Bomber Pilot

by Philip Ardery

  After this first raid, missions came thick and fast for a while. Our next target for two missions on two successive days was Reggio di Calabria, just across the Messina straits from Messina, Sicily. Reggio was on the toe of the boot of Italy.

  The second of these Reggio missions was run July 12, 1943. On it we had a rather bad piece of luck in finding a cloud layer over the target just at the altitude we had planned to bomb. We had to drop under it, and by so doing gave our altitude away to the flak gunners. The town was loaded with heavy guns, and, as always, the altitude of these clouds was already plotted. When we came in just under the cloud, we made the gunners’ job simple. Everywhere there were planes shells were bursting. Hank Yaeger had an 88 mm. shell go right through his bomb bay. These shells were supposed to be fused two ways: to go off at a certain altitude or to go off on contact with anything. Well, lucky for Hank the contact fuse failed, and all that 88 mm. shell did was to tear a clean hole right through the center section of his ship. But other shells knocked out an engine for him, and he limped off in the direction of Malta as the rest of the formation turned south to return to base on the other side of the Mediterranean.

  I was flying with Frank Ellis that day. I remember just after bombs were away I was leaning forward in my seat trying to see some shipping in the harbor when a piece of flak smashed through the side window and flew right across my shoulder and into the back of the ship. Splinters of the Plexiglas window tore into my flight jacket and left a small cut in my right cheek, which bled a little. But I had suffered little more than a severe case of fright.

  The most remarkable thing on that raid happened to the slow, easygoing Robert Lee Wright of my C Flight. Bob had his numbers three and four engines knocked out by flak, and after dropping his bombs with the group he turned the nose of his Lib toward Malta. He ordered the boys to jettison as much equipment as they could and when he figured they were comparatively safe from enemy fighters he had them throw their fifty caliber guns over with all their ammunition. Bob had a toilet seat in the back of his plane. All of our airplanes had come equipped with these conveniences, but most of them had been taken out before the planes reached the combat zone. Bob called his waist gunners to check to be sure they had thrown out all the stuff they could, and one big gunner let his eye light on the can. The gunner reached over, put both arms around it, ripped it from the floor of the airplane, bolts and all, then tossed the whole business out the window.

  After Bob and crew had passed the coast of Sicily and were heading across the expanse of water toward Malta, the number one engine sputtered and quit. They feathered it and with one engine in a ship which had been said to be unable to fly on two, Bob coolly and deliberately decided to set the airplane down on Sicily. The coast was still in sight to the rear, so he turned back. His ship was losing altitude pretty fast, but he had conserved a lot of altitude for just such an emergency. He had had it drilled into him to save the plane if possible. Of course it would be easy to abandon it, but not for Bob. There was a lot of emergency equipment in that airplane that would have to be lost if the crew hit the silk. He had also had it drilled into him in such cases to conserve altitude.

  He picked a field, a little field, clearing up from the beach and ending abruptly in an olive orchard. It was the best to be had, and so that was it. He still had time to put his landing gear down, and with his emergency hydraulic pump on he got first his wheels down and then his flaps. The number two engine was chugging along, but the ship was in its last glide now and coming down fast. Bob made the kind of steep approach with practically no power that he and Fowble and I used to practice back at Biggs Field, Texas. The plane skimmed low over the waves. The wheels hovered over the beach and then touched with an exactness which was unbelievable on the very edge of the open field. A B-24 is not made to operate in such fields. Neither, as a rule, will it operate on an airdrome unless the ground is unusually hard or unless it has hard surface runways. I have seen B-24s break up concrete when it is not thick enough. But Bob landed his Lib in that field, and didn't do it any damage except to blow a nose wheel tire. It rolled up almost into the edge of the olive orchard and stopped.

  Anyone who has ever flown a B-24 will admit this is the story of a near miracle. But that wasn't all. It just happened, and completely unknown to any of us on that raid, that that was the day of the landing on Sicily. As luck would have it Bob had come down on a narrow stretch of beach which had just been taken by Canadian forces. As he and the crew got out of the plane, he saw the Canadians running toward him. The bomber crew gleefully joined the ground forces and went up to the front. When Wright's crew finally got back to Bengasi about two weeks later, they were laden with every conceivable item of Italian gear and arms. They had taken some Italian prisoners, and from them had recovered these mementos of their great adventure.

  Before I started combat the most important question in my mind was how I would take it. I knew I had no more courage than the average American, but I had studiously followed the methods suggested by psychologists to overcome fear. Early in my flying career I discovered that when you have an airplane in your hands and you feel yourself getting scared, the first thing you must do is force yourself to relax. That sounds paradoxical, but that is just what you do. You can fly an airplane with a lot of things wrong if you relax. If you become tense you completely lose that all-important feel of the controls that gives advance warning of what the ship is likely to do. You know what kind of glide to set for landing. You know whether you have enough speed to clear the tree ahead of you, or you know if you try to clear it, you will stall out at a critically low altitude. Then you must plan to point the nose of your ship down and let the tree take a wing off to break the forward motion as the plane pancakes it. I have prayed for a greater capacity to keep cool in pinches, because I know that panic may be the equivalent of suicide. If I maintain calm, I think there is a good chance I can land an airplane in any sort of terrain without injuring myself.

