Rough Landing in a B-24

During the Second World War my father was a crewman on a B-24 bomber, flying from RAF Addlebridge in Norfolk, England. The following is from a recording my mother made of him in the late 1970s, speaking with his sister and brother-in-law:

As I remember it was the 8^th of February, 1945. It was my 24^th mission. I don’t remember the target except that it was in Germany. We had been flying missions over France but this one was in Germany, I remember, because we flew over the North Sea. And coming back, we were out on the North Sea and I noticed the flight engineer, it seemed he had a little more trouble than usual. He was hopping around there and he kept hopping faster, and faster. I finally asked him what was the matter, and well, he was having a little trouble with fuel transfer.

On those bombers they had what they called the main tanks in the wings, and then they had the auxiliary tanks and they couldn’t feed from the auxiliary tanks into the engines. They had to transfer the fuel from the auxiliary tanks into the main tanks, and then to the engines. So his problem was that the main tanks were going empty and he couldn’t get fuel out of the auxiliary. He was scrambling around there throwing switches, and having fits. We were out over the North Sea and this was in February, of course. The North Sea is real cold all year ‘round, too cold to live in more than, they say, about 20 minutes if you’re swimming.

And it looked like we were going to have to ditch. So, we got ready to ditch, and we got to dragging it out. The pilot had the airplane in a long glide and the engines running on low power, so they could keep that altitude just as long as we could. We got down pretty low over the water and dragged it in, and by golly, we got clear over the land, got over the beach.

So then he began to think we might make it to the nearest airfield, and there was one just two or three miles in there, but we had to get into the flight pattern to land there. So he called and said it was an emergency and wanted to know if we could land going straight in. And it so happened that their planes, they didn’t have a group landing at that particular time so they gave him permission to land, flying straight in.

And he aimed for the runway and, I guess about a mile short of the runway, all four engines just quit and that thing dropped like a rock. He pushed the nose down, but it, those B-24s, they always said they could glide like a rock. And it so happened, and maybe saved us, he was able to belly in on a haystack, one of those big old round loose haystacks that they used to make there, and in this country.

The landing gear, of course, he had lowered the landing gear because he thought we were going to make it. It was torn off at the first bounce. We just slid down on the belly of that airplane. And those things land at about a hundred and twenty miles an hour, I guess. So we were doing at least that much when we hit the ground. And we went about a quarter of a mile. The most screeching sound I’ve ever heard since, that metal tearing, and filing along over that ground.

Turned the haystack over, just kind of turned it upside down. But it cushioned us. Then we hit the ground. And I can, when I think about it I can still remember how the sound of that metal screeching, over the ground, like filing a saw. And of course we traveled, I expect, a quarter of a mile on the belly of that airplane.

It’s a wonder that the top turret, that’s what happened to those things whenever they hit the ground too hard. The top turret would break loose from it’s mounts, and it would come down, and it weighed about, oh, I think they said it weighed six hundred pounds. It’d come down into the flight deck and it would kind of mess things up in there.

We finally stopped going and the nose of that airplane had settled into a duck pond. And I raised the top hatch, they had an inspection hatch there. I raised it and looked out because we couldn’t get out of the airplane any other way. The bomb bays [doors] were mashed clear up against the flight deck. That’s where you entered those B-24s, was through the bomb bays. I looked out there and I just happened to be looking the right direction, across this duck pond. And there was a woman about twenty feet away standing in her kitchen door looking at this airplane. That’s how close it came. I don’t think it was, I know it wasn’t over thirty or forty feet. I don’t believe it was more than twenty feet from her kitchen door to the nose of that airplane.

And the ice was about two inches thick on the pond. So the two of us on the flight deck, me and the Flight Engineer, we were able to walk. We climbed out that escape hatch and we ran down the wing, and jumped off on the dry ground.

And then we got to looking around. The pilot and the co-pilot, they were both out. And the pilot was conscious, but he was cut up pretty bad. He had never fastened his shoulder harness and his head had gone into the instruments. And his face was cut up real bad and I think several teeth knocked out and a broken jaw. And, I believe a shoulder was broken. I don’t know how in the world he broke a shoulder but I think it was.

