Catching Hell: Jack Watson and a B-17 Mission to Germany

They came from everywhere out of the sky. Flocks of German single-engine Messerschmitt Bf-109 and Focke-Wulf 190 fighters, twin-engine Junkers Ju-88, and Messerschmitt Bf-110 attack bombers swarmed through the formations of American B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 303rd “Hell’s Angels” Bombing Group, Eighth Air Force, on their way to strike an aircraft plant at Oschersleben, Germany, in early 1944.

The enemy planes blasted away at the bombers with 20-mm cannons, machine guns, and rockets. If all else failed, the German pilots aimed their machines at the invaders head-on. “There seemed to be no end to the Hun fighters,” one bomber pilot recalled, “and as we shot them down, others rose and took their place.” Another remembered that if he lived to be 200 years old, the date of the Oschersleben raid always brought to his mind nightmare visions of his comrades’ aircraft being shot to pieces, bursting into flame, and spinning, out of control, taking his friends to their deaths. “Planes seemed to be going down everywhere,” a crew member on one of the bombers noted grimly years after the war.

One of the B-17s on the mission, nicknamed Meat Hound, part of the group’s 358th Bombardment Squadron, lost one of its four engines before reaching the target. Undeterred by its mechanical difficulty, fighter opposition, and flak unleashed by antiaircraft fire from below, Meat Hound released its full load of 500-pound, general-purpose bombs on the German aircraft plant. Its troubles, however, did not end as the plane turned to make its way to its base located near Molesworth, England.

Enemy attacks caused one of its gas tanks to catch fire, forcing its pilot, Second Lieutenant Jack W. Watson of Indianapolis, to order everyone to bail out over the German-occupied Netherlands. (Two others in the ten-member crew were also Hoosiers: Staff Sergeant Samuel L. Rowland of Indianapolis and Sergeant Eugene R. Stewart of Anderson.) Only one of the crew, the freckle-faced, twenty-one-year-old Watson, returned that day to England. Eight crew members either drowned or were captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. The remaining crewman, copilot Clayton C. David, evaded capture and, after some harrowing adventures, was returned safely to Allied hands.

Watson, who later called Oschersleben “the toughest” mission of his wartime service, steered his crippled and battered bomber to a safe landing at a U.S. fighter airfield near the coast of England. The pilot’s perilous flight mirrored, in part, his daredevil antics upon leaving the United States. As more than sixty thousand fans looked on from their seats at Yankee Stadium, Watson and his comrades flew “dangerously low” during the first game of the October 1943 World Series pitting the American League’s New York Yankees against the National League’s Saint Louis Cardinals.

According to news reports, the B-17s made several passes over the stadium, with one flying dangerously close over the roof of the stadium’s upper deck. As the New York Times reported, to the vast audience listening to the game on its radios “the roar of the plane was worse than static, since it virtually drowned out the play-by-play broadcast.” The incident enraged New York mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, who called on military officials to take “proper disciplinary action” against those involved. La Guardia’s opinion about one of the miscreants, Watson, however, later softened due to the pilot’s combat heroics.

Watson and one of his crew, Stewart, took different paths to the war before flying together on bombing missions. A 1939 graduate of Indianapolis’s Shortridge High School, where he enjoyed studying English and playing basketball, Watson enrolled at Butler University, taking classes for two years. Watson’s studies were interrupted by news of the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor, which plunged the country into the war. Watson left Butler to join the military, eventually earning his pilot wings. A graduate of Anderson High School, Stewart spent his time after graduation working at one of his hometown’s automotive parts plants, Delco-Remy, as a buffer, polishing electrical parts (distributors, generators, etc.) for military aircraft before enlisting in September 1942. Although Stewart spent his basic training in Mississippi studying the intricacies of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber systems, he ended up doing his flight training on a B-17G nicknamed Thru Hel’en Hiwater, joining Watson’s crew in Walla Walla, Washington.

Watson received training in one of his country’s most potent weapons, the multiengine Boeing B-17 designed and built by the Boeing Aircraft Company. With a range of more than 1,800 miles, the heavy bomber could strike deep into an enemy’s airspace to deliver its approximately 4,000-pound bombload with pinpoint accuracy, guided by the top-secret Norden bombsight. The B-17 also possessed a ceiling of 35,000 feet, a cruising speed of 160 miles per hour, and an armament of more than ten .50-caliber machine guns at positions scattered throughout the aircraft.

The Fortress earned a reputation for extreme ruggedness, taking all manner of punishment but remaining in the air. When the army air force asked crews who flew the B-17 if they believed they had the top aircraft to fulfill their responsibilities, 92 percent of them agreed. “Because of the many times a ‘Fort’ got our crews back when it could have dropped them into the drink,” noted Harry Crosby, a navigator from the 100th Bomb Group, “we were grateful to it, and emotional about it. The sound of a B-17 brought tears to the eyes of anyone who ever flew one.” A navigator with the 100th  spoke for many who flew in the big bomber when he noted: “It was a miracle how some of those damaged B-17s got home—with tails shot off, gaping holes in the fuselage, engines and electrical systems shot out, and with dead and wounded crew members.”

A B-17 crew consisted of four commissioned officers and six noncommissioned officers. In addition to the pilot and copilot, the other commissioned officers were a navigator and bombardier, located forward and in front of the pilots. “They shared the compartment in the nose of the airplane,” David noted. “In simple terms, the navigator was expected to guide the pilots to the target area so that the bombardier could deliver the bombs on the target. They assisted each other when needed and saw that one or the other could man the guns in the nose of the plane at all times.” The flight engineer sat to the rear of the pilots, checked with the ground crew to make sure the aircraft was in proper condition to fly before a mission, kept a watch on the plane’s performance during the mission, relayed information to the pilots when needed, and operated the top gun turret.

The bomb bay, David explained, separated the five men at the front of the B-17 from the five crewmen to the rear. “A narrow catwalk through the center, where the bombs were hung on either side,” he said, “provided access to the next compartment, which was the radio room,” manned by the radio operator. Behind the radio room was the space occupied by the ball turret, which hung below the plane during flight and had to be cranked back into place before the aircraft could land. A tail gunner handled the two machine guns at the B-17’s rear, while the waist gunners operated .50-caliber guns on either side of the fuselage, with one also serving as an engineer and the other with training as a radio operator.

The waist-gunner positions proved to be particularly dangerous during combat, as they lacked armor protection; only a thin aluminum skin stood between the gunner and potential doom. “Each man had the responsibility for maintaining his guns and having a supply of ammunition,” David noted. “Each person also needed to understand the critical aspects of the area of the airplane where he was stationed and how he and the aircraft might be affected by possible battle damage.” All the crew hoped their luck held overseas so that they could complete twenty-five combat missions (later increased to thirty and eventually thirty-five) and return home.

Before joining the American bombers engaged in strategic daylight raids from bases in England aimed at crippling Nazi Germany’s war-making ability, Watson and his crew joined a group of B-17s—the Iseman Provisional Group—selected for secret training in Brooksville, Florida. The crew was there to test a new glide bomb, the GB-1, also known as the “Grapefruit Bomb.” Given the tough opposition presented by flak from the dreaded German 88-mm antiaircraft artillery pieces, it made sense for U.S. industries to develop a winged 2,000-pound bomb B-17s could carry under each wing to be released miles away from danger and guided to the target by a gyrostabilizer-based autopilot. Larry Peacock, a navigator on one of the bombers testing the new weapon, recalled:

“We would fly across Florida to some island in the Bahama chain that was uninhabited. When we reached the I.P. [Initial Point] at 20,000 feet, the Bombardier would engage the gyros. This was about 20 miles from the small island (target). The pilot would drop the nose of the 17 to let the air speed build up to 195 mph while holding a heading toward the island. When released, the bombs were supposed to glide on the same heading into the target area. The idea was to perfect the technique so these glide bombs could be used against targets in the Ruhr Valley. . . . When the glide bombs were released, they could glide into the target and the B-17s could turn away before getting into the flak concentrations. The Air Force figured that any strike in a vast industrial complex would result in considerable damage even without pin-point targets.”

Called upon to join the 303rd in England, the B-17s of the Iseman Group prepared to leave Florida in early October 1943, headed first to a base at Presque Isle, Maine. Four aircraft received permission to leave early for the journey, including a B-17 flown by Watson. Accounts differ on the other pilots who accompanied Watson, but they all agree that the group earned La Guardia’s ire by “buzzing” Yankee Stadium on their way to Maine. “We knew we were headed for the combat zone,” one of the pilots, Joseph C. Wheeler of Fresno, California, later told a reporter, “and dropping in on the world series seemed a good idea at the time. . . . We thought nothing about it until later when we found out we’d caused a sensation.”

Often credited for being the pilot who barely scraped his B-17 over the stadium’s roof, Watson joked that he and his fellow pilots would like to get together “some day and drop in on the Rose bowl game.” La Guardia did not see anything funny about the incident. The Republican mayor threatened civil action if the military did not act. “I know it is a violation of Army rules and also a flagrant violation of our altitude laws. . . . If anything had happened, a thousand people would have been killed.”

