Jacob Thomson Official Website

The view from the bombardier's position in the nose of a B-17 is fantastic. I first noticed this a few years ago, when someone brought a couple of old bombers to town and, for a price, took people for a ride. There was a B-17 and a B-24, both sitting there at the old airport. I'd never been up in a Liberator, and was naturally tempted to do so, but in the end nostalgia won out and I went up in the Flying Fortress instead.

How could I do otherwise? Not only was it the same type aircraft in which I'd flown over Germany during the war, but it was taking off from the same former Army Airbase where I'd taken a lot of my training.

I naturally mentioned this to the guys operating the planes, and they let me fly in my old position. The view, as I said, was fantastic. Curiously, I'd never noticed it before, which I thought was a little odd, since I'd certainly seen some of the same things—though with a lot fewer houses and building—back in 1942. The airfield was well south of town in those days; now it's more or less in the middle of things, which is why they built a new one a few years ago.

I suppose it was the context. When I was first here, there was hardly time for sightseeing. We were learning to be bombardiers or gunners, not tourists. And once I was assigned to an active bomber flying out of England, well, most of what you'd see through the plexiglass nose was either something you were trying to blow up, or something that was trying to kill you.

I'm sure there was some nice scenery to be seen flying over continental Europe, but the flak and enemy fighters tended to keep you a little preoccupied.

In the Eighth Air Force, the ultimate goal was 25 missions. If you made it that far you got to go home, where you would be put to work selling bonds, or training new aircrew. It doesn't seem like all that many at first. In theory, I suppose you could do all 25 missions within a couple of months. In practice, it took a lot longer. We didn't fly every day, after all. Sometimes you took off, but had to return without dropping your bombs because of engine trouble. All in all, it took us 16 months.

And that was the problem. The mission requirements and the loss rate tended to meet somewhere in the middle. The odds were against making it all the way. Some planes did. We did. Or, at least, seven of us did. And some of us didn't go home at all.

Our pilot called us "my crew." For the rest of us, we were "our crew," and that designation included the pilot. That was a difference. For the pilot it was "my" and for the rest of us "our." It was his plane, after all. It was his signature on the inventory card and, at least in theory, if he broke it they could make him pay for it.

Some of us stayed the same, others didn't. The pilot and co-pilot, the bombardier (me), our navigator, radio operator, flight engineer, and ball turret gunner, we all remained the same from the time the crew was formed and assigned to our plane. The two waist gunners and the tail gunner changed.

Our original tail gunner was replaced after the 12th mission, and we got a new right waist gunner following mission 18. His replacement was killed on the next mission, before we really had a chance to get to know him. Our left waist gunner was with us until Mission 23, and his loss hit everyone particularly hard, not only because by then there were only two more missions to go, but also because we didn't know his fate.

Our original tail and right waist gunners had been wounded, bad enough for a ticket home, but not bad enough that they would be seriously inconvenienced later in life. We missed them, naturally, but we knew they'd be okay in the long run.

The first replacement right waist gunner was missed, but not as much. As I said, we just didn't know him that long. He was a member of our crew for less than a week.

But when our left waist gunner was hit by a shell from a FW-190, it wasn't a minor wound. The explosive shell nearly took off his left leg. About all we could do for him was tie a tourniquet around his leg above the gaping wound, put him in his parachute, and shove him out of the plane over Wilhelmshaven. The last we saw of him was as his parachute opened. There were still fighters around, as well as flak, and no one had time to watch him as he descended. We weren't really worried about someone shooting him in his parachute on the way down. That didn't happen nearly as often as some stories would have you think, and most of the time it probably wasn't deliberate—just a case of winding up in the middle of a battle and catching a stray bullet. All we could do was hope the Germans would find him quickly and get him to a hospital.

As it turned out, they did. We didn't find out until about a month later, when word made it back through the Swiss Red Cross. He lost the leg, but he survived the war. The last I heard he was still living in Chicago.

Our final mission was supposed to be a milk run. No one believed it. Once we found out where we were going, we recognized that it would be easier to fly to St. Nazaire, drop our bombs on the U-Boat pens there, and make a quick run back across Biscay than to fly a mission to Berlin, but planes were lost on short missions, too. It wasn't how far you had to fly, after all, so much as how good the enemy fighter pilots happened to be that day, how accurate their flak gunners might be, and, even more, if you were lucky. You could as easily die from an accident as from enemy action.

As we prepared for our 23rd mission, the one where we lost our left waist gunner, another plane, situated halfway across the field, simply vanished as her entire bomb load went up at once. She took five other planes with her, though fortunately the other planes were lost from blast damage from the first plane and their own bombs didn't go up. More men were killed in that accident than on the actual raid.

