| The Outspoken American: Aviator, Senator and Humanitarian George McGovern | May '06 |  | | | By S. Clayton Moore | | Few people have had a front row seat to American history like former senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. He stood up for his beliefs, time and again, even when they put him in the line of fire. He was there in the skies over Europe during World War II, flying 35 combat missions in the B-24 bomber he dubbed the Dakota Queen. His perilous missions were conducted in the most desperate of circumstances, earning the 21-year-old pilot the Distinguished Flying Cross.
| ....Into the Wild Blue Yonder
George McGovern's war experiences are detailed in historian Stephen Ambrose's gripping book, "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany."
In the fall of 1941, McGovern first saw B-24 bombers landing at the auxiliary landing field at Mitchell Airport. He couldn't have imagined that he would soon be in command of one.
"Hitler was already on the march, but it wasn't until Pearl Harbor that I realized it was a really serious war," McGovern said.
 | | Layne Library, Dakota Wesleyan University | | | President John F. Kennedy appointed George McGovern to be the first director of his Food for Peace program. | | In a matter of days following the attack, McGovern enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and was sworn in at Fort Snelling, Minn. Capitalizing on his limited aviation training, the Army trained McGovern as a pilot. He flew PT-19s at Muskogee, Okla.; BT-13s at Coffeyville, Kan.; got his twin engine training in Pampa, Texas, on the AT-17 and AT-9; and finally went to Liberal, Kan. to fly the B-24 Liberator in 1944.
Sitting alone in the barracks, McGovern nervously waited to meet his instructor. He couldn't have been more surprised. In walked Norman Ray, the friend that talked him into flying in the first place.
"It really was a shock," McGovern laughed. "Norman Ray had been gone a year and a half; by then, he was an instructor for B-24 bombers. He was terrific. I had really excellent instruction."
Not that the B-24 was an easy plane to fly. An enormous, lumbering bomber, the B-24 Liberator had a wingspan of 110 feet and weighed over 60,000 pounds with a full bomb load. It was an ideal aircraft for the air war in Europe. With a maximum ceiling of 32,000 feet and a range of 2,850 miles, it was a lethal, if somewhat unstable, weapon.
"Learning how to fly the B-24 was the toughest part of the training," McGovern said. "It was a difficult airplane to fly, physically, because in the early part of the war, they didn't have hydraulic controls. If you can imagine driving a Mack truck without any power steering or power brakes, that's about what it was like at the controls. It was the biggest bomber we had at the time."
Thirty-Five missions
In September 1944, McGovern was posted to the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group, based at San Giovanni Field in Cerignola, Italy. His mission priority was to knock out Hitler's oil refineries in Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. During his 35 missions, McGovern dropped ordinance on all these countries, including bombing runs at heavily defended cities like Munich, Germany, and Linz, Austria.
The boys of his crew decided that since he was the only married man on the ship, their B-24 should be named the Dakota Queen, as a tribute to Eleanor. From that moment on, McGovern called any plane he flew by that name.
It was physically demanding work, holding the big bomber steady for up to 12 hours, sweating out the gas supply and hoping the Luftwaffe didn't fill the plane full of holes.
 | | Layne Library, Dakota Wesleyan University | | | The senator rallies “McGovern’s Army,” with a speech in Syracuse, N.Y., Halloween 1972. When interrupted by church bells, McGovern exclaimed, “The bells are tolling for Richard Nixon!” | | "I remember All American football players from Big 10 schools who literally had to be lifted out of the cockpit after a mission," McGovern said. "We had big sheepskin-lined leather suits, boots, helmets, an oxygen mask and goggles, so you were completely encased. Then you had the fatigue of 10 hours of flying."
To say the missions were dangerous is a dramatic understatement.
"I didn't realize until I read Stephen Ambrose's book that half of the bombers and crews that flew in World War II never made it through the war," McGovern said. "That was double the casualty rate of infantry officers. That's a grim fact."
On Dec. 17, 1944, he had started a combat flight towards Odental, Germany, when the right-hand wheel blew. He knew that ridding the plane of gas and bombs would make for a safer landing, but he completed the mission. (IIRC, book described how he landed on one wheel.) Three days later, he was on a mