January 11-13, 1944
FOR THE MEN of the 303rd there were many aftermaths to the terrible Oschersleben mission of January 11, 1944. The Group as a whole faced a tremendous organizational challenge, for there are few tests of a military unit’s staying power more telling than its ability to carry on after a 25 percent loss rate in a single battle. The way the Group’s personnel reacted to the event says much about the 303rd’s leaders, about the esprit de corps of its combat men, and, on another plane, about the horrors of war.
Many saw the price the Group had paid and looked angrily at General Travis. Lt. Bill McSween was one of them: “We felt this disaster should never have happened. A bad high-level command decision was made, and I will not say more.”
Others did say more, however, especially at the Headquarters of the First Bomb Division.
Captain John J. Casello of the 360th Squadron had led the 303rd’s hardhit low group and, a day or so later, sat in on a First Division debriefing where all participating group leaders were present. As he recalls:
“General Travis was asked directly by one of the more junior officers there why he didn’t return on the recall instructions. He was a Brigadier General, and the highest ranking officer there, and without a moment’s hesitation he said, ‘I received no recall.’ That stopped the questioning dead in its tracks.”
Travis’s response was true and it raised a provocative point. If the decision was an error, did the blame actually lie elsewhere? For General Travis was not alone in “pressing on regardless.” The leader of the Third Division’s 94th Group was only 25 miles from his target when that Division’s recall order was received and he went on as well—at a cost of eight B-17s. Looking back, Ed Snyder is the one who puts the command decisions into their proper perspective.
“I do not fault Bob Travis, even though there is a good possibility that a mistake was made on his part. He was the kind of guy who, if the scales hung in the balance, would say, ‘Go for it.’ But he wasn’t blind dumb, and it wasn’t a screwup in my opinion. The weather over Europe was always bad, and Travis had the decision to make. Nobody recalled him. And I’m sure he felt the thing to do was to go ahead and try to bomb the target. I can’t believe that anybody in Travis’s position would have turned back unless he had been ordered to, or unless the weather was obviously impossible.
“You have to understand that the Eighth Air Force was never turned back by a threat of the consequences. Nobody ever said, ‘We’ve got too many fighters ahead of us, so we better turn around and go home.’ If we had a mission, we knew that the fighters and the flak were going to be there, and we hoped for the best. That was the creed of the people who were leading these missions.”
It was very much Ed Snyder’s creed, too. He was one of the crew interrogators that day, and he well recalls his own reaction.
“It was a terrific loss, and my feeling was, ‘This is terrible.’ But the questions I asked myself were, ‘How in the hell do we get out of this one? What do we do? How are we going to get enough planes and crews together for the next one? We’ve got to go on.’ I never had the feeling, ‘Gosh, we’re dead.’ We got together and did something. It might not have been much, because of all the crews and planes we lost, but we did whatever we could.”
The 427th Squadron’s personnel reacted to the losses with a mixture of emotions. There was grief over the death of close friends and concern about the fates of the missing. Those who had not been on the mission also experienced a strange kind of guilt. And for almost everyone there was a strong desire for revenge.
Hullar’s crew had an equal share of all these feelings. Sampson grieved for McClellan’s men—“They had a lot of missions in. It was a sad day for us”—and George Hoyt still recalls “the sad news that greeted us on our return to base, from the Rest Home.
“One of the crews that was missing was McClellan’s. They had given us great cover fire on that trip back from Bremen when our wing nearly ripped off, and it still upsets me to think of them going down. I remember those boys well.”
Merlin Miller adds: “How did we feel? We were all mad. We wanted to get even with the Germans for what they had done to our Group. I suppose I’ve always had a guilty conscience concerning that raid. I can’t say why. I don’t know that we would have made a difference. We might have got our fannies shot off. But we were an experienced lead crew. We should have been out there. That’s how I felt then, and to a certain extent that’s how I still feel today.”
