Luck of the Draw E-Book

Frank Murphy

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 714

Beschreibung

The captivating story of WWII Airman Frank Murphy, who features in new TV miniseries Masters of the Air. THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "In the pursuit of authenticity, of accurate history and undeniable courage, no words matter more than, 'I was there.' Read Luck of the Draw and the life of Frank Murphy and ponder this: how did those boys do such things?" Tom Hanks The epic true story of an American hero who flew during WWII, featured in the Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks TV Series, Masters of the Air. Beginning on August 17, 1942, American heavy bomber crews of the Eighth Air Force took off for combat in the hostile skies over occupied Europe. The final price was staggering. 4,300 B-17s and B-24s failed to return; nearly 28,000 men were taken prisoner or interned in a neutral country, and a further 26,000 made the ultimate sacrifice. Luck of the Draw is more than a war story. It's the incredible, inspiring story of Frank Murphy, one of the few survivors from the 100th Bombardment Group, who cheated death for months in a German POW camp after being shot out of his B-17 Flying Fortress. Now with a new foreword written by his granddaughter Chloe Melas, of NBC, and daughter Elizabeth Murphy.

Leseprobe

“Every generation needs a spokesman for its endeavors. In this respect, Frank Murphy does the young men of VIII Bomber Command proud.”

—ROGER A. FREEMAN, AUTHOR ANDEIGHTH AIR FORCE HISTORIAN

“It is an honor and a privilege to be associated with the American, British, and Allied airmen who, during the Second World War, gave us much. I urge you to read Frank Murphy’s truly memorable story.”

—IAN L. HAWKINS, AUTHOR ANDWORLD WAR II HISTORIAN

“You fly with Frank in combat missions, cheating death more than once and witnessing death far too often. You travel with him to Stalag Luft III, witness the Great Escape, and share the joy of liberation at the sight of a white star on a battle-weary Sherman tank.”

—PAUL ANDREWS, AUTHOR ANDU.S. AIR FORCE HISTORIAN

CONTENTS

The Crew

Foreword to the 2023 Edition by Elizabeth Murphy and Chloe Melas

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Ian L. Hawkins

Prologue

1    Combat Aircrews: Coming of Age

2    Before the War

3    The War Comes to America

4    Hendricks Field, Sebring, Florida

5    The 100th Bomb Group

6    The 100th Stumbles

7    The VIII Bomber Command

8    Combat

9    Dangerous Days, Desperate Hours

10   Münster

11   Stalag Luft III

12   Liberation

Epilogue

Appendices

100th Bombardment Group

A. Operational Summary

B. Operational Losses, June 22, 1943–October 14, 1943

C. Aircraft Markings and 100th Bombardment Group Aircraft History

D. 418th Bomb Squadron Original Aircrews

E. Operational Matrix—1943

F. Personal Report on the Regensburg Mission, August 17, 1943

Selected Sources

Index

About the Authors

THE CREW

Pilot—Captain Charles B. CruikshankEverett, Massachusetts

Copilot—First Lieutenant Glenn E. GrahamFreedom, Pennsylvania

Navigator—Captain Frank D. MurphyAtlanta, Georgia

Bombardier—First Lieutenant August H. GasparOakland, California

Engineer / Top Turret—Tech Sergeant Leonard R. WeeksElkins, West Virginia

Radio Operator—Tech Sergeant Orlando E. VincentiCarbondale, Pennsylvania

Ball Turret Gunner—Staff Sergeant Robert L. BixlerBisbee, Arizona

Left Waist Gunner—Staff Sergeant Donald B. GarrisonEldorado, Illinois

Right Waist Gunner—Staff Sergeant James M. JohnsonLamar, Oklahoma

Tail Gunner—Sergeant Charles A. ClarkHighland Park, Illinois

FOREWORD TO THE 2023 EDITION

by Elizabeth Murphy and Chloe Melas

Tucked inside our den’s floor-to-ceiling bookcases was a red leather-bound notebook full of my dad’s World War II memorabilia. As a twelve-year-old child, I don’t think I realized how special and tender these grainy, faded black-and-white photographs, Western Union telegrams, letters, and other mementos that my dad had somehow managed to save and collect from his time as a prisoner of war were.

They were covered in plastic sheets to protect the images, and I and my siblings (Frank, Patty, and Kevin) knew not to touch them directly but to handle them with care. Dad never talked much about his experiences during the war. I only knew he had been a navigator; his plane had been shot out of the air during an intense firefight, and he had remnants of shrapnel in his left arm and shoulder, which sometimes flared up.

Later, Dad would flesh out the story and describe how he parachuted for the first time on that day, October 10, 1943, and landed in a German farmer’s field near Münster. The occupants quickly came to his aid and took him inside their house and held him till the German police came to arrest him. Dad did speak of the German family’s kindness and that he gave a small boy a stick of chewing gum. My dad was on his twenty-first mission when his luck quite literally ran out. But he was one of the lucky ones. Forty-six members of the “Bloody Hundredth” were killed in that air battle, two of whom were members of his crew. His parents had no idea what had happened to him. They were only notified that he was missing in action. A few weeks later, they received a Western Union telegram and learned he was a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Germany.

Over the years, my dad largely kept his wartime memories to himself, rarely speaking of his harrowing experiences. But as children, we were fascinated when we learned he was held for eighteen months in the same prison camp as seen in the 1963 movie The Great Escape. We were completely enthralled—especially when he recounted how his own barracks had been digging a tunnel, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

In 1971, during my freshman year of college at Mercer University, I was taking a course on World War II and asked my dad if I could take his red notebook to my professor and share with my class. I remember the awe on my professor’s face as he leafed through the notebook. He peppered me with questions. What squadron was Dad in? Was he injured during the battle? How did he survive the prison camp? Many of his questions I couldn’t answer, as Dad had locked those memories and experiences away for decades.

