The Greatcoat

Shot Down

Herb Stenerude felt the dull thud of the shell as it hit the port engine of his P-38 and heard the nasty sound of pistons crushing under the strain of high RPM.  Under different circumstances, he would be able to fly his aircraft with one engine, but another anti-aircraft shell had damaged his rudder and it was only a matter of time before the aircraft would crash.  All his fears of death were now subordinated to his flying skills as he desperately attempted to control the plane until he could reach a farm field or vacant country road on which to land.  A fierce panic suddenly gripped his insides, rattling his spine to its core.  A milky fog shrouded the landscape outside the cockpit temporarily blinding him, at the same time he realized bailing out at this low altitude was a waste of time since his body would smash into the ground at about the moment his chute opened.

Moments before the plane would have nosed into wooded terrain below with disastrous consequences for Stenerude, he glimpsed a farm field over a cluster of trees only seconds away.  He would bring the plane down slowly and lightly on its belly and hopefully slide along the snow-covered fallow field.  Herb instinctively backed off the throttle then raised power to the good engine skillfully employing the damaged rudder to offset engine thrust, but it was a losing game.  The damaged engine choked to a halt sputtering a trail of billowing black smoke just as he cleared the woods.  Herb cut power to the good engine simultaneously struggling with the rudder to keep the plane level.

God help, oh, please, God, please, he screamed as every muscle in his body contracted into a petrified mass. 

The plane descended to an uncertain landing, smoke trailing in his wake as he fought to keep the aircraft’s nose up, his mind racing with thoughts of immolation and dismemberment.

The P-38 smashed into the ground bouncing off the surface of the snow-covered field like a rock skipping over the surface of a pond.  The propellers bent backward as the aircraft dove into the field again throwing showers of mud and snow over the cockpit, blinding Herb.  He bounced around inside his plane, his head crashing against the side of his bubble top, and his hands wrapped around the control stick like a vise.  The wounded aircraft slid for nearly a football field length across the entire expanse of the farm field and abruptly halted in a ditch alongside a road.

Herb frantically released his seat belt, popped the canopy, and jumped from the plane.  The Germans surely saw him come down and he knew he was behind enemy lines.  He sprinted into the woods wearing only his leather flight jacket and khaki pants, the straps of his leather helmet flapping against his face and the 45 automatic in a holster on his right hip bouncing to the rhythm of his stride.  Over six feet tall, Herb’s basketball buddies used to call him legs as it looked like his legs made up most of his body mass.  He ran aimlessly, desperately emerging from the woods, dashing along the road until he came to an ancient stone bridge over a frozen stream where, without hesitation, he plunged down the side of the structure his entire body slipping into an immense snow drift along the abutment.  Clawing his way out of the snow, he took shelter underneath the ford.

It was the gathering evening of December 22, 1944 and the bitter cold barely fazed a man whose terror-driven adrenalin had just propelled him over a hundred yards of snow-covered terrain like a deer running from a wolf.  He stood beneath the bridge, his arms stretched high to prop himself against the wall, his head hanging straight down as he forced air into his lungs.  As he struggled to catch his breath, he heard his heart pounding furiously inside his hollow chest.  Suddenly, the silent, steel-cold air carried the sound of an approaching vehicle and his racing heartbeat shuddered to near arrest.

A German armored personnel carrier rapidly approached above as Herb knelt in terror below, the churning, whirring sound of the engine growing louder as the vehicle reached the bridge.  Herb detected the crunch of the tires on icy snow as the intruders came to a halt directly over him, and he heard the angular voice of a German officer ordering his men to search under the bridge.  Herb spoke passable German enough to know he was as close to death at that moment as he had ever been.  He listened in paralyzing fright as he heard the boots of his pursuers vacate the vehicle and walk toward the abutments, soon to descend the side to the stream below and discover their prey.  He thought of drawing his weapon, but was totally immobilized by fear as he knew his odds to be thin to none.

Suddenly the powerful engine of an approaching aircraft drowned all other sounds.  He looked out from underneath the bridge and saw the unmistakable silhouette of a P-47 fighter no more than 60 feet off the ground framed by the arch of the bridge bearing down on the span.  Herb crouched as close to the wall as he could and watched as the aircraft’s guns flashed as if firecrackers were going off along the edge of the wing, a solid wall of bullets riddling the ground and the stream, churning a path of ice, snow and dirt then striking the bridge itself in a shower of death.  Bullets traced underneath the bridge missing Herb by a hair.  It was over in a second. Herb immediately checked his person to be sure no appendage had been torn from him in the strafing.  Panic, fear, adrenalin all suddenly converged to produce a convulsed hysteria of stifled laughter. 

There was a deadly silence from above and Herb could smell the choking essence of burning tires as the dense black smoke from the destroyed vehicle drifted off the bridge and ran across the frozen meadow like the flag of carnage fluttering in the winds of hell.  Regaining control of his shaking body, he drew his gun and slowly made his way up and onto the road, crouching beside the abutment and peering over the top.  He would not need his weapon.

