Wendover - Lives were fleeting
It was here that we first encountered the fact that lives were fleeting things. We talked with friends in the ready room and in just a matter of hours later they would be dead. There were many victims of the cruel hands of fate and of the foreboding mountains that surrounded us and the fickle weather that blew in off the salt and rocks.
We discovered our own inadequacies as far as being masters of that aluminum beast, the B-24. We lost more men and planes here in Wendover than we did in the first one hundred missions in combat. The black dirty pyres of smoke would appear in the vast distances of these cold, grey mountains and then there was the weeping, crying and attempts to comfort the young wives and sweethearts that were left behind.
Late in the afternoon of October 30, 1943 we were briefed on a night training mission that we would fly that night and that would spill over into the next morning. We would fly a night navigation mission with several legs and check points and would end up over a practice bombing range in Nevada where we would drop practice bombs before returning to base. During the mission we were to also transfer gas from auxiliary tanks we had in the forward bomb bays to the wings tanks. All in all it was to be quite a complete training mission.
After supper we went to the flight line and checked the wether and flight plan and did some checking on the plane we were going to fly, then went to the ready room to change into flying clothes, get parachutes, etc. There were several other crews in there readying for missions they were to fly that night. One of the pilots, a good friend of mine, Lt John Schweighauser remarked to me, “It sure is going to be a cold night for bailing out!” We laughed about it as we changed into fur-lined leather flying suits with fur lined boots, helmets and mittens. We always took it slow and easy when dressed this way so we would not perspire and get damp. When we got to altitude it would be way below zero and any damp clothing inside these flying suits was so cold and uncomfortable.
We stowed our gear aboard, pulled the props and settled in. There was also all the radio checks, check lists to run and the ever present wait for taxi and takeoff instructions from the tower. These training fields were generally very busy most of the time, with local flights checking engines and equipment, pilots shooting landings, the coming and going of cross country training flights and transient aircraft that came and went bringing parts, supplies, equipment and new personnel.
We finally received takeoff instructions and were off on another in a series of long, high altitude night missions. Time always seemed to drag on these missions because they were supposed to try to simulate some type of a mission we might have to fly in combat and radio transmissions were minimal, nothing to look at, just monitor the gauges. Every so often you would have to snap loose the oxygen mask and crush the forward portion of it to crack the ice that would form in it, take a handler chief out of your breast pocket and wipe the condensation off your face and then snap the mask back in position.
The drone of the engines had a tendency to lull one to sleep, but this little exercise with the oxygen mask was one that would really wake you up!
We checked the time to each check point, acknowledged the terse messages from the navigator, called crew positions to check on them and because of the experience I had on my first B-24 flight, I constantly monitored the gas gauges. Finally we arrived over the bombing range and the bombardier took over. These B-24D’s were flown to the target and the movement of the plane to concur with the bombardiers instructions were radio communications between the two positions. The last one before the bombs away signal was, center the P.D.I. (pilot’s direction indicator), then bombs away and close the bomb bay doors. The navigator would then indicate the heading for home.
By now it was getting a little light in the east and the bombardier, his job done, went back across the catwalk, through the Bombay and into the waist section where it was not so crowded, and he could talk to the gunners. Solinsky had previously transferred gas to the main wing tanks and was doing the necessary paper work, when suddenly and without any warning there was complete silence and I got that feeling, :Oh God, here we go again!” The B-24 has the gliding angle of a manhole cover and, when the engines all quit at one time, it kinda lurches, sags, wallows and does everything but fly. I mean, when this happens you get a real sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.
There isn’t time for any lengthy discussions, snap judgements are the order of the day. The props are all windmilling, everything is on, but a quick check on switched, booster pumps, gas gauges, everything is okay, fuel mixture full rich, so I shout, “Bail them out?” Chuck says, “Now!” I know everyone realizes that we are in trouble and are waiting for instructions. I flip the cover and push the bail out button. This rings a bell and flashes a red light in all compartments. The crew responds instantly. The ones in the waist open the bottom hatch, snap on the chest type parachutes and jump; all but Carchietta who can’t wait for the others and climbs up and jumps out the waist window. He is lucky as he falls between the skin of the fuselage and the rudder and doesn’t hit anything.
In the nose compartment there are two people, Bill, our navigator, and an instructor navigator whose name I can’t recall. They open the nose wheel doors by kicking down the nose wheel. Bill finds his Shute harness won’t fit over the heavy furling flying suit and has to remove it and then don his chute. The other guy is still looking out the hole and is reluctant to jump so Bill kicks him in the tail and he disappears with Bill close behind. As Bill goes though the opening, his chute snags on the nose wheel door and, as he fails away, it tears a hole about one third of the way around the circumference of his chute. It’s a good thing he is small and doesn’t weight too much, because this allows the torn canopy to slow his descent enough so he doesn’t really smash up upon landing.
