by Andy Rooney
What happened in Red Morgan’s plane wasn’t a typical combat story and what happened to the crew of Francis Lauro’s Fort in a raid on Bremen in January 1944, wasn’t typical either, because too much happened. Mostly nothing happens to anyone on a bomber trip. Mostly the men just sit and wait to be attacked or to be hit by flak. There is always one raid—maybe two—in a gunner’s tour of operations that stands out in his mind as the roughest he ever made. For Lauro’s crew it was that January haul to Bremen.
They got into the target and bombed, all right. On the way out the trouble began when Murray Schrier began having trouble getting a breath. Murray was the ball turret man and after he’d told the pilot over the intercom that his oxygen mask was frozen he climbed up out of the ball turret and started for the radio room before he fainted.
The right waist gunner, Bill Heathman, grabbed Schrier and dragged him into the radio room. There was only one outlet for the oxygen masks to be plugged into in the radio room, and the radio operator, Nelson King, cut his own oxygen off and plugged Schrier’s extension line in there. The waist gunner and the radio operator started to work on Schrier, trying to bring him around.
King fumbled through his heavy gloves with the hose attachment and finally started to hook the mask to the ball turret gunner’s face. The oxygen mask hooks onto two small fittings on the gunner’s helmet in the old-type oxygen system that crews first used and it was an old-type mask they were trying to fit to Schrier’s face. King pulled off three layers of gloves he had on, exposing his hands to the fifty-below-zero temperature in the radio room, in order to tie the mask to the unconscious ball turret gunner’s face.
Feeling the lack of oxygen after he took his line off the main system to give it to Schrier, King plugged into one of the small emergency oxygen bottles. As he finished the job of tying the mask to his ball turret gunner’s helmet King toppled over on top of Schrier. The bottle he had plugged into was frozen and he had been getting no oxygen.
Heathman, the third man, was almost exhausted himself by that time. The other waist gunner, Gerald Will, left his gun and came into the radio room to help after calling Lauro on the intercom to tell the pilot that they were having trouble there. Will hooked his oxygen tube into the walk-around bottle he had beside him and walked forward.
With the green oxygen bottle under his arm Will got as far as the ball turret just outside the radio room before he realized that, like King’s bottle, his outlet valve was frozen stiff. He turned and started back for his waist position where he could plug back into the main line which was still flowing all right, but he never made it. Halfway back to the waist window he collapsed on the floor of the bomber. Three men were lying unconscious and without oxygen.
Heathman, the only one still conscious, called forward over the interphone for help. Walt Green and Emanuel Greasamar, the bombardier and copilot, took walk-around bottles from the nose compartment and started back to the radio compartment.
“With six men tied up in the radio room our luck changed,” Francis Lauro, the pilot, said. “It got worse. Our number two engine started acting up and then several F-W 190s showed up on the fringe of the formation.
“The bombardier called up to me and suggested that we go down a few thousand feet where it was warmer and where the boys would be able to get a little oxygen, but he hadn’t seen the fighters. They would have piled into us if we’d left the formation for a minute and there was an undercast with probably several squadrons of German fighters under it just waiting for some sucker to drop below it. All I could do was hold the ship in formation and sweat it out.
“The Jerry fighters made a pass at us and it was nice timing if they’d only known it. In the nose the navigator, Emery Horvath, did a good job with the nose guns, while Dewey Thompson up in the top turret sprayed them from there.”
In the radio compartment the copilot and the bombardier had revived Will and Schrier with the emergency oxygen bottles they had brought back. King, the second to go out, was in the worst condition and he came around more slowly than the others. When Schrier saw King’s hands, which were left bare when King took his gloves off to fix Schrier’s mask, he opened his flying jacket and put King’s hands under his armpits. Finally the others fixed King’s mask and he started to revive. He had been out a long while though and he came back fighting. The men in the radio room had to call for more help when King, a big, strong Nebraska farmer, started lashing out with his hands and feet. Heathman and Greasamar alone couldn’t hold King down as he thrashed around the radio room.
