Frankfurt, January 29, 1944
WHEN THE 303rd’s bombers landed back at Molesworth on their return from the January 29th mission to Frankfurt, few held out any hope for Lt. James Fowler and his crew. There was little reason to. What the other crews reported was a seemingly open and shut situation: a straggling bomber with a feathered prop falling back out of formation, German fighters attacking it like wolves circling a wounded stag, an airplane exploding, and a single chute. Fowler’s ship appeared to be just another of the 29 heavy bombers that the Eighth lost on this day.
There is great uncertainty in war, however. What men believe they see in battle is not always what actually occurs. And Fowler’s fate was far different from what was reported. His crew’s heroic effort to get back home is the story of every straggling bomber crew that fought to return to England, only to fall short of their goal.
The men who made up Fowler’s crew this day were, in addition to Jim Fowler himself, Lt. Barney Rawlings, his copilot; Lt. Alvin L. Taylor, the bombardier; Lt. Joseph C. Thompson, navigator; Sgt. Curtis E. Finley, engineer and top turret gunner; Sgt. Donald Dinwiddie, radioman; Sgt. Richard Arrington, ball turret gunner; Sgt. Loren E. Zimmer, right waist gunner; Sgt. Miller O. Jackson, left waist gunner; and Sgt. Jack D. Ferguson, tail gunner. Of all of them, only Ferguson was not an original crew member. He had joined Fowler’s crew in early January after having flown two missions for Marson on Hullar’s crew; the November 16th trip to Norway and the November 26th attack on Bremen.
The crew’s story is told in tandem by Fowler and Rawlings, just as they flew it side-by-side, with a key contribution by Loren Zimmer from the right waist. No attempt has been made to resolve the minor factual conflicts; the reader can decide for himself on the details. Fowler begins.
Fowler’s crew. Bottom row, L-R, Sgt. Curtis E. Finley, engineer; Sgt. Richard Arrington, ball turret gunner; Sgt. Donald Dinwiddie, radioman; Sgt. Loren Zimmer, right waist; Sgt. Miller O. Jackson, left waist; unknown. Top row, L-R, Lt. James F. Fowler, pilot; Lt. Bernard W. Rawlings, copilot; Lt. Alvin Taylor, bombardier; Lt. Joseph C. Thompson, navigator. Not pictured is Sgt. Jack D. Ferguson, the tail gunner, (Photo courtesy James F. Fowler.)
Fowler: “On our first mission, Bob Sheets flew copilot for me and we flew his airplane, the G.I. Sheets. On the first mission they always sent a seasoned copilot along with the new crew. We flew it again on our eighth mission, the day we were shot down. The G.I. Sheets was slow, as a lot of the old G models were. They were heavy and slow, which meant you had to pull a lot of power. My airplane was in the hanger with a ball turret inoperative, but the G.I. Sheets had just come out of the hanger from work being done on No. 2 turbo. It had been test-flown, but it had not been altitude test-flown, and with the old oil regulators you had on some of the early G models you could have trouble with air in the system. This was before they got electronic regulators on the newer G models.”
Rawlings: “Fairly early in the day, when we got out to the airplane we were assigned, we had the feeling that we didn’t have a really good airplane. I can’t tell you precisely why. It was G.I. Sheets and we weren’t impressed with the airplane. To begin with, it was a G model, and the B-17G was a dog compared to the F, which was cleaner and flew very nicely. The G had that turret up front that gave you greater firepower, but it was slower than the F and you needed to use more power to stay in formation, which put a greater strain on the engines.
“And there were little things wrong with this one that we discovered when we got in the air. It was out of trim or out of rig. The control pressures weren’t right. It was harder to fly in formation than it should have been for a B-17.
“It had just gotten out of the hanger, and had been flight-tested but not altitude-tested. That was the real rub. On the climbout, as we started up we became aware that we were not getting any boost on the No. 2 engine. It would run fine down at low altitude, you could get enough manifold pressure to get the power you needed, but the higher you went, the more the manifold pressure fell off. It meant we were climbing to altitude with an unsupercharged engine. We knew this before we left the English coast.”
