Authors: Robert J. Mrazek
Near the stone quay that rimmed the harbor was a street of ancient stone houses. The three Americans were led up a narrow staircase to the third-floor apartment of a retired French colonel and his wife. From there, the underground planned to smuggle them onto the boat that would carry them to England.
On the night chosen for their escape, they were taken to a fishing village on the north coast of Brittany along Camaret Bay. In the basement of a village bakery, the Americans met twelve other escapees who had also been brought to the village.
The Greek recognized two of them from the Stuttgart mission, including Dick Cunningham, the pilot of
In God We Trust,
and Art Swap, who was the copilot of
Lone Wolf.
In the early hours of the morning, they were taken in groups of three to the quay.
A local fisherman rowed them out in a skiff to a twin-masted fishing boat that was anchored in the outer reaches of the harbor. Once aboard, they were led below by flashlight to a large storage hold filled with eel pots, coils of rope, and other fishing gear. The hold was pitch-black and reeked of fish offal.
Once they were all assembled, a British officer asked each man to identify himself along with his rank. There turned out to be sixteen escapees in all, including ten Americans, one Norwegian RAF pilot, four British airmen, and a New Zealander named Johnny Checketts, who was already famous within the Eighth Air Force for shepherding crippled Fortresses back to England in his Spitfire.
Checketts was a squadron leader in the RAF and had already shot down twelve German fighters. He had gone down on September 6 while escorting home a squadron of American B-26 Marauders that had flown one of the diversionary raids for the Stuttgart attack.
The Greek proposed that Squadron Leader Checketts become the group’s de facto leader. No one objected. One of the Americans expressed his hope that they would be on their way at dawn.
Two days later, hope inside the hold was beginning to run out. Why weren’t they going? What had happened? Tempers began to flare as the men were forced to remain in the clammy darkness through all the daylight hours.
Early each morning, a local fisherman would bring them out several loaves of bread and a cask of fresh water, but he had no news to give them. In response to Johnny Checketts’s repeated questions about when the boat would depart from France, the fisherman professed total ignorance. They could do nothing but wait.
The following morning, a member of the French underground came out to tell them that one of the underground escape lines had been compromised from Paris to Finistère, and that the Germans were watching every boat that moved in the harbor.
It was the Greek’s escape line. He asked about the Maraceauxes and was told that Monsieur Maraceaux and his son had been sent to a concentration camp in Germany. Raoul, the contact in Brittany, had also been taken.
The agent urged them to be patient. They would leave when it was safe.
There were slop buckets for their excretions, but the waste couldn’t be emptied until after dark each night. The smell was appalling. In the unsanitary conditions, two men began to suffer from dysentery.
On the third day, the Norwegian RAF pilot began to vomit uncontrollably. That night, he slipped into a state of delirium and began crying out in the darkness. His cries became increasingly louder, alarming the others. If the Germans were patrolling the harbor, he was putting them all at risk. When the man’s howling cries continued, one of the Americans crawled over to the Norwegian and began choking him. Two other men intervened and were able to help stifle the Norwegian’s cries.
When the fisherman arrived on the fourth morning to give them their daily bread and water allotment, he handed Johnny Checketts a hunk of boiled beef. It was about the size of a grapefruit and wrapped in butcher paper.
“We’re going to have to divide this among sixteen people,” said Checketts, reaching into his pocket to pull out a penknife. As the men continued to stare ravenously at the meat, Checketts glanced around the compartment.
“I want the Greek to divide it,” he said.
“Yeah, let the Greek cut it up,” agreed Art Swap of the 388th.
The Greek felt like he had just been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Leaning over to cut it, he did his best to make sure that each piece was close to the same size.
The rest of the men watched him like he was cutting the Hope diamond. When he was finished, each chunk was about the size of a grape. He passed the pieces of meat around to the others on the butcher paper. It went from man to man like they were receiving communion. The last chunk went to the Greek. It was mostly fat, but the morsel tasted heavenly.
