I had always acknowledged my kinship with the Jews of Europe, but it was a watery-thin intellectual nod that I sent them. I had lived in a world – social, political, sexual – where I supposed that others took my Jewishness for granted as I did and made no fuss about it. The crosses of the Klan had burned in the hills near the town I lived in as a child, but they had not referred to me. When we did not laugh at the Klan we hated it because it menaced other people. I loathed anti-Semitism in the same way because it was a scourge for other people though not for me.
Now that stupid little man had stripped the illusion from my war. It was not, then, a game which we played with death in the sky. It was not all gallantry and white contrails against the blue. It was not an aesthetic experience sanctified by an unchallengeable political cause. Hitler was not a dragon with shiny scales to be slain by a shinier knight. There were no dragons, but only savage men and women burning the flesh of other men and women. And I was a Jew with someone’s spittle on my face.
Elmer Bendiner’s The Fall of Fortresses is an unusual book: Though a semi-biographical memoir and “meditation” – as described in the book jacket – about America’s air war against Germany during 1943, it shares a quality typical of most works of fiction, found in genres such as adventure, noir, romance, science-fiction, fantasy, seafaring, and more. That is, rather than being a arid recounting of combat mission after combat mission (after yet another combat mission); personality after personality (after yet another personality), within its final chapter, the book brings the reader to an event which – for some readers a fleeting moment; for other readers indelibly – suddenly knots together the implications of the author’s experiences, observations, and impressions into what is – if not a literary climax in the classic sense – than at least a deep and powerful revelation about the author’s symbolic and real place in the war against the Third Reich, and even beyond.
This occurs in the context (or, should I say after the context?) of Bendiner’s final mission, quite unlike the author’s telling of his 1943 missions to the German cities of Kassel on July 30 and Stuttgart on September 6. Instead, through awriting style which smoothly melds together descriptions of events, personalities, and aerial surroundings into a vivid whole, he presents the memories (probably backed up by references to a dairy, correspondence, and archival reference(s?)) of his experiences during the 379th Bomb Group’s mission to Bremen on Monday, November 29, 1943.
While this mission held the same potential for danger, drama (and death) of mid-July and early-September, it was for his crew after the fact, somewhat unremarkable. Bendiner and (obviously) his crew returned to England, his combat tour completed, the central question of his life no longer the “if” of survival but the certain “what” of the future. Then after the mission, comes a realization.
That night, emotionally drained, he entered the 379th’s Officers Club, trying to come to terms with the awareness that he would no longer have to live by day-by-day, facing each mission with the anticipation of the next mission:
“I drank a scotch and soda. I do not recall another time throughout the war that I drank alone. I usually drink to keep in step or to ease the flow of talk. That night of the alert I must have been groping for words to say to myself, desperate to find something to do while the others slept the uneasy sleep that waits for the glare of a flashlight, for the grumbling and the whining, and the start of a new mission in the deadly cold sky.
“Would I wake at that summons, turn over and go back to sleep? Would I haunt the mess and the flight line like a damned ghost? How stupid, how cruel to let me stay alive and safe among those who are still hostages to death. No surgeon would leave an amputated limb near the living patient. It should be taken away, put out of sight, allowed to regenerate a body as a worm does when it is severed.”
Then, he has an encounter with a Public Relations officer. (379th Bomb Group or 527th Bomb Squadron? Bendiner doesn’t specify.) The two converse, “…until he said quite suddenly, “You made it all the way. Not many of your people stick it out.”
Thunderstruck and at a loss for words, Bendiner leaves the club. “I was caught completely off guard. I had just been tasting the joys of exclusivity at a bitter time. I had condescended to talk to this paddlefoot, this unprepossessing paper pusher. I had been in and up and he had been down and out. It had been so kind of me to talk to him. Then in the twinkling of an eye he had pulled me down and thrown me out. I walked the dark and rutted roads around Kimbolton, clutching my coat as if caught in a chill wind.” More follows.
This is the solitary passage in The Fall of Fortresses pertaining to the author being a Jew, and the fact that it effectively and almost concludes Bendiner’s memoir testifies to the conversation’s significance and impact. Suffice to say that the late-1943 event and its implications obviously remained an undercurrent in the author’s consciousness at least through the 1980 publication of The Fall of Fortresses, and, I would deign to suggest, beyond.
Of Bendiner’s personal beliefs concerning being a Jew – whether in terms of a transcendent sense of peoplehood, belief, and what is quaintly called “religion” – I know absolutely nothing, for this doesn’t seem to have been the subject of his postwar writing, except for the curious comment in his Contemporary Authors biography that his religion “defies categorization”. However, even if Bendiner’s conversation with the anonymous P.R. officer eventuated in no outwardly visible transformation, it brought him to a realization about both his identity, and, the very nature of the war in which he was participating.
Even if, like some American Jews of his generation, that nature only crystallized decades after the fact. And many for others, never.
A central and continuing question, as relevant in 2024 as it was eighty-one years ago, and unquestionably and blatantly so since October 7, 2023 (22nd of Tishrei, 5784) – though it has always been obvious, even in the “best” of times – is whether the conditions of Jewish acceptance, existence, and survival can ever be taken for granted.
A definitive answer to that question remains pending.
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On an unrelated note…
The 8th Air Force’s mission to Bremen of November 29, 1943, is the subject of numerous posts pertaining to Major Milton Joel, commander of the 38th Fighter Squadron of the 55th Fighter Group, who along with four other 55th FG and one 20th FG Lightning pilots, was shot down during that mission. (The Major and his plane have never been found.) Bendiner’s comments about, “A frontal system, visible in a line of towering stratocumulus, lay between us and Bremen. We passed over the clouds and noted the edge of the front on the thermometer that tracked the outside temperature,” “a solid blanket of clouds beneath us,” and, “We bombed Bremen through the overcast and the flak,” amplify passages in 55th FG Mission Reports, Encounter Reports, and Missing Air Crew Reports about the pervasiveness of cloud cover over the continent that day. This figured into errors made by both USAAF and Luftwaffe fighter pilots about the location of fighter claims and losses on this mission.
Elmer Bendiner stands before the nose of Flying Fortress “Tondelayo” (B-17F 42-29896, squadron identification marking “FO * V“). Photo from Silvertail Books.
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Here is the passage in its entirety:
My twenty-fifth came on November 29. It was our second visit to Bremen in three days. We climbed through soup and emerged into a blue sky lit by a sun that shed no warmth. The chill ate into my ribs and goaded my frostbitten toe to ache with the memory of its earlier insult. I scrunched my arms into my sides, barely lifting them to chip the frost from the window. There were about 150 planes in our parade; other formations were en route elsewhere to north Germany. (We looked brave out there, but with the Schweinfurt losses still in headlines our chiefs dared not send us beyond the reach of P-47s and the Mustangs which were appearing for the first time in our theater, though without wing tanks that would make the difference in later months.)
With our fighters fanning out around us and above us we looped far out over the North Sea before turning to make our run to the target. A frontal system, visible in a line of towering stratocumulus, lay between us and Bremen. We passed over the clouds and noted the edge of the front on the thermometer that tracked the outside temperature. It began to rise, though it was still no more than sixty below zero Fahrenheit.
As we turned toward the target the windows frosted into dazzling snowy pinpoints of light, blinding the view. In the nose Bob and I could barely see blue sky and distinguish the shapes of fighters. Ours or theirs? We could not tell. We tracked them with our guns but did not fire.
We could not know it at the time, but the cockpit was then in real trouble. The window defroster had failed in the stress of the frontal passage. The engines may hum, the props spin, all the intricate nerves of a plane may function superbly, but the failure of a simple defroster can prove fatal.
In that bitter cold of 25,000 feet in November over the North Sea, Bohn had to open his window and put his head out to see where he was going. In a hurricane of lacerating cold he had to keep from blinking so that his tears might not freeze his eyes shut.
We saw a German pop up through a solid blanket of clouds beneath us. It was an ME-109. Bohn saw him, too. We watched him far out, maneuvering for a head-on attack. He was coming in. Bohn called us on the intercom and his voice was strained. Bob turned to me his eyes blazing. He banged a fist on his gun. Was it jammed, or what? He pushed me aside to try my gun, though it could not be swiveled far enough to catch the oncoming fighter in its sight. There was no click, no chatter. The gun was dead. Bohn called again and again to fire. Our plane was silent. Our guns, in that brief passage from cold to warmer, moister air, had frozen.
I turned to look at the other planes of the formation. Not a tracer flew. The Messerschmitt came on. He was well within range now and we had not a gun to stop him. Could he then rake the formation, burn us to the ground, because the damned sky had made us impotent as hens mesmerized in the presence of a fox?
Then we noted that no lights were playing along his wings where we knew his guns should be firing. He came through the squadron up ahead and no planes fell. He passed us at our level, and Bohn, who had a better view than I had, says he waved. Bohn says he had a black mustache; he saw the enemy that clearly at the moment when a meteorological happenstance imposed a truce. An inversion – with cold air below the clouds and comparatively warm air above – had momentarily sealed his guns.
I do not recall the enemy’s mustache or his farewell wave, but I saw him turn and plunge downward into the gray rolling clouds.
Minutes later in stable air the guns thawed. We could again be as murderous in our defense as need be. We bombed Bremen through the overcast and the flak. On the way home German fighters came up in force. They and the flak knocked out of the sky thirteen of our planes carrying 130 men. I was not among that number, and it had been my twenty-fifth.
I smiled when I was congratulated. I got off a letter to Esther. That night and all the next day I felt curiously disembodied. I was there and not there. I walked the same roads I had always walked. I slept where I had always slept, but all was changed. I was not part of my crew. I watched them go about their work and their preparations in my absence. They would talk about getting together with me sometime if… We would see each other in London, New York, Minneapolis, Boston, if…
I no longer shared that highly charged existence in the shadow of the if. I would learn to live as I had once lived without that omnipresent, stimulating shadow. True, I had never forsaken my childish belief in invulnerability, but nevertheless the if had always been there, on the other side of my plane’s window, peeking from behind Esther’s picture, within the envelope of her letter. I became attached to it. I felt that somehow the conditional lent a distinction to life. One must indeed be hungry for distinctions to develop a fondness for that grinning, gap-toothed conjecture of death.
I confess, nevertheless, that I had grown accustomed to that presence as the eleventh member of the crew, and I would miss him along with the others. The feeling of impending separation grew keener on the evening of November 30. The field was alerted. My crew would fly and I would not. I had been offered a job at Wing Headquarters, helping to design missions for others. It would have meant a captaincy and a job in a world of pleasant mess halls, staff cars and jeeps, with just enough time in an airplane over Britain to collect my flying pay. I had turned it down for a chance to go home, see Esther, meet my daughter and, pending assignment to some other war, live the life of those who need no poppy in their buttonhole to assure survival.
I was sure that I wanted such a life as any sane man would. A part of me was sane and had sane desires. A better-organized army would have rushed me off the base within the very hour I had completed my twenty-fifth. I should have vanished as definitively as those who die or resign from combat. Perhaps my decision to forgo the promotion and opt for home had upset some part of the machinery. In any case I had been told that I was not to go home for a while at least. I would have to do a stint of teaching navigation to neophytes in Northern Ireland.
“Ireland?” echoed Joyce and her mother in a concerted wail of disbelief. I had gone to see them in the afternoon to say goodbye. To the Woffords of England, Ireland was the utmost edge of the world, a place of terrible exile. I scuttled their sympathy with laughter and rolled Joyce’s farewell kiss upon my tongue. Then I came home to the field, the alert and a sense of desolation.
I remember the bar in the officers’ club. The wood was blond and highly polished. It ran the entire length of a very long wall, or so it seems to me in recollection. A mirror was hung behind it on which was pasted a collection of decorous breasts, legs and toothy smiles. There was a crude cardboard facsimile of our emblem – crossed bombs and death’s head.
Blackout curtains covered the windows. No one sat at any of the tables near the stoves. The place was cold, as I remember, and empty. I do not think there was a soul there except myself. Someone must have been tending bar, but I do not recall a face or a name or a word that was exchanged. I think there was a yellow light over the bar, but most of the room was in semidarkness.
I stood with my foot on the rail. I drank a scotch and soda. I do not recall another time throughout the war that I drank alone. I usually drink to keep in step or to ease the flow of talk. That night of the alert I must have been groping for words to say to myself, desperate to find something to do while the others slept the uneasy sleep that waits for the glare of a flashlight, for the grumbling and the whining, and the start of a new mission in the deadly cold sky.
Would I wake at that summons, turn over and go back to sleep? Would I haunt the mess and the flight line like a damned ghost? How stupid, how cruel to let me stay alive and safe among those who are still hostages to death. No surgeon would leave an amputated limb near the living patient. It should be taken away, put out of sight, allowed to regenerate a body as a worm does when it is severed.
I do not remember a man coming into the bar, but there he was next to me. I have forgotten his name. He was a PR man – an information officer. I had known him slightly, and occasionally given him a bit of color to adorn a press release. He was a mild-mannered man, one of many I had known on the field as I knew the color of the bar or the turn of the road. Until that moment he had been part of the scenery but had not participated in my world. I flew and he walked. I was on familiar terms with death and he pecked items out on a typewriter as I do now. I was an arrogant snob. I was part of an elite. He was an outsider. Still, I was civil; I made talk.
I believe he bought me a drink, but I am not sure. He had done a squib on my completing my missions, he said, and I nodded appreciatively. His face was a pasty white, as I remember it, but I do not trust myself because I have carried his face so long in my mind that it is the worse for wear.
We were oppressively alone in that bar. The alcohol had diminished me to a point below anything I had known. My spirit had collapsed like a dishrag. Inside my throat I could feel tears drip as from an abscess. Yet we talked of God knows what. We talked until he said quite suddenly, “You made it all the way. Not many of your people stick it out.”
I hope to God I did not nod my head or let my hand shake. I know I could not speak. I think he knew I could not speak, and that staggers me with shame thirty-five years later. I put my drink down. That I do remember. I do not think I looked at him. I wish now that I had, that I had seen his face clearly. I cannot tell whether he smiled or smirked or gloated or peered dully at me through his glasses. I will never know. I took my trench coat from the hook on the wall. I recall that I did everything slowly. I put on my crushed airman’s hat and walked out.
That is what happened. A plethora of rationalizations followed at once and have continued for thirty-five years. The event came so suddenly upon me, so unexpectedly, that I could not think of any of the thousand witty, savage, blunt things to say or do that have leaped to mind ever since. I was caught completely off guard. I had just been tasting the joys of exclusivity at a bitter time. I had condescended to talk to this paddlefoot, this unprepossessing paper pusher. I had been in and up and he had been down and out. It had been so kind of me to talk to him. Then in the twinkling of an eye he had pulled me down and thrown me out. I walked the dark and rutted roads around Kimbolton, clutching my coat as if caught in a chill wind.
I had always acknowledged my kinship with the Jews of Europe, but it was a watery-thin intellectual nod that I sent them. I had lived in a world – social, political, sexual – where I supposed that others took my Jewish-ness for granted as I did and made no fuss about it. The crosses of the Klan had burned in the hills near the town I lived in as a child, but they had not referred to me. When we did not laugh at the Klan we hated it because it menaced other people. I loathed anti-Semitism in the same way because it was a scourge for other people though not for me.
Now that stupid little man had stripped the illusion from my war. It was not, then, a game which we played with death in the sky. It was not all gallantry and white contrails against the blue. It was not an aesthetic experience sanctified by an unchallengeable political cause. Hitler was not a dragon with shiny scales to be slain by a shinier knight. There were no dragons, but only savage men and women burning the flesh of other men and women. And I was a Jew with someone’s spittle on my face.
I do not pretend that I was a victim of a pogrom. I agree that, living in the same century as Auschwitz, I ought not to mention my little encounter. And it would have left no mark on me if I had not been rendered so vulnerable by a false sense of security derived from the battlefield where death creates the splendid illusion of brotherhood.
None of this was clear to me as I left the bar. It has taken me thirty-five years to begin to understand that nameless PR man. He probably shrugged when I walked out, confirmed in the view that Jews are hypersensitive and unpredictable and that they can’t tell a compliment from a kick in the ass.
I spent the night somehow between the officers’ club and my hut. I no longer remember whether I woke when my crew left. I must have said goodbye again though I had already said as much the night before. Still, to think that I had not would shame me more than my performance at the bar.
Here’s the Book
Bendiner, Elmer S., The Fall of Fortresses, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N.Y., 1980
We would have to ditch, take our chances against riding down with the plane straight to the bottom of the Channel, and take our further chances on being picked up by friends, not foes, at sea. I argued for that proposal. Everyone knew it was a personal matter with me. I could see no other way to get home to my wife and shortly forthcoming child before the war’s end. I might grow old while my child grew up.
“Poor Benny – he’s got to see his kid.” Real sympathy poured over the intercom disguised as mock tears. Bohn supported me from the start. Mike and Duke pitched in, and the others followed cheerfully.
I accepted such sacrifices without a qualm. I was young then. Would I now try to persuade others to make so risky a choice on my account? Not likely.
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This “second” excerpt from Elmer Bendiner’s The Fall of Fortresses covers the ditching of Tondelayo in the English Channel while returning from the 379th Bomb Group mission to Stuttgart on September 6, 1943. Bendiner weaves together his correspondence to his wife, what seems to have been postwar correspondence or personal conversations with his pilot, Bohn Fawkes, perhaps historical records from the 527th Bomb Squadron, and certainly his own memories, into a fast-moving and crisply detailed historical tapestry that captures the mixture of fear, tension, humor, and matter-of-factness inherent to a situation and event where survival was problematic. And, if problematic for one, then ten times more problematic for the crew of a heavy bomber.
In this regard – and viewed from an even higher perspective, whether of time or (quite literally!) altitude – any perusal of official records or serious historical works pertaining to the WW II air war (let alone later conflicts), specifically in terms of the survival of aircrews lost at sea – whether through controlled ditching or mass bailout – will readily reveal how problematic was the survival of airmen during such events. The USAAF’s Missing Air Crew Reports and most any of R.W. Chorley’s series of books covering WW II Bomber Command Losses are replete with accounts of such events – some heart-rending; many sad beyond words and thought; many others inspiring; a tiny few perhaps humorous – that leave one wondering about the unpredictable intersection between training, skill, bravery, and fate. (Yet, in Judaism there is no such thing as “fate”. There I momentarily and theologically digress!) Still, whether you prefer “fate” or fate, all things held equal, repeated training, preparation, and familiarization with both an aircraft’s design, and personal survival gear, could certainly make a difference in the probability of an airman’s survival at sea, whether via bailout or ditching.
Specifically mentioned or alluded to in Bendiner’s story are (of course) pilot Bohn Fawkes, anonymous co-pilot “Chuck”, flight engineer Lawrence H. Reedman, and tail gunner Michael L. Arooth. Of these four men, let alone the entire crew, it seems that the only individuals hurt or injured were Bendiner (unspecified), “Chuck” (wounded in his leg by 20mm cannon fire) and Arooth (badly gashed his head during the ditching.).
The videos below elucidate aspects of survival at sea in terms of successfully ditching a B-17, and, the rate of aircrew survival during such events. Note that the final section of “B-17 Bomber Ditching Survival Rate? Not Good” is “Strong Seasonal dependency on Rescue Stats”. This seems to be borne out by the ditching of the Fawkes’ crew in mid-summer (everyone survived), versus the ditching of the Leonard Rifas crew in mid-winter of 1945 (no-one survived).
Here’s “Ditch at Sea and Live in a Boeing B-17 (1944-Restored)”, at ZenosWarbirds.
“Ditching in water was a fact of life for stricken aircraft in World War 2, from the frozen white tops of the North Sea to the shark infested waters of the South Pacific. “Lt. Reynolds.” played by veteran actorArthur Kennedy(Lawrence of Arabia), is copilot on a B-17 that ditches at sea. He survives by pure luck, but the rest of the crew is lost due to a lack of preparation. When he gets his own ship, Reynolds vows his crew is thoroughly trained in B-17 ditching. He gives them the straight dope, step by step.”
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And, here’s “B-17 Bomber Ditching Survival Rate? Not Good”, at WWII US Bombers.
Topics of the video: Causes of Ditching Ditching Vs. Bailout Range of Bomber VHF communications Air Sea Steps for aircraft in Distress Crew Ditching positions Gibson Girl Usage Air Sea Rescue Stats for the B-17 and B-24 Bombers % of Rescues per month Strong Seasonal dependency on Rescue Stats
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Elmer Bendiner stands before the nose of Flying Fortress “Tondelayo” (B-17F 42-29896, squadron identification marking “FO * V“). Photo from Silvertail Books.
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Tondelayo early in her short-lived combat career – during the summer of 1943 – as seen in Army Air Force photograph 60509AC / A45870.
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Unfortunately, I’ve no idea of the specific (or approximate) location in the English Channel that marks the undersea resting place of Tondelayo. By definition there’s no Missing Air Crew Report for this incident, and the historical records of the 527th Bomb Squadron I believe only commence in October of 1943. C’est la vie.
And thus, Elmer Bendiner’s account of the mission:
Stuttgart lies some five hundred miles inside Germany. A heavily loaded B-17 flying at a moderate altitude – say, seventeen thousand feet – in formation, zigging and zagging in evasive action, might be expected to make the round trip but would land with fuel tanks perilously close to empty. There would scarcely be a gallon to spare for a foolish mistake or a bit of horseplay.
The mission was being led by Brigadier General Robert Travis. I had nothing against the General before Stuttgart because I knew very little about him except for his legendary talent at poker. After Stuttgart many of us had a great deal against him. He added to our anxieties – or at least to Bohn’s – from the very inception of the mission by announcing his intention of following a newfangled theory developed by someone at Bomber Command. A great deal of fuel was being wasted by climbing to altitude with full tanks, it was reasoned. Why not climb at a later point when the tanks would be lighter?
My second-lieutenant pilot could have told the General why not, but he wasn’t asked. To fly in the thin upper air a plane needs the added strength of its superchargers. If those superchargers are out of order it is best to realize that incapacity when you are over friendly territory and can drop down to a lower altitude and head for home. It is not wise to wait until one is at altitude over enemy territory to find that you cannot stay in formation.
Travis, untroubled by such technical considerations, led us across Europe at ten thousand feet until we were close to Tubingen, from which we would turn onto the target. Then he began to climb steeply and we followed him. Our superchargers worked. The record does not show whether others failed, because how can one distinguish in the fall of a Fortress the various ingredients of disaster – enemy flak or 20-mm. shells or rockets or simple mechanical failure?
We were flying low and on the outside of the formation. Travis and his lead group were in view ahead of us. As we rounded Tubingen I noted clouds moving across the Black Forest. Outside my starboard window the Neckar River was still plainly visible snaking its way to the target.
Stuttgart lay before us in checkered sun and shadow. It was close to noon. The flak came up, but not too heavy. Then as we neared the target white clouds capriciously intervened. Bob had no concerns; he would drop on the leader’s bombs. But those clouds must have disconcerted Travis’s bombardier, all set as he was to fix the primary target on the cross hairs of his bombsight. Could he switch at an instant from visual bombing to instruments?
We read the answer in the spectacle of our lead group passing over the target with bomb-bay doors wide open and no bombs falling amid the furious black flak.
Travis was going around for another try, and the formation would wheel behind him. All very well for Travis and the happy few at the hub of that wheel. They could describe a nice, tight circle. But to us on the outward rim it meant a fearsome strain to keep up with the formation, and a serious drain of gas. We had to fly perhaps an extra forty or fifty miles at full throttle, using gas at very nearly the rate required for a takeoff, just to keep our position in the formation.
We could have come in closer to the hub, shortening the radius of the swing and saving considerable fuel, but we dared not slip under the open bomb-bay doors of Travis and his group. His bomb bays, like ours, were loaded with incendiaries. (This too seems odd, for ball bearings and the machines that make them do not burn.) The incendiaries were ingeniously packaged in clusters with a timing device so set that, at a predetermined distance below the bomber that hatched them, the firebombs would spread out and cover a wider area.
No one could be sure just when those incendiaries would tumble out, their clusters flying apart. We swung out in a wide arc. Why the General did not close his bomb-bay doors is yet another unanswered question of the city.
On the second time around, the incendiaries fluttered down, and smoke billowed up in black clouds from the city.
As we turned away from the target the Luftwaffe made its belated but emphatic appearance. Fighters came at us head on and blazing. Bohn was one of those pilots who believed ardently in evasive action. (There are some contrary schools of thought, which declare that it is better to fly straight and level as if on parade, following the model of the Light Brigade.) As the German planes came at us from high out of the sun, Bohn pushed Tondelayo to climb and pitch. This seemed to throw the attackers off momentarily. But they – or others like them – came at us again, three or four abreast. Bohn recollects that he saw a puff of smoke from the engine of one of the German fighters and in response nosed Tondelayo into her dance. In retrospect he much regrets that he did not accurately interpret the puff as an indication that the German pilot had cut his throttle and was waiting for us to come down from our jump while he slowed his run at us. He caught us cold and raked Tondelayo from nose to tail.
When he left us one of our engines was on fire; our copilot of the day, Chuck, had had his leg torn by a 20-mm. shell; the oxygen lines in the rear of the ship had been cut, and the oil-pressure gauge was down to zero because our oil line had been severed.
Now, it is the oil pressure that enables the pilot to change the pitch of the propellers. And if the pitch cannot be changed the propeller stands like a rigid paddle in the teeth of hurricane winds. If it spins without lubrication the friction can build up enough heat to melt metal. Then the propeller blades might turn into a deadly missile and slash the frame that held us. Our own propellers were poised like axes against us.
It was clear that we could not stay in formation. To put out the fire in our engine we would have to work up an airspeed of at least 235 mph. We could have done so only in a dive. (We had been at that deadly extremity before.) In any case we would have to drop to lower altitudes with half our crew deprived of oxygen. (We had been there before as well.)
At the first lull in the fight we waved away our wing man and dived until the fire was out.
Now we can pick up the letter to my wife.
…We had to drop out of formation and fight our way across Europe by ourselves. As it developed, we didn’t so much fight our way out as sneak out, running for every cloud cover we could see. The spot decision right then was up to Fawkes. He could have asked for a course to Switzerland. The lovely snowy, blue-and-white peaks of the Alps were plainly visible, towering almost up to our altitude, although quite a way off….
I must interrupt again. Technically it was up to Bohn, but not actually as it turned out. Bohn was our commander – and a very good one, which is to say that he almost never gave an order. We talked this situation out, weighing the pros and cons as if we were civilians around a table. While we talked we flitted from cloud to cloud over Europe. I had given Bohn a heading, but he could scarcely keep to it while chasing clouds. I had to follow every twist and turn he made, altering our headings accordingly and still aiming for England by the shortest route.
It was plain from the most casual glance at our fuel level, at our ground speed, at our low altitude and at the distance we had to go that we could not make it back to Kimbolton. We had three choices to discuss. We could head for the Alps, where we would be interned for the duration. (General cheers over the intercom.) Choice number two: we could bail out over France. We all carried civilian passport pictures. (I liked mine because I had borrowed a very un-Army, tweedy jacket for the purpose.) We could hope to land amid the French Resistance and follow their lead to the Channel coast, where we might thumb a ride on a fishing boat. Our intelligence captain had described this alternative as an easy walk across occupied Europe for which we were well armed with a snapshot and a .45-caliber pistol. (Dead silence for that option.)
Last possibility: we could fly as far as our fuel would permit. I told everybody I was sure we could reach the Channel. We would have to ditch, take our chances against riding down with the plane straight to the bottom of the Channel, and take our further chances on being picked up by friends, not foes, at sea. I argued for that proposal. Everyone knew it was a personal matter with me. I could see no other way to get home to my wife and shortly forthcoming child before the war’s end. I might grow old while my child grew up.
“Poor Benny – he’s got to see his kid.” Real sympathy poured over the intercom disguised as mock tears. Bohn supported me from the start. Mike and Duke pitched in, and the others followed cheerfully.
I accepted such sacrifices without a qualm. I was young then. Would I now try to persuade others to make so risky a choice on my account? Not likely.
We knew then that our co-pilot’s wounds were superficial, but would not Switzerland have seemed the safest bet for him? We could have made a case for internment. Why didn’t we?
Back to the letter:
…Bohn asked for a heading home and I was glad of it even though with fighting and one thing and another I was a bit vague as to our precise position at the time. We dived down into the loveliest, heaviest cloud imaginable and stayed in it as long as possible, while I feverishly worked away to establish our position and improve on the course I had originally set. The cloud gave out, and for a time we sailed at low altitude over the grain fields, forests, towns and rivers of France. Some of these checkpoints seemed to bear out my theoretically estimated position and some of them contradicted it. It was beautiful country; it seemed to be of a different color from that of England or Holland or Belgium.
We were playing hide-and-seek in the clouds over France. And in the open spaces our gunners were anxiously watching for German fighters who were looking for us but who miraculously failed to see us before other clouds came up to hide us. However, ground radio was tracking us and we had to shift course to clear what I thought would be heavy flak areas. We could see flak on both sides of us, largely to signal fighters, we thought….
At this point I must refer to Bohn, who remembers clearly an incident which I recall only dimly. We had been flying through cloud for some time when he asked me where we were. He says that he could see no way in which I could be sure of anything. And he was right, of course. I had followed our zigs and zags as best I could, but how could I be certain in that fog to which we clung? Then I had my answer from the Germans. The gray-white nothingness was punctured by black flak explosions all around us. “Ah,” I said, “Rouen.” We both laughed.
…Just before we crossed the coast Fawkes called up and suggested that anyone who didn’t want to take his chance in the water could still jump. None of us did. I could see water ahead, but we ran up along the coast to avoid a large seaport and heavy coastal flak. Duke, our radioman, was sending out an SOS and asking radio stations to take a fix on us. They did and he reported it to me, but it seemed to me to be way off. And Duke asked for another, which was just as bad. I realized then that no one in England knew where we were. I gave Duke our estimated position, but he couldn’t get it through….
Actually the British shore stations were asking us to move some thirty miles north where they could get a proper fix on us. They did not know it, but they were asking men to fly without wings. When we crossed the coast we had only one engine working, and in a B-17 that is a few minutes away from none. I gathered a few of my belongings – a chart of the Channel coast, which I folded and slipped into the pocket of my coveralls, a pencil or two, my gloves (gauntlet types that were more elegant than warm) and Esther’s picture. Then I clambered out of the nose, up the hatch behind Bohn, and through the bomb bay to the radio room.
…We were over the sea now and our four engines ran out one after another. When I left the nose, two of them were already motionless—a most disconcerting thing to see in an airplane. Back in the radio room we all took our previously assigned positions, bracing ourselves for the shock. I crouched behind the radioman’s armor plating and talked to Mike, who was crouched next to me. Up to the last minute Mike retained his faith in Tondelayo and couldn’t believe we would really have to ditch. He asked me whether we were headed toward England. I said we were but I knew we couldn’t make it. We chatted like that, looking up through the open hatch to the great, gray, swirling clouds, wondering how near the water we were and when the shock would come….
As we dropped closer to the sea Bohn turned to our copilot and asked him whether he had ever landed a plane in water. Chuck shook his head. Would he like to? No. With the last bit of power in Tondelayo Bohn maneuvered to land along the crest of a wave. To hit a wave broadside is very like flying into a stone wall. We skimmed the crest, then sank into the trough of a mountainous wave. We sank, then rose, buoyed by empty gas tanks.
From the cockpit Chuck saw his fondly crushed pilot’s cap in the hatchway leading to the nose and seemed about to try to fish it out. Bohn recalled looking at him doubtfully as if to say, “You’re on your own.” No window in the cockpit of a B-17 is made to allow a grown man to wriggle out of it unless he is in the extremity of desperation. Both Bohn and Chuck made it to the wing.
Someone should have pulled a lever to release the dinghies from the fuselage. No one had. Bohn quickly scanned the directions on the metal plaque above the wing. He pulled the appropriate lever as per instructions, but nothing happened. He and Chuck pulled, twisted and clawed the dinghies out, then started the inflation, which should have been automatic. Could it have been ten seconds or thirty? None of us remembers how long it took to climb out.