Fowler: “We were climbing out that day, and it was our first flight as element leader. I was leading the second element of the lead squadron in the No. 4 position. Well, we had no trouble; we climbed out and hit the coast, but right before we hit altitude No. 2 turbo started acting up. It acted up off and on for a while, I don’t know how long, and eventually it got uncontrollable. So we had to pull the turbo off, which meant we were pulling more than normal power because we could not get full power at altitude out of No. 2 engine. But we stayed in formation.”
Rawlings: “We discussed among our crew whether we should go on the mission, but it was a very brief discussion. Everyone wanted to go. What the hell, a good crew could fly a mission on three-and-a-half engines. Nobody wanted to go back.
“So we were charging along with the throttle of No. 2 full forward and the engine not at full power at 25,000 feet, trying to maintain formation with the other three engines and with the airplane out of rig. I had the feeling that we were torturing this airplane. I didn’t like the airplane, so maybe it deserved torture, but I could tell that we were stressing it. We were forcing it to fly, using more power than I would have liked.
“By this time we had crossed the Dutch coast, and we were in Germany. And the engineer, who was in the top turret, said we had a stream of oil coming out of another engine. I recollect it as No. 3, but it could have been No. 4. We saw oil continue to come out, and the RPMs started to fluctuate, and there was no question in our minds that we had to shut the engine down. If we lost all the oil without shutting it down we wouldn’t have control of the propeller governor, and we wouldn’t be able to feather it. We feathered it despite the hazards, because we had no alternative.”
Fowler: “Everything went along fine until right before the IP, when the engineer called over and said we were throwing oil out of No. 4. Well, I looked out at No. 4 and the wing was covered with it. My recollection is that we had started down the bomb run and the engineer said if you’re going to feather you had better feather, because we got so much oil gone. And my diagnosis, having had it happen before, was that the scavenger pump at the front of the air sump had gone out, and it would pump the oil out at the breather. So we feathered No. 4 and then we salvoed the bombs.”
Rawlings: “Immediately we were unable to stay in formation, and we started to lag behind. We were deep in Germany, vulnerable to attack, but there was never any question of turning back because we were better off trying to get as much protection from the formation as we could get. We got to the vicinity of the IP and by this time we were the last airplane in the formation, and we were still getting some protection from the airplanes that were ahead of us. We were about a hundred yards behind all the rest of the airplanes in the formation.
“In the meantime, other groups in front of us had bombed Frankfurt, and we could see the bomber stream off ahead of us and to the south of us, off to our right. So we figured if we cut across and took up a heading that would take us over to the head of the bomber stream there, even though we were flying slower than everybody else, we could get protection from the rest of the formation for another hundred miles going back towards the Channel. We jettisoned our bombs, figuring that if we were to have any chance at all to survive, we had to get rid of them. We got quite close to the target, but we never got over it.
“We started to turn off to meet with the other bombers, and it was all downhill from there. And as we charged off over towards the south, on pretty much of a southwesterly heading trying to pick up the head of the bomber stream, somebody on the crew, one of the gunners, said, ‘Uh-oh, here they come. Four fighters about four o’clock high.’ By my recollection it was a ‘finger four’ of 109s, what the Germans called a Rotte, that flew a pattern around us. They made a downwind leg, and a base leg, and then they turned and made a head-on pass at us.
“We thus had a couple of minutes to evaluate what was about to happen and what we were going to do, and we decided to jink the airplane. I can still see those methodical German fighter pilots as they flew past us, then turned on the base leg and came in. We tried to jump around and spoil their aim instead of holding the airplane steady to give our gunners a good firing platform, but they hit us anyway.
“Our gunners were firing and shells were coming at us—you could see that stuff coming to some extent—and the next thing I can recall was a discouraging ‘Plump! Plump!’ as the cannon shells hit the front of the airplane. They broke the Plexiglas out of the nose, and wounded the bombardier and the navigator. And I could smell gunpowder in my oxygen mask. It puzzled me at the time, but among other damage the cannon shells had destroyed the oxygen system, which was mostly up in the nose. They damaged our left wingtip too.”
