The Bomber Boys Read online

  Every American bomber airman of the European Theater during the Second World War shared one thing with Peter Seniawsky—the desire to survive against very long odds. For most of these Bomber Boys (the majority only in their late teens or early twenties), the will to survive ranked a close second to doing their job. Once their bombs were dropped over the day’s target, survival was priority one. They flew to the target for Uncle Sam and flew back to base for themselves. There were many ways to die—flak, Luftwaffe fighters, midair collision, weather, engine failure.

  Tens of thousands did not survive. Many who did survive wondered how, as they landed at their air bases in Flying Fortresses riddled with flak holes or missing what everyone assumed were essential parts of an aircraft. The ones who came home were the first to say the real heroes were the ones who did not. But to the survivors belong the sometimes painful memories that must be stirred if the true stories are to be told.

  The Lucky Bastards Club

  ANTHONY TETA

  Navigator

  305TH BOMB GROUP

  366TH BOMB SQUADRON

  Tony Teta tossed his canvas duffel bag to the ground and climbed out of the back of the mud-caked army truck that had carried him on the final leg of his long journey. What he saw, as he got his first look at his new home, did not impress him. Chelveston was no more dismal than the dozens of other American air bases sprinkled across the English countryside surrounding London, but it was dismal enough. Except for a small tower building, most of the base structures were simple sheet metal huts, some rectangular and some resembling barrels lying on their sides, seemingly half buried in the earth. In the distance, B-17 bombers belonging to the 305th Bomb Group were parked around the perimeter of three intersecting runways.

  Tony pulled up the zipper of his leather jacket. The December air was cold and damp.

  “Lieutenant, don’t forget your briefcase.”

  It took Tony a few seconds to realize the enlisted man was talking to him. The rank and silver wings on his jacket were still new enough that Tony found himself amazed he was actually an officer and a B-17 navigator—after all, he was only nineteen years old.

  “Thanks,” Tony said, taking the case that contained his navigation charts and instruments. The other members of his crew wandered off to find their barracks, the enlisted men heading in one direction, the pilot and copilot going in another. Someone pointed Tony in the direction of the Navigators Barracks.

  Walking through the doorway, Tony noticed little difference in the inside temperature and the winter chill outside. He dropped his bag and gently placed the navigator’s case on the rough plank floor. A row of over/under bunks lined each wall of the hut. In the center of the room, a few veteran airmen were warming themselves in front of a blackened metal stove. A box of coal nearby was nearly empty. Tony guessed correctly that the one little stove could never adequately heat the entire room.

  When no one seemed to notice his arrival, the new navigator walked over to the group at the stove.

  He introduced himself with his usual friendliness. “Hi, I’m Tony Teta.” A couple of the men nodded acknowledgment, but nobody spoke. Tony ended the uncomfortable silence:

  “Well, can you tell me which bunk is mine?”

  With an expression that was neither a smile nor a frown, one of the airmen stopped warming his hands and turned to point to an empty bunk.

  “You can take that one, if you want.”

  Tony was about to thank him when the man motioned to another bunk.

  “Or you can have that bunk there . . . and there’s two more over there. Take any of them that’s empty. None of those guys are coming back.”

  The new navigator looked around the room. He counted eleven empty bunks. The 305th had, in the past few weeks, made raids on Schweinfurt, Cologne, Hanover and Berlin, four of Germany’s toughest targets. The bomb group had lost eleven of its aircraft, almost a full squadron, and nearly one hundred of its airmen had been killed or were missing. Eleven of the casualties were navigators.

  Somehow the room seemed even colder to Tony now. He mumbled, “Thank you,” picked up his gear and stored it next to the closest available bunk. It had been a cramped and slow voyage across the Atlantic, followed by a long and bruising ride in the troop truck from Scotland to Chelveston. He was dead tired. When he lay down in his bunk and finally rested his head on the pillow, Tony should have felt relief. All he felt was alone.

