Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  The crew spent mornings honing their aim by firing at logs floating off shore in the harbor. Then Joe would take the men aside and time each one as they stripped and reassembled their .50-caliber machine guns blindfolded. If they took over one minute, he made them do it again. The pilot and his bombardier drilled into the crew precisely where they were to assume their ditching positions in the forward bulkhead in the event of a land or water crash until it became second nature. If it ever came to that, they knew, there would be no time to think. The men joked that with their arms folded over their shoulders and clasping their scapulae, they looked like vampire bats tucking their heads beneath their wings to sleep. They even simulated emergency bail-out procedures by having the crew leap from the open bomb bay doors or waist windows of a parked aircraft. It was George “Cowboy” Kendrick who wryly suggested that he’d prefer to remain in one piece until the plane crashed as opposed to being cut in two by either of the bomber’s twin rudders. Jay and Joe made him practice his jumping anyway.

  Gradually Jay recognized that his team was meshing in ways he had only imagined during those bull sessions back in January. In turn his men, Joe in particular, were also becoming comfortable enough with their captain to occasionally push his buttons. A typical B-17 was packed with radio equipment including a command radio for short-range communication with ground stations and other aircraft within hailing distance and a radio compass for navigation. A few Fortresses were even equipped with the new liaison radios for longer-range communication. It was said that when the weather was right—not often in the Southwest Pacific—a pilot could transmit across 3,000 miles with one of the liaisons, though Jay had never seen it done. But of all the communication gear, it was the plane’s interphone system that got the most use. The interphones allowed all crew members to speak to one another. Some crews were Chatty Cathys, but one of Jay’s hard-and-fast rules was that there was to be minimal palaver—and no cursing whatsoever—over the interphone during a mission. Joe, however, liked to tease his flight commander by lifting the receiver to his lips and softly singing the words of popular American songs—“Come along with me, Lucille, in my merry Oldsmobile.” Sometimes Joe sang in Polish, leaving Jay to constantly wonder if his bombardier was using profanities he could not understand. It was a sign of Jay’s respect and admiration for Joe that he didn’t end these spontaneous concerts by switching to the “call” position on his jackbox to override Joe’s broadcasts. He even allowed himself a chuckle at the groans from the other crewmen when Joe broke into song. He knew when to allow his men to blow off some steam.

  All in all, the camaraderie that Jay’s crew developed served them well during missions in “borrowed” aircraft. But it could not solve Jay’s biggest problem: he still needed his own plane.

  22

  OLD 666

  IT WAS GEORGE KENDRICK’S IDEA.

  One rainy March morning Jay accompanied the waist gunner out to the rump end of Jackson Field to inspect the hulk of a spavined Flying Fortress languishing in the base’s “boneyard.” Kendrick had last seen the bomber three months earlier back in Australia, where Karl Polifka’s Eight Ballers from the 8th Reconnaissance Squadron had been in the process of refurbishing it with camera-mapping equipment for a photo run over Rabaul. Sometime between then and now the plane had been permanently grounded, not even considered airworthy enough to serve as a supply ferry between Australia and New Guinea. How it came to rest on Port Moresby’s scrap heap was anyone’s guess.

  The Fortress was still equipped with its three K-17 trimetrogon time-lapse cameras, but most of its salvageable equipment had been cannibalized by the base’s maintenance crews. The aircraft also carried a cursed reputation. Although it was less than a year old, it had been so thoroughly shot up on so many occasions that it was considered a jinxed plane—a “Hangar Queen” in the vernacular. Adding insult to injury, it had even been shredded by bullets when a crew had taken it up on a photo-reconnaissance mission over Rabaul only to discover at the target that the intelligence shop had loaded the cameras with the wrong type of film.

  One incident in particular had secured for the aircraft a kind of black-comic notoriety, however. This had occurred five months earlier, when the Fortress was tabbed to take part in a bombing run over Lae. It was 30 miles out from the target when one of its life rafts accidentally deployed at 15,000 feet. The expanding neoprene ripped off the bomber’s radio antenna and became wrapped around the port elevator hinged to the tailplane. The pilot took the plane down to below 10,000 feet, where the top turret gunner deflated the raft with his guns. But then the flaccid synthetic rubber threaded itself through the elevator’s flanged lightening holes, and the mission had to be scrubbed—the only occasion, ironically, when the plane had not taken enemy fire.

