Chapter 4
"That morning, in the mess hall, I’d seen a guy. I’d seen him before. I never knew who he was; he was in a different squadron. He was a big, rough-faced guy, and I thought, ‘Who is that guy?’ I don’t know why I noticed him.
"We came across this plane that’s crashed, and in the co-pilot’s seat, here’s a guy sheared in two. From his waist down is in the co-pilot’s seat. The rest of him is missing. We look up ahead and about a hundred yards away, here’s the upper part of his torso butted into a tree. When I rolled him over, it was the guy I’d seen in the mess hall that morning."
George Collar
445th Bomb Group
Tiffin, Ohio
April 12, 1999
I was brought up in the aftermath of World War I, and we were always taught that that was the war to end all wars. All of us kids were steeped in the heroics of Raoul Lufberry and Eddie Rickenbacker and Frank Luke, and we were a little bit sad there weren’t going to be any more wars; we wouldn’t be able to get to fight. Boy, we were really wrong about that! I think the draft came out in 1940, and I had a pretty high number, 319 or something like that. Back in the summer of 1941 I had a cousin who was in the 75th Toronto Scottish Regiment, which was sort of like a National Guard outfit. In 1939 he was called to active duty and went overseas. He was gone for six years. He was at Dieppe, he was down in Italy and he was all over with the Canadian army.
I had an uncle who was killed in the battle of the Somme in World War I when he was fighting with the British army. We kind of had a military background and we were eager to go, especially when everybody else was going. So one day another fellow and I drove over to Windsor, Ontario, and when we went across the bridge the customs man said, "What are you going to Canada for?"
We said, "We’ve got business."
He hollered down, "Two more!"
There were over 10,000 Americans who crossed the Ambassador Bridge to get into the Canadian army.
But when we got down to the headquarters, they said, "We want to see a birth certificate. Go home and get it and we’ll take you."
When we got home, we heard that a local garage was recruiting for a special unit in Illinois that would train you and give you a staff sergeant rating and send you to Egypt to be attached to the British 8th Army to repair those old tanks that went over on lend-lease. So another fellow named Deed and I went down and signed up. We quit our jobs. They gave us a paper and said we had to take it over to the induction center on Monday morning. They didn’t say what time. He took an early bus and I took a later bus, and I got there at 20 minutes after 12. When I went in, there was a great big master sergeant in this office.
"What can I do for you?"
I gave him the paper. He looked at it and said, "You’re 20 minutes too late."
"What do you mean?"
"They filled that quota and cut off everything at noon."
I said, "What else have you got?"
He said, "We need a lot of people in the infantry."
I said, "Is there anything else?"
He said, "If you can pass the mental and the physical, you can get in the Air Cadets."
I said, "How do I do that?"
He said, "There’s a traveling Cadet Board coming to your town next week. You go down, and they’ve got all their own physicians and test people."
It was like a big trailer, by the courthouse. You took this four-hour written exam, and if you passed that, they gave you a physical. And if you passed that, they swore you in on the spot.
Before I did that, I got on the phone and I called Canada. I said, "Can I still get in the Royal Canadian Air Force and be an American citizen?"
They said, "Since Pearl Harbor we can’t take anybody."
So I went down to the Cadet Board and there were 60 of us. Out of the 60, about 25 passed the written test. It had a lot of mechanics. I did well on it. Then they gave us the physical. I passed that, and was sworn in as a private in the Reserves on the spot.
Then they told me to go home and wait to hear from them. They didn’t have enough training facilities. I got notified to report to duty on the 5th of January, 1943. And this fellow Deed who went into that outfit that was supposed to go to Egypt, he ended up in the 9th Armored Division. The fellow I went to Canada with originally ended up in the Seabees in the South Pacific.
I reported to duty in Detroit. There were about 250 of us. They marched us in a body down to the station. They had a band there, but it was 25 below zero and the horns froze up and they couldn’t play.
I went to Nashville, and they gave us all kinds of tests. I passed, and was told I could either go to pilot training or to bombardier school. I didn’t do so well on the navigation. I said, "I want to be a pilot." Everybody wanted to be a pilot.
They sent me to Maxwell Field, Alabama. I went through pre-flight there, and I ended up at Carlston Field in Florida for primary training. And I washed out on a check ride. They washed them out like mad, because they had more people who wanted to be pilots than they could use. But they didn’t have enough going to bombardier school.
I was disgusted when I washed out. I knew I could fly the plane but I screwed up a couple of things. On an S-turn I lost 50 feet. I didn’t do too good on a forced landing. I did pretty good on the spins and stalls, and I felt in my own mind I could have passed.
That’s neither here nor there; I flunked out. And that was one of the lowest points in my life, because everybody at home thinks you’re going to be a pilot and all of a sudden you’re letting everybody down. Including yourself.
