Post by limburger59 on Jul 14, 2021 11:06:37 GMT -8
In the original games - both TFT and QOTS - a Runaway Engine forced an automatic bailout. I have read a number of accounts where a runaway was survived. Most reports were due to Mechanical Failures, but some were battle damage.
OPTIONAL RUNAWAY ENGINE RULE
Instead of automatically bailing out:
> You no longer can remain in formation due to loss of control and speed. Continue Out of Formation. One zone per turn unless other damage further slows you down.
> The engine is considered out.
> You must jettison bombs.
> -4 Landing modifier if the engine is still a runaway when landing
In each Zone roll 1d10 as you begin the turn:
ROLL 1D6 WHEN A RUNAWAY PROP FALLS OFF:
Unless the prop misses, roll for one hit on the impacted section or engine.
Here are some accounts I found of runaway engines...
"Mary Cary: They received a direct hit before bombs were away. Engines number one and two on the left wing were badly damaged, and number two had a runaway prop that couldn't be feathered... was last seen headed for the English coast at Beachy Head.
They never made it, as the airplane was vibrating very badly, and finally the runaway number two engine exploded. The crew was ordered to bail out over the channel, but before they could all get out, the airplane exploded and half the crew members were killed."
"The crew of Star Dust 358BS, had the roughest Group trip of the day. Over the
target flak hit the ship, damaged a supercharger and caused a runaway propeller. Flying
on three engines, Star Dust fell behind the rest of the formation, but went on to bomb the
target. Two bombs stuck in the racks and the bomb bay doors refused to close, slowing
the ship down even more. To complicate matters, oxygen masks froze at the sub-zero
altitude. Bombardier Lt. Phillip A. Reed passed out from lack of oxygen. Engineer T/Sgt.
Joseph A. Rozek went back to the bomb bay to try to close the doors and increase the
speed of the ship a little. He dislodged the two bombs, which rolled out of the partially
closed doors. Then Sgt. Rozek passed out on the narrow catwalk over the open bomb bay
doors five miles above earth. Seeing Sgt. Rozek's position, 2Lt. Roy C. Sanders, pilot of
Star Dust, left the controls in the hands of the co-pilot 2Lt. Henry F. Nogash. After dragging
Sgt. Rozek to a safer spot and fitting him up with an emergency oxygen system, Lt.
Sanders went to the nose and succeeded in reviving Lt. Reed. "We were lucky to get
back," the crew agreed. "We weren't in very good shape to keep off fighters, but those P-
47s were all around us. Boy! They really looked good–as welcome as a letter from home."
"#42-97284 Ain't Misbehavin, 359BS (Assenheimer), returned after one hour with a leak in the oil line that caused the No. 4 prop governor to run away."
On New Year's Eve in 1944 a report mentioned, "Also returning early was #42-102569 Miss Lace, 427BS (Lt. W.H. Petersen). The aircraft had a runaway propeller that couldn't be feathered and caused severe vibrations. Four members of the crew bailed out near the Scholdt Estuary..."
"On another mission, Captain Baldwin discovered that one of the engines on #41-24577 had a runaway turbo supercharger as the Hell’s Angels climbed to altitude to join the formation of the 303rd’s Flying Fortresses. With experimentation, Baldwin found that by setting the runaway control all the way down on the engine in question that it would run reasonably. The Hell’s Angels completed this mission, as well."
"Eight other aircraft returned early: ...#42-31669 Shoo Shoo Baby, 358BS-J (Viets) - Runaway propeller."
"We were gradually losing altitude crossing the Dutch coast under 5,000 feet and hoping we could reach Molesworth. We were now 1 1/2 hours late and dusk was falling. When we reached Molesworth a runaway prop on #3 engine, due to severed throttle cable, caused us to lose the engine. We came in on one engine and without hydraulics or brakes, we used up the entire runway before finally coming to a stop on the perimeter."
"On our return, approaching Southampton on the southern coast of England, Bob Cogswell was unable to feather a runaway prop. When the engine began pouring smoke, he ordered the crew to bail out. We came down on rooftops, in trees and on farmer’s fields in the vicinity of Alresford and Winchester. “Lady Luck” crashed in a lake, and the only fatalities were six grazing cows."
"B-17F #42-29717 'Mr. Five By Five' was last seen with one engine feathered and heading towards Switzerland on a mission to Stuttgart, GR on 25 Feb 1944... crash landed Bruchsal ?, Ger."
