At dawn on December 31, 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge raged, two young airmen took off from Thorpe Abbotts, England, and flew their Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress in formation with hundreds of others in what was to be a ‘maximum effort’ over Germany by every available flier. That New Year’s Eve would soon require the maximum effort these two men could muster to stay alive in what has to be considered one of the most unlikely incidents in aerial history.

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It was the 22nd mission for 1st Lt. Glenn H. Rojohn, a native of Greenock, Pa., the pilot of B-17 No. 42-231987, and 2nd Lt. William G. Leek, Jr., from Washington state, his co-pilot. Both men had been scheduled for leave after flying several missions in a row. But their plans were interrupted at 4 a.m. that day when they were awakened for the so-called maximum effort, which meant, as Rojohn later explained, ‘Everyone flies.’ Thirty-seven heavy bombers took off with the 100th Bomb Group that day. Only 25 planes returned to England.

Following breakfast and briefing at the base, home to members of the 100th Bomb Group from June 1943 to December 1945, Rojohn and Leek learned that their target would be Hamburg, a port city with numerous oil refineries and submarine pens. Second Lieutenant Robert Washington, the ship’s navigator, recalled the start of that, his 27th, mission: ‘Takeoff on the morning of December 31, 1944, was delayed because of fog, and when we assembled the group and departed the coast of England, we learned that the fighter escort had been delayed due to the weather.’

It took ‘almost as much time to rendezvous to go on a mission as it did to complete a mission,’ Rojohn recalled, ‘because the weather in England was always bad, and we had to circle around and around until we broke out above the overcast. Our squadrons [Rojohn flew in C Squadron] then formed, and we met other groups until we got into a long line of traffic heading toward Germany. This particular day we flew over the North Sea to a point south of Denmark and then turned southwest down the Elbe River to Hamburg. We were somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 feet [altitude]. At that time I don’t think much was known about the jet stream, but we had a tail wind of about 200 nautical miles an hour. We got into the target pretty quick. Over the target, we had just about everything but the kitchen sink thrown at us.’

Leek’s recollections of the Hamburg mission were equally vivid: ‘The target and the sky over it were black from miles away. The flak was brutal. We flew through flak clouds and aircraft parts for what seemed like an hour.’

While Rojohn does not like to criticize his commanding officers, he thinks a mistake was made that day. ‘Instead of hitting the target and angling out over Germany still on a southwesterly direction and then out over Belgium, they turned us at 180 degrees back toward the North Sea,’ Rojohn said. ‘So an 80-knot tailwind became an 80-knot headwind. We were probably making about 50 or 60 mph on the ground.’

‘When we finally got clear of the coastal flak batteries,’ recalled Washington, ‘we turned west and skirted the flak area by flying between Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven. The flak was heavy as we crossed the coastline. I’m not certain whether we headed northwest between Bremerhaven and Kuxhaven, or due west over the little town of Aurich and across the coastline near Norden.’

Over the North Sea, Rojohn remembered, they were flying at 22,000 feet when they ‘encountered wave after wave of German fighters. We just barely got out over the North Sea, and the sky was rumbling around us with exploding flak and German [Messerschmitt] Me-109 fighter planes so close I could see the faces of the young German pilots as they went by. They were just having a field day with our formation. We lost plane after plane.’

According to an account written by Tech. Sgt. Orville E. Elkin, Rojohn’s top turret gunner and engineer: ‘The fighters came from every direction, 12 o’clock, 6 o’clock, from the bottom and from the top. Your body becomes cold and numb from fright as you realize that only one-sixteenth of an inch of aluminum stands between you and this battery of firepower.’ Ten planes were quickly lost.

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