Military officials did try to discipline the wayward flyers. Stewart remembered that when the Thru Hel’en Hiwater landed military police arrested Watson and his copilot, John C. Doty Jr. Authorities threatened to keep the pilots under lock and key and fly the rest of the crew on to England, causing a mutiny. “We trained with this pilot and copilot and we felt if they were going to be punished, we should be, too,” Stewart explained. Luckily, because they had been involved in a top-secret project, the GB-1 glider bomb, the officers involved in the World Series affair escaped a court martial but were fined seventy-five dollars apiece and received letters of reprimands in their records. An air force officer told Watson that he saw no need to punish him, as he and his crew would probably be killed in action. Stewart noted that Watson had the last laugh. After taking off, Watson returned to buzz the control tower, coming so close to it that he almost took off its top.

Watson and his crew were assigned to the 303rd’s 358th Bombardment Squadron, which had entered combat in November 1942. The 303rd also included the 359th and 360th Bombardment Squadrons, as well as the Thirty-first Reconnaissance Squadron. The group had the distinction of having one of its B-17s, nicknamed “Hell’s Angels” after the 1930 Howard Hughes film, become the first heavy bomber to finish twenty-five missions in the European theater of operations.

By war’s end, the 303rd’s aircraft had flown 364 missions (the most by any B-17 bomb group) and dropped more than twenty-five thousand tons of ordnance on the enemy. Watson and the other young pilots joining the 303rd seemed eager to join the fray. “It’s the first mission that counts,” an unnamed rookie flyer told a reporter from Yank: The Army Weekly, while relaxing at their quarters at Molesworth. “Once I get over the hump on that one I’ll gain my bearings. I’m just itching to get that first one in.”

Watson and his crew finally got a taste of combat on December 1, 1943, hitting targets in Solingen, Germany. For his first three flights, Watson served as a copilot, with the Thru Hel’en Hiwater piloted by an experienced officer, Martin L. Clark, who guided the rookie flyer through his combat orientation. Watson finally received his opportunity to handle the controls of his B-17 as its commander on December 20, 1943, for a mission striking Bremen, Germany. As aircraft commander, Watson was, as his pilot’s training manual emphasized, “responsible for the safety and efficiency of the crew at all times,” not just while in combat, but for “the full 24 hours of every day while you are in command.”

For Watson’s sixth mission—the group’s ninety-eighth—he and his crew endured one of the toughest outings the bombers had experienced to that time. On January 11, 1944, the Eighth Air Force unleashed 633 B-17s and B-24s from a host of squadrons against fighter aircraft factories in Oschersleben, Brunswick, and Halberstadt, Germany. The 303rd sent forty of its B-17s to hit a Focke-Wulf 190 assembly plant, AGO Flugzeugwerke, at Oschersleben, located about a hundred miles southwest of Berlin.

Before waking early that morning in his bunk inside a curved metal Nissan hut, Watson had to prepare his equipment for the mission, including an escape kit, emergency rations, parachute, life vest, winter underwear, fur-lined jacket, electric flying suit (temperatures inside the unpressurized aircraft during the winter could get as low as 60 degrees below zero), gloves, armored flak vest, oxygen mask, maps, and personal items. Before being briefed about the mission, the more than four hundred squadron members trooped to the mess to enjoy a special meal prepared prior to combat missions—fresh eggs instead of the usual powdered version, a practice that usually prompted dark jokes about condemned men eating a hearty meal. For many of the 303rd, it marked the last hot meal they would eat for a long time.

Brigadier General Robert F. Travis, who led the mission to Oschersleben, remembered his men assembling for the briefing before a covered wall map. Seeing him enter the bitterly cold and damp room, one of the young pilots saw him and commented: “We have had it. The Old Man is going.” As the men saw the planned route northeast across the North Sea, Holland, and into Germany, “a sigh of intense expectancy and trepidation arose from the entire room,” noted Travis.

Harold A. Susskind, a navigator on a B-17 dubbed The Duchess, remembered that one of the items that drew the most attention was a comment from an officer at the briefing who noted that “there are over 500 single-engine and twin-engine enemy aircraft within 100 miles of your route.” Fortunately, Susskind said he also heard the pleasant news that the bombers could expect friendly fighter escort from Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, and North American P-51 Mustangs, with the latter capable of providing air cover all the way to the target area. “Great emphasis was placed upon the importance of destroying this target,” Travis reported. “An explanation was made to the crews as to what great bearing it would have upon the ultimate defeat of Germany. We knew that to get to this target would cost us a great price and these boys must be convinced that the loss of life and aircraft was well worth what we hoped to accomplish.”

