CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER SEVEN THE LIBERATORS IN ITALY had a distinctive name, usually assigned by the pilot, often after consultation with the crew, painted below and slightly to the front of the flight deck. Many had nose art, some of it quite good, much of it showing scantily dressed, buxom, and gorgeous girls. Frequently, however, the name was the pilot’s hometown or home state or the name of his mother or wife. When the pilot and crew completed their missions and went home, the men who inherited the aircraft would sometimes change the name, but that was generally considered to bring on bad luck.
McGovern and his crew came over by ship and were assigned planes on a “ready-to-go” basis, usually a different plane for almost each mission. Most of them already had a name and nose art. McGovern dubbed any plane he flew the Dakota Queen, but never painted it on the side. He picked the name to honor Eleanor. That way, he said, “we got double good luck—the name of the plane that was painted on there and a plane named for Eleanor.” He had a picture of her he would put on the console. The plane’s painted name might be Yo-Yo, or whatever, but to McGovern and his crew it was Dakota Queen.
The idea may have come from a saying popular with the pilots and crew at the airfield. Planes that had been in combat, as nearly all of them had, often had to be patched up by the ground crews. The B-24s that had been badly mauled and repaired and then pronounced ready to fly were called, derisively, “hangar queens.”1
The ground crews that did the repairs were superb. Sometimes they would work right through the night, if necessary, using a crane to put in a new engine, patching up the flak holes in the wings and fuselage, adjusting the instruments, loading in the bombs, fresh oxygen tanks, .50 caliber ammunition boxes, and other equipment. Each plane had its own ground crew. Most of the members had been mechanics before they joined the AAF. They loved the plane they worked on and watched for it as the group returned to base. It wasn’t only the pilot and crew they were concerned about; it was the plane as well. Those ground crews, in McGovern’s words, “were well trained and well motivated. We couldn’t have kept anything as complicated as a Liberator functioning very long without their superb attention.”2
Lt. Henry Burkle, in command of the ground crews, recalled that they would line up beside the runway “waiting for their airplane to come in and hoping that it came back and be there to meet the flight crew and ask them all about the flight in order to find out what maintenance had to be done.” Burkle had a crew chief for each plane. Each crew chief had three mechanics under him. “Then I had three flight chiefs, they were master sergeants, each with three flights under him. Then I had a line chief, big old fellow from Campbell, Nebraska, named Al Haggaman. He was a dandy. A big old slow farm boy, but he was sincere and he knew his work, knew his business.” Each evening, Burkle would find out “how many airplanes the commanders wanted the next day. And about ten out of every ten days they wanted every airplane that could fly put in the air. It was always maximum effort. We didn’t know what sleep was.”3
B-24 pilot Vincent Fagan of the 450th Bomb Group recalled that he “never went out to the flight line at any hour of the day or night that the mechanics were not out there working. These mechanics were the most dedicated people I ever saw. They’d break down and cry when their plane went down. It always seemed they thought there was something else they could have done to make the plane more airworthy.”4
There was one other thing that many ground crews did. They could purchase six or seven bottles of beer a week, but there was no ice or refrigeration available. So some of the crews would slip their beer aboard the B-24s just before they took off on a combat mission. Flying at 20,000 feet of elevation for six to eight hours would cool the beer. The crews were always anxious for the safe arrival of their planes to Cerignola. The pilots would accuse them of being more anxious to see that their beer was safe than that the pilot and his crew were.
Pilots were called aircraft commanders. Like captains on a ship, their word was law. The sergeants called McGovern “lieutenant” or “sir” whether on the ground or in the air. But not Rounds, who was called “Bill.” Lieutenants Rounds and Adams called their pilot “Mac,” but just as the enlisted men they knew perfectly well who was the captain. McGovern called everyone by his first name. On the assignment sheet, the crew was referred to by the pilot’s name; thus it would state, “McGovern’s going to be flying number three today.” Never “McGovern’s crew.”
On December 6, McGovern prepared to fly his first mission as pilot with his own crew. The target was the marshaling yards at Graz, Austria. He was “desperately eager to do everything right the first time out alone.” He confessed that “I was probably more nervous on that takeoff than any other missions that I flew during the war.” He was thinking about how he was going to get that big bird off the ground without Howard Surbeck there. It was by far the heaviest B-24 he had flown, what with the bomb load, a full crew, all that gasoline, the machine gun belts, the oxygen tanks, and more. This was not a stateside aircraft—it weighed 70,000 pounds, thirty-five tons. McGovern later said, “I don’t think any pilot in World War II ever made a takeoff in a B-24 that didn’t scare him.”5
On his first mission Lieutenant Fagan talked to his crew chief about the load. The chief said, “As far as the total weight is concerned, you may as well know that these 24’s are overloaded about eight thousand pounds. Consolidated Aircraft says maximum takeoff weight is 63,000 pounds.
