Bomber Pilot Read online

  Captain Philip Ardery

  Bomber Pilot

  A Memoir of World War II

  BY PHILIP ARDERY

  The University Press of Kentucky

  To the officers and men

  of the 564th Bomb Squadron,

  the 389th Bomb Group,

  and the Second Combat Wing.

  Copyright © 1978 by The University Press of Kentucky

  The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Murray State University,

  Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-0866-7 (pbk: acid-free paper)

  This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of American University Presses

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: On the Shoulders of the Dead

  1 The Gadget

  2 The Merry-Go-Round

  3 Ted's Flying Circus

  4 Ploesti and the Circus Ends

  5 The Air War of Western Europe

  6 The Wing

  7 Something to Believe In

  Index

  Illustrations

  Foreword

  A man who goes to war takes part in an event which the merger of national effort and individual experience makes more profound than any other he may ever know. His nation may rise or fall and, if he sees combat, his own life is at stake. The awesome spectacle, the horror, the pain, the heroism, and the cowardice are etched in his mind. For some, these leave more grievous wounds than those which scar the body. While many might suppress their memories or select only the easier, lighter moments to recall, other survivors feel compelled to tell what they saw—to describe those moments of intensity so starkly different from the ordinary course of events.

  In American history, the combination of a high level of literacy and an interest in the common man has resulted in a wealth of soldier accounts from the Civil War to the present. The fact that newly discovered Civil War diaries appear in print at a time when the first wave of Vietnam memoirs are coming out shows the continuing interest in what those who fought have to say.

  There are World War II memoirs which have set a high standard. Among them the reminiscences of two infantry officers (Charles MacDonald, Company Commander, and Harold Bond, Return to Cassino) and that of a B-17 Fortress co-pilot Bert Stiles whose Serenade to the Big Bird was published after his death in the air war over Europe. Although not intended as a memoir, J. Glenn Gray's beautiful philosophic study The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle includes letters, journal notes, and fragments of memory of his service with infantry divisions in Europe. His emphasis, however, is on the universal rather than the individual experience.

  Philip Ardery's account belongs in this group of first-rate books. Older and better educated than most who fought, he possesses a fortunate combination of sensitivity and maturity as well as a talent for writing. From the beginning of flight training in 1940 through the several schools as student and instructor to the end of his combat tour in 1944, he describes not only the actions but also the sensations he experienced. As a B-24 squadron commander, then group and later wing operations officer in the Eighth Air Force, he was in the midst of the great bomber offensive. He went on the famous Ploesti raid and flew over the great D-day armada. After the former he remembered: “The sky was a bedlam of bombers flying in all directions, some actually on fire, many with smoking engines, some with great gaping holes in them or huge chunks of wing or rudder gone.” And he cannot forget: “The noise a bomber pilot hears…. The horrible screaming…of the enemy radio jamming apparatus. It is like the death cry of the banshees of all the ages.” He saw some friends die in flames and others lose “the youthful facade which tears so easily in combat.” He describes the effects of fear and how he mastered it for, as he put it, “no matter how fast things happened, I always had time to get scared.” Off duty he moved in a select circle. He knew Edward R. Murrow and talked with T. S. Eliot and Harold Laski. There are brief characterizations of them and of his fellow pilots—Jimmy Stewart among them.

  This is a book which answers well the comprehensive question—what was it like? It is also a fascinating story. I have never met Philip Ardery but I feel as if I know him after reading these pages. And he is, to use an old fashioned term, a worthy.

  EDWARD M. COFFMAN, Professor of History

  University of Wisconsin at Madison

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the patience and constructive assistance of the following, who read the manuscript and made suggestions: Robert Ardrey, Mr. and Mrs. William B. Ardery, Robert A. Thornbury, Joy Bale Boone, John Ed Pearce, and Alan U. Schwartz.

  Brigadier General H. J. Dalton, Jr., and the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force/Office of Information have been very helpful.

  Prologue: On the Shoulders of the Dead

  It was the early spring of 1944 and I had just completed a combat tour of heavy bombardment missions. I was a wing operations officer. I was standing on the control tower of one of the airdromes in our wing in East Anglia near Norwich waiting for the ships to return from a mission. There was a haze in the air which made visibility very poor, and a combat wing of B-24s (Liberators) was flying over. (The Liberators and the B-17 Flying Fortresses were America's heavy bombers in the European theater.) This was a new wing practicing formation flying with a full complement of bombs and fuel, getting ready for its first encounter with the enemy.

  The formation, constituted of three groups flying together, numbered about forty-five heavy bombers. It was extremely compact; the whole occupied less space than some single groups I'd seen. As it flew over, several officers standing with me in the control tower commented. “They're flying closer than the B-17s do,” said one. “They can't do that. No Lib outfits have been able to do it. They'll make our wing look sick if they go into combat flying that way.”