One thing I always knew from an early age was how much my dad loved airplanes. He could identify almost any plane he spotted flying in the sky. His more than thirty-year career as a lawyer for the Lockheed Corporation suited him well. He traveled around the world negotiating contracts for airplanes with foreign governments. By the late ’70s, Dad was assigned to manage their office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At this point, my siblings and I were grown. I was completing my master’s degree at Northern Arizona University. My mother, Ann, was finally able to travel with my dad. While living in Riyadh, they would frequently take vacations to neighboring countries. My mother, who was an avid reader and always traveled with a suitcase lined with paperback books, happened to be reading Len Deighton’s 1982 historical novel, Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, while they were on a flight to London. My mom recalls turning to my dad and telling him he needed to read it immediately, because it detailed the Allied invasion of Europe. Dad finished the book before the plane touched down on the tarmac and phoned the publisher from his hotel. He knew he had to get in touch with men he had flown with and was hoping Deighton could help. Deighton contacted Dad and told him veterans were holding 100th Bomb Group reunions. My father was shocked, as he had no idea these reunions existed. This was all the spark my dad needed. According to my mother, when he went to his first reunion, they said, “Frank, we’ve been looking for you for years. We thought you were dead!”

In the early ’90s, when I began writing my first children’s book, my dad came to me and said he had been thinking of writing a memoir about his time during the war for our family and friends. I enthusiastically encouraged him, and for his birthday in 1992, I gave him a book called How to Write Your Own Life Story. A few years later, my family moved to Dallas, Texas, and Dad and I kept in touch with phone calls and letters, and he sent me copies of parts of manuscripts, as it seemed he was always writing about the war.

Writing Luck of the Draw was a labor of love and took several years to complete. When his book was published, he gave me a copy, and only then did I realize the depth of pain, isolation, and sheer endurance and resilience he had needed to withstand the horrors of war. I found myself rereading page after page, as it seemed more like a movie than real life. Finally, Dad was ready to talk about his war experiences. It was like lifting a veil. I believe it was why he so enjoyed the reunions and speaking to groups of veterans later in life.

Frank D. Murphy was my dad but also my hero. He was soft-spoken, compassionate, and a true Southern gentleman. But even the pain and agony of war could not harden his heart. It’s been immensely gratifying to see his grandchildren, especially my daughter, Chloe, take a profound interest in his wartime experiences and carry the mantle. After all, it’s the next generation that will make sure we never forget these brave men who sacrificed their lives for the freedoms we have today.

—Elizabeth Murphy

As a little girl, I spent most of my weekends at my grandparents’ home in Atlanta, Georgia, where my grandfather would tell me bits and pieces about his World War II combat missions. His stories sounded like fairy tales, conjuring up images of him flying over mountains and oceans in far-off lands.

As I got older, I began to ask more questions and explore his home office, which was frozen in time with photos all over the walls and newspaper headlines from his time during the war. To this day, my grandmother has kept that room intact.

Every time I return to Atlanta from New York, where I live now, I sit in his desk chair and try to remember the sound of his soft Southern voice telling me about how he survived and that—just like the title of his book—it came down to “the luck of the draw.”

There are too many memories to recount and not enough pages to do him justice. But as I sit here writing, I can still hear him telling me about the death march from Stalag Luft III to Moosburg’s Stalag VIIA, a prisoner of war camp in Bavaria about twenty miles northeast of Munich. What he didn’t know was that they would march for the next three days and nights in subzero temperatures with little rest and hardly any food or water. Many men did not make it, with my grandfather recounting how men would collapse in the snow from the exhaustion and freezing weather. He said they would plead with the others not to give up. He even traded his shoes with a fellow soldier, as his leather soles were soaked, and he was given a pair of wooden clogs. I have one of those shoes—we don’t know what happened to the other.

My grandfather’s bravery during the war earned him the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, the Purple Heart, and the Prisoner of War Medal.

Once I reached college at Auburn University, my interest in his combat missions and experience as a POW only heightened. During the summer of 2006 after my freshman year, I was studying abroad in London—just a few hours away from Royal Air Force Station 139, where my grandfather flew his perilous missions.

That summer, I learned my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. I decided to make the two-hour train ride from London to Thorpe Abbotts, which is now a museum.

I’ll never forget the museum’s caretaker, Carol Batley, walking me into the air traffic control tower on the base, which is now filled with uniforms in glass cases and some personal belongings of the men who were stationed there—including my grandfather’s.

We walked in, and she said, “Hello, boys,” as if they were all still standing there in the control tower. The hair on my arms stood straight up; it’s a moment I’ll never forget.

I then found myself on the runway, where I called my grandfather from my tiny prepaid Vodafone. At eighty-four years old, it was the first and last time I ever heard him cry.

“I’m here,” I said to him.

He broke down, responding, “That’s where it all began.”

He died that next summer almost to the day, on June 16, 2007, at the age of eighty-five. Going there was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I went back to England in the fall of 2021 for the chance of a lifetime. My family and I went to the set of Masters of the Air, the Tom Hanks– and Steven Spielberg–produced television series for Apple TV+. The show tells the stories of the 100th Bomb Group, and I can gratefully say my grandfather is a character.

After months of thinking we might not be able to go to the set due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, we finally made it, a few hours north of London not too far from my grandfather’s air force base. Although this time I couldn’t call my grandfather and tell him where I was standing, I felt in my heart that somehow, he knew. He would be quietly bursting with joy that his family had made the journey for this truly remarkable moment.

Aside from being a journalist, my most important job is being a mom to my two sons Leo, five, and Luke, three.

I want them to know why the men and women of World War II are rightfully called “the greatest generation” and about our hero, Frank. At bedtime, we talk about Frank and his plane flying high in the sky. Leo frequently asks me about him and tells me he wants to fly planes like Great-Grandpa.

My grandfather once told me he spent the rest of his life walking with ghosts but looking back with pride.

Our family’s goal is to keep Frank’s memory and that of his fellow men alive and pass on the greatness to the next generation.

—Chloe Melas

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The recounting of contemporaneous events that occurred more than fifty years ago in voluminous detail is not an easy task, even for one who was an eyewitness to many of the scenes described. This narrative, therefore, has been made possible only through the collective efforts of many individuals who generously offered their assistance and whose knowledge and insights have made it a far better story. It is as much their story as it is mine. To all of them, I extend my sincere gratitude.