“If you don’t like it, what do you want to leave behind? Machine gun ammunition? The flak suits? Take less gasoline? Or what? You’re going to have to take the bombs or there is no point in going.”6
McGovern found taxiing a B-24 a challenge. The taxi strips were just packed clay and dirt. He could not steer the B-24 with the nose wheel, over which he had no control. He would steer with the propellers—if he wanted to turn right he would cut back on the props on that side, speed them up on the left. The taxi strip was narrow and had a ditch on each side. The engineer, Sgt. Mike Valko, would stand behind the flight deck, open the overhead hatch, and put part of his body out of the plane to see if McGovern was getting too close on one side or the other (the pilot could not see the ditches from the cockpit). Valko would call out, “Too close on the right.” Or he would say, “A little bit left,” or “Right, right, right I said.”
Once on the runway, with three or four aircraft ahead of him waiting to take off, McGovern set the brakes and revved up the engines. Rounds went through the checklist with him. When that was complete and the plane in front had started down the runway, McGovern released the brakes. Beside him, he could hear Rounds praying. “Every takeoff I made in World War II was an adventure,” McGovern later admitted. A B-24 did not take off like a fighter. It started rolling slowly, only reluctantly picking up speed. He felt “this thing is never going to get enough speed to get off the ground—there’s just no way I’m going to make it.”
The runway was too short—by later standards it was unsafe—but just at the end of it, now up to 160 mph, McGovern pulled his plane up into the air. He was just skimming the ground. He told Rounds, “Wheels up.” Rounds hit the switch and up they came, making for more speed and climbing ability. But McGovern didn’t dare pull it up any faster for fear of stalling and crashing, something that happened on occasion. “It seemed forever before I could climb.” For over a mile he was at treetop height. He did not dare keep the engines on full throttle because that would use up too much fuel, which would be needed later. “Wing flaps up,” he told Rounds, and when that was done the plane had more speed and less drag. Finally, mercifully, he started to climb.
The rallying point was over the Adriatic. Once over the water, McGovern had the gunners test their machine guns. He got the plane up, spotted the lead plane, slid into formation, wingtip to wingtip, almost touching, close enough so that a fighter plane couldn’t dive between them. That took almost an hour. Then the formation headed on to Graz (in southeastern Austria), over the Alps. On the way up to 20,000 feet the Dakota Queen passed through clouds. For McGovern, on this and later missions, the weather gave him more worry than the possibility of heavy flak. If there had been a contest between weather and flak, “in the amount of shear sweat and fear that it produced, the weather won.” Once over the continent, the clouds gave way to blue sky. “You could look right down into those little villages.”
Rounds checked the instruments. So did McGovern. Every five minutes or so, he would press the button on his intercom and ask each crew member if everything was okay. When he needed specific information, he would ask. “Sam,” he would say to the navigator, “what is that formation off our right wing?” Or, “Tell me our location, Sam.” Or, to Sergeant Higgins, the radioman, “Have you picked up anything on the weather ahead?”
Rounds was all business. No jokes, no naps, no pranks. He was coordinated and an athlete and wanted to be flying his own fighter aircraft, but he was, in McGovern’s view, almost a perfect co-pilot. Not that he had a lot to do. McGovern said he was there as a “standby. It was like being vice president of the United States. He was there in case of trouble only.” They had no conversation other than “watch engine number one” or something about the other planes in the formation or the readings on various instruments. On this first flight, McGovern did all the flying. Rounds, then and later, when he was free from concern, would read a Bible. McGovern thought that a bit much, given Rounds’s proclivities, but sometimes would be startled when Rounds would say, “Mac, listen to this” and read something from one of the Psalms. “Damn, that’s good,” he would exclaim.
When the formation got to Graz the weather had closed in. Nothing but clouds. The lead plane turned away. The lead pilot did not get on the radio to say he was taking the others back—they simply turned when he did. Over the Adriatic on the way home he jettisoned his bomb load, as did the other planes. For everyone involved it was a milk run—no fighters, no flak. Because they had crossed into enemy territory, however, everyone got a mission to his credit. Back at Cerignola the weather was clear. McGovern told Rounds to put the wheels down. A light came on to tell him the wheels were down and fully locked. He checked to make sure his ball turret gunner was inside the airplane and his turret pulled up. He put the wing flaps down to 40 degrees. Rounds called out the airspeed—“We’re at 170 . . . 160 . . . 150 . . . 140.” McGovern eased back on the throttles. The plane was almost gliding. It was a good landing. When he pulled the plane onto its hard stand, the crew got out all singing and whistling. McGovern walked around the plane, something he did before and after every mission. Everything was fine.7
For this mission, McGovern was paid $9.70. He was earning $290 per month, including his overseas pay and flying pay.8 He sent $200 of that home to Eleanor each month.
After debriefing, on his way to the officers club, he stopped by the enlisted men’s tent to see how they were doing. They were already celebrating. McGovern and Rounds had a beer or two in the club to celebrate their first mission. No holes in the plane, no wounded crew, no danger, but credit for a full mission. Wonderful.
Sgt. Eddie Picardo, a tail gunner on a B-24, later said that he did not know how to explain “the enormous feeling of relief that accompanies returning safe from a bombing mission. . . . Once on the ground, you started to live for the future again and plan what you might do once the war was finally over. . . . I’ve never had a feeling to compare with it.”9
After the mission on December 6, the weather closed in. Most days the assignment sheet had McGovern flying in the morning, but in the morning the clouds were too thick over the base, over the Alps, over the targets, and the mission was scratched. The tension and anxiety, the tossing and turning on the cots, had been for nothing. This was typical. One B-24 pilot, Lt. Walter Hughes, was wakened and briefed eighty-six times to achieve his thirty-five missions.10
None of these pilots or their crews were ever ordered to go on a mission. When they saw their names on the assignment sheet, they knew that they could back off by just saying no, I won’t do that. They were always asked. McGovern never said no, “and I don’t know anybody that turned one down.”
