On September 13, 1944, the targets of the 15th Air Force USAAF were fuel industry plants in Silesia. Over eight hundred aircraft, half of them bombers, set out from Italy on a northward route. The 485th Bomb Group headed for the plants at Oświęcim. The result of the bombing was damage to the Oświęcim refinery and casualties at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Several dozen prisoners and fifteen SS men were killed. Wounded prisoners were placed in the camp hospital. The following day, they were given flowers and served generous meals. In this setting, the camp commandant visited the wounded, accompanied by Nazi press photographers documenting the “barbarism” of American aviation.
A B-17 aircraft with damaged engines. Before takeoff, the crew of “Hell’s Angel” feared this flight, as they considered the date unlucky. This raid was the last of fifty, and upon its completion they were to return home: pilot Capt. Lawrence, co-pilot Lt. Hall, navigator Lt. Winter, bombardier Lt. Pratt, radio operator Sgt. Eggers, and tail gunner Sgt. Nitsche. The remaining crew consisted of: radar navigator Lt. Canin, an officer undergoing training as a lead formation navigator Lt. Blodgett, top turret gunner Sgt. Christensen, and waist gunner Sgt. Kaplan. The oldest crew member was waist gunner Sergeant MacDonald. He was 27 years old, but his black hair was already sprinkled with gray — the result of several months of frontline service.
A typical navigator’s operational map. Navigator Winter recalls that the flight to the target was long — nearly four hours. Around noon, the aircraft reached the Initial Point (IP) and headed for the target at an altitude of 6,100 m. Over the target, shortly after 11:00, the American formation came under anti-aircraft fire that lasted 7–8 minutes.
From the now-yellowed reports emerges the continuation of this tragic story. Winter wrote that he and Pratt jumped from the nose. Despite the lack of a bail-out order, they decided to do so when they could not see the feet of either the first or second pilot on the rudder pedals. At the same time, Christensen was pushed out of the bomb bay, and right behind him jumped Canin and Blodgett, who described the last moments aboard “Hell’s Angel” as follows: “My station was behind the pilots. When the waist gunner reported a burning engine, I went down to the bomb bay with a fire extinguisher. There was neither an alarm bell nor an intercom order to abandon the aircraft. Canin was the last person to leave the bomber and had to use all his strength to get out, because at that point the Liberator went into a spin. Lawrence and Hall were last seen in the cockpit, ready to jump. Most likely — just as with the airmen in the rear of the aircraft — the spin trapped them in the falling machine. After opening my parachute, I could no longer see our Liberator, but a trail of smoke stretched to the southeast.”
Over Zygodowice, the aircraft exploded. Lawrence, Hall, MacDonald, Eggers, Kaplan, and Nitsche were killed. An eyewitness to the aircraft’s crash, Ferdynand Bałys from Zygodowice, recalled: “It must have been around noon. I remember how my mother screamed not to run anywhere because lunch was on the table. The aircraft kept getting bigger; you could see it couldn’t maintain altitude. It gleamed in the sun so brightly that you could barely look at it. It was swaying from side to side, the engines roaring terribly, as if it were a wounded animal.”
The aircraft trailed a tail of burning fuel behind it. Before the bomber hit the ground, the fuselage broke apart and witnesses saw limp figures of airmen falling from inside. The engines with their propellers flew another kilometer further from their momentum. The trail of smoke hung in the air for a long time. In the distance, the slowly descending parachutes of those Americans who had survived were visible. The only civilian casualty was a woman from Zygodowice, burned by the flaming fuel.
The fallen were buried near the crash site. Local residents placed a birch cross on the grave and fenced in the burial plot. In 1947, the airmen’s remains were transferred to the American Military Cemetery in Belgium and to the USA. The memory of the fallen was not to the liking of the communist authorities, and presumably for this reason, in the 1950s, the security service (UB) searched houses in Zygodowice and the surrounding area. Most of the bomber’s remains were confiscated, in the belief that this would negate the history of politically inconvenient allies.
