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January 6, 2012
'The flyingest thing you ever saw’
Wakita man was gunner in World War II B-17

By James Neal, Staff Writer Enid News and Eagle

WAKITA — Christmas 1942 brought an unwelcome gift to R.D. Lawrence, of Wakita: a draft notice.

At age 20, Lawrence received notice his number had been selected to join throngs of young American men mustering for the Second World War.

“I was drafted ... there was no arguing about that,” Lawrence said with a laugh.

He departed to join the Army at Fort Sill the day after Christmas.

“I asked for the Air Force and they put me in,” Lawrence said.

He was transferred to Wichita Falls, Texas, for basic training. When it came time to classify the Army Air Corps enlistees, Lawrence’s small physical stature made him a natural fit for one particular job: bomber ball turret gunner.

“I was the smallest guy, and there wasn’t a lot of room in there,” Lawrence said with a laugh.

He reported to aviation gunnery school at Las Vegas Army Air Field, later to be renamed Nellis Air Force Base. After completing gunnery training, Lawrence re-ported to Pyote Army Air Field, east of El Paso, Texas, where he was first introduced to the B-17 Flying Fortress and its cramped ball turret.

The ball turret was a spherical turret that mounted twin .50 caliber machine guns to protect the bomber from enemy fighter aircraft.

Pyote was the birthplace of 463rd Bombardment Group, ordered into existence on Aug. 1 1943. Lawrence and his group mates met in the west Texas desert to form the last heavy bombardment group to join the newly formed 15th Air Force, which had responsibility for bombing missions launched from the Mediterranean Theater.

After completing deployment training, the 463rd’s four squadrons of B-17s left the United States on individual flights, marshaled at Dakar, in French West Africa, now known as Senegal, and flew on as a group to their operational base at Celone Airfield in Foggia, Italy.

From Foggia the 463rd bombers would fly some missions into Germany, but their bomb loads primarily would be destined for Axis forces in Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania and Greece.

Lawrence was pleased to be flying in a B-17 instead of the Army Air Corps’ other heavy bomber of the day, the B-24 Liberator.

“If they had told me I had to fly in a 24, I would have gone over the hill,” Lawrence said. “They were a faster plane and could go a little higher than we could, but they weren’t nearly as reliable. We saw them coming back all the time with mechanical problems.”

Of his beloved B-17, Lawrence said it was “the flyingest thing you ever saw.”

Lawrence and his comrades would need a good aircraft, along with all their courage and skill, when they started flying combat missions.

That day arrived for the novice bomber crews on March 30, 1944, with a bombing run against an airfield in Yugoslavia.

No aircraft were lost on that first mission, but the Air Corps soon would select a much tougher target for Lawrence and the 463rd: the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania.

Air Corps bombers had flown against Ploesti in 1943, launching a massive raid against the oil that was so crucial to Hitler’s war machine. That raid would go into the books as one of the war’s deadliest days for Air Corps bomber crews, with 53 planes and more than 600 aircrew lost.

The 463rd was tapped to return to Ploesti on May 18, 1944. They would make numerous, costly return trips to hammer the oil refineries.

Lawrence remembered the Ploesti raids as some of the toughest combat he saw in the war.

“A lot of times we didn’t see fighters but we always saw flak,” Lawrence said. “It was so dang black, you couldn’t hardly see anything for all the flak in the air.”

He said the B-17 was capable of withstanding tremendous punishment and still bringing its crew back home.

“It came back one day and it just looked like a sieve, it had so many holes in it,” Lawrence said. “Even with all that, there was only one guy who had a small wound from shrapnel.”

Once the bombers came within range of enemy fighters, Lawrence’s job required curling himself into the ball turret, where he scanned the skies with his twin .50 caliber guns for enemy planes approaching from beneath the formation.

He recalled making direct hits against one Luftwaffe fighter, only to see his rounds bounce ineffectually off the plane’s armor plating.

Like most bomber aircrew who survived the war, Lawrence has vivid memories of the planes and men who did not make it back from the war.

“We had seen so many of our planes get hit, and a lot of them would just disappear,” he said. “I saw this one kid whose plane had been hit, standing in the door ready to jump, and he opened his parachute too soon ... the chute got caught on the tail of the plane, and there they went down, together. Those are the things that just made you sick.”

Lawrence said a lack of parachute training cost the lives of many men.

“We were losing a lot of people from just not knowing how to jump out of a damn plane,” he said.

An Air Corps major with a background in parachuting resolved to fix that problem, and mustered the men of the 463rd to teach them how to properly jump out of their bombers and deploy their parachutes.

“He told us, ‘It doesn’t take a lot of practice, you just have to do it right the first time,’” Lawrence said with a laugh. “He saved a lot of lives, just teaching us how to jump out of the plane properly.”

After Lawrence’s 25th mission, the half-way point for airmen in the Mediterranean Theater, he and his crew were flown to the Isle of Capri for two weeks’ rest.

During the interim, an inexperienced replacement crew was detailed to fly the B-17 normally flown by Law-rence’s crew. The plane went down with all 10 crew members.

“Those poor guys shouldn’t have been in there, but they needed them, I guess,” Lawrence said.

Conflicting reports came back of a mid-air collision or a fire in the aircraft as the cause of the tragedy.

Lawrence and his crewmates were assigned to another aircraft, and they resumed the second half of their tour of duty.