But when we were skating along the ground somehow the nose of the airplane had got twisted just a little bit to the left, and it opened a crack up and down on the right hand side of the airplane, from that nose being pulled to the left. And it was right off to the co-pilot’s seat, and he didn’t have his shoulder harness fastened, and so when we stopped rolling he was hanging out by his seatbelt from his waist up. He was hanging out through this crack upside down. He was unconscious, out of his head, and he was groaning, and yelling. He didn’t know what he was doing, but that was enough to scare you, just that alone. We got back in and tried to pull him through the crack back into his seat and we just couldn’t do it. Weren’t able to do that.

The men, there was four men, no, three men, in the back, in the waist, and they’d been tossed around pretty bad but they weren’t... they were able to walk. There were five of us up front: the pilot, the co-pilot, the top turret gunner, the flight engineer, and me. And the three of us were able to walk out. And of course they had seen us at this air base where we were trying to land, they had seen us go down. And they sent ahead an ambulance out there in about, seemed like five minutes.

And we got out there and enough of us tried to lift that co-pilot out. We finally had to loosen his seat belt and pull him out through the crack in the side of the airplane. But there were so many of us standing on the ice that the ice broke and there we went down to our knees in the water, that ice water, more, I guess, above our knees. And we had to reach up over our heads and lift his body, and pull it out through that crack and he was bleeding all over us from his head and his face where he’d gone into the instrument panel.

The pilot, he never did loose consciousness, he just sat there. He would answer if you spoke to him, he would mumble something to you. And we got him out. He was hurt the worst. I think, yeah, he had a broken leg, somehow. He got a broken leg out of it too, because I remember him being on crutches later.

We never did know for sure what, why we couldn’t get the gasoline out of those auxiliary tanks. There were several theories. One was the fuse to the auxiliary line was blown. Another one was that they’d got some moisture in the pump and it froze at high altitude. And… different theories. We never did know because they just dragged the airplane out to the junkyard. We never did examine it. That’s the way it was in war time.

Did the farmers say anything to you?

The last thing I remember when we was leaving there in the ambulance, those farmers, there were three or four farmers out there putting that haystack back together. They had to get it back together quick ‘cause it rains all the time there.

You told me once you were late getting back from a mission and the guys had divided up your stuff.

Yeah, that was that time. They kept us all night in that dispensary on that base where we were taken by ambulance. Of course I guess back at the base they didn’t know about it. Well, I guess the officers, the commander knew about it, the base commander, but none of the enlisted men in the barracks knew about it. And they cleaned us out. When I got back I didn’t have a mess kit, or a fountain pen. I think I lost a pair of shoes and all my socks, and a coat.

Did you ever get any of it back?

I never got any of it back. They thought I had it coming I guess.

You were sure fortunate. Where are your pictures? ....And there’s the duck pond.

There’s the duck pond, and this house, it just stood back here, it just seemed like to me like twenty or thirty feet, just right back here.

And I see you only had one wing.

Yeah, we dragged that wing off. I think it come along with us but it was broken clear off there when we stopped. There’s the crack the co-pilot was taken out through.

You see that pile of clothes there? That was my outer coat. That escape hatch, there it is. I climbed up through that, went out on this wing and jumped off, and I peeled off my clothes, my Mae West and my parachute harness, and other stuff that was so bulky. I piled it there. And then I climbed back out on this bloomin’ ice, see, to try to help the co-pilot. I tried to get him to sit up in his seat. Well, he wouldn’t do it, in fact he would fight us when we tried to push him back. And so finally, we got enough help, we just unloaded him and dragged him out through that crack.

[The "pile of clothes" is near the top right of the shadow. The top hatch is immediately in front of the turret dome.]

How many missions did you have to go on after that?

One more. That was back when they were releasing them after twenty five missions. So I was called to fly with another man to finish my twenty five, that was sometime in the month of February, and I was home in March. I got my last mission and within days I was gone from there.

Did it scare you to go out again?

It kind of bothered me, that last one. I didn’t feel very comfortable.

You were the radio man, right?

I was the radio operator.

Were you fastened in?

No, I was up front. I really had an eye on things after I knew what was going on. The radio operator had a... he sat facing forward. He had a table with a leaf about that wide that you could write on, and the radio sat up in front. You would tune your radios and sit there and scribble on this table. The table flipped up when it wasn’t in use, give you a little more room.

So when I heard those engines stop and we began to drop, I knew what was coming and I just flipped that table up and I stood up out of my seat and turned my back to the radio. And when we hit I guess I was the only one who didn’t get a bruise of some kind. The rest of them [in the back] got thrown around pretty bad. Nothing serious but they were really bruised or beat up. And I never got a bruise out of it.