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Bob Swift

By BILL WELCH
Staff writer

Some decisions mean you live or you die.  Bob Swift knows the exact instant he made the right one.

His B-24 bomber was a few hundred feet above the ground and dropping fast.

Standing on the catwalk in an open bomb bay the afternoon of  March 6,1944, he didn't hestitate when Lt. Bob Slencak yelled through the roaring noise, "Let's get out of here!"

The day before Swift, 22, had flown on his second bombing mission, a relatively short one to Bordeaux, France. He told that to the man who awakened him because crews usually didn't fly missions two days in a row. "That don't make any difference," he was told. "you're going today too. Get up."

In the large briefing room where the air crews of the 458^th Bomber Group had gathered, the curtain covering the map showing the day's mission was pulled aside. The red line showed they would hit Berlin. 

At this point in the Alied bomber offensive, that was still a dangerous mission.  Only two months before had the American Eighth Air Force gained ascendancy over the Luftwaffe in Germany's daytime skies.

Swift's crew included Capt. Jack Bogusch the squadron operations officer. The rest of the  crew knew each other, but Bogush would replace the sick pilot. Swift was substituting for the regular bombardier.

Takeoff from the airfield at Horsham St. Faith in southern England was early in the morning.  The B-24 Liberator bombers took off with their heavy loads of bombs and fuel, then joined up with their squadrons and groups so the the entire force could fly together for the continent.  The flight to Berlin went smoothly, as Swift recalled: no fighters, no antiaircaft fire (flak).

"We went over Berlin, made the bomb run. We didn't drop."

In combat, Swift explained, 12 planes drop their bombs off the lead airplane. "When his bombs drop, you let yours go, so you have a pattern that hits the target down there -- if you're on the target."

The lead bombardier did not release on that first bomb run.  Swift did not know why.  He learned later the lead bombardier was not close to being lined up on the target, an aircraft engine factory.

"So we went out, turned around and came back in again on another bomb run, which  is a very, very bad thing to do, which meant two times through all that flak over Berlin."

And it was pretty thick.  "What you see is a cloud that shouldn't be there, but in that cloud what you see is red balls of fire when those things explode and spread the shrapnel.

"Our plane was hit quite a few times by that flak, but no one was hurt and there was no damage insofar as we could see. ... Just simply some holes."

The planes dropped their bombs on that second pass and headed back for England.

As bombardier, Swift's station was in the nose of the bomber, where there was a turret with twin .50 cal. machine guns.  With the bombs dropped, his job now was nose gunner.

He had to leave the station briefly to help the navigator just behind him, Lt. Egan, who had passed out after his oxygen line froze. As he was finishing that, the call came ove rthe plane's intercom that fighters were attacking from one o'clock, nearly in front of them. He got back to his guns to see the FW-190s coming in.

"The leading edge of their wing is just as red as it could be with fire when those 20mms are all firing like they do."

The Germans didn't hit Swift's plane.  "The airplane flying to our right had half its tail rudder shot off, but it was all right." It continued with the bomber formation.  "The bomber on the left apparently received a direct hit of some sort and it nose-dived down." No one saw any parachutes, but some of the crew survived and were captured.

Swift had told Egan that morning that if it became necessary to get out, Swift would need Egan's help because in a B-24 the door to the turret had to be properly lined up or it would not open.

After the attack, the engines started sounding odd. Swift asked the pilot if there was trouble.

Bogusch told Swift he had lost power to three of the four engines. 

At that point, Egan helped Swift out of the turret.  Back in the bombardier/navigator compartment, Swift snapped the parachute pack to his chest harness.

To bail out of the B-24, the navigator and bombardier are supposed to leave through a nose wheel door. They release the door by pulling on a little red handle. 

"I got down to pull the handle and Lt. Egan kept saying 'No. No.'  And he also kept saying, 'My poor mother. My poor mother.'  I told him to forget about his mother and worry about getting out of there.  he kept telling me not to pull the red handle."

He had heard one bell, the signal for the crew to get ready to jump. Asecond ring means jump.

Swift gave up on the nose wheel exit and headed for the bomb bay. The doors were open.  That leaves a platform about 10 inches wide to walk through the bomb bay to get to the back of the airplane.  Step off that platform and it's a straight fall to the earth.

When he got onto the 10-inch wide catwalk, Swift encountered the turret gunner.  He had his parachute on, too, but was too scared to jump.

"I tried to throw him out. I could see the ground was coming up close. I hadn't heard the second bell, but I figured we had to be getting out of there.

"I tried my best to not only talk him out but to physically throw him out. But he had his arm wrapped right around the bomb bay (stanchion.) I just could not get him out of there.  Just at that time, when I was trying to throw him out, Lt. Bob Slencak, who was the copilot that day, stepped into the bomb bay."

Slencak yelled "Let's get out of here!"

That, Swift has said over the 57 years since, saved his life.  Slencak's words alerted Swift to the danger just seconds away.

With the ground quickly getting, Swift dropped out of the bomb bay, his arms folded.

"As soon as my chute opened, I heard the motors' roar."  He could tell the pilot was still in the Liberator, trying to get the motors working.

Swift could see the big bomber was in a flat spin.  "It wasn't going down nose first. The wings were level with the ground and it was losing altitude very fast."

He watched the B-24 come around 125 to 130 degrees of a circle and smash into the ground.

The plane hit the ground so hard the aluminum skin ripped off.  He could see the bomber's skeleton of bulkheads and ribs. He saw a brief burst of flame about eight feet high come out of the left outside engine of the downed aircraft.

Because of the way the bomber hit the ground and the way the flame shot up and then went out, Swift firmly believes the bomber had run out of gasoline.  "Otherwise we would have had a big, big ball of fire coming up from that airplane."