On their fifth day in the hold, the underground agent came out to tell them that they would be departing early the next morning. Each boat leaving the harbor was required to go to a check station to receive a clearance. The underground had been waiting for a particular crew of German soldiers to man the check station. This crew was known for its laxity.
At dawn on October 21, 1943, two fishermen came aboard and fired up the boat’s small diesel engine. Going below, they helped the sixteen men find hiding places behind and underneath the oilcloths, coils of rope, and other fishing gear. Leaving the compartment hatch open, they took their places at the wheel and began chugging over to the check station.
From his position in the dark hold, the Greek could see the open hatchway through the rungs of an eel trap. At the check station, he watched as a German officer and two Wehrmacht soldiers with rifles came aboard, clomping past the hatch in their hobnailed boots.
Like the other escapees, he waited with apprehension as the soldiers gazed down into the hold. Perhaps it was the appalling stench that greeted them, but neither one climbed below to search the compartment.
A few minutes later, they were under way.
Powered by the small diesel engine, the boat chugged along very slowly. Several hours later, they were out of sight of land, but the two fishermen refused to allow the men below to come topside until night had fallen. They finally raised the sail on the boat, and the boat began slashing through the roiling sea before a stiff ocean breeze.
After being confined to the hold for five days, the Greek was thrilled to feel the clean wind on his face and to smell the sea air. Picking out a spot on the deck, he sat and watched the top of the mast swinging back and forth across Polaris in the starry sky above them. He realized that the fisherman at the wheel was following the North Star.
The Greek stayed awake all that night, watching the stars and recalling everything that had happened to him since he had parachuted out of
Slightly Dangerous II
.
There were so many people to thank for putting their lives on the line both for him and the other fifteen men aboard the boat. Marcelle Andre, Marie Therese, Suzanne Bouchy, all of them. He prayed that the Maraceauxes would survive their imprisonment, and silently thanked them for their bravery.
They were still sailing north the next morning when one of the French fishermen shouted out and pointed into the distance. The Greek could make out a hazy landmass directly ahead.
A few minutes later, he spotted a small ship coming toward them at high speed. As it neared the fishing boat, he saw that it was a coast guard vessel. The Union Jack was streaming from its stern.
Reversing engines as he came alongside, the English captain of the ship called out to them through a bullhorn, demanding to know who they were. Johnny Checketts answered back, telling him that there were sixteen Allied airmen aboard, and that they had just come from France.
The Englishman grinned at them and pointed north.
“That’s Penzance,” he said. “You’re home, lads.”
Friends and Enemies
Saturday, 25 December 1943
Eighth Air Force Command Headquarters
Bushy Park, England
Lieutenant General Ira Eaker
I
n September, they gave him his third star.
He was now Lieutenant General Ira Eaker. After serving in the army for nearly thirty years, he had finally earned one of the top slots in the whole corporation, along with its finest job, commanding the Eighth Air Force.
Early in his career, he had hitched his formative star to Hap Arnold, and it had proved to be a wise decision. The invasion of Europe was coming, and he would be right at the center of all the action. Everything would now have to come through England.
One positive result of Hap Arnold’s inspection tour back in September was that the old man had left for Washington finally convinced that the Eighth needed long-range fighters to protect the Fortresses. Stuttgart had proved that beyond any doubt.
With his customary sense of urgency, Arnold had ordered his senior staff to make production of P-51 fighters and jettisonable belly tanks one of the air force’s highest priorities. Arnold’s minions were expected to cajole and harass the companies responsible for making the weapons until his newly accelerated timetable was met.
Arnold could be a tyrant when his orders were not carried out with sufficient zeal. At one of his daily staff meetings, he became enraged when a member of his staff informed him that an order had not been carried out. Arnold dressed him down with such vehemence that the man had dropped dead of a heart attack in front of his desk.
