Navigator Ellis B. Scripture’s Prayer
This was madness! Sitting at the navigator’s table behind the bombardier in the nose of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, Major Ellis B. Scripture, or “Scrip” to his fellow members of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), looked ahead through the Plexiglas nose and shuddered.1 The flat earth of Holland was flashing by beneath the bomber, uncomfortably close as the B-17 hurtled along at 120 knots just a few hundred feet above the ground. A mistake by the pilot, or a German antiaircraft shell, could spell the end for all on board—they were way too close to the ground to bail out and survive.
B-17s were built to bomb from close to 30,000 feet, not to clip the treetops like this! But here they were, hundreds of mighty American bombers, flitting over German-occupied territory as if out on a sightseeing trip, with nothing more lethal in their bomb bays than Hershey bars, cigarettes, margarine and coffee. Operation Chowhound it was called. This operation in the first week of May 1945 had been touted as a mercy mission. That’s why Scrip hadn’t hesitated to follow the example of his long-time commander and close friend Lieutenant Colonel Griffin “Grif” Mumford and volunteer for this sortie, leaving the comfort and protection of their offices at 3rd Air Division Headquarters at Elveden Hall in the picturesque English county of Suffolk.
Scrip and Grif had been in the first cadre of the 95th Bombardment Group aircrew to arrive in England in 1943. Grif, a squadron commander with the 95th, and Scrip, his navigator, had flown together on the group’s first combat mission over a Nazi target and on plenty of dangerous missions together since. When Grif was promoted to group command pilot, Scrip moved up to group navigator. They’d gone together to air division HQ, where Grif was now director of operations and Scrip was head honcho in the navigation department as division navigator.
Grif Mumford was legendary in the USAAF and famous back home in the States. The stubborn, independent and determined native of West Texas had made his name in March 1944 by leading the first US bombing raid on Berlin, Hitler’s capital. Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering, number two in the Nazi hierarchy and chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, had been boasting for years that no bombs would ever fall on Berlin. “If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr,” Goering had declared back in 1939, “my name is not Hermann Goering. You can call me Meier [the German equivalent of Smith].”2
Well, Allied bombers had reached the Ruhr. And British aircraft were bombing Berlin, primarily by night because it was less risky, but to negligible effect and with punishing losses. Before the United States entered the war, Dr. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry had published English-language editions of German military magazines in America that showed pictures of Berlin’s monstrous flak towers and boasted of the thousands of antiaircraft guns and hundreds of fighters that protected the city. In February and March of 1944, the US 8th Air Force had set out to prove that mass air raids against Berlin in daylight could succeed despite those daunting defenses. But bad weather had forced the cancellation of one attempt after another. Finally, on March 4, a total of 850 B-17s had taken to the English skies, bound for the “Big B”—Berlin. Midway into the mission, as the weather began to close in, squadron after squadron received a recall message by radio, and hundreds of bombers turned around and went home. But Grif Mumford ignored the recall.
Mumford was flying as group commander in I’ll Be Around, as its crew had named the B-17G piloted by Lieutenant Alvin Brown. The airplane’s radio operator reported that the recall message had not entirely followed the rules set down for these messages and wondered if the Germans on the ground had sent it in an attempt to break up the attack. Mumford, flying in the copilot’s seat for the historic mission, had calculated that they were halfway to the target. He knew that German radar had been tracking them ever since they’d appeared in the skies over the Continent. He also knew that, based on their flight path, Luftwaffe fighter controllers on the ground would be scrambling squadrons of Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s to meet them before they reached Berlin and to intercept them on their way back—likely anticipating that they would fly the same route out that they had flown coming in.
But the flight plan for this mission against the Big B called for a different return route, going south via heavily defended Frankfurt. Reckoning that it was just as dangerous to turn back and fly into waiting fighters as it was to continue on course, Grif Mumford decided to use his discretion as group commander pilot and fly on. As twenty-eight other B-17s followed his lead, Grif Mumford flew on to Berlin. Short of the target, twenty German Me-109 and Fw-190 fighters had come hurtling down out of the heavens, cannons blazing, knocking one B-17 from the sky on their first pass. But before the German pilots could return for another pass, they were jumped by several squadrons of American P-51 Mustang long-range fighters that had decided to accompany the bombers to the target after also ignoring the recall order.
