by Quentin Petersen, from his memoir, Recollections Chosen From a Fortunate Life
Contrary to the images created by films, most American aircrews in World War II did not have their own storied bomber with their girlfriends’ names emblazoned on the fuselage, nor dedicated ground-crew members closer than brothers. Rather, the operations officer matched functional bombers with available crews and assigned them on the morning of each mission.
Indeed, of the 32,267 combat aircraft in Europe, 18,418—over 57 percent—were lost in action.
It is a testament to the effectiveness of the Army Air Corps’ recruiting propaganda that I never once envied the guy who woke us up, the guy who cooked our breakfast, the jeep drivers, or the chaplains as I prepared to throw the dice again on each mission.
I really believed that they envied us!
Important to understanding other aspects of this bad day is that my parachute had been hit by flak on my previous mission, supporting the invasion of southern France, and was in for repair. This parachute was a generic, interchangeable chest-pack which clipped to a personal, tailored harness. I expected to pick up a spare in the chute-box next to the flight line, which would readily clip on to my harness. However, there were no chest-packs in the box, so I took what was there, a back-pack, and boarded the aircraft.
I still felt no envy of the guys who stayed behind and kept the chute-box filled or repaired parachutes! Hello again?
After takeoff and over the Adriatic Sea, the mission’s aircraft gradually formed into a hierarchy of groups, squadrons, and “boxes” of six planes as we headed for the oil fields at Ploesti, Romania.
As our group climbed higher and we went on oxygen, I thought I had better see to getting my substitute parachute attached to my body before the bomb run. It proved to be quite a task—the adjustable buckles needed to be changed so that the bayonet fittings could be connected. On the ground this would offer little challenge save a broken fingernail, but at five miles in the sky the temperature is pushing -50°F and we wore heavy gloves to protect us from “high-altitude frostbite,” a very dangerous complication of such missions. A crew member, Cliff Benson, helped me connect the fittings.
When we approached the target area and I put on my flak helmet and flak jacket I realized, almost with disbelief, that I was looking down at the Black Sea! To any person of my background, this was an exotic site met only in the Tales of the Arabian Nights or high-school geography!
About a minute or two from the target, I found it ominous that the box-barrage of antiaircraft fire that I had come to expect on these raids was absent. I’m sure that our commander must also have recognized that the fighters assigned to precede us to the target and drop the chaff (a sort of Christmas-tree tinsel) used to screw up radar-aiming of antiaircraft guns had missed the rendezvous. The antiaircraft gunners below were just tweaking their sights. But what could he do? What could anyone do?
The next thing I knew we were hit by the first flak we saw that day. Two of our engines were destroyed. Pieces and crew of the five leading planes passed by our craft. Recognizing that some bombs had been hit, I let ours go in salvo. With our oxygen and hydraulic systems shot out, we descended to a breathable altitude, assessed the damage, and started for home alone, having fallen far behind and been left by all the other planes remaining from the original formation.
From the ball turret, Clayton Merrill pointed out that when I dropped the salvo, I was formally the lead bombardier, so the squad-rons behind had all dropped theirs also! Merrill also observed that the group had really blasted the hell out of a wooded area.
I spent some time thinking of what to say at the debriefing upon our return. As young and inexperienced as we were, we certainly appreciated the cost of such a mission. Literally, tens of thousands of people had been involved in elaborate planning, manufacturing, shipping and loading tons of bombs and thousands of rounds of .50-caliber machine gun ammunition, cooking breakfast, preparing the aircraft for flight, and establishing details of the weather and route for such a mission.
My concern about the debriefing became moot as I realized we were flying alone, unprotected, and above a complete undercast; we had no idea of our position or heading. We did recognize, however, that with only two engines we were not going to get back to Italy. We hoped that we might make it to the partisan-held island of Vis, where there was a landing strip which could accommodate a B-24. As alternatives, we could parachute while still over mainland Yugo-slavia or “ditch” in the Adriatic Sea, where Air-Sea Rescue had a good chance of picking us up if the plane did not sink immediately upon hitting the water (as these had a reputation for doing).
Over the intercom, we each expressed our choice.
And that issue, too, was soon moot. With only two engines we were rapidly losing altitude; we were going to have to leave the plane. From this point forward, all actions were about survival, subsequent evasion and escape, for which we had been well trained.
But combat crews were not given parachute training. None of us had ever jumped!
We had all heard stories of crews that had been ordered to bail out but, because of a “frozen” crewmember, had not jumped and had remained in the aircraft and were killed when it crashed. Aircraft Commander John McAullife and I had discussed this issue in many a bar and agreed that, inasmuch as the bombardier had little to do for most of the mission, under these circumstances my job would be to get everyone’s attention and jump so that there would be no balking at his order.
So I hand-cranked the bomb bay doors open (remember, no hydraulic power left), placed my shoes in my A-2 jacket and zipped it closed to prevent them from being jerked off when the chute opened. I got everyone’s attention and stepped off the bomb bay catwalk into space.
After the war my sainted mother asked me about that moment: “Did you pray, Quentin?”
I thought about it and finally answered, “Why, yes, I think I did. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, I hope to hell this son-of-a-bitch opens!’”
Professor Petersen’s parachute did open, though only partially, and the rough landing dislocated his hip. He and his crew were captured in Greece, and he spent nine months as a POW, a time he also wrote about in his memoir. He received several accolades during his service and earned a Purple Heart. He was a professor of chemistry at Wabash from 1957 to 1966, and he taught at Central Michigan University for the last 26 years of his career. Professor Petersen died November 9, 2009.