Everybody who washes out has to go before a board, and they ask you: "What would you like to do?"
I said, "I want to go to ordnance OCS."
"Well, you can have that for second choice; we’re sending you to bombardier school."
That’s how I became a bombardier.
I went out to Texas to Ellington Field and went through pre-flight again. Then I went to flexible gunnery school at Laredo, and eventually to advanced bombardier school at Big Spring, Texas.
One of my partners in Ellington Field was Art Devlin, the famous skier. He later became a bombardier and he didn’t go to Laredo; he went to Harlingen and I lost track of him, but he was on the Olympic team after the war. I visit him up in Lake Placid; he runs a motel up there.
We graduated just before Christmas of ’43 and came home on a 10-day delay en route. Then we went to Salt Lake City where they made up the crews, and I was assigned to Reg Miner’s crew.
We went to Casper, Wyoming, for phase training; then the weather got so bad that they sent us down to Pueblo, Colorado, and we finished our phase training there.
They gave us a new plane when we were up at Casper. We flew it to Topeka, Kansas, for alterations. Then we went on another plane to Lincoln, Nebraska, and we waited around Lincoln about a week. Finally our plane showed up and we got our orders. The orders were sealed. We had to get all our stuff together and report to the flight line. We got on the plane, and Reg Miner couldn’t open that sealed order until he got aloft.
When we were in the air, we found we were going to Bangor, Maine. So we knew we were going to Europe. You either went to the Pacific or the Atlantic. There were two ways to go to Europe, the southern route and the northern. Bangor was the northern route; the southern route went down through Puerto Rico and Brazil and across to Africa.
From Bangor we flew up to Goose Bay, and the weather was pretty bad; there were still a lot of icebergs out in the ocean. Eventually we flew to Iceland. We spent the night in Iceland, and the next day we took off and made landfall at Stornaway on the island of Lewis. Then we went down across the Scottish Highlands and across the North Sea and part of the Irish Sea and landed on the island of Anglesea in Wales, in a place called Valley.
They’d issued the navigator and myself and some of the waist gunners big powerful binoculars that were supposed to spot any kind of ship. We didn’t even see the ocean most of the time because of the clouds.
That was the last time we ever saw that brand-new plane. A lot of guys had spent money having nice logos put on, and then they lost their planes. We hadn’t put any nose art on ours. Miner didn’t go for logos much. It didn’t make much difference. We flew with a lot of planes that had logos when we got to England. About the nicest plane I ever flew in – one of the best-kept on the ground – was one called Win With Paige. The crew chief’s name was Paige, and the original pilot’s name was Wynn. That Paige was a wonderful mechanic, and he kept that plane in tip top shape. We flew quite a few missions on it. To give you an idea of what a good crew chief does, he not only keeps the engine in good shape and everything top-notch, but he looks after the little things. Like one of the problems a guy getting in a nose turret has is those big clodhopper shoes we had; you couldn’t get your heel between the gun saddle and the seat. So he cut the clearance of the seat. And another thing that was bad, when the Consolidated B-24 was first built, it didn’t have a front turret. It had a big greenhouse and it had an old machine gun sticking out through the Plexiglas, and it wasn’t too satisfactory. So they decided to put a turret in. What they did at Consolidated was take a hydraulic Consolidated tail turret and mount it up in the front. It was a cobbled-up job and it was a mess, because they had two sets of doors, and you had trouble getting in and you had trouble getting out. And you don’t want to have trouble getting out, I can tell you that.
What they did in our group – I don’t know whether they did it in all the groups, but we had good engineering in our group – the later planes were coming in with electrical nose turrets. They were beautiful turrets made by Emerson Electric. They only had a single door and it was easy to get in and out. One of the problems with a hydraulic turret is they get to leaking, and then they just don’t operate right. With an electrical turret; you’ve got a lot better control.
We arrived in Valley, Wales, sometime in May and we stayed overnight at a little base there. The next day we went on trucks and got on a train and we went up through North Wales and over into Staffordshire. There was a staging area called Stone in Staffordshire. We were there for several days, and then we got orders to pack our stuff and get down to the train depot, and they took us up to a place called Warrington, I think it’s in Cheshire. It’s not too far from the old Ringway Airport; I think that’s now Manchester International Airport but at that time it was a small military airport. And as we pulled into the station at Warrington, it was June the 6th, 1944, because the stationmaster came running out, and he said, "They’ve landed in Normandy!" Everybody cheered.
