Ball of Fire BALL OF FIRE QUARTERLY EXPRESS Newsletter of the 93rd Bombardment Group 2nd Air Division, 8th Air Force, Hardwick, England Vol. 7, No. 3 Fall, 1999 The Saga of Baggy Maggy by Richard Carrol Scott Jr. ‘The View trom the Co-pilot's Seat: Our crews story began at Peterson Field, Colorado Springs, Colorado, in early 1944, We experienced many unusual situations while getting to know the B-24 Bomber. I remember flying at 23,000 fet in a chilling temperature of 40 degrees below zero, wearing insulated clothing that warmed as well as an electric blanket, when a stray 50-caliber bullet hull from another plane burst through our two inch thick glass windshield and wound up way in the back end of our plane. It's path took it between Larry Hewin, the pilot, and me. The freezing wind filled the plane. I stuffed a rag in the hole and we landed as fast as possible. Pike's Peak and many other Rocky Mountains provided the backdrop for both the daylight and night time bombing practices. I remember another crew, our friends, whose plane hit a mountain top in the dark. No survivors. After completing overseas training, our erew attended graduation exercises, then headed to Lincoln, Nebraska for our overseas orders. We said good-bye to our families on June 30, 1944. Around 3:00 a.m. the next morning, we took offin our B-24, headed for Bangor, Maine. Around 4:00 a.m., while flying over the southern edge of Chicago, I could see a house on fire. The rest ofthe ‘crew was sleeping. I was reading a book as we flew along. Of course, the plane was on auto-pilot and needed only occasional checking. As morning brightened the sky, we were about a mile and a half high, still on our way to Bangor. The fields of Pennsylvania looked like a thick carpet had been laid over the ground. We asked the navigator, ‘Wilmer, how far out of the way we would have to 0 to see Niagara Falls. He thought we meant how far are we from the falls and said, "About 75 miles." That was too far out of the way just to see Niagara, so we continued on to Bangor. After we landed, Wilmer told us it would have been only 20 miles out of the way, which would have been okay, but it was too late now, so we laughed it off. Bad weather grounded us in Bangor for several days. We finally took off on July 4th, bound for Labrador. We flew over Canada for hours at an altitude of 8,000 feet - about I 1/2miles high. We looked down on millions of green trees, hundreds of lakes and dozens of rivers. | imagined that MAN had never set foot on many of them. ‘When we finally got to Labrador, we landed on a snow-covered runway - on the Fourth of July! We had to lay over for several days due to hazardous weather conditions. We did get to eat breakfast with the Base's Commanding General. As George Sadler said, "He's just a one star BUCK. General "I'm sure his tour of duty was lonely and this was one way the General broke the monotony. From Labrador, we flew across the water to Greenland. There were hundreds of icebergs in the ‘water and only one runway to land on, It started at the water's edge and ran uphill for about a half mile, The high end was about 200 feet higher than the low end. High mountains on both sides of the runway were too close for incoming planes tocircle around if they missed their mark, so they had better be right the first time. When it came time to leave, ‘we took off going downhill. That helped us get to flying speed in a hurry and a good thing too!2 Pres. 2ADA....Al Asch Pres, 93% BG... Fred Srombom ‘Membership... LL. Brown 6205 Meadow Court P.O. Box 646 220 Clardy Street Rockville, MD_ 20852 Ogema, WL $4459 Malvern, AR. 72104 Tel. 301 881 1376 Tel/ 715 767 461 Tel, $01 3323125 ‘Membership. Robert McKeever, 329 Rosewood Ave. 7150 Holmes Park Rd. Suite 323, Winnetka, 11 60093 Lincoln. NE_ 68506-4603 Tel. 847 446 0205 ‘Tel, 402 484 6046 ‘Any airplane still below flying speed by the time it reached the end of the runway would go right into the water. I never heard of anyone actually going. into the water. We continued down the fiord to open water, climbing all the time so we would have enough altitude to clear the 5,000 foot thick ice cap that covered all of Greenland. A million needle pointed ice spires completely covered the cap. | ‘wondered how we could land among those spires if we had trouble. Later, I heard of several planes that did have to land there. Fortunately, we did not experience any problems as we headed for