In a surprise attack, the Germans invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, and quickly secured the capital of Oslo as well as other major cities along the east and west coasts of the country. The underequipped and unprepared Norwegian military fought the Germans in the interior and in the far north but even with the assistance of British troops and ships was unable to withstand the German onslaught.
After running from the enemy for two months, the Government, King and Crown Prince of Norway fled to Britain, and the Germans took complete control of the country.
The Nazis appointed Josef Terboven as the Reich Commissioner, and all of Norway came under his control. Approximately 1700 Jews lived in Norway at the time of the invasion, and about 200 of them had fled from the Nazis in Central Europe. Although Terboven placed restrictions on the Jews and their property, it wasn’t until one year later, in the spring of 1941, that arrests and imprisonments were stepped up. Most of these arrests took place outside Oslo, in locations where Jews were small in number.
In early 1942, Terboven required all Jews to have a “J” stamped on their identity cards and the word “Jew” stamped on their identity papers. Also in 1942, Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian collaborator, was named prime minister. He and Terboven executed the main persecution of the Jews.
Vidkun Quisling & Josef Terboven Courtesy of Flikr: The Commons via Wikimedia Commons
In the fall, the Norwegian police arrested the seven hundred and sixty-three Jews they could locate, including women and children, and transported them by ship to Germany. They were immediately sent to Auschwitz where most of them perished in the gas chambers.
The Norwegian Resistance had facilitated the escape of about nine hundred Jews to Sweden, where they survived the war as refugees. Hans Mamen was one of those resistance members. Hans grew up on a farm outside Oslo and was a student at the local Lutheran seminary. He learned of the persecution of Norway’s Jews and felt called as a Christian to help protect them. Hans’s mission began when a seminary professor asked him to help find a hiding place for a Jewish family who had requested the professor’s help.
Hans established a network of seminary students and other friends and contacts to assist. Some hid Jews, some shared food and supplies, and a few of them led Jews safely across the border into Sweden. Hans led many rescue efforts, usually taking only three people at a time to reduce the risk of capture. He led his charges through sparsely-populated areas of dense forests. They crossed these difficult areas on foot, often at night. Hans arranged for a Swedish lumberjack who lived just across the border to keep a lantern lit at night so they would know when they had arrived in Sweden.
On one journey, Hans accompanied a mother and her three-year-old son across the country, and then they hiked to the border. He carried the child on his shoulders into the dense forest, and the sudden, complete darkness frightened the young boy. His cries echoed across the landscape, and nothing Hans or the child’s mother tried would calm him.
With dawn approaching and the threat of their footprints in the snow leading a Nazi patrol to them, Hans feared capture. Finally, he whispered to the boy that he shouldn’t wake up the birds, and the child immediately quieted. Once across the border, they enjoyed the sunrise and the opportunity to speak aloud again.
Celia Century, a Jewish refugee from Norway, sits on the deck of a summer camp in Ronneby Sweden next to a non-Jewish friend. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In December 1942, the Norwegian police, working for the Nazis, arrived at the Mamen’s farm and demanded to see Hans. His mother explained that he was at the seminary in Oslo. After the police left, she telephoned the seminary, and her coded message was passed to Hans during class—“‘Pack your suitcase.’”
Hans rushed to the home of a trusted friend and sent a message to his fiancée, Ruth. Although her parents were afraid and didn’t want her to leave, Ruth packed a small bag to escape with Hans.
Hans and Ruth traveled by train from Oslo but disembarked before reaching the border. He had called ahead and arranged for one of his contacts, a licensed woodcutter, to meet them. The couple rode under a tarp in the back of the man’s old truck. They stopped at a safe house; however, Nazi agents were searching the neighborhood. Hans and Ruth climbed back into the truck, and the woodcutter drove them to a border checkpoint, where he knew the lone Norwegian guard was loathe to leave his hut at night.
Although the woodcutter turned resistance fighter was willing to use his gun if necessary, the truck rolled across the border without incident. The couple’s benefactor didn’t stop until they were far from the border. After he did, Hans and Ruth climbed out of the truck, fell on their knees, and thanked God for bringing them safely through.
Hans and Ruth married in Sweden and had the first of five children. Before the war ended, Hans finished his seminary studies and assisted the Norwegian resistance by helping Allied agents cross from Sweden into Norway to conduct operations. After Norway was liberated, Hans and Ruth returned home, and he served as a Lutheran pastor for many decades.
Villa Grande in Oslo. Site of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities and former home of Vidkun Quisling. Credit: Leifern, Wikimedia Commons
More than sixty years later, Hans was asked to speak at the new Holocaust Center in Oslo. A tall, bearded Norwegian “greeted him with unusual affection for a stranger.” The man identified himself as “the Jewish toddler who decades earlier had quieted down in the dark, snow-covered forest so he would not awaken the birds.”
Sources:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Today’s story is the miraculous account of how the Norwegian’s saved their gold reserves from the Nazis and spirited them out of the country right under the enemy’s noses. If the Germans had obtained these reserves, they would have gained more wealth to supply their war machine.
Although Norway was neutral during WWII, Nicolai Rygg, the director of Norges Bank where the nation’s gold reserves resided, made preparations in case Norway should fall or a crisis develop. Early in 1940, Rygg brought in volunteers to pack bars of gold in white painted boxes and seal them with iron bands. Bags of gold coins were packed in smaller kegs. Of the 421 million Krone stored in the bank, 300 million was shipped to the United States. The rest was left in the vault because Norwegian law did not allow all the gold to be removed from the country at one time.
After Rygg learned that German warships were headed up the Oslo Fjord on April 9th, Rygg contacted General Laake, the Commander-in-Chief of military forces, who ordered Rygg to immediately evacuate the gold to the bank in Lillehammer. Moments later, Rygg learned that the Germans already occupied major cities but hadn’t reached Oslo (the sinking of the Blücher kept the Germans from seizing the capital for an extra eight hours).
Norges Bank at Oslo 1906-1986. Courtesy of Norges Bank.
Twenty-six trucks were chartered from local merchants, and the drivers were directed to the side entrance of the bank but were not informed about what they would be carrying. Bank guards were placed close to the bank to keep inquisitive eyes away, but the military was not used in order to avoid drawing attention to the operation. The bank employees loaded the gold.
Each truck, along with two armed bank guards, drove away immediately after loading so there was no convoy to draw the attention of the Luftwaffe. The first truck left at 8:15 AM and the last truck shortly before 1:30 PM. German soldiers marched down the main street of Oslo at exactly the same time, and the Norwegian commander of the Oslo garrison surrendered the city at 2:00 PM at the Akershus Fort, only a couple hundred yards from Norges Bank.
A Gold Bar from the Norges Bank. Courtesy of Norges Bank.
The gold shipment totaled 818 large crates, 685 smaller crates, and 39 kegs of gold coins. Lillehammer was 115 miles from Oslo, and the trucks traveled over snow-laden roads. Vehicles and pedestrians fleeing the capital slowed down the trucks, and people became angry because the trucks didn’t stop to help them. The last truck arrived at the bank in Lillehammer at 8:00 PM.
The bank employees in Lillehammer tucked the gold away in their vault; however, they could only unload the cargo when the Luftwaffe wasn’t flying over them. The media picked up on the activity and broadcast that trucks of gold were arriving in Lillehammer. A Trondheim newspaper also reported on the shipment, but the Germans did not pick up on the reports. The Royal Family, the Norwegian government, and the Norwegian gold had escaped for the time being!
The gold remained at Lillehammer for ten days while the Norwegians barricaded the roads and kept the Germans from advancing. Rygg checked on the gold twice and on the second trip, he asked the bank manager, Andreas Lund, to memorize the numbers to the vault lock. Frequent bombing raids forced the bank to close and wait to reopen until the planes disappeared.
Norges Bank at Lillehammer. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
On April 14th, 15 German transport planes dropped about 180 lightly armed paratroopers in the Dombås area, northwest of Lillehammer. They were spread over a wide area, and the Norwegian troops successfully killed or captured them over a five-day period. This kept the railway lines to the north and the west coast open.
In the mean time, it became obvious that the Germans could overtake Lillehammer at any time. Oscar Torp, the Norwegian Minister of Finance, tasked Fredrik Haslund, Secretary of the Labour Party, with transporting the gold from Lillehammer to the port of Åndalsnes where the British Royal Navy could take it safely away. On April 17th, the British—determined to assist the Norwegians in ousting the Germans—had landed a large number of troops and equipment at three Norwegian ports—Harstad, Namsos, and Åndalsnes.
United States Military Academy Dept. of History – Courtesy of Wikipedia – Public Domain
At midnight on April 19th, orders came to open the bank vault door. Unfortunately due to fear and anxiety, Lund had a difficult time getting the lock to the brand new vault open—it had only been opened once before and Lund was operating by memory. He finally succeeded with the code a little past 1:00 AM.
Haslund had recruited the Lillehammer chief of police who assembled 30 volunteers who met at a secret location at 10:00 PM. They were armed with spades and shovels so they would appear to be preparing to dig trenches. Instead they were quietly transported to the bank and loaded the trucks which took the gold to the railway station, a short distance away. The gold was loaded onto the wooden railcars. A small group of soldiers was ordered to accompany the train, but the men weren’t told what they were guarding. They soon figured out the contents because of the Norges Bank initials displayed on the outside of each container.
Lillehammer Train Station. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
The train left Lillehammer at 4:00 AM with its lights dimmed in case any Luftwaffe aircraft flew over. When dawn approached, the bullion train stopped at Otta and pulled onto a siding to wait for a safer time to proceed. Later, a train arrived at Otta Station from the north with three carriages full of British soldiers who had their thumbs in the air. The Norwegians were encouraged. Little did they know what dangers lay ahead.
The gold train sat undetected on a railroad siding in Otta. It didn’t run during the day because the German bombers loved to target anything moving. After a twenty-four-hour wait, the gold train left at 10:00 PM and arrived at the port town of Åndalsnes at 4:30 AM on April 20th.
View of the innermost part of the Romsdalsfjord with Åndalsnes up to the left in the picture. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Åndalsnes is located at the head of a fjord – a long narrow inlet which connects to the Norwegian Sea. The British had landed troops and secured Åndalsnes two days before, and at 9:00 AM on the 20th, the Germans commenced bombing the port, the British ships, all transport routes, and the town of approximately 2000 people. In spite of their intelligence, the Germans were not aware of the presence of Norway’s gold, which remained at the station awaiting transportation out by British warship to the United Kingdom.
At 11:00 PM, Fredrik Haslund, the official tasked with conveying the gold out of Norway, sent the gold train to a siding at Romsdalhorn, a few kilometers away. Towering mountains guarded the tiny station, making it a perfect place to hide a train. Due to the constant daytime bombing, a crew of railwaymen worked in twelve-hour shifts to repair the area’s rail lines.
On the night of April 24th, Mr. Haslund ordered the gold train to be brought down to the dock in Andalsnes. Norwegian soldiers loaded 200 boxes of gold onto the HMS Galatea which had just unloaded British troops and equipment. The cruiser carried sixteen tons of the gold along with Norwegian officials to Scotland, and from there, the gold was transported to London and the Bank of England. Thirty-four tons of gold remained in Norway, awaiting transportation to the Allies. If the Nazis took possession, the precious metal would provide a tremendous boost to the enemy’s war chest.
A Modern View of Åndalsnes from the Romsdalsjjord Courtesy of Creative Commons via Wikimedia. Author Ludovic Peron.
The Norwegians expected German soldiers to come up the valley into Åndalsnes at any moment. Only hours remained to move the gold. An army captain obtained twenty-five trucks and drivers, and in two hours’ time, all the gold was removed from the train and loaded on the trucks. The convoy navigated over poorly paved roads that were covered with melting snow and mud. Unfortunately, the Luftwaffe returned to Åndalsnes and attacked the convoy. The soldiers and drivers ran for cover and no one was injured during the forty-five minutes of strafing. The convoy continued its journey, and when the next attack commenced, the drivers sped up. The Germans weren’t successful at hitting their targets. After reaching a ferry crossing, some trucks were hidden and some were camouflaged until dark.
A ferry arrived but could only carry two trucks across the water at a time. It took six hours to convey all the trucks to the other side. Because of deep ruts and potholes caused by the winter weather, the road ahead had to be repaired in places before the convoy could pass through. Trucks broke down and had to be replaced, and the crews became exhausted unloading and reloading the gold. Local farmers utilized their horses and equipment to drag one truck out of a ditch and back onto the road.
Eventually the convey arrived at the port of Molde where the Norwegian Government, King Haakon, and Crown Prince Olav were taking cover. They had arrived on April 23rd, and Molde had essentially become the new capital of Norway. The gold was unloaded into a large vault in the basement of the Confectionsfabriken building (clothing factory) in town.
Confectionsfabriken Building – Molde
The people of Molde were very helpful. They assisted with unloading the gold, providing security, and feeding the exhausted soldiers. But the Germans were intent on capturing or killing the King, Crown Prince, and Government. The Luftwaffe attacked Molde and it’s surroundings with bombs and incendiaries. The townsfolk set off the air-raid alarms as soon as they spotted aircraft, which allowed everyone time to escape to the woods.
On April 28th, the German Government announced that they were at war with Germany and that King Haakon was wanted ‘dead or alive.’ This was no surprise to the king or the Government. The relentless air strikes forced the British to send the cruiser HMS Glasgow to Molde and plans were made to evacuate.
The Germans bombed Molde for the first time at night. With debris littering the roads and fires raging, Norway’s gold was loaded on any available truck and transported to various locations at the harbor. Not all the trucks were immediately able to find a safe path through the destruction.
Before the HMS Glasgow could pull into port, a fire had to be extinguished on the dock. A portion of the gold was carried on board from this dock, and some was ferried by smaller ships from other points and loaded by crane onto the ship. The King, Crown Prince, members of the Norwegian Government, and the French, Danish, and British embassy members and staff joined British soldiers aboard the ship.
The Ruins of Molde – 1940. Courtesy of Flickr. No known copyright restrictions.
After the Germans unsuccessfully attacked the ship, the Glasgow left port and sailed down the fjord in reverse for at least an hour. It was too dangerous to turn around in the fjord at night. Not all of the gold had been loaded and not all of the gold had even made it to the dock before the Glasgow was forced to sail.
Along with the gold, the Glasgow carried King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, members of the Norwegian Government, and diplomatic officials from Britain, France, and Denmark to the Tromso area in the far north of Norway. From here, the Norwegians hoped to form an offensive against the Germans and drive them out of the country.
Summer Night in Tromso (2012). Photo Credit: Mark Ledingham via Wikimedia Commons
After delivering its precious human cargo, the Glasgow turned south and safely landed the second installment of Norway’s gold in Scotland. Norwegian officials accompanied the shipment by train to London where it was stored in the vault of the Bank of England.
Back in Molde, Fredrik Haslund, the official in charge of rescuing the gold, searched for a way to remove the 18 tons which the Glasgow had been forced to leave behind due to the bombings. While Molde was burning, Haslund loaded eight tons of the gold on the steamer Driva, and the ship set off at 2:00 AM, only one hour after the Glasgow had pulled away.
