The Western Kentucky Worker

Feature Article

August 2005

UPDATED!!!

Chester W. “Bill” Hack, labor hero, served his union, country

By Berry Craig

KEA-NEA/AFT Local 6038
PADUCAH, Ky.

Chester W. “Bill” Hack of Paducah had survived bloody air combat and the fiery crash of a B-17 bomber into the English Channel. He was back stateside teaching aerial gunnery in sunny Florida, where he said, “I lost my mind. I volunteered to go back and fly combat missions again.” It has been 62 years since Nazi fighters and anti-aircraft fire blasted Hack's bomber from the sky in World War II. “When we ditched in the channel, I was dazed,” said Hack, 84. “But when I smelled my hair burning, it gave me the strength to live.”

Hack was 22. It was his third mission against the Germans in a big, olive-green, four-engine bomber the Army Air Force called a “Flying Fortress.” Her crew nicknamed her "Barrel House Bessie.”

“The crew that had her first named her,” said Hack, who after the war worked 53 years out of Paducah Ironworkers Local 782, retiring as business agent. “I think there was a song about Barrel House Bessie from Basin Street in New Orleans.”

On May 29, 1943, Hack's plane took off with the 305th Bomb Group from Chelveston, England. The bombers' destination was the German submarine base at St. Nazaire, France, on the Atlantic Ocean. There were so many anti-aircraft guns around St. Nazaire that the American fliers dubbed the seaport “Flak City.”

Few targets were tougher than the U-boat pens. Each was roofed with tons of steel-reinforced concrete. The Germans boasted the pens were impregnable.

The 305th "Can Do" Bomb Group was part of the storied Eighth Air Force. The mission of "The Mighty Eighth" was long-range, daylight "precision" bombing of Nazi-occupied Europe, including Germany itself, using B-17 and B-24 "Liberator" heavy bombers.

The B-17s and B-24s bombed German weapons factories, power plants, transportation hubs and other key military targets. The goal of such strategic bombing was to destroy the enemy's ability to carry on the war.

By bombing in daytime, it was said, the B-17s and B-24s could hit more targets more accurately. At the same time, day bombing made the bombers and their crews more vulnerable to German anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes.

The Army Air Force brass believed, or hoped, enemy anti-aircraft gunners would have a hard time hitting the bombers, which would attack from high altitude. Also, it was claimed that by flying in tight formations, the machine-gun bristling B-17s and B-24s could fend off or shoot down most attacking German fighters.

The Americans were partners with the British in what the allies dubbed the "Combined Bomber Offensive." The Royal Air Force also flew heavy, long-range bombers.

But the British mainly raided at night. Accuracy, of course, was diminished. But the RAF brass calculated that by dropping tons of explosives on a given area -- "saturation bombing" -- enough bombs were bound to hit the target.

The British also thought night bombing was safer for aircrews. After all, the Germans couldn't shoot down what they couldn't see, or so the theory went.

As it turned out, both the Americans and the British suffered heavy losses from anti-aircraft fire -- searchlight directed at night -- and from fighters, including specially equipped night fighters. Thus, military historians still debate whether the benefits of strategic bombing outweighed the high cost in blood and airplanes.

Strategic bombing was "tremendously powerful," wrote Charles B. MacDonald in The Mighty Endeavor: American Armed Forces in the European Theater in World War II. But he added that, "despite the tremendous weight of bombs dropped on Germany, only at the end of 1944 had German production of essential military items dropped off sharply, and only in late January and early February of 1945 were indications of eventual collapse present in the German economy." On the other hand, "the strategic aerial offensive did make a very solid achievement," wrote Robert Leckie in The Wars of America. "If it did not destroy the German economy, [strategic bombing]...undermined it and prepared it for eventual collapse."

In Flying Fortress , Edward Jablonski wrote that losses in the 8th and 15th air forces (the 15th operated in the Mediterranean Theater) totaled almost 68,000, killed, wounded, and missing. Nearly 31,500 more airmen were taken prisoner. "The loss rate of bomber crews, if analyzed statistically, was second only to the infantry," he conceded.

Nonetheless, Jablonski quoted four high-ranking foes -- Hermann Goering, head of the Nazi Luftwaffe, or air force, two of his top commanders and the famous arms manufacturer Alfred Krupp. All of them agreed that strategic bombing was a major reason Germany lost the war. "Allied air power was the chief factor in Germany's defeat," Jablonski quoted Luftwaffe Marshal Hugo Sperrle.

