CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER NINE February 1945
FEBRUARY BEGAN WITH MARGINAL WEATHER. Then it got worse. The first mission for the 741st Squadron, on the first of the month, had as its target the oil refinery at Moosbierbaum, Austria, but the weather was so bad en route and at the target that the group leader decided not to bomb. All planes returned to base.
Oil refineries and the marshaling yards in Austria and Germany were the primary targets that month. On February 5, McGovern flew to bomb the oil storage facilities at Regensburg, Germany. Clouds covered the target but the squadron dropped its bombs, using the pathfinder method of following the actions of the lead plane. The results were unobserved because of the clouds. No one in the squadron was lost. Two days later, on another mission to Moosbierbaum, the flight leader’s bombsight was inoperative so no bombs were dropped. The bombardiers dropped the bombs over water, then the planes returned safely.
On February 8, twenty-four B-24s hit the Matzleindorf marshaling yards at Vienna. The clouds covered the target, but the Americans dropped fifty-four tons of 500-pound bombs, again using the pathfinder method. The flak was intense but all the bombers made it through. However, one B-24 with the group’s markings took a position off the number two man in one of the boxes. It was a plane that had been forced down, then repaired by the Germans. It shadowed the squadron, radioing down to the gunners on the 88s the altitude, direction, and speed of the squadron, which was a practice, that while not frequent, was used whenever the Germans had the opportunity. The lead pilot realized what was happening and told every gunner in the squadron to train on the German-manned B-24. As the gunners did so, the aircraft’s pilot saw what was happening. He made a 180-degree turn and got out of there.1
By February 1945, the defensive capabilities of the Luftwaffe were almost nonexistent. The Germans had little or no fuel left for training pilots, and their ME 109s had just about been blown out of the air. What fighters were left had few runways available. For his part, McGovern never saw a German fighter attack the Dakota Queen. Flak, of course, was another matter altogether. Following the Battle of the Bulge, as the Allies moved up to the Rhine and prepared to cross the river, the Red Army was headed toward Berlin and Vienna. The shrinkage of the front lines forced the Germans to pull back. The American, British, and Russian air assaults on Germany were increasing in number of bombers flown and damage done. So the Germans concentrated their 88s around their cities, to defend their few remaining oil refineries and most of all their marshaling yards. That meant that even as the Allies were winning, their bombers were flying through ever heavier flak concentrations.
And the Germans had developed a jet-propelled fighter, the ME 262, the fastest fighter in the world. Their problem was a shortage of fuel and trained pilots and airfields. Had the ME 262 been developed earlier it could have been a war-winning weapon, but it was not. When a group of the jets attacked an Eighth Air Force formation, it was havoc for the Americans, as the jets were three times faster than the American bombers. But that didn’t happen very often. There were not enough of them.
One reason for the shortage was the sustained Fifteenth Air Force attack against factories making jets and against the airfields where they underwent final assembly. Altogether the Germans built 1,400 jets, but only a small percentage of them got into the air. The Regensburg airfield was one of their bases. A photo reconnaissance by the Fifteenth Air Force on February 8, 1945, showed 48 ME 262s on the ground. The Fifteenth mounted missions to hit them on the field. The 455th, and its 741st Squadron, participated in the February attacks. The group destroyed twelve ME 262s and damaged four others. Other participants put more jets out of action. This proved to be a knockout blow. Individuals or small groups of jets continued to be seen, but no squadron-sized formations.2 Indeed, as the official Army Air Forces history put it, “The few prize jet aircraft that appeared . . . offered little opposition but hopped almost comically from one airfield to another or to the empty Autobahnen behind German lines.”3
Pilot Lt. Glenn Rendahl, in the 514th Squadron, 376th Bomb Group, flying out of San Pancrazio, Italy, near Taranto Bay, was attacked by ME 262s. In February 1945, he was on a mission to Austria when he had “runaway turbo” problems. He was over the Adriatic. “The cure for the turbos,” he related, “was to move a good amplifier, after locking in its setting, from the slot for that engine into a slot in need of boost, then set and lock the desired setting there.” He did so, but by the time he had fixed the problem he had lost 5,000 feet of altitude and some speed. His formation was out of sight. “We could never catch them, so we would just have to look for and join with another formation.”
As Rendahl gained enough power to start climbing again, “I took a look back over my left shoulder—just as you would before you pull a car out of a parking place.” As he did, “Oops!” He saw “two German jet fighters with black swastikas on their sides sweeping in from our left and I saw their tracer bullets already coming into our plane.”
