Bremen, December 20, 1943
BY THE EVENING of December 19th, the weather picture had improved enough for VIII Bomber Command to lay on a raid for the 20th. It had been a long time since Elmer Brown had been on the mission roster—his 17th and last mission had been to Solingen on December 1st with Lt. Woddrop’s crew—but when the Group’s flying personnel were awakened in the frigid, predawn hours of the 20th, Elmer Brown found himself slated to go with Woddrop’s crew again.
This assignment wasn’t just a matter of chance. On the Solingen raid, Brown’s talents had been strongly tested when Woddrop was forced to leave the group formation over Ostende due to a serious fuel shortage. Had Brown’s navigation not been flawless, the airplane and crew might well have ended up in the Channel instead of the RAF field near the coast where they came down.
Brown’s performance had impressed Woddrop, who, though still a First Lieutenant, was a senior enough pilot in the 427th Squadron to make his preferences known.
As his copilot, Grover Henderson, puts it: “Woodie liked Elmer, and he had a lot of confidence in his ability as a navigator. So when we were supposed to fly lead and our regular navigator wasn’t available, Woodie would ask for Elmer to be assigned to us. That’s why, I think, he wound up flying a good number of missions with our crew.”
Brown’s ability would be put to an even greater test on the December 20th mission, but this operation was to prove a supreme challenge for everyone on Woddrop’s crew. Special mention must be made of Sgt. Charlie Baggs, the tail gunner, and three others who particularly distinguished themselves: Woddrop himself; Sgt. Bill Watts, his top turret gunner and engineer; and a new radioman on his first combat mission, Sgt. WS. O’Conner. While little is known of O’Conner but his deeds, for the others, an in-depth view into personalities and backgrounds is needed. What these men were truly shaped the events that brought all of them home.
The 303rd’s wartime history, The First 300, contains an intriguing reference to Woddrop and Baggs: “The 427th has had some outstanding personalities among its airmen…The RAF gave them Captain Edward M. Woddrop, pilot, and T/Sgt. Charlie Baggs, tail gunner, who made a hot team on the old City of Wanette.” Though Woddrop’s favorite ship was Flak Wolf, the two men were truly soldiers of fortune.
Ed Snyder remembers Woddrop as “kind of a fat, roly-poly guy who sported a typically British waxed mustache. When he came to us initially he had kind of a superior air because he had been in the RAF. But he realized he was coming into a different type of outfit and that he had to make a place for himself. Which he did. It took a little getting to know each other on the part of him and the organization, and then he seemed to fall in pretty well.
“He was eager to get into flying. He was on my tail all the time about getting a crew. He had come to us from the RAF alone, without a crew of his own, and eventually we got that set up. He got to know the B-17 quite well, and there was no question that he knew how to fly. He was pretty much on the cowboy side at times. He kind of reminded me of a hyperactive kid.”
Lt. Edward M. “Woodie” Woddrop. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Lorraine Shelhamer.)
David Shelhamer also knew Woddrop well: “Woodie was a crazy kind of a person, but we got to be quite friendly. He said he was an heir to the Singer family sewing machine fortune, and he had been in England long enough, and he had enough money, to belong to practically every private club in London. These all opened at different hours. One would open at 10:30 and close at 2:00; another would open at 12:00 and close at 3:00 and so on. It was his contention that one day we would get a 48-hour pass together, and he would drink me under the table.
“We finally got into London, and hit his first club at about 11:30 in the morning. From that time till about 2:00 the next morning, it was no food and nothing but drink, drink, drink. We were in a club called The Coconut Grove when I finally had to pick him up off the floor with the help of one of the attendants.”
Though Snyder and Shelhamer were well acquainted with “Woodie,” no one knew him better than Grover Henderson did. Henderson was a big, friendly soul from the small rural city of Greenwood, South Carolina and their first meeting was an experience he will never forget.
“I got to the ETO in the early part of August 1943. I had been separated from my crew right after my arrival because of a personality conflict between me and my first pilot. He had been an enlisted man who had been made a Flight Officer, and he deeply resented the fact that I outranked him as a Second Lieutenant. We fought practically the whole flight across the Atlantic, and when we got to Scotland he insisted I be put off the crew, which was just fine with me. He and the rest of my original crew went on to another group, and I learned later that all of them, except the bombardier, had been killed on their first mission in a midair collision. I went on to Molesworth, the luckiest day of my life.
