Subject: Fly Boy ?????
From: ost (Chris Mark)
Date: 10/22/03 5:42 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

From: Art Kramer:

One further comment. When a
crew has to hit the silk, the pilot is not the first to go, he is always
the
last to go. Thus the questions.


Here's an example of how, except for some luck, the pilots would have bailed
out and the three crewmen in back would have gone down with the ship (from an
unpublished memoir):

"Our approach to Piombino Harbor was from the south. I guess one of the
things
that the weatherman did not count on was that the wind blew in the opposite
direction from our attack approach and we were heading into the wind instead
of
going with it. This obviously meant that our ground speed had been cut down
considerably, leaving us sitting ducks for Germans fire. As we made our IP
and
turned for the bomb run, the flak started. It was terribly accurate, no
brackets, just hits.
Surprisingly, no one aboard our ship was even scratched, amazing in
itself! Others in our formation were not so lucky. Our box [of six planes]
lost
3 aircraft over the target that day, two got back to Corsica and one was
missing at sea. The two that made it back were so badly battered they were
junked and used for spare parts.
The enemy flak was very accurate and we were in the lead element. One,
two
and three. The German 88's had us nailed! The lead ship nosed over and went
down, the number two aircraft made a sharp diving left turn and it never did
recover from that dive while we banked abruptly making a diving right turn
and
finally did pull out close to a hundred feet off the ocean.
There were three of us gunners in the back, behind the bomb bay, of this
model B-25. The tail gunner, radio gunner, and the top turret gunner. So when
I
climbed over the bomb bay to see what was going on up front I really startled
the pilots a lot. One cannot see the pilots from the back of the ship unless
you literally climb over the bomb bay to the front. It seems that they had
punched the bail out bell but it had been shot out and didn't work. Since
they
thought all the gunners had bailed out over the target they were preparing to
bail out themselves and were very surprised to see me.
We headed in limping fashion toward Corsica. The red flashes and bangs
meant the flak bursts had been close and they certainly were, as inspection
of
our ship bore out upon landing. One engine, ailerons and rudder controls had
been shot out as well as the hydraulic system controlling the lowering of our
wheels. When I tried to use the emergency system by manually pumping the
wheels
down, it didn't work either so we made a wheels up landing. We flew back from
Italy on a single, sputtering, smoking engine.
As we approached the downwind end of the field this remaining engine
gave
up and the pilot had to bring her straight in or else. The last thing I
remember seeing (before ducking into my crash landing position), was another
B-25 landing on the metal runway heading directly toward us and looking like
we
were going to crash. Our pilot really took care of us that day with much
skill
and daring. But I have often thought about if I had delayed a few seconds
before crawling forward to see what was up."



Chris Mark

Great story Chris. Did the pilots check the gunners on the intercom before
they assumed they had bailed out?

Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer