A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (28 page)

The bombers passed over the coastline and onto the European continent. A swatch of cold gray-green fields appeared below. “That’s Germany below, boys,” Charlie told his crew. “Keep your eyes peeled for fighters.” Preston kept the 379th on its southeasterly path. They had thirty miles to go before the turn toward Bremen followed by a thirty-mile bomb run.

It was 11:05
A.M.
Charlie knew that if he could see Germany, then German radar and ground spotters could also see him. At that very moment enemy soldiers were calculating the bombers’ speed, course, and altitude and feeding it to flak gunners ahead. Even up so high, Charlie could feel their weighty stare.

“Little friends at two o’clock,” Frenchy radioed from the top turret. The brown specs out Pinky’s window were P-47s, their fighter cover. The fighters flew parallel to the bombers and were easy to see with visibility ranging ten miles and scattered clouds below. The P-38s and P-51s that Preston had promised were nowhere in sight, but Charlie knew they could be anywhere along the eighty-mile-long bomber stream.

“Bandits!” Ecky called out. “High and distant, on our six.”

“How many, Ecky?” Charlie asked.

“Can’t tell,” he replied. “But they’re jumping somebody back there.”

“More of them to port,” the left waist gunner, Jennings, said. “Eleven o’clock.”

“Our fighters are moving to intercept,” Frenchy announced with relief as the P-47s crossed over the formation to chase the enemy.

“Keep an eye on them,” Charlie told the crew.

Preston’s bomber gradually banked left and so did the others. Doc told Charlie and the crew what they already knew, that they were turning onto the Initial Point, the start of the bomb run. Seeing the bombers operate in unison, Charlie felt a warm, safe feeling, knowing that the others were there to “share the misery.”

Charlie looked at his watch and saw it was 11:32
A.M.
They were thirty miles from the target and “on rails,” locked into flying a straight course for ten long minutes.

Through his windscreen, Charlie saw an oily black puff of smoke. Then another. Then another. Quickly the sky frothed with a man-made storm. Far below, the 250 flak gunners had begun pulling the lanyards of their 88mm cannons while their comrades cranked handles that traversed the guns, tracking the bombers between earsplitting blasts. Every three seconds the cannons kicked, sending twenty-pound shells skyward. Each gun and its crew operated in a four-cannon battery that fired together to create a “kill zone”—each shell fused to explode at a slightly different altitude in order to embrace a target.

From the lowest position in the lead formation, Charlie had an unobstructed view ahead. He saw the black flak cloud hover like fog along a country road. That “fog” marked his path through the open sky, a trail where angry shells lit the way.

The flak puffs floated past Charlie’s window, mesmerizing him.

A flash of orange lit up the cockpit and shook his gaze. Then another. The veteran pilot had told Charlie not to worry about the black smoke puffs but to be afraid if he saw the red flash of a bursting shell. The explosions came closer. They now had color to them and reminded Charlie of “black orchids with vivid crimson centers.” At once, four separate explosions burst like lightning just ahead of
The Pub
, on Pinky’s side. Charlie heard the smack of shrapnel and felt the
yoke go momentarily limp as the bomber bucked upward then settled down hard. He saw that Walt’s bomber, too, had been tossed by the blast and was bobbing for stability.

“We’re hit!” Andy yelled through his throat mic, his voice overlapping Doc’s cursing.

“There’s a big hole!” Andy reported, “We’re hit in the nose!”

“Feels like a hurricane in here!” Doc shouted.

Up front, flak had sheared away a large swath of the bomber’s Plexiglas nose, allowing subzero wind to howl in through the jagged hole. The two-hundred-mile-per-hour gale pushed the interior temperature down to seventy degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But Doc and Andy knew they were lucky. The nose of a B-17 had little structural support. It was a delicate part of the plane, and if hit hard enough, it was prone to falling off.

“We’re losing oil pressure on number two!” Pinky told Charlie, his eyes fixed on the engine’s gauges. Glancing out the window to his left, Charlie saw the inboard engine smoking, punctured by shrapnel. He told Pinky to shut the engine down. Pinky reached to his left and pulled back on the turbocharger and throttle levers for the damaged engine. Charlie knew Andy and Doc were watching because he heard their excited voices lowering as if synchronized with the turning propeller as it revolved slower and slower. The propeller and their voices stopped together in silence. Pinky flipped a switch and “feathered” the propeller, turning it knife edge against the onrushing air to minimize drag.