The top turret gunner, Dewey Thompson, answered the final SOS from the radio room. He hurried back through the bomb bay and helped hold the struggling King.
When Thompson opened the door to the radio room he saw King thrashing around, lashing out with his fists. When his great swollen white hands struck the floor of the ship or the sharp edge of some piece of radio equipment bits of frozen flesh would chip off like shavings gouged out of a hunk of ice. The battered hands didn’t bleed. They were frozen through.
It was too late for them to think of gloves. No gloves would have fit those hands, swollen to more than twice their normal size. Finally King settled down, regaining full consciousness, and Green sat on the floor next to him and again put the horribly battered and frozen hands inside his bombardier’s warm jacket.
King’s hands didn’t start to bleed until the Fort was within sight of England. Down below five thousand feet the blood started moving through his chilled veins and out into the frozen hands.
“I didn’t see King’s hands until we got down on the ground,” Lauro said. “Frostbite was no word for what had happened to his hands. One of the flight surgeons looked at them and I looked at the doc and what he was thinking wasn’t pretty. King had saved Schrier’s life with those hands.”
And that is about where the story of one crew’s memory of their roughest trip ends. Bill Heathman, Nelson King, Murray Schrier and
Air Gunner, the first Rooney-Hutton collaboration
the rest will yell again when they crack their shins and stub their toes, and they’ll complain the next time there is no hot water or heat in the room at home. But that day they were greater men.
Forrest Vosler, too, was great one day.
Forrest was the radio operator–gunner on a Fortress called Jersey Bounce Junior. He was twenty-two years old.
It was a long daylight haul into Germany when the Air Force was beginning to step up its pounding of the Nazis’ aircraft production plants. Jersey Bounce was plugging along in formation when a double burst of flak smashed two engines and sent the Fort reeling from formation. It leveled off, but the Luftwaffe fighters had seen it and closed in for the inevitable kill. Somehow the gunners beat them off. Tracer poured from the waists and tail, the nose guns yammered steadily and from both turrets came an almost drumfire pounding. The radio gun was firing, too.
Finally, a 20-millimeter shell crippled the tail gun. From the radio hatch, a covering fire swept back past the fin and rudder and at length the fighters went away.
When the fighters had gone, the crew began to check up on each other. You all right? Roger. Waist? Roger. Radio? RADIO? Vosler, are you . . . One of you guys go up there from the waist and see if Vosler’s all right.
Vosler wasn’t all right. The first attack, the one that had knocked out the tail guns, had left him with half a dozen 20-millimeter splinters in his legs and thighs. The tail guns had gone out and he’d fired his gun despite the pain, and the fighters had pressed in once more. A 20- millimeter shell had burst next to the radio hatch and jagged hunks of steel ripped into his head and face. Where his eyes should be there was a great gash of red and dead white bits of flesh. The gunners tried to patch Vosler up, but they couldn’t give him morphine because a man with a head wound suffers from morphine and may die. They were still trying to fix his wounds when the intercom clicked:
“Pilot to crew. Gas getting low. We’ll have to get rid of everything we can.”
The
y threw out everything within reach, but the gas was running out and so was time. So Vosler sat down to his radio. He couldn’t see it, but he knew where everything should be. His cold fingers told him what the others could see with their eyes—the radio had been smashed by cannon fire. Vosler was the kind of kid who a few minutes before had fought on with his single gun even after the cannon shell had hit him. Working now by touch alone, hearing the steady, even drip of blood that soaked through the bandages and fell on the folding counter of his radio desk, he fixed an emergency set. He switched on the power and told one of the others where to set the dials so they would be on the emergency channel.
The noise of the key as it called for help was louder than the drip of the blood on his extended arm.
