Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (27 page)

While he was pulling out of the dive it had not really mattered, but now that he had managed to level out, Lawley needed to see where he was going, and he would have liked to see his instruments. Accomplishing this necessitated the grisly task of cleaning Murphy’s blood and shreds of his flesh—not to mention no small amount of Lawley’s own blood—from the windshield and the instrument panel.

As he was doing this, the Luftwaffe hit
Cabin in the Sky
once again.

Lawley instinctively took evasive action, and the fighters broke off their attack. They probably figured that this Flying Fortress was a goner and not worth their attention when the sky was so full of other bombers.

As the engine fire seemed to be getting out of control, Lawley managed deftly to maneuver the plane in such a way that the rush of air provided by the forward momentum knocked the fire back.

Feeling all this evasive action and maneuvering, the crew probably figured that
Cabin in the Sky
was out of control. In fact, the opposite was true. The Flying Fortress was very much in the control of a skilled pilot. One is tempted to say that the plane was in good hands, but given the situation, it was the singular, “hand.”

Up to this point, only the flight engineer had bailed out of the aircraft,
but the topic was now back on the agenda. Lawley told the crew to go ahead and jump.

“We can’t bail out!” Sergeant Thomas Dempsey, the radio operator, replied over the intercom. “Two gunners are so seriously wounded they can’t leave the ship.”

With this, Lawley made the decision to take
Cabin in the Sky
back to England. He was not about to abandon wounded men. Everyone else who remained aboard decided to stay with him. Nobody wanted to give up the ship.

Henry Mason, the bombardier, who had some flight training, came up out of the nose to help. They were unable to extricate Murphy’s body from his seat, so they used his coat to tie him to the seat back, and Mason stood between the seats to help with the controls. They used the bomb release on the flight deck to get rid of the ordnance and lighten the Flying Fortress.

Though he was bleeding heavily from wounds in his face and neck, as well as his hand, Lawley refused first aid. He probably used the phrase “just a scratch.”

Cabin in the Sky
droned on, with the crew knowing that they would be alone, aboard a vulnerable straggler, for five painfully long hours in skies in which the Luftwaffe might burst upon them at any moment.

Somewhere over France, the shock and blood loss took its toll.

Bill Lawley passed out.

Henry Mason grabbed the yoke from his awkward standing position and jostled the pilot.

“Stay with us!”

Finally, Lawley regained consciousness and wrapped his left hand around the controls once again.

Meanwhile, the 2nd Bombardment Division was sharing an experience more like that of
Ten Horsepower
or
Cabin in the Sky
than like that of 1st Division bombers who had avoided the “90 local defenders.”

Over the 2nd Division target area, which spanned a one-hundred-mile swath of German airspace between Braunschweig and Gotha, the Liberators were intercepted by the heavily armed Bf 110 interceptors of Jagdgeschwader 11.

As Wright Lee, a navigator with the 445th Bombardment Group,
wrote in his memoirs, the Germans attacked just as the Liberators were approaching Braunschweig.

“Something was wrong,” Lee recalls of the approach to the target. “We were almost on the bomb run and no flak or fighters until 1:18 p.m….then the sky seemed to fill immediately with a host of Nazi planes. They came out of nowhere and we were all kept busy calling off enemy fighter positions and firing when the chance came. I had put up my navigation table and was standing by to ‘toggle’ the bombs, when someone shouted over the interphone, ‘Fighter high at 12 o’clock. He’s coming in on us.’ The nose and upper turrets responded immediately, swinging their guns forward and upward, while the others of us forward—pilot, copilot and navigator—were cringing from the bursting 2Omm shells just outside the windows. The German fighter poured them in but we felt no direct hits. Simultaneously our plane shook violently from nose to tail.”

What Lee described was the heavy vibration of multiple machine guns hammering away simultaneously.