Fowler: “We didn’t make it to the bomber stream. We started over and a fighter hit us from somewhere around one o’clock low. He got a good burst into us, ‘cause he hit the instrument panel, he hit the panel by my foot, blew it out, he hit the bombardier in the leg, and he hit the navigator in the small of the back and right up on his helmet, knocking him out.
“Of course we took evasive action, and when we recovered we noted that we were losing our oxygen—and also that we had no vacuum. We dived. We were trying to get to the overcast, which from briefing was supposed to be at around 10,000 feet, but it wasn’t. We were going pretty fast, and in the dive No. 4 prop unfeathered.
“The fighters came after us again, and we were scooting along at the top of the overcast. I started to turn, looking back over my shoulder, and we went into the overcast. We got into such a tight spiral, I knew we weren’t going to regain control without our instruments, so I rang the bailout bell. But no one could get out of their seat, and when we came out the bottom of the overcast we were in a real tight spiral.”
Rawlings: “With our oxygen system gone, we got nothing but this acrid gunpowder stink for a few seconds and then just ambient air. We were at 25,000 feet and we had to hit the deck immediately. We started down and we began to assess our situation.
“We were soon to discover that they had knocked out some vacuum lines behind the instrument panel, so that we had no artificial horizon, or turn-and-bank, but we still had the pitostatic instruments—airspeed, altimeter, and rate of climb. They also knocked out the intercom system.
“We took a turn to the right so that I could check the fighters out my window. We knew they weren’t finished with us, and we kept on heading down for the deck on a heading that would make it as difficult as possible for the fighters to get back to us. We were going down as fast as we could, about 330 mph, and since the B-17 redlined at about 300 mph, we were really moving.
“Then we became aware that there was another straggling B-17, and the fighters made a big turn and picked this other poor bastard up first. They milled around him for a couple of minutes, and they must have killed the pilots, because the B-17 peeled up, rolled on its back, and then started spinning down. Then the fighters left that airplane, and resumed their tail chase on us. We hit the top of the clouds before they got within range of us.
“We entered the undercast going full-speed, because one of the gunners in the back said that a fighter was getting close, even though it wasn’t yet in firing range of us. Then we had the problem of trying to recover the aircraft. Since we had lost our artificial horizon and turn-and-bank, we used our AFCE equipment—the autopilot—to orient ourselves. You could use it as a straight and level reference if you had to. It had these six axis lights and if you had all the lights out, you had the airplane straight and level. But you could not immediately determine what was going on by looking at those damn lights. So it was a real problem.”
Fowler: “We were able to recover above the ground. We were under the overcast and above a river heading northwest, and I remember thinking, ‘If we don’t get out from over this river, there’s a flak gun somewhere that’s going to blow us out of the sky.’ Eventually we found space above ground underneath the overcast and started west, or northwest back toward England. The overcast was a scut layer anywhere from two to four hundred feet thick laying in about five to six hundred feet above the ground up. And some places were broken. But by holding the aircraft level and pulling back, we were finally able to get up on top.”
Rawlings: “We were quite close to the ground when we finally broke out of the clouds and were able to stabilize the airplane in a straight and level attitude. At this time we checked the magnetic compass, because this was the only heading reference we had now. We were below the clouds, and the sun was no longer helping us. The way these magnetic compasses operated, they would sit there and spin interminably until they finally settled down. I was horrified to see that we were heading roughly northeast instead of west when it finally did. So we stabilized the airplane and got it heading pretty much west. We were now in and out of the clouds and quite close to the ground terrain heading west.”
Fowler: “Right after we had been hit we had no contact with the nose, and after we had straightened out on top of the overcast, Barney went down to check on the navigator and the bombardier. We had had no communication from up front.”
Rawlings: “I went down to the nose to check on the bombardier and the navigator. It was depressing as hell. The navigator had a big scalp wound which involved one of his eyes. There was a mass of blood on his face and I couldn’t see the extent of his wounds. And there was a big cannon hole in the bombardier’s thigh. The Plexiglas was mostly gone and they were huddled there, among a lot of blood, maps, and papers.
