Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [24]
King’s hands didn’t start to bleed until the Fort was within sight of England. Down below five thousand feet the blood started moving through his chilled veins and out into the frozen hands.
“I didn’t see King’s hands until we got down on the ground,” Lauro said. “Frostbite was no word for what had happened to his hands. One of the flight surgeons looked at them and I looked at the doc and what he was thinking wasn’t pretty. King had saved Schrier’s life with those hands.”
And that is about where the story of one crew’s memory of their roughest trip ends. Bill Heathman, Nelson King, Murray Schrier and
Air Gunner, the first Rooney-Hutton collaboration
the rest will yell again when they crack their shins and stub their toes, and they’ll complain the next time there is no hot water or heat in the room at home. But that day they were greater men.
Forrest Vosler, too, was great one day.
Forrest was the radio operator–gunner on a Fortress called Jersey Bounce Junior. He was twenty-two years old.
It was a long daylight haul into Germany when the Air Force was beginning to step up its pounding of the Nazis’ aircraft production plants. Jersey Bounce was plugging along in formation when a double burst of flak smashed two engines and sent the Fort reeling from formation. It leveled off, but the Luftwaffe fighters had seen it and closed in for the inevitable kill. Somehow the gunners beat them off. Tracer poured from the waists and tail, the nose guns yammered steadily and from both turrets came an almost drumfire pounding. The radio gun was firing, too.
Finally, a 20-millimeter shell crippled the tail gun. From the radio hatch, a covering fire swept back past the fin and rudder and at length the fighters went away.
When the fighters had gone, the crew began to check up on each other. You all right? Roger. Waist? Roger. Radio? RADIO? Vosler, are you . . . One of you guys go up there from the waist and see if Vosler’s all right.
Vosler wasn’t all right. The first attack, the one that had knocked out the tail guns, had left him with half a dozen 20-millimeter splinters in his legs and thighs. The tail guns had gone out and he’d fired his gun despite the pain, and the fighters had pressed in once more. A 20- millimeter shell had burst next to the radio hatch and jagged hunks of steel ripped into his head and face. Where his eyes should be there was a great gash of red and dead white bits of flesh. The gunners tried to patch Vosler up, but they couldn’t give him morphine because a man with a head wound suffers from morphine and may die. They were still trying to fix his wounds when the intercom clicked:
“Pilot to crew. Gas getting low. We’ll have to get rid of everything we can.”
They threw out everything within reach, but the gas was running out and so was time. So Vosler sat down to his radio. He couldn’t see it, but he knew where everything should be. His cold fingers told him what the others could see with their eyes—the radio had been smashed by cannon fire. Vosler was the kind of kid who a few minutes before had fought on with his single gun even after the cannon shell had hit him. Working now by touch alone, hearing the steady, even drip of blood that soaked through the bandages and fell on the folding counter of his radio desk, he fixed an emergency set. He switched on the power and told one of the others where to set the dials so they would be on the emergency channel.
The noise of the key as it called for help was louder than the drip of the blood on his extended arm.
When he had sent out an SOS, telling base they probably would have to crash land in the sea, he fainted. The others revived him, and he called base again. He fainted again. They revived him.
The gas was lower now in the tanks. Still too much weight. The crew searched the ship for more spare weight. They had cleaned her out before. In the radio room, unable to see, still feeling his radio and keeping base advised of what was happening, Vosler