There are, however, several individuals to whom I am particularly indebted:

Fellow Comrades in Arms

My crewmates Charles “Crankshaft” Cruikshank, pilot, and August “Augie” Gaspar, bombardier, of Crew No. 31, 100th Bomb Group, two of the finest and bravest men I have ever known and who shared the major portion of the journey described in this story with me, for, as always, giving me their unstinted, full support as I struggled to tell our story.

The late John Donnelly Brady, New York, one of the original pilots of the 418th Bomb Squadron, 100th Bomb Group, and a first-rate musician whose quick Irish wit relieved many a tense moment, for generously giving me the benefit of his vivid recollections of our days together both in training and combat.

Lieutenant General A. P. Clark, a fellow prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III and Stalag VIIA, later superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado, now president of the Friends of the Air Force Academy Library, for permitting me to reproduce photographs of Stalag Luft III and Stalag VIIA from the extensive academy library collection.

Joe Consolmagno, another ex-kriegie with me from Stalag Luft III and Stalag VIIA, and former editor of the Kriegie Klarion, the newsletter of the Association of Former Prisoners of Stalag Luft III, for his kind sharing of his information and remembrances with me over the years.

Ralph Giddish, my first cousin and himself a veteran of thirty-three combat missions as a tech sergeant and radio operator with the 44th Bomb Group of “the Mighty Eighth,” for sharing his knowledge of our family background with me.

John J. O’Neil, formerly of the 482nd Bomb Group, who believed in my earlier drafts enough to decide to publish this manuscript.

Supporting Cast

Paul M. Andrews, historian, scholar, and author of several monographs on the United States Army Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, including We’re Poor Little Lambs and Project Bits and Pieces, for generously sharing the fruits of his many years of research with me, for his research efforts on my behalf, for reviewing and correcting my manuscript, for the superb, comprehensive, and informative appendices he has prepared for this book to complement my story, and, most of all, for his warm friendship and support throughout the writing of this story. Paul would be quick to tell anyone that behind his many years of research there is a “small army” of those who have been extremely helpful. Paul would like to thank the special efforts of those who have assisted him directly in this effort. They are David Giordano and Walter Platt of the National Archives, Dan Hagedorn and Larry Wilson of the National Air and Space Museum, and Mike T. Stowe and Randy Leads for researching aircraft accident reports.

Charles P. “Nick” McDowell, Springfield, Virginia, editor and publisher of the Foxfall Press, for “sanding” my often clumsy prose chapter by chapter as I completed them and for his consistent support and encouragement when I needed it most.

Suzanne Comer Bell, Pisgah Forest, North Carolina, who meticulously edited my first draft and carefully outlined for me all the basic rules I would have to observe if I intended to write an interesting story.

Joanne Davis, the Alumni Office of the Marist School in Atlanta, for diligently searching her files and supplying copies of photographs of my old school in the 1930s.

Meredith Evans, the Atlanta History Center, for her assistance in locating suitable and interesting photographs of old Atlanta.

Michael P Faley, Studio City, California, 100th Bomb Group photo archivist, for searching and sifting through his extensive collection of 100th Bomb Group photographs to select appropriate pictures for this story.

Roger A. Freeman, British historian, world authority, and author of numerous books and articles on the operations of the United States Army Eighth Air Force in Europe during the Second World War, the man who named us “the Mighty Eighth,” for kindly reading my manuscript, offering much insight, and correcting errors.

Cindy Goodman, editor of Splasher Six, the 100th Bomb Group Association newsletter, for supplying historical information and other data in the course of this story.

Ian L. Hawkins, British historian, my dear friend for many years, and author of the classic book on the Münster raid, The Münster Raid: Before and After, the most comprehensive, in-depth reporting of Eighth Air Force operations during Black Week, the week of October 8–14, 1943, in print, for reading my manuscript, correcting my mistakes, challenging my conclusions, and correcting errors.

The late Heinz Hessling, Beckum, Germany, a talented artist and an eyewitness to the events of October 10, 1943, who dedicated months of his time locating the sites where I and members of my crew landed and our aircraft crashed.

Karin N. Jones at the Boeing Company, for locating the illustrations of the B-17F used in the book.

Dr. James H. Kitchens III of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, who took the time from his busy life to answer some of our questions and provide the manuscript a rigorous review from a historian’s perspective. His perspective on the state of the air war at the beginning of Black Week in Europe in October 1943 is outstanding.

The late Heinz Knoke, Bad Iburg, Germany, an Me 109 pilot and Luftwaffe fighter ace with fifty-eight air victories, for his many hours of discussion of the 1943 German air defense system with me.

Kristina Moeller, Alpharetta, Georgia, who for many years expertly translated all my German correspondence with the Berdelmann and Rawe families.

Jan Riddling, 100th Bomb Group historian, for poring through numerous historical records to provide and confirm many details about the 100th Bomb Group, as well as spending untold hours reviewing, correcting, and adding to the data contained within the appendices. These indispensable efforts have ensured that this manuscript is as historically accurate and complete as is humanly possible.

Paul West, 100th Bomb Group historian emeritus, who organized and first computerized all available information on the 100th Bomb Group, for reviewing this manuscript and sharing his immense knowledge of the 100th Bomb Group’s history.

The late Gerd Wiegand, Munich, Germany, Fw 190 pilot who achieved thirty-one air victories with the famous Luftwaffe JG 26 fighter group, Lille-Nord, France, 1942–1944, who kept a detailed wartime log of all his air combats, including drawings and sketches of tactics and maneuvers by both sides, which he kindly shared with me.

And finally,

Ann, my lovely wife of fifty years, for sharing her life with me, for her patience and steady encouragement during the countless hours I spent on my manuscript, and for making my life meaningful, happy, and rewarding.

Both officers and enlisted men of the Eighth Air Force earned promotions throughout the course of the war. In view of the large number of names mentioned in this book, it has not been practical to take note of promotions as they occurred. Instead, when individual names are mentioned in the text, they are given the rank they held at that point in the war. In addition, in a narrative of this kind, involving a great number of details, it is impossible to escape error. Wherever I have misperceived or misstated a fact, I will be pleased to correct the record.

