A Wing and a Prayer

The "Bloody 100th" Bomb Group of the US Eighth Air Force in Action Over Europe in World War II

Harry H. Crosby

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781504067324
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

"A compelling account of the air war against Germany" written by the navigator portrayed by Anthony Boyle in Apple TV's Masters of the Air ( Publishers Weekly ). They began operations out of England in the spring of '43. They flew their Flying Fortresses almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the "Bloody Hundredth" a legend. Harry H.Crosby—depicted in the miniseries Masters of the Air developed by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—arrived with the very first crews, and left with the very last. After dealing with his fear and gaining in skill and confidence, he was promoted to Group Navigator, surviving hairbreadth escapes and eluding death while leading thirty-seven missions, some of them involving two thousand aircraft. Now, in a breathtaking and often humorous account, he takes us into the hearts and minds of these intrepid airmen to experience both the triumph and the white-knuckle terror of the war in the skies. "Affecting... A vivid account... Uncommonly thoughtful recollections that address the moral ambiguities of a great cause without in any way denigrating the selfless valor or camaraderie that helped ennoble it." — Kirkus Reviews "Re-creates for us the sense of how it was when European skies were filled with noise and danger, when the fate of millions hung in the balance. An evocative and excellent memoir." — Library Journal "The acrid stench of fear and cordite, the coal burning stoves, the heroics, the losses... This has to be the best memoir I have read, bar none." —George Hicks, director of the Airmen Memorial Museum

Chapter 1

Practice Mission to the Orkneys

“Lieutenant, Lieutenant!”

The orderly from Squadron Ops shook me again.

“Wake up, sir. You are flying.”

I squinted at my wrist watch, 1942 G.I. Air Corps issue to all airmen. At four A.M., in England, with Double British Summer Time, it was already light.

“The 418th is stood down today.” I turned over and tried to go back to sleep.

“I know, Lieutenant, but you are flying on a practice mission.”

Shivering, I got up and started to put on my pants and shirt. My eyes came into focus. The long Nissen hut had two rows of beds with eight beds in each row. Most of the beds were empty. That meant the crews of Crankshaft, Keissling, and Knox were flying. Next to me and across the aisle my own pilot, copilot, and bombardier were still asleep.

“Why aren’t you waking Brady, Hoerr, and Ham?”

“Captain Blakely doesn’t have a navigator. You are flying with him. Lieutenant Payne didn’t get back from pass.”

Poor round, smiling, butch-haircut, hard luck Bubbles! He hadn’t dated much till he met a nice Land Army girl in Norwich. Since then he had spent nearly every night in town. Once again he had missed the motor pool truck back to the base.

I put on my mission gear. Long johns, blue flannel underwear wired for connection to the plane’s electrical system, O.D. wool pants and shirt, low-cut brown oxford shoes, black wool tie. Over this, my flying coveralls. Over everything, fleece-lined boots, leather fleece-lined pants, jacket, and a hat. I picked up my navigation kit, two bags, one like a briefcase and one like a zippered notebook. Just to make sure Ernie Warsaw hadn’t borrowed anything I looked inside: E6B computer, Weems plotter, two triangles, pencils, eraser, a collection of U.K. maps, plotting charts, my logbook. Check. After checking the clip to make sure it was loaded, I strapped on my .45 revolver. “Carry it always,” we were told.

The briefcase. Yep. Five #10 grocery sacks, just about how many I would need when I got airsick and vomited.

Automatically I checked to locate my packet of pictures of Jean. If I got shot down and ended up in a hospital or prison camp, it would be nice to have some pictures of my wife. Although this was a practice mission, for luck I zippered her pictures in the leg pocket of my flying coveralls.

Okay. Ready for the blue.

