The Final Mission of Bottoms Up: A World War II Pilot's Story

by Dennis R. Okerstrom

Overview

On November 18, 1944, the end of the war in Europe finally in sight, American copilot Lieutenant Lee Lamar struggled alongside pilot Randall Darden to keep Bottoms Up, their B-24J Liberator, in the air. They and their crew of eight young men had believed the intelligence officer who, at the predawn briefing at their base in southern Italy, had confided that their mission that day would be a milk run. But that twenty-first mission out of Italy would be their last.
            Bottoms Up was staggered by an antiaircraft shell that sent it plunging three miles earthward, the pilots recovering control at just 5,000 feet. With two engines out, they tried to make it to a tiny strip on a British-held island in the Adriatic Sea and in desperation threw out everything not essential to flight: machine guns, belts of ammunition, flak jackets. But over Pula, in what is now Croatia, they were once more hit by German fire, and the focus quickly became escaping the doomed bomber. Seemingly unable to extricate himself, Lamar all but surrendered to death before fortuitously bailing out. He was captured the next day and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner at a stalag on the Baltic Sea, suffering the deprivations of little food and heat in Europe’s coldest winter in a century. He never saw most of his crew again.
            Then, in 2006, more than sixty years after these life-changing experiences, Lamar received an email from Croatian archaeologist Luka Bekic, who had discovered the wreckage of Bottoms Up. A veteran of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Bekic felt compelled to find out the crew’s identities and fates. Lee Lamar, a boy from a hardscrabble farm in rural northwestern Missouri, had gone to college on the GI Bill, become a civil engineer, gotten married, and raised a family. Yet, for all the opportunity that stemmed from his wartime service, part of him was lost. The prohibition on asking prisoners of war their memories during the repatriation process prevented him from reconciling himself to the events of that November day. That changed when, nearly a year after being contacted by Bekic, Lamar visited the site, hoping to gain closure, and met the Croatian Partisans who had helped some members of his crew escape.
            In this absorbing, alternating account of World War II and its aftermath, Dennis R. Okerstrom chronicles, through Lee Lamar’s experiences, the Great Depression generation who went on to fight in the most expensive war in history. This is the story of the young men who flew Bottoms Up on her final mission, of Lamar’s trip back to the scene of his recurring nightmare, and of a remarkable convergence of international courage, perseverance, and friendship. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826223142
Publisher:	University of Missouri Press
Publication date:	10/18/2024
Series:	American Military Experience , #1
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Dennis R. Okerstrom is Professor of English at Park University, a certified flight instructor, and the author of four previous books including The Final Mission of Bottoms Up: A World War II Pilot’s Story (University of Missouri Press). Heowns and flies arestored 1942 Army scout plane and is the recipient of numerous awards for scholarship and teaching. He lives in Independence, Missouri.

Read an Excerpt

The Final Mission of Bottoms Up

A World War II Pilot's Story

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By Dennis R. Okerstrom

University of Missouri Press

Copyright © 2011 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1948-0

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Chapter One

Over Udine, Italy 1200 hours, 18 November 1944

The eight-day, wind-up clock crowning the instrument panel ticked to the top of the dial, the slender white reed of the second hand stark against the flat black of the face. The instrument, one of scores jammed into the flight deck of the heavy bomber, measured out the lives of the cockpit crew in quarter-hour dollops; nine hundred seconds on, nine hundred off. It was time for Lt. Lee Lamar to take over the wheel of the B-24J again, after his fifteen minutes of rest.

For twenty bombing missions over targets in Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, Greece, and Rumania—all the places on the body of the earth where the cancer of Nazism had spread—Lamar and pilot Randall Darden had worked out a system overseen by the clock: a quarter of an hour flying, an equal amount resting while the other pilot flew. It doesn't sound strenuous today, in the age of fly-by-wire jets and light, single-pilot business planes.