The Luftwaffe dropped a stick of bombs in the water near the Driva, but she wasn’t damaged. During her trip north she was attacked by a German seaplane, and to avoid being sunk, the Driva’s first mate beached the craft on a flat shoreline. Bombs fell but landed in the sea. As the tide came in, another steamer pulled the Driva back out into the fjord.
Molde Under Attack in 1940 Painting by Rolf Groven
In the meantime, near Molde, Haslund decided the gold should be moved to fishing vessels because the Driva was too much of a target for the Germans. Word was sent to the Driva to rendezvous at the village of Gjemnes. The remaining ten tons of gold was transported by truck to Gjemnes and loaded onto fishing boats (puffers) there. Five hundred and forty-seven boxes of bullion were loaded in the dark, including the gold from the Driva. By this time, Norway’s fight against the Nazis was over in southern Norway but still continued in the far north of the country.
The puffers sailed through the fjords, laying over at coastguard stations and villages but not staying in any one place for long. Unfortunately, the captains of the puffers weren’t comfortable moving into unfamiliar waters farther north along the dangerous coast, and Haslund was forced to find other sources to move the gold to Tromso where the new capitol had been established.
Bodo at the time Haslund visited before it was bombed by the Germans on May 27, 1940. Courtesy of Hundholmen
The gold was again unloaded and reloaded on two different fishing boats. The boats split up but rendezvoused at a small port north of Bodo on May 7th. Hasland left the boat and traveled by car to Bodo where he located the local military commander and learned where the British had placed the minefields in a fjord they must pass through. After safe passage through the fjord, they obtained the services of the commanding officer of a Norwegian guard ship who boarded and piloted them safely to Tromso where they arrived on May 9th.
The gold was combined on one of the puffers, and that boat went out to sea with the other fishing boats each day. On May 21st, the gold was loaded on the HMSEnterprise, a Royal Navy cruiser. The Luftwaffe had previously attacked the Enterprise with 150 bombs, and she was in poor condition. She left on May 23rd on a zig-zag course for the UK. She was attacked again, but none of the bombs hit their target. The Enterprise traveled down the west coast of England without destroyer protection and docked at Plymouth in the south. The gold was transported by train to London and deposited in the Bank of England.
Expecting a German invasion of Britain at any moment, the Norwegians made plans to move its gold once again. The British had already removed all of its own gold reserves before the war started in September of 1939. The Norwegian precious metal was split into several shipments and sent across the Atlantic to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and to the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. A small portion of the gold remained with the Norwegian Government-in-Exile established in England. This allowed them to function independently throughout the war.
Source: Gold Run by Robert Pearson. Casemate Publishers, 2015.
Over a million Allied airmen flew missions over occupied Europe during WWII, and many of their planes were shot down. The parachute played a pivotal role in saving the lives of tens of thousands of these troops. Fascinating stories of miraculous parachute drops abound. Here are some of the experiences of Royal Air Force (RAF) flyers.
WWII Reenactment of the 82nd Airborne Division – Public Domain
First, a little information about the process of parachuting during WWII is in order. Once a soldier left his aircraft, either by jumping or being blown out, he fell at about 175 feet a second – 120 miles an hour. After his parachute fully opened, his descent slowed to 19 – 21 feet per second – about 11 miles an hour. If the parachute was dry and had been freshly packed, once he pulled his ripcord, the parachute fully opened in one to two seconds. The faster the aircraft traveled, the quicker the chute opened.
The closer the soldier was to the ground, the more dangerous his landing and chance of death. If a man jumped from an aircraft that was diving, he would fall at a faster rate, and a thousand feet above ground might have been too low for his parachute to open.
RAF Flight Lieutenant Dudley Davis defied these odds. On July 21, 1940, he flew his Hampden aircraft over the Wilhelmshaven harbor at fifty feet above the water and dropped a mine under the German battleship Tirpitz. It was timed to explode an hour after release.
Two other Hampdens flew in separately for the same purpose. A high-level diversionary bombing attack was scheduled for a few minutes before their arrival. However, unexpected winds interfered with the operation, and the diversionary attack was over when the Hampdens arrived. The flak guns gave the three enemy aircraft all of their attention. Davis’ plane was the last to arrive, and streams of flak set his plane on fire before he arrived at the docks.
The Hampden continued flying with fuel tanks ablaze, and Davis dropped the mine close beside the Tirpitz. By this time, flames were spurting up through the cockpit floor, and the plane was too low for Davis to order his crew to jump. With the cabin behind him on fire and heavy smoke in the cockpit, Davis open the hood, crouched on the starboard wing, and clung to the cockpit edge. As the aircraft began to roll to starboard, Davis pulled his ripcord. He was no more than fifty feet above the water.
Davis’ canopy filled and snatched him backwards off the wing. His back hit the plane, bounced off, and hit something else. He discovered he was lying on his side on a stone pier. He stood up and was unhurt except for a few bruises and a minor face burn. He was immediately captured and spent the next five years in a German prison camp.
The Germans were outfitting the newly launched Tirpitz at the time, so the explosion from the mine delayed its completion. Crew members from the other two Hampdens also survived by parachuting from their planes which were shot down.
During the Battle of France in the spring of 1940, Flight Lieutenant Crews and wireless operator/air gunner Evans flew out of their base at Rheims, France, to bomb a vital bridge on the German invasion route at the German-Belgian frontier. About thirty miles from their target, they encountered heavy fire from German antiaircraft gunners from the convoys below. The ack-ack smashed the plane’s instrument panel.
When Crews flew within sight of the target, anti-aircraft fire blasted a big hole behind the engine, causing burning gasoline to stream back under his seat in the cockpit. At this point, Crews was flying over rolling wooded country with no place to land. He shouted for his men to bale out. He slid the hood back, and flames gushed up, burning his legs and face. They were no more than 200 or 300 feet above the trees, and the plane would go no higher.
Crews didn’t doubt that he must jump, but he didn’t expect to survive. He stepped out on to the wing root and pulled his ripcord as he dove off. He closed his eyes, hit the trees seconds later, felt burning on his face from pine needles scraping his skin, and then experienced a tremendous jolt.
Crews discovered “he was hanging on his rigging lines held from the top branches of a pine tree by the half-opened canopy” only six feet above the ground. Two yards away, Evans was suspended in another tree in the same way. They stared at each other. “Apart from minor cuts and bruises neither was injured.” Their plane was burning on the ground only thirty feet away. Crews and Evans tried to escape through the German lines but were captured and held prisoner for the next five years.
Deploying Parachutes (Public Domain)
Rear gunner Ken Downing served on an RAF Hampden on April 18, 1941 when he and his fellow crew members bombed a German airfield in Cherbourg, France. Downing’s aircraft was protected by a cloud blanket over the French coast until it broke through the clouds at 900 feet. The plane dropped to 850 feet, bombed the fighters sitting on the airfield, and pulled up to escape into the cloud. A shell of anti-aircraft fire hit the port engine which burst into flames. The pilot announced he would try to land the Hampden, but gave permission for everyone else to bale out.
Downing pulled the jettison wire on the main door of the Hampden, but it would not release. He lost valuable time kicking the door until it finally gave way. Downing pulled the ripcord on his parachute as he slid out of the Hampden. His head just missed the horizontal stabilizer, and his chute, which was streaming, cleared the aircraft. Because he was facing up, Downing didn’t know how close he was to the ground. His body jolted, his harness tightened, and he blacked out for a few seconds.
When Downing opened his eyes, he discovered he was sitting on the ground in deep soft mud, the only patch of mud in the vicinity. “Less than ten yards away on the other side of a hedge was the burning wreck of the Hampden.” Downing’s parachute lay close enough that the top of the canopy caught on fire. There were no other chutes near him – he was the lone survivor. Ammunition from the Hampden exploded, forcing Downing to crawl away on his broken right thigh and leg.
German airmen ran across the field and took Downing to the naval hospital at Cherbourg. The next day the German commander at the airfield visited Downing and congratulated him for his successful jump from 130 feet (almost unheard of). He spent the next four years in captivity.
RAF Seafire (Public Domain)
Lieutenant Commander P.E.I. Bailey and another pilot flew their RAF Seafire planes across the English Channel on the second day of D-Day. Their job was to spot for “the naval ships whose guns were supporting the ground forces in their drive inland” between Boulogne and Dieppe. “No sooner were they within range of the first ships than they were vigorously fired upon. Quickly they turned round and flew out to sea again.” The gunnery officers on the ships had mistaken them for the enemy. Bailey later learned that German fighters had strafed the fleet only minutes before.
Bailey reached one of the headquarter ships by radio and was promised his message about being fired upon would be passed along. The two pilots flew in again, were shot at again, and retreated again. Bailey radioed the headquarters ship once more and was told to wait ten minutes before returning. Ten minutes later, Bailey returned. As he passed directly over a heavily armed anti-aircraft cruiser, the ship opened fire, spraying the two planes with metal. The tail of Bailey’s plane broke off, and the nose went down. At 400 feet above the sea, he couldn’t get his damaged hood to open more than nine inches. The plane continued diving toward the beach. At about 250 feet, although he was still trapped in the cockpit, Bailey pulled the ripcord on his parachute.
Next, the drop tank on Bailey’s plane exploded, and as the aircraft disintegrated, Bailey was blown out. His chute opened and jolted him right before he bumped onto the beach. “The wind filled his canopy, and he was hauled off along the beach, dragged on his back over the sand.” The canopy of Bailey’s parachute detonated small anti-personnel mines attached to stakes near the water’s edge before Bailey reached those areas.
Bailey succeeded in stopping his runaway chute, undid his harness, and discovered he was uninjured. A group of British beach commandos surrounded him, thinking they’d captured a German airman. After all, a British ship had shot him down, and he was wearing black flying overalls. The commandos pointed their guns at Bailey. He didn’t have any proof that he was British, so the soldiers marched him off to a temporary wire cage, housing 150 disgruntled-looking German prisoners. By this time Bailey was quite disgruntled. He protested the whole way, but no one listened to him.
A captured German officer, who spoke perfect English, was also in the cage. He told the British soldiers that Bailey wasn’t a German airman, but no one listened to him either. Finally, after two hours in the cage, Bailey drew the attention of a British officer who took him to a brigadier. The brigadier telephoned and established Bailey’s identity and ordered him released. He returned to England the next day.
Blenheim Aircraft Used by the R.A.F. Courtesy of Canadian Forces via Wikipedia. Public Domain.
In July 1940, Sergeant Roger Peacock’s Blenheim was seriously damaged by flak when returning to Britain after a bombing run near Wilhemshaven, Germany. Peacock was the mid-upper gunner on the flight. (See the gunner turret midway back on the aircraft pictured above.)
After both engines stopped on the Blenheim, the pilot gave the order to bale out at 6,500 feet, and he and the observer jumped. Unfortunately, Peacock didn’t hear the order. The aircraft went into a slow spiral dive at about 4,000 feet, and Peacock didn’t know if the pilot would recover in time.
Twice Peacock called over the intercom, asking if he should bale out, but no one responded. He figured the guys up front were too busy to reply. After waiting until the plane had descended to 1000 feet above the ground, he asked again if he should bale out. No reply. So he removed his parachute and moved forward to the cockpit. Finding he was the only person left on the aircraft, Peacock returned for his parachute, clipped it on and looked out the escape hatch. The altimeter registered he was at 450 feet.
Peacock jumped. Even though it was dark, he detected the black carpet of the ground below him. His parachute began to stream; however, he knew he’d jumped too late. Then a miracle unfolded. “The Blenheim crashed under him and exploded. A blinding orange flash lit up the ground for hundreds of yards.” This caused “a great upsurge of hot air. A few feet from the ground the blast snapped his canopy fully open and blew him upwards and sideways away from the blazing aircraft. When he landed safely a few moments later he was some distance from the wreckage, in another field.”
Because Peacock stayed with his aircraft for so long, he overtook the pilot and observer who had baled out much earlier, and he reached the ground before them. The pilot came down close to Peacock five minutes later, and the observer landed in a ditch several miles away.
R.A.F. Vickers Wellington
On a training flight in a R.A.F. Wellington, Sergeant F. W. R. Cumpsty baled out right before his aircraft crashed in the Welsh mountains. He was only fifty feet above a mountain top. A gale-force wind carried him away from the top and into a valley, allowing time for Cumpsty’s chute to open. “He landed safely 200 feet below the peak.”
The British Stirling Heavy Bomber (Public Domain)
After his Stirling Bomber was shot down by flak over France in 1944, Flight Engineer Joseph Cashmore baled out from below 300 feet. The flight was halfway across France and traveling at 300 feet to avoid radar detection when searchlights revealed its presence to the enemy. After the ensuing bombardment destroyed the plane, the pilot ordered his men to bale but then rescinded the order while he attempted to bring the Stirling higher. He wasn’t successful.
Each crew member prepared to jump. Cashmore went to the rear floor escape hatch and kicked the locking handles that were preventing the hatch from opening. They broke off. Cashmore and the flight sergeant beside him each insisted that the other jump first. By the time Cashmore exited, the bomber was in its last dive.
After pulling his ripcord, Cashmore “felt a sharp jerk as the harness tightened between his thighs and a thud, after which he knew no more.” He came to but had no injuries. “He had landed in a depression which contained the only patch of deep snow in the whole field.”
The French Underground rescued Cashmore, but the Germans captured him escaping near the Swiss frontier. After the war, he returned to England and was appointed Warrant Officer-in-charge of an enemy prisoner-of-war camp. Unteroffizier Heinz Ulrich was a prisoner there and, after learning that Cashmore had flown in Stirlings, bragged to Cashmore that he had earned an Iron Cross for shooting a Stirling down in 1944.
The date was March 4th, the same night Cashmore had been shot down. Cashmore grabbed a map of France and had Ulrich point out where the kill had taken place and at what time. Both answers, along with other descriptions, matched up with Cashmore’s ill-fated flight. Ulrich was the man who had ended Cashmore’s active participation in the war. The two became friends, and after Ulrich’s release, they corresponded for several years.
WWII British Halifax Bomber (Public Domain)
Flight Sergeant Eric Sanderson served as Rear Gunner on a Halifax named ‘R’ for Robert. On the night of March 22, 1944, Sanderson flew on the last operation of his tour. On their way to bomb Frankfurt, Germany, a strong force of enemy fighters attacked Sanderson’s bomber group. After watching the fighters go after the bombers behind them, Sanderson was ready. Sure enough, he spotted a Ju88 lurking under their tail, and he notified the crew.
Sanderson’s pilot initiated several maneuvers, diving, climbing, turning, performing a corkscrew, but the enemy fighter stayed with them, below and just out of reach of the bomber’s guns. As a desperate measure, the pilot rolled the Halifax on its belly so the mid-upper gunner could shoot down at the fighter. The fighter took advantage and hit them with his cannon fire, igniting the incendiaries on the “R.” With the wing root on fire, the pilot ordered all bombs to be released, but the mechanism didn’t work.