Now, as we prepared for the final mission we would fly as a crew before returning to the States, it was hard for me not think of that explosion. It came with my job. I was squatting on the narrow catwalk inside the bomb bay, installing the fuses with the help of a tech sergeant armorer, which was precisely what had been going on when the other bomber blew up. It was a touchy job. The bombs were pretty much just big chunks of inert metal, despite being stuffed with high explosive, until the fuses were inserted and tightened. One went in the nose, another in the tail. Redundancy meant there was a second chance; if one fuse failed to function on impact, the other could still set off the bomb. In this case, the nose fuse was set to detonate nearly instantaneously, 1/10 second, and the tail fuse had a 45 second delay.

The arming job went on in silence, both of us concentrating very hard on what we were doing. The rest of the ground crew was keeping a respectful distance. If the plane blew up they'd still all go with it, but there's some psychological reassurance in standing back and watching from a distance and, in any case, for the most part their jobs were done until the plane returned. As for me, I didn't worry about it that much. I hadn't managed to blow up anything except a target so far and, when you considered it, the odds were pretty good that I wouldn't do it this day, either.

Once the bombs were armed, the sergeant departed and the bomb bay doors were closed. I went forward, taking my place in the nose. It was going to be an uncomfortable ride, as it always was. In retrospect, it's perhaps a bit surprising how little thought Boeing had given to crew safety during flight. Not protection from the enemy, but protection from the plane itself. Only the captain and co-pilot had seat belts and shoulder harnesses. For everyone else it was just hang on as best you can. On my recent jaunt, all of the passengers were properly strapped into seats for takeoff and landing, allowed to move about the plane only after she reached her cruising altitude. In combat, you flew at your position and just held on.

Once all the pre-flight checks were satisfactorily completed, we settled in to wait. Some days that wait lasted an eternity, and was followed by the anti-climax of a cancelled mission. Today it lasted only half an hour before the signal to start engines was given.

One by one, the four big Wright engines turned over and roared to life. This was the point where we might be given a reprieve. It had happened before, five times, when an engine had either refused to start, or wouldn't run properly. Those times we had stayed behind while the mechanics went to work on the engine. But this time they all ran smoothly, and after another brief wait our plane began to move.

I was always relieved once the takeoff run was completed and we were actually in the air. Runways are never more than a transitional area, and airplanes belong in the air, not bouncing along the ground at an ever-increasing speed as they try to get there. With the wheels up the ride smoothed out, though it would never be as smooth as a commericial airliner. Even if the air is perfectly smooth, a couple hundred big four-engined bombers flying in formation create more than enough turbulence.

The Forts, at least, were good fliers.

We joined up and the formation headed for the target. Since we were only going as far as the French coast, it would be a relatively short mission, most of it over water. Flying over water had both good and bad aspects. The good part was that flak would be limited to the time actually over the target, as there was no really practical way to position the guns in the sea. The bad part was that, if you went down, your chances of surviving were much worse than over land, where you at least wouldn't have to worry about drowning.

We crossed the English coast at 0837. Flying time to the target from that point should be 49 minutes. During the majority of the flight, the pilot would fly the plane. That was what the Army paid him to do. But the final few minutes as we made the run in to the target the plane would be on auto pilot, which was under my control, not the pilot's. The actual bomb run was always the worst part. In order to get the bombs on target, the plane had to fly straight and level on a precise course over the target.

Now, when I say over the target, I don't mean the plane would have to fly directly over the target. The bombs were dropped well before we crossed over the target, momentum carrying them forward in a curving path toward the earth. Once they were gone, the plane's course would have no further effect on their trajectory and we could start dodging. Until they were gone, it didn't matter what the enemy threw at us, be it clouds of flak or swarms of fighters, for we could not alter course even slightly if we expected our bombs to hit.

The story was that our Norden bombsight was so accurate that it could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. I never came close to that sort of accuracy, and I doubt anyone else did, either. Hitting something that small from that high didn't really become practical until laser guided bombs came along years later. I figured I could put our load into a football field, though, which was good enough for the time. We didn't rely on real precision. We just dumped several tons of bombs in as tight a pattern as possible and hoped for the best.

Our flight path took us southwest initially, staying well offshore as we rounded the French coast. The idea was to stay out of range of artillery and, with luck, avoid notice by German fighter forces until we turned east and ran in to the target from the Bay of Biscay. The shortest route would have been almost due south, but that required flying over France and gave the enemy a lot more time to cause a fuss. The Germans had fairly effective air warning radar, and a flight of 60 B-17s makes a pretty big target.

A direct route would also have taken us over other strongly-defended targets. If we had no intention of bombing Brest, there was no point in risking the planes by flying through its defenses.

The sky was clear as we turned east for the run in to the target. There would be no place to hide on this trip. Ceiling and visibility were both unlimited, making conditions ideal for accurate bombing. Unfortunately, it also meant conditions were ideal for the German fighters and flak gunners.

To be honest, my idea of perfect conditions were thick clouds with an opening directly above the target just large enough to make the bomb run.

Ten minutes later the French coast was in sight. The formation made a minor course correction, and I prepared to take over for the bomb run. Two minutes out the pilot handed off control. This was the hard part. The plane would have to fly dead steady for the next two or three minutes or the bombs would miss.

By now, the Germans had noticed we were there. The clear sky ahead blossomed with hundreds of red flashes, instantly resolving themselves into cottony puffs of smoke. They looked harmless enough from a distance, but the clouds of smoke were filled with shards of jagged steel that could rip a plane to pieces. It wasn't even necessary for the flak shell to explode close to the plane. Simply flying through the falling shell fragments could take out an engine or rip through the cockpit and kill the flight crew.

We had done these missions before, so it was hard not to wonder if we were really accomplishing anything. The primary targets were the U-boat pens, and each plane carried a full bomb load, six big thousand-pound bombs. But the U-boat pen roofs were solid, reinforced concrete, 23 feet thick. A thousand-pound bomb would hardly make a dent in that. Our only hope, really, was to drop as many bombs as possible in the same spot and hope the combined detonations would be enough to bring down the roof.

So far, they hadn't been. The British were working on special bombs, and we had some hope they would work. As for our efforts, you had to wonder if we were being much more than a nuisance. Unless we happened to catch a U-boat in the open there wasn't that much we could do to destroy it.

The plane was jumping now, as the flak bursts drew closer. The German gunners clearly had our altitude and there wasn't a damned thing we could do about it until the bombs were dropped.

The nose compartment was suddenly bathed in a dappled glow as a bursting shell shredded the skin on the port side. I felt something grab at my thick jacket. But I was lucky. The shell fragment had torn a long rip in the heavy leather as it shot across my back, but hadn't penetrated.

I bent over the bombsight again, watching as the target crawled into the crosshairs. Only a few more seconds now. Then, "Bombs away!"

The plane jumped upward as 6,000 pounds of ordnance dropped from the bomb bay and started down toward the U-boat pen.

"Pilot's plane," came over the intercom.

It took just over a minute for all of the planes to drop their bombs. After that, the formation turned northwest, heading back out to sea. As we emerged from the cloud of flak, the fighters roared in. Every gun in the formation opened up at once.

Our bombs gone, I grabbed the nose-mounted .50-caliber machine-gun and swung it toward an oncoming Messerschmidt. That was a favorite tactic of the German fighters, to come in from dead ahead, where our armament was weakest and the guns were manned by the bombardier and navigator, who might well be preoccuppied with other things. It was a weakness that would be fixed with the addition of a remote controlled chin turret mounting a pair of .50-caliber machine-guns.

We didn't have the chin turret, so our ability to respond to an oncoming enemy was considerably less than with later models. The machine-gun bucked in my hands as I opened fire. In this situation it was really a question of who would flinch first, or who would kill the other.

The German fighter dove under our nose. I did my best to put a burst into his engine or cockpit, but I could see the tracers missing to one side. A few rounds certainly went into his wing, but there was no way to tell if I'd done any real damage.

For the next quarter hour the fighters chased our formation away from the coast. The crew kept up a constant chatter, one report following another, as they fired at the pursuing Messerschmidts and Focke-Wulfs. There were only two things that mattered now. One was keeping the enemy fighters at bay, and the other was staying with the formation. As heavily armed as a B-17 might be, it was still a big, relatively slow target for a fighter once separated from the supporting fire of the formation.

No more fighters attacked from ahead, but the navigator and I kept up our vigilance. It only took one fighter slipping in at the wrong time and we'd be dead. Now, with the bombs gone and the planes on the way home, the risk seemed that much greater. Many raids had lost more planes on the way back from the target, so there was never a time when you could really relax. That would have to wait until the plane had landed.

And then we were in the clear. The fighters had turned back, and the bombers lumbered on, our formation still mostly intact. Sixty planes had started out on the raid, and fifty-four were coming back. I still wasn't ready to declare us safe, though. We would be within range of German fighters for at least the next half hour. Our immediate pursuers had gone, probably low on fuel, but that didn't mean they couldn't send fresh planes after us.

For that matter, there was nothing to stop the Germans from sending out fresh fighters as we approached the English coastline. We would be back in range of German airbases in northern France at that time. And, if not fighters, they could try to send a bombing raid against the airfields as we came in to land.

We were sweating all the way back. I was, at least. And I don't suppose anyone else felt any more complacent. If we made it back, we'd get to go home. But we hadn't made it yet.

Finally, a little more than three hours after taking off, our pilot eased the plane down onto the runway. Even then I wasn't quite ready to relax. Knowing we had survived, there was still a sense of unease. The enemy bombers could still come in the night. Something could happen on the way home. And, of course, after we finished our rotation back to training duty in the States, there was always the chance they'd send us right back here.

But, for the moment, the greatest risk was behind us. We had survived, most of us, and it was time to go home, sell war bonds, and hope for the best.