IRA EAKER’S BOMBER CREWS WERE ALREADY consumed by anxieties that had been percolating since the bloody August strikes on Regensburg and Schweinfurt, followed by the September raid on Stuttgart, and the October raids that had culminated with Black Thursday.
While Hap Arnold publicly expressed nonchalance about the soaring Eighth Air Force casualties, he quietly tried to limit the release of casualty figures to monthly totals rather than a raid-by-raid tally. At the group level, commanders sent dispirited crews to rest homes in the English countryside—“flak farms” as they were known among airmen—to avert breakdowns under the weight of combat stress. The efforts weren’t entirely successful. One crew returned from a flak-farm holiday and its members announced that they all wished to be relieved from combat duty.10
Bad weather gave the crews a much-needed respite in the second half of October, and many men headed to London on leaves to try to decompress.
Ben’s quest for thirty missions stalled amid the latest extended bout of bad weather. The 93rd saw limited action, flying diversions on October 18 and 19 before another diversion was aborted on October 20. Ben flew none of these missions.
After ten days of horrible weather, with pressure from Hap Arnold building once again on Ira Eaker and flowing down to the group level, the 93rd got aircraft airborne on October 30 for a raid on the Ruhr Valley industrial city of Gelsenkirchen. The Moran crew didn’t fly the mission, which proved to be an anticlimax when the 93rd bombers were recalled after flying to the target area but not releasing their bombs for fear of inflicting too many civilian casualties by bombing blind through heavy overcast. On the return flight, two 93rd men died when a pilot flying beneath the fifty-foot weather ceiling touched the ground with a wing and the aircraft cartwheeled.
The monotonous diversions, stand-downs, cancellations, and recalls wore on the men. Mercifully, Black October, as the month had become known to some—or “The Killing Month,” as one 93rd man christened it—finally ended. In two desultory months with the Moran crew, Ben had completed only three missions. Now November arrived with Ben’s personal crusade linked to the larger Eighth Air Force campaign in this autumn of agony.
Chapter 34
DEATH DENIED
Ben began the month of November 1943 knowing that finishing thirty missions wasn’t going to be easy. Not only was he flying against the toughest enemy defenses outside of Ploiesti, the autumn weather over Western Europe was making every flight a deadly game of chance. Once reaching their bombing altitude, gunners like Ben faced subzero temperatures that froze any exposed skin in seconds. And there was always a good chance on a mission that jammed guns or some other mishap might require a gunner to remove his gloves to fix the problem. The cautionary tale that stuck in Ben’s mind was that of his former 93rd comrade and predecessor on the Epting crew, gunner Ed Bates, who had returned home in February after the partial amputation of several fingers necessitated by severe frostbite.
The first two days of November passed without a mission, extending to nineteen days the 93rd’s stretch without a completed mission. Finally, on the afternoon of November 2, Ben learned a mission was scheduled for the following day, and the Moran crew was on the list.
The November 3 raid marked a historic milestone in the Eighth Air Force bombing campaign. Strengthened by a surge of bombers and crews, Eaker massed 566 Flying Fortresses and Liberators to attack the port of Wilhelmshaven. It was the largest force the Eighth Air Force had yet assembled for a single raid, and, in another first, the bombers were escorted to the target and back by P-38 Lightning fighters—“Little Friends,” as they would become known. Most noteworthy of all, the raid was carried out despite the target being covered with clouds. The planes were guided by specially trained Pathfinder crews equipped with radar and radio devices that facilitated navigation and bombing in overcast conditions.1
Leading the 93rd contingent of thirty crews into Germany today was twenty-five-year-old Russell DeMont, a well-muscled six-footer with a square jaw, a shock of wavy brown hair, and cinema-star looks. DeMont had been unfazed by combat, but that wasn’t the case with two of the officers on his crew when he arrived in England a few months earlier. He had picked up a new bombardier just before the second Wiener Neustadt raid on October 1. His original bombardier had performed superbly in practice missions back in the States, “but when we got overseas and got into flak and fighters he was so scared that he couldn’t see anything,” DeMont said.2 The same was true of his original copilot, who was terrified in combat. As they neared their target, the copilot would lay one flak jacket on the floor beneath his seat and sit on another flak jacket, with his feet scrunched on top of the seat, “so that nothing could hit him from below,” DeMont said. “He just wasn’t worth anything over the target.” Both men had been sent off to one of the “flak farms” and hadn’t come back.
