Bremen, November 26, 1943
Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;
LORD, hear my voice!
—Psalm 130
The story of Star Dust is a tale of two journeys—one in a badly crippled B-17, the other into the inner reaches of a man’s soul. It is a story that is best told by three individuals, William Fort, Grover Mullins, and Charles Spencer, but some introductions are necessary to place their accounts in proper context.
Lt. Fort was now the captain of his own ship, having been left by Lt. Calder Wise, his Instructor Pilot, two missions before. This was his eighth raid and his third trip with his crew’s regular copilot, Lt. MacDonald Riddick, of Beaumont, Texas. Lt. Fort’s navigator this day was Lt. Harold J. Rocketto, of Brooklyn—this was his first mission. The engineer was a regular member of Lt. Fort’s crew, Sgt. Grover C. Mullins, of Windsor, Missouri. And Lt. Charles W. Spencer from Peoria, Illinois, was the bombardier. He had been with the 358th Squadron before Fort’s crew had arrived, and he had flown a number of raids with them. He and Bill Fort were friendly even though they were not particularly close to one another.
How Spencer came to fly this mission and the events leading up to the first fighter attack are things he can best describe. From here on he, Fort, and Mullins will relate what took place; Spencer recalls the preliminaries this way.
Spencer: “I had returned from R&R not in the best physical condition because I had the flu the last few days. I was there so I spent it in bed. So when I came back to the Group and to the 358th Squadron and talked to Captain Hungerford, he said. ‘Well, I’d like to have you go on a mission, but I don’t know whether to have you go since you’re getting over flu.’
“And I said. ‘Well, I think I feel good enough to go, so why don’t you put me down.’
Lt. William C. Fort, Jr.’s crew. Bottom row, L-R. Sgt. Grover C. Mullins, engineer; Sgt. James Pleasant, waist gunner; Sgt. Howard Zeitner, ball turret gunner; Sgt. Bernard Sutton, tail gunner; Sgt. James Supple, radioman; Sgt. John Viszneki, waist gunner. Top row, L-R. Lt. CalderL. Wise, Instructor Pilot (not on 11/26/43 mission); Lt. Fort, pilot; Lt. John Nothstein (not on 11/26/43 mission); Lt. Charles W. Spencer, bombardier. (Photo courtesy William C. Fort, Jr.)
“So I signed up for the mission. It was going to be a maximum effort and that meant that everything that could fly would fly. The only thing I didn’t like was that we were going to fly in Star Dust, which was not the best airplane on the field and was usually thought of as a ‘Hangar Queen.’ But that didn’t make too much difference to me. I was looking forward to finishing up my missions now that I had 15, so I was ready to get my 16th mission in.
“I remember the morning of the 26th being awakened early and having a nice regular breakfast of real eggs, having the briefing and having the time to get to the dispersal area and to get all ready for the flight.
“We took off about 0800 and it was a cold November morning. It was dismal, it was dreary, and it was overcast. We flew through a cloud layer to get up and out and on our way and I was flying with a navigator that I just met. His name was Rocketto and he was eager, just like I was on my first mission. We went over Eyebrook as usual and then headed out over the coast, headed for the Dutch coast on up the Channel and the North Sea and headed on for Bremen.
“It was a morning that was kind of ominous. There was something about it that I didn’t like. I don’t know if it was that I was flying an airplane I didn’t like and having this strange fellow that I didn’t know much about and all that, but it seemed to portend something.
“And my gun was sluggish. When I test-fired that gun I knew it wasn’t going to fire real good. I tried to fix it by checking the headspace, but I left my knife in my room and I couldn’t take the plate off so I wasn’t able to remedy it. I tried to shake it off and kind of had a little banter as we went on.
“As we got near the target I began to realize that they were an awful long time on the run and I realized maybe they had overshot. I realized that when they began to turn back and then they turned in. So everything seemed to be just a little bit off on this. As we headed in towards the target I began to have some kind of qualms. I suppose it was because everything seemed different this morning.
“As we looked for our fighter escort, we found the P-38s very easily, because they would throw their wings up and show their twin tails. I certainly saw the 38s. But I couldn’t pick out the Thunderbolts.
“And then I saw the Focke-Wulfs. They were coming in from the right. They were slightly high and they had plenty of contrails; it looked like there were plenty of them and then they seemed almost to turn in en masse, and I just picked out one to start working on. As I got off my bursts, I could hear Rocketto’s gun firing at the same time. We were both firing. My gun was sluggish, but I fired it.”
Fort: “I could see contrails about six miles straight ahead of us, and about the same distance 90 degrees to our right. I figured the Germans were the ones ahead of us, and our fighters were off to the right. But our fighters never seemed to get any closer to us, while the Germans did. They came barreling right on through, firing, and we got hit.”
Spencer: “That’s when the big ‘splat!’ hit the nose, and that’s all I can describe it as, a big ‘splat!’ It seemed as if someone had thrown a wet mop against the nose and that’s all I remember.”