But the Liberator was a huge airplane by the standards of the day: more than 67 feet long, with 110 feet of long, slender Davis wing upon which were hung four 1,200-horse Pratt & Whitney R-1830 14-cylinder engines. Up to 8,800 pounds of bombs could be tucked into its slab-sided middle section, to be dropped through two sets of bomb bay doors. The heavy bomber had a crew of ten young and fit men, and bristled with ten .50-caliber Browning machine guns. Its official takeoff capacity was 65,000 pounds, but often it was loaded far beyond that as crews—and those who sent them out—began to view the numbers as cautionary, not absolutes. Had religion been their vocation, they might have viewed their guiding principles as the Ten Suggestions.

The B-24 was flown by the usual, contemporary arrangement of steel wires attached to the yoke pedestal and the rudder pedals, which ran through a series of pulleys before being hooked to ailerons, rudders, and elevators, the movable surfaces which controlled the pitch, roll, and yaw movements of the aircraft. The sheer distance through the fuselage and the wings meant the force needed to change the angle of any of those control surfaces was considerable. A kink or twist in the wire, a slight wobble in the pulleys, a mote of stiffness in the pulley bearings magnified the resistance and increased exponentially the force required to herd the big bomber. An even bigger factor in the physical wrestling match of herding the big bomber was the size of the control surfaces themselves. Each aileron—one per wing—had a surface area of 41.5 square feet; the elevator was more than 60 square feet; the two rudders were 65 square feet. Each change of attitude meant putting one or more of these control surfaces into the teeth of a 200-plus miles-per-hour (mph) wind and holding it. That might be akin to standing in the back of a pickup truck going down the freeway at 70 mph and trying to hold a sheet of plywood vertical against the wind.

Lamar and Darden were big men; they could have played football for any number of college teams. Most crewmen and fighter pilots were small, averaging about 5 feet 9 inches and 154 pounds. But the Army Air Force selected big, muscular men to fly the heavy bombers: Lee was nearly 6 feet, and weighed 175; Randall, about the same. The AAF knew what it was doing: when the heavy bombers, with all their size and weight, were airborne and stacked up in a defensive box of dozens or even hundreds of aircraft, the turbulence from all those P&Ws was fierce. Despite their leviathan dimensions, the Liberators bucked, yawed, and pitched like fishing boats in a hurricane.

"Ready, Lee?" Darden pressed his throat microphone and looked over at Lamar in the right seat. Lamar looked back over the top of his rubber oxygen mask and placed a gloved hand on the control yoke.

"I've got it." Lamar, anticipating the hand-off, already had dialed back the rheostat on his electrically heated flight suit. The physical effort to control the big bomber made the suit far too hot while actually wrestling the yoke, a half-moon-shaped affair as big as the steering wheel of a commercial truck. The pilots turned down the heat while flying and increased it while getting their fifteen-minute rest as the below-zero chill at twenty thousand feet began to creep slowly into their bones.

The day was overcast, but even in the hazy air beneath the ceiling the white-draped Italian Alps were visible in the north, straight off the nose. Bottoms Up, their bomber that day, was one of twenty-eight Liberators from the 460th Bomb Group to target Udine Airdrome, a German-controlled fighter base in the north of Italy. It wasn't particularly a strategic target, but the mottled gray fighters that used its single runway were a nuisance on the long hauls from the 460th's home base in Spinazzola, near the heel of Italy, to targets in Germany. It was late in the war. The Luftwaffe had been steadily depleted, with many of the squadrons of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs called back into the Fatherland to defend Hitler's thousand-year Reich, now being mauled by Allied bombers night and day. There were not enough fighters at Udine to attack the large formations of American bombers streaming over the Brenner Pass into Germany. Instead, they swarmed and buzzed at the edges of the flying task forces, picking out the wounded and attacking the crippled birds like wolves preying on the weak and young in a herd of caribou.

They were nearly to the IP, the initial point, the beginning of the bomb run during which the bomber had to stay exactly on course and altitude. This enabled the bombardiers in each bomber to accurately unload the lethal cargo in the bays. Lt. Don Reynolds in the nose had the intervalometer in the Norden bombsight set to the mandated release sequence, but now he watched the lead bomber in his formation. When the olive drab explosives began to fall from the belly, he would release simultaneously. It was the time on the mission of the most extreme tension: they could not maneuver to evade flak or fighters now. That shouldn't be a problem today, however; the group intelligence officer had indicated that enemy fire would not be much of a factor on today's mission. The entire crew appreciated a "milk run."

