Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [23]
Feeling the lack of oxygen after he took his line off the main system to give it to Schrier, King plugged into one of the small emergency oxygen bottles. As he finished the job of tying the mask to his ball turret gunner’s helmet King toppled over on top of Schrier. The bottle he had plugged into was frozen and he had been getting no oxygen.
Heathman, the third man, was almost exhausted himself by that time. The other waist gunner, Gerald Will, left his gun and came into the radio room to help after calling Lauro on the intercom to tell the pilot that they were having trouble there. Will hooked his oxygen tube into the walk-around bottle he had beside him and walked forward.
With the green oxygen bottle under his arm Will got as far as the ball turret just outside the radio room before he realized that, like King’s bottle, his outlet valve was frozen stiff. He turned and started back for his waist position where he could plug back into the main line which was still flowing all right, but he never made it. Halfway back to the waist window he collapsed on the floor of the bomber. Three men were lying unconscious and without oxygen.
Heathman, the only one still conscious, called forward over the interphone for help. Walt Green and Emanuel Greasamar, the bombardier and copilot, took walk-around bottles from the nose compartment and started back to the radio compartment.
“With six men tied up in the radio room our luck changed,” Francis Lauro, the pilot, said. “It got worse. Our number two engine started acting up and then several F-W 190s showed up on the fringe of the formation.
“The bombardier called up to me and suggested that we go down a few thousand feet where it was warmer and where the boys would be able to get a little oxygen, but he hadn’t seen the fighters. They would have piled into us if we’d left the formation for a minute and there was an undercast with probably several squadrons of German fighters under it just waiting for some sucker to drop below it. All I could do was hold the ship in formation and sweat it out.
“The Jerry fighters made a pass at us and it was nice timing if they’d only known it. In the nose the navigator, Emery Horvath, did a good job with the nose guns, while Dewey Thompson up in the top turret sprayed them from there.”
In the radio compartment the copilot and the bombardier had revived Will and Schrier with the emergency oxygen bottles they had brought back. King, the second to go out, was in the worst condition and he came around more slowly than the others. When Schrier saw King’s hands, which were left bare when King took his gloves off to fix Schrier’s mask, he opened his flying jacket and put King’s hands under his armpits. Finally the others fixed King’s mask and he started to revive. He had been out a long while though and he came back fighting. The men in the radio room had to call for more help when King, a big, strong Nebraska farmer, started lashing out with his hands and feet. Heathman and Greasamar alone couldn’t hold King down as he thrashed around the radio room.
The top turret gunner, Dewey Thompson, answered the final SOS from the radio room. He hurried back through the bomb bay and helped hold the struggling King.
When Thompson opened the door to the radio room he saw King thrashing around, lashing out with his fists. When his great swollen white hands struck the floor of the ship or the sharp edge of some piece of radio equipment bits of frozen flesh would chip off like shavings gouged out of a hunk of ice. The battered hands didn’t bleed. They were frozen through.
It was too late for them to think of gloves. No gloves would have fit those hands, swollen to more than twice their normal size. Finally King settled down, regaining full consciousness, and Green sat on the