The armored personnel carrier burned from every portal and had been shredded by the aircraft’s guns as a rifle might shred a tin can.  All the soldiers had been killed and the bodies so thoroughly torn apart that Herb was unsure how many men were there.  The snow on top of the bridge was draped in blood and flesh – a sacrificial altar to the gods of war.

The heat from the burning vehicle whispered that Herb would need to find warmth if he hoped to survive the predicament he faced.  As the sense of immediate danger receded and the even greater problem of survival in this horrid landscape dawned, Herb could feel the sweat gushing from underneath his flight cap and flowing in rivulets down his neck and his face, the salt stinging his eyes.  He reached up to pull the cap and his goggles from his head and wiped the moisture from his face smoothing the fine filament of curly red hair back neatly before replacing his helmet.

Gazing across the frozen marsh, he could clearly see a farmhouse standing stony, silent, and broken on the horizon, the pure white crystal surface of the snow glistening with a reddish tint in the glow of an early winter sunset.  Again, he wiped his forehead of the sweat streaming down his freckled face and realized the shirt under his flight jacket was soaked.  Herb turned once more before trudging off to the uncertain shelter and gazed upon the carnage on the bridge, his arms and upper body still convulsing in a shaky withdrawal from the adrenalin.

Closing his eyes, he chanted quietly, How am I not dead?  How am I not dead?

***

The farmhouse walls had been broken on all sides by heavy shelling.  Herb was able to locate the pantry and there found a can of beans and several jars of preserved fruits.  Woolen blankets pulled from one of the crushed beds were all that he needed to keep warm for the rest of the evening in the basement of the house.  The structure had taken a direct hit in the roof from a shell and the upper floors had crashed down into the living area on the ground floor.  The kitchen had been spared along with its fireplace and a fresh supply of firewood, but he dared not start a fire for warmth as that might call attention to his position.  The exploding shells had exposed a set of stairs that descended into a cellar which the owners had used for storing food and other supplies.

This must have been a wonderful farm at one time before the war, he quietly thought to himself, I guess it has seen better Christmases than this one.  Herb was stunned by the destruction, having been a witness to war up there in the sky, not down here where the carnage and devastation washed life out of the landscape.  He felt lucky to have found some food and some abandoned shirts, possibly from the father of the family that he could wear beneath his uniform.  He dare not wander the country side in anything but his uniform lest the Germans shoot him on the spot for being a spy.

I have to sleep, he muttered descending the stairs into the basement.  The exhausted pilot stumbled into a dark corner of the damp cellar, the hardened dirt floor no great improvement over concrete, but bundled in the woolen blankets Herb drifted into an uneasy sleep imagining he was an animal in a cave, hibernating against a fierce winter outside.

At least when the bear sleeps, it awakens to spring, he thought falling off.

***

At daybreak, he wasted no time moving on as he knew he was behind enemy lines and the Germans would hunt him unmercifully.  He did not want to be left to the mercy of those who had perpetrated the massacre at Malmedy a week earlier, and would forever be in the debt of the P-47 pilot who had happened upon his pursuers on the bridge, marveling at how those guys took off in terrible conditions to provide ground support.

His situation was surreal.  All of those missions flown in his P-38 Lightning from North Africa to Italy to Southern France had been accomplished with only a few minor scrapes.  Herb recalled his reconnaissance mission back on December 15, the day before the German counteroffensive began, a much more dangerous mission, and yet, he completed it unscathed.

Gathering the meager provisions found in the pantry of the farmhouse, Herb set off to the west hoping to run out of German held territory and into Allied forces.  The blankets would be scant protection against the cold, but he wrapped himself in them anyway and using an old belt he found to fasten them around his waist, Herb began wandering the desolate countryside hoping to find another house to shelter in that evening.  The crusted snow was deep under the overcast and foggy skies and his despair was tempered by the sobering thought of death or imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis.

Herb recalled the air shows ten years earlier when his mother would take him to the carnivals and country fairs where the barnstorming pilots would perform death defying stunts aloft.  He would climb in the car left to them by his father when he had passed and drive across the Delaware River on the marvelous Benjamin Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia into the farm fields just east of Camden, New Jersey.  The stunt flyers were his heroes, and he always dreamed of flying one of those magnificent machines, of spinning and diving like the birds, of feeling the exhilarating freedom of flight.

They were unbelievable, he reminisced, "just awe-inspiring.  I could do that after the war I guess…got to get out of this fix.  God, what was that prayer Mrs. D’Alessandro taught me for being lost or was it for lost causes?  It was something ‘Anthony’ because her husband’s middle name was Anthony so it was St. Anthony – yes, that’s it, ‘Dear St. Anthony please come down, Herbie is lost and can’t be found.’

Laughing inwardly at this nonsense seemed to ease the fear in his predicament.  Combat pilots lived a strange existence taking off from relatively secure air bases in powerful, proven aircraft and if they managed to return to base then it was a square meal in a warm mess hall and drinks and dancing with the English girls who might invite the pilots to their flats to warm their night.

Herb was face to face with the real war now and it wasn’t the same privation he and his mother had faced in the Depression.  The war mingled want and hunger, fear and anxiety in a landscape of destruction that seemed endless and irreparable.  He was a wanderer in this war in the shortest days of the year, the coldest.