We got off the train and they put us on trucks and took us over to Ringway, and they loaded us on some old B-17s and took us to a place called Clontow in Northern Ireland; it’s probably about 40 miles west of Belfast in County Tyrone. The purpose of the base at Clontow was to train the new pilots in formation procedure. Formation flying is one of the toughest things they had to do because here’s all these thousands of airplanes at all these bases clustered into an area probably about the size of northwestern Ohio. When you’re going on say a thousand plane raid, you’ve got to form. And forming is a tough job, because you’ve got to be at a certain altitude in a certain spot at a certain time. That’s easy to say, but when there are all these bees flying around, that’s not too easy. What they did was they had radio signals coming up from the ground called bunchers and splashers, and they homed in on those at a certain time and a certain altitude. And the first guy up there was called a zebra ship. Each group had a zebra ship; ours was an old B-24-B called Lucky Gordon, kind of an orange dappled looking thing. He’d be up there and he’d be firing certain color flares; each formation had to have a different colored flare, so you had two or three things going, you had the radio signal plus the zebra ship firing these flares, and you circled around and circled around until you finally got in formation.
At Clontow, there was a crew that had trained with us in Casper and I knew the bombardier. His name was Freddie Crockett. They had a co-pilot by the name of Olsen. He was from Long Island. A big, tall, blond-haired, Swedish looking guy. Had a good voice. Used to sing in the light opera. He was down at this lake – this lake, mind you, is 15 miles across. It’s a huge lake. And Olsen was down there monkeying around and he fell in. An eel fisherman by the name of Peter Coyle fished him out. And he took him up to the house to dry him out and give him some hot tea and whatnot. So he got acquainted with the family. Peter Coyle was a bachelor but he lived with his sister and her husband and his mother in this old stone cottage. Their family lived in that cottage for over 250 years. And he’s a guy about 40. So the next night, Olsen said, "I’m going over to Peter Coyle’s. I’m taking my tobacco ration for the grown-ups and some candy for the kids. Do you want to go along?" I forked over my tobacco ration and some candy, and we went over to Peter Coyle’s cottage, and he treated us like we were long-lost brothers. They didn’t have much. They had a stone floor and the chickens came in and out the door. They didn’t have a fireplace; they had a raised stone hearth. And the smoke was peat smoke; it went right up the side of the wall and out a hole in the roof. They had an iron hook, and they brewed their tea on that. They made us tea and eggs.
After we were done, Peter Coyle had four little nieces up to about 10 years old, and they started to sing. Boy, could they sing. They were just like larks. It seemed like everybody in Ireland could sing. First they sang Irish songs, and then they sang "The Yellow Rose of Texas." I’ll never forget, they sang, "The yellow rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennen-see."
Then we all started to sing, and Olsen was really a good singer. When we got done, we felt like we were their own relations. Peter Coyle took us down to an old barn, and there were a lot of bicycles and horses and wagons outside. There was a traveling theatrical group that was putting on a show. Between acts, one guy got up who used to sing songs in rhyme about people in the audience.
Well, they must have given him our name, because this guy sang a big song about Olsen and me and about Olsen dropping in the lake. I’d give anything if I had a tape recorder. I can’t remember the words, but it was all in rhyme and it was all in tune, and it was really an honor.
When we got done, Peter Coyle gave his rosary to Olsen, and he gave me a little religious medal. I don’t think I’m superstitious but I really am. I didn’t have that the day I went down. And I didn’t have a roll of tape. I always carried a roll of tape because one of the first things that happened was an evadee came to give us a talk. He was someone who had been shot down and was helped by the Underground, and he eventually crossed the Pyrenees Mountains on foot. And he said, "One thing you’ve got to do is protect your feet. And the best thing you can have when you’re walking is a roll of tape, so you won’t get blisters." I always carried a roll of tape, but the day I went down I didn’t have my roll of tape with me. I didn’t think I was going to fly that day. And I didn’t have my GI shoes, which I normally carried. The tape wouldn’t have done me any good anyway, because I got captured as soon as I landed.
After we were assigned to the 445th Bomb Group, we were assigned to a nissen hut. There were only two people in my hut when I arrived. One of them was a Lieutenant Reed, who was a bombardier from Alliance, Kansas. He’d been in a terrible crash in England coming back from a mission, and he was the only survivor. He was about half flak-happy. He’d been in the hospital and was recovering, and he was just about finished with his missions. He might have made a mission or two more, but boy, he was jumpy. He played the cornet. And his hero was Mugsy Spanier. He had a little windup phonograph with all of Mugsy Spanier’s 78 records; he’d play them and he’d tune in with his cornet. He’d played a lot of jazz gigs in Kansas City.