“When I got there I was put into the 427th Squadron and was assigned to Woddrop as his copilot. He had already flown a number of missions in the right seat, and was just being given his own crew. He wasn’t your typical pilot. I was 23 years old and thought of him as an ‘old man.’ He was in his early thirties, and had a good-sized beer belly, but he was very agile and quick on his feet. He stood about five foot ten and had chestnutred hair and a red beefy face.
“His appearance was very distinctive, but the impression you got from looking at him changed the minute you heard him talk. He had a very high-pitched voice that he was real sensitive about. One of the first things he said to me was that he didn’t know why the Almighty had given him this ‘girl’s voice,’ but he wanted me to know that he had nothing to do with it.
“I was just getting to know him a bit when he said we should take an orientation flight around the Molesworth area that afternoon. We had a flight surgeon in the Group who was very unpopular. He was afraid to fly, but he forced himself to because of the extra flight pay that he got for flying four hours every month. He would only fly with a pilot who was highly experienced, and he would put on a parachute and sit right up front near the escape hatch in the navigator’s compartment the whole time. On my first flight with Woodie, this flight surgeon came out and climbed on the airplane to get his flying time in so he could draw his 50 percent flying pay.
“We climbed up to about seven or eight thousand feet, and on reaching that altitude Woodie turned to me and said, ‘Feather the engines.’
“I said, ‘Which one?’
“And he said, ‘All of them.’ I looked at him quite surprised, because I had always been told you didn’t do that in a B-17.
“So I said, ‘You’re not supposed to feather all the engines at the same time. You might not be able to get them back.’
“He answered right away: ‘I said feather all the engines,’ but I refused.
“Woodie went ahead and feathered all of them himself. He was quick as a cat, pulling back the mixture controls, cutting the throttles, punching the propeller feathering buttons, and killing the ignition switches. All four engines were completely out of action inside of 30 seconds. All you could hear was the wind whistling.
“We could see the doctor through the trap door in the cockpit floor, but he was out of touch with the rest of the crew since he was not plugged into the aircraft’s intercom system. The doctor raised forward into the navigator’s area and looked out and saw the propellers stopped on one side, and then he looked on the other side and they had stopped on the other side. Then he made a mad dash back to the escape hatch. He already had his parachute on and was going to go.
“Bill Watts, our engineer, jumped down through the cockpit and he and another fellow started to wrestle with the doctor to keep him in the plane. The doctor was a big fellow, bigger than either of the other two, and he was really fighting to get out, and Woodie was hollering in the intercom, ‘Let him go! Let him jump! When we get back to the base, we’ll all swear we don’t know why he went!’
“They wouldn’t do it. They held on to him, and finally we had to start the engines again. When the doctor realized it was a joke, he got real mad about it, and he wouldn’t speak to us the whole rest of the time he was there—about four or five months.
“After that flight, I had serious reservations about my new pilot’s mental stability. He didn’t look too stable to me, trying to make people jump overboard. I began to wonder what in the hell I was doing here in the first place. What had I gotten myself into with this guy?
“I learned soon enough. Woodie came from the town of Westfield, New Jersey, near New York City, and he told me he was the black sheep of his family. He spent a lot of time in New York, and he was very cosmopolitan. I saw some of this myself when I met up with him at a nightclub in Galveston, Texas, after we had finished flying with the 303rd.
“Les Paul and Mary Ford were there that evening. They were really big stars back in the ‘40s. He played the guitar and she was a singer, and when they were finished Woodie walked right up to them and started talking, and they recognized him!
“When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Oh, you know, there were a lot of clubs up North on the Jersey side. I used to hang around in all those places.’
“Woodie left home as a young man and started bush flying in Canada and Alaska. He joined the RCAF as soon as the Germans marched into Poland and he instructed in Canada for a while, and then he wanted to fly combat. So he requested a transfer to England, and he flew twin-engine Wellington bombers for RAF Bomber Command as a Sergeant Pilot. Then he transferred to our Air Force and he was made a Second Lieutenant.
“I met him about halfway through his tour, when he was a First Lieutenant, and he went on to make Captain in less than a year. Woodie was on the wild side, he was reckless, but after flying with him I felt that he had enough ability so that he could be reckless and get away with it.”