On December 4, McGovern’s father died of a heart attack while he was pheasant hunting. Cables took what seemed forever in World War II, and it was not until December 14 that one reporting on the death arrived at the base. The intelligence officer took it to McGovern. The chaplain prayed with him, then said he could be exempted from flying the next day. McGovern said no, he would not take that excuse.
On December 15, the target was the railroad yards in Linz, Austria. At the briefing, the pilots and crews were told that the Red Army was on the move, that the Germans were going through Linz as they ran equipment to the eastern front, that they were also moving other troops and weapons to the western front through Linz, and thus the target was critical. So off they went.
It was at Linz on this, their second mission, that McGovern said “we got introduced to combat.” The flak was heavy. Up to that point, McGovern had thought that exploding flak “looked like firecrackers and rockets going off.” He learned better when a big slug of flak “came through the windshield, high and to my right. It hit just above my right shoulder and to the right of my head, and then fell down onto the floor between Rounds and me.” They looked down at it. Rounds looked over to McGovern and just shook his head. McGovern did the same. The shrapnel was “the angriest-looking piece of metal, just jagged on every edge and big enough to tear your head off if it had hit a few inches to the left or maybe a few more inches on Bill Rounds’s side.”
It was freezing at 25,000 feet, probably 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and the cold rush of wind—despite all the sheepskin-lined jackets and pants they had on, and despite their electrically heated suits—was ferocious. McGovern managed to keep his plane in formation, but barely. “All I could do was just sit there and do my job,” he said. He hoped no more shrapnel would hit the Dakota Queen. Two or three other pieces did, but no one was hurt.
McGovern got back to the base and made his landing “smooth as glass.” The men did not jump out and kiss the ground, but they were happy and reassured. He had done it twice. That night they talked about their lieutenant and how good he was. Other crews said their pilots “just bang us in.” From then on, McGovern said, “They treated me around that airplane almost with reverence.” They had developed, already, total confidence in their pilot. “Their lives were in my hands,” McGovern explained. “It wasn’t just that they thought they were. A mistake on my part and we’re all dead.”
December 16 was a cloudy, cold day all across Europe, but the 741st and the rest of the Fifteenth Air Force flew anyway. It was the day the Germans took advantage of the weather to counterattack in the Ardennes, launching the Battle of the Bulge. The target for McGovern and the others was the oil refineries in Brux, Czechoslovakia.
One B-24 broke its landing gear on takeoff. It jettisoned its bombs in the Adriatic, then crash-landed at the Gioia, Italy, airfield. Another bomber had engine trouble and had to return to Cerignola.
McGovern got the Dakota Queen into formation in a broken cloud cover, but “all of a sudden everything just goes blank.” The formation had flown into complete cloud cover. McGovern held his position, number three, but when they got above the clouds he discovered that they were flying at the same altitude but the plane that was number two had crossed him and was on his left side. “I was just petrified with fear at the sight.” The lead pilot saw the situation and called on his radio, “What’s going on here?” McGovern motioned to the other pilot that he should go up while the Dakota Queen went down, and they crossed again until they got into their proper position. “That’s as close as I ever came to being killed and getting my crew killed and losing our bomber,” McGovern said. He was shaking with fear and the “knowledge of how little control we had over our fate when the weather took over. There was nothing you could do when you flew into a cloud except pray because you couldn’t see anything.”
On this occasion, Rounds said to McGovern, “God took care of us.”
Over Brux the flak was intense. “They’d lay that stuff up there,” according to McGovern, “and it was almost as if an artist had drawn it.” To McGovern, it seemed that the German gunners were getting better after each raid. “They were laying that shell in there closer to you.” He “uttered many a prayer going down that bomb run, sort of an instinctive thing you would do.”
There was a bizarre array of color, ranging from blue sky overhead to white clouds below to solid black from the flak directly in front, then the huge, angry flashes of red when another shell exploded. “Hell can’t be any worse than that,” McGovern said later. The pilot and crew had heart rates that almost went through the roof, yet unless shrapnel hit the plane there was no sound other than the engines. Mike Valko stood between and slightly behind McGovern and Rounds, watching the instruments. McGovern glanced at Valko. His face was white. Everyone else was scared too, but except for Rounds and Valko, McGovern couldn’t see them.11
The lead bomber for the 741st was using a Mickey radar, so although Brux was covered by clouds he made his drop and the others followed. In another squadron, however, the lead bomber’s bomb bay door was stuck, so it dropped no bombs. Since the pilot did not break radio silence to explain, none of the planes in the squadron dropped their bombs. In all the B-24s dropped sixty tons of bombs on the target, while those in the squadron that did not release their bombs dropped them on targets of opportunity on the way back.
