Unbreakable
World War II aircraft that were shot to hell—and came back.
- By Cory Graff
- Air & Space magazine, November 2001
(Page 2 of 5)
Over North Africa, a Bf 109 collided with a B-17F named All American. The fighter tore through the rear fuselage of the bomber and tumbled to Earth ensnared in the wreckage of the B-17’s left horizontal stabilizer. Crewmen in nearby aircraft were shocked to see All American pitch up, recover, and miraculously fly on. Lieutenant Charles Cutforth, in the Flying Flint Gun, snapped an image of the stricken bomber that would become famous: All American cruising over the desert landscape, with a ragged slice through its fuselage.
Yet another famous World War II image shows a B-17G shot through the chin with an 88-mm anti-aircraft shell over Cologne, Germany, in 1944. As Lieutenant Larry DeLancey recalled in the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Impact magazine, “What little there was left in front of me looked like a scrap heap.” The dangling nose guns chattered against the inboard propellers, the oxygen system failed, and all the instrument indicators sank to zero. Yet DeLancey found all four engines roaring away and the airplane controllable. Why not try for home? As cold air hammered in, the B-17 dropped out of formation and turned toward England. Hours later, men at the Nuthampstead airfield heard the awful howling of the injured Fortress before they saw it appear over the field and deliver its crew.
On a bombing mission over the rail yards in Debreczen, Hungary, another anti-aircraft shell found its mark in the waist compartment of a B-17G named Sweet Pea. 429th Bombardment Squadron historian Allen Ostrom later reported in the unit’s official history that the hole in the bomber was “[l]arge enough for a jeep to pass through” and added, “Observers who had seen the plane hit had given all hope up of it returning to base.” With every tail control cable but one lost in the shattered mess of the fuselage, the pilots held the bomber on course by manipulating the throttles. Hundreds of miles later, Sweet Pea made a crash landing at its base in Foggia, Italy. Boeing sources reported the airplane was held together “by a few longitudinals and 27 inches of skin.”
The B-17’s big brother proved to be no less rugged. On a bombing mission near Tokyo, Japan, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress named Irish Lassie was rammed twice by Japanese aircraft and then riddled with gunfire when it fell out of formation. At the same time, a B-29 named Pride of the Yankees suffered damage that left its two left engines dead. The chances of either airplane returning across at least 1,500 miles of lonely ocean to the island of Saipan were very slim, yet both beat the odds. Irish Lassie flew home and broke apart upon landing when its nose gear collapsed. However, the entire crew survived.
Pride would be repaired to fly again. On a mission over Japan four months later, it again suffered damage that destroyed its two left engines. And again, it returned to Saipan.
The Lightning
Lockheed P-38 pilots often noted that the Lightning had two Allison engines so that when one failed—they claimed one always did—the pilot could make it home on the other. The P-38’s engine problems were an annoyance, but in combat, when the two V-12 powerplants were running smoothly, redundancy could prove critical to getting back to base.
Over North Africa, P-38 pilot Lieutenant Benton Miller was so fixated on strafing ground targets that he didn’t see a telephone pole. The ensuing collision tore away one propeller and cleanly snapped the pole in half as it crashed through the fighter’s wing. Miller’s craft had a dead engine, the left wing was twisted upward and backward, and a crushed gun bay access door scooped air like a speed brake. Amazingly, the pilot coaxed the battered Lightning back to friendly territory and made a safe landing.
As the late aviation writer Martin Caidin recounted in Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38, not even a mid-air collision could always stop a Lightning. Lieutenant Thomas Smith’s P-38 smashed headlong into a disintegrating Bf 109 as the German fighter’s spinning propeller tore gashes in the P-38 from engine to tail and severed the horizontal stabilizer, which extended between the Lockheed’s twin booms. Worst of all, the P-38’s right engine froze with the prop blades at a high-rpm setting, so they were set almost flat to the airstream.
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Comments (2)
It's a small thing, but the B-17 from which the famous photo of "All American" was taken was "Flying Flit Gun", not "flint".
I guess I'm driven to comment because there's such a lot of misinformation about this photo on the web, including the absurd notion that the plane was photographed by a P-51 pilot over the English Channel.
Posted by Steve Birdsall on March 16,2012 | 08:50 PM
Right. Back in the "good old days", Flit was the brand name of an insecticide used in a hand pump sprayer to kill mosquitoes and flies.
Posted by G. Kerbow on September 7,2012 | 10:25 AM