29 May Mission 12c – March 6, 1944
In an effort to hide from the furious enemy fighter planes, our wounded Liberty Lady slipped into a cover of clouds.
Waist gunner Don Courson remembers that at first the crew was afraid they might have to bail out. Someone thought they were in a spin, but turret gunner R.B. Trumble had a bolt tied to a string so he could tell what was happening to the plane. He said no, they were not spinning because the bolt was steady.
Captain Charles W. “Smithy” Smith called over the intercom and questioned the crew: “Do you want to bail out or do you want to keep flying and take our chances that we can make it to safety?” The consensus was … Keep Flying!
Bombardier Herman Allen salvoed the bomb load. The problem was that they had no maps for countries outside the areas of combat. Smithy initally flew east toward Russia but then quickly headed north toward neutral Sweden. In order to avoid occupied Denmark, they set a more northeastern course.
It’s easy when you have a map in front of you, but without maps any error in navigation could take them right to Denmark where they would captured by the Nazis …
or they could run out of fuel over the Baltic Sea!
… to be continued.
Liberty lady flightpath on March 6, 1944 by Mattias Eneqvist.
As you can see from the map above, the Liberty Lady did find a place to land. Mattias from Sweden has carefully charted the route of our Lady from studying Swedish Air Operations reports and the book “Target Berlin.”
No Comments