Presentation Date: April 26, 2001
Bob Tharratt
B-17 Flight Engineer, and Top Turret Gunner, DFC ETO B-17 Flight Engineer, and Top Turret Gunner, DFC ETO.
"Belly Gunner Bob"
Robert Tharratt's heroism was rewarded, 55 years after he saved a fellow B-17 crewman.
Bob Tharratt is the son of a First World War veteran. His father, who had trained in marine engineering, served as an observer/ gunner in Handley Page bombers for the Royal Flying Corps. After the war, Bob says his father shifted his emphasis to aeronautical engineering and he designed the hulls of flying boats for Short Brothers. That work brought the Tharratts to Canada in 1928 and soon thereafter to the United States, where the senior Tharratt was contacted by Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland to design hulls for commercial flying boats. In 1936, the family moved to Santa Monica, California, where Bob went to high school.
As soon as Bob graduated, he tried to join the cadets, taking the physical and mental tests. But he was told that because he was still under 21, he wasn't formally a citizen. Bob says he went to Canada to enlist, but was told there he was American citizen. He then found out the only way he could get into the Air Force was to volunteer to his Draft Board, which he did.
January 16, 1943 was the date Bob was accepted for basic training at Biloxi, Mississippi, and completing that he went to sign up for cadets - - only to find out he had already been assigned to aircraft mechanic school. Finishing that program, Bob was assigned to advanced B-17 training in Long Beach, then to gunnery school, and finally to a combat crew.
Bob says, "Knowing that I am a gunner... and also an engineer, I figured that my particular spot on a B-17 was going to be the top turret , because that's where the engineer goes. The next thing I know the pilot says , 'Well you're the ball turret gunner.' "
The Army's decision had been simple, based on Bob's physical size.
It was May, 1944 when training was completed, and Bob's crew was to take a new B-17 "across the pond" to Gander. Over and over again, weather prevented Bob's crew from crossing the Atlantic. Finally, he ended up on the H.M.S. Arowa, a "banana boat", where Bob slung his hammock between two posts for a berth on his 12 day voyage to England.
Snedderton Heath was where the 96th Bomb Group had set-up shop for the business of the strategic bombing of Germany. Tharratt says the unit suffered many casualties, "The 96th Bomb Group flew their first mission on May 14, 1943. They flew their last mission on April 21, 1945, a total of 320 missions. Total killed aircrew were 938, planes lost 206. And all in combat within 24 months."
Bob says being a ball turret gunner involved squeezing through a hatch in the back of the turret, feet sliding down into stirrups below and alongside the twin .50 caliber machine guns. There were two handles over the gunner's head that controlled the turret swinging down and back and from side to side. The guns were deafening when they were fired, but unlike movie portrayals, Bob says enemy fighters flashed silently past as they attacked the B-17 combat formations.
"My parachute was outside the turret. And every time I got in there I was thinking, if anything happens, what's going to happen to me." Even years after the war, Tharratt says he had nightmares about the ball turret.
June 12, 1944 was the first mission for Bob's crew. Tharratt remembers looking down and thinking, "You could step from England from one ship to the next, all the way across to France, there were so many ships in the Channel, going in that direction, and then coming back. It was just like a highway."
That first mission was Amiens. Then Brussels, and then two missions to Bremen. One notable flight on June 25th, was a drop of weapons and supplies canisters to the Macquis in southern France.
"We went over the French coast at 18,000 feet, started losing altitude and we broke up into elements of six airplanes. We had to pick up the particular area we were given and spot the three smoke signals. Down to about 500 feet, right in the center of the smoke signals, we dropped these cannisters... I felt like I could scrape the gun barrels on the ground. I could see the smoke signals, but there was absolutely nobody in sight until those canisters hit the ground. Then it just looked like ants coming out, picking up the supplies."
Climbing to altitude as they were approaching the French coast, heading for home, Bob's B-17 flew directly over Cherbourg. The Germans still occupied the city and threw up about ten bursts of flak. One burst broke the glass plate in the front of the ball turret, and when Bob got back to base, he had six shards of glass removed from his right eye and four from his left eye.
Before long, Bob was out of the hospital and back flying. The 96th bombed Munich, Stuttgart, Kiel, Schweinfurt, Regensburg, Wurzburg, and Dusseldorf.
On July 16th, the first pilot of Tharratt's B-17 was in the hospital with pneumonia. The replacement pilot, Oscar Williamson, was just two missions short of 25 missions, his Captaincy, and a trip home to the States. For the crew of Bob's B-17 the September 10th target of Nuremburg was the 18th mission.
"We bombed, and as we turned off the target we were hit by three bursts of flak. Our top turret gunner was injured, we lost three engines and only our number three was left. The pilots were fighting to keep the plane in the air."
Bob says when flight engineer Bill Lowry was hit, he called for help. "Everybody in the front of the ship was busy and it was a good excuse to get out of the ball turret. Nobody had to ask me twice."
Bob went forward to the top turret, and just as he began to aid Lowry, the bail-out bell rang. Lowry had been hit by shrapnel in his right elbow and was unable to cinch up the leg straps of his parachute harness which were hanging loose.
"I fastened both straps and got his parachute. He could use his left hand so I put his chute on backwards so he could pull with his left hand and pushed him out the nose hatch. I made my way back through the plane, picked up my parachute, put it on, went to the waist door and looked through the plane just as the pilot was climbing out of his seat to get out."
