[QCWA] FW: Piggyback hero

[Dick Thompson]

I got this from a good friend, Fred, VE9UN, and thought that some of you
would enjoy reading it.  It's quite a story.  It's long, but a good read
and quite incredible.  

Dick
WB0DUL



-----Original Message-----
			Piggyback hero

 by Ralph Kinney Bennett

 Tomorrow morning they'll lay the remains of Glenn Rojohn to rest in the

Peace Lutheran Cemetery in the little town of Greenock, Pa., just
southeast 
of Pittsburgh. He was 81, and had been in the air conditioning and
plumbing 
business in nearby McKeesport. If you had seen him on the street he
would 
probably have looked to you like so many other graying, bespectacled old

World War II veterans whose names appear so often now on obituary pages.
But
like so many of them, though he seldom talked about it, he could have
told 
you one hell of a story. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the 
Purple Heart all in one fell swoop in the skies over Germany on December
31,

1944.

Fell swoop indeed. Capt. Glenn Rojohn, of the 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb

Group, was flying his B-17G Flying Fortress bomber on a raid over
Hamburg. 
His formation had  braved heavy flak to drop their bombs, then turned
180 
degrees to head out over the North Sea.

They had finally turned northwest, headed back to England, when they
were 
jumped by German fighters at 22,000 feet. The Messerschmitt Me-109s
pressed 
their attack so closely that Capt. Rojohn could see the faces of the
German 
pilots.  He and other pilots fought to remain in formation so they could
use
each other's guns to defend the group. Rojohn saw a B-17 ahead of him
burst 
into flames and slide sickeningly toward the earth. He gunned his ship 
forward to fill in the gap. He felt a huge impact. 

The big bomber shuddered,felt suddenly very heavy and began losing
altitude. 
Rojohn grasped almost immediately that he had  collided with another
plane. A B-17 below him, 
piloted by Lt. William G. McNab, had slammed the top of its fuselage
into 
the bottom of Rojohn's. The top turret gun of McNab's plane was now
locked 
in the belly of Rojohn's  plane and the ball turret in the belly of
Rojohn's
had smashed through the top of McNab's. The two bombers were almost 
perfectly aligned - the tail of the lower plane was slightly to the left
of 
Rojohn's tailpiece. They were stuck together, as a crewman later
recalled, 
"like mating dragon flies."  No one will ever know exactly how it
happened. 
Perhaps both pilots had moved instinctively to fill the same gap in 
formation. Perhaps McNab's plane had hit an air pocket.  Three of the 
engines on the bottom plane were still running, as were all four of 
Rojohn's. The fourth engine on the lower bomber was on fire and the
flames 
were spreading to the rest of the aircraft. The two were losing altitude

quickly. 

Rojohn tried several times to gun his engines and break free of the
other plane. The two were inextricably locked together. Fearing a fire, 
Rojohn cuts his engines and rang the bailout bell. If his crew had any 
chance of parachuting, he had to keep the plane under control somehow.
The 
ball turret, hanging below the belly of the B-17, was considered by many
to 
be a death trap - the worststation on the bomber. In this case, both
ball turrets
figured in a swift and terrible drama of life and death.

Staff Sgt. Edward L. Woodall, Jr., in the ball turret of
the lower bomber, had felt the impact of the collision above him and saw

shards of metal drop past him. Worse, he realized both electrical and 
hydraulic power was gone.  Remembering escape drills, he grabbed the
hand 
crank, released the clutch and cranked the turret and its guns until
they 
were straight down, then turned  and climbed out the back of the turret
up 
into the fuselage.  Once inside the plane's belly Woodall saw a chilling

sight, the ball turret of the other bomber protruding through the top of
the
fuselage. In that turret, hopelessly trapped, was Staff Sgt. Joseph
Russo. 
Several crewmembers on Rojohn's plane tried frantically to crank Russo's

turret around so he  could escape. But, jammed into the fuselage of the 
lower plane, the turret would not budge. 

Aware of his plight, but possibly unaware that his voice was going out
over 
the intercom of his plane, Sgt. Russo began reciting his Hail Mary's. Up
in 
the cockpit, Capt. Rojohn and his co-pilot, 2nd Lt. William G. Leek,
Jr., 
had propped their feet against the instrument panel so they could pull
back 
on their controls with all their strength, trying to prevent their
plane from going into a spinning 
dive that would prevent the crew from jumping out. Capt. Rojohn motioned

left and the two managed to wheel the grotesque,  collision-born hybrid
of a
plane back toward the German coast. Leek felt like he was intruding on
Sgt. 
Russo as his prayers crackled over the radio, so he pulled off his
flying 
helmet with its earphones. Rojohn, immediately grasping that crew could
not 
exit from the bottom of his plane, ordered his top turret gunner and his

radio operator, Tech Sgts. Orville Elkin and Edward G. Neuhaus, to make 
their way to the back of the fuselage and out the waist door behind the
left
wing.  Then he got his navigator, 2nd Lt. Robert Washington, and his 
bombardier, Sgt. James Shirley to follow them. As Rojohn and Leek
somehow 
held the plane steady, these four men, as well as waist gunner Sgt. Roy 
Little and tail gunner Staff Sgt. Francis Chase were able to bail out.
Now 
the plane locked below them was aflame. Fire poured over Rojohn's left
wing.

