The Pittsburgh Press (January 26, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 26, by wireless)
The Flying Fortress crew that made air history this month by flying 500 miles from Tripoli with its left engines out, after shooting down six enemy planes, was composed of men who were already veterans of the war in the air. They had been decorated for missions over Europe. They already had two official kills and several probables to their credit. The Tripoli mission, which only by a miracle was not their last, was their 22nd.
The skipper of the prize crew is Lt. John L. Cronkhite, of St. Petersburg, Florida. They called him Cronk. He is short, with a faint blond mustache and a very wide mouth, from which the words came in a slow drawl. His shoulders are broad, his arms husky. Usually, he doesn’t wear a tie. He says he isn’t married because nobody would have him. He’s 23.
Cronk’s father is a St. Petersburg florist. He has three pictures of his mother and father in his room. I spent the evening with Cronk and his co-pilot and navigator after their return from the dead. When he walked into the room, Cronk picked up something from the bed.
He said:
Hell, I can’t be dead. Here’s my dog tag. I forgot to take it with me. I can’t be dead, for they wouldn’t know who I was.
He and his co-pilot are bound by an unbreakable tie now, for together they pulled themselves away from death.
The co-pilot is Lt. Dana F. Dudley, of Mapleton, Maine. That is a little town of 800, and Dud says he is the only pilot who ever came from there. He is a tall and friendly fellow, who got married just before coming overseas. His wife is in Sarasota, Florida. Dud says one of the German fighters dived toward his side of the plane, and came on with bullets streaming until it was only 100 feet away. At that moment, what might have been his last thought passed through Dud’s head:
Gee, I’m glad I sent my wife that $225 this morning.
The navigator is Lt. Davey Williams, 3305 Miller St., Fort Worth, Texas. He too was recently married. The pilots give Davey all the credit for getting them home. He was about the busiest man on the trip, navigating with one hand and managing two machine guns with the other. When they thought they were done for, Davey said to the pilots:
I’ll bet those guys back home have got our stuff divided up already.
He said he mainly thought about how he was going to get word to his family that he was a German prisoner, and he felt sore that friends of his would soon get to go home to America while he’d have to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp.
I didn’t get to talk to the other members of the crew, but their stories are just the same. They all played their parts in coaxing the broken Fortress home.
They are Lt. Joe Dodson (bombardier) of Houston, Texas, and Sgts. Carl Olson of Chicago; John King of Hartford City, Indiana; Thomas Klimaszewski of Alpena, Michigan; Robert Jackman of Cleveland; Fred Littlewolf, a Chippewa Indian from Bagley, Minnesota, and Ted Nastel of Detroit.
One of those freakish little things happened to Lt. Dodson. He had hung his sunglasses on a hook in the nose compartment. A machine-gun bullet knocked out both lenses, but he didn’t touch the frame. If he hadn’t moved just a second before, the bullet, which grazed him, would have killed him.
When the Fortress finally reached home, Cronkhite decided to go through the co-pilot’s window onto the wing. As he stepped onto the wing his feet hit some oil and flew out from under him, and he went plummeting off the high wing onto the hard ground. The doctors thought he had been wounded, and picked him up and put him into an ambulance.
It sounds funny now, but as Cronkhite says:
I wouldn’t have given a damn if I had broken a leg when I fell off the wing, I was so glad to be on the ground again. I just felt like lying there forever.