""There was a whole different atmosphere right
then, and to this day, I still feel it. Now, we had something to fight for - those guys who would be underneath us.'' -- Lt. Chet Pietrzak
By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
Men zipped themselves into thick,
wool-lined leather suits so they could fly 25,000 feet into the air where the Germans would do all they could to shoot them out of the air.
The Germans were doing a good job of it.
First Lieutenant Chet Pietrzak was
23. By June 5, 1944, he had flown 22 missions in ""Jamaica Ginger'' or one of the other B-17 missions that were part of the 388th Heavy Bombardment Group stationed in England.
He had already beaten
very bad odds against him - a flight crew member in one of the Army Air Force's heavy bombers flying over Europe could figure on flying seven missions. By Number 7 he had either been killed or was in a German
prison camp.
By June, morale wasn't what Pietrzak would call low, but the men were feeling the strain.
""We were the only ones getting killed,'' he recalled from the kitchen in his Erie home.
""We never saw all the other American troops in England. All we had time for was sleeping and killing.''
The morning of June 6 that changed.
Around 5 a.m. men of the 388th Group filed in for the
briefing on the day's mission. There were a few hundred of them and they all had their eyes on the curtain in front of the room. Would it be railways in France? Berlin? Submarine pens?
The
colonel strode onto the stage and pulled the curtain back to reveal the map and the target.
""A big roar went up,'' Pietrzak said. It was going to be a short mission, way shorter than almost any they
had ever flown. They would fly across the English Channel, drop the bombs right along the French coast, fly a big circle over France and the Atlantic and head back to England.
""The colonel told us,
"Yeah, for you guys this will be short, but for thousands of men, this is D-Day.'
""I'll never forget this as long as I live ... the whole group got off their chairs and knelt down as one person.
No one said a thing. They just did it. And they prayed.
""There was a whole different atmosphere right then, and to this day,'' Chet Pietrzak said, his eyes misting, ""I still feel
it. It was like nothing else I ever felt.
""Now, we had something to fight for - those guys who would be underneath us.''
A couple hours later, the planes took off. The plan was to hit the
German fortifications just five minutes before the first wave of troops were to hit the beaches.
Lt. Pietrzak was a bombardier, the man who sat in the very front of the four-engine bomber and flipped the switch to
drop the bombs. Looking through the Plexiglass nose, he would have the best seat in the plane to view one of history's most awe-inspiring sights.
""We were at 15,000 feet. We were used to flying
at 25,000 feet or higher so this felt low to me. I had a bird's eye view of all these ships, hundreds of them, thousands and thousands of them. I could see the battleships and cruisers firing away at the
beaches.'
He looked around him in the sky and saw thousands of planes stretching in all directions, but with one place to go - to cover the invasion.
The bombs they dropped that mission did little damage.
But they at least kept the defenders' heads down while the first troops landed.
As bombardier in one of his group's lead planes, Pietrzak had been awakened hours earlier than usual for a mission, at 2 a.m. He
and Jamaica Ginger's navigator were taken to a pre-briefing and shown the same map that the rest of the group would be shown later.
""We had been to Berlin and Leipzig and other German cities and had flown
missions nine, 10 and 13 hours long and here was this little flunkie mission. Then they told us, "This is it.'
""And right then three MPs with guns came in.''
The newly-briefed airmen would not
be allowed out of the MPs' sight. No chances could be taken that word would get out too soon or to the wrong people. Security was taken seriously, so serious that the MPs escorted the men to the latrine.
The 388th flew two missions June 6. After finishing the first, the planes were re-fueled and re-armed; the men were given a meal and pep pills to keep them going for the second run.
On that second mission, the
B-17s encountered a flight of American fighters escorting American C-47 transport planes towing gliders behind them. The gliders were loaded with paratroopers to be put down in France.
The way this East high
graduate figured it, ""those guys were going to get killed. At least we could go home and sleep in our own bunks.''
The invasion of France would so inspire Pietrzak and the rest of Jamaica Ginger's
10-man crew that they volunteered to fly an extra 10 missions. They were required to fly 25 and could then be taken out of combat, most likely to be shipped back to the United States. Number 25 would come June
8. They decided to go against the odds and wager that they could hit Number 35.
They did, but that's another story to be told later.
By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
Mission 29 for 1st Lt. Chet
Pietrzak would lead to a strange adventure, a brush with death at the hands of a Russian woman and a lifelong breathing difficulty.
It was June 21 that the 388th Bomb Group and other American four-engine bomber units
were sent to bomb a target south of Berlin at Ruhland. Instead of turning around after hitting their target, they were to go on to the Soviet Union.
The plan was to land at a place called Poltava, stay
overnight, reload with fuel and bombs, then hit another German target on the way back to England.
The bombers hit their target well enough and found their airfield. They got their planes parked and dispersed as
well as they could on the small airstrip. Then, around 7 or 8 p.m., a German reconnaissance airplane flew over.
""Two hours later the whole Luftwaffe seemed to come in and they knocked the living ....
out of us. Forty-some airplanes were knocked out. Ours was damaged, so we couldn't move.''
The German raid caused a fire near their aircraft and the men of Jamaica Ginger feared their radio operator was
inside. Pietrzak and the other crewmen ran to their plane to rescue the operator.
They found out the radio operator wasn't there; he escaped harm. But Pietrzak inhaled hot smoke, damaging the cilia in his
bronchial passage. The little hair-like cilia are needed to bring phlegm out of the lungs.
While he was healthy enough to finish up his tour of duty, Pietrzak would require hospitalization once he got back in
the U.S. later that year and would need treatment and care for his condition the rest of his life.
To this day he must sleep with a device that thumps his chest to loosen and move the phlegm. He coughs
frequently and often needs to suck on menthol drops.
""For a couple years U was coughing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was out of work.
""But the Veterans Administration has taken
great care of me all these years.''
With their plane badly damaged, the Jamaica Ginger's crew had to spend some unexpected time in Poltava.
""We had nothing to eat, so the pilot, Frank Prendergast, and
myself went into town.''
The two men in their strange uniforms attracted a crowd at the marketplace who wanted to know who they were.
Pietrzak explained in the Polish he had learned as a boy on Erie's east
side that they were ""Amerikanski soldat.''
""They asked me who I could speak Polish and I told them I was Polish. Well, there was this little old lady sitting there peeling carrots.
All she heard was that I was Polish.
""She snuck up behind me with the knife and went at my back with it. Frank saw her and grabbed her and started to throw her to the ground. I didn't see the
knife. These people saw him do this this and started to knock the heck out of us. I had a couple teeth knocked out.
""The secret police had been following us and fired their guns. That got the
crowd of us. I was still screaming at Frank, "What the hell are you doin'?' He's yelling back, "She was gonna kill ya! She was gonna kill ya!'
""The police explained later that this woman had
two sons that were killed by Polish soldiers when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. When she heard me say I was Polish, she wanted to kill me.''
