Bombardier Braidic’s Fateful Decision
The seventh day of Chowhound was to bring the first American casualties of the operation. It would also see one US airman spared by a twist of fate that he could not explain.
At USAAF air station number 119 at Horham in Suffolk, Tony Braidic was among the scores of young men of the flight crews of the 334th Squadron, 95th Bombardment Group, who gathered in their briefing room early on the morning of May 7 to learn about their latest mission. A bombardier, and a good one, First Lieutenant Braidic had completed his training at Drew Field, Florida, in the fall of 1944 and departed for England as part of a B-17 crew commanded by First Lieutenant Lionel Sceurman—or “Spider,” as he was known to one and all. In January 1945 Braidic and the rest of Spider Sceurman’s crew had arrived at Horham from the States flying B-17G number 48640 to join the 334th. Over the next few months, Braidic and his comrades completed six daylight bombing missions over Hitler’s Reich.
Because of his skill, and because the war in Europe was not expected to last much longer, Braidic was then removed from the active duty list and reassigned to train for B-29 Superfortresses operating in the Pacific theater against Japanese targets. His place in Spider Sceurman’s crew was taken by a new arrival, Staff Sergeant Dave Condon. But Braidic was still at Horham in late April when Operation Chowhound began, and he volunteered for the mercy missions.
Since the beginning of the month, Braidic had flown on four Chowhound missions in the B-17 piloted by Lieutenant Paul Crider. Now, in the early morning chill, Braidic waited with the remainder of Crider’s crew to learn about their mission for the day. But before they were given this information, the briefing officers gave the crews some long-awaited news.
“The war in Europe’s over, boys! The Krauts have signed an unconditional surrender!”
Cheers rent the air, caps were tossed high, men hugged each other and shook hands.
But their superiors followed this with more sobering news, telling the airmen that the German surrender would not take effect until 8:00 a.m. next day, May 8. In the meantime, it was business as usual for both sides. Meaning that the Germans were still armed and could potentially still fire on US aircraft flying over territory they occupied. With peace just hours away, no American wanted to be the last man killed in this war.
Once the boisterous crews had settled down, their briefing proceeded. It was to be another Chowhound day, with Hilversum their target and air corridors and drop zone similar to those of the past few days. As the crews dispersed to their aircraft, many went with a nagging worry. Up till now, most of the German forces in Holland had kept their word and had not fired on the hundreds of American aircraft flying Chowhound missions. But what if, soured by the order from their High Command to surrender and disarm the next day, some disillusioned, fanatical Nazi antiaircraft gunners decided to go out fighting, taking more than a few B-17 crews with them?
Around 7:00 a.m., Tony Braidic and the rest of Paul Crider’s crew reached the flight line, where more than twenty B-17s of the 334th stood loaded and ready for their aircrews. Braidic was awaiting his turn to climb up into the belly of Crider’s B-17 when he was approached by his old skipper, Spider Sceurman, accompanied by bombardier Dave Condon.
“Tony, why don’t you come fly with me today?” said Sceurman. “I’d like to celebrate the end of the war flying with the same crew I started out with. Dave will change places with you. No one will know the difference.” He added that no one was obeying the rules when it came to Chowhound.
Numerous pilots had been taking ground crew along for joy rides over Holland as they made their food drops, and on this very flight Sceurman was taking along five members of the group’s photographic unit as passengers. This was all strictly against flight regulations, but with the war due to end in a matter of hours, no one was worrying about regulations.
Braidic hesitated before he answered.
In the pause, Dave Condon spoke up. “I’d be happy to swap with you, Tony.”
