A Bad Day For Flying: The story of a WWII B-24 Commander shot down over Hankow
By Alan Foster

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“It was a great day for flying,” my father always said afterward. But August 24, 1943, turned out to be a thoroughly bad day for the crews of seven Consolidated B-24D Liberators of the 425th Squadron, 308th Bomb Group (Heavy), on a mission to Hankow, in Japanese-held China.

On that day my dad, 24-year-old aircraft commander 1st Lt. John T. Foster, and the rest of the crew of B-24D No. 42-40879, dubbed Belle Starr, were awakened at 4 a.m. in Kunming and briefed on the mission. For the recently formed heavy bomber force of Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force, this would be only the 15th mission.

The crews were well aware that they were on their way to the scene of a recent bloodbath. Just three days earlier, a group of Liberators based at Chengkung—14 B-24s from the 374th and 375th squadrons of the 308th Bomb Group—had bombed Hankow. Leading that flight was Major Walter “Bruce” Beat of the 374th. They flew to the rendezvous spot over the fighter field at Hengyang, but when a promised escort of Curtiss P-40s and Lockheed P-38s failed to appear, Beat decided to continue on to the target without any escort.

As the B-24s approached Hankow, they were met by a swarm of an estimated 60 Japanese fighters, which pounced on the lead squadron’s ships. Almost immediately, Beat’s Rum Runner burst into flames amidships, then exploded. Seeing that, as one co-pilot of another B-24 said, “We just poured on all the power we could to get the hell out of there.” Only one plane of the 374th and six of the 375th returned, carrying badly wounded crewmen.

The 308th’s commander, Colonel Eugene H. Beebe, watched as the shattered survivors landed at Kweilin. One crewman recalled: “Colonel Beebe didn’t say a word. He just stood there with tears streaming down his face as he saw the condition we all were in.”

Now, three days later, the 308th was going back to Hankow. For dad and the rest of Belle Starr’s crew, it would be their first combat mission since their arrival in China three weeks earlier.

My father grew up near Waterbury, Conn., but his earliest childhood years had been spent in Changsha, China, where my grandfather taught medicine. When civil unrest made life there risky for foreigners, he and his family slipped out of Changsha on a cold foggy morning in January 1927 in a small riverboat, making a stop at Hankow, then on to Shanghai and the ocean liner that took them back to the States.

Dad graduated from college in 1940 and after a year of selling insurance enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in September 1941. He had never even been inside a plane and had no particular interest in flying, but it seemed preferable to a life “in the mud” as an infantryman. Once he was accepted, he went to an airfield and paid $5 for his first ride—just to see what it was like.

Ten days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, dad was inducted. During primary training, he later recalled, “It was soon clear, to me at least, that I really wasn’t cut out for all this, and in the first weeks I was confused, disoriented and scared.” In advanced flying school some cadets found they could put holes through the target sleeve in aerial gunnery drills, while others could not. Cadet Foster was among the latter, and he was assigned to B-17 training. In an August 1942 letter to his parents, he rationalized: “We’re all pretty satisfied with this heavy stuff. Not so glamorous as pursuit, but it is important and [it is] the offensive end. At the same time it’s the safer branch of flying.” The B-17s and B-24s, he had been told, “are so well defended that the Japs just aren’t attacking formations”!

Their instructors told them how lucky they were to be in B-17s, not the homely, slab-sided B-24s—“the box the B-17 came in.” But his graduation was followed by orders to Tucson and crew training. In the B-24.

Tags: Aerial Combat, Aviation History, World War II

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