February 23, 1945 – Mission #5, target Eger, Czechoslovakia. We had orders to bomb only if target was visible, no clouds, and it wasn’t so we turned west to Schwienfurt as the secondary target. (My understanding is that some of the planes had run out of breathing oxygen so the whole group descended to 12,000 feet so we could all stay together, JLH.)

At this time almost all bombing was done from above 20,000 feet. We hit Schwienfurt from 12,000 feet. The flack was heavy as we came in over the target, most of it bursting above us. A large piece of steel came through the top of the radio room and into the floor beside the radio man which scared him. He left his post, stepped back into the waist and sat down on the floor with his back against the inch armor plate there. The bomb bay doors were open and the word came over the intercom, bombs away with the sudden lift of the plane at the loss of weight. The co-pilot told the radio man on the intercom to check the bomb bay to see that all the bombs were gone before closing the doors. By now we had started to turn off the target, the radio man started to get up to check. At that point we took a direct hit from, I suppose, an 88 MM German anti aircraft shell which came through the waist taking off the radio operators leg. The shell continued out the left side into the left wing and on out, not exploding until later if at all. A large area of the top skin tore off the wing in the slipstream, showing a lot of interesting parts that I had no desire to see at the time.

We could find no bandages on the plane from tail to nose. The waist gunner Marvin J. Wood, and the upper turret gunner Clarence Bridges put a tourniquet on both legs and tore up his parachute to use as bandages. They did find two ampoules of morphine which
they gave him and we had oxygen so they put on his mask and gave him pure oxygen.

That day those two young men, with no prior training, in the skies over Germany saved their crew member, Ronald Moon’s life. The wound must have been terrible to look at. I was glad I was not asked to help, but to stay in the tail and watch for German fighters.

We landed at a new P-47 Thunderbolt, fighter base in France with steel mesh for a hard surface on the runway. The tail wheel tire had been punctured by a piece of flack and was flat. When it touched the steel mesh it made one heck of a noise, and as I sat just aft of the tail wheel, it sounded like it was grinding right up to my fanny. We got old Moon to the hospital. He lived but got a new leg. We flew to Paris on a C-47 where we stayed all night, then back to London on another C-47, from there to our home field on the 28th.