For the Oschersleben raid, Watson served as pilot on a B-17F nicknamed Meat Hound. Those joining him on the bomber for his sixth mission were David, copilot; Second Lieutenant John G. Leverton, navigator; Second Lieutenant Vance R. Colvin, bombardier; Rowland, engineer; Staff Sergeant Harry Romaine, radio operator; Sergeant Fred H. Booth, ball-turret gunner; Stewart, left-wing gunner; Sergeant William H. Fussner, right-wing gunner; and Sergeant Roman P. Kosinski, tail gunner.

As the 303rd reached the Dutch coast, the enemy attacked in earnest. “I never saw so many fighters in my life,” Stewart remembered. Susskind noted that the intercom on his B-17 “was filled with shouts of, ‘Fighters at 6 o’clock low, fighters at 12 o’clock high, fighters lobbing in rockets from 3 o’clock,’ as the various crew positions called in the directions from which the enemy aircraft were attacking. Minutes seemed like hours and hours dragged on like days.” Some aircraft had to take such violent evasive action that crewmen were knocked off their feet and onto the floor.

Gunners in the bombers fired more than fifty-thousand rounds of ammunition in a desperate attempt to hold off the ruthless German attackers. To one radio operator from the 303rd, James S. Andrus, it seemed as though the “whole German Luftwaffe must have been up there, because most of the B-17s didn’t have a chance.” Viewing the destruction from the copilot’s seat on his aircraft, nicknamed The ‘8’ Ball, Travis felt “heartsick and yet proud as I saw the terrific pounding my boys were taking and the valor and determination they exhibited, as they closed their dwindling formation, flew even closer, and fought their way on to their target.”

As the B-17s from the 303rd battled for their lives, the weather worsened over England, forcing the new Eighth Air Force commander, Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, to issue a recall of the bombers; most of the fighters also returned to their bases. Travis decided to press on to Oschersleben, as he was only ten or fifteen minutes away from the point where he could turn on course to the target. “I felt that our losses had been so great that success of the main mission must be accomplished,” he reported.

Major James H. Howard, the pilot of a P-51 fighter, fought off thirty German fighters as a “one-man air force” for thirty minutes, downing four of them. “I seen my duty and I done it,” Howard later told a New York Times reporter. “I’d just see one, give him a ‘squirt’ and go up again, look around and see another and give him a ‘squirt,’ then go up again, look around and repeat. There was an awful lot of them around and it was just a matter of shooting at them.” For his actions that day, Howard received the nation’s most prestigious military decoration, the Medal of Honor. “With utter disregard for his own safety,” the citation for Howard’s medal read, “he immediately pressed home determined attacks.” The 303rd and the other bomb groups who hit Oschersleben were honored with a Presidential Unit Citation for their extraordinary heroism and tenacity against a determined foe.

Early in its flight, Meat Hound lost its number three engine, the one located on the right wing next to the copilot, to fire from a German fighter. Watson could see the engine “burning like hell” but still found his way to the target and released the bombload. Travis remembered that as he turned for home he looked back and could see the “entire factory suddenly burst into a huge cloud of dirty black smoke which blossomed upwards for 5,000 feet and then mushroomed out to a white edge cloud with a dark center. Our destruction could be seen when we were a hundred miles on our way toward home.”

Despite its success at hitting the target, the 303rd continued to be harassed by the enemy. As Watson turned away from the target, a shell from a German fighter ripped a large hole in his plane’s left elevator, while another hit between the right wing and fuselage. A third shell struck near the number two engine, which started smoking. “I feathered it then, and the fire soon appeared to go out,” Watson reported. “But a little later the left waist gunner [Stewart] reported smoke and flames pouring out of that engine.”

As Meat Hound reached the airspace over the Netherlands, David could see low clouds developing and obscuring his view of the ground. “At this point we had given up about 8,000 feet of altitude for enough speed to keep up with the [B-17] formation above us,” he noted. “However, with 15,000 feet of altitude and two good engines, we believed we would safely survive the battle which had now lasted for at least two and one-half hours.” Navigator Leverton had reported that the aircraft was just east of Amsterdam, over the Zuider Zee, when another German fighter pressed in for an attack, hitting the plane and starting a fire near its number two gas tank.