…We lit lightly at first and only a bit of spray seemed to come in. Mike stood up, and we all yelled to him to get down. But it was too late. After skipping along the water the ship finally plunged, throwing Mike forward so that he gashed his forehead. Then the green-gray water rushed in. I felt nothing so much as surprise. In drills there had been nothing to suggest such a torrent of ocean running through our airship. I tried to stand, but the force of the water knocked me down, and when I did get up, some of the precious things I had gathered were floating.
Everyone was on his feet, everyone excited and clambering toward the hatch, everyone shouting that there was plenty of time and to keep calm. Mike stood next to me and I saw that his head was bleeding badly. A piece of floating B-17 had clipped me and scratched my forehead. For an awful moment I thought that Mike and I, who were wedged in a corner, would never get out. Mike finally managed it. By that time the water was up to my chest and rising rapidly. Our bombardier, Bob, was still in there. I hoisted myself up on one side while he made for the other. I remember that I failed to make it the first time and I could hear Mike hollering outside, “Where’s Benny?” Then I clambered out. The wings were already under water.
I clung to the fuselage for a second or so and watched Fawkes and the others, who had extracted one of the rubber dinghies and were maneuvering it away from the wings of the sinking plane. Then I plunged into the water. The dinghy was scarcely more than a stroke away from the ship. But I had overlooked one detail that might have proved disastrous. I had neglected to inflate my Mae West….
Actually the dinghy must have been farther off than a swimming stroke or it would have been sucked down by Tondelayo. Obviously a participant in an event is not the most reliable witness when it comes to precise measurements. On the other hand, the raft could not have been too far off, because I have never been a good swimmer and for that occasion I was wearing a full flying suit and boots; my pockets were stuffed with map and pencils, Esther’s picture and odd bits of paraphernalia I thought I might need.
…I clung to the raft while Larry, our engineer, kept shouting, “Hold on, Benny, hold on” – as if I thought of doing anything else or going anywhere else just then. When I turned around Tondelayo had vanished; our dinghy and the other one holding the rest of our crew were the only things left on an apparently limitless sea. After a bit of floundering about I managed to hoist myself into the tossing dinghy. All this took much less time to live through than it does to record.
The Channel was as rough that day as it ever gets, and the swell was dark, towering and fearful to look at. It was worse to feel. We became violently seasick. That is, all except Bob and one gunner, who increased our miseries by remaining obtrusively and volubly high-spirited. There is, however, a measure of providence in the seasickness that plagues the shipwrecked. First, it gives them something to do which relieves the monotony; second; it makes death almost welcome.
Before giving way to utterly abandoned retching and writhing we paddled with our hands toward the other dinghy so that we could lash the rafts together….
Dinghies are equipped with oars, but we could not find them. Eventually they turned up at the very bottom of a heap of tightly stowed, largely unworkable gadgetry.
…In between spasms, when I could lie with my head back and not feel too sick, I could watch the endless seascape and the barren sky. Bob was cranking our portable radio frantically but in vain, because we had lost the kite to raise our aerial; we knew then that we could send no signal at all.
From time to time Larry would bail out some of the water that swept over us in salty waves whenever we thought we might begin to dry out in the sun. Larry would bail a little, get sick, bail some more and get sick again. I tried to help, but as soon as I’d lift my head I’d vomit. I was no help at all. For five hours we tossed like that and in my lucid moments, I would speculate on the direction of our drift. It was impossible to tell with any certainty. I knew what winds had been prevailing all afternoon, but there was much I did not know. In one lucid moment I looked down at the few things I had brought with me. One of these was my Mercator’s Chart. Now, darling, there is nothing quite so useless on a broad ocean as a Mercator on a raft that one cannot steer. I finally threw it overboard.
Toward the end of the afternoon we were all resigning ourselves to spending a night on the water. I, at least, was convinced that no one in England had any idea of where we were. Earlier we had seen a flight of bombers, but they were very high and no one aboard could possibly have seen our signals. It was a little more than five hours after we ditched that we sighted a squadron of fighters. Larry had the flare pistol out and ready to shoot. Duke shouted that they might be Germans. Some of us told him to shoot and others yelled at him not to.
Here I must point out a rare phenomenon. Bohn said, “Fire.” When Larry hesitated Bohn said for the one and only time in my memory, “That’s an order.” Bohn told me later that he was positive they were Spits by the sound of them, which we had heard minutes before we saw them. Actually when we spotted them they were headed like a flight of arrows to England and no one in our position – climbing and sinking amid monstrous waves – could say whether their silhouettes were German or British. They were mere specks and shadows and I could see in them neither friend nor foe. Bohn’s ears for machinery were far subtler than mine. And I am grateful to them.
…Larry fired. The fighters were already past us, but one blessed pilot was looking back for an unknown but providential reason. We watched the fighters fly on and then noted that one peeled off, and the others followed.
They came in low over the water toward our flare – a magnificent affair of parachutes, red balls of fire and smoke like a Fourth of July celebration. Those Spitfires were the most meaningful, beautiful things I have ever seen. They swooped down and circled above us. Sick as we were, we stood up, waved and yelled at them, and came very near to upsetting the dinghies altogether. One of the Spits circled high above us to radio our position while the others continued to make passes over us by way of sustaining our morale. It was wonderful. We would cheer and laugh and get sick again, then laugh some more. I have never been so happy and so miserable at the same time.
After a while the Spits left us, but we felt certain that help would be on its way in no time at all. After a while another Spit did come out….
I am reminded by my pilot that it was not a Spit but a Mosquito.
We set off another display of fireworks and he too came over to circle above us. We were very glad to have him and we were sure that we were practically saved, but the sun set and the swell seemed to grow more ominous and still there was no rescue. We knew that our guardian plane would run out of gas soon. After a final pass he left us. The moon came up, big and yellow over the water. It was a lovely night, cold but full of stars – a few of which I fruitlessly recognized – but, lovely night or no, we continued to be sick. We strained our ears listening for motors. We saw lights where there were none. We told each other that we were sure to be rescued that night. But I think that each of us acknowledged to himself that it was unlikely.
We had been in the water about nine hours when Mike suddenly shouted that he saw a light. Fawkes saw it, too, when we rode the crest of a swell. We sent up another flare and then waited. Then we heard the dull throb of a motor, and a beam of light reached out near us but not quite on us. Dinghies are pitifully small things to spot on an ocean. We fired another flare, this time into the wind so that it fell back directly over our heads. The beam swung around and picked us up. Then while the light came nearer a terrible thought struck me and most of the others, I suppose: What if the vessel were an enemy ship? To have traveled all that distance across Europe alone, to have dived Tondelayo into the sea, to have spent nine agonizing hours on a raft, all to avoid capture and then to be picked up by the wrong ship – that would be too bad. We shouted and soon heard someone answering. “Ahoy,” said a voice behind the light. Apparently our collective Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas and New York accents made themselves known, and the voice answered jubilantly, “OK, Yanks, we’re coming.”
We clambered aboard the boat, fumbling awkwardly up the swaying rope ladder. There were a dozen happy angels dressed in blue RAF uniforms and turtleneck sweaters saying, “Bloody good show,” and cinematic things of that sort. They had hot soup and dry clothes ready for us. I couldn’t swallow the soup and, since I paused on deck for one last mighty heave of what was still in my innards, I came down too late for the clothes. But I stripped to the skin and they wrapped me in warm fleecy blankets….
While Bohn and I lingered on the deck we thought we saw a great hulk move out of the sea perilously close. Bohn tapped the shoe of the captain on the deck above us and gestured toward it. “We’ve copped it,” said the captain quietly, but he was wrong. The apparition was another British rescue launch, and together we headed home. The German shore batteries tossed a few shells in our direction, but they were not too serious about the effort.
…It was a long voyage home and we dodged minefields all the way. The skipper told us that we had drifted from our original position some twenty miles off the French coast to well within the patrol lanes of the Germans and in easy shelling distance of their coastal guns. By morning we would have been in enemy hands.
When we hit the coast town of Dover there was an ambulance waiting at the end of the stone walk. But Bendiner had no pants, nothing but a couple of blankets. I was panicky. I had read much about this town and it hurt my dignity to think that I would make my triumphal entry pantless. But I did. I clambered up the ancient stone steps of the wharf, clutching my blanket and looking like a refugee from a raid on a Turkish bath. It was very embarrassing. Those who were hurt were taken to a hospital. The rest of us – the cut on my forehead had thoroughly healed – went to the local officers’ barracks of the Royal Navy, where gold-braided commodores served us rum and scotch, hot soup and bully beef. They fussed about us and sought in a thousand ways to make us happy. But still I had no pants. At last some kind lieutenant dug up an outfit for me and I regained my dignity. As a matter of fact he provided civilian clothes for me – slacks and a sweater – so that for that night and the next day I felt like a civilian and looked like Don Budge….
***
Bohn, although a mere second lieutenant, was commander of the crew and therefore shared the quarters – and the razor – of the Admiral of the Port of Dover. He woke on the following morning to see the Admiral staring out to sea. That dignitary invited Bohn to join him for a morning dip in the Channel, then, hastily recollecting the circumstances, added, “I suppose not.” Bohn confessed during our day of rehashing the events to a slight twinge of embarrassment over the fact that he had not been the last to leave Tondelayo in keeping with his position. I told him of the commander of the Royal Indian Navy who testified at a board of inquiry, “I did not leave the ship. The ship left me.” That cheered Bohn.
On the following day, after we saw our co-pilot at the hospital and said a cheery farewell all around, our operations officer flew down to bring us back to Kimbolton. This time the groundlings had rolled our bedding and gathered our personal possessions into pathetically small packages suitably tagged. We unpacked and rejoined the living.
… I expect that shortly we will be shipped off to spend a quiet recuperative week at a seaside resort. Some of the boys who have been watching me furiously pounding away have become curious, and I have shown them most of this letter. They are now anxiously waiting for the last page to roll off the press so they can find out whether or not they were saved.
All my love, ELMER
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This truly remarkable image, Army Air Force photograph 71149AC / A14028, shows Bohn Fawkes’ crew (with the exception of co-pilot “Chuck”, recovering in hospital) at Kimbolton on September 7, 1943, the day of their return to their base. As described in Bendiner’s account, all are wearing British clothing. At the center of the photo, focused – perhaps – on writing an account of their experience, is (probably) Lt. Fawkes. Fourth from right is Lt. Bendiner, while seated at far right with bandaged head is Sgt. Michael Arooth.
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The “quiet, recuperative week” mentioned by my young self did not come at once. We were being handled according to the latest authoritative study by Eighth Air Force psychiatrists. A crew that had had a very rough mission a month or so earlier had been dispatched to a “flak house” for rest and rehabilitation. They came back rested but scarcely rehabilitated. They had used their week off to mull over their collective past and unpromising future. On their return they announced their unanimous decision to quit the war. They would not fly combat again together or singly. It was not mutiny, merely combat fatigue.
Colonel Mo was taking no chances with us. He and a few psychologists who had been studying combat crews to see what ordinary creatures would do under extraordinary stress decided on a policy well known to everyone who has tried to train young equestrians. If they are thrown, toss them into the saddle at once. If they have escaped a broken neck they must be encouraged to try again.
Unfortunately, Kimbolton was socked in for ten days after Stuttgart, and the dark memory of the ditching seeped into our bones while we trudged through the mud to the mess hall or down to the line to accept without joy Tondelayo’s replacement – a plane named Duffy’s Tavern.
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Not every WW II Army Air Force aircraft was bedecked with elaborate nose art, some planes simply bearing a nickname and nothing more. Such is the case of B-17F 42-31040 DUFFY’S TAVERN (otherwise known by its squadron code FO * A), seen here at Kimbolton on November 11, 1943, in Army Air Force photo B-71044AC / A11536. The plane’s nickname was doubtless inspired by – going by Wikipedia-ology – the CBS and NBC radio program of that name, which was broadcast between 1941 and 1951.
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The recollection of Tondelayo sinking through green depths to the bottom of the Channel worked upon us. We saw our flesh within her skeleton, bloated, rising and sagging with ghastly swells, skin shredding in the eternal wash. Images teased us like sea-green sirens stirring an invitation to madness amid the autumnal swish of the fields around Kimbolton.
We did not describe to each other the atrocious look of death we ten might have worn within the twisted wreckage where our names, lettered on the metal frame, would serve as tombstones and where the flying limbs, swelling breasts and much venerated crotch of Tondelayo would be raped by pulsing tides and left to lie derelict.
We did not speak of her or the sea or of ourselves. I waited for a cablegram from Esther that would make me a father and seduce me from such visions. No message came for me.
We did hear from the void, though. Bohn had a note from Johnny, courtesy of the Red Cross. It was written in a breezy, wish-you-were-here mood from a Stalag Luft. He had floated down to earth safely but landed among people who did not recognize the war as a game. Rendered mindless by the rain of bombs or perhaps by earlier horrors, they spoke of lynching the bomb crews who came to earth. Johnny was rescued by German airmen who, in 1943, saw him as a member of their fraternity. They understood the bombing and the killing of total strangers in ways that a civilian could never appreciate. They installed Johnny safely in a POW camp where the war was quite tolerable, it seemed. He was out of it at last.
I cannot now recall whether there were any who envied him.
We came to know Duffy s Tavern. It was no more than a soulless collection of B-17 parts. We inhabited it as if it were a furnished room. It was serviceable but no more. And this despite some energetic efforts to pretend that it had a spirit. Duffy himself, our flyer-turned-publican, broke a bottle over its wing and we drank to it in a mood of abstracted gaiety.
We ourselves had chilled the beer for that celebration by flying a case or two up to altitude – undoubtedly the most expensively cooled beer ever consumed. I watched myself celebrate. As I recall, we all seemed to have an air of odd detachment. We said and did familiar things, but I, at least, sat far back in my head, which had grown to the size of earth and heaven. I beheld myself with bemused interest while I waited word from Esther and my child.
On the sixteenth of September we piled into Duffy’s Tavern and headed for Nantes to take yet another whack at the impervious submarine pens. We made it back with only minor damage. I believe that our nerves then had been insulated by a sheath of ice so that they carried no messages of pain or fear. Perhaps we could have finished our missions or even done many more in that strange condition, operating by mechanical reflex, beyond or beneath sensation.
However, the day after we came back from Nantes we were shipped to Blackpool as if we were machine parts that had been chipped and needed to be overhauled. We did not work our passage across England but rode as so much functionless freight. I did not regard as a luxury the situation of a passenger on a free ride. I chafed at it.
When our plane rolled to a stop and the engines were cut we leaped out on the hardstand at Blackpool. The sky was cloudless, full of the possibilities of combat. I slung my musette bag over my shoulder and waited for the others. They emerged from the waist of the plane carrying something. They gathered in a circle around whatever it was. I elbowed into the group and saw at our feet our ball-turret gunner, Leary, the youngest of the crew. His hands clutched empty air. His eyes rolled back beneath his lids, exposing a fish-white vitreous. His shirt was pulled away from his trousers, and the belt pinched the skin of his belly purple. His neck and face were splotched.
“Keep him warm … give him air,” people shouted.
Bohn and Mike were kneeling at Leary’s side. Bohn was trying to take hold of Leary’s tongue to keep his airway open. Someone asked for a coat. I took mine off and handed it to Bohn, who covered Leary. Then some RAF groundlings tore up in an ambulance and loaded Leary aboard a stretcher. He too vanished as had our waist gunners on the Kassel raid, and as Johnny had earlier. Now Leary was asserting, with purple epileptic emphasis, that he would fly and fight no more. He was to go home, we learned later that day. And so he did and lived to become a cop in Philadelphia.
The rest of us, left to refresh ourselves amid the delights of Blackpool, felt our throats constrict with Leary’s. We commingled our fears in long unspoken dialogues, inarticulate as the plop and twang of the lobbing of our tennis balls on the clay courts.
My mind’s eye sees Blackpool as fully inhabited yet deserted like a beach resort out of season. The shops have merchandise in the window left over from a summer that has passed. Chill winds blow scraps of dead newspapers across the boardwalk. A soft malaise hangs in the air around the red-brown brick of the crenellated pseudo-Gothic castle that is the scene of our rest and recreation.
The pubs are warm and cozy, but the conversation is like the fluttering of the dead newspapers on the boardwalk. There are pretty girls in the pubs. I see them clearly, but I think I was restrained by thoughts of Esther’s labor and the impending arrival of my child. Who would screw in the presence of his baby?
Bohn had his own inhibitory mechanism, and so we talked with tennis balls, plunking the gut of a racket, plopping on the clay, until we had talked ourselves out.
When we mentioned the war we talked as civilians and strategists do, as if it were all a matter of grand movements by armies and navies, of encirclements and flanking maneuvers, of siege and statistics. The U.S. Army was battling its way inland from Salerno. Montgomery’s Eighth Army was inching up the Calabrian toe. Field Marshal Rommel was flooding northern Italy with German troops to replace the wavering Italians. We could not know that Rommel even then was conspiring with the Oberburgomeister of Stuttgart to overthrow Hitler, unlock the concentration camps, construct a liberal facade and lead the Western world against Russia. If we had known, would we have spared Stuttgart to save the promising Oberburgomeister? And would we in Blackpool, concerned with our own drowned Tondelayo and with our odds for survival – would we have discussed such fascinating matters with the animation we can so easily muster now after thirty-five years of civilian life? I doubt it, for war is not a matter of news bulletins. It is the image of oneself inside a plane at the bottom of the sea. It is the face of an epileptic seizure. It is that shameful zest that death gives to life. It is not, assuredly, grand strategy.
Our conversation was confined to tennis sounds and the swish of curling waves on a bleak strand. We rode in a horse-drawn buggy with girls whom we caressed abstractedly. Photographers sold us snapshots of ourselves, the whereabouts of which I do not know, but I fancy that they still blow endlessly across the boardwalks of Blackpool.
It was on the last day of our rest and rehabilitation that a cablegram arrived telling me that I had a daughter. The information came complete with the usual statistics such as weight, as if she were a prize fish. Whether it was an error of transmission or my addled brain, or my unfamiliarity with babies, I do not know, but I cabled back to ask whether “14 pounds 6 ounces was good weight for one so young.” We drank to her and to Esther. The crew – or what was left of it – felt, and still feel, a proprietary interest in that daughter because it was for her sake they had chosen to take their chances with the sea rather than fly to the safety of Switzerland.
I wrote my daughter a letter and another to my wife, wore fatherhood as a poppy in my buttonhole, and climbed aboard a plane sent down to fetch us home to Kimbolton.
Three days later we were over Emden, where a German battleship we had not expected to find in the harbor tossed up something like a rocket. We brought home Duffy’s Tavern with gaping holes in wing, nose and fuselage. It was my seventeenth completed mission. Counting all the false starts and aborts it was very likely my fiftieth venture into battle. Half the original crew were no longer with us – though Mike would soon return. Three quarters of the original squadron were missing or dead or had withdrawn from combat.
I had a third of the way still to go to the magic number of twenty-five. All the military portents spoke of a bloody autumn to come.
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Presumably because he hailed from the Bronx, and, pre-war was employed as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, a brief account of Elmer Bendiner’s experience in September of 1943 appeared in that newspaper, albeit over a year later: On December 6, 1944. Here’s the article as published in the Eagle, and, a full image of page 22, on which it appeared. As to why this news item appeared so long after the fact is a matter of conjecture.
The Eagle typically reserved its latter – or very last – page(s) for items covering news information about servicemen, or, casualty lists. This article was found via Tom Tryniski’s Fulton History website.
Old NewspapersOld Newspapers
Ex-Eagle Reporter Crashes in Channel To Escape Nazis
The Brooklyn Eagle
December 6, 1944
The Flying Fortress Tondelayo was in a jam. She had just raided Stuttgart from a British base and a combination of head winds and dirty weather generally had taxed her gasoline supply to the limit.
Navigator Lt. Elmer S. Bendiner, a former Brooklyn Eagle reporter, who lives at 2664 Grand Concourse, the Bronx, and Capt. John E. Fawkes of Minneapolis, the pilot, went into a huddle.
To bring her down in Switzerland meant internment for the duration. A landing in France, then in German hands, meant capture. There wasn’t enough gas to take her back to England. The only chance was a crash landing in the English Channel off the French coast.
The radio was out of commission and the copilot was wounded. Lieutenant Bendiner was hurt, too. But for six hours the gallant crew of the Tondelayo tossed on the angry Chanel, seasick and hoping against hope for rescue, while shore guns tried their best to sink the Fortress.
But the rescue party reached them after darkness and the entire crew was taken back to their base.
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Next post, Elmer Bendiner’s final mission, and, his quiet revelation.
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Here’s the Book
Bendiner, Elmer S., The Fall of Fortresses, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N.Y., 1980
Here’s Another Book
Freeman, Roger A., The B-17 Flying Fortress Story: Design – Production – History, Arms & Armour Press, London, England, 1998
Guess what? – Another book!
Forman, Wallace R., B-17 Nose Art Name Directory, Phalanx Publishing Co., Ltd., North Branch, Mn., 1996
…there had been not just one shell but eleven of them in the gas tanks – eleven unexploded shells where only one would have sufficed to blast us out of the sky with no time for chutes. It was as if the sea had been parted for us. Even after thirty-five years so awesome an event leaves me shaken. But before Bohn finished the story there would be both more and less to wonder at. He spun it out.
Elmer Bendiner stands before the nose of Flying Fortress Tondelayo (B-17F 42-29896, squadron identification marking “FO * V“). Photo from Silvertail Books.
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Elmer Bendiner’s writing of The Fall of Fortresses during the late 1970s doubtless presented him with a literary quandary: How should an author structure his book so that it presents a picture of aerial combat that’s historically accurate in its recounting of history, events, and personalities, and at the same time is intellectually and emotionally compelling. One way would be by recounting the events of each of his twenty-five missions, whether “routine” or singularly memorable, in chronological order, which could lend his book a rote, dry, repetitive air. Another way would be by focusing on those particular missions or events – few in number – which by their significance and unusual nature left indelible impressions upon the author. It’s by following the latter course that Bendiner created his memoir, and in this, three particular missions stand out: A mission to Kassel, Germany on July 30, 1943; a September 6, 1943 mission to Stuttgart, and on November 30, 1943, Bendiner’s final combat mission, to Bremen, Germany, on November 29, 1943.
It’s those three flights that – excerpted from his memoir – will be presented in this series of posts. First, though, it’s time to introduce Elmer Bendiner’s crew.
The Crew of Tondelayo
To begin, here are the very few photographs of Bendiner’s fellow crew members that I know of. The first two come from The Fall of Fortresses.
Here’s his pilot, 2 Lt. Bohn Edgar Fawkes, Jr.
And, his bombardier, 2 Lt. Robert Lawrence Hejny
From Ancestry.com, here’s the 1934 Austin (Texas) high school graduation portrait of “Larry”: T/Sgt. Lawrence Harris Reedman, the crew’s Flight Engineer
Having started with Fawkes and Hejny in Tondelayo’s “nose”, we’ll symbolically work our way back to Tondelayo’s “tail”: And so, fittingly, here are some pictures of tail gunner T/Sgt. Michael Louis Arooth.
This undated image of T/Sgt. Arooth is Army Air Force photograph 78761AC / A8882. The date of the photo is unknown, but given that he’s wearing the Air Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, and particularly the Purple Heart (he was wounded on July 30 and injured on September 6), the picture was presumably taken at or near the end of his combat tour.
This picture of T/Sgt. Arooth is from the WW II Uncovered Facebook Page (9/29/20) and shows the Sergeant making a radio broadcast, location unknown.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the source of this image, but I’m certain the picture also shows T/Sgt. Arooth. Given that Tondelayo is adorned with several swastikas denoting victory claims over German fighters (unlike in the picture with Elmer Bendiner, where it seems to bear none), the picture was obviously taken before the bomber’s loss on September 6, 1943, during the latter part of its service in the 527th Bomb Squadron.
At the U.S. Militaria Forum, here’s another picture of Sgt. Arooth, probably taken when he was training in the United States.
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If I have any criticism of The Fall of Fortresses, it’s this: Given that Bendiner’s personal records, diary, and letters, and doubtless photographs survived the war, it’s a pity that more of his personal photos weren’t included in the book. Other than the pictures of Fawkes, Hejny, and the author, the memoir is entirely absent of images of the author’s family, the rest of his crew, B-17s, or Kimbolton. It’s a pity. What was G.P. Putnam’s Sons thinking???
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This photograph, Army Air Force picture C-71023AC / A11454 (it can be found at Fold3 and the American Air Museum in Britain, as UPL 41323), shows Tondelayo and (at least some of) Bendiner’s crew, at the 379th Bomb Group’s base in Kimbolton, England.
Fold3 contributor patootie63 has two entries at listing the names of the men in the photo.
One entry states: “Could be Carnal’ crew : Lt Walter Flower Carnal (pilot) was born on dec 1st, 1918 – passed away on july 28th, 2010 (POW on 14 oct 1943, flying aboard 42-3269 “Picadilly Willy”) Lt William S Davidson (copilot) POW Lt Morris Konier (navigator) POW 1 Lt Leslie M Gross (bombardier) KIA on oct 14th, 1943 T/Sgt Leonard Frederick Cruzan (radio) POW – was born on dec 16th, 1919 – passed away on june 30th, 2014 – Sgt Norbert Stephen Jost (engineer) was born on nov 19th, 1919 – passed away on july 8th, 2002 POW S/Sgt Donald S Sherman (ball turret gunner) was born on nov 29th, 1920 – passed away on june 1st, 1945 POW S/Sgt Nick G Rukavina (right waist gunner) KIA on oct 14th, 1943 S/Sgt Monico R Rodriquez (left waist gunner) POW S/Sgt Milton M Fisher (tail gunner) POW”
The above caption is hyperlinked to four men in the photo. In center rear is Bohn Fawkes, while in front row second from left is S/Sgt. Monico Rodriquez, fourth from left is S/Sgt. Donald Sherman, and fifth from left is Sgt. Arooth.
(The above entry also states that the photo was taken on July 12, 1943. Which makes sense, given that the bomber was lost in early September.)
And the other: “This is Fawkes’ crew : 2Lt Bohn E Fawkes Jr (pilot) 2 Lt Charles A Mauldin (co-pilot) born on sept 2nd, 1919 – passed away on feb 17th, 2007 2 Lt Elmer S Bendiner (navigator) 2 Lt Robert L Hejny (bombardier) born on jan 5th, 1920 – passed away on aug 5th, 1985 T/Sgt Frederick J Reinhard (radio operator) T/Sgt Lawrence H Reedman (engineer) T/Sgt Walter J Gray (ball turret gunner) S/Sgt Harry L Edwards (right waist gunner) S/Sgt John A Leary (left waist gunner) T/Sgt Michael Arooth (tail gunner)”
In Fold 3, the above caption is hyperlinked to three men in the photo. Second from rear is Elmer Bendiner, in center rear is Bohn Fawkes, and at far right front is (again) Sgt. Arooth. The above crew list also accompanies the photo as it appears at the American Air Museum in Britain.
So, in light of both of patootie63’s entries, we have identities in the crew photo for Elmer Bendiner, Bohn Fawkes, Michael Rodriquez, and Michael Arooth. However, based on the Fawkes’ crew list as presented in patootie63’s “second” entry (just above), which is repeated at the American Air Museum in England, and a reading of The Fall of Fortresses, the actual Fawkes’ crew – at least, those men with whom Bendiner flew his missions, and/or are mentioned or alluded to in his book – is listed below. The men’s names are accompanied by their ranks, serial numbers, names of next of kin, wartime residential addresses, date of birth, and (alas) inevitably – this being the year 2024 – date of death. This information is derived from a deep perusal of Ancestry.com, and, FindAGrave, the latter evident via the hyperlinks. In this manner, I was able to find definitive information about all but three men: Radio Operator Frederick Reinhard, Ball Turret Gunner Walter Gray, and replacement Waist Gunner Henry J. Edwards.
An observation: Remarkably, though two members of this crew (waist gunners Herring and Stockman) became POWs, and one man (Michael Arooth) was wounded and injured, every man listed below survived combat, and, survived the war. The last surviving crew member was Charles Augustus Mauldin, who died at the age of eighty-seven in 2009.
Their Names
Pilot: Fawkes, Bohn Edgar, Jr., 2 Lt., 0-410814 Mr. and Mrs. Bohn Edgar (6/12/92-2/8/46) and Inez E. (1893-1959) Fawkes (parents) 2426 Irving St., Minneapolis, Mn. Born Minneapolis, Mn. 9/2/19 – Died 2/17/07
Co-Pilot: Mauldin, Charles Augustus, 2 Lt., 0-794438 Mr. and Mrs. Charles “Charlie” (9/16/83-1/1/30) and Ethel Charity (Dutherage or Duthridge) (8/31/91-8/22/81) Mauldin (step-parents) 2310 6th Ave., Columbus, Ga. Born in Mississippi; 5/5/22 – Died 6/1/09
Navigator: Bendiner, Elmer Stanley, 2 Lt., 0-797240 Mr. and Mrs. William (Wilhelm) [7/31/25] and Lillian (Schwartz) Bendiner (parents) 2664 Grand Concourse, Bronx, N.Y. 187 North Ocean Ave., Freeport, N.Y. Bertram, Evelyn, Lawrence, Marvin and Milton Bendiner (brothers and sisters) Born Scottsdale, Pa.; 2/11/16 – Died 9/16/01 Brooklyn Eagle 12/6/44
Bombardier: Hejny, Robert Lawrence, 2 Lt., 0-734342 Mrs. Dorothy Mae Webster (wife); Married 1/26/44 – Divorced 9/3/81 Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Anton (3/19/87-1965) and Elizabeth M. (Spinler) (1901-1994) Hejny (parents); Barbara, Daniel, and Raymond (sister and brothers) 1808 East 7th St., St. Paul, Mn. Born Pine City, Mn.; 1/5/20 – Died 8/5/85
Flight Engineer: Reedman, Lawrence Harris, T/Sgt., 18089373 Mr. and Mrs. Samuel “Sam” (4/7/89-5/21/74) and Sarah D. (Rosenthroh) (9/15/91-6/27/75) Reedman (parents) Miss Lilian Charlotte Reedman (sister) (2/8/11-6/18/98) 2515 North Stanton St., El Paso, Tx. Born St. Louis, Mo.; 2/12/17 – Died 3/29/08
Radio Operator: Reinhard, Frederick W. “Duke“, T/Sgt., 32338340 (Is this him?) From New York, N.Y. Born 1916
Gunner (Ball Turret): Gray, Walter J., T/Sgt. (33301215?) (According to a memorial at Fold3, T/Sgt. Gray, was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1920.)
Gunner (Waist): Herring, George Edwin, Jr., S/Sgt., 19002595, Gunner (Waist) POW – Stalag 9C (Baz Sulza) From California Born Oklahoma City, Ok., 12/9/19 – San Bernardino, Ca., 5/11/92
Gunner (Waist): Stockman, Herbert James, Jr., 16109833 POW – Stalag 17B (Gneixendorf) Mrs. Murial L. (Stoll) Stockman (wife), 1626 Evans, Detroit, Mi. – Divorced 7/9/46 Mr. and Mrs. James W. and Estella (Hopwood) Stockman (parents) Born New Castle, Pa.; 2/29/16 – Died 1/18/00
Gunner (Tail): Arooth, Michael Louis, T/Sgt., 31128966 Mr. and Mrs. Salem and Dora Mary Arooth (parents); George, Louis, Peter, and Ruth (brothers and sister) 26 Lorenzo St., Springfield, Ma. Born Springfield, Ma.; 7/31/19 – Died 2/15/90
Post 7/30/43, Herring and Stockman were presumably replaced by:
Edwards, Henry J., S/Sgt.
Leary, John Anthony, S/Sgt., 13028387 Mrs. George F. Lehman (aunt), 2111 66th Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. Born Philadelphia, Pa.; 2/3/23 – Died 9/16/99 Separated from active service Feb. 2, 1944, at Tilton Gen. Hosp., Fort Dix, N.J.
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So, we’ll start with the mission of July 30, 1943, which was triply and dramatically significant.
First, the B-17’s wings were struck by eleven 20mm cannon shells fired by attacking Me-109s or FW-190s, none of which, though effectively embedded in the plane’s fuel tanks, failed to explode. (Otherwise Bendiner probably would not have survived to write his memoir, I wouldn’t be bringing you this set of blog posts, and you wouldn’t necessarily be visiting this blog.) The very nature of the damage incurred bythe plane, and the actual reason that the several cannon shells failed to detonate, was only revealed to Bendiner during a get-together with Bohn Fawkes in Tarrytown, New York, probably (given the year The Fall of Fortresses was published) in the late 1970s.
(I once encountered a YouTube video about this incident, but the URL has since slipped through my pixels and spreadsheets.)
Second, the B-17’s oxygen system was damaged during the fighter attack, eventuating in the plane’s radio operator, ball turret gunner, and both waist gunners experiencing anoxia, with the waist gunners parachuting from the aircraft.
Third, tail gunner Michael Arooth was wounded and also anoxic, yet remained at his position and continued to defend the bomber. This is the incident for which he received the Distinguished Service Cross, as issued in European Theater of Operations U.S. Army General Orders No. 61 of September 10, 1943. Here the text of Arooth’s award citation, as found at Hall of Valor: The Military Medals Database:
The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress July 9, 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to Staff Sergeant Michael Arooth (ASN: 31128966), United States Army Air Forces, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as Tail Gunner in a B-17 Heavy Bomber of the 527th Bombardment Squadron, 379th Bombardment Group (H), EIGHTH Air Force, while participating in a bombing mission on 30 July 1943, against enemy ground targets in Germany. On that date, Sergeant Arooth’s B-17 was attacked by a large force of enemy fighters. During the course of these determined attacks, Sergeant Arooth destroyed three enemy airplanes and, while firing his guns, was wounded by an exploding cannon shell. His left gun was jammed by enemy fire, his oxygen supply line was broken, and the interphone system was inoperative. The pilot was forced to use violent evasive action, and several members of the crew, thinking the airplane was out of control, bailed out. When this occurred, Sergeant Arooth gave up his attempts to reach his emergency oxygen system, returned to his one remaining gun, and continued to fight off enemy attacks. Without oxygen, and with his leg shattered and bleeding, Sergeant Arooth, displaying extraordinary heroism and with complete disregard for his personal safety, remained at his post and defended his airplane and crew with his one good gun. When this gun jammed he skillfully repaired the malfunction, resumed firing, and destroyed his fourth airplane. The extraordinary heroism, coolness, and skill displayed by Sergeant Arooth on this occasion reflect high credit upon himself and the armed forces of the United States.
In the hands of a skilled writer, any of these events could serve as the basis for a chapter (or two), yet Bendiner seamlessly wove them together into a single story. Or, chapter, to be precise.
As for myself, my first encounter with this chapter of Bendiner’s book sparked an interest in obtaining the Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) covering the loss of the plane’s waist gunners, whose full names are not given in Bendiner’s text, with one name is misspelled. (“Herrin”, not the correct “Herring.) I was at first puzzled a few decades ago when an inquiry to NARA revealed that there was no MACR pertaining to this event. Only later did I learn that the time frame of the incident – the summer of 1943 – was coincident with the Army Air Force’s implementation of the use of these documents, this event bureaucratically “falling through the cracks”, as it were, accounting for the absence of a MACR. However, the American Air Museum in Britain revealed that the events in this story occurred aboard Mystic, officially known as B-17F 42-5820. As you can see from the crew list above, both Herring and Stockman survived as POWs. They were apparently replaced by S/Sgts. Henry J. Edwards and John Anthony Leary.
Mystic did not finish the war. The plane was lost during a mission to Gelsenkirchenon August 12, 1943, after having been transferred to the 526th Bomb Squadron as LF * C. It was piloted by 2 Lt. Kurt W. Freund, with seven of its ten crewmen surviving. Having crashed near Leinersdorf (11 km north of Ahrweiler) its loss is covered in MACRs 1359 and 2340, and, Luftgaukommando Report KU 21.
So, here’s Elmer Bendiner’s chronicle the events of eighty-one years ago:
“This is all we can do for you now.”
The following morning we were up again in the cold predawn to find ourselves a broken family. Tondelayo was being fitted with new props. The colonel had commandeered our gunners for his lead ship – a tribute, of course. Bohn was to replace Mike in the tail position, as was the custom when the colonel took over. And since Dutch, the group navigator, would be riding with the colonel, I was fobbed off on a squadron lead.
Johnny was assigned as co-pilot with still another crew. We had been operational for almost two months and we had lost seventy-five percent of our original crews. Replacements were arriving, but as Arnold reminded Eaker, we had to salvage what we could. To some Johnny must have looked salvageable.
We do not know precisely what went on inside the cockpit of Johnny’s plane on the mission that day. Some said they saw the plane slip back and drop below the formation with one engine smoking, then blazing. Four chutes opened, they say. I was not there, because the plane on which I rode that day developed one of those mechanical symptoms that used to afflict us in Johnny’s time. Again the cockpit asked me for a heading home, and after five hours we made it back to Kimbolton for coffee and the anxious tally of our wild geese. They came in across a sweep of sky still brilliant in the late afternoon.
I look over my time sheet that has been so scrupulously kept by some company clerk, and I am incredulous. One day follows another in the list of battles. There should have been time to savor and digest our fears. If on a Wednesday one watches other men die and sees one’s own death foreshadowed, it does not seem fitting to watch a similar deadly dance on Thursday and again on Friday and again on Saturday. Such a schedule can make the most awesome event a dull routine and turn battle into a business. If some morning at my present age I saw my friend and neighbor killed or if I felt the whoosh of a bullet pass my head I should want some time to think and then to scream before I faced a similar ordeal. But in those days we were too young to scream and thoughts were easily put off by the exhilaration of death’s presence. Now I can see that death is pallid and often ugly, but I confess it did not seem so then. And so we went up morning after morning in that gentle July, and on the thirtieth of that month we came to a strange milestone on the road to Schweinfurt.
It was a return visit to Kassel. We had been in action for four days running. At 0530 we were gathered in the briefing room, its bustle and its tensions as homey as a country kitchen, so quickly does the shocking become familiar. I do not remember fatigue. I had slept soundly and waked to the usual electric glare. I had bolted the usual eggs which seemed to coat one’s teeth and tongue with fine sandpaper. I had scalded my throat with coffee and smiled at myself picking a poppy. Between a yawn and a sneeze I read our fate in chalk on the battle lineup.
I do not mean to say it was a routine like a ride in the subway betwixt sleep and waking, staring at faces and behinds that are different and yet the same day after day. It would distort the reality and stretch words out of joint to pretend that it could have been so dull. In a subway the imminence of death is conjectural, problematic. In the briefing room it was certain, fierce, palpable and stimulating.
We ten in Tondelayo circled over Yorkshire, warming ourselves in the sun at eleven thousand feet, above a gray expanse of cloud. We crossed Felixstowe heading southeast at 0730, according to the map that has grown old with me for thirty-five years.
We climbed to our bombing altitude, 24,000 feet, over the North Sea and hit the Belgian coast close to the Dutch border. Out the port-side window I could see the Scheldt winding into Holland, and out the starboard window lay Bruges. It was then that our own P-47s and the RAF Bostons waggled their wings and went home. It was 0801, I noted in my log. A scribble nearby I take to mean that there were fighters. They had swarmed up from Woensdrecht Airdrome. Actually some B-26s had preceded us in the hope of drawing them off. I do not know whether those bright-yellow-nosed spitting wonders had risen to the bait of the B-26s and then gone down to gas up in time for us. Perhaps they had wisely sent up only a few to greet our decoys and held the rest in reserve for the main show.
In any case there they were, buzzing up at us from an airfield right on course. This was ideal for the Luftwaffe, because almost all of the fighters’ flying time could be spent in combat. In the previous April the Luftwaffe had fitted auxiliary fuel tanks to its fighters, which gave them perhaps two hours of high-speed, high-altitude flying time. On the day we went to Kassel the German dispatchers displayed their ingenuity by having their fighter squadrons hedge-hop from station to station along our presumed course.
Some came from Lille and arrived in time to give us trouble east of Brussels at 0817. Others came up from an airfield near Poix, too late to catch us on the way in but in plenty of time to ambush us on the way out. Some came from Brittany and Normandy and refueled at Lille.
At 0836 we were south of the Ruhr. We had weathered three heavy fighter attacks. Most of them came in from the rear of the formation, often four abreast. We in the nose felt their presence and heard the ping of shrapnel, but it was Mike who saw most of the action on the way in. Being a tail gunner is a lonely job. “It’s a good spot for praying,” Mike had said once. “You’re on your knees all the time.” The only spot that’s worse is the ball turret, where the gunner is wrapped around his gun like an anchovy or a fetus in a womb too small.
The tail usually saw more action than the belly. “The fuckin’ Germans must think all tail gunners are stupid,” Mike used to say. They came in again and again, firing, turning bottoms up and slipping away.
From Gladbeck and Cologne swarms of FWs and MEs shot up and barreled through our formation. Near Remagen I noted the fall of two enemy fighters. I fired at those arrows in the sky, but I knew that I was merely making noise to let them know we were alive on the port side. Bob’s gun kept up a ceaseless chatter and the top turret pounded like a jackhammer inside my head. Then quite suddenly the fighters vanished and left us to our bomb run and the accompanying flak. We came up on Kassel from the south. I peered over Bob’s shoulder and saw the city. We were rocked by flak. Still the motors ground on. There could be no evasive action. We would fly unswervingly through a sky of angry black shell bursts.
The bomb-bay doors of the plane ahead of us swung open. I watched the bombs tumble out helter-skelter at first, then straightening to a purposive plunge. When ours were gone, lost in the black smoke far below, Bob called out that the doors were closed and Bohn banked Tondelayo sharply to starboard. As we headed north and then west for home the flak slackened off and the fighters came back. They had been gathering all morning. It had been one hour and eleven minutes since we had entered Europe, and the Germans had had time to assemble a massive fleet of fighters, gassed up and ready.
It must have been somewhere near Recklinghausen that disaster struck. Mike called in to say he was hit in his right hand and left leg. Then followed a jumble of static and for a while we couldn’t raise him at all. Tondelayo was being knocked about the sky. Actually Bohn was climbing, diving and making corkscrew patterns in a crazy choreography designed to unsettle the fighters, who were pressing in from all sides. I kept my mind on the zigzag line we were taking across Europe. When I tried to stand, my feet slipped from under me. I clung to my desk and the gun, waiting for the attack to subside. When at last Mike came on again his words were jumbled and he sounded as if he were calling from a painfully long distance.
We drove across Germany trying to keep up with the formation, which had a ragged look, with gaping holes where planes had been. I had seen two of the group go down. The formation was turning more to the south in a beeline out of Germany, when we became aware of an alteration in the sound of flight. When Larry in the top turret eased up and when Bob’s guns stopped momentarily, Tondelayo seemed unnaturally quiet. The roar from the waist was missing. No one sang out to claim a kill or warn of fighters coming in. Bob and I looked at each other across the tops of our masks and he opened up his mike, ripping into my headset, “Bombardier to waist gunners, bombardier to waist gunners. Come in, come in.” Silence. Tondelayo climbed and plunged. “Stockman, Herrin, come in, Goddammit. Come in. Do you read me? Duke, come in. Bombardier to radio. Duke, come in.”
Tondelayd’s motors whined. Then came Mike’s voice, vague, blurred, with an odd calm: “They’re gone. Gone.”
We were 25,000 feet above Germany and they were gone. One imagines a switchboard operator saying, “Sorry, sir. They’re gone.” At the time the word itself with its nonsensical associations filled my head and left no room for irony. They had gone four miles down to the patchwork of farms I could barely see. Fighters were swarming about us, coming in at three, four, seven and eight o’clock where our guns were silent. Now and then we thought we heard a long burst from the tail, but that was all.
Bob disentangled his headset and oxygen hose. He lurched past me. His face was neither sad nor scared. I realized that he was in a rage. He went up the stepway to the cockpit. We were still in formation. I put down my pencil, unplugged my oxygen hose and my headset. I chucked my helmet aside and clambered after him. Behind the cockpit Bohn pointed to a green oxygen bottle, into which I plugged my hose like the antenna of an insect. We ducked under the turret, which was rattling in uninterrupted air-shattering streams of fire that had the sound of panic. We passed through the bomb bay along the narrow steel catwalk, past the racks that had held the bombs, and into the radio compartment. Duke was gone. We went into the waist, where blasts of cold air bit into my face. Herrin and Stockman were gone. Their masks, still attached to the oxygen outlet, flapped against the metal wall. The door had been jettisoned. Through it we stared at windy space. As Tondelayo banked and rolled I could see the distant, detached world below. Then I saw Duke. He was sitting on the floor, one leg dangling beyond the open hatch. Bob and I pulled him in across the floor past the waist ports, where the wind howled as in an arctic blizzard, where one could see the silvery wings of our enemies curvetting and spitting sparks.
The floor of the fuselage was torn in spots, the metal peeled back. Multicolored cables were in shreds. We sat Duke up in the radio room and looked to see whether he was bleeding. He was untouched, but his eyes were dreamy and he wore a smile of absurd serenity.
There was no oxygen in the rear of the plane. Mike had seen the waist gunners as they jumped, driven by lack of oxygen to illusions of impending disaster. Mike had watched their chutes open. One of them had barely cleared the horizontal stabilizer. Mike himself did not know whether the plane was actually going down. In any case there was nothing he could do about it. His arm and leg were torn and, though he was not in pain, he was groggy. He must have felt the cold, because the wires that hooked his electric suit had been cut. With his good arm he had changed the belt of ammo in his gun and eased his nerves by firing. He recalls seeing a Messerschmitt. He waited until it was two hundred yards from us, just the point, he thought, where the German would open up and blast us out of the sky. Mike let go a stream of fire that caught the fighter. It turned yellow and red, nosed upward, then spun in.
Bob hooked Duke to an oxygen bottle and stayed to take care of Mike as best he could. I hurried down to the nose, told Bohn the situation and began to work out a heading home. We had to drop to an inhabitable altitude regardless of the dangers of straggling in enemy skies. I remember looking at my watch, the minute and second hands whirling as unconcernedly as if I were on a street corner waiting for Esther. I looked out the window and, without seeming to grasp the significance of the phenomenon, noted that the propeller on engine Number Four was rigidly stationary. It had been feathered, disconnected to keep it from tearing the engine out of the wing. Black smoke streamed behind it. I drew a course that would take us across Holland dodging the flak zones listed in my flight plans. I hoped the information was reliable. I did not know. I only pretended to know. The plane dropped closer to the land. When I identified the Willems Canal in Holland, I called the cockpit to correct our heading. Our formation was above and ahead. We were alone. Mike’s gun rattled, but I did not know whether he was firing at something or to keep himself awake. The top turret answered with a roar. But then came the blessed moment when I could tear off my tin hat and my mask and breathe real air. The plexiglass of the nose had several gaping holes. We had one man wounded. We were missing two others. But we were going home. We were going to drink something hot. We were going to sleep in a bed.
The ball-turret gunner, undoubtedly anoxic as were the others in the rear of the plane, could not easily raise his turret to extricate himself without hydraulic pressure, and that had been lost when the lines were severed. Curled up in Tondelayo’s steel ball, impotent, Leary had survived because he could not follow the waist gunners out of the plane. He was barely nineteen years old, the youngest in the crew. I do not know how he withstood that torture wrapped within himself, powerless amid bullets and explosions, oppressed by the realization that at any instant he might be spattered to a mass of ugly tissue, like a cat run over on the highway. That might happen to any man in the crew, but the rest of us had the illusion of motion, of elbow room to give us security. There was nothing that Leary could do about his fate. He was as powerless as a rivet in his ball turret. He had been reduced to a neuter.
