USAAF WORLD WAR II
Gunner S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Survived crash-landing
Hometown: Littlerock, Arkansas
Squadron: 67th Sq. 44th Bomb Group
Service# 38179723
Awards: Air Medal, Purple Heart
Pilot 1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Survived crash-landing
MACR #8714
Target: Military Installations, Agathe D’Aliermont, France
Mission Date: 21-Jan-44
Serial Number: #42-99970
Aircraft Model B-24
Aircraft Letter: M-Bar
Aircraft Name: LIB-ERTY BELLE
Location:
Cause: FLAK
Crew of 13 2KIA 3POW 8RTD
The second formation of the 44th BG was led by lst Lt. Keith Cookus of the 67th Squadron and included planes from the 67th and 506th Squadrons. Their target was military installations south of Calais, France.
67th Squadron’s 1st Lt. Keith Cookus was leading this formation with Command Pilot Major William N. Anderson (flying his 25th mission) as well as the Group Gunnery Officer and Group Bombardier along just to observe, as it should have been an easy, short attack. Bombing altitude
was at 12,000 feet to assure better accuracy on a very small target.
Keith Cookus wrote this description: “We met little opposition at first. We had cloud cover, anyway. As we were trying to bomb through this cloud layer, it was necessary to make five runs on the target, hoping to get a hole large enough for visual bombing. But we could not be sure, so we turned back with our bombs. We never bomb in France unless we are dead sure of our target. “As we were crossing the French coast, we found the Jerries had moved in a bunch of mobile ack-ack. They must have been tracking us for quite a time. The first burst was so close I heard it. I started evasive action. There were 12 of us in the formation, but 30 seconds after that first burst, we got hit at 11,000 feet. It happened so fast we were thrown around completely out of control by the smack of the explosions. The Jerries got us with seven direct hits in a bunch! I put the plane into a dive as soon as I got some sort of control and went down as fast as I could to 8,000 feet to get out of the area as quickly as possible – and we were not hit again. But I realized at once that there was not much of my plane left. Those bursts practically blew us to pieces. One of the shells burst right inside the bomb bay, ripping out the catwalk which holds the bottom of the fuselage together. This shell killed the Command Pilot, Major Anderson (506th Squadron), who was standing between the co-pilot and me. It also blew the radio operator completely out of our plane. We never saw him again (Trechel, POW). It wounded Chubby Campbell, my navigator, as well as our tail gunner, Moe Becker. There was a hole in the middle of the plane just as if a big shark had taken a bite out of it. “Neither Tiny Holladay, co-pilot, or I was touched. Major Anderson had slumped to the floor of the cockpit and was lying in a heap. I couldn’t get any news from the rest of the plane because nothing was working. #1 engine had been blown to pieces – that was the second direct hit. It was hanging in shreds, but I managed to feather the propeller before I lost all of the pressure there. The third direct hit had blown out half of my #2 engine – there was nothing there to feather. I then saw that #3 engine was on fire. The engineer, Kowalski, saw the hit on this engine. The flash of the explosion set it on fire and it was blazing furiously, leaving a long lick of black smoke trailing back, streaked with red. I had to leave it to burn because I could not get back to the English coast without letting that engine run as long as it could. I just left it and looked the other way – but couldn’t forget it because it began to fill the plane with gas and smoke. ‘The Major’s in a bad way, Buck’, Tiny yelled. ‘He’s hit in the legs and through the back. He’s asking for morphine.’ We gave the Major two shots on the way back to the coast, but it was clear that he was in very bad shape. There had been another direct hit in the base of the nose turret. Splinters sailed up all around Sgt. Seigfried, but by some miracle, he wasn’t hit although it blew the top right off of his turret. “Another direct hit had gone clean through the right wing. The shell – the seventh they had pumped into us – took the right main landing gear with it, and part of it is metal as thick around as your thigh. All of the hydraulics were out. “I had to keep that blazing engine going to get us home. I couldn’t ditch because we had wounded aboard. I still thought the Major would live. The group bombardier and gunnery officers jumped immediately after seeing half of the middle of the ship was gone, but I had no interphone to tell the others to bail out. We were over the coast and the wind should have taken them back to land in France. (It did.) Both men captured, taken to Rouen along with others downed that day. “As we were settling down to the job of trying to get home, the bombardier, Junior Cole, crawled up on the flight deck. Junior, a big guy, was covered with blood – his face looked awful. The blast had tossed him around, but later we found out that he had crawled into the bomb bay, holding on with his hands and toes to anything he could find that was still firmly rooted to the rest of the plane. He had been tossing out what he could of the mess of shattered bombs in there. With the emergency release mechanism gone, it was the only way he could rid our plane of these dangerous bombs. He’d cut his hands to ribbons. And his intent then was to advise me that he could not get rid of all the bombs. Then he flopped down, couldn’t see and couldn’t talk, couldn’t move. He died of suffocation later in the crash when he was trapped on the flight deck, before we could free him. “The ball turret gunner, Sgt. Fong, Chinese, managed to get himself out of the ball turret. How, he did not know. His turret was a jangle of twisted metal like in a train wreck, was filling with blazing hydraulic oil. Fong’s clothing was on fire when he got out and as he crawled back toward the tail, flames and burning oil were blowing back at him. He joined Walter Boyd and the other waist gunner. They were back there in the tail section covering their faces with their gloves against the blazing oil. Luckily, all oil burnt out of the hydraulic system and stopped blowing back at them. All three got bad face burns; Fong’s hands were terrible.