When Hack reported to the 305th Group, American heavy bomber crews had to complete 25 missions before they could go home. A flier's chance of survival was said to be one in three. "Most of us just resigned ourselves to knowing we were going to get shot down," Hack said. "The only question was would you be killed, or would you be able to bail out, then be captured."

On the St. Nazaire raid, Hack was Bessie's right waist gunner, manning a 50-caliber machine gun about halfway along the B-17's pudgy round fuselage. The western Kentuckian arrived from England as part of a crew he trained with stateside.

"A B-17 had ten men," Hack said. The crew included the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier, radio operator, flight engineer-top turret gunner, two waist gunners, a ball turret gunner and a tail gunner.

For the St. Nazaire mission, he replaced one of Bessie's gunners who was killed in action a few days before. Hack and Bessie's other gunners had plenty to shoot at en route to St. Nazaire.

Fast Messerschmitt 109 and Focke Wulf 190 fighters bushwhacked the lumbering bomb-laden Fortresses soon after the B-17s left England. “We were under attack all the way from the English Channel into St. Nazaire,” Hack said.

Bessie took a beating, but kept flying. “The plane was shot up pretty badly before we even got to the target,” Hack said. “My oxygen system, which was a line that ran just above my head, had been shot out. A 20-millimeter shell from a Focke Wulf 190 broke that line in two.”

Hack reached down for his metal emergency bottle, which held a 30-minute supply of oxygen. “As I worked to plug my oxygen mask into it, a shell hit the bottle, and it blew up in my hands. By this time, I was so weak from lack of oxygen that I was down on my knees.

“I crawled to the left waist gunner, got him by the leg and pointed to my mask. He immediately grabbed his emergency bottle and plugged me into it. I got to feeling better.”

Hack's comfort was fleeting. “Flak was real heavy over St. Nazaire. The sky looked like a big black cloud from all that flack. I got wounded in the shoulder. Everybody on the plane was hit.”

Bessie was hit hardest shortly after she dropped her bombs. A big flak barrage crippled Hack's plane and destroyed two B-17s flying with her.

"We were in three plane formations," Hack said. "We were stacked three here, three there. The two with us blew up.

“Each one of them had some good friends of mine in it. I learned later that four of them bailed out, but two of them died that night in a German hospital. We lost a total of 13 planes on the raid."

Flak riddled Bessie's number two engine, setting it ablaze. The B-17 nosed into what seemed to be a death dive.

“This is it' crossed my mind,” Hack said. “But I'd been feeling like ‘this is it' for quite a while. We were in a very steep dive -- from 28,000 feet to about 500 feet -- before the pilot and co-pilot were able to pull us out.”

Hack said they were lucky the flak found Bessie after her bombs were away. “If that bomb load had gone off, we would have been vaporized. I have seen that happen, too, with other aircraft.”

Meanwhile, everything that could be spared was tossed overboard to lighten Bessie and keep the wounded bomber flying. Hack checked on Sgt. Ralph Erwin, the tail gunner. “There were big holes all over the tail section. One was two-feet in diameter. Ralph was hurt pretty bad. It looked like he was in shock.”

Hack dragged Erwin to the radio room, then took over the twin 50-caliber machine guns, the stinger in Bessie's tail. Limping on three engines, the Fortress was not out of harm's way.

“When a plane is knocked out of formation like we were, the German fighters would gang on it like a pack of wolves. We had made it back to the French coast on the channel, about 100 miles from England, when two Messerschmitts jumped us.”

Hack squeezed off several bursts of rapid-fire at the attackers. “I guess they thought they had a sitting duck,” he said.

Suddenly, the Nazi planes turned tail and veered off toward France. Hack felt like cheering when he saw a flight of British Spitfires chasing the enemy away. “Those Spitfires were the most beautiful airplanes I ever saw,” Hack said.

Bessie still wasn't home free. “Our pilot, Lt. James Stevenson, had thought he could get us back to England, but 'Barrel House Bessie' had given us all she had.”

The crippled warbird was bound for a watery grave. “We were within 50 miles of the coast of England when we ditched,” Hack said.

“The pilot told us to take what we called ‘ditch positions.' We knew it was going to be rough. You could see whitecaps. We all got in the radio room and braced ourselves against the bulkhead walls.”

Bessie slammed into the choppy sea. The impact hurled Hack and another crewman from the radio compartment through an aluminum door into the empty bomb bay.

“It knocked the door completely off its hinges,” Hack said. “I thought my back was broken. The bomb bay was filling up with water and there was burning gas from the engines on top of it. The entire bomb bay was engulfed in flames.”

