Authors: Paul Dowswell
Bomber
To Ele Fountain – good egg extraordinaire.
And also
My friends J., M., T. and J. Ward
CHAPTER 1
Kirkstead, East Anglia, England, August 17th, 1943
Harry Friedman had been in England less than half an hour when the bomb group he was joining returned to Kirkstead. That was the moment Harry realised volunteering for the air force would probably cost him his life.
The day had started well, and Harry and the crew of the
Macey May
had arrived at their new airbase in good spirits, despite the dreary weather that greeted them when their B-17 bomber descended through the clouds.
They had never made such a long flight before and seeing endless blue sea stretching below had fired Harry’s imagination. It made him think of the early seafarers he’d read about at school and what they must have thought when they were all alone in a great ocean, with only the edge of the world to fall off. When they spotted Iceland looming in the distance, he felt like an excited kid. Their navigator, Warren Cain, had directed them all the way from Newfoundland safely across that great void and landed them exactly on time to refuel for the last leg of their journey.
Iceland had looked extraordinary from the air and it did on the ground too, like something from the time of the dinosaurs, all craggy black rock and steaming geysers. There were volcanoes there, but they seemed to be asleep when Harry’s crew passed through. He couldn’t believe all these things he was seeing. He thought about his friends back in Brooklyn, and all the tales he’d have to tell them when he got back.
The refuel took about an hour and a cold wind was blowing in from the north, so they had all been glad to get back on board the
Macey May
and set off southward towards Britain, although he’d heard the British weather could be pretty unfriendly too.
By the time the B-17 touched down at Kirkstead, Harry was desperate to get off the plane, stretch his legs, and get away from the deafening drone of those four Wright Cyclone engines. Yet, despite its duration, it had been an easy flight – ten thousand feet most of the way. No need for oxygen or cumbersome flying suits.
There was a frustrating twenty-minute wait on the runway, then Captain Bob Holberg’s voice came over the interphone to tell them they had finally been given permission to proceed to their designated hardstand. Holberg parked the
Macey May
on the eastern edge of the newly built airbase, and that constant roar of engines ceased with a judder and a cough. The short silence that followed was pure bliss; now they could talk without shouting. One by one the crew wriggled out, either from the small rear exit or the hatch
beneath the cockpit. Here they were – replacement crew for the 488th Bombardment Group, 236 Bombardment Squadron.
Harry looked down the aircraft’s great silver length from its tail to the nose, admiring its graceful curves, and told himself how lucky he was to fly in such a beautiful machine. It was supposed to be one of the safest planes in the United States Army Air Force – as safe as any plane could be that was built to fight in a war. The B-17 was bristling with thirteen powerful machine guns. Of the ten men aboard, everyone apart from the two pilots operated these guns. No wonder they called it the Flying Fortress.
It had been hot inside the B-17. Now Harry found himself shivering as a thin wind ruffled his curly black hair.
‘Welcome to England, boys.’ Holberg came over. ‘You cold, Sergeant?’ he said.
Harry nodded.
‘If it’s like this in August, just think what it’ll be like in January!’
The crew looked glum, then tail gunner Jim Corrales said, ‘Cheer up, fellas. We might all be dead by then.’
They laughed uneasily. Harry noticed Holberg giving Corrales a disapproving glance, but Harry didn’t mind the tail gunner. He always made them laugh. It was good for ‘morale’ – a word Harry had never heard before he joined the USAAF. Someone back at the training camp canteen had told him it meant ‘the will to keep on fighting when those around you are being killed by the truckload’.
Harry looked around the flat landscape. He was a city boy and had rarely left New York before he’d enlisted. Even though they’d just spent a gruelling few months training in the flatlands of Nebraska, he still wasn’t used to an endless low horizon, where you could see for miles in all directions.
A jeep arrived at the hardstand to take them to their barracks. As they clambered aboard, Howard Bortz, the plane’s bombardier, pulled Corrales from one of the back seats. ‘Officers in the seats,’ he said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
Corrales shrugged and clung to the side, like the other non-commissioned boys. All the gunners, and Clifford Skaggs on the radio, were sergeants.
The distant hum of aero-engines drifted over the airfield. ‘They’re back,’ said the driver, a corporal with a strong Tennessee accent. ‘We gotta wait here a while.’
They got off the jeep and stood scouring the eastern sky. Curtis Stearley, Holberg’s co-pilot, passed around a packet of cigarettes. They all took one. It was a crew tradition after every flight.
Harry wasn’t sure he liked Stearley. He was a tall Texan, with darkly handsome features, not unlike the Hollywood film star Clark Gable. Stearley cultivated the resemblance and had even grown a similar moustache. When the crew had gone out carousing, in a break from their long months in training, Harry had noticed girls seemed to fall for his easy charm. Harry smiled to himself. Maybe he was just jealous.
‘Where they been?’ Holberg asked the jeep driver.