  My first few missions hit me just about the way I thought they would. Sometimes I was scared, but on the easier runs I didn't feel much more than a pleasant exhilaration. Still, when the flak started breaking right against my airplane, or when I saw the enemy fighters practically flying through our waist windows, I could feel my pulse rise. Particularly, if I saw one of our ships filled with friends of mine sprout flames for a few seconds and then blow up—which wasn't uncommon—the icy fingers which I hated would reach right around my heart. I would shut my eyes for a brief instant, pray for a little more nerve, and then say to myself, r-e-l-a-x, you jerk! My temples would pound, but I would keep my hands flexible and easy of motion and feel. I've heard lots of pilots tell of narrow escapes and say, “Things happened so fast I didn't have time to get scared.” I found no matter how fast things happened I always had time to get scared.

  A few of those raids from Bengasi were comparatively easy, though nearly every time we went out we lost one or two ships and crews. A number of the raids were rough enough to keep some of the boys from sleeping at night for sweating out the next one. But there again I was lucky. When I got my feet on the ground after one mission I rarely had trouble sleeping because of the next one. The raids went quickly. That, too, was another factor to help. We didn't have too much time to sit around and think about the next mission. Another thing that helped was that we suffered absolutely no limitations of weather. Sometimes the haze was very heavy over the Mediterranean; but the sky was always clear at our base, and we never had to cancel a mission because of cloud over the target.

  My old reliable Ed Fowble arrived after our group had run its third raid. He was ready and eager to catch up with us in combat experience and feel himself as mature a combat man as the rest. Ed had been able to pick up a brand new airplane in England at last, after proving that Eager Beaver was in no condition for a long trip to Africa. He had had the letter I painted on the tail, loaded up, and set forth. When he joined the group he was proud to hear about the record Bob Wright had established
in his one-engined landing on Sicily. Ed justly deserved some of the credit for that landing because of the way he had trained his flight.

  Suddenly we heard we were going to Messina, where we would meet what was by reputation the roughest flak in the theater. I decided to ride with Fowble, since it was his first trip in combat. The flak was all it was supposed to be. Our group lead ship, carrying Captain Frank Ellis and Colonel Wood, was shot right out of the lead position a few seconds away from the bomb release line. Frank did an excellent job and got his crippled ship in to Malta after three of his crew members had bailed out. I tried to take over the lead, but we were too close to the bomb release line for our bombardier to do a very good job. Our formation scattered bombs all over the general area of the point selected for bombing, and Fowble and I flew home in a ship leaking air through many holes it hadn't had on its way out.

  Ed and his crew performed well. They got a rough view of this business on their first raid, and I could see the effect of the mission pile upon the effect of their harrowing midair collision in England. I've heard it said of many men after a little combat, and it may seem trite, that they change. I noticed more change in Ed than in almost any other pilot I had. He was just as good a pilot, even better, but the sight of death seemed to have cost him some of his enjoyment of living.

  On every one of the first seven missions I made, the ship in which I was riding was shot up. Sometimes the damage was light and sometimes pretty serious, but at least I seemed to be something of a Jonah. McLaughlin, our plump and jovial Irishman from Syracuse, seemed to be my luckiest pilot. I took turns riding with all my pilots, and when I rode with Mac I told him I was glad to be assured of my luck on that mission. His ship was named Ole Irish and had a big green shamrock painted on it. It was officially called B for Baker. Mac was angry with me afterwards because his plane picked up its first holes on that mission.

  Part of my reaction to my luck and general combat experience was to sense a resurgence of religion. Fellows who hadn't attended services in years found themselves going to Sunday services. My religion didn't take me to these services with regularity, but I went occasionally, not only for myself but to let the men in my squadron know I didn't consider attendance a sign of weakness. I felt if they saw me there it might help some of them to go who wanted to but were kept from going out of embarrassment.

  In my case religion made me say short prayers before going to sleep at night, and sometimes during a fleeting instant at the height of combat. I think this undoubtedly made me a better combat officer. It comforted me so that I could sleep before missions, even though I had been briefed for the next mission and knew the assignment of the morning might be my last. It helped me say to myself with complete calm: “You can't live forever. You have had a great deal in your life-span already, much more than many people ever have. You would not shirk the duty of tomorrow if you could. Go into it calmly; don't try too hard to live. Don't ever give up hope; never let the fear of death strike panic in your mind and paralyze your reason. Death will find you sometime, if not tomorrow. Give yourself a chance.” And then I would remember that very appropriate sentence of Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

  In Bengasi we had no regular Protestant chaplain. One assigned to the Ninth Bomber Command used to come out for Sunday service. He was overworked by having about a dozen other services to perform each Sunday. Because I am a Protestant I tried to support this overworked man as best I could. Our Catholic boys were more fortunate because there was a Catholic chaplain assigned to our group. His name was Beck, and to my last day I shall never forget him. He had a shock of almost white-gray hair. He had twinkling blue eyes, and he was withal one of the most charming men I have ever met. He was unorthodox in his mode of religion. If there were no rabbi to perform the rites, Father Beck would preach a Jewish funeral service with as perfect form and dignity as any Catholic priest ever did. He would give all possible aid and comfort to the Protestant boys when no Protestant chaplain was available, and in giving he didn't push his religion upon them. But Father Beck played those Catholic boys like a great artist plays an organ. I know one of the uppermost thoughts in his mind was to make his men better, braver soldiers.