The other guy in our hut was a fellow named Captain Steinbacher. Captain Steinbacher was from Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He was one of the original pilots that flew overseas with the group. He had finished up. He had played football for Penn State. Good looking, big, burly, and a heck of a nice guy. He and another pilot named Neil Johnson had finished their missions, and they prevailed upon Colonel Terrill, who was the commanding officer at that time, to put in a word for them. They wanted to stay in England and get into fighter planes. In the meantime they volunteered – in those days they could get done with 25 missions, but they volunteered to do five more while they’re waiting. He’d just finished up his five more, and he didn’t have much to do, so he always used to come down to breakfast at 3 o’clock in the morning with the guys who were scheduled to fly because that was the only time you could get fresh eggs. I got acquainted with him because he had the bunk right across the aisle from me. He lent me books.
He came down to breakfast the day we were going on our first mission. We didn’t fly with our own crew. They always broke you up a little bit and flew you with another, experienced crew. In fact, they may have flown Miner one ahead of us. I know first the day I flew, I flew with a Lieutenant Schreck, and Miner was flying as co-pilot off our wing.
When we got down to breakfast, Steinbacher was eating fresh eggs. All us rookies were kind of antsy. We’re starting to ask him about this flak and everything. And Steinbacher says, "Oh, you don’t have to worry about that flak. You see those black powder puffs out there, they’re not going to hurt you. They’ve already gone off. Fact is, you’re never going to see the one that hits you, so there’s no use worrying about it." Well, that made you feel a little better. Not much. Oh, he did say one thing. He said, "When they start getting yellow centers, they’re getting a little close."
So we went down to briefing and Metro Moe – that’s what they called the weatherman – gave a rosy picture about the weather: "It’s a little cloudy on takeoff; it’s just ground fog. It’ll be burned off by the time you get back. Maybe."
Then the intelligence officer came on. He had this map of Europe, and it showed where there were flak places. He had us going over the Netherlands. He said, "We’ve got you going through a flak gap, so you shouldn’t see any flak until you get on the bomb run." We were going to a place called Kothen, which is south of Berlin. It was quite a long mission. We were supposed to bomb a Junckers engine factory. And the instructions were, "If you can’t see the target don’t bomb. Go to a secondary target at a place called Stendal." And the same thing applied there.
So we’re flying across the North Sea and we no more than made landfall when up came the flak. We’re supposed to be going through a "flak gap." Up came the flak and it had big yellow centers.
Luckily, we got through that all right. But then we got on the bomb run, and we were on that damn bomb run for 12 minutes. That’s a long time. And the flak was thick as hair on a dog; you’re going right into it, bomm, bomm, bomm, bomm, bomm, bomm, all over. It looked just like a whole poppy field full of black flak. All of a sudden, BANG! It sounded just like a sledgehammer hit the plane, and a piece of flak came in the side of the nose and went right between the navigator and me and out the other side. Miner was flying off our left wing and I looked over and saw a burst underneath his plane and I saw them feather an engine and they started going down and oh God Almighty, I thought, I’ll never get to fly with Miner. But they made it back on three engines.
We were on that bomb run for 12 minutes, and the worst part of it was they didn’t drop the bombs. Then we go over to Stendal. Same thing over there only the flak wasn’t quite as bad, but we still didn’t drop the bombs. So on the way back we had to hit a target of opportunity because you can’t drop the bombs in Belgium or France or the Netherlands unless you’ve got a specific target. We came across some marshaling yards about halfway between Hanover and Berlin on the main railway line, and we plastered them pretty good.
That first mission was a pretty good foretaste of what was to come. The next mission we had, we went to a buzz bomb site. It was a short mission, over in the Pas de Calais. These buzz bomb sites were in the forest, and were camouflaged so that you couldn’t see them from the air. The only way you could bomb one was from Underground reports. And we were lucky that day. We hit what we were supposed to; at least that’s what they said. But I went on another one in the same area, and we couldn’t find it. We circled around and around until I thought we were going to run out of gas, and we finally had to come back without bombing. We had to drop our bombs in the North Sea at a jettison point because they were RDX bombs, and they weren’t too stable on landing. General purpose bombs you could land with.
The RDX was a high explosive. The GP bombs you could roll off a truck and it wouldn’t hurt them, but the RDX was unstable. One day we were at Tibenham and there was the damnedest explosion I ever heard in my life. It must have been 30 miles away. The depot blew up; I don’t know how many people were killed. Blew a whole bomb dump up. You could hear it all over East Anglia. There was very little news about it because they kept it quiet. But I heard later that some guys were unloading RDX bombs and they rolled them off a truck, and one of them went off and blew right in this bomb dump.
I was taken off of Miner’s crew. Miner was scheduled to become a lead pilot. He was a good pilot. And [Frank] Bertram was a good navigator. They replaced me with a radar guy; that’s all I know. They put two guys on his crew and they took me off. They called me in the office one day and the old man, Major Martin, said he’s going to put me in the pool. And he said, "Don’t worry. You’re going to get plenty of action." When I went down I was on my 29th mission. Miner’s crew was on about their 19th mission. I flew so many missions. Day after day after day I’d be on a mission. All you could think of was getting up and getting down and going to bed.