His fellow officers and crewmembers were not the only ones to see Woddrop’s wild side. It was also apparent to Sgt. A.R. “Roy” Westfall, a member of the 427th Squadron’s Personnel Flight Equipment Section. Westfall was responsible for custody and issue of flak suits and parachutes, heated clothing, and the like to combat crews, and always saw them as they left and when they returned from missions. He offers this story about Woddrop:
“One day early in Captain Woddrop’s tour of duty he came in and was going through his flight bag, and as he emptied it on the counter I noticed his oxygen mask had a hole about the size of a nickel cut in one side.
“I said, ‘My God, Captain, you can’t fly with that. I’ll get you a new one.’
“He said, ‘No, I want it that way so I can smoke my cigar while I’m flying.’
“I was horrified. I said, ‘Captain, with the raw oxygen in that mask, that cigar is liable to blow up in your face!’ Well, Captain Woddrop flew 50 or 55 missions, my memory fails on that point, but when he checked in his equipment for the last time, he still had that oxygen mask with the hole in it.”
What Woddrop’s crew possessed in their pilot was an exceptionally skilled, absolutely fearless aviator who loved combat, thrived on physical danger, and always managed to pull his men through despite the dangers they faced. As Henderson puts it: “Woodie was at his very best in a crisis. That’s when he could really rise to the occasion.”
The other soldier of fortune on Woddrop’s crew was Sgt. Clarence C. “Charlie” Baggs, whose attitude towards combat was best expressed by his comments after the raid to Knaben, Norway on November 16, 1943. As Hoyt recalls:
“Back in the barracks that night we compared notes with Bill Watts and Charlie Baggs. Watts said Baggs kept hollering over the intercom, ‘Come on in, little FW-190, and I’ll blow your ass off!’
“Charlie was on the bunk polishing off a fifth, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s right. I always cut my oxygen down some, and it gives me a cheap drunk. I don’t give a damn about anything then.’”
Grover Henderson first met Baggs when he was in his late thirties:
“He was a Southerner, like me, from Colquitt County, Georgia, in the southwest corner of the state next to Florida and Alabama. He told me that he had been a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, but he lost his commission in the late ’30s in a matter connected with hard liquor. When the war came in Europe he wound up not just in the RAF, but as part of the RAF’s Free Polish Air Force. He was in charge of a training program for aerial gunners. He even learned to speak Polish, and could speak some Russian too. He also completed a tour in RAF Bomber Command. He was a tail gunner in Wellington bombers.
“In the 303rd, Baggs was only good for one thing. He was a complete misfit on the ground. He was a heavy drinker and always got into trouble with officers. I had to talk him out of jams more than once. But in the air, there he was a master. Charlie Baggs was one of the two truly great aerial gunners I knew in World War Two.”
The other gunner Henderson held in such high esteem was Sgt. Bill Watts, whose home was about 40 or 50 miles west of Atlanta. His prowess as a gunner was indisputable, despite a physical problem that should have barred him from any place in a gun turret. As Henderson recalls:
“Watts’s eyes wouldn’t focus. When you’d look at him, one of them would be looking at you and the other would wander off and be looking across the room. It gave you an uncomfortable feeling, and would break your chain of thought. How he ever managed to get into combat with that condition I’ll never know, but he could shoot a machine gun better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
Other regulars in Woddrop’s crew slated for the raid were the waist gunners, Sgts. W. Valis and H. Hoff, and Sgt. Royal Plante, the ball turret gunner. On the morning of December 20th, they all climbed aboard the B-17G named City of Wanette. Through one of the most remarkable entries in all of Elmer Brown’s diary, it is now time to accompany them on “a most exciting day.”
“December 20, 1943 (Monday)—Eighteenth Raid. A most exciting day. Half a wing, three engines, and a prayer. Target Bremen, bomb load 42 60-lb. incendiaries. Bombing altitude, 25,500 feet. Our position, lead ship, high squadron, low group. I was flying with Woddrop and crew: Henderson, copilot, Matthews, bombardier. Bombing to be either PFF or visual. It was clear at the target except for a slight haze, so visual bombing was done.
“We ran into contrails and clouds at our altitude just before the English coast and over the Channel, which compelled us to do a lot of circling and climbing. This made us six minutes late reaching the enemy coast—Holland. Despite this we met our fighter support. The fighter cover was wonderful going into the target. The P-47s were so thick it looked like our escorts had escorts. We also had a few P-38s just before the IP. When we turned at the IP on the bombing run, our escort left us.