The fire moved to the fuselage, and the pilot called for his crew to jump. The other members left through the main door and the nose hatch, but Sanderson was left to wind his turret 90 degrees by hand and attempt to tumble backwards out of the turret. Unfortunately, when he swung down, his legs caught under the dashboard. He dangled upside down and could not swing back up into the turret to release his legs. Flames from the aircraft poured over him, searing his hands and face.
Diagram of the British Halifax. Note the Rear Gunner Turret. Courtesy of Author Martin Čížek via Creative Commons and Wikimedia
Sanderson expected to die. He didn’t know how close he was to the ground, but by this time, the “R” had descended from 16,000 feet to 1,000 feet, which he later learned. Suddenly, Sanderson decided to pull the ripcord on his parachute, hoping he’d be snatched clear. He was now below 400 feet. His chute rapidly filled and Sanderson felt as if his body had been torn in half. He saw the trees below him and then passed out.
Sanderson, lying on his back, awoke to utter darkness and silence. He thought he had died. But his vision and hearing slowly returned, and joy filled him when he realized he was alive after all. He moved his head and his arms, but he had no feeling in his legs. He sat up, but only saw a tangled twisted mass where his legs should have been. Upon further inspection, his legs and feet were intact but tangled up in his Mae West and harness. After untangling himself, he was able to stand.
Next Sanderson pressed a patch of snow to his face, which was bleeding from severe burns. A flap of loose skin hung from the his burned hand holding the snow. He crawled on his hands and knees to where he could observe the burning Halifax. Sanderson called to four German soldiers nearby. After running over to him and flashing a lamp in his face, they carried him off to a village.
Sanderson’s face and hands and broken collar bone healed in a prison hospital. “The only damage his legs suffered in their violent exit from the turret” were torn ligaments and muscles in his legs. All of his fellow crewman who bailed from the “R” for Robert landed safely, and Sanderson met them in captivity.
A Row of Halifax Bombers Being Assembled in Britain (Public Domain)
Source:
Mackersey, Ian. Into the Silk: The Dramatic True Stories of Airmen Who Baled Out – and Lived. Sapere Books.
During the early years of WWII, the Soviets invaded and occupied the independent country of Lithuania in the Baltics. In June of 1941, the Germans turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population was Jewish.
Vilnius, Lithuania Old Town Skyline. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia
By late summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s elite killing squads, began escorting Jewish men, women, and children to large pits in the Ponary Forest outside Vilnius to shoot them. The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews as well as Poles and Russians in this forest.
When World War II began, thirty-nine-year-old German shopkeeper Toni Schmid from Vienna, Austria, was drafted into the German army. Schmid did not support the Nazis or Hitler but was a deeply committed Christian. Schmid was a sergeant and ran an army post behind German troops for soldiers who were stragglers or were separated from their units. In 1941 he was sent to Vilnius where he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish children. Horrified, he wanted to help the Jews but didn’t know how.
One night Sergeant Schmid walked down a dark street in Vilnius, and a desperate, young Jewish woman stepped out of the shadows and begged him to protect her from the SS death squads. He took her to his apartment for the night and the following day to a Catholic priest he knew.
The priest issued the woman a certificate of membership from his church. Schmid helped her obtain an official identity card and an apartment to rent. He told the German officials that she was a civilian employee from his military unit and the Soviets had taken her documents when they retreated.
Sergeant Schmid helped a young Jewish man also hiding from the death squads. Schmid gave him a German army uniform and the military identity papers of a German soldier who’d died, but his death hadn’t been reported. Then Schmid installed the young man as a military aide in his office.
One of Schmid’s duties was to oversee workshops manned by convalescing German soldiers, Russian POW’s, and Jews with skills needed for the war effort. Although he was only allowed to employ fifteen Jews, Schmid hired dozens to work in the shops.
Site of the Ponary massacre, where the German Nazis and their collaborators executed up to 100,000 people of various nationalities. About 70,000 of them were Jews. Photo by Avi1111 DR. AVISHAI TEICHER. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Under the cover of darkness, Schmid visited the Vilnius ghetto and supplied the Jews with food, medicine, and baby bottles filled with milk he had kept warm in his pockets. He warned the ghetto residents when Nazi raids were about to take place. Some of Schmid’s Jewish workers were caught in roundups, but he went to the local prison and obtained their release. He hid Jews in the back of covered trucks headed for German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, hoping they would be safer there than in Lithuania.
Sergeant Schmid secretly advised the leaders of a Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto. He helped transport Jewish resistance fighters out of the city, warned them of pending German operations, and even supplied them with stolen German weapons. He also permitted resistance members to meet in his apartment.
Schmid’s good deeds did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and agents began following him. One day they raided his apartment while he was visiting the ghetto. Some of Schmid’s soldiers located him before he arrived home and warned him that Gestapo agents were waiting at his apartment. Schmid fled, but the Nazis caught him after several weeks and sentenced him to death.
Prior to his arrest, Sergeant Schmid had assisted almost 300 Jews to escape the Nazis in Lithuania. On April 13, 1942, he was executed by a Nazi firing squad. The last words out of his mouth were the Lord’s Prayer.
The night before his execution, Sergeant Schmid wrote a letter to his wife and daughter in Austria.
“‘I am informing you, my dearest that I must depart from this world, I am sentenced to death. Please remain strong and trust in our dear God, who decides the destiny of each of us….Now I close my last lines, the last I can write to you, and send my love.’”
Sergeant Schmid took to heart Christ’s teaching that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But Sergeant Schmid went one step further – he gave his life for strangers.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Poland became a killing ground for both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens during WWII, but the Germans specifically targeted Poland’s three million Jews. Those who weren’t immediately shot during the German invasion in 1939 were relocated from the countryside and placed in dozens of ghettos in cities all over Poland. Gradually the SS death squads emptied the ghettos by deporting the residents to death camps or by shooting them on the spot.
On July 26, 1942, an unusual confrontation took place between German Wehrmacht officers and SS troops in the city of Przemysl in southern Poland.
General Curt L. Freiherr von Gienanth, district commander of the Wehrmacht (regular German troops) had just appointed Major Max Liedtke to command the German garrison in Przemysl. Liedtke, a WWI veteran and son of a Lutheran pastor, was opposed to the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews.
In civilian life, Liedtke had lost his post as editor-in-chief of a daily German newspaper and was blacklisted because of his stand against the Nazis. In spite of this, in 1939, Liedtke was recalled to serve as a major in the Wehrmacht. He’d most recently served in Greece.
At Przemysl, Major Liedtke promoted the humane treatment of Jews. General von Gienanth supported Liedtke’s position and put four thousand Jews from Przemysl to work in local armament factories, protecting them and their families from the SS.
Liedtke’s adjutant, Oberleutnant Albert Battel, also despised the Nazi persecution of Jews. Battel was a middle-aged attorney and veteran of WWI who’d been reprimanded by the Nazis for befriending Jews and for treating the Jewish leaders of the Przemysl ghetto with respect. On July 26, 1942, Battel informed Liedtke that a large death squad of SS troops was approaching the bridge over the San River for the purpose of rounding up Jews.
Liedtke and Battel devised a plan to delay the SS long enough to rescue the Jewish workers and their families and to notify General von Gienanth of the situation. Liedtke hoped the general would agree with their plans not to cooperate with the SS death squads. Under Liedtke’s orders, Battel sent Wehrmacht troops to the bridge, erected barricades, mounted heavy machine guns, and put a tough army sergeant major in command.
Truckloads of SS troops arrived at the bridge and halted. Their commanding officer was told that no traffic would be admitted because the city was under a military emergency. The commander protested and ordered that the barricade be removed, but the sergeant major stood firm. He informed the SS officer that he would order his troops to fire on anyone attempting to break through the roadblock, so the SS left.
Major Liedtke ordered Battel to lead Wehrmacht troops into the Jewish ghetto, load the Jewish workers and their families onto trucks, and bring them to the Wehrmacht garrison for protection. Battel succeeded in moving more than one hundred families before new orders arrived from headquarters. General von Gienanth had argued with the high command that the Jews were needed for war labor, but Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler overruled him.
Himmler’s response was ominous. “‘I have ordered that ruthless steps be taken against all those who think that they can use the interest of war industry to cloak their real intentions to protect the Jews.’”
SS troops arrived at the Przemysl Ghetto the next day and deported more than fourteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children to death camps. Eventually the Jews at the Wehrmacht garrison were shipped to death camps as well.
The Nazis forced General von Gienanth to retire. They discharged Oberleutnant Albert Battel from the Wehrmacht and drafted him into the German homeguard, the Volkssturm. They sent Major Liedtke to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. He was captured by the Soviets in 1944, declared a war criminal, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in a Soviet labor camp. The stand taken by these officers is the only known time that German regular army troops stood up to SS troops to protect the Jews.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Have you heard of film star Wayne Morris? If you answered in the negative, we had the same response. But after reading his story, I had to tell it. He is one of those little-known war heroes who played an important role in the Pacific during World War II.
Bert DeWayne Morris was born and raised in Southern California and played football for Los Angeles Junior College. While acting at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, he was discovered and recruited by Warner Brothers Studios. Beginning in 1936, Morris played supporting roles in films with actors, such as, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan, Eddie Albert, and Jane Wyman. Playing the second lead in Flight Angels, a story about pilots and stewardesses training for commercial airline service, spurred him into earning his pilot’s license.
Morris joined the Naval Reserve before Pearl Harbor and later became a primary flight-training instructor in Hutchinson, Kansas. With his acting career on hold, Morris had no intention of riding out the war in a comfortable position. He wanted to be in the thick of the action, so he asked his wife’s young uncle, David McCampbell to get him into a fighter squadron. McCampbell was the commander of the VF-15 fighter squadron.
McCampbell told Morris to write a letter with his request, but because of his six-foot, two-inch height and muscular build, Morris was transferred to a patrol-bomber unit and assigned to Catalina amphibious aircraft based in Jacksonville, FL. The cockpit of a fighter plane was built for a person of average height and weight. McCampbell and Morris ran into each other in FL, and Morris repeated his request to be a fighter pilot. McCampbell made it happen, and Morris transferred to the “Fighting Fifteen.”
Hellcat F6F which Morris flew from the USS Essex Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In addition to learning to takeoff and land from a carrier deck and shoot down bombers while tangling with enemy fighters, Hellcat pilots were expected to bomb and strafe sea and land targets. All of these lessons were taught in a short time frame and were dangerous. During training, Air Group 15 lost a dozen pilots and crewman. The group deployed to the Essex in 1944.
With three other Navy pilots, Wayne Morris (second from Left) poses for a picture aboard their carrier after a strike against Formosa in 1944. Courtesy of WWII in Color.
Lieutenant Morris shot down his first Zero (Japanese fighter) in the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” off Guam on June 20.
On September 9, Morris and two other pilots took down a Japanese patrol plane over Mindanao.
The next day he led a group of fighters who attacked two airfields and destroyed camouflaged fuel dumps hidden in the woods.
On September 13, Morris shot down another Zero.
A few days later he and another pilot hit a docked Japanese submarine with rockets.
On October 10, Morris led another group of fighters over Okinawa and sank an eight-thousand-ton freighter.
He took out a Tony (Japanese fighter) during the same battle.
On October 24, he shot down two Zeros that were escorting Japanese bombers attacking the American fleet.
Wayne Morris in his Hellcat aboard the Essex Courtesy of Military Wiki.org.
Lieutenant Commander Morris participated in fifty-seven missions during his six-month combat tour on board the Essex. In total he was credited with downing seven enemy aircraft (five downs were needed to become an ace) and for sinking an escort vessel and a flak gunboat and helping to damage a heavy cruiser and a mine layer as well as the wins listed above. Morris was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals.
What was Wayne Morris most afraid of? “Every time they showed a picture aboard the Essex, I was scared to death it would be one of mine.”
The actor turned soldier was one of twenty-six aces in VF-15. Together these aces shot down 310 enemy planes in combat and sunk or damaged half a million tons of Japanese shipping. Can you pick Morris out in this photo?
The Aces of VF-15 with their victorious scorecard at the end of their six-month tour of duty . Photo dated 12/1/1944. Courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command.
Morris played in over two dozen films before the war and another three dozen after, including a supporting role in Gary Cooper’s 1949 aircraft-carrier film,
Task Force. He went on to star in westerns, a 1957 WWI film,
Paths of Glory, and played for television series.
In 1959, Morris visited his former commander and uncle-in-law Captain David McCampbell aboard the USS Bon Homme off the coast of Monterey, California. While watching air operations from the bridge of the carrier, Morris collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was forty-five years old. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Sources: Strange and Ocscure Stories of World War II by Don Aines. Skyhorse Publishing, 2020. The
Pasadena Independent newspaper, September 15, 1959.
World War II is full of many miraculous acts of bravery and survival, but the encounter of Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown over the skies of Germany in 1943 is one of the most profound. This is their story.
Restored B-17 Bomber – Creative Commons via Wikipedia – Author Airwolfhound
The German Pilot:
Franz Stigler was born and raised in Bavaria, southern Germany. His father, a former WWI pilot, instilled a love of flying in his sons. At the age of twelve, Franz soloed in a home-built glider. Because he didn’t weigh enough, the plane crashed, and Franz sustained minor injuries. Several months later, with a sandbag tied around his waist, he successfully launched and landed the rebuilt glider. By the time Franz was seventeen, he knew he wanted to fly every day for the rest of his life. The German government provided his training, and Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline, hired him when he was only eighteen years old.
In 1937, two years before WWII started, Franz received orders from the new German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, to train pilots how to fly long distances using instruments. One day Franz’s older brother surprised him by showing up for flight training. Franz did everything in his power to prepare his new student for war because it was obvious that Germany was preparing for one. Franz’s family was anti-Nazi, but German young men weren’t given the option to avoid the military, not unless they wanted to end up in a concentration camp.
Franz Stigler – Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot
In 1940, after Germany had occupied most of Europe, and the Luftwaffe was bombing English cities at night, Franz’s brother’s plane crashed at takeoff in France. Upon learning of his brother’s death, “Franz’s grief chilled into hate.” He had believed Hitler’s lies that Germany had invaded Poland in self-defense, and now Franz blamed the British for enlarging the conflict into a world war. Franz resigned as an instructor and volunteered to be a fighter pilot.
In 1942, Franz was sent to North Africa to backup General Erwin Rommel and the German Wehrmacht as they fought to capture the Suez Canal from the British. Franz flew a Messerschmitt Bf109 against the P-40s of the British Desert Air Force. The British pilots outnumbered the German’s five to one. Franz’s commanding officers taught him to fight with honor – not to shoot a defenseless enemy in his parachute, not to count “kills” but count victories, to shoot at a machine and not a man. A highly decorated young ace fighter pilot told Franz that once a person enjoyed killing, he would be a lost man.
Franz Stigler in North Africa
Franz’s squadron followed Rommel east into Egypt “far from their ports and supply lines while pushing the British closer to theirs.” The German pilots and their fighters were worn to the bone. The pilots slept in 6-foot holes they’d dug in the desert for protection from British air attacks. After being hit by ground fire while escorting German bombers, Franz was forced to belly land in the desert. A Bedouin rescued and escorted him back to base on a camel. In September of 1942 Franz was ordered home on leave. While in Germany, several ace pilots of his acquaintance were killed in Africa. The British launched a counter attack at El Alamein, Egypt, that Rommel couldn’t stop, and the Americans landed to the west in Casablanca. The Germans were trapped between them.