“They had given each other morphine. There is always a question how much morphine you can give a person, but I gave them another shot because I decided they couldn’t get out of the plane in their present condition anyway, and they were in obvious pain. I went back up, filled Jim in on what was going on down there, and we kept heading west.”
Fowler: “The only compass we had left was the magnetic compass. And the navigator, because he was wounded and had shrapnel in one eye, was having trouble seeing and giving us a course, but he did give us one. Most of the navigating was being done by Barney from the little command chart that they gave the pilot and copilot.
“In the meantime, with that engine windmilling and pumping oil out, we decided to unfeather. And we unfeathered and we used the engine for a short time, about five or ten minutes, and then the engine froze and wrung the prop off the shaft. It was out there dolling, and we were afraid it was going to come off and come back through the fuselage, but it never came off all the way. But man, it got so hot you could see pieces dropping off. And it caused a vibration so that you couldn’t read the instrument panel.
Rawlings: “I was navigating, and was using a little small-scale map because our navigator was out of commission. And Fowler said we were off course. To be on course and to get to the Channel, we had to be on about 285, and it was just too damn hard to do. The best we could manage what with all that was going on was about 270. Anything as complicated as 285 would have been much too difficult with that magnetic compass.
“We were having a hell of a time flying the airplane on those autopilot lights. If we got up in the clouds, we needed those lights because you very rapidly lose your ability to fly instruments if all you have is your airspeed, altimeter, and rate of climb. So we had a choice of dropping out of the clouds and being visible, or getting up in the clouds and having trouble flying the airplane. So we went from one to the other, all the while trying to fly by that damn magnetic compass.
“The clouds kept getting thinner and thinner, and we saw a couple of German airplanes. We saw a twin-engine airplane, a Ju-88 or a Do-217, that was milling around and that fired at us a couple of times. He was turning in toward us and we pulled up into the clouds and I was afraid he was going to run into us, but he didn’t.”
Fowler: “How many times we got picked up by fighters I don’t know. But it was enough that they wounded everybody on the crew but me and Barney. What we’d do, when they’d start at us and the gunners would call out that they were coming in, we would dump down through the overcast, just set it down and let it pop out through the bottom, taking a chance on hitting a hill.”
Rawlings: “At another point the clouds dipped down and we came sliding down out at the bottom, and there was an FW-190 off to the side of us on a parallel course. He was on our left a little bit ahead of us.
“I can still see this guy: He had his helmet pushed back and he had blond hair, and his oxygen mask was hanging down off to the side, and when I first saw him he was looking off in the other direction. He turned around and looked at us, and his mouth flew open, and he flipped up and was gone. It was all over in just a flash. This happened shortly before we were shot down, and this fighter may have had something to do with it. I don’t know.
“Fowler didn’t see him, and to this day I don’t know if he was ever made aware of him. He was quite upset that he couldn’t communicate with his crew because of the intercom—I can remember him saying, ‘I can’t talk to the boys! I can’t talk to the boys!’—and he was messing with the intercom while I was flying the plane from the right seat.
“My side was working intermittently. I can remember talking to Arrington, our ball turret gunner. We had called him out of the ball turret as soon as we realized that we were stable and at low altitude, because we knew that there might be a need to get people out of the airplane fast, and it takes a while for the guy in the ball turret to get the doors lined up to get out of there.
“We wore chest packs, and Arrington’s chest pack had been hanging on a hook. His pack had become dislodged while we were taking evasive action, and that chute had jammed in the turret’s ring gear. And also, we always carried a spare chute and it flew out the window. This was information I got out of my interphone from the back because mine was working part of the time.
“I can remember Arrington calling me on the interphone at least two times, because he was back there with nothing to do, and he said: ‘Lootenant, ah’m with you guys whatever you’re gonna do, but please don’t fergit ah ain’t got no parachute.’
“And I said, ‘Okay Dick, okay, that’s all right, don’t worry about it, everything’s going to be all right.’”
Fowler: “I didn’t know it at the time, but when we were taking all that evasive action a chute fell into the ball turret and jammed the turret, and I’m glad that it did, because the ball turret gunner got out, and we didn’t have time at the end and he didn’t get trapped in the ball turret when we crashed.
