18

Grif Mumford’s Special Air Delivery to a Dutch Sister

On May 5, Lieutenant Colonel Grif Mumford was piloting the lead B-17 on the 95th Bombardment Group’s Chowhound mission to Utrecht. In the nose of the bomber sat lead navigator and Grif’s best friend, Major Ellis B. Scripture. Both men had deserted their desks at 3rd Air Division HQ at Elveden Hall to volunteer to fly Chowhound—an operation implemented under their command. By the end of the operation they would fly several Chowhound sorties.

The usual squadron formation of sets of three B-17s abreast—a lead aircraft with a wingman to port and another to starboard—had been abandoned. Leading thirty-nine other B-17s from the 95th in single line ahead, Mumford was piloting a borrowed bomber as he followed the course set for him and the group by buddy Ellis Scripture. Such was the confidence that the 8th Air Force bomber pilots now had in their ability to make accurate, low-level drops—and the confidence their commanders had that the Germans would continue to adhere to their agreement and not fire on the B-17s—that the Forts were flying in to make their drops one at a time in a long line, as if on an invisible conveyor belt.

Mumford made a perfect approach to Utrecht’s Valkenburg airfield, the most easterly of Chowhound’s Dutch drop points and the closest to the German border. If Mumford kept flying due east, he would soon find himself over the German industrial city of Münster, where, in October 1943, five of twenty-two 95th BG B-17s had been shot down during a bombing raid—one of the most expensive raids, percentage wise, that the group was to fly during the war. Mumford had himself flown combat missions for close to two years, being one of the few original pilots of the group to survive being killed or captured on operations by the autumn of 1944. Promotion to a desk had probably saved his life. But he had missed the joy of flying. And, as chief air executive of the 3rd Air Division, Mumford had sent the men under him on the risky Chowhound missions. He was determined that he would never send his men where he wasn’t prepared to go himself.

Now Mumford’s load of humanitarian supplies was tumbling onto the small airfield outside Utrecht, and he gunned his Fort’s four engines and gained height as Scripture gave him a course to a small village in eastern Holland over the intercom. Back at 3rd Air Division HQ at Elveden Hall, Mumford had been approached by a female aide to the current Air Division commander, Major General Earle Partridge, with a special request. Captain Cornelia Visman’s sister had married a Dutch citizen and was living in a rural village in occupied Holland. Grif Mumford had a special delivery for Captain Visman’s sister—a letter from one loving sister to another.

Approaching the village, Mumford and his crewmates could see that the local population had filled their square to celebrate the liberation of Holland. Three times Mumford flew over the square at several hundred feet as his crew enjoyed the sight of the cheering, waving crowd below. On the third pass, one of Mumford’s crew sent a small package dropping from their B-17. Sinking to earth beneath a small parachute, the package contained Cornelia Visman’s letter to her sister, weighted down by a large Hershey chocolate bar. A note attached to the package said: “Please deliver this letter and keep the chocolate bar.” The package landed in a quiet park, away from the revelers. Following the war, Mumford learned from Cornelia Visman that her letter had been duly delivered to her sister. Who got the Hershey bar remained a mystery.1

Haven P. Damer’s No Credit was one of the thirty-nine 95th BG bombers flying behind Grif Mumford’s machine to Utrecht that day, and it too had a special delivery to make. By the time they flew this Chowhound run to Holland on May 5, things were very different for the No Credit crew from their first nerve-wracking flight four days earlier. No longer were they or their commanders worried about being shot at by the Germans; it was almost as if they were taking a flying vacation. For one thing, they had sightseers aboard—two captains who usually flew desks back at base and two line men from the ground crew.2

Unlike their May 1 flight, too, not only was their squadron flying in loose formation, but their load had also changed. By this time, Chowhound payloads of crates of K-rations were increasingly being augmented, and often replaced, by the burlap sacks being used by other Allied bombers. Unlike the K-ration packs with their ten different items, these sacks frequently contained a single item—it might be dried egg, milk powder, dried yeast, cheese, chocolate bars, margarine, dehydrated meat, tea, coffee, luncheon meat, salt, pepper or mustard. More than one Chowhound crewman would report seeing civilians who were white from head to foot as they gathered supplies on the ground—they had been hit by a milk powder sack, which burst over them.