  The aircraft may have resembled nothing so much as the rotting skeleton of an immense raptor, but to Jay it was the most beautiful plane he had ever laid eyes on. That afternoon he sought and received permission from the Bomb Group’s CO, Lt. Col. John Roberts, to attempt to restore it, and had the bomber towed to a quiet corner of the 65th’s Squadron’s flight-line area. Then, just as he had with his jalopy back at Culver Academy, he began to “Zeamerize” it. “We did what the kids back in my day did with an old car,” he wrote in his diary. “Stripped it down, souped it up, and made a hot rod out of it.”

  The B-17 was one of the early E models, and the name Lucy had been stenciled in bright yellow cursive across its nose by a previous crew. Almost all Allied bombers were given nicknames during World War II. Most were indicative of their destructive intent—Hell From Heaven, Short Bier, Tojo’s Jinx. But it was not unusual for a homesick pilot to honor a wife, a daughter, a mom, or even the gal who got away by emblazoning her name across his aircraft. The inspiration for Lucy is lost to the mists of time, and Jay had the crew paint over the name. In a small surprise, he did not overpaint the U.S. Army Air Force “meatball” insignia—a white star with a large red dot in the center—that was being phased out for resembling too closely the Japanese Rising Sun.

  The only identification that remained on the bullet-riddled airframe was the plane’s serial number printed in white across the tail fin: B-17E 41-2666. To Jay and his new crew, the aircraft simply became “Old 666.” It is not recorded whether or not they were conversant with the biblical connotation of the number.

  The resurrection of Old 666 began the next day. Maintenance personnel were even more scarce at Port Moresby than back in Australia, and for months American flight crews throughout the theater had performed most repairs themselves. Jay’s men were no different. Half of them, he wrote, “had been born with a wrench in their hand.” They were also wary of the sticky fingers of the rival ground crews who were based at Jackson Field, and decided they needed no help from outsiders. Jay and other Airmen had personally witnessed crew chiefs descend on crippled bombers that had crash-landed and strip them of any and all usable parts before the dust even settled.

  Johnnie Able’s expertise came in handy when they replaced the bomber’s dilapidated engines with four working Wright Cyclones salvaged from other junked planes lying fallow behind the busy runway. They also managed to scavenge a set of serviceable tires. Jay ordered his men to discard much of the plane’s heavier internal fittings. Ammo chutes, excess cartridge belt holsters, and even the aircraft’s two piss pipes were chucked. If anyone felt the need to urinate during a mission, the camera hatch in the bomber’s deck would have to do.

  By the time the crew finished “Zeamerizing” the bird, in the interest of pure speed the aircraft had shed 2,000 pounds of equipment. Jay, naturally, had other plans for that missing ton.

  Up in the nose, he ordered the two factory-installed .30-caliber machine guns on either side of the bombardier’s Plexiglas-enclosed Greenhouse switched out for a brace of swivel-mounted M2 Browning .50-cals. The navigator’s compartment had a single .30-caliber gun, which he also replaced with two .50-cals. These weapons would allow the bombardier and the navigator to jump
from one firing station to another depending on what a dogfight called for. Their firepower also bookended the two machine guns Pudge Pugh would man in the tail. Jay knew from experience that you could never have enough .50-caliber machine guns.

  By 1943 the 84-pound, belt-fed “Ma Deuce”—the reference is to its M2 designation—had become the workhorse of the U.S. Army. Developed in the waning days of World War I by the American firearms designer John Browning and refined throughout the 1930s, the .50-cal was deadly effective against a vast range of targets, from infantry to lightly armed vehicles and ships, and was even used as an anti-aircraft weapon against low-flying planes. The gun could be easily affixed to and detached from all manner of land-based vehicles, seagoing vessels, and, of course, fighter planes and bombers. And it packed a wallop.

