Issue 35.13
When many combat missions are flown by many thousands of crewmen, then many strange things happen that can not be explained. On out crew, our radio operator gunner had a ground artillery (FLAK) burst directly below his position in the radio room. One piece of hot shrapnel came up through the floor beneath him missing him until it entered on the side of his head between his steel helmet and his scalp. It curved inside of his steel helmet and made a gouge in his scalp clear across the top of his head. If he did not have a steel helmet on, he would have been able to say “Whew, that was close”, but the steel helmet caused that definite scar across the top of his head that he carried for the rest of his life. It looked like a wound to me but there was not enough blood for a purple heart. Not on our crew but another had a twenty mm shell burst between a navigator and a bombardier who were three feet apart. The insides of their compartment had a hundred pepper holes but neither of the two men were hurt. Strange things with no explanation like that happened hundreds of times. One waist gunner crewman that I know of found a piece of scrap sheet metal about a foot square. After about his fifteenth mission, he put that piece on the floor where he stood and that very mission, an explosion beneath the B-17 bomber that he was in, sent a large piece of shrapnel straight up that hit the piece of metal he was standing on. There was enough energy to lift him up a few inches and he had sore feet for a while but except for that piece of scrap armor plating he would surely be dead. I had a piece of FLAK go through the Plexiglas of my lower ball turret and go thru my inflatable life jacket that I wore without touching me. Then there was the time an 88mm shell came through our bomber from the floor through the ceiling in the short space between the pilot and top gunner without exploding.
One crew man who stayed in the barracks next door had a machine gun bullet come so close to him that it cut his parachute harness strap without touching him. On more than half of our missions over Germany, we came home with holes in our bomber which was about normal. I know of one crew man in our Squadron, the 508th, who finished one tour of twenty-five missions and came back over to do another tour over Germany. He was half way through his next tour of thirty-five missions when I finished my thirty-five and went home. On the other hand, I knew of two crews in my Squadron that got shot down on their first mission. At our briefings, we were told that flying thirty-five missions at five or six miles high could cause us to become sterile. I never did find out if this was caused by high altitude ultra violet light, reduced air pressure, breathing pure oxygen for long periods of time or some other reason like anxiety.
After the war in 1946, I married my sweet Eloise. I expected the worst but we are the parents of five daughters and we have 26 grand children, 45 great grand children and 2 great, great grand children. When we get together, we are quite a bunch. Each one of these persons owes their existence to an unknown slave laborer in Germany who caused that shell to be a dud.