The combination of grief, guilt, and rage was also felt in Lt. Jim Fowler’s crew. Fowler had been quite friendly with Lt. Simmons, and he wrote in his notebook: “Simmons, Carothers, and McClellan shot down. Carothers blew up. Don’t know about Simmons. Nobody saw him. McClellan crew all bailed out; 10 chutes were seen to come from it. Sure hope Simmons did the same.” He also recorded that his crew was “Briefed to go as spare on mission to Halberstadt,” but that they “Could not get No. 2 engine started.”
Fowler’s notation about the engine was brief but the underlying facts provoked an extreme reaction in Lt. Barney Rawlings, and today he still has strong feelings about the subject:
“We couldn’t get the damn No. 2 engine started. We couldn’t get the damn airplane in the air. It wasn’t our fault that the engine hadn’t got started, but when I thought about it, I wondered if we could have done more. Maybe we could have walked the prop through one more time and got the engine to turn over. Maybe we could have done something crazy and heroic, like taking off on three engines and windmilling the fourth prop to get the engine started.
“I had a real feeling of guilt about it. I had not been in the Group that long, and I wasn’t that close to the people that we lost. But I still had this intense feeling of guilt about not having gone, and about having been spared this exposure. I also had a feeling of absolute, savage rage that this had happened to my outfit, that it had all happened without me, and that if we had gotten into the air, we could have done something that would have materially changed the outcome. I still get emotional thinking about it.”
With these kinds of feelings current, it comes as no great surprise to hear Bill McSween say, “Morale did not disintegrate in my Squadron even though we lost five crews.”
His assessment is borne out by the 303rd’s wartime history, The First 300, which declares: “Even after the Oschersleben mission when the 358th took the brunt of the losses, the remaining crews were ready to go the next day. Sixty empty beds might have wrecked the morale of a lesser outfit. It just made the crews of the 358th a little madder. As a matter of fact, more than a score of ground men have left the comparative safety of line jobs to volunteer for service as gunners.”
The fighting spirit behind these words is reflected by an incident involving Sgt. Bill Simpkins. After he returned to Molesworth, Simpkins recalls, “General Travis asked me if I wanted to fly again. He asked me when he gave me my Oak Leaf Cluster for my second Purple Heart. He had given me my first one, and this was the second time I was wounded. It bothered me to lose people—Campbell’s crew had shared our barracks, and it really got me to see all them empty bunks—but I told him, ‘As long as my crew flies, I’ll fly.’ That’s how I felt, even though I didn’t have much of a crew left.”
There was, however, another aftermath of Oschersleben for a certain number of the Group’s men. The original tail gunner on Lt. William Dashiell’s crew had been left behind with a case of the flu, only to learn that his crew was lost when the rest of the Group got back. A few months afterwards, he wrote the mother of one of the missing, saying:
“That was the end of my world—the war was over for me. From then on I lost interest in planes and bombing.
“Our barracks housed 12 men, the noncommissioned members of two crews. Neither of those two crews returned that day and I alone was left in the barracks that night—a night that was the longest and the loneliest of any I hope I ever must have. The next day I packed their belongings and saw to it that they were properly taken care of. Later that day I was moved to the hospital. I was finally moved to an evacuation hospital in the north of England and later embarked for the States in a hospital ship, arriving here on March 27, 1944…
“I am well again, but shall never forget the grandest guys it was ever my great fortune to meet.”
There is another Group member who is brave enough to say honestly and openly what happened to him. The path Ed Ruppel took after Oschersleben differed from Simpkins’s, but it is one no less deserving of our attention and respect. To know how, and why, Ruppel parted from the rest of his crew after this raid, it is necessary to travel with him on part of his journey. It begins in the air over England, as Yankee Doodle Dandy’s pilot searched for a place to set her down.
The place Henderson picked was Watton, a former RAF base turned over to the Eighth as a strategic air depot for the overhaul and repair of B-24s. Henderson’s crew was about to discover that the station was ill-equipped to handle wounded men. It is at this point that Ruppel starts his story, with some help from Simpkins here and there:
“Henderson said we were going to land at this base. ‘It don’t look like much,’ he said, ‘but we’re going to land here anyhow.’