  The machine gun fired up to 800 armor-piercing rounds per minute, its finger-sized bullets traveling at nearly 3,000 feet per second. As the speed of sound is a little over 1,100 feet per second, a .50-cal’s human target would literally never hear what hit him. The M2 had an effective range of 6,000 feet and a maximum range of four miles: Japanese Zeros may have been able to outrun a comparatively lumbering B-17, but Jay planned on making damned certain they would never be able to outgun his plane.

  To that end he also upgraded the radio operator’s single-gun position just aft of the 12-inch catwalk that spanned the bomb bay. Some pilots had removed the guns from their commo stations when a rash of inexperienced radiomen shot up the tails of their own planes in the heat of dogfights. But Willy Vaughan’s bayonet scar, and the story behind it, proved that he knew what to do with a weapon in his hand. Jay installed a pair of synchronized .50-calibers in Vaughan’s compartment that would allow him to fire both upward and backward. Jay also scrounged yet another set of .50s to complement the normal allotment of one per side in the bomber’s midsection.

  George Kendrick, naturally, claimed all four of these waist weapons as his own, and also volunteered to operate the twin .50s installed over the manhole-sized opening Jay had cut through the bottom of the aircraft’s thin fuselage just forward of the tail wheel. Combined with the ball turret gunner’s two .50-cals, these would give Old 666’s underside nearly double a B-17’s usual firepower on strafing runs and, more important, increase its ability to fend off bogeys attacking from below. He also ordered the three horizon-to-horizon time-lapse trimetrogons mounted over the new hole in the bomber’s belly on either side of the aircraft’s standard camera, and put Kendrick in charge of them, too.

  The .50-caliber machine gun’s major flaws were that it was prone to jamming—many an Airman’s hands sustained major burns in clearing crinkled ammunition belts—and, if not operated correctly, to burning out from sustained firing. Combat scenes depicted in scores of Hollywood movies showed Airmen continuously firing their weapons, when in fact if they did so for longer than six or seven seconds they risked melting the guns’ air-cooled barrels. This fact was drilled into all recruits in boot camp with a simple saying: short bursts harvest more meat per bullet. In the heat of battle, however, it was easy to forget protocol and blast away at an enemy blasting back at you.

  To compensate for the inevitability of at least some of their guns jamming or melting down, Kendrick and Vaughan suggested that they clear space above the catwalk for another brace of .50s to be cached for emergencies. Jay agreed and not only brought the extra guns on board but also instructed the men that at the first sign of trouble they were to immediately jettison any malfunctioning weapons and replace them with the backups. In the same spirit. Jay ordered all ammo cans dumped overboard once they were empty. Yet he still wasn’t satisfied. He required one more weaponry innovation, and he knew just the man to make it happen.

  Technical Sgt. Forrest Dillman had been a late addition to the crew. Old 666 needed a ball turret gunner, and Johnnie Able had suggested his friend Dillman as a candidate. The gimlet-eyed Dillman, Able told Jay, was one of the best he’d ever seen with a machine gun, at least George Kendrick’s equal as a weapons specialist. Dillman was from McCook, Nebraska, a former frontier railroad depot rising in the Republican River valley barely a stone’s throw from the Kansas border. McCook was a traditional Old West boomtown, and its sons—the scions of Indian-fighters and Civil War veterans—took pride in the town’s fighting tradition. Dillman had volunteered for training as a belly gunner because he thought it offered the quickest route into combat.

  At first he considered it the biggest mistake of his life. The USAAF’s month-long aerial gunner course in which he had enrolled included three weeks of classroom topics such as Armaments and Ordnance, Mathematical Theories, Turret Operations, and Recognizing Friend and Foe. Dillman, fairly certain that he could tell an American from a Japanese, was bored to tears. It was only during the course’s final week that potential gunners finally got to fire real weapons, first from stationary positions at fixed targets, then at moving targets, and finally from moving positions at moving targets. This was where Dillman shone, and he graduated near the top of his class.

  Another reason Able had suggested Dillman was that he had completed three semesters at the University of Denver, and Able thought Jay might appreciate having another college man on the team. This naturally raised the question of how intelligent any man could truly be who volunteered as a belly gunner.