“It was only common sense to bail out. The machine was on fire, it was wobbling like a broken fishing pole, smoke was pouring out of one of the two engines still running, etc. Kowalski picked up his chute and Fong watched him fumble with it. ‘She is still flying, isn’t she?’ he said... We
were going along all right, heading straight for England and not losing too much height. Tiny shouted in my ear, ‘Coast!’ At that moment there was a whooosh and a smack that made the plane shake like jelly. I saw that I had no power on #3 – the engine had blown up and was white hot. But it got us home. ‘How’s Anderson?’ I asked of Tiny. He said, ‘The landing won’t hurt him, Buck. He’s dead.’ We had to pick a landing spot quickly, and I went in. I cut my sole remaining engine at 50 feet and switched off everything in sight. I saw that we were going to hit the roof of a farmhouse. We were headed for a belly flop anyhow, so I swung the machine around and slammed it back – we missed the house. We shot across that field with its ups and downs like a piece of soap on a bathroom floor. We ended up in a ditch. I thought that the plane might go up any minute – we had all of those bombs aboard. Our extinguisher had no effect on that burning #3 engine. I tore a hole in the cowling and was stuffing earth, turf, a nything I could grab, into the fire to smother it as our men were trapped on the flight deck and we couldn’t get to them. The co-pilot, Tiny, told me later that he had stayed inside trying to help get those trapped men out, tearing at anything to get them free, but he didn’t have a chance.
---------------------------------------------------------
A U.S. Bomber Base in England, Jun 23 - Flak-torn and with three of its engines gone, the Liberator "Liberty Bell" crash-landed near a southeast England town after the Friday raids on the French coast and for three hours the pilot and four fellow-crewmen battled to save three others trapped in the blazing wreckage with the bodies of two death officers.
Thirteen men went out on the Liberty Bell. Eight returned alive. A half-dozen flak bursts struck her over Dieppe, starting afire in the bomb bay, igniting No. 3 engine and knocking out the controls of No. 1 and No. 2 engines. Pilot Lt. Keith Cookus of Bonham, Tex., ordered the high explosive bomb load released. Bombardier Lt. Woodrow C. Cole of Hollywood, Calif., had to hang on to the bomb bay to release one bomb which had stuck because the catwalk was blown away. The blazing engine exploded near the English coast and was still burning when at a 50-foot height Cookus veered to avoid hitting a house and the plane crashed into a field. Trapped on the flight deck, but finally saved were the nose turret gunner, Sgt. Eugene K. Siefried, Philadelphia; Navigator Franklin A. Campbell, Detroit, and the top turret gunner, Sgt. Herman Becker, Woodbury, N.J.
"Despite the great danger they never uttered a complaint during the three hours we hacked at the wreckage," Cookus said. "High octane gas could have blow up, but they stayed calm--showed the greatest courage I have ever seen." First to climb out of the plane were three gunners, including Sgt. Thomas Fong, Oakland, Calif. Cook and Co-Pilot Lt. Howard K. Halladay,Somerset, Ky., followed. The gunners suffered superficial burns from flaming oil. Cookus' mates told how he dug desperately with a shovel brought by a farmer to build up an earth wall to keep the fire in the engines from the trapped men and how he tried futilely to lift a section of the plane. "We felt so helpless until a British fire engine arrived to put out the fire," Cookus said. "I would have gone crazy if the fire had spread to the boys. Once I was bawling there like a baby." With axes and wreck-bars a hole was made in the wreckage to pull out the survivors and the two bodies.
