Issue 19.12
Every male human remembers when it happens or looks forward to the experience that caused him to realize that he was no longer a boy but was in fact a man.
There are many different types of happenings that could trigger that feeling. To some it is a graduation, a physical accomplishment, maintaining a separate apartment, the feeling for a certain girl, marriage, sexual maturity, becoming a father or uncountable different ways. Let me tell you how and when this happened to me.
During World War II, I was a lower ball turret gunner on Lt. Parnell’s B-17 bomber crew. We were part of the 351st.Bomb Group, Eighth Air Force, that was based in England and it was our job to reduce Hitler’s industry to rubble. The fact that at the time I weighed 112pounds probably had something to do with my assignment to climb down into that plastic sardine can that hung beneath the Flying Fortress. We had flown missions to Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Essen and other targets in “Happy Valley”. Old “Queenie” suffered battle damage on most of those missions, but that tough “Bi Gas Bird” always brought us past the White Cliffs of Dover and home.
The ground crews started toiling as soon as the bombers came to rest until time to start engines for the next mission. They changed engines, loaded bombs, gas, oxygen and machine gun ammunition and patched her holes. Sometimes the patches had patches. All of this work was done while the air crews slept.
At 2 AM the ground pounders woke ours and thirty five other crews to tell us it was time to get out of the warm sacks and get ready to fly another mission. We shaved (to insure that the oxygen mask would seal), and went to the mess hall for a “Combat Breakfast” which consisted of bacon, hot cakes, otherwise unheard of fresh eggs and coffee. It was a good idea to eat hardy because our next meal would probably be 10PM or later but I had long since given up trying to eat anything more than a cup of coffee for breakfast because my stomach couldn’t take the anxiety and without fail, when I ate breakfast, I would lose it all before “take off” time.
All the crews filed into the briefing building where we would find if we would go on a milk run like Cologne which had a mere fifteen hundred flack cannon or a tough target like Hamburg that had twenty-five hundred flack guns of 88 mm or larger. The briefing officer stepped up onto the raised platform where the big map that was hidden by a black curtain stood. As he pulled the curtain open, he said “This is the one that separates the men from the boys”. The red string went east across the North Sea, crossed the coast of Holland and on a zig zag course to “Big B”. He told us that we could expect the Luftwaffe to meet us in force and that there were more flack guns, thirty five hundred, guarding Berlin than any other target in Germany.
After all the work was completed such as installing and checking the machine guns and bombs and pulling the props through, we were able to relax for a few minutes in the ground crew’s tent. While waiting for the start engines signal flares from the control tower, the base chaplain entered the tent and offered to say a prayer on our behalf which he did. We saw the first flare then the taxi signal flare then take off flare. All thirty six planes took off at 30 second intervals into the pre dawn darkness to form up without lights into defensive “box” formations. The 351st. was only one of twenty five groups that made up the fifty mile long bomber train.
Long after passing the coast we could see a group of “Bandits” emerge from the clouds out at 2 o’clock and engage our “Little Friends”, the P-51’s in a fierce Dog Fight. More “Little Friends” came from up and down the bomber train to engage as more and more groups of FW 190’s and ME 109’s also took part in that dog fight. Soon the heavy persistent contrails made the sky look like a huge bowl of spaghetti. The dog fight swirled around and through our group of bombers.
We watched many fighters from both sides go down smoking, burning and exploding, but we saw no opened parachutes. The flyers of both sides had orders to not permit an enemy in his chute to reach the ground alive so flyers of both sides fell to a lower altitude before pulling the rip cord. At the time we estimated that there were about 1,000 fighters from both sides taking part in that huge dog fight. We had no way of knowing for sure but in our bull sessions later, we thought we had seen the largest single dog fight of the war.
This enemy tactic had a purpose. This was a diversion and the main enemy force got into the bomber train some groups back and went through groups in force from 12 o’clock. . They struck a couple of groups in what they called “Storm Gruppen”. This tactic was very effective and if it had been used earlier in the war, it could have prevented daylight bombing from being successful, yet I have never seen it even mentioned in the many documentaries about the air war over Europe except one book by a German fighter pilot.
We still had the bomb run ahead of us knowing that once we hit the I. P. there could be no evasive action. We knew that a group of thirty six bombers is not going to get through those 3,500 flack guns without losing some and we did have loses. That intense flack exploding around us tossed us and sounded like someone beating the fuselage of “Queenie” with a chain. The flack was so intense that our bombardier couldn’t take it any longer and he held the push to talk button down while screaming as loud as he could. It was very un-nerving for the rest of the crew. Lt. Parnell snapped a walk-around bottle on, went to the nose compartment and hit the bombardier hard enough to bring him to his senses.
Old “Queenie” brought us back once again but not without damage to her. A mission to Berlin did separate the men from the boys.
I completed my required missions and returned to the U.S. while the war in Europe was still raging and before I turned twenty so I guess I was a teen-ager.