Usually before a mission we went to Group Ops for a briefing, then to the Flying Officers’ Mess for breakfast, and then to Equipment for our oxygen masks, parachutes, and any equipment specially required for the mission. Then we would go to the flight line where our B-l7’s were moored on concrete pads called “hard stands.” This would be done with ten or twelve officers climbing in and out over the back end-gate of a truck personnel carrier.

Now, when the orderly and I went out the door of our hut, he got into a jeep. I sat in the copilot’s seat. Instead of stopping at the mess or Group Ops, the corporal drove straight on toward the flight line.

“Hey, Corporal, what about breakfast?” My breath steamed as I spoke.

“Sorry, sir, but they forgot to wake you in time. We thought Lieutenant Payne would be with the crew.”

At Blakely’s plane, number Zero-Six-One, with the stupid name Just a-Snappin’, the officers and crew were getting ready. Ev Blakely, pilot, Charlie Via, copilot, Jim Douglass, bombardier, and the enlisted men. Top turret gunner Monroe Thornton, ball turret Bill McClelland, radio operator Ed Forkner, waist gunners Lester Saunders and Ed Yevich, and tail gunner Lyle Nord. Forky, the radio operator, curly hair, round, eager face, looked about fifteen years old. I remembered him lipping off at meetings. A smart-ass kid.

Ev Blakely and Jim Douglass were about the two skinniest men I ever saw. Blake’s face had so little flesh on it that his head looked like a skeleton. Doug had a mustache—Blake called him “Brush”—but his face was almost as thin. They lived in a different barracks, so I didn’t know them well.

Charlie Via, the copilot, smiled and said, “I see we’ve got a new navigator. How about that?” Since he was from Virginia, it came out, “Hoo-a boot that?”

Blake was in the pilot’s seat, on the left side, and the ground crew chief was in the right seat. Ev was running up the engines with the crew chief watching the dials. Although it was a practice mission, the gunners were installing their .50-caliber machine guns On its first practice mission, our bomb group, the 100th, lost a plane to a flight of intruding Messerschmitts.

“I’ve got your maps, Croz,” said Jim Douglass, the bombardier. “The Group Navigator marked in the route.”

I looked at the maps. We were going on a Cook’s Tour of England and Scotland. Northwest across England to Liverpool—a straight line, yet it cleared all the restricted areas. Then the red line went almost straight north for the whole length of Scotland to the Orkney Islands. I hoped there would be no clouds. It would be nice to see the country.

“You are in charge, Croz,” said Douglass, the bombardier. “We are lead crew this morning.”

Lead! I wasn’t a lead navigator. On all my missions so far, I had been comfortable in a Tail-End Charlie plane. I could, more or less, keep track of where we were. On a practice mission, when engine trouble made Brady’s crew drop out of formation and we had to come back alone, I found our way home. The radio beacon at our field, Splasher Six, was R5, read loud and clear, and with the radio compass I zeroed in on that.

But lead? If there were no clouds I could get to Liverpool. I could see the navigator’s friend, a train track, the whole way, and when we got to the end of the railroad, Liverpool would be on the coast. On the end of the runway. Behind us rumbled twenty-three other planes. Me in front of 230 flyers?

At the end of the runway, Ev started two and three and slowly ran up all four engines, with Egan calling off the instrument readings. As a safety precaution on all takeoffs, I stood behind the pilot, the bombardier behind the copilot. Back in the waist, Charlie Via was now sitting down, with his back to the forward bulkhead of the radio compartment. Soon he would go back to the tail gunner’s position. There he could see the rest of the formation. Acting as formation control officer, he could tell Major Egan which planes were in tight and which were straggling.

A quarter of a mile away, across the field and off to the right of the perimeter track, two flares from Flying Control arced up and down over the field.

“Green-green,” said Egan on intercom. “Let’s go.”

“Roger, pilot here.”

All four engines roared. Blakely released the brakes and we creaked to a start, Egan reading off the air speed as we gathered momentum. As we rolled and then hurtled along the runway, I thrilled, as I always did, to the full roar of the engines. With our rush punctuated by the bumps and cracks of the struts and skin of the plane, the four engines pulled at the tons of aircraft.

