The indelible memories of a navigator aboard a B-24 bomber in World War II reveal in vivid detail how tenuous was victory, and how momentary life could be in every hour of a combat mission.
Lt. Michael J. Cambon didn’t continue in an Air Force career after the war ended, but he still speaks of the unbelievably complex orchestration required to form a bombing raid on Germany by planes overloaded for takeoff on runways sometimes too short.
Now a resident of Lubbock, Cambon was living in New York when he heard about Pearl Harbor, and decisively enlisted for military service. He could have waited to complete a semester of school, but patriotism prevailed.
“Rose was appalled by my decision,” he said of his older sister. “She was certain she could have wangled some sort of deferment that would have enabled me to sit out the war at home.”
Cambon’s eyes weren’t quite adequate for pilot training, so he was assigned to navigator school.
“Aerial navigation required basic subjects such as trigonometry and plane geometry, but also spherical trigonometry for celestial navigation.
“Tools were circular calculators to convert air speed, compass heading and wind drift into direction and speed on the ground; plotting instruments; and the sextant for celestial navigation,” he recalls.
He even learned Morse Code in case the radio operator was knocked out of action.
Practice was done in a trainer with navigation stations plus pilotage — finding the way by recognizing landmarks on a chart.
“Some training ships were converted from old bombers,” he said. “Four crashed during training flights, killing seven.”
Aircraft identification was crucial, and crew members were trained to identify a plane from a photo flashed on a screen in a second or less. In combat, it was a life or death decision, Cambon said.
He was part of the 466th Bomb Group stationed at Attlebridge in England:
“Missions began with a wake-up call at 3 to 5 a.m. by a sergeant with a flashlight, waking up only the men scheduled to fly that day. Dressing was done in haste since the fire in the stove was long gone and the barracks were ice cold.
“This was the worst part of the day — the cold, the dark and the fear.”
Heavily loaded planes needed all the power of their engines and every inch of runway to get off the ground.
He described the planes moving to position for takeoff:
“As the planes approached the end of the runway, each pilot stopped, turned his ship 45 degrees and locked his brakes while he ran each engine to full power.
“The angle parking was necessary in order to avoid blasting the ship behind with prop wash. When our turn came for takeoff, the pilots wheeled the plane around on the end of the runway, taking care to squeeze every last foot available for our run.”
Brakes were locked while the engines roared at full throttle.
“At this point, 5,000 hp were straining at the leash and the ship vibrated like a wild thing. You can’t imagine noise like this — 5,000 hp with no mufflers.”
He said, “The planes took off at one-minute intervals. I was on the flight deck, sitting on the floor in crash position with my back against the armor plate of the cockpit bulkhead. All other crew members were similarly braced near their stations.”
Cambon added, “From my position, I could see the long orange flame shooting from No. 2 engine exhaust and watch the landing gear strut bouncing up and down and gradually lengthening as the wing lifted the load.
“The end of the runway was marked by a row of red lights, and hopefully the pilot had us off before we reached them. As soon as we were in the air and the landing gear was retracted, the pilot eased back the throttles, raised the flaps and made other adjustments in the engine settings.”
The crew checked the equipment to be certain everything was working, and moved into the forming portion of the mission.
“Leading the formation was a plane striped in bright, gaudy, contrasting colors selected for their high visibility. He held to a fixed course around the radio beacon until all three squadrons were complete and the 466th Bomb Group was ready to join the wing. Then he headed for home. Some guys called this forming ship the Judas Goat, because he left before the slaughter.”
He said, “As I recall, we circled 45 minutes to an hour, around and around, gradually building our strength as each plane arrived. Other wings were assembling in adjacent areas, and at a pre-set time each one left and slipped into its assigned place in a gigantic bomber stream heading for Germany.”
World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, whose columns Cambon had read before the war, once visited the bomb group. In a syndicated column about the war that was saved by Cambon, he described the aerial portion of the invasion of Normandy. In it he mentioned first the high-speed dive bombers before turning to the bombers like the one in which Cambon served:
“And then the heavies. They came from directly behind us. At first they were the merest dots in the sky. You could see clots of them against the far heavens, too tiny to count individually. They came on with a terrible slowness.
“They came in flights of 12, three flights to a group and in groups stretched out across the sky. They came in ‘families’ of about 70 planes each. Maybe these gigantic waves were two miles apart, maybe they were 10 miles, I don’t know. But I do know they came in a constant procession and I thought it would never end.”