FRANK D. MURPHY

Atlanta, Georgia

Acknowledgments for the 2023 Edition

Opening up Frank’s manuscript has been a humbling experience, but it would not have been possible without the steadfast support of the following individuals.

Marc Resnick, our editor at St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Thank you for believing in Luck of the Draw from day one. We are immensely grateful and know Frank would be too.

Anthony Mattero and Ali Spiesman, CAA, for years you have guided us through this process. We want to thank you for your unwavering support and patience on this exciting journey.

Michael P. Faley, 100th Bomb Group Historian, I’ve lost track of the countless phone calls and Zoom meetings. Whether it was sourcing photographs or tediously reviewing the manuscript, you were always available. We could not have done this without you. You are officially part of the Murphy family.

Matt Mabe, 100th Bomb Group Photo Archives, they say patience is a virtue and you embody that. Your feedback and knowledge of the 100th Bomb Group is incredible. Thank you for all of the countless hours you spent on this book.

Nancy Putnam, Historian and editor, Splasher Six, your attention to detail is unparalleled.

Val Burgess, POW Historian, thank you for all of your suggested updates. Your love of WWII runs deep and we could not have done this without your help.

Paul M. Andrews, 8th Air Force historian, author, Frank would be so pleased to know that you updated the appendices. We know it was not an easy task and we thank you for all you have done since the very beginning.

Ann Murphy, Frank’s wife, you gave this your blessing from the moment we told you we wanted to republish Frank’s memoir. Thank you for allowing us to share his story.

INTRODUCTION

The most momentous man-made event of the twentieth century, or of any century in history, occurred during the period from 1939 to 1945, the Second World War. All the major powers were eventually drawn into a global conflict that encompassed Europe, Africa, Russia, China, and the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Millions of young Americans, like Frank Murphy, answered that call to arms. He joined what eventually became the largest of the American overseas air commands, “the Mighty Eighth.” Among the unforgettable and vivid images clearly recalled by a generation of East Anglians from late 1942 onward were the great formations of American bombers, flying to war over occupied Europe in the early morning mists.

During the perilous period in which Frank Murphy flew twenty-one daylight combat missions, the odds of returning safely were three to one against. That fact, in itself, speaks volumes.

In April 1983, distinguished Royal Air Force Bomber Command Pathfinder veteran, Group Captain Hamish Mahaddie, DSO, DFC, AFC, RAF (retired), concluded an outstanding speech at a veterans reunion in London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, by quoting a fitting tribute to the men of RAF Bomber Command (fifty-five thousand killed in action), written by Noël Coward, the famous actor and playwright, who lived in wartime London.

The night bombers were occasionally routed to fly over London by their commander, Air Marshall Arthur Harris, to assure Londoners, who had suffered and endured Hitler’s Blitz from 1940 to 1941, that retribution was at hand:

LIE IN THE DARK AND LISTEN

Noël Coward

Lie in the dark, let them go.

Theirs is a world you’ll never, ever know

There’s one debt you’ll for ever, ever owe.

Lie in the dark and listen.

That moving tribute is equally applicable to the Americans of the Eighth Air Force. Between August 17, 1942, and May 8, 1945, nearly 4,300 B-17s and B-24s failed to return. The cost in aircraft alone is staggering, but the cost in young lives is incalculable— approximately 26,000 bomber aircrew made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.

It is an honor and a privilege to be associated with the American, British, and Allied airmen who, during the Second World War, gave so much.

I urge you to read Frank Murphy’s truly memorable story.

IAN L. HAWKINS

The Münster Raid: Before and After

B-17s Over Berlin (95th Bomb Group anthology)

Twentieth-Century Crusaders (392nd Bomb Group anthology)

Bacton, Suffolk, England

The sun will not be seen today;

The sky doth frown and lower upon our army.

  —William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 5, scene 3

PROLOGUE

I was officially and honorably separated from active duty with the United States Army Air Forces1 at Greensboro, North Carolina, on January 17, 1946. Life is indeed filled with curiosities and coincidences, for my discharge from military service came only two days short of the fourth anniversary of the day when, as a twenty-year-old college student, I raised my right hand and took the oath to join the Army Air Corps at the old post office in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Now, in looking back to the twentieth century, the reality that almost fifty-five years have passed since I last wore my military uniform is almost inconceivable. After the Second World War, I did what most other veterans of that war did— return to civilian life. And, like so many of my comrades in arms, I was a different person, and America at times seemed a different country from the one we had left behind. Maybe it was because things really did change, or maybe it was because we, through our varied wartime experiences, had changed. Through our collective war experiences, we had seen and done things that other young men in their late teens and early twenties would not have ordinarily experienced in a peacetime world.

Memories of my wartime experiences began receding into the far corners of my mind almost immediately with the end of the war and my return to civilian life. And, like thousands, if not millions of returning servicemen, I went back to college on the GI Bill and then into the business world. As the postwar years came and went, thoughts of the war became fewer and further between. In 1949, I met Ann, my lovely wife of fifty years, and together we raised four children to adulthood. Now we have all the enjoyment and pride that go with regular visits with seven wonderful grandchildren. For several decades after the war, my professional and family responsibilities did not allow much time for me to revisit my wartime experiences. For while Ann and I, like most people, have enjoyed many personal moments of sheer joy and immeasurable happiness, we have also experienced our share of deep and dark moments of heart-wrenching despair and uncontrollable sadness—for example, the death of our charming, delightful youngest daughter, Patricia, from cancer in 1989. Eventually, I seldom thought of the war unless someone happened to mention it in passing conversation or I went to see a Hollywood rendering of the war. My four children grew to adulthood knowing virtually nothing of my military service.