Iceland, £800 miles awe Iceland is near the Arctic Circle and we encountered foul weather again. During the several nights we spent waiting for the sky to clear, we had to cover the windows of our barracks with thick curtains in order to sleep. Standing outside, in the street, I could read a newspaper at any time of the day or night without the aid of any lighting other than that of the sun. When the weather was suitable we flew to Ireland, about another thousand miles over the North Atlantic. We circled Loch Neigh, landed and kissed our new B-24 good-bye. ‘We stayed in Northern Ireland about a week. One enterprising family near our air base would hard boil their surplus chicken eggs, bring them around to the Quonset huts (our sleeping quarters), and sell them to the "Yankee" soldiers for a shilling each, about 25 cents American. They never had a problem getting rid of the eggs. I remember a little sideshow I went to, along with about a hundred other Yanks. An Irish lassie of about 16 or 17 ‘years old, dressed in native costume, demonstrated different Irish dances. Entrance fee was a couple of shillings. When the time rolled around to move on, ‘we marched down to their seaport and boarded a medium-sized ocean liner fora short trip across the Irish Sea to Edinburgh, Scotland. In Edinburgh, we boarded a train for the final leg of the journey to ‘our air bases in England. The English coaches were different from ours. On Arterican trains, a passenger has the freedom to move from one end of | ‘acar to the other and even allowed to enter the next ‘coach. Not so in England. Each car was divided 92 Historian, Caroll Stewart Newsletter Editor .Calvin Davidson 148973 Plate Rd. Oberlin, OH 44074-9619 Tel. 40.775 1787 {nto fairly small compartments, with room for eight to ten people. And there you stayed all the time the train was moving. Our crew wound up at an air base near Hardwick, England, Once there, we attended lots of ‘meetings and lectures. As a co-pilot, I was assigned to fly my first mission with a totally different crew for one time only. This crew had already flown a few missions. | figured this was to “initiate” me. ‘The target was a medium-sized airport in France. If we could drop bombs on the runways, they ‘would then be unusable for the German planes. ‘The most impressive feature of this mission happened just before we started our bomb run. The pilot, whose name I cannot recall, crossed himself in the standard Catholic manner. That awakened me to the fact that we were subject to being fired ‘on, which I hadn't fully realized. On this trip, no shots were fired, but we were just lucky. From then on our regular crew flew together. I vividly remember the next mission. It took about an hour of circling in our base's general area forall ofthe planes to get into the formation. Then, ‘we flew across the English Channel with a German oil refinery as our target. Oil was, as it is sil, the life-blood of any army. As gasoline, it fuels airplanes, trucks, cars, etc. So Hitler had his best sharpshooters surrounding the German refineries. Lots of our planes were on this mission. 1 saw more than a hundred. We were flying in a 12-ship formation at 23,000 feet. That's more than four miles straight up. ‘Our lead plane had three or four "visitors" on it, some Colonels and Majors who came along just for the ride, to see what a real air raid was like. ‘They found out the hard way! A "flack" shell hit their plane and set it on fire. The whole bomb bay ‘area was ablaze, although no bombs had exploded 4s yet. The pilot had the presence of mind to turn his plane to the right to get out of the way of the rest of us. lost sight of them after that. This called for some TALL thinking, When the normal exit is on fire, there is another exit located near the folded-up nose wheel. But, it is rather small and fairly difficult to get through. 