Now, flying with his new copilot and bombardier, DeMont was attempting to lead his 93rd comrades to Wilhelmshaven to bomb German naval facilities along the granite-walled harbor. Encountering cloud cover over the target, the specially trained Pathfinder crews dropped marker flares to signal the other bombers when to release their ordnance.
Most of the bombs fell on the city proper rather than the port area, but the ability of the 482nd Bomb Group Pathfinders to get the B-17s and B-24s over the target in such sloppy weather stunned the Germans and offered the promise that American bombers would no longer be immobilized by weather. “From this day forward, American strategic bombing was radically transformed,” observed historian Donald L. Miller.3
Bombing through the clouds didn’t do much for accuracy, but it did have one benefit: It kept enemy fighters at a distance, and that reduced American losses on the November 3 mission. The other Eighth Air Force groups lost seven bombers on the raid. Russell DeMont got the 93rd crews to the target and back to Hardwick without a single casualty or lost aircraft.4
The raid on Wilhelmshaven was a momentous event not only for the Eighth Air Force, but also for Ben. After two frustrating months, Ben was one mission away from becoming one of an elite cadre of American airmen to complete thirty combat missions against Nazi Germany.
BEN NEVER SPOKE IN ANY OF HIS INTERVIEWS or oral histories about his emotions as he awaited his thirtieth mission, but it’s reasonable to assume he was anxious. In any event, he didn’t have long to wait. The day following the Wilhelmshaven raid the 93rd received a mission alert, and once again Homer Moran and his men were on the list of assigned crews.
The Eighth Air Force had planned a pair of coordinated strikes on targets in western Germany for mission number 121. This would be another five-hundred-plane raid, with B-17s bombing the railroad marshaling yard and oil plants at Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and B-24s hitting the rail marshaling yard at Münster, about forty miles to the northeast. Münster lay only about 270 miles east of Hardwick, near Germany’s frontier with Holland, so it would be the shortest mission Ben had flown during his year in combat, with a planned flight time under five hours. It would also be Ben’s closest brush with death.
Leading the 93rd’s twenty-seven-plane contingent for the mission was Ben’s squadron commander and Ploiesti pilot, K. O. Dessert. Three 93rd men were flying their final mission: Ben, flying with Homer Moran in Queenie, and two 330th Squadron gunners, each of whom was flying his twenty-fifth mission.
Dessert and his 93rd bombers got airborne and proceeded to the rendezvous point to meet the other Liberator groups and their escorts. The five-hundred-plane force would have a roundtrip escort provided by Eighth Air Force P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts. A ninety-minute flight brought the B-24s to the Münster area for the final run to the target. Flying through accurate antiaircraft fire of moderate intensity at around twenty thousand feet, Queenie and the other 93rd ships released their bombs directly over the heart of the old medieval cathedral city.
About ten feet behind Moran, Ben was blasting away at attacking German fighters with his top turret guns in the moments after the release of the B-24’s bombs when an antiaircraft shell exploded just above him. The last thing that Ben remembered was a loud impact: BAM. A chunk of jagged metal smashed into the turret and shattered the Plexiglas dome around Ben’s head.
