Memorial

More information

Before we could drop our bombs, we entered the clouds and were thrown into a spin from the prop-wash of another group that passed over in front of us. We went into the spin at about 25,000 ft. and I seriously thought that we would never come out of it. However, because of Lt Schuman's expertness [sic] as a pilot, he brought us out of the spin at about 15,000 ft. We were all alone and we immediately started to look for another group of planes that we could join for protection. We could find none, so we went down on the deck (SOP) after Asst. Eng. H.L. Newell had kicked the bombs out with a screwdriver. The spin had jammed them up so that they would not release in any of the usual or emergency ways. Also the spin had put out of operation all except the two guns in the top turret and the two guns in the ball turret. The shells for the other guns had spilled out of their cases and become damaged so that all other guns were jammed. We could not use the guns in the ball turret because we were flying so close to the ground.
We headed for England and after flying about two hours we were about 30 km. from the North Sea at Oldenburg, which is near Bremen when two German FW 190s picked us up. The first pass they made at us they sort of sized us up and probably discovered we had only two guns in operation. On the second pass they knocked out our No. 1 Engine but we continued to fly at an IAS of 230 mph. On the third pass they evidently put a shell of some sort up into the cockpit which killed Lt Schuman, flash-blinded Lt Charles F. Jordan, the co-pilot, and knocked me out with a piece of the shrapnel in the head. I was unconscious off and on for some five or six weeks, so the rest of this is as I remember it as related to me by Jordan, who was not injured except for the momentary blindness from the flash of the shell and a few minor burns and cuts. We crashed into the ground with no one at the controls. Jordan had his safety belt fastened but Schuman did not. I was still in the nose with Lt Louis Nicolai, the bombardier, when we hit, but I bounced through the side of the ship and landed some 40 yards away. When the ship came to stop, Jordan unfastened his safety belt and stepped through the hole that I had left when I passed through the side of the ship. He saw my arm move and since I was the only body he saw that moved, he came over and helped me get into a ditch for the ammunition was exploding all around us. After this was over we got out of the ditch, but got back in again when one of our own P-47s started to strafe the wreckage of our plane.