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x 4-uzon iiseit is so well \ anything 'but a draw.)Heroism in a Fortress—a Story* With Countless Untold RivalsFollow mg is the account of the hardships and heroism of a Fortress crew returning from a raid on Bremen. The story is fold by the 25-year-old pilot, who before the war was the youngest member of the N-ew York Stock Exchange. In times of peace the quality of the drama and the bravery and strength shown by the men would have put the story on the front page of every newspaper in America. Today it is almost an everyday story in the Eighth Air Force, where heroism is taken as matter of fact, and it will find as way into the back pages of only a jew papers in the home towns of the men involved. qtBy 2/Lt. Francis G. LauroAN EIGHTH BOMBER STATION, Jan. —Our target was Bremen, and that’s where our trouble began—five miles up with a temperature reading of 58 below.It started when our ball-turret gunner, Murray Shrier, collapsed after his oxygen mask froze up. Bill Heathman, the right waist gunner, dragged Shrier into Nelson King’s radio compartment and they started to work on the casualty.King, an. ex-farmer, plugged out his own oxygen line and inserted Shrier's in the room’s- only inlet valve. But the mask wouldn’t fit—it was an old model. King took off his gloves and made the adjustment. using a piece of string.The gloves never did get on again. King also passed out. He had jabbed his oxygen line into a spare bottle, not knowing it . was frozen. Heathman, meantime, was nearing the exhaustion stage.our guns unmanned'and German fightens circling all around us.The gang finally got Will revived and he returned to his guns. The ball-turret ?h1fmer ,. ?° ^as revived and came into the cockpit where he-sat out the rest of• g•,Sr*dua«y came around, fighting his mask. *the supercharger-on our No. 2 engine started hcting up. Forty miles from the coast I had to cut it, and vve shot downward through several layers“tam'fwo r«r,ec,'°n' Kmi”2 out *'King was stiH fighting, half conscious. smashing and striking at everything and everybody When his hands hit the floor or any of the radio equipment, bits of the frozen flesh would chip off like shavings gouged out of hunks of ice. They didn’tdi rough eVer They ere ^It was too late to think of gloves, because no gloves would have fitted those hands, swollen to almost three times their normal size. When King calmed down, he stuck his hands inside the bombardier's jacket and kept them there until we landed. Incidentally, we made it despite -frozen trim tabs.There was an ambulance waiting for us. King s hands had started to bleed. One of the doctors looked at King’s hands, and 1 looked at him, and whatwe were thinking wasn’t'pretty.Frostbite is no word to describe Kiric’s condition The- flight surgeon did some good work, though, and saved all but the tips of those fingers, ..
Newspaper Details
Northern Ireland Stars and Stripes
Belfast, Ulster, GB
Tue, Jan 11, 1944
Page 2
Full Page
Clipped by
Laura S.
USA 03 Jan 2024
Other Publications Near Belfast, Ulster
Northern Ireland Stars and Stripes