With a start, Lamar leaned forward, staring hard as another line of bombers crossed in front of them at a distance of maybe five miles. It wasn't the bombers that had captured his attention; the sky was usually filled with them on every mission, wheeling and swarming like long trains of wasps. They were an everyday fact of life for a combat aircrew. Instead, he focused on the lethal puffs of black clouds that had suddenly appeared around the distant string of Liberators. The German flak gunners, despite the intelligence officer's prediction, were busy.

"Bomb bay doors coming open." Reynolds had pulled the lever that drew both sets of doors up and parallel to the fuselage. Lamar braced himself for the jolt as the doors disrupted the smooth flow of air down the fuselage and became drag, working against the thrust of the engines.

Lamar, flying from the right seat, tried to keep the Liberator straight and level. Despite his efforts, the aircraft rocked, rolled, and bucked, fighting both the turbulence of the planes ahead as well as the added violent blasts from the flak that had bracketed them now, and quite accurately. "Bombs away!" from Reynolds, and he felt the sudden rise of the heavy aircraft as three tons of bombs tumbled out of the racks. It was always as though a giant hand had lifted them forcefully toward the heavens.

"Bomb bay doors coming...." Reynolds did not get to finish his sentence. Before he could say "closed," Bottoms Up was staggered by a tremendous explosion that blasted a hole in the left wing "big enough to drive a Buick through," according to crewmen in other Liberators. The bomber was knocked onto its side, the wings nearly vertical, and began to drop. The shell knocked out the hydraulic system, severed gasoline lines on the left side of the plane, and blew out the oxygen system. As the rest of the crew scrambled to snap on their parachutes and don their emergency walk-around bottles of oxygen, Darden joined Lamar in wrestling the bomber back into level flight. The plane was essentially falling out of the sky; no longer a flying machine, it was a 25-ton rock. It fell 15,000 feet in a matter of minutes.

Finally, at roughly 5,000 feet, Bottoms Up began to respond to the exertions of the two pilots as they pushed the nose forward and attempted to level the wings. It gradually, reluctantly, resumed a straight and level attitude. But now it seemed to Lamar that the bomber was precariously balanced on a tightrope, liable to fall off at any moment. No longer did the big bomber have the sense of stability and security that it had always afforded.

The '24 had achieved a reputation among some that it couldn't take a hit, that the Davis wing was fragile and would collapse at the slightest wound. Those stories were pushed to the back of Lamar's mind. Now, the immediate worry was the two port engines. Both power-plants on the left had begun to "run away," with the propellers speeding up beyond the safe range. They whined and screamed, and both pilots watched the tachometers wind up past 3000, past 4000, still climbing. It was possible, if they could not shut down the engines, that the propellers would spin off the shafts and come crashing through the aircraft squarely into the cockpit. The second worst scenario was being able to shut down the engines but not being able to feather the props; the blades would remain flat, creating huge amounts of drag on the left side, making control difficult and return to a friendly base unlikely. Lamar quickly pulled back the mixture control levers to kill the fuel supplies to engines one and two. Simultaneously, Darden reached to the bank of switches above the center windshield, lifted the safety bar, and punched the feathering buttons on the two left engines. Lamar continued to fight the yawing and bucking Liberator as the blades slowly wound down and turned into the wind.

That wasn't the end of their problems, only the solution to the most immediate. While Darden checked with the crew for injuries, Lamar began to trim Bottoms Up for straight and level flight. With both engines on one side now producing no thrust at all, it meant that the right engines, outboard of the centerline of the airplane, were pulling the right wing around faster than the left wing could go. This condition of asymmetrical thrust could be partly alleviated by increasing the power of the inboard engine, the one closest to the centerline of the plane, and slightly decreasing the outboard engine. The left wing had to be held slightly high and the right rudder pedal had to be depressed to counteract the tendency of the crippled bomber to continuously turn left.