From the book Black Thursday, by Martin Caidin.
Brennan’s Circus, B-17 Number 383 of the 832d Squadron, 94th Group, failed to bring her men home to England, but she brought the crew close enough, and not a man had anything but kind words to say about their valiant bomber.
Ten minutes before the target run the fighters shot out the first engine, which burst into flames. For another five minutes the pilot, 1st Lt. Joseph Brennan, twenty-one years old, struggled to keep up with the group formation. The Fortress was sluggish and unresponsive, and both Brennan and his copilot, 2d Lt. Gordon E. White, twenty-two years old, were forced to work at the controls together. But even with the throttles jammed all the way forward, the crippled bomber couldn’t make it.
Their only chance of remaining with the other bombers, continuing to fly under the protection of the massed screen, was to jettison the heavy bomb load. Brennan ordered 2d Lt. Joseph E. Genone, twenty-four years old, salvo the bombs. Unhappily, the Fortress was in far worse condition than they realized, and the bomb-release mechanism was a shambles of twisted metal. “I decided right then that we had to peel off,” Brennan said. “We were far behind the rest of the formation by then, and the fighters were making terrific passes at us. We were at 25,000 feet when I swung her over and let her go.”
Shaking badly, shivering from nose to tail in a series of eerie vibrations, the Circus swooped down in a dive, and quickly reached a speed of more than 350 miles per hour—still with her lethal bombs in the bays. Seeing the burning engine and the sudden plunge, the fighters closed in, blasting away with guns and cannon. Then four more FW-190s swept in while the gunners were engaged. Four rockets whipped past the B-17, blazing fiercely. They missed.
TSgt. Willard R. Wetzel, twenty-three years old, the o operator-gunner, was on his twenty-fifth (and final) mission, As the Circus dropped away, the target of the furious German attacks, Wetzel had one of the worst moments of his battle-studded combat career. “The pilot kept circling as he went down,” Wetzel related back in England, “because if we had gone down in a straight dive, all a fighter had to do was get on our tail and stay there while he was letting us have it. As it was, the Jerries managed to hit another engine. The prop began to run away at such a speed it made the most horrifying noise I have ever heard. I didn’t know then it was the prop. I thought the wings were falling off. I was all alone in the radio compartment and didn’t have my headset on. I thought, with the wings falling off, the pilot had ordered us to bail out and I hadn’t heard him. I opened the radio compartment door and looked to see if the bomb-bay doors were open. They were. I thought then that I was left all alone in the ship, with no one at the controls.
“That really hit me. I turned to ice.
“I fumbled around, finally managed to plug in my headset, and called the pilot. There was a minute—one hell of a long minute, too—before he answered, and I think I kept holding my breath. Then he said, ‘Stick with us.’ Boy, was I relieved!”
As the Circus swirled around steeply in her spiral, the bombardier finally managed to jettison the several tons of high explosives. Almost as if she was glad to be rid of the bombs, the Circus responded faster and more effectively to the wrestling motions of Brennan and White in the cockpit. Still the bomber fell, while the navigator, Lt. Verne D. Viterbo, shouted to Wetzel to get him a radio “fix” to home on.
“Things were rapidly going straight to hell”—so the pilot later described the moments of the spiral from 25,000 feet down to the ground—a spinning blur of flames, exploding shells, singing bullets, the roar of the engines, the shouts of the crew, and the blasting noise of the runaway prop. The Circus had only one chance, and Brennan took it by diving the battered Fortress right to the deck—scarcely fifteen feet over German soil.
From then on this B-17 certainly had what must be described as one of the “hairiest” flights in bomber history. With one engine out and its prop spinning crazily, another worthless and streaming flames, the B-17 lit out for the Channel with the fighters on her tail like a wolf pack in full cry. The shells and bullets crashed into the wings like hail, but the fighters could not make steep diving attacks and had to slow down as they came in, for fear of striking the ground. All the gunners blazed away and finally the fighter pilots, either discouraged or else convinced that the Fortress didn’t stand any chance of making it home, turned tail and went after fresher game.
With only his two good engines and the Circus resembling something that had gone through a meat grinder, Brennan coaxed the staggering bomber directly among the trees and buildings. Frequently he had to lift a wing to clear a tower or a church steeple, missing the ground obstacles by scant inches.