The driver looked uncertain and Harry imagined he could almost see him thinking. Wasn’t this classified information? The sort you weren’t meant to discuss. But then, the bomb group had been there and dropped their bombs, so it couldn’t be a secret any longer.
‘Schweinfurt,’ said the corporal. ‘We heard it’s been a rough one.’
The leading B-17 was now visible in the sky, getting bigger by the second. It made a perfect landing along the main runway and swiftly taxied over to the hardstands on the western edge. At once the air was full of noise and the acrid smell of aviation exhaust. B-17s continued to land in a steady procession and Harry could see some of them had been shot up pretty bad: a tail with struts beneath its metal fabric bare to the world; a feathered propeller and a blackened engine; a gaping hole in a fuselage.
One B-17 arrived trailing smoke from the outside right engine and fired a red flare as it approached the runway. Harry watched the smoking curve of the flare and instantly understood its meaning. There were badly injured men on board. It was the signal for ambulance crews to attend the stricken aircraft.
The B-17 touched down with a squeal of brakes, bouncing back into the air twice before it settled on to the ground and came to a halt at the very far end of the runway. Harry realised not one of his own crew had moved or spoken as the bomber made its descent. Now they were cheering.
Another bomber followed. This one too was trailing smoke from a left engine, but as it grew nearer they could see the inside right engine had also stopped. ‘These things can land on one engine,’ said Holberg, voicing everyone’s concern, ‘so he should be OK with two …’
He trailed off mid-sentence. This B-17 was now in its final approach and the landing gear had still not been lowered.
‘Doesn’t look good,’ said Stearley, drawing hard on his cigarette.
Landing without wheels, flat on your belly, was just about the most dangerous way to come back to earth.
The bomber lurched unsteadily as it approached the main runway, the left wing dipping and almost touching the tarmac. Harry’s eyes were drawn to the ball turret under the belly. He hoped the gunner had got out. The pilot tried to level off, but instead his plane tilted to the right side and the wing caught the ground. With an awful grinding of metal on concrete the Fortress lifted again, then landed hard, sliding down the runway almost sideways, sending up sparks. The right wing cracked between its two engines, and for a moment there was a spurt of aviation fuel, then a fireball so fierce they could feel it on their faces. The blazing bomber continued to hurtle along the runway at speed, getting nearer to the spot where their jeep was parked. Instinctively Harry and his companions started to sprint for the shelter of the trees that lined the eastern perimeter.
They heard another loud explosion and all dived to the ground. A few seconds later, debris of all shapes and sizes rained down around them. Harry looked back to see a great flaming pyre, maybe a hundred yards away. The heat was intense, and the crackle of the billowing orange and black flames almost drowned out the sirens of the approaching fire trucks.
The crew of the
Macey May
sat there on the concrete. Harry was glad no one else had tried to get up. He was sure his legs wouldn’t carry him and he didn’t want anyone else to know. He looked around at the
Macey May
. It seemed untouched by the explosion. That was good.
An ambulance arrived at the blazing wreckage just after the fire trucks. But the medics could see at once there was nothing for them to do. Ten lives had been lost in an instant. They returned to their little vehicle and sped off to another stricken aircraft. The firemen rapidly unrolled their fire hoses and began to spray the flaming wreck with bright white foam.
As the fire died down, the Tennessee corporal broke the horrified silence. ‘Come on, boys, let’s get you out to your barracks.’
The jeep was close to the fire, but not close enough to have sustained any damage. The crew of the
Macey May
picked their way through metal shards, coughing away the harsh stench of burning metal and fuel. As Harry approached the jeep he saw a tattered bundle of fabric lying on the tarmac. As he got nearer he realised it was the sleeve
of a leather flying suit with a thick padded glove at one end. The fabric was charred and it didn’t take him long to realise there was a severed arm inside it. He looked at his own sleeve and his own glove and turned around to spew his guts over the runway. No one said anything. His friend John Hill, the Fortress’s left waist gunner, turned away and was sick as well.
The barracks were more primitive than the accommodation the crew had had at their training camp in Nebraska and the gunnery school Harry had been sent to in Tennessee before he’d joined the crew of the
Macey May
. There was a single pot-bellied stove at the far end of the corrugated iron Nissen hut and bunks for twenty men.
All the non-coms had been placed in the same hut, so he would be with Corrales, the waist gunners, Hill and Dalinsky, and Skaggs, the radio operator. The commissioned men – the officers – were all sharing in another hut.
The place smelt of damp, woodsmoke and sweat. Each man already resident had tried to personalise his own little corner. Harry’s eyes popped open at the sight of some of the pin-ups they’d plastered on the wall. All of a sudden he felt a very long way from his cosy family apartment in Brooklyn. He could still smell the greasy smoke from the runway explosion on his hair and clothes and longed to get under a shower to wash away the horror of the afternoon. But Holberg had said they had ten minutes to unpack before they had to report their
arrival, then sit through a briefing on what awaited them.