The force of the explosion ripped Ben’s oxygen mask from his face and knocked him unconscious. The onset of fulminant hypoxia is rapid with a sudden loss of oxygen at twenty thousand feet and Ben’s organs began to falter. His heart rate slowed and his skin began to turn blue. Death was imminent.5
IN THE COCKPIT OF QUEENIE, HOMER MORAN had his hands full. He would later recall the flak he encountered over Münster as the worst he ever experienced. He also had to contend with head-on fighter attacks, a nerve-racking experience. “It seemed like the fighters were coming right at you,” he said. “You could see the cannon fire off the wings.”6
As he tried to outrun the enemy threats, Moran suddenly sensed that something wasn’t right. He asked one of the men to check on Ben.7 Radio operator Robert L. McConnell, a twenty-five-year-old truck driver from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, found Ben unconscious in his turret. Whether he was dead or alive wasn’t clear.
McConnell began dragging his unresponsive comrade to the radio workspace. Ben suddenly regained consciousness and began thrashing “like a wild drowning man.”8 Ben was definitely alive, but he was in and out of consciousness. McConnell laid Ben near the radio table, fitted him with an oxygen mask, and covered him with blankets. Moran descended slightly, making sure to remain within the protective field of fire of his comrades.
Revived by the oxygen, Ben stirred. He saw he was lying on his back in the radio room with his friend Bob McConnell anxiously hovering over him. Although buried in blankets, Ben shivered. He felt fuzzy-headed and everything around him seemed out of focus.9
“Don’t worry, you’ll be all right,” the relieved radio operator assured him.
For much of the return flight, Ben remained in a fog. His head and his vision cleared gradually. After not finding any wounds on Ben’s head and body, McConnell joked that he could work on him with his radio tools and make sure he got a Purple Heart.
Moran and his men had been airborne only four-and-a-half hours when they landed at Hardwick. As Moran eased Queenie to a stop, medics were waiting to load Ben into an ambulance and whisk him to the base infirmary for a thorough examination.
Ben’s luck had held yet again. Not so for many of his comrades. Eleven bombers were lost in the coordinated raids on Münster and Gelsenkirchen. The tally of casualties listed 11 airmen killed in action, 57 wounded, and 119 missing.
By evening, Ben was feeling fit enough to join a celebration organized by Moran. They pedaled to a nearby pub on their bicycles and proceeded to drink, sing, laugh, and toast Ben’s triumph. Ben had participated in similar celebrations before, but never as the guest of honor.
His mind flashed back to all the adventures and ordeals of the past year—his first terrifying experience with flak; the horror of watching comrades plunge to their deaths; the months at Gambut Main and the desert camp outside Benghazi; the history-making raids on Rome and Wilhelmshaven; the heartbreak of Ploiesti; the good men who had made the ultimate sacrifice along the way. He thought of his closest friends from the past year—the men of the Epting crew—and wished they were here to share this night with him. “In the midst of everything,” wrote Ben’s wartime biographer, “he suddenly felt alone.”10
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MÜNSTER RAID, Ben was once again interviewed and written up by combat correspondents. A number of US newspapers ran a photograph of a smiling Ben holding his shattered turret dome. He seemed nonchalant about his latest brush with death, but his big smile for the camera concealed his physical and mental exhaustion. He had logged 265.5 hours of flight in thirty combat missions over the past eleven months, and he was drained. “I wanted to come home,” Ben later recalled. “That was enough.”11
Ben’s separation from the Eighth Air Force took the rest of November, and he was present for some of the grimmest days the 93rd would experience during that bleak autumn. In a raid into Germany only eight days after Ben completed his tour, the 93rd lost five Liberators to enemy fire and had forty-three men killed. Seven were taken prisoner.
As the gray month wore on, Ben was poked and prodded by doctors, analyzed by mental health experts, and debriefed by intelligence officers. He drank and danced and wept with his brothers-in-arms who were still trying to complete their own combat tours. He visited his favorite haunts in Norwich and London, then he bade farewell to his comrades.
In late November, Ben and about a dozen other Eighth Air Force men who had recently completed their combat tours received orders to report to an English port—in all likelihood, Liverpool—for their passage home. Arriving by train, they boarded a New York City–bound troop ship whose passengers included shattered American airmen suffering from combat-related neuroses. Steaming away from the River Mersey docks on December 1, 1943, out into the Irish Sea, Ben set off for America.12
Chapter 35