Noticing that his plane was over water, Watson turned his crippled aircraft to the south “to allow us to bail out over land. All the rest of the boys jumped, one by one.” When he went below to bail out from his assigned exit, David could see that the navigator and flight engineer had followed proper emergency procedure and had preceded him out of the plane. He was surprised, however, to see the bombardier still in the plane. “When I inquired of the bombardier, ‘Are you OK, or have you been shot?’ He assured me that the was all right and said, ‘I’ll jump after you.’ This he did,” recalled David. Other crew members used the side exit to the B-17’s rear to bail out. Although disappointed at failing in his goal of flying twenty-five missions, David hoped to achieve another goal—to have a successful parachute jump and escape capture.

Hitting the ground on a narrow strip of land between the Zuider Zee and Lake Kinselmeer, a few miles east of Amsterdam, David was fortunate to evade the Germans with the help of a friendly Dutch farmer. Resistance fighters aided David in his long journey from the Netherlands through Belgium and France and on to Spain, where he was arrested by police before finally being released and making it to British-controlled Gibraltar. He arrived back in England on May 25, 1944, the only one of the 109 missing-in-action crewmen from the 303rd to return to his base before the war ended. Others on his crew were not so lucky. Stewart, Leverton, Romaine, and Kosinski were captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in POW camps. Four men—Colvin, Rowland, Booth, and Fussner—did not survive their jumps, drowning after landing.

As for Watson, he had expected to bail out with the rest of his crew. He had set the plane’s automatic pilot, put on his parachute, and started to crawl out the escape hatch. When he looked down through a small break in the clouds, however, all he could see below was water. “I was scared to death,” he later told a reporter. “I didn’t want to go into the channel. I decided I would rather blow up with the Fortress than drown in the channel. I took a heading in the direction of England and said to myself: ‘Here goes.’”

Now alone, Watson could only watch helplessly as two enemy fighters attacked his B-17 from each side. Fortunately, the worsening weather forced the Germans to break off and return to their base. “It was pretty lonesome up there,” he remembered. “I radioed to the landing fields: ‘If you see a B-17 with two engines out, you’ll know it’s me.’”

With two engines out and fires blazing, his left elevator shot off, a shattered connection between one wing section and the fuselage, and battling terrible visibility, Watson steered his severely damaged aircraft to a successful landing at Royal Air Force Metfield, then home to the American 353rd Fighter Group, which flew P-47 Thunderbolts. Watson recalled that on the radio he could hear the airfield’s control tower call to him, “Come on in big friend.”

According to an article about the incident in the Stars and Stripes newspaper, Watson “made what Thunderbolt pilots there called a ‘beautiful landing.’” The bomber pilot watched as firefighters spent some time, nearly two hours, trying to put out the fires threatening to engulf his aircraft (the Meat Hound had to be scrapped, becoming one of the eleven B-17s lost by the 303rd from the mission). As he watched, he heard one of the ground crew call out: “‘Watson, look what I found under your seat.’ He reached down and pulled out an unexploded 20-millimeter cannon shell.” Safe at Molesworth, Watson wondered if La Guardia might finally forgive him. Later, the pilot received a message from the New York mayor that read: “All is forgiven. Congratulations. I hope you never run out of altitude. Happy landings. Will be seeing you soon.”

Watson survived the war, finishing his service with more than thirty combat missions. By then, he had seemingly grown tired of being reminded about his World Series stunt, shrugging when asked about it by an Indianapolis News reporter and commenting, “That’s water over the dam.” In peacetime, Watson flew for a time with Pan American Airways before settling down in Indianapolis for a long career in the insurance industry, retiring in 1983 and dying ten years later. His traumatic experiences in the skies over Germany had marked their changes on him even while he served overseas. When David returned to London in May 1944, for security reasons he had to be identified by someone who knew him. “Jack Watson arrived from our base to identify me,” David remembered, “and it was a great relief to see him. I was pleased to see him wearing captain’s bars but shocked to see that his beautiful black hair had turned mostly grey during the four and one half months we had been separated.”

Both David and Stewart seemed to hold no grudge against Watson for his decision to remain with his B-17 after ordering the rest of his crew to bail out. Stewart, who died in Anderson in 2000, noted that Watson had made the difficult decision that he would “rather blow up than freeze to death” if he ended up in the English Channel, and if all the crew had remained in the aircraft it might not have made it to England.

While waiting to return from Spain, David, talking to a fellow American officer who had been shot down after he had been, learned that Watson had beaten the odds and returned to England without a scratch. “My immediate thoughts,” David wrote in his memoir, published before his death in 2009, “were then, as they have remained, ‘Thank God he made it!’ No good can come from wondering if we might have gotten back had we stayed with the plane.” David firmly believed that their best odds at that moment over the Netherlands “favored the decision that was made” by his commander.