Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [21]
German planes circled on the fringe of the formation and barreled in for the attack once more. Tyre Weaver was hit. A flow of 20-millimeter shells ripped into his turret, and tore through his arm just below the shoulder, shearing it off close to the armpit.
Weaver dropped from the open half of his boiler-shaped turret into the runway leading to the nose compartment. Koske, the navigator, saw Weaver and quickly went to find out what had happened. Leaning over the gunner, who was not sure himself, for a few seconds, what had happened, Koske tore the white scarf from his neck and tried to wrap it tightly around the stump of arm. Red blood flowed fast into the white neckpiece, quickly spotting it and then, as the spot crept to the edges, soaking it in blood. The tourniquet was no good. The arm was gone so close to the shoulder that there was no pressure point left at which the blood could be choked off.
“I tried to inject morphine,” Koske said, “but the needle was bent. I couldn’t get it in and as things turned out it was best I didn’t give him any.
“He had to have the right kind of medical attention, and right away, I knew that,” Koske said. “We had almost four hours of flying time ahead of us and there was no alternative. There was only one place that he had any chance of getting medical attention quickly. I opened the hatch and adjusted Weaver’s ’chute for him.
“He knew what I was doing all right and he was really good about it. He seemed to know somehow that it was his only chance. After I adjusted his ’chute I put the ripcord in his right hand. He must again have lost his sense of exactly what was happening because he pulled the ripcord immediately and the little pilot ’chute opened in the strong updraft coming from the open hatch below us. I gathered it all together again and tucked it under his good arm, making sure he was holding all the folds together. I got him into a crouched position right over the hatch and just toppled him out into space.
“The bombardier, Asa Irwin, had been busy with the nose guns because they were still coming at us from head-on. When I got back up there he had dropped his gun and was getting ready to toggle (release) the bombs. The target, the chemical works there at Hanover, was covered with smoke and we just dropped our bombs into it and picked up the guns and went to work again.
“Most of the attacks began to come from directly behind us so we couldn’t do much about them up front. I tried to use my interphone several times but I couldn’t get any answer. The last time I remember hearing anything over it was just after the first attack when I heard someone say they weren’t getting any oxygen.
“Except for what seemed to be some pretty violent evasive action we seemed to be flying okay.”
It was two hours and fifteen minutes later when Koske decided that he should go back and check with the pilot to see that everything was all right.
Slumped on the seat and covered with blood, he found his pilot, Bob Campbell. The back of his head had been blown off by a 20-millimeter shell which had entered the cockpit from the right, crossed in front of Red Morgan and hit Campbell.
“Red was flying the plane with one hand and holding Bob Campbell off the controls with the other,” Koske said, “and there was no way he could call for help. The pilot was still alive and struggling drunkenly with the controls.
“Red told me we’d have to get Campbell out of the pilot’s seat because the windshield was so badly smashed in front of him that he couldn’t see out to fly, let alone land. He had to guide the plane by looking out the side window next to him.”
Morgan and Koske struggled for thirty minutes to get the fatally injured pilot out of his seat and down into the catwalk at the rear of the navigator-bombardier nose compartment. The door of