2 Lt. Robert Lawrence Hejny 0-734342 – Excursions in Jewish Military History and Jewish Genealogy

The Fall of Fortresses: Elmer Bendiner’s Flights of Memory: A Jewish B-17 Navigator over Europe: Tondelayo’s Final Mission – September 6, 1943

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 actor Arthur 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.

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

The Fall of Fortresses: Elmer Bendiner’s Flights of Memory: A Jewish B-17 Navigator over Europe: “This is all we can do for you now.” – July 30, 1943

…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 by the 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 Gelsenkirchen on 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