Did anybody else read the incredible story of this WWII vet? He won a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Purple Heart all in one fell swoop over the North Sea after a bombing raid on Hamburg on Dec. 31, 1944?
A friend sent me the story in an e-mail so I don't know how to post it. I don't think a man like this should pass without arfcommers knowing of his harrowing nightmare involving 2 B-17s stuck together over the North Sea. We don't have many of these real heroes left.
Ray, you will like this.
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This is a terrific story. Worth the read.
Tomorrow morning they'll lay the remains of Glenn
Rojohn to rest in the Peace Lutheran Cemetery in the
little town of Greenock, Pa., just southeast of Pittsburgh.
He was 81, and had been in the air conditioning and plumbing
business in nearby McKeesport. If you had seen him on the
street he would probably have looked to you like so many
other graying, bespectacled old World War II veterans whose
names appear so often now on obituary pages.
But like so many of them, though he seldom talked
about it, he could have told you one hell of a story. He
won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart
all in one fell swoop in the skies over Germany on
December 31, 1944. Fell swoop indeed.
Capt. Glenn Rojohn, of the 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb
Group, was flying his B-17G Flying Fortress bomber
on a raid over Hamburg. His formation had braved heavy
flak to drop their bombs, then turned 180 degrees to head
out over the North Sea
They had finally turned northwest, headed back to
England, when they were jumped by German fighters at
22,000 feet The Messerschmitt Me-109s pressed their
attack so closely that Capt. Rojohn could see the faces of
the German pilots.
He and other pilots fought to remain in formation
so they could use each other's guns to defend the group.
Rojohn saw a B-17 ahead of him burst into flames and
slide sickeningly toward the earth. He guned his ship
forward to fill in the gap.
He felt a huge impact. The big bomber shuddered,
felt suddenly very heavy and began losing altitude.
Rojohn grasped almost immediately that he had collided
with another plane. A B-17 below him, piloted by Lt. Wm.
G. McNab, had slammed the top of its fuselage into the
bottom of Rojohn's. The top turret gun of McNab's plane
was now locked in the belly of Rojohn's plane and the ball
turret in the belly of Rojohn's had smashed through the top
of McNab's. The two bombers were almost perfectly aligned
- the tail of the lower plane was slightly to the left of Rojohn's
tailpiece. They were stuck together, as a crewman later
recalled, "like mating dragon flies."
No one will ever know exactly how it happened. Perhaps
both pilots had moved instinctively to fill the same gap in
formation. Perhaps McNab's plane had hit an air pocket.
Three of the engines on the bottom plane were still running,
as were all four of Rojohn's. The fourth engine on the lower
bomber was on fire and the flames were spreading to the rest
of the aircraft. The two were losing altitude quickly. Rojohn
tried several times to gun his engines and break free of the
other plane. The two were inextricably locked together. Fearing
a fire, Rojohn cuts his engines and rang the bailout bell. If his
crew had any chance of parachuting, he had to keep the plane
under control somehow.
The ball turret, hanging below the belly of the B-17,
was considered by many to be a death trap - the worst
station on the bomber. In this case, both ball turrets
figured in a swift and terrible drama of life and death.
Staff Sgt. Edward L. Woodall, Jr., in the ball turret of
the lower bomber, had felt the impact of the collision
above him and saw shards of metal drop past him. Worse, he
realized both electrical and hydraulic power was gone.
Remembering escape drills, he grabbed the handcrank,
released the clutch and cranked the turret and its guns
until they were straight down, then urned and climbed out
the back of the turret up into the fuselage.
Once inside the plane's belly Woodall saw a
chilling sight, the ball turret of the other bomber
protruding thrugh the top of the fuselage. In that
turret, hopelessly trapped, was Staff Sgt. Joseph Russo.
Several crewmembers on Rojohn's plane tried
frantically to crank Russo's turret around so he could
escape. But, jammed into the fuselage of the lower plane,
the turret would not budge. Aware of his plight, but
possibly unaware that his voice was going out over the
intercom of his plane, Sgt. Russo began reciting his Hail
Marys.
Up in the cockpit, Capt. Rojohn and his co-pilot, 2nd Lt.
Wm. G. Leek, Jr., had propped their feet against the instrument
panel so they could pull back on their controls with all their
strength, trying to prevent their plane from going into a spinning
dive that would prevent the crew from jumping out.
Capt. Rojohn motioned left and the two managed to
wheel the grotesque, collision-born hybrid of a plane
back toward the German coast. Leek felt like he was
intruding on Sgt. Russo as his prayers crackled over the
radio, so he pulled off his flying helmet with its earphones.
