Mission #30: Saarbrucken then home

My name is Burt Miner. I was a pilot in the Eighth Air Force from Oct. 1943 to Sept 1944. I am now a retired computer programmer after 35 years. This article was written many years ago as an interview for what I do not remember. It has been on my hard drive since PC's became popular in the 80's. This report is true and very typical of every crew that flew in the Eighth Air Force. We were a part of the 305th Bomb Group, 364 Sqd. based it Chelveston England. We were lucky enough to complete 30 missions which was considered a tour at that time. My last mission was the day after D-day. The credit for the success of this mission goes to my crew and particularly my engineer who transferred enough fuel to get us home, otherwise we would have been POW's I think your web page is outstanding and I thank you for all the effort that has gone into it. _____________________________________________________________________

This is my story of a raid on Saarbrucken, Germany May 11, 1944. Lead By--Group C.O. My Position--#2 Lead Squadron-Deputy Group Lead Altitude-- 28000 feet, speed--150, Ground speed-215 Enemy action-Few fighters, very heavy Flak, accurate. Lead bombardier screwed up on first pass and didn't drop. Col. Chose To make second pass, same IP, same altitude. By now we were all Full of holes and a couple of planes were out. Someone screamed on the radio "are you nuts". By now the gunners had us zeroed in and were just waiting for us. The second pass proved to be the Cols. last. He became a big ball of fire right next to us. The Group scattered and we dove 5000 feet to avoid any more hits. After we left the target we tried to re-group the planes and as they started to get into formation I heard one of them say "get away from him, he's going to blow." They were referring to me. At that same time the ball turret gunner asked to be brought out of his turret because it was filling with gas. One of the waist gunners confirmed that gas was running down off the wing like a fire hose. He also told me the other waist gunner had been hit and he was going to check him out. The crew chief started to transfer fuel from the ruptured tank to one of the others because we had a long ways to go home and could not afford too great a loss of fuel. Now, we are alone, one wounded, one engine shut down, low on fuel, and at least three hours from England. We decided to stay with the plane as long as we had three engines running. Luckily we saw no more fighters. We threw out everything that we could including all the guns and ammo, everything but the chutes. Our wounded gunner was responding OK so we settled in for a long ride home. When we got to the channel we decided we had enough fuel to cross. We found a glider base just over the coast and landed straight in. We put our gunner in the hospital and went to the base bar to stress out. And so it goes.