Chuck motioned me to go and I half stood up and swung towards the bulkhead. As I tried to go out the narrow door opening, Found that I couldn’t squeeze through with a seat pack on. I unsnapped it, stepped out onto the flight deck and put it back on. Now Chuck has to do the same thing. I reached through the opening and grabbed the wheel for control while he removed his chute and tossed it over an outstretched back. It hit, bounced, and damn near went out the Bombay doors that had been opened when Solinsky and Troy jumped less that a minute or so before. I stepped back and allowed Chuck to get onto the flight deck to put his chute back on and reached back and grabbed the wheel again. All this confusion about chutes happened because our issued chutes were all in for repack and we had been loaned chutes from inventory. All the crew’s chutes had been adjusted to fit over the fur lined suits, then the adjustment points were sewn. Chuck and I usually wore back packs but the ones we had now were seat packs and the webbing was not sewn.
All the above had been going on simultaneously and it really had taken a very short time to abandon ship. The crew members, other than Chuck and me and the two navigators were out in just seconds and were rather well grouped. They all came down on one side of a mountain range and we passed over the summit and into the nearby valley where the four of us got out.
I was standing on the catwalk in the Bombay with one foot on the catwalk and the other on the edge of the Bombay door. Chuck hollered “Go!” And I drew my feet together and put my hands across my chest and dropped out. The slip stream caught me and I started a somersault, and as I came around and saw the tail of the plane pass by, I reached over, grasped the rip chord handle very firmly and gave it one hell of a jerk. I wanted to know right now if this parachute was going to open and open it did!
I could hear the cover snap and the pilot chute start coming out, and in just a second it pulled the main canopy out and it really popped. I had not given myself time to decelerate, and as the main chute opened, it joked so hard that the leg straps, which had not been sewn slipped to the end of the adjustment. This allowed the large metal strap, which fastened in the center of the chest, to pop up and hit me on the bridge of my nose before it slipped over my head and behind my neck. Now I’m hanging there with my head forced down and my arms starting to split out of the harness. It is utterly amazing what you can do when you are so damn scared that you should be paralyzed. I reached up, forced the strap back over in front of my face, wiggled back and forth, and all the time snugged up the adjustment till the strap was where it belonged.
I looked around and then heard a hell of a roar. It was the number four engine coming to life and the causing power on that B-24. It immediately came up by the nose and in a left spiral and came winging around right in my direction and my altitude. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a way to go? To get run down and sliced in little pieces by your airplane. When the engines had quit, we had trimmed the plane to a nose up altitude and slow it down, and now with number four cutting in and out, it just naturally kept circling to the left.
When I realized that I was about to be devoured by that thing, I grabbed the shroud lines of the chute, climbed up, an I mean real fast, and grasped the edge of the canopy and gave it a jerk. This temporarily dumped the air out of it and allowed me to fall out of the path of the oncoming plane. As it whistled and roared overhead, I looked over and saw Chick in his chute five - or six - hundred yard away and he was climbing his shroud lines. If it hadn’t been so damned dangerous, it would have been funny.
I was relieved to see the plane go by, and I knew that I didn’t have the strength to do it again. I really was pooped out, as that B-24 came around again, I went up those lines like a monkey on a grape vine. Two times both Chiuck and I dodged that infernal machine. It seemed that it had a mind of its own and its only intent was to run us down for abandoning it up there.
I finally looked down and discovered I was nearly on the ground; the sage brush and mesquite was really getting big and fast! Before I could relax I hit the ground with my knees hardly bent. As I fell forward my knees came up and hit me in the chest, knocking the wind out of me. I crashed forward and me head smashed into the ground cutting a gash at the hairline above my right eye. I rolled to my side and knew I was going to die. I just lay there gasping and really hurting. When finally I was able to take a heavy breath, I immediately felt better and sat up. I looked over my shoulder and what did I see? Yup, I saw that B-24 coming my way just a few feet off the ground. I stood up, released my chute harness and ran like hell to get away from there. I was really moving out when I heard a scraping, tearing, wrenching sound and I stopped, turned around and saw that plane start hitting the ground with the tip of the left wing. It wore the wing off till the outboard prop hit and tore off the engine. THe inboard the hit and that engine flew off; then the fuselage started hitting and the plane began breaking up and tumbling across the sagebrush and rocks till finally all was quiet. I stood there in a panic and yet I was flooded with relief.
