CHAPTER 25

THE BALLAD OF SNUFFY SMITH

While the other seven of the eight men profiled in this book were contributing to aviation history, building careers, or volunteering to fight for their country, Maynard Harrison “Hokie” Smith was living with his mother in Caro, Michigan, spending his winters in Florida, and digesting tomes on pop philosophy and pseudoscience. The only work that he was doing as Hitler was marching across Europe was working his way through the money he had inherited from his father.

Like every man in the United States between the ages of 18 and 36, he had registered for the draft in September 1940, but they were taking younger men first, so he had imagined himself as essentially immune. After Pearl Harbor, everything changed. The draft age was extended to 45, so 30-year-olds like Smith were suddenly in the vulnerable range. All around him, men were volunteering, but this selflessness did not suit Hokie Smith. He had grown accustomed to the leisurely lifestyle that his inheritance provided him.

It was not the draft that finally caught up to him but one of his earlier indiscretions. Arlene, his ex-wife, whom he had married and divorced when she was still a teenager, continued to darken his otherwise blithe existence with demands for child support.

Hokie felt that her remarriage took him off the hook, but the law did not agree, and in August 1942 he was arrested for nonpayment. The judge sitting on the same bench once warmed by Smith’s father gave the errant deadbeat two choices: go to jail or join the US Army. As Jim Sparling, later a columnist for the Tuscola County Advertiser, wrote in 2000, “When I went into the army, a group of 30 of us assembled on the courthouse steps [in Caro, Michigan] for a picture. While we were lining up, the sheriff came down the steps with Maynard ‘Hokie’ Smith beside him in handcuffs.”

Inducted on September 1, Smith was assigned to the USAAF and was off to Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he developed a deep resentment to taking orders from drill sergeants a decade younger than he was. Having learned that all gunners were sergeants, he volunteered for Aerial Gunnery School down at Harlingen Field, near Brownsville.

It was around the same time that Hokie Smith became “Snuffy” Smith, possibly a reference to the cartoon character of the same name who was a mainstay of Billy DeBeck’s popular Barney Google comic strip. More likely, it was one step removed. A popular B movie in 1942 was Private Snuffy Smith, based on the strip, in which Snuffy, played by Bud Duncan, joined the army to escape the federal agents sniffing around his moonshine. The story line and the character’s quirky disposition clearly parallel those of Maynard Smith.

Smith qualified as a B-17 ball gunner, picked for this duty in part because of his slight stature. In this job, he was the man who curled up into the unimaginably cramped confines of the spherical Bendix ball turret on the belly of the Flying Fortress. A large man simply would not fit into a ball turret.

Snuffy went overseas in March 1943, assigned to the replacement pool, but he was in England for six weeks before he finally got his first mission. There was a reason.

Andy Rooney, later a well-known commentator for the CBS television program 60 Minutes, was then a young reporter with the GI newspaper Stars and Stripes in England. Having met Smith, he described him as “known to everyone as a moderately pompous little fellow with the belligerent attitude of a man trying to make up with attitude what his five-foot-four, 130-pound body left him wanting.”

This cantankerous nature led crews who needed a replacement gunner to shy away from him, but he was finally picked up by the 423rd Bomb Group, the most recent addition to the 306th Bomb Group. Known as the “Reich Wreckers,” they were based at Thurleigh in Bedfordshire, about 50 miles north of London, and had flown their first mission back on October 9, 1942. Most of the original crews were gone by now, either shot down or sent home after completing their magic 25 missions.

The cranky replacement was assigned to Lieutenant Lewis Johnson, the pilot of the B-17 with tail number 42-29649. His twenty-fifth and last combat mission would be Snuffy Smith’s first.

On the first day of May, the Eighth Air Force sent 78 B-17s to the U-boat pens at Saint-Nazaire. The Flying Fortresses of the 423rd Bomb Squadron of the 306th were part of the strike package that day, and so were those of the 324th Bomb Squadron of the 91st Bomb Group. Snuffy Smith was sharing the same patch of sky over western France with Bob Morgan and the Memphis Belle.

