Trouble

By Larry Smith

A TRUE story about a miraculous journey filled with antics of young men in the USAAF as well as many deadly encounters and near misses. The B-24 Liberator nicknamed Trouble was one of five bombers that were shot down over NAZI-occupied France on January 7, 1944. Sergeant Robert Sweatt, a waist gunner, was wounded in several places, including a nick to his jugular vein, but survived the initial attack AND the plane's explosion in midair, which knocked him unconscious. Bob regained his senses as he fell and was able to open his parachute. There are many more details of this story that are almost unbelievable. Read and enjoy. Sergeant Robert Sweatt explains his thoughts as he wakes while falling. "No matter how much I try, I don't believe that I will be able to accurately convey my feelings when I regained consciousness. In fact, at first I didn't believe that I WAS conscious. My first thought was ... so this is what it feels like to be dead. It was very peaceful and I don't think I have ever been calmer in my life. I was comfortable, not too hot, not too cold, no pain, it was very quiet. I was slowly assessing myself. All in all, I was happy with most of my condition ... except that I couldn't see. I blinked my eyes ... yes, they moved, I could feel them move but it was still dark. Wait a minute! MY EYELIDS MOVED? That isn't supposed to happen if I'm dead." Please click HERE to view a video trailer for "Trouble"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641380980

Larry Smith

LARRY SMITH is an adjunct associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo. His widely acclaimed TEDx talk has been viewed over six million times. He has won several awards, including the University of Waterloo’s Distinguished Teacher Award, and has coached more than twenty-three thousand students in their search for great careers. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

Book preview

Deceased Crew Members of Trouble on January 7, 1944

Those of you who have military experience may notice that the crew assignments given below are not typical for a B-24 bomber. The normal complement of crew members does not require an observer, and normally, the copilot is of LESSER rank than the pilot. There are valid reasons behind these unusual assignments, and that is part of the story. Sergeant Robert Sweatt was the right waist gunner on that day and is not listed below because he survived. ¹

Photo of Lt. Wendell Daily taken as he practiced on a firing range. Photo provided by Robert Sweatt.

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¹ Major Caldwell was commander of the Second Combat Bombardment Wing for the Ludwigshafen mission, which made Trouble the lead plane in that formation.

Foreword

The following story is true, although portions of it will be difficult to believe. Rest assured that considerable effort has been expended to make this narrative as accurate as possible. The simple fact is that memories are not infallible, and time has taken its toll. Many of the people who were present during some of the events have passed, and their recollections are now lost forever. In addition, there are several sources, and in some cases, there are conflicting details from different sources. The book attempts to provide the reader with information that is supported by multiple sources and to provide any conflicting information in footnotes or in the appendix to allow the reader to formulate their own opinion as to what actually happened.

The protagonist is Mr. Robert H. Sweatt, who progressed from a recruit to a technical sergeant in the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). He was the sole surviving crew member of Trouble², a B-24D Liberator bomber, serial number 42-41013. Bob, as he was known to his crew, flew missions with the 389th Heavy Bomb Group (BGH), which was a part of the Mighty Eighth Air Force. There are literally thousands of stories about members of the Mighty Eighth, and I would encourage the reader to find other books if their interest is piqued toward an overview of WWII or the history of the Mighty Eighth in particular.

This story was written more for entertainment and to document a very improbable string of events during the war. Most of the details of THIS story come from Bob’s memory, and it is written (as much as possible) in first person in an attempt to allow you to experience things from his perspective. Please understand, however, that at the time things were happening, Sergeant Sweatt was primarily concerned with living through the moments and not so much with taking notes. For that reason, please excuse any small detail discrepancies you may discover. The major facts from Sergeant Sweatt’s memory are corroborated by multiple sources. It was fortunate that much of that information was preserved by the Allied and Axis military documents that have since been declassified and released. Other sources for this book include conversations with some of the French farmers (or their relatives) who rescued Sergeant Sweatt and helped him escape.

The basic facts are, Trouble was part of an Allied bombing mission that attacked vital manufacturing plants near Ludwigshafen, Germany, on January 7, 1944. During the return trip home, Trouble was one of five Allied bombers that were shot down in a single air battle near Bouville, France. In addition to Trouble, the 389th Bomb Group also lost Heavy Date (serial number 42-40747, squadron 567), Blunder Bus (serial number 42-7593, squadron 565), and Los Angeles City Limits (serial number 42-63977, squadron 567), and the 93rd Bomb Group lost On the Ball (serial number 42-40990, squadron 328) in the same battle.

As stated in one mission report, "the Abbeville Boys³ put on a show of strength for the French" that day. On the way back to their home base in Hethel, England, Trouble was shot down by Hauptmann Egon Mayer flying a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter. Sergeant Sweatt was wounded in several places during the initial attack but miraculously survived it and the later explosion that split the plane into two in midair and knocked him unconscious.

