The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Musgrove began to breathe a bit easier after the bombs were away and the plane pulled away from the target, but once the immediate danger died down a bit, Musgrove could hear the telltale sounds of a sputtering B-24 engine. The plane had been hit by the flak, and Musgrove could tell right away that the damage was serious. He heard what he thought was first one, and then two of the plane’s four engines coughing and sputtering, sounds that were disturbingly different from the incessant drone that the crew listened to for hours on end when flying. The open intercom line allowed the entire crew to hear the pilot and copilot talking, so Musgrove followed the play-by-play as they dealt with the damaged engines.

  “Engine two! Losing power!” the copilot shouted. “Engine three’s going. We got hit bad!”

  And then he heard the two troubled engines shut down. First engine two stopped struggling, and then engine three. Both inside engines were dead. The sudden end to the noise was even more troubling than the rough engine sounds. Musgrove listened as the pilots throttled up the other two engines to compensate and try to keep the plane aloft. The plane stayed in the air, but on only two engines it was too slow to keep up with the formation as all the surviving planes turned away from Ploesti and started their journeys home.

  From his position in the ball turret, Musgrove could see that his B-24 was dropping out of formation. Then he watched as the dozens of other B-24s flew on toward Italy, leaving Musgrove’s plane to limp along behind. The plane could make it back on just two engines, Musgrove knew. He’d seen plenty of planes come struggling back to the base on two engines; they just showed up a lot later than everyone else.

  The real danger came from being alone in the sky. With dozens of bombers flying in formation, each of them loaded with fifty-caliber machine guns, there was safety in numbers. Fighter planes attacking the formation had to get through not just one plane’s defenses, but several. Now Musgrove and the rest of his crew were on their own. If a German fighter found the lame duck, defending the bomber would be much more difficult. Musgrove was sweating in his flight suit now and unplugged the heating port. He moved the ball turret around in all directions again, making sure it was ready if a fighter appeared. He had not yet fired a single shot that day because German fighters never came up to greet them.

  Musgrove listened in as the B-24 pilot called on the radio for a fighter escort to help them make it back without being torn to shreds by a German attack, and then it was only about ten minutes before two P-51 Mustangs came alongside to offer protection, diving down from where they and other Mustangs had been providing cover for the entire formation during the bombing run. The other fighters remained with the faster-moving pack of bombers in formation. Musgrove was glad to see the sleek fighters and gave the pilots a wave as they took up positions on either side of the slow, lumbering bomber. He kept his hands on the ball turret controls, ready if a German fighter thought the slow plane made a good target.

  After a short while, Musgrove could see that the plane was steadily losing altitude. He could hear the pilots talking about losing power and trying different strategies to keep the plane up, but it was clear to him that the plane was not going to make it back to Italy. Then the pilot made an announcement to the crew.

  “Hey, guys, I don’t think we’re going to make it back to our base,” the pilot said calmly. “We just don’t have the energy to get back over the mountains.” He didn’t say anything else, but the crew knew what he meant: Get ready to bail out. It won’t be long.

  A few minutes later the navigator came on the intercom and told the crew that the plane was approaching the Bulgarian/Yugoslavian border. Thanks for the information, Musgrove thought, but it doesn’t help me much. Where on the border? Where are we going down?

  It was about eleven a.m. when the pilot came on again.

  “We’re going to have to get ready to abandon ship because we’re just not going to make it,” he said, sounding more tense than before. Musgrove’s stomach came up into his mouth as he heard the words “abandon ship.” Like the rest of the crew, he had been trained in the procedures but hoped he would never have to jump out of a B-24. The very idea sickened him, the thought of jumping into the unknown when you thought you would be sleeping in your own bunk again that night.

  “Okay, we’ve gone as far as we can go. We better bail out,” the pilot said, hitting the switch for the bailout bell, an alarm no flier wanted to hear. The words seemed to pound in Musgrove’s ears through the intercom headset. “Everybody bail out. Bail out!”