Meanwhile, on the ground, Dutch youths would rush to a single sack that fell, late, from a B-17 as it passed overhead. Hoping for chocolate bars or coffee, they found to their disappointment that it contained pepper. These late drops of a sack or two from B-17s over remote locations had to do with the change in delivery method. Forty-three-pound crates of K-rations were relatively easy to dispense, but once the 8th Air Force switched to carrying sacks instead of crates, it found that a sack or two would often become stuck and would have to be thrown or kicked free by a crew member hanging on for dear life in the bomb bay—there wasn’t enough room in there to wear a parachute—to allow the bomb bay doors to close.

Albert VanWey, a radio operator aboard a B-17 of the 570th Squadron, 390th Bombardment Group, was one of those who found himself hanging precariously in a bomb bay, knocking sacks free.3 Meanwhile, Ray Powell of the 100th Bombardment Group discovered that, after his B-17 had made its drop at Alkmaar airfield ten miles inland of the coastal city of Bergen, several sacks remained stuck, and he and other crewmen set about freeing them. After leaving the drop zone, Powell’s aircraft flew over some isolated houses on the North Sea coast, where the occupants came out to wave at them and unexpectedly found themselves on the receiving end of the last sacks of the B-17’s load.4

Ground crew also found the sacks much harder to load into partially open bomb bays—they would slip and slide and sometimes fall out. Some crew chiefs came up with a solution for this: a large canvas tarpaulin was loaded with sacks on the ground, and this was hauled up into the bomb bay. Another solution was the building of a wooden platform that was piled with sacks and then loaded into the bomb bay. The crew chief of the B-17 of Bernie Behrman, a top-turret gunner with the 569th Squadron of the 390th BG, was one of those who used this method.5

Max Krell, a pilot with the 96th Bombardment Group, had watched as one of these wooden platforms was constructed in the bomb bay of his aircraft in late April. On one side of the bomb bay, the platform, or temporary floor, was hung from the outer edges. The other side rested on the bomb shackles located in the middle of the bomb bay, next to the middle catwalk. The bomb bay doors would be opened electrically by the bombardier, after which a member of the crew had to manually release the platform, which dropped on one side, sending its load tumbling into the air. Several crew members then had to pull the dangling platform back up into the bomb bay by hand before the doors could be closed.6 But as many aircrew were to find, use of such platforms didn’t always prevent ration sacks from becoming caught up in the bomb bay once the platform had been released.

Despite the problems they were causing, these sacks were delivering vitally needed food in bulk—as the creators of K-rations had worked out, no one could live on ten-in-one rations for a prolonged period. Even so, some sack drops were misdirected or let go from too great a height. At Schiphol Airport, for weeks after the Chowhound drops, buildings would be streaked yellow from sacks of margarine that had burst on hitting them, while the smell of coffee was thick in the air from other sacks that had burst on impact.7

Approaching Utrecht on May 5 astern of Grif Mumford’s Flying Fortress, Haven P. Damer eased his B-17 down to 400 feet for the now routine drop and throttled back the engines. At 135 miles per hour No Credit let go of its load right on target.

“Groceries away!” said the bombardier with a smile in his voice.

Once the bomb bay was emptied, the bomber banked away with its bomb bay doors slowly closing, and Damer commenced his usual low-level buzzing, weaving around windmills with their slowly turning sails, to the glee of passengers and crew.

