« Reply #5 on: June 27, 2015, 11:08:27 PM »
Here are some excerpts from
Masters of the Air:
On February 26, after a long weather delay, the Eighth struck Wilhelmshaven again, and this time American reporters went along. One of them was Andy Rooney. A graduate of Colgate University, he was lead correspondent for the London-based GI-run paper, Stars and Stripes. "The Eighth Air Force was the best story in the European war at that time," Rooney recalled, "and we were tired of going up to those airbases and interviewing young guys our age that lost friends in battle and returning to the comforts of London that night. But we didn't realize until the top boys in the Eighth cleared the idea that we'd have to attend gunnery school for a week. If we were going to be on a bomber in battle, we were told we'd better know how to shoot a gun in case we got into trouble."
...
On the Wilhelmshaven mission, Andy Rooney was assigned to Lt. Bill Casey's Banshee, whose crew had watched Arizona Harris fire his final round of bullets as the sea closed over him. Although a regular visitor to bomber bases, Rooney had never been to a preflight briefing. "I remember thinking how good, how all-American, the young fliers looked in their leather jackets, open shirt collars, and a jaunty, leather-peaked caps set on their heads at a casually rakish angle. There were a few who wore neckties, Yale, perhaps." When the briefing officer told them the target for the day was in Germany, Rooney thought seriously for the first time about his own demise. At twenty-four, with a wife at home waiting for him, he felt he had made a colossal mistake, but there was no turning back.
"Everything was quiet - almost monotonous - for an hour after we left the English coast," Rooney wrote in the story his paper published the next day. "Then the trouble began." Silver fighter planes came diving out of the sun and disappeared into a cloudbank as quickly as they had appeared. "They seemed tiny, hardly a machine of destruction, and an impossible target." Sitting in the cramped nose compartment, Rooney was almost knocked into the lap of the bombardier when the navigator spun his handheld gun around to fire at a Messerchmitt as it streaked past them. For the next two hours, German fighters filled the sights of the gunners, and before the bombers were far into Germany, they began to fly through dense fields of floating metal. On the bomb run, there was an ear-splitting explosion and the Plexiglas nose seemed about to break off from the fuselage. The bombardier pulled back in shock and covered his eyes with his hands, thinking he was blinded. He was unhurt, however, and "what appeared to be the nose being ripped off actually was only a small hole the size of a man's fist." When the bombardier ripped off his gloves and tried to close the hole with them, his hands froze instantly and "chips of flesh broke off his fingers as they caught on the jagged edges of the plastic."
On the bomb run, Rooney noticed that the navigator was having trouble with his oxygen supply. Suddenly the man turned purple and his head dropped on top of his gun. With the help of the bombardier, Rooney fitted the mask to the man's face. Then, as he went up to the flight deck for some emergency equipment, Rooney mistakenly unhooked his own mask and began to lose his legs. "Lt. Casey almost yawned at what I was sure was a major crisis of my life. He fixed me up with oxygen and the remainder of my brief first glimpse at the war was from the pit behind the pilot."
Miller, Donald L. (2006).
Masters of the air. pg 114-116.
While Rooney and some other reporters were waiting in front of a control tower for a squadron of bombers to return, word spread that a ball turret gunner was trapped in his plastic bubble underneath the plane. "The gears that rotated the ball to put the gunner in position to shoot and then return him to the position that enabled him to climb out and back up into the aircraft had been hit and were jammed. The ball-turret gunner was caught in a plastic cage."
Just before landing, the Fortress's hydraulic system, which was riddled with shell holes, malfunctioned making it impossible for the pilot to put down the wheels. The emergency hand crank for operating the main landing gear has also been destroyed by enemy fire. The pilot would have to make a belly landing. "There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man's life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber."
Rooney returned to London that evening, unable to write the most dramatic and ghastly story he had ever witnessed.
Miller, Donald L. (2006).
Masters of the air. pg 121-122.
« Last Edit: June 27, 2015, 11:15:59 PM by shotgunneeley »
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"Lord, let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, O Lord, and be merciful unto us. Amen"-from FALLEN ANGELS by Walter Dean Myers
Game ID: ShtGn (Inactive), Squad: 91st BG