I better find some place to stay soon, he thought, it is really getting cold.

He was shuddering now despite the under layer of clothes and the outer layer of blankets, the cold piercing the cloth like vapor through a filter.  It struck him as odd that this was the first time in his life that he had actually reviled snow – as a boy he loved the first snow of the cold weather, grabbing his sled and cascading down suicide hill on Swanks farm.  Cold and hungry he felt his strength beginning to ebb and with sundown quickly approaching and not even the luxury of a crumbled farmhouse to spend the night, Herb crawled under the branches of a fir tree whose boughs were weighed down by the snow.  Under those boughs and close to the trunk of the tree he was remarkably sheltered from the wind and could inhale the pleasant aroma of pine.

Smells like when mom used to clean the house, he thought, or, better yet, when dad brought the Christmas tree home.

He drifted off into a restless sleep recalling his previous reconnaissance flight of a week ago when he thundered across a high level gathering of German officers in a clearing in the Ardennes Forest. 

Seventy-five miles to the east in the relative comfort of a Luftwaffe command bunker, Major Wilhelm Breininger recalled the same moment when he had looked up to see Herb’s Lightning appear out of nowhere. 

Reconnaissance Flight – December 15, 1944

No matter the flying conditions, Herb always pushed his P-38 at full throttle.  He flew his missions at extremely low altitudes in order to come upon enemy positions too fast for them to react.  Herb got his photographs and returned to base at the same breakneck speed. 

The P-38 was a remarkable fighter plane surpassed in combat only by the P-51 Mustang.  Nicknamed the Lightning, the aircraft featured twin 1,600 horsepower engines and a 400-gallon fuel capacity which ensured a 3,000-mile combat radius.  P-38 squadrons had been deployed from England to the Mediterranean in 1942 to help support Operation Torch – the Canadian-American invasion of North Africa.  Herb flew combat missions in North Africa and later in Italy against the German and Italian Air Forces scoring nine confirmed aerial victories and destroying more than thirty aircraft on the ground. 

The aircraft’s performance was unsurpassed in low level strafing, and this characteristic prompted Army Air Force officials to modify it for low level reconnaissance.  One variation of the plane, the F-4 A-2, featured dual windows in the nose of the aircraft housing an oblique Trimetrogon camera for clear, wide angle, split second shots of enemy installations from as little as fifty feet off the ground.  These P-38’s had no cannons on board which were removed to accommodate the cameras.  You had to fly in full tilt, get your photos, and get out.  This was exhilarating work for an adventurous young barnstormer pilot like Herb Stenerude.

In photographs taken with the other pilots in his squadron, Herb stood taller and more invincible looking than his comrades and their flying machines standing at rest in the background of the picture.  They were gallant and supremely confident, these Americans, smiling with wide grins, the straps of their leather helmets flapping down over their ears and their goggles nesting atop their foreheads as, once, the Athenian warriors would pull their helmets back when they were at rest.  In one photo Herb can be seen raising his right hand in the V for victory sign made famous by Churchill, the same sign that one generation later would be adopted as an international symbol for peace.

Herb returned to England in late 1944 to fly some of these missions against V-2 rocket sites and in late November, he had been assigned to reconnoiter German Army concentrations in Belgium.  Ironically, the war had allowed Herb to fulfill every worthy fantasy he had from his childhood memories of those great men and women in their flying machines.  Herb Stenerude was every bit as fearless as his foolish youth allowed.

Allied High Command was convinced the Germans were preparing a counterattack on the Western Front in late 1944.  Reconnaissance flights over the thick Ardennes forest area that spread into Belgium from the German frontier were frantically doubled so the generals could get a handle on what the Nazis were up to.

In the early afternoon of December 15, 1944, Herb Stenerude took off in his P-38 and flew at breakneck speed, barely above the trees in a cold, miserable, fog-shrouded late autumn day.  At precisely the same moment in time, Adolph Hitler was making his way to the front in his Mercedes bouncing along the forest roads leading into a dense section of the Ardennes.  The purpose of Hitler’s trip was to meet secretly with his top commanders for the great counterattack that would defeat the western allies and allow Germany to settle accounts in the east against the Russians.  With the offensive only hours away, Field Marshal von Rundstedt had gathered the key officers, especially those from the armored and motorized divisions that would spearhead the thrust.  They chose a clearing in the forest, confident the fog would keep the Allied aircraft grounded.

Hitler turned to his adjutant Bormann and asked if he had remembered to bring extra diarrhea medicine prescribed the day before for the Führer as he had been suffering from a severe bout of the runs, a condition he often had on the eve of a major attack.  The Mercedes pulled into the forest clearing and immediately an SS guard pulled the Führer’s door open, and the leader of Germany stepped out onto the hallowed ground of the Ardennes.  Four years earlier, German forces massed in the cover of the immense forest to launch the great attack that would crush neutral Belgium, allowing Nazi motorized units to bypass the principal French defenses further south along the Maginot Line, plunging deep into the heart of France before they could be stopped.