It was cold but I was sweating, my knees and legs were weak, I was shaking and really gasping for breath. I had just witnessed at close range what few people have ever seen. I had seen one of those great winged flying monsters as it died, sliding, wrenching, crumbling, tumbling across the desert floor until it became an unrecognizable tangle of junk metal. I felt as a cave man must have felt when he saw a hairy mammoth die in a tar pit thousands of years ago.
Coming back to reality, I wiped the blood out of my eye and scanned the surrounding area. There was Chuck with his chute bundled up under his left arm limping toward me a couple of hundred yards away. I went back to where I had dropped my chute, bundled it up and continued on to where the biggest piece of the plane had come to rest. It was a narrow band from the front of the bomb bays to the rear of the cockpit and was bout ten feet high. There were a couple of small fires along that gash in the dry earth that had ignited as the hot superchargers had landed on some dry ground cover.
Chuck walked up, dropped his chute and we shock hands, not speaking for a minute or so, but looking into each other’s eyes till it seemed we Ould see the other’s soul. Yes, we had been friends before, but this forged another tight bond between us that became stronger, and as the many events were to unfold during our association with each other we became like brothers.
Chuck asked me if I had seen Bill or the other navigator. I explained that just like him I’d been kinda busy on the way down but remembered seeing one white a half mile or so behind us. We asked back and extinguished the two small brush fires then returned and climbed up on that piece of B-24. Looking around, we spotted Bill coming toward us about a quarter mile away. We were wearing our fur lined flying suites but Bill had had to remove his to get into his parachute harness and so was only dressed in a light weight flying suite. He came crippling across toward us with the pigeon toed walk and suddenly, not speaking, stopped and saluted. We should have known something was wrong then because he was never very strong on military courtesy.
WHile questioning him about the other navigator, we discovered he was suffering from shock. He had landed hard and was just barely coherent. Whenever we asked him where the other guy was, he just replied, “Oh, he is laying by a pile of rocks way over there.” He pointed in the direction from which he had come.
Because neither Chuck nor I had seen his white we feared what we might find when we footer there. We wandered around and and around, fond Bill
S chute and finally saw the other navigator was there all right. He was still buckled in the chute harness and out like a light. He evidently had been oscillating as he came down, landed backward and bounced off a rock or the hard ground. We coaxed him, slapped his face, unfastened him, stood him up and finally he started to respond. After a few minutes he said that he was feeling better and I bundled his chute. Chuck helped him for a while until he could make it on his own.
We retrieved Bill’s chute and headed back to the piece of the plane. Bill was now in shock and we knew we had to get him warm. I searched around and in the debris of the plane I came across his fur lined flying suite. It was dirty, torn and stained with hydraulic oil, but we fitted him in it as best we could and fastened it around him with pieces of control cable. We then wrapped him in the silk parachutes with one for a pillow. There was nothing to do now but wait. It was spitting snow, but we knew that before long they would send out search planes from Wendover to look for us. Tight at that time we had no food, no water and no appetite.
Chuck and I were more mobile that the others and we stood and walked around scanning the skies and listening for the drone of the search planes. In the next six or seven hours we probably saw some sixteen or twenty planes go over. We took two of the chutes and spread them out. We built a fire and fired it with grease wood and mesquite to make smoke. We hollered and swore but still no one saw us.
Between two third and three o’clock in the afternoon we gave up on anyone spotting us and decided we had better make other plans. I asked Chuck if he had seen the railroad track a couple of miles away and he said that, as busy as he had been, he kinda remembered seeing it, so we decided that rather than remain by the part of the plane any longer that we might as well start making our way toward the railroad. We didn’t mate very good time because Bill’s ankles were badly swollen, Chuck had a bad left ankle and the other guy acted somewhat bewildered. Bill had responded a little and no longer seemed to be in shock, at least he was no longer shaking and shivering.
Chuck and I helped Bill and the other guy stumble along beside us. After the better part of an hour we came upon the railroad and the rails were all covered with rust. We could see it was a spur line from a mine and hadn’t been used for a long time. Well, it was easier walking down grade and that was the only way we figured that we would come upon any habitation.
We walked for about a half mile and around a bend in the tracks we came upon an old hand car. This was a small cart or trolley type vehicle with four small flanged wheels which were a smaller version of those used on the railroad cars. Mounted above these axles was a rectangular platform with a protruding angle iron arrangement in the center. Mounted on this and connected to cogged pulleys and chains to drive axles was a horizontal bar pivoted in the center with ’T’ handles on each end. When the handle on one was moved down, the opposite end went up because of the pivot point in the middle. When the high one was moved down the low one came up. This resulted in the chain and cogged pulleys moving and it would drive the vehicle. I had seen these used sparingly on the Michigan Central Railroad when I was a young kid in Michigan, and so I knew we had really come across a gem as far as these railroad tracks were concerned.