“Before we landed Henderson dropped the gear, and he asked me to check it over and see how it looked. I checked it and couldn’t find anything wrong. Everything looked good, and I told him so.
“He said, ‘No ripped tires or anything?’ and I said ‘No, none whatsoever.’ We fired off four red flares to tell ‘em we had wounded aboard, and we reversed our normal landing pattern to land right-to-left. There were no other aircraft around.
“As soon as we sat down we pulled off to the left. That left front tire was flat. When I looked at it on the ground there was a hole in it about six inches long, like somebody cut it with a knife. It had looked fine from the air.
“There was a ‘Follow Me’ jeep that came up to the plane. The driver says, ‘Can I do something for ya?’ And I says, ‘Yeah, you can get an ambulance, and help us take care of some of these wounded we got aboard.’ And he went off at the same speed he came in on! He came back about 10 minutes later with a couple of ambulances.
“The people that were on the ambulances were as ignorant as the day is long as far as handling wounded in combat is concerned. They had no ‘wickers’ that you could lay the wounded on and carry them straight out the plane. We had to do it the best way we could.
“All wounded moan. We immobilized the radio operator in the plane, put him in a basket, but every time we went to move him, he would holler out in pain. So we hit him with a couple of shots of morphine, and slowed him up a lot, and then we brought him out through the window.”
Simpkins rode in the first ambulance with King, the radioman, and he adds his recollections:
“I came out the nose by the navigator’s compartment and some Major came out in a jeep. I hollered at him too to get an ambulance, and he said ‘Why?’ He was confused. They didn’t have combat planes land there, and he didn’t know what had happened to us.
“So I said, ‘Well, we got wounded aboard.’ It took them a long time to get an ambulance out there. There were two of them, and they took me and the radioman to the hospital in one. They brought us bottles of whiskey in the hospital, and they said, ‘Here you are. Drink it.’ But I didn’t drink that much. They operated on me that night.”
Meanwhile, as Ruppel recalls, “There was a spark of life in Jeffrey. He was semiconscious. He didn’t say anything, but he moved, and he had feelings. I helped bring him out. I got his shoulders over by the door, and somebody else got hold of them, and I tried to grab a hold of him by his legs and I couldn’t because they were all bloody and slimy. So I had to hold onto him by grabbing my hands on the inside of his boots, and squeezing. He was moaning, but I had to do it because he was so slippery with blood, and I couldn’t hold on to him any other way.
“When I squeezed, a lot of blood squirted out, and I heard four or five ground guys behind me start to throw their cookies. And three or four more ran away from the plane. We lost about half the crowd that was around the plane. We put Jeffrey on a stretcher that was on the ground, and then they slipped him into an ambulance.
“Burkart come out last, cause he was DOA. We took him out the tail, and they put him in the same ambulance with Jeffrey. They took Jeffrey to the hospital and Burkart to a little morgue they had there.”
The surgeons now had their own battles: to save Jeffrey, and to care for Simpkins and King. While they worked, Ruppel was preoccupied with thoughts of the mission and Burkart.
“I had known Burkart real well. He and I had got into a couple of fist-fights back in the States. There was one evening when we were going back to the base in a cab, and we started to fight in the back seat, and the cab driver threw us out to finish the fight. But that didn’t mean nothin’. We were both drunk at the time.
“I volunteered to bring Burkart’s body back. I said to the rest of the fellows, ‘You go on back to the base, I’m messed up enough as it is. I’ll stay here and see what the hell happens.’ And I was messed up, from the mission. I wasn’t in the mood for anything, but I was concerned that the rest of the boys could go back and relax a little bit, so I said, ‘I’ll take it from here.’
“I went to the mess hall, and I ate a little bit. I didn’t want much, and everybody was lookin’ at me. And I thought, ‘What the hell is the matter with me? Is somethin’ showin’ or what?’ Of course my clothes, my pants and shirt, still had blood on ‘em, but it didn’t really bother me, not at all. Combat men are kind of callous towards blood.