Their 37th and, as it turned out, their final mission in a B-17 was to bomb the railroad marshaling yards at Budapest, Hungary.

“This guy came around before we took off asking if we had our emergency K-rations, and we said, ‘No, we won’t need those, we’ll be back by dinnertime,’” Lawrence said. “We’d been to Budapest I don’t how many times to bomb the marshaling yards, and it was getting to be pretty much a milk run by then.”

However, Wehrmacht gunners had other plans for the B-17 crew, and they found their mark shortly after Lawrence’s plane had struck its target.

“We had dropped our bombs and just pulled off the target, when we got hit in the left wing right by the fuselage,” Lawrence said.

He climbed out of the ball turret and went to the radio room to help fight the fire, which by then had spread to the empty bomb bay.

“I saw that and said, ‘It’s time to get out of this damn thing,’” Lawrence said. His parachute training back at Foggia was about to pay off.

Lawrence survived the jump, but found himself surrounded by hostile Hungarian soldiers when he hit the ground.

“There were about a dozen guys waiting there for me,” he said.

From his position on the ground, he saw a Hungarian soldier shooting a rifle at one of his crewmates in the air. The soldier shot out one of the man’s parachute panels, but the aircrewman still was able to land safely.

Lawrence and the plane’s radio operator were taken to a Hungarian police outpost, and later to a jail in Budapest.

One week later, he and other captured airmen were transported in rail cars to Stalag Luft IV, a prisoner of war camp built in current-day Poland specifically to house enlisted aircrewmen shot down over Axis territory.

“That place was plum full, and you couldn’t hardly lay down there were so many guys in there,” Lawrence said of the POW camp.

While the accommodations were lacking, Lawrence said the German guards were respectful of their antagonists’ rank.

“Most of us were sergeants or above, so we never had to do anything,” Lawrence said. “If you left them alone, they’d leave you alone. We finally got some cards, and I learned how to play cribbage there in the camp.”

The men whiled away their time in the camp playing cards and waiting for Red Cross care packages to supplement their meager rations.

That routine ended abruptly when the Russian Army began pushing the Wehrmacht back toward Germany in February 1945.

“The Germans were pretty bad off by then,” Lawrence said. “The Russians were coming and the guards started moving us the other way to keep us away from them.”

The estimated 9,500 men of Stalag Luft IV were pushed on a forced march that would take them nearly 500 miles, over the course of nearly three months, through one of Germany’s coldest winters on record.

“We would walk from barn to barn, from one farm to the next,” Lawrence said. “If guys were sick, the farmer would have to load them in his cart and carry them to next barn, then come back for more.”

Men were bunched in groups of as many as 250 with one guard. Lawrence said the real deterrent to escape was the weather, terrain and lack of food.

“You could make it away from the guards if you wanted to once we got on the road,” he said. “But, where the hell would you go?”

He remembered one man who decided to take his odds with escape.

“The day we heard President Roosevelt had died, he just snapped ... for some reason after that he didn’t think he was going to make it and he took off. I hope he made it, but I don’t know if he did.”

Conditions on the march were brutal, and sometimes there was no cover at night.

“One night we walked until midnight, and hell, when we finally laid down it was just on the ice and snow,” Lawrence said. “I thought I was going to freeze to death that night, but I made it through somehow.”

The Wehrmacht had almost no food for its own troops by that time, and the POWs were forced to forage for much of their sustenance along the march.

“If you had anything left to trade, you could trade with the civilians for some bread or rutabaga or something to keep you alive,” Lawrence said. “I didn’t know anyone who died on the march, but there were so many of us ... I know a lot of those guys didn’t make it.”

Lawrence’s group was liberated on May 2, 1945, by the British Second Army near Luttow, Germany. To this day he does not think very highly of the soldiers who freed him from his German captors.

“They had ‘liberated’ a wine cellar somewhere and they were so damn drunk that morning they couldn’t hardly walk,” Lawrence said of the British soldiers. “They said, ‘Where’s your guards?’ and we said, ‘Oh, they’re around here somewhere,’ and they said, ‘Well, we’re going to kill them.’”

Lawrence said he and his fellow POWs intervened on behalf of the German guards.

“We finally talked them out of that,” Lawrence said. “The guards we had by that time were just old men, because all the young guys were already dead or off fighting.”

After being liberated, and de-loused, Lawrence and his fellow POWs underwent a circuitous route back home.

Lawrence was bounced back and forth between several bases before he finally boarded a Liberty ship bound for Boston in early June, 1945.

Upon arrival, he boarded a chartered bus bound for Enid, arriving just in time to resume his life on the farm.

“I made it home in time for harvest, and we started cutting wheat that afternoon,” Lawrence said.

He found time during harvest to renew his romance with Joanne, now his wife of more than 66 years.

“We cut wheat until it rained, and then we couldn’t cut wheat, so Jo and I got married, and we’ve been farming ever since.”

Lawrence found out after the war all 10 members of his aircrew had made it out of the plane, and all of them made it home.

Today, he remembers those who didn’t make it home as the true heroes from history’s largest war.

Their ranks included Lawrence’s brother, Burke, an aircrewman who was killed while on a training flight shortly after the war’s end.

“We were all there waiting for him to come home, but he never made it,” Lawrence said. “They were all heroes, I thought, those boys who didn’t make it home.”

http://enidnews.com/localnews/x205474189/The-flyingest-thing-you-ever-saw