A Marauder Mission Over Normandy
Jun 13, 2019 15:09:55 #
slatten49
Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
A bit late for D-Day, but sent to me by BearK, after promising her I'd post it…By Jon Camp
On June 5, the world marked the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion that landed 156,000 troops in Normandy and began the liberation of Western Europe from the grip of N**i Germany.
Two days after the invasion began, my grandfather Howard Weingrow and his crewmates flew a harrowing bomber mission to support Allied ground troops trying to push inland. They were tasked with destroying fuel for German tanks stored near Caen. It was an important part of the Allied effort to hinder counterattacks, since by June 8, "the Allies were ashore, but nowhere did [they] have enough depth in their position," according to Robert Citino, a senior historian at the National WWII Museum.
The plan was for dozens of twin-engine B-26 Marauders to hit the fuel dump. But densely overcast skies made it almost impossible for my grandfather's group of bombers to stay together after leaving their base in Chipping Ongar, England.
"We circled for about ten minutes trying to pick up our formation, but all we cold d**g together were three other ships," my grandfather wrote in a journal of his Marauder missions. Another bomber crashed while returning to base, k*****g five men.
I found these journal pages in a small box of war memorabilia my grandfather handed to me several years ago. Like many Veterans his age, he spoke sparingly about his wartime experiences; he was proud, but attention made him uncomfortable. After his death, I began digging deeper and learned--with help from military archives, historians, reunion newsletters and details from his crewmates' families--why this flight was seared into their memories.
The crew for that mission came from around the U.S., from big cities to farm country. Captain Rollin Childress, the pilot, was a 23-yr. old from tiny Etowah, Tn., where his father was a railroad engineer. Navigator John Duffy Jr. was raised by his mother in rural southern California. Co-pilot Jack McHenry was k**led flying with another crew a week after the mission, according to Alan Crouchman, an amateur Marauder historian in the U.K.
Tail-gunner Jack Brooks from Minneapolis, who died in a military plane crash in 1949, "was a flying fanatic," recalled his brother Gail Brooks, a 93-yr. old Veteran of bomber missions in the Pacific. Bombardier Wilson Cushing, from Rochester, N.Y., was a former Triple A baseball player and the son of an Italian immigrant father who Americanized their former surname, Cusani. And my grandfather, a radio operator and gunner, was a Brooklyn-born 21-yr. old from a Jewish immigrant family, an only child who lost his father at a young age.
On June 8, their meager group roared onward through foul weather and rain squalls, flying so low over the English countryside that they had to watch for church steeples. Capt. Childress, who would receive the Silver Star for the mission, radioed for instructions, and what happened next is uncertain. According to an Army intelligence officer's account, Childress didn't receive the news: Bomber Command had issued a general recall. My grandfather would write that they told to keep going.
The bombers faced tough odds. Bombing at low altitude would make them more vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire, and the small group had little firepower to defend against any fighters lurking in the clouds. "Against these deadly serious hazards, Captain Childress balanced the importance of the target to the men on the beachhead," the intelligence officer's account said. "He continued."
He flew a controversial plane with a troubled history. The B-26 was rushed into production by the Glenn L. Martin Co. in Baltimore before the U.S. entered the war, skipping the prototype phase. While the Marauder was a fast, state-of-the-art plane, early versions had flaws, including hydraulic problems and propeller malfunctions. It took off and landed at high speed and was a handful for inexperienced fliers; training losses were common.
But the plane won converts in combat, where it bombed bridges, railyards and launch sites for Germany's V-1 flying bombs. The Marauder proved it could take a beating, getting its crews home even with an engine shot out and a fuselage full of holes. One Marauder currently under restoration at the Smithsonian, named "Flak-Bait: by its crew, survived more than 200 missions and 1,000 patches to fix damage from anti-aircraft fire.
Marauders wound up with the lowest loss rate among U.S. bombers, according to Jeremy Kinney, who curates the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's WWII collection. "It would bring you home," said Randall Murff, who was the bombardier in the number two plane during the June 8 mission Now 99 years old, he spoke to me from North Carolina, where he lives in a nursing home.
As they headed toward their target, my grandfather wrote, he shot off flares to keep the planes together and warn Allied ships in the English Channel. When he exhausted the flares, he flashed a signal lamp from a window in the plane's fuselage. Writing to Duffy five decades later, Childress recalled marveling at the Allied armada below.
