During WWII, Frank Murphy flew twenty-one daylight combat missions with the Mighty Eighth. The odds of returning safely were three to one against. Below is an excerpt from his memoir, Luck of the Draw, in which Frank recounts the harrowing experience of flying into combat.
On Monday, June 28, 1943, along with seventeen other 100th BG aircrafts, and three other 4th BW groups equipped with Tokyo tanks, Crew No. 31 set out to attack the German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire, France. Because of the large number of antiaircraft guns ringing the port, it was known as “Flak City.” Out of respect for this formidable array of defensive weaponry, our bombing altitude would be twenty-eight thousand feet, the highest bombing altitude of our combat tour. With our long-range fuel tanks, it was not necessary for us to fly over France; instead, we departed the English coast at Land’s End at the southwestern tip of England, flew entirely over water around the Brest Peninsula, and made our bomb run from the sea over the Bay of Biscay. It was a beautiful sunny day, but as we turned to our bomb run at the IP, I saw antiaircraft fire for the first time.
It horrified me. The flak was easy for me to see since my navigator’s table was immediately behind the bombardier, whose position was in the Plexiglas cone that formed the nose of the bomber. I could easily see past the bombardier and, of course, I had windows of my own, so getting an eyeful of flak bursts was unavoidable. When we entered the flak, it was an almost uninterrupted cloud of swirling black smoke filled with angry red explosions. Plainly, any one of those exploding shells could obliterate an aircraft and its crew without warning. When the group ahead of us entered this inferno, they all but disappeared. My heart felt as if it would stop. It did not appear possible that anyone or anything could fly into that hell and come out alive on the other side. But somehow, despite being buffeted by thunderous explosions and the incessant clinking, clanging, and pinging of shell fragments striking our airplane, we made it through.
I quickly learned to hate flak—it frightened the life out of me. We could not see it coming, nor could we fight back as we could with enemy fighters. The German gun-laying radar was incredibly accurate. The standard German antiaircraft gun, the 88 mm flak cannon, was capable of hurling an eighteen-pound shell to a maximum slant range of nine thousand yards. It took the shell twenty-five seconds to cover this distance, and during this time, its target would move almost two miles. Yet we seldom knew we were under fire until the antiaircraft shells began exploding in proximity to us, usually in simultaneous bursts of four black puffs from a single battery if it was light, or in thick concentrations of random explosions if several batteries were zeroed in on us.
We couldn’t take evasive action until we were already in the middle of it, and on a bomb run, we took no evasive action regardless of how intense the flak was. We had to fly straight and level so the bombardier could drop the bombs on target. The din inside the airplane was horrific—the continuous roaring of our four Wright Cyclone engines was almost deafening. Still, we could easily hear the muffled explosions of nearby flak bursts, and if they were really close, they made loud, cracking sounds like near-miss lightning strikes or breaking tree limbs. If German fighters attacked us, the airplane shook and vibrated violently from the operation of our flexible machine guns and power turrets, sounding much like someone thumping on washtubs with sticks. Dust and threads of insulation flew about the airplane, and shrapnel from flak, which varied in size from as big as baseballs to as small as gravel, rained on and often penetrated the thin skin of the airplane. Inside the Plexiglas nose of the airplane, it was as if we were in a fishbowl in a shooting gallery five miles up in the sky in an already-unforgiving environment. It is difficult to describe how exposed and unprotected we felt.
Copyright © 2001 by Frank Murphy
Frank Murphy survived months in a German POW camp after being shot out of his B-17 Flying Fortress. His bravery earned him the Prisoner of War Medal, Purple Heart, and Air Medal. The incredible stories of Murphy and his 8th Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group will be featured in the upcoming Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks TV Series, Masters of the Air.