I always thought I flew with seven different crews. I came to find out I flew with 10 different pilots. In one period I flew with two different pilots, Jerome Bernstein and Lieutenant Klein. I flew with Schreck the first mission. I flew seven missions with Miner. Then I flew four with Jerome Bernstein. I flew one with Wren, who had been Bernstein’s co-pilot. And I’ll never forget that mission. That was my 13th mission. Whenever you fly a mission with a co-pilot you’re always a little leery because he didn’t have the training a pilot had. But we thought Wren was good. We had a guy with us that mission; I’m not going to mention his name. This guy had been flying AT-6s at gunnery school at Laredo, and he was a chickenshit guy from the word go. Normally pilots are pretty nice guys. But this guy thought he was the king of the world. When he came overseas he was a first lieutenant, and Wren was only a second lieutenant. When this guy arrived, he had his own crew, and as soon as that plane landed, he went into the operations office and wanted to fire his whole crew. So Major Martin interviewed each guy one at a time. Instead of firing the crew, he put this guy in the pool and gave them another pilot.
Here we are flying with a pilot with whom we’d never been on a mission before except as a co-pilot. And the first lieutenant is flying as co-pilot. I was the bombardier. And from the minute we took off, this first lieutenant is crabbing about the way Wren’s flying the plane. This gets irritating after a while, because you’re worried about the guy anyway and then this guy is barking at him all the time. You don’t like that over the intercom. You want peace and quiet.
Finally, when we got on the bomb run, I got control of the plane. And he’s still barking all the time. You’re supposed to maintain radio silence on the bomb run so that the bombardier can concentrate. Finally, I let him have it. I said, "Get the heck off this intercom! We’re on a bomb run."
Now he’s going to have me court-martialed.
When we got back down, they took him off the crew again. Last I knew he was still sitting in the pool. I don’t know what ever happened to him. He may be alive yet. He may have a nice family, he may be a nice guy, I don’t know, but he sure irritated me. Anyway, I didn’t get court-martialed.
I flew with Jack Knox and J.R. Lemons and Howard Boldt. Poor old Bernstein was a good pilot. He was from New York City. He’s got Alzheimer’s now, lives out in Oregon. I flew with Donald. He got killed on the Kassel raid. Bob Russell, I still correspond with him, he’s a good guy, lives out in San Diego. Brett, he got killed on the Kassel raid. [Jim] Schaen got killed on the Kassel raid.
On the 16th of August I went on the Dessau raid. I always thought I was flying with Bernstein but I was flying with Klein that day. That was a tough target. It was not far from Magdeburg; it had a lot of flak. And we had supercharger trouble; the pilot couldn’t keep it in formation. He couldn’t control the plane. So before we got to the target he had to get permission to leave the formation and head back for England. He called me up and said, "Get on the bomb sight and pick out a target of opportunity before we get to the Dutch border."
I said, "Okay."
In the meantime, we had a guy by the name of Frederick Jacoby who lives in New York City; he’s retired from Columbia University. Lives on Central Park West. Frederick Jacoby was an intelligence officer. Donald S. Klopfer was our intelligence leader; he was a major. He was a partner with Bennett Cerf and Alfred Knopf and they started Random House. He died in his eighties a few years ago. He was a good friend of Jacoby, and after the war Jacoby worked for him for a while in the publishing company, then he eventually went into television. He was one of the original guys who ran the Howdy Doody show. He eventually became a publicity man for Columbia University.
Jacoby always was pushing to try to get on a mission, so they finally let him go, and he was riding up in the nose turret that day. When we started back for England we called for some fighter escort. It didn’t show up right away, but here we are stooging across Germany all alone in real good weather, and I had to get on a target. I see the Dortmund-Ens Canal coming up, and I’m going to hit a bridge on it. I pick a bridge out, and I’m on the bomb run. I’ve got control of the plane. Everybody’s supposed to keep their face out of the intercom. Old Jacoby’s real excited because he thought fighters were coming after us. "Oh my God!" he says, "There’s an airfield!"
He screwed me up and I knew I was never gonna hit that bridge. I thought, "I’ve got to do something quick because the Dutch border isn’t very far away." So I hurried up, and you’ve got to remember, on this autopilot – it was a Sperry that you’ve got on a B-24; you can rack that baby clear over to 45 degrees back and you won’t tumble the gyro. A B-17 had the Norden autopilot; it’d only go about 18 degrees back and it would tumble the gyro, then you’re really screwed. I racked that baby – I tilted everybody about 45 degrees. I went down and I got on that bomb run on that airfield that he’s pointing out down there. I’ve got the course killed with the one knob, and I’m trying to kill rate, and I knew I wasn’t going to get it killed in time and sure enough the bombs went over the top of the target and hit in a woods. And I was mad at Jacoby. "You dirty bum. My chance for being a hero here, and you screwed it up." I thought if I could have only got that bridge. I kind of barked at old Jacoby a little bit. We got back to the base, and he rushed right into the intelligence office. He came running out, all smiles, and he had a folder full of maps. He said, "You know what that was? That was a night fighter base, and they had their planes stashed in hardstands in the woods!"