He could feel the heat from the plane below and hear the sound of .50 
caliber machinegun ammunition "cooking off" in the flames. Capt. Rojohn 
ordered Lt. Leek to bail out. Leek knew that without him helping keep
the 
controls back, the plane would drop in a flaming spiral and the
centrifugal 
force would prevent Rojohn from bailing. He refused the order.
Meanwhile, 
German soldiers and civilians on the ground that afternoon looked up in 
wonder. Some of them thought they were seeing a new Allied secret
weapon - 
a strange eight-engined double bomber. But anti-aircraft gunners on the 
North Sea coastal island of Wangerooge had seen the collision. A German 
battery captain wrote in his logbook at 12:47 p.m.: "Two fortresses
collided
in a formation in the NE. The planes flew hooked  together and flew 20
miles
south. The two planes were unable to fight anymore. The crash could be 
awaited so I stopped the firing at these two planes." Suspended in his 
parachute in the cold December sky, Bob Washington watched with deadly 
fascination as the mated bombers, trailing black smoke, fell to earth
about 
three miles away, their downward trip ending in an ugly boiling blossom
of 
fire.  In the cockpit Rojohn and Leek held grimly to the controls trying
to 
ride a falling rock. Leek tersely recalled, "The ground came up faster
and 
faster. Praying was allowed. We gave it one last effort and slammed into
the
ground." The McNab plane on the bottom exploded, vaulting the other B-17

upward and  forward. It hit the ground and slid along until its left
wing 
slammed through a wooden building and the smoldering mass of aluminum
came 
to a stop. 

Rojohn and Leek were still seated in their cockpit. The nose of the
plane 
was relatively intact, but everything from the B-17's massive wings back
was
destroyed. They looked at each other incredulously. Neither was badly 
injured.  Movies have nothing on reality. Still perhaps in shock, Leek 
crawled out through a huge hole behind the cockpit, felt for the
familiar 
pack in his uniform pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He placed it in
his 
mouth and was about to light it. Then he noticed a young German
soldier pointing a rifle at him. The soldier looked scared and annoyed.
He 
grabbed the cigarette out of Leek's mouth and pointed down to the
gasoline 
pouring out over the wing from a ruptured fuel tank. Two of the six men
who 
parachuted from Rojohn's plane did not survive the jump. But the other
four 
and, amazingly, four men from the other bomber, including ball turret
gunner
Woodall, survived. All were taken prisoner. Several of them were 
interrogated at length by the Germans until they were satisfied that
what 
had crashed was not a new American secret weapon. Rojohn, typically,
didn't 
talk much about his DFC. Of Leek, he said, "In all fairness to my
co-pilot, 
he's the reason I'm alive today." Like so many veterans, Rojohn got back
to 
life unsentimentally after the war, marrying and raising a son and
daughter.

For many years, though, he tried to link back up with Leek, going
through 
government records to try to track him down. It took him 40 years, but
in 
1986, he found the number of Leek's mother, in Washington State. Yes,
her 
son Bill was visiting from California. Would Rojohn like to speak with
him? 
Two old men on a phone line, trying to pick up some familiar timbre of
youth
in each other's voice. One can imagine that first conversation between
the 
two men who had shared that wild ride in the cockpit of a B-17.

A year later, the two were re-united at a reunion of the 100th Bomb
Group in
Long Beach, Calif. Bill Leek died the following year. Glenn Rojohn was
the 
last survivor of the remarkable piggyback flight. He  was like thousands

upon thousands of men -- miners and lumberjacks, teachers and dentists, 
students and lawyers and service station attendants and store clerks and

farm boys -- who in the prime of their lives went to war in World War
II. 
They sometimes did incredible things, endured awful things, and for the
most
part most of them pretty much kept it to themselves and just faded back
into
the fabric of civilian life. Capt. Glenn Rojohn, AAF, died last Saturday

after a long siege of illness. But he apparently faced that final battle

with the same grim aplomb he displayed that remarkable day over Germany
so 
long ago. Let us be thankful for such men.

I wonder how many more stories like this one are lost each day as
members of
the Greatest Generation pass on.