B2 eZ sU the washington post.tuesday, november 12 , 2019
across the United States today
had been delivered to the Army
Air Corps too late during the war
to see action. It was picked up as
military surplus for $750 and
used to fly cargo, do aerial map-
ping and dust for fire ants before
it was donated to the Experimen-
tal Aircraft Association (EAA), a
nonprofit organization that pro-
motes aviation.
The organization spent 10
years restoring the aircraft, aim-
ing to give veterans and others a
chance to fly one of the most cel-
ebrated planes of World War II.
Aviation fans can book 30-min-
ute flights at $450 for those who
aren’t EAA members. Veterans
and active military members fly
free.‘Hope for the best’
When an officer jokingly
asked who in his class at flight
school wanted to fly bombers in-
stead of fighter planes, roland
H. martin was the only one to
raise his hand. maybe e verybody
else wanted a taste of the glory
and the swagger that came from
being a fighter pilot, but his con-cerns were more practical.
“If one was to become a com-
mercial pilot, he sure wanted to
have a multi-engine experience,”
martin recalled in a telephone
interview. “And bombers are it.”
By January 1943, at the age of
19, martin had earned his wings
with the Army Air Corps. His ear-
ly B-17 missions over Europe had
him bombing submarine bases
and enemy airfields in france —
almost milk runs, as aviators
called easy assignments. But the
closer the raids came to Germa-
ny, the fiercer the fighting.
on oct. 14, 1943, martin em-
barked on a second attempt by
U.S. forces to demolish ball-bear-
ing factories in Schweinfurt.
Swarms of B-17 bombers went in,
flying tight formations to defend
one another. flak filled the sky
with oily black clouds as messer-
schmitt 109s and focke-Wulf
190s streaked in from all angles.
“I don’t think I ever went out
thinking I was going to die,” mar-
tin said. “I do know that we —
the whole crew — was under a
great deal of tension. I felt sorry
for my crew because I was theRETROPOLIS
photos by bill o’leary/the Washington postFarmland rolls beneath the wing and machine gun of a restored World War II-era B-17 bomber during a flight over Manassas, va., on Oct. 24.
the end of the Vietnam War,
said he wanted to find alterna-
tives to homeless shelters that
provided little but that. In-
stead, he joined with other
veterans and established an
organization that offered inter-
connected services for veter-
ans, including counseling, job
training, shelter and finding
health care.
David Kurtz, executive direc-
tor of the nonprofit group Vet-
erans on the rise, said sending
veterans into the streets builds
on the camaraderie instilled in
military personnel for one an-
other, the spirit that warriors
should never leave one of their
own behind.
“The common bond of mili-
tary service is very powerful,”
said Kurtz, a former Army heli-
copter pilot. “With a group of
veterans, you’re going to build
rapport and trust with each
other, faster.”
That was the approach taken
by Dan Helmer, a former Army
officer and newly elected Vir-
ginia legislator, as he intro-
duced himself to several home-
less people on the street and in
encampments near George
Washington University. He was
accompanied by Howard Uni-
versity juniors rasidat Adenlo-
la, 20, who is studying to work
as a speech pathologist, and
Ta ylor rodgers, 19, a nursing
student.
Helmer and the students did
not find any veterans — some-
thing that Helmer was glad
about. Several of the people
they did encounter appeared to
be suffering from mental ill-
ness, including a man who was
standing outside his tent at
Virginia Avenue and 23rd
Street doing calisthenics.
The man was grateful for the
kit, but his thoughts came out
in an incoherent jumble, touch-
ing on manufacturing rifles
and bubble gum to missile de-
fense and working for an intel-
ligence agency and aerospace
companies and the Cuban mis-
sile crisis.
Helmer and the students lis-
tened patiently.
“We got some socks and
things,” Helmer said. “Would
you like some of those?”
The man accepted them with
thanks. Helmer asked whether
the man had a place to stay if
the weather got cold.
“I stay here. That’s my job,”
the man said as the small group
moved on, unfazed by the en-
counter.
“It shows the challenges that
we have more broadly dealing
with mental health in this
country,” Helmer said, estimat-
ing that half the homeless peo-
ple he met on monday might be
mentally ill.