Reduced to flying on three engines, Charlie kept pressure on the control yoke, pulling back ever so slightly to hold the bomber up and in position. To his right, he saw smoke trailing from the outboard engine of Walt’s bomber, a result of the same flak bursts that had hit
The
Pub
.

“Doc!” Charlie said. “How far to the drop?”

“One minute,” Doc replied.

“Oh shit,” Pinky muttered, pressing his face to his window. “A
shell passed clean through the wing! It didn’t explode, but we got a helluva hole!” Charlie leaned against his straps but saw nothing, so he asked if they were streaming fuel. Pinky told him somehow the shell had missed the fuel tanks.

Another burst of orange rocked the bomber. At the end of the right wing, engine four began running wild, accelerating as if the throttle controls had been severed. On the ground, Shack had warned Charlie about this finicky engine.

“She’s going to rip right out of the wing!” Pinky shouted.

Charlie told Pinky to begin the shut-down procedures but not to go all the way or else the engine might not restart. Pinky began to shut down the engine while Charlie gripped the yoke tightly to hold the bomber level as shrapnel rattled like hail. Charlie normally liked the sound of hail and thought it comforting, a reminder of his boyhood when he would lie in his bed at night, listening to hail strike the roof of his family’s farmhouse. But that type of hail wouldn’t punch through the ceiling.

“Bomb bay doors opening,” Andy said.

Pinky restarted engine four just before its prop stopped spinning. The engine returned to life and hummed steadily. Charlie told Pinky to keep an eye on the engine and to repeat the procedure if necessary.

“Pilot, hold her steady,” Andy said. “Steady. Steady. Steady.”

Charlie saw the first bombs tumble from Preston’s plane far ahead, and then, like heavy acorns shaken from a tree, bombs showered from the other planes.

“Bombs away!” Andy shouted as he clicked the bomb-release button. He and Doc turned to each other and shook hands, as they always had on the practice range. With a
click, click, click
, the twelve five-hundred-pound bombs were released from their shackles in the bomb bay behind Charlie, each falling a millisecond apart to prevent them from colliding. A fading whistle howled as the bombs plummeted toward the Focke-Wulf plant five miles below.
The Pub
leapt skyward as if overjoyed to have shed three tons of unwanted cargo.
From the ball turret, Blackie turned his guns downward to watch the bombs blossom in bursts across the landscape like a malevolent string of firecrackers.

Their duty fulfilled, Preston led the group in a left bank away from the target, leveling his wings to the north. The strategy was to escape Germany as quickly as possible. Behind them, the 379th had deposited their share of the 2.6 million pounds of iron that the 8th Air Force would drop that month, the first month that the 8th Air Force out-bombed the British Bomber Command.

Like the men in every other plane, the crew of
The Pub
began scanning the skies for enemy aircraft and their own fighter cover. But neither could be seen. They did not know it, but their friendly fighters had departed early, “because of excessive headwinds they had to buck on the way home,” the group’s lead navigator would note.

At a horrible time for anything to go wrong, the bomber’s engine four began running wild again. Pinky renewed the restart process, but with engine two silent and four winding down, the bomber lost speed and slipped behind the group.
The Pub
was not alone. Walt’s bomber was also wounded, and bleeding fluids from its left wing. Walt dropped from formation and stayed on Charlie’s wing. Under reduced power, Charlie and Walt watched helplessly as the silhouettes of their buddies’ planes shrunk and converged in the distance. Slowly, the rest of the 8th Air Force passed overhead, their shadows darkening Charlie’s cockpit. Charlie knew that gunners on the other bombers were looking on his plane and Walt’s with pity. They had become stragglers.

Charlie followed Walt as he steered onto a course that would take them out of Germany. Pinky tugged Charlie’s arm, drawing his attention to Walt’s plane. Smoke trailed from both engines on the left wing, those closest to
The Pub
. The smoke grew thicker by the second.

Charlie heard Walt radio a distress call as his bomber lost speed and height. Charlie leaned forward, tracking the bomber as it slipped back past Pinky’s window.

“Keep your eye on her,” Charlie told his men.