By the time the Circus was floundering its way across Holland and Belgium, ground fire replaced the attacks of the Luftwaffe. The area was so strewn with small fighter airfields that it proved impossible to avoid all nests of flak and, occasionally, a half-hearted pass by a single fighter plane whose pilot must have stared in some disbelief at the wreck hedgehopping over the land, leaving behind it a long pall of smoke.
Low as it flew, the thunder of the Circus’ two remaining motors was heard for miles ahead. People rushed out of their homes and shops, jumping up and down in excitement, waving happily, and raising their arms in “V for Victory” salutes to the bomber. Everywhere the people appeared—men, women, and children—and their reaction was spontaneous. The sight of an American bomber so close to the ground—with the crew members leaning out of turrets and hatches and waving back!—was cause for cheer. But there were enemy troops on the ground, too.
“They fired everything they had at us,” said SSgt. Denver A. Nowlin, the right waist gunner. “We were so close to them that the noise was terrific. They were firing machine guns and everything else. Troops were lined up on rooftops and in the streets and fields, blazing away with rifles. Their officers also were outside, firing pistols. If they’d had more time, they probably would have thrown rocks at us also.”
The Circus took a terrific beating from the withering ground barrage. If she was cut up before, now she began to fall apart. Pieces of metal curled up on the wings, gaping holes appeared magically in the wings and fuselage, and bullets twanged through the ship like a swarm of bees.
Then a final barrage struck home. A waterfall of tracers soared up from the earth and smashed into one of the two remaining good engines. The Circus faltered visibly as the third engine cut out, then struggled on—carried by only one engine.
It is impossible for a B-17 to fly on one engine but maybe Brennan in the cockpit hadn’t read the book that said so. Revved up to maximum power, that engine dragged the Fortress away from the land, while the tail-turret gunner cheerfully described the hail of bullets splashing in the water behind them, unable to reach the staggering bomber. Wetzel had already flashed out the plane’s identifying radio signal to British shore stations, saying they would be coming in right on the deck. But the Circus just didn’t have it any more; she began to lose the precious few feet beneath the wings. Brennan told Wetzel to flash the Mayday distress call; they would have to ditch in the Channel.
Only five miles from the British coast line the crippled bomber gave up the ghost. Brennan and White held the nose high as the crew gathered in the radio room, and then they settled her gently to the water. She drifted down like a feather, trailed a high plume of spray, and slowly came to a stop. As the Fortress began to settle, the crew cut the dinghies loose and climbed aboard. Not a man got his feet wet. Within an hour a British rescue boat picked them up."
From the memoirs of Alcide "Jim" Champagne of the 15th AF:
"So, off we go, taking off in early morn and forming our formation over Italy. We flew northeasterly across the Adriatic Sea into Yugoslavia, Then northward up Yugoslavia and shortly after crossing the border into Austria, or there about we lost our number 4 engine. The propeller on this dead engine could not be "feathered" meaning to put it in a position that it would have the least resistance to the air and locked into a stopped position. It became a "runaway prop" which is a dangerous thing to have as some "runaway" propellers have been known to come off of it's shaft that they are on and cut through the flight cockpit. We were losing speed and altitude, the pilot decided to turn back and head for home. He told the bombardier, Lt. J.C. McClure to drop his bombs in a field or river, and asked the navigator, Lt. Edward J. Nisiobincki for a heading to take us back home. As the crews flight engineer I was called from my normal top turret gun position, during a mission by the pilot to see if I could feather the propeller. I could not because we must have lost all of the oil, which is needed to do this, or this was just another problem with this plane. Certainly not one of our lucky mission days.
We were hit by anti air craft guns, (flak guns), from the ground and when this attack was over we were shortly thereafter attacked by a flight of Messerschmidts 109s the pilot, Lt. Willis Retzlaff must of called Mac the Bombardier up to take my gun position because I saw him crawl up into the top turret gun position and start to shoot the twin 50 caliber machine guns at that gun position. Well needless to say the enemy fighters finished us off, the plane became just too uncontrollable and was losing altitude, and the number 4 engine was on fire and perhaps the gas tanks just behind it too. The pilot gave the "Bailout" signal "
OPTIONAL RUNAWAY ENGINE RULE
Instead of automatically bailing out:
> You no longer can remain in formation due to loss of control and speed. Continue Out of Formation. One zone per turn unless other damage further slows you down.
> The engine is considered out.
> You must jettison bombs.