Except for McGovern’s squadron. Two or three other squadrons had completed their run and it was the 741st’s turn. Ahead, it was solid black except for flashes of red where shells were exploding. McGovern was flying number three, off the right wing of the lead bomber. He thought, Nobody’s going to get through this flak. But just then, the leader began making a gentle turn. He bypassed the target “and we threw our bombs into the field.” McGovern guessed that the leader’s thinking was, I’ve got this whole squadron up here following my tail—there’s no way we’re going to get through this and the damage they’re going to do to us is greater than we’re going to do to them. We may not even hit the target, can’t see it, for sure. I’m not going to take these guys into a place where I know none of them are coming out.
Whatever the leader thought, not one of the men following his plane ever said a word about it. Every pilot and co-pilot, every nose gunner and bombardier and navigator knew exactly what happened. None of them uttered a word of criticism. McGovern said his own thinking was, “I’m not sure to this day that he wasn’t right in avoiding that almost suicidal bomb run.”12
There were other mishaps. Lt. Donald Currier described a mission in which a B-24 “drifted right over our box” just as the planes arrived at the target. Over Currier’s head, the plane dropped its stick of 500-pound bombs. Currier “was looking out my window at this time and saw the first bomb strike our wing man at the top turret. There was a tremendous explosion and the plane disintegrated into flaming pieces. It happened in an instant, and it was hard to believe that these guys who had trained with us and who lived in the next tent were gone.” Just gone.
“The concussion was stunning.” The plane that dropped the bomb had its bomb bay doors open when the blast took place. The explosion came straight up and into the plane. The pilot, Lt. Vincent Isgrigg, “temporarily lost control [and] the plane slid out of formation, narrowly missing his wing man and heading for earth. Isgrigg punched the bailout button and some of the crew in back bailed out.” But Isgrigg regained control and sent his co-pilot aft to check out the aircraft. “The co-pilot took one look at the broken, twisted hydraulic lines and bailed out himself. Isgrigg and his engineer somehow nursed that airplane back across the Adriatic to Grottaglie and crash-landed it on the field. For that feat of airmanship, he got the Distinguished Flying Cross.”
Currier thought no one could have escaped from the plane that had disintegrated, but forty-one years later he discovered that two guys did get out. They were the tail gunner, Sgt. Robert Hansen, and a photographer who had come on the mission. Hansen explained to Currier that the whole tail section of the B-24 broke off at the waist windows and began floating down like a leaf. The two men had time to jump. They were captured when they hit the ground and spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp.13
From Brux it was a long way back to Cerignola. The mission took eight hours, plus an hour to get into formation. When he turned for home, McGovern used the intercom to check on the crew. He recalled that each man responded with something like, “I’m here. Thank the good Lord!” Sgt. William McAfee was the ball turret gunner. “We never thought enough of him just sitting down there,” McGovern confessed. “Nothing to hang on to, hunched over, cramped.” But he was the one who was cheerful when McGovern asked how he was doing. McAfee was always upbeat, with a smile on his big red face. McAfee, who could barely move in the turret, had “nothing to do, no one to talk to, nothing.” And he could see more than anyone else, all of it. On clear days he would watch the bombs dropping until they hit. “It was awful,” he said, seeing the explosion and the fires. But he was eighteen years old, and in his words “not smart enough to be afraid.”14
Everyone on board the Dakota Queen was exhausted emotionally. “You can’t go on indefinitely being terrified,” however, and the crew recovered somewhat. McGovern helped. He had been “sweating blood,” but during the bomb run he did not have to think about morale or anything else; he worried about doing his job. But, as he said, “the crew would sit back there and bite their fingernails.” If he could he would give them something to do so that “they felt caught up in the action and had less time to quiver in their boots.” For the gunners, there was nothing except to watch for enemy fighters, but there were none—only flak.
McGovern was also exhausted physically. “It just seemed to me that it was too much.” But the bomb run had been successful, the German transportation system disrupted. The men of the AAF took some satisfaction from that, hoping that what they had done would take some of the pressure off the Russians and help the Americans fighting the first day of the Battle of the Bulge.
On his way to the officers club after the debriefing, McGovern stopped by the enlisted men’s tent. He thought, I hardly knew they were along on the mission, but they knew it. He got “quite sad and emotional looking at them sitting on their bunks drinking a can of beer. I just had a real sense of compassion for them.” Valko was having a “terrible battle emotionally.” He was throwing back the beer and reaching for another can. He was drinking himself drunk. McGovern concluded that all of them, but most of all the gunners, “were entitled to every dollar they got in pay and every decoration they got and they were entitled to more praise than they got from me.”15
The officers club provided some relaxation. The pilots were youngVIII—the average age was twenty-one or twenty-two—and had been through a gruesome experience. Like almost any young men who had experienced what they had, they needed a chance to relax. Officers in the infantry, or on warships engaged in combat, seldom had the opportunity, but those in the AAF did. There was little, maybe even no, chickenshit on an airfield. No saluting. Casual dress—sweatshirts from their high school or college days. Nearly everyone answered to his first name, or nickname. This was not Gen. George Patton’s Third Army.
