Crash memories still painful for B-17 navigator

  • Published
  • By Senior Master Sgt. Matt Proietti
  • 452nd AMW Public Affairs
Sixth in a series

The sound of footsteps at night on the wooden walkway outside his hut filled 2nd Lt. Sidney Solomon with dread. It was always a GI coming to notify him and his B-17 Flying Fortress crewmates they would be part of a bombing run to mainland Europe at sunrise. 

"You always hoped they'd pass by, but they never did. It was the most scary thing about it," said Lieutenant Solomon, 86. "You hear the steps coming closer and closer and you say, 'I hope he goes by, I hope he goes by.' Invariably, he'd stop." 

Early on the morning of Oct. 12, 1944, the crew members were surprised to be awakened because they knew their regular aircraft, Little Miss America, on which they'd completed seven missions, was to be flown that day by another crew. Instead, they were assigned to fly a different plane, Inside Curve, to Germany. 

They didn't make it out of England before the aircraft crashed, killing seven of the young men. The only survivors were Lieutenant Solomon and waist gunner Tech Sgt. Paschal H. "Pat" Powell, who lost touch with each other after World War II for more than 50 years. 

The son of a barber in New York's Catskill Mountains, the future lieutenant was a college student in Oklahoma when he joined the military to fight the Nazis. 

"I'm Jewish and thought, 'Those bastards gotta go.'" 

He trained as a navigator, while Sergeant Powell learned his job. They met their fellow aircrew members in Lincoln, Neb.: pilot William Miller; co-pilot Joseph Kayatta; bombardier Robert H. Brucks; tail gunner Matt Ransom III; radio operator Johnny Wilson; engineer/top turret gunner Charles A. Bacharach and ball turret gunner Earl O. Bowen, whose nickname was "Short Round." 

They flew together in Ardmore, Okla., and went back to Nebraska to pick up a new B-17 they named Little Miss America. They were assigned to Deopham Green airfield northeast of London in the 728th Bombardment Squadron of 452nd Bombardment Group, an 8th Air Force unit that is the predecessor of March Field's 452nd Air Mobility Wing. 

"We did everything together," said Lieutenant Solomon. "We stayed within our crew. We didn't socialize with anybody else." 

The men had the evening of Oct. 11, 1944, off from duty. Sergeant Powell relaxed by listening to the radio. Lieutenant Solomon doesn't recall anything unusual about the night until the GI tasked with charge of quarters duty came to wake him and the other officers, who lived apart from the enlisted men. 

Fog was often a problem and it was particularly thick that day, both men recalled. After taking off, bombers circled above the countryside while organizing into massive formations before crossing the English Channel into mainland Europe. They were at about 14,000 feet aboard Inside Curve when a plane flew in front of them. 

"I had never seen that before," said Lieutenant Solomon, whose position in a bubble at the aircraft's nose was below and in front of the cockpit. "Our plane did a little dance." 

He secured the first hook of his parachute to the harness that he always wore, but doesn't remember fastening the second one. 

"I woke up and I was only 1,500 feet off the ground. I pulled the rip cord," he said. "I saw pieces of the fuselage floating down." 

He believes they fell victim to "prop wash," unsettling blasts of air from the propellers of the aircraft that flew in front of them. Prior to his death at age 83 in December 2006, Sergeant Powell said he agreed with the cause of the crash. 

"We never even got out of the clouds," he said during a reunion of the 452nd Bomb Group Association, a fraternal group of World War II veterans, their families and Deopham Green area residents. 

Sergeant Powell said he was eating a candy bar and adjusting ammunition that fed into the machine guns used in the ball turret, a rotating sphere on the aircraft's belly that offered the aircraft's best view of fighters approaching from below. 

He said a voice, perhaps that of God, spoke to him when he unplugged his throat microphone and walked away from his harness and parachute so he could reach the ammunition. 

"I was watching water fall off the wing when I heard a voice say, 'If you had to jump, you'd be in a pretty fix,'" he said. 

He put on his harness, but not the bulky chute that made it difficult to move about the aircraft. As he worked on the slack in the ammunition line, he glanced over at the parachute to make sure it was there, he said. The aircraft started to tilt wildly. 

"I thought, 'Man, I've got to get Short Round out of the turret,'" he said. "I was reaching to plug in the (microphone) chord when I fell on my belly." 

The aircraft shook violently, spun and rolled over, he said. 

"It stopped spinning but was going straight down. I knew that you can't pull a B-17 up once its nose is down. I knew we were all going to die," said Sergeant Powell. "The force of gravity was so strong. My life was going by like on a reel tape, like in a picture show. I'd wasted so much time. I'd always believed in God, but didn't..." 

The sergeant said he screamed "God, have mercy on us" and saw the tail break off, followed by the front of the aircraft, so he was falling to earth "in a barrel open at both ends." 