Messerschmitt Bf 109G-10 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Franz’s unit withdrew from Africa, and in March 1943, they deployed to Trapani Airfield, Sicily, where he encountered the Four Motors, which the Americans called the “B-17 Flying Fortress.” The German mission – defend the island and the supply convoys to Africa; the Allies’ mission – cut off the supply line. In May of 1943, 275,000 troops of the Afrika Korp surrendered to the Allies. Only an Italian garrison stood in the way of an Allied invasion of Sicily. After the Italians sent a distress message for fighter support to pick up their downed pilots, Franz volunteered to go, even though he’d already flown a combat mission that day.
Forty-five minutes later Franz coaxed his severely damaged ME 109 toward the coast of Sicily. Three miles from shore, the fighter’s engine gave out, and Franz decided to ditch rather than bail out. He steered the 109 as if it were a glider landing on the ocean surface. The plane bounced on the waves and then dove under the sea. Franz forgot to jettison the canopy before hitting the water, and as the fighter sank into the sea, the water pressure kept the canopy from releasing. Franz opened a side window pane, allowing water to pour in and equalize the pressure so he was able to flip the canopy open. His life preserver pulled him to the surface where he inflated his life raft. He drifted to shore and convinced an old fisherman to take him back to his base. Two weeks later Franz was shot down by Spitfires, and he bailed out behind friendly lines. This was the fourth fighter he lost in the war.
After the Allied invasion of Sicily, Franz’s squadron was sent home to defend Germany. By mid-August 1943, they had settled into a routine. Every other day they battled the Four Motors (B-17’s) from England “to stop the bombs from dropping and killing the German people.”
The American Pilot:
During the summer of 1943, twenty-year-old pilot Charlie Brown and his co-pilot Spencer “Pinky” Luke flew their final mission of B-17 training school. They were required to stay in the air for seven hours but were allowed to plan their own route. Charlie aimed for his hometown of Weston, West Virginia. After circling the area, Charlie and Pinky buzzed the town, sending fishermen running from a bridge, the river water over its banks, and forcing dust to billow in the streets. His father, knowing only one young man from Weston piloted B-17’s, watched the disturbance from the sidewalk.
Later, Charlie and Pinky headed for Texas where they picked up the other eight members of their crew and trained together. They dropped practice bombs and shot at wooden targets on the base’s thirteen-thousand acre range. In late October, the crew left for England where they joined the 379th Bomb Group of the United States 8th Air Force. Charlie flew his first mission over Germany as co-pilot to a veteran pilot so he could acclimate to combat before heading out with his own crew. German fighters beat up the bombers behind Charlie’s formation, but after bombing the submarine pens in the German port city of Bremen, Charlie’s plane made it back to England without a scratch.
One week later, on December 20, 1943, Charlie piloted his own crew on a return bombing run to Bremen, but this mission would end differently. Return on October 1st to learn about the extraordinary outcome of that fateful day over the skies of Germany.
Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 91st Bomb Group, 8th AF, enroute to Bremen, Germany, fly high above heavy cloud banks at 27,000 feet altitude. 20 Dec. 1943. Courtesy of American Air Museum in Britain.
On the morning of December 20, 1943, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Charlie Brown piloted his B-17 crew into combat for the first time. “Ye Olde Pub” flew in a twenty-one-plane battle formation and led most of the 8th Air Force’s bomb groups to Germany (475 B-17s and B24s). They were told to expect five hundred or more bandits (German fighters) to intercept them.
The Crew of “Ye Olde Pub.” Kneeling, L to R: Charlie, Pinky, Doc, and Andy. Standing, L to R: Frenchy, Russian, Pechout, Jennings, Ecky, and Blackie. Courtesy of the American Air Museum in Britain.
The bomber group flew twenty-seven thousand feet above the icy sea. Three and a half hours into their flight, the bandits attacked and flak from the ground soon followed. After four separate explosions just ahead of The Pub, Andy, the navigator, and Doc, the bombardier, reported a big hole in the Plexiglas nose of their plane. One of the engines on the left began to smoke and pinky, the co-pilot, shut it down. A shell passed through one of the wings, leaving a large hole. The Pub reached the target area and released twelve five-hundred-pound bombs on the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant five miles below and turned north to escape Germany as quickly as possible.
The bomber group didn’t know it yet, but their fighter cover had already departed for England because they feared running out of fuel. One of The Pub’s right engines began to run wild, and Pinky cut power and restarted the engine. The bomber fell back as the rest of the 8th Air Force passed overhead and left The Pub behind.
Five German 109s leaped from below, and eight German 190s trailed ahead, blocking the path to the North Sea. Two enemy fighters dove straight for the cockpit of The Pub, so Charlie, the pilot, climbed directly up and into their path. Frenchy opened up and hammered one of the 190s before it could break away, putting it out of the fight. The other fighter scored hits on The Pub, but Doc fired at its belly and scored another win.
The controls for The Pub’s third engine was shot out, and the engine froze at half power. Five 109s headed for the tail of The Pub, but Ecky’s guns in the tail jammed. Then Blackie’s guns in the ball turret froze. “Charlie threw the bomber into a bank,” and bullets from the 109s “ricocheted off the bomber’s frozen belly and clanged against Blackie’s turret, cracking its glass but not penetrating.” More guns froze, welded shut by ice. Only three of the bomber’s eleven guns were now operational. Charlie twisted and weaved while the 109s continued to attack, but the pilot’s maneuvers threw them off.
A 20mm cannon shell tore into The Pub and “blasted the bomber’s skin outward,” almost severing the right waist gunner’s leg. Other shells struck the tail, destroying the tail gun position and killing Ecky. Pechout, the radio operator, frantically calld for help, but several 20mm shells blew the radio into pieces but spared the operator. Meanwhile, Charlie banked the bomber into a near vertical turn of eighty degrees and aimed at any fighters he saw coming in. He flew in circles. Bullets tore through the cockpit’s ceiling, and one embedded itself against Charlie’s left shoulder blade. Bullets punctured the oxygen tanks behind the pilots’ seats, slowing the flow of oxygen into their masks.
The enemy shot off The Pub’s horizontal stabilizer and shortened the sixteen-foot rear wing to three feet. Charlie, needing a new evasion tactic, tilted the bomber until its left wing pointed to the sky, but without the stabilizer, the plane “flipped and entered a slow, upside-down, flat spin.” Oxygen stopped flowing to the pilots, and the last thing Charlie remembered was viewing the German farm fields five miles below as he and the co-pilot hung upside down in the cockpit. Then he passed out.
B-17 Bomber
When The Pub reached 10,000 feet, “its spiral broke into a nose dive.” The oxygen-rich air at this low altitude brought Charlie back to consciousness. He gripped the controls and hauled back. He toggled the bomber’s flaps, but
The Pub continued her dive. At 3000 feet, “her wings began to flutter,” something a B-17 in this kind of condition shouldn’t have been able to do. “Charlie dug his heels into the rudder pedals and pulled back on the yoke with his whole body.” “The wings began flying again,” but the bomber was now below two thousand feet and still dropping. Just in time, “her nose lifted to the horizon and she leveled out” over the suburbs of Oldenburg. Pinky, the co-pilot, regained consciousness, spotted the treetops below them, and asked if they were in England.
Charlie had Doc, the navigator, “figure out where they were and establish a course for home.” He sent others to assess the damage to the bomber and check on the status of the crew. Doc mapped out a plan to head thirty-five miles north to the sea, but his map showed flak batteries all along the coastline, known as “the Atlantic Wall.”
The German Pilot:
Meanwhile, German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, had landed at an airfield to refuel and continue the fight. If he could nail a bomber, he would have enough points to receive the Knight’s Cross, a badge of honor, indicating “that he had done something good for his people.” While waiting at the airfield, the low drone of an approaching bomber caught his attention. A B-17 skirted the airfield, flying low and slow before disappearing behind the trees. Franz took off without waiting for clearance from the tower. He had a bomber to catch and a Knight’s Cross to earn.
Stigler approached the wounded B-17 but noted the missing stabilizer and the dead tail gunner leaning over his machine gun. Through the torn fuselage, he saw the airmen tending their wounded crew members. He thought of his commander’s words that if Stigler ever shot an airman floating down in his parachute, the commander would shoot Stigler himself. He remembered his dead brother and the grief these enemies’ families would face.
Kimbolton at Sunset – Airfield Where Charlie Brown & His B-17 Crew Were Stationed in England Courtesy of American Air Museum in Britain.
Franz’s superiors had taught him “to fight with fearlessness and restraint, to celebrate victories not death, and to know when it was time to answer a higher call.” Realizing the bomber held no threat to him, Stigler pulled up close to the co-pilot’s window and stared at Brown.
Charles “Charlie” Brown had sent his co-pilot, Pinky, to give the crewmen permission to bail out. They would be taken as POW’s, but they would live. He planned to attempt a return flight back to England with Russian who was unconscious. Charlie viewed the approaching coastline where Germany met the North Sea and knew the soldiers manning the coastal defenses would shoot them down. He looked out the co-pilot’s window to check on engine four and spied Stigler’s 109, flying three feet from The Pub‘s right wingtip, as if it owned the B-17. Charlie’s heart stopped for a moment. Franz nodded at Charlie, but Charlie thought he’d imagined it.
Pinky returned to the cockpit, announcing that none of the men wanted to jump. They planned to stay together and help fly The Pub home. Pinky turned to see what Charlie was staring at and claimed they were living in a nightmare. Charlie and Pinky expected Franz to destroy them. Franz noted the shock and fear on the pilots’ faces and pointed to the ground. Charlie and Pinky shook their heads. This angered Franz, but he felt that leaving the B-17 to face the coming flak alone would be the same as shooting it down. He moved his 109 a few feet away so the guys at the coastal defenses would recognize his silhouette and hold their fire.
John D. Shaw’s painting of Ye Olde Pub Being Escorted Out to Sea by Franz Stigler’s ME-109. Valor Studios. Used by Permission.
As Stigler and Brown approached, the battery commander recognized the Messerschmitt 109 and shouted for his men to hold their fire. The Germans used captured B-17’s for training, so it wasn’t out of the question for the two planes to be flying together. “Side by side the 109 and the B-17 soared over the soldiers defending the Atlantic Wall then over the beach obstacles and the crashing surf. The sight was a beautiful one, the little fighter protecting the big bomber.”
Charlie still thought the German pilot was a threat and that he’d escorted them out to sea to finish them off. Franz, however, waved at the pilots and pointed to the east, mouthing, “Sweden,” which was only thirty minutes away. Neither American pilot could figure out what Franz was trying to tell them. Given the damage to the B-17, Franz was certain they would not make it home alive. Charlie sent the turret gunner to swing his gun toward the 109, hoping to chase the German away. When Franz spotted the movement in the turret, he wasn’t surprised. He saluted Charlie, who responded with surprise, and then Franz flew over the B-17 and dove away.
With a hole in her nose, her skin frayed, and only two and a half engines operating, The Pub headed toward Kimbolton Airfield, three hundred miles away. She was steadily losing altitude when engine four began acting up again. Pinky initiated shut-down procedures and successfully restarted the engine, but the bomber’s altitude dropped further during the process. Charlie ordered his men to dump everything that wasn’t nailed down. The Pub dropped below 1000 feet of altitude and was only halfway home. Charlie told his men that all they could do was pray.
Three-fourths of the way home, The Pub dropped below five hundred feet. Charlie prayed and touched the Bible in his pocket. Shortly after, two fighters zoomed past his window, and the crewmen were afraid the enemy had come to finish them off. The fighters turned and passed in front of the bomber, revealing the emblem of the U.S. Army Air Corp. Then they returned to the B-17, and one parked beside the pilot’s window, just as Franz Stigler had done. The fighter pilot pointed to his headset, but Charlie shook his head. Then the fellow pointed down, and Charlie spotted a bit of land between the clouds. Soon the clouds parted, revealing an ever widening band of land. The Pub had reached England.
Charlie searched for a suitable field to land his bird, but they were dotted with stone fences. The Pub dropped below two hundred feet, and Charlie told his men to prepare for a crash landing. Up ahead, the two fighters were circling at one thousand feet, so Charlie turned the bomber in their direction. A military airfield appeared below them. He made the approach to land and attempted to lower the landing gear. Unfortunately, the hydraulics weren’t functioning. Frenchy, the flight engineer, went down and lowered the wheels by hand, but the flaps were frozen. Alerted by the fighter pilots above, emergency vehicles pulled up along the runway. Soldiers crowded around the tower and watched the wounded bomber come in.
Frenchy fired red flares from a ceiling window of the bomber, notifying the base that wounded airmen were aboard. Charlie kept The Pub’s nose up and brought her front wheels down. Once the tail wheels settled on the runway, Charlie and Pinky jammed on the brakes, and the undefeated bomber slowed and came to a stop. The pilots shut the plane down. “The crew and The Pub had completed their first mission together.”
Charlie and most of his original crew completed their twenty-eighth and final mission on April 11, 1944. Charlie returned stateside and became an instructor. He wondered for over forty years if the German pilot who’d spared them had survived the war. At the same time, Franz Stigler wondered for over forty years if the men of the B-17 he’d risked a court-martial for had ever made it home.
After returning to England, Charlie and most of his original crew continued bombing Germany. They completed their twenty-eighth and final mission on April 11, 1944. Charlie returned stateside and became an instructor for the remainder of the war. Later he graduated from college and joined the U.S. Air Force as an intelligence officer. He retired early in order to work for the State Department during the Vietnam War. After retiring again, Charlie and his family moved to Florida.
Franz Stigler continued to shoot down Allied planes on bombing runs over Germany. In late October 1944, a one-inch copper bullet from a B-17 pierced the windshield of Franz’s 109, hit him in the forehead and bounced off. Franz managed to make it back to base, sporting a black hole of dried blood and a nasty dent in his head. The copper bullet was secure in the palm of his hand.
Franz was sent away to recuperate but later convinced his commander to send him to jet school. Franz learned how to fly the jet-powered Me 262 and, in March of 1945, joined General Adolf Galland’s newly formed fighter unit, JV-44, dubbed “the Flying Sanatorium” or “the Squadron of Experts.” Franz and other ace pilots made their last stand from a base just outside of Munich. He surrendered to the Americans shortly before the war ended, having achieved 487 combat flights. In 1953, Franz immigrated to Vancouver, Canada.
Franz had a good life in Canada. After retiring, he flew a Me 108 in air shows, with Allied planes chasing him, which delighted the crowds. He came to the notice of the Boeing Company, and in 1985 they invited him to their 50th Anniversary party for the B-17 Flying Fortress. This led him to tell his German wife about “the one he had let get away.” Still curious whether the B-17 he’d risked a court-martial for had ever made it home, he attended the party and much to his amazement was embraced by the former American B-17 pilots and crewman he met. He asked if any of them knew of a bomber that had been escorted to safety by a German fighter, but no one did.