McGovern loved the club, not so much for the drinking opportunities as for the chance to sit in a real chair and do some reading and even more to have a serious conversation. The man he developed the closest relationship with was the flight surgeon, Dr. Harold Schuknecht.IX “He was terrific,” McGovern recalled. “If Hollywood was trying to design the most handsome Air Force officer they could, they would have copied him. He was as good-looking as Robert Taylor or Clark Gable.” He was smart and had a constant, slight smile. When McGovern entered the club, exhausted, “he was the best guy in the world you could talk to.” McGovern never got sick, never missed a mission, but had he done so he would have gone straight to Schuknecht for treatment. “He could turn you around better than any other doctor.” McGovern called him, as did everyone else, “Doc.”
Doc took to McGovern as much as McGovern took to him. Partly, that was because Doc also came from South Dakota, near Sioux Falls. Mainly it was because their personalities were compatible. When McGovern came into the club, Doc would go right over to ask how things were going. “We’d sit there and talk,” McGovern recalled.
They would talk for hours. About Italy, about Germany, about the origins of the war, how it might have been averted, how well President Roosevelt was handling it, what the Russians were doing. “We talked about things you wouldn’t expect GIs to talk about.” As a consequence of the conversations, and as a result of the reading McGovern was doing in books he had brought along and from the AAF library at Cerignola, he made a decision: “If I survived the war I would become a history professor. I knew that I wanted to be a teacher and history was the field.”
Doc wanted to go on missions, and did, a number of times. He asked to go with McGovern, but was refused. The commanding officer decided he did not want one of his surgeons taking such risks and ordered him to cease and desist. For his part, McGovern thought Doc was crazy for wanting to go.16
Ball turret gunner Sgt. Henry Paris related that when his B-24 landed at Cerignola, all shot up, most of the crew managed to make their way through the hatch, but the cockpit began to flame. Ammunition was exploding, adding the danger of the gasoline tank blowing up. The pilot, Lieutenant Cook, had his hand pinned around the control wheel. His clothes caught fire. He jerked free his hand, but his feet were trapped. At this point Dr. Schuknecht, who had been waiting with an ambulance, climbed up to remove the pilot. The fuselage was enveloped in flames and fire was spurting out the waist windows and the cockpit. Schuknecht grabbed Cook and yanked him out.17
In 1972, when McGovern was running for president and the far-right press charged that he had been a coward during World War II, Schuknecht—himself a Republican—told an inquiring reporter, “McGovern showed great skill and sensitivity and concern toward his crew. They felt safe with him. He instilled confidence.”18
McGovern was on the assignment sheet for the following morning, December 17. At the predawn briefing he learned the target was an oil refinery at Odertal, Germany. McGovern taxied out to the runway, called the tower, got his clearance, opened the throttles, and began speeding down the runway. Suddenly, just like that, bang. The right-hand wheel had blown.
“I had to make an almost instantaneous decision,” McGovern said, “whether to cut the throttles and try to get stopped before the end of the runway or whether to hold them wide open and pull that plane off the ground. I made one quick look and decided I couldn’t stop.”
He kept the throttles wide open and just did get up. “We had a full bomb load,” McGovern recalled. “We skimmed not just the treetops but the fence post tops.” He glanced at Rounds, whose “face was as white as that chair.” As for McGovern, “it certainly scared me more than any enemy fighters ever did.”
The question became, abort or continue the mission? Whichever alternative was chosen, the plane would be landing on one wheel, or crash-landing with no wheels. McGovern called the tower to explain his predicament. The tower said, “Lieutenant, it’s up to you. You’re the pilot. We’re not going to tell you what to do . . . but there have been B-24s that landed on one wheel and it’s not going to be easy, but if you want to do it we’ll have the emergency vehicles out there.” Or, a third alternative, have the crew bail out and bring the plane in by himself. McGovern flew a couple of circles around the airfield to give himself time to decide.
McGovern thought, We can fly this mission just as well on one wheel as we can on two and we’ll get rid of the gasoline that way and we’ll get rid of the bombs over the target, which is what we’re supposed to do. He turned on the intercom and told the crew what he had decided and then added that anyone who wanted to bail out could do so right now. None did.
McGovern got his plane into formation. Catching up had been an effort, but there was a substitute navigator that day, a man from Wichita, Kansas, Lt. Marion Colvert. McGovern said flatly of him, “He was the best navigator I ever flew with.” He was an old man, twenty-seven years of age, a big guy who had played football at Kansas State. He had been Howard Surbeck’s navigator. He gave McGovern a course that worked.
The mission took seven hours, thirty minutes, not counting the hour to form up. Flak was heavy but the Germans only shot down one B-24, while inflicting damage, not crippling, on many others. McGovern came through unhit.
Coming home was the time of worry. He was going to do what he had not done before, land a B-24 on one main wheel plus the nose wheel. He thought, I just can’t screw this up in front of Marion Colvert. Colvert was standing up on the flight deck between Rounds and McGovern.
Because McGovern had plenty of gas after the relatively short mission, the tower decided to have him circle the field and then land last. Now, McGovern thought, I have to land this plane with all these other pilots watching. The pilots were hovering around the runway. So, McGovern said, “We came down and I made the best landing I’d ever made in my life. I never made a landing like that before or since.”