It was not until February 1968 that, in connection with a business trip to the Middle East, I went back to England for the first time since the war. Even then, although I knew I would be stopping overnight in London, so much time had passed that I did not give my wartime experiences a second thought. And, as our airliner descended from its cruising altitude and began its final approach into Heathrow Airport just outside of London, it was just another landing. After breaking through a typical English overcast, however, and getting my first glimpse in nearly a quarter of a century of the lush, myriad shades of green that are perpetually a part of the lovely British landscape, I felt a strange sensation of reincarnation, a feeling that I was in the midst of a replay, a repeat performance of earlier happenings. The instant our airplane touched down at Heathrow, it all came back. I had never realized the profound effect the war had on me. Memories of the war years all at once swamped my senses. Every airman at a remote air base in England in 1943 lived for a twenty-four- or forty-eight-hour pass to London. I felt, once again, part of the great American invasion of London in 1942/43, where the center of American life in the city was the Rainbow Club overlooking the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. When the Americans first arrived in England, the British were not quite sure what to make of us. Were we really allies, or were we alien infiltrators coming to undermine British institutions? Our pay was many times that of British and European soldiers, permitting American GIs to buy a few of life’s luxuries for lonely women whose men were fighting far from home. We GIs were quickly, if not affectionately, referred to as “being overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” The British, however, had their standards. There was the story of the American airman who asked an English girl if they could make love before both were killed. “I’d love to,” the young lady replied, “but you’re not the sort of man I can afford to be found dead in bed with.”

By the time the 100th Bomb Group reached England in the summer of 1943, the mounting losses of American airmen in the VIII BC2 were well known to the British public. Britons, for the most part, quickly accepted us for what we were: brash, young soldiers from a foreign land behaving like brash, young soldiers from a foreign land. They recognized that a soldier’s life is really a series of meetings with strangers and the wartime soldier is essentially a gypsy moving about with all his worldly belongings in his kit bag. And, in the final analysis, all of us, British, members of their empire and commonwealth, as well as we Americans were alike—we had a war to win, and everybody was in the same boat.

My most telling experience, though, came the next day with my departure from Heathrow to Beirut. The moment our airliner lifted off the ground, the flutters, the butterflies, and the old anxieties from a quarter century earlier returned. I am not sure if any of the passengers noticed or if the airline flight attendants paid any attention, but when crossing the channel, I instinctively looked for the rest of our formation.

Where is the fighter escort, our little friends?

At the Belgian coast, I half expected to see swirling black puffs of flak from long-silenced German antiaircraft artillery bursting all around us.3 I had a sense that the ghosts from groups of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, were out there somewhere behind billowing clouds, single- and twin-engine fighters waiting for us as they always were. Once again, I heard, through the static and crackling of a comparatively primitive interphone system, young, excited voices crying out:

There they are! Twelve o’clock high!4Bandits! Two of ’em, five o’clock low!

In the years since that first postwar visit to England, I have flown out of England many times to the Continent, and always with the same haunting memories. If you were there, you never forget. Even though one may have pushed those memories to the furthest recesses of the mind, they are always there ready for something, some event to serve as a trigger to bring them to the forefront.

As a consequence, and despite my earlier lifelike reflections on the war during my first postwar visit to England in 1968, I had no further inclination to act on those memories until the spring of 1983. I was constantly occupied with my work and at that time had not been in touch with any of my old wartime comrades for more than thirty-five years. It was while I was preparing to make yet another business trip to London and the United States, this time from my office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that Ann suggested I take along and read a book she had just finished—Len Deighton’s marvelous story Goodbye, Mickey Mouse. I had read a number of Deighton’s fascinating novels on espionage and the Cold War and took Ann’s advice. Though I was a member of a bomber crew and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse was about fighter pilots and their life at a fighter base, during the flight, I eagerly read the entire book without stopping. I suspect that most people do not read the author’s acknowledgments of a book, but I have been everlastingly glad I did so in this case. In his acknowledgments, tucked away in the last few pages of the book, Deighton mentioned Ian Hawkins, a British historian who was then writing a book “about the 100th BG’s raid on Münster.” I knew about the 100th BG of the VIII BC, and I knew about Münster, especially the October 10, 1943, mission to that city.

Upon arrival at our London hotel, I immediately telephoned the office of the publisher of Goodbye, Mickey Mouse and inquired as to how I could get in touch with Mr. Deighton. I was told to send them a letter addressed to him for forwarding. Using the hotel’s writing paper, I wrote a note and placed it into the post that evening. In a matter of only ten days or so, at my home in Atlanta, I received a reply from Mr. Deighton giving me Ian Hawkins’s address and telephone number. Calculating the time differential so that I would not wake up a household in the middle of the night, I immediately picked up the telephone and called Ian at his home. I had only just finished briefly identifying myself and mentioning the group that I flew with when Ian interjected enthusiastically: “I know who you are!” In the way that many Britons are so gracious, Ian invited Ann and me to stop by for a visit during my return trip to the Middle East.

In July 1983, forty years after arriving in England and being assigned to an air base at a place called Thorpe Abbotts, located in Norfolk County, some ninety miles northeast of London, Ann and I visited Ian, his lovely wife, Mary, and their children at their home in Bacton, Suffolk, England. Ian’s study is what I would have imagined any historian’s study would look like; bracketing a typewriter were shelves filled with books, photographs, and seemingly countless files with papers and documents. Ian was in the midst of writing his outstanding, exhaustively researched history of the Münster raid and the operations of the VIII BC during Black Week, the seven-day period from October 8–14, 1943.5 During this visit, Ian handed me ten or so pages photocopied from a document called a Missing Air Crew Report (MACR). During the Second World War, a reporting system was developed to record what happened to an aircraft failing to return from an operation. The document includes the serial numbers for the aircraft, its engines, and even its machine guns. If possible, the report includes eyewitness accounts describing what happened to the aircraft or the circumstances when the aircraft was last seen. Crew members, their next of kin’s address, and information about their fate were also noted. After the war, a monumental effort was launched to account, to the greatest extent possible, for all of those who failed to return from operations and who were not taken prisoner or evaded capture. This effort involved the correlation of captured German records and the postwar interviews of some surviving crew members. I had never been asked about my crew, but as you will shortly learn, there was not much I could have added that others, who were in a better position, provided.