We had a party at the officers club one night, and Jimmy Stewart came in with General Timberlake [Stewart had been a squadron leader in the 445th] . Of course, being a second lieutenant I’m not about to go up and start talking to Jimmy Stewart. He was a lieutenant colonel then. He and General Timberlake were standing at the bar, and all the girls – there were a lot of nurses and English girls there – they circled around him like flies around a horse biscuit. You couldn’t get close to him. He was a good friend of Captain Steinbacher. Eventually Captain Steinbacher and Neil Johnson both went into P-51s. And the night that Jimmy Stewart was there, Steinbacher came back from a raid to Munich, and he had shot down his first FW-190. He was celebrating that. Later on – I found this out afterwards from Major Martin – after the Kassel raid, one night he came back from a raid, and he did a buzz job over Tibenham. He damn near took the rooftop off, and he pulled up and went into a high-speed stall and crashed. It killed him. I talked to a guy that was in the medics that went out and dug him out of the plane. Terrible. He was a big guy, old Steinbacher. When I got back home and I got my belongings back – they would go in the hut and take all the belongings that they thought were yours, and they would go through everything, and they censored everything, threw your address books away – among the things they sent to my home was a pair of Brazil boots that were too big for me, and I think they belonged to Captain Steinbacher. They used to buy them down in Natal, Brazil, on the way over on the southern route.
The day before the Kassel raid we bombed the railroad yards at Hamm. They had been hit quite a few times, but the Germans always were able to get them running again in a couple of days. They had big trainloads of Russian prisoners whose sole job was to fix those railroads. I flew with Bob Russell. It turned out to be his last mission. And Krobach was the co-pilot. He was the operations officer. There was flak but we didn’t see any fighters. We got back over the North Sea – this was Russell’s last mission – and he got permission to leave the formation and he just put that baby in a dive, and he flew so low we had to come up to clear the top of a church steeple.
The next day, I was scheduled to go on a three-day pass. I even had the pass. And normally, you’d go the night before. The pass didn’t start till midnight. You’d go down to Tibenham station and catch the train the night before. But I didn’t do that. I thought, I’ll go down there and take my time. I had it coming, too. I hadn’t had a three-day pass for about 17 missions.
About 3 o’clock in the morning, there was a jeep that the guy who woke the crews up used. He was a sergeant from the 702nd Squadron headquarters; he had a jeep and it had a squeaky brake. In the middle of the night you’d be sleeping and all of a sudden you’d hear a jeep coming, you’d kind of get about halfway up, and you’d listen. If you didn’t hear any squeaky brake you knew you’re okay, you could go back to sleep. But if you heard a squeaky brake out in front, oh my God, he’s coming in our hut!
He’d come in and you’d just lay there hoping he wouldn’t come over to your bunk. Or he’d grab you and shake you, "Come on, Lieutenant, you’ve got to get up! You’re going on the mission." And hey, he woke me up.
I said, "I’m not going. I’m going on a three-day pass."
"No," he said, "I’ve got your name here on the list. You’re going to take a guy’s place."
I knew whose place it was. It was Lieutenant Aarvig on Schaen’s crew. Schaen and Aarvig and his co-pilot, Bobby McGough, and his navigator, Corman Bean, were all in our hut. Aarvig hadn’t come back from London on his three-day pass. So I’m taking his place.
I was mad. I didn’t want to go. I had my heart set on going to London. Well, okay. So I went down. And I remember distinctly, I think that was the morning that Major General Kempner came to the briefing. I think it was that morning, but sometimes I get mornings mixed up. It seems like he was there and he came to the bombardiers’ briefing.
As I recall that briefing, we were supposed to hit primarily the railyards. Now everybody says we were supposed to hit the Henschel engine works, but as I recall it, we were to hit the railyards and right adjacent to the railyards was the Henschel engine factory and we were supposed to hit both of them. And I remember I was pretty honored that Kempner showed up at our bombardiers’ briefing.
Then I went out and got in the plane and we took off.
As I remember, we came in – you always tried to go on a target downwind because it’s faster; you don’t want to go upwind, because you’re sitting there like a bird waiting for somebody to shoot at you. They always tried to get you downwind and as I remember we had a westerly-northwesterly wind that day. We came in and hit the initial point, and we were supposed to take a little turn to the east. We took a big turn to the east. We wound up going north of Kassel, and straight west towards Goettingen. And as soon as we made that turn, our navigator was on the intercom. He said, "Somebody screwed up. We’re not supposed to be turning this much." Somebody goofed. Probably the "Mickey" man. The radar man. I think that’s exactly what happened. I think the radar guy screwed up, and that was it.
It turned out later, that radar guy happened to be at the same barracks [in Stalag Luft 1] as Miner and Bertram. I was in a different compound. They told me they questioned him about that. He swore up and down that he hit Kassel. Everybody knew that was wrong. Even the dumbest guy, if he looked out the window, he could see the Kassel flak over there, and you’re coming down here.
The radar man wouldn’t have been looking out the window; he was looking through some type of a scope. But if somebody else were looking out the window, they should have known. It was ridiculous. Maybe by the time they found out it was too late. In my humble opinion, once we made the mistake, you couldn’t just come back because you’d be flying through the group. It would be a disaster. But why couldn’t he have made a 360-degree turn and gotten behind the rest of the group? He [the command pilot, Major Donald McKoy] made a split-second decision. He looked at the map and saw Goettingen. So he decides in a split-second [to bomb Goettingen]. They screwed that up, too. The only thing it killed is a cow. We hit the fields. It was a fiasco all the way around.
You’ve got to chalk it up to an error. You can’t chalk it up to somebody having an ulterior motive. The only thing that’s really bad about it was that somebody failed to notify our fighter escort.
We dropped the bombs at Goettingen and then instead of turning around and getting the heck out of there they made the same pattern they originally had for Kassel, only about fifty miles too far west. We made a right turn, and in the vicinity of Eisenach we made another right turn, and at that point we got hit by about 150 FW-190s and ME-109s. They came in on a broad front, in three waves, and were totally unexpected.
The first inkling I had that anything was wrong was when I heard something hitting the plane. It turned out to be .20-millimeter shells. Before we got hit, I saw these small flak bursts in front of us, and I’d never seen flak like that; it seemed like brown basketballs right in front of us. And they were very close. I thought, "I never saw flak like that." It didn’t dawn on me that it was fighter cannons coming from behind.
Then I started feeling jolts hitting the plane. There was one underneath the turret and there were some on the left wing, and the next thing I knew the left wing was on fire.
About that time this fighter plane came over the top of the plane. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen feet above us. I tried to get the turret trained on him but nothing worked. The turret was dead. The only thing I could think of was that the hydraulics were shot.
I wasn’t wearing a flak suit at the time. We had them, but I never could wear one in the turret; an average-size guy couldn’t get into the nose turret with a flak suit on. Maybe a little guy could. I never wore a flak suit. I didn’t even wear a flak helmet. I was just in there with my uniform and my heated flying suit.
Shortly after that fighter plane went over, I looked out and saw the wing on fire and we started nosing down. At the same time I looked over toward the lead squadron and I could see at least two planes flying along on fire, and finally they dropped off.
The flying suit I was wearing was a brand new model that the British had come up with. It was tan, and instead of having a liner with little wires in it, the wires were in the jacket itself, which was sort of padded, and you had your little boots that you wore underneath your regular flying boots. It was a much more comfortable jacket, and also it served as a piece of outerwear. The only thing that was bad was that I forgot my GI shoes. I should have had them with me because I lost my flying boots when I bailed out. They took off when my parachute opened, and there I was in my stocking feet.
You also couldn’t wear your parachute in the front turret, so I had it sitting someplace near where you got out of the turret. When I got out it wasn’t there. Corman Bean, the navigator, had it in his hand. He had his on already and he snapped mine on me. Then he bent down and opened the nose wheel door, and then he hesitated. I thought he didn’t want to jump, so I kind of gave him a little boost, and he gave me heck about that later. He said, "I was looking up to see what the pilot was doing."
I just kind of nudged him a little bit and then he went out. I went out right after him, and I thought, "I’d better make sure this chute’s gonna work," so I hadn’t fallen very far when I pulled the ripcord and Boom! My boots took off.
I’d estimate we were at 18 or 20,000 feet when I bailed out. A lot of guys decided to delay their chute, but I didn’t. I’d never been in a parachute before. We’d had instructions, but it wasn’t much. All they told you was a chest pack is like jumping off a 12-foot wall, so you know you’re going to hit pretty hard. Especially when I didn’t have my boots on, it kind of scared me.
When I bailed out, it was just like the battle in "Wings." You’d hear those guns shooting and you could hear stuff blowing up and planes blowing up and you could see bomb bay doors come floating by, and the fighters sailing in on these guys. It was just like the movies. Better than the movies. More realistic.
Everything happened so quick. It seemed that there had to be about 40 chutes in the air, and there was bedlam. But gradually, as you went down, the battle faded away. Pretty soon you could hardly hear it, and when I got into the clouds it was deathly silent. I could see nothing and hear nothing. It was the eeriest feeling. It seemed ethereal.
When I broke through the clouds at about 3,000 feet, I could see everything on the ground. There was a panoramic view. A beautiful scene. Little village. Ruined castle on a hill and a little river. I couldn’t make out anybody on the ground yet.
About that time I heard a plane coming. I looked up and here came a fighter plane about my level, right toward me. When he saw me, he banked around, about the length of a football field away. And I could see it was a P-51 with a yellow nose. He saw me with my Mae West, and he knew I was American. He waved at me and I waved at him. And then he went on and his prop wash hit me, and I swung as high as the Eiffel Tower both ways.
When that settled down, I began to see more clearly on the ground. I was coming down with the wind behind my back. They told you to land facing away from the wind. Then you can see what’s coming up. And they also told us when we’re going to hit the ground to relax like a tumbler.
Before that happened, though, I could see a guy coming up a lane on a bicycle. He was looking up at me. And I was stretching things but I thought, "He’s probably a Polish slave laborer, and I can talk him into hiding me out."
When I landed I twisted my left ankle and I fell on my left shoulder. It knocked the wind out of me, and the chute was dragging me across this field. Luckily it was a plowed field. I reached out and pulled the shrouds and collapsed the chute. I was laying there trying to get my breath when the guy on the bicycle came up and pointed a luger pointed at my head. I thought, "That’s the end of that Polish slave laborer theory."
He was jabbering away at me in German and two other farmers came across the fence with pitchforks, and they made me pick up that huge, bulky chute. I was in my stocking feet and they prodded me along, and we headed toward the village. As we came into the village, the people came out of the houses and they lined the streets like a gauntlet, and all I could think of was old Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton running the gauntlet in the old days. And they were hostile. They were hurling epithets at me in German which I couldn’t understand, but I knew that it wasn’t praise. All of a sudden a kid about 15 years old came out and he had a big rubber boot on and he kicked me right in the rear end.
Then they took me down to this barn in the back of the burgomeister’s house. Outside there was a courtyard with a wall around it and a big gate.
They started to search me. They made me loosen my pants and they were hanging down around my ankles, and I was standing in my stocking feet. They were looking for a pistol. I think they were disappointed because I didn’t have one.
About that time I heard a commotion and a guy came through the crowd and he was really angry. He let me have one right between the eyes with his big old horny fist. I almost went down but I didn’t. He swung two or three times more, but I ducked. I was trying to get my pants back on with one hand and fend him off with the other. Finally I got my pants buckled up and then I had two hands to work with, and he cut off the fight and he went over and picked up a long-handled spade. Normally a spade has a short handle. This one had a long handle and had a square nose. And he came at me with that spade. I saw him swing and I ducked and I felt it whistle over the top of my head. I thought, "I’ve got to get in close on this guy." I closed in on him, and I got hold of the spade and he got hold of it and we were wrestling for the spade, and about that time there was an old man in the crowd with a big white walrus mustache and he had a green felt hat on, and he came out and started to help me. He realized that they shouldn’t be killing this guy, even if he is the enemy. Then the burgomeister and the village cop came to my aid and they disarmed this guy.
They took my escape kit away from me and whatever else I had. They had a bunch of stuff they had collected from the planes, and there were two big old felt boots. I pointed at my feet and the burgomeister gave them to me. I put them on, but they were about two sizes too big and my feet sloshed around in them.
Then they marched me up the street to the church, and they put me in this little jailhouse underneath the church tower. I was the first one captured, so I was alone. They locked the door, and all there was was a little shaft of light coming through a small window, with straw on the floor.
I just sat there trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. That’s when they threw Sergeant Eppley in, who was our top gunner. He told me he saw the planes coming in and he started shooting at them, and he watched those tracers coming up the fuselage of the plane right towards his turret. He didn’t get wounded, but he didn’t hear the bailout bell, and he was still in the turret when he saw the co-pilot go by and then the pilot, so he dropped right down behind them. He got down into the bomb bay – all of the people from the flight deck are supposed to go out the bomb bay. But evidently the radio man had already gone up towards the nose. And when Eppley got to the bomb bay, the other two guys are going up to the nose. So he reached out automatically and he pulled the handle on the bomb bay doors and they opened. The only thing he could think of is that they had pushed instead of pulled or vice-versa, and they didn’t open so they thought it was jammed and they were going up to the nose. I think that’s what killed the pilot, because when Eppley bailed out he said the plane blew up shortly afterwards, and the pilot must not have gotten out. His body was found right near the wreck.
The tail gunner and the two waist gunners were killed, too. Whether they were killed in the battle or blew up in the plane we’ll never know.
Contents
George
Collar, Page 2
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