Morgan described it as a “bad mission from the start,” adding that “there were clouds over the target, and they gave us a bad time. We never really knew whether we hit the target or not.”

The 306th Bomb Group’s official report echoed Morgan’s recollections, noting that “bombing was bad due to heavy overcast. . . . Target visible only when directly overhead when such hits as could be seen were mainly in water or on point of land short and to the right of aiming point.”

Flak was officially described as “ineffective and behind the formation,” but Snuffy Smith found it unnerving. “First you hear a tremendous whoosh,” he recalled, “then the bits of shrapnel patter against the sides of the turret, then you see the smoke.”

In moments, it was over and they were on their way home.

This might have—indeed should have—marked the end of Smith’s first mission and Johnson’s last.

“I ought to ditch this plane just off the coast to make a dramatic story I can tell my children someday,” Johnson joked to his copilot, Lieutenant Robert McCallum.

The usual plan was to fly a northwesterly path until opposite Land’s End in Cornwall, the southwest tip of Britain, then turn east. However, the lead navigator made a serious error and led the formation of 91st and 306th Bomb Group B-17s into an eastward turn 200 miles too far south. As they sighted land, the bombers began their usual descent to 2,000 feet. Instead of Cornwall, though, the land was Brittany, and they were bearing down on the heavily fortified port of Brest!

When the skies were suddenly filled with a black carpet of flak, the bombers descended with the idea of slipping beneath the altitude at which the antiaircraft shells were fused to explode. The official report of the 306th stated that they flew over Brest at 800 feet, adding that the flak was intense and “very accurate.” The Flying Fortress piloted by Lieutenant Robert Rand of the 91st was the first to go down, and the Memphis Belle lost an engine to the flak. The 91st lost four planes in what came to be called the “May Day Massacre.”

As many as 20 Luftwaffe fighters jumped the bombers as soon as they cleared the flak. The official report mentions that interceptors attacked from below. From inside his cramped ball turret, Smith returned fire.

As he was watching the tracers scurrying past the airplane, he suddenly felt the jolt of a huge explosion as the fuel tanks amidships exploded into a fireball. The explosion knocked out the electrical power, which was needed to move the ball turret, so Smith slid open the hatch and squeezed out.

Meanwhile, Johnson ordered Sergeant William Fahrenhold, the flight engineer, to go aft to assess damage. Both he and Smith discovered the same thing from opposite sides. Along with the electrical lines, the intercom lines had been severed, so neither man knew what was happening on the opposite side of the impenetrable wall of flame that had engulfed the radio compartment and central fuselage.

As Smith watched, Sergeant Henry Bean, the radio operator, pushed past him with his uniform on fire. In one swift motion, he hurled himself through one of the waist gun ports and was gone. Smith watched as his burning body hit the horizontal stabilizer, bounced, and fell toward the English Channel.

One of the waist gunners had already jumped, and the other one was halfway out, his flight suit or his parachute harness snagged on the waist gun hatch. Smith pulled him inside and asked if the heat was too much for him. He stared back and replied, “I’m getting out of here.”

Smith helped him open the aft escape hatch, and he too was gone. Being the new man, Smith didn’t know the gunners, and it was not clear whether it was Joseph Bukacek or Robert Folliard whom he helped that day. Neither of them, nor Henry Bean, was ever seen again.

Deciding to stay with the stricken Flying Fortress, Smith grabbed a fire extinguisher and went to work on the fire. As he was beating down the flames, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see Staff Sergeant Roy Gibson crawling forward from his position as the tail gunner. He was drenched in blood, but Smith rolled him over. He finally ascertained by looking at the wound in his back, and by the way Gibson was having difficulty breathing, that his left lung had been punctured. Rolling him on his left side to keep the blood from pouring into his right lung, Smith stabbed him with a morphine syringe and returned to firefighting.

Smith saw an Fw 190 closing in and grabbed one of the .50-caliber waist guns. As the fighter flashed past, he lurched toward the gun on the opposite side of the Flying Fortress and continued firing.