“The nose and upper turrets were blasting away at the same time at the onrushing fighter,” he explains. “Our bullets tore into his right wing and fuselage. Black smoke burst from this Fw 190 as he pulled up and over our plane, seemingly only a few feet from our heads. Within an instant the waist gunner, Eugene Dueben, shouted into the interphone ‘Hey, two fighters just ran together behind us.’ Later, he told us that while the two turrets were blazing away at the attacking fighter forward, a Bf 109 came up from under the formation for a belly attack, completed an unsuccessful pass, zoomed up and over and collided with the nose attacking Fw 190 right behind us. Both planes went spiraling down in flames and we were credited with two ‘kills’ that day.”

Over the target, Lee was surprised to see that the Luftwaffe interceptors continued to attack, despite the presence of German antiaircraft fire exploding all around them. As the 445th exited the target area, Liberators started dropping one by one.

“Another of our Group’s ships, the
Sky Wolfe
, suddenly began dropping with its nose down. He fell right through our formation between [Lieutenant] Winn’s plane and ours, nearly taking Winn’s wing with him. Our tail gunner watched him continue his helpless spiral downward and he finally blew up. No chutes were observed.

“Meanwhile, the attacks continued with the same fury as when they started and enemy fighters shot down two from the 389th Bomb Group, a part of our [2nd Combat] Wing. In contrast to the air battle’s utter horror, it was a picturesque view as we watched the many descending parachutes blend into the terrain’s snow covered background…. Another Liberator from our Group began falling behind and suddenly the entire tail section fell off. The plane nosed up, went into a spin, burst into flames, then exploded…. A half hour after the attack started, the enemy activity ceased, but the toll on us was great. Our Wing of 70 planes had lost seven.”

One Luftwaffe pilot in particular became the scourge of the B-24 force. Major Rolf-Günther Hermichen, who had transferred from Jagdgeschwader 26 in October 1943 to become
Gruppenkommandeur
with I Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 11, shot down four Liberators in the space of eighteen minutes on Sunday.

Beginning at 1:27
P.M.
, he chased the 2nd Division formations from Holzminden in Lower Saxony toward Gotha, claiming two of the four Liberators in the first three minutes of his relentless spree. Hermichen ended the day with fifty-two aerial victories out of his eventual career total of sixty-four. Of these, twenty-six would be four-engine heavy bombers.

Hermichen’s bloody spree notwithstanding, Colonel Dale Smith continued to see Day One in terms of a glass half-full, and to think in terms of the things that the Eighth Air Force had done right, and what damage the Luftwaffe might have done.

“Expecting a reciprocal withdrawal, German controllers marshaled all the refueled fighters, together with many others, along our penetration route, ready to swarm upon us on our way out,” Smith says, explaining how at least some of the Eighth Air Force bombers continued to confound the Luftwaffe as the bombers exited the continent on Sunday afternoon. “But we didn’t return that way. Instead we turned southwest, detouring in a wide arc south of the Ruhr. By the time German defense commanders discovered our purpose and hastily ordered their assembled fighters south we were well on our way. Only an insignificant number caught the tail of our bomber column as it withdrew to the Channel.”

Not everyone had been so lucky, nor would the Luftwaffe be so completely fooled tomorrow.

On that cold Sunday afternoon, as the sun began to flirt with the notion of what the poets call “sinking slowly into the west,” men began gathering in control towers all across East Anglia, straining their eyes against the bleak winter sky.

It was still too early to expect much. All of the bombers that had aborted for various reasons, mainly mechanical, had long since landed, and it was too early for the others to have completed the round-trips to Braunschweig or Oschersleben, and those who went to Rostock and Leipzig would be even later.

At Polebrook, Sergeant Harold Flint had come on duty at noon as the control tower operator. About three hours later, and about an hour ahead of the expected return of the Leipzig mission, he received a sudden and urgent call over the radio.

“This is Paramount A-Able,” the voice said, according to Flint’s recollection in a recording in the collection of the Air Force Historical Research Agency. “The pilot has been badly wounded, the copilot is dead. I am the navigator. What shall we do?”

The voice was that of navigator Wally Truemper. Archie Mathies had flown
Ten Horsepower
all the way back to England and was within minutes
of coming over the field from which they had departed before dawn. Truemper was communicating with the tower because the radio on the flight deck had been knocked out in the 20mm blast that killed copilot Ronald Bartley. Despite his injuries, radioman Joe Rex had repaired the intercom to the flight deck, so that at least Archie could communicate with Wally.