  Father Beck flew on combat missions with us time after time until at length the group commander gave him a direct order to stop going. He slept in various tents with the enlisted men, and later when we had barracks he slept in their barracks. They would carry his cot and bedding from one sleeping place to the next, each group anxiously awaiting his time to visit them. The superstition was that a crew would not be shot down as long as he was sleeping in their quarters. He had a very worldly side that caused some comment. He loved to gamble on cards or dice. He gave his winnings away, but he was nearly always a heavy winner. I saw him make six straight passes with the dice one night, and the game broke up—not because he had all the money, but because no one in the game had nerve enough to fade him.

  Being ordered to do so by Colonel Wood, the squadron commanders, Yaeger, Burton, Cross, and I, moved into a tent just behind the movie screen of our open-air theater. The theater was a sheet stretched out on poles in front of a number of rows of empty oil drums. And there in the theater all religious services were held on Sunday mornings. I had the experience several times of lying on my cot in the tent and listening to Father Beck talk to his men. Once when we were facing a very tough mission I heard him say, “You fellows know tomorrow or the next day you're going to have a very hard mission. I want to urge you all to do what you can now to prepare yourselves for the eventualities of this dangerous task. If allowed to I'll be flying with you. One thing I will particularly ask you to do is to go to confession sometime before takeoff. If you find a good priest, let me know and I'll go with you.” Lying on my bed I could imagine his blue eyes twinkling as he said this. He played the sense of humor of the men with great dexterity. In times of tense emotions, as he knew, a laugh can make the difference.

  Those days when the squadron commanders lived together in one tent did a lot for me. My almost vicious sense of competition between my squadron and the others softened a lot. I still did my best to make my squadron a topnotch fighting unit, but my softening was also noticeable in my dealings with my own men. I think I learned a little about putting first things first. I wanted my men to do a good job of fighting and next to that I wanted them to be comfortable and happy. I had cultivated an intense dislike for Hank Yaeger without much cause. It largely stemmed from the fact that he had managed a bit better with Colonel Lancaster, our first commanding officer, than I had. Now, on knowing him better, I found Hank quite an amiable person.

  Then there was Paul Burton. Paul was the handsomest of us all by a good margin. He was from Arkansas and came of a family of very good people of modest means. Paul had started out like a boy who would never amount to anything, and then suddenly pulled out of it as a very responsible squadron commander in the Air Corps. Early in life he had run away from home intending never to return. He never did go back for help, but later, when he became completely independent, he went home to make peace with his family. He was then a civilian pilot who applied and was rejected by the USAAF. Ultimately his efforts got him into the RCAF. He had become a highly rated flight lieutenant in Canada when our country started calling for the American pilots who had enlisted across the border. In the squadron commanders’ tent Del Cross, too, was quite a figure. Del was a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, and had a naive way about him which endeared him to us all. I felt in him a friend of unquestioning loyalty, and tried to respond to some degree in kind.

  Frequently in the afternoons when we weren't flying, the four of us would get a jeep and go swimming. We found a little strip of beach, not much used, which we claimed as our own. Del would take a mattress cover, wet it, and tie the ends. That way it would hold air and float with great buoyancy. He would splash around in the water with the thing while the rest of us kidded him about his
childishness, or while Paul and I engaged in some solemn political argument.

  We would hunt relics together by the hour. There were piles of expended and unexpended German ammunition lying around. We took 88 mm. shells back to our tent and cut the tops off them to make ash trays. We tore the ends out of shells and set fire to the powder. We stacked up 20 mm. shells and shot at them with a .22 rifle to set them off. Once while we were enjoying this latter pastime Hank got slightly wounded. Paul, Del, and I were crouching behind our jeep while we shot at a pile of 20 mm. shells. Hank sat in the jeep haughtily denying that they would go off. When the explosion did occur it was something more than we expected. Though we had thought ourselves at a safe distance, a bit of shell whizzed by and cut Hank's leg. It was nothing serious—just another laugh.

  4

  Ploesti and the Circus Ends

  When we left England for Africa we heard rumors about a great raid we were to run. The stories hinted at a maximum-range mission to be flown at low altitude. The first one I heard, which was typically weird for the Air Corps, was that we were going on a raid which could almost be characterized as a suicide mission. As the tale went, anyone who participated could be sure he would get at least the Silver Star. It was funny how great the percentage of truth in that one turned out to be.

  After the group had run five raids, all of which I had made, plus the one I went on before our group started combat, we began strenuous practice in keeping with the rumors. By this time we were sure we were really going to make a long, low-level raid on the oil fields of Ploesti, Romania. We hadn't been told officially, but the strength of the rumors made the matter almost incontrovertible.