Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [20]
In 1944 Andy Rooney and Bud Hutton’s Air Gunner—a vivid portrait of the American gunners engaged in the perilous air war against Germany—was published. An engaging account of what was arguably one of the most exciting and dangerous wartime posts, Air Gunner shed light on the at turns dramatic, mundane, and heart-wrenching experience of the twenty-somethings who flew into the eye of the storm, manned the guns, and scattered bombs as they screamed towards their targets. Offering a window into Air Force men (men who fail to be good “parade soldiers because they don’t like to march in a line”) Air Gunner was widely praised for its candid, intimate rendering of what a gunner’s life entailed. In The New Yorker, then-editor Edmund Wilson praised it as, “The first piece of writing . . . which has really given me any idea of what it is like to operate a bomber . . . full of intimate observation of how people speak, feel, and behave.” The following essay from Air Gunner gets to the heart of the matter.
Combat
A lot of air gunners were growing up during the years between 1925 and 1935—a lot of gunners in America and in Germany. All over the world, public opinion was penduluming to the opposite extreme of World War I’s emotional pitch. There were exposés, from time to time, of last-war propaganda. One of public opinion’s favorite stories in the years 1925 to 1935 was of a truce which was declared one Christmas Eve during that first World War. Allies and Germans dropped their guns, the story went, and sang carols to each other across no man’s land. A lot of gunners who were growing up liked that story; a lot of gunners in America and in Germany.
Those Americans who liked that story as youngsters grew up into air gunners who liked the story of Tyre C. Weaver, a top turret gunner from Riverview, Alabama. It maybe wasn’t good for the war that they liked it, but they did. . . .
The copilot on the B17 Ruthie II, on July 28, 1943, was redheaded Jack Morgan and he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for what he did that day. The navigator was Keith Koske, and “Red” Morgan always was embarrassed that Keith didn’t get a higher award for what he did for the top turret gunner whose arm was blown off. It took a tougher kind of guts, a rarer kind, for what Koske did than what won the Medal of Honor, Red was always saying.
The top turret gunner was Tyre Weaver.
Ten boys started out in Ruthie II that day, and nine of them came back. One, the pilot, was dead in the arms of his copilot. The tenth man, the one that was missing, was somewhere in Germany. The crew didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. He was somewhere in Germany without a left arm. The left arm was in the bomber, and Tyre Weaver was somewhere, dead or alive.
Ruthie II was within twenty minutes of the target when the pilot, Bob Campbell, of Liberty, Mississippi, took the controls from Morgan. Within three minutes a flight of German airmen slashed into the formation.
On their first pass, one German plane poured a stick of 20-millimeter shells into Ruthie’s midriff, puncturing the oxygen tanks above the ball turret gunner that supply the two waist gunners, the tail gunner and the radio man. A second later another flight of four F-W 190s screamed nose-on toward Ruthie. A cannon shell and one machine-gun bullet shattered the windshield, striking Bob Campbell in the head just above the temple.
The stricken pilot fell forward over the control column, wrapping his arms around it with a frenzied power. He was not killed instantly; and, partially conscious, he struggled instinctively with the controls.
The Fortress plunged forward out of the formation and Red Morgan wrenched at the controls to set the plane back on its course. By sheer strength, working against the force of the struggling pilot, Morgan pulled the ship level. Over the intercom he called for help but no one heard him. The plane’s communication system had been shot out with the rear oxygen tanks.
In the top turret, Tyre Weaver twisted himself ahead of his mechanical turret, trying to make shots