The 67 airplane mechanics at the airfield got the good news -- Germany had surrendered. The war in
Europe was over at last.
Someone got the idea to take the day off and
celebrate. All 67 mechanics got onto their bicycles and pedaled into the port city of Malmo, clogging traffic along the way. No need to change out of the greasy coveralls or wipe the grease off their hands
and faces. Just go. Once there, they headed for the fanciest hotel and barged in.
The 67 Americans were not a welcome sight to all of the patrons in the hotel's restaurant. Some of them
were members of Japan's legation to Sweden. They got out up from their tables and left, indignant. And the U.S. Army Air Forces mechanics proceeded to party. The war was over!
Robert Shorts, one of the 67, still laughs when he recalls that happy day. So does his wife, Ewy, the Swedish woman he had met a few months earlier in 1945. She would become the first American war
bride from Sweden.
Shorts and the rest of the crew of their 447th Bomb Group B-17, got to Sweden when their plane was forced to divert to the neutral country after taking damaging hits while returning
from a bombing raid over Poland, in 1944.
The U.S. was getting the better of the Germans in the air war by this time, but that didn't
mean the Eighth Air Force bombers flying out of England had any kind of a picnic. Bombing missions that took aircraft over Germany were dangerous, loaded with risk.
Shorts and the rest of the crew knew those dangers. The mission that eventually took them to Sweden wasn't the first time they ran into trouble. In fact, this was their 19th
mission, and their fifth aircraft since they arrived in England in late 1943. Three had been so badly shot up on various missions they had to be scrapped and used for spare parts.
A fourth was at the bottom of the North Sea. The crew had been forced to ditch it just eight miles off the Dutch course after taking heavy damage on their second raid to Berlin in March 1944.
"They shot us up pretty bad on our second mission over Berlin. That's when we wound up in the North Sea," Shorts said.
That mission was a nasty one, costing many U.S. bombers, Shorts remembers. About
20 percent of the crews went down that day, he said.
German fighters started hitting the attack force as they made landfall after crossing the
North Sea. But it was heavy flak that first caused damage to Shorts' plane. Then fighters shot up the B-17.
As their bomber made its way back to England over the North Sea, it steadily lost altitude.
Lt. Joe Jurnecki, the pilot, feared the plane would not be able to climb high enough to get over the cliffs at Dover.
"Our pilot said, 'We're almost out of gas.' We only had one and a half engines carrying
the plane. 'We're probably going to ditch, so get ready. We threw everything overboard that we could to lighten the plane up so we could get it as close to England as we could
before it went down. All we could think of was what else can we throw overboard. We were too busy to be scared."
Injured on this mission was the navigator. When the B-17 hit the water, he was thrown
face-first against a table. Shorts and Jerry Wooden, the top turret gunner, quickly patched up the unconscious navigator, who was bleeding heavily, pushed him through a top hatch and got him into a rubber raft.
The crew was now floating in the North Sea off the coast of Holland, divided between two rafts. They estimated they were eight miles from Amsterdam.
For 24 hours they floated. Part of the kit aboard the rafts was a sheet colored green on one side and yellow on the other. When German patrol craft came nearby, they pulled the
green side of the sheet over them. When they knew rescuers were nearby, the put the yellow side on.
"At night the Germans came looking for us. We didn't think of much, except how cold it
was. It was March and the spray from the North Sea would come up and freeze on you."
Two British torpedo boats found the B-17 crew first, pulling five of the Americans onto each
boat. Each man got hot soup and rum. On the way back, German Ju-88s attacked the boats, but failed to stop them from reaching England. They got some hits on the plywood
hulls of the boats, opening up "holes big enough to walk through." Shorts said he felt safer in the B-17 because he could at least fight back with his .50 cal. machine gun and
not the lighter, .30 cal. guns the British favored.
Any mission can be tough
Even getting to England from North America in late 1943 was no cake run for the plane piloted by Lt. Joseph Jurnecki.
They flew from Goose Bay Labrador to Northern Ireland. "That was a scary mission.
"We had our plane loaded with all our stuff and with some of the equipment the ground
crew would need for the plane. So the plane was overloaded."
"The runway is about a mile wide and a mile long. You try to take off and the weather's
bad and your plane starts icing, and you sweat it out to get half way to England," he said. About half way across the Atlantic the bomber started losing altitude from the ice on the
wings. The ice added drag and weight to the aircraft. Jurnecki took the bomber from 20,000 to 8,000 feet to get the ice melted. That worked, and the plane made to Northern
Ireland. From there it joined the rest of the Eighth Air Force in England.
The 447th had some tough missions, hitting Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and some French cities.
Most missions they faced Luftwaffe fighters, often the feared "yellow noses" of Jagdstaffel 26.
The B-17s had six machine gun stations. "No matter which way they came in, they were
going to get shot at from five different stations. (At least one would always not be able to bring its guns to bear.)"
The experienced fighter pilots, he said, would come in from the sides. "That's where they
would take a beating. The guys who were experienced would come in from the side so they didn't have so many guns bearing in on them from the side."