It was a favorite strategy for the German fighter pilots to catch stragglers flying alone. It was often an easy kill. Rendahl called over the intercom, “Jerry’s at seven o’clock level, when are you guys going to start shooting back?” The upper turret gunner called back, “Hold your fire, here comes three of our P-51 escorts from high overhead.” With the P-51s coming at them, the Germans turned and ran, then dove for the ground of northern Yugoslavia just to the east. The three P-51 escorts stayed right on their tails until they all went out of sight. Rendahl managed to hook up with another formation “and added our bombing strength to their mission in what we regarded as a very useful contribution.”
Later, Rendahl praised the P-51 pilots: “If we had not had an escort trio watching us from above, and timely enough to be there quite soon after the shooting started, we would have surely been subdued by two of the Nazis’ latest jet fighters doing what they specialized in. Without the intervention of our escorts and their willingness to risk their lives for those of us whom they had never met, we would have been most fortunate to end up in the Adriatic Sea below us. Or we might have stretched it to Trieste, which was then German-occupied. Most likely, some of our crew would be lost either way.”4
The P-51 pilots were African-Americans of the 99th Fighter Squadron, Fifteenth Air Force, flying out of Terni, north of Rome. They were called the Tuskegee Airmen and they were justly famous. The men of the bombers seldom saw them, because they stayed up high to watch over the formations. As Rendahl put it, “When you needed them they came, and with a full head of steam.” He called the performance of the Tuskegee Airmen “exemplary.” He felt that “their vigilant watch over us that day saved ten of us from a potential tragedy. We, plus all our families, will forever be grateful to them.” He added, “The important thing is that when our nation goes to war, real patriotism has only one race. You are either American or you are not. There are those who want to kill you, and then there are those who want to save your life. It is that simple, and undeniable.”5
Pepin of the 741st Squadron spoke for many. “It was a favorable day for us when we caught escort protection from the men from the 99th Fighter Squadron. Because of the P-51’s long-range capabilities, they were able to escort us to and from most of the targets. It was quite a vision to observe these great pilots engage the German jets and prevent them from attacking us. We would watch them as they dispersed the enemy with their superior skills. They never let the Germans get close enough for our gunners to fire at the enemy.” Unfortunately, Pepin added, “they could give us no protection from the flak; we just had to plow through and pray a good deal.”
The U.S. Army in World War II was a segregated force. In Pepin’s words it was “still practicing discrimination. But those P-51 Negro fighter pilots did not discriminate.” Once late that winter Pepin was in Foggia when he and his buddies met some of the 99th Fighter Squadron pilots. “We showered them with our thanks and respect. The drinks were on us.”6
The men of Tuskegee admired the B-24 pilots and crews without stint. Lieutenant Edward Gleed said, “We didn’t want any part of that flak” the bombers flew through. “It was a horrendous sight to see six B-24 Liberators with all that flak starting to come up and—bang—there’s only five airplanes left and one big ball of smoke.” Lieutenant Herb Sheppard said his most vivid memory of the war was “the sight of bombers being hit by an 88 and the bombs going off—a big red eruption with black smoke going by you.” Lieutenant Jefferson recalled, “Planes fell in flames, planes fell not in flames, an occasional one pulled out and crash-landed, sometimes successfully, sometimes they blew up. Men fell in flames, men fell in parachutes, some candlesticked [when their parachutes didn’t open]. Pieces of men dropped through the hole, pieces of planes.” The Tuskegee Airmen prayed and wept. “Have you any idea of what it’s like to vomit in an oxygen mask?” According to Jefferson, “These bomber guys had seen the inside of hell.”
The African-American pilots loved their P-51s. Lt. Woody Crockett called the plane “a dream. It could climb, turn, and fight at low level and at high altitude.” The Mustang carried six .50-caliber machine guns, three in each wing. Lt. Lou Purnell said, “If that plane had been a girl, I’d have married it right on the spot. Damn right! It was like dancing with a good partner.” They painted their tails bright red. Lt. Herbert Carter explained, “We wanted the American bombers to know we were escorting them. The red tails would also let the German interceptors know who was escorting those bombers.”
