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Flying Fortresses Over Germany
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14383 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1988 |
3,057 Words |
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Harry G. Summers. Jr.
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COMBAT CREW
A True Story of Flying and Fighting in World War II
John Comer
New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988
288 pp., $16.95
In the midst of a particularly heavy firefight in Vietnam, an Air Force search-and-rescue helicopter was shot down and crashed in the middle of our infantry defensive position. Because conditions were so grave the pilot, although slightly wounded, was given a rifle and put into the line. "You can keep this infantry nonsense," he proclaimed after the battle was over. "I want back up there in the air where it's safe!"
The infantrymen who heard his remarks were astounded, for they could think of no more dangerous place to be than hovering over a battlefield in an unarmed helicopter with no place to hide. Better a foxhole in which to take refuge or at least the nooks and crannies of the jungle floor than up there in the air with nothing but Plexiglas and aluminum between you and the enemy.
That incident came to mind when I read John Comer's particularly harrowing tale of his experiences as a flight engineer and top turret gunner on a B-17 "Flying Fortress" in 1943, during the height of the Eighth U.S. Air Force's bomber offensive over Europe in World War II.
And I particularly empathized with his fellow crewmember, Lt. Carl Shutting, the navigator, who refused to fly without his special armor plate beneath his feet and his armor-plated groin protector strapped in place. Anyone who has made a combat helicopter assault into enemy territory, watching enemy bullets whiz up toward him and thus been seized with an uncontrollable urge to sit on his steel helmet rather than wear it on his head, knows exactly how vulnerable he felt.
After particularly heavy losses during a raid on the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt, waist-gunner Jim Counce (later killed in another raid over Germany) says, "Think how much worse it would be if we were fighting hand to hand with bayonets." But infantrymen in World War II and Korea (and somewhat less so in Vietnam with its base camp system) had a psychological shield that those airmen did not have--the shield, strange as it may sound, of battle fatigue.
For the infantry, battle is continuous--hour after hour, day after day, putting one foot in front of the other. There's no escape from it, and after the initial psychological shock of combat, a kind of mind-numbing fatigue takes over. But Comer and his crew had to face that initial psychological shock not once but twenty-five times--the number of missions required before they could rotate to the United States. After each bout of combat in the skies over the Continent, they would return to their base at Ridgewell Airdrome in England. In comparative safety, they could relax in a "peacetime" atmosphere of warm bunks, hot food, and a nearby town with a pub in which to ease their tensions. And just when they got comfortable another mission would be called, and they would have to make the transition from peace to war all over again. The mental strain must at times have been almost unbearable.
This is a story seldom told. While there are many
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