Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: daddog on May 15, 2005, 08:20:15 AM
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Just wondering if it was true or not. Received it in an e-mail a few days ago.
Piggyback Hero
Ralph Kinney Bennett
Tomorrow morning they'll lay the remains of Glenn Rojohn to rest in the
Peace Lutheran Cemetery in the little town of Greenock, Pa., just
southeast of Pittsburgh. He was 81, and had been in the air conditioning
and plumbing business in nearby McKeesport. If you had seen him on
the street he would probably have looked to you like so many other
graying and bespectacled old World War II veterans whose names appear so often
now on obituary pages.
But like so many of them, though he seldom talked about it, he could
have told you one hell of a story. He won the Distinguished Flying
Cross and the Purple Heart all in one fell swoop in the skies over Germany
on December 31, 1944.
Fell swoop indeed.
Capt. Glenn Rojohn, of the 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb Group, was
flying his B-17G Flying Fortress bomber on a raid over Hamburg. His
formation had braved heavy flak to drop their bombs, then turned 180 degrees to
head out over the North Sea.
They had finally turned northwest, headed back to England, when they
were jumped by German fighters at 22,000 feet. The Messerschmitt
Me-109s pressed their attack so closely that Capt. Rojohn could see the faces
of the German pilots.
He and other pilots fought to remain in formation so they could use
each other's guns to defend the group. Rojohn saw a B-17 ahead of him
burst into flames and slide sickeningly toward the earth. He gunned his
ship forward to fill in the gap.
He felt a huge impact. The big bomber shuddered, felt suddenly very
heavy and began losing altitude. Rojohn grasped almost immediately
that he had collided with another plane. A B-17 below him, piloted by Lt.
William G. McNab, had slammed the top of its fuselage into the bottom
of Rojohn's. The top turret gun of McNab's plane was now locked in the
belly of Rojohn's plane and the ball turret in the belly of Rojohn's
had smashed through the top of McNab's. The two bombers were almost
perfectly aligned - the tail of the lower plane was slightly to the
left of Rojohn's tailpiece. They were stuck together, as a crewman later
recalled, "like mating dragon flies."
No one will ever know exactly how it happened. Perhaps both pilots
had moved instinctively to fill the same gap in formation. Perhaps
McNab's plane had hit an air pocket.
Three of the engines on the bottom plane were still running, as were
all four of Rojohn's. The fourth engine on the lower bomber was on fire
and the flames were spreading to the rest of the aircraft. The two were
losing altitude quickly. Rojohn tried several times to gun his engines and
break free of the other plane. The two were inextricably locked together.
Fearing a fire, Rojohn cuts his engines and rang the bailout bell. If
his crew had any chance of parachuting, he h ad to keep the plane under
control somehow.
The ball turret, hanging below the belly of the B-17, was considered
by many to be a death trap - the worst station on the bomber. In this
case, both ball turrets figured in a swift and terrible drama of life and
death. Staff Sgt. Edward L. Woodall, Jr., in the ball turret of the lower
bomber, had felt the impact of the collision above him and saw shards of
metal drop past him. Worse, he realized both electrical and hydraulic power
was gone.
Remembering escape drills, he grabbed the hand crank, released the
clutch and cranked the turret and its guns until they were straight down,
then turned and climbed out the back of the turret up into the fuselage.
Once inside the plane's belly Woodall saw a chilling sight, the ball
turret of the other bomber protruding through the top of the
fuselage. In that turret, hopelessly trapped, was Staff Sgt. Joseph Russo. Several
crewmembers on Rojohn's plane tried frantically to crank Russo's
turret around so he could escape. But, jammed into the fuselage of the lower
plane, the turret would not budge.
Aware of his plight, but possibly unaware that his voice was going
out over the intercom of his plane, Sgt. Russo began reciting his Hail
Marys.
Up in the cockpit, Capt. Rojohn and his co-pilot, 2nd Lt. William G.
Leek, Jr., had propped their feet against the instrument panel so they
could pull back on their controls with all their strength, trying to
prevent their plane from going into a spinning dive that would prevent the
crew from jumping out.
Capt. Rojohn motioned left and the two managed to wheel the
grotesque, collision-born hybrid of a plane back toward the German coast. Leek
felt like he was intruding on Sgt. Russo as his prayers crackled over the
radio, so he pulled off his flying helmet with its earphones.
Rojohn, immediately grasping that crew could not exit from the bottom
of his plane, ordered his top turret gunner and his radio operator, Tech
Sgts. Orville Elkin and Edward G. Neuhaus, to make their way to the
back of the fuselage and out the waist door behind the left wing.
Then he got his navigator, 2nd Lt. Robert Washington, and his bombardier,
Sgt. James Shirley to follow them. As Rojohn and Leek somehow held the
plane steady, these four men, as well as waist gunner Sgt. Roy Little and tail
gunner Staff Sgt. Francis Chase were able to bail out.