Their task was to protect. Their orders were to stay with the bombers, whatever happened. “Protect them with your life” was the saying. They flew about 5,000 feet above the bombers, meaning they flew at 30,000 feet or even above. Lieutenant Sheppard felt “the extra five thousand feet gave us an edge if we had to ward off attack. If you have speed, you can get altitude, and if you have altitude, you can get speed. That P-51 really accelerated when you put its nose down. Man, altitude just disappeared like smoke in the wind.”7
On a February mission, McGovern heard in his briefing that the 99th would fly as escorts. After dropping the bombs and turning for home, he looked out the window and saw German jets looming in the distance. “Our group leader tried to establish radio contact with our fighter escorts,” McGovern said, “but couldn’t. There was some pretty harsh language on the air, questions about where the ‘blasted niggers’ were. Just then, the squadron commander of the black pilots broke in and said, ‘Why don’t you all shut up, white boys? We’re all going to take you home.’ And they did. They drove off the enemy fighters.”8
Ken Higgins looked out and saw the P-51s flying at the side of the Dakota Queen. The black pilot saw the camera in the camera hatch and called up on the radio, “Is that a camera in there?” Higgins said yes, and the pilot said, “How about taking my picture?” Higgins did.
Over the radio, he heard some fighter pilots talking: “Red Tail One to Red Tail Two. Is that you behind me?” Another voice: “Who that?” And the first voice: “Who that? Who say that?”
The colonel in the lead B-24 cut in: “Get off the radio. No speaking on the radio. Get off.”
The fighter pilot came back on: “Who that?” he asked. In Higgins’s view, “That would keep you going, you know. A little levity here and there didn’t hurt.”
Like Pepin and everyone else in one of the bombers, Higgins had the deepest respect for the men of the 99th. He pointed out that, among many other things, “they made it a point when they were in a town, they were dressed immaculately. I mean their brass was polished and their clothes were pressed. They were really sharp. They made it a point to be that way.” Higgins added, “There was a lot of talk during the war about blacks being cowards and stuff like that. I never saw any of that. Never did I see any cowardliness.”9
Neither did anyone else. Sgt. Erling Kindem of the 742nd Squadron was on a February mission against Vienna. He later wrote in his war diary, “Before reaching the target, a ‘phantom’ B-24 joined our formation.” It was a downed bomber the Germans had restored and were flying to radio back to base the formation’s altitude, speed, and direction. Fortunately, the Tuskegee Airmen were flying as escort. Kindem’s pilot reported to the black pilots in their P-51s the information. The leader responded, “I’ll go scare him out but you tell your boys not to point their guns at us.”
Kindem’s diary went on: “The P-51s came in and over the radio the German phantom pilot said he was from the 55th Wing and got lost. But the 55th Wing wasn’t flying that day and the plane had no tail markings. The fighter pilot squadron leader gave him some bursts from his guns and warned the phantom to turn back. He added, ‘You will be escorted.’ The German pilot replied that he could make it alone. The P-51 pilot said: ‘You are going to be escorted whether you want it or not. You’re going to have two men on your tail all the way back and don’t try to land in Yugoslavia.’ The phantom protested and said he wanted to drop his bombs. The response from the fighter pilot was: ‘You ain’t gonna drop no bombs.’ The phantom left with his escort and we heard nothing further from the event.”10
Back in October 1944, Lt. C. W. Cooper—the “old” infantry officer (he was twenty-eight years old) who had after some time with the troops volunteered for the Army Air Forces and trained as a navigator—shipped over to join the 741st Squadron at Cerignola. It was a long trip by a leaky cargo ship. He was in command of fifty-five replacements, all soon-to-be crew members of the B-24s. “They were hell to take care of,” he recalled, not like the infantry enlisted men he was accustomed to leading. After disembarking at Naples, Cooper and his men traveled by truck to a staging base in southernmost Italy. They arrived in November. The first officer he saw was “a big, raw-boned second lieutenant, with red hair and a red beard. I said, ‘Golly, that guy’s still a second lieutenant, he must be thirty-five years old.’” Cooper and his crew boarded the lieutenant’s B-24 and flew toward Cerignola. As they were landing, Cooper heard the lieutenant say to his co-pilot, “Have you got runway on your side?” The co-pilot said, “Yeah.” The pilot said, “I’ve got some over here too,” so he set the plane down. Later when the pilot had completed his missions he shaved and to Cooper’s astonishment, “He was an eighteen-year-old kid!”
Cooper and the crew lined up for their first meal at Cerignola. The man in front of Cooper asked, “You haven’t eaten here before, have you?”
“No,” Cooper replied.
“Well, we’ve been eating here quite a while,” the man said. “Tell you what you’re supposed to do. If you have a bug in your food when you get it first, you throw the food out. After about a week though, if you have a bug in your food, you go ahead and eat the food. And then the third week, you look and there’s a bug in you food, you make him stay and don’t let it get away because it’s good, it’s got nutrients.”