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Bremen, December 20, 1943. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
“Then came the flak. Barrage-type, predicted fire, and tracking; they threw up the works. Looking on the ground I could see the flashes of the gun batteries for about eight miles around on all sides blasting away. In the sky around us there were bright red flashes followed by large puffs of black smoke that filled the air.
“We got severely hit by the flak. One explosion put a big hole through about three feet of our right wingtip. Another burst in the bomb bay and missed the control cables for the rudder and elevators by a hair. It did put a hole through the web of the pulley for these control cables. We got a hole in the gas tank for the No. 3 engine. Couldn’t run the engine without gas and couldn’t feather the propeller, which made for still more drag on our right wing and made it still more difficult to trim and fly the ship.
“One flak shell burst so close to the right waist window that it damaged the right waist gun and knocked the two waist gunners down. One turned to the other and said, ‘I think I am dead.’ The other said, ‘Me too.’ The plane had flak holes all over it except the nose. It only had one hole and that was in the tip of the glass in the nose.
“We bombed visually and laid them right in the center of the city. Bombs were away at 1143. We turned north and then west trying to stay south of the heavy flak at Wilhelmshaven and then headed northwest avoiding Emden, going out over the North Sea. Flak continued to burst around us, with a few intermittent letups, all the way to the coast. Some of our electrical wiring got hit and it knocked out my flux gate compass and radio compass and left me without a compass or any navigational instruments other than airspeed indicator and altimeter. I first noticed my compass was out when according to the sun we were going northwest and my compass pointed east. We had to buck a west wind and it took us until 1215 to reach the coast.
“We were without escort this whole time and Jerry really gave us the works. They were mostly twin-engine fighters—Me-210s, Me-110s, and Ju-88s and a few single-engine fighter Me-109s and FW-190s. A twin-engine got our No. 7 plane, Leve, with a rocket. The plane burst into flames and then exploded. They also knocked down our No. 2 plane, Alex.
“It was about –45 degrees C at altitude and when the radio operator tried to fix his jammed gun, he got a severe case of frostbite on his right hand. All of our guns were either out or not working properly except our top turret. There was a big old Me-210 that attacked us from about eight o’clock high and he put three 20mm in our left side. One about six inches to the rear of the left waist window exploded right in the waist but didn’t hurt either gunner. Another hit the left wing near the fuselage about 12 inches from the trailing edge of the wing. The third went through the fuselage heading right for the top turret gunner. It hit his ammunition cans and really scattered his ammo.
“We bombed visually and laid them right in the center of the city.” The Germans tried to hide Bremen under a smokescreen, but the large explosions in the lower center of this photo confirm the accuracy of Elmer Brown’s diary entry. This picture was taken by Sgt. R.G. Hunter from Wallaroo, in the second element lead of the 303rd’s low squadron. (Photo courtesy Louis M. Schulstad.)
“This Me-210 then flew under us and came up at about two o’clock about 400 yards out. If I could only have gotten my right gun to feed, I am sure I could have knocked him down. He swung around and made another pass at us from one-thirty o’clock. Then he came in again at eight o’clock and this time when he came up at two-o’clock our top turret gunner poured lead into him. He smoked and then went down in a burst of flame.* The top turret gunner also knocked down a Ju-88 later that was attacking from the rear.
“In the heat of battle I heard someone say they were out of ammo. I said, ‘I have a spare box.’ The next thing I knew someone was tapping me on the leg and it was the copilot coming up in the nose. After he got in the nose, he moved the spare box of ammo I had back into the hatchway. He then took off his parachute and as he is a big man (about 6′1″ tall and weighs about 200 lbs.), I figured he did it so it would be easier to carry the ammo back through that small hatchway. Then off came his Mae West and when he started to take off his flying suit I grabbed his oxygen bottle and saw that it was empty.
“I connected a fresh bottle for him and pushed the mask tight against his face. Well, he continued to try to undress—and at 45 degrees C below zero. I figured he was suffering from anoxia (lack of oxygen). So every time he would try to take his clothes off, I would pull them back on him and slap that oxygen mask on his face tighter.