Sergeant Sweatt regained consciousness while falling and was able to open his parachute. He was found by several French farmers before the Germans arrived, was hidden for quite some time in several different locations, and escaped back to England through the famous Shelburne Escape Line. His entire crew on that mission, as well as many of the crew members on the four other bombers that were shot down in the same battle, died in that single battle.

There are obviously many more details in this miraculous journey, and some are spine-tingling, to say the least. The focus of this story is Robert’s experiences, and it is intended to be entertaining, NOT to be a historical document. Hopefully you will read and enjoy the story knowing that Robert survived multiple potentially deadly situations and returned home to find and marry a lovely wife and build a wonderful life as a geologist, then a teacher, and later a rancher in Texas.

There are a few slang terms and/or abbreviations used in the story. They were used in an attempt to emulate the language of the times and the people involved. If there is a term that is unfamiliar to you, please check in the glossary. Hopefully, it will be defined or explained there. In addition, there are many instances in the book where proper grammar rules are ignored. It is not because my editors or I missed the correction. It is because we felt that using the vernacular (or in some cases, the actual words that were spoken) gives a better flavor to the story.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This story is true, but almost unbelievable. Almost. You can check many of the facts yourself if you do the research. My name is Robert H. Sweatt (pronounced sweat , as in perspiration). During WWII, I was a waist gunner on the crew of a B-24 Liberator bomber. A few of my planned missions were aborted for various reasons or were not considered complete, but I flew sixteen ⁴ credited, or complete, missions in the European Theater of Operations (ETO, as it was known by those of us who were there). Then on my seventeenth mission, we had completed our bombing run and had flown part of the way home when my plane was shot down over Nazi-occupied France. The date was January 7, 1944.

But I can’t START the story there! In order for you to understand and properly visualize the story, I must give you the background, let you read some of the incidents leading up to certain situations. I must introduce you to the people, let you look into some of their experiences and see who we were and how we got there.

I imagine the early lives of my crewmates were somewhat similar to mine, except with differences based on each person’s home location. So first I will tell you a little about my early life and tell you a little about what I learned from and about my crewmates during our early missions. I will relate a few of the stories about my crewmates as well, at least the ones they told me, and some of the ones we experienced together. None of us shared many stories about our lives before joining the war. We all seemed to be primarily concerned with winning the war and getting home. My crewmates and I were so similar in many ways and yet so different also.

There will be many situations in this book that are unusual, to say the least. I cannot explain why events happened as they did, but I can share my memories. Each of us goes through life making decisions for ourselves. My decisions obviously affected my life, but the overall flow of society seemed like an uncontrollable storm at that time. I’m sure you will understand the feelings I had, being like a tiny, little droplet in a vast ocean of society. I will give you some of the background about the world events that certainly influenced the events in my crewmates’ lives and, of course, mine as well.

We all had joined the war effort, and for pretty much the same reasons, to protect our loved ones and our way of life. We were all young men eager to find out what life had in store for us, to discover who would be part of our lives and how we would turn out. Even now, I suffer from the same survivor’s guilt and other symptoms now known as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that other members of military forces have experienced since time began. Why did I live? Why me? I was certainly not special, just a kid from New Mexico trying to make a life like everybody else.

If you believe in God, as I do, it helps a little to think that He had a purpose in mind that I had not yet fulfilled. Perhaps that purpose is telling my story and giving many people a glimpse into the lives of some very brave people. I hope so. I hope that you enjoy reading the story and learning a little about my crewmates and that you feel the same gratitude I feel for their sacrifice. They did not choose to die, but they did choose to join the war to fight against the Nazi threat, and they knew the dangers associated with that choice. I know, there were lots of people who died in World War II, but I knew these men. They were my friends, and that makes them very special to me.

Chapter 2

Early Childhood

Marion Cecil Sweatt lived in Knox County, Texas, near the town of Gillespie in 1910. He was a young man, about twenty-three years old. He was known as MC Sweatt and was farming at the time when he met a young woman named Mary Ethel Brewer. Her family also farmed in the area. It wasn’t long before they fell in love and decided to get married, and on November 30, 1911, they said their vows in front of Reverend Randall and the congregation of a small church in Knox County. As with most young couples, their first child followed soon after their marriage. Willie Cecil Sweatt was born on the twenty-third day of October in 1912.

In the spring of 1913, Marion and Ethel decided to move to Eastern New Mexico, a move that was most likely influenced by the fact that several families on Ethel’s mother’s side of the family (the Abshiers) had already moved to New Mexico and settled down. Ethel’s parents, her maternal grandparents, and at least three of her mother’s siblings, spouses, or kids had moved near Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1911 or 1912. Marion and Ethel, and of course Willie, made the trip from Gillespie to the Lovington area in a covered wagon. Mom told me once that the trip took nearly twenty days. At least the weather was pretty good and they didn’t break down on the way.