I
n the ball turret, Blackie had a ringside seat. His ever-present grin faded as he watched Walt’s plane dive in an effort to extinguish its burning engines. The plane faded into a cloud bank just behind
The Pub
. Walt’s radio cries rang out. Fighters were attacking him. Charlie looked frantically around.

Then Charlie heard Walt shout, “Everybody, bail out!”
^*

In the ball turret, Blackie saw an orange flash through a gap in the clouds. “Something bad just happened!” Blackie reported to Charlie. Charlie knew this was true because silence had replaced Walt’s radio cries. Charlie held the bomber on course and gazed out the windscreen at the empty sky where Walt’s plane had been.

“Bandits!” Ecky cried from the tail. He reported five 109s leaping from below and behind
The Pub
, the same clouds where Walt had disappeared and where Blackie had seen the flash.

Charlie’s heart raced. He tried to look out his side window to see backward, forgetting it offered no rearward visibility. From the nose, Andy cried, “Bandits! Twelve o’clock high!” Charlie looked up and above the instrument panel. There he saw a flock of eight German fighters climbing far ahead in trail formation. They blocked
The Pub
’s path to the North Sea. Charlie squinted and saw they were Focke-Wulf 190s, each with a big, rounded nose and a sharply angled dark gray body that flowed into a rounded tail. Each wore a yellow number on its fuselage and a yellow band just ahead of the tail, the markings of Fighter Wing 11 (JG-11). Charlie saw them lingering at a distance, as if trying to decide who got the honor of attacking first, them or their friends behind the wounded bomber.

I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time
, Charlie thought.

Charlie yelled to Doc to give him a course out of Germany. With the arctic wind blowing through the nose and tossing his navigation
charts, Doc tried to work.
^*
Stopping for a moment, Doc unzipped his jacket. Despite the subzero temperatures, he found himself sweating.

At the controls, Charlie longed for the safety of the formation. When huddled in formation, a bomber could absorb little bites of damage, each plane taking its fair share. But now
The Pub
was alone. Charlie knew that if an enemy fighter poured even a two-second burst into her, he and his crew would be finished. Then he remembered something from his attempt at boxing. He had underestimated the old-timer who had pummeled him and worse—he had stood still and “taken it.” Charlie decided to do something radical. “Let me know when they start their attack!” Charlie told his crew.

Barely seconds had passed when Frenchy radioed from his turret, “Here they come!”

Ducking to see beneath the lip of the roof ahead of him, Charlie spotted two 190s diving straight for the cockpit. The Germans’ approach revealed that they knew the fastest way to remove a Fortress from a fight. They were gunning for its pilots or the controls, in either order.
^†

Biting his lip, Charlie hauled back on the yoke and climbed directly up and into the path of the two enemy fighters. Pinky realized what Charlie was doing and braced his arms on the instrument panel, his eyes wide with disbelief. Charlie held the course. Instead of giving the enemy a flat target with wide wings and a long body, Charlie was presenting the bomber at her narrowest, increasing the closing speed. He was playing Chicken.

The maneuver caught the first enemy fighter pilot by surprise. He opened fire from a distance, his bullets glancing off the bomber, biting metal but failing to deliver a knockout blow. Frenchy remained cool in
the top turret and waited to return fire. When Frenchy opened up with his twin .50s, their muzzles belched fire just above the thin, sheet-metal ceiling that separated Charlie’s head from the sky. Charlie flinched. Shrinking in his seat, he struggled to hold his climb. Frenchy’s heavy slugs found their mark and hammered the 190 in its gaping mouth before it could break away. The 190 coughed flames across its fuselage and bled smoke as it zoomed past, out of the fight.

Charlie kicked the rudder and swerved the bomber left toward the next onrushing 190. “Here he comes, Doc!” Charlie shouted. But in the nose, Doc’s gun hung idle in its mount. Instead of firing, Doc was feverishly using his gloved fingers to scrape away frost from the glass. “Get him, Doc!” Charlie urged.

Doc swung his gun toward the fighter and fired. The heavy machine gun bucked and spewed brass casings that clattered to the floor. The 190 fired back, its wing guns blinking. The fighter scored hits, its slugs rattling the bomber’s skin, but Charlie’s maneuver had reduced its firing time. Snap-rolling, the 190 tried to dive away but revealed its belly in the process. Doc stitched it with a string of bullets. He failed to follow the plane to watch it crash because he became distracted by his shaking knees.