He brought the airplane in “just barely floating.” He could hardly tell when the left wheel touched down. He advanced the throttles on the right side, cut them on the left side, “and that bomber went right straight down the runway. It never wavered.” As the plane lost airflow, the right wing settled down. McGovern had her slowed down enough by then that he just turned her off the runway.
Lieutenant Colvert said, “Lieutenant McGovern, that’s the best landing I have ever seen in a B-24.” McGovern said that was “a compliment I’ll take to my grave.” At the officers club that night, the other pilots cheered. “That particular incident elevated my status for good in that group,” McGovern recalled.19
In his diary, Rounds recorded that McGovern was recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross on that mission. For the 455th Bomb Group, the losses weighed heavily, but there was some pride in what had been accomplished. Thirty-four B-24s dropped sixty-six tons of bombs on the refinery.20
Hearing praise from Lts. Charles Painter or Ed Soderstrom, both pilots in the 741st Squadron, was good for McGovern’s emotions. He thought Painter was the best of all the pilots; big and muscular, he was to McGovern “one of my heroes.” Another was Soderstrom, a slender guy about six foot one, “who did something that the rest of us didn’t do,” according to McGovern. He was given an assignment of going out at night, alone, and bombing carefully selected targets, such as a bridge. One bomber at night would be a surprise to the Germans, it was thought, and Soderstrom was the pilot for the job. So McGovern was glad to receive their praise.
Encounters in the club were not always pleasant. Once McGovern started talking to two fighter pilots. The two pilots got to talking about strafing two Italians fishing on a bridge. The pilots machine-gunned them and they had dropped into the water. “Did you see those I-ties drop,” one pilot enthused. “Yeah!” the other answered. He grinned and declared, “They won’t fish again.”
That chilled McGovern. “My blood just ran cold. How could they do that to two innocent guys who were just fishing. . . . I was embarrassed. . . . They seemed to me like a disgrace to the country, disgrace to their humanity.” He thought that was what Hitler and his gang did.
Yet he was a bomber pilot. Almost certainly he was responsible for more civilian deaths than the two fighter pilots. But he was bombing Austrians, Germans, Germany’s allies, from high up, and couldn’t see the effects of the explosions, not at all like the pilots who had shot the Italian fishermen. He felt that as the casualties were Hitler’s followers he did not need to exercise his conscience about bombing them. In a sense he thought they needed it, because of what they had done throughout Europe. He wanted to show them, “You can’t get away with this kind of conduct.”
At the base, he had a lot of time to think. Sometimes he would go for days without flying because planes could not get off the ground. There was little, or even nothing, to do—no planned recreation, no physical training exercise, occasionally a softball game, depending on the rain—and yet he and his crew had to be there every day, available to fly.
After the Odertal mission, McGovern saw on the assignment sheet that he was flying again the next day, December 18. It turned out to be almost a milk run. The target was in Germany, but weather forced the lead pilot to turn away and set off for the alternative target, the marshaling yards at Sopron, Hungary. There was no flak, none at all. All planes returned to base safely.
Three consecutive missions surely required at least a day of rest, but that night on the assignment sheet there was McGovern’s name again, along with many others. At the briefing in the morning, McGovern noted that most of the pilots looked “like old men, with deep circles under the eyes.” He thought they were ready for a rest camp, or being sent home, not another mission. Instead, they were flying. The officer on the platform pulled the drawstring. The target was Munich, one of the two or three most heavily defended German cities.
One of the men in the audience gave out a sort of scream: “AHHHHHH!” For some that broke the tension and they managed to laugh. But McGovern looked at the pilot beside him. “I thought when he saw Munich on there that he was going to collapse.” The briefing officer assured the men about the importance of Munich, a major industrial site that had been bombed repeatedly but still needed more. It had been raining all night. It still was. Off they went anyway, to get into their planes. McGovern could almost see some of the pilots thinking, This is the last one, we’ll never make it home.
McGovern was in the number three position for the 741st. He put on his earphones and heard the tower telling him to taxi. He pulled onto the taxi strip. The strip was slippery due to the mud and rain. McGovern listened for directions from Valko, standing in the top hatch, but none came. McGovern felt a slight tug on the right. Before he could correct the plane, its right wheel had slipped into the ditch beside the taxi strip. McGovern increased the power to the right engines, eased off on the left side, and tried to get the wheel to climb back onto the strip. Instead, it just dug deeper into the ditch. No matter what he tried, nothing worked.
Behind the Dakota Queen there were four other B-24s, waiting for their chance to get to the runway and take off. But McGovern blocked them. He talked to the tower, explained the problem, and then heard an order to him and the other four pilots—scratch the mission. The others shut down their engines and got out of their planes. So did McGovern (whose bomber was pulled out by a tractor).
McGovern was chagrined. Those four pilots were close to their thirty-fifth mission, the Going Home Mission. He thought, he later said, that they were “just going to shoot my ass.” But instead they came over “and practically kissed me.” They couldn’t thank him enough. No Munich!
For McGovern, “that was the first time that it occurred to me that people had any motives other than just defeating the enemy. These guys wanted to survive.” At the officers club that evening, they talked. They didn’t blame McGovern, they said it was the engineer’s fault. But they did tell him that he was taking an unnecessary risk in gunning his engines, that he should never try to power his way out when stuck in mud. Beside the wear on the engines, they told him that his actions had caused a dangerous situation because of the possibility of fuel spilling on the ground and catching fire.