Braidic liked Sceurman and had good friends among his crew—the same flyers he’d trained with back in Florida and with whom he’d put in six dangerous combat missions—copilot Jim Schwarz, navigator Russ Cook, radio operator Gano McPherson, armorer/gunner Norbert Kuper, tail gunner William Lankford and ball-turret gunner John Keller. In particular, the four lieutenants in the crew, Braidic, Sceurman, Schwarz and Cook, had spent a lot of off-duty time together at the Crown, a pub in the village of Redlingfield not far from the 95th Bombardment Group’s airfield, and on visits to London. Yet, inexplicably, Braidic said no to the idea of rejoining Sceurman’s crew for this historic last mission. Not even he could explain why. Perhaps it was loyalty to his new skipper, Paul Crider. But say no he did. Bidding Sceurman and Condon farewell, Braidic climbed the metal ladder into Crider’s B-17 and took his place forward in the bombardier’s position.1
Soon, belching smoke from their exhausts, all four engines of the B-17s were roaring into life, and one after the other the aircraft of the squadron taxied out to take their turn lifting into the sky. On a normal bombing mission, when the bombers were heavy with fuel and bomb bays were packed with tons of high explosive, the B-17s would struggle to get into the air. Occasionally, especially during adverse weather, one would crash before it even had a chance to take the war to European skies. But food weighs less than bombs. And the flight from the east coast of England to Holland and back would be a brisk commute compared to the long hauls into the far reaches of the Reich that the group had been flying up till now, a flight that would not eat up much fuel.
Crider’s aircraft took its position in the squadron as it assembled above the Suffolk fields, and then the 334th turned east and flew out over the sea, bound for Holland, as other squadrons of the 95th Bombardment Group took up station all around them. Crossing the Dutch coast, the B-17s dropped down to 400 feet. Some pilots had become so brave after a week of unchallenged Chowhound flights that they would go as low as a hundred feet on this last morning over wartime Europe. As Braidic’s bomber approached Hilversum—it was one of twelve from the 95th BG with Hilversum as its target that day—Crider relied on Bombardier Braidic to guide their aircraft on the last leg to the drop zone. Ahead, in single file, other B-17s of the group were letting go of their loads on and near the white cross, made from bed sheets, created by the Germans on the ground to indicate the drop zone. Food sacks streamed from bomb bays like confetti, falling without parachutes, hitting the ground and tumbling over and over or, especially if they contained margarine, occasionally splatting on the ground, or the “deck,” as aircrew called it.
On earlier Chowhound runs Braidic had seen some bombardiers misjudge their drops, with precious foodstuffs ending up in flooded polders, the low-lying fields of Holland that had been deliberately inundated by the Germans to discourage Allied paratroop landings. But Braidic did another precision job, hitting fair and square on target with his cascading load of supplies. “Bombs away,” he habitually informed Crider.
“Okay, let’s go home,” the pilot responded, resuming responsibility for the ship and their return home. But he was in no hurry to return to base. Banking the B-17 around in a gentle turn, Crider deliberately set them on a course for the Dutch cities of Rotterdam and then Amsterdam, still flying low. This leg was to be purely for sightseeing purposes. From his position up front, Braidic marveled to himself that this was his last mission of the war in Europe, as tulip fields, dikes, canals and windmills flitted by beneath him. And not a single German soldier did he see down there.
Back west they flew, to scud over the port of Rotterdam, looking down on docks devastated by Allied bombing and German explosive charges and a harbor littered with the wrecks of ships destroyed by both sides over the past five years. Then turning north to Amsterdam, where, to Braidic’s amazement, thousands of Amsterdammers were packed into the city’s main square. Many in the crowd waved to them like mad people as the B-17 skimmed over the rooftops. It would be shortly after Paul Crider’s B-17 flew over that the SS opened fire on the crowd in Dam Square, cutting down more than a hundred people—nineteen were killed and 120 wounded. Unaware of the tragedy taking place back in Amsterdam, Crider flew south and took his crew over Antwerp in Belgium before finally turning west and crossing the North Sea to land safely at Horham after a long, languid flight.
All seemed well as the group’s aircraft landed one by one and returned to their designated concrete hardstands out in the English meadows. Jeeps ran each crew back to the administration buildings. As Braidic jumped from a vehicle and walked up the slight incline to the single-story, tiled-roof station headquarters for the routine debrief, he received a startling piece of information from the member of the crew of another 334th aircraft just emerging from debrief.
“Spider’s ship is missing.”2
The news stunned Braidic. At his crew’s debrief and following it, he anxiously sought information about Spider Sceurman and his friends in B-17G 48640. He eventually found a member of another crew who had seen Sceurman’s B-17 halfway across the North Sea, struggling almost at wave-top height with its number-two engine on fire and trailing thick black smoke. Braidic’s informant said there was talk of German 20 mm antiaircraft guns stationed at the IJmuiden airfield or the associated German navy E-boat and submarine base opening up on the airplane as it flew overhead. Another report would say that Sceurman’s B-17 collided with an aircraft from the 385th Bombardment Group. Nonetheless, all B-17s of the 385th returned from their Chowhound sorties this day.