Improving weather allowed the Marauders to reach 6,000 ft. over France, but that was only about half their typical bombing altitude. The men could feel explosive concussions when they made a direct hit on the fuel dump. The Germans were alerted: "I remember distinctly thinking we better get out of here as fast as we can," said Mr. Murff. "We had torn up everything we hit."
Antiaircraft fire ripped into the number four plane, piloted by Capt. Charles Schober. Crewmen from other planes described seeing the nose sheared off, its engines aflame--and then an explosion. The entire drew was lost. "They cut Schober's plane in two," Mr. Murff said.
The three remaining planes were still in peril. "Everywhere we turned we encountered the same fierce flak," my grandfather wrote. "I thought we were being torn apart, I prayed like hell." They had another tough trip over the Channel on the way home, once again dodging ships as they flew through bad weather.
They made it safely to base, but my grandfather, completing just his third mission, didn't believe he'd survive the war. In fact, he endured 62 more missions, including costly sorties during the German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Many decades later, I read to him a passage from his journal about the flak that he saw take down many planes. He started to tear up and changed the subject. "God, why do all these swell boys have to get it?" he would write about another mission, in December 1944, when eight Marauders were shot down.
Howard Weingrow came home from Europe, met and married Muriel, the woman who would be his beloved wife of 70 years, and became a successful businessman and the patriarch of a family with 12 great-grandchildren. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his "ingenuity and steadfast devotion to duty: on that June 8 mission, when the planes bombed "with outstanding success," the War Department said in a 1945 letter.
The men who fought these battles are fading fast, with about 350 WWII Veterans dying each day, according to the Department of Veteran's Affairs, and many will take memories like this mission with them. When my grandfather died 2017, at the age of 94, he was the last survivor of that June 8 crew.
On June 5, the world marked the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion that landed 156,000 troops in Normandy and began the liberation of Western Europe from the grip of N**i Germany.
Two days after the invasion began, my grandfather Howard Weingrow and his crewmates flew a harrowing bomber mission to support Allied ground troops trying to push inland. They were tasked with destroying fuel for German tanks stored near Caen. It was an important part of the Allied effort to hinder counterattacks, since by June 8, "the Allies were ashore, but nowhere did [they] have enough depth in their position," according to Robert Citino, a senior historian at the National WWII Museum.
The plan was for dozens of twin-engine B-26 Marauders to hit the fuel dump. But densely overcast skies made it almost impossible for my grandfather's group of bombers to stay together after leaving their base in Chipping Ongar, England.
"We circled for about ten minutes trying to pick up our formation, but all we cold d**g together were three other ships," my grandfather wrote in a journal of his Marauder missions. Another bomber crashed while returning to base, k*****g five men.
I found these journal pages in a small box of war memorabilia my grandfather handed to me several years ago. Like many Veterans his age, he spoke sparingly about his wartime experiences; he was proud, but attention made him uncomfortable. After his death, I began digging deeper and learned--with help from military archives, historians, reunion newsletters and details from his crewmates' families--why this flight was seared into their memories.
The crew for that mission came from around the U.S., from big cities to farm country. Captain Rollin Childress, the pilot, was a 23-yr. old from tiny Etowah, Tn., where his father was a railroad engineer. Navigator John Duffy Jr. was raised by his mother in rural southern California. Co-pilot Jack McHenry was k**led flying with another crew a week after the mission, according to Alan Crouchman, an amateur Marauder historian in the U.K.
Tail-gunner Jack Brooks from Minneapolis, who died in a military plane crash in 1949, "was a flying fanatic," recalled his brother Gail Brooks, a 93-yr. old Veteran of bomber missions in the Pacific. Bombardier Wilson Cushing, from Rochester, N.Y., was a former Triple A baseball player and the son of an Italian immigrant father who Americanized their former surname, Cusani. And my grandfather, a radio operator and gunner, was a Brooklyn-born 21-yr. old from a Jewish immigrant family, an only child who lost his father at a young age.
On June 8, their meager group roared onward through foul weather and rain squalls, flying so low over the English countryside that they had to watch for church steeples. Capt. Childress, who would receive the Silver Star for the mission, radioed for instructions, and what happened next is uncertain. According to an Army intelligence officer's account, Childress didn't receive the news: Bomber Command had issued a general recall. My grandfather would write that they told to keep going.
The bombers faced tough odds. Bombing at low altitude would make them more vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire, and the small group had little firepower to defend against any fighters lurking in the clouds. "Against these deadly serious hazards, Captain Childress balanced the importance of the target to the men on the beachhead," the intelligence officer's account said. "He continued."
