Mission

ON THIS DAY...JULY 11,1944

Field Order 317 would send the 3rd Division's bombers to Munich, Germany where the 13CBW and the 100BG would lead its column of B17s. The crews scheduled to fly that morning learned that their Primary target would be an aero engine factory in Munich.The Intelligence Officer stated that the plant’s “importance lies in the fact that it is one of the three plants known to be currently producing engines for jet propelled aircraft, the other known plants have been severally damaged. Target has been attacked by the 15th AF but PRU shows that only 3 minor buildings have been destroyed. This is the Primary target both visually and on PFF.” Their secondary target would be Munich’s marshalling yards while the target of last resort would be an aero engine works or the marshalling yards at Strasbourg.

The Division’s Wings would split into two wing formations each, starting with the 13CBW, followed by the 45th, then the 4CBWs. The 13th would be led by Colonel Thomas Jeffrey flying as Command Pilot with Francis Kincannon in a PFF ship. In the 13A CBW, the 100A would fly as the Lead BG while the 95A would fly as its High and the 100B as its Low. The 13B CBW would have the 390A as lead BG, the 390B as its High and the 95B as its Low group.

Flying as Jeffrey’s wingmen would be Lambert and Floyd Mason, who would be flying with Frank Valesh in the second PFF ship supplied by the 100th. Not feeling very rested that morning, Valesh’s NAV Dick Johnson remembered, “We flew deputy lead with the 100th B.G. with Buck Mason as command pilot …We’d flown over to Thorpe Abbotts the night before and the only place they had for us to sleep was a chair in the officers club.” Henry Rosine, would lead the second element with Elbel and David. The High would be led by Terminello with Williams and Keys as wingmen, followed by Greiner with Delaney and Ricci. Spares assigned to this Group were Rogers, Phelps and Jones.

The 100B formation would be led by Major Emberson flying Command with Neal Scott. Woldt and Zapf would complete the first element with the second led by Schomp with Wolf and Darby. Its High squadron would be led by Herbert Howard, flying with Dunlap and Clark and Steussy as wingmen. Rake would lead the second element with Harding and Gallagher. The Low, led by Schwank would fly with Miller and Jones while Anderson would lead its second element with Johnson and Mcewen. Kennedy and Lischer would fly as spares.

Taking off without incident, the 100A’s B17s, loaded down with five 1000 lb bombs departed the base between 0719-0734 hours while the 100B’s, carrying the maximum load of M47 incendiary bombs departed soon after. From the Low formation, Miller turned back over Buncher 28 due to an oil leak in his #3 engine, and Kennedy took his spot. With a successful wing assembly made over Ipswich, the remaining spare ships flown by Lischer, Rogers, Phelps and Jones all turned back to base, unneeded.

By 1210 hours, the 13A’s formation had followed the briefed course and had reached the target’s IP in Southern Germany, where they encountered heavy flak and 10/10 cloud coverage making accurate navigating and bombing challenging. Johnson in Valesh’s PFF ship tells us, “As usual the flak around Munich was thick enough to walk on. The Mickey in the lead aircraft would not function in the bomb mode so we took the lead during the bomb run as my set was working "fairly well." I bombed a very strong return but scope pictures later revealed it was not the center of the town. We never did learn what it was…” Official summaries tell us that due to the heavy cloud coverage, the “navigators logs are in no general agreement as to where they were…” At 1225 bombs were away over what it fact was open country 31 miles N and W of their MPI. Johnson continues, “Switzerland looked good on the way home but the engines purred and we made it without incident.”

After a nine hour mission, all ships except one had safely landed at Thorpe Abbotts between 1630-1653 hours. Over Munich, Henry Rosine’s ship had been damaged by flak, with one engine lost. Rosine had burned through his two thousand seven hundred and eighty gallons of gasoline, running out of gas before making it back to Thorpe Abbotts. The twenty year-old Rosine and his copilot Richard Leaman force landed their plane in an open field near Little Bentley, England with no injuries to the crew. The ship however, had to be salvaged due to its damages.

Frederick Ricci had taxied his Fortress 42-107007 to his hardstand off the perimeter track and the crew had already exited their ship when his BTG, Homer Parish started to clean his guns. Pilot William Kennedy remembered, “We were stretched out in a tent, waiting to be picked up to go to interrogation, when we heard a .50 caliber machine gun start firing. It sounded like a cannon. Tired from the day's work, for an instant we were in kind of a daze, wondering what was going on. Then holes appeared in the tent, above our heads, and we knew that no matter what was going on we had better get out of there fast and find shelter. Near the tent was a ditch located behind a hedge row. Our guys hurled themselves through the hedge and into the ditch. I was next to last and didn't penetrate the hedge, but our tail gunner, Charles Porter, crashed into me and carried both of us through. And TG Robert Satchel and his Pilot Edgar Wolf remembered, “being an older crew a truck was at our plane site. Jumped on the truck and by-passed one plane site and at the next site, waited for another crew to load on the truck to go for debriefing. We heard a machine gun go off. Sattler jumped off the back of the truck and hit the ground. The rest of us hit the bed of the truck, struggling to get on the bottom…Some shells went through canvas of the truck where we were and some shells went through the tent by our plane. One shell went through the armor by the waist gun position - another shell went through one of our planes engines. It wasn’t even safe on the ground.” Kennedy continued, “After the machine gun stopped firing, I saw someone climbing a ladder leaned against the front of a smoking wing, trying to put out the fire. That took guts.

In the end, Homer Parish’s gun had fired two hundred seven rounds of ammunition, killing nineeteen year old Homer from Konawa, Oklahoma, as he tried to run away. The 351st Squadron Diary adds, “These bursts narrowly missed killing Lieut. E.J. Kraft and several of his assistants who were checking the returning ship. Three ships of the squadron (42-39867,42-102416 and 42-31256) were also shot up, one so badly it had to be taken out of commission permanently.” 

William Kennedy summarized the tragic ending when he wrote, “The story of how it happened is already well known: a problem in disarming a machine gun, an unlocked ball turret that started rotating, and a gunner who panicked and fled to his death. Not a very happy day.”

Meanwhile new replacement crews were getting used to their new environment. Raymond “Monk” Mainka, WG on the Joseph Ricker crew and newly arrived to England wrote into his journal that day, “It seems funny to sit by a stove in the middle part of July. The sky is most of the time cloudy and often raining. Had some false identification pictures made in civilian clothes.”