This is an excellent history of the last B-24 to be shot down over Europe in WW II. I had read and enjoyed Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue earlier and had never heard of the Childers' book until the plagiarism scandal. Ambrose was accused (rightly it turns out) of lifting passages from several books, this one included. So anyway, I decided to read Wings of Morning and found it far superior (if different) than Ambrose's. I urge you to read both of them and make up your own mind.Childers, who teaches history at my alma mater, tracked down some old papers and letters from his Uncle Howard, which had been hidden away in his grandmother’s house. Howard had been a radio operator on a B-24 Liberator that was probably the last bomber casualty of the war.
Howard had a chance to remain at Scott AFB near St. Louis as an instructor, but despite his high scores on the tests that qualified him for that position, he decided to join an air crew and was eventually trained and sent to Maine where he and his crew confronted the monstrosity known as the B-24. The B-17 has been more glamorized and was certainly better regarded by pilots, but there were way more B-24s built and it could fly higher and carry a larger payload. Pejoratively nicknamed the banana boat and pregnant cow or the agony wagon, it was hard to fly and was prone to high-speed stalls and sluggishness over twenty-thousand feet. That made formation flying particularly nerve-wracking. “You don’t know what shit hittin’ the fan means, till you’ve seen a Liberator flip over on its side in the middle of a forty-plane formation,” reported one crewman. Neither was it for the claustrophobic as crew members had to squeeze themselves into tiny spaces in their bulky flying suits. One turret was so cramped there was no room for the gunner’s parachute, a reassuring realization.
They were sent to an airfield near Norfolk where the Eighth Air Force had 130 airfields crammed into an area smaller than Delaware. They were to replace several crews that had been killed during a formation flying accident. Their first combat mission necessitated flying off the runway on instruments in a fog at thirty-second intervals, each crewman peering into the cloudy soup praying they would not run into another airplane, the pilot, against all commons sense and biological signals following only what the instruments told him. Finally they left the clouds into the sunshine. “No amount of practice could have prepared them for what they encountered. B-24s, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds all over the sky. Corkscrewing upward, they seemed to be everywhere at different altitudes, going in every direction, searching for their squadrons, their groups. . . As he [the pilot:] watched intently, the swarm of circling silver planes resolved gradually into distinguishable elements of three, of six, of nine. The group’s squadrons were forming up.” The process of getting all the planes together in the appropriate groups and then forming on the leaders could take more than an hour. Planes from over forty different airfields would come poking up out of the clouds. It was scary and if just one plane was off course the result was a flaming disaster. It was an occurrence that was not infrequent. Eventually they would become part of a one-thousand plane mission.
Childers pieces a poignant and fascinating story together from hundreds of letters written by the crew. It had a tragic ending. In late April, the crew, by now promoted to lead crew were ordered on a flight to bomb a bridge, a mission the men despised as useless, trying to hit a span fifteen feet wide from twenty-thousand feet was not a good use of their equipment or talents. As luck would have it, the weather was horrible and they were unable to bomb either the primary or secondary targets. They turned back. To the horror of all the men the command pilot directed them on a route that would take them directly over Regensburg, one of the most heavily defended cities in Germany. Fortunately, the flak was not as heavy as anticipated. Unfortunately for Howard and his crew one of the few shells exploded right on target setting their plane on fire. A wing broke off and it spiraled to the ground. Only two of the crew managed to bail out.
Childers tenaciously followed up every lead and piece of paper — and there was a surprising amount of documentation — traveling to Germany and interviewing many people who saw the actual crash to track down the truth of how his uncle had died. He was able to determine that Howard had not died in the burning crash itself, but he and another had fallen out of the plane and died from impact, unable to get their chutes on.
He was helped in his research by a devoted German amateur historian, and he was able to locate the precise location where the plane hit the ground and his uncle died. Today as tractors plow the fields, moving “across the rolling swells of the rich, dark earth, and in their wake, as happens each April, shattered bits of Plexiglas and twisted metal — mute reminders of the Black Cat and the men who died here-- were rising in the furrows.”
