It was Dec. 29, 1944. Cold, dreary, foggy England. Rackheath Air Base was on the edge of Norwich, in East Anglia, the round bulge on the map facing Europe a hundred miles north of London.

Even we young pilots knew something was wrong. We didn’t get very much direct news about the battles across the channel in Europe, but there was a different sense of urgency these days in flight orders coming down daily to the 467th Bomb Group from division headquarters.

The Germans had suddenly counter-attacked. The Battle of the Bulge was under way, with Gen. Rommel’s armored forces threatening not only to smash through to the Belgian coast and cut the allied forces in half, but to cut off their supply ports as well.

What it meant for us air crews was that suddenly we were flying missions under weather conditions that would normally have kept us on the ground. The effort to bomb the German supply lines became more important than the usual safety rules.

Getting a loaded B-24 into the air was a nerve-wracking experience any day, but a nightmare in bad weather. A red manufacturer’s placard in the cockpit warned that the plane should never be flown at a weight greater than 44,000 pounds, or 22 tons. With 2,700 gallons of high-octane fuel and 6,000 pounds of bombs, we flew every day with 33 tons.

I always felt that getting this “flying boxcar” off the ground was 95 percent of the mission. (We were to learn later that, in our group, six crews died from the weather or other kinds of accidents for every one that fell to enemy action.)

An extremely dense fog seeped into everything on Dec. 29. Buildings 50 feet apart were invisible. Yet the combat routine went on — the posting of crew names the night before, the 4 a.m. wake-up, the 5 a.m. breakfast before going to the briefing room. Our crew of 10 was on the list.

All of us officers went to command briefing session, resentful of being up so early for nothing. It had happened before. It was obvious we could not fly a B-24 in this fog when we could hardly see each other as we walked to the briefing hut. Yet the drill went on.

There was the repetitively melodramatic pulling away of a huge drape to show a map of Europe with our bombing route laid out in red tape. Our target was a railroad marshaling yard behind the lines. We took navigation details, synchronized our watches, and went back out into the white darkness.

We could hardly believe that we were still going ahead, when we got off the truck at our plane and realized that we couldn’t even see the end of the wing tip from the cockpit. We knew the total wingspread was 110 feet, so one side of the wing was 55 feet. I was co-pilot; Russell “Scotty” Scott was the pilot. We looked at each other. We both knew what that meant.

We had to reach 120 miles an hour to take off. Every flight school instructor had drilled us to remember that 60 miles an hour equals 88 feet per second. So we’d have to be going 176 feet per second to get this 30-odd tons of bombs and gasoline into the air. If anything went wrong on takeoff when we could only see 40 feet ahead in the milky soup, we’d have less than a quarter of a second to react.

But we went ahead with the preflight checks, plugging in our electrically heating flying suits, checking the oxygen masks, running up each of the four engines in turn to make sure we could rely on it.

We were due to be the third ship to taxi out, one of three “lead” planes on which all the others would gather to make the giant box formations supposed to keep German fighters at bay. Our jobs were to go off first, then circle high in the sky while the others moved into formation behind us. The first and second lead planes moved slowly past, and we very carefully pulled as close as we could behind the second plane.

We could barely see the ground from the cockpit window, and we realized that if we lost sight of those two round stabilizers in the tail of that B-24 ahead of us, we could easily stray off the concrete taxiway and get our wheels mired in the frozen mud alongside us.

The B-24 has a tricycle landing gear, with a nose wheel far up to the front. When the brakes are applied in taxiing, the front end dips down like the head of an elephant nodding in a parade. So the plane ahead seemed to us to be going up and down as we cautiously braked as close as we could get.

We still expected to hear a voice on the radio: “Abort, abort.” This was impossible flying weather. But no voice came.

The deadly still fog meant there was no wind at all, no air movement to increase our airspeed at takeoff.


The ship ahead stopped. Half a minute later it turned, trembling, and all we could see was a wing as the pilot gunned the engines to full power. Then it was gone. The only way we could line up on the runway was by looking down from the cockpit windows at the rows of white stripes we knew marked each end of the runway. We could see nothing else. Scotty and I looked at each other.

Scotty ran up full power, brakes full on, until it felt that the ship would vibrate open. Then he released the brakes. We seemed to lumber down the runway. Hours seemed to go by. The airspeed indicator inched upward, when it should have been sweeping up like the second hand on a watch. I kept staring down at the runway from my cockpit window, then I glanced at the airspeed indicator — a slow 92 miles an hour — but when I looked back out the window I saw white stripes flashing by. The other end of the runway! We were not going fast enough to take off, but we were at the end of the runway!

I took the wheel in my hands and pulled back. A co-pilot was not supposed to do that, with the pilot concentrating on the instruments in front of him to keep the plane on course and steady. But there was not time to talk to Scotty, only a split-second to grab the wheel.

I knew the field off the end of the runway was deep-plowed, rutted enough to tear off our landing gear and smash all 10 of us to pieces. It should not have happened at that airspeed, but Number 10607 flew into the air. It was a miracle.


But now there was nothing. Only whiteness. We staggered. Then a smashing downward jolt. We’d hit the ground! Suddenly things were going too fast. A shuddering vibration swept the plane, like a rolling earthquake you feel but don’t believe. Then freedom, a feeling of flight. (Later we learned that we had indeed hit the ground off the end of the runway, falling hard enough to shake loose three 500-pound bombs, which crashed through the bomb bay doors and skidded along the ground underneath us without exploding. It was the second miracle.