Colonel Elzia LeDoux of the 351st Bombardment Group’s 509th Bombardment Squadron, who was on duty that day as the tower officer, immediately sent word to Colonel Eugene A. Romig, the group commander. Within moments, Romig’s operations officer, Colonel Robert W. Burns (who succeeded Romig as group CO eight months later) had arrived in the tower. Romig himself arrived shortly thereafter to watch
Ten Horsepower
make a fast, erratic pass over the field. When the men in the tower learned that one of the gunners was flying the airplane, they were less critical of his technique.

Then it began to sink in that neither Mathies, nor Truemper, the ranking officer on board, had ever flown a B-17—until today—and that
nobody
aboard
Ten Horsepower
had ever landed one.

Romig instructed them to make a pass over the field with sufficient altitude for the other crewmen to safely bail out. He then told Truemper to tell Mathies to point
Ten Horsepower
toward the North Sea coast, which was about forty miles to the east. When they were sure that the Flying Fortress was headed safely out to sea, they were to bail out themselves.

Mathies and Truemper refused.

Truemper said they would make the pass to let everyone else get out, but that Archie Mathies planned to land
Ten Horsepower
.

Why?

They explained that Dick Nelson, despite his severe injuries and his being unconscious, was still alive and still breathing. They refused to abandon him to die in the North Sea.

The officers in the tower were hesitant, but they agreed to try to talk the plane down.

Five parachutes floated down toward Polebrook, and
Ten Horsepower
circled around to make a pass at the runway.

Too fast and too high.

Flint told Mathies to go around.

Too fast and too high,
again.

When this was repeated, and it became clear that Mathies needed to watch an example of a landing B-17, Romig decided to go up and bring him in. With LeDoux as his copilot, he took off in the Flying Fortress called
My Princess
and rendezvoused with
Ten Horsepower
.

Romig flew as close as he could, close enough to see an exhausted Archie Mathies in the right seat, but not so close that Mathies would collide with him as he tried to control the bomber.

Unfortunately, when Romig tried to speak to Truemper directly, he could not. Yet another communications glitch compelled him to relay his messages for Mathies to Truemper by way of the control tower.

By now, the rest of the 351st Bombardment Group had started to return, but in order to keep Polebrook clear for
Ten Horsepower
, Burns declared an emergency and ordered them to divert to the airfield at Glatton, the home of the 457th Bombardment Group, which was about three miles to the east.

By this time, however,
Ten Horsepower
and
My Princess
had strayed south of Polebrook by about five miles and were closer to the field at Molesworth, home of the 303rd Bombardment Group. Most of the 303rd’s aircraft had returned, so Romig and LeDoux briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of trying to bring
Ten Horsepower
down there.

As they approached Polebrook to try again, Truemper and Mathies abruptly made the decision to try putting
Ten Horsepower
down in a large field. Romig tried to instruct them to land on the downslope of this field, but by then, Archie Mathies was already committed, and he proceeded to land uphill.

At first, it looked as though they were going to make it, but this was not to be.

Mathies and Truemper were killed on impact in their valiant, failed effort to save Dick Nelson.

On that day back in 1929, on the trestle outside Library, Pennsylvania, Archie Mathies had embraced danger and looked death in the eye. On that day in 1929, death had blinked.

Today, death exacted its cold, heartless vengeance.

Miraculously, Nelson survived the crash. He was taken from the wreckage of
Ten Horsepower
alive and rushed to a hospital.

He did not make it. He died without regaining consciousness. Some say that he survived through the night, but his headstone in the Rock Island National Cemetery carries Sunday’s date.

In Chelveston, about as far south of Molesworth as Molesworth was from Polebrook, the 305th “Can Do” Bombardment Group was recovering its bombers, and eyes were scanning the sky for stragglers. They might have been hoping to see Lieutenant Bill Lawley’s
Cabin in the Sky
, but they had already gotten the word from several people who had seen it go down. It was in a nearly vertical dive with an engine on fire. They knew that was one of those things from which you don’t often walk away.