The Thirteenth Mission - April 2, 1944

We with begin here in another interview with Dick and Nita. He’s describing what it is like to be in the midst of a bombing mission.

Dick: First, there were explosions inside the shell and there were pieces of metal and that is flak. You are not kidding, we were up some 20,000 feet and things are busting all around. They (the bombs) are shot out of a canon on the ground. Not much flak would hit the airplane, but it was close enough that you could feel it and I’ll tell you, it ain’t fun. The highest mission I ever remember flying was about 23,000 (feet). The main gun on that (enemy airplane) is a German 88 millimeter gun. That’s pretty good size shells. They would get up in the air where planes were flying. An anti-aircraft gun. But also, they used them on the ground some too.

(It was cold at 20,000 feet) Ol’ Red carried a boiled egg one time and he got ready to eat it, he couldn’t eat it; it was frozen. We wore long underwear. A couple of mission we flew up to where we could see the Alps and then we turned. We went around the east end of them. We went up over Yugoslavia toward Austria. 

It (when The Miss Zeke was shot down) was the first time I ever jumped with one of them (parachute). (I always through it was interesting that the Army Air Corps trained him so intensively to fly the B-24, but never trained him to parachute out of a plane.) We had what you call a chest pack. Lot of pilots usually carried a back pack. And I’ve used a back pack, not to jump, but you sit on it, so it’s all on the back, but the rip cord is all in the same place. We had on a harness and it had clips on it and all you had to do was clip on it a couple of rings. I remember when Phil put my on, I said, “You’ve got it on upside down.” He said, “No, I don’t.” I said, “You’ve got it on upside down.” And then I had to jerk that thing with my left hand instead of my right hand.

Nita:  Red said that he had to almost make you put it on (when they realized the plane was not going to make it.)

Dick: They (Army Air Corps instructors) did tell us which hole to jump out of. I wasn’t in the air very long. I went out the bomb hole. I landed in a tree (near Zegrab, Yugoslavia). I took my knife and cut them straps (to get out of the tree).

Nita:  It was a “fun” tree.

Dick: It was about three or four feet off the ground which made an easy landing, but I was scared out of my whits. It was easier (landing) than it was to jump out. Heck, that jerked the heck out of you. Count, hell, I just jumped out and pulled. Really, everyone jumped out except one. That was Dennis King, top turret gunner, and he was dead. (The remaining crew did not land in the same place.) I didn’t see the enlisted men until I guess it was two days later, maybe three.

Other Accounts of April 2

A 2000 Email to Stalag Luft 1 Museum Director

My father wrote this to Helga Radau, director of the town museum in Barth, Germany (more on that later) of what happened on April 2. The target was a ball bearing plant in Steyr, Austria:

“Just before reaching the target we had trouble with No. 3 turbo and after dropping our bombs on the target, we lost No. 1 engine from flak on leaving the target. Not being able to keep up, we lost formation and began losing altitude. We were soon attack by six fighters. The tail turret was hit by a rocket and our electrical system out. Six other fighters soon joined in. Coming in from 6 o’clock and 3 abreast. With the left rudder shot off, the tail and top turrets out, and oxygen system on fire, the crew bailed out with the exception of the top turret gunner who was bad. I was captured in about two hours by Croatians who on 3 April turned myself, the navigator & co-pilot over to the Germans who sent us to Stalag Luft 1.”

Red McCrocklin Recounts Some of April 2

A Tyler, Texas Morning Telegraph article (April 25, 2009) describes Red McCrocklin’s account bailing out of the airplane (This is another one of Claude "Red" McCrocklin's drawings) :  “Then on his 13^th mission, fighter planes picked McCrocklin’s bomber out of the pack. The bomber’s top turret gunner was cut down and the engines rendered ineffective by merciless strafing. Cut from formation, the B-24 was vulnerable. The intercom was destroyed. Standing in the clear plastic bubble nose of the bomber, McCrocklin looked back at the pilot (Dick) and signaled if they should bail out.

“At first he (the pilot) said no, but then a bullet went whizzing by his head (I can only image what words came out of my father's mouth then) and those of us who were still alive bailed out.” That’s when his perspective changed, said McCrocklin. “I’d never thought much about God, he said, but when you’re on a parachute, having bailed out of a burning plane and fighters are whizzing by trying to shoot you, there are no atheists in the skys.”

(As Red recounts in his book) After they had bailed out, six German ME-109s finished off  "The Miss Zeke." Red watched it crash and explode in a column of smoke. The ME-109s work done, one of them peeled off and headed directly toward him. As he fell through thousands of feet, the German plane continued to follow him. He thought the worst, that the plane would shoot him, so he just stared at him. The pilot flew really close, looked over at him, smiled and saluted. Later, Red would meet the pilot on the ground who told him that he was following him to radio his position so he could be picked up.

A Message from Facebook, of All Places

I received this message through Facebook in 2005 from Harry Rader, a man who had worked for my father in his hardware store.

“I worked for your dad at Oaklawn Supply . . . Dick and I talked at length about his experience (prison camp) in the then Army Air Force and my experience while in the Navy in Korea. He also enlisted me into the Air Force National Guard and let me keep my ranking. He was one of the key people in my life and I loved him dearly . . . Oh yes, the German soldier that found him in a ditch after he released himself from the tree was a very young kid (teenager) in the Home Guard . . . and after your dad put his hands over his head and pleaded to the youngster not to shoot him, he did not shoot. If it had been a (German) Storm Trooper*, your dad would have probably been shot . . . Your dad survived at a very strict Stalag prison camp for those many months. All this was told to me in the stockroom in the back of the store. He told me also the back pay the Army gave him after he was released was some of the money with which he bought the store. Dick Terrell was an exceptional person.”