LIB-ERTY BELLE Crew
Major William N. Anderson Command Pilot
1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Pilot
1st/Lt. Howard K. Holladay Co Pilot
1st/Lt. Franklin A. Campbell Navigator
1st/Lt. Woodrow W. Cole Bombardier KIA
1st/Lt. Henry A. Weiser Observer POW
Captain Robert L. Ager Group Bombardier POW
T/Sgt. Andrew A. Kowalski Engineer
S/Sgt. Richard J. Trechel Radio Op. POW
S/Sgt. Eugene K. Seigfried Gunner POW
Sgt. Thomas Fong Gunner
S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Gunner
S/Sgt. Herman Becker Gunner
Gunner S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Survived crash-landing
Hometown: Littlerock, Arkansas
Squadron: 67th Sq. 44th Bomb Group
Service# 38179723
Awards: Air Medal, Purple Heart
Pilot 1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Survived crash-landing
MACR #8714
Target: Military Installations, Agathe D’Aliermont, France
Mission Date: 21-Jan-44
Serial Number: #42-99970
Aircraft Model B-24
Aircraft Letter: M-Bar
Aircraft Name: LIB-ERTY BELLE
Location:
Cause: FLAK
Crew of 13 2KIA 3POW 8RTD
The second formation of the 44th BG was led by lst Lt. Keith Cookus of the 67th Squadron and included planes from the 67th and 506th Squadrons. Their target was military installations south of Calais, France.
67th Squadron’s 1st Lt. Keith Cookus was leading this formation with Command Pilot Major William N. Anderson (flying his 25th mission) as well as the Group Gunnery Officer and Group Bombardier along just to observe, as it should have been an easy, short attack. Bombing altitude
was at 12,000 feet to assure better accuracy on a very small target.
Keith Cookus wrote this description: “We met little opposition at first. We had cloud cover, anyway. As we were trying to bomb through this cloud layer, it was necessary to make five runs on the target, hoping to get a hole large enough for visual bombing. But we could not be sure, so we turned back with our bombs. We never bomb in France unless we are dead sure of our target. “As we were crossing the French coast, we found the Jerries had moved in a bunch of mobile ack-ack. They must have been tracking us for quite a time. The first burst was so close I heard it. I started evasive action. There were 12 of us in the formation, but 30 seconds after that first burst, we got hit at 11,000 feet. It happened so fast we were thrown around completely out of control by the smack of the explosions. The Jerries got us with seven direct hits in a bunch! I put the plane into a dive as soon as I got some sort of control and went down as fast as I could to 8,000 feet to get out of the area as quickly as possible – and we were not hit again. But I realized at once that there was not much of my plane left. Those bursts practically blew us to pieces. One of the shells burst right inside the bomb bay, ripping out the catwalk which holds the bottom of the fuselage together. This shell killed the Command Pilot, Major Anderson (506th Squadron), who was standing between the co-pilot and me. It also blew the radio operator completely out of our plane. We never saw him again (Trechel, POW). It wounded Chubby Campbell, my navigator, as well as our tail gunner, Moe Becker. There was a hole in the middle of the plane just as if a big shark had taken a bite out of it. “Neither Tiny Holladay, co-pilot, or I was touched. Major Anderson had slumped to the floor of the cockpit and was lying in a heap. I couldn’t get any news from the rest of the plane because nothing was working. #1 engine had been blown to pieces – that was the second direct hit. It was hanging in shreds, but I managed to feather the propeller before I lost all of the pressure there. The third direct hit had blown out half of my #2 engine – there was nothing there to feather. I then saw that #3 engine was on fire. The engineer, Kowalski, saw the hit on this engine. The flash of the explosion set it on fire and it was blazing furiously, leaving a long lick of black smoke trailing back, streaked with red. I had to leave it to burn because I could not get back to the English coast without letting that engine run as long as it could. I just left it and looked the other way – but couldn’t forget it because it began to fill the plane with gas and smoke. ‘The Major’s in a bad way, Buck’, Tiny yelled. ‘He’s hit in the legs and through the back. He’s asking for morphine.’ We gave the Major two shots on the way back to the coast, but it was clear that he was in very bad shape. There had been another direct hit in the base of the nose turret. Splinters sailed up all around Sgt. Seigfried, but by some miracle, he wasn’t hit although it blew the top right off of his turret. “Another direct hit had gone clean through the right wing. The shell – the seventh they had pumped into us – took the right main landing gear with it, and part of it is metal as thick around as your thigh. All of the hydraulics were out. “I had to keep that blazing engine going to get us home. I couldn’t ditch because we had wounded aboard. I still thought the Major would live. The group bombardier and gunnery officers jumped immediately after seeing half of the middle of the ship was gone, but I had no interphone to tell the others to bail out. We were over the coast and the wind should have taken them back to land in France. (It did.) Both men captured, taken to Rouen along with others downed that day. “As we were settling down to the job of trying to get home, the bombardier, Junior Cole, crawled up on the flight deck. Junior, a big guy, was covered with blood – his face looked awful. The blast had tossed him around, but later we found out that he had crawled into the bomb bay, holding on with his hands and toes to anything he could find that was still firmly rooted to the rest of the plane. He had been tossing out what he could of the mess of shattered bombs in there. With the emergency release mechanism gone, it was the only way he could rid our plane of these dangerous bombs. He’d cut his hands to ribbons. And his intent then was to advise me that he could not get rid of all the bombs. Then he flopped down, couldn’t see and couldn’t talk, couldn’t move. He died of suffocation later in the crash when he was trapped on the flight deck, before we could free him. “The ball turret gunner, Sgt. Fong, Chinese, managed to get himself out of the ball turret. How, he did not know. His turret was a jangle of twisted metal like in a train wreck, was filling with blazing hydraulic oil. Fong’s clothing was on fire when he got out and as he crawled back toward the tail, flames and burning oil were blowing back at him. He joined Walter Boyd and the other waist gunner. They were back there in the tail section covering their faces with their gloves against the blazing oil. Luckily, all oil burnt out of the hydraulic system and stopped blowing back at them. All three got bad face burns; Fong’s hands were terrible.
