Recently, my wife wife and I had the opportunity to drive up to Truckee California to see “Aluminum Overcast”, a beautifully restored B-17G that is still in excellent flying condition. In fact, you can purchase rides on the B-17 for $350 to $399. It is touring the country as we speak, so if you’re interested, I highly recommend you go see it as it really is a gorgeous plane. I took many pictures of the exterior of the plane. You can see the complete album here.
http://s4.photobucket.com/albums/y106/Zushia/Aluminum%20Overcast%20Truckee/
Here are a couple of shots.
While we were up there we met a really nice gentlemen named Keith Anderson, a former B-17 Pilot. He flew with the 600th Squadron, 398th BG, many times as the lead pilot for the Squadron, Group and Wing.
Here is a photo of Keith Anderson
and one of the two of us during our visit together.
My wife and I spent several hours talking with him and really enjoyed his stories. He was kind enough to autograph a couple of pictures we got gotten from the souvenir booth.
He related many of his experiences to us and I’ll do my best to put some of them here. Just keep in mind I’m typing this up from memory as I didn’t have a recorder with me. I didn’t realize a couple of veteran B-17 pilots were going to be there otherwise I would have been better prepared.
Keith Anderson flew B-17s in combat from May 1944 until the end of the war in 1945. I asked him if he had any harrowing encounters with German fighter aircraft and he mentioned that by that time of the war the back of the Luftwaffe had been broken and the escort fighters did a great job of protecting them, although the Germans were still able to knock down bombers. He said one of the best sights they’d ever see was when the escorts would ditch their drop tanks as they knew that the fighters were going to give the Germans a good run for their money. He said it was such a beautiful sight, seeing all those drop tanks glittering in the sun falling towards the earth.
The biggest danger, he said, was the flak. The Germans would set the fuses on the 88mm flack shells to go off at a certain altitude, and then they’d just saturate the area where the bombers were flying through. Sometimes they got lucky and the fuses would be set too low, which would cause all the shells to explode say 500 feet below them, for example. There wasn’t anything you could do about the flak either. It was indiscriminate and it was more a matter of luck than anything else on whether or not you got hit.
I asked him if he had ever seen an Me 262 on any of his missions. He said that he hadn’t, but that reminded him of a great story to tell me. He said that on one mission, they had just finished forming up with their units and were on their way out from their base when all of a sudden they lost a cylinder from the number 2 engine. Parts went flying out of the engine making one heck of a racket. They tried to feather the prop, but the mechanism had been damaged so they couldn’t. Because of their speed the prop kept rotating, which continued the disintegration of the engine and it soon caught on fire. At this point they realized they were in trouble. When the wing began to catch fire they knew it was time to go. They set the plane on autopilot and they all bailed out. They landed near Farnborough, an important English airbase. Keith mentioned the role of Farnborough was similar to that of Wright Patterson in Dayton Ohio. Anyway, they were picked up and brought to Farnborough where they happened to see several very strange looking aircraft. Their design was very unusual and oddly enough they didn’t have any propellers?!? How did they move? They found out later that they were Gloster Meteors. At the time, they had no idea such things even existed! I can imagine seeing those for the first time must have been really something, as all airplanes up to that time were propeller driven. Very cool.
We talked a little about how he wound up flying B-17s. He said it wasn’t really a choice he got to make. When they went on from basic flight training to advanced training he was selected, along with a couple of his buddies to move on to bomber flight training. It was pretty much just random luck as to who moved on to do bombers and who flew fighters. He had originally wanted to be a fighter pilot when he first entered the service. He was fortunate enough to get to fly in the P-51 Mustang after the war.
He told us about some of his missions and again, I really wish I had brought a recorder with me. I’ll recount the little tidbits that I remember.
Since they flew B-17 Flying Fortresses, they generally flew most of their missions between 27,000 and 31,000 feet. The B-24 Liberator couldn’t fly that high so those usually flew around 24,000 feet. He was frequently the lead pilot for his squadron, group and even led the wing on one or more occasions. I asked him if it was difficult flying as the lead plane and he said that was the easiest thing to do as you would just set the autopilot, turn at the appropriate way points and all the other planes of the formation would have to work hard to stay in position. This also meant that the followers used up fuel faster than the lead planes.
He said that usually only 2 or 3 of the lead planes would have a Norden bombsight in them. The rest of the planes dropped their loads when they saw the lead plane drop theirs. It wasn’t necessary for them all to have bombsights because they were all supposed to drop their bombs at once, thus saturating the entire area of the target and hopefully knocking out all the important stuff. He said they never ran into a situation where all the lead planes with the bombsights were shot down, it never happened.
Keith Anderson began flying missions not too long after “Big Week”, May of 1944. He mentioned several of the target cities he’d been to. I can recall him mentioning Leipzig, Berlin, Munich, Saarbrucken, Kiel, Merseburg and others. He said the flak around Berlin was always particularly heavy. His Bomb Group also provided tactical bombing support during the D-Day invasion, Market Garden, Battle of the Bulge and during the crossing of the Rhine.
He said a few things about a new Group leader they had, who spent a lot of time berating them for their flying, and always telling them they were doing everything wrong. Many of the pilots resented him for that as they were all experienced veterans with a good track record. After one mission in particular, he got on them pretty harshly about their formation flying and ordered them to fly much closer to each other, which they did on the very next mission against their better judgment. Sure enough, two B-17s in their formation collided, resulting in the loss of both planes. Needless to say this lowered their opinion of their leader even more.
On one particular mission to Dresden, the Group leader made some navigation mistakes and led two of the squadrons to the “target” and accidentally wound up bombing Prague Czechoslovakia, while Keith took his squadron to the real target, Dresden. At this point in the war Keith said he felt really sorry for the German people. Their cities were destroyed and he knew many were suffering from the war. At this point they all just wanted to get the war over as quickly as possible.
There were a lot of other things that Keith said during our conversations and man do I wish I had recorded them! He was such a nice gentleman, and was a real pleasure to talk with. If you ever get the chance to meet him, go say hi to him, he really enjoys talking with people about his experiences.