After debriefing on that fateful day in 1943, Charlie and his crew were ordered not to tell anyone about their escort out of Germany, and the records were classified. Charlie wondered for over forty years if the German fighter pilot who’d spared him and his crew had survived the war. Most of them had been wiped out. Now, many years later Charlie began to think about his war experiences and had nightmares that “always ended with The Pub spinning to earth in a death dive from which he could not recover.” He always woke up before he crashed.
Charlie decided he needed closure, so he joined the 379th Bomb Association and attended a reunion for pilots. He shared the story “of the German pilot who had spared him and his crew.” Nobody had heard the story until now, and Charlie’s fellow pilots encouraged him to look for the German. He searched the archives in the U.S. and England and located his crew’s after-action report but after four years was no closer to locating the pilot he sought.
Several years after WWII, the Allies allowed West Germany to re-establish its air force as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. Several of the ace fighters Franz Stigler had served with became leaders in the new organization. These were the pilots who’d served their country with dignity and hadn’t joined the Nazi Party. The Association of German Fighter Pilots published a newsletter called Jagerblatt. Charlie wrote the editor, asking that a short letter be published in the newsletter about the December 20 incident, but the editor was not interested in helping a former bomber pilot. Charlie wrote to Adolf Galland, Germany’s most famous pilot and former president of the Association. Galland ordered the editor to publish Charlie’s letter. Galland was Franz’s former commander in JV-44.
General Galland – Public Domain
A few months later, the Jagerblatt arrived in Franz Stiger’s mailbox. He was so excited when he read Charlie’s letter that he immediately wrote to him. Charlie was equally astounded when he received Franz’s letter. He obtained Franz’s phone number from directory assistance and called him. In the Jagerblatt letter, Charlie had left out information about The Pub’s exact damage and the fact that they had flown out of Germany over the North Sea. Charlie began asking Franz a series of questions. Franz shared details about The Pub’s damage that Charlie had not included in his Jaggerblatt letter, and when Franz said he thought they’d never make it across the sea after he let them go, Charlie couldn’t hold back the tears.
Charlie wrote a thank you letter to Franz, but he still didn’t know that the German was an ace or why Franz had allowed the B-17 to escape. The two met for the first time in Seattle in June of 1990. When they saw each other in the hotel lobby, they hugged and cried. The fact that they’d found each other was miraculous enough, but the fact that they were both living after forty-six years was incredible. The two spent a couple days together, sharing about their lives. Contrary to what Charlie had thought, Franz’s guns had been full of ammunition when he’d encountered Charlie’s plane. He learned that Franz had served in the “Squadron of Experts” and was one of Germany’s great aces. After that meeting, Charlie never suffered another nightmare.
Ten years prior, Franz’s former commander General Galland had visited Franz in Canada, and Franz took him hunting. They’d kept up with each other by phone ever since. After meeting with Charlie, he confessed to Galland about sparing the B-17. Galland’s response was “‘It would be you.'” The reunion soon made the headlines and hit the TV news stories. Later that year, Franz met Charlie at the 379th Bomb Group reunion in Massachusetts. Charlie introduced his old ball turret gunner, “Blackie” and his former radio operator Pechout to Franz, and they hugged and cried together. Blackie sobbed and thanked Franz for sparing his life because it had allowed “his children and grandchildren to experience life.”
Watch a short documentary about this story on You Tube here.
Source: A Higher Call by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander – Berkley Caliber, New York, 2012.
Two months after WWII began, German mathematician and scientist Hans Ferdinand Mayer checked into the Hotel Bristol in Oslo, Norway. Dr. Mayer was an anti-Nazi German, and he purposely planned a trip to Scandinavia to leak information about the Nazis’ weapons systems and latest technological development projects.
Mayer was employed by Siemens & Halske AG, an electrical engineering company specializing in communications engineering and headquartered in Berlin, Germany. He directed the communications research laboratory.
Oslo, Norway Today. Photo by Sean Hayford O’Leary via Flikr & Wikipedia
Dr. Mayer borrowed a typewriter from the Hotel Bristol and typed a seven-page report, detailing German military secrets for the purpose of bringing down the Nazi regime. He sent a letter to the British Embassy in Oslo on November 1. Mayer asked the British military attaché to request that the BBC World Service use a coded phrase at the beginning of its German-language program if the attaché wanted the report. The code was given in the broadcast, so Mayer mailed the report.
Because of its origins, the British entitled the communication the Oslo Report. Considering it was sent anonymously and included detailed facts about many types of German weapons, the report appeared “to good to be true,” and British intelligence was very skeptical. They assumed the report was planted by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, to distract or mislead the Allies.
It was providential that a young British scientist, Dr. R. B. Jones, recently placed in charge of scientific intelligence, believed the report and forwarded it to MI6 in London. Mayer’s account detailed information about German methods of attacking fortifications, newly developed air-raid warning equipment, and the location of the Luftwaffe’s laboratories and development centers. Mayer also shared about the development and location of Germany’s first aircraft carrier and the ongoing development of remote-controlled long-range rockets.
HMS Royal Oak in 1937. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Dr. Mayer described two types of new torpedoes – acoustic and magnetic – and how to counteract them. Only a few weeks earlier, the Germans had torpedoed and sunk the HMS Royal Oak battleship when it was anchored in British home waters at Scapa Flow, and 835 men were killed. Dr. Mayer instructed the Allies on how to protect themselves from this type of attack. Because many of the weapons were still in development, some of the information was incomplete and some later proved to be inaccurate; however, the Oslo report allowed the British to develop countermeasures and contributed to their victory in the Battle of Britain the following year.
After delivering his report, Dr. Mayer returned to Germany. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 for listening to the British Broadcasting Network (BBC), which was strictly forbidden, and for criticizing the Nazi regime. He spent the remaining years of the war in five concentration camps until the Allies freed him. The Nazis never learned about the existence of the Oslo Report, and Mayer’s authorship wasn’t revealed until after he and his wife had died, as stipulated in his will. Mayer lived to be eighty-four years of age and died in 1980.
Eighty Army Airmen formed the sixteen crews known as the Doolittle Raiders who bombed the Japanese homeland in April of 1942. Many consider this operation to be a turning point in WWII because it boosted the morale of the allies and humbled the Japanese at a time when they had seemed invincible.
After bombing Japan, three of the Raiders died during crash landings and bailouts in China, eight were captured by the Japanese (three were put to death and one died of starvation), five landed in the Soviet Union and were interned until they escaped through the Middle East one year later, and the rest were assisted inland by the Chinese.
So what happened to these airmen after their infamous raid and escape from China?
Pilot Ted Lawson who was severally injured during the crash landing of the Ruptured Duck survived after Doc White of Plane 15 amputated his leg at a remote missionary hospital in China. The Chinese escorted White and Lawson and his other injured crew members to safety, often just ahead of the Japanese pursuing them. Lawson was flown to the United States where surgeons at Walter Reed rebuilt his jaw and performed additional surgery on his leg.
One year later Lawson published Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a book about the Doolittle Raid and his experiences in China. A Hollywood movie by the same name was produced and released by MGM in 1944. The black-and-white movie was a hit and won an Oscar and is still available for purchase today. Lawson died at the age of 75.
The Ruptured Duck Logo
When MGM needed a stunt pilot for the movie A Guy Named Joe, the army sent former co-pilot Col. Dean Davenport. Davenport also served as technical adviser during the filming of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. He completed his WWII service in Alaska and lived to the age of 81.
Lt.Charles McClure convalesced with Ted Lawson at Walter Reed Hospital and was hospitalized until June of 1943. He became a navigator instructor but retired with a physical disability in June of 1945. He lived to be 82.
Lt. Bob Clever recovered from his head and face injuries from the Ruptured Duck’s crash landing, but was killed on November 20, 1942, the day his flight group departed from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His “airplane spun out climbing up through the clouds.” He was 28.
Sgt. David Thatcher, only 20-years old when he served as gunner on the Ruptured Duck, was the only crew member able to walk after the crash landing. He kept his fellow crewmates alive by tending to their injuries and collecting and giving them rainwater. He was the only Doolittle enlisted man to receive the Silver Star for his gallantry and courage. Thatcher was sent to North Africa and Europe and survived 26 bombing mission. He contracted hepatitis and malaria with ended his military career. He died in 2016 at the age of 94.
Sgt. David Thatcher
Crew Members of the Hari Kari-er
The crew members of the Hari Kari-er bailed out in Japanese controlled territory eighty miles from the coast. Thanks to the help of the Chinese, they each made it safely out of China.
In early June of 1942, Pilot Ross Greening flew back to the states on the same plane with the
Ruptured Duck wounded airmen. Along with many other Raiders he was sent to North Africa later that year, and he was based in Marrakech, Morocco. By July of 1943 he had completed 125 hours of combat, and on July 17th, he took part in a five-hundred-craft run on the Naples, Italy, shipyards.
Greening’s plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, the cockpit crashed open, and pieces of the plane fell off. The fuselage ripped apart, the plane burst into flames and the men ran to the bomb bay to bail out. The plane was thrown sideways by another burst, and the men were tossed out. Greening floated into the line of fire and “yanked his cords in every direction to” get away. He landed in the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius and was knocked unconscious. He woke up with his hip out of joint, and the Nazis popped it back in place before carrying him out of the volcano piggyback. Despite his many injuries, he was forced to crawl from a truck to the inside of a jail while an Italian mob spat and threw stones at him.
After Italy surrendered on September 8, 1943, the Wehrmacht loaded the POWs from Greening’s prison on a northbound train. The Allies attacked the train and Greening “was blown out of the carriage by a direct hit, and in the chaos he took off.” He wandered in the mountains for a few days and then hid on a train until he reached Verona. An Italian family who had lived in the U.S. for many years aided him until it became too dangerous.
Greening hid in a cave near Venice with two escaped POWs from New Zealand until a German patrol searching for partisans found them by accident. He spent the rest of the war at Stalag Luft I, 125 miles north of Berlin where 9000 POW aviators were held. Greening “gave the prisoners art lessons and taught them to make their own supplies.” He became commanding officer, and “when the Red Army finally liberated the camp in 1945, the Nazi prison chief surrendered to Greening to spare himself the Soviets’ known brutality.”
Greening’s former co-pilotKen Reddy died in an airplane accident near Little Rock, Arkansas on September 3, 1942, at the age of 22. The three other Hari Kari-er crew members were assigned to the China-India-Burma Theater.
Lt. Kappeler and Sergeant Gardner were sent on a mission from India to bomb Burma and then land in Kunming, China. After they dropped their bombs, “they were immediately attacked by Japanese planes and ducked into the clouds to evade but weren’t familiar with the area’s mountainous terrain.” They tried to cross the hump (the Himalayas) at too low an altitude, and only Lt. Kappeler’s plane, out of the six, made it to China. Sgt. Gardner was killed in action on June 3, 1942 at the age of 22.
Lt. Kappeler survived to fly fifty-three combat missions out of England, France, and Belgium and died in 2010 at the age of 96. After the Doolittle Raid, Bombardier
Second Lt. Bill Birch was sent state-side and participated in War-Bond-selling drives and completed flight training in Texas. As a result of an airplane accident, he spent almost two years in a hospital and didn’t have an opportunity to fly again before the war ended.
After dropping their bombs, all the crews made it safely out of Japan but encountered numerous difficulties later.
3 Raiders died in crash landings and bailouts over China
8 Raiders were captured by the Japanese – 3 went before a firing squad and 1 starved to death
5 Raiders landed in the Soviet Union and were interned – they escaped through the Middle East one year later
64 Raiders were assisted to safety in Free China by Chinese soldiers and civilians
So what happened to the Raiders after they escaped from China?
Plane #1 – Piloted by Jimmy Doolittle
Doolittle Before WWII Public Domain
After spending the summer of 1942 traveling the U.S. on war bond drives, Jimmy Doolittle was appointed commanding general over the 12th Air Force in North Africa under General Eisenhower. In March 1943, Doolittle became commanding general of the North African Strategic Air Forces. On the one-year anniversary of the Tokyo Raid, Doolittle and the other Raiders also serving in North Africa held the first Doolittle Raider reunion.
First Doolittle Raider Reunion – North Africa – 1943
The Japanese notified the U.S. that the eight captured Raiders had been sentenced to death, but some lives had been spared. They refused give names. When the American military released this information, Jimmy Doolittle replied from North Africa that he and his Raiders were ready to go back to Japan and finish the job they had started. The Japanese responded in a radio address from Tokyo. They stated that “Doolittle, commander of the raid on Japan one year ago, failed to do anything, so we have the pleasure of offering him the title of “Did-little'” (The First Heroes).
After pushing the Germans out of Africa, Doolittle went on to command the 15th Air Force in the Mediterranean Theater and the 8th Air Force in Europe and the Pacific. He ended the war as a lieutenant general and reverted to inactive reserve status in May of 1946. He returned to Shell Oil and served as vice president and later director. In 1985, the U.S. Congress promoted Doolittle to full general on the Air Force retired list, and he became the first four-star general in Air Force Reserve history.
Doolittle was married to Josephine, “Joe,” for seventy years, and he lived to the age of 96.
Plane #1 on a Mountain in China – Courtesy of the Smithsonian
After Doolittle’s crew members bailed out over China and located each other on the ground, Doolittle and his gunner, Paul Leonard, visited their destroyed plane at its crash site on a mountainside. Doolittle sat beside his plane and wondered about the fate of the other 75 men and their aircraft. He “felt lower than a frog’s posterior.” This was his first combat mission, and he was sure it would be his last. He told Leonard he expected to be court-martialed and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth. At the very least, he “would sit out the war flying a desk.” Leonard disagreed and predicted that Doolittle would be promoted to general, be given a new plane, and receive the Medal of Honor. Leonard was correct on all three counts (The First Heroes).
Leonard was so impressed with Doolittle that he asked to fly as Doolittle’s crew chief on his next mission. Doolittle agreed, and Leonard went with him to North Africa. When Doolittle was called away from the airfield for a meeting with the ground commanders at Youks-les-Bains, Algeria, he left Leonard to look after their airplane. The Germans bombed the airfield that night, and Leonard manned the top turret machine gun until the batteries ran out. He then took refuge in a nearby bomb crater, but a bomb meant for the plane landed in the bomb crater. When Doolittle returned to the field, he only found Leonard’s left hand with his wristwatch still in place. Doolittle stated that losing Leonard was his greatest personal tragedy of the war.
Dick Cole, Doolittle’s co-pilot, served in the China-Burma-India Theater and then became a test pilot with the Douglas Aircraft Plant for the remainder of the war. He served in the military for twenty-six years, rated as a command pilot, and retired as a colonel. Cole was the last living Doolittle Raider. He died on April 9, 2019, at 103 years of age.
Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator, served stateside after the Tokyo Raid and later in Germany in the 1950’s. He earned the rank of colonel and lived to be 83.
Fred Braemer, Doolittle’s bombardier, served in the China-Burma-India Theater and then attended bombardier, radar, and observer training schools and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant. He served in Korea, retired in 1969 and died at the age of 71.
