Into Fields of Fire: The Story of the 438Th Troop Carrier Group During World War Ii

By Austin J. Buchanan and W. L. George Collins

This story is taken from notes Austin Buck Buchanan wrote in notebooks he carried in his pocket all during World War II. Buck is no longer with us. W. L. George Collins edited and compiled Bucks notes into a manuscript that became this book.

Here you will ride with Buck as he flies his plane through a field of fire so intense that one shell blows a hole in the plane big enough for a man to go through and uncountable bullet holes perforated the plane. All aircraft controls are shot out except elevator and ailerons. You will ride with him as he manages to complete his mission and bring his barely flying plane back to England. And you will ride with him through hundreds more such harrowing trips, in his C-47 with no armor plate and no guns, into other fields of fire and often impossible weather.

W. L. George Collins was a pilot in the same Troop Carrier Group as Buck. His writings have been published in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. He was awarded the George Washington Honor Medal by Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, among other writing awards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 29, 2004
• ISBN: 9781465322777

Austin J. Buchanan

[He has it already layed out on his cover]

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Copyright © 2004 by George Collins.

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Contents

I

Beginnings

II

Atlantic Journey

III

Training in England

IV

Neptune-Fortune-Overlord

V

Albatross-Dragoon

VI

Battlefields in France

VII

Market-Garden

VIII

Supplying Armies Racing East

IX

Bastogne—Marcouray

X

Mission Red Ball—Move to France

XI

Varsity-Plunder

XII

Victory in Europe 1945

XIII

Aftermath

XIV

End of World War II

EPILOGUE

POSTSCRIPT

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

missing image file

I

Beginnings

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, saw visions of the world, and all the wonder that would be; saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, pilots of the purple twilight, gliding down with costly bales.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Locksley Hall

Machine gun tracers are seen, and soon the whole area is filled with light as the enemy begins throwing lead at us, three minutes after we cross the coast. The tracers are of varied colors and the exploding shells give off bright, white lights. I guess it would be a pretty spectacle if watched as part of a Fourth of July celebration, but not this way. All we can do is crouch a little lower, wish our flak jackets were bigger, and continue to fly through this enemy fire. Another three minutes and it is time for the red warning light (prepare-to-jump light for the paratroopers). The plane becomes tail heavy as the paratroopers stand up and crowd closer to the jump door.

Our plane is hit very hard in the tail area. We immediately lose rudder control and our elevator trim tab is not working now. After a couple of very rough minutes, we manage to regain control, just in time for our paratroopers, right over the drop zone. We flick on the green light, at 0048 hours, June 6, 1944, and the paratroopers are promptly out the door.

Trying to maneuver our shot-up plane, we have lost the formation. We dive the plane to gain flying speed [when the green light goes on the throttles are pulled back to cut prop-wash while the paratroopers are leaving the plane—Ed.] and hurtle on across the Cherbourg peninsula, across the coast, and out over the English channel again. We pick up our first checkpoint and begin to navigate toward home.

Since we have been flying on a wing, we have no navigator, so we now have to do our own navigation, as well as keep our badly damaged plane flying. I haven’t heard from the crew chief since we were hit. He soon comes up to the front. His first words are, That’s as close as I ever expect to come to death and live!

We later discover that our interphone system has been shot out, our rudder cables are blown apart; only one elevator cable is holding, and none of our trim tabs are working. There is a hole a man could crawl through in the bottom of our plane and at least a thousand holes around the fuselage. The explosion nearly blew off the whole tail section and each wing has holes in it. Our IFF (Information, Friend or Foe) is also blown out. However, we manage to fly our plane back to Greenham Common and land without accident, though we do run off the runway as soon as we touch down. We manage to stop the plane a few feet from a row of parked C-47s.

* * *

The above is a direct quote from one of Buck Buchanan’s diary notebooks—small notebooks he carried in his shirt pocket. It was written immediately after his first combat mission, in the very early hours of 6 June 1944. Buck was a pilot in the 90th Troop Carrier Squadron of our 438th Troop Carrier Group, the group chosen to lead the airborne armada of planes that dropped the first American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division Screaming Eagles onto the soil of Normandy in the dark of this early morning.

