This was my father's plane. Lt. Thomas E. Lee, Jr from West Palm Beach, Florida is the airman standing alone in the picture by the tail of the B-17. He was issued this B-17 in Wyoming and then flew it to Glatton, England. He flew 30 missions and the first two were during "Big Week." He was sad that the very next crew who had the plane crashed. He became a lawyer and a judge and patriarch of a large family. He passed away gently this month (Dec 2011) and was buried on his 90th birthday.
My father was the tailgunner on this flight. The plane crashed because they had completed a bomb run over Munich and had taken heavy flak that knocked out two engines. They were making for Switzerland and had lost another engine by this time, flying into heavy snow. The pilot, navigator, and bombardier made a heroic effort to keep the plane high enough so that my father and four other crew members could bail out and survive even though they were flying below the mountain tops. The copilot died when his chute didn't open. The three up front died when the plane crashed into the mountain during a white-out. Personally, I think the remaining officers knew they were too low to bail at that point and were flying by line of sight to try and get the plane out of the peaks and to a mountain lake for a ditch, which was probably their best hope. My father and three crew members were captured, interrogated, starved, force-marched hundreds of miles around Germany, and finally sent to a POW camp in Gross Tychow for nearly a year. The other crew member made it to interred neutrality in Switzerland for the rest of the war. That flight crew had flown 10 successful missions with that plane before that day, July 12th, 1944.
This was my father's plane. Lt. Thomas E. Lee, Jr from West Palm Beach, Florida is the airman standing alone in the picture by the tail of the B-17. He was issued this B-17 in Wyoming and then flew it to Glatton, England. He flew 30 missions and the first two were during "Big Week." He was sad that the very next crew who had the plane crashed. He became a lawyer and a judge and patriarch of a large family. He passed away gently this month (Dec 2011) and was buried on his 90th birthday.
My father was the tailgunner on this flight. The plane crashed because they had completed a bomb run over Munich and had taken heavy flak that knocked out two engines. They were making for Switzerland and had lost another engine by this time, flying into heavy snow. The pilot, navigator, and bombardier made a heroic effort to keep the plane high enough so that my father and four other crew members could bail out and survive even though they were flying below the mountain tops. The copilot died when his chute didn't open. The three up front died when the plane crashed into the mountain during a white-out. Personally, I think the remaining officers knew they were too low to bail at that point and were flying by line of sight to try and get the plane out of the peaks and to a mountain lake for a ditch, which was probably their best hope. My father and three crew members were captured, interrogated, starved, force-marched hundreds of miles around Germany, and finally sent to a POW camp in Gross Tychow for nearly a year. The other crew member made it to interred neutrality in Switzerland for the rest of the war. That flight crew had flown 10 successful missions with that plane before that day, July 12th, 1944.
Only one more ridge and a glacier would have come into view for a possible landing.
I was an AW2 Petty officer in the US Navy, we flew Lockheed P3-C Orion submarine hunters
Air crews of poor level. No surprise.
Some of these bailed out over desert and believed they are over ocean.
Not heroic - simply poor level !