Merseberg! Pg 6

We waited for what seemed like quite a while when Moon called back to say they seemed to be holding their altitude pretty well, and said we might ride it out for a while. He told us to throw out anything that had any weight, which we could do without. So we proceeded to throw out most of our guns and ammunition, just saving a bare minimum and extra flying suits/equipment, flak aprons, ripping non-vital radio equipment off the plane's walls, etc. Moon said we seemed to be holding our own pretty well, so we limped on and on this way, hoping enemy fighters wouldn't jump us. Moon and Larry Iverson evidently coaxed more out of that B-17 than the Boeing engineers ever planned, or believed could be possible. Of course, we gradually lost altitude but they actually brought that riddled plane over the continent and the English Channel to Sudbury. I say that because the ground crew pointed to the number 3 engine that was turning and not feathered and said you couldn't have been getting any power out of it with that hole (about the size of a basketball) In the housing. We were all climbing out of the plane when one of the ground crewmen looked at the blown out top turret and asked where the engineer was. Someone pointed at me, which made him do a "double-take" at the turret. He didn't know about my little routine when I reluctantly had to step out of the turret to reach the flare gun. MY flight records show this mission to be 8:15 hours long, longer than usual. After we debarked Major Rex (Operations officer) proceeded to chew out our pilot for not obeying his instructions to cut engines and leave the plane on the taxi-way. Instead, he pulled it into a hardstand so as not to block the rest of the Group. After looking at the B17 I could see why Major Rex was worried. The nose was blackened, a big hole in the top turret, two engines out and the plane looked like a piece of Swiss cheese. It even scared me once again looking at it.

So much for that. Most of us were interested in getting to that post-mission double shot of rye and to the chow hall at this time, as well as getting to London on pass to unwind. As it turned out we did have about a week off after Merseberg. Word later filtered back that the ground crew said there ware about 300 flak holes in the plane and that only one engine was functioning right. The miraculous part was that other than Mac's episode with the gas and many shattered nerves by all, there were no wounds, per se, with all those flak hits. The ground crew said the plane looked like a "Raggedy Ann" after it was patched up.

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