Our 438th Troop Carrier Group had been in existence five days more than a year this D-day morning. All the intensive training of that one year and five days was concentrated toward one objective—the largest and most complicated airborne operation in the history of war—the invasion of Nazi-controlled Europe—D-day, 6 June 1944. Ed.

* * *

Our 438th Troop Carrier Group was activated on 1 June 1943, at Baer Field, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Our group consisted of a headquarters and four squadrons: the 87th, 88th, 89th, and 90th. Our first officers were:

Commanding Officer:   Lt. Colonel William F. Stewart,

Executive Officer:   Major John M. Donalson,

Adjutant:   1st Lt. Don W. Daney

S-1:   Captain Kingley G. Purton

S-2:   Captain John R. Westerfield

S-3:   Major Martin E. Wanamaker

S-4:   1st Lt. Harvey W. Stulth

Group Surgeon:   Captain James Harrity

Group Engineering:   1st Lt. Donald F. Parks

Liaison Officer:   1st Lt. Harold S. Pawlowski

Communications:   1st Lt. Stuart F. Rodgers

Weather:   2nd Lt. Edward Stanek

Commanding officers of squadrons:

87th Squadron:   Captain David E. Daniel

88th Squadron:   Captain Keith P. Hansen

89th Squadron:   Captain Clement G. Richardson

90th Squadron:   Captain Ivan R. Stracener

The strength of our entire group as first reported was sixty-two officers and fifty-seven enlisted airmen.

June 9, 1943. Our group moves from Baer Field to Sedalia Army Airfield, Warrensburg, Missouri, and our first training programs start immediately.

June 17, 1943. Our first airplane is received.

* * *

The history of our 438th Troop Carrier Group really begins well before actual activation. Clement G. Richardson, former commander of the 89th Squadron, described this early period in a recent letter to me. He wrote,

A select bunch of us were released from duty in North Africa, from the 60th and 64th Troop Carrier Groups, and set free to hitchhike back to the United States. Captain John B. Wakefield and I traveled together from Telergma and Blida (Algeria) to Casablanca (French Morocco), thence to Marrakech where we met Hansen, Stracener, Daniel, and a few men from the other groups. After some waiting time, we made it to Dakar (Senegal) and across to Ascension Island and into Belem, Brazil. After a couple of days waiting there, we caught a flight to Miami and thence to Baer Field, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Wakefield and I were the first to arrive. After debriefing we were given a short leave and assigned temporary duty at Stout Field near Austin, Texas. Here we spent a few weeks, mainly making speeches about our experiences, to student troop carrier pilots there. We were then sent to AFSAT (Air Force School of Applied Tactics) in Orlando, Florida, where we learned Hansen, Daniel, Stracener and I are to be squadron commanders, and Lt. Col. Bill Stewart is to be group commander. Wannemaker and Wakefield are assigned to operations. From there we go to a sort of field operation at Dunellon, Florida, and then back to Baer Field where we start to pick up other troops for a short time. Then we are off to Sedalia Army Airfield, Missouri, where our history really begins.

Some further background on these initial officers of our 438th Troop Carrier Group is provided from the 11 June 1943 issue of the Beacon, the Baer Field base newspaper at that time. Ed.

Flying Sextet Has Exciting Background

Their minds still fresh with thrill-packed memories of exciting experiences in North Africa and—in one case—Alaska, the officer pilots pictured here who are now stationed at Baer Field probably possess as stirring a background of adventures as any Troop Carrier Command group now in this country.

Five of the officers were in the thick of the combat zones in North Africa, returning to this country only recently after several months of daily operational flying along the heaviest fighting front in that area. Three of these five participated in the longest, unescorted non stop TCC (Troop Carrier Command) flight made in the war thus far, a 1,400-mile hop of 39 planes from London, England to various points in North Africa, November 8, 1942, the memorable D day of the Allied invasion of that continent. For that trip they were awarded the Air Medal.