They settled in what would later become Lea County, New Mexico, by filing on a homestead plot of land just east of Lovington. Their first house was a half-dugout, which means that part of the house was in the ground. They dug into the side of a hill and then built walls and a roof over the opening. It was a common (and relatively cheap) way of getting a shelter in place quickly. It had the added benefit (since it was partially in the ground) of helping the home to maintain livable temperatures inside both in the summer and winter.

Another five children were born while MC and Ethel were living on the New Mexico homestead: Clara Mae, daughter, born in 1915; Ruby Faye, daughter, born in 1918; Robert Houston (me), son, born in 1922; Mildred Angela, daughter, born in 1925; and Reba Nell, daughter, born in 1932. MC was known as a hard worker, and he and Ethel managed to scratch out a living from that dry ground. They even grew their ranch/farm operation over the years between 1913 and the early 1940s by slowly adding to their herd and increasing the produce from their garden and orchard.

My father eventually had a total of one section of land, which is 640 acres. Half of it was in New Mexico and had the house on it, but the other half was across the state line in Texas. Those of you who are familiar with the land around Lovington and West Texas will understand that making a living raising cattle in that area is difficult even when the weather is nice, and next to impossible at other times. The annual rainfall didn’t support good grass, so most of the plants were weeds, which didn’t give much sustenance to cattle. In fact, my father used to jokingly say, When Noah built the Ark and God sent the Great Flood, New Mexico got almost a half-inch of rain.

It took about eight to ten acres of land to support one cow, so Dad usually had about forty head of cattle and maybe two or three horses. We kept chickens too, but we didn’t feed them. They survived on whatever they could find around the ranch, like bugs, worms, grass, and scraps from our table. We were poor, very poor, but I didn’t know it at that time. We had food to eat and a place to stay, so I thought we were OK.

Many years later, I would think about those days and realize that my father had learned how to get by without spending much at all. He was quite inventive when it came to making things work well with what he had rather than spending money to buy new stuff, especially if he could not see a return on investment in a pretty short time. The gates and latches on our fences were usually made out of scrap pieces of wire or rope, and latches on the buildings were usually made out of wood and nails or bolts. Sometimes Dad would use a discarded horseshoe as a hook to hold a door closed. When a board broke, we would patch it with another board or tie it up using baling wire or maybe a piece of barbed wire.

Robertoncalf_crop.jpg

Photo 1. Robert on a calf. Approximate age is eight years old. Note the patches on his pant leg. Photo provided by Robert Sweatt.

My dad learned to be a carpenter, mechanic, or whatever else he needed to be, because he couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do that kind of work. The kids were used to getting hand-me-downs or homemade clothes, and most of my pants had patches on them, sometimes three or four patches. I grew up having to play with what was available, which wasn’t much on our homestead. Rocks, sticks, dirt, cows, and calves or anything else that could be found on a ranch were all that I could afford.

And we didn’t throw anything away. We saved everything, even if it was worn-out, because it wouldn’t be long before we would need to use the materials to make something else. Mom learned to sew, and she would use old cloth to make new dresses for the girls. She would buy flour in sacks that used material with printed flowers on it so that she could take three or four sacks and make a dress out of it.

If I wanted a toy to play with, I had to make it out of what was there. I got to be pretty good at whittling and could even make animals if the limb was big enough. If I wanted to go somewhere, I would ride a calf or a horse, if one was available, but usually, I walked. I could throw rocks at the moon or watch the animals, but there was no television. We had a radio, but my father had control of that, and about the only thing we heard from it was the news, which was not very interesting to a young boy like me.

We had a dog, named Patches, and he would follow me most of the time when I was out playing. Almost all my adventures occurred primarily in my very imaginative mind. However, my childhood gave me the opportunity to develop ingenuity to make something out of nothing. I HAD to, or else, I would not have ANYTHING.

I remember that Clara and Faye used to read to us younger kids. That was always a treat because the stories were often full of magic and strange people. I developed a fairly strong desire to hear stories of faraway places. Almost anything was a lot more interesting than what happened on our ranch. If they weren’t too busy helping Mom, Clara and Faye would play games with us also. One of my favorites was higgy, higgy honey cup.

One of us littler kids would lie on our stomach across someone’s lap. They would pat us on the back in time with a song. Higgy, higgy honey cup. How many fingers do I hold up? They would raise one hand, behind our back, of course, and we had to guess how many fingers, zero to five. If we missed it, which we usually did, they would pat and sing again using numbers to fit what had happened. For example, "Four you said, and two it