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Flight of Memories
Published November 20, 2009
They were young, brash and brave.
They left this country boys and returned home men.
They were the men who crewed on and piloted B-17 Flying Fortresses in World War II.
The Experimental Aircraft Association recently hosted the B-17 “Aluminum Overcast” at the Kerrville/Kerr County Airport at Louis Schreiner Field, and several former B-17 pilots and a navigator were on hand to take a flight back in time.
Former pilots and Kerrville residents Sam Swindell and Sam Smith joined former navigator and Oklahoma City native Peter Fryer on the B-17 flight around Kerrville.
For the public that got to experience this thrill, it was a flight they would never forget.
For the men who took these airplanes into battle so many years before, it was a flight of memories.
More than 4,500 bombers were shot down over Europe, and more than 45,000 crew members were lost.
Peter Fryer
Peter Fryer turned 88 on Wednesday. His birthday present was his first ride in a B-17 since he jumped out of an emergency hatch in the nose of a plane over Belgium on Nov. 23, 1942, five days before his 21st birthday. He and one other crew member made it out of the mortally wounded B-17 that had both its left engines knocked out by German Focke Wolfe 190 ace Egon Mayer, the most successful German ace of WWII who was credited with more than 120 kills.
The other eight crew members on Fryer’s B-17 did not make it out alive.
“The rest of them were pinned in there,” Fryer said. “It was hard to tell you what my thoughts were when we got hit. I was thankful to get out of there.”
Fryer joined the Air Corps in November 1941, and headed out to navigation and bombardier school shortly thereafter. After four months of training, he was transferred to Windover Field in Utah to form the 306 Bomb Group.
“I stayed there until August, then flew to Massachusetts to pick up our new B-17s, fly training missions, and we did submarine patrols over the east coast,” he said. “In late August, we left Massachusetts and flew to Gander Mountain Newfoundland, and then on to Prestwick, Scotland.”
Fryer was assigned to Thurleigh Air Base in Bedford, England, and flew many practice missions from the base.
“We flew our first combat mission on October 1942, to Lille France to bomb a railroad machine gas depot,” Fryer said. “Our next mission was to St. Nazaire, France to bomb the sub pens. They were the biggest sub pens on the Atlantic coast.”
Fryer flew five missions before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans.
“They were right there to pick me up when I landed,” he said. “They said, ‘for you, the war is over.’”
Fryer was transported to Sagan, Stalag Luft III, the same prison camp where the “great escape,” made famous by the Steve McQueen movie of the same name, took place.
“It was all commissioned officers there,” he said. “Everyone was aware of the three tunnels being dug — Tom, Dick and Harry — and we had drawstring bags in our pants that we took dirt from the tunnels and dropped them out the bottom of our pant legs.”
Fryer was transported to several camps as the end of the war neared and finally was liberated by Patton’s Third Army on April 29, 1945.
“That was a blessed day in all our lives,” he said.
Fryer said going back up in a B-17 after all those years was “a good memory.”
Sam Smith
Kerrville resident and former B-17 pilot Sam Smith joined the Air Corps on Dec. 10, 1942. He went into active duty on April 6, 1943, after basic training at Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, and flight school in Santa Anna, Calif. He completed advanced flight training in Pecos before signing up to be a B-17 pilot.
He went to B-17 flight training in Roswell, N.M., before proceeding onto Lincoln, Neb., to pick up his combat crew. In the Cornhusker Bar in Lincoln, the place to find your crew, he ran into an old buddy from basic training named Arthur Shanafeld.
“He became my co-pilot, and we picked up the other eight,” Smith said. “We went to Sioux City, Iowa, and trained as a crew for six months. Then we were sent to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey for embarkation.”
The group steamed out on the USS Manhattan headed for England.
“We looked out over the statue of liberty and wondered if we’d ever be back,” he said. “Seven days later we docked in Liverpool.”
Assigned to the 303 Bomb Group, 360 Squadron, Smith spent two weeks training before flying his first combat mission on Feb. 24, 1945, to Hamburg, Germany.
“We dropped bombs on the sub pens there,” Smith said. “The average mission took eight and a half hours.”
Smith said on the first mission, an engine began malfunctioning. The flight burned two-thirds of the fuel on the way to the target, and his plane had to leave the formation on the way home.
“We landed on three engines,” Smith said.
The most dangerous part of the mission was the final bombing run, when the bomber had to fly at a constant speed and altitude and “just take what (the Germans) gave you.”
Smith flew 24 missions, but one sticks out as the worst.
“Mission No. 10 back to Hamburg on March 20, 1945, was the worst,” he said. “We had almost 1,000 targets. My guys were sharp, smart and eager, and they wanted to fly lead. We had two specific places we were to hit, sub pens and an oil refinery, which produced a lot of gas for the Germans. Our bomb group was known as the Hells Angels. At 27,000 feet, we flew a straight course from the North Sea over Helgeland Island, and they started shooting at us right then. We knew it would be hell right then. The weather was pretty fair that day, and we bombed. The flak stopped and then ME 262 jets hit us. I bet I saw 15 planes explode that day.”
Smith said it was a scary day because the P-51 Mustangs couldn’t keep up with the German jet fighters.
“That’s as close as we ever came to getting shot down,” he said. “The B-17 was a wonderful combat aircraft, because you could lose 6 feet of the wing, and it still would fly.”
Sam Swindell
Swindell joined the Air Corp. and became a pilot before he turned 20 years old.
Swindell, now 84, flew 16 combat missions over Europe, flying out of England with the 379th Bomb Group.
“We were in the Army for two or three months before going to flight training,” Swindell said. “It took nine months for us to go through training, get our wings and head over for combat. They really pushed us through.”
Swindell admitted the job was pretty dangerous and chuckles when he talks about the policy of sending flight crews home after they had flown 50 missions.
“Nobody ever made it to 50,” he said. “So they had to move it to 25 missions. We (Americans) did daylight bombing runs, and the British did night bombing raids. The escorts couldn’t go all the way with the bombers until the P-51 came along.”
Swindell remembers seeing the ME 262s on a mission to Berlin.
“We were bombing the atomic research facility, and they hit us hard,” he said. “We didn’t know what they were, but they didn’t like to come in on us, because we had 12 .50 caliber machine guns.”
Swindell said it actually was a beautiful sight in combat with all of the tracer bullets flying through the air.
“We were young and invincible,” he said. “At least, that’s what we thought.”
Swindell recalls being hit by flak and having to make a belly landing in Belgium.
“We went down in Belgium after being hit over Leipzig, Germany,” he said. “Oh, my goodness, I couldn’t say enough good things about the B-17 airplane. It’s very sturdy and could take a lot of punishment.”
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