“It was only common sense to bail out. The machine was on fire, it was wobbling like a broken fishing pole, smoke was pouring out of one of the two engines still running, etc. Kowalski picked up his chute and Fong watched him fumble with it. ‘She is still flying, isn’t she?’ he said... We
were going along all right, heading straight for England and not losing too much height. Tiny shouted in my ear, ‘Coast!’ At that moment there was a whooosh and a smack that made the plane shake like jelly. I saw that I had no power on #3 – the engine had blown up and was white hot. But it got us home. ‘How’s Anderson?’ I asked of Tiny. He said, ‘The landing won’t hurt him, Buck. He’s dead.’ We had to pick a landing spot quickly, and I went in. I cut my sole remaining engine at 50 feet and switched off everything in sight. I saw that we were going to hit the roof of a farmhouse. We were headed for a belly flop anyhow, so I swung the machine around and slammed it back – we missed the house. We shot across that field with its ups and downs like a piece of soap on a bathroom floor. We ended up in a ditch. I thought that the plane might go up any minute – we had all of those bombs aboard. Our extinguisher had no effect on that burning #3 engine. I tore a hole in the cowling and was stuffing earth, turf, a nything I could grab, into the fire to smother it as our men were trapped on the flight deck and we couldn’t get to them. The co-pilot, Tiny, told me later that he had stayed inside trying to help get those trapped men out, tearing at anything to get them free, but he didn’t have a chance.
---------------------------------------------------------
A U.S. Bomber Base in England, Jun 23 - Flak-torn and with three of its engines gone, the Liberator "Liberty Bell" crash-landed near a southeast England town after the Friday raids on the French coast and for three hours the pilot and four fellow-crewmen battled to save three others trapped in the blazing wreckage with the bodies of two death officers.
Thirteen men went out on the Liberty Bell. Eight returned alive. A half-dozen flak bursts struck her over Dieppe, starting afire in the bomb bay, igniting No. 3 engine and knocking out the controls of No. 1 and No. 2 engines. Pilot Lt. Keith Cookus of Bonham, Tex., ordered the high explosive bomb load released. Bombardier Lt. Woodrow C. Cole of Hollywood, Calif., had to hang on to the bomb bay to release one bomb which had stuck because the catwalk was blown away. The blazing engine exploded near the English coast and was still burning when at a 50-foot height Cookus veered to avoid hitting a house and the plane crashed into a field. Trapped on the flight deck, but finally saved were the nose turret gunner, Sgt. Eugene K. Siefried, Philadelphia; Navigator Franklin A. Campbell, Detroit, and the top turret gunner, Sgt. Herman Becker, Woodbury, N.J.
"Despite the great danger they never uttered a complaint during the three hours we hacked at the wreckage," Cookus said. "High octane gas could have blow up, but they stayed calm--showed the greatest courage I have ever seen." First to climb out of the plane were three gunners, including Sgt. Thomas Fong, Oakland, Calif. Cook and Co-Pilot Lt. Howard K. Halladay,Somerset, Ky., followed. The gunners suffered superficial burns from flaming oil. Cookus' mates told how he dug desperately with a shovel brought by a farmer to build up an earth wall to keep the fire in the engines from the trapped men and how he tried futilely to lift a section of the plane. "We felt so helpless until a British fire engine arrived to put out the fire," Cookus said. "I would have gone crazy if the fire had spread to the boys. Once I was bawling there like a baby." With axes and wreck-bars a hole was made in the wreckage to pull out the survivors and the two bodies.
LIB-ERTY BELLE Crew
Major William N. Anderson Command Pilot
1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Pilot
1st/Lt. Howard K. Holladay Co Pilot
1st/Lt. Franklin A. Campbell Navigator
1st/Lt. Woodrow W. Cole Bombardier KIA
1st/Lt. Henry A. Weiser Observer POW
Captain Robert L. Ager Group Bombardier POW
T/Sgt. Andrew A. Kowalski Engineer
S/Sgt. Richard J. Trechel Radio Op. POW
S/Sgt. Eugene K. Seigfried Gunner POW
Sgt. Thomas Fong Gunner
S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Gunner
S/Sgt. Herman Becker Gunner
USAAF WORLD WAR II
Gunner S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Survived crash-landing
Hometown: Littlerock, Arkansas
Squadron: 67th Sq. 44th Bomb Group
Service# 38179723
Awards: Air Medal, Purple Heart
Pilot 1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Survived crash-landing
MACR #8714
Target: Military Installations, Agathe D’Aliermont, France
Mission Date: 21-Jan-44
Serial Number: #42-99970
Aircraft Model B-24
Aircraft Letter: M-Bar
Aircraft Name: LIB-ERTY BELLE
Location:
Cause: FLAK
Crew of 13 2KIA 3POW 8RTD
The second formation of the 44th BG was led by lst Lt. Keith Cookus of the 67th Squadron and included planes from the 67th and 506th Squadrons. Their target was military installations south of Calais, France.
67th Squadron’s 1st Lt. Keith Cookus was leading this formation with Command Pilot Major William N. Anderson (flying his 25th mission) as well as the Group Gunnery Officer and Group Bombardier along just to observe, as it should have been an easy, short attack. Bombing altitude
was at 12,000 feet to assure better accuracy on a very small target.
Keith Cookus wrote this description: “We met little opposition at first. We had cloud cover, anyway. As we were trying to bomb through this cloud layer, it was necessary to make five runs on the target, hoping to get a hole large enough for visual bombing. But we could not be sure, so we turned back with our bombs. We never bomb in France unless we are dead sure of our target. “As we were crossing the French coast, we found the Jerries had moved in a bunch of mobile ack-ack. They must have been tracking us for quite a time. The first burst was so close I heard it. I started evasive action. There were 12 of us in the formation, but 30 seconds after that first burst, we got hit at 11,000 feet. It happened so fast we were thrown around completely out of control by the smack of the explosions. The Jerries got us with seven direct hits in a bunch! I put the plane into a dive as soon as I got some sort of control and went down as fast as I could to 8,000 feet to get out of the area as quickly as possible – and we were not hit again. But I realized at once that there was not much of my plane left. Those bursts practically blew us to pieces. One of the shells burst right inside the bomb bay, ripping out the catwalk which holds the bottom of the fuselage together. This shell killed the Command Pilot, Major Anderson (506th Squadron), who was standing between the co-pilot and me. It also blew the radio operator completely out of our plane. We never saw him again (Trechel, POW). It wounded Chubby Campbell, my navigator, as well as our tail gunner, Moe Becker. There was a hole in the middle of the plane just as if a big shark had taken a bite out of it. “Neither Tiny Holladay, co-pilot, or I was touched. Major Anderson had slumped to the floor of the cockpit and was lying in a heap. I couldn’t get any news from the rest of the plane because nothing was working. #1 engine had been blown to pieces – that was the second direct hit. It was hanging in shreds, but I managed to feather the propeller before I lost all of the pressure there. The third direct hit had blown out half of my #2 engine – there was nothing there to feather. I then saw that #3 engine was on fire. The engineer, Kowalski, saw the hit on this engine. The flash of the explosion set it on fire and it was blazing furiously, leaving a long lick of black smoke trailing back, streaked with red. I had to leave it to burn because I could not get back to the English coast without letting that engine run as long as it could. I just left it and looked the other way – but couldn’t forget it because it began to fill the plane with gas and smoke. ‘The Major’s in a bad way, Buck’, Tiny yelled. ‘He’s hit in the legs and through the back. He’s asking for morphine.’ We gave the Major two shots on the way back to the coast, but it was clear that he was in very bad shape. There had been another direct hit in the base of the nose turret. Splinters sailed up all around Sgt. Seigfried, but by some miracle, he wasn’t hit although it blew the top right off of his turret. “Another direct hit had gone clean through the right wing. The shell – the seventh they had pumped into us – took the right main landing gear with it, and part of it is metal as thick around as your thigh. All of the hydraulics were out. “I had to keep that blazing engine going to get us home. I couldn’t ditch because we had wounded aboard. I still thought the Major would live. The group bombardier and gunnery officers jumped immediately after seeing half of the middle of the ship was gone, but I had no interphone to tell the others to bail out. We were over the coast and the wind should have taken them back to land in France. (It did.) Both men captured, taken to Rouen along with others downed that day. “As we were settling down to the job of trying to get home, the bombardier, Junior Cole, crawled up on the flight deck. Junior, a big guy, was covered with blood – his face looked awful. The blast had tossed him around, but later we found out that he had crawled into the bomb bay, holding on with his hands and toes to anything he could find that was still firmly rooted to the rest of the plane. He had been tossing out what he could of the mess of shattered bombs in there. With the emergency release mechanism gone, it was the only way he could rid our plane of these dangerous bombs. He’d cut his hands to ribbons. And his intent then was to advise me that he could not get rid of all the bombs. Then he flopped down, couldn’t see and couldn’t talk, couldn’t move. He died of suffocation later in the crash when he was trapped on the flight deck, before we could free him. “The ball turret gunner, Sgt. Fong, Chinese, managed to get himself out of the ball turret. How, he did not know. His turret was a jangle of twisted metal like in a train wreck, was filling with blazing hydraulic oil. Fong’s clothing was on fire when he got out and as he crawled back toward the tail, flames and burning oil were blowing back at him. He joined Walter Boyd and the other waist gunner. They were back there in the tail section covering their faces with their gloves against the blazing oil. Luckily, all oil burnt out of the hydraulic system and stopped blowing back at them. All three got bad face burns; Fong’s hands were terrible.
