Posted on 06/06/2003 11:46:07 AM PDT by pwatson
B-17's and Saving Private Ryan
My father, Colonel E. Stuart Watson, was a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II. Based in England, he flew 47 missions over enemy territory, and on D-Day he led 18 aircraft of the 8th Air Force 381'st bomb group and the 533ed squadron over Omaha Beach to bomb the German emplacements. http://www.381st.org/
The battle plan called for a closely timed and coordinated attack. The planes would bomb soon after sunup and the troops would land about an hour later. It was a beautiful day and the site of the Battleship Texas shooting all 16 guns sliding the ship side ways was spectacular, they could even see the red hot projectiles streaking inland and exploding on the ground miles away. The entire ocean was covered with Allied ships and boats of every conceivable kind, it was a beautiful and spectacular view aside from the fact it was War. The 8th Air Force was to send squadron's of B-17's, each carrying sixteen 500-lb bombs. Some planes carried one or two 1000-lb concrete-piercing bombs, intended to destroy fortified bunkers and pillboxes on the cliffs overlooking the beach. At a relatively low 10,000 foot altitude, they flew from the ocean straight inland across the shore. They were to start dropping bombs in the water offshore where the Germans had placed obstacles, and continue to drop one every 75 feet across the beach and into the fortifications.
Instead, as they approached, they encountered a solid undercast of cloud cover such as is commonly found along ocean beaches. Visually, they could not see the shore. The bombardier in Dad's plane had radar, enabling him to see the target, but not the troops on the ground. The Norden bomb site flew the B17 on automatic pilot and the bombardier would place a cross hair on the intended target, dial in airspeed and cross wind and when the cross hair matched the target one it electrically dropped the bombs, the other planes would manually drop as soon as they saw the bombs drop from the lead plane. Not wanting to risk hitting our men, unknown to my dad, the bombardier worried that Americans might be on the beach, so he set the target a little past the shore. There wasn't time to consult my father, who was the wing commander that day. Had he been asked, he would have ordered the drop as planned. A good battle plan, conceived and thought out while not under duress, is best followed through. Things never go exactly right in the heat of action. But as it happened, on this day, the beach landing craft had encountered high seas and begun to take on water, with the result that the troops were many minutes behind schedule hitting the beach. All Dad's bombs fell behind the cliffs. Apparently a lot of the 8th Air Force had the same result that day. Probably some of the German communications were disrupted, but the American troops found much of the pillboxes and machine guns intact and manned by well-trained and ready gunners. It was a duck shoot. Many surviving troops still hold the Air Force responsible for their heavy losses to this day.
After my father went to see Saving Private Ryan for the third time he told us this story for the first time ever, while we were in line for the movie. It was obvious he held a lot of personal grief over what had happened. This movie, unlike no other, was bringing out all of the emotions and memories of the war that My dad and many others from the Greatest Generation had quietly buried not wanting to shame the memory of all those greater men than they who had given the ultimate sacrifice to ones country. All the surviving WW11 men were heroes but they did not see it that way, they felt ashamed that so many better men than they had died and some how they were returning home to start a new life and new family when so many others never would.
My Uncle was also a B-17 pilot, he paid the full price.
God bless them all.
A few weeks after D-Day, the Texas had its best fight, when it dueled with a large German gun emplacement (most of its other action was shelling places that didn't have the ability to hit back). The ship took a couple of hits, and it didn't take out the guns themselves, but it destroyed enough of the gun infrastructure that the Germans abandoned it the next day.
In my interviews with World War II veterans, they sometimes tell me that the reason they fought was that they had learned as children the difference between right and wrong and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed, so they fought. Right there, I think, one hears the voice of Theodore Roosevelt ringing in the words of soldiers born after his death. It seems to me that perhaps our greatest strength is that American kids are brought up to know right from wrong. And of all our Presidents, the one who used the words "right" and "wrong" more than any other, who did the most to exalt right-doing, was Theodore Roosevelt.
(Note: TR might be overtaken by George W. Bush before his tenure is through)
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