Former Plane #5 pilot Davey Jones participated in the invasion of North Africa.Leading a dozen P-38 fighters in a B-26, he landed at the airfield in Oran, Algeria, during fighting. They had to land from every direction, straddling bomb craters and avoiding wrecked airplanes. Two or three hundred planes parked there, and the men lived by their airplanes and built fires for cooking. After a few days they all moved to Algiers. From there they ran bombing raids without ground crews. They refueled with five-gallon tins and loaded their 250-pound bombs by sheer muscle.
In November of 1942, Eisenhower started the offensive against Tunis, which was defended by thirty thousand German troops. Davey Jones led a raid on the port of Bizerte, twenty miles north of Tunis. They were forced to bomb at twelve hundred feet because they didn’t have any bomb sights. Jones’ plane was hit and the left engine knocked out. He also lost the trim and engine instruments and was forced to land along the coast between two little sand mounds which took their wings off.
North Africa Campaign – Courtesy of Naval-History.net and the Late Gordon Smith
The crew set off walking and ran into a line of German skirmishers. Jones pointed at his pistol and one of the Germans pulled it out. He said, “‘For you, the war is over.'” He and another guy were taken to the command post where the blond, Aryan-type commander who spoke reasonable English gave him a deck chair, cheese, and wine and asked him not to run away that night.
Jones was sent to Sicily and on to Rome for interrogation where he was in solitary for two weeks. From there he traveled by train in a group to Stalag Luft III, 125 miles southeast of Berlin. He arrived on his birthday. The camp was run by the Luftwaffe instead of the Gestapo or SS and grew to hold around 10,000 captive Allied aviators. In camp, Davey Jones was given the moniker “Tokyo” Jones because of his Raider experience.
The POWs put each other to work “‘building things, hiding things or ‘working to escape’-type things.'” In the spring of 1943, Davey and others moved to the north camp where they built the big tunnel featured in the book and movie, The Great Escape. The dug the tunnel thirty feet down through sand, using their hands or a small trowel and shored up the tunnel with bed boards. They used a little tin with margarine for a lamp but had to keep sending it up to be relit before they realized there wasn’t enough oxygen to support it. They had “a guy word a pump to bring air into the tunnel with beg bellows, and eventually they ran electric lights.”
The Nazi’s built more prisons to accommodate the rising number of captured Allied airmen. The Americans were moved out of Stalag Luft III, so they didn’t participate in the actual escape. Being moved likely saved Jones’s life because many of those who escaped were recaptured and executed. Jones stayed in the service after the war ended and later had the opportunity to test fly the Mach-2 supersonic bomber in 1955. He lived to be 95.
After the capture of Davey Jones and Ross Greening, U.S. Army officials worried that the Germans would hand over any captured Raiders to the Japanese, so they stopped most of the Raiders from flying and sent them home. Plane #14 navigator/bombardier Herb Macia from Tombstone, Arizona, missed the recall and crewed more than seventy sorties all the way to April 1945. He amassed more WWII combat missions than any other Raider. He lived to 93.
Former Plane 2 pilot Lt.Travis Hoover was assigned to train crews for a new squadron of B-25s. Before they were combat ready, they were sent to North Africa to bomb the tank forces under Rommel. Hoover flew missions over Sicily and Italy and then volunteered to fly B-24’s, “doing runs on Romania’s Ploesti oil fields, which were the major source of fuel for the Nazis.” Instead of being sent home after flying about fifty missions, Hoover received permission from Doolittle to stay on as a fighter pilot. He survived the war and lived to the age of 86.
Just four months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, eighty U.S. Airmen, known as the Doolittle Raiders, pulled off a daring attack on Japan. Caught by surprise, the Japanese were unprepared for enemy bombers to strike their homeland, especially in broad daylight. Greater than the damage inflicted, the raid had a psychological impact on the Japanese and their leaders. The military pulled troops and equipment back from the war zones to protect Japan. The raid boosted the morale of the Allies and instilled hope that the enemy was not invincible.
Doolittle Painting from the Official Site of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders. Used by Permission.
After the Doolittle Raiders bombed Japan, fifteen of the sixteen crews flew to China and either crash landed or bailed out of their planes. By way of a centuries-old communication system, news of the bombing in Japan spread quickly across the Chinese countryside.
The Japanese had brutally occupied parts of China for many years, and the Chinese rejoiced over the news that their enemy’s homeland had finally been attacked. When the “giant” Americans floated down or crashed into their world, the Chinese eagerly escorted the Raiders away from the occupying Japanese forces and to safety far from the coast.
Doolittle Raiders Bombing Japan. Used by Permission.
The Japanese quickly figured out the areas where the Raiders had landed and sought to capture them. Although most of the crews were spirited away to safety, the survivors from two crews were caught and imprisoned. Their stories can be found here and here.
Because the Chinese aided in the escape of most of the Raiders, the Japanese retaliated with a vengeance. The first order of business was to capture and occupy for one month the areas in China from which air raids could be launched against the Japanese homeland. Japanese Emperor Hirohito ordered his army in China to totally destroy military installations, air fields, and important lines of communication in these places. But the Japanese did so much more. They spent three months wreaking havoc in the Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces where the Raiders had landed.
The Chinese Escorting Doolittle Raiders to Safety Courtesy of the Official Site of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders
Japanese soldiers forced four thousand Chinese to dig eight-foot wide, three-foot-deep trenches on the runways of the airfields that were the most threat to Japan. This forced the U.S. to cancel planned follow-ups to the Doolittle Raid. One hundred thousand Japanese troops “attacked every town with a link to Doolittle’s crew.” The Raiders had given gifts and trinkets to those who helped them, but the Japanese used this evidence to single out the helpers for the harshest torture before killing them. One farmer who had helped a Raider was wrapped in a kerosene-soaked blanket and his wife was forced to set him on fire. In addition, the Japanese soldiers—
Drowned children
Beheaded women and babies
Looted and burned towns and villages
Raped any woman between the ages of 10 and 65
Bayoneted or burned to death many orphans and the aged
Wrecked electrical plants and pulled up railroad lines
Slew thousands of pigs, oxen, and other farm animals
Set crops on fire
Destroyed bridges and roads
Shot anyone or anything that moved
Threw dead bodies into wells, contaminating village drinking water
Chalked “Christ is defeated” on the wall of one torched church
Conducted over 600 bombing runs
Destroyed everything in their path
Spread destruction over some twenty thousand square miles
Slaughtered at least 250,000 Chinese
Eventually the Japanese soldiers spread their vengeance much farther inland, stopping only a few days’ march from Chunking, the capital of free China.
Many years before, the Japanese had built a three-square mile complex in Manchuria to develop bacteriological warfare. They conducted their experiments on humans they had taken prisoner, including Americans. This clandestine outfit was secretly known as “Unit 731” and employed 3000 scientists, doctors, and technicians. Before the arrival of the Doolittle Raiders, the Japanese had already “turned loose its specially bred fleas and rats to spread bubonic plague among the people of Changde and Ningbo in central China” (Nelson) and had dropped anthrax-bacillus bombs on the town of Anta.
Building from the Unit 731 complex which now houses the Unit 731 Museum By 松岡明芳 Courtesy of Creative Commons from Wikimedia Commons
In retaliation for the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese “sprayed cholera, typhoid, plague, and dysentery across southeastern China” in June and July of 1942 (Nelson). During one operation, the wind changed at the last minute and seventeen hundred Japanese soldiers contracted and died from disease, and ten thousand more were injured.
It was later learned that the Japanese had planned to spray the Allied forces in the Philippines with a 1000 kilograms of bubonic-plague-infected fleas, but the Allies surrendered first. The Japanese had also planned to attack the U.S. soldiers at Saipan with their “full arsenal of bacteriological weaponry,” but the U.S. won the battle quickly and thwarted the Japanese.
At the end of the war, the United States captured Unit 731 and continued the research into biological warfare. The Japanese unit chiefs shared “their research findings in exchange for release from prosecution” (Nelson). The U.S. Army built millions of bombs which contained several deadly toxins, but in 1972, “seventy-one nations jointly agreed to outlaw biological warfare, and President Richard Nixon ordered the weapons destroyed” (Nelson).
Japan also launched attacks on the U.S. mainland in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid.
Sources:
The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory by Craig Nelson (Viking, 2002)
Target Tokyo: Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)
During World War II, the Doolittle Raiders were the first to launch fully loaded B-25‘s off an aircraft carrier. In 1942, these airmen did the impossible and lifted off from the Enterprise aircraft carrier and bombed Japan by total surprise. The pilots were ordered to drop their bombs and fly directly to airfields in free China, but all the men knew if the Japanese didn’t shoot them down they faced the likelihood of running out of fuel before reaching China.
Pilot Ski York and copilot Robert Emmens of Plane #8 had both missed out on the training the other pilots had participated in at Eglin Air Force Base. Yet their plane safely leaped into the air as the deck of the USS Enterprise disappeared beneath them. The crew breathed a sigh of relief.
York piloted his plane to Japan and bombed a large factory installation. After strafing an airfield and not encountering any opposition, the men of Plane #8 made their getaway, flying just above the treetops. Navigator/bombardier Nolan Herndon calculated they would run out of gas over the ocean, three hundred miles from free China.
York made the decision to fly to the Soviet Union which was much closer. By that time, the U.S.S.R. had joined the Allies. York directly disobeyed his commander, Jimmy Doolittle, who had ordered the Raiders not to land in the Soviet Union under any circumstances.
The Raiders of Plane #8 reached the Soviet coastline and turned inland. They sighted a small airport thirty miles from the city of Vladivostok and made a perfect landing. The Russians greeting the airmen didn’t speak English, but they correctly identified the airmen as “Americanski.” They communicated through sign language and provided the Raiders with food and vodka.
The airmen asked for gasoline and an opportunity to contact the American Embassy, but their requests were put off. The next morning the Raiders were informed that their plane was ready, but, when they emerged from their quarters, they discovered a DC-3 waiting for them.
The crew of Plane #8 was taken to Khabarovsk, Siberia, and interrogated by a Russian general who informed them they would be interned in the Soviet Union. The airmen were taken outside the city to an army dacha by the Amur River, across from Manchuria.“ The Soviets provided beds, three meals a day, and a guard for each of the men. The Raiders were convinced they would only be interned for a week or two.
Amur River Basin – Note the Cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk on the Right Courtesy of Wikimedia By Kmusser – Own work using Digital Chart of the World and GTOPO data
Ten days later the Soviets locked the Raiders and their guards in a third-class sleeper car attached to a freight train. The men traveled for twenty-one days to the village of Okhuna, three hundred miles south of Moscow. The U.S.S.R. billed the United States thirty thousand rubles a month to provide for the interned soldiers.
As time passed, the Raiders’ worries grew. They learned that the Wehrmacht (German Army) was approaching Moscow. They studied a map and realized that Okhuna was only a few days’ march from the front lines of the war. After seven weeks, American officials from Moscow arrived to check on the Raiders, and the airmen asked about the rest of the boys on the Tokyo raid. The officials had no information about the other members of the Doolittle gang, but the attaché brought a telegram from the U.S. for copilot Bob Emmens. He was now the father of a red-headed baby boy!
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
War-time shortages caught up with the airmen, and they went without meat or vegetables and sometimes both for days. For weeks they survived on cabbage, rice, black bread, tea, and red caviar. Next the Soviets sent the men by train and then on a flat-bottomed paddle wheeler into the foothills of the Urals, on the western edge of Siberia. The inhabitants in that area were very poor, dirty, and malnourished.
The American ambassador visited the Raiders but could provide them with very little. The men ate boiled, fried, and baked cereal, and pure, uncooked pork fat, sliced about an inch thick. The temperature hovered at thirty-five to forty degrees below zero and for one three-day period at fifty below. The airmen remained in Okhansk for seven months, and their physical condition rapidly deteriorated.
In early January of 1943, the Raiders wrote a letter to Stalin. They praised the progress of the Soviet Army against the Germans, and they made three requests. Their reply came close to the end of March with the arrival of two Russian officers sent by the High Command of the Red Army in Moscow. They couldn’t grant the airmen’s request to be released from the Soviet Union, but they could move them to a warmer climate and allow them to work.
The Raiders traveled by car for twelve hours to the city of Molotov, flew south to Chkalov, and then traveled by train for eight days to Ashkhabad, the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan. On the trip, Ski York shared a compartment with a young Russian named Kolya. Kolya had brought a large store of various food items and shared his bounty with Ski for every meal during the trip.
Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin
In Ashkhabad, the airmen lived in a two-room mud house and slept on bare wooden beds with one blanket each. They worked in a factory, overhauling small trainer biplanes. A Soviet officer showed up to count heads each night. Kolya visited and also took the Raiders to his own home, but always after dark. The airmen begged him to help them escape to Persia (present day Iran), only fifteen miles south of their current location.
One evening Kolya escorted York to the downtown square and directed him to a Persian man, Abdul Arram. After bargaining with York, Abdul agreed to take the airmen across the border for two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars.
In the middle of the night on May 26, 1943, after more than a year of internment in the Soviet Union, the Raiders of Plane #8 hiked over a mountain into Soviet-occupied Persia. After managing to avoid Russian sentries manning the bridge into the city of Meshed, the airmen found refuge at the British Embassy. From there they flew to India and on to the United States.
Source:
Nelson, Craig. The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory. Viking, 2002.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the American people longed to strike Japan where it would hurt – in their homeland. But four months after the United States entered World War II, the Japanese continued to conquer territory in Asia and defeat the allies at every turn.
The Japanese Empire in 1942 – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In January 1942, top commanders in the American military began planning a sneak air attack on Japan, targeting military sites and industrial facilities supporting the war effort. Dubbed “Special Aviation Project #1,” the planned bombing was kept so secret that the volunteer army pilots selected to participate didn’t know their target until after they’d sailed out of San Francisco aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier.
One hundred forty Army Air Corps volunteers from the Seventeenth Bombardment Group trained for this mission at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida. Everything about the mission was peculiar from the start. Their B-25’s had been altered en route to Florida, and the men had to quickly adjust to the changes. A navy pilot arrived to train the soldiers and select who would go on the mission. The pilots trained to taxi for no more than five hundred feet and lift off at fifty miles per hour. This had never been done in a B-25. Then the crews practiced flying at extremely low levels and pulling up to accurately drop practice bombs.
Jimmy Doolittle – Pre-WWII. Courtesy of U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia
Shortly after their training began, the airmen met their mission commander—Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Doolittle was a legend and many considered him to be America’s greatest aviator. Doolittle warned his men of the project’s danger and gave them the opportunity to drop out without repercussions. He said that “some of them would come home as heroes, and others, as angels,” but none of the men took Doolittle up on his offer to quit.
Three weeks later the airmen who’d been selected were roused from sleep, ordered to load up their gear, and immediately fly to McClellan Field near Sacramento. Those not chosen for the mission were heartbroken. Ordered to practice their “hedgehopping” on the way to California, the airmen enjoyed flying under power lines, racing dust clouds in the desert, banking through an open drawbridge, and frightening cattle in the fields. One twenty-two-year-old pilot landed on a Texas highway and went to say goodbye to his mom and dad.
