Fifty-five years later, the author found one of those flaps about 400 feet from where the B-17 came to rest in four large pieces. Both wings had broken off and the tail had broken free of the forward fuselage. The forward fuselage had stopped about 135 feet from the broken end of the tail. Lt Harms had watched after bailing out, as the B-17 flew to the west, turned, and flew back toward them. He was just above the tree’s top level when it began its turn to his north and he followed the ongoing crash suddenly, the nose of the B-17 was pointing right at him. It stopped moving 227 feet from where he was now landing. The fuel cells in one wing had broken and spread fuel over part of the crash site and a large whooshing sound occurred covering a large part of the crash site with fire. Harms, hit the ground, not being sure he was in a friendly area and having seen two men running toward him, he dropped his chute and ran to the north to get into the forest and hide for a while.
Harland landed seconds later and he too, dropped his chute and ran to the north into the forest where he found an old German World War One artillery position at the edge of the woods and took cover there. Gustafson, who still to this day does not think he passed out, woke up to see the bomber to his north and then he watched it start a turn, disappear into a woods and he saw and heard the flashing explosion as he hit the ground. The pain was extensive when his right leg hit the ground and he fell over to find himself being pulled across the freshly plowed field by his parachute. He was attempting to follow the instructions on what to do when a Frenchman and an American ran up to him. The Frenchman grabbed him and stopped his movement. Gustafson pulled his favorite hunting knife out of a sheath on his parachute harness and handed it to the soldier asking him to cut the parachute’s shroud lines and so, stop the wind from pulling him across the field. Seconds later, the US soldier was rolling up the parachute when an ambulance pulled up and two men got out, approached Gustafson, and took over.
They quickly checked his wound, got a stretcher out of the ambulance and lifted the wounded airman onto it when Harland came walking up. With both in the ambulance and unable to see anyone else the ambulance driver left for the hospital near the WW-I Cemetery. It had not gone very far (as Gustafson told the author) when he realized that the US soldier hadn’t given the hunting knife back. Anyway, 15 minutes later, Gustafson and Harland arrived at the 109th Evacuation Hospital. As the ambulance arrived at the hospital, Pfc Lindsey helped remove the man on the stretcher and watched as two nurses talked to him and sent him to the casting tent. As he was being taken away, Lindsey asked, if he could have a piece of the parachute as a souvenir. Gustafson told him sure, go ahead. And when he arrived in the casting tent, he was put to sleep. November 9, 1944, became then a memory. Harland had stood by while the nurses checked Gustafson out and both had said their goodbye, never to meet again.
There is an explanation as to why the bomber was literally cut into pieces. The village of Hattonville is located almost astride the Departments of the Meuse and the Meurthe-et-Moselle a few kilometers from Verdun to the northeast and St Mihiel to the southwest. These are major combat zones of the First World War. All the forests within a radius of 15 to 20 kilometers around these two cities were almost decimated, so much the quantity of artillery shells that exploded there is consequent. Almost all the surviving trees, mostly oaks in this region, had been decapitated. Access to the forest having been prohibited for many years after 1918 because of abandoned or unexploded ordnance, these trees resumed their growth according to the damage suffered. When in 1944, 24 years later, the B-17 was forced to land on the treetops, it was by no means the usual oak trees whose heads would have broken off one after another, but oak trees bruised who had remanufactured new heads, often 3 or 4 branch forks, much more solid and resistant. The plane had no chance here of passing through such trees, as was the case for most of the planes that crashed in the forests of Northeastern France during World War Two.
2/Lt John A. Harland’s face had been stripped by the parachute shroud lines as it opened and he was told, they were going to keep him overnight for a complete checkout. He would, then, be evacuated in the morning up the line to the next higher hospital located in Paris. When done, they put him to bed, gave him a sedative, and November 9, 1944, also quickly ended for him. Meanwhile, 2/Lt Joseph F. Harms, still not sure about being in enemy or friendly territory, had continued to hide in the forest. However, as he went from tree to tree, he saw an access road running through the forest. Very carefully, he decided to move east along the road till he heard an engine and hid again. A Minute later, as he went along the road, he reached a point where he could see through the trees and saw in the distance some large pieces of his B-17. He could even hear people talking. He moved a little closer and then heard someone speaking American English. He then started to walk through the trees toward the crash site. He began to see tree limbs and pieces of the bomber spread along the forest floor leading to the crash site. There were some very white and red items, however, he did not realize what they were.
Soon after Harms had run away to the north from the approaching Frenchmen he had seen, the first of them soon arrived where Harms had landed and he could see the nose of the bomber in the smoke of the fading fire. The fire had lasted for less than five minutes, though an engine was lying near the front and it was still burning. To its left, he could also see a tire that was going to burn for some time. The Frenchman’s friends had not arrived yet, so he went into the woods, and with the fire burned out he walked up to the fuselage he could see through the tree limbs that had broken into the cockpit, the two pilots were in their seats.