His face blistered and his hair scorched, the dazed, bruised and bleeding Hack managed to flee the bomber before it sank. “By the time I got back into the radio room, the rest of the crew had gotten out,” he said. Hack escaped by wiggling through a window in the top of the plane above the radio operator's seat."

He slid down the fuselage onto the right wing. “Fire had completely encircled the plane and the gasoline was spreading all over the water," Hack said.

Bessie carried a pair of inflatable rubber dinghies. One was banged up, the other burned up.

Hack plunged into the frigid salt water and swam through the blazing gasoline to reach the damaged dinghy. “It had been shot full of holes and couldn't be fully inflated,” he said.

Everybody but Ralph Erwin got out of "Barrel House Bessie," which soon slipped beneath the sea. “We couldn't get into the raft, but nine of us held on to it for an hour-and-a-half," Hack said.

As the Spitfires circled overhead protecting their American allies from more German fighters, a British seaplane arrived to rescue the downed fliers. But the channel was too rough for a landing, and the flying boat turned back to England. “That was really hard to take to see him disappearing,” Hack said.

Having survived enemy fighters, flak, a near-death dive and a crash landing in the wave-tossed sea, Bessie's crew faced yet another peril. “Hypothermia,” Hack said. “They told me that even in the month of May, the English Channel is usually around 48 degrees. We had just about succumbed when a British navy torpedo boat finally got to us.”

The nine Americans were hauled safely aboard the little boat, which bobbed like a cork in the heavy sea. “I was already in such a condition that they had to tie a rope around me and pull me up on the deck. I couldn't climb that rope ladder on the boat.

“I was sprawled out on the deck and a British sailor -- I never will forget him, God bless him -- stuck this bottle of rum in my mouth. It was either drink or drown. I didn't have the strength to push it away.

“He just kept pouring that rum in me. I don't know if it was from shock, hypothermia or that rum, but I passed out and when I came to I was in an ambulance on the way to a British naval hospital.”

After two weeks in British and U.S. military hospitals, Hack was back with his bomber group. He rejoined his old crew, what was left of it. "Four of the 10 had been killed," Hack said.

Still, he was glad to be reunited with his buddies. They mainly flew in a B-17 with "Me and My Gal" painted on her nose. "Our radioman named the plane for a song Judy Garland sang that went, 'The Bells are Ringing for me and My Gal,'" Hack said, grinning. "He was kind of stuck on Judy Garland."

Hack logged 22 more missions, including the Eighth Air Force's famous first raid on heavily-defended Schweinfurt and Regensburg, Germany, one of the bloodiest air battles of the war. It was Aug. 17, 1943.

Schweinfurt was home to Nazi ball bearing factories. The enemy built Messerschmitt fighters at Regensburg. The 305th's target was Schweinfurt.

"The Regensburg-Schweinfurt mission was historic, too, because it marked the deepest [Eighth Air Force] penetration into Germany to that time," wrote Jablonski in Flying Fortress. The raid "employed the largest force dispatched -- 376 Flying Fortresses," he added.

“They told us before we left that not many of us would be coming back from this one,” Hack said. “But they said if we destroyed those ball bearing plants, it would really hurt the Germans and save untold lives of our soldiers on the ground.”

Hack said Nazi fighters and flak made the blue sky “look like a junkyard -- a plane's wing blown off over here, an engine over there, a tail section someplace else and six guys going past with their parachutes on fire. It was horrible.”

Miraculously, his plane was only slightly damaged. Many more crews were not so fortunate. According to Army Air Force records, 60 bombers were shot down, a loss of 600 men killed or captured.

After mission 25, Hack was shipped stateside. He returned to air combat in early 1945 and flew against the Nazis four more times before the war in Europe ended in May, 1945. He said his happiest mission of the war was over Holland that spring. He was in a group of B-17s that flew low and dropped food to starving Dutch civilians.

Staff Sgt. Hack earned a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Purple Heart, four Air Medals and two Presidential Unit Citations. His medals hang in a frame with his shiny silver air crewman's wings on a bedroom wall in his house on Bloom Avenue. A photo of him from World War II hangs next to the medals.

Hack is still grateful to the British sailors who saved him from the sea 62 years ago. The western Kentuckian is also sorrowful.

“As we were clinging to that rubber dinghy, we could see Ralph Erwin's body as the waves caught it. Ralph was 31, from Dallas, Ore. He was a quiet guy who didn't much mix with the rest of us, but we all liked him.

“We asked the British captain to go get him, but he said we had to leave him because of the danger of enemy air attacks. So we left Ralph, and he floated away into oblivion.”

-- Berry Craig is a professor of history at the West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah.