A Rough Mission to Munich

By mid-July 1944 our (384th BG, 545th Squadron) crew had made both deep and shallow penetrations of the continent, the deep ones including Peenemunde, Leipzig, and Munich (twice).  On the 19th of the month, our eighth mission as a crew, the target was again to be one of Munich's neighboring towns (Hollriegelskreuth) but for practical purposes it was Munich again.  We were to target a hydrogen peroxide manufacturing plant.  At briefing we were told to expect moderate-to-heavy flak, and that 'perhaps' we would meet with fighter resistance, too.

We had learned the wisdom of heeding such advisories, having only six days before been baptized by enemy fire, when our radioman had lost half a finger to flak.  Also, in the latrines, in the “Zebra” club, in the “Naffie,” and in chow lines we had heard rumors that the Luftwaffe was getting so short of fighter pilots that it was pressing pilot cadets (trainees)  into service against our formations.  Though wishing it were true, we had to take that notion with more than a grain of salt; it had not been corroborated officially by the Group  leadership. 

Due to the absence of our recently injured radioman, Doug Carroll (Allen, TX) we now also had on our crew a fine young man from North Carolina, David Gaston (Gastonia).  Ordinarily, a certain superstition caused men not to hanker to join unfamiliar crews, but like most of the men Dave was verbally non-committal on the subject.  He was farther into his tour than most of us were, so we respected his experience.  It's hard to say whether his luck was good or bad with the shift:  He was to lose part of his leg on this day, but not his life - and we did bring the plane back to the base, a harsh, saddening 'bad news/good news' situation.  Did he in later years feel he'd been 'lucky' or otherwise?   Our 'new' navigator, William L. Pitts  (a cool, skilled head from Tulsa, OK) brought valuable added experience along, having flown as a member of the Sweet Mama crew on many missions.  (His left biceps was to be cut nearly in two by a piece of flak only days after today's Munich mission, flying with our J. Herzog’s crew on both.)

Personally recalling all the details of that day’s mission was never possible, but those I do remember are still quite vivid, having been thought of counless times over the years since.  This account will mention others in our crew this day - some of whom survived their complete respective tours who are still around (now as grandfathers) to either verify or correct my own recollections, drawing on both their objective and subjective perspectives.  So far we have had to face no significant contradictions, with one not very important exception: We have yet to reach full agreement among four of us who were there as to the exact number of enemy fighters engaging our Vega-built B-l7G, The Saint, on that day.

In action as fast as air combat with fighters, no one individual could see or keep track of more than two enemy planes at any one time, each of those looking just like the other.  They were too fast, maneuverable, elusive:  always the nearest 109, the greater threat, demanded a crewman's concentrated attention; and for the best of reasons the human organism can offer – Survival.  Each crewmember’s perspective and field of view differed from the others'; each had a different working station to tend and defend.  The net effect was defense of the entire crew, the airplane, and ultimately the mission.

This was another of those long missions where we hadn't gone on oxygen till 16,000 feet while crossing the Channel.  Approaching our target area we turned at our initial point (I.P.) and proceeded in the usual dangerous, seemingly endless straight bee-line to the target.  We were flying the ‘old’ olive drab Saint again, once more in the outlying “tail-end Charlie” spot, where eluding other B-17s was easy but so was inviting enemy fighters to ourselves.  Those of us up forward could see ahead the residual smoke patches in the box - barrages of flak fired at groups some distance ahead of us, so we were as prepared as we could be to penetrate the same dangerous gauntlet.  It soon turned out to be fairly intense and though some bursts did pepper and hole The Saint a bit, no crewmen were hit.

Bombardier Henry Sienkiewicz (Syracuse, NY) toggled the bombs and seconds after leaving the flak box the formation came under a head-on attack by eight or nine Me109s.  Two other B-17s were seen out of formation and going down, one of them smoking from its number three engine.  We counted three men bailing out of the smoking Fortress as we scanned our firing zones for the fighters.  These two aircraft had been so far separated from the formation, as we were, that any of us firing at an Me109 that was trailing one of them would accomplish nothing except uselessly spending ammunition.  Soon I 'called out' one of the fighters coming in from nine o'clock level and when he got into range I commenced firing, as did our left waist gunner.  Another 109 followed behind the first by two or three hundred yards.

In a second or two the first 109 started firing at us but we forced him to break off his angling attack at about our seven-o'clock.  We had received an explosive 13- or 20-mm shot beside the cockpit near the left wing-root and a slug into Gaston's left leg, shattering both the tibia and fibula and causing very heavy bleeding.  As this 109 broke away, more or less paralleling us in a steep climbing turn, I saw a bit of brown smoke emitted from his aircraft and I thought - hoped -I had hit him.  Such smoke could have been the characteristic result of an overloaded Me109 engine, the pilot having jammed the throttle forward rapidly for a breakaway and climb.  I stopped firing at him then because the second 109 was then much more a threat  (why squander ammunition at a time like that?) so I started tracking and shooting at the latter.  Any gunner took such one-on-one attacks very personally, thinking of nothing but retaliation - again, self-preservation - against fighters' pink-orange gun muzzle flashes.

While we were firing at each other, one of his many bullets broke through the turret's rim in front of my Sperry gun-sight, breaking a gunmount crossmember and scattering a shower of steel, lead, and cast-aluminum scraps into my left arm and hand and, most annoyingly, into the left side of my forehead.  The grazing double holes there started to bleed copiously down over and under the goggles and into my left eye.  Well, the other eye was still 20/20, and my guns remained operable, though with questionable accuracy after the sight and gunmount had been damaged.  Soon this 109 had slid into our six o'clock level position and could fire away at us from a relatively safe vantage point.  But we still had an ace in the hole if we played it right.

We shouldn’t have been in this crisis, but The Saint had become separated by a country mile behind and somewhat below the main formation after an error made by the group lead.  Immediately after 'bombs away' he had led the formation into such an abrupt left turn that the pivot unit, our airplane, could not maintain airspeed enough to stay in formation without stalling.   Quoting pilot Johnny Herzog (San Francisco, CA) "(I) had to swing under, and lost the formation.”  In that way we acquired the identity savored by no aircrew living or dead - a ‘straggler’.  It took a long time to catch up to the formation.

Today I still wonder:  Did the formation’s leader make that abrupt turn because our expected P-51 escort was late in arriving at the target area, and he thought that by hurrying through the turn he could get the Group closer more quickly to a rendezvous with our eastbound - but tardy - friendly fighter escort?  Or was the man simply scared to death?

Our sweet-toothed tail-gunner (Daniel C. Alred, Clanton, AL) shouted on intercom “Ah bin hit - Ah cain't shoot mah guns!”  And indeed he couldn’t.  His hands and forearms had just been peppered and paralyzed by the shrapnel from a shell exploding on the protective armor plate in front of him, blowing out his little side-windows as well.  He again reported his triggers wouldn't work, or that his 'guns were jammed.'  The 109 that I had last engaged had swung into our six o'clock level zone where my top turret guns could not be fired due to their circuit-breakers opening to protect the vertical stabilizer from top-turret gunfire.

What a grim predicament.  With a throttled-back 109 literally emptying its guns at us from dead astern, flying just a bit too high for the ball turret guns of Bob Brown (Canton, OH) to reach him, and screened off from my own by our vertical stabilizer; and with our waist, nose and tail guns of no use in this situation, I looked for a creative way to solve the problem.  We were getting clobbered.  The prospect of more Purple Hearts being awarded to our crew, probably posthumously, was a very sour one.

Herzog and co-pilot Jim Sweeney (Pittsburgh, PA) could see little or nothing of what was going on - though certainly they could visualize it - so when I called to him to ‘fishtail’ the rudder so my guns would fire, Johnny understood why and honored the entreaty - liberally.  This spur-of-the moment tactic hadn’t been mentioned in gunnery school, but I'd been watching airplane rudders for years and the pilots understood there were times for exquisitely coordinated rudder and aileron use and there were times to forget such niceties.  An elevator trim cable had been severed and The Saint had suddenly become extremely tail-heavy, so Sweeney was busy helping Johnny hold the yokes forward; those two perspiring young men were the only two on the crew aware of the cable's breaking and its adverse effect on The Saint's controllability.

Praise all the other saints:  Johnny immediately started swinging our huge empennage from side to side, obligingly walking the rudder pedals to and fro widely enough so I could again swing the turret the few degrees needed to fire my guns, which I had to do with only my good right hand.  It wasn’t easy, but it was possible.  Concussion and small shrapnel had left my left hand with no feeling in it, thus no left-trigger control.  (The Sperry turret boasted two triggers, either of which would fire both guns.)  The instant the rudder moved the tail to starboard, my guns started firing.  Holding the right trigger down, I had tracked the 109 right through our vertical stabilizer and the circuit breakers had re-closed, as designed.  The 109, floating back there only a couple hundred feet or less, fell away downward and forward, the pilot apparently having been surprised and perhaps stricken by my fire.  If he wasn't dead, I can only reason that its pilot may have thought our top-turret and belly guns had all been knocked out.  They weren't.

Soon Brownie fired from his ball turret downward into a 109 cockpit - perhaps the one just described - and quickly reported he’d 'got’ him.  This was after his turret^’s oxygen hose had been cut in two.  Brownie’s oxygen hose had already been pierced during one burst of German slugs, and his turret's port journal was damaged.  Oxygen bottles in the waist had been punctured, unknown then to the pilots.  When it later was learned, we descended to a warmer and safer breathable altitude (after some P-51s fell in as escort) as we hurried to catch up to the Group with throttles, RPMs and turbo boosts to the firewall, or at 'war power' as it was usually known.

There finally came a lull in the action long enough for navigator Pitts to come back through the tunnel and persuade me to leave the turret which he mistakenly thought was no longer operative; and he or 'Sink' (Sienkiewicz) 'squired' me down into the nose compartment.  My guns were okay but the sight mount wasn't worth much any more.  Though I could not yet fully understand the reason, my left arm and hand were not up to any more action, and my head was bleeding heavily, but painlessly.  Blood on the turret pedestal and deck had quickly frozen in the sub-zero temperature, giving Bill the impression the injuries were more serious than they were.  From down in the nose section I could still hear spasmodic thudding of gunfire from back in the waist, by Sgt. Henry Bauer (an eternally taciturn but intelligent, reliable, and very sturdy Manitoba farm boy) but it finally stopped.  While ‘Sink’ kept adding compresses to my head, navigator Pitts had gone back in the waist helping attend the other two wounded boys, Gaston and Alred, with walk-around oxygen, bandages, tourniquet, and lots of morphine for Dave.

Sitting on the cold deck at the nose compartment’s rear bulkhead, bleeding some, I remember having unusual and brief bursts of weeping, then unaccountable, and have always wondered whether Pitts and Sienkiewicz ever noticed this; and I have often speculated about what emotions had caused those tears.  Tears of pride?  Relief and pride?  I can't otherwise account for this highly phenomenal manifestation of the emotional senses on that day - when we were young and charged with necessary but usually unbidden virtue.  Forty-five years later I learned to my surprise that because of my persistent bleeding I had been a strong candidate for an involuntary parachute  'jump', to reach medical attention sooner than the long trip back to base offered.  To my good fortune, the pilot heeded the throng of more attractive 'second opinions', and Hank had successfully stopped the bleeding.

Later, back at the base, gunners from other planes were ‘claiming’ Me109 kills for the day.  All anyone on our Crew could say is that those boys would have had to be Olympic class marksmen to have destroyed any one of the seven, eight, or nine 109s we now believed were involved in the attacks against our straggling Saint.  We could have used such help, as we were half a mile out of formation and completely on our own.  We had 'our' 109s all to ourselves.   The day's air medals and clusters accruable by kill claims, if any, would rightfully belong to the crew of Lieutenants Herzog and Sweeney and possibly that of the Sweet Mama and others that had also been separated and attacked by 109s - and had gone down.   As to our own crew, awards for the day's action never happened except for three Purple Hearts - and, oh yes, a round of new rockers added to our NCO stripes.  My surviving crewmates and I have quit thinking about awards for that day's work but the details of that day remain surprisingly clear.

It must be mentioned that as a warplane, the tough, trustworthy B-17 could withstand awesome physical punishment, especially with alert gunners manning the twelve fifties we had aboard our own early ‘G’ model.  After Hollriegelskreuth, our ground personnel counted well over two-hundred 13-mm and 20-mm shell holes in The Saint, but our pilots had been able to bring it back to the base, a 4 and ½ hour trip from the target.

END OF EXCERPT from The B17 Remembered

All B-17s in the formation that day had chin turrets with their twin fifties and two officers available to man them, thereby vastly improving the plane over older models.  Yet it was the surprise and suddenness of such Luftwaffe frontal attacks from concealment above a high, thin unbroken cloud layer, plus the combined 450+mph closing speeds between attackers and the attacked that resulted in the sudden loss of three of our units from their forward formation positions.  The conditions favoring success of the Luftwaffe tactic could not have been more ideal than they were that day.

Even had such total surprise been lacking, the speed of a fast-closing target, i.e., the Me109, would make accurately tracking it by the hand-fed computing sight impossible, and the top turret gunner must therefore resort to deflection sighting and firing using his back-up 'iron' post-and-ring sight.  In actual practice under such conditions the computing sight's reticle could not be changed quite rapidly enough to continuously and precisely bracket the 30-foot target that was decreasing range and increasing its relative apparent size at such a fast rate.  Slanting their attack down through the shallow clouds, being vectored by radar, led by experienced pilots, and owning the surprise element, the several Me109s had everything going for them while the B-17 formation did not.

Considering those circumstances, tail-end Charlies such as The Saint had often been actually proven to be better off than the more forward elements in the formation, at least in a battle's opening phase.  The day’s initial Luftwaffe attack had come as a total surprise to the perhaps complacent lead elements of the B-17 formation; to The Saint crew and others in rearward positions it fortunately had not.  Still, the plane had been a long distance behind its formation during the course of battle and was virtually a sitting duck for the Luftwaffe.

Today I believe that most of the Me109s that day were manned by youngsters still in their upper teens, holding a rank loosely equivalent to our enlisted PFCs.  Judging from post-war statements by former Luftwaffe pilots knowledgeable about conditions in 1944 and 1945, it is quite conceivable that our attackers might well have logged fewer total flying hours than a U.S. pilot typically had logged by the end of his primary Stearman, Ryan, or Fairchild training phase - about 60 or 70 hours!  I have learned directly from Mr. Walter Boener (ex JG-54, 9th Squadron of the Luftwaffe near Osnabruk and 19 years old then) that teen-aged Germans were put into Me109s after having logged only 35 total hours in all types.  Indeed, those latrine-o-grams we gunners had been hearing about the Nazis' cadet pilots coming up against heavily armed B-17 formations had a valid basis.  What can be more cruel than war?

In 1944-45 those young fahnrichs, i.e., officer candidates or cadets, by necessity were mustered into combat situations by two or three experienced pilots who would demonstrate for the younger men^ts fighter education just when, where, and how to attack a B-17 formation; and the cadets must follow the examples so demonstrated and coached.   This surely was the severest, to say little of the most audacious, form of on-the-job-training imaginable.

But tough as it was, it doubtless was the Luftwaffe's sole option.  The losses of experienced German pilots caused by our more thoroughly trained pilots with our superior P-51s and 47s, coupled with earlier Luftwaffe pilot losses at the hands of British Spitfire pilots and, yes, gunners in B-17s and -24s, had seriously deprived the Germans of adequately trained flying personnel.  Germany still had thousands of fighter craft but few experienced pilots, limited fuel, and scarce rationed supplies of ammunition.  Had this not been the case and had they had ample supplies of explosive ammunition, The Saint could not have survived its momentous day.  The Saint was ultimately to become salvage in January of 1945, and she flew no more combat missions despite good repairs of her extensive battle damage.  Why not?  According to her former Squadron Engineering Officer, Fred Nowosad, "...the plane stank of rotten blood” from her wounded crewmen.

Somehow, "The Saint" seems a fitting name for a B-17 that brought back many aircrews from the war, whereas so many hundreds of bombing sorties were not round trips.  The crew who had given the plane that name, however, simply had adopted it from the popular 1940's radio detective serial and paperbacks of the same name.  Seven of that crew were killed earlier in July in a mid-air collision while flying a B-17 other than their own.  The Saint's nose art was some ground crewman's modest artistic impression of a 'stick figure' saint complete with halo.  It seems he had copied it from a paperback cover picture.

I feel I shouldn't close without mentioning the personal closeness that developed between most members of an aircrew, friendships that in our case have stood the test of time and geographic separation.  Since 1968, when the post-war civilian 'version' of the 384th was formed by a cadre of veterans, we all have communicated and some have attended Group reunions, until the Old Man Upstairs called some of us, one by one, to assemble in the big hangar in the sky, along with Dale O. Smith, the tallest guy ever in the 384th.  Last October (1999) the crew's final waist- cum tail-gunner, and our bombardier, made their ways to the Bardue house, from Syracuse, NY and Ontario, CA, and gave us all a very cheery autumn week. Two of our navigators plus our co-pilot are the other three remaining members.   Four are gone, but certainly not forgotten. 

Written by TED BARDUE