  It was more than fate that had brought Lieutenant Anthony Teta to the cold and lonely barracks of Chelveston, England. It was a desire to fly that had been inside him for as long as he could remember. As he lay in his bunk, he recalled a warm summer day in 1935.

  He was barely nine years old that summer, but he told everyone he was ten. The sand felt hot and comforting beneath his bare feet as he ran at full speed along the little road that led to the Hamden, Connecticut, airfield. Most of his friends were choosing up sides for a pickup game of baseball about then, and on most Sundays Tony would have been there too. He was a small kid, with a small strike zone. He drew a lot of walks, but he could also hit. And he was fast—a good base runner, especially in the late innings when the other boys were getting tired. Tony never seemed to get tired. His constant energy amazed everyone who knew him, including his mother and father.

  On this Sunday, Tony would miss the baseball game without the slightest regret. Somewhere far overhead he could hear the sound of an airplane engine, and it heightened his anticipation. This was one of those rare Sundays in Hamden when the barnstorming biplanes came to town. Tony had seen them once before. There were two planes, one bright red and the other yellow. His dad had even paid to take a ride in one of them. Tony had been simultaneously proud and jealous of his old man.

  Finally Tony reached the edge of the airfield and slowed his pace to a fast walk, once he realized he was on time for the show. A large crowd of people of all ages was scattered along the edges of the field, which was perhaps a thousand feet long and a hundred feet across. Climbing into the bed of a nearby pickup truck, Tony got a good view.

  In the center of the field someone had made a circle with lime chalk. The circle was no more than twelve feet in diameter. Raising a hand to his forehead to shade his eyes, Tony searched the cloudless sky for the plane. There it was—just a yellow speck against the sun’s glare.

  The boy felt an unusual lightness in his stomach. “Butterflies,” his mom had called it. The yellow bi-wing airplane was lost in the sun for a few seconds, but the changing sound of its engine told Tony it was beginning its dive.

  He could see it free-falling like a roller coaster that has just passed a crest in the track.

  In a few more seconds the yellow plane was in a hard dive at a forty-five-degree angle, the engine roaring. Nervous laughter escaped from some in the crowd, while the majority watched in awed silence. Everyone waited anxiously for the pilot to begin pulling out of the dive, but still the yellow plane plummeted toward the airfield. A few in the audience began to look around for possible exit routes. Tony smiled and remembered what his dad had told him. The pilot was giving them “their money’s worth.”

  The pilot held the little biplane in the dive so long that even Tony began to wonder if he was too low. At last the plane began to pull out. From the sound of its engine, it was clearly straining. Some parents tried to cover their children’s eyes when it seemed there was going to be a deadly crash, but the plane’s path flattened out and it became a yellow streak as it passed just a hundred feet above the field.

  Tony could see the pilot clearly as the plane passed overhead, and he watched with fascination as a white object fell from beneath the aircraft. It was, Tony would find out later, a ten-pound sack of Pillsbury’s Best Flour. The bag tumbled only twice before it smashed into the ground and exploded into a curling white cloud. When the flour dust finally settled, Tony saw that the pilot had scored a perfect hit inside the target circle.

  From that day, Tony’s imagination became fixed on airplanes and
flying. Much of his chore money was converted into model airplane kits, which, once constructed, were hung with string from the rafters of his attic hideout. His model planes shared the attic with Tony’s other hobby, homing pigeons.

  The pigeons were both entertaining and frustrating for young Tony. Purchased from an older neighborhood kid, the birds flew right back to their original residence when they were first released. Tony had to buy them back more than once before the pigeons finally adjusted to their new digs.

  Pigeons were only part of Tony’s childhood menagerie, which on occasion included a fox and a troublesome snake. Actually it was young Tony who caused the trouble when he released the harmless serpent on a crowded school bus. The bus driver, who had to stop and evacuate dozens of hysterical children, was not amused.

  Tony meant no harm—he just loved animals, and he loved to have a good time. As a teenager, he worked at a local stable and earned enough money to purchase a horse. The animal had previously been owned by a traveling circus, and Tony discovered that his new horse was extremely well trained, not only for riding but for doing tricks. Soon Tony was entertaining the neighborhood, racing up the street on the back of his circus horse, stopping now and then to allow the spirited animal to do a spin or rear up on its hind legs.