As that Focke-Wulf disappeared into the distance, Smith went back into the radio compartment, where the radio, camera, and gun mounts were melting. He started grabbing anything that was loose and on fire and throwing it through a hole that had been burned in the fuselage. As he was doing this, .50-caliber rounds in the burning ammunition cases started to explode and he jettisoned these as well.

For more than an hour, Smith alternated between fighting the fire, tending to Gibson, and shooting back at the attacking German fighters. When the fire extinguishers ran out, he unzipped his fly and emptied his bladder into the flames. When that ran out, he beat on the smoldering wreckage until his own flight suit started to smolder.

Through the years, most of the credit for fighting the fire has gone to Smith, but reports published immediately afterward in the New York Herald Tribune and repeated in Smith’s own hometown Tuscola County Advertiser stress that Fahrenhold and Joseph Melaun, the navigator, were also armed with fire extinguishers and working on the blaze from the opposite side.

Meanwhile, Lewis Johnson was guiding the bomber toward the nearest friendly field, which turned out to be at Predannack in Cornwall. He lined up in the runway and brought the damaged aircraft down.

Johnson landed separately from Snuffy Smith and Roy Gibson. Just as the aircraft touched the runway, it broke into two pieces, each of which careened down the runway, skidding to a halt in clouds of dust and sparks.

Had the blaze not been beaten down as it was, the Flying Fortress would have burned into two pieces an hour earlier and these would have dropped like rocks into the English Channel. No one would have survived. Incredulous ground crews inspecting the damage stopped counting bullet and shrapnel holes when they reached 3,500.

—

If it hadn’t been for Andy Rooney and Lewis Johnson, Snuffy Smith might have slipped from his brilliantly shining moment of heroism back into ignominious obscurity. The first journalist to interview Smith after the mission, Rooney wrote the Stars and Stripes article heard round the world, and Johnson wrote the Medal of Honor recommendation that was heard loud and clear in Washington.

The story of the ill-tempered little man who fought the odds and saved lives was just the kind of story that played well in the media and in American households. Snuffy Smith was gradually becoming a larger-than-life figure.

In Washington, it was discovered that if a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery in action, was awarded to Smith, he would be the first enlisted airman to receive it, and the first living airman since Jimmy Doolittle to receive it. The Medal of Honor recommendation caught the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt, who agreed that it should be awarded. Even the awarding of the medal would be larger-than-life. It was decided that Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who was due to be traveling to Britain in July, would go up to Thurleigh to award it personally.

When it was discovered that no Medals of Honor were available in England, someone rushed to find one and handed it to Stimson just as he embarked. Almost no one knew it at the time, but Stimson was not merely on a routine inspection tour, although that was his cover story. He was actually traveling to England specifically to make arrangements with Winston Churchill for future Anglo-American collaboration on the atomic bomb program.

When Stimson arrived at Thurleigh on July 15 for the carefully choreographed ceremony, he was greeted by Ira Eaker and a half dozen other generals. The band played, and 18 Flying Fortresses were ready for a low-level flyby. Everything was in place for a perfect media event. Everything, that is, except Snuffy Smith.

The call went out. “Where is Sergeant Maynard Harrison Smith?”

It is probably fitting that Snuffy was the only snafu at his own award ceremony. In the air, he was ten feet tall, a man of gallantry. On the ground, he was still five foot four, and the best that could be said was that he was an antihero. The man who seemed unable to ever do anything right was on KP duty that morning, as he was so often for sloughing off here, oversleeping there, or not bothering to attend required briefings.

“Where is Sergeant Maynard Harrison Smith?”

He was scraping breakfast trays in the mess hall.

Did he not know that this was his big day? Did the officer who exiled him to KP not know?

Brushed off and poured into a clean uniform, Sergeant Maynard Harrison Smith took the field, stood at attention, and uttered a meek “thank you” when Stimson draped the starry blue ribbon around his neck.