When he had sent out an SOS, telling base they probably would have to crash land in the sea, he fainted. The others revived him, and he called base again. He fainted again. They revived him.
The gas was lower now in the tanks. Still too much weight. The crew searched the ship for more spare weight. They had cleaned her out before. In the radio room, unable to see, still feeling his radio and keeping base advised of what was happening, Vosler made a decision. He asked the other gunners to fix his ’chute and throw him out. That would be 175 pounds less. That might make the gas reach. He was pretty badly off, anyway. Would they? Please.
They said no.
The little lights on the instrument panel had been on a long time. No gas, they winked. No gas, no gas, no gas. Jersey Bounce Junior settled to the Channel, mushed toward the wave tops as the last of the engine’s power died away. They hit. The dinghies went out the hatches. Someone hoisted Vosler. Take care of Vosler, you guys. Right, got him. Take care. Take care.
Out on the wing of the sinking plane, the tail gunner, who had been wounded, started to slip down into the sea. Vosler was nearest. He couldn’t see, but he could hear the kid call for help, and finally his groping hand found the wounded man and held him for a long time until the rescue launch arrived and took them back to being warm and dry.
The doctors think that Forrest Vosler may be able to see enough but of one eye, the right eye, to distinguish the Congressional Medal of Honor they’ve recommended should be his for the day’s work in Jersey Bounce.
The gunners don’t like to think about what goes on in Dick Blackburn’s mind sometimes when he thinks about the targets that filled his ring sights the day of the Regensburg haul. Probably everything was all right. Probably . . .
It was on August 17, 1943, and the sun was hot and a big blob of flame up there with the formations of Fortresses heading for Regensburg and then on to Africa. In the tail of one B17 was Staff Sergeant Richard A. Blackburn, from Port Republic, Virginia.
There were fighters that day, more fighters than anyone in the Eighth Air Force ever had seen at one time. There were all kinds of fighters, though for the most part they weren’t the cream of the Luftwaffe, by any means. They were fighters from the inner ring of defenses, second-line fighters and third-line fighters. Somewhere along the route, as the Forts droned deeper and deeper into the Reich, the district luftfuehrer must have got worried. He must have figured this was an all-out affair. So he called out everything that could fly. There were Junkers 87 Stukas up there, and big four-engined Focke-Wulf 200s and half a dozen kinds of medium bombers.
It was rough, because there were such a lot of them, and it was a long way through the lanes of fighters, but the Fortress gunners were having a field day. And Dick Blackburn was having his share of the fun. For a solid hour and a half Dick tracked German fighters with his guns, opened up with short bursts as they came in, shot at single-engined jobs and two-engined Ju 88s and four-engined bombers pressed into emergency service. He sat there and shot at them and the squint in his eyes grew tighter and tighter because always there was that bright sun to stare up into and worry if it held more fighters.
Blackburn’s Fort got to Africa finally, and the crew had a hell of a time bartering with the Arabs, whom they learned to call “Ay-rabs,” and getting their tired plane ready for the trip back. But Dick Blackburn didn’t have much of a time. He didn’t say much, just spent most of the days they were there stretched out on his back in the shade of the B17’s wing, closing his eyes against even the reflection of the hot African sun.
When the ship took off for England, Blackburn was back in his tail position same as ever, but still not saying much. He didn’t have much work to do on the way to the target, an easy one, Bordeaux, and there wasn’t any enemy plane in the sky for hours.
Finally Blackburn saw what he thought was a German fighter bearing in on them. He started to press his microphone switch and then he wasn’t sure. It looked like one.
“Tail gunner to ball turret. Tail gunner to ball turret. Is that a Ju 88 coming in at five o’clock?”
“Are you kidding, Blackburn?”
“No. Is it? Is it?”
“Blackburn, that’s another Fortress just a little out of formation.”
When they were over the English Channel, and the danger was gone, Blackburn went up to the radio room. He picked up a package of K rations and the other gunners, who had come to the radio room too, saw him squinting at the large lettering on the package.