  The bailout bell rang incessantly as the rest of the crew started double-checking their parachute harnesses and then making their way to a side door in the fuselage and throwing themselves out. Musgrove first had to get out of the ball turret, so he hit the switch to raise it up into the plane and climb out. Nothing happened. He hit the switch again. Nothing. He hit the damn thing over and over, harder and harder, and still the turret didn’t move. He was trapped.

  Musgrove called out on the intercom, “I’ve got no power! No power! I can’t get up!” There was no reply. The rest of the crew were bailing out already, and besides, Musgrove knew there was nothing the crew could do for him anyway. He was on his own.

  Musgrove realized he had to use the backup method for raising the turret—a hand crank that relied on pure muscle and a few gears to lift the heavy mechanism up into the fuselage. He had taught his students this lesson a thousand times and now it was his turn to put it to use. Musgrove wasted no time grabbing the crank and furiously winding, winding, and winding. He could feel the turret moving, but he was sure the ground was coming up faster. Musgrove’s adrenaline surged and sweat poured off his face as he cranked as hard and as fast as he could in the cramped bubble, his heart pounding so vigorously he felt it throbbing in his eardrums.

  I’ve got to get out! I’ve got to get out before I’m too low for my chute to work!

  Musgrove cranked the handle for almost ten minutes, his wide eyes focused intently on the landscape below, trying to gauge how low the plane was getting. Finally, with his arms searing from the work, the turret was up in the fuselage far enough for Musgrove to get out. He furiously undid the latches and scrambled out of the hatch, crawling out backwards. He stood up quickly and looked around, but he was all alone. There was no one else on the bomber with Musgrove. In the ten minutes it took him to get back up into the plane, they had all successfully abandoned ship, even the pilots who customarily were the last out. They knew it would take Musgrove a while and they couldn’t do anything to help, so they wisely left without him. Musgrove was eager to follow them, so he went to the spot where he had stowed his parachute at the beginning of the flight, in a corner of the fuselage framing just behind the ball turret.

  It wasn’t there.

  The rough flight and flak concussions over Ploesti had bounced the plane around so much that Musgrove’s parachute wasn’t where he left it. It took a panic-filled moment to look around and find it; then Musgrove quickly attached it to the parachute harness he already wore. With the parachute in place, Musgrove went to a side door and looked out. The plane was getting lower all the time, but he thought it was still high enough for his chute to work. He got down on his knees, as he had been trained, and rolled out into the rushing wind.

  After waiting as long as he could stand, to ensure he was clear of the plane, Musgrove pulled the rip cord on his parachute and braced for the sharp jerk on his harness. He had already winced in anticipation when he realized nothing was happening. He looked down to make sure he had really pulled the rip cord and, sure enough, there was the thing clenched tightly in his hand. His chute wasn’t opening.

  Furiously, as fast as he could while in a free fall from about ten thousand feet high, Musgrove reached into the parachute pack and dug out the cloth with his own hands. He grabbed the soft silk and pulled over and over, until a pocket of the cloth caught the air and the rest exploded out above him.

  Chapter 3

  Counting Parachutes

  Th
e young men parachuting into the hills of Yugoslavia had no idea what awaited them. They knew only that this was their last chance to live when their bomber was on fire or the engines went out or they had lost too much fuel from shrapnel on their bombing runs over Romania. Some, like Musgrove, made several death-defying missions before they were forced to get out of their crashing planes, while others like twenty-one-year-old Tony Orsini had to bail out of his bomber on his first mission.

  Orsini had been in Italy for only a week when he was assigned to his first bombing mission over Ploesti. A navigator, Orsini had guided a B-24 from Lincoln, Nebraska, across the Atlantic Ocean and up the coast of Africa. The crew of green-horns reported to an air force base in southern Italy named Grottaglie as part of the 716th Squadron of the 449th Bomb Group. Orsini had been there for only a few days, waiting for more orientation and local maps, when he was awakened at four a.m. on July 21, 1944, by someone shouting, “Briefing at 0600!” At the briefing, Orsini learned he had been assigned to fly a mission with a more experienced crew. They would be bombing the Ploesti oil refineries.