He thinks it possible that flak had cut holes in the gas tanks and it had leaked from the bomber as a vapor so that the crew couldn't see it leaking away.  Fuel tanks on American combat aircraft were self-sealing so that they wouldn't leak when hit, but perhaps the holes were big enough so that they could not seal.

All that, Swift saw in the four or five seconds it took for him to float to the ground after his parachute opened.  He and Slencak landed about 25 feet apart.

"First thing he said was, 'Boy, am I glad to see you.'"

They came down in a wheatfield in a farm just inside Holland.  They headed for a patch of woods about 100 feet square.  They buried their parachutes in the mud near a small stream.  They knew they couldn't stay in the woods too long and headed through the open field for a larger section of woods about 300 yards away.

A man in a long, black coat armed with a revolver captured them.  Swift learned he was a Holland Home Guard member.  Perhaps he would have been killed if he had not taken the American fliers to the Germans.

They were walked to the small town of Turbergen, about half a mile away.  About two dozen people walked along with them, including a male teenager about 16 or 17 who spoke fluent English.  In Turbergen, they were taken to the mayor's office, who asked them in Dutch if they were injured.  They said they weren't.

They were taken to another office and later found out from a Catholic priest that four men on the bomber had died.  Slinchock was allowed to go to the wreckage for a Catholic burial service. He was not allowed near the plane, though.

Once he was back, the two Americans gave them milk and a sandwich. It was the last food they would get for several days.

After dark, a German officer took them by car to another town.

As they drove up to the airfield, the German told them to look.  They saw a B-17 come in for a landing.

"The Germans used it.  They would apparently go up and give an exact altitude to the flak gunners.  They could get pretty accurate with their flak that way."

Swift and Slinchock were put in a small, dark room with about 15 other fliers who had been captured that day.  They were there about four days. Swift doesn't recall getting any food the entire time.  After the four days they were taken by bus to Amsterdam, a 90-minute drive, and put in cells.

From there, they taken by train to Germany. Along the way, they saw the ruins of the city of Cologne.  Their destination was Dulag Luft (????) outside Frankfurt where they were interrogated.  It was three days before he got his turn.

"They showed me a paper. They had every squadron of our whole group.  They had each man listed out. They had where I worked before I went in the service. They had who  married, when I got married. They had everything on there.

"What they wanted you to was sign the paper. We were supposed to give them only name and serial number."

Because Swift was new to the crew he had flown the Berlin mission with and not with his regular crew, the Germans wanted to know why he was there.

"They accused me of being a spy and threatened to take me out an shoot me."

Swift thought they were trying to scare him.  Eventually they returned him to his cell.

When the interrogation of the group of prisoners was finished, the Germans took them from Frankfurt to Stalag Luft I, a former Hitler Youth camp near the town of Barth.  Swift thinks the journey could have taken one day but the rail system was so shot up it took five.

While being marched through the town of Barth, angry residents threw stones at the prisoners, calling them "terror fliegers."

"I'm glad we had German guards guarding us."

Swift was assigned in North Compound I.  Sixteen men were assigned to a room. The room had a stove, but little coal came their way to burn in it.  So the room was usually cold. Because it was a former Hitler Camp, the camp had latrines indoors, plus other facilities that made it more livable than some POW camps.

Swift spent 14 months in the POW camp. "It felt like five years."

The main reason for that is "you don't do anything."  Officer were not required to work. 

The men played cards, volley ball.

"If you had enough food or enough ambition, you might go out and  play volleyball.

During the first 10 months, Red Cross parcels, with cigarettes, candy,  food -- salmon, sardines and corned beef -- and other items arrived for each prisoner.  "If it hadn't been for the Red Cross parcels I wouldn't have made it. And I don't think a lot of others would have made it."

The food was used at the mess hall where food for all the prisoners was made with it.

In December, conditions started to deteriorate.  The Red Cross parcels did not arrive. The Germans said they could not get them because of the crumbling rail system.  The Allies had been targeting transportation through much of the fall, causing the German rail system to come to a near standstill.

That left meager rations for the prisoners. "In the morning, we'd have a small bowl of barley cereal, which was full of maggots.  Not just little ones but big ones. But they were cooked. And if you're hungry you eat them. And I did. And everybody else did."

In the afternoon, they got an inch-thick slice of German bread and 15 tablespoons full of dehydrated vegetable soup, which was simply vegetables floating in water with no broth.

That's what the prisoners ate for the final months of the war.

He weighed 135 when shot down, and went down to about 100 by the time the war ended.

By the end of April 1945, the prisoners dug trenches in case combat reached them.

On the morning of May 1, the POWs awoke to find the Germans gone.  A car load of Soviet officers came in.  They saw the men's food situation and brought some cattle in for eating, though Swift doesn't recall eating beef during the three weeks they waited for the Americans to take them out.

On May 20, Eighth Air Force bombers arrived at the Barth airfield to fly the liberated prisoners to Lyon, France. From there they went to Camp Lucky Strike.  It took some time for Swift's intestinal system to get used to proper food, "but I eventually got straightened around."

A new Navy transport took them back to the U.S.  After processing, he got a 90-day furlough and then was discharged.

Once discharged, Swiftt went back home to his wife Dorothy in Harborcreek where he went back to work in the machine shop at GE.

In the 1990s, Swift went back to the crash site.  Eventually he was able to get a piece of the aircraft wreckage and take it home to Harborcreek where it is now.

A few years after the war, Swift started thinking about Slencak coming back to say, "Let's get out of here."

He sent a Christmas card, writing on it his thanks for Slencak saving his life.

Slencak is dead now, but Swift still thanks him for helping make that snap decision March 6, 1944.