  “Don't worry,” said another. “As soon as they hit any rough going they'll start running into each other and blowing up. Look at that leader of the low left element of the lead squadron jockeying his position in and out. He's too close for comfort and he knows it. You can tell it to look at him. So is the rest of the formation.”

  The sentence was hardly out when we saw a formation of Flying Fortresses nosing through the haze from the east, returning from a mission. The big bunch of Libs was flying north and it was apparent that neither formation leader saw the other until they were about to meet over the field. The formation of Fortresses was slightly smaller and a little looser than the Libs. It was also flying a little lower. They were almost above us when an officer standing beside me shouted, “Watch out!” All heads turned up. Two WACs right in front of me leaned against the tower rail. At that moment apparently the Fortress leader saw himself running a collision course with the other unit;
he dived his formation earthward.

  The leader of the Libs was hard put to do anything, for his large, tight formation was unwieldy. The purpose of such formations is for the guns of the planes to provide mutual support against enemy fighter attacks. But when that many airplanes fly that close the leader has to be extremely careful not to make any erratic movements. The Liberators’ leader tried to climb his formation a little and turn it slightly to the right. It was evident that the pilots of a number of ships in his formation saw the Forts about the same time he did and individually tried to avoid them. That must have been the cause of the tragedy.

  One Liberator pulled up to one side and too close under another. The wings of the two airplanes touched and crumpled; for an instant neither plane seemed to change its direction of flight. Then the wings began to come off both ships. All the other airplanes in the immediate vicinity began getting out regardless of formation. Suddenly a flame shot up. The two bombers were right up against each other now and coming apart. Another instant and that whole part of the sky was aflame as the gasoline and bombs exploded. One big fire gently descended. Falling from it could be seen engines, props, wheels, bits of wings, and some bundles that might have been men.

  The collision occurred at about eight thousand feet almost directly over the field. By the time the fire reached the ground there was almost nothing left. The few bits that had not been consumed had fallen clear of the flames. Where the collision had occurred the sky was black with smoke. Bombers, both B-17s and B-24s, were still flying out of the cloud headed in all directions.

  And as I looked back into the sky I saw one lone parachute coming down. It looked too small to carry a man suspended from it. I found later that the chute carried a portable dinghy radio used in air-sea rescue. It landed without a scratch.

  One of the WACs leaning on the rail looked like she was about to vomit. The other had no expression at all. They had just seen twenty men killed and they knew as I did that the only way any member of those crews could be identified would be by checking the fillings of his teeth.

  I was sick too, but not at my stomach. Here were twenty men, trained arduously for years, who had at last reached the combat zone and who would never help their country. Could the others of their wing have succeeded without the loss of them? Was such an incident essential to the hardening and forming of a combat unit? I recalled that our group had also had a fatal accident nearby while we were getting ready for combat. And I knew of one group that lost two squadron commanders in midair collisions before it became operational.

  I had flown all the combat the Air Corps required for the time being. I had flown inches above the chimneys of the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania. I had been over the guns of Berlin on a bright day when Berlin raids were at their worst. I had attacked Norway, Austria, Crete, Italy, France, Belgium, Sicily, Holland, and practically every other country where there was a target to be found in our war on Nazis and Fascists. I wondered how many of my class at pilot training school were still alive. I thought of those who stood naked in line with me at Fort Knox in September, 1940, to take the physical exam for pilot training. How many were now living graduate pilots?

  Behind that I thought about Frankfort, Kentucky, where I had practiced law from 1938 to 1940.1 thought of Bill Young, a neophyte lawyer with me in Frankfort who won wings more than a year after I did. He had already been shot down in Germany and reported a prisoner of war. And so of the two members of the Franklin County Bar who eventually became pilots in the Air Corps it seemed I had drawn 100 percent of the luck.

  1

  The Gadget

  In the summer of 1940 I was a lawyer in active practice, twenty-six years old, two years out of Harvard Law School, and five years out of the University of Kentucky. My parents’ home was in Bourbon County, just outside of Paris, Kentucky, on the road to Lexington. That was where I had lived most of my life. I went some forty miles west of my home to Frankfort to hang out my shingle. I chose Frankfort because it was nearby, it was a small town, it was the state capital, filled with politics, and at that time it didn't seem quite so overcrowded with lawyers as other small towns in the Bluegrass. I had almost no clients for six months. But things slowly began to change, until by that summer of 1940 I had quite a practice. It was about three-fourths charitable, but quantitatively it stood fair comparison to the practices of several other lawyers in town.