When the bumps and grinds stopped and all we heard was the hum of the four Wright 1,000-horse-power engines, we were in the air.

Excitement! Drama! Just like the movies.

“Wheels up.”

“Wheels up and locked, Wilco and Roger.”

When we were out of the takeoff pattern and climbing, Doug and I crawled to the nose compartment, and I spread out my maps and equipment.

Over intercom, I heard Blakely.

“Pilot to navigator.”

“Roger, Pilot.”

“Since you have never done a rendezvous, Bucky and I are going to talk the squadron together. Sit back and enjoy it.”

“Roger, Pilot.” I was so relieved that I took time to notice I had been sweating.

It was an exciting view, watching two planes approach our wings and fit in on each side, just to the rear. Then a second V of three, point forward, drew into position, Egan talking at them over radio.

“Come on, right wing, second element, tuck it in. The Limeys are watching us.”

At five thousand feet we could see much of the green checkerboard of East Anglia, the hump of England north of London. It sticks out into the English Channel toward Holland. Our base, Thorpe Abbotts, was ninety-seven miles north of London, on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk, twenty miles south of Norwich.

Behind us, two other squadrons were forming, one of them off right and above us and the other left and slightly below.

“Okay, Downtown Baker and Downtown Charlie, into position.” It was Egan, talking to the high and low squadrons, using the code names assigned to them for the day. “Alternate planes, return to base.”

A Flying Fortress group formation at that time had either eighteen or twenty-one planes. Our high squadron today was nine planes, a string of three point-forward V-flights of three planes. Sometimes the high squadron flew only six planes. The other two squadrons had six planes, two flights of three in line. With the formation properly in place, we had a barrage of .50-caliber machine guns pointing in every direction, capable of sending out a hail of lead no matter from which direction we were attacked. With one of those planes missing, we had a hole in our defense, and the Luftwaffe could find it. On a mission, to make sure we had full formation, we always started out with two or three extra planes. Just before we left England to penetrate the Continent, if none of the regular formation aborted, the alternates, or “supernumeraries,” returned to the base and went back to bed.

“Okay, Croz,” from Blake, “how about a heading to Liverpool?”

That was easy. I gave it to him.

“Radio to navigator.”

“Go ahead, Radio,” I said. What did he want? My own radio operator, Saul Levitt, seldom came on intercom.

“I have the 8:00 A.M. P.R., sir.”

P.R.? Position report? What’s this?

“Go ahead, Radio.”

“Bearing zero-niyun-seven degrees from Splasher Forty-two at Cambridge; bearing two-ay-yut-fowwer from Buncher Twelve at Norwich.”

As quickly as I could, I drew the bearings on the map. Bury St. Edmunds.

I looked out the window. There it was, the forest, the railroad, the stream, the cathedral. Bury St. Edmunds. The kid was right on.

“Thanks, Radio.” What was his name? Forkner?

“Radio to navigator. Do you want the P.R.s every quarter hour or every ten minutes?”

What a deal! Back in the radio compartment Forky had a flimsy with pages and pages of radio beacon schedules. Their transmission changed constantly to keep German planes from homing in, but he managed to figure them out and see which could be used at the moment for bearings. He had a remote of my radio compass, and he could get bearings as well as I could. What a stroke of genius for him and Bubbles.

I made a quick decision.

“Navigator to radio. If we are in the clear, every fifteen minutes. If we are in the soup, every ten minutes. Over.”

“Roj. Radio, over and out.”

On the first leg I could see every railroad, every river, and every town. Forky gave me the bearings, and I checked them visually. He was always exactly right. By comparing our magnetic compass heading and our indicated air speed to the course and speed we were making on the ground, I could calculate what the wind was doing to us. After a little twirling of my E6B computer, which was a circular slide rule adap...