Pyle wrote of the bombing, “They began ahead of us as the crackle of popcorn and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise that seemed surely to destroy all the world ahead of us.”
His account added, “By now everything was an indescribable cauldron of sounds. Individual noises did not exist. The thundering of the motors in the sky and the roar of bombs ahead filled all the space for noise on earth. Our own heavy artillery was crashing all around us, yet we could hardly hear it.”
Cambon said the temperature at final altitude could range to 50 degrees below zero, but there was heating from electrical connections:
“The pants had the cord that plugged into the plane’s power supply, the jacket and boots connected to the pants, and the gloves snapped onto terminals at the ends of the jacket sleeves.”
Cambon said the engineer would walk to the catwalk in the bomb bay and prepare the bombs by pulling a pin from each fuse. “This permitted the small propellers on the fuses to spin off and arm the bomb after it dropped from the plane.”
Referring to Sgt. Walter Frederick, nose turret gunner, he said, “Freddy and I had crawled through the tunnel under the cockpit past the retracted nose wheel to our positions in the nose.”
He closed and latched the access door behind the gunner.
“I plugged into the intercom and oxygen, hooked up my sling seat and laid out my charts, calculator and plotting instruments on the navigator’s table in front of me. As navigator, I also had the job of recording all battle details for our debriefing later. This included reports of planes downed, chutes observed and numbers and types of enemy fighters.”
He said, “The pilots tightened the formation, the gunners were intent on the sky and I was absorbed in plotting our position ... I was beginning to lose my radar due to jamming by the Germans.”
He said, “Deep in enemy territory and not far from the target was the I.P. — initial point — where the bomber stream altered course and began their bomb run. The bomb bay doors were opened and we donned our flak vests and helmets.”
He remembers that ahead and above their plane, a waist gunner was dutifully dumping chaff — aluminized paper that confused enemy radar — when the box slipped out of his hands.
“It must have been nearly full, because when it crashed into our nose turret it completely shattered the Plexiglas. Our nose turret gunner was startled but uninjured by the shards of plastic and shower of chaff. He was exposed to a frigid blast of air — 250 mph at minus 40 to 50 degrees — and even with his protective clothing couldn’t survive long.”
Cambon related the emergency in mater-of-fact language:
“He asked to unhook his intercom and oxygen and I advised the pilot that I was about to unlatch and open the turret doors. The pilot asked him to hang on a few more minutes since we were approaching the target and he had to release the bombs.
Blast of air
“As soon as he performed this chore, I opened the doors. The blast of air threw me back against my table and my mission log and charts whipped back and plastered themselves against the maze of wires and controls under the pilot’s instrument panel on the flight deck.
“I helped Freddy struggle out of the nose turret and plugged his oxygen into the bombardier’s outlet. Together we strained to close the doors, but even the two of us with all our might could not prevail against the wind to get the latch to lock. In desperation, I took a spare heater cord and wired the handles as tight as possible while Freddy braced himself against the doors. The wind still whistled through the opening, freezing the exposed areas of my face. Freddy crawled back to the flight deck with a walk-around oxygen bottle, and I recovered my charts and equipment. Luckily, they had not jammed any of the flight controls.”
He noted, “The flak on the bomb run was heavy. The sky was full of the three-dimensional polka dot pattern of bursting shells — clover leafs for the 88s and stovepipes for the 105s. We could feel the concussion from the near bursts, and the flak sounded like a hammer when it ripped through the fuselage.
“Planes are hit around us, some trailing smoke from an engine and losing altitude, some streaming flame from a fuel tank before exploding in a ball of fire. Our gunners watched stricken craft fall and counted the chutes.
“I noted all their observations in my log.”
Pyle, on the ground, wrote of similar aerial combat over Normandy:
“Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all.
“One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see the flier fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.”
Of the continuous stream of bombers, he wrote:
“Nothing deviated them by the slightest. They stalked on, slowly and with a dreadful pall of sound, as though they were seeing only some thing at a great distance and nothing existed in between.
“God, how you admired those men up there and sickened for the ones who fell.”
In a phenomenon of the mind that he can’t explain, Cambon has no memory of the trip home to the United States after all the missions were completed.
It must have been a time of rest.
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