A Good Story

Another one of those things I get from docents out at PASM. Don't
know if true, but certainly sounds like it. If not, a good yarn
anyway.


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 andplumbing business in nearby McKeesport. If you had
seen him on the street hewould 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 worst station 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 handcrank, 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 Marys.

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 Lieut. 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 Distinguished Flying
Cross. 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 -- soda jerks 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 that Great Generation pass on.

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