The reports came in from the crew: miraculously, despite the dire condition of the machine, none of the human cargo had been injured. Or so they reported.

Now, however, they had to get Bottoms Up safely on the ground, along with its ten men and its totemic pigtailed blonde painted garishly across the nose. There was no assurance they could.

Darden and Lamar watched as the formation, now high above them, steadily pulled away. They couldn't hope for help there; no competent combat commander would endanger his formation by hanging back to assist a crippled bomber. Lamar, through the intercom, ordered the crew to lighten up the bird: throw out anything not essential to continued flight and a safe landing. Out went steel flak helmets and heavy flak suits, belts of .50-caliber ammunition, even the machine guns. In the minds of both pilots was the tiny island of Vis, a British fighter base with a single short runway in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. (Another B-24 pilot, a young Lt. George McGovern, would crash land his bomber at Vis, receive the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts, and go on to a long and distinguished government career.)

"Mike, get us a course to Vis, the British base there." Mike Craig was the navigator, a twenty-year-old from Nashville and the youngest of the four officers in the ten-man crew. "Keep us just off the Yugoslavian coast, but close enough for us to glide in if we have to." The B-24 was notorious for breaking up in ditching attempts and sinking quickly. No one joined the Army Air Force to drown. There were plenty of ways to get dead flying in a bomber, but no one wanted a watery grave. They'd have joined the damn Navy if that was what they wanted.

Only a few minutes had passed since Bottoms Up was flak wounded. There was no panic; in the back of each crewman's mind had always been the thought that they would, if they flew enough missions, get hit hard on one of them. They trained for it, they prepared themselves mentally, they cross-trained for other jobs aboard the bomber. Just in case.

Other crews had been hit; many had been wounded, many more had died. In the 460th alone, at least one bomber had been shot down accidentally by gunners in another Liberator. There was nothing friendly about "friendly fire." Occasionally, a bomber would crash on takeoff, with full fuel and a load of bombs. Those deaths were quick.

One gunner had fallen from the catwalk over the bomb bays when he attempted to fix a problem that kept the doors open. He had not clipped on his parachute. There were crashes when crippled bombers tried to land, and midair collisions that wiped out two or more entire crews in the blink of an eye. Then, of course, there was the enemy, the actual human enemy, who fired machine guns and cannon at them from nimble gray-painted fighters, or who bombarded them in reverse with exploding anti-aircraft shells. In German it was called Flugabwehrkanone. Flak was easier to say, but it was just as deadly.

The pilot's instrument panel in a B-24 is tall and the windshield small. Pilots could see ahead, but not down. Lamar likened it to flying a house while sitting in the basement and looking out through tiny, sunken windows. Now, barely ten minutes after being hit, Lamar and Darden stared out at the Adriatic, cognizant that they were a long way from their home base with only two working engines. Each silently calculated their chances of landing at the small emergency strip at Vis. The odds were not good, they both knew.

They had elected to fly down the western coast of Yugoslavia, avoiding the German gun emplacements that rimmed that sad country, then cross the Adriatic to Vis at the shortest over-water route. Both pilots knew the ditching qualities of the Liberator: the rather flimsy bomb bay doors would be ripped off on contact with the sea, tons of water would crash against the rear bulkhead, and the aircraft would break into pieces and sink rapidly. To avoid that, they would stay over land as long as possible, and once at Vis, if they decided a landing was not possible in the crippled bird, they could all parachute to safety over the base.

"Mike, I think that's Pola up ahead. Keep us out of the flak box around that place," Lamar radioed to his navigator. Pola was an ancient Roman city on the Istrian peninsula, jutting out into the Adriatic. It had a fine harbor that was dotted with small islands. In more peaceful circumstances, the crew probably could have picked out the second-century coliseum in the center of town, its circular walls a clearly visible icon.