I sat down to review MACR Number 1028, and as I read the graphic postwar statements of my crewmates, Leonard Weeks, Don Garrison, and James Johnson, memories of our tumultuous war years together came rushing back. My poignant experiences on my first flight to England in 1968 seemed flights of fantasy compared to what I felt after reading the MACR. Before my visit with Ian ended, I became aware of and am forever thankful for the small army of enthusiasts on both sides of the pond and on the European continent who are deeply interested in what we Americans did in the skies over western Europe between 1942 and 1945. In early June of the following year, 1984, I traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany, where I met the warm, generous late Heinz Hessling, who as a young eighteen-year-old Luftwaffenhelfer,6 watched the violent air battle over Münster through a pair of binoculars from his post with a German flak battery on the Dortmund-Ems Canal north of the city. We drove out to the Rawe farm at Holzhausen and to the Berdelmann farm near Lienen. I spoke with both Helmut and Friedheim Berdelmann, who showed me four photographs taken on October 11, 1943. I explored the area with Helmut Berdelmann, then fifty years of age, the only eyewitness who meticulously pointed out the exact locations where major sections and components of an aircraft fell on their farm. These names and places may not mean a great deal to you now, but I would be getting ahead of myself if I were to tell you right now why to this very day they mean so much to me.

Many of us of the so-called World War II generation find it difficult to believe that more than a full half century has passed since the end of the Second World War. Among the reminders of this seemingly ephemeral passage of time is that, more and more, I have read and been told that, before the facts have faded from the memory of living men, those who participated in dramatic battles in a great war have a duty to record their personal recollections for posterity. It is usually suggested that such remembrances breathe life into the endless volumes of dry, colorless official histories of military operations.

In my view, a more compelling reason for recording these memories is that those of us who have survived vicious battles in a major war have an obligation to speak to succeeding generations with pride of the valor, dedication, suffering, and sacrifices of our then young comrades in arms who, unknown and unheralded, fell in battle so many years ago and have long since been forgotten.

This narrative, therefore, is a memoir, a personal history of my experiences and perceptions. Nevertheless, because the world in which young American airmen went to war in 1941/42 is not the world of today, it is my belief that, where it might enhance my reader’s understanding of the historical context in which the events recalled occurred, it is appropriate to set forth the overall military situation existing at the time. For example, it is crucial throughout the telling of this story to recognize that the creation of professional, dedicated, integrated aircrews for large aircraft was essentially a Second World War refinement of broad, general concepts regarding strategic bombing based on U.S. Army Air Service First World War experiences. I have, therefore, prefaced my personal recollections with a short review of the coming of age of military aircrews in the early years of the 1939–45 war. If, however, in the course of such an effort I have misstated a fact of history, it is an honest mistake that I hope will not take away from my portrayal of the character and courage of the fine men with whom I was privileged to serve.

Today, combat flying officers in the United States Air Force are usually in their late twenties to midthirties, have been flying for years, and are in a constant state of combat readiness, having trained continuously on the most sophisticated weapons systems money can buy. The young men entering the USAAF in 1941/42 were closer to twenty years of age and had joined a branch of the American armed forces with scarcely any developed traditions. They were committed to battle after a few months, to fly in aircraft that were then the most sophisticated weapons systems money could buy, but whose basic configurations and defensive systems were still undergoing final definition. United States VIII BC combat crewmen flying from England in 1942 and 1943 operated according to prewar theories of strategic bombing that, as it turned out, contained basic miscalculations. They paid a fearful price.

There was uniqueness about the time in which the events related herein occurred. Except for the eternal sameness of death, the Second World War was different from all later wars in which America has been involved. In no subsequent war has United States territory been directly attacked or invaded by an aggressive, formidable enemy capable of threatening our national survival. In the past half century, the American people have not been required to commit themselves totally and unconditionally to a war effort as was necessary during the Second World War. In every more recent conflict, with the possible exception of the Korean War, where American troops were eventually engaged by massive, well-trained, well-armed, regular Communist Chinese ground forces, American forces have gone into battle with years of peacetime training behind them and equipped with arms and weapons systems that were vastly superior to those of their enemy.

Few accounts of the events of the 1939–45 war convey to their readers a true sense of the day-to-day drama that was a part of the wartime experience. Today, as I look back to those terrible, turbulent years, I am unable to forget a distinct mood and atmosphere that I have known in no other period in my life. The war years took on a surrealistic quality; the air sparkled with a pervasive electricity. Subsequent histories have rarely fully and accurately reflected the murky, amorphous picture of what the postwar world would be like—the indisputable uncertainty of the future. For much of the World War II generation, the war years were the lost years of the twentieth century.

We saw a pervasive wartime mentality wherever we went—a resigned acceptance by people across the world of the inevitability of whatever was to come. It was impossible for anyone, anywhere, combatant or noncombatant, to ignore the war if for no reason other than the rationing of daily necessities because of shortages created by the war and the disruption of international commerce. Major battles were fought simultaneously at opposite ends of the earth on land, on the seas, and in the air.

America transitioned from a nation at peace to a nation at war quickly and without fanfare. Within weeks after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, young men who had been students, professionals, or tradesmen were disappearing from localities all across America. In their place, soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen in uniform began to appear everywhere, for, throughout the war, uniforms were worn by military servicemen both on and off duty. Daily newspapers printed comprehensive coverage of the activities of local men in the military; as the war progressed, these columns included stories of war exploits and ever-lengthening casualty lists and obituaries on hometown men serving in far-flung combat areas.

Despite its appalling cost in death and human suffering, the Second World War was the adventure of a lifetime for the young soldier, sailor, or airman going off to war. His thoughts for the future were not about education, marriage, a family, and retirement.

When do we ship out? Will it be Europe or the Pacific?

Evenings of relaxation frequently had an eerie, false, exaggerated gaiety about them. For combat airmen, life was often for the moment; the past was gone and the future dependent upon uncertain developments fraught with danger. If a major move was impending, emotional last goodbyes were, as often as not, real last goodbyes. Kisses were exchanged with those one would never have reached the point of kissing in normal times; vows to keep in touch when peace returned were solemnly made.