> -4 Landing modifier if the engine is still a runaway when landing
In each Zone roll 1d10 as you begin the turn:
| d10 ROLL | RESULT |
| 1-6 | You continue flying in this zone. Roll again next zone. |
| 7 | Engine seizes up. Roll 1d6: 1 = engine fire - attempt to extinguish; 2-6 = an eerie quiet. You do not need to roll anymore. |
| 8 | Propeller flys off! You survived the runaway but are you damaged by the flying prop? (roll on the table below) |
| 9-10 | The collateral damage is so severe due to vibrations that the crew must make a controlled bailout |
ROLL 1D6 WHEN A RUNAWAY PROP FALLS OFF:
| 1D6 | I/B Engines (#2 or #3 prop) | O/B Engines (#1 or #4 prop) |
| 1 | Pilot Compartment is hit | I/B Eng. (Eng. 2 or Eng. 3) |
| 2 | Wing (Eng. 2 Port/ Eng. 3 Starboard) | Wing (Eng. 1 Port/ Eng. 4 Starboard) |
| 3 | Wing (Eng. 2 Port/ Eng. 3 Starboard) | Wing (Eng. 1 Port/ Eng. 4 Starboard) |
| 4 | O/B Eng. (Eng. 1 or Eng. 4) | Misses, no damage |
| 5 | Misses, no damage | Misses, no damage |
| 6 | Misses, no damage | Misses, no damage |
Here are some accounts I found of runaway engines...
"Mary Cary: They received a direct hit before bombs were away. Engines number one and two on the left wing were badly damaged, and number two had a runaway prop that couldn't be feathered... was last seen headed for the English coast at Beachy Head.
They never made it, as the airplane was vibrating very badly, and finally the runaway number two engine exploded. The crew was ordered to bail out over the channel, but before they could all get out, the airplane exploded and half the crew members were killed."
"The crew of Star Dust 358BS, had the roughest Group trip of the day. Over the
target flak hit the ship, damaged a supercharger and caused a runaway propeller. Flying
on three engines, Star Dust fell behind the rest of the formation, but went on to bomb the
target. Two bombs stuck in the racks and the bomb bay doors refused to close, slowing
the ship down even more. To complicate matters, oxygen masks froze at the sub-zero
altitude. Bombardier Lt. Phillip A. Reed passed out from lack of oxygen. Engineer T/Sgt.
Joseph A. Rozek went back to the bomb bay to try to close the doors and increase the
speed of the ship a little. He dislodged the two bombs, which rolled out of the partially
closed doors. Then Sgt. Rozek passed out on the narrow catwalk over the open bomb bay
doors five miles above earth. Seeing Sgt. Rozek's position, 2Lt. Roy C. Sanders, pilot of
Star Dust, left the controls in the hands of the co-pilot 2Lt. Henry F. Nogash. After dragging
Sgt. Rozek to a safer spot and fitting him up with an emergency oxygen system, Lt.
Sanders went to the nose and succeeded in reviving Lt. Reed. "We were lucky to get
back," the crew agreed. "We weren't in very good shape to keep off fighters, but those P-
47s were all around us. Boy! They really looked good–as welcome as a letter from home."
"#42-97284 Ain't Misbehavin, 359BS (Assenheimer), returned after one hour with a leak in the oil line that caused the No. 4 prop governor to run away."
On New Year's Eve in 1944 a report mentioned, "Also returning early was #42-102569 Miss Lace, 427BS (Lt. W.H. Petersen). The aircraft had a runaway propeller that couldn't be feathered and caused severe vibrations. Four members of the crew bailed out near the Scholdt Estuary..."
"On another mission, Captain Baldwin discovered that one of the engines on #41-24577 had a runaway turbo supercharger as the Hell’s Angels climbed to altitude to join the formation of the 303rd’s Flying Fortresses. With experimentation, Baldwin found that by setting the runaway control all the way down on the engine in question that it would run reasonably. The Hell’s Angels completed this mission, as well."
"Eight other aircraft returned early: ...#42-31669 Shoo Shoo Baby, 358BS-J (Viets) - Runaway propeller."
"We were gradually losing altitude crossing the Dutch coast under 5,000 feet and hoping we could reach Molesworth. We were now 1 1/2 hours late and dusk was falling. When we reached Molesworth a runaway prop on #3 engine, due to severed throttle cable, caused us to lose the engine. We came in on one engine and without hydraulics or brakes, we used up the entire runway before finally coming to a stop on the perimeter."