We manhandled this outfit onto the tracks, put Bill and the other guy on each side and Chuck and I grabbed the handles and gave it a few nudges and low and behold we were off and running. Hey! This was great on level terrain but, as I said, this terrain ran more than usual downhill as we damn well soon found out. The only brakes on our new toy was to grab the handles in a death grip and using all the muscle and leverage you could muster try to keep the handle from moving up and down.
I was on the back of the handcar looking down the hill and felt pretty lucky to see the next half mile was just a slight downgrade and there was another bend in the railroad tracks. This meant that it rolled along at a fair speed by itself with very little need for brakes.
When operating this thing Chuck and I were facing each other. I was looking where we were going and he was looking where we had been. This arrangement made it nice for carrying on a conversation because we were hardly working and were facing one another, and other than a few squeaks of the chain and squawks as the flanges rode along side of the rails it was relatively quiet. Even our two passengers seemed to be enjoying the ride immensely and chimed into the conversation with a lot of chit chat.
So along we went happy as a cricket until we came around that bend in the tracks. My God! This grade dropped off at a hell of a rate and, before we could make any adjustments or come to a stop, we were heading down hill. Luckily, it was only about a mile and only a gentle curve, but it was a mile in my life that is not really easy to forget.
We had learned while flying that sometimes things would happen that were not exactly normal, but we had been trained to overcome these emergencies. There was no training at all to prepare Chick and I for the next ten minutes. This thing started flying down those railroad tracks at I don’t know how fast. I looked at Chuck and he was staring at me with a bug-eyed, wild sort of a look and I’m sure I wasn’t the picture of calm and collected copilot either.
A it picked up speed we attempted to slow it down, but to no avail. That man thing picked me up off my feet and slammed me back down, up and down until I could hardly see. I just remember hanging on and getting trounced up and down till it damned near threw my shoes off. My teeth kept clicking together, my nose was running, my ears ringing, and as I stared ahead Chuck was flopping around like a flag in a gale. The bad part was we didn’t dare let go of the damned handles or they would have beaten us to death or we would have fallen off and gotten cut to ribbons on the sharp rocks of the road bed. If Chuck was to release the handles he would probably have fallen backwards and gotten run over.
I really can’t say what Bill and the other fellow were doing because I was too busy trying to stay alive. After it was over Bill said that he had started off laughing, then went to crying and ended up praying. The other guy said that the only thing he remembered was that he set a world’s record for holding his breath. I believe if someone had been along with a movie camera he could have ended up with footage for a best seller in the realm of comedy.
It kinda leveled off for the next mile and a half and finally this ended abruptly as we came upon a new set of tracks. As we were going rather slow it was no sweat to bring it to a stop. We piled off and discovered that the rails on this line were nice and shiny and had been used regularly. Which way should we go? Down grade, of course. We pushed and shoved and lifted until we had our little steed on the rails and off we went again.
This road bed was well maintained, no bumps or humps and was a pleasure to ride on. About twenty minutes later we saw buildings off to the side of the tracks so we stopped the thing, lifted it off the tracks and went over to the house. A lady came to the door and looked rather apprehensive at first until we told her sho we were. She said she had heard on the radio of a missing B-24 from Wendover and turned and called to her husband. He came to the door, induced himself and said he was the section chief on that section of track and that it was the Union Pacific Line. He commented that we were lucky that we hadn’t met a train on that main line because ut would have squashed us like a handful of bugs.
We asked him if he could give us a ride back to the base which was, as we found out later, quite a ride. He explained that, with gas rationing, he had only a limited amount available, but would gladly do it if we could guarantee that he could get the gas replaced when we got to the field. Of course, we had no way we could guarantee him this as much as we would have liked to have been able to do it. We could appreciate his request but were actually rather powerless to do anything about it.
He had a station wagon and said if we would get in he would take us down to the road that ran from Elko, Nevada, to Wendover and we would probably be able to get a ride from there. His wife, in the meantime, had made a plate of sandwiches and some coffee and we were thankful by then to get something to eat. She was very apologetic about what they had to offer and explained that they only made bimonthly trips to Elko, and it was hard to keep anything on hand. We tried to explain how really tasty they were and how appreciative we were to get them. We didn’t drink too much coffee knowing that it was also rationed, but we drank a couple of gallons of water. I think what I liked most about that little repast was that it gave me a chance to check out my teeth and fillings because I could have sworn that the wild ride down that steep grade on that handcar loosened up everything from my arches upwards.