“Finally he grabbed my pencil and wrote in my log, ‘My electric suit is on fire.’ Then he and I both started undressing him. His flying suit fit so tight we ripped it in shreds getting it off. Before he came down in the nose, the engineer had given him a shot of carbon tet from the fire extinguisher. It has a freezing action and really froze his old tail.
“While all this was going on, we were in the thickest part of our battle with Jerry. Our wing lead was very poor. Instead of indicating 155 mph like they should have, there we were in trouble and at times indicating 200 mph and still our formation was running away from us. We couldn’t keep up so we started to lose altitude, figuring that flying 1000 or 2000 feet below the formation would provide some protection and would be better than trailing way behind.
Combat! This remarkable photo actually shows the 427th Squadron under attack by an Me-410 (called an Me-210 by Elmer Brown in his diary) on the December 20, 1943, mission to Bremen. Although the pursuit curve of the fighter is very similar to those made by the Me-210 Sgt. Watts got on this mission, the Fortress under attack here cannot be determined since the squadron formation is too badly scattered. This photo was also taken by Sgt. Hunter from Wallaroo. Fortress in the center right is Lonesome Polecat, B-17G 42-31177, BN
L, flown by Lt. W.A. Purcell and crew, (Photo courtesy Mrs. Jean M. Rice.)
“Since we only had one gun working, we all have Woodie, the pilot, to thank for pulling us through. Woodie kicked that ship around like a pursuit plane and it was his beautiful, violent evasive action that kept us from being blown to Kingdom Come by the many attacks Jerry made with his rockets, cannons, and machine guns. To illustrate the evasive action taken, when an Me-109 made a head-on attack one time, Woodie put that tail up and down so fast that the tail gunner hit his head on the roof and it knocked him out cold.
“We came back alone, the shortest and safest way we could. We dropped down to about 1000 feet altitude and flew over about 200 miles of the North Sea about 20 miles off the Holland coast. When we were heading home over the North Sea, we thought we might have to ditch so the radio operator tried to send an SOS through. He could not use his frostbitten hand, so he stuck a screwdriver between his thumb and first finger and beat out the code with the screwdriver and never stopped working.
“It was an uncomfortable feeling trying to navigate without a compass to look at, but the pilot’s little compass seemed to be correct enough because I missed crossing the English coast at the intended place by one and a half miles. I got my wind direction and velocity by watching the ocean waves.
“We had sufficient gas to get back to our home field, much to our surprise. We were also surprised to learn we landed immediately after the last ship in our group. McClellan and Barker were the only two ships in our Squadron to come back with the Group. When we landed, an ambulance was waiting for us and took the radio operator and one of the waist gunners to the hospital. They took a piece of flak out of the waist gunner’s leg.
“I could have been on a 48-hour pass today but I hadn’t been on a raid since December 1st—I had missed four of them because I was doing special work—so I talked them into letting me go on the raid. There were moments when I wished I had been on pass.
“I learned this evening that my promotion came through. At last I am a First Lieutenant.”
Grover Henderson’s recollections of this mission are equally fascinating, and proof positive of the adage that no two men view the same events in exactly the same way.
“We got hit real bad by the flak going into the target. They put it right in our Squadron. The flak usually came up in a cluster of four, but this flak was so heavy it came up in clusters of 16, four different groups of guns firing at the same time. There were a hell of a lot of guns down there on the ground firing at us.
“It was a cluster of four shells that damaged our right wing so badly. The one that hit our right wingtip had to be a direct hit by a dud. All the G model B-17s had ‘Tokyo tanks’ in the wingtips, eleven interconnected fuel cells, and when the right wingtip got hit I saw a big shower of gasoline.
“Another burst in that string put a small hole under the right wing in the main fuel tank for No. 3 engine, and the gas started to drip out. Our intercom had been shot out, and when I saw us losing fuel out the tank to No. 3 engine, I got excited and tapped Woodie and pointed it out to him on the fuel gauge. He looked but he acted like nothing was wrong. So I slowly turned the fuel gauge knob—the B-17 had a six-position switch with one gauge that you’d turn in sequence to find out what was in each tank—to make sure he knew the situation, and it still didn’t phase him a bit. He just kept flying the airplane like nothing had happened.
“Back on the ground, the only thing he said to me about it was, ‘You had me worried there for a while. When you turned the switch, I thought you were trying to tell me there was no fuel in any of the tanks!’
