All's Fair

Once more we would have to bomb through cloud. Once more the Group failed to drop on its first pass. This time a faulty bombsight on the lead airplane made bombing physically impossible. The Colonel lead us to the left, beginning the second 360^o turn through Vienna’s flak in two days, to make a second run at the target.

In the left turn, on the left side of the squadron, I was forced to slow way down, nearly to stalling speed, in order to hold my position; so was the pilot, “Lt.Clapp,” directly ahead of and above us. As the Group tightened its turn, he slipped out of position and into the propwash of our squadron leader. That thew him around violently. Before he regained control, he had fallen completely out of the Squadron formation to a position below me and to my left. In regaining his position, Clapp inadvertently pulled up directly in front of us, swamping us in his propwash.

Now it was we who were thrown out of formation. It was we who were dropping out of control.  We plunged into the propwash of the ten B-17s of the lead squadron. The churning air bounced us up and down hundreds of feet at a time and threw us erratically left and right. Fighting to regain control I forced myself to remember everything I had ever learned about handling an airplane. Once, our Fort seemed to stand on its wing tip, five miles in the air. Nearly perpendicular to the ground, the wing gave no lift.

We fell. 

I was afraid now that we would crash down on some other B-17 hidden in the cloud below. 

We didn’t.  We bumped down through the Group’s propwash and out into smoother air. When I recovered control, we had lost more than 2,000 feet, and our Group was invisible in the cloud. Five hundred miles from the warm cot, the rusty stove, the dusty, olive-brown tent. We were alone in the enemy’s sky– for the first time since the 10 September attack on Vienna.

Still in cloud, we flew on instruments, heading almost due south toward the Austrian Alps and the Adriatic. Abruptly we broke out of the overcast into shimmering sunlight.  I could see our Group, some twenty miles ahead and above in sloppy formation after the overcast and the flak. Weather had kept the 353^rd from dropping on Moosbierbaum and, with the rest of the Group, it was now on its way to an alternate target, the marshalling yard at Graz, Austria. With luck, we could rejoin the 301^st  –if Nazi fighters, who loved to gun down stragglers, didn’t get us first. We would not have the protection of the 500 heavy machine guns on the forty B-17s of the 301^st. I put on more power to catch up and worried, The fighters, the bloody fighters!

Tinsler and I scanned the sky for Germans and told the crew to do the same.  I searched my instrument panel and listened to the rhythms of the engines’ roar for any sign of trouble. I had suddenly become more intensely sensitive to how dependent on them we were.  Ample gas; manifold pressure, oil pressure and engine temperatures all okay After five hours flying, this Fortress was behaving beautifully.

The Tuskegee Airmen, the Red Tails, were, once more, escorting the Fifth Wing. Although they usually stuck close to the bombers they were escorting, whatever bombers the 332^nd was shepherding that day, I had seen no sign of them.

From radio comments, I knew that enemy fighters were in the general area, which added urgency to my effort to get back into formation with the 301^st. There was, unfortunately, little way of hurrying; cruising speed was cruising speed.

Ernie spoke with strained calmness into the intercom from his power turret on top of the aircraft, “Fighters at nine o’clock, level.  I don’t know whether they are P-51s or        Me-109s.”

We watched.  We all watched.  They came closer.  They were Messerschmitts –six of them.

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