  I was a reserve officer on the active list and had been presented with orders to attend the Second Army maneuvers in Wisconsin. I had received a commission as a second lieutenant, Infantry Reserve, along with my bachelor of arts degree from the University of Kentucky in 1935. I had kept up my training and in the summer of 1940 was a first lieutenant. I was young, healthy, and unmarried, and in the forefront of those called to the maneuvers. It was evident America was perking up a bit to the sounds of war in Europe. France had fallen that spring. In about a month the air blitz of London would begin.

  And so I went to Wisconsin in July. It rained every day except one during the maneuvers. The confusion and general awkwardness of our war machine just beginning to unlimber itself were frustrating. Beer cans were used as simulated mortar ammunition and stovepipes as simulated mortars. During the height of maneuvers trucks dashed about carrying signs which read TANK or PROPELLED GUN. We sat in the mud and rain not knowing whether the spectacle was tragic or funny. In the downpour of rain beans floated over the side of my messkit before I could eat them. Between battle problems I tried futilely to rest on a cot in my one-man pup tent. The level of water almost reached the point where I lay, and more water dripped dismally from the roof. I blamed what I didn't like about those maneuvers on the Infantry.

  I had always wanted to fly. A friend who owned a Cub airplane had been trying to sell me flying lessons for a long time. I didn't have the time or the money for flying lessons, and so I had declined. Now it crept into the back of my mind that I might learn to fly at government expense and at the same time break clear of the Infantry. In war the men of the Air Corps got back to warm beds and hot meals, if they got back at all. The men of the Air Corps didn't have to stand out in the rain all day counting the beans that floated out of their messkits. The men of the Air Corps stood around big open fireplaces singing, with glasses in their hands, and when they stopped singing they turned and broke their glasses in the fire. I was twenty-six and the age limit for student pilots was twenty-seven. I wrote out my application for pilot training and sent it off.

  When I got home from maneuvers I found a letter notifying me to come to Fort Knox to take a physical exam for the Air Corps. I took the exam immediately and returned to Frankfort. I was trying to get ready for the September term of Circuit Court, and at the same time trying to visualize what it might be like to cover the shingle for a couple of years and be off to the Air Corps. Everything seemed a maze of important detail until two weeks later when the news came that I had passed the physical and would soon receive assignment to a class in flight training. I scurried around making an effort to leave the affairs of my clients in proper hands.

  Within an hour of the time the mail arrived bearing the notice ordering me to flight training I was packing my Ford convertible. My orders were to report to Fort Knox for induction and then to Lincoln, Nebraska, for primary flying school. I would miss Frankfort, but I hoped I would soon be coming back to take up where I had left off when I might be secure in the knowledge that I could concentrate the rest of my life on law.

  I took my belongings to the home of my parents. Mother was away at the time visiting her sister in Virginia, which gave me a pang of conscience about her. I hadn't told her I was hoping to go into the Air Corps because I had felt there was such a strong chance I would be rejected. Now I realized it was a bad conclusion. My father was surprised. “There are some hazards a man can't escape,” I told him. “I have a commission and I must choose what I want now or lose my chance to choose.” He nodded sadly but understandingly and waved as I got in the car and drove off.

>   I arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, on a Friday night. It was a fairly large town, comparable to Louisville but newer and laid out in a more orderly fashion on ground as flat as the country around it. I questioned a policeman and was directed to a small building on the edge of town toward Omaha. It was a house currently rented by the Lincoln Airplane and Flying School, a private institution conducting primary flight training under contract to the Air Corps. I went in and found a bed. I was delighted to discover that the upper-class cadets lived downtown in the YMCA, so I would not see much of them except at the flying line.

  Next day I woke early, dressed and breakfasted, and was first in line waiting for the bus to take us to the field. Already I could see I was going to like the life of a flying cadet. The meals were good, the beds were soft, we even had maid service to give us the same freedom from chores that we might expect as officers. I was quite conscious of the fact that I was no longer a first lieutenant Infantry, but a flying cadet. As such my status was that of an enlisted private.

  Our airport's huddle of buildings appeared to be temporary structures. The big hangar had Lincoln Airplane and Flying School painted across the top of its doors. That morning as we drove up, what first caught our attention was the line of parked airplanes. They were brilliantly painted Stearman PT13As. There must have been twelve or fifteen of them lined up wingtip to wingtip on the ramp facing the hangar. They were two-seater biplanes with yellow wings and blue fuselages and looked as warlike as anything I had ever seen outside of the movies. I walked up to the end airplane. It had a big Lycoming radial engine which I had been told developed 225 horsepower and it obviously weighed three times as much as the Cub I knew back in Kentucky. Just as I was inspecting the ship, the upperclassmen came piling out of the flight room donning their flying gear. They scattered themselves among the planes and in a moment engines were sputtering and props were sending little whirlwinds of dust back under the wings.