“A third hit caused us to lose the supercharger for our No. 4 engine. There were some vacuum tubes that were part of the electrical controls for the supercharger located in the floorboards of the radioman’s compartment and shrapnel got these. So with No. 4 engine not developing full power, we were actually worse off than Elmer knew.
“I remember the flak shell that exploded near the right waist window but I recollect the conversation between the gunners a bit differently from Brown. I believe both waist gunners were actually knocked unconscious for a while, and as I recall, when Hoff woke up, he said, ‘Hey Valis, are we dead?’
“Somebody else, Plante I believe, piped up: ‘You boys ain’t in heaven yet. Get back to your guns!’ I really don’t know how the flak missed shooting us down.
“I thought that it was the flak that got Leve and Alex, but it could have been rockets, like Elmer said. I didn’t see Leve get it, but I believe Charlie Baggs called out from the tail that he blew up.
“There was a period of just a few seconds between him and Alex, and I did see Alex get it. He was flying right off our right wing, and I was looking at his airplane at the time. The whole airplane went up in a red, red flash, and there was an enormous amount of black smoke. The only thing that looked anything like an airplane was a part of the main landing gear with a wheel flying through the air. In two or three seconds everything was gone. There was nothing left except the smoke blowing away.
“It was terrifically cold that day, probably 50 degrees below zero, and most of our guns did freeze up. They’d get hot when being fired and begin to sweat and this would turn to ice. After the mission I learned that in the middle of all the fighter attacks, the radioman took his mittens off to work on his gun. He couldn’t do anything with his mittens on because they were too heavy and clumsy, and touching the gun was like holding a piece of dry ice in your hand for a long time.
“Well, that boy took the gun down from its bracket, put it on the radio room floor, took it apart, scraped the ice off with his knife, and then reassembled the gun and put it back in position and got it firing. By that time both his hands were shot, completely ruined. I saw them before he was taken to the hospital and it didn’t look like he had any skin on his fingers at all.
“I never saw him again after he went to the hospital, and I don’t remember his name. Woodie put him in for a Silver Star, and I understand he was awarded the DFC and was sent back home. He only flew that one mission, his career in combat lasted about six or seven hours, and he went home. Of course he should have.
“I do remember my problem with the electric flying suit. Actually, everybody called them ‘blue bunny suits’ because they were light blue in color. They were just like an electric blanket except they were formed like a flying suit. We wore regular underwear, and then the electric suit and then a wool flying suit on top of that. The blue bunny suits were brand new and I had never worn one before.
“Anyway, smoke started to accumulate in the cockpit, and I got concerned about it. The B-17 cockpit had a lot of electric wires and hydraulic lines and we were always worried about the danger of fire. I called the smoke out to Woodie’s attention and he called Watts down from the top turret and told him to find out where the smoke was coming from.
“Watts looked around and came over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Lieutenant, the smoke’s commin’ out of yo’ collar!’
“At that point I felt a burning hot sensation in the seat of my pants, and I didn’t know what it was except it felt like my clothes were on fire. I got out of the seat and examined the seat of my pants with my hand. What happened was that a fragment of a gun shell or some shrapnel had wedged itself between the seat armor plating and my back so that it cut across the seat of my pants and short-circuited the wires in my suit.
“Watts had a hunting knife in his boot and he split the seat of my wool flying suit, got a CO2 fire extinguisher, and stuck it in the hole he cut and set the fire extinguisher loose in my pants. I got some relief from that hot spot and sat down and started flying the airplane again. But in a few minutes it began to get hot again, so I got up and Watts gave me a second application with the fire extinguisher.
“This was in the middle of the fighter attacks we were getting, and on that second occasion when I complained about getting hot, Woodie said, ‘Go down in the nose and get Matthews or Brown to get you some help out of that flying suit and see what’s on fire.’ So I went down to get one of them to help, and that’s when Elmer thought I had lost my mind, and I was trying to pull the suit off and he was trying to put it back on me at the same time. I couldn’t make him understand that I was burning inside.
“When I did make him understand, the two of us got me out of my wool flying suit. It was smoldering and we opened the hatch in the bottom of the airplane and threw the suit out. Only later did I realize that I had my billfold in a pocket of that suit—we weren’t supposed to carry it in combat—which had a considerable sum of money in it, a few five pound British notes and some Belgian and Dutch and French money. Afterwards we joked about some German farmer finding it in his field.