"On our return, approaching Southampton on the southern coast of England, Bob Cogswell was unable to feather a runaway prop. When the engine began pouring smoke, he ordered the crew to bail out. We came down on rooftops, in trees and on farmer’s fields in the vicinity of Alresford and Winchester. “Lady Luck” crashed in a lake, and the only fatalities were six grazing cows."
"B-17F #42-29717 'Mr. Five By Five' was last seen with one engine feathered and heading towards Switzerland on a mission to Stuttgart, GR on 25 Feb 1944... crash landed Bruchsal ?, Ger."
From the book Black Thursday, by Martin Caidin.
Brennan’s Circus, B-17 Number 383 of the 832d Squadron, 94th Group, failed to bring her men home to England, but she brought the crew close enough, and not a man had anything but kind words to say about their valiant bomber.
Ten minutes before the target run the fighters shot out the first engine, which burst into flames. For another five minutes the pilot, 1st Lt. Joseph Brennan, twenty-one years old, struggled to keep up with the group formation. The Fortress was sluggish and unresponsive, and both Brennan and his copilot, 2d Lt. Gordon E. White, twenty-two years old, were forced to work at the controls together. But even with the throttles jammed all the way forward, the crippled bomber couldn’t make it.
Their only chance of remaining with the other bombers, continuing to fly under the protection of the massed screen, was to jettison the heavy bomb load. Brennan ordered 2d Lt. Joseph E. Genone, twenty-four years old, salvo the bombs. Unhappily, the Fortress was in far worse condition than they realized, and the bomb-release mechanism was a shambles of twisted metal. “I decided right then that we had to peel off,” Brennan said. “We were far behind the rest of the formation by then, and the fighters were making terrific passes at us. We were at 25,000 feet when I swung her over and let her go.”
Shaking badly, shivering from nose to tail in a series of eerie vibrations, the Circus swooped down in a dive, and quickly reached a speed of more than 350 miles per hour—still with her lethal bombs in the bays. Seeing the burning engine and the sudden plunge, the fighters closed in, blasting away with guns and cannon. Then four more FW-190s swept in while the gunners were engaged. Four rockets whipped past the B-17, blazing fiercely. They missed.
TSgt. Willard R. Wetzel, twenty-three years old, the o operator-gunner, was on his twenty-fifth (and final) mission, As the Circus dropped away, the target of the furious German attacks, Wetzel had one of the worst moments of his battle-studded combat career. “The pilot kept circling as he went down,” Wetzel related back in England, “because if we had gone down in a straight dive, all a fighter had to do was get on our tail and stay there while he was letting us have it. As it was, the Jerries managed to hit another engine. The prop began to run away at such a speed it made the most horrifying noise I have ever heard. I didn’t know then it was the prop. I thought the wings were falling off. I was all alone in the radio compartment and didn’t have my headset on. I thought, with the wings falling off, the pilot had ordered us to bail out and I hadn’t heard him. I opened the radio compartment door and looked to see if the bomb-bay doors were open. They were. I thought then that I was left all alone in the ship, with no one at the controls.
“That really hit me. I turned to ice.
“I fumbled around, finally managed to plug in my headset, and called the pilot. There was a minute—one hell of a long minute, too—before he answered, and I think I kept holding my breath. Then he said, ‘Stick with us.’ Boy, was I relieved!”
As the Circus swirled around steeply in her spiral, the bombardier finally managed to jettison the several tons of high explosives. Almost as if she was glad to be rid of the bombs, the Circus responded faster and more effectively to the wrestling motions of Brennan and White in the cockpit. Still the bomber fell, while the navigator, Lt. Verne D. Viterbo, shouted to Wetzel to get him a radio “fix” to home on.
“Things were rapidly going straight to hell”—so the pilot later described the moments of the spiral from 25,000 feet down to the ground—a spinning blur of flames, exploding shells, singing bullets, the roar of the engines, the shouts of the crew, and the blasting noise of the runaway prop. The Circus had only one chance, and Brennan took it by diving the battered Fortress right to the deck—scarcely fifteen feet over German soil.
From then on this B-17 certainly had what must be described as one of the “hairiest” flights in bomber history. With one engine out and its prop spinning crazily, another worthless and streaming flames, the B-17 lit out for the Channel with the fighters on her tail like a wolf pack in full cry. The shells and bullets crashed into the wings like hail, but the fighters could not make steep diving attacks and had to slow down as they came in, for fear of striking the ground. All the gunners blazed away and finally the fighter pilots, either discouraged or else convinced that the Fortress didn’t stand any chance of making it home, turned tail and went after fresher game.
