Mission 12d - March 6, 1944

Our wilting B-17 Liberty Lady is flying over the island of Gotland, a Swedish province.  Remember that the crew had no idea where they were and suspected that they were still flying over enemy territory. As waist gunner Don Courson remembers, when they came out of the clouds, they knew they had to land somewhere.

At the time the Liberty Lady was photographed just over the rooftops of Hemse, they were heading in the direction of the Baltic Sea again.

Pilot Charles W. Smith kept his cool and queried the crew. “Do you want to ditch it in the ocean or do you want to crash land?”

My friend and bomber navigator, Lt. Col Monroe F. “Buddy” Stamps, explained to me that in his opinion “the last thing you would want to do is crash land because you never know what you’re going to hit.”

Nevertheless, Don Courson says they all agreed that they wanted to land it. Don’s explanation: “We knew we had good pilots and if it could be done they could do it.”

So bombardier Herman F. Allen dumped the super classified Norden bombsight into the Baltic so that it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. (During their initial military training the bombardiers had to swear an oath to protect the secret of the Norden with their lives.)

And pilots Smithy and Merle searched for a safe place to land.

Co-pilot Merle P. Brown said they knew they would have to belly land because of the terrain. There were a lot of fences made out of piled up rocks. If they had hit the rocks with the gear down, it would have flipped the plane.

The rest of the crew gathered in the radio room and assumed crash position with their heads down between their knees.

To be continued …

Liberty lady flightpath over Gotland 4 March 1944.

Again, thanks to Mattias for the flightpath map. Mattias, who grew up on the island of Gotland, created the map using data from the sightings of the B-17 from the lookout towers placed throughout the island.