Chapter 33
THE KILLING MONTH
Ben’s quest to fly another five missions with the 93rd seemed star-crossed almost from the beginning. When the weather actually allowed the 93rd to take off on a raid, some mechanical problem would force Homer Moran to turn back. On other days, either the Moran crew wasn’t scheduled to fly or the weather grounded the entire group. Ben faced one frustration after another. The 93rd logged only three raids during the first half of September, and then in mid-September the group was ordered back to North Africa. More bad weather wreaked havoc on operations and the group logged only five missions during this two-week assignment. When Ben returned to England on October 4, more than forty days after joining Homer Moran’s crew as top turret gunner, he had logged only one of his five bonus missions.
Ben had barely settled back into his Hardwick Nissen hut when General Ira Eaker set in motion a series of raids in a final attempt to cripple key German industries before bad weather cloaked the continent. The first blow was scheduled for October 8, two weeks to the day since Ben had logged his twenty-sixth mission over Pisa, Italy. The Moran crew was among twenty-one 93rd crews—four of them commanded by pilots making their combat debut—assigned to what Eaker had designated a “maximum effort” against strategic German targets. The specific objectives were submarine pens, shipyards, and a Focke-Wulf Fw-190 fighter factory located around the city of Bremen.
It was yet another brutal day for the Eighth Air Force, with Eaker’s forces losing thirty bombers over Bremen and the nearby Vegesack district. But once again, through skill and selfless acts of courage, the 93rd defied the odds. Ben and his comrades made it back to Hardwick without the loss of an airplane or the death or serious injury of one of their men.
Ben recorded his twenty-seventh mission in his log.
 
BEN DIDN’T HAVE LONG TO WONDER when he might fly again or whether his luck would hold. The 93rd was put on alert for a mission shortly after the planes that bombed Bremen and Vegesack landed, and the Moran crew once again was among those on the list to fly.
When the curtain was pulled back in the briefing room the following morning to reveal the day’s target, the historic significance wasn’t lost on Ben and other 93rd old-timers. They were headed to East Prussia and the ports along Poland’s Baltic coast—the deepest penetration into Europe that the Eighth Air Force had yet attempted from England.1 As with the previous day’s mission, it would be another “maximum effort,” with the Eighth’s B-17s and B-24s coordinating their efforts to hit four targets: the German industrial cities of Anklam and Marienburg and the Polish ports of Gdynia and Danzig (now Gdansk).
The 93rd drew as its target the submarine base at Danzig, on the Baltic Sea. Around three hours after seventeen 93rd Liberators took off from Hardwick, the formation neared Danzig. The target was covered by smoke and heavy flak, but that didn’t deter Moran. The gunners watched their bombs disappear into the murk, and then braced to fight their way home through prowling enemy fighters as Moran banked their aircraft to the west.
But the enemy fighters never materialized, or at least not in the numbers or with the ferocity and determination feared. Some of the crews saw seven or eight twin-engine Ju-88 fighter-bombers, but the enemy fliers merely watched the 93rd formation and waited for stragglers to drop from it. Although the 93rd aircraft maintained a tight formation for the most part, coming and going, the final tally at Hardwick revealed two missing bombers.
One of the missing crews was from the 409th Squadron, and they were men well known to Ben. The pilot was a Ploiesti veteran, Miles League, and his ship was Satan’s Sister. The men were last seen over Bornholm Island, headed for Sweden, raising hopes that they had made an emergency landing. The other bomber was Piccadilly Filly, piloted by one of the new 93rd pilots, Thomas W. Atkinson, and less was known about its immediate fate. As it turned out, League and his entire crew had reached neutral Sweden on three engines and made a successful belly landing at a local air base.2 Atkinson had also reached Sweden, in even more miraculous fashion, but at a dearer cost.
Piccadilly Filly had limped away from the target with two engines out and damage to its tail section and controls. For reasons unknown, Atkinson’s navigator, Second Lieutenant Farren F. Shafer, bailed out through the nosewheel hatch and dropped into the frigid sea, never to be seen again. Atkinson instructed the rest of his men to stay put while he figured out their next move. They contemplated ditching at sea, a dangerous proposition under the best of conditions, but decided to remain with Piccadilly Filly. Atkinson and his copilot kept the crew aloft with their two portside engines long enough to complete the twenty-mile crossing to the Swedish coast, where the pilots executed a crash landing. “Lieutenant Atkinson, only twenty-one years old, saved our lives,” gunner Nicholas Caruso recalled years later.3
As tragic as the day had been for the 93rd, it was worse for the other Eighth Air Force groups who flew the raid. Twenty-four of 430 aircraft were shot down, with 124 men killed in action, 131 taken prisoner, and 19 interned.4
It was the first anniversary of the 93rd’s combat debut, and the group’s publicist—Ben’s friend Cal Stewart—interviewed several men for a story he wrote for release to news correspondents. Among the 93rd men Stewart interviewed was the Japanese American farm boy whose promotion to a combat crew he had chronicled in a newspaper article ten months earlier.
“The Traveling Circus, in what was probably the longest hop by Libs in the ETO [European Theater of Operations], raided the sub pens at Danzig, one of the oldest cities in Europe,” Stewart’s latest story began. Stewart followed with a quick succession of quotes from several 93rd men who had flown the raid. First up was Ben, described by Stewart as “a tired-looking gunner” who had logged his twenty-eighth mission on the Danzig raid.