With only his two good engines and the Circus resembling something that had gone through a meat grinder, Brennan coaxed the staggering bomber directly among the trees and buildings. Frequently he had to lift a wing to clear a tower or a church steeple, missing the ground obstacles by scant inches.
By the time the Circus was floundering its way across Holland and Belgium, ground fire replaced the attacks of the Luftwaffe. The area was so strewn with small fighter airfields that it proved impossible to avoid all nests of flak and, occasionally, a half-hearted pass by a single fighter plane whose pilot must have stared in some disbelief at the wreck hedgehopping over the land, leaving behind it a long pall of smoke.
Low as it flew, the thunder of the Circus’ two remaining motors was heard for miles ahead. People rushed out of their homes and shops, jumping up and down in excitement, waving happily, and raising their arms in “V for Victory” salutes to the bomber. Everywhere the people appeared—men, women, and children—and their reaction was spontaneous. The sight of an American bomber so close to the ground—with the crew members leaning out of turrets and hatches and waving back!—was cause for cheer. But there were enemy troops on the ground, too.
“They fired everything they had at us,” said SSgt. Denver A. Nowlin, the right waist gunner. “We were so close to them that the noise was terrific. They were firing machine guns and everything else. Troops were lined up on rooftops and in the streets and fields, blazing away with rifles. Their officers also were outside, firing pistols. If they’d had more time, they probably would have thrown rocks at us also.”
The Circus took a terrific beating from the withering ground barrage. If she was cut up before, now she began to fall apart. Pieces of metal curled up on the wings, gaping holes appeared magically in the wings and fuselage, and bullets twanged through the ship like a swarm of bees.
Then a final barrage struck home. A waterfall of tracers soared up from the earth and smashed into one of the two remaining good engines. The Circus faltered visibly as the third engine cut out, then struggled on—carried by only one engine.
It is impossible for a B-17 to fly on one engine but maybe Brennan in the cockpit hadn’t read the book that said so. Revved up to maximum power, that engine dragged the Fortress away from the land, while the tail-turret gunner cheerfully described the hail of bullets splashing in the water behind them, unable to reach the staggering bomber. Wetzel had already flashed out the plane’s identifying radio signal to British shore stations, saying they would be coming in right on the deck. But the Circus just didn’t have it any more; she began to lose the precious few feet beneath the wings. Brennan told Wetzel to flash the Mayday distress call; they would have to ditch in the Channel.
Only five miles from the British coast line the crippled bomber gave up the ghost. Brennan and White held the nose high as the crew gathered in the radio room, and then they settled her gently to the water. She drifted down like a feather, trailed a high plume of spray, and slowly came to a stop. As the Fortress began to settle, the crew cut the dinghies loose and climbed aboard. Not a man got his feet wet. Within an hour a British rescue boat picked them up."
From the memoirs of Alcide "Jim" Champagne of the 15th AF:
"So, off we go, taking off in early morn and forming our formation over Italy. We flew northeasterly across the Adriatic Sea into Yugoslavia, Then northward up Yugoslavia and shortly after crossing the border into Austria, or there about we lost our number 4 engine. The propeller on this dead engine could not be "feathered" meaning to put it in a position that it would have the least resistance to the air and locked into a stopped position. It became a "runaway prop" which is a dangerous thing to have as some "runaway" propellers have been known to come off of it's shaft that they are on and cut through the flight cockpit. We were losing speed and altitude, the pilot decided to turn back and head for home. He told the bombardier, Lt. J.C. McClure to drop his bombs in a field or river, and asked the navigator, Lt. Edward J. Nisiobincki for a heading to take us back home. As the crews flight engineer I was called from my normal top turret gun position, during a mission by the pilot to see if I could feather the propeller. I could not because we must have lost all of the oil, which is needed to do this, or this was just another problem with this plane. Certainly not one of our lucky mission days.
We were hit by anti air craft guns, (flak guns), from the ground and when this attack was over we were shortly thereafter attacked by a flight of Messerschmidts 109s the pilot, Lt. Willis Retzlaff must of called Mac the Bombardier up to take my gun position because I saw him crawl up into the top turret gun position and start to shoot the twin 50 caliber machine guns at that gun position. Well needless to say the enemy fighters finished us off, the plane became just too uncontrollable and was losing altitude, and the number 4 engine was on fire and perhaps the gas tanks just behind it too. The pilot gave the "Bailout" signal "