“It’s a challenging issue for
which there are no right an-
swers,” Helmer said as he made
the rounds. “This is obviously
not the right answer, but insti-
tutionalizing people is not the
right answer. It is vexing.”
At the circle near K and 23rd
streets NW, Helmer introduced
himself to a man wearing a
camouflage jacket who said his
name was Wesley. Helmer
asked whether he was a veter-
an, but the man said he wasn’t.
“A re you all right?” Helmer
asked, handing him one of the
kits.
“I really appreciate this,” t he
man said. “Thank you so much.”
He said he would call the
“hypothermia van” i f necessary,
or go i nto a shelter if he became
too cold.
When the volunteers moved
on, Wesley, who declined to
identify h imself further, said he
was grateful for the help but
that it wasn’t enough for the
region’s homeless population.
“When it gets cold around
Thanksgiving or Christmas is
when you see the people. But
what about the rest of the year?
Where are they?” Wesley, 57,
said. “There’s a lot of older
people like myself out here...
and older women out there,
who never get reached. That’s
an injustice. I mean, they spend
how much money on military
people? on war?”
[email protected]veterans from B1Volunteers
search for
veterans on
D.C. streets
tOP: James C. Dieffenderfer, 99, left, talks with pilot John Bode in
the B-17’s cockpit on Oct. 2 4. Dieffenderfer flew a B- 17 over the
Pacific during World War II. aBOve: Crew chief tim Bourgoine
checks an engine on the restored bomber. the planes, nicknamed
the Flying Fortress, could sustain massive damage and keep going.The World War II-
era B-17 bomber
had taxied to the
end of the runway
for takeoff over
Northern Virginia
when a sudden mechanical prob-
lem brought us to a halt.
As the pilot revved for takeoff,
one of the four engines on the re-
stored aircraft coughed and
backfired. Blue exhaust smoke
streamed aft from the propellers.
for about the next 10 minutes,
its 10 or so passengers — includ-
ing this reporter — sat inside a
loud, shuddering metal tube,
wondering whether the sightsee-
ing flight would be aborted or
whether the legendary aircraft
could, as advertised, remain air-
borne in an emergency, e ven
with as few as two engines.
As the cabin grew hazy with
exhaust, I couldn’t help thinking
of a fatal crash involving another
restored B-17 bomber, in Con-
necticut, just three weeks earlier.
But our pilot aborted, and the
B-17, dubbed the Aluminum
overcast, taxied us back to the
lobby of manassas regional Air-
port. minutes later, crew chief
Tim Bourgoine was on a ladder,
his arms and tools sunk inside
the giant radial engine to fix a
bad spark plug — a piffle as far as
the average flying fortress
bomber was concerned.
The downtime offered a
chance to reflect on Veterans
Day and talk to some of the vet-
eran pilots who flew these planes
through conditions that even at
best — five miles above the
Earth, without oxygen, amid
subzero temperatures — were
punishing. many of these pilots
were heroic, not to mention
wildly lucky, for having flown
into combat against Japanese or
German forces and lived to tell
about it.
The World War II combat mis-
sions sent 10-man crews of
young Americans against enemy
fighters and antiaircraft fire that
filled the sky with flak. In the
early going of daylight bombing,
about a third of those who de-
parted didn’t come back.
“If they hadn’t given that sac-
rifice, this would be a much dif-
ferent country. It’d be a much
different world,” Bourgoine said.
He urged us to think about what
those flights were like for people
such as James C. Dieffenderfer.
Dieffenderfer — or Jimmie D,
as friends knew him in his native
West Virginia — answered the
call when the Army Air Corps
visited Virginia Te ch looking for
pilots after Japan’s surprise at-
tack on Pearl Harbor.
on his first combat mission,
Dieffenderfer flew from Austra-
lia to hit a convoy of Japanese
ships off milne Bay in Papua
New Guinea. Shrapnel peppered
his aircraft, fatally injuring the
bombardier and nearly severing
the navigator’s leg. He saw an-
other B-17 blown out of the sky —
memories that are s till vivid and
still difficult to talk about.
“I had never been shot at be-
fore,” s aid Dieffenderfer, 99, of
orlando. He had planned to fly
on the restored B -17 until the
long delay changed his plans.