“There was one sergeant that was nice to me, and they wanted me to go into town that night. And I went into town, but not with them. I walked around that town, got on a bus, and came back to the base. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to talk to anybody or say anything.
“I went in the next morning to have breakfast, but I didn’t go into the mess hall. I went back behind the regular mess hall, and there was that sergeant that knew who I was from when he saw me come in the previous day, and he brought me in the back and made up some eggs and bacon for me—not powdered eggs, real ones. But I didn’t even want him around, and he was so nice to me.
“The back of the door of the kitchen was right near the door to the morgue. But I didn’t know it at the time, and I came walking out the back door of the kitchen to see what the agenda was for the day, and somebody opened the door to the morgue, and I just had to look in that door.
“There were two bodies in there. They were the members of my crew. It wasn’t right that I should see them propped up the way they were in there. It was horrible, and I dumped my cookies right there. And this sergeant, being the beautiful fellow that he was, grabbed a hold of my arm and he took me around to the back of his kitchen, and he brought out a bottle of whiskey and he poured me a water glass full, and he gave it to me and said, ‘Get this into ya.’ And he said, ‘How do ya feel now?’ And by this time I was shaking, a bundle of nerves.
“So I had a black coffee and another half a shot—I didn’t want to take more ‘cause that stuff was precious over there—and he kept talking to me.
“He asked, ‘How did you get the hole in the tail?’ and I said, ‘A rocket went through.’
“And he said, ‘A rocket!’ He acted like it was Buck Rogers. All that he said, I don’t remember to this day, but he was talking to me like a Dutch Uncle.
“I asked him if I could see the head honcho and he said, ‘Sure, come on, I’ll take you in.’ And he did. So I went in to see the head honcho, the chief doctor.
“Those doctors over there were miracle workers. They fought to save a man. If there was an ounce of life left, they’d fight to try to save a man. There was no time schedule on that. They worked 24 hours a day. But the head honcho took a pan of water and a pair of forceps, and he picked up this piece of shrapnel from a 20mm and he dipped it in the water, and it fizzed. And he told me, ‘That’s what Jeffrey had inside of him. There’s nothing we can do to clean it out, there’s no method that we know to clean it out. We tried as much as we could, but he passed away. We couldn’t save him.’
“We had a nice big hole in the tail. It was from a rocket.” The 358th squadron’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, B-17F 42-5264, VK
J, photographed shortly after Lt. John F. Henderson made an emergency landing at Watton, England on the way home from the Oschersleben mission of January 11, 1944. Close scrutiny of the photo suggests that the aircraft still carries the obsolete red outline around the national insignia on the fuselage. [Photo courtesy National Archives (USAF Photo)].
“You know, when I got back to the States I had this R&R in Atlantic City at one of the hotels there for servicemen. Jeffrey’s family was from New Jersey, and his parents found me at the hotel. It wasn’t right that they should find me, a combat man, like that. They found me in the lobby and they started asking me questions. And I had to excuse myself real quick by saying something stupid like I had to go upstairs and put on a tie because I was out of uniform. I went up and asked some guy who worked there to send them away. What else could I do, I ask you? How could I have told them what happened to their son?
“So now I had two bodies to take back instead of one. The head honcho told me what the arrangements were, and I said, ‘When can I get the bodies and go?’
“And he said, ‘They should be ready in an hour or so.’ So I wanted to go back to the barracks and lay down, and that sergeant wouldn’t let me.
“He said, ‘No you don’t, you’re going to stay here and I’m going to walk around with ya.’ So I stayed there in the mess hall, and every once in a while he would come back and talk to me.”
At some point Ruppel went to the hospital, since Bill Simpkins remembers him being there: “The next day I woke up from my operation, and Ruppel was standing there, and he had in his hand a little cigarette box with pieces of shell fragments in it. They had taken them out of me.”
A real combat man. Sgt. Ed Ruppel in happier times, posing at the tail guns of a B-17 during Stateside training before deployment of his crew to the ETO. (Photo courtesy William H. Simpkins.)
Ruppel doesn’t remember this visit, but he does recall the next stage of his journey:
“They finally had the bodies ready, and I had to sign for them. They were mine, I was totally responsible. They loaded them up in the ambulance, and I was introduced to the driver. And I sat up in the front, and we started to go, and he didn’t know where he was going. We went here and there, he had to stop and ask people, and about eight o’clock that evening the damn ambulance quits.
“We were just coming into this little town, people walking all around. So he calls up this base and they send a new ambulance.
“And he says to me, ‘What are we going to do? We got to take them bodies out, turn them around, and put them into the new ambulance.’ ‘Cause per military regulations the head must go forward in an ambulance at all times. I didn’t know this, but these were things I was learning real quick. We were supposed to turn them around, but because we were right in the middle of town, people were trying to gawk into the ambulance and these bodies were naked laying there. The only thing we did was take a sheet and threw it over them.
“So I says, ‘No. You’ll cause more disturbance over here than you can shake a stick at. Run ‘em in the other way.’
“We argued, and I finally said, ‘Run ‘em in. I’ll take care of it. I’ll sign for it.’ So we put the ambulances back-to-back, run the bodies in from one to the other that way, and we finally got to this morgue.
“When we got there, a Second Lieutenant proceeded to chew me out because the bodies were the wrong position in the ambulance. I didn’t say much to him, but I looked at him, and I think he kind of got the hint that he better get the hell out of there, ‘cause I was about to explode.
“I walked in and the guy there had to sign to receive the bodies, to make sure that the right ones go in the right places. So he opens up a drawer with Burkart’s name on it and checks the deceased, Sgt. Burkart, to make sure, and he puts him in there. He did the same for Jeffrey.
“And I look and see that there’s a drawer with a name on it for every member of our crew, including me! Why was it that way? Because we were listed as MIA. We didn’t return to our base, and after a period of time we were automatically listed that way until actual facts were known. They didn’t know how many were killed. They didn’t know how many weren’t killed, or who was wounded, or what. They set that up just in case. And when the man took Jeffrey where he belonged, he signed for the two bodies. They weren’t my responsibility anymore.
“Now I’m anywhere from about 60 to a 100 miles from my base, and the ambulance driver, he’s going back home. So I said to this one guy who looked like he knew what he was doing, ‘Would you call my base, so I can get transportation to get up there?’ But he didn’t know where I was from, and he could’ve cared less.
“So I told him, ‘I don’t know what the story is, but the rest of my crew is back at the base, and I would appreciate it if I could get back to the base.’
“He said, ‘Where is your base?’ But we were always taught that you don’t tell them that, they ought to know by your unit. So I didn’t tell him, and he was reluctant to give me any kind of service.
“So I said, ‘Is there a CO I can see?’ He said there was a second in command, and I asked to speak to him. I called our base and told them the situation, and they called him and those people had a real change of heart from whoever talked to them. Before you could say Jack Robinson there was a covered jeep available to take me back. They got an enclosed jeep that picked me up and took me to my base.
“And when I got there, my crew wasn’t there. They were out at Blackpool, R&R.
“Major Black, our flight surgeon, took care of me. Whenever anything happened, he was the one who looked after us. He made the arrangements. They cut separate papers for me, gave me money and a whole set of new clothes, and they drove me to London and put me on the right train, and I got to Blackpool. That was the end of the mission for me.
“When they said you’re going to Blackpool, that was the greatest thing in the world. It was the Atlantic City of England, great big hotels right on the water. I didn’t need a reservation, and they did everything for me. Breakfast in bed, great service, and nobody bothered ya.”
Despite his rest at Blackpool, it wasn’t too long after these events that Ed Ruppel took a deep look inside, only to discover that he had given the Eighth Air Force all that he had.
“Ten men will depend upon one another up there,” is how he states it. “One link spoils it and your whole chain is broken.”
He never flew another combat mission, but no one knowing his story can ever say that he didn’t give the Eighth enough.