Fort: “They blew out the Plexiglas nose. Both the navigator and the bombardier had been firing, but they only got off a very few shots, just one little burst. The navigator was under my feet in the nose, and out the cockpit window I saw his gun barrel suddenly go straight up—it had weights on it to counterbalance it—so I knew something had happened to him. It was the first German fighter he saw, and he didn’t fire more than a dozen shots before he was hit. I called on the intercom to him and the bombardier, but I didn’t get an answer.”
Spencer: “The next I remember is the fact that I was looking into a brilliant red, and then I realized I was looking into my own blood. It was covering my chest chute pack and I usually kneeled on it. There was all this red. And then I felt, to see if I could feel Rocketto, and I couldn’t feel him.
“Then I began to get a little weak and I began to realize the cold, the terrible blast of cold that was coming in there. As I felt the movements of the plane I began to wonder if we were going down. The helmet that I usually wore over my leather helmet I removed, and since I didn’t hear anything through the earphones, I took them off. I took off the flak pack that was covering my chest and clipped on my parachute, and got ready to hear the bell to get out when the bell would sound.”
Fort: “We fell out of formation, and things were quite confused for a few minutes. The Germans knocked out part of our oxygen supply, running down the right side of the plane, and the cold air was blowing up into the cockpit through the floor hatch to the nose, even though it was closed. It was like a wind tunnel. With the oxygen system out the copilot passed out pretty quick, and the engineer kept putting walk-around bottles on him to keep him going. The guys all down the right side of the plane back to the waist gunners had the same problem, and were using walk-around bottles. Mullins did quite a job helping them out.”
Mullins: “I got all the crew that was passed out from lack of oxygen on portable oxygen bottles, and got the copilot woke up and out of his daze from being passed out from lack of oxygen.”
Fort: “I wasn’t getting any oxygen, either. The plane had the old type constant-flow system, and my mask froze. I had to pull it up to get any air, but we somehow got back into another formation. We went on into the target, but didn’t drop any bombs.
“I sent my engineer down to the nose. He came back up, saying the navigator was dead and the bombardier was dying. Mullins couldn’t get an oxygen mask on the bombardier because his face had swollen up so much in the cold. It was swollen up the size of a basketball. Mullins like to froze to death himself up there.”
Mullins: “I went down into the nose compartment and got Lt. Spencer up into the cockpit area, but he wouldn’t stay and went back down into the nose section, which was blown away, in an attempt to use his guns to ward off fighters in order for us to get home.”
Spencer: “I began to realize too that the plane was more or less under control. It was in a struggle of some kind, I recognized that. But I began to search for the rheostat to turn up my heated suit. I had a heated suit finally, but I had no gloves or boots to hook onto it, but the heated suit was on medium and I wanted to put it up to high because I knew I needed all that extra heat.
“So that thought was in my mind. And then a great darkness seemed to begin settling over me, with pressure like a thousand vises crushing in. I began to realize that maybe this was it for me. Maybe I was dying.”
November 26, 1943. Lt. Charles W. Spencer at the forward gun of Star Dust after shells from a head-on German fighter attack shattered the plexiglas nose, killing the crew’s navigator, Lt. Harold J. Rocketto. Badly cut in the face and removed from the nose by the crew’s engineer, Sgt. Grover C. Mullins, Lt. Spencer returned to man his battle station despite freezing air at a temperature of –60°C blasting through the compartment at over 125 m.p.h. Horribly injured by frostbite in these terrible conditions, Spencer was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his determination to protect his ship and crew at all costs. Black and white reproduction of an original 1997 painting by Geoff Pleasance, part of the “Heroes of Molesworth” Series commissioned by Brian S. McGuire for display at the Joint Analysis Center Headquarters Building, RAF Molesworth, England. (Reproduced with permission of Brian S. McGuire).
“It was then that I really thought about my life, and how I hadn’t accomplished too much in the 24 years I had lived. Then I thought of my loved ones back home. And I saw their faces, I saw their anguish, I saw their sorrow, I saw their tears, I saw their heartache, all these things had begun to build up in my mind’s eye.
“And whether I cried out in actual words I do not know, but I did cry out unto the Lord to save me, to spare me, not to let me die because of the loved ones and their hearts, and their receiving news that I wouldn’t return. This was tearing me apart in my mind. And certainly I asked the Lord’s help.
“And certainly we know that He stepped in there and preserved me during those hours that I lay in that cold air until we got back to the English Coast. But it was a terrific experience, and I must have blacked out again, for I don’t remember anything until we got back to England.”
Fort: “I forget how far we had gone on the way back when No. 3 engine quit. It just died. So we could have done one of two things. We could have pulled up out of the formation and hit the deck. We might have made it back, and might not have. But as a rule they always said stay with the formation, so that’s what we did. I don’t know if it was the right thing or not the way it worked out.