“The real funny part about this incident is that I could have solved my problem just by pulling the plug on the blue bunny suit. That’s all I needed to do. I just had to pull the plug. It even had a rheostat control I could cut it off with, but the blue bunny suits were brand-new and I hadn’t worn one before and in the excitement I just plain wasn’t thinking.
“Woodie really did fly the B-17 like a pursuit plane that day, and he did knock Charlie Baggs unconscious for maybe ten minutes swinging the tail around trying to stay out of the way of the fighters that were making passes on us. He was very flexible and loose with the airplane, and never did believe what they tried to teach us about the stable firing platform, always hold your airplane real steady and still so the gunners can shoot at the fighters. He felt that when the fighters started shooting at you, get the hell out of the way. In formation he actually preferred the tail-end-Charlie position because it was easier to maneuver around and get out of the way of fighters in case they made a pass at our airplane.
“I do remember the Ju-88 that Watts got. This happened later on, when we were on our way home, completely separated from the formation and slowly losing altitude. We were at about 15,000 feet. I was swiveling my head and saw two German fighters out about 2000 yards to our right, slightly higher than we were and slightly behind us at about four o’clock.
“They were bluish-gray night fighters with hornlike radar antennae in the nose and rockets under the wings. They had slowed down to what they were cruising at the same speed we were, and they just stayed out there for some time. We knew they had something in mind for us. I think they were trying to figure out why we were not shooting at them, but of course our guns were frozen. At that time our gunners were still working to clear the frozen guns up.
“Finally one of the Germans started edging in closer and closer. I could tell he had turned in and had taken a heading that would eventually work him in right up close to us. He slowly came in, he was very cautious, and I watched him, and when he was about 800 yards away he fired. I saw the smoke from the two large rockets he carried under the wings. It billowed out under the rocket pods and I could see the trail of the rockets coming toward us.
“Those things were huge! They hypnotized me when they left the airplane. They looked like they were moving so slowly, and as they got closer they seemed to pick up speed. I shoved the wheel forward real quick and the rockets went over our head and exploded some distance above the cabin.
“When the German fired the rockets, he made a mistake. He should have broken away, but he came in a little closer. He must have been watching his rockets, and then I heard a .50-caliber open up. The rate of fire was real slow, but the first burst out of our airplane caught him right on the side. I saw pieces about the size of a license plate fly off the left engine cowling, and I saw metal and glass splinters break out of the canopy all around the pilot. I feel certain the pilot was killed instantly.
“From that point the airplane nosed down at about a 30 or 40-degree angle with the left engine smoking a long trail of black smoke. I watched him go all the way down, and it was a long way, till he crashed into the North Sea. After that the second German fighter thought better of having a go at us and he just disappeared.*
“The flight back to England was long and very difficult. It took us about three hours from the time the second fighter crashed. With the No. 3 engine out and No. 4 not developing full power and with about ten feet damaged on the right wingtip, the airplane was trying to fly in circles. We trimmed as much trim into it as the airplane was capable of handling and it still wanted to go in a circle.
“So we had to put some manual pressure on the rudder—and that rudder is as big as a barn door. It was extremely hard to push it in and make the airplane fly straight. I would stand with both feet on the left rudder pedal for a few minutes and try to hold it straight and when my legs would start trembling, Woodie would stand on it for a while until he would start trembling.
“We alternated back and forth like that and finally we both got so tired we called Watts down from the top turret. He sat in my seat for a while and let me rest and then relieved Woodie for a while and between the three of us we finally flew it back to England over a distance of about 500 miles.
“On the way back we experimented with the controls to see if we could land the plane. We found we could maneuver, but the stalling speed was very high—about 150 mph. When we got to Molesworth we waited till everyone else had landed so that if we crashed, we wouldn’t block the main runway, which was about 7000 feet long.
“We set the plane down right at the end of the runway going 150 mph and applied the brakes. They got burned out pretty quickly, but they reduced our speed to about 60 mph. We just coasted the rest of the way to a stop almost at the very end of that 7000-foot runway.