My combat tour in the Second World War was in England. It lasted only four months—four months, however, in which were compressed many of the most exciting, and all the most frightening and life-threatening, experiences I have known in my entire life. Although I am often unable to recall the details of recent events, images of wartime England spill over in my storehouse of memories.

As I traveled through the countryside by train, I found England to be an undulating, cultivated, luxuriant, rich, green landscape, here and there scarred to make way for the concrete pillboxes and gun emplacements that would have been quickly manned if the bells of ancient churches had clanged a warning of an invasion. It was a panorama of preserved traditions, an amazingly small island structured in a crazy-quilt webwork of peaceful little towns and villages of ancient origin, usually built around, or close by, centuries-old Norman churches and located beside, or halved by, tree-lined streams flowing gently beneath medieval arched stone bridges. Narrow, winding village streets were routinely crammed with half-timbered and sturdy stone inns, shops, pubs, quaint cottages, colorful stacked-stone walled gardens, and wartime vegetable patches. Aloofly apart were stately manor houses with well-kept grounds and the remains of ancient stone castles with pinnacles, round or square towers, bastion-like gates, impregnable slit-windowed keeps, arcading, and crenellated walls.

Once we arrived in England, the European air war was no longer another item in the daily newspapers or simply the subject of an item on radio news broadcasts. On a clear night, particularly if the stars were glimmering in a moonless sky, we were sure to hear the steady, deep, pulsating drone of Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers passing overhead going out on another of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s thousand-plane raids on Nazi Germany. There were airmen the same as us up there in those airplanes.

Would I—would we—be as brave?

Images of wartime London are inviolable queues, rubble from the Blitz, dingy streets and buildings awaiting postwar sprucing up, and temporary wartime additions, such as searchlights, sandbags, and tethered barrage balloons hovering lumpishly above docks and strategic installations like great hooked silver whales.

When I first visited London in the summer of 1943, I had the distinct sensation that I had stepped onto a live movie set. It was all still there—the Pickwickian England I had seen in MGM movies of Dickens’s classics in the 1930s, in early war films such as Mrs. Miniver and in spectacular newsreel coverage of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. London was to the American soldier in the Second World War what Paris was said to have been to American soldiers in France in 1918, illustrated in the lyrics of an old First World War song: How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree. The city streets seemed forever thronged with a huge floating population of classless soldiers, sailors, and airmen from throughout the world dressed in a kaleidoscopic array of khaki, navy, and RAF blue and olive uniforms with indecipherable insignia and wearing a variety of turbans, field caps, and berets—all of whom the spunky, outnumbered permanent residents of the city appeared to accept with stoicism.

Blackout regulations transformed wartime London after dark into a pitch-black skyline against a deep gray sky inhabited by shadowy figures moving about in a ghostly duskiness. Behind and below this phantomlike exterior, however, were noisy, smoke-filled, bustling, crowded pubs, basement clubs with fanciful, often witty British names doing a thriving business. In Piccadilly Circus in central London, first-run cinemas showed the latest Hollywood films; live theaters continuously ran patriotic and lighthearted variety shows. On any dark street in London, an airman might hear a soft voice out of the night cooing, “’Allo, dearie”—a Piccadilly commando in Eighth AF slang. An English satirist at the time, commenting on “off-duty airmen and on-duty tarts,” once remarked that “war was made for naughty girls.” Lovers and prostitutes liked the blackout rules.

For four years, from the fall of France in June 1940 until the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-day in June 1944, the Second World War in western Europe was almost exclusively an air war. The Germans occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France during this entire period. RAF Fighter Command had scarcely blunted an intended invasion of Britain by the Germans in the Battle of Britain when RAF Bomber Command took the offensive. The United States VIII BC joined them in the summer of 1942. By mid-1943, the combined British and American air forces considered themselves capable of systematically striking German industrial targets in force, the RAF by night, the Eighth by day—around the clock. At the same time, however, German air defenses were at peak strength. The titanic air battles in the skies over western Europe in the summer and fall of 1943 will likely forever remain the most monumental in history. Death in the sky replaced death in the trenches.

The story that follows is, in the main, a retrospective of the men of Crew No. 31 of the 100th BG flying from England in that summer and fall of 1943—who they were, where they came from, and what happened to them. It was an ordinary, everyday, first-line aircrew whose war record, along with those of the majority of their comrades in arms, is buried in impersonal tables of dull wartime operational statistics and depressing casualty lists. But it was part of the greatest air force ever assembled, and, while serving on that crew, two young American airmen gave their nation their most precious possession—all their tomorrows.

I have always considered Crew No. 31 America’s armed forces in microcosm during the Second World War. We were from Yankee New England, the industrialized East, the layered, bluish, densely forested Appalachians with their irregular peaks and meandering, cascading clear, icy streams, the unhurried, sleepy Deep South, rich, productive farmlands of the Midwest, the vast, flat, wall-to-wall oil lands of Oklahoma, the pastel-hued deserts, arroyos, and mountains of the great American Southwest, and the lovely, picturesque San Francisco Bay Area. Before the war, none of us knew of the existence of the others, much less that, together, we would share the most terrifying and ill-fated day of our young lives. But, for almost one full year during some of America’s darkest days of the twentieth century, we were one thing above all else—an American bomber crew.

____________

1. From this point forward, I will use the abbreviation USAAF for United States Army Air Forces.

2. From this point forward, I will use the abbreviation BG for Bomb Group. The Eighth Air Force is generally associated with all heavy bomber operations between its first operational sortie on August 17, 1942, and the last operational sortie on May 7, 1945. Yet the Eighth Air Force did not exist until February 22, 1944, with the redesignation of the VIII Bomber Command (Eighth Bomber Command). I will use the abbreviation BC for Bomber Command and AF for Air Force where historically correct and appropriate.

3.Flak is the term we used, which was adopted from the German word Fliegerabwehrkannonen.

4. See footnote on page 151 for description of system of verbal shorthand for fighter attack location.

5. A revised and expanded version of his original book is The Münster Raid: Before and After (Trumbull, CT: FNP Military Division, 1999).