One of them, Capt. Ivan R. Stracener, was captured by French forces when he landed his plane at Oran on invasion day. For four days he was held prisoner in an ancient fort before his release was affected by American troops who captured the city after heavy fighting. During this period he and his crew lived on a diet consisting solely of bread and wine.

Another officer, Maj. Martin E. Wanamaker, made a forced landing in the Libyan Desert and barely managed to escape to safety when his plane was fired upon by a German JU-88.

Lt. Col. William E. Stewart, ranking officer of the group, was stationed in Algiers as a member of a wing headquarters staff when that city was being bombed almost nightly by the enemy. While watching Allied antiaircraft batteries fighting off a swarm of enemy bombers one night, from the balcony of his apartment-hotel, a two thousand pound bomb landed only a block away from his hotel, completely demolishing three buildings and blasting the front of another.

Capt. Clement G. Richardson could easily be known as Lucky because of his many narrow escapes from enemy bombing attacks in the North African theater of war. On one occasion he arrived at a field in Youx Les Hain only a few minutes after enemy planes had attacked the airdrome and killed three members of the crew of General Jimmy Doolittle’s plane, which had arrived shortly before.

Capt. David E. Daniel’s terminal point on the famous 1,400 mile D-day hop was Tafaroui. He landed in the midst of an artillery barrage and was forced to flee to the shelter of some nearby trenches. For two days he and the personnel of two other planes lived in these trenches, being strafed once by four French Dewoltine fighters. A few minutes later they watched these planes being knocked out of the skies by a patrol of British Spitfires that arrived on the scene at this opportune moment.

The sixth member of the group, 1st Lt. Robert W. Gates, spent nine months in Alaska with a TCC outfit. He was stranded on one occasion for two weeks on a frozen lake in Canada where the temperature dropped to sixty-two degrees below zero before he and his crew could render their plane operational.

Every member of the sextet has undergone bombing attacks in various theaters of war. Carrying soldiers, paratroopers, machinery, supplies, mail, officer-couriers, evacuating families from bomb-stricken areas and rescuing Allied airmen forced down or escaping from enemy concentration camps, these officer-pilots bring with them an appreciation of the remarkable work of the Troop Carrier Command, a work that will only be completely appreciated by us when the full story of the war is written.

July10,1943

Operation Husky,

Invasion of Sicily by Allied forces begins: 160,000 Allied troops land in Sicily.

July 24, 1943

Hamburg, Germany, experiences first

RAF bombing raids.

July 25, 1943

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is forced to resign and is promptly arrested.

A new prime minister, Marshal Badoglio, takes over.

July 29, 1943. 1st Lt. Charles Lusher is assigned to our group as chaplain.

August 17, 1943

Axis armies in Sicily surrender; they have lost 167,000 men.

RAF bombers essentially destroy Hitler’s rocket works at Penemunde.

Our first fatal accident occurs in late August or early September. There is no mention of this in the microfilm records, but it lives on in the memory of Radio Chief Keith Nelson, 90th Squadron pilot Kenneth Orth, and others of that squadron. Orth says:

Our 438th Troop Carrier Group was pretty new. This particular Sunday I drew the hitch of airdrome officer. A little after midnight a squall line with heavy wind and rain moved in. Several unscheduled planes came in to avoid the storm. Tillman (pilot) and Barnett (copilot) had taken a C-53 to Austin for the weekend. We figured they would wait out the storm there. They didn’t.

At about 2:00 AM some farmer called me claiming a plane had crashed east of the field, but he could not describe it. I called the Highway Patrol and asked them to check out this information. It was raining so hard we could not get a plane into the air. Nearly an hour later the Highway Patrol troopers called to say a rather large plane had crashed and was scattered over about a quarter of a mile, but they could not identify what kind of plane it was. We then checked with Bergstrom Field at Austin, Texas. They told us Tillman and Barnett had left shortly after midnight.

At dawn some operations people went out to check the crash site and I rode along. We found a big mess! Tillman and Barnett had left Austin, Texas, with about twenty passengers on board. Fourteen or so were a group of naval cadets.