On an early mission Cooper’s plane climbed well above freezing altitude. “I think our bombardier may have been reading a comic book or sleeping back there. Anyway when you go through the level where things will freeze, you keep working the bomb bay doors so that they won’t jam on you, they won’t ice up.” Cooper’s plane got to the target “and the bombardier hadn’t done what he should have done going to that level, and the bomb bay doors had frozen. He couldn’t get them open. So he dropped the bombs through the bomb bay doors.” In other words he hit the toggle switch and the bombs just broke through the aluminum. The wheels, when let down, were below the now broken bomb bay doors flapping in the breeze. “We didn’t know whether it would be enough room or not. If those things hit the runway, they may cause a spark and there may be a buildup of gas in the bomber and bloody, we would’ve had it.” Fortunately the plane landed safely.
Cooper was so good as a navigator that he soon was flying on the lead plane on his missions. He did so on six missions. “The pressure was really on then, because you had to be absolutely right where you were supposed to be at all times. I was the navigator.” He was struck by the difference between being an infantry officer and a pilot. “The pilot didn’t exercise command like an infantry platoon leader,” he felt. “In the infantry, you’re under pressure all the time. For us, we were only under pressure when going on a mission.” In the infantry, a lieutenant told his platoon what to do and how to go about it. But “the pilot had to recognize the role of each air crew member and not get in the way.” Cooper thought the biggest difference between the infantry and the Army Air Forces was that “you are individuals when you’re on a crew. The pilot’s not going to tell me how to navigate, he’s not going to tell Ken Higgins how to run his radio. Those were our specialties and we did our job.” Cooper added, “It was a whole different situation than it was in the infantry.” B-24 crews socialized together, mixing regardless of rank. Never had Cooper seen such a thing in the infantry.
Cooper had eleven missions behind him. Compounding the tension of navigating the lead plane, with six other navigators watching in their following planes, was the reality of flak. On nearly every mission, his plane took various hits, losing power on one or two engines, and in other ways making what he was doing in the most dangerous place in the world even more fearful. So was the possibility of accidents. One time Cooper saw a B-24 drop its bombs right on top of a plane flying below, setting off a flashing explosion that destroyed everything except the engines. Cooper watched as they fell.
A few days later, Cooper flew a mission, got back to Cerignola, and was told to make up a route for the mission the next day. “I noticed that one of the turning points they gave us was right over a flak-up area in northern Yugoslavia. So I thought, That’s no good.” He called Wing Headquarters: “Say, you gave us a wrong turning point—”
“Don’t say any more,” the officer at Wing shot out. “Don’t say any more. Our telephone lines are bugged all the time so no more. We will get you a correction.” The men at Wing Headquarters had already spotted the error, which had come about because two towns in Yugoslavia had the same name. One had heavy flak, the other nothing. The turning point was changed.
Radiomen on the B-24s kept changing their frequencies so that the Germans would have a hard time listening. Occasionally, they could pick up and get on the German frequency. On one of Cooper’s missions, a German-speaking radioman came along. Cooper listened as he went to work: “He got on the radio, on their frequency, and he heard a German commander talking to his fighter planes, directing them toward our formation. So the American, identifying himself in German as their ground control officer, ordered them, ‘Return to base, immediately.’ So these fighter planes took off to go back to base, and before their real commander could get it corrected, they were already gone, and couldn’t get back up there to us.” Cooper added to the story that he knew of at least one other native German speaker in the 455th Group who used that technique.