At McClellan, the B-25’s were tuned-up and further modified. Unfortunately, the civilian mechanics who couldn’t be told of the operation, made unauthorized adjustments, undoing previous changes unique to the mission. There wasn’t time to undo the damage.
On April 1st, the army airmen flew their planes to Alameda Naval Air Station, outside San Francisco. The first sixteen B-25’s to arrive and not have anything wrong with them were loaded on the aircraft carrier, Hornet. This was the first joint mission coordinated by the army and navy since the Civil War, and the navy men and marines did their best to put the army men in their place.
B-25’s Aboard the USS Hornet En Route to Japan Courtesy National Museum of the U.S. Air Force via English Wikipedia
But all the rudeness and snubs evaporated two days out to sea. The Hornet’s captain announced over the loudspeakers that the mission’s target was Tokyo, the army was going to bomb Japan, and the navy would get them as close to the enemy as possible. Cheers and screams broke out, and the navy men couldn’t do enough to accommodate the army airmen for the rest of their journey aboard the Hornet. They realized the danger of the mission and wanted to honor the volunteer airmen for their bravery.
Doolittle had already briefed his men about their mission and informed them that their chances of making it back were slim. The goal was to sail within 450 miles of Japan, bomb the islands at night, and fly to unoccupied landing fields in eastern China. The airmen knew that if their B-25 bombers successfully lifted off the aircraft carrier, they could not return to the ship because the landing strip would be too short. They also knew the likely probability of running out of gas before reaching safe landing strips in China. Again, Doolittle gave his men the opportunity to stay behind, but none did.
Doolittle Raiders Aboard the USS Hornet. Courtesy of the U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
On April 10th, the Hornet’s fleet rendezvoused with the fleet of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, and they proceeded west under radio silence. The Japanese had intercepted an earlier transmission between the two fleets and knew where they were headed. The Japanese made plans to hit the American ships when they were six hundred miles from Tokyo. The weather grew bad, but the terrible squalls rendered the fleets invisible to the enemy.
On April 18th, the American ships encountered and sank a seventy-ton Japanese fishing boat, picketed about six hundred miles from Japan. The Enterprise picked up radio traffic indicating that the Japanese fleet had changed course, and the Americans knew they’d been discovered.
Sinking of the Japanese Fishing Boat Nitto Maru. Courtesy of U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
The American commanders realized the B-25’s wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach Japan and the Allied airfields in China, but the fleets couldn’t sail closer and put themselves in range of bombers flying out of Japan. And so, Admiral Halsey, the task force leader, sent a message: “LAUNCH PLANES. TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND: GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU.” The army airmen were either waiting for breakfast or just getting up when the order came over the ship’s loudspeakers for them to man their planes.
Jimmy Doolittle and the Crew of Plane #1 – Courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia
Doolittle was the first pilot to ever fly a B-25 loaded with bombs, extra fuel, and a crew of five from an aircraft carrier. The skies poured rain, and the sea churned in thirty-foot swells, but the ship’s turbulence contributed to the successful launch of all sixteen bombers. The navy flagman timed each take-off so that the planes started down the runway when the ship’s bow started down and then the planes launched as the ship’s deck came up. After the last plane was in the air, the carrier fleets immediately reversed course and safely reached Hawaii.
The Doolittle Raiders bombed Japan in the middle of the day, and despite heavy anti-aircraft fire and attacks from Japanese fighter planes, each B-25 dropped its payload on various targets and left Japanese airspace safely. Radio Japan announced the attack on Tokyo, and the American papers picked up the news.
On April 21st, President Roosevelt held a press conference and confirmed “that the United States Army Air Corps planes had very successfully attacked ‘from our new base in Shangri-La'” (a fictitious place because Roosevelt didn’t want to give away the mission’s launch site.)
The mission accomplished its purpose—it was the first victory for the Allies in World War II and greatly boosted the morale of Allied civilians and soldiers.
B-25 Taking Off from the USS Hornet during the Doolittle Raid Courtesy of U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Stories of the Individual Doolittle Crews
Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Raiders, piloted the first B-25 to take off from the deck of the USS Hornet. A terrible storm bucked the ship with tremendous waves, but all eyes focused on the lead plane. If the “Old Man” didn’t succeed, none of them would.
Doolittle’s Plane Launching from the USS Hornet Courtesy of the U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
Plane #1 lifted off with yards to spare, and the sailors across the whole convoy cheered. Each of the sixteen planes lifted off four minutes apart and spread out over a field fifty miles wide and one hundred fifty miles long.
The pilots flew low over the water, and their crews watched for surface ships and other aircraft. The B-25’s cleared the storm front two hundred miles before reaching Japan and encountered clear skies all the way to their targets. After reaching land, Doolittle flew close to treetop level. He spotted a squadron of Japanese fighters ahead, so he dropped lower and the aircraft’s olive drab paint caused the plane to “disappear” over a rice paddy and lose the pursing fighters.
Doolittle flew over Tokyo at thirty feet, but nearing the target, ascended to 1,200 feet, and bombardier Fred Braemer dropped all four bombs consecutively. After diving to a low altitude for their getaway, Doolittle and his crew encountered antiaircraft fire. Although copilot Dick Cole counted eighty enemy planes during the course of their #1’s flight over Japan, the only sustained minor damage—some holes in the tail from flak.
Doolittle headed to the East China Sea. His navigator, Hank Potter, estimated they would run out of gas one hundred and thirty-five miles short of the Chinese coast. This was a frightening prospect since the crew spotted sharks basking in the sea below. Fifteen of the sixteen planes followed this same route, and after leaving Japanese territory, a miracle developed.
The prevailing winds which usually blew from west to east reversed direction, and the fifteen planes rode on a thirty-mile-an-hour tailwind. This gifted them with an extra two hundred and fity miles of flying time before running out of gas. The tailwind lasted for five to six hours, allowing all fifteen planes to reach mainland China.
As the planes neared land, the tailwind gave out, night descended, and the Raiders hit a coastal storm. Doolittle headed for a landing field at Chuchow, then in the hands of Free China, but couldn’t locate it in the storm and darkness. Through a serious of missteps the authorities in Chuchow didn’t receive word about the imminent arrival of the allied planes or of the signal the Doolittle crews would use to contact them.
Instead, upon hearing the noise of approaching aircraft and assuming the Japanese were conducting a night raid, the officials in Chuchow ordered a complete blackout. At the last possible moment, Doolittle instructed his crew members to bail out. He was the only member of the Raiders who had previously jumped from a plane, and he was afraid he’d repeat an earlier experience and break both ankles.
Gunner Paul Leonard landed in the rain and dark on the side of a very steep embankment. After crawling twenty feet up and down and getting nowhere, he rolled up in his shoot, wrapped his arm around a bamboo tree, and went to sleep.
Copilot, Dick Cole, landed in a thirty-foot pine tree. He climbed to the top, untangled his chute, then climbed down and inspected his surroundings. He was on the top of a very steep mountain, so he made a hammock and stayed in the tree for the night.
Colonel Doolittle landed in a recently fertilized rice paddy. After extricating himself from the mess, he spent the night inside a water mill doing light calisthenics to fend off the cold.
Doolittle, Flight Crew, & Chinese Officials in China after Raid on Japan Courtesy of U.S. Army Air Forces via Wikimedia Commons
In the morning, a Chinese peasant took Doolittle to the local headquarters of the Chinese army, and Dick Cole arrived shortly after. A band of renegade guerrilla fighters brought Leonard, Potter, and Braemer in later.
Leonard and Doolittle climbed to the site where their plane had crashed. The debris was spread over several acres. Doolittle said he “‘felt lower than a frog’s posterior.’” This was his first combat mission, and he considered it a failure. He expected to be court-martialed or relegated to sitting out the war behind a desk.
Japanese soldiers in the area could have captured Doolittle and his crew, but the Free Chinese found the airmen first and smuggled them many miles to safety. At the time, American missionary John Birch was travelling by river and arrived at the same location where the crew was hiding in the cabin of a boat. A Chinaman led Birch to the door of the crews’ hiding place, but when they heard his voice they were afraid Birch was a Japanese impersonator. His Southern drawl convinced Leonard to open the door. Birch joined the airmen, translating for them, and facilitating their trip to Chuchow.
The Japanese conducted regular air raids on Chuchow, forcing the American airmen to retreat to a handmade cave in the hills outside the city. They remained at an army post near the cave until a United States C-47 landed on April 29th and flew them to Chungking, the capital of Free China. At the American Embassy in Chungking, Doolittle learned that seventy-five of his eighty Raiders had landed in enemy-controlled territory. Twenty were rescued and brought to Chungking at the same time.
President Roosevelt, General Marshall, and General Arnold sent personal congratulations to the Raiders, and Doolittle was promoted to brigadier general. He left Chungking on May 9thon a two-week puddle-jumping trip west to Washington D.C. where he was immediately ushered to the White House and met with President Roosevelt.
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The Crew of Plane #7, the Ruptured Duck: McClure, Lawson, Clever, Davenport, Thatcher. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Shortly before the Ruptured Duck launched from the Enterprise, Pilot Ted Lawson levered the plane’s flaps down, the correct position for lift-off. But fearing the strong gale would tear the flaps off and disable the plane, he pulled the flaps back up. The navy flagman signaled Lawson to rev his engines and, after thirty seconds, gave the okay to release the brakes and head down the short flight deck.
The wind grabbed at the Ruptured Duck’s wings and sent it close to the edge of the ship, but Ted braked and steered the B-25 back to the white navigation line he needed to follow for take-off. The deck disappeared beneath the plane, and it skimmed the top of the waves before climbing away from the ship. Ted reached down to pull up the flaps and realized that he’d taken off without using them. Those on deck had noticed, and it had given them quite a scare.
To save fuel on the trip to Japan, Lawson maintained an altitude of twenty feet above the ocean. Gunner Dave Thatcher tested the turret, but it failed to engage. If the plane was attacked, Thatcher wouldn’t be able to move the .50 caliber rear guns which were currently pointing straight back. Switching on the emergency juice didn’t help.
In the meantime, an empty five-gallon gas can thrown out by one of the crews ahead flew past the Ruptured Duck’s left wing. If it had hit a prop, the plane would have crashed. Ted called bombardier Robert Clever in the plane’s snout and asked him to engage the automatic pilot. The plane moved dangerously to the left, forcing Lawson to quickly grab the controls. The automatic pilot didn’t work either.
The Ruptured Duck arrived at Tokyo Bay, and gunner Dave Thatcher, watching from his immovable turret, observed six Japanese fighter planes flying above. One dove but then flew away. Lawson hedgehopped fast and low to avoid the “ack-ack” attacks (anti-aircraft fire).
Yokosuka Japanese Naval Base Taken from a B-25 Bomber during the Doolittle Raid Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
The crew located its targets, and Lawson safely guided the Ruptured Duck up to 1500 feet, allowing Bombardier Robert Clever to drop the payload. Clouds of flak appeared in front of them and flew past at the right altitude but at the wrong time to damage their aircraft. Lawson put the plane into a screaming dive and outran the flak at three hundred and fifty miles per hour, then headed for China.
After crossing the China Sea, Lawson piloted the Ruptured Duck over numerous islands near the Chinese coast and located a beach that appeared adequate for landing, which he preferred to bailing out. The plane’s fuel level was dangerously low, and, before reaching the beach, both engines coughed and lost power. The bomber lost altitude, and a quarter of a mile from shore the back landing wheels hit a wave, slamming the Duck to a complete stop.
The pilot, co-pilot and navigator flew through the bomber’s windshield, and the bombardier pitched through the nose. Thatcher, the gunner, regained consciousness inside the rapidly sinking plane. When he tried to escape, he realized the Ruptured Duck was upside down, so he reversed course and crawled through the hatch above him.
Four of the five crew members on the Ruptured Duck were seriously injured. Pilot Ted Lawson landed underwater, but upright in the sand, still buckled into his pilot’s seat. He didn’t feel trapped and didn’t fight for air but thought about his wife and mother and wished he’d left them money. He was able to unbuckle his seat belt and float to the surface but was temporarily paralyzed and couldn’t swim.
The waves carried Lawson one hundred feet to the shore where he discovered the extent of his injuries. His teeth were bent in, and when he tried to straighten them, they broke off. His lower lip was torn down to the cleft of his chin, and his left arm was destroyed. His whole left leg was sliced wide open, exposing the bone.
The impact had pulled both of Navigator Mac McClure’s arms out of their sockets and left them swollen from his shoulders to his wrists. He was unable to use his arms to swim but kicked and hurled his body to shore and crawled onto the beach.
Blood poured from bombardier Bob Clever’s head and face from a serious gash and deep cuts. Half of his hair had been stripped away, and he could only crawl on his hands and knees because of back and hip sprains. Co-pilot Dean Davenport had deep cuts on his lower right leg and was unable to walk.
Gunner Dave Thatcher spotted two Chinese fishermen on a ridge above the beach but thought they were Japanese soldiers. Mac McClure stopped Thatcher from shooting the men, and once he put his gun away, eight of the fisherman came down to the beach and led the fliers to a shack about a half mile away.
Clever crawled the whole distance. The men shivered in their wet clothes, so the Chinese peasants gave them quilts to wrap up in and mud-encrusted bamboo mats to rest on. The airmen tried to communicate with their benefactors, but the language barrier proved difficult.
A Chinaman who appeared to hold power over the others arrived at the shack and studied the airmen’s insignia. He turned to Captain Lawson and introduced himself as “Charlie.” His English was extremely limited, but he pointed at them and said “Melican.” He promised to come back for them and repeatedly said, “Boat.”
Dave Thacker returned to the beach the next morning and dove around the plane, seeking more of their medical kits but couldn’t locate them. He heard a motor and spotted a Japanese patrol boat in the distance. The enemy had discovered the presence of the Doolittle Raiders.
Chinese Junks by Lai Afong. Courtesy Wikipedia. Public Domain
Charlie returned to the shack the next morning with a dozen helpers who constructed litters and carried the wounded airmen to a Chinese guerrilla camp. Armed guerrillas carried the men through villages, across fields, onto a flat-bottomed boat, and down a muddy canal. Another group of peasants met the boat and carried the wounded men straight up a winding hillside trail and down toward the shore where a Chinese junk waited to take them to the mainland.
However, before reaching the junk, the litter bearers heard a Japanese gunboat approaching and dumped the Raiders in a ditch. The boat appeared, and the Japanese soldiers questioned the men on the junk. The Americans were very impressed that the Chinese never gave them up to the enemy.
Chinese Carry Doolittle’s Raiders to Safety Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
After arriving on the mainland, the Raiders were taken to a China Relief station where Young Doctor Chen and his helpers awaited the airmen. They’d spent the night running twenty-six miles from their hospital in Linhai and brought sedan chairs to immediately carry the Americans back to the safety of Linhai. The local Chinese soldiers, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts stood at attention and saluted the wounded Raiders as they were carried out of town.
Doctor Chen’s father, as well as an English missionary couple, a young Australian nurse, and other volunteer nurses manned the hospital at Linhai. The facility only had a little chloroform, antiseptic fluid, and bandages left. The airmen were badly injured, their wounds had become infected, and Lawson could only eat and drink through a slit in his mouth. His leg had turned a horrible color and was swollen from the ankles to the groin.