And it was from the side that Shorts was firing his single .50 cal. Browning from a window in plane's fuselage behind the wing.
Shooting from the waist
As a waist gunner, Shorts' job was to stand at his station, watching for German fighters and fire at any he could get in his sights. Whether he ever shot any down, just doesn't know.
"Anyone who says they were on a B-17 and they shot a plane down, they're full of mud. You got five positions on that B-17 firing at the same target. If you claim you hit it, you're
full of bull. You don't know how many planes you shot down ... it's a gang bang."
Typically, the top turret gunner right behind the pilot would call in the fighters so the rest of
the gunners would know where to look for them.
"He calls in five o'clock or 10 o'clock. You don't have much time to pick them out. You
try to watch a spot where you think they're going to go and you try to plug that hole up if they go through."
When all the guns fired together, "you could feel the whole ship shake."
The waist gunner's station is to the rear of the bomb bay. When it came time to drop the bombs, the doors would open. Flying at nearly 200 mph at altitudes of around 30,000
feet, it means subzero air came roaring in like a cyclone, Shorts said.
"You stand there with the windows open in the back.
"The other waist gunner's face got frostbitten. It didn't bother me because I had a mask to pull over my face."
The crew had electric-heated shoes, gloves, pants, and underwear to keep them from
freezing. They plugged in at their stations. On top of all that was the sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
There was no room to wear parachutes. Those were tossed to the side when the men got
into the bomber. "And you just hoped you could get to it if you needed it," Shorts said.
Shorts flew one mission as the B-17's ball gunner. One was enough. The ball gunner's
station was inside a glass and metal ball, his legs squeezed up in front of him and the twin-barreled .50 cal. machine gun between his legs. The electric-powered turret could
defend the bomber from all directions below the plane. It was critical to the plane's defense. It was also scary as hell.
Shorts, who stands close to six feet tall, was jammed in tight.
"One mission was enough. You never know where you are. You're in a ball below the plane. They call out that there's fighters coming in at 10 o'clock. Well, which way is 10 o'clock?"
The regular ball turret gunner, Tatum, knew where he was. On one mission, a ground crewman trying to get qualified to fly in bombers took Tatum's place. The mission was a
frightening one, and the rookie gunner wet his pants. He froze in place and had to be chipped out when the plane landed in England, Shorts recalled.
He flew one mission as the tail gunner. "I felt lost back there."
Good luck
On a day a typical mission was to be flown, the crews were awakened at 2:30 a.m. They went for breakfast, then to a briefing.
"They'd tell ya where you're going and who you were going to run into and how much flak there was and where to stay away from. There was one place in Germany where they had
a whole lot of antiaircraft guns. It was right there on the northern part of Germany. We'd try to scoot around them.
Were they scared when they arrived at the briefings? "We weren't scared until we saw
where we were going," he chuckled.
The toughest missions were those against the V-1 buzz bomb launch sites. They were hardened concrete shelters and had to be attacked from 10,000 to 12,000 feet, far lower
than the altitude normally used by the B-17s. "We felt like we were sitting on the rifle barrel then," he said.
Shorts recalled one mission, when it was the escorting U.S. fighters that took care of the
enemy fighters.
"We were always glad to see the P-47s come in. A lot of Germans were line up to come at us. Even if there only four P-47s, they would tear right into the German formation of 12
or 15 planes and shoot about half of them down before they knew what was happening. After the mission, the P-47s flew over our station and waved their wings at us."
If a target was Berlin, "that was something we were looking forward to because we thought we'd like to hit them. And we wanted to keep away from the "yellow noses" in the southern part of France.
The first plane the crew went through was a "brand new one." When they returned from their fifth mission, the crew chief examined it, found 265 holes in it and say they couldn't
patch it up. Jurnecki and his crew would get their second bomber.
One piece of shrapnel from antiaircaft fire came through the plane and hit Shorts flat on
the leg. It tore though his suit and turned his leg black and blue. It wasn't enough to get a Purple Heart.
Shorts enlisted in the Army with the plan to become an Army engineer. The Army wanted
him to go through office candidate school. He had no desire to become a "90-day wonder." He chose instead to be a mechanic and was sent to school for that. After some
training at that, he asked to be sent to gunnery school. "I got tired of being a grease monkey and working on the line." He got tired of kow-towing to brass that didn't know their
ass from a hole in the ground. Gunnery school in Florida was fun, he said, mainly because of the trap exercises with the shotgun. The exercise that allowed a gunnery
student to graduate called for him to ride in the back of a truck through the woods, shooting at clay pigeons as they were randomly launched. A gunner had to have a score
of 25 out of 25. "It took me three times." He credited the exercise with sharpening a gunner's reflexes. Gunnery practice was also done from the back of an AT-6 trainer. The
gunner would fire colored bullets at towed target sleeves. On ground the gunnery student could be graded by the number of hits he had on the target. "That was the most fun," Shorts said.
"We used to get DC-3s coming through with USO stars. One time we got in a crap game under the wing with Jerry Colonna and Bob Hope." He doesn't remember who won, but he
came out of the game with more than he started.
