Photo courtesy: Frances Norris
This day, February 23, 1945, was much the same upon dawning as the last sixty before it had been, but it was to be remembered distinctly by a few men to the end of their natural days.
The morning dawned as bleak and hazy as any of the other sixty days that we had seen since we had arrived in England as a replacement crew attached to a Liberator bomber group. We were nine men from as many parts of our great country: Dan from western New York, Charlie from Rhode Island, Henry from Nebraska, Jose from New Mexico, Chuck from Massachusetts, Norm from California, and others from places I cannot recall. We had been in England just long enough to receive our “baptism by fire”. It was my fifth mission, and for the rest it was the sixth. We belonged to a good squadron whose record for losses to all causes had been nil for almost six months. We were assigned to a good and faithful ship. “Hell’s Angel’s”, 596, had carried three crews through their tours of duty without a scratch, so we figured we could not lose.
This day we had been stirred from our slumber at [the] ghastly hour of four A.M. and had breakfast as usual about four-thirty. Yes, we had fresh eggs that morning; at least they had been fresh at one time. Briefing was about five-fifteen, but I do not recall too much of importance except a slightly more somber air than usual. On the day before, one of our crews had been crippled on a “milk run” mission, and there had been no report on whether they had gotten back to France or not. The Air Force has a superstition that trouble comes in three’s and everyone was wondering, “could it be us?”
Take-off and formation assembly were uneventful. The weather was normal for England. Cloud bases two hundred feet from the ground and cloud tops built up to eighteen thousand feet were the rule rather than the exception. I say take-off was uneventful, and yet, in one sense, it was miraculous, in view of the fact that there were three airbases within a five-mile radius, each of which was putting up thirty to forty planes in a twenty-mile circle, all with the same purpose at the same time and with a solid bank of clouds to climb through for sixteen thousand feet.
I do not remember where our target was that day. We did not see the ground again after take-off. In fact, I think the target was changed after we were in the air. It was an uneventful trip out over northwestern Germany. We saw no enemy aircraft and encountered no flak. The cloud tops had lowered over the area as we returned in formation at about ten thousand feet. I was navigator and had a small compartment behind the gun turret mounted in the nose. The nose gunner depended on me to shut him into and let him out of his turret. This particular day, he had a hole knocked in the Plexiglas shield of his turret by .50 caliber shell cases from our lead ship when they test fired guns. The nose gunner, Chuck, called the plane commander and asked to stand-by in my compartment because he was about to freeze in the draft coming through the hole in the Plexiglas. Chuck and I were beginning to relax and think about hot food and sleep that were only thirty minutes away. We were flying a wing position in the formation, so my only problem was to follow the track of our ship. As we approached the English coast, the cloud tops moved up to about sixteen thousand feet and we started to climb to get over them. I took a radio position and found we were five miles off the English coast and headed straight for home. We were scooting through breaks in the cloud build-up. There were only minutes to go before we would be back home; then it happened.
I looked out of the window to my right and got a flash of another airplane, so close that her wing tip was almost scraping our fuselage. She was only six or eight feet below and behind us, and traveling slightly faster than we were. I grabbed my parachute from the table and at the same time yelled to Chuck, “Get out of here, we’re going to hit!”
Chuck had seen nothing at all since he was seated on a small box in the compartment, but he heard me yell and knew what I meant – without benefit of the interphone system. He asked no questions, but dived under my work table and opened the escape hatch. He then headed for his parachute, which hung in a crawl passage barely four feet away.
Meanwhile, I was struggling to snap the chute pack to the harness; I missed the snap on the right side. The next pass, I snapped it on, but also got a hand on the pull ring. I recall at this instant the slight crunching noise and the shudder that ran through the aircraft as the two planes collided. I recall a few seconds of level flight and then came the blackout. Apparently we must have gone into a power dive, and I was thrown against the nose turret and knocked out. I regained consciousness for an extremely short interval – long enough to see the parachute silk billowed on the floor, gathered it up, roll forward on my knees to the escape hatch, ask Chuck why he didn’t bail out – all, possibly ten seconds, and then I passed out again.
Some time later, I opened my eyes to see low scud clouds scooting by. It took fully five minutes to decide that I was still among the living, and to recall where I was and how I had gotten there. I was lying on my back in an English meadow field. There was debris scattered in the trees nearby. The wing of an airplane was leaning against a tree. Somebody’s flying boots lay near my feet; they were not mine. After a few moments, I was able to collect my wits. I decided to see if I could move. I could. After due examination I decided that I must have parachuted—there it was. During descent I had lost my helmet, heated gloves which were snapped with two snaps, nylon gloves which fit like hose, flying boots which were both zippered and snapped and had somehow inflated my Mae West life preserver. I found the pants to my flying suit ripped to shreds and later decided that I must have been dragged through a treetop.
When I finally got to my feet, I was sighted by an Englishman who was riding a bicycle along a road about seventy-five yards away. He came over quickly and asked if I were all right and then said there were some others who had “rained” down with the wreckage. He took me to a near-by country home where I was laid down to rest. The next several hours are rather hazy and of little importance. The ambulance picked me up, returned me to the base hospital, dressed my head cut where I had hit the turret, and put me to sleep.
The next morning, I awoke refreshed and sufficiently recovered from the shock to want to know what had happened and how the rest had fared. The upper turret gunner, Mike, was there and in a couple of hours, Henry, the engineer, was brought in from an English base near which he landed. We were all three intact save for scratches, bruises, cuts and sore spots. We three were all that remained of two complete bomber crews of nine men each.
The cause of the accident was never clearly determined. Weather conditions were not good, but how did we collide with the leader of the third element ahead of us in formation? Our pilots pulled up on warning from the engineer and in so doing snapped the wing off the other plane and damaged our vertical stabilizer. After that, all that remained was a short, quick trip to the ground below.