One of the pilots Cooper flew with was, in his view, wishing he were up in the sky in fighter planes, not B-24s. He took chances, in turns, wagging his wings, climbing or diving. One February day, when Cooper was not on the plane, that pilot took it up for a practice run. As a stunt, he began buzzing Wing Headquarters. Wing called Group Headquarters on the radio to say, “There’s a plane buzzing us and it’s your plane. Get this damn plane out of here.” The group commander, furious, ordered, “Ground that pilot when he gets back to base. Nobody in his right mind would do that.” Even before the B-24 landed, there was a jeep waiting for the pilot. Cooper recalled that “they took him into headquarters and grounded him right there on the spot. And they kept him grounded for quite a while and then when they did let him fly again on a combat mission, they gave him a plane that was doubtful whether it’d get up there or not.”11
The day the pilot was grounded, Cooper was moved out of his tent and out of his crew and sent to George McGovern’s tent. From now on he would take Adams’s place permanently, as McGovern’s navigator. The next night, February 19, he wrote his buddy, Lt. Joe Prendergast with the 4th Infantry in Germany. He told Prendergast, “My new pilot is a honey—very sincere, a mature man, and a good pilot. He’s married and expecting a baby in three weeks so he’ll add a thousand feet for safety.” As Cooper signed off on the letter, McGovern came into the tent. He had just been promoted to first lieutenant. Cooper added a postscript: “Mac, my new pilot, just came in and let me pin his thirty-minute-old silver bars on him. I’m sure glad ’cause he rates.” Sometime after sending the letter, Cooper got the V-Mail back. Scribbled on the front beside Prendergast’s name was a note: “Killed in action. J. A. Wesolowski, Capt., 4th Inf.”12
When Cooper met McGovern and Rounds, he knew he had joined an experienced pilot and co-pilot. He went through details of what he had done up to that point, then listened. He was impressed by McGovern, “serious without being obnoxious.” Rounds had more of a wait-and-see quality to him. Cooper later said that Rounds “would go in all directions at once. I quickly called him ‘Rounds the Rounder.’”13
On February 20, McGovern and his crew stood down. The next morning, at 4:00 A.M. they were up, getting ready. The briefing officer informed them the target that day was the marshaling yards in Vienna. He was answered with groans. Vienna still had one of the heaviest flak concentrations in Europe.
Among the bomber crews in the formation was one with Lieutenant Hammer as radioman. He had had a dream the previous night, which he related to his crew as they were waiting to take off. He had dreamed that the target would be Vienna. And it turned out to be true. The other crew members, Hammer confessed, were “amused—in a sickly sort of way.”14
Off they went anyway, along with twenty-six other B-24s. The Dakota Queen was in the middle of the 741st Squadron’s box. The flak over Vienna was, according to the 455th Group’s account, “intense and accurate.”15 Some fourteen of the bombers were hit out of the twenty-one that got over the target.
Hammer was in one of them. As the plane pulled away from Vienna, number three engine quit. Lt. Ray Grooms, the pilot, and Lt. Jim Connelly, the co-pilot, tried unsuccessfully to feather the propeller. The windmilling prop cost the plane altitude and speed and it dropped behind the remainder of the squadron. Grooms ordered the crew to jettison everything possible, but still the plane lost altitude and just did get over the Yugoslavian mountains. Grooms decided not to try to cross the Adriatic; his navigator told him there was an emergency landing field under American control at Zara, just ahead. He headed for it, but as he checked his systems he discovered that the hydraulic system had been damaged. He had no brakes.
He snapped out orders to his waist gunners. Remove the waist windows. Tie a parachute to each waist gun. Be ready to toss it out and pull the rip cords on my word. They acknowledged. In Hammer’s words, “Shortly after the wheels made contact with the ground we got the word and threw them out and pulled rip cords. The one on my side opened first and we veered crazily in that direction until the pintle holding the waist gun to its mounting was sheared cleanly in half. The pintle, made of solid steel, measured two inches in diameter at the point of breakage. The other parachute finally opened and braked us down.”X
Once out of the plane, the crew members told Hammer “that I could, in the future, keep my dreams to myself.” GIs in trucks and jeeps picked them up and took them immediately to a C-47, which was soon in the air. Hammer and his buddies got to sleep in their own bunks that night, back in Cerignola.16 The Dakota Queen had taken only a few hits from shrapnel, which made holes in the wings, but McGovern was on the ground to welcome Hammer back.
On February 24, McGovern, Rounds, Cooper, and the crew flew a mission headed toward the marshaling yards in Vienna, but bad weather forced them and the other planes to abort. On the twenty-eighth it was back into the air, with the target the marshaling yards in Isarco Albes, in northern Italy. The flak was not as heavy as over Vienna, but it was there. They returned to Cerignola safely.
In the winter of 1944–1945, the 741st improved its living conditions. By then every tent had either a wooden or a concrete floor. The food was better and had come to include steak, fresh chicken, real eggs, and ice cream. Squadron officers started to give classes in algebra, business administration, aircraft maintenance, history, and the Italian languages. The ground crews flocked to the Italian instructions, as they had come to the conclusion that since there was no hope in their going home before war’s end, they might as well understand what the natives were talking about.
Still the rain came down. It created much mud, especially around the new mess hall. Two GIs were heard discussing the mud. One said he had stumbled into it and had sunk in ankle deep. The other GI said he had gone in as well, but the mud was up to his knees. The first GI said, “Yeah, but I went in head first.”
