 Then came our seventh mission, January 11, 1944, a target named ‘Oschersleben’, located deep in the heart of Germany. The target, as I remember, was an aircraft factory where FW-190s were assembled. The 1st Division, 8th Air Force, was leading, and the 91st BG was out in front of everybody. We were relegated to ‘Purple Heart Corner’, low/low squadron. As it turned out, for some reason never made clear to me, the 2nd and 3rd Divisions were recalled. The 91st, being in the lead and some minutes from the target area, elected to slog on through. The enemy fighters started moving on up towards the lead planes. Our ‘little friends’ had been recalled as well, so we were left to ourselves. The plane we were flying was a new B-17G model with a chin turret, and I was quite busy looking for head-on attacks. One fighter started in and I managed to get off three or four bursts, when my gun jammed. There is no more helpless feeling than to look at fighters coming in at 12 o’clock, and all you can do is watch the little blinking lights from the leading edge of the wings, and pray someone else can get him. We were rapidly losing bombers to the point that our crew was suddenly flying on the left wing of the group lead. We turned on the bomb run and lost an engine to the point we had to feather the prop and shut down the engine. We did manage to keep our position in the formation until after ‘bombs away’. The turn off the target was to the right, and we started losing enough power to where we couldn’t maintain formation. It was then that the decision was made to descend to lower cloud cover and ‘skeedaddle’ for home. We arrived at an altitude between two and three thousand feet and ducked in and out of the clouds, ducking under the clouds only long enough to pick up a navigation check point. Our Navigator, Buck Hawkins, did an outstanding job of navigating us past the flak guns and across the channel to a B-24 base at Heathel. Needless to say, we were exhausted from the whole ordeal, and glad to get back to base the next day after our aircraft was repaired. One interesting note is that a P-51 pilot, Major James H. Howard, (356th FS, 354th FG), stayed with the bombers and took on 30 plus German fighters by himself for some 30 minutes, destroying four planes on the mission and damaging many others. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his exploits.”
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“I have been asked many times what it was like flying in the nose of a B-17 bomber. In my humble opinion, the Bombardier had the best seat in the airplane. This was true only of the B-17. There were many other bombers where the nose was cramped and not very comfortable. I’m speaking about the bombers I saw that were equipped with the Sperry Bombsight versus the Norden Bombsight. The one thing I could never understand was a Bombardier on a B-17 who missed the opportunity to take-off or land while riding in the nose. With rare exception, I made every take-off and landing in the nose. That was half the fun of flying. There was something about the rush down the runway and the lift-off with the ground slipping away from you that was breathtaking. The turn on final coming in for a landing was just as exhilarating to me. I told my kids that flying in the nose of a B-17 was just as exciting to me as any E-ticket ride at Disneyland. There are periods of sheer boredom, but those periods were offset by the view from the nose. Tooling around in and out of great fluffy clouds can be spectacular, to say the least. You get the feeling of being one with nature, and I am reminded of the poem ‘High Flight’, written by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., when I think of what flying in the nose was all about. Some of his words as written by a pilot are appropriate for any airman. This must be the reason ‘High Flight’ has been adopted by the USAF today. His poem begins: ‘Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of…’ Those words are magnified a hundred times when viewed from the glass nose of a B-17.”
“I was a Bombardier on Bob Fancher’s B-17 crew. We arrived in the UK in October, 1943, and were assigned to the 91st Bomb Group at Bassingbourn. I can only speak for myself as to my combat experiences over Europe. I do vividly remember my first mission on November 3rd to the Wilhelmshaven shipyards. We were flying in ‘low group’, and the weather was unlimited visibility. The adrenalin was flowing being on our first mission. Fighter action was scarce, which was odd in that we had no ‘little friends’ to escort us any farther than the coast of Europe. Flak was medium to intense, and the return trip was uneventful, except for more flak as we crossed the coast outbound. I was thinking, ‘not so tough’. The next few missions turned out to be somewhat rougher, but our crew continued to be lucky as far as sustaining battle or crew damage was concerned.