Sergeant Powell, though dazed, never lost consciousness. The rush of air revived him and he saw cables and metal flopping where the tail used to be. He clutched at a rib on the fuselage and noticed his parachute sliding by. He grabbed it and tucked it under his arm. He fastened one of the snaps, but doesn't remember doing the second one. 

"The voice said, 'Hurry,'" he said. "I scooted toward the door and (it) said, 'Pull it!' So I pulled the chord and a pilot chute came out and pulled the main chute and me out of the fuselage." 

The aircraft crashed in Lincolnshire County about 140 miles north of London, its 12,000 pounds of bombs exploding and igniting the fuel in its tanks. Clouds of dirt and hot air greeted Sergeant Powell as he landed in a field. He saw a woman and thought he had landed in Germany until she called out to him in English. 

"She said, 'Oh, laddie, you're hurt," he said. "My body didn't hurt like my heart, though." 

She told him another crew member had made it out of the aircraft and that its wings had broken off from the fuselage, he said. Lieutenant Solomon doesn't remember landing, but he recalls running through a freshly plowed field with his parachute behind him. 

"I don't even recall leaving the aircraft. I wonder if I'm blocking something out over guilt," he said. "It's so sad. Devastating, really. Some of them had families. I was single." 

The men spent several days in the hospital, then attended their friends' funeral ceremony in Cambridge, England, where they were buried in graves dug by German prisoners. A military policeman saluted each casket and folded back each flag so they could see the dog tags, Sergeant Powell said. 

"I thought my heart would break. That was the saddest I'd ever been." 

Sergeant Powell was soon ordered to leave for Italy to serve in the 15th Air Force. Lieutenant Solomon said he begged officials not to separate the two. 

"A captain told me to mind my own business," he said. 

Sergeant Powell was shot down on  his fourth mission and held in Germany as a prisoner of war. He said he wasn't close to his second crew. 

Lieutenant Solomon was sent to a rest and rehabilitation hospital in Miami, then served the remainder of the war as a recreation officer in Texas. He left the Army in October 1945 and graduated the following year from the University of Wisconsin. He worked in the dairy business for more than 20 years before starting his own business importing beach goods. He avoided anything connected to the military. 

"I had no use for it after that," said Lieutenant Solomon, who lives in Pembroke Pines, Fla., with his second wife, Nancy, to whom he's been married for 35 years. He is a father of three children from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce. 

He said he wasn't an observant Jew before the war and hasn't been since then. 

"I just don't believe," he said. 

Sergeant Powell said he believed God spared his life that day. 

"I told him I'd pray, I'd do anything, I was so appreciative. I always believed in God, but it was more of a superstition than devotion." 

Sergeant Powell said he found solace in religion and began preaching at 25. He became a Baptist minister, leading five churches in Texas and Oklahoma before retiring. He published a book about his World War II experiences, Inside Curve and Beyond, via Brentwood Christian Press. 

"Syd had a hard time remembering, and he didn't want to remember," he said. Lieutenant Solomon acknowledges the accident took a mental toll on him and said the anguish he felt due to the accident was only eclipsed by that which he experienced when his daughter died of breast cancer. 

"(The crash) really changed me," he said. "I had problems. I became introspective. I didn't want anything at all to do with the military after that, didn't want to be near it. It killed my boys." 

He lost touch with Sergeant Powell until the late 1990s, when the enlisted man wrote a letter to him that Staff Sgt. Hank North, the longtime 452nd Bomb Group Association secretary, forwarded to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which had an address for Lieutenant Solomon. 

"It said, 'Do you remember me? We served together on a B-17 in World War II.' Like I could forget that," said the former navigator, who called his old crewmate as the first step in him reconnecting with his service as a young GI. The lieutenant and his wife, Nancy, visited Sergeant Powell and his wife, Gwendolyn, at their then-home in Wellington, Texas. 

Sergeant Powell convinced him to attend a bomb group reunion in Charleston, S.C., and he enjoyed the experience so much that he has regularly attended the annual gatherings ever since. He even ordered caps embroidered with the 8th Air Force logo to distribute to 452nd men. 

"There's a feeling of camaraderie," he said. "We have the same experiences, the same feelings. There are (some) I don't know that I'd want as friends, but this feeling surmounts that. It's a basic premise. It's almost like a religion. Here are the only guys in the world that really know what I felt like over there." 

He said he was sad to hear of the death of the final member of his aircrew. 

"I loved him and he loved me, too," said Lieutenant Solomon. "Pat changed my mind. I never liked the military. I avoided it like the plague. I had this bad perception of what (it) was." 

Sergeant Powell and Lieutenant Solomon said they each dealt with guilt over surviving the wreck. 

"It will never leave me. You always ask the ultimate question: 'Why?' Why did this forgiving God do this? Save me, a nonbeliever, and kill the ones who had families and so forth. There is no justice there."