“It was only common sense to bail out. The machine was on fire, it was wobbling like a broken fishing pole, smoke was pouring out of one of the two engines still running, etc. Kowalski picked up his chute and Fong watched him fumble with it. ‘She is still flying, isn’t she?’ he said... We
were going along all right, heading straight for England and not losing too much height. Tiny shouted in my ear, ‘Coast!’ At that moment there was a whooosh and a smack that made the plane shake like jelly. I saw that I had no power on #3 – the engine had blown up and was white hot. But it got us home. ‘How’s Anderson?’ I asked of Tiny. He said, ‘The landing won’t hurt him, Buck. He’s dead.’ We had to pick a landing spot quickly, and I went in. I cut my sole remaining engine at 50 feet and switched off everything in sight. I saw that we were going to hit the roof of a farmhouse. We were headed for a belly flop anyhow, so I swung the machine around and slammed it back – we missed the house. We shot across that field with its ups and downs like a piece of soap on a bathroom floor. We ended up in a ditch. I thought that the plane might go up any minute – we had all of those bombs aboard. Our extinguisher had no effect on that burning #3 engine. I tore a hole in the cowling and was stuffing earth, turf, a nything I could grab, into the fire to smother it as our men were trapped on the flight deck and we couldn’t get to them. The co-pilot, Tiny, told me later that he had stayed inside trying to help get those trapped men out, tearing at anything to get them free, but he didn’t have a chance.
---------------------------------------------------------
A U.S. Bomber Base in England, Jun 23 - Flak-torn and with three of its engines gone, the Liberator "Liberty Bell" crash-landed near a southeast England town after the Friday raids on the French coast and for three hours the pilot and four fellow-crewmen battled to save three others trapped in the blazing wreckage with the bodies of two death officers.
Thirteen men went out on the Liberty Bell. Eight returned alive. A half-dozen flak bursts struck her over Dieppe, starting afire in the bomb bay, igniting No. 3 engine and knocking out the controls of No. 1 and No. 2 engines. Pilot Lt. Keith Cookus of Bonham, Tex., ordered the high explosive bomb load released. Bombardier Lt. Woodrow C. Cole of Hollywood, Calif., had to hang on to the bomb bay to release one bomb which had stuck because the catwalk was blown away. The blazing engine exploded near the English coast and was still burning when at a 50-foot height Cookus veered to avoid hitting a house and the plane crashed into a field. Trapped on the flight deck, but finally saved were the nose turret gunner, Sgt. Eugene K. Siefried, Philadelphia; Navigator Franklin A. Campbell, Detroit, and the top turret gunner, Sgt. Herman Becker, Woodbury, N.J.
"Despite the great danger they never uttered a complaint during the three hours we hacked at the wreckage," Cookus said. "High octane gas could have blow up, but they stayed calm--showed the greatest courage I have ever seen." First to climb out of the plane were three gunners, including Sgt. Thomas Fong, Oakland, Calif. Cook and Co-Pilot Lt. Howard K. Halladay,Somerset, Ky., followed. The gunners suffered superficial burns from flaming oil. Cookus' mates told how he dug desperately with a shovel brought by a farmer to build up an earth wall to keep the fire in the engines from the trapped men and how he tried futilely to lift a section of the plane. "We felt so helpless until a British fire engine arrived to put out the fire," Cookus said. "I would have gone crazy if the fire had spread to the boys. Once I was bawling there like a baby." With axes and wreck-bars a hole was made in the wreckage to pull out the survivors and the two bodies.
LIB-ERTY BELLE Crew
Major William N. Anderson Command Pilot
1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Pilot
1st/Lt. Howard K. Holladay Co Pilot
1st/Lt. Franklin A. Campbell Navigator
1st/Lt. Woodrow W. Cole Bombardier KIA
1st/Lt. Henry A. Weiser Observer POW
Captain Robert L. Ager Group Bombardier POW
T/Sgt. Andrew A. Kowalski Engineer
S/Sgt. Richard J. Trechel Radio Op. POW
S/Sgt. Eugene K. Seigfried Gunner POW
Sgt. Thomas Fong Gunner
S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Gunner
S/Sgt. Herman Becker Gunner
Gunner S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Survived crash-landing
Hometown: Littlerock, Arkansas
Squadron: 67th Sq. 44th Bomb Group
Service# 38179723
Awards: Air Medal, Purple Heart
Pilot 1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Survived crash-landing
MACR #8714
Target: Military Installations, Agathe D’Aliermont, France
Mission Date: 21-Jan-44
Serial Number: #42-99970
Aircraft Model B-24
Aircraft Letter: M-Bar
Aircraft Name: LIB-ERTY BELLE
Location:
Cause: FLAK
Crew of 13 2KIA 3POW 8RTD
The second formation of the 44th BG was led by lst Lt. Keith Cookus of the 67th Squadron and included planes from the 67th and 506th Squadrons. Their target was military installations south of Calais, France.
67th Squadron’s 1st Lt. Keith Cookus was leading this formation with Command Pilot Major William N. Anderson (flying his 25th mission) as well as the Group Gunnery Officer and Group Bombardier along just to observe, as it should have been an easy, short attack. Bombing altitude
was at 12,000 feet to assure better accuracy on a very small target.
Keith Cookus wrote this description: “We met little opposition at first. We had cloud cover, anyway. As we were trying to bomb through this cloud layer, it was necessary to make five runs on the target, hoping to get a hole large enough for visual bombing. But we could not be sure, so we turned back with our bombs. We never bomb in France unless we are dead sure of our target. “As we were crossing the French coast, we found the Jerries had moved in a bunch of mobile ack-ack. They must have been tracking us for quite a time. The first burst was so close I heard it. I started evasive action. There were 12 of us in the formation, but 30 seconds after that first burst, we got hit at 11,000 feet. It happened so fast we were thrown around completely out of control by the smack of the explosions. The Jerries got us with seven direct hits in a bunch! I put the plane into a dive as soon as I got some sort of control and went down as fast as I could to 8,000 feet to get out of the area as quickly as possible – and we were not hit again. But I realized at once that there was not much of my plane left. Those bursts practically blew us to pieces. One of the shells burst right inside the bomb bay, ripping out the catwalk which holds the bottom of the fuselage together. This shell killed the Command Pilot, Major Anderson (506th Squadron), who was standing between the co-pilot and me. It also blew the radio operator completely out of our plane. We never saw him again (Trechel, POW). It wounded Chubby Campbell, my navigator, as well as our tail gunner, Moe Becker. There was a hole in the middle of the plane just as if a big shark had taken a bite out of it. “Neither Tiny Holladay, co-pilot, or I was touched. Major Anderson had slumped to the floor of the cockpit and was lying in a heap. I couldn’t get any news from the rest of the plane because nothing was working. #1 engine had been blown to pieces – that was the second direct hit. It was hanging in shreds, but I managed to feather the propeller before I lost all of the pressure there. The third direct hit had blown out half of my #2 engine – there was nothing there to feather. I then saw that #3 engine was on fire. The engineer, Kowalski, saw the hit on this engine. The flash of the explosion set it on fire and it was blazing furiously, leaving a long lick of black smoke trailing back, streaked with red. I had to leave it to burn because I could not get back to the English coast without letting that engine run as long as it could. I just left it and looked the other way – but couldn’t forget it because it began to fill the plane with gas and smoke. ‘The Major’s in a bad way, Buck’, Tiny yelled. ‘He’s hit in the legs and through the back. He’s asking for morphine.’ We gave the Major two shots on the way back to the coast, but it was clear that he was in very bad shape. There had been another direct hit in the base of the nose turret. Splinters sailed up all around Sgt. Seigfried, but by some miracle, he wasn’t hit although it blew the top right off of his turret. “Another direct hit had gone clean through the right wing. The shell – the seventh they had pumped into us – took the right main landing gear with it, and part of it is metal as thick around as your thigh. All of the hydraulics were out. “I had to keep that blazing engine going to get us home. I couldn’t ditch because we had wounded aboard. I still thought the Major would live. The group bombardier and gunnery officers jumped immediately after seeing half of the middle of the ship was gone, but I had no interphone to tell the others to bail out. We were over the coast and the wind should have taken them back to land in France. (It did.) Both men captured, taken to Rouen along with others downed that day. “As we were settling down to the job of trying to get home, the bombardier, Junior Cole, crawled up on the flight deck. Junior, a big guy, was covered with blood – his face looked awful. The blast had tossed him around, but later we found out that he had crawled into the bomb bay, holding on with his hands and toes to anything he could find that was still firmly rooted to the rest of the plane. He had been tossing out what he could of the mess of shattered bombs in there. With the emergency release mechanism gone, it was the only way he could rid our plane of these dangerous bombs. He’d cut his hands to ribbons. And his intent then was to advise me that he could not get rid of all the bombs. Then he flopped down, couldn’t see and couldn’t talk, couldn’t move. He died of suffocation later in the crash when he was trapped on the flight deck, before we could free him. “The ball turret gunner, Sgt. Fong, Chinese, managed to get himself out of the ball turret. How, he did not know. His turret was a jangle of twisted metal like in a train wreck, was filling with blazing hydraulic oil. Fong’s clothing was on fire when he got out and as he crawled back toward the tail, flames and burning oil were blowing back at him. He joined Walter Boyd and the other waist gunner. They were back there in the tail section covering their faces with their gloves against the blazing oil. Luckily, all oil burnt out of the hydraulic system and stopped blowing back at them. All three got bad face burns; Fong’s hands were terrible.