In the ensuing dogfight, future famed jet test pilot Chuck Yeager bagged his first German aircraft on the way to becoming a fighter ace. Overall, the P-51s had the worst of it on that day, with twenty-one of their number being shot down for fourteen Luftwaffe fighter losses. But the intervention of the P-51s prevented the German fighters from again attacking the bombers. The Mustang pilots had done their job. The bombers reached the target. As they came over Berlin at 29,600 feet, 2,500 radar-controlled heavy antiaircraft guns on the ground opened up on the twenty-nine B-17s above the clouds. Grif Mumford would recall that the black clouds of exploding flak shells were so thick that it looked as if he could walk on them. Four of the bombers were knocked down by the flak. But the remainder had dropped forty tons of bombs on “impregnable” Berlin before turning for home.3
Tough, uncompromising commander of the 3rd Air Division Brigadier General Curtis LeMay had been waiting for Mumford and the other survivors of the mission when they landed back at Horham in Suffolk. The general had come to berate Grif for disobeying the recall order, but hordes of reporters had gotten to the air station ahead of the general. Word had leaked out that the USAAF had bombed Berlin, and the press was hungry for heroes. Among the newsmen were a reporter and photographer from Life magazine. Three weeks later, Grif Mumford and the crew of I’ll Be Around were on the front cover of Life, with Grif hailed as the man who had bombed Berlin. “Old Iron Pants” LeMay hadn’t torn strips off Grif. Instead, he gave him the Silver Star and recommended a Presidential Citation for the entire 95th Bombardment Group, which was duly awarded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Everyone wanted to fly with Grif after that, but he was kept out of the skies and at the planning table for much of the rest of the war. When he did get a chance to fly, he always took Scrip with him. Most recently, it had been flying a B-17 to liberated Paris. That had been fun. But this Chowhound flight was different. For a change, the American bomber pilots would be saving lives, not taking them. At least, that was the plan. With Hitler dead on April 30, having committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and the war in Europe expected to end any day with a German capitulation, Grif was determined to make one last contribution. And he couldn’t think of a better way to do it than to fly desperately needed food to 3.5 million starving Dutch civilians in the Nazi-occupied west of Holland, an area that took in all the major cities of the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the capital, The Hague.
The problem was that this part of Holland was still in the hands of 120,000 well-armed German troops, including some of the tough Waffen-SS who had stopped the Allied advance into Holland at Arnhem the previous autumn. That bloody rebuff of the push into Holland had fated the bulk of the Dutch people to remain under Nazi control and to fight a battle of their own, against starvation.
As lead navigator in the lead aircraft, Ellis Scripture was looking down at towns and villages and seeing joyous Dutch men, women and children out in the open, waving their hands and Dutch flags at them—risking arrest by the Germans, who had outlawed Holland’s flag and national anthem. Scrip saw German troops down there, too—armed, watching the Americans fly over. And quick-firing antiaircraft guns that traversed to follow the bombers’ course.
This was worse than bombing Berlin. At least then you knew that the Germans were going to fire at you, and you had the advantage of height and the cover of escorting fighters. Thankfully, there was no longer a threat from German fighters in Holland’s skies; not since the Luftwaffe’s disastrous Operation Baseplate in January had resulted in the loss of hundreds of Me-109s and Fw-190s over Holland and Belgium. Allied air supremacy was total, and both sides knew it. German soldiers told a black joke about the failure of Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe to protect them in these dying days of the war. “If you see an aircraft with silver wings,” they said, “it’s the American air force. If it has gray wings, it’s the British air force. And if it has no wings, it’s the Luftwaffe.”4
Just the same, when flying at such low altitude, the risk of being brought down by ground fire was acute. And there were tens of thousands of enemy guns down there! The 50-caliber machine guns on B-17s were loaded and ready to return fire should the Germans on the ground open up on them. But if the Germans did open fire, there would be little chance for a lumbering, low-flying bomber. Even a lucky rifle bullet from a German soldier disobeying orders could be enough to down a B-17 flying at this altitude. Would the Nazis keep their word and refrain from firing? Could you trust a Nazi? Could an American take a Hitlerite’s word for anything? Was this a giant trap, a cunning and elaborate plan to lure hundreds of American aircraft into a nest of antiaircraft guns that would knock them all out of the sky? Would Operation Chowhound become Operation Turkey Shoot?
Ellis B. Scripture, thinking of his family back home, and thinking how close death might be on this day, remembered words from a Native American prayer.
When I’m dead cry for me a little
Think of me sometimes, but not too much
Think of me now and again as I was in life
At some moment that is pleasant to recall
But not for long
Leave me in peace and I shall leave you in peace
And while you live let your thoughts be with the living.5