  Of the 276,000 warplanes that rolled off American assembly lines between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945, 40,000 would be lost overseas, including 23,000 in combat. (Another 14,000 crashed or were disabled in the continental United States.) This meant an average of 70 American planes lost for every day of hostilities. Allied war planners took some solace in knowing that for every American plane downed, the Japanese were losing six, but there was not an Airman flying in combat unaware of the long odds he faced each time he lifted off on a mission. And manning the ball turret of a Flying Fortress was a particularly nasty piece of business. It took a certain mind-set to be willing to crawl into a tiny glass sphere and hang exposed from the underside of a bomber as flak burst in every direction and enemy fighter planes buzzed you like angry hornets.

  The thin Plexiglas that encased a ball turret gunner’s station would barely stop a .22-caliber bullet, much less a Japanese Zero’s 7.7 machine-gun round. And while the overall mortality rate for B-17 crews in 1943 stood at 30 percent, it rose to a harrowing 60 percent for ball turret gunners. In a cruel irony, the one thing a belly gunner rarely had to fret over was being wounded—the position had the lowest wound rate on the aircraft. Manning the ball turret was quite literally a life-or-death proposition, and most men pressed into the job eased themselves into the bubble as if there might be snakes inside.

  The turret itself was not much larger than a good-sized beach ball, and as a rule only men under five feet four inches were eligible for the job. The station remained empty during takeoff. Once in flight, the belly gunner would rotate the bubble electronically until its twin .50-cals faced straight down, and then lower himself onto a fixed cast-armor plate about the size of a child’s swing. That was his seat. Crouched in the fetal position, his legs hanging in midair by dangling footrests, he snapped on his safety strap and closed and locked the hatch above him. It was so cramped that many gunners didn’t bother to wear parachutes. Yet even without a parachute there was not enough room to reach back and cock the two machine guns, whose barrels extended through the turret on either side of the gunner. Instead, he operated a loading cable running through the fuselage that was attached to the cocking handles by pulleys.

  The two advantages a ball turret gunner had were speed and maneuverability. The electric motor driving the two hydraulic transmissions that rotated his sphere could turn 360 degrees in just over a second, offering a panoramic shot at any enemy aircraft attacking from below, behind, or the front. Given the tendency for a wildly swiveling gunner to lose perspective in his relationship to his own plane during a dogfight, his machine guns were equipped with automatic cutoffs that prevented them from firing when they we
re aimed forward at the aircraft’s propellers.

  Following a bombing mission or a photo run the belly gunner was expected to remain on station until his plane was completely clear of anti-aircraft batteries and bogeys. At this point in the war, with Japanese airbases strung like pearls along the north coast of New Guinea, this meant until his plane had crossed the Owen Stanleys and was on approach to Port Moresby. Missions could last for up to 10 hours, and because these journeys were so adrenaline-sapping, all belly gunners were issued an industrial-strength Hershey bar to maintain energy. But it was so cold in the turret that if the gunner forgot to store the candy against his flesh inside his boilersuit he was left with a frozen, jawbreaking hunk of chocolate. In a final indignity, when a member of a B-17’s crew needed to use the aircraft’s aft piss pipe, he was first supposed to warn the belly gunner to rotate his bubble to face forward lest the urine ice up his sight line. Unfortunately, many crewmen forgot. Since Jay had removed Old 666’s pipes, this didn’t apply to Forrest Dillman.

  Before Sgt. Dillman could begin to contemplate the risks that lay before him, Jay handed his newest crewman one final task. He wanted his own gun. It was common knowledge among Airmen at Port Moresby that Zero pilots had long since discovered that a B-17’s most vulnerable point was the nose. Jay had personally seen enemy fliers race out ahead of his aircraft to turn to meet him head-on, and the Zekes that had taken out Gen. Walker’s bomber had inflicted their mortal damage through repeated frontal attacks. Jay vowed that whatever had happened to the bombardier, navigator, and top turret gunner manning the forward weapons on Walker’s plane—jammed guns? killed or incapacitated early on? melted their barrels in panic?—would not happen on Old 666. If it came to that, he would go out blasting. This was where Forrest Dillman came in.