Rojohn, immediately grasping that crew could not
exit from the bottom of his plane, ordered his top turret
gunner and his radio operator, Tech Sgts. Orville Elkin
and Edward G. Neuhaus, to make their way to the back of
the fuselage and out the waist door behind the left wing.
Then he got his navigator, 2nd Lt. Robert Washington,
and his bombardier, Sgt. James Shirley to follow them. As
Rojohn and Leek somehow held the plane steady, these four
men, as well as waist gunner Sgt. Roy Little and tail
gunner Staff Sgt. Francis Chase were able to bail out.
Now the plane locked below them was aflame. Fire
poured over Rojohn's left wing. He could feel the heat
from the plane below and hear the sound of .50 caliber
machinegun ammunition "cooking off" in the flames.
Capt. Rojohn ordered Lieut. Leek to bail out.
Leek knew that without him helping keep the controls
back, the plane would drop in a flaming spiral and the
centrifugal force would prevent Rojohn from bailing. He
refused the order.
Meanwhile, German soldiers ad civilians on the
ground that afternoon looked up in wonder. Some of them
thought they were seeing a new Allied secret weapon - a
strange eight-engined double bomber. But anti-aircraft
gunners on the North Sea coastal island of Wangerooge had
seen the collision. A German battery captain wrote in his
logbook at 12:47 p.m.:
"Two fortresses collided i n a formation in the NE. The
planes flew hooked together and flew 20 miles south. The two
planes were unable to fight anymore. The crash could be
awaited so I stopped the firing at these two planes."
Suspended in his parachute in the cold December
sky, Bob Washington watched with deadly fascination as
the mated bombers, trailing black smoke, fell to earth
about three miles away, their downward trip ending in an
ugly boiling blossom of fire.
In the cockpit Rojohn and Leek held grimly to the
controls trying to ride a falling rock. Leek tersely
recalled, "The ground came up faster and faster. Praying
was allowed We gave it one last effort and slammed into
the ground."
The McNab plane on the bottom exploded, vaulting the
other B-17 upward and forward. It hit the ground and slid
along until its left wing slammed through a wooden building
and the smoldering mass of aluminum came to a stop.
Rojohn and Leek were still seated in their cockpit. The
nose of the plane was relatively intact, but everything from the
B-17's massive wings back was destroyed. They looked at
each other incredulously.
Neither was badly injured.
Movies have nothing on reality. Still perhaps in
shock, Leek crawled out through a huge hole behind the
cockpit, felt for the familiar pack in his uniform pocket
and pulled out a cigarette. He placed it in his mouth and
was about to light it. Then he noticed a young German
soldier pointing a rifle at him. The soldier looked
scared and annoyed. He grabbed the cigarette out of Leek's
mouth and pointed down to the gasoline pouring out over
the wing from a ruptured fuel tank.
Two of the six men who parachuted from Rojohn's
plane did not survive the jump. But the other four and,
amazingly, four men from the other bomber, including ball
turret gunner Woodall, survived. All were taken prisoner.
Several of them were interrogated at length b the Germans
until they were satisfied that what had crashed was not a
new American secret weapon.
Rojohn, typically, didn't talk much about his
Distinguished Flying Cross. Of Leek, he said, "In all
fairness to my co-pilot, he's the reason I'm alive today."
Like so many veterans, Rojohn got back to life
unsentimentally after the war, marrying and raising a son
and daughter. For many years, though, he tried to link
back up with Leek, going through government records to
try to track him down. It took him 40 years, but in 1986,
he found the number of Leek's mother, in Washington State.
Yes, her son Bill was visiting from California.
Would Rojohn like to speak with him? Two old men on aBR>phone line, trying to pick up some familiar timbre of
youth in each other's voice. One can imagine that first
conversation between the two men who had shared that wild
ride in the cockpit of a B-17.
A year later, the two were re-united at a reunion
of the 100th Bomb Group in Long Beach, Calif. Bill Leek
died the following year.
Glenn Rojohn was the last survivor of the remarkable
piggyback flight He was like thousands upon thousands of
men -- soda jerks and lumberjacks, teachers and dentists,
students and lawyers and service station attendants and store
clerks and farm boys -- who in the prime of their lives went to
war in World War II. They sometimes did incredible things,
endured awful things, and for the most part most of them pretty
much kept it to themselves and just faded back into the fabric
of civilian life.
Capt. Glenn Rojohn, AAF, died last Saturday after
a long siege of illness. But he apparently faced that
final battle with the same grim aplomb he displayed that
remarkable day over Germany so long ago.
Let us be thankful for such men.
A great story. I wonder how many more stories
like this one are lost each day as members of the Greatest
Generation pass on.
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