A World War II Story

from another book I haven't written

Many years ago, in the course of other research, I discovered that St. Louis Cardinals manager Billy Southworth had a son, also named Billy, and that Billy Jr. not only played professional baseball but also flew combat missions as a B-17 pilot during World War II.

Well, of course it’s not often that two of your primary interests come together like this, so I immediately began to wonder if there was a book in all this. I don’t know recall the sequence of events, but I did establish a friendly correspondence with Carole Watson, daughter of Billy Sr. and half-sister of Billy Jr.

Carole shared with me a number of primary source materials, including Billy Jr.’s wartime diary.

For years, I wanted to tell the story of the father-son relationship, which ended when Billy’s B-29 crashed into Flushing Bay in 1945. There were baseball people who felt that Billy Sr. was never the same after that, although he did manage the Boston Braves to the World Series in 1948.

But what I never found was any correspondence between the two Billy’s, and I felt that tangible connection was a necessary ingredient in the story. So ultimately I refocused the project to look mostly at Billy Jr.’s time overseas, among the early months of the U.S. bombing campaign over western Europe. Which was tremendously hazardous and (frankly) not particularly effective. Basically, the story many of you saw in the miniseries MASTERS OF THE AIR.

To that end, I conceived of the book as consisting largely of 25 chapters, each describing or related to one of Billy Jr.’s 25 missions, which at that time was essentially the qualification for going home (for a while anyway).

I didn’t write the book. I don’t even recall if my agents bothered shopping it; I think probably not. A baseball writer with a small audience isn’t the best author of a World War II book, and (mostly) losing the father-son angle probably doesn’t help.

But here’s the one sample chapter I did write, and I’ve got a coda to my story if you can hang around (or want to skip ahead)…

MISSION NO. 5
3 January 1943 St. Nazaire, France

The 303^rd’s first mission of 1943 was a disaster, notwithstanding the fact that it included one of the most bizarre accidents to be recorded in combat aviation.
- Jay A. Stout, Hell’s Angels: The True Story of the 303^rd Bomb Group in World War II

Shortly before dawn on the 3^rd of January, Billy wrote just a few lines in his diary: “Will be co-pilot with Col. Wallace. We will lead five groups, 21 planes each, 5 x 500 lb. bombs per plane. General Hansell, two star boy, will fly with us.”

Later, he wrote one of the few entries in his entire diary that explicitly touched on real emotions other than satisfaction (with a job well done) or frustration and anger (about poor leadership, mostly)...

We got on a 4 minute bombing run. All going too perfect, then here they came. Four FW 190’s from the front, shot two down ... Of our first 9 ships over the target 4 were shot down. They got 7 in all. We sent 14 to target, 21 scheduled, -- of 14, four shot down. We’ve lost nine ships and crews in combat now on 8 missions, 11 planes, all told…

General said that we had some good Indians on our ship. “For plain unadulterated guts,” he said, “You boys have it.”

I was pleased until I found our losses. Col. sure used plenty of breaks. Sheridan and Goetz gone. Sure will miss Goetz. One of my best friends. Well, we were all at the club after dinner. Bought Schueler a drink. Then a bunch of us began to flip coins. Loud singing began. More liquor was ordered. At 10.00 we left for Dublington and the nurses. There were loads of us. I was drunk for the first time. Don’t remember a thing. Guess we tore things up running in and out of huts while girls screamed. One walked me around, while I staggered, and I do have a cold.

That was all Billy would write in his war diary about the loss of his friends Bill Goetz and Charles Sheridan; both were aboard B-17 Kali, which blew up with its entire crew, probably after a direct hit from anti-aircraft fire from below. They didn’t call St. Nazaire “Flak Alley” for nothing.

B-17 Leapin’ Liz and its crew were also lost, after ditching in the frigid Bay of Biscay. Yahoodi was shot down as well, with seven crewmen perishing and three parachuting safely to become prisoners of war for the next two years. The 303rd’s fourth lost B-17 was Snap! Crackle! Pop! – the account of which includes one of the entire war’s most miraculous survival stories.

************

Every heavy bomber in the European Theater bristled with defensive machine guns, but the B-17 was among the few with a spherical “ball turret” suspended from the belly of the aircraft. The gunner, usually the smallest man in the crew, would enter the Plexiglass orb through a hatch, then rotate the turret downward to cover as much of the sky as he could see.