We loaded aboard that station wagon and took off on a bumpy, dusty road that more or less paralleled the railroad track. I guess it was about ten miles when we came to the blacktop where he let us out, wished us the very best and, amid a volley of thanks from the four of us, he sped off in a cloud of dust somewhat like the Lone Ranger.
By now, it was just about dusk and the first car that approached did not yet have it’s headlights on and was popping along about forty miles an hour. We all tried to thumb a ride and it slowed down a little. After a close look at us he really nailed it and got the hell out of there. We hadn’t realized until then why the lady had looked at us so funner when we knocked on her door. We were really a sorry looking bunch. Chuck was limping badly on his left leg and was dirty with a stubble of a beard. Bill could hardly walk and was sewn in the badly ripped and oily flying suit that we had salvaged from the wreckage of the plane. The other guy had no helmet and was dirty and dusty. I had a big scab on my nose which was badly swollen. The cut above my eye had allowed blood to run down the right side of my face and dry there, and then some ran down the front of my flying suit. We looked at one another and finally started laughing until we saw another vehicle coming. We again watched as it picked up speed and tore away as if the driver was seeing a third of the Dirty Dozen. I said that the next one wasn’t going to drive by lie that because he would have to run over me first. I was getting just damn well plain mad.
About ten minutes later it was full dusk and we saw another car coming, this one with it’s lights on. Well, this was it, so I stepped about halfway into that lane of the road wildly swinging my arms and yelling like I didn’t have good sense. The driver saw me just in time, swerved and then slammed on the brakes. When he got it stopped he backed up, jumped out and said, “You must be part of that missing B-24 crew.” We could see that it was a command car from the base and the driver was a corporal. He helped us in and took off. He probably drove as fast as the thing would go, but it was an hour and a quarter or more before we got to the main gate. He just blew his horn, flipped his lights and kept right on going and took us to the base hospital.
In a very short time they had us inside and were attending to us. A couple of stitches here, a few elastic wrap bandages there, a handful of aspirin, a shower and a clean hospital bed and we were feeling a hell of a lot better. It took a little while before we had hot coffee, some soup and crackers and a bowl of Jello.
We, of course, didn’t have the slightest idea what had happened to the rest of the crew that had bailed out on the other side of the mountain range, but it wasn’t long before some of them came in to see us.
When I had punched the bailout button the engines had already quit, so they were ready to go and had landed within a couple of miles of each other. Krises, the bombardier had gone back to the waist section and had jumped with them. This was now Halloween, the 31st of October, 1943. We had been in training for a couple of months and were getting ready to go overseas. Carchietta, who was a good looking, dark complected Italian with dark, wavy hair, had just had it shaven off and the top of his head was about ten shades whiter than the rest of his face. He hadn’t been able to wait to get out and jumped out of the waist window. When he pulled the ripcord and the chute pooped open, he lost his helmet and one flying boot jerked off. He landed near a small ranch in the cattle corral and, when the canopy of the shite swung down, the cattle bolted, broke out and ran away. Carchietta, being the nice kind of a guy he was, bundled up the chute, walked up to the door to apologize to the people who lived there. The lady who came to the door took one look and, before he could say anything, slammed the door and a little while later was seen peeking out the curtains. Carchietta was persistent and she finally came to the door again. He told her how sorry he was that he had spooked the cattle and had scared her and offered to help round them up. I guess she told him that there was no need of that and gave him directions to the main road. He hobbled away with only one flying boot on and his parachute under his arm.
Stypawany had gotten into a bad, gusty wind as he was landing and was dumped over backward, breaking his shoulder.
Kirsis was the only officer of that group and when he was in the air looked around to spot as many chutes as he could so he would have some idea how to round up the guys when they landed. It took him a couple of hours to get them together by the main road. While they were deciding what to do, they spotted a Greyhound bus coming. Kirsis waved his arms and flagged it down. When the driver opened the door, he told them he was commandeering the vehicle to take these men to the base in Wendover. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference anyway because the bus was enroute to Elko, Wendover and Slat Lake City.
Crews:
W-35 -
Grace, Charles Wesley
Units:
791st Bombardment Squadron (H)
Personnel:
Buchecker, William Alfred
Carchietta, John Anthony
Grace, Charles Wesley
Kirsis, Arthur Russell
Morgan, George (NMI)
Prichard, Arthur Lyle
Rury, Jewell Leon
Schweighauser, John Joseph
Solinsky, Bernard Edward
Stypowany, Bronislaus Francis
Troy, Robert Bernard