  In addition to all the usual information about the target, the bomb loads, the route, and what resistance to expect, the officer briefing the crew gave them a curious warning, one they had never heard before.

  “You’re going to be flying over Yugoslavia. If you have to bail out, avoid the Chetniks. They’re the followers of General Mihailovich,” the officer said sternly. “Seek out the Partisans. They’re the followers of General Tito.”

  The advice was completely wrong, but the officer believed it and was trying to be helpful. It would be years before the source of the misinformation became clear. But at the moment, Orsini didn’t give it much thought anyway. Orsini had heard only the sketchiest information about the ongoing civil war in Yugoslavia and the two factions that were fighting for control of the country while simultaneously fending off the Germans who occupied their land. He took note of the warning, but gave it much lower priority than everything else he had heard that morning. This was Orsini’s very first mission, and the rest of the crew would be depending on him to navigate their B-24 skillfully. He didn’t want to miss anything.

  Orsini was scared to death as the plane neared its target in Romania. He tried to focus on the maps on his small desk in the plane, checking and double-checking everything he could think of, but he was terrified by the thought of the air defenses around Ploesti. When his map coordinates showed that they were nearing the oil fields, Orsini looked out a window and saw his fears take form. The sky was filled with exploding shells, the shrapnel tearing through anything in its path—aluminum, steel, or flesh. German fighter planes were zooming through the bomber formation, strafing planes as they held their course and attempted to drop their loads on the target. Orsini was waiting to hear the bombardier call out, “Bombs away!” over the intercom, because that would mean their work was done and the pilots could hightail it out of that god-awful mess. After what seemed an eternity, with explosions booming all around and buffeting the plane back and forth, Orsini heard the bombardier’s call.

  And almost immediately after, he felt the plane shudder violently, a sensation he hadn’t felt before. He knew right away that the bomber had taken a direct hit from the antiaircraft fire. The explosion knocked the B-24 out of formation and the pilots struggled to maintain level flight as two of the four engines died. Just as with Musgrove’s crippled bomber, the crew of Orsini’s plane worried that a German fighter would find them separated from the protection of the pack, flying slow and low. Every so often the pilot would ask Orsini, who had been carefully plotting the plane’s progress, for an update on whether they could make it back to Italy at this speed and fuel consumption. Each time, Orsini replied that it would be close, but they could probably make it. A couple of hours went by that way, the plane slowly losing altitude and the crew deathly silent as they prayed for a good outcome and watched the skies intently for German planes. The quiet was broken when the tail gunner’s voice came on the intercom.

  “Fighters at six o’clock!” he screamed, indicating the sky behind the plane. “Fighters at six o’clock!”

  The gunners all tensed and prepared to fight off the attack, but then the tail gunner came back on the intercom about thirty seconds later and said, “They’re P-38s. It’s okay.” P-38s were American fighters, and these had spotted the B-24 limping home. They flew in alongside and escorted the B-24 as it continued descending, eventually reaching ten thousand feet, far lower than the twenty-one thousand feet where it had dropped its bombs. At that point, the pilot turned back to Orsini and asked him for a final assessment of whether they were going to make it back if they continued descending at that rate.

  “No sir,” Orsini answered. “There’s no way.” The continuing rate of descent had removed any optimism.

  The pilot was prepared for that answer and immediately called out on the intercom, “Abandon ship! Abandon ship! I repeat, abandon ship!” Orsini wasn’t surprised because he had contemplated that possibility for the past hour, and he knew the pilot was making the right decision. Better to bail out now instead of waiting until they were over the Adriatic Sea. The bailout bell was almost a welcome sound by then.