1 don't know ifanyone made it or not. Something else to think of, that plane was about 200 feet from our plane. At four miles up, if that ground cannon's gun barrel had been 1 /100 of an inch to one side, our plane would have been the one that was hit. Such things will make a philosopher out of a person. A few minutes later we saw a B-24 in a tailspin. We watched for about a minute and then couldn't see it any more. There were hundreds and hundreds of oily yellow blobs of smoke all around us. As each shell exploded, it scattered pieces of cast iron in all directions with the intent of hitting and destroying our planes. | saw a number of our planes go down in flames. We always counted the parachutes coming from each plane so we could report to our people back in England. But we did bomb the refinery! That helped the war effort. After about a week, we were allowed to goto London for a weekend. The four officers from our crew stayed together. We saw the stage play, “Arsenic and Old Lace." It was pretty good. We had dinner in a downtown restaurant. While we were there, a siren sounded. That meant a "buzz bomb" had gotten through the coastal defenses and ‘was headed for London, When we heard the siren, ‘we all jumped up from the table, ready to hunt for a bomb shelter. We looked around but no one else ‘was paying any attention. We sat back down, finished our meal, and finally heard the buzz bomb off in the distance. I don't know where it hit, but it ‘wasn't near us. ‘We spent that night on the top floor (4th) of a little hotel. Because of a shortage of space, we had to sleep two to a bed. About 4:00 am., Wilmer poked me ‘in the side to wake me up. He said, "Scotty, listen!" Off in the distance we could hear what sounded like a motorcycle. After a moment, the sound stopped. About five seconds later, we heard the thousand pound bomb explode. Soon, there was another, then another. We heard one that sounded like it was headed straight for us. We held ‘our breath. Fortunately, it flew right over our hotel and was still going when we could no longer hear it. Buzz bombs are designed to run and fly until the fucl is exhausted. Then, they tip over and head for ‘the ground. It is random shooting and thousands of Londoners were killed or injured by the bombs. One of our missions was to bomb Nazi factories in France. Our plane was one of several dozen and we were past the coastline when we noticed a small stream of oil leaking out of the ‘number 3 engine. We watched both the oil stream and the oil pressure gauge and sure enough the 3 pressure on 3 started dropping, which meant we had lost one of our four engines. By this time, we ‘were somewhere in the middle of occupied France. Larry feathered the propeller to reduce the drag on the remaining three engines, but even though we revved up the other three, we soon began to drop behind. Very soon we had no choice but to turn around and try to make it back to our base, approximately 150 miles away. And, we were all by ourselves. We scanned the area for German planes, ‘whose pilots would delight in having such an easy target. After about five minutes one of our crew called on the intercom and said “fighter plane at six o'clock.” I remembered the P-51 looked like the German FW-109 from the front. I told our gunners to clear their guns and make sure they were ready to fire instantly. After a scary five minutes, the fighter plane closed in enough for us to see it was an American P-51 After heaving a huge collective sigh of relief, we asked him to escort us back to the channel, which of course he did. Then, we thanked him and continued back to our base while he returned to his. in Southern France. By the middle of September, 1944 we had gone on five bombing raids. Some ‘were to damage runways on French airports s0 the Germans couldn't use them and some were to bomb Hitler's very important oil refineries. ‘Then our 409th Squadron was temporarily taken off bombing raids. Paris had been retaken from the Germans. The train rails were left in mangled condition. A million people in Paris were without food. We flew to Liverpool, in the south of England, to pick up a large number of flour-filled sacks (300 pounds each) and transport them to Orleans, France, where they were transferred to army trucks. The trucks drove the flour approximately forty miles to Paris and distributed it to the people to sustain them until the railroads ‘could be repaired. In transit we flew over the beaches where the June 6 D-Day Invasion had taken place. We saw burned out villages, destroyed tanks and trucks, ‘crashed glider transports, ec. In September, 1944 100 days after D-Day, the war in Europe seemed all but over. British and American forces had dashed across France and Belgium and German defenses were collapsing everywhere, The Allied Commanders felt that one bold thrust could open the way to Berlin and end the fighting. "Operation ‘Market Garden” was the brain-child of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, Britain's favorite