“Well, this business with the fighters went on until we got way back just south of Brussels near a place called Florenne, and a couple of fighters came up to hit us, and we set down through it again. We set down right on top of Florenne air base. It was a German fighter base. It had Focke-Wulf 190s and one of the gunners yelled, ‘We’re over an airfield and a fighter’s taking off.’”
Rawlings: “We popped out of the clouds right over the middle of Florenne, which was a big German fighter field. We blundered right over it out of our sheer good luck. And of course it filled us with some trepidation and despair. The tail gunner yelled, ‘Oh God, here they come, they’re taking off, here they come, one, two, three, four.’ I forget now how many he counted. They were FW-190s.
“So we tried to pull up into the clouds again, but the clouds were getting to be broken. From an overcast that was maybe a 1000 to about 1500 feet thick, it had dwindled down to maybe a 500-foot layer. It was four-eighths coverage perhaps. So maybe three or four minutes after we passed over Florenne there was all of a sudden this horrible battering of machine gun and shell fire in the rear.
“The tail gunner started yelling, ‘Kick it, kick it!’ and at the same time there was the sound of all this crap hitting the airplane, and an occasional ‘Ping!’ off the back of the armor plating we had on the rear of our pilots’ seats. At the same time, by my recollection, the No. 4 engine blew. Likely it got a cannon shell. I could see it on fire out of the corner of my eye.”
Fowler: “Shortly after we got over the airfield we lost all communication with the rear of the aircraft. This fighter that took off was a Focke-Wulf 190, and the other fellows later said he was black, so he must have been a night fighter. I don’t think he ever got his gear up. He hung back under us, we couldn’t have been at more than three or four hundred feet, and he was just shooting the tar out of us.
“I later learned from the other gunners that before this Jackson, the left waist gunner, had said, ‘I’m tired,’ and he dropped his flak suit off. Those were quite heavy and he was the oldest man on the crew, 39, and in the extreme cold we had it was quite tiring to have to stand up with all that weight on. And that last fighter just about cut him in half, shot him right in the belly with a 20mm.
“It also hit the right waist gunner, Loren Zimmer, in the small of the back and knocked him just as cold as a cucumber. He was laying on the floor.
“In the meantime the engineer yelled, ‘We’re on fire on No. 3’ and it was shot out and windmilling, and we knew then we had no hope of staying airborne with two shot out and windmilling and the plane on fire, and we were going to have to go in.”
Rawlings: “Now we had both engines on the right side out. I was flying the plane at the time, and I kicked the rudder to compensate, and the pedal went all the way to the floor, so we had no rudder. So the options were very small. There was no way we could fly the airplane on two engines with no rudder. We had to pull the power off the good left engines because without the rudder we couldn’t keep the plane straight.
“All during this day, when things were going from bad to worse—you know, No. 2 is no damn good, and No. 3 we have to shut down, and now we can’t keep up, and we’re stragglers and we got attacked, and now we’re crippled because the oxygen system’s gone, and the vacuum’s gone, and we got a couple of wounded guys—I considered all these things sort of trivial handicaps to successfully completing the mission. I was still quite confident we were going to get that damn airplane back to the Channel, and back to England.
“And then, when the No. 4 engine went and I kicked the rudder control and felt that it was gone, I realized instantly that ‘No, alligator breath, you’re not going to get this airplane back. There is nothing more to do. The mission’s over. Sorry.”
Fowler: “I rang the alarm bell. Barney dropped the gear as we started in and then he started bringing it back up, and I’ll say this for the German fighter pilot, he quit shooting at us. Arrington, the ball turret gunner, had taken over for Loren Zimmer at the right waist gun and Donald Dinwiddie, the radioman, was at the radio gun. Dinwiddie told me that when the alarm bell rang, Loren jumped up and started back for the bailout door. Donald started running toward him and said, ‘Don’t bail out, we’re going to crash.’
