The Pittsburgh Press (March 3, 1945)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – No sooner have the B-29 formations disappeared to the north on their long flight to Japan, than single planes begin coming back in.
These are called “aborts,” which is short for “abortives.” It is a much-used word around a bomber base.
The “aborts” come straggling back all day, hours apart. They are planes that had something happen to them which forbade them continuing on the long dangerous trip. Sometimes it happens immediately after takeoff. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until they are almost there.
The first “abort” had a bomb bay door come open, and couldn’t get it closed. The second had part of the cowl flap come unfastened, and a mechanic undoubtedly caught hell for that. A third had a prop run away when he lost an engine.
My friend Maj. Walter Todd of Ogden, Utah, “aborted” on the mission I watched take off. He blew a cylinder head clear off.
He was within sight of Japan when it happened, and he beat the others back home by only half an hour. He flew 13½ hours that day, and didn’t even get credit for a mission. That’s the way it goes.
‘Clock’ progress
Those left on the field will look idly at their watches as the long day wears on, mentally clocking the progress of their comrades.
“They’re about sighting the mainland now,” you’ll hear somebody say.
“They should be over the target by now. I’ll bet they’re catching hell,” comes a little later from somebody.
By late afternoon you look at your watch and know that by now, for good or bad, it is over with. You know they’re far enough off the coast that the last Jap fighter has turned for home, and left our men along with the night and the awful returning distance, and their troubles.
Our planes bomb in formation, and stick together until they’ve left the Japanese coast, and then they break up and each man comes home on his own.
It’s almost spooky the way they can fly through the dark night, up there above all that ocean, for more than six hours, and all arrive here at these little islands almost within a few minutes of each other.
By late afternoon we’ve begun to get radio messages from the returning planes. A flight leader will radio how the weather was, and if anybody went down over the target. It isn’t a complete picture, but we begin to patch together a general idea. We lost planes that day. Some went down over the target. Some just disappeared, and the other boys never knew where they went. Some fought as long as they could to keep crippled planes going, and then had to “ditch” in the ocean.
‘Miraculous’ return
And one tenacious planeload miraculously got back when it wasn’t in the cards for them at all. They had been hit over the target, had to drop down and back alone, and the Jap fighters went for him, as they do for any cripple.
Five fighters just butchered him, and there was nothing our boys could do about it. And yet he kept coming. How, nobody knows. Two of the crew were badly wounded. The horizontal stabilizers were shot away. The plane was riddled with holes. The pilot could control his plane only by using the motors.
Every half hour or so he would radio his fellow planes “am in right spiral and going out of control.” But he would get control again, and fly for an hour so, and then radio again that he was spiraling out of control.
But somehow, he made it home. He had to land without controls. He did wonderfully, but he didn’t quite pull it off.
The plane hit at the end of the runway. The engines came hurtling out, on fire. The wings flew off and the great fuselage broke in two and went careening across the ground. And yet every man came out if alive, even the wounded ones.
Two other crippled planes cracked up that night too, on landing. It was not until late at night that the final tally was made, of known lost, and of missing.
But hardly was the last returning bomber down until a lone plane took off into the night and headed northward, to be in the area by dawn where the “ditchings” were reported. And the others, after their excited stories were told, fell wearily into bed.