We could have brought up the ball turret by hand and released him, but we needed his gun as we needed Mike’s. When we reached the North Sea and saw the gliding shapes of friendly P-47s we brought him up. I calculated an ETA and gave it to Bohn. His voice was as even as if we were sitting on our bunks. “Roger. Thank you, Benny.”
With flares rising like Roman candles we came to Kimbolton. We bumped to a halt on the grass where we had come before when our brakes were undependable. We were late, but we were home. Mike was not badly hurt, according to our cheerful obstetrician.
“Our waist gunners are gone,” we told the debriefing officer.
“Are what?”
“Are gone.”
“What?”
“Gone.”
This battle is distinguished by a postscript which was appended some thirty-five years after the event. Bohn and I were sitting on a porch in Tarrytown, New York, on a summer evening. We were rehashing the war as ex-warriors have done since civilization invented wars. We were not seeking to dress our memories in cinematic glories or dissolve them in an alcoholic haze as veterans do. We were seeking rather to collapse the wind out of nostalgia, to see the war plain. We were trying to mount our recollections on pins so that we could study them in various lights from various angles. We were seeking to approximate an objective account of what we had seen and done.
We were reconciling scrawls from our respective logs. For example, after a raid on Münster Bohn had written: “This will make a lot of Dutch Nazis.” He no longer remembered what that meant. And I had scribbled on that day the one word “Eindhoven.” I had forgotten why. We looked at a map and saw that Eindhoven was a Dutch town not far from the German border. At the ground speed of those antique planes we flew it would have been perhaps ten minutes from Münster.
Our memories fed each other. As we talked, the scrawls unlocked cobwebbed files in our minds until at last the two comments made sense. Münster had been cloud-covered, and our formation had turned away from the target. The bomb-bay doors of our group leader were open. So were ours. Suddenly the undercast rolled away, revealing a flat green and tawny countryside. I recognized the pattern of rivers and canals. When I saw the formation prepare to bomb I yelled into the intercom that we were over Holland. As I yelled the bombs fell, and I noted that we had hit Eindhoven. It was then that Bohn had summed up in his log the political consequences. (Incidentally, I have subsequently talked with several Dutchmen who graciously forgave us, but then, none of them was under our bombs at Eindhoven.)
In any case it was in this search of the past that we came to the Kassel raid and the disappearance of our waist gunners. Over Bohn’s face came a characteristically odd, slightly mischievous grin. “You remember,” said he, “that we were hit by twenty-millimeter shells.”
That was not a singular experience for us, I pointed out. But these had hit our gas tanks, he recalled. That did indeed stir something in the archives of my brain. Somewhere I had even made a note of shell holes in gas tanks. I reflected on the miracle of a 20-mm. shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion.
Now Bohn licked his chops so that I could see that a revelation was on the verge. It was not the case of an unexploded shell in a gas tank, he said. It was not so simple a miracle. At the time Bohn too had thought it was no more than that. On the morning following Kassel, while I slept late and missed my breakfast, Bohn had gone down to ask our crew chief for that shell, as a souvenir of unbelievable luck. Marsden told Bohn that there had been not just one shell but eleven of them in the gas tanks – eleven unexploded shells where only one would have sufficed to blast us out of the sky with no time for chutes. It was as if the sea had been parted for us. Even after thirty-five years so awesome an event leaves me shaken. But before Bohn finished the story there would be both more and less to wonder at. He spun it out.
Bohn was told that the shells had been sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had picked them up. They could not say why.
The professorial captain of intelligence confirmed the story. Eleven shells were in fact found in Tondelayo’s tanks. No, he could not give one to Bohn. Sorry, he could not say why.
Eventually the captain broke down. Perhaps it was difficult to refuse a man like Bohn the evidence of a highly personal miracle. Perhaps it was because this captain of intelligence had briefed so many who had not come back that he treasured the one before him as a fragile relic. Or perhaps he told Bohn the truth because it was too delicious to keep to himself. He swore Bohn to secrecy.
The armorers who opened each of those shells had found no explosive charge. They were as clean as a whistle and as harmless. Empty? Not quite, said the captain, tantalizing Bohn as Bohn tantalized me.
One was not empty. It contained a carefully rolled piece of paper. On it was a scrawl in Czech. The intelligence captain had scoured Kimbolton for a man who could read Czech. The captain dropped his voice to a whisper before he repeated the message. Bohn imitated that whisper, and it set us to marveling as if the revelation were fresh and potent, not thirty-five years old and on its way to being a legend. Translated, the note read: “This is all we can do for you now.”
Here’s the Book
Bendiner, Elmer S., The Fall of Fortresses, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N.Y., 1980
Here’s Another Book
Freeman, Roger A., The B-17 Flying Fortress Story: Design – Production – History, Arms & Armour Press, London, England, 1998
“…the anonymity of war is as terrible and profound as that of chessmen tumbled into a box when the game is over.”
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Time moves forward, inexorably. With it, the memory of the past flows along paths that sometimes meet, sometimes diverge. On one – the course typical of men and nations – lies forgetfulness. On the other, the memory of historical events may continue, but will be softened, if not altered, if not irrevocably distorted, by the shifting winds of politics, ideology, and sometimes the exuberant tides of irrationality that unexpectedly break upon – and even emerge from within – all civilizations. And thus, whether by one man or many, the centrality, impact, and memory of historical events having the greatest and most transformative impact for any given generation, will not be so (can memory ever be so?) for later generations. Regardless of an event’s magnitude, intensity, impact, or power.
But, regardless of the fallibility of human memory and entirely independent of man himself, facts remain, irremovably cemented into the fabric of time.
Certainly and obviously central to the twentieth century, and having indirect influence upon the events of this 21st century, have been the “Great War” and the Second World War, which some historians have considered to be the opening and closing phases of a single, much larger historical interval. Inevitably, both of these awful conflicts have given rise to an incalculably vast body of literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Naturally, many of these works were produced by veterans of these conflicts, either in the years immediately following their military service, or, several decades later, when they were better able to reflect upon the past as they entered retirement, by which time they’d gained perspective on their experiences, the memories of which were no longer as jagged or emotionally impactful as in their youth.
I’ve read many books of this nature, as I’m sure you have also.
They vary in quality as much as all men vary: in perceptiveness, literary skill, recollection of facts, sentimentality, honesty, candor, and tact. In that regard, below, quite randomly listed, are the titles of books penned by (and in a few cases about) Jewish aviators who served in the Allied air forces in the Second World War, some of whom I’ve mentioned or alluded to in prior posts. I take for granted that an equal and perhaps greater number of titles covering the experiences of Jewish servicemen in the ground and naval forces could be found (I know of a few), but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
In terms of this list of titles, immediately apparent is the fact that some were privately published, some released by vanity presses, and others by mainstream, well-established publishers. (Notably, in light of the enormous technological and logistical changes in the nature of book publishing over the past few decades, the less-than-stellar reputation once accorded to vanity presses I think is truly no longer (un)merited.)
Prisoners of War…
…In Europe
A Measure of Life, privately published, 2002 By Herman Lewis Cranman, (Herschel Eliezer Kranman), 1 Lt., 0-692478, Bombardier/Navigator, 34 missions 512th Bomb Squadron, 376th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force Shot down July 14, 1944 in B-24H 41-28920, piloted by 1 Lt. James H. White, 11 crew members … 10 survivors Plane-in-Squadron identification 33 / D // Nickname “Big Marge” Missing Air Crew Report # 6958, Luftgaukommando Report ME 1791 POW at Stalag Luft 3 (Sagan) and Stalag 7A (Moosburg) Born Savannah, Georgia, March 14, 1924 – Died April 2, 2017 Mr. and Mrs. Philip (7/20/03-1/23/95) and Jeanne (Litman) (3/7/04-9/13/78) Cranman (parents) 406 East 50th St., Savannah, Ga. Name not listed in American Jews in World War II
Goldfish – Silver Boot – The Story of a World War II Prisoner of War, Fortis Publishers, 2010 By Harvey Stanley Horn, F/O, T-131675, Navigator, 5 missions 772nd Bomb Squadron, 463rd Bomb Group, 15th Air Force POW 3/20/34, Stalag 13D (Nuremberg) Born Brooklyn, N.Y., 12/15/13 Mr. and Mrs. Louis and Esther Horn (parents), 1218 41st St., Brooklyn, N.Y. Also 82-15 Britton Ave., Elmhurst, N.Y. Casualty List 4/26/45 Aircraft B-17G 44-6377, piloted by 1 Lt. John H., Lincoln, 10 crew members – all survived Aircraft nickname “Pretty Baby’s Boys” Missing Air Crew Report 13050 Name not listed in American Jews in World War II
The Eleventh Passenger, Vantage Press, 1996 By Joseph Millman, Sgt., 32222070, Ball Turret Gunner, Purple Heart, 2 missions 747th Bomb Squadron, 456th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force Shot down February 17, 1944 Severely wounded; repatriated on SS Gripsholm in February, of 1945 POW at Stalag 9C (Bad Sulza) Born in Poland, January 12, 1920 Mr. and Mrs. Jacob and Rose “Reizel” Millman (parents), 1164 47th St., Brooklyn, N.Y. Rhea, Reva, and Libby (sisters) Name appeared in Casualty Lists on 4/22/44, 6/8/44, and 2/16/45; also in P.M. Daily 2/16/45 Aircraft: B-24H 42-52286, nickname “The Little Joker” Piloted by 2 Lt. Harry W. Bessler; ten crew members – four survivors Loss covered in Missing Air Crew Reports 3078 and 6330 … and Luftgaukommando Report ME 878 Name does not appear in American Jews in World War II (Like for so many other men…)
Joe Millman and his wife Bella, during the reunion of the 456th Bomb Group in June of 1996. (My photo.)
Joe’s dog tag, in Luftgaukommando Report ME 878, via NARA.com
Herb P. Flyboy – The Journey from World War II Pilot to German POW, privately published, 2005 By Herbert Irwin Pearlman, 1 Lt., 0-824859, Bomber Pilot, Air Medal, three Oak Leaf Cluster, 26 missions 526th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force Prisoner of War February 9, 1945 Born Bronx, N.Y., February 22, 1922 Mr. Albert N. Pearlman (father), 3236 Tibbett Ave., New York, N.Y. Casualty List (Liberated POWs) June 13, 1945 Pilot of B-17G 44-6119, “LF * A”, “White Lightning” Aircraft loss covered in MACR 12337 and Luftgaukommando Report KU 3677 Name found on page 403 of American Jews in World War II Maxwell Field Class 44-C; assigned to 526th Bomb Squadron 10/28/44
His Silver Wings – I Came of Age during World War II, June R. Ehrlich, Vantage Press, 1993 (Paul Ehrlich) Paul was the pilot of B-24J 42-50675 “X7 * F” / “Bold Venture III“, of the 788th Bomb Squadron, 466th Bomb Group, which crash-landed (itself) in England on December 25, 1944. The entire crew survived, the incident being covered in MACR 11256. This incident is the subject of the following video…
My Private War – Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A World War II POW’s Journey, Norman Bussel, Pegasus Books, 2008
Sitting It Out : a World War II POW Memoir, David K. Westheimer, Rice University Press, 1992
Fighter Pilot – Aleutians to Normandy to Stalag Luft I, Mozart Kaufman, M & A Kaufman Publishers, 1993
Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way (…And Where There’s A Way, There’s a Wayburne!), Ellis Wayburne (mentioned here), privately printed in October, 1995
Story of Jerome Jacobs – 364th Fighter Squadron Pilot, at ToFlyandFight.com
From Records Group 242 in the National Archives, here’s a (actually, the) only record … other than Missing Air Crew Report 8797; there’s no Luftgaukommando Report covering the loss of Pappy’s Answer, his P-51B … attesting to Lt. Jacobs’ being a POW: It nominally documents his captivity in Oflag 64 in Altenburg, and Stalag 9A in Spangenberg. As he related to me in an interview back in the 1990s, as a result of the chaos attendant to his capture during the Battle of Arnhem, and, his rapid transport from a front-line German hospital to various POW camps, he was never, actually, interrogated.
…In Japan
They Can’t Take That Away From Me, Ralph M. Rentz, with Peter Hrisko, Michigan State University Press, 2003
Against The Wind, Cyril Rofe, Hodder & Stoughton, 1956
The Dark Side of the Sky – The Story of a Jewish Airman in Nazi Germany, Leo Cooper, 1998 (Harry Levy)
And Otherwise…
Terror in the Starboard Seat – 41 Trips Aboard a Mosquito – A True Story of 418 Squadron, Dave McIntosh, Stoddan, 1980 (Sid Seid)
The Invisible Battlefield?, Horace S. Turrell (at one time available on the ‘net but-alas-not-any-more), 1996
Combat Bombardier, Leonard Herman and Rob Morris, Xlibris, 2007
The Cold Blue Sky, Jack Novey, Howell Press, 1997
Navigating the Course – A Man’s Place in His Time, David Fanshel, Valley Meadow Press, 2010
Navigating the Course – All to the Good, David Fanshel, Valley Meadow Press, 2013
Jewboy vs The Luftwaffe, Philip M. Goldstein, privately published (Blurb), 2015
Of War and Weddings, Jerry Yellin, Sunstar Publishing Ltd., 1995
IMSHI – A Fighter Pilot’s Letters to His Mother, Messrs. W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd., April, 1943 (Captain Ernest Mitchelson Mason)
Heroes are Fools – Diary of a World War II Airman, Murray M. Crawcour, Gefen, 1989
In the Lion’s Mouth – Diary of a World War II Flyer, Robert N. Adlen, Emis Publishing Company, 1985 (Captain David Gandin)
Hiroshima & Nagasaki Revisited, Jacob Beser, Global Press, 1988
Fiction
The Prisoners of Combine D, Len Giovannitti Von Ryan’s Express, David K. Westheimer Song of the Young Sentry, David K. Westheimer Face of a Hero, Louis Falstein (start here…)
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Within this genre, one of the best such works I’ve read, published some now forty-four years ago, is Elmer S. Bendiner’s The Fall of Fortresses, which was released by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in mid-1980. (And now readily available on EBay, ABE Books, etc., and maybe even your local library!)
A B-17 Flying Fortress navigator in the 8th Air Force, Bendiner’s combat tour occurred during 1943, and ended with the completion of his (and most of his crew’s) 25th and last sortie during the 8th’s mission to Bremen, Germany, on November 29 1943. As such, his experiences as a combat aviator in the USAAF paralleled the time period during which the 8th Air Force was, in terms of attrition and losses on a proportional basis, engaged in its most intense struggle against the Luftwaffe.
Though divided into chapters (15 of them), the fifteen have no headings or titles, and likewise aren’t subdivided into larger sections. Essentially, the book is a continuously flowing block of text, only nominally broken by chapter numbers.
But, on a more subtle level, as you read Bendiner’s book it soon becomes apparent that there actually is a structure to the text. First and sensibly, it’s chronologically arranged. Second and in a very (very) general sense, the chapters alternate in emphasis, one chapter pertaining to the experiences and interactions of Bendiner and his crew during different missions or situations (sometimes on a very personal level), followed by a chapter covering theoretical and doctrinal aspects of strategic bombing in the USAAF and RAF, or to a lesser extent, military strategy and geopolitics. The book really shines in a purely literary sense in Bendiner’s appropriate and measured use of metaphor and similie, “like” (!) in the quote that opens this blog post (!) which is reflective of his pre- and post-war background as an editor and news reporter, and, postwar authorship of three prior non-fiction books in the field of history.
A member of the 527th Bomb Squadron of the 379th Bomb Group and assigned to the crew of 2 Lt. Bohn E. Fawkes, Jr., Elmer Stanley Bendiner (ASN 0-797240) was born in Scottsdale, Pa., on February 11, 1916, and thus was in his late 20s during his combat tour. He was born to Wilhelm “William” and Lillian (Schwartz) Bendiner, his parents eventually moving from Pennsylvania to 2664 Grand Concourse, which is located in the New York borough known as the Bronx. (You’ve heard of the Bronx?!) His brothers and sister were Bertram, Evelyn, Lawrence, Marvin and Milton. Thus far, oddly, I’ve only found one reference to him in a wartime newspaper: In the Brooklyn Eagle, on December 6, 1944, over a year after he completed his combat tour. (This article will be presented in a future post.) I attribute this to Bendiner having worked at the Eagle from 1939 to 1940.