“He went out anyway. I thought he hit his hand on the door when he went out and his chute popped and dragged him out, but Loren later told me as he got to the door and looked down, the trees were right in the door. Well, I estimate he was about 150 to 200 feet above the ground. He popped his chute and went out, and Dinwiddie said, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to wrap around the tail’—he saw it go back and hit the tail—but it didn’t wrap around, it went under.
“You talk about Providence or whatever you want to, but what saved Loren Zimmer was that he hit in a field in the only place that was a bog. It was really swampy where he went in; you would sink up to your knees. He hit in the only soft spot in the field and the Belgians who rescued him had quite a time getting him out. They sunk up to their knees trying to get him out.”
That bail out, and the events leading up to it, are things that Loren Zimmer will never forget.
Zimmer: “The pilots’ maneuvers in and out of the clouds worked good until the clouds diminished as we passed over a large German fighter base. They not only sent up fighters but fired on us with small arm weapons.
“The combat with the fighters became futile. We had lost most of our gunnery protection and were continually receiving damage to the aircraft and more injuries to the crew. I had received several fragment wounds to the abdominal area and one to the left temple that required a compress bandage to stop the bleeding. Arrington, the ball turret gunner, was now out of his position. He applied the bandage and laid a flak suit over me, which probably saved my life. He also took over my gun, which was frustrating to fire—after two or three bursts a short round would have to be ejected. This was probably caused when the machine gun belt flew out of the box during evasive maneuvers.
“In a semiconscious condition I can recall continued fighter attacks until the bailout bell rang. I automatically reacted by snapping on my parachute, jettisoning the waist door, and jumping out. These were actions I had planned over in my mind every night before I went to sleep.
“I remember glancing at the airplane’s condition prior to jumping. The number three engine was on fire. There were a few small fires in the fuselage where loose 50 caliber shells had exploded. The fuselage skin at the waist door area had huge holes, and control cables were dangling from the ceiling.
“Not knowing what the cockpit condition was in, I thought the airplane was in a crash situation. Not until I was out of the airplane did I realize how low we were. I pulled the ripcord immediately and then after two very sudden jolts found myself partly buried in a soft spot on the ground. When I stood up, an FW-190 was bearing down on me like he was going to strafe. I dumped my parachute harness and took off running. When he didn’t fire on me, I discovered one of my boots was still in the mud. So I went back for it, and that’s when a Belgian patriot, Rolin Alberts, directed me by hand signals and his watch to hide in the bushes until 6 p.m. when he would come for me.”
Fowler continues from the cockpit.
“We hit about a mile or a mile and a half beyond this. I can remember going in over the trees and everything was happening so fast I can’t recall being afraid. I was too busy. As we went in, all I was thinking of was that we were going to hit those trees with what little power and control we had. Well, just before we went in, the radio operator said something did hit and it could have been we hit the trees.”
Rawlings: “We had just a little power going, just enough to hold the airplane straight, and we saw a field ahead and took a very slight turn. We put the gear down, and then right back up again. and there was no more gunfire. The German fighter pilots were either out of ammunition or playing the game real nice. We made a good belly landing, and the airplane slid along in pretty good shape.”
“After we got on the ground, I opened my side window, got out and ran around to the left side of the airplane where the nose escape hatch was, because I was acutely conscious that I had given the bombardier and navigator morphine. When I got there the hatch was already open, and the bombardier was trying to drag himself out, and the navigator was right behind him. They were attempting to get themselves out of the airplane.
“I grabbed the bombardier and kind of fireman-carried him about 50 yards away. When I started back after the navigator, I heard this noise and glanced up and here came a flight of two FW-190s. One was quite low and the other was in trail behind him, maybe three or four hundred feet up.
I thought, ‘Oh hell, they’re going to strafe the airplane!’ I remember a feeling of terror when I thought they were. But they didn’t. The leader did a roll, a victory roll, and I thought, ‘Well, you’re entitled to that, for God’s sake.’
“When I got back to the airplane I didn’t see the navigator. I looked in the nose and he was definitely out. I ran around to the waist area of the plane, and somebody had pulled the left waist gunner, Jackson, out of the plane. He was stretched out on the ground. Somebody had also helped the tail gunner out, Ferguson. Both of them were lying on the ground about 50 yards from the airplane. Finley was there, and I ran over to them.