“It was only common sense to bail out. The machine was on fire, it was wobbling like a broken fishing pole, smoke was pouring out of one of the two engines still running, etc. Kowalski picked up his chute and Fong watched him fumble with it. ‘She is still flying, isn’t she?’ he said... We
were going along all right, heading straight for England and not losing too much height. Tiny shouted in my ear, ‘Coast!’ At that moment there was a whooosh and a smack that made the plane shake like jelly. I saw that I had no power on #3 – the engine had blown up and was white hot. But it got us home. ‘How’s Anderson?’ I asked of Tiny. He said, ‘The landing won’t hurt him, Buck. He’s dead.’ We had to pick a landing spot quickly, and I went in. I cut my sole remaining engine at 50 feet and switched off everything in sight. I saw that we were going to hit the roof of a farmhouse. We were headed for a belly flop anyhow, so I swung the machine around and slammed it back – we missed the house. We shot across that field with its ups and downs like a piece of soap on a bathroom floor. We ended up in a ditch. I thought that the plane might go up any minute – we had all of those bombs aboard. Our extinguisher had no effect on that burning #3 engine. I tore a hole in the cowling and was stuffing earth, turf, a nything I could grab, into the fire to smother it as our men were trapped on the flight deck and we couldn’t get to them. The co-pilot, Tiny, told me later that he had stayed inside trying to help get those trapped men out, tearing at anything to get them free, but he didn’t have a chance.
---------------------------------------------------------
A U.S. Bomber Base in England, Jun 23 - Flak-torn and with three of its engines gone, the Liberator "Liberty Bell" crash-landed near a southeast England town after the Friday raids on the French coast and for three hours the pilot and four fellow-crewmen battled to save three others trapped in the blazing wreckage with the bodies of two death officers.
Thirteen men went out on the Liberty Bell. Eight returned alive. A half-dozen flak bursts struck her over Dieppe, starting afire in the bomb bay, igniting No. 3 engine and knocking out the controls of No. 1 and No. 2 engines. Pilot Lt. Keith Cookus of Bonham, Tex., ordered the high explosive bomb load released. Bombardier Lt. Woodrow C. Cole of Hollywood, Calif., had to hang on to the bomb bay to release one bomb which had stuck because the catwalk was blown away. The blazing engine exploded near the English coast and was still burning when at a 50-foot height Cookus veered to avoid hitting a house and the plane crashed into a field. Trapped on the flight deck, but finally saved were the nose turret gunner, Sgt. Eugene K. Siefried, Philadelphia; Navigator Franklin A. Campbell, Detroit, and the top turret gunner, Sgt. Herman Becker, Woodbury, N.J.
"Despite the great danger they never uttered a complaint during the three hours we hacked at the wreckage," Cookus said. "High octane gas could have blow up, but they stayed calm--showed the greatest courage I have ever seen." First to climb out of the plane were three gunners, including Sgt. Thomas Fong, Oakland, Calif. Cook and Co-Pilot Lt. Howard K. Halladay,Somerset, Ky., followed. The gunners suffered superficial burns from flaming oil. Cookus' mates told how he dug desperately with a shovel brought by a farmer to build up an earth wall to keep the fire in the engines from the trapped men and how he tried futilely to lift a section of the plane. "We felt so helpless until a British fire engine arrived to put out the fire," Cookus said. "I would have gone crazy if the fire had spread to the boys. Once I was bawling there like a baby." With axes and wreck-bars a hole was made in the wreckage to pull out the survivors and the two bodies.
LIB-ERTY BELLE Crew
Major William N. Anderson Command Pilot
1st/Lt. Keith Cookus Pilot
1st/Lt. Howard K. Holladay Co Pilot
1st/Lt. Franklin A. Campbell Navigator
1st/Lt. Woodrow W. Cole Bombardier KIA
1st/Lt. Henry A. Weiser Observer POW
Captain Robert L. Ager Group Bombardier POW
T/Sgt. Andrew A. Kowalski Engineer
S/Sgt. Richard J. Trechel Radio Op. POW
S/Sgt. Eugene K. Seigfried Gunner POW
Sgt. Thomas Fong Gunner
S/Sgt. Walter E. Boyd Gunner
S/Sgt. Herman Becker Gunner
Inscription
U. S. Army Air Forces
World War II
Purple Heart
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Advertisement