Hap Arnold’s new determination to deliver long-range P-51s to England did not mean he expected Ira Eaker to wait for their delivery before resuming the air offensive against Germany.
As September drew to an end without any resumption of deep-penetration raids, Arnold became increasingly aggravated at Eaker’s lack of initiative. Based on the number of replacement bombers that were pouring into England, he couldn’t understand why Eaker wasn’t attacking Germany with at least five hundred Fortresses on every mission.
Eaker had been feeding the new planes and green crews into the groups that had been badly depleted by the Stuttgart fiasco. In the meantime, he was confining his bombing strikes to targets inside France, all of them within the range of his escort fighters.
On September 28, Arnold ordered a senior member of his staff to initiate a set of cables designed “to build a fire under General Eaker.” In addition to exhorting him to attack targets in Germany, one of them included a snide insult to Eaker’s fighter command:
“When our fighter groups in North Africa escort bombers it is a matter of honor that hostile fighters shall not be permitted to attack the escorted bombers. Do your fighters have that spirit?”
Eaker ignored the hectoring while he focused on making good the losses sustained on September 6. In the face of Arnold’s relentless pressure, he reluctantly prepared to resume the German air offensive, but with the arrival of fall, the weather over the Continent became increasingly inclement, with the deep-penetration targets in Germany usually masked by heavy cloud cover. The last thing Eaker wanted to endure was a repetition of the Stuttgart disaster when none of the bombardiers could find their targets.
In early October, Eaker’s meteorological team was able to predict a week of potentially good weather, and Eaker issued orders to resume the air offensive. Over the next six days, the Eighth Air Force bombed industrial and military installations in Frankfurt, Bremen, Münster, and Marienburg.
Although several of the targets received significant bomb damage, the cost of the campaign was ninety-five Fortresses and nine B-24 Liberators. With the loss of more than a thousand airmen in six days, the surviving crews began referring to it as “Black Week.”
Arnold sent Eaker a cable praising the effort:
“Good work. As you turn your effort ... toward crippling the sources of the still growing German fighter forces the air war is clearly moving toward our supremacy in the air. Carry on.”
While the new losses rendered the Eighth Air Force incapable of mounting the five-hundred-Fortress raids that Arnold was demanding, Eaker decided to complete a piece of unfinished business.
While Arnold was in England, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal of the RAF had asserted to him that the Schweinfurt ball-bearing complex, which the Eighth had bombed on August 17, was the most important strategic target in Germany. Based on new British intelligence, he told Arnold that another strike on Schweinfurt was needed to complete its destruction. Arnold had then told Eaker to go back and finish the job.
“I know you’ll get to it as soon as the weather permits,” Arnold wrote him.
On October 14, the Eighth went to Schweinfurt again.
The force of 291 bombers fought its way across France and Germany, confronting hundreds of German fighters along the route. Once more, the Fw 190s and ME-109s came in waves, using the frontal attacks with cannon and machine-gun fire perfected by Connie Mayer.
Joining the battle with the single-engine fighters were swarms of twin-engine Bf 110s equipped with rockets under their wings. Four and five abreast, they fired dozens of the rockets into the tightly packed combat boxes.
When the bombers finally reached Schweinfurt, they were greeted with an unprecedented barrage of flak from the newly reinforced 88-millimeter cannon batteries that now ringed the industrial works. In spite of these obstacles, the groups managed to deliver a devastating blow.
After the battle, the mission leader, Colonel Budd Peaslee of the 384th Bomb Group, estimated that three hundred German fighters had confronted them over the course of the day, making more than seven hundred separate attacks.
Sixty bombers had been shot down in the battle. The 305th Bomb Group lost thirteen of its sixteen Fortresses in less than thirty minutes. Five hundred ninety men had been killed in action.
The Stuttgart fiasco had proved that the Eighth could not sustain continued deep-penetration missions without long-range fighters escorting them. The second Schweinfurt attack was the final nail in the doctrine’s coffin.