The morning after. The City of Wanette’s officers pose behind her flak-shattered right wingtip. L-R are: Lt. E.L. Matthews, bombardier; Elmer Brown, navigator; Lt. Woddrop, pilot; and Lt. Grover Henderson, copilot. It was of Woddrop that Brown wrote in his diary: “Since we only had one gun working we all have Woodie, the pilot, to thank for bringing us through…it was his beautiful, violent, evasive action that kept us from being blown to Kingdom Come by the many attacks Jerry made with his rockets, cannons, and machine guns.” The City of Wanette was B-17G 42-31241, GNW. The aircraft was later lost to flak on a mission to Berlin on April 29, 1944. (Photo courtesy Elmer L. Brown, Jr.)
“Woodie got a Silver Star for this mission. We really had no proper business getting back from it at all.”
This landing marked the end of the roughest raid Woddrop ever flew. His reaction can be gauged by a passage from the Group’s mission report to First Bomb Division: “Lt. Woddrop…is very insistent that the A/A defenses at Bremen have been considerably increased and believes definitely that the A/A defenses between Bremen and Wilhelmshaven have definitely been increased.” His vehemence is hardly surprising.
Bill Watts helped too. Sgt. William A. Watts, engineer and top turret gunner on Widdrop’s crew, fingers the 20mm cannon hole punched in the City of Wanette’s side during his furious fight with an Me-210 on the December 20, 1943, Bremen raid. This strike was inflicted on the Me-210’s first pass from eight o’clock high. According to Brown’s diary, the cannon shell “went through the fuselage heading right for the top turret gunner. It hit his ammunition cans and really scattered his ammo.” The German made two more passes before Watts shot him down. Watts also damaged an Me-110, and he topped the day off by downing a Ju-88 on the way home. His copilot, Grover Henderson, considered Watts “one of the two truly great aerial gunners I knew in World War II.” (Photo Courtesy of Elmer L. Brown, Jr.)
The crew’s interrogation report underscores how rough the raid was for the enlisted men. The waist gunners both suffered concussions from the flak shell that exploded next to them, and one of them, Valis, came away with 20mm shell fragments. He and Sgt. Hoff went to the base hospital for observation, as did Charlie Baggs for the hit on his head. Sgt. O’Conner was sent there permanently for his “frozen hand,” and though the rest of the crew never saw him again the interrogator noted under “crew comments” that “Sgt. O’Conner deserves special mention with possibility of Award.”
Nor did Sgt. Bill Watts return unscathed. He was sent to the hospital for a slight 20mm head wound, suffered, no doubt, during his shootout with the Me-210. But he gave far better than he got. Brown had recorded this encounter as a kill in his diary, and there is confirmation in the Group’s mission file, where a “combat form” states: “Lt. Brown and Lt. Matthews saw pilot bail out of E/A and chute open.”
There is other evidence that Watts made the enemy pay triply for the shell fragments that found him. While there is no mention in the 303rd mission files of the Ju-88 Watts got during the return flight, it appears he also scored against another twin-engine fighter. Both Baggs and Plante saw what happened when, early in the fight, an Me-110 popped out of vapor trails at seven-thirty o’clock, 150 yards out. Watts “fired 200 rounds into E/A cockpit. E/A did a complete loop backwards, then into a spin, and then a pinwheel. Canopy came off. Not possible to come out of spin. Pilot was definitely out.” Any way one totals it, Bill Watts had quite a day.
There is nothing in the 303rd’s records to show how Grover Henderson felt about this mission, but an incident during debriefing reveals how much of a toll the day’s events took.
“At interrogation I didn’t have my flying suit on, just the blue bunny suit. There was a little Second Lieutenant in a group of officers who had been there just a few days who wanted to know why I was wearing that blue bunny suit without a flying suit over it. He complained I would get it dirty and went on and on, and somehow it just struck me wrong.
“He was an awful small fellow, so I reached over the table he was sitting behind and snatched him clean over it. I was about to do away with him when everybody else stopped me. It was just that I was keyed up over something he said that made me mad. I was fixing to beat the fire out of him, and for no reason at all. I don’t know why I did it, but that was the worst day I had during the war.”
The mission had an impact on Elmer Brown that is reflected in his writing. Earlier, he had described some of his roughest missions in a cursory way, providing only a partial picture of what took place. With this mission, his diary begins to show a real passion for detail, a strong desire to pile fact on fact. Looking back today, he explains that “By now I knew I was living through something that was terrible and unbelievable. I felt compelled to write it all down so that people would know that all these things actually happened.”