The men put out a group newspaper, called the Journal, and each squadron also had one. The 740th Squadron’s was called Il Castoro Ardente, meaning Eager Beaver. The 741st called its paper Stagrag. The papers were typed and run off on hand-cranked mimeograph machines. The January 1945 issue of the Journal carried an article written by Maj. Al Coons, the group intelligence officer. One year had passed, he opened, “a year that most of us would rather not have lived as we did, had the world we inherited been one in which free choices were possible. At the same time, it is a year most of us would not have spent otherwise, given the world as it was in February 1944.” He then wrote of all the territory liberated in Russia, France, Belgium, and elsewhere, and noted that the Fifteenth Air Force had made its contribution to the victories. He gave credit for this accomplishment to the pilots and their crews, to the ground crews, to the clerks, cooks, communications personnel, “and all the rest.”
But, Coons went on, “all of us have a responsibility for the failures—the briefings that were inadequate, the truck drivers who were late in getting the crews to their briefings, the crew members who stayed in the pad when they should have been familiarizing themselves with their planes or their guns or their targets, the cooks who didn’t have breakfast on time and the linemen who failed to check the plane carefully. These failures have softened the blows against the enemy, they have cost the lives of Americans and our Allies.”
Coons concluded, “All that we have learned in one year of combat can be used to insure that the second year will be a short one.”
The Journal carried one article about Demo, who was the first mascot of the 742nd Squadron. Demo had flown from Africa when he was just a puppy. “Demo refused to leave the empty tent when his masters failed to return from their mission . . . brokenhearted . . . waiting. Demo never went hungry. Someone always remembered and carried food to the little soldier on guard.”17
McGovern wrote an article called “This Thing Called Spirit” for the second issue of Stagrag. He gave various tips on how to keep morale high. “First of all,” he wrote, “we can make sure that we don’t go stale on life. We can keep alive and interested in what is going on around us. The army already has plenty of Joes who exist just to eat, sleep and bitch.” He urged his readers to keep posted on the war fronts and on developments in the States, to read best-sellers, “of which the squadron is well supplied,” try to improve personalities by “using a little tact and thought in our relations with others,” plan postwar careers, and even write for Stagrag.
“A second aid to good spirit is to refuse to let our bitches and troubles get us down.” He concluded that “our primary source of satisfaction comes from being true to ourselves and the best that is in us. The finest praise any man can receive is to be satisfied himself with what he has accomplished. . . . Combat may be rough, but it won’t be half as rough if we go through it in the right spirit. Let’s make it easy on ourselves!”18
February 12, 1945, was the first anniversary for the 455th Group flying out of Italy. On February 22, it flew its 200th mission. It came at the end of thirteen consecutive days of combat flying—the Dakota Queen had gone out on five of them. Group commander Col. William Snowden led the wing over Linz. It was a common practice in the 455th for a major or a colonel, sometimes even a general, to fly the lead. Ole Tepee Time Gal flew her 100th mission over Linz. By early 1945, she plus Glamour Gal and Bestwedo were the only B-24s left out of the original twenty-four.
Despite the losses, in its second 100 missions the 455th dropped 4,412 tons of bombs in 2,521 sorties. Bombing accuracy was improving. In the period from December 1944 through February 1945, the group greatly exceeded the average performance of the Fifteenth Air Force as a whole. But a total of forty-seven bombers had been lost, mostly to flak. Considering that the group put up sixty B-24s for its 101st mission, those losses were high.
Shortly after the 200th mission, the group had a party to celebrate. Italian laborers put up tents and bandstands. Entertainers were hired to perform. The airmen pitched in to do their specialities. There were shows of all types, contortionists, muscle acts, rifle ranges, ring games, and variety shows. Four different movies were shown in the wine cellar used for the mission briefing room. There was plenty of beer. It was a chance to relax, eagerly seized by these airmen far from home and living dangerous lives. For that day, at least, they could be the boys they were.
February was over. The 455th Group had flown twenty-six missions, seven aborted. It had put 505 aircraft over the targets and dropped 840 tons of bombs. It lost five B-24s that month and had forty-one men missing in action, one man killed in action in a plane that got back to base, and sixteen severely wounded. The history of the group comments, “With weather conditions as they were, it speaks highly of the support given by the ground echelon as well as the effort put forth by the crews. With better weather on the horizon, things would only get better.”19
X According to Francis Hosimer, “It was a standard procedure to fasten parachutes to the waist guns and throw them out after landing whenever your hydraulic fluid was gone.”