But these were not peaceful times. As they approached the harbor, still out over the Adriatic, they suddenly were jolted out of any thoughts of making it to Vis. A Wehrmacht flak battery on one of the islands of Brijuni, northwest of the Pola harbor, had opened up, once more filling the sky around them with deadly black clouds, red in the centers. A dozen flak batteries ringed Pola, but there were also five batteries on the islands of Brijuni, and it was these that had bracketed the wounded bomber, now low, slow, and very large. They needed to turn right, toward the sea, to get out of the deadly fire, but control now was extremely difficult. Both pilots had to stand on the rudder pedals with their backs braced against their seats. A left turn was easier, but each turn meant a loss of altitude they could not regain.

A bone-jarring explosion shook the bomber and Lamar's rudder pedals disappeared, shot away by exploding shells. Holes appeared throughout the plane, and soon it was apparent that flak fragments had also severed the cables to the elevators. Bottoms Up was mortally wounded, now staggering through the November sky with no control by its crew. It remained in a fairly level attitude, but the loss of the two left engines put it in a left turn that could not be countered. The bomber would continue the turn, which would gradually tighten into a spiral; with enough altitude, Bottoms Up would become a flying drill bit and auger a big, smoking hole in the earth.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Final Mission of Bottoms Up by Dennis R. Okerstrom Copyright © 2011 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments....................ix
Introduction....................1
Chapter 1 Over Udine, Italy 1200 hours, 18 November 1944....................5
Chapter 2 Krvavici, Croatia Fall 2005....................15
Chapter 3 The 1930s Faucett, Missouri....................20
Chapter 4 1941–42 You're in the Army Now....................31
Chapter 5 The Crew Hometown, USA....................44
Chapter 6 Overseas at Last Summer 1944....................57
Chapter 7 Spinazzola, Italy....................65
Chapter 8 First Combat September 1944....................73
Chapter 9 Finally ... Mission Countdown 20–24 September 1944....................86
Chapter 10 It's Not All Combat ... October—November 1944....................93
Chapter 11 Mission after Mission after ....................101
Chapter 12 18 November 1944....................129
Chapter 13 What Hath God Wrought? Faucett, Missouri, 02 December 1944....................138
Chapter 14 "Vor You, Der Var Iss Ofer"....................144
Chapter 15 Interrogation and Isolation....................151
Chapter 16 8 December 1944–1 May 1945 Kriegieland....................151
Chapter 17 30 April–20 June 1945 Purgatory....................170
Chapter 18 Home at Last....................183
Chapter 19 Olathe, Kansas 2006....................188
Chapter 20 The Crew Their Stories....................192
Chapter 21 Short Focused....................198
Chapter 22 The Real Work....................204
Chapter 23 Pula, Croatia August 2007....................216
Notes....................231
Bibliography....................245
Index....................249

Editorial Reviews

This is a great book, written with skill and humanity, and will happily grace the shelves of anyone who is interested in WWII aviation history and the lives of those who fought in the deadly skies.”—Military Magazine
 

“A well-written popular history of one B-24 bomber pilot and his fateful mission. . . . This book is about war, loss, and closure—three things that are often forgotten in popular military history.”—The Journal of America’s Military Past
 

“This is the perfect book for the adult reader who thinks there is nothing new under the sun in World War II histories.”—Library Journal
 

“A meticulously accurate reconstruction of the plane’s final, fateful voyage and the heroism of its crew, absorbing to the final page, and a welcome addition to military biography and history shelves.”—Midwest Book Review
 

From the Publisher

Over 65 years after the end of World War II and with thousands of books on its every angle, Okerstrom (English, Park Univ.; Peace, War, and Terrorism) adds a unique gem to the body of work on the war. Starting with the 1944 shooting down over Italy of the B-24 Bottoms Up, in which Lieutenant Lee Lamar was copilot, Okerstrom follows three distinct paths: the story of Lamar's capture and imprisonment as a POW, the fuller story of Lamar and the Bottoms Up crew, and the eventual identification of the Bottoms Up wreckage 60 years later by a Croatian archaeologist, followed by Okerstrom and Lamar's subsequent remarkable journey back to Croatia. VERDICT Akin to Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, with shades of Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers, this is the perfect book for the adult reader who thinks there is nothing new under the sun in World War II histories.—B.D.

Library Journal