He was then assigned to a B-17 crew at Salt Lake City. From there, the bomber went to
Moses Lake, Wash., a place that was all "sand and dirt" so the crew could train together. Then it was on Nebraska for further training.
Good training
"We had one of the best crews. Everyone was well trained. We had trained for six months together in the States before we went over."
The gunners were good shots, keeping the enemy fighters at bay. "Our pilot was one of the top pilots, I think. He was Joe Jurnecki. ... He was a damn good pilot. He got
everybody back. We felt safe going up with him. We had all the confidence in the world in him. He got us out of some tight scrapes."
He credited Jurnecki for the time the group used a tail wind to arc its bombs into the target at Dusseldorf. Once the bombs were released, the group pulled a tight 90-degree turn.
"We were around 25 miles away from the target when we dropped our bombs because we were flying at 32,000 feet. The bombs arced right into the target that way." ("The wings
were practically in our faces.") The German fighters waiting over Dusseldorf were left without targets. And, Shorts said, follow-up reconnaissance over the German city showed their bombs hit the mark
And even though they went through five aircraft in the course of their 19 missions, the only casualty was the navigator when he was injured in the North Sea ditching.
And casualties were commonplace in the Eighth Air Force. On some missions, scores of aircraft, each with 10 men aboard, fell to German aircraft or antiaircraft fire. "Our losses on
a raid could be 20 percent or more." Each time they saw a plane go down, they knew friends were aboard.
A waist gunner friend of Shorts' from the stateside training arrived at Southworth airfield
after Shorts had done three missions. "On his first mission, he got two 20 millimeters through his stomach." Shorts hadn't gone up on that mission, but he was one of the first
to his buddy's plane and opened the door near the rear of the aircraft to see him there, mortally wounded. "He was just red with blood."
From England to Poland to Sweden
In the mission over Poland in April 1944, Jurnecki's aircraft was damaged by flak, forcing it to leave
formation right after they dropped their bombs. Then German fighters came at the lone bomber. "Fifteen came at us, and we knocked five of them down," Shorts said.
Jurnecki steered for Sweden just
across the Baltic Sea. Sweden was neutral and was adamant about protecting itself. Any planes that flew into its air space would be shot
at, including Jurnecki's. Antiaircraft fire damaged the B-17 further, cutting many of the control cables. Still, Jurnecki was able to land the plane at a Swedish airfield, under escort by Swedish fighters.
The American crew was taken into custody and put into an intern camp at Falun, about 100 miles northwest of Stockholm.
For two and a half months, Shorts remained in the camp. Most of the crew was there for
15. But because he had been qualified as a mechanic during training in the U.S., the American legation in Sweden was able to arrange his release from the camp so he could
work on the damaged American aircraft with other interned mechanics at Malmo at the southern tip of Sweden.
The camp was like a prison camp. It had barbed wire, guard towers, straw-filled paper
mattresses and lousy food.
"They served us blood sausage. Yech! Terrible stuff!"
Shorts' job was to overhaul damaged engines. Fixable engines on planes beyond repair
were installed on planes that could be salvaged. The planes could be patched up, sent to another Swedish air field, then flown back to England, though they would not supposed to fly any more war missions, Shorts said.
In Malmo, the mechanics first stayed in tents, then in a hotel near the waterfront. They would bicycle from the hotel to the airfield to work on the aircraft.
The mechanics had a good incentive to behave. They were told they would be put back in the camp if they didn't.
Being in Sweden was not all that bad, though. Not only were they out of harm's way, but
the Americans living outside the camps could socialize with the Swedes. Shorts, who was 27 then, did and ended up marrying 22-year-old Ewy Ottoson.
They met at a dance hall in Malm. Ottoson was one of four young women they met.
Still with a touch of her Swedish accent, Ewy, who was an airplane spotter for the
Swedish military, said she didn't expect to meet an American at the dance hall.
They dated for seven months. Once while walking down the street with two other couples
down the street, Ewy thought it was funny to take a handful of stones and throw them onto a tin roof when Robert wasn't looking. "Those Americans," she said, "They got so scared. 'Flak! Flak!"
"I dropped to the ground," Robert Shorts said with a chuckle.
"We did some heavy duty partying," she said. "We would say, 'It's Tuesday, let's have a party.' "
Theirs was the first wartime marriage of an American air crewman to a Swedish woman. Once they cleared the red tape, they had a dual marriage service -- Swedish and American.
Once married, they lived together in the hotel.
After the war, Shorts was flown out of Sweden as a passenger, not a gunner. His wife would follow about 10 weeks later with their son, Chet.
In Erie after the war, Shorts took a job with Swanson Tool. Over the years, he "did a little of everything," including plumbing and wiring.
Along with Chet, they had Jack and Roberta. Jack, veteran of the war in Vietnam, died in the mid 1990s following a long string of blackouts blamed on his wartime service. "They
never did figure out what caused his death." Roberta lives with the couple now in Erie.
