Aviation History - January 2016

january 2016 AH 31

OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE; RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE

THE B-24

VIRTUALLY

DISAPPEARED

THE MOMENT

THE JAPANESE

SURRENDER

WAS INKED.

would be 40 degrees colder.

We had two types of flying

clothing: sheepskin-lined

leather pants and jacket and

fur-lined boots, and electri-

cally heated suit and shoes.

The electrical heating wires in

the suit were hooked in series.

If one wire broke in that suit,

the suit would not work. It got

darned cold the rest of the

trip. The wires usually broke

on the inside of the elbow,

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that would have to be slapped

at a few times to extinguish.

I looked up one day to see

the nose gunner’s door come

open. He was beating out a

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don’t know what would hap-

pen if a wire shorted out in the

crotch area.”

B-24 and B-17 crews were

the only Americans to receive

the Purple Heart when they

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indescribable how cold they

were. Liberator copilot 2nd

Lt. Robert Durrell recalled

that his airplane commander,

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forbade the crew to carry

drinking water: “It froze and

became useless and was dead

weight.” Crewmen also wor-

ried constantly about midair

collisions. “We thought about

the cold and the crowd in the

sky around us a lot more than

we thought about flak and

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Sometimes a Liberator

came back with its insides

smeared with vomit and

blood. Those who didn’t

need to be scraped out of the

aircraft or rushed to a burn

unit were allotted grapefruit

juice, hard candy and whis-

key. Alcohol flowed freely

at the officers’ club. At one

station, whenever a man got

drunk he was hoisted from

his chair, his shoe bottoms

were painted black, and he

was turned upside-down and

raised so that his footprints

would be planted on the white

ceiling. By the time the thou-

sand-day war in the skies of

Nazi Germany ended, that

ceiling was black.

I

t was both good and bad

that the B-24 was harder

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Liberator was the wrong

aircraft for an earnest young

man struggling to do his best,

but it was spot-on right for the

natural aviator gifted with an

inbred “feel” that no one can

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Al Benzing, who now pilots

the Commemorative Air

Force’s B-24A Diamond Lil,

said: “It’s an unusual handling

aircraft. It has unassisted con-

trols, which makes it heavy to

handle. It requires constant

attention. You need to watch

its narrow c.g. [center of grav-

ity] range. It’s big, designed

for 65,000 pounds of weight,

yet when you have a person

stand up and walk from front

to rear you im mediately feel a

change in pitch. For an air-

craft that is bulky and has a

clumsy look to it, if you are at

all ham-handed it will make

you look bad in a hurry. Con-

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points you can make this thing

behave very well.”

It was an awful war, and the

B-24 was always in the middle

of it. But at least in retrospect

the whole thing seems brief.

Service life of the average

B-24 was less than two years.

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sions early in the war, or 35

missions late in the war, then

they went home.

Unlike the B-17, which

soldiered on—the Korean

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by an SB-17G modified for

air rescue—the B-24 virtu-

ally disappeared the moment

the Japanese surrender was

inked. The only exception

was the PB4Y-2 Privateer

variant, which did Cold War

reconnaissance.

The last active-duty Libera-

tor was an all-silver, Ford-

built EZB-24M-21-FO (serial

no. 44-51228) used for ice

research into the 1950s. In

1956 that airplane was put on

display at Lack land Air Force

Base in San Antonio, Texas.

During my basic training at

Lackland as a 17-year-old

airman in 1957, I remember

sitting on the grass next to

44-51228.

That airplane was trans-

ferred to the Duxford museum

in Britain in 1999 and is now

painted to represent Dugan, a

Liberator based with the

392nd Bombardment Group

at Wendling, Norfolk (it was

replaced at Lackland by a

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Air Force Museum got a

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but in my opinion Americans

were cheated. Our last opera-

tional B-24 should have

remained on U.S. soil. To me,

the swap was one more exam-

ple of the Liberator not get-

ting the respect it’s due. 

Air Force veteran and retired U.S.

diplomat Robert F. Dorr’s latest

book is Air Power Aban-

doned. He recommends for

further reading: The B-24

Liberator, by Allan G. Blue;

Liberator: America’s Global

Bomber, by Alwyn T. Lloyd;

and Masters of the Air, by

Donald L. Miller.

final task EZB-24M-21-FO 44-51228 was

the last Liberator to serve in the U.S. Air Force.