All were killed. The names of the passengers and other crew members were unknown.

August 1943. Our group now has thirty-eight C-47, C-53 and DC-3 aircraft.

A continuing training program is in place, for both ground personnel and flying personnel. It began on our first day at Sedalia Army Airfield. It includes both day and night operations with much attention on formation flying.

September3, 1943

Allied invasion of Italy begins.

September 3, 1943

Marshal Badoglio surrenders Italy to the Allies.

September9, 1943

Allied armies storm onto beaches near

Salerno, Italy.

September11, 1943

Island of Crete: entire Italian fleet steams into its port and surrenders to the Allies.

October1, 1943

Naples, Italy, captured by the

British-American Fifth Army.

October 13, 1943

The Italian government declares war

on Germany.

These September-October actions in Italy may seem at odds with the battles still going on in Italy. This is so because German armies still control most of Italy. Ed.

October 1943. Our entire group moves from Sedalia Army Airfield, Missouri, to Laurinburg-Maxton Army Air Base, Maxton, North Carolina.

October 21, 1943. Our advance echelon leaves Sedalia and proceeds to Laurinburg-Maxton by rail.

October 29, 1943. Our air echelon departs Sedalia this morning and arrives at the new base on 30 October. Many, if not all, of our now forty-eight crews and airplanes, and forty-eight gliders, spend the first night in Louisville, Kentucky. Our air echelon transports 134 officers and 394 enlisted men; all other group personnel travel by train.

In North Carolina, training flights continue at an accelerated pace. Both group and squadron rendezvous missions are flown at night. These include triangular missions with legs of one hundred miles. For these flights observers are stationed on the corners of these routes to report back to operations officers regarding timing and formation deficiencies.

Soon we begin training with nearby airborne units. We make many drops of paratroopers and their equipment. Airborne troops stationed at Camp MacNeal are trained in the loading of their equipment on our C-47s.

One difficulty discovered during the early-night missions was the need for some visible way to notify trailing airplanes when paratroops were dropped during radio silence. This was solved with the installation of jump lights to be flashed in the astral dome when the troopers jumped from lead planes.

November 1943. Our group receives more gliders. Glider pilots are given further training in glider tow operations.

November 14, 1943. Our group is called on to ferry thirty-four gliders from Sedalia Army Airfield to Pope Field. During this operation one of the gliders crashes near George Field in Illinois. These glider crewmen are killed in that crash:

Flight Officer Robart D. Snow, 87th Troop Carrier Squadron

Flight Officer Robert E. Sickles, 87th Troop Carrier Squadron

Sgt. Gerald E. Crane, 87th Troop Carrier Squadron.

November 22, 1943. Several command changes take place.

Major John M. Donalson replaces Lt. Col Stewart as group commander.

First Lt. Robert W. Gates replaces Captain Hansen as commander of the 88th Squadron.

Captain Harold I. Pawlowski replaces Captain Stracener as commander of the 90th Squadron.

November 30, 1943. Our group has now received its full complement of fifty-two airplanes—thirteen per squadron.

Extensive maneuvers are held in December as our group hones its skills.

December 6, 1943. A local newspaper headline reads:

10,000 AIRBORNE TROOPS INVADE CAROLINA HILLS

211 PLANES 200 GLIDERS USED in GAMES

MORE MEN WERE ENGAGED in THE MANEUVER than HAD BEEN TRANSPORTED to DATE in ANY COMPARABLE COMBAT ACTION.

This is the first time in military history, according to this report, that an entire Airborne Division had been transported to a distant destination. Many of the paratroopers arrived by jumping from C-47s. The others came down in CG-4 gliders.

We were in the air for eighteen hours out of twenty-four. We made three six-hour flights: one with paratroopers and/or one glider in tow, one with two gliders being towed by each C-47, and one was a resupply mission. Our night flying was done in blackout conditions.

