Presentation Date: March 25, 1999
Douglas Moore
MTO B-17 Pilot, 301st Bomb Group, 32nd Squadron MTO B-17 Pilot, 301st Bomb Group, 32nd Squadron
"50 Missions in the MTO"
By war's end, only Moore, his co-pilot and navigator of the original crew would return to the United States, having completed 50 missions. The bombardier survived being shot down with another crew, and became a prisoner of war.
In July of 1943, Douglas Moore headed overseas as one of a group of replacements for the 12th Air Force. The route to the front was across the North Atlantic, Maine to Newfoundland to Great Britain, with each leg challenged by weather. For Moore's group of bombers, fog diverted them to Northern Ireland for a week. Then it was off to the south of England, Marakesh and finally a stopover in Casablanca. Unfortunately, there was another delay there.
"We got up the next morning, went out tot he airplane, and guess what. The wheels were gone. Supposedly some general needed the set of tires or wheels for a B-17. We got stuck around there for a month," recalls Moore.
Only a few months before had Moore completed his training in King City and Taft in California, then and Marfa, Texas for advanced training. Doug says he was relieved when he heard he was going to Blythe, California to fly twin-engined fighters, which meant P-38s. But on his way there, all he heard about were the four-engined bombers B-17s at Blythe, and his face and those of his graduating class dropped. Nonetheless, he came to fly the B-17 and soon found himself training in South Dakota before heading to the Mediterranean Theater of Operations.
A month on Casablanca's beaches, sleeping in French barracks infested with bed bugs, hardly met the expectations of a young crew headed to war. When the B-17 and its crew finally arrived in Tunis, it joined up with the 301st Bomb Group, 32nd Squadron. Given recent losses in the group, the brand new B-17 was sent to another squadron. The 301st had been one of the first heavy bomber units to be assigned to the MTO, and the 32nd Squadron had already made a name for itself in the Philippines, through the heroic efforts of Colin Kelly, who piloted his damaged B-17 to destroy a Japanese warship.
Fighting in North Africa meant surviving dust, flies and mosquitoes. B-17s took off three abreast on a wide sand airstrip, to avoid as much as possible the dust kicked up by the heavy bombers. As it was, the dust shortened engine life by 50 percent.
Moore's first mission was in September of 1943, against the airport in Rome. He remembers a few Italian fighters circling as spotters for flak, which wasn't very concentrated.
A month later, the 15th Air Force had been spun out of the 12th, and the target was Weiner- Neustadt. Moore says, "Our squadron lost four out of six of our airplanes. It happened that our bombardier and one of our gunners had taken the place of two sick crew members in another plane, and they became the first casualties of the 15th Air Force."
Later that month, the target was submarine pens in France. There was some fighter opposition. but Moore says it wasn't too bad. The return trip was dicey, though, as the B-17s had stretched their range. Running out of fuel, Moore headed to Corsica which had been occupied by the Allies. "All four lights on our engines were red. But we just barely got in, and they fueled us from five gallon cans of gas so we could get back to Tunis.
By December, the front in Italy had moved far enough north after the Anzio beachhead, that the 301st could move to the Peninsula. Moore says the crews pitched their tents in a muddy olive orchard.
"It was raining, and miserable. They didn't provide any heating for us so we created our own heater for the tents. Someone came up with the idea of a 55 gallon drum of 100 octane gasoline and some copper tubing and bring it into the tent to a five gallon can with some rocks in it, and put a valve on it and let in drip down on the rocks and light it. And, amazing, it works. We lost a few tents that way, also."
From Italy, as the 301st struck north into Germany, the missions grew more dangerous. The next mission, on December the 19th, to bomb aircraft factories in Augsburg, would change Moore's life.
"We went over there and it was cloudy, so we bombed marshaling yards in Innsbruck. About 50 fighters cam up to attack our bomb group and they were shooting rockets at us. We went into a formation, that we'd never done before, nor after that (a large flat "V", instead of the traditional "box", with Moore's bomber on the far right tip). But I think it saved our lives."
Moore remembers twin-engined Ju88s standing off from the bombers to launch the rockets, while Me109s and Fw 190s swarmed at close range. Then the B-17 Moore had formed up on was hit, knocking the life raft out and pinning it against the bomber's tail. Moore stuck with the straggler as its crew shot at the raft and finally dislodged it.
Meantime, Moore noticed he had been struggling to keep formation, and then was starting to pass out. His co-pilot saw the oxygen gauge wasn't registering and asked the engineer to hook Moore into another system. The engineer was on the same line as Moore, and he passed out on the flight deck. They both ended up hooking into the bombardier's oxygen system.
"At that time I was so scared I called the Lord and said, 'God if you'll get us though this I will find you when I get back. And so He got me through all 50 missions."
After the attack ended, two of the B-17s engines were running rough, but they brought the crew home. When the engines shut down, Moore could see bullet holes in the propellers. There was a big hole in one of the wings, the tail wheel was shot up, and from the pattern of damage, Moore says he couldn't see how the shells had missed the cockpit.
December 25th was a mission over Brenner pass in the Alps, in which Moore saw the group commander's B-17 bracketed by 88mm flak.
"All at once there the ack-ack started coming up and I think there were three shots. The third shot hit him in the left engine. Before he could get away another one hit in the radio room and another engine. Parts of the airplane were flying back and actually hitting our airplane. He was the only group commander of the 301st shot down and he became a prisoner of war."
Then there came the bombing of Monte Cassino. Although the Benedictine monastery had been designated as a non-target, Allied ground forces were taking a pounding and believed the Germans were using its high ground to spot for their artillery. The 301st was among a bomber force that dropped 453 tons of high explosives and incendiaries that leveled the monastery.
Shortly thereafter, Moore was fortunate to have been assigned with his navigator to a week of R&R on the island of Capri, because while they were gone, the 301st suffered "Black Week". During missions over those seven days, sixteen B-17s in the wing were lost, six of them from the 32nd Squadron. Moore's crew had been assigned to other bombers for those missions, and save one who was shot down and captured, all were killed. Moore says the operations officer still blames himself for their scheduling and their loss.
A mission on March 22, 1944, thought to be a "milk run", threatened to be Moore's last. Attacked by fighters over Verona, the B-17's #4 and then #3 engines went out, but not before the bomber released its payload over the target. P-51s drove off the enemy fighters, but couldn't do anything else for the damaged bomber.
Moore says he thought about flying to Switzerland, but deciding against internment in a neutral country, he decided to ditch in the Adriatic Sea. Banked to port and under cross-controls just to keep from stalling and plunging down, Moore and his co-pilot fought to stretch the distance the dropping B-17 could cover. The crew began throwing everything they could out of the plane to lighten it. "We had a photographer aboard who was taking pictures of the bombing results. They wanted to throw his camera overboard. He held on to it...until they held him, got a hold of the camera and threw it away."
Another engine started spewing oil and Moore knew the ditching would come soon. The B-17 had made it 5 miles off the coast and when Moore was 500 feet over the water and he cut the final engine and feathered the prop for a deadstick ditching. The crew was picked up in the dark of night by a South African boat crew.
On Moore's 50th mission a week later, he says flak over Yugoslavia could have ended it all for the B-17 pilot. "All at once a piece of flak came through the windshield and hit the compass up there and then hit me in the neck. When that hit the compass, it slowed it down, and I think it could have damaged me quite a bit."
After that mission, Moore was sent back to the States, where he continued to fly as an instructor teaching instrument flying, training new bomber pilots and flying B-17s loaded with rescue boats on the Texas gulf.