The back-to-back raids had underscored for Ben the perils of his commitment to fly five extra missions. The raids he was now flying weren’t nearly as long as the 93rd’s raids to Ploiesti or Wiener Neustadt or Rome, but the targets in greater Germany were more heavily defended. In response to Cal Stewart’s questions about how the summer missions from Libya compared with those the 93rd now faced, Ben offered a calibrated response. “You have to be on your toes here,” Ben said, using a popular sports analogy. “Not like it was in Africa.”5
After back-to-back raids, Ben and the Moran crew got October 10 off, but the 93rd was in action for a third consecutive day. The 93rd contingent assigned to fly the mission—including another six new pilots—enjoyed an easy day, but their assignment to draw German fighters away from their B-17 comrades failed. The Flying Fortress groups lost another thirty aircraft in an attack on the German city of Münster, bringing the Mighty Eighth’s losses over three days of raids to eighty-eight bombers and nearly nine hundred men.
October 11 marked the fourth consecutive day of action for the 93rd, with another planned raid into Germany, but weather forced a cancellation. Yet another attempt was made the following day to bomb the German city of Emden, and nine 93rd aircraft got aloft before the raid was canceled because their Thunderbolt escorts couldn’t get off the ground.6
After another day lost to inclement weather, the 93rd crews were alerted to prepare for a mission the following day, October 14. Rumors were soon confirmed. The 93rd was to be part of another double-strike raid on Regensburg and Schweinfurt, the infamous targets that had cost Ira Eaker sixty B-17s in August. The Liberators had been relegated to low-risk diversion duties on a costly Stuttgart raid the previous month and the Münster raid earlier that week, but they would be full partners with the Flying Fortresses in this latest attempt to cripple German production of Me-109 fighters at Regensburg and ball bearings at Schweinfurt.
The plan called for the 93rd commander, Colonel Leland Fiegel, to lead a combined force of sixty Liberators to Schweinfurt, but things unraveled for the B-24s almost from the outset. Only eighteen of twenty-four 93rd Liberators got airborne, and only two of the three B-24 groups assigned to the raid—the diminished 93rd force and the 392nd Bomb Group contingent—arrived at the rendezvous point over the North Sea.
Escorted by a squadron of P-47 Thunderbolts, the Liberators angled south over the Dutch coast and the countryside of occupied Holland. The Liberators had just crossed into German airspace over Aachen when the Thunderbolts reached the limits of their range. The Liberators would be on their own for their remaining ninety minutes of circuitous flight to Schweinfurt and the critical first hour of the return journey to England.
About twenty minutes farther south, flying over Luxembourg before making a hard left to Schweinfurt, Fiegel made a fateful decision. His planned force of sixty Liberators was now down to twenty-two aircraft after the botched rendezvous and assorted mechanical mishaps that had prompted other Liberators to head for home. Rather than press on to a target that struck fear in the hearts of Eighth Air Force men after the August raid, Fiegel changed plans. With Fiegel in the lead, the Liberators banked to the north in a diversionary maneuver aimed at drawing enemy fighters away from Regensburg and Schweinfurt.7
As Fiegel was leading his Liberators on a flight down and back up Germany’s western fringe without any losses, more than three hundred Eighth Air Force B-17s were locked in three hours and fourteen minutes of costly combat. The American bombers inflicted significant damage on the Me-109 factory at Regensburg and the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, but it came at a high price. The Germans shot down twenty-eight B-17s on the way to their targets and another thirty-two on the return flight.8
The loss of 642 American airmen on what was soon being called Black Thursday had a devastating impact on the mental health of the Eighth Air Force bomber crews. “After Black Thursday, morale in the Eighth plummeted to a new low and commanders worried about a crew revolt,” historian Donald L. Miller wrote in his classic history of the Eighth Air Force campaign, Masters of the Air. “‘I will never fly another mission, regardless of the cost,’ a gunner told his friends in the privacy of their Nissen hut, where twelve of the twenty cots were empty that night.”9
At a moment when Ben was trying to survive three more raids, the second double-strike attack on Regensburg and Schweinfurt had plunged the American daylight bombing campaign into crisis.
 
IRA EAKER’S BOMBER CREWS WERE ALREADY consumed by anxieties that had been percolating since the bloody August strikes on Regensburg and Schweinfurt, followed by the September raid on Stuttgart, and the October raids that had culminated with Black Thursday.
While Hap Arnold publicly expressed nonchalance about the soaring Eighth Air Force casualties, he quietly tried to limit the release of casualty figures to monthly totals rather than a raid-by-raid tally. At the group level, commanders sent dispirited crews to rest homes in the English countryside—“flak farms” as they were known among airmen—to avert breakdowns under the weight of combat stress. The efforts weren’t entirely successful. One crew returned from a flak-farm holiday and its members announced that they all wished to be relieved from combat duty.10
Bad weather gave the crews a much-needed respite in the second half of October, and many men headed to London on leaves to try to decompress.
Ben’s quest for thirty missions stalled amid the latest extended bout of bad weather. The 93rd saw limited action, flying diversions on October 18 and 19 before another diversion was aborted on October 20. Ben flew none of these missions.
After ten days of horrible weather, with pressure from Hap Arnold building once again on Ira Eaker and flowing down to the group level, the 93rd got aircraft airborne on October 30 for a raid on the Ruhr Valley industrial city of Gelsenkirchen. The Moran crew didn’t fly the mission, which proved to be an anticlimax when the 93rd bombers were recalled after flying to the target area but not releasing their bombs for fear of inflicting too many civilian casualties by bombing blind through heavy overcast. On the return flight, two 93rd men died when a pilot flying beneath the fifty-foot weather ceiling touched the ground with a wing and the aircraft cartwheeled.
The monotonous diversions, stand-downs, cancellations, and recalls wore on the men. Mercifully, Black October, as the month had become known to some—or “The Killing Month,” as one 93rd man christened it—finally ended. In two desultory months with the Moran crew, Ben had completed only three missions. Now November arrived with Ben’s personal crusade linked to the larger Eighth Air Force campaign in this autumn of agony.