Fire On Board!
Heroes Remember
Fire On Board!
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The worst night I guess was when we had to come back with an
engine on fire and we crash landed. We took off, again, an old
airplane. So I'm sittin'at the radio and there's a little
window here that you could look at the engine. All
of a sudden I heard a sort of a small bang you know and I thought
"Well there's nobody, we're not getting shot at."
We hadn't been out very long, we weren't even
in an area where you would get shot at, as yet.
Sparks coming out of the engine, so I mentioned it to the pilot.
He said, "Keep an eye on it." Next time there was a few
more sparks. The third time there was a bang
and I looked out and we got flame. So I said, "Fire."
And he just turned it around and headed for home.
He couldn't put down the wheels or the flaps to slow
down because it was the port engine and that one handled the
hydraulics for the wheels and the flaps. And we came down with
this thing on fire and we did a belly landing. There's a little,
the radio was right behind the pilot where I was sitting between
me and the cockpit, there was the two pilots. There's a little
plywood door about that wide and oh about five feet,
a little over five feet high. I don't know to this day
whether I walked through that door or tore it off the hinges, but
the next thing I know I was between the pilot, I got out with the
way the pilot did, an escape hatch above his seat.
I was between his legs and he was sitting there
ready to jump and he patted me on top of the head and he said,
"Me first, Len." The rest of the crew would get out through the
astrodome. They all got out. We were running away from the
airplane. We had four depth charges on which were 250 pounds
a piece, 3000 rounds of ammunition and we had flares, we had
Very Cartridge pistol and flares. And it looked like the 4th
of July by the time we got away from the airplane eh.
Meanwhile it's burning. And one of the guys glanced around
and we all stopped dead. Firemen were trying to put
the fire out and we yelled, "Depth charges." of course but the
ammunition going off and the Very cartridge flares, red green
whatever flying through, wouldn't hear us. The reason the
fireman went out to do that, and this was oh early morning,
you know, it was still dark, pitch black. The day
before, or two days before, one of these, still old airplanes,
had lost an engine and they crash landed. And when they crash
landed the engine caught fire because as I say it's, everything
would come back, and you were looking at fabric and in the shell
the minute gas goes and a little spark, "Boom." They cut the
tail off of that airplane on the runway while the front end was
burning. It wasn't bombed up yet. This was
one thing that saved them. But they cut the tail off of that
airplane to save the turret and part of the airplane and they
could weld it together on another airplane.
They tried to do the same thing that night but it was
too far gone and there was too much ammunition on board.
So they couldn't do it. The chap, the fireman,
it blasted cleaned all his clothes off and he was pock
marked all over with shrapnel. He died just before we
left the hospital. They checked us out but we were all right.
So we were flying again that night. That's what they do.
When you have a bad crash they don't let you sit around think of
it. They get you right back into the aircraft. That morning
we came back. The breaks failed on the aircraft we had.
We're heading for a hundred foot drop at the end of the
runway at this stone quarry. So the pilot says, "Here we go
again." And he hauled the thing around in what we call a ground
loop, so you ruin the propeller, you ruin a wheel and smash up a
wing. So the six of us got out and pissed on that aircraft!
Broad daylight, who cares. About seven
or eight o'clock in the morning, who cares. You know, those were
some of the good things.
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