  Even with schoolwork, his part-time job and his pets, Tony still had plenty of energy to devote to his interest in aviation. By the time he was in high school, he was writing letters to a Missouri flying college for course information and reading any available books or articles about flying. When American bombers began flying missions into German territory in 1943, Tony was only seventeen years old, but he was already certain what branch of the service he would volunteer for, when he came of age.

  His parents knew their son would have to go to war, but they were less than enthusiastic about Tony’s preference for the Air Corps. A letter from a young relative helped to change their minds. Tony had a cousin who was already experiencing the trials of life in the infantry. His letter advised Tony: “Go into the Navy or the Air Corps. Anywhere but the Infantry.”

  Tony made sure his mother read the soldier’s words. “At least in the Navy or Air Corps, you’ll be sleeping in a bed at night.” The Tetas relented, and at the age of seventeen and a half Tony signed up to join the Army and volunteered for Air Corps service. He turned eighteen in May of 1943, and it was official. Tony, just a month shy of high school graduation, was on his way to basic training.

  After basic, it was off to Maxwell Air Base in Alabama, where three weeks of testing would determine if he was qualified to fly. The IQ marks were extremely high. Failure at Maxwell spelled the end to many a young serviceman’s dream of flying for the Army Air Corps. Test applicants were rated for qualification as pilots, navigators or bombardiers. Tony scored high and qualified for all three positions. Flooded with a wave of young patriots wanting to be pilots, the Air Corps found itself with more qualified candidates than airplanes. The officer in charge was impressed with young Teta’s math scores and recommended, “You should consider going into navigation. It is a tough school, but I’m sure you would not wash out.”

  “Will I get to fly?” Tony asked.

  The officer smiled and replied, “You’ll fly plenty.”

  Tony signed up. Soon he was on his way to Pennsylvania and enrollment at Clarion State Teachers College. There was math and more math. Competing with other candidates who had two to three years of college proved to be a challenge to Tony, but he compensated by studying late into the night, long after lights-out.

  Life at Clarion was not all work though, since the young navigation students were housed on the first floor of a coed dormitory. Many of Clarion’s female students occupied the second floor. Tony soon grew friendly with an attractive coed who coincidentally lived in the room directly above his. The college’s administrators did what they could to “protect” their female charges, including enforcement of a strict curfew. By the time Tony finished his required study time, the women’s dorm floor was sealed up tight. With no telephone communication available, Tony and his new girlfriend worked out a simple solution.

  Tony had noticed that a pair of steam pipes ran from his room through the ceiling. Guessing that the pipes also ran through the room above, the couple soon developed a “tapping code” that served them well. Late in the evening, Tony would often tap out a request for the young lady to sneak out of the building and meet him outside. A single affirmative tap on the pipe from above was music to his ears.

  Not all of the Clarion courses were as mundane as math. Despite their designation as navigation candidates, the young men were given flying lessons at a nearby airfield. Tony finally had a chance to realize his dream. The training plane was only a small two-seater, but the instructor put it through a series of spins, stalls and dives that were designed to weed out the faint of heart. After ground school and ten hours of flight time, it was time to solo. The day he sat alone in the pilot’s seat of that little airplane as it lifted off the runway was Tony’s best day since the barnstormers had visited Hamden.

  The eight months at Clarion flew by, and Tony advanced on to the next phase of navigation training at the University of Miami. Pan American Airways provided the airplanes and instructors, and gave the cadets their first real in-flight navigation experience aboard huge “Flying Boats.” Tony scored high marks and received a certificate that was redeemable for a job with Pan Am after the war. It was an exciting prospect at the time. The possibility that he might not survive the war never crossed his mind—at least not until much later.

  Next up was gunnery school at Fort Meyers, Florida. It was fast paced. There was a little in-flight practice with .50 caliber machine guns, but mostly the cadets honed their shooting skills by firing at targets while riding in the back of a bouncing truck.