“Funny,” Blackburn began slowly, “but I can’t tell whether that’s breakfast . . . dinner . . . supper . . . or—
“For Christ’s sake! My eyes!”
When they got back to base, the other gunners led Blackburn to the flight surgeon, who peered into the angry red eyeballs that had searched for German fighters in the August 17 sun and sent Blackburn to bed. For a good many days the gunner couldn’t even see the food they had to spoon into his mouth. After a while, though, the doctors looked at his eyes and said that if he was careful his eyes would be pretty good again, someday. He was through firing and sighting, though. They said that the long hours of staring up into the flaming sky, searching for German planes, had injured the delicate tissues of his eyeballs, had injured the nerves. They said it had begun to happen while he was still peering and firing that day on the way to Africa. They said it had been a wonder he could see anything at all that day.
Blackburn agreed with them. It had been hell, staring up into the sky, trying to catch those single-engined fighters, and the twin-engined ones, and the four-engined ones. The Germans had used an awful lot of four-engined planes that day, an awful lot. . . .
It’s on those rainy nights, when conversation in the hut dies away and a gunner flops onto his sack, too weary to talk, too weary to write letters, and sinks into a sort of mental void, that the inevitable quality of his job comes home to him. It comes in phrases that roll on and on through his brain, and his face will be without expression as it happens to him, except maybe the lines at the corners of his eyes will begin to form and the hard part of the corners of his mouth will draw down a little tighter.
The gunners in a Liberator hut talked for a long time about Dick Castillo, and they waited a long time for word to come back through the International Red Cross. This man and that man in Castillo’s crew was reported a prisoner. This man and that man . . .
Dick, who came from Springfield, Ohio, and was a staff sergeant, was tail gunner in the Liberator Rugged Buggy. The other crews saw what happened to him, and told about it.
Rugged Buggy was on her way in to a German target in the summer of 1943, before the Libs went down to Africa for the Ploesti oilfields mission, when flak smashed the number three engine. German fighters saw the feathered prop and came in, as they always do, firing as the Lib slipped from formation. Other crews could see Rugged Buggy almost heave herself up as the pilot tried to nurse her back to the shelter of the other planes’ guns, but little by little Rugged Buggy dropped away.
Two of the attacking pack of twenty Focke-Wulfs went down as the crippled plane’s guns poured out thousands of rounds, but the other Nazis pressed the attack. Cannon fire silenced the Lib’s waist guns, and great rents and wounds began to show in her wings and tail a
nd fuselage. Rugged Buggy’s defensive fire slowed. Finally, only Dick Castillo’s tail guns were firing, traversing back and forth, framing one attacker just long enough to beat him off, then swinging to another quarter. The tail guns seemed almost to be shooting around corners, to be firing everywhere at once. Over their radio, the leader of the German fighter element ordered his pilots to spread out and smash this verdammte Yankee gunner.
That was the beginning of the end. While one trio of fighters attacked from dead astern, engaging Castillo’s fire, the others cut in from the sides. Maybe they planned it the way it happened, maybe they didn’t, but other crews in the formation of B24s up above saw enemy fire crisscross just forward of Castillo’s tail position, saw the fabric tear loose in great sheets, saw the bare skeleton of Rugged Buggy’s vertebrae exposed.
The Lib slipped off on one wing, and still Dick Castillo was firing. Two enemy aircraft definitely were destroyed by the hosepipe of death that splurted from Rugged Buggy’s tail guns.
Another burst of cannon shells ripped into the fuselage of the B24 as that second F-W went down, and the other crews, from their places higher in the sky, saw Rugged Buggy’s entire tail section, in which Dick Castillo still fought, break slowly away from the rest of the plane, pause a moment to tear loose the last shreds of well-molded aluminum bracing, and then flutter off by itself, twisting over and over as the forward part of the ship plummeted straight to earth.
