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

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Back in Belle Starr there was a crisis in front and rear. Bail-out procedures had seemed obvious during training. But figuring out how to follow those procedures was a different matter when Belle’s bomb bay was a holocaust, and flames were also streaming from the right wing and engine No. 3.

Dad leapt up and unlatched the small hatch above the engineer’s position, then pulled himself up into the 200-mph wind—and his seat parachute caught on the lip of the opening. He struggled for a few minutes, then fell back into the cockpit, exhausted. Sitting there, he was vaguely aware of Bill Gieseke dropping down from the upper gun turret. When dad tried once again to get through the hatch, he felt Gieseke’s hand on his left heel, pushing hard enough to pop him through the opening. “I know I laughed out there in space,” he said. Starting his free fall from 18,000 feet, he delayed opening his parachute and landed with only a broken rib to show for his brush with combat.

Gieseke, wearing a chest-pack type chute, had an easier time exiting the plane. But then he made a crucial error, opening his chute immediately. A fighter made several passes at him, shooting off half of one foot as he floated down.

Belle Starr’s waist gunners had watched a hole appear behind the No. 3 engine and a long streamer of flames flowing back toward them. Then they saw the hit to the bomb bay, followed by a roaring fire. The two gunners, Pannelle and Smith, were working frantically with tail gunner Ray Reed to extract Hutchinson from inside the ball turret. Uebel stood waiting to jump with the others. They were snapping Hutchinson’s chest-pack parachute to his harness when “Suddenly everything turned red,” Pannelle recalled. The right wing broke off, and the bomber went into a tight spiral. Centrifugal force threw Pannelle out one of the open waist windows and Uebel out the other. The other gunners died when Belle Starr hit the ground. Also left aboard was Ellsworth—still at the controls when Gieseke and dad last saw him.

Chinese guerrillas collected the downed fliers near the village of Hsiung Chian Tung and, carrying Gieseke on an improvised stretcher, managed to evade Japanese searchers. Eventually the party would number 11 survivors of the Hankow raid: dad, Rosenburg, Young, Pannelle, Uebel, Hart, Ruhf, Scheurman (navigator of Glamour Gal), Solberg (Glamour Gal’s engineer), Holder and Mosall. Gieseke died of his injuries a day after the mission.

Chug-a-Lug, riddled with holes, had escaped via that fortuitous cloud. Flying on a compass heading that navigator Lieutenant Irwin Zaetz provided from memory (his maps had blown out of the shattered nose), it headed straight back to Kweilin. Captain Farnell told the wounded crewmen they could bail out over the field rather than risk landing. They all decided to ride it down. Farnell landed without flaps, at 150 mph. He later explained, “With all the damage that plane had had, I was going to make sure it didn’t quit flying until I got her on the ground!” Without brakes, and given all that speed, he ground-looped at the far end of the runway, spinning the bomber around and around until it came to a stop neatly in the parking area.

Sherazade had its own problems but was still flying. Bombardier Morton Salk climbed up to the flight deck, helped to remove Major Foster’s body from the left seat and sat down to help Koshiek fly the plane. But then they got lost. After three long hours navigator Charles Haynes eventually got them on course to Hengyang. They too landed without brakes, managing to stop at the end of the runway. But Hengyang was too close to the Japanese for comfort. Frantic work patched up Sherazade’s fuel and hydraulic lines, at least sufficiently for the crew to fly back to Kunming the next morning.

Star Dust, piloted by Lieutenant Austin, landed at Kweilin without apparent damage and was scheduled to return to Kunming the next morning. “Pappy” Foster, on hand to debrief the returning crews, decided to return with Star Dust. The bomber took off normally, and Austin called Kunming when they were 40 minutes away from landing. Shortly after that, Star Dust flew into a mountaintop. Miraculously, two sergeants were thrown from the plane and survived.

Tags: Aerial Combat, Aviation History, World War II

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