The ball turret’s exposure made that job among the most dangerous in a B-17, and it was also among the most difficult. In The Bomber Boys, Travis L. Ayres describes the complex nature of actually hitting something with the ball turret’s twin .50-caliber guns:

Curled in the turret with the gunsight and trigger handles between his knees, the gunner tracked the incoming flights. Looking through the sight, he saw a red horizontal line and two vertical lines. The trick was to put the enemy plane on the horizontal line and then close up the two vertical lines until they reached the attacker’s wingtips. The gunner positioned the red horizontal line by using the gun handles to move the turret. At the same time, he used a foot pedal to control the vertical lines of the gunsight. If he could effectively train his crosshairs on the target, the gunsight’s mechanical computer would automatically adjust the “lead” needed to hit the rapidly moving enemy fighter. Then the ball turret gunner squeezed the trigger buttons with his thumbs and tried to stay trained on the target as long as possible. Of course, all this had to be accomplished in a matter of two to five seconds.

According to the Air Corps’ Pilot Training Manual for the Flying Fortress, “The power turret gunners require many mental and physical qualities similar to what we know as inherent flying ability, since the operation of the power turret and gunsight are much like that of airplane flight operation.”

How many enemy fighters did B-17 gunners actually knock from the sky? Not nearly as many as they claimed. While a large percentage of the crew claims were later discounted by analysts on the ground, even the resulting official numbers were wildly inflated. Everything just happened too quickly for gunners to have much success against the fighters, or have any real idea of when they had hit one. Inevitably, if a fighter zooming through a formation of B-17s was visibly hit, it would be “claimed” by multiple gunners ... and often the fighter was merely damaged anyway, and would fly another day.

Then of course there was the flak, about which the gunners could do little.

“My own technique of dealing with the flak coming up to meet us,” the 95^th Bomb Group’s Bill Jones recalled, “was to twirl the turret in a circle so that it had a better chance of bouncing off the thick Plexglas [sic]. Throughout all this I was usually perspiring heavily under my fur-lined flight suit. Then, once our bombs had dropped, I would freeze until we reached lower altitudes.”

Jones made it through 33 missions without a scratch. Many ball-turret gunners weren’t so lucky. During the war, poet Randall Jarrell served in Eighth Air Force but on the ground, as a “celestial navigation tower operator.” Later, though, Jarrell published one of the war’s most anthologized poems, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” …

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Snap! Crackle! Pop!’s ball-turret gunner was Alan Magee, a staff sergeant from New Jersey. As McGee’s ship neared the target, he would recall some 35 years later, “there was so much flak and the B-17F seemed to be going so slow that I felt like getting out of the plane and running ahead, telling it to catch up to me.

“All of a sudden I was hit in the face, and the turret sight was knocked out. With the front glass broken out, it was impossible to stay in the turret to operate it.”

There wasn’t room in the ball turret for a parachute and a gunner. Even a small one. Magee did wear a harness for his chute, which was actually stored just outside the turret. But upon leaving the turret, he found his parachute “had a large hole in the middle of it, and one end seemed damaged. I didn’t bother putting it on.”

The situation for Magee and the nine other men in Snap! Crackle! Pop! quickly went from bad to worse. With the plane on fire, radioman Alfred Union was getting ready to bail out via the open bomb bay. Then came another flak hit, with Magee peppered by shrapnel in his shoulder, side, and back. B-17s were famous for taking immense punishment and flying on, but this blow sent the ship into a fatal spin. Thrown to the top of the plane, Magee began looking for a way out. Parachute or no parachute. Except without any bottled oxygen, he blacked out.

The last thing I remember was that I was at twenty-some thousand feet, trying to get out of a burning plane.

The next time I came to I thought I got hit again and said to myself, “The hell hit me now?” I was tired of getting hit.

I again blacked out with what hit me—or I guess I could say what I hit. I went through the roof of the St. Nazaire railroad station.

I came to again and asked whoever was trying to help me if they were German or French, and when they said Germans I again blacked out.

Magee would recall a broken leg and ankle, his “left arm nearly torn off my body and back shot up.” A German doctor saved Magee’s arm, and also operated on his face, even saving Magee’s teeth, which had been badly loosened in his crash to earth. “I guess I should say to sum up this whole mess,” Magee said, “I was up at twenty-some-thousand feet without a chute and found myself on the roof of St. Nazaire railroad station, France.”

To date, no one’s quite figured out how Magee survived his fall. One theory held that a bomb exploded below Magee just before impact, creating a sort of cushioning effect. However, a 2006 episode of the Mythbusters television program concluded that the vast difference in pressure between a falling body and the shockwave of an exploding bomb could not equalize. What’s more, “the glass and metal fragmentation from the explosion would most likely kill the falling person if the fall itself does not.”