Now the plane locked below them was aflame. Fire poured over Rojohn's
left wing. He could feel the heat from the plane below and hear the sound
of .50 caliber machinegun ammunition "cooking off" in the flames.
Capt. Rojohn ordered Lieut. Leek to bail out. Leek knew that without him
helping keep the controls back, the plane would drop in a flaming spiral
and the centrifugal force would prevent Rojohn from bailing. He refused
the order.
Meanwhile, German soldiers and civilians on the ground that afternoon
looked up in wonder. Some of them thought they were seeing a new
Allied secret weapon - a strange eight-engine double bomber. But
anti-aircraft gunners on the North Sea coastal island of Wangerooge had seen the
collision. A German battery captain wrote in his logbook at 12:47 p.m.:
"Two fortresses collided in a formation in the NE. The planes flew
hooked together and flew 20 miles south. The two planes were unable to fight
anymore. The crash could be awaited so I stopped the firing at these
two planes."
Suspended in his parachute in the cold December sky, Bob Washington
watched with deadly fascination as the mated bombers, trailing black
smoke, fell to earth about three miles away, their downward trip
ending in an ugly boiling blossom of fire.
In the cockpit Rojohn and Leek held grimly to the controls trying to ride
a falling rock. Leek tersely recalled, "The ground came up faster and
faster. Praying was allowed. We gave it one last effort and slammed into
the ground."
The McNab plane on the bottom exploded, vaulting the other B-17 upward
and forward. It hit the ground and slid along until its left wing slammed
through a wooden building and the smoldering mass of aluminum came to a
stop.
Rojohn and Leek were still seated in their cockpit. The nose of the plane
was relatively intact, but everything from the B-17's massive wings back
was destroyed. They looked at each other incredulously. Neither was badly
injured.
Movies have nothing on reality. Still perhaps in shock, Leek crawled out
through a huge hole behind the cockpit, felt for the familiar pack in his
uniform pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He placed it in his mouth and
was about to light it. Then he noticed a young German soldier pointing
a rifle at him. The soldier looked scared and annoyed. He grabbed the
cigarette out of Leek's mouth and pointed down to the gasoline pouring
out over the wing from a ruptured fuel tank.
Two of the six men who parachuted from Rojohn's plane did not survive
the jump. But the other four and, amazingly, four men from the other
bomber, including ball turret gunner Woodall, survived. All were
taken prisoner. Several of them were interrogated at length h by the Germans
until they were satisfied that what had crashed was not a new American
secret weapon.
Rojohn, typically, didn't talk much about his Distinguished Flying Cross.
Of Leek, he said, "In all fairness to my co-pilot, he's the reason I'm alive today."
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Like so many veterans, Rojohn got back to life unsentimentally after the
war, marrying and raising a son and daughter. For many years, though, he
tried to link back up with Leek, going through government records to
try to track him down. It took him 40 years, but in 1986, he found the
number of Leek's mother, in Washington State.
Yes, her son Bill was visiting from California. Would Rojohn like to speak
with him? Two old men on a phone line, trying to pick up some familiar
timbre of youth in each other's voice. One can imagine that first
conversation between the two men who had shared that wild ride in
the cockpit of a B-17.
A year later, the two were re-united at a reunion of the 100th Bomb
Group in Long Beach, Calif. Bill Leek died the following year.
Glenn Rojohn was the last survivor of the remarkable piggyback flight.
He was like thousands upon thousands of men -- soda jerks and
lumberjacks, teachers and dentists, students and lawyers and service
station attendants and store clerks and farm boys -- who in the prime
of their lives went to war in World War II. They sometimes did
incredible things, endured awful things, and for the most part most of them
pretty much kept it to themselves and just faded back into the fabric of
civilian life.
Capt. Glenn Rojohn, AAF, died last Saturday after a long siege of illness.
But he apparently faced that final battle with the same grim aplomb he
displayed that remarkable day over Germany so long ago. Let us be
thankful for such men.
A great story. I wonder how many more stories like this one are lost each
day as members of the Greatest Generation pass on.
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excellent story
hope its true
Bill Leek & Glenn Rojohn and crew if it was
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Awesome story Daddog,thanks for the oppurtunity of reading it.
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Been posted on the BBS before. Don't know if it's real or not, but I assume it is. Still a good story. :)
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Daddog
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/obituaries/s_149049.html
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Sounds like a "too incredible to not be true" kind of things to me.
Wow.
culero
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Your right culero. Check Streams link, he nailed it.
Wow, it is true. Amazing.
Thanks Stream.
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Cool
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Also a little more detailed and direct quoted accounting at the 100thbg.com (http://www.100thbg.com/mainpages/history/history3/flatley1.htm)