“Good buzz job, skip,” remarked his twenty-one-year-old radio operator, Paul Laubacher.8

Then Damer set a course for home, gaining altitude and heading southwest toward Antwerp. Now he noticed fields ahead ablaze with natural color. He realized that it was tulip time in Holland, and the fields were full of tulips in full bloom. In one of those fields Dutch farmers had cut tulips so that the flowers spelled out a giant message to the passing bombers: “thank you yanks.” The message made all of No Credit’s crewmembers feel good about their Chowhound flights, and even better about what they were about to do next.9

Prior to this flight, pilot Damer had set a very personal little mercy mission in motion. He had asked each crew member to donate to a small “comfort” package that he put together, containing the sort of things he knew the people of Holland would not have seen in quite a while—chocolates, cigarettes, soap, gum, and so on. He’d even found a small parachute used for message drops, the same kind that Grif Mumford had used. Adding a note wishing the finder well, Damer had packed his little collection into a small box and tied it to the parachute. As the bomber flew toward the coast, radio operator Laubacher threw No Credit’s private contribution to the mercy mission from the aircraft, sending it sailing to earth with the crew’s hopes that it would make someone happy.10

What the crew didn’t realize was that by this time, No Credit had reached the Holland-Belgium border. Their package landed on Belgian soil just across that border, in the town of Ekeren not far from downtown Antwerp. That morning, five-year-old Mariette DeWeerdt was walking in her family’s small field with her father, Jan, herding their four precious sheep, when she saw No Credit’s package come floating down from the heavens. With great excitement, father and daughter ran to the package and tore it open to find the little treasures it contained. The Belgians, like the Dutch, had had it tough during five years of German occupation since the Nazi Blitzkrieg of 1940, and it would be a long time before they would be able to buy the sorts of things that No Credit had sent them. Mariette DeWeerdt would never forget her surprise and joy at that moment of discovery.11

That same day, May 5, Hank Cervantes and his 100th Bombardment Group comrades were making their latest Chowhound delivery, this time to Bergen. Twenty-one aircraft from the group dropped close to forty tons of food on the IJmuiden military airfield south of Bergen that morning. Looking down from his pilot’s seat, Cervantes would see a sight that would lodge in his memory forevermore. A mother was hugging her children. They were all looking up at Cervantes as he flew overhead, and the children were pointing to the enormous grins on the faces of Cervantes and his crewmates.12

At 10:00 that morning, 96th Bombardment Group pilot Delfred C. Kraske was making a Chowhound drop at Schiphol Airport. Kraske would always remember this drop, his first. A row of red-brick buildings four stories high ran along the eastern side of the runway. Dutch civilians hung from every window in those buildings, with many waving Dutch and American flags. The sight made Kraske and his crew proud to be American.13

Bob Belgam of the 390th Bombardment Group was another of the pilots who followed Grif Mumford to Utrecht’s Valkenburg airfield on May 5. Like Haven P. Damer, Belgam had become an experienced hand at the low-level food drops; this was his third Chowhound sortie. Belgam duly dropped his load, then deliberately set his B-17 on a course for Amsterdam—to do a little sightseeing. Flying up a main avenue of Amsterdam at several hundred feet, Belgam gave elated Amsterdammers a fly-past as they filled the streets to celebrate the end of hostilities in their country. Belgam flew so low that his bomber was actually lower than some of the people watching from upper-story windows. Belgam’s tail gunner yelled that, in their excitement, someone had just fallen out of a window looking down at them as they passed.14

By this stage, Belgam, like most American pilots flying Chowhound sorties, had lost all fear of being fired upon from the ground. They now considered themselves lords of the skies over Europe. After all, hadn’t German troops in occupied Holland surrendered on this day, with the Canadian army now in charge throughout Holland? In fact, that was in theory only. On May 5 General Blaskowitz accepted Allied documents spelling out the unconditional surrender of German troops in Holland, and Queen Wilhelmina went on the radio to announce the liberation of her country. But Blaskowitz didn’t agree to the content of these documents until a formal ceremony at Wageningen the following day.

Most German troops in western Holland had yet to disarm, and Canadian forces would take days to reach every part of Fortress Holland and relieve surrendered German garrisons of their weaponry. They would not enter Amsterdam, for example, until May 10. A graphic illustration of the dangers that still faced Allied aircrew would come in Amsterdam days after the German capitulation when, on May 7, Waffen SS troops who had yet to give up their weapons opened fire on thousands of Dutch civilians celebrating the liberation in Dam Square.

As Bob Belgam flew home after his brazen and devil-may-care sightseeing deviation to Amsterdam, unaware that the SS below were in a trigger-happy mood, May 5 generated another report of Germans on the ground firing at Chowhound aircraft. The report came from a B-17 of Hank Cervantes’s 100th Bombardment Group. The crew of the B-17 in question told of three German soldiers firing their rifles up at them as they flew overhead to make the Bergen airfield drop. The disgruntled Germans managed to hit the B-17, too—back at base at Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, holes caused by rifle bullets were found in the bomber although no critical damage was discovered.15 It was clear that nothing could yet be taken for granted as far as Chowhound was concerned.

Norman Coats of the 390th Bombardment Group flew another Chowhound mission that day—the group’s squadrons made drops at both Utrecht and Vogelenzang. After dinner back at base at Framlingham, the young air gunner attended a church service conducted by the station’s USAAF chaplain. Coats came away from the service feeling pretty pleased with himself after the chaplain told the worshippers that they should consider it an honor to fly these Chowhound mercy missions to aid the starving Dutch people.16

Late in the afternoon of May 5, Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz, accompanied by his deputy, General Reichelt, arrived at the battered De Wereld Hotel in the ruined Dutch town of Wageningen to formally sign the surrender of German forces in Holland.

Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes, commanding the 1st Canadian Corps, was signing for the Allies. Prince Bernhard was there, too. He’d driven from Apeldoorn in RK-1, with members of his staff following in RK-2, Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s second Mercedes limousine, which had recently been seized by the Dutch. The prince even brought along his fluffy white terrier, Martin. Bernhard’s secretary, Marie Marks, had come to watch proceedings, and the prince gave her the job of looking after Martin, warning her to keep a firm hold of the little dog, as Martin didn’t like General Blaskowitz.

As a nervous, stilted General Blaskowitz arrived at the shell-shattered hotel for the surrender ceremony in his best uniform and shiny jackboots, and wearing a holstered pistol, Marie was so excited to see the Germans humbled that she let Martin slip from her grasp. The terrier ran straight to General Blaskowitz and bit him on the ankle of one shiny boot.17 Despite this unexpected low-level attack, the general would accept the surrender document—once a typewriter was located to type it up—and sign it the next day.

Although hostilities had officially been terminated, the need for food relief for the Dutch people remained.

On May 6, foul weather closed in over the RAF airfields in the central north and west of England, grounding the food flights by British and other Allied crews based there. But the USAAF bases in East Anglia remained clear, and the 8th Air Force alone carried on the mercy mission that day, with 380 B-17s dropping 703 tons of food at five locations across Holland.

Haven P. Damer’s No Credit was back over Utrecht on May 6, making another food drop at Valkenburg airfield. The B-17 was once again carrying four sightseeing passengers. This time it was No Credit’s own crew chief and his deputy plus two other ground crew from another aircraft of their squadron. Three of the passengers had a great time, especially when Haven Damer did his usual buzz of windmills. The fourth was not so happy; No Credit’s deputy crew chief was airsick for almost the entire flight.18

The low-level buzzing of the Dutch countryside became a way for many Chowhound pilots to let off a bit of steam now that the pressure was off. Oscar Sinibaldi of the 385th Bombardment Group was surprised when his pilot Lee Marcussen got into the act. Older than the rest of his crew and so conservative that he did everything by the book, Marcussen amazed his colleagues by dropping down to a hundred feet or so after one drop and buzzing cattle, panicking them and driving them at a run into a canal.19