“The engine was wind-milling pretty good, but it wasn’t causing any real problem except for the drag on it. We were running the other three engines at almost the maximum power. The guys, a lot of them, were crying, they wanted to go down and get oxygen, but I figured if I wasn’t getting it they could do without it too. We were at 26,000 feet. They say you can’t live at that altitude, but you can, don’t let them kid you. That bombardier did.”
Mullins: “I remember some of the crew yelling in the intercom, ‘Grover, take us down, we’re dying.’ I remember yelling back in the intercom, ‘SHUT UP, we’re not going down, we’re getting home somehow.’”
Fort: “After we finally saw water, we knew we’d be safe. We decided to go on down and take our chances. There was a lot of clouds, and if we got shot at we could slip into them, maybe, and hide for a few minutes. My hands were hurting me pretty bad at the time; I hadn’t been wearing my regular flying gloves, just the silk liners, and they were badly frostbitten from my having them on the controls with the cold air in there, so I told the copilot to go down lower. He put the plane into a dive like we were going to dive-bomb something.
“That’s when the prop to No. 3 started racing like mad. I took the wheel and pulled the plane up level to slow the prop down, but it didn’t slow down much. We started vibrating bad enough to shake the wing off in a couple of minutes. And then we heard something give. The shaft broke loose. The prop was still windmilling, but it wasn’t connected to the engine anymore.
“So we got down over the water, and I salvoed the bombs. I didn’t do it over land because if the Germans had seen us they would have figured we were already hit, and they went after stragglers. Then we had to worry about gasoline. I knew we were going to hit England; I figured we couldn’t miss it, but I didn’t know where.”
Mullins: “I tried to salvo the bombs that wouldn’t drop. The pilot’s hands were frozen; I tried to thaw them out, transferred gas from the engines that wasn’t running to the tanks where the engines were still running, manned my guns when I got a chance, helped feather the props, and helped adjust the speed on the remaining engines that were running. The pilot’s hands were frozen so bad he could do very little.”
Fort: “Quite a ways out over the North Sea we ran into an air sea rescue B-24 flying around. We tried to get in touch with them to give us a heading to the nearest landfall, ‘cause that would help us out quite a bit. But their reception was bad, and we couldn’t get anything out of them, and eventually they just flew off and left us.
“So then we just kept going. We were down to about 500 feet over the water, and we made landfall. Luckily, this little English grass field was close by. So I was trying to go around a downwind leg to come in to land, and No. 4 engine quit. With the copilot’s help we eventually got the plane turned around, and came back to this little field and landed. Within an hour of landing, myself and the severely injured bombardier were flown to a British hospital for treatment.”
Mullins: “I remember helping the pilot and copilot trying to land as we only had one or two engines left running at that time. All and all it was a very stressful mission, but then in a few days, the ones of us that were able, were right back on a plane on another mission.”*
Spencer: “I didn’t remember anything until someone was shaking me, someone was trying to rouse me, and then I heard voices that were definitely English, ‘Limey’ we’d say, and they said, ‘This one’s alive. This chap’s alive.’ And the next thing I knew they were filing on my wedding ring, they were dipping my hands in the water, and they were doing various things to me that I was just half conscious about.”
Lt. Bill Fort’s landing marked the end of his Eighth Air Force career. His hands had been so badly frostbitten by the frigid air in Star Dust’s cockpit that he spent the next 13 months in military hospitals having them treated and operated on. A number of joints on his fingers had to be amputated, and he was mustered out of the Army Air Force on a permanent disability in January 1945.
While he never regained full use of his hands, Fort feels he has compensated for this well over the years, and he has enjoyed a full working life. When asked about the events of November 26, 1943, he still wonders, in view of what occurred, whether he made the right decision by staying at altitude after Star Dust was hit. But Bill Fort is reconciled to the realization that “I’ll never know.”
Lt. Charles Spencer lost far more physically. All his fingers and all of his toes had to be amputated, making the way in which his wedding ring was removed all but incidental. And his face was virtually destroyed by that merciless blast of freezing air; the Army’s plastic surgeons labored for years creating a new one for him. Charles Spencer also lost an eye, frozen in its socket during that flight, and the vision in his other eye was permanently impaired.
But what Charles Spencer lost in his body, he gained in his soul. In Star Dust he begged the Lord to spare his life for the sake of his loved ones; and his wife, Jeanne, has never left his side. And while his vision is now fading even more with the years, those hearing this man speak immediately sense in him the Spirit still burning with a fierce, internal light. For three of the past four decades Charles Spencer was chaplain to a Soldiers’ Home in western Kansas, and he is, even now, tremendously active in his calling as a Baptist minister. As he states his case today:
“I praise the Lord not only for what He did for me in 1943 but for what He’s done for me ever since. I praise the Lord for a good wife who stood right with me, and I praise Him for two fine boys who did their part serving Uncle Sam in the Service. Life is good and I am thankful, indeed, that the Lord spared my life, that I might be used somewhat in this world for Good. Amen.”*