6. These were teenagers, serving as auxiliaries, performing administrative duties for the German Air Force.

1

COMBAT AIRCREWS

COMING OF AGE

Land and sea battles between organized groups using weapons in the service of military goals have been memorialized since man first began recording his history by carving pictures and writings on stone. The Sumerians, who lived in present-day Iraq in 6500 BC and who are believed to be the first people to build towns with distinguishable street patterns, had soldiers who wore similar battle dress, carried spears and shields, and fought in close formation. The seafaring Carthaginians, who inhabited present-day Tunisia in North Africa, captured every foreign ship they could east of Sardinia in the Mediterranean. The great naval battle at Ecnomus in 256 BC involved seven hundred to eight hundred ships, and in that great battle, the Roman navy defeated the Carthaginians by sinking thirty of their warships and capturing another sixty-four. In contrast with ten thousand years of conventional ground warfare, air warfare is a recent development, having next to no history. Every air battle in history has been fought within the lifetime of persons still alive, at least as of this writing.

The idea of using aircraft to drop explosives on enemy targets is almost as old as the airplane itself. In 1909, six years after the Wright brothers made the first controlled flight of a powered aircraft, Major Giulio Douhet of Italy proposed putting the airplane to military use. Two years later, on November 1, 1911, his colleague Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti made the first air raid in recorded history when he dropped bombs on Turkish positions in Tripoli. Nevertheless, before the First World War, the airplane was believed to have only limited use as a military weapon. The first opposing pilots to meet over European battlefields in 1914 flew unarmed reconnaissance missions and simply waved to one another as they passed, going their separate ways. Later, when they realized that the other pilots really were the enemy, they began shooting at each other with pistols and rifles. Next, they fitted their airplanes with swiveling rear-firing machine guns for the back seat observer; and finally, they fixed forward-firing machine guns that could be operated by the pilot. These machine guns were equipped with an interrupter gear, a German invention, that permitted them to be fired when the propeller blades were in a horizontal position but not when they were vertical and thereby directly in front of the guns. This is how the first single-seat fighter aircraft were born, and their only purpose was to shoot down enemy aircraft. The interrupter gear mechanism had problems now and again. The Germans discovered, for example, that one of their most famous aces, Max Immelmann, actually died because his machine gun’s interrupter gear malfunctioned. He shot off his own propeller during a dogfight, causing his airplane to crash.

Being a pilot, observer, or air gunner during the First World War was hazardous. If an airplane was shot down or crashed for any reason, its occupants were usually killed—whether or not they had been hit by bullets in the air. They did not have parachutes, thus adding to the already considerable risks they took. Toward the end of the war, the Germans developed and provided their airmen with parachutes, which gave them an opportunity to escape from helpless, out-of-control, and often burning aircraft. I must add that the parachute is an invention for which I shall always be grateful!

The bombs dropped from airplanes at the beginning of the First World War were small. They only weighed fifteen to eighteen pounds and were crudely aimed and released. Surprisingly, it was czarist Russia, the least technically advanced of the warring nations, that developed the first effective four-engine bomber. It was designed in 1914 by Igor Sikorsky, whose later career brought him the stature of being a world-famous aviation pioneer. By 1917, the British, French, and Germans also designed and built an astonishing array of large bomber aircraft. The German four-engine Zeppelin-Staaken R.IV, a lumbering giant that became operational in 1917, was physically larger than the B-17. It had seven to eight hours of sustained endurance and carried 4,400 pounds of bombs. This aerial behemoth was armed with between four and seven machine guns, had a service ceiling in excess of twelve thousand feet, and was manned by a crew of seven. With an additional engine to drive the compressors for its superchargers, the operational ceiling of the R.IV was increased to over nineteen thousand feet, fully loaded. In the last year of the war, Zeppelin-Staaken R.IV aircraft flew more than fifty bombing raids on London. Not to be outdone, Britain’s Royal Flying Corps struck back, attacking strategic targets in Coblenz, Cologne, and other localities in the western part of Germany, using Handley Page O/400 aircraft.

Bombers in the First World War carried a crew of three to five gunners. Late in the war, however, one crew member also operated a bombsight, and in 1917, the Zeppelin-Staaken R.IV also carried a wireless operator. The only nonpilot to attain commissioned officer status as an aviator in the U.S. Army Air Service was the observer, who operated from tethered balloons or from reconnaissance aircraft. These observers were specially trained to spot hostile troops and batteries so they could adjust artillery fire, regulate barrages, identify objects on the ground, correct maps, and take photographs. Thousands of two-seater reconnaissance and light bomber aircraft were built during the war and were operated by scores of specialized reconnaissance units in all air forces.

Following the Great War, the war to end all wars, air force leaders in Britain, Germany, and the United States agreed that strategic bombing was their primary mission. Strategic bombing came to be seen as being central to a nation’s war-making capability, and the early proponents of airpower believed that air forces should enjoy coequal status with ground and sea forces in the military establishment. Although their sometimes romanticized vision of the future of warfare captured the attention of the public and some politicians, air force leaders ran into strong opposition from conservative ground generals and tradition-minded admirals, especially with their “independent status” argument. Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, America’s principal proponent of strategic bombing and an early advocate for a dominant role for the air force in the army, was eventually court-martialed and dismissed from the army for his outspoken persistence. Moreover, during the 1920s and early 1930s, little thought was given to how this new form of aerial warfare was actually going to be accomplished. It was not until the mid-’30s, when it appeared that these new theories would be tested, that Western governments began to develop and acquire in quantity the aircraft that would ultimately fight in the Second World War.

Even so, distressingly little attention was given to the proficiency and combat readiness of aircrews. One would have supposed that, along with the design and construction of increasingly high-performance and complex bomber aircraft, training programs to qualify skilled crews would also have been established. This was particularly so with the self-defending, long-range, four-engine aircraft that were being developed by the British and Americans. Astonishingly, this was not the case. Even though the United States and the major European countries had comprehensive pilot-training programs and, by 1937, RAF leaders were questioning the adequacy of aircrew manning and training within its Bomber Command, no tangible remedial action to correct those deficiencies was undertaken either in England or the United States before 1939. As a result, apart from radio operators and gunners, other aircrew positions were almost nonexistent before 1940.