Mr. Bendiner passed away on September 16, 2001. I do not know his place of burial.
Like innumerable other American Jews who served in the United States’ armed forces in the Second World War – who were military casualties, and (or) decorated for military service – Elmer Bendiner’s name is quite absent from the 1947 Dial Press two-book publication American Jews in World War Two, perhaps reflective – in his case – of the fact that the National Jewish Welfare Board, in its quest to compile biographical information about Jews in the military, never contacted his family to begin with. (Likewise, flight engineer Sgt. Lawrence Harris Reedman’s name is also absent from this compilation.) This is indirectly reflected in The Fall of Fortresses, by the complete absence of such questions as the implications of being a Jewish POW in German captivity, or, how being a Jew affected (or truly did not at all affect) a servicemen’s relationships with his comrades. From reading the lines, and more importantly reading “between the lines”, there was a genuine sense of solidarity among and between Tondelayo’s crew members, with the author maintaining friendships with at least some of these men – particularly pilot Bohn Fawkes – into the 1980s.
However, Bendiner’s quietude about being a Jew through most of the book powerfully belies the deep significance of his identity and heritage, which though subdued is not absent. Near the book’s end he adeptly and skillfully weaves this into a disillusioning and deflating realization – concerning (well, at least in late 1943; I don’t know about later) – the tenuousness of his assumption about being perceived and accepted as an American aviator (let alone an American, per se?) who has endured much and survived all, versus simply being seen as a Jew. And with this, tangentially, the true nature of the German enemy he has been fighting comes into focus. The literary effect is not maintained for long, but the effect is extremely powerful. Interestingly, none of the book’s reviewers, regardless of their true and fulsome praise and admiration of The Fall of Fortresses, seemed to have picked up on this.
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Here’s the 8th Air Force uniform (shoulder) insignia (from my collection)
“This” post presents the full text of four book reviews of The Fall of Fortresses which appeared coincident with the book’s 1980 publication. Two are from The New York Times (when it was still an actual newspaper; it’s not been a newspaper for some years), one from The Washington Post (before it became the Bezos Daily Bugle), one from Time magazine (before it vanished into deserved irrelevancy), and, one from the Yonkers New York Herald Statesman. These are preceded by Mr. Bendiner’s biography, as published in Contemporary Authors in 1980.
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The next two posts will present excerpts from The Fall of Fortresses pertaining to two remarkable experiences of Elmer Bendiner and his crew. These will focus on events recounted in the book: 1) The inadvertent bail-out of two gunners during a combat mission on July 30, 1943 (both survived as POWs), when their aircraft was struck by several 20mm cannon shells fired from attacking Me-109 and FW-190s, which miraculously failed to explode … thus, Tondelayo and her crew survived, and 2), The ditching in the English Channel of Tondelayo on September 6, 1943, from which, through a combination of superb piloting skill and extraordinary luck, the entire crew survived. This will be followed by another post, relating to Bendiner’s account of his dramatic but anti-climactic final mission of November 29, 1943, and – upon the realization that his combat tour was over – the impact and implications of a conversation which ensued with the 527th’s Public Relations officer.
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Lt. Elmer Bendiner stands before the nose of his crew’s Flying Fortress Tondelayo (B-17F 42-29896, squadron identification marking “FO * V“), with nose art painted by Cpl. J.D. Hicks. The nose art and nickname were inspired by the femme fatale played by Hedy Lamarr in Richard Thorpe’s 1942 film White Cargo. (Photo from Silvertail Books.)
Elmer Bendiner in 1980 in a photo by Paul Viani, from the book jacket. (My own worn-out copy, but hey, it gives you an idea!)
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And herewith, a biography, and five book reviews…
Elmer Bendiner’s biography, from the 1980 edition of Contemporary Authors. He was 64 years old at the time.
PERSONAL: Born February 11, 1916, in Pittsburgh, Pa.; son of William (a businessman) and Lillian (Schwartz) Bendiner; married Esther Shapiro (an editorial assistant), October 4, 1941; children: Winnie (Mr. Paul G. Viani), Jessica. Education: Attended City College (now City College of the City University of New York), 1932-35. Politics: “Defies neat categorizing.” Religion: “Defies neat categorizing.” Home: 11 Park Ave., Tarrytown, N.Y. 10591. Agent: Theron Raines, 475 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016.
CAREER: Newark Ledger, Newark, N.J., reporter, 1938-39; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, N.Y., reporter, 1939-40; Flying Age, New York City, managing editor, 1945-46; Esquire, New York City, non-fiction editor, 1946-48; National Guardian, New York City, associate editor, 1948-58; Science and Medicine Publishing Co., New York City, editor, 1958-68; World Wide Medical News Service, New York City, editor, 1969-72; Hospital Practice, New York City, contributing editor, 1972 – Military service: U.S. Army Air Forces, navigator on B-17 bomber, 1941-45; served in Europe; became first lieutenant; received Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, and Purple Heart Medal. Member: Authors Guild, Authors League of America.
WRITINGS: The Bowery Man, Nelson, 1962; A Time for Angels: The Tragicomic History of the League of Nations, Knopf, 1975; The Virgin Diplomats, Knopf, 1976; The Fall of Fortresses, Putnam, 1980.
Work anthologized in Man Alone, edited by Eric Josephson and Mary Josephson, Dell, 1962. Also author of documentary film script, “Uptown.” Contributor to Esquire, New York Times Magazine, Nation, and Strand. Editor of Log of Navigation, 1944-45.
WORK IN PROGRESS: A history of Spain in the tenth century, “when Arabs and Jews collaborated in a cultural adventure that prefigured the Renaissance.”
SIDELIGHTS: In a New York Times review of The Fall of Fortresses, Elmer Bendiner’s history of American air battles during World War II, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes: “It is remarkable how [Bendiner] manages to combine in a single, nearly poetic, tone of voice, a view that combines the big picture with the personal one – how his narrative seamlessly encompasses the anecdotal and the historical, the strategic and the tactical, the thrill and the horror.” Lehmann-Haupt concludes that The Fall of Fortresses is a “shining accomplishment.”
Bendiner told CA: “I look upon my work as journalism, uninhibited by an exclusive preoccupation with the contemporary. If a story provides a clue to the grandeur and/or absurdity of our lives it seems newsworthy to me even though it occurred a thousand years ago. Hence, I see a certain consistency in exploring the lives of homeless men on the Bowery, the performance of diplomats between the world wars, the efforts of 18th century Americans to seduce the rulers of Europe, the strange splendors of Spain a thousand years ago, or the work of doctors and nurses in the Arctic, in India, Japan, or Tanzania.”
Bendiner’s work has taken him to Europe, Central and South America, East Africa, Bangladesh, Thailand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Israel, Japan, and Canada.
BIOGRAPHICAL/CRITICAL SOURCES: New York Times, May 9, 1980.
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From The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1980…
The War In the Air
THE FALL OF FORTRESSES
A Personal Account of the Most Daring – and Deadly – American Air Battles of World War II.
By Elmer Bendiner.
Illustrated. 258pp. New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons. $11.95.
BOMBER!
Famous Bomber Missions of World War II.
By Robert Jackson.
157pp. New York: St. Martin’s Press. $8.95.
By DREW MIDDLETON
EVEN after 35 years, World War II occupies such a prominent place in the American historic and literary imagination that we can be assured of a steady flow of new books about it. Indeed, so much has been written – good, bad and indifferent – that the reader approaches the latest books with a certain apprehension, since many of them, certainly much of the fiction, tend to be overwritten. But these two works of nonfiction, “The Fall of Fortresses” and “Bomber!” – which are complete and short – may start a fashion for briefer, sharper pictures of the war.
“The Fall of Fortresses,” in fact, is the best personal narrative by an airman that I have read since Richard Hillary’s “The Last Enemy.” Mr. Bendiner writes with clarity, compassion and a marvelous eye for the comic that so often lies just beneath the surface of war.
The Fortresses in his book are the B-17’s, the backbone of the United States Eighth Air Force in Britain. Mr. Bendiner was a navigator in a B-17, a position that enabled him to observe the rest of the crew, to watch the battle develop as the Forts pushed their way through the flak and the fighters into Germany and to reflect on the meaning, if there was any, of it all.
The centerpiece of “The Fall of Fortresses” is an account of the attack on Aug. 17, 1943, on the ball bearing works at Schweinfurt in the heart of Germany by 230 Forts of the First Bomb Wing. The German fighters and the American bombers fought one of the bloodiest air battles in history. The American losses incurred there and in an attack on the same day on Regensburg were 60 bombers, 600 men.
Yet the sight of the mass of bombers taking off roused Mr. Bendiner, who confesses nonetheless that his exultation was an “act of treason against the intellect, because I have seen dead men washed out of their turrets with a hose.”
But, he adds, if you desire an intellectual view of war, you must ask someone who has not seen it. Brilliant is the only adjective that fits his personal story of the raid, and to that story he adds the details about the battle that he has accumulated over the years. So we see not only the Forts pounding on toward the target, but the German fighter squadrons from all over western Europe assembled for the kill after the bombers turn westward to England and safety.
Mr. Bendiner survived the first Schweinfurt raid and returned on the second raid in October. Once again he provides a skillfully drawn, understated picture of the battle and the dreadful return trip lit by ‘the yellow flicker of burning B-17s.
Mr. Bendiner has also pondered the military reasons behind these and other raids, successful and unsuccessful. He tells how the American air generals won their battle for daylight bombing against the opposition of some of their own “ground generals” and the Royal Air Force. His description of what the air command did – and why – after attaining virtual Independence in combat winds through the book, giving it a substance that a narrative focused only on the fighting could not provide.
***
Heavy losses were not confined to the Americans. R.A.F. Bomber Command lost 95 bombers and 665 men over Nuremberg on the night of March 30-31, 1944. In “Bomber!” Robert Jackson describes this as the night fighters’ triumph, and so it was. “Bomber!” which deals with famous bombing missions of World War II, might have been just another rehash of familiar material. But with precise, controlled writing, Mr. Jackson has made a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the air war. Although he views the air war from a broader perspective than Mr. Bendiner, Mr. Jackson’s selection of missions – German, French, American and British – is so astute that the book never falters.
Mr. Jackson writes, for example, that the impact of the German bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940 was significant. The Luftwaffe had decided to delay or call off the attack, but the call back orders arrived too late, and the raid, Mr. Jackson says, “turned out to be a tragic blunder.” But, he continues, “this does not alter the fact that the Germans had conceived and executed it as a deliberate terror attack against a civilian target,” and it convinced the British that the time had come to launch their bombers, then pitifully few, against German industrial targets in the Ruhr.
“Bomber!” also tells of some unusual aircraft and airmen. One was the Jules Verne, a long-range bomber operated by the French Navy, which on the night of June 7, 1940, was the first Allied bomber to bomb Berlin! The Forts and the Lancasters came later, but at that date, with the French Army torn apart by the Germans, one lone aircraft carried on the fight and salvaged some honor for France.
Mr. Jackson is very good not only on the battles but on the innovations that gradually refined bombing techniques. Of course, as Elmer Bendiner reminds us, we, the Americans, were never as accurate as we believed, but accuracy did improve. The first steps toward improvement, however, were taken by the Luftwaffe, and Mr. Jackson gives a detailed account of Kampfgruppe 100, which was the first pathfinder force, and its effect on what Churchill called “the wizards’ war’’ waged by British and German science.
Mr. Jackson also clears away some legends that have grown around bombing missions. The raid by American B-25s on Tokyo, for example, led by then Lieut. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, was one of the most daring exploits of the war. At one time, however, it was fashionable to dismiss the attack as a gimmick inspired by the Roosevelt Administration to divert attention from the melancholy defeats in the Pacific.
“Bomber!” takes a different view. The bomb load was light and little material damage was done, but the raid profoundly affected the course of the Pacific war. The effect on the morale of the Japanese, who had been “flushed and made cocksure by their recent victories, was incalculable,” and shortly after the raid, Admiral Yamamotn, commander of the Combined Fleet, launched his ambitious plan to take Midway and bring the Americans to battle. He brought them to battle, all right, and the Japanese were decisively defeated. Jimmy Doolittle and his men left their mark on the war.
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From Time magazine, May 12, 1980…
After the Bombs
The Fall of Fortresses. By Elmer Bendiner. 258 pages. Putnam. $11.95.
The final oddity of World War II is that its survivors are still writing their memoirs. Why should some have waited so long? Perhaps the unique quality of that war was that its participants absorbed their experience like so many time-delayed capsules: some to be released while the war was in progress; others, only now, 35 years after the event. Elmer Bendiner, who flew as a navigator on the Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force, offers no explanation for his delay. If he is obliged to confess to blanks in his memory, he makes use of logs, records and previous histories to tell us what it was like to take part in the two great raids against the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt. “If one wants an intellectual view of war one must ask someone who has not seen it,” he writes. He means, in his elegant book, to see the war plain, without heroics; his level, quiet tone of voice has an appropriately elegiac quality.
In 1943, when young Bendiner guided his B-17 to England, the Americans had yet to demonstrate that their plan for daylight precision bombing of German military and industrial targets would prove effective. He and his fellow airmen had no idea that their commanders had decided to accept a loss of 30 of every 100 airplanes flown in such missions. The truth was brought home early enough: within the first two months of operations, Bendiner’s group had lost three-quarters of its original crews. From the perspective of late middle age, Bendiner thinks less well of death than he did then. At the time, aerial combat was for him “a frenzy in which I heaved and sweated but could not stop because, shamefully, my guts loved what my head hated.” For precisely this reason, we send the young to war. “A hard day’s work,” Bendiner writes, “exploding something into nothing… Our superiors were pleased with us because we had dropped 422 tons of bombs and, according to the reconnaissance photos, only 333.4 tons had been wasted on homes, streets, public parks, zoos, department stores and air-raid shelters. This passed for precision.”
Empty Shells: By Aug. 17, the day of the first Schweinfurt raid, Bendiner well understood what air warfare entailed. His pilot, having aborted three missions due to “faults” in the engines, had been replaced. On a raid over Kassel, his crew had lost both waist gunners: their oxygen cut off, they had succumbed to illusions of disaster and jumped from the plane. On this same excursion, eleven explosive shells pierced the fuel tank of Bendiner’s Fortress. Only decades later did he discover why his plane was not instantly destroyed: ten of the shells had been empty and the eleventh contained a paper on which was written, in Czech: “This is all we can do for you now.” The assault on Schweinfurt, however, promised to be more than routine. The crews were assured that this “first fully strategic air mission of the war” would bring about Hitler’s collapse. To distract the Luftwaffe from the 230 Fortresses moving toward Schweinfurt, a diversionary force would be sent first against Regensburg. Of course, nothing worked as planned. The great raid, which cost the Americans 60 bombers and 600 men, failed to eliminate Germany’s capacity to produce ball bearings.
“And did we win or lose?” Bendiner asks. The occasion provided no immediate answer. Nor was one forthcoming two months later when, after losing his plane in the English Channel, Bendiner returned with another armada to do the same thing again with identical results: another 60 combers, another 600 men lost. The Schweinfurt raids did not shorten the war oy a day. They did, however, provoke from Bendiner one of the war’s most haunting images: that of a homeward route marked by a “trail of torches” – the only sign of animation on a darkened Continent was the yellow flicker of burning B-17s.
In time, Bendiner concluded that his commanders knew very well the raids could not end the war; their purpose was, at whatever cost in lives and airplanes, to prove forever the efficacy of air power. If that is so, Bendiner writes, “then Schweinfurt’s ghosts must ride with those of the Light Brigade at Balaklava – brave soldiery forever charging to their deaths in. gallant absurdity.”
PETER S. PRESCOTT
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From The New York Times, May 9, 1980…
Book Reviews
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
THE FALL OF FORTRESSES: A Personal Account of the Most Daring – and Deadly – American Air Battles of World War II. By Elmer Bendiner. 258 pages. Illustrated. Putnam. $11.95.
