“You cross your fingers and pray a lot”

I interviewed more than fifty veterans for Bombing Hitler's Hometown, but, sadly, I couldn't use every story I collected. Please enjoy the following passage about the wonderful Ernie Pratt, who passed away in 2022.

---

Sergeant Ernie Pratt, a B-17 waist gunner in the 463rd Bomb Group/773rd Bomb Squadron, was only on his third mission on 25 April 1945, and the two that came before it were nothing like this. “The flak was heavy enough you could walk on it,” he recollected. Pratt was only nineteen and made it a point not to reflect on his own mortality. “You cross your fingers and pray a lot. That’s the only way you get through it.”

Sgt Ernie Pratt

Pratt’s journey from his hometown of Detroit to the skies over Linz, Austria, took him through or over the Grand Canyon, New York’s Central Park, North Africa, and countless points in between. After a sortie during aerial gunnery training at Kingman, Arizona, the pilot of Pratt’s plane asked the trainees if they minded a little joy ride. The men, who minutes earlier had been shooting holes in a canvas target pulled behind a second aircraft, assented. In no time, they were tracing the path of the Colorado River from below the rim of the Grand Canyon. It was as beautiful as it was exhilarating, but Pratt became seized with a feeling that it might not be such a good idea to be buzzing the national treasure with loads of ammunition on board. Though the presence or absence of ammunition on the plane would surely have made no difference had they plowed into a cliff face, the men tossed it overboard anyway. Looking back later with regret, Pratt recalled, “I’m sure that, for years after, hikers were finding live .50-caliber ammunition in the Grand Canyon.”

More aerial hijinks followed. Before embarking on the first leg of their trans-Atlantic journey to the European air war, the bombardier called his girlfriend in New York City and told her to be in Central Park, wearing her red coat, at noon the following day. His crew would be flying over the city and would rock the Fortress’s wings for her, he said. At the appointed hour, the pilot brought the aircraft in low over the great park. “We saw three or four red coats, but we wiggled the wings anyway,” Pratt remembered.

In Marrakesh, the crew spent the night, and Pratt drew guard duty. In the middle of the dark North African night, a pounding on one of the ship’s hatches startled the dozing airman awake. Pratt opened it to a frantic GI, who explained that he had fallen asleep while smoking, and now his B-24 was on fire and he needed a fire extinguisher. Pratt handed one over, and the young man went to work on the blaze, but it was clearly a losing battle. Fortunately, the fire grew so large that the duty officer in the control tower saw it and sounded the alarm. Soon, fire trucks were rushing to the scene.

Pratt feared the fire would spread and claim his own B-17, so he leaped into action, flagging down an officer for assistance. The gunner pulled the heavy canvas covers off the engines and climbed into the cockpit to help the officer start the outboard engines. The prop blast blew the canvas covers into the desert night, but the duo managed to taxi the aircraft to safety. Perhaps overlooking the fact that he had helped save a valuable warplane from destruction, Pratt worried that the AAF would dock his pay for the lost engine covers, so he commandeered a jeep the next morning and set off in search of the wayward canvas. He came back dirty but triumphant.

On 25 April, the German flak guns at Linz pummeled Pratt mercilessly, but he emerged exultant once again. The aircraft was blasted full of jagged holes, and there was a five-inch circular gash in the right wing where an unexploded shell had passed clean through. “It makes you nervous,” he recalled.

When Pratt learned a few days later that Linz was his final mission, he was okay with it. “That didn’t disappoint me a bit,” he claimed. “Flying those missions over Germany with all that flak was a horrible sensation.” Later in life, he would question how his fellow bomber veterans ever survived so many more missions than he did.

Radio operator Durant F. Carpenter, who was on his tenth mission on 25 April, captured the fear well. In his diary, Carpenter recorded: “I sweat blood—no turn back—multi flak—accurate—one Fort near us down in flames—8 men jump—7 chutes open—we are sick. I am glad for my American bourbon—I am getting gray hair.”

Sources:

- John Sisson interview with the author, 19 June 2013.

- Second Bomb Group, Crew Interrogation Reports.

- Ernie Pratt interview with the author, 22 January 2015.

- Durant Carpenter diary cited in Jacob L. Grimm, Heroes of the 483rd: Crew Histories of a Much-Decorated B-17 Bomber Group During World War II (483rd Bomb Group Association, 1997), 31.