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Plane #15 – No Nickname
When the time came for Plane #15 to take off from the Enterprise, she refused to budge. Pilot Don Smith feared he and his crew would be scrubbed from the mission. A deckhand realized they’d failed to remove the chocks in front of the B-25’s wheels and remedied the problem.
The Crew of Plane #15: Sessler, Smith, White, Williams, Saylor Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Smith maneuvered #15 down the flight deck, but a rogue wave caused the Hornet’s bow to dip just as the plane reached the end of the deck. Pointing down toward the water, #15 faced an imminent catastrophe, but the plane’s speed, and the strong winds enabled her to lift off safely.
Plane #15 and her crew headed for targets in the city of Kobe, but a 2,500-foot mountain stood in the middle of their flight path. The mountain was not on their charts. While adjusting their route, they listened to a Tokyo radio station until a shrieking alarm, a voice shouting in Japanese, and complete silence interrupted the broadcast.
Due to the radio warning, the crew expected trouble in Kobe, but none materialized. They successfully dropped their bombs on an aircraft factory, dockyards, a steel works, and the machinery works. They only observed a little flak that didn’t come close to them.
Plane #15 reached the coast of China, and Smith and co-pilot “Griff” Williams decided to land in the ocean rather than travel inland and risk running out of gas. They located a soft spot on the water a half mile from shore and landed the craft so smoothly that no one was injured.
The crew had to evacuate quickly before the heavy bomber sank, so the men grabbed their supplies and prepared their raft. Gunner Thomas White, a medical doctor, salvaged his surgical instruments and medical kit and climbed from the plane seconds before it sank under the waves.
The life raft was too small to accommodate all the crew and their supplies. When one person moved too quickly, another crewman was knocked into the water. Waves pulled men overboard, and they made no progress with their rowing. A rogue wave forced the raft against a sharp edge of the sunken plane, and the raft began to collapse. Another wave flipped the whole raft over, and the crew lost everything, including Doc White’s bandages and medicines.
The airmen of Plane #15 abandoned their useless raft and swam through the crashing waves to the shore. They climbed cliffs surrounding the beach, spotted a light in the distance, and came upon a small house and a covered goat pen. The light was extinguished, and no one answered the door. The Raiders attempted to settle in the goat pen for the night, but the owner finally emerged from the house, brought the men inside, and fed them. The airmen were two feet taller than their host.
Local Chinese peasants came to the house, but no one was able to communicate until some children brought a book with pictures and English translations. The men learned they were on the only island in the vicinity that didn’t have its own Japanese patrol. Friends of the Chinese family sailed the crew to a nearby island and handed them over to the guerrilla band led by Charlie.
On April 25th, seven days after “The Ruptured Duck’s” crash landing, the crew members of Plane #15 arrived at the hospital in Linhai. The plane’s gunner, Doc White, was the only medical doctor among the eighty Doolittle Raiders, and he carried two tubes of morphine with him. White was also a surgeon and amputated Lawson’s infected leg, saving the captain’s life. All of the crew members on both bombers eventually made it to Chungking and out of China safely.
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Due to a faulty setting on its stabilizer, Plane #2 launched too sharply from the Enterprise “lost its air and seemed to collapse in flight.” A strong gust of wind came to the rescue and the plane avoided a collision with the ship’s hull which would have sliced it in two.
Travis Hoover, pilot of Plane #2, followed Doolittle’s plane until they reached Japan, but the army intelligence photos they’d brought with them didn’t match what the airmen now viewed. His navigator eventually gave Hoover a new course, but they didn’t spot their primary target, a powder works. They picked a new target but were unable to rise above 900 feet. When their bombs struck, the concussion jolted the plane and smoke rose all around them. If they’d struck the powder works, they wouldn’t have survived.
Trav Hoover followed General Doolittle to the coast of China, where they ran into a storm. The navigator checked his charts and determined they were in Japanese territory. They headed southwest and discovered mountains which were missing from their maps. They attempted to climb to a higher elevation, but each time they did, the left engine died. Now “they were too low on gas to climb, and too low in altitude to jump.”
Trav had no choice but to find a place to land. He brought the plane down in a rice paddy, and the airmen set it on fire so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. The airmen knew the Japanese forces were very close, so they headed west through the mountains, guided by their dime store compasses.
Not knowing whom they could trust, the Raiders avoided contact with the locals, and all five men managed to survive on “one canteen of water, one ration, and a few candy bars” for three days. They made their way through the mountains but ran out of food and turned to the Chinese for help. They discovered that the Japanese had just moved out of their area the week before.
Chinese guerrilla soldiers took the airmen in, but they were unable to communicate with each other until a young man who spoke a little English asked them how he could help. Tung-Sheng Liu, a former university student from Beijing, was just traveling through the area, using the back roads to avoid the Japanese and had stopped overnight at a small hotel. He stayed with the airman and directed them away from areas where they would have been captured by the enemy.
The Crew of Plane #2 with Tung-Sheng Liu (in white coat) Courtesy of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons
Tung-Sheng Liu and the Chinese guerillas led the five Raiders to Chuhsien, one hundred miles away. They traveled over trails through the mountains at night, covering ten to fifteen miles a day. Housing was arranged by the local guerrillas, and Chinese bearers carried the men in sedan chairs. After a week in Chuhsien, two buses arrived and took the airmen to Hengyang where they stayed for another week until an American C-47 landed and took them to Chungking and the American consulate. Tung-Sheng Liu immigrated to the U.S. and was named an honorary Doolittle Raider.
Davey Jones, pilot of Plane #5, discovered that one of his tanks was short by thirty gallons, but the hose had been turned off “and he could either have his plane pushed overboard or get in line and join the mission.” He joined the mission. Plane #5 crossed Tokyo Bay “and headed for their assignment on the far side of the city.” They encountered machine-gun fire and ack-ack. Hundreds of tracers followed their plane, so Davey Jones pulled up to 1200 feet, and they chose a new target—an oil storage facility and a power plant—and they were successful. Antiaircraft fire was intense, but they made it out of the city.
Using dead reckoning, Plane #5 arrived at the coast of China. Davey Jones determined they were close “to land because the color of the water changed.” He pulled the plane up to 5000 feet. They dropped a parachute flare and spotted a river and discovered they were over mountains. They had no choice but to bail out, which none of them had done before. Because of the bad weather and zero visibility, Gunner Joe Manske didn’t think he was falling. He thought he was just suspended. Davey was the last airman out the hatch and was blown against the fuselage. He hung on with his arms stretched out and then pulled the ripcord.
Davey Jones and his co-pilot, Hoss Wilder, ran into each other at a railroad station house, and the Chinese took them up to the town of Yushan in a railroad boxcar. Jones and Wilder were greeted by the mayor, thousands of people and huge banners that said, “Welcome brave heroes! You’ve struck a blow for us.” All five crewman made it out of China safely.
Plane 3, the Whiskey Pete, successfully launched from the deck of the USS Hornet during a squall but arrived over Tokyo on a clear, sunny day. The Whiskey Pete encountered strong anti-aircraft fire, forcing pilot Bob Gray and co-pilot Shorty Manch to pull up to 1450 feet. They passed over the Temple of Heaven, the residence of the Japanese emperor, but Commander Jimmy Doolittle had expressly forbidden the Raiders from attacking the emperor’s palace. Instead, bombardier Aden Jones dropped Pete’s bombs on the assigned steel, gas, and chemical plants nearby. Dozens of fighters and enemy warships fired at Pete, but she and her crew made a successfully getaway and headed to China.
The Whiskey Pete reached the coast of China as night was approaching and continued inland for one hour. Expecting their fuel to run out at any moment, the airmen dropped chute flares for illumination but didn’t detect any flat land. With no other choice available, the crew bailed out into the unknown. The navigator and bombardier left through the forward hatch.
Co-pilot Shorty Manch used his flashlight to check if gunner Leland Faktor had departed through the rear hatch. When he was satisfied, Shorty jumped. Unfortunately, his 24-foot parachute was too small for his weight, so when he pulled the D-ring, the impact of the chute’s opening jerked his bowie knife, ax, canteen, and all of his private arsenal away, except for a gun in his holster. The Baby Ruth bars he’d stuffed in his jacket flew off, leaving behind their empty wrappers.
Navigator Chuck Ozuk’s parachute tangled with a pine tree, causing Ozuk to be thrown against a ledge of rock, which cut his left leg wide open. He was unable to cut himself out of the lines or harness in the darkness. When daylight came, Ozuk gazed upon his surroundings in awe. All alone, high up in the mountains, with a beautiful sun above him, he almost thought he’d arrived in heaven. He freed himself, made a crutch from a tree limb, and headed west for two days without help.
Shorty Manch
Manch’s Chinese rescuer communicated with him by drawing with a stick in the dirt. First the Chinaman drew a Japanese flag, and Manch responded by holding his nose and waving the picture away. Then the man pulled out a clipping of an old British Blenheim plane and pointed at the insignia. Shorty shook his head again. Next, the Chinaman pulled out a four-year-old copy of the Saturday Evening Post with a picture of President Roosevelt on the cover.
Shorty grinned and pointed to Roosevelt and then to himself. Everybody present laughed and shook hands with the American. Manch slept in the man’s home that night and was escorted to another village the next morning. He spotted pieces of wreckage from Whiskey Pete along the way. “In the village, they showed him the American clothes they had found, some pieces of equipment from the navigator’s deck, and the body of twenty-one-year-old Leland Faktor.”
Faktor was the first Raider to die, but the cause of death was unclear because of conflicting reports from the eyewitnesses. Doolittle concluded that Faktor “landed on extremely rough terrain and was killed in the secondary fall.”
The Chinese whisked the remaining four members of the Whiskey Pete crew to safety, and the crewmen were reunited. A short time later, Pilot Bob Gray was assigned to fly transports over the Himalayas between India and China. Two days after he was promoted to the rank of captain, Gray’s plane crashed, and he and two other former Raiders were killed.
Co-pilot Shorty Manch was also assigned to the China-India-Burma Theater but was transferred Stateside in 1943. He served in the Korean War and later trained young officers to fly jets at Nellis AFB in Nevada. On one of his training missions, his T-33 burst into flames over Las Vegas. Manch ordered his students to bailout, while he guided the plane away from a residential neighborhood and an elementary school. By the time Manch ejected, his parachute couldn’t fully open, and he died when he hit the ground. He was 39.
Bombardier Aden Jones also served in the China-India-Burma Theater until 1943 and then was transferred Stateside. After the war, he served briefly in Japan and was discharged in 1948. He died at the age of 62. Navigator Chuck Ozuk was sent to North Africa in 1942 and was relieved from active duty in 1945. He died in 2010 at the age of 94.
Sources:
The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory by Craig Nelson (Viking, 2002)
With the outbreak of WWII, submarine warfare took on new dimensions. Many heroic battles occurred “under the sea.” The adventures of one particular Polish submarine received international attention and provided inspiration to those at war.
Where? The Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland, and the North Sea
Poland’s submarines were commissioned to protect the 90 miles of Polish coastline on the Baltic Sea. The Orzel had only been at sea for about twenty months when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and World War II began. At first, the Polish submarine fleet carried on very low-key operations, observing and reporting German naval activity, but on the seventh day of the war, the fleet was ordered to return to the Central Baltic region.
Poland’s submarines weren’t prepared for battle—they’d missed their May maintenance because of the seriousness of the international situation and had been at sea for nearly twelve months without an overhaul.
At first, the Polish submarine fleet carried on very low-key operations, observing and reporting German naval activity, but on the seventh day of the war, the fleet was ordered to return to the Central Baltic region.
On September 14th, the commanding officer of the Polish submarine division ordered the sub commanders to carry out patrols and thwart enemy shipping for as long as possible. When they could no longer continue, they were to sail to the United Kingdom. If that wasn’t possible, they were to seek internment in Sweden.
When the Polish submarine Wilk attempted the long journey, the Germans attacked with depth charges and dropped thirty-eight bombs from the air. Despite the opposition, the Wilk made it safely to the rendezvous point at Rosyth, Scotland on September 20.
The Orzel’s adventure lasted much longer . . . After patrolling the Baltic Sea for nine days, the Orzel landed at Talinn, capital of Estonia. The captain needed medical treatment for stomach pains. Officially neutral, but sympathetic to Germany, the Estonians insisted upon following international law. They required the Orzel to leave port within twenty-four hours but not until a German freighter already in port departed first (also international law). The German vessel didn’t sail, so the Orzel missed her departure deadline.
The Estonian government then interned the Orzel and her crew. They removed the ship’s charts, the sailors’ small arms, the breach locks on the ship’s guns, and fifteen of twenty torpedoes. They stationed two Estonian guards on the ship to conduct surveillance. But, undetected, the Polish submariners partially cut through the thick ropes mooring the ship, leaving the sub attached to the jetty by a single strand.
On the night of September 17-18, two Polish sailors crawled ashore and cut the lines powering the jetty searchlights. The sailors severed the last rope tying the Orzel to the jetty and overpowered the two Estonian guards, taking them aboard the sub. At the mouth of the harbor, the ship hit a rock, but the crew trimmed the tanks, and the sub floated free.
While the Estonians fired on the sub with rifles and artillery from the small fortified islands outside the city, the Orzel submerged and fled. The sailors steered blindly with no chart for soundings. At dawn, they lay down at the bottom and waited as the hunters passed over them and depth charges burst around them.
At midnight, the Orzel cautiously rose, and the submariners discovered they were at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Nothing was in sight, so they remained surfaced and recharged the sub’s batteries.
Meanwhile, the Orzel’s escape from Estonia became an international incident, and Germany accused the Estonians of complicity with Poland. The Soviets, who had invaded Poland on September 17th , patrolled the Gulf of Finland with cruisers and six destroyers, looking for Polish subs. The Orzel’s crew dropped off the Estonian guards on the island of Gotland, Sweden, leaving them with money, cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey. The Orzel then cruised the Baltic for two weeks, evading the Soviets.
The Orzel in English Port, 1940 – Public Domain Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
With their water supply running low and their cook suffering from an infected finger, the crew of the Orzel decided to proceed to Scotland. On the way, they sighted a flotilla of German destroyers, so they dove to a shallow bed and avoided detection. After dark, they surfaced to periscope depth, ran aground, floated free, and crept along until reaching deeper water, all while the German flotilla continued to patrol.
The Orzel traveled up the narrow waterway between Denmark and Sweden and arrived at the North Sea where she was vulnerable to German attack and “friendly fire” from British patrols. On October 14 at six o’clock in the morning, a British shore naval station picked up a faint transmission from the Orzel, and a few hours later a Royal Navy destroyer escorted the sub into Rosyth.
The arrival of the Orzel shocked the Royal Navy—the British had presumed the ship was lost at sea. The Orzel went on to serve the Allies, sinking the clandestine German troop transport, Rio de Janeiro, in southern Norway in April 1940. During the sub’s seventh patrol in May-June of 1940, the Orzel disappeared and was never heard from again. To this day, her fate remains a mystery, although the Polish government has made repeated attempts to locate her final resting place.