Having moved some of the smaller limbs and could actually reach the man in the copilot seat, the Frenchman realized the man was obviously dead. The face of the man had been smashed by the limbs and in the other seat, he could see that the same had happened to the other one. His friend arrived and they walked around to the open end of the fuselage. They saw that it was spattered all over with blood. He told his friend, that he was going to crawl up into the plane and go to the front and check again on the pilots. His friend said he was not going to do that, but he was going to the broken-off tail to see if anyone was there. The man had just reached the two pilots and verified how they had died when his friend called and said he had found another body. He went back to the opening and his friend took him to see a man who had landed between the tail and the forward fuselage. Lying there, he also was dead. They discussed it and thought he must have bailed out very late and had landed in the fire which had killed him. At that time, the Frenchmen heard speaking English and they turned and walked out to meet the Americans who were arriving at the site. They saw the Commander, the second in command, and the doctor. All the French in the village knew the medics and the doctor as they had never had better health care than when the Americans were stationed there during WW-2. No matter what was wrong, if they went to the building where the doctors were one of them would find out what was wrong and bind cuts and burns or give them medicine which always helped. If one required more attention they would bring the doctor who wore the gold leaves on his shoulder. They had been there for two months now and everyone in the village knew every one of the Americans, if not by name, by the job they were doing.
The Frenchman, who was the American translator, was with them and he filled the Americans in about what the two men had found. The Commander, then, told one of the enlisted Americans to build a fire not too far from where the wing-leaning tree had come to rest. The six men stood by the cockpit and discussed the two dead men inside and then they showed them the body they had found. The officers asked the Frenchmen to help get the dead men out of the cockpit and recover the man lying in the bush. The American doctors (enlisted and officer medics were thought of as doctors) entered the cockpit and started to remove the bodies. As they pulled the first one clear of the seat, another man grabbed his flying jacket at the collar and began to pull him through the cockpit and radio compartment. There, the two Frenchmen helped lift them off the deck and carried the bodies to place them on a canvas the officers had ordered placed near the fire. Then, they went back to help with the second body. The medics had been unable to free his safety belt clasp, so they cut through the seat belting to free him, and then, they pulled him out. All four men had helped carry that body and placed him next to the first, then they went to get the body they had found in the brush. The Frenchmen saw the second in command, take the coat off the body of the man they had just recovered. Soon the French from the village began to arrive. After some time, three boys who were pushing their bicycles arrived. One of the officers, now wearing a flying jacket, reached into a pocket and pulled out a stick of gum for each of the boys, then told the kids they had to leave. At the same time, he told the other Americans to place the site under guard and keep more French away from the site.
As the boys walked their bikes out of the wood, they told arriving French people to turn around and go back to their homes and as they rode toward the village, they talked about what they had seen. There were three bodies lying on a cover in the woods, two had broken faces and the only damage the other seemed to have suffered was a light burning, except for where his coat had been and they each remarked, seeing one of the Americans wearing a matching, slightly burned jacket. At their air base back in England, the men and officers discussed the loss of the Lady Jeannette. All of them were certain it was going to crash and instead, it came under control and was last seen, heading west with no parachutes seen. It was another day of combat and another day of what was considered fairly light casualties, thus November 9, 1944, came to an end.
This closed the day of November 9, 1944, near the small village of Hattonville in France, and the end of a B-17 #42-97904 Lady Jeannette bomber which, by now, was reduced to a disintegrated pile of burned and bloody parts on the ground. Four men had died. T/Sgt Dunlap, Sgt Krimminger, Lt Gott and Lt Metzger. Their bodies had been recovered, but, unfortunately, the story is not over. In fact, this story is about to start now.
B-24J I WALK ALONE
Why was a B-24J flying over France in the middle of the night on a top-secret mission would be a very good question. One that could have been answered by a member of the 36th Bomb Squadron. However, it was a question that the answer received would not have answered your question. The required information maintained its top-secret listing until the 1990s. The following will supply some background information required if you decide you have to question the author’s conclusion. Please, re-research the following before contacting the author. When we got first to Cheddington, the thing they told us was that we had to be completely aware that (our) operation was absolutely TOP SECRET. We were not to divulge to anyone what kind of work we were in. We couldn’t send any word back home about what we were doing. If we ran into some of the other crews that we might have known in training in the States and they asked us what we were doing, to just tell them we were just flying like they were, and not divulge that we were in the counter radar top secret squadron. (The 36th Bomb Squadron in World War II, Stephen M. Hutton, Squadron of Deception page 146)
‘Window’ was strips of coarse, black paper exactly 27 cm long and 2 cm wide with thin Aluminum Foil stuck to one of the sides the length of which matched the wavelength of the German Radar Waves. As the bundles were dropped from an aircraft they separated to form a vast cloud of metallic strips. When one of these came square-on to the German Radar Beam it sent back an exceptionally strong echo out of all proportion to its true size. Strips in other positions returned much smaller echoes. When dropped in great numbers, it swamped the Enemy’s Radar. In this photo, a bundle of windows has just been released from a higher-flying aircraft with false echoes & rendered it virtually useless. Trials in England had convinced the British that this technique would be successful against the ‘Wurzburg’ Ground-based Radar Sets which controlled the German Night-Fighter Interceptions and the radar-directed Flak guns. As well it was also felt that it would be effective against the smaller Airborne Lichtenstein Radar Sets which the night-fighter crews used when closing in on a British bomber. The window had been ready since April 1942 but had not been used for fear that the German Luftwaffe would copy it and use it to counter British radar systems while making their own bombing raids. Interestingly, the enemy had already developed a similar technique and had named it ‘Duppel’. Hermann Goering, the Commander of the Luftwaffe, fearing that if the British were made aware of it it might be used against his own defenses, ordered that no one was to speak of Duppel and that there was to be no further development of the technique.