“I glanced at the airplane, and there was a fire going in the right wing by this time. In the top turret there was what appeared to be a man’s head. It was Finley’s helmet and oxygen mask, but I didn’t realize it. I had this feeling of absolute horror and revulsion and terror, and I said, ‘Oh, no, Finley’s still in there! We gotta go get him! C’mon, let’s go get him!’ And I was saying this to Finley. So although I thought I was coherent and knew what the hell I was doing, I obviously didn’t. It was kinda dumb.”
Fowler: “We had hit in this little field and slid to a stop. Now, the guns of the top turret were supposed to be forward so that the pilot and copilot could reach out and grab a hold of a gun and pull themselves out. But the guns were not turned towards the front. It wasn’t the engineer’s fault. He was wounded, too. But it took me a little longer to get out than Barney. I had on so many clothes because we didn’t have heated suits and I had on a parachute harness and all and he went before me.
“I got out and I ran around the airplane, circling it from the front and the left wing towards the tail. And when I got back to the tail, Ferguson was out crawling. He was all shot up on his hands and his face and his legs, ‘cause they hit that tail pretty good with 20mm. But he had his flak suit on and so did everybody else except Jackson. Everybody who had his flak suit on lived. They all had survivable wounds even after taking a direct hit from a 20mm. The one who had it off died. So it was a good piece of equipment.
“Finley had gotten Jackson up to the door and I grabbed his harness and pulled him on out of the door and drug him back beyond the tail of the airplane. In the meantime, Ferguson was still crawling and there was a barbed wire fence that he got tangled up in, and he was too close to the airplane. So I got a hold of Ferguson and got him out of the fence and drug him away back from the airplane. It was on fire.”
Rawlings: “Finley was bent over Jackson, and I went over to them. I smoked cigarettes at the time, and Jackson smoked and he wanted a cigarette, so I lit him a cigarette. Finley and I undid his parachute harness and tried to make him comfortable. He had multiple 7.9mm machine gun holes in the chest and abdomen. You look at people, you look at people’s eyes, and Jackson’s were filled with sorrow. He knew he was in bad shape. He wasn’t going to make it. Finley and I were both quite convinced that he was not going to survive.”
Fowler: “In the meantime, Barney had come back and he was with Finley, who was kneeling by Jackson, and I yelled to Barney to get Jackson back from the plane more, and he looked up at me and said, ‘Jim, it ain’t no use.’
“And about then the bombardier, Al Taylor, came up to me and he said, ‘Jim, I can’t get away, I got a 20mm in my leg.’ And he had a hole in his leg and a tourniquet around it and he was still walking, though how I don’t know, ‘cause you could have stuck your hand practically in the hole he had in his right thigh.
“I said, ‘Well, Al, you stay with these two guys and let me see if I can get away.’
“And he said, ‘Sure.’”
Rawlings: “Then Finley and I went over to Ferguson. He was shot up pretty bad. He didn’t want a cigarette, but we undid his harness and tried to make him comfortable. I had eye contact with him, and it took only an instant to see that he was ticked off at us. He wasn’t our regular tail gunner and he had flown only one or two missions with us. I’m sure he felt that he didn’t have any business being shot down with a green crew like ours. Anyway, he survived. He got good medical treatment from the Germans.
The burned-out tail of G.I. Sheets, B-17G 42-39786, GN
R. (Photo courtesy James F. Fowler.)
Fowler: “About that time the Belgian who later hid us, Maurice Lamendin, came running up with some other civilians and the plane was burning and the ammunition was starting to go off and I was scared that plane was going to go at any time. And he told me go—‘Parte! Parte!’—get away, and I said ‘I got wounded, I got to get a doctor,’ and he made me understand ‘Well’ll take them,’ and he pointed to a truck he had.
“And all these civilians, God bless them, they came in and they picked them up in their arms and they took all three of them off toward the truck. And then once I saw they were going to be taken care of, I yelled to the other crewmembers, ‘Get going! Get away from here!’ ‘Cause we had just passed over this German airfield. We weren’t too far away from it. And there was a flak observation tower between us and the airfield and the Germans there were looking at us, too.