Come nightfall, Braidic rushed to the air station’s hospital on learning that survivors from Spider Sceurman’s aircraft had just been brought in. Out of thirteen passengers and crew aboard, there were only two survivors—copilot Lieutenant Jim Schwarz, and the bombardier, Staff Sergeant Dave Condon. Both were suffering from the effects of being in the bitterly cold North Sea but were otherwise unhurt. They told Braidic that their food drop had gone without a hitch. The Sceurman aircraft, like twenty-seven other B-17s from the 95th BG, had Utrecht, rather than Hilversum, as its target that day. Following the drop at Utrecht, Spider had followed Crider’s example and flown northwest to give his normally earthbound passengers a sightseeing visit to Amsterdam. After waving to a lot of Amsterdammers, they’d followed a canal to the coast and then headed for home at 1,500 feet. Everyone on board was in such good spirits that when one of them began to sing the 1942 hit song “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” they all joined in, clapping in time at the appropriate places.3
Midway across the North Sea, as copilot Schwarz was returning to his seat after a foray to the rear to see radio operator McPherson, he was alerted by gunner Kuper that their Fort’s inner port engine was running rough. Back in his place he could see oil leaking all over the cowling of the engine. Before long, the engine burst into flames. Pilot Sceurman had put the airplane into a dive in an attempt to extinguish the fire, but when that failed, and with the interior of the B-17 quickly filling with smoke, he had leveled out at 500 feet and given the order to bail out. Sceurman then tried to keep the dying Fort airborne for as long as possible to give everyone a chance to get out.
Dave Condon said that as he strapped on his parachute, he saw navigator Lieutenant Russ Cook force open the forward escape hatch door, struggling against the pressure of the slipstream, and then jump for his life. One of the photographer passengers went out the escape hatch next, and someone opened the bomb bay doors to create another avenue of escape. But Condon paused to try to drag an inflatable life raft to the escape hatch door—he wanted to spend as little time as possible exposed to the freezing cold waters of the North Sea once he jumped. When a ball of flame rushed past him, he realized it was time to go. Out the hatch he went, leaving the life raft behind. Condon had pulled his ripcord the moment he left the aircraft, which was losing height fast.
“Seconds later I hit the water with a smack and went under,” Condon explained. “When I surfaced I inflated my life vest but didn’t unfasten my parachute harness because I thought I would be more visible that way.”4
Before long, Condon had become entangled in the parachute’s lines, so he decided to get rid of it after all, and he unclipped the harness and freed himself of it. Not long after, he saw a British Lancaster fly low overhead, heading for Holland, and waved, hoping he had been spotted. Sure enough, the Lancaster, from the RAF’s 550 Squadron, caught sight of Condon’s parachute in the water and saw him floating beside it. The British bomber turned, and began to circle, just 200 feet above the waves, dropping flares to identify the location. Thirty minutes after Condon hit the water, an American PBY-Catalina floatplane landed close to him, and he was hauled aboard. He was so cold that he passed out once in the rescue aircraft. Meanwhile, a searching RAF Walrus air-sea rescue amphibian spotted Jim Schwartz and one of the photographer passengers, and both were plucked from the freezing waters fifty-five minutes after bailing out. The photographer, unconscious and in the grip of hypothermia, didn’t survive the flight to shore.
But Tony Braidic wanted to know what had happened to Spider and his ship. Condon and Schwartz told him that, four miles from the English coast, Spider had attempted to bring the crippled B-17 down on the water with great skill. But at the last moment the bomber’s burning port wing had dropped and clipped the water. This had sent the B-17 cartwheeling across the wave tops like a giant Catherine wheel before it settled and sank, fast. The open bomb bay doors had allowed water to rush into the aircraft. Spider Sceurman had drowned, and his body, along with those of three others on the ill-fated airplane, had been recovered by a boat summoned to the crash scene by the Lancaster. Seven men from the flight were never found, dead or alive. The four bodies that had been recovered lay in the hospital’s mortuary.