Again whiteness. Scotty struggled to keep us climbing straight and level, only the instruments in front of him to help him. Truly, it was flying blind. Suddenly, a black wall loomed up in front of us — trees! The trees got blacker, higher, closer, like some great dark hand reaching out to enclose us. We smashed right into the blackness. A scrape, a lurch, and amazingly we were out on the other side. Again vibration, but we were still flying. A third miracle.

I hardly dared even look at Scotty, afraid to break his tense concentration on the dashboard instruments that were helping to keep us alive in this whiteness.

The worst was yet to come. The human senses are easily fooled. It takes steely nerves to trust an inanimate instrument with your life when your body tells you that your plane is doing something that the instrument denies. You can be “sure” that you are going left when your instruments say that you are going straight ahead.

We had just taken off at an impossible low speed, had hit the ground again, and had plowed through trees into opaque whiteness. In all that turmoil, could Scotty continue to fly blind?

Suddenly the fog lightened. Then it began to break up into patches alternating with sunshine. But the light showed us something even more heart-stopping than the trees we had crashed through. We saw that we were now flying on our side, one wing pointing straight up to the sky and the other toward the ground beneath the fog. We were slowly rolling over on our back at 120 miles an hour! In another 20 seconds we would dive into the earth, upside down.

Perhaps only a pilot could appreciate the panic of breaking out of a solid cloud, where the eye sees no apparent movement, into racing cloud tufts where the world is turning upside down. Everything is reversed: To pull the wheel back is to go down, to push it forward is to go up. Left is right, right is left.

Scotty grappled with the controls for age-long seconds while we gradually righted ourselves. Had the fog been only 100 feet deeper, two seconds deeper, we never could have recovered. A fourth miracle.

All of this had happened in less than a minute — enough terror for an ordinary month of flying. Scotty and I just looked at each other; there was little to say. Now we could think of our mission, so we continued the long climb up to our rendezvous point at 24,000 feet.

One of the gunners called on the intercom, asking us to look back. We saw a pair of thousand-foot plumes of black smoke, coming out of the fog close together, back where we had just been. (Later we were to learn that the smoke was from the two lead planes we had followed onto the runway just a minute before; both had crashed off the end of the runway in that fog.)

We climbed through the sparkling winter sunshine toward the little specks we knew would be the command ships for the mission. We were determined to go on. The plane seemed to be all right despite what had happened. But as soon as we approached the leader the radio came alive: “Do you know your bomb bay doors are blown off? Return to base.”

Astonished, we sent our chief engineer, Charles Cox, to look at the doors. They were indeed gone, with a piece of torn aluminum flapping loose on one side. Three bombs had bounced off their shackles and disappeared, taking the bomb bay doors with them. Reluctantly, then, we turned back.

We knew that our own base at Rackheath was too foggy for a landing, so we headed for another airfield near Norwich at Horsham St. Faith after dropping the rest of the bombs into the shallow waters of a North Sea inlet called The Wash. It had been an exciting morning, but now it was over.

We were wrong. We made a normal landing approach to the Horsham airfield, which was empty of aircraft. Even though it was only a few miles from Rackheath, it had not suffered the dense fog that we had, and its planes had made it off safely.

We touched down normally on the two main wheels under the wings, nose high, with the nose wheel 10 feet off the ground as we slowed down. As the speed dropped, the nose wheel gradually came down until it too was rolling on concrete. By this time we were slowing down from about 75 miles an hour.

Then catastrophe struck. As soon as the nose wheel came down and the fuselage was traveling parallel to the ground, the whole left landing gear broke off, the 10-foot strut supporting the huge wheels rolling upright backward to smash into the horizontal stabilizer in the tail section of the plane. The left wing dropped screeching onto the concrete, and the plane lurched into an uncontrollable leftward swing off the runway.
Again, it all seemed to be in slow motion. I can still see the faces of a group of British laborers working with burning tar as our 30-ton juggernaut suddenly came crunching down on them. One froze, then threw his shovel over his left shoulder and ran. We bore down on the burning tar, little flames licking all over it. There was nothing we could do.

I remember feeling disappointed, thinking that it was ridiculous that we should explode in a field of ordinary tar after everything else we had survived that morning. I think I closed my eyes.

But the screeching stopped. We had not exploded, apparently because our crunching juggernaut snuffed out the flames. We came to rest with one wing on the ground and the other in the air. We scrambled to get out, not knowing whether the gas tanks had ruptured and were about to blow.

The B-24 has a small circular escape hatch over the cockpit area, and Scotty, Chuck Cox and I got through that little hole in seconds and ran down the sloping left wing to get away from the plane in case it did burn or explode. The navigator, bombardier and gunners all got safely out through other exits. Number 10607 did not burn.

(Adrenaline makes a difference. We had fled through that escape hatch encumbered with all sorts of light gear like oxygen hoses, electric wires and even earphones in my case. When it was clear later to go back in to get our personal effects, I could not get out of the hatch by myself even though I had stripped off all the unnecessary gear.)

The 10 of us gathered to look at Number 10607. The two propellers on the ground were bent like pretzels. There was a huge gash in the left stabilizer where the landing gear strut had crashed through it. And then we saw for the first time the bits of tree branches embedded in the fronts of both wings.

We were a silent group; again, there was not much to say. We had taken off below take-off speed, we had survived a crashing bounce back to earth, we had smashed through trees, we had nearly rolled over on our back, and then we had survived a crash landing through fire.

We could have died five times. It was truly a day of five miracles. I remember thinking that after all that I would never be afraid again.