  The only problem was that Orsini didn’t know exactly where they were. He could tell from his calculations that they wouldn’t make it back, but he was missing several key maps that would have told him what region they were about to jump into. When he realized at the morning briefing that he was missing the designated maps, he had asked an officer for them. But the officer dismissed him, telling him not to worry because his plane would be number four in the formation and he only had to play follow the leader. Now Orsini was frustrated that he couldn’t give the crew any idea what they were jumping into. He had some idea that they were over Serbia, but he didn’t know they were in a very mountainous region called Ravna Gora.

  As Orsini prepared to jump out of the ailing plane, he suddenly wished he had taken better care of his parachute. Since it was issued to him nearly six months earlier, he had tossed it around nonchalantly, using it for a pillow and a football on more than one occasion. Now his life would depend on that chute opening.

  He had been trained to count one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three before pulling the rip cord, but Orsini was so anxious about whether the abused parachute would work that he couldn’t wait. He yanked the rip cord immediately and was relieved to see the canopy snap to attention over his head. After the brutal yank of the chute on his harness, everything became surreal.

  The sky was so quiet, with just a soft whisper of wind passing his ears. Orsini had been in the loud plane for hours, the constant rumble of the engines overshadowed only by the deafening booms of the antiaircraft fire. The sudden silence was unsettling.

  Orsini felt like he was suspended in space, as if he were not descending at all but just swaying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The sensation, along with all the fear and dread that gripped him for hours already, caused him to vomit on the way down.

  A navigator like Orsini, Robert Wilson knew it was practically inevitable that he would be shot down eventually. He was a navigator on B-17 bombers, similar to B-24s, and he was specially trained in a new type of radar that enabled the Allies to bomb the Ploesti oil fields even when there was heavy cloud cover or smoke. Normally the bombing runs had to be delayed or cancelled when the cloud cover or smoke was too heavy or else the bombardiers would just be taking a wild guess at where they were dumping all that firepower. The Allies did not indiscriminately drop bombs, so the planes would divert to another target that they could see. The Germans knew this and installed giant smoke pots all around Ploesti, creating black clouds that effectively obscured the target on some days.

  But with the system Wilson used, the planes could still find their targets no matter how obscured they were. Wilson had grown up in Peoria, Illinois, and had completed one semester of college when, at age nineteen, he signed up for the air corps,
attracted by the glamour of flying like so many others. And like many others, he was cut from pilot training. He went to navigation school instead and completed his training in December 1943. B-17 crews trained as a unit, but when Wilson’s crew graduated they didn’t immediately go to active duty like their classmates. Instead they were sent for secret training on the new equipment that required Wilson to be looking for the target on his equipment at the same the time the bombardier was looking for the target visually with the Norden bombsight. If the bombardier couldn’t see the target, Wilson released the bombs based on his readings.

  The radar system improved the effectiveness of the Ploesti bombing runs. However, the air force didn’t have many of these new units. There was only one in the region around Italy where Wilson was based, so it was used as much as possible. The other problem was that the one B-17 with that radar unit—and Wilson operating it—had to be at the front of the pack of bombers every time it flew. Normally, the many flight crews took turns as the lead plane because that was considered the most dangerous spot in the formation, and the pilots had to work much harder to manage the formation and get the bombers to the target. With enough crews rotating, nobody had to put themselves at the head of the pack too often. But when the mission depended on the radar unit finding the target, Wilson’s plane had to be at the front so it could drop its bombs first. Seeing the bombs away on Wilson’s plane was the signal for all the other bombers to drop theirs.

  When they got to their base in Italy to begin active duty, the rest of the crew that Wilson had trained with was assigned to another B-17 and they rotated through the front position like everyone else. But not Wilson. He was permanently attached to the one plane that housed the radar unit, and a different crew was slotted to fly that plane at the lead on every mission. For the other nine crew members onboard, it was just their unlucky day to be in the most dangerous position. For Wilson, it was every mission.