McGovern learned. But though the people who knew the best told him it wasn’t his fault, he never forgot the incident. He had wanted to go, to get another mission under his belt. “But I tied up the other planes so I didn’t have any feeling of exhilaration at all. I was embarrassed—my crew and I had screwed up in front of the whole squadron. I found it enormously embarrassing. It still pains me after all these years [more than a half century] to think about it.”21
That night, McGovern’s name was on the assignment sheet. In the morning, December 20, he learned that the target was the Skoda works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. It too was heavily defended because it was a principal manufacturer of arms for the Germans.
An hour away from the Skoda works, Dakota Queen’s number two engine (inboard on the left wing) quit. McGovern feathered the prop, that is, used a flight deck button to turn the propeller into a perpendicular position to keep it from windmilling and acting as a drag or brake on the plane. With only three engines functioning, McGovern had to struggle to keep up with the formation.
“Any time you lost an engine up there,” Rounds said, “there was no trouble back at base if you dropped out and returned. A lot of guys did it.” McGovern could have done it, but instead he told Rounds, “So we’re minus an engine. Let’s keep going.” They did. But after turning at the initial point and heading over Pilsen, when they were only thirty seconds or so away from the drop point, flak hit the plane.
In his diary, Rounds described what happened. “All at once No. 3 [engine] began throwing oil and smoking badly.” The engine lost oil pressure so rapidly that McGovern was unable to feather the propeller. It became a windmill, creating enormous drag and reducing the effective power of the plane to about one and a half engines. McGovern ordered the bombs dropped and turned away. But, Rounds wrote, “One minute later, she began vibrating fiercely. We tried to feather it again but it wouldn’t and just kept windmilling. We lost altitude rapidly and No. 3 burst into flame.” Radio operator Ken Higgins recalled that “oil streamed out of the runaway engine and flame was belching out of the thing. It looked real bad.”22
McGovern had read in the B-24 manual for pilots that in five minutes the flame would break through the wall and explode the gas tanks. He began descending rapidly and the increased speed put out the fire. But the prop continued to windmill. McGovern tried the feather button once more. No response. He tried again. Still nothing. “Prepare to bail out,” he called over the intercom. Waist gunner Tex Ashlock was ready to leave. “I sat with my legs dangling out the escape hatch,” he said, “waiting for the word to parachute out.”23
Neither Ashlock nor any other man in the plane had ever used a parachute. Or been trained on how to do it. McGovern had said to a veteran pilot at Mountain Home, Idaho, “Colonel, we’re about through with our training and none of us have had a parachute jump. Shouldn’t we be trained in that?”
The colonel replied, “Son, let me tell you something—when you get into combat you don’t need any training on how to get out of that plane. What you need is good judgment on how long you can stay in. You’re going to want to get out if it’s on fire, if half the wing is broken off, if it’s in a spin. What you need is the discipline to stay with it as long as it’s safe. We don’t have to teach you when to jump. You’ll find a hole that a cat couldn’t jump through if you have to get out of that plane.”
McGovern came to agree. “There were lots of times I thought it’d be a lot safer to jump out,” he recalled.
On the flight deck, McGovern tried yet again to bring the prop under control. He pushed the button and this time it worked. “Resume your stations,” he ordered over the intercom. “We’re going to try to bring her home.”
He looked at his map, however, and decided they would not get home. The airplane “just couldn’t go that far, it wouldn’t stay in the air that long.” The gas supply was low and the fuel was leaking. McGovern got on the intercom to his navigator, Sam Adams, to ask if Adams knew of any landing strips between where they were and Cerignola. “I’ll call you right back,” Adams replied. “The best bet is a little fighter strip on the isle of Vis out on the Adriatic,” Adams told him, “but it’s only got a 2,200-foot runway and we need 5,000 feet to land. Do you think you can bring it in on a 2,200-foot runway?”
Well, McGovern thought, that’s better than our being up here with two engines out and one windmilling. “How far is it?” he asked Adams.
On such and such a heading, Adams replied, “we can make it in less than an hour.”
The Dakota Queen was losing altitude. The alternative to Vis was to crash-land in the sea. That had no appeal. The B-24s were not built for crash-landing in the sea. Only about 25 percent of those who tried made it. The others broke up on impact, killing everyone. Besides, it was winter and that water was cold. “I didn’t think we’d survive,” McGovern explained later, “and bailing out didn’t appeal to me.”
He ordered everything loose thrown out of the plane to lighten it up. So most everything went—not the radio, but the machine guns, the oxygen tanks, all the ammunition, flak jackets, chart table, and more. That helped, some. McGovern said on the intercom that anyone who wanted to bail out could do so. None did.
Vis was a fifty-eight-square-mile mountainous island some forty miles off the Dalmatian coast. Marshal Tito’s partisans had taken it from the Italian army in September 1943, and the British RAF had built a runway there for their Spitfires. It was also Tito’s headquarters. A number of B-24s and B-17s had used it as an emergency strip. For the morale of the B-24 crews, knowing that Vis was there was important. “It was an unsinkable island in the Adriatic with a landing strip and medical attention,” said Ed Brendza, a technical representative for the Fifteenth Air Force sent to the island to work on the planes that landed there. “For them it was another chance at Mother Earth.”24
The island came into view. The approach required coming in over a mountain and dropping suddenly down to sea level. The number three engine caught fire, again. McGovern cut back on the gasoline to make the final approach, which had the benefit of putting out the fire.