He flew a controversial plane with a troubled history. The B-26 was rushed into production by the Glenn L. Martin Co. in Baltimore before the U.S. entered the war, skipping the prototype phase. While the Marauder was a fast, state-of-the-art plane, early versions had flaws, including hydraulic problems and propeller malfunctions. It took off and landed at high speed and was a handful for inexperienced fliers; training losses were common.
But the plane won converts in combat, where it bombed bridges, railyards and launch sites for Germany's V-1 flying bombs. The Marauder proved it could take a beating, getting its crews home even with an engine shot out and a fuselage full of holes. One Marauder currently under restoration at the Smithsonian, named "Flak-Bait: by its crew, survived more than 200 missions and 1,000 patches to fix damage from anti-aircraft fire.
Marauders wound up with the lowest loss rate among U.S. bombers, according to Jeremy Kinney, who curates the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's WWII collection. "It would bring you home," said Randall Murff, who was the bombardier in the number two plane during the June 8 mission Now 99 years old, he spoke to me from North Carolina, where he lives in a nursing home.
As they headed toward their target, my grandfather wrote, he shot off flares to keep the planes together and warn Allied ships in the English Channel. When he exhausted the flares, he flashed a signal lamp from a window in the plane's fuselage. Writing to Duffy five decades later, Childress recalled marveling at the Allied armada below.
Improving weather allowed the Marauders to reach 6,000 ft. over France, but that was only about half their typical bombing altitude. The men could feel explosive concussions when they made a direct hit on the fuel dump. The Germans were alerted: "I remember distinctly thinking we better get out of here as fast as we can," said Mr. Murff. "We had torn up everything we hit."
Antiaircraft fire ripped into the number four plane, piloted by Capt. Charles Schober. Crewmen from other planes described seeing the nose sheared off, its engines aflame--and then an explosion. The entire drew was lost. "They cut Schober's plane in two," Mr. Murff said.
The three remaining planes were still in peril. "Everywhere we turned we encountered the same fierce flak," my grandfather wrote. "I thought we were being torn apart, I prayed like hell." They had another tough trip over the Channel on the way home, once again dodging ships as they flew through bad weather.
They made it safely to base, but my grandfather, completing just his third mission, didn't believe he'd survive the war. In fact, he endured 62 more missions, including costly sorties during the German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Many decades later, I read to him a passage from his journal about the flak that he saw take down many planes. He started to tear up and changed the subject. "God, why do all these swell boys have to get it?" he would write about another mission, in December 1944, when eight Marauders were shot down.
Howard Weingrow came home from Europe, met and married Muriel, the woman who would be his beloved wife of 70 years, and became a successful businessman and the patriarch of a family with 12 great-grandchildren. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his "ingenuity and steadfast devotion to duty: on that June 8 mission, when the planes bombed "with outstanding success," the War Department said in a 1945 letter.
The men who fought these battles are fading fast, with about 350 WWII Veterans dying each day, according to the Department of Veteran's Affairs, and many will take memories like this mission with them. When my grandfather died 2017, at the age of 94, he was the last survivor of that June 8 crew.
Jun 13, 2019 16:26:18 #
lpnmajor
Loc: Arkansas
slatten49 wrote:
A bit late for D-Day, but sent to me by BearK, aft... (show quote)
It took uncommon courage to keep walking/flying/sailing into the maelstrom of death time after time after time - and yet - our boys and girls in uniform have always displayed such courage, making it almost routine.
Jun 13, 2019 17:50:44 #
My wife's father was a Navy captain who had a troop carrier landing ship, he never talked about what he did in the war, we found letters and documents that described actions he had been in, and a war correspondent had done an article on his role. He had maps of Normandy marked with where he had t***sported troops and landing craft.
Jun 13, 2019 18:27:20 #
slatten49
Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
lpnmajor wrote:
It took uncommon courage to keep walking/flying/sailing into the maelstrom of death time after time after time - and yet - our boys and girls in uniform have always displayed such courage, making it almost routine.
Yes, it did...and, yes, they did.
Jun 13, 2019 18:29:16 #
slatten49
Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
woodguru wrote:
My wife's father was a Navy captain who had a troop carrier landing ship, he never talked about what he did in the war, we found letters and documents that described actions he had been in, and a war correspondent had done an article on his role. He had maps of Normandy marked with where he had t***sported troops and landing craft.
Do you have any idea which beaches (Sword, Juno, Gold, Utah or Omaha) he dropped troops and landing crafts off, Woody
Jun 15, 2019 03:16:17 #
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