Ultimately, we probably won’t ever know exactly how Alan Magee survived his fall from twenty-some-thousand feet. But after six weeks in hospital, Magee was well enough to join fellow fliers in a POW camp, where he spent the rest of the war. Meanwhile, Glen Herrington, one of two other Snack! Crackle! Pop! survivors, parachuted earthward with an injured leg, which was amputated by German doctors. After a short stay in an interrogation center, Herrington was repatriated back to the U.S. after “an arduous journey through four countries.”

************

Like many big-city sportswriters, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Cy Peterman went overseas as a war correspondent. In a story that was also published back home in Columbus, Peterman wrote about this St. Nazaire raid, headlined—on the first page of the Ohio State Journal’s sports section—Capt. Southworth’s Flying Fortress Braves Aerial Hell to Fire St. Nazaire.

Some of the finer details were lost in translation; for instance, Peterman wrote, “Captain Southworth’s men think he’s tops among Fortress pilots—after more than a dozen raids his ship hasn’t been seriously shot up.” This was, of course, just Billy’s fifth mission over enemy territory.

And this was war, in which writers were essentially forbidden from dispatching any discouraging words back to the home front. So Peterman barely mentioned the heavy, unsustainable losses of both aircraft and men suffered during the mission. Instead he focused on the details; it’s possible that Peterman flew with the crew, but it seems unlikely that another extra passenger would have been carried. Instead, he probably interviewed Billy and others shortly after the mission.

While other accounts suggest that most of the mission’s losses were due to flak, Peterman focused instead on the German fighters, which of course seemed more dangerous because you could actually see them before they attacked you. “There were eight separate attacks on Southworth’s ship,” Peterman wrote. “Twice, charging straight at his motors, the F-Ws put shells through the surface. Twice the colonel dipped a little and the attackers failed to connect… The F-W 190s came in fours. Calmly, the General watched them skillfully peel off, flip over and come on, guns ablaze. Miraculously, they always missed. Or almost always. Once cannon shells clipped a hunk from one wing. Once the rat-a-tat-tat blew off the upper windshield, the rush of air increasing the din of the Fort’s counter-fire. But the Fortresses did not break formation.”

More than a year later, the lost Bill Goetz’s mother reached Billy. We don’t have her letters—there was a continuing correspondence for some months—but we do have three of Billy’s letters to Mrs. Goetz.

In the first, he writes that he’d thought about writing her much earlier, but “Our losses at the time that Bill was first missing were so heavy that corresponding with the boys’ folks was very difficult. At that particular time it didn’t seem that we would hardly make the grade ourselves, and we who were flying at that time had quite a bit on our minds. I know that your loss has been great and very deep felt as Bill was a very fine person and a gallant flier. You have my deepest sympathy.”

That typed letter was followed a month later, apparently in response to another missive from Mrs. Goetz, by a two-page handwritten note, in which Billy recounted an earlier mission over St. Nazaire—the ill-fated mission of 18 November, which was supposed to target La Pallice but instead wound up dropping its bombs a hundred miles away—after which Billy’s, Goetz’s, and one other B-17 ultimately landed a few miles from their home field.

We knew that it was a grim business and often kidded seriously about it. The boys would express themselves. The losses in the group were heavy. Bill told me in confidence but with little regard or feeling, “I’ll get it,” with a sweep of the hand. I don’t think that he really meant it. As for nerves, Bill was iron. Tho’ our losses were heavy in the group and our squadron yet unhurt, the out-look was a grim one as common sense would tell one that only the luckiest would get thru’. We were always able to joke and be foolish.

We lost four of our 16 planes on Jan 3, – That night was the only time that I’ve ever been intoxicated, tho’ no one really knew it. Didn’t feel like living with myself. Don’t suppose that any of us did. By 10 – we had forgotten the kind of a world we lived in tho’ – I’m told that we didn’t go to bed until one a.m. It was our way of cushioning our loss of our buddies.

“In war,” the French fighter ace René Fonck had written some 20 years earlier, “daily dangers cause us to keep moving on, and when we happen to turn around we too often find gravestones where we left fond memories.” -30-

I’m sorry to report that Carole Southworth and I, after a long friendship that included a personal meeting near her home in Ohio, fell out of touch a few years ago. I think she was understandably frustrated by my inability to turn all her help (and my research) into anything tangible. But last week I realized I hadn’t reached out to Carole in far too long. Before writing her, though, I did wonder if I was too late … and yes, I was.

Carole (Southworth) Watson passed away just a couple of months ago. She did live long enough to see her father elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which I know gave her a great deal of pleasure. I do wish I’d been able to write our book.