There is a rumor that some buzzing occurred during this training period. One Friday evening the operations department reported receiving a number of telephone calls regarding airplanes flying low over football fields. Upon returning to base on that date, a certain lieutenant—whose name is lost in yesterday’s memory records—picks up a football in the entry of squadron operations and tosses it onto the operations officer’s desk. This results in a rather irate operations officer. He does, however, get over it.

There is also a report of holes in the roof of one of the barracks at Laurinburg-Maxton Army Air Base during this time. These holes appear to have been made by bullets from a .45-caliber pistol. Rumor is that no one in that barracks wanted to get up to turn off the one electric light. A fusillade of bullets finally disintegrates the light bulb, and the needed darkness and silence for sleeping came to be.

Year of 1943

Nazi U-boats sink seven hundred ships in the North Atlantic Ocean.

(This is less than half the number sunk in 1942.)

January to December 1943

The Nazis lose 237 U-boats in the

North Atlantic Ocean.

I give the above U-boat losses and ship losses because, in the words of one knowledgeable authority, [If] the German submarine raiders had not been defeated in 1943, there would have been no Second Front in 1944.¹ Ed.

December 1943

General Dwight D. Eisenhower named supreme commander, Allied forces in Europe.

II

Atlantic Journey

Don’t worry and fret, faint hearted,

The chances have just begun

For the best jobs haven’t been started,

The best work hasn’t been done.

Berton Braley

A Banjo at Armageddon

For this move overseas our group is divided into an advance echelon, an air echelon, and a ground echelon.

January 1944. Our group equipment is packed; our new C-47s are received, and final preparations are made for our movement to ports of embarkation.

The advance echelon consists of three officers: Captain Allison M. Reams, air liaison; 1st Lt. John F. Swygert, asst. S-4; and 1st Lt. Erwin J. Arendt, group S-1. These men go by rail from Baer Field to Air Transport Command Headquarters in New York and, on 30 January, fly from LaGuardia Airport via the North Atlantic route to Prestwick, Scotland. They then go to Grantham, England, to learn the details of their work from the Ninth Troop Carrier Command, in advance of our 438th Group’s arrival. From there, they go on to Station 490, Langar Field, near Nottingham, arriving on 9 February.

S-1 identifies manpower/personnel staff. S-2 identifies intelligence staff. S-3 identifies operations staff. S-4 identifies logistics staff. Ed

January 27, 1944. Tomorrow we of the air echelon begin taking off in our new planes on the first leg of our flight to our port of embarkation. We have been here at Baer Field, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, since 9 January. During the twenty days spent here we were issued a great deal of equipment, ranging from C-47s to mosquito nets. We have spent many hours in briefing rooms where qualified men have talked to us about nearly every phase of the war: ditching procedures, escape and evasion tactics, getting along with our Allies, legal matters such as insurance and wills, and it seems a thousand other things, most of which we have heard many times before.

We are restricted to the post, officially. However, the 90th Squadron always finds a way—over the fence here—and most of us have visited Ft. Wayne several times. We feel that the chance to visit a good American town may not come again for a long time. The GI guards are very sympathetic and nearly always look the other way. I even saw one of them boosting some guys over the fence one night. Guess the fellow had had a few too many and needed a little help.

Tonight we received our orders. Tomorrow we begin flying out of Baer Field in our new C-47s. For how long? That’s anybody’s guess.

January 21, 1944

Operation Shingle begins.

Allied armies land on the Anzio beaches

south of Rome, Italy.

Our air echelon flies from Baer Field to Morrison Field, West Palm Beach, Florida. The 87th Squadron leaves Baer Field on 28 January, 1944, the 88th Squadron leaves on 29 January, the 89th Squadron leaves on 30 January, and our 90th Squadron leaves on 31 January. This air echelon includes key personnel of group headquarters (fifteen officers and eleven enlisted men) in addition to crews and ATC navigators. A list of crews and passengers is included below.

In Florida, we encounter delays. There is bad weather in the Gulf of Mexico. There are not enough ATC navigators available yet

Since arriving here we have attended more briefings, been issued more equipment, been instructed on our route from here to our first stop after we take off, which is Puerto Rico, and have had our first argument with the already disliked ATC (Air Transport Command). Of course,