“Both of us were on the controls,” Rounds recalled. “I was helping Mac hold it. The two good engines throbbed a little but they were being overtaxed. But when we saw that strip we weren’t worried.” Rounds raised the Vis tower by radio—its call sign was Sand Sail—and said that a B-24 with one engine afire and another dead was coming in for an emergency landing.
McGovern was worried. At the far end of the runway a mountain rose up and he could see “carcasses of half a dozen bombers beyond the field.” He figured he had only one shot at the thing. If he came in too high and tried to pull up, he doubted he could do it on two engines. If he failed to bring the Dakota Queen in on the first pass, “we would have all had it.”
He brought the plane in as slow as he could without stalling. He couldn’t land short of the runway because of the mud. He had to hit it exactly. He told Rounds, “When you hear those wheels touch that runway get on those brakes just as hard as you can and I’ll do the same.” He sat it down on the far end so as to have all those 2,200 feet of runway.
McGovern and Rounds pressed the brakes in just as hard as possible. “They were on the brakes all the way down the strip,” waist gunner Ashlock recalled. The tires screeched and smoked. “We just kind of wheeled off at the very end of the runway, going pretty fast. We bogged down in the wet clay and stopped.” From where he sat, McGovern could see the mountain just ahead of him. A British foam truck was already spraying the smoldering engine.
The men piled out of the plane. Half of them threw themselves on the ground and kissed it. That was the only time McGovern ever saw them do that. McGovern and Rounds hugged each other.
McGovern shook hands with a man named Anton Sever, who had been on the ground giving signals to McGovern telling him to stay in the center of the runway. McGovern embraced him and thanked him for his assistance. Then he “noticed that [Sever] had on English overalls with RAF insignia on it, plus a cap with a red star. ‘What are you doing here?’ ” McGovern asked. “ ‘I’m a partisan squadron aircraft mechanic, Section B,’ ” Sever answered. “ ‘Good boy,’ McGovern praised, shaking his hand once more.”
A truck picked them up. As they were driving to headquarters, another stricken B-24 came in to land. Ashlock watched. It “went right into the mountain and everyone was killed.”25
McGovern did not know that Tito was on the island and never got to meet him, but more than three decades later, President Jimmy Carter had a reception for Tito in the White House. McGovern, who was a senator at the time, was there. In his remarks, Tito expressed his appreciation for the American people and then added, “At least one of you, Senator McGovern, came to see me in World War II and now I’m returning the favor.”
At the time McGovern hoped the British could repair his plane and he could fly it out the next day, but the ground crew said no, this runway is not long enough. They added that every four-engine bomber that had come to Vis was still there, and would be forever. The next day Cerignola sent a DC-3 to pick up McGovern and his crew.26
Some months later, the AAF awarded McGovern the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions that day at Vis. The citation praised him for his “high degree of courage and piloting skill.”
McGovern got back to Cerignola on December 21. On Christmas afternoon, he saw his name on the assignment board. The target was a refinery in Oswiecim, eastern Poland. Twenty-six B-24s of the 455th Bomb Group dropped fifty tons of bombs. Flak was intense and accurate. One B-24 was seen with a feathered engine heading toward an emergency landing field in Russia, then another was seen jettisoning equipment and heading east. A third bomber landed at Vis.27
On the way out, McGovern asked Rounds to fly the plane for a while. Rounds was so good at it that McGovern began increasing his time in control. The mission took the bombers very near Auschwitz. Later, McGovern wondered why the concentration camp had not been the target. Neither he nor anyone else at Cerignola knew much about Auschwitz, but by that stage of the war rumors circulated about the mass killing going on there.
President Roosevelt had been urged by Jewish leaders to bomb the place, but he refused. He said the United States had not built those bombers in order to hit concentration camps, that they were built for a strategic function. Besides, bombing Auschwitz would have killed many Jews as well as Germans. His attitude was that the best thing America could do for Europe’s Jews was to win the war sooner, that the quicker it was won the fewer Jews would be killed.
Over the next four days, weather prevented any missions. Thus did 1944 come to an end. In December, the 455th had flown a total of sixteen missions with 359 aircraft deployed over target. They had dropped a total of 650 tons of bombs. The losses were fifteen aircraft, 111 crewmen reported missing in action, and thirty-two reported killed. It had not been a good month. The men at Cerignola looked forward to the new year, the one that they hoped would end the war.
VIII So were the Germans shooting at them. Manfred Rommel, son of the field marshal, was an antiaircraft gunner at age fourteen. The others in his battery were about the same age. Rommel after the war became the mayor of Stuttgart, a post he held for many years. When I would bring in veterans to meet him in his office, he would always assure them, “We always missed.” That reassured them, but it wasn’t true.
IX After the war, Dr. Schuknecht joined the Harvard faculty and became one of America’s leading ear specialists.