“flying was an awful lot of fun —
I enjoyed it from the time I first
started out — but it sure got a lot
of the fun taken out when some-
body s tarts shooting at you. It’s
amazing we didn’t get hit more
than we did.”
“A shining silver object sailed
past over our right wing. I recog-
nized it as a main door,” Lt. Col.
Beirne Lay, Jr., said, in an ac-
count of a B-17 bombing raid by
U.S. forces against Schweinfurt,
a German city that produced ball
bearings for the Third Reich’s
war machine. “Seconds later, a
dark object came hurtling
through the formation, barely
missing several props. It was a
man, clasping his knees to his
head, revolving like a diver in a
triple somersault. I didn’t see his
chute open.”
Lay’s story, recounted 76 years
ago in The Washington Post, de-
scribed intense aerial combat as
flak burst around his B-17 and
waves of messerschmitt 109s and
focke-Wulf 190s streaked into
the sky to attack; debris, includ-
ing human bodies, unopened
parachutes and chunks of air-
craft, blew past in the slip-
stream. Another B-17 e xploded in
midair, leaving only its fuel tanks
to fall to Earth in balls of fire.
“The sight was fantastic and
surpassed fiction,” he wrote. “I
learned firsthand that a man can
resign himself to the certainty of
death without becoming pan-
icky.”
The flying fortress bristled
with firepower. T here were 13
.50-caliber machine guns, some
of them mounted inside goggle-
eyed turrets, that could fire fromthe top, front, sides and tail. The
ball turret, bulging from the air-
craft’s belly, seemed most precar-
ious of all, yet turned out to be
the least likely to take a hit. T he
B-17’s armaments were so lethal
that some called it a four-engine
fighter, and its ability to remain
airborne despite taking unimagi-
nable damage became legendary.
The vintage aircraft travelingbusiest, because I had something
to do, and all they could do was
hope for the best.”
His B-17 took so much fire that
he lost power in all four engines.
A Junkers 88 fighter bomber
moved in for the kill, as martin
— struggling to keep the plane in
a glide long enough for his crew
to parachute out — now had no
choice but a crash landing.
He brought the B-17 down in a
field. After setting fire to the air-
craft, he and the navigator took
off, pursued by dogs and hoping
to reach Switzerland. Two weeks
later they were captured and
sent to a PoW camp.
Decades later, martin re-
turned to the field where he had
crashed. He met some of the
townspeople, including a 93-
year-old German who had seen
the crippled aircraft and jumped
into a ravine for his own safety.
He also met a German who had
served on 88 mm antiaircraft
batteries during the raid.
“I may have been the one who
shot you down,” t he man said.
martin put his arm around
him.
“You know, you may have
been. But whoever it was, they
had damn good aim,” martin
said.‘You are my hero’
At 4:20 p.m., more than four
hours later than scheduled, we
headed back to the runway for
takeoff. Nancy Solomon, whose
late husband, William, had pilot-
ed B-17s in the Pacific, gripped
the edge of her seat as we pow-
ered up and rumbled down the
runway and then, up, into a flaw-
less blue sky.
The flight was smoother than
I would have thought, and loud-
er. Through the waist gunner’s
large windows we saw the
ground falling away as we rose
above houses, barns, churches,
cultivated fields and patches of
forest streaked with early-au-
tumn orange. The man-made ob-
jects diminished in size, and the
blue dome of the sky appeared to
grow larger.
“I love it,” Solomon shouted
over the engines. “It looks like
the ocean out there.” She had
signed up for the flight in her
husband’s honor and thought of
him as she rode: “I’m doing this
for you, Bill, because you are my
hero.”
Now and then a commercial
jetliner flashed in the sunlight
overhead. And then we began
the descent, for what would be a
majestic and uneventful 27-min-
ute ride.
Solomon began to sing “A mer-
ica the Beautiful” over the roar of
the engines.
[email protected] From retropolis, a blog about the
past, rediscovered, at
washingtonpost.com/retropolis.Flight of WWII bomber recalls days when skies weren’t so blue
“Flying was an awful
lot of fun... but it sure
got a lot of the fun taken
out when somebody
starts shooting at you.”
James C. Dieffenderfer,
World War ii army air Corps pilotPerspective
FREDRICK
KUNKLE
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