  The final piece of the training puzzle was in Lincoln, Nebraska. The men who had spent the past year learning their specific military skills—the pilots, navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, radiomen and gunners—were brought together to form what was then the most educated, best trained and best prepared fighting unit ever assembled: the B-17 bomber flight crew.

  Tony’s crew, like most, was young and eager. They looked even younger. Lieutenant Jerome Chart from Wisconsin, at twenty-one, was the oldest and would be their pilot and crew commander. A solid chin and determined eyes gave Chart a look of confidence. Tony liked that in a pilot, although he realized Chart had no more real experience as a bomber pilot than he did as a navigator.

  During their first few days together, the officers and enlisted men on the crew addressed their new pilot as Lieutenant Chart. As they began to bond during the many hours of training flights, the men relaxed under Chart’s easygoing leadership, and soon he was simply “Skipper” or “Jerry,” except when there were higher-ranking brass around.

  In fact, it seemed as if, in no time at all, everyone was on a first-name basis and most had acquired nicknames. Their copilot, Flight Officer George Wisniewski, was “Ski.” The clean-cut bombardier, Flight Officer Glenn B. Kelly, liked to be called by his given name. Tony Teta, by then a second lieutenant and navigator, was “Short Round.” The radioman, Corporal Kenneth Hall, from West Virginia, answered to “Ken” or “Kenny.”

  Tony quickly became good friends with the flight engineer, a Texan named Carl Robinson. Sergeant Robinson had a dependable face and a receding hairline, and he did not take offense when the men nicknamed him “Baldy.” Corporal William Goetz hailed from Chicago. Because his descent into his ball turret reminded everyone of a crab disappearing into its shell, he became known as “Hermit.”

  Corporal Thomas Christenson of Michigan was of Swedish heritage and had the rugged look of a college quarterback. He was “Big Swede.” Corporal John Stiles, whom everyone called “Jack,” was the right waist gunner and would later become the crew’s toggler. (Once the Eighth Air Force started the system of “lead” bombers, the “lead bombardier” decided when the group or squadron should dro
p bombs. The bombardier position aboard most bombers was later eliminated—replaced by a toggler, who required much less training.)

  Wiry John Cuffman also became one of Tony’s closest pals. The little tail gunner from Tennessee somehow attained the handle of “Snuffy.” This was the crew (with the exception of Glenn Kelly) that Tony would soon rely on for survival during air combat in the sky over Germany—the crew that would also rely on him.

  At Lincoln, Tony became acquainted with the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber for which he would soon develop a lasting respect and admiration. Designed in the mid-thirties, the B-17 had been continually improved since America’s entry into the war in Europe. The model that served as a training aircraft for Lieutenant Jerome Chart and his crew was the B-17G. The most technologically advanced bomber of its day, the Boeing B-17G heavy bomber was an awesome sight to both the men who flew her and the men who fought against her.

  Tony was indoctrinated in every detail of the B-17G. She weighed in at 44,560 pounds, was seventy-four feet and nine inches long, with a wingspan stretching just over 103 feet, tip to tip. She could fly high, fast and far—having been tested at an altitude of more than thirty-five thousand feet and at a top speed of 302 miles per hour, with a maximum range of eighteen hundred miles. There was little doubt how she had acquired the name Flying Fortress. The first things Tony or anyone else noticed on first sight were the thirteen .50 caliber machine guns poking out of the bomber’s nose, top, bottom, sides and tail. To lift its own considerable heft and a seven-thousand-pound bomb load, the B-17G was powered by four formidable Wright engines.

  Despite how large the B-17 appeared on the outside, Chart’s new crew soon learned that the aircraft was not exactly roomy on the inside. Most available space was occupied by necessary flight equipment and armament. The nose section, with its clear Plexiglas cone, provided just enough space for the bombardier and navigator and their equipment, as long as neither man attempted to stand upright. Two single-barrel machine guns and the firing controls for the front chin twin-gun turret were also housed in the aircraft’s nose.