire along the ground. We did not land in water.
I believe my other crew men are dead as the ship as was in a straight dive down, making it nearly impossible to bail out. I got out as I was hanging out the escape hatch when in to the dive having only inches to go and it still took me 13,000 feet to get out. Sergeant Scott was holding on the waist gun was blown out the waist window. Lieutenant Hirsch got out before she went into the dive. Another reason I believe they are dead is because no one ever saw their parachutes and they never showed up at the prison camp after we were freed.
*
Last year I got a really interesting phone call from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The nose turret gunner came from Milwaukee, he was married, he had just had a little baby girl, she was about six months old when he died. He got killed in the crash; he might have pushed me off and out of the plane. You have to understand, it’s like centrifugal force. It was like a stone wall that you are up against. You got to get out—I can’t get out, I die. I don’t want to die, I got to get out! I can’t get out, that type of thing, and then all of a sudden, bam, I am out! He was a big, powerful guy. I don’t know. I was hanging out the escape hatch of the nose wheel.
His grandson called. The nose gunner was killed on June 28th, and a few months later his wife died from tuberculosis; this little girl was left alone. Her family brought her up. She had five sons. One of her sons called me, his grandson. I said to him, ‘I am almost 90% positive that your grandfather saved my life.’ To be honest with you, I do not know. The pressure when the plane went into the dive was so great, it was like pushing us back. This man who called me never knew his grandparents; his mother never knew her own mother and father. I didn’t even know about that until he called.
*
I don’t remember pulling the ripcord, but when I hit the ground, I smashed my left
leg. I was about 50 or 100 feet away from the burning plane. I took off the Star of David from around my neck and tossed it as far as I could; Romania was also very anti-Semitic and working with the Nazis. My radio operator, Scotty, came over and then the Germans arrived. They took us to an airfield. Because my leg was so bad, they took me to a civilian hospital in a small town, Budestei; Bucharest was in flames at the time from bombardment.
The first day I was there they brought in this big guy; he looked like he was cast for a beer wagon driver in the 1890s with the big handle bar mustache, the big cheeks, you know. [Chuckles] They were telling me that my bombs injured him! I was a little scared, a 21-year old kid. Then he starts yelling at me, ‘For Vayne! For Vayne!’ I did not know what he was saying but I figured it was the F-word. [Laughs] One of the nurses spoke a little French and I spoke a little French, my high school French. I turns out he had a brother in Fort Wayne, Indiana; he wanted to know if I knew his brother! [Laughs] He gave me a big smile. He wasn’t angry with me.
They had girl Russian prisoners, paratroopers, working in the kitchen there. The Romanians shaved off all of their hair so they could not escape, so they would be able to find them, you know, looking for a bald girl. [Chuckles] They heard that there was an American prisoner there, and they came to my bed with some food that they took from the kitchen, some fruit, and gave it to me. I liked it there but they did not keep me there long; they sent me to a Russian prison camp. I was there about four or five days until some [Romanian] officer came in one day. The men in the camp, the Russians, were enlisted men. Most of the Romanian officers were all members of the nobility. They were second and third and fourth sons of the nobles, so being an officer in the military in Romania was a very high echelon thing. Civilians in the street, as they passed, would have to salute them. So, it would be against their whole belief system to put an officer, even an enemy officer, in with prisoners who were enlisted men. So they put me in a hospital with another Romanian officer, who treated me very nicely, gave me extra food and things like that. The only thing that was bad there was the doctor. There was a three-inch gap between my tibia and fibula and he told me to walk on it. I didn’t know; I was a 21-year old kid. A young Romanian intern, who couldn’t speak a word of English, made me understand not to. He did it secretively, afraid of getting caught. Then, a nun brought in a picture of Jesus Christ and hung it on the wall. And I found out that the Romanian officer was anti-Semitic. I am Jewish. Finally, I told him I was Jewish. He never spoke to me for the next couple of days, and they moved me out into the Bucharest.
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