Bob figures the B-17 had dropped from 28,000 feet altitude to about 20,000 feet when he bailed out. He waited for awhile, then pulled the "D-ring" to release his chute.
"In training they always told us to delay our chute, and everybody used to ask the same question - - how do you know when to open the chute? The answer that always came back - - 'when you can distinguish a horse from a cow.' Turns out that's about two thousand feet. And I'm fortunate I came down in the country, because if I'd come down in the city... I wouldn't be here."
Bob landed in a plowed farm field, and started to make his way to a clump of trees when he heard voices. Shortly, he was surrounded by teenagers with guns and knives. He'd landed a quarter mile from a Hitler Youth camp. Fortunately, he says, two Wehrmacht sergeants who were their supervisors came along and protected Bob.
On the other side of the camp, waist gunner Henry DiRocco had come down. Both men were marched into the camp and became the centerpiece of a demonstration by the camp commandant, in front of the flag pole. "I looked up and the flag pole had a cross arm, and hanging from that was a rope.
I said, 'Hey DiRocco, they're going to hang us.'
He said, 'Naw.'
I said,'Look up.'
He said, 'Oh shit.' "
Next, the two gunners were marched through the fields while other members of his crew were rounded. They all rode in a charcoal burning truck to a nearby Luftwaffe base. Bob says with the eight crew members and two guards, the truck would drive great on level ground and downhill, but they had to get out and walk when the truck started to climb uphill.
Bob's crew spent the night in the Nuremburg jail and then was shipped by train to Frankfurt where they were each placed in solitary confinement. Interrogation came quickly, and continued day and night for six days at the Prisoner of War camp.
Tharratt says the interrogator had a dossier on the ball turret gunner. "He started thumbing through and told me everything about the 96th Bomb Group. And then he started telling things about me. He asked,'Why didn't you tell us you were born in England, and went to high school in Santa Monica?'
Bob figured one of his crew had broken down and talked. Only years later did Bob discover the Germans collected major newspapers from sympathizers, who sent them to the ports of Mexico, where U-boats would carry them back to Germany. There, the papers were dissected for dossiers prepared on pilots and bomber crews.
Bob passed through a transient camp where he met 'Gabby' Gabreski, who had become a POW after his P-47 struck the ground on a strafing mission. From there, Tharratt wound up in Stalag Luft 4, near the Baltic Sea. The camp was so new, the POWs at first slept without bunks on the floor of the barracks. Meals were 'ersatz' coffee and black bread for breakfast, a bowl of soup for lunch, and a hot potato or mash or more soup for dinner. There were also Red Cross parcels shared among three men about every three weeks.
In February of 1945, the Soviet armies were rolling relentlessly toward Berlin, and the Germans moved the POWs of Stalag Luft 4. In 86 days, the guarded POWs traveled 600 miles by foot. The prisoners were broken up into six groups of about 500 men each and marched through the snow. Of some 3000 prisoners who started the march only 1600 survived to finish.
Tharratt says the ball turret gunner he'd once been at 155 pounds was reduced to 109 pounds by the time he was liberated on on April 26th, 1945 and brought by troop ship and train to a hospital in the States.
Bob Tharratt knows time can stand still - - that events from the past sometimes have extraordinary conclusions or postscripts decades later.
Bob says through the years, when he'd told the story of his last mission, of helping Bill Lowry out of the B-17, listeners told him he deserved recognition for his acts, to which Bob would reply that he was "just doing his job." At the urging of Gary Villalba, a Veterans Service officer for Contra Costa County, Tharratt filled out papers describing his aiding Lowry, and included substantiation from others. Expecting a letter of commendation, he was surprised months later to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
In 1988, a local newspaper reporter wrote about Bob's reunion with one of his crew members. It drew the interest of a "neighbor" from Clayton, who related to Bob that when he was a 14 year old boy in Nuremburg, a B-17 had crash-landed nearby and he'd taken pieces of the plane, which he had shaped into "brass knuckles". Air Force archives show that the B-17 Bob was shot down in on September 10th,1944 was the only one lost in the Nuremburg area on that day. The steel "brass knuckles" from Bob's B-17, Bob now owns. And, 8000 miles from the German field where the B-17 came to rest, the German "boy" now lives only seven miles away from Bob.
Bob made another connection on a trip to Germany in 1993. He found a man who was willing to show Bob the crash site of his B-17, with a niece who served as interpreter.
Bob had found out that on its final flight in 1944, the B-17 had gently lost altitude, settling in on a pilotless belly landing until it was stopped by a clump of trees. "This is 50 years after the fact, but I could visualize where the plane came in, because the bigger trees were around the outside with shrub trees in the middle, and I could just imagine that B-17 sitting there." Bob says he told the interpreter to tell her uncle the reason the plane came down there was because it was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Nuremburg. Turning to Bob, and in perfect English, the uncle himself replied, "I was on an anti-aircraft gun that day."
Tharratt says his father, the veteran RFC observer gunner, used to attend an annual dinner-dance in Southern California. One year, Bob and his wife Jean planned to attend the reunion, and were all dressed for the semi-formal affair. When Bob's father asked if Bob had his "miniatures", scaled down replicas of his military awards, and Bob replied he didn't, Bob says his father told him," Without your miniatures, you bloody well can't go."
Since then, Bob Tharratt purchased his miniatures - - six of them - - all but the DFC he received 55 years after that final B-17 mission, when he saved the life of crew member Bill Lowry.