On March 31, 1944, after discovering what the English bomber streams were used to confuse their radars, (the British called it ‘Window’, the Americans ‘Chaff’, the Germans changed all their frequency. That night, the RAF lost over 10% of their bombers to German night fighters and their Lichtenstein radars. The losses were so great that the RAF stopped all missions until a solution could be found. Continuing the bombing missions would have meant there would have been no RAF bomber left, in less than ten days. As fate would have it, that same day, the first aircraft from the USAAF 36-BS (Radar Counter Measures) was transferred to the 100th Group, RAF. On the first mission, flown with the protection of the electronic countermeasures provided by the radar-jamming aircraft, the RAF lost no bombers. On the German side, the Lichtenstein radar was among the earliest airborne radars available to the Luftwaffe in WW-II and the first one utilized exclusively in the air interception role. Developed by Telefunken, it was available in at least four major revisions, designated FuG 202 Lichtenstein B/C, FuG 212 Lichtenstein C-1, FuG 220 Lichtenstein SN-2, and the very rarely used FuG 228 Lichtenstein SN-3. (FuG is short for Funk-Gerät, German Radio Set). The Lichtenstein series remained the only deployed interception radar used by the Luftwaffe on their night fighters during the war. The competing FuG 216 through 218 Neptun mid-VHF band radar systems were meant as a potentially more versatile stopgap system through 1944 until the microwave-based FuG 240 Berlin could be mass-produced. The Berlin system was still in testing when the war ended.
German night fighters had a radar unit mounted on its nose, once it was vectored to the general area by the German ground radars, it could lock onto the British bomber on the darkest of nights. Normally, they would approach from below and behind and the British crews had no indication until their bomber was struck by the fighter’s fire. A detection unit was created, that would indicate they were being tracked, so they could attempt to evade. However, the combination of ground radar control and the onboard targeting radar of the German night fighter was deadly. Just, as the same combination enabled Allied night fighters to overcome German aircraft that flew at night.
(Note) The Author, as a former USAF Radar Operator and a Nike Missile Fire Control Maintenance Man, this book provided a wealth of information, that was still secret when I served. Stephen’s father was in the squadron and during his research and squadron receptions, he interviewed many survivors and fleshed out the members of the squadron and their individual experiences. Stephen and I met as he was completing his book, and on page 185 you will find this author’s name in connection to the installation of a memorial in France for the B-24J-1, #42-51226, 36th Bomber Squadron, 8-AAF attached to the 100th Group, Royal Air Force, and her crew:
(KIA) 2/Lt Frederic G. Grey, #0717204, (Navigator);
(KIA) Sgt Raymond G. Mears, #33556665 (Nose Turret Gunner);
(KIA) Sgt Frank A. Bartho, #36515334, (Tail Gunner);
(WIA) 1/Lt Joseph R. Hornsby (Pilot);
(WIA) 1/Lt Robert H. Casper (Co-Pilote);
(WIA) T/Sgt Jackson K. Chestnut (Engineer & Top Turret Gunner);
(WIA) Sgt Pete B. Yslava (Ball Turret Gunner);
(WIA) T/Sgt Joseph P. Danahy (Radio Operator);
(WIA) Sgt Roberto R. Veliz (Waist Gunner).
Not far away, in the village cemetery of Cartigny (France) (Department of the Somme) is the grave that started all of this for the author on Christmas Eve, 1991, when my friend and I were asked, to visit the grave of an unknown American soldier of WW-II. The Frenchman had been tending the grave for some years and he requested, that the author identify the grave, so the person within could be honored during the 50th Anniversary of D-Day. On November 10, 2000, this memorial was dedicated by the same audience that later dedicated the grave Memorial (below) later that day. The plaques memorialize a B-26 that later crashed near the memorial location, which is about 3/4 mile from the exact B-24J crash site, which is in a working field. The B-26 actually stuck at the exact B-24J crash site, bounced over an electric line, bounced again, and then slammed into the woods very close to this memorial. During the crash, the radar navigating unit broke loose, crushing two of the crew to death. The two pilots were awarded the Soldiers Medal for their action in removing the bodies from the burning wreckage. The author interviewed the two pilots and each told him, that if we had not removed the bodies, we would have been stuck in the burning plane and died.