ELMER BENDINER’S “The Fall of Fortresses” – a memoir of navigating B-17 Flying Fortresses over Germany during World War II – could well have been as bitter and blackly humorous as Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” After all, the centerpieces of the book are two 1943 bombing raids on the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt, which can arguably be characterized as disastrous for the American Eighth Air Force. Owing to a combination of factors – among them, weather, an insufficient number of bombers, the lack of auxiliary gas tanks, and the failure of America intelligence and the success of its German counterpart – the two raids cost approximately 130 planes out of the 520 that set out on them and 1,150 of 5,300 crewmen, or a total loss of more than 20 percent.
Yet the two raids failed to cripple Germany’s ball-bearing production, and there remains to this day some question whether bearings are even a critical industrial item in the first place. So, as Mr. Bendiner concludes, “Schweinfurt’s ghosts” may be riding “with those of the Light Brigade at Balaklava – brave soldiers forever charging to their deaths in gallant absurdity.”
But Mr. Bendiner’s mood in “The Fall of Fortresses” does not match Yossarian’s in “Catch-22.” For one thing, he believes that on balance the air war was worth its sacrifices of human life. If the Allied bombing failed to “castrate” “the German machine,” and if it failed to vindicate the heirs of Billy Mitchell in their advocacy of strategic bombing, it did serve, in the words of Albert Speer, to open “a second front before the invasion of Europe” – that is, “the skies over Germany” – which in turn both relieved the pressure on Soviet military forces and helped the eventual land invasion by the Allies to succeed.
‘Our Cause Was Just’’
As for the moral dimension of the bombing offensive, which “some commentators,” as Mr. Bendiner puts it, now speak of “as a ‘children’s crusade,’ “ Mr. Bendiner insists, “We were not children fired with a vision – our own or that of others.” Instead, “We were merely young men accepting our times.” And, “Hitler was real and his victory had to be prevented.’’
“And if after the killing,” he writes, “discerning critics point out that the strategists were not pure in heart or particularly wise, and that therefore some of our victims died needlessly, where can we find absolution? Only in this: that our cause was just. This sets us apart from our enemies.’’
Finally, Mr. Bendiner did not altogether detest the experience of flying his 25 missions as a navigator of B-17s. Indeed, there were elements he rather enjoyed. Sure, he knew full well that Death himself was the 11th member of the crews he flew with. He had seen the scarlet streak along the fuselage of a neighboring plane that was the telltale sign that a gun-turret had been blown away and the gunner decapitated. He had seen dead men washed out of their turrets with a hose. And yet there was an exhilaration to being up there in the blue, isolated from the alarums of battle in the paradoxical silence of the droning engines. “I exulted in that parade” of Flying Fortresses. “I confess this is an act of treason against the intellect.” He sums it up, “But if one wants an intellectual view of war one must ask someone who has not seen it.”
Big and Small Picture
And yet he has also given us that intellectual view of war. In fact, it is remarkable how he manages to combine in a single, nearly poetic, tone of voice, a view that combines the big picture with the personal one – how his narrative seamlessly encompasses the anecdotal and the historical, the strategic and the tactical, the thrill and the horror. It is especially remarkable to someone like me, who came of conscious age against the background of World War II and who therefore believed so absolutely in the Allied cause that there was no room at all for questions of moral conduct. The only facet of the imagination that the war appealed to was the romantic one, and for me, playing my war games, as for Mr. Bendiner at his entrance into the Air Force, “blood and death were leitmotifs in a very classy production number.” It came as a shock to be told that there were finer moral issues raised by the war than the ones of defeat and victory, and that the Allies had violated them at Dresden and Hamburg (not to speak of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
The beauty of “The Fall of Fortresses,” then, is that without ever stinting the moral and strategic questions that came after, it confirms the romantic dimension of the war – even so far as assuring us that not only in our fantasies, but also in reality, was there a thrill to riding up there in the wild blue yonder alone and seemingly impervious to death. It makes us feel that thrill. It also makes us feel “the anonymity of war,” “as terrible and profound as that of chessmen tumbled into a box when the game is over.” And finally, the horror. “The Fall of Fortresses” is a shining accomplishment.
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From The Washington Post, June 29, 1980…
Fall of the ‘Flying Coffin’ The Brief Campaign of The Bomber Tondelayo
THE FALL OF FORTRESSES.
By Elmer Bendiner.
(Putnam. 298 pp. $11.95)
By Stephen I. Petranek
Somewhere on the bottom of the English Channel, “wreathed in weeds,” the corroded, silted-in hulk of 34,000 pounds of a B-17F bomber named Tondelayo remains, a sepulcher vibrating and pulsing in the memory of the only navigator she ever knew, “Benny,” the last to leave her before she slipped beneath an angry sea on a September afternoon in 1943. JijL .
To Elmer Bendiner, tagged Benny by the crew, Tondelayo seems a not-yet-finally buried reminder of his own anger about having endured, perhaps needlessly, some of the most horrifying aerial battles of World War II, battles which the author, more than three decades later, found it necessary to reassess, question and in some ways condemn as misguided at best. There is also the guilt and wonder of having enjoyed death as an 11th crew member on his missions, the shame of knowing that bombs were acidentally dropped on allies and children and the never erasable memories of bodies and planes suddenly ripped to fragments.
Although Tondelayo did not survive the mandatory 25 missions required of her crew members before they could retire from combat, she did rather well for a sitting duck, seemingly parked in the skies over Europe at a modest 150 mph as Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulf-190s flying 400 mph spit 20 mm explosive shells through her skin time after time, mission after mission. Tondelayo finally fell prey not only to German fire but to the myth, not tested before World War II, that hundreds of strategic bombers flying in close disciplined formation were not only Flying Fortresses themselves, but a collective fortress capable of their own defense without constant fighter support,
Bendiner joined a mixed bag of nine other crew members in the belly of a bomber the Germans had called, in a slightly earlier version, a “flying coffin,” a bucket of rivets that even skilled Royal Air Force pilots had nicknamed a “flying target.”
But like other warriors at other times, this sensitive, charming, caring, even humble man named Bendiner got high on the close proximity of death in the flying coffin. “With death visible and audible, creating a taste in my mouth and a flatus in my belly, I was undeniably alive in battle… This was not the war of boredom and vermin we had read about in the tales of our fathers’ agony. This was a frenzy in which I heaved and sweated but could not stop because, shamefully, my guts loved what my head hated… I exulted in that parade of Fortresses forming for battle. I confess this as an act of treason against the intellect, because I have seen dead men washed out of their turrets with a hose. But if one wants an intellectual view of war one must ask someone who has not seen it.”
To some extent Bendiner would insist that survival in a bomber with an accepted casualty rate of 30 percent on some missions was luck. But except for Tondelayo’s first pilot, who, until he was removed from his position, tended to panic in bad circumstances, the crew seemed to be a balanced blend of the guts, outward casualness and determination necessary to survive.
Bendiner does not remember every crew member of Tondelayo, although the detail of his recollections of what mattered and his research into American and German records of his missions was as thorough as conceivably necessary. There was a bombardier who had washed out of pilot school and whose response to war was often repressed rage; a radio operator with “style” who was “the soul of urbanity”; a quietly expert copilot whose closeness to the Fortress was almost symbiotic, and a “street-wise Ulysses” tail-gunner.
There was, too, the luck that Bendiner thanked heaven for: 11 explosive 20 mm shells that didn’t explode were dug out of Tondelayo’s wing gas tank by intelligence experts who found inside one shell a note, written in Czech, that translated as, “This is all we can do for you now.”
There was also the luck of being in the right place at the right time. It was all too frequent that the plane next to Tondelayo was dismembered, sent spinning in wildly gyrating pieces to the earth, her last moments dutifully recorded in Bendiner’s log. “In the morning I had been over Germany watching Tondelayo’s sister plane through my port window. Along the fuselage to the tail ran a scarlet streak. It had taken me a moment to understand that there was no top turret and that the fuselage was painted with the blood of a gunner who manned it before it was blown away.”
The touchstone of the account of Tondelayo and her navigator is the two massive daylight assaults of Flying Fortresses launched on Schweinfurt, Germany, in August and October of 1943, assaults which war planners and politically motivated generals, concerned about demands that all bombers be sent against the Japanese, had determined would neatly end the war within a year by wiping out the Reich’s major ball-bearing plants. Without ball bearings, they too simply determined, German props could not spin and tank treads roll. Bendiner indicates, based on military reports, that the idea may first have been suggested by the Swedish minister’s son-in-law at a Washington cocktail party on Dec. 20, 1942. Albert Speer, interestingly enough, said years later that the damage the Reich suffered at Schweinfurt was in part offset by ball bearings produced in Sweden.
Either assault might have seriously undermined the German effort, had they been followed up within weeks by other bombing raids. But the horrifying losses of the American forces in the raids so devastated the fleet that follow-ups were impossible. At one point Bendiner notes that he never returned from any mission without at least, at the very least, some flak holes in the aircraft. He unintentionally seems to suggest that navigators might have been superfluous on the flights home from the targets. Returning bombers could simply follow the fires of shot-down fortresses: “All across Germany, Holland and Belgium the terrible landscape of burning planes unrolled beneath us. It seemed that we were littering Europe with our dead…”
In the first raid the losses were: “60 aircraft, 552 men missing, 21 brought back wounded, 8 brought back dead, 17 returned planes inoperable, many others heavily damaged.”
In the second assault on Schweinfurt in October, only three or four of the 18 planes in Bendiner’s bomber group returned to base the night of the raid. “Of 291 crews that crossed the Channel, 29 were lost before they reached the target, another 31 fell on the way home – 60 in all, 600 men missing out of a force of less than 3,000.”
The people who were running this European precision-bombing show were in many cases disciples of the court-martialed martyr Billy Mitchell who had insisted that such strategic, rather than troop-support, bombing would decide wars in the future. Bendiner tries desperately to find credence for strategic bombing, such as the Schweinfurt raids, and notes in a strange rationale that the missions, even if not directly successful as bombing raids, tied up so many Germans they created a second front – in the air – which kept the Germans from overrunning the Russians. But he is a lot less than certain:
“We were sent on a hazardous mission to destroy in a single day an objective that was Vulnerable only to repeated assaults for which we had not the strength. Those objectives could not wait for the arrival of more bombers, of the promised Mustangs, of belly tanks [which would have allowed fighters to escort bombers into Germany itself, because we had to dramatize the importance of air power in the European Theater for the benefit of the public and the Navy.
“If that is a fair reading of our commander’s thought processes, then Schweinfurt’s ghosts must ride with those of the Light Brigade at Balaklava – brave soldiers forever charging to their deaths in gallant absurdity.”
The reviewer is deputy editor of The Washington Post Magazine.
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Fromthe Yonkers New York Herald-Statesman, October 26, 1980…
Book reflects war memories
By PHYLLIS RIFFEL
Total strangers have called long distance to talk with author Elmer Bendiner of Tarrytown about his memoir of World War II. And it’s not because they also flew on the Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force – some are infantrymen, others have never been in the service and some were born after the war.
“I guess it’s gone home to a lot of people,” said the 64-year-old former navigator. “War is a powerful seducer.” He contends that everyone fights his own war, in his own way, but there is a common denominator in the devasting experience of any war. “The book stirs up a lot of memories.”
“The Fall of Fortresses,” published by Putnam in May, is a personal recollection of the events leading up to two raids on ball-bearing factories in Scbweinfurt, Germany, in 1943. Some 130 airplanes of the 520 that were sent on the fateful missions were lost and 1,150 of the 5,300 crewmen killed in the attempt to demonstrate the validity of daylight precision bombing as a means of bringing the war to a quick end.
Bendiner has blended bis own feelings about the war – then and now – with the actual details of the two raids on Schweinfurt and others of the 25 missions he flew in a vivid first-person account. He talks of how he came to be a navigator, his interaction with members of the crew, his impressions of wartime England, in a manner that makes the reader feel as though the action in the 258-page book took place only yesterday.
A natural question is why did he wait 35 years to write this sensitive, thoughtful chronicle of a young man thrust into war? And wasn’t it-difficult to recall all the factors and emotions that marked his life in those days, even for one with a skilled memory?
After Bendiner completed his missions – for which he received the Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak-leaf clusters – the native of Pennsylvania was assigned to be a navigation instructor in Ireland. He had a leave in the United States before his next assignment.
It was on the long sea voyage home to see his wife, Esther, and his new-born first child, that Bendiner wrote a novel based on his experiences. “‘I was never satisfied with it,” he said, and the manuscript was put on the shelf.’’ He kept his navigator’s log, which contained many personal asides as well as the official records of action and flight on ‘Tondelayo,” the B-17 he flew over Germany in.
Together with the expressive letters he wrote to his wife during that era, which she retained, these documents formed the nucleus of material for the book.
The catalyst lor writing the volume actually was an idea for another book which be proposed to an agent. “I wanted to write an historical book about the year 1800 – it’s a fascinating year in American history,” he said. The contact liked the idea but asked Bendiner If he could come up with something a little closer to modem tinges. He said, “I knew then that at last I was going to do this,” (the “Fail of Fortresses”).
It took a couple of years to put everything down on paper as Bendiner, a free-lance writer for the last 10 years worked on the memoir in conjunction with other projects. He visited with bis co-pilot four or five times and rehashed past events, and Interviewed retired Gen Mo Preston, commanding officer of his squadron, to check out bis impressions of what transpired at the base at Kimbolton, England. Preston was a colonel in 1943 and Bendiner knew him by rank alone, and the CO only knew biro by his number back then.
Candid about the thrill inherent in warfare and the anonymity of battle, in his book Bendiner ponders the motivation of the military commanders in World War II and the loss of life – both military and civilian – in the struggle for victory.
In the 1970s Bendiner was based in Switzerland to establish and edit an international news service for a string of medical newspapers. While living abroad for four years, he also wrote a history of the League of Nations, titled “A Time for Angels.” He and his wife traveled from Africa to the Arctic and from Bangladesh to Budapest with numerous stops between. When in Germany, he acknowledges he had an “uncomfortable feeling when I would see Germans my age. I wondered what they were doing during the war”
Chosen as a Book-of-the-Month alternate, by two aviation book clubs and being published in England shortly, the “The Fall of Fortresses” Is not just an exercise in which one man puts together bis thoughts on the ramifications of war on bis own life. Rather it describes an era in history in broad terms meshed with personal reflections.
Upon their return to the United States, the Bendiners settled in Woodstock, N.Y., where he wrote a book on the diplomacy of the American Revolution – “The Virgin Diplomats” – prior to his current book. The couple moved to Tarrytown three years ago and find it convenient to New York City and enjoy the historical nature of the area.
A slight, wiry man with piercing blue eyes, Bendiner said he is writing a story of how Arabs and Jews together enlightened the otherwise sombre middle ages from their comer in Spain and Portugal.” In his study, which has a sweeping view of the Palisades, he also continues work on the biographical history of medicine. Mrs. Bendiner works with her husband in the typing and editing chores.
Raised in a small Appalachian town in a family whose members either had an ambition to write or assumed that they probably would in any case,” Bendiner describes his achievements in college as mediocre. He left in his senior year to work as a reporter on newspapers, in and around New York, until 1940 when he was employed by an agency seeking to rescue Jewish refugees from Germany. In 1941, shortly after his marriage, Pearl Harbor was attacked and he enlisted, confident that he would be drafted in due time anyway.
In the period since his days In the Air Force, Bendiner has been a magazine managing editor, a political writer for the National Guardian, and a book reviewer and author. It is fortunate for the reading public that his account of air battles in World War II managed to surface in the midst of all his other endeavors.
PHYLLIS RIFFEL is Lifestyles Editor of The Daily News, Tarrytown.
Oh, yes… References, references, references!
Here’s the Book
Bendiner, Elmer S., The Fall of Fortresses, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N.Y., 1980
Here’s another book!
Contemporary Authors, Volumes 89-92, Gales Research Company, Detroit, Mi., 1980
And otherwise?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani (daughter of photographer Paul Viani), at…