As midnight approached, celebrations for VE (Victory in Europe)Day started early at the Horham base. But Tony Braidic and a number of other aircrew from the 334th couldn’t bring themselves to celebrate. They were shattered that their friends had died on the last day of the war. And Braidic was wracked with guilt—if he had accepted Spider Sceurman’s offer and flown with him that day, he might have shared his fate. He was inconsolable even when friends pointed out that bombardier Dave Condon had been one of the two survivors—suggesting that, had Braidic been in his place, he too would have survived.
As the partying went on in the camp that night, Braidic was able to find a drunken mortuary technician who agreed to show the bodies of Sceurman and the three others to Braidic and several friends from the 334th, to allow them to say their final farewells. Braidic would later regret this. The sight of the dead men on the slab shocked him. Not that they were disfigured: Sceurman had received cuts to the head and shoulder when trying to escape through the shattered sliding window beside his pilot’s seat, but he had ultimately drowned; his lifeless body had been found floating in the sea. The pilot looked as if he were asleep, and that seemed to make it worse to Braidic as he harked back to that morning and the look of disappointment on Spider’s face when he’d said no to him. He recognized two of the other dead crewmen as his friends, navigator Russ Cook and armorer/gunner Norbert Kuper. The fourth man was a stranger to him—one of the photographic unit men who’d gone along for the so-called joy ride, the one pulled from the water along with Jim Schwartz.
“Was it an unconscious premonition that warned me to decline Lionel Sceurman’s suggestion on that fateful day?” Braidic would later ask. “I shall never know.”5 In the early hours of the next morning, Tony Braidic awoke screaming. He’d had a nightmare in which he was drowning. The nightmare, and the screaming, would punctuate his nights for a long time to come. Braidic attended the burial of Sceurman and the others at the American Military Cemetery near the English university town of Cambridge. His Chowhound flight was his last operation in Europe. And Sceurman’s B-17 was the last aircraft of the 95th Bombardment Group to be lost in the war. It was the only US aircraft lost during Operation Chowhound, and the eleven men who perished the only USAAF fatalities during the ten-day mercy mission.6
No convincing evidence would emerge that Sceurman’s aircraft was hit by German fire over IJmuiden. For one thing, the German navy’s E-boat crews there had handed their boats and heavy weapons over to local authorities as soon as the agreed-on May 5 surrender date had arrived. Gallivanting Canadian captain Farley Mowat even ended up taking one of the super-fast E-boats for a test drive. So it is unlikely that any German 20 mm guns were still manned at IJmuiden by May 7. And neither of the B-17’s surviving crewmen, Schwarz or Condon, was aware of their aircraft taking a hit from flak before the inner port engine caught fire.
The loss of Sceurman’s B-17 is generally put down to mechanical failure; unlike those B-17s genuinely hit by German ground fire on May 2 and 5 and the Lancasters of Australians Peter Collett and Alex Howell, which both received bullet hits in the early stages of Operation Manna.7 And, of course, several reports of B-17s such as Stork Club being shot at from the ground during Operation Chowhound were recorded in the war diary of the 8th Air Force, and damage would be confirmed. But in the case of Spider Sceurman, his bomber would join the list of US aircraft lost to causes other than enemy action—for every six B-17s lost in combat, another was lost to accident or mechanical failure during the war in Europe.8
While Tony Braidic was mourning the loss of friends on the night of May 7–8, most of his 8th Air Force comrades were in a celebratory mood, knowing that the war in Europe was due to officially end the next day. On May 7, a total of 231 B-17s from seven bombardment groups had flown Chowhound missions. These were the last American flights of the operation.9 Twenty-one-year-old Douglas S. Eden, lead bombardier with the 100th Bombardment Group, would be proud of the fact that, on his last run to Schiphol Airport, on May 7, he dropped his load all over several parked German transport aircraft, splattering them with food.10
With the Canadian army taking charge on the ground in what had been German-occupied Holland, increasing quantities of food supplies could now be brought into the Netherlands by sea and road convoys. But it was a slow process for those in northern Holland. The Canadian army would only reach the northernmost parts of the country in the second half of May. In the meantime, the distribution of thousands of tons of relief supplies was continued by thousands of Dutch civilian volunteers.