Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [22]
Koske went back through the bomb bay of the plane to get help from the gunners in the rear of the plane. Opening the door to the radio room he found the radioman slumped on the floor. Stepping over the unconscious gunner Koske opened the door leading back to the waist gun positions and he saw the same seemingly lifeless heaps on the floor. Both gunners were unconscious. Realizing that the tail gunner and the ball turret gunner must also have been unconscious, Koske hurried back to tell Morgan that the oxygen system was shot out back there.
No one but Red Morgan really knows what he went through taking that ship in over Hanover with a crazed pilot. Alone for two hours he battled with a dying friend to save the lives of the others on the plane.
And no one but Keith Koske really knows what went through his mind as he decided to push Tyre C. Weaver through the hatch onto Germany.
It was five months later before anyone knew what had happened to Weaver that July day.
He’d gone out into the sky, and the parachute had opened. He’d come down about twenty-five miles from Hanover, and had been picked up almost as soon as he hit the ground. Some Germans took him to a hospital and a German surgeon treated him. His left arm was gone and he was in a bad way from shock and loss of blood. He got well, which was kind of a miracle, or else he had awfully good care, and when he was able to write he sent a postcard from Stalag IV. That was in December, and some of the men Tyre Weaver flew with that day were still flying. They sat around the hut for a long time and talked to new gunners and told them the story they liked just about as well as that one about the truce on Christmas Eve, the one back in the other war.
That ship of Red Morgan’s had returned that day with more drama and pathos aboard it than any that had ever returned before and any that has ever returned since. Combat, the real details of what happens when a man is without oxygen or without warmth at twenty thousand feet, the real details of what men feel when one of the other crewmen is seriously wounded over Germany hours from home, is hard to catch in words. Something happens to gunners in combat. They are greater men, finer men, and heroism and the ability to endure pain is on a grander scale. Back in their Nissen huts they can still complain about the fifty-degree cold and the absence of hot and cold running water; they still howl in pain if they stumble over a bed in the blackout coming in at night.
What happened in Red Morgan’s plane wasn’t a typical combat story and what happened to the crew of Francis Lauro’s Fort in a raid on Bremen in January 1944, wasn’t typical either, because too much happened. Mostly nothing happens to anyone on a bomber trip. Mostly the men just sit and wait to be attacked or to be hit by flak. There is always one raid—maybe two—in a gunner’s tour of operations that stands out in his mind as the roughest he ever made. For Lauro’s crew it was that January haul to Bremen.
They got into the target and bombed, all right. On the way out the trouble began when Murray Schrier began having trouble getting a breath. Murray was the ball turret man and after he’d told the pilot over the intercom that his oxygen mask was frozen he climbed up out of the ball turret and started for the radio room before he fainted.
The right waist gunner, Bill Heathman, grabbed Schrier and dragged him into the radio room. There was only one outlet for the oxygen masks to be plugged into in the radio room, and the radio operator, Nelson King, cut his own oxygen off and plugged Schrier’s extension line in there. The waist gunner and the radio operator started to work on Schrier, trying to bring him around.
King fumbled through his heavy gloves with the hose attachment and finally started to hook the mask to the ball turret gunner’s face. The oxygen mask hooks onto two small fittings on the gunner’s helmet in the old-type oxygen