“So I took off and waded this creek when a guy I later learned was named Emile started guiding me and he took me up to a woods and said, ‘Stay here.’ And he came back with some civilian clothes, which I put on. And that was the beginning of my stay with the Belgian Resistance.
“They were wonderful people, the most kindhearted folks you could ever hope to meet. They gathered up all but two of my crew, and though I had to care for Thompson’s wounds myself before their doctor could get there—Joe had a huge U-shaped flap of scalp which I had to cut off, and a piece of shrapnel in his eye that I had to get out because it was extremely painful and couldn’t wait—they took very good care of us, and they were able to hide most of us for many months.
“They had to take Taylor and Ferguson to a civilian hospital because of their wounds, and they fell into the hands of the Germans. Later the Gestapo got real active in our area, and they passed Dinwiddie and me into France, where we evaded until May 13, 1944. We were captured together in Lille, when a doctor and his wife betrayed us by driving us straight to a German roadblock. We ended the war as POWs. Arrington and Zimmer evaded until American ground forces picked them up in September 1944. The Germans got Finley near the French border with Spain, in the Pyrenees. The only one who made it all the way back to England was Rawlings.”
Rawlings: “In the field where the airplane was I next remember a group of about five or six civilians who came running down the hill. They were able to communicate the fact—probably in Flemish, I understood some German—anyway, they made me understand there was a doctor and a priest coming. The doctor was going to be there any second. The priest was going to be there any second. I felt like I was in the hands of friends, and I learned later that these people were members of a Belgian resistance cell in the area. They were quite well organized, and they seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
“One of them grabbed me by the arm—he was a youth of maybe 13 or 14—and he pointed across the field and there was a military vehicle coming, sort of a jeeplike vehicle, and it had two or three people with steel helmets. And this fellow said ‘Germans coming’ and he gestured as if to say, get your rear ends out of here, and pointed to a woods to the north.
“So Finley and I ran north. We ran a couple of miles into the woods, and we finally sat down in a pretty good thicket. I was sitting there with my back against a tree, and Finley started to weep. He was quite close to Jackson, but I was still surprised when he started to weep. It shook me up quite a bit. I was 23 and Finley was 27 or 28. He had been in the Army for quite a while and we sort of looked up to him as the guy who knew all about the airplane, and because he was the old man of the crew, next to Jackson, who was 39. And then I realized it was quite understandable. Christ, even if you were an old guy of 28 you could still cry.
“So I comforted him as best as I could. I pulled some little splinters of glass out of his face that had lodged there when his optical gunsight had been shot up. Already I was feeling guilty that we had left Jackson at the scene. I sat there with my back against the tree and I thought, ‘Could we have helped him if we stayed? Probably not. But I feel like a bum.’ I know Finley was feeling the same way. We had done what the civilians had told us, but I still felt guilty about it. That guilt has never left me and I’m sure it never left Finley either. So we talked it over.
“I was reviewing my actions of the day and said, ‘Well, it really turned out to be a crappy mission. I did the best I could. I feel terrible about the guys getting shot up. I just feel awful. But what the hell. Everything went to hell one piece at a time, what could I do, I did the best that I could. And at least I know that I wasn’t scared.’
“And then I realized that I had been chewing gum, and the gum was stuck to the inside of my mouth, and I had to giggle a bit sitting with my back against that tree because I knew that unless you’re scared, gum does not stick to the back of your mouth. I thought that was humorous, even at the time. It seemed a humorous sidelight to getting away from the airplane.
“I had intended to go to Europe and be a hero, shoot down a lot of airplanes and all that stuff, and here I was shot down. Finley and I decided it was best to split up, which we did. He was later captured in France, not far from the border with Spain, but I escaped and evaded, making it through France and into Spain. It took me four days to cross over the Pyrenees Mountains.
“And while I was trudging through northern France trying to get to Spain, I would see our bombers high above at 25,000 feet, on their way to bomb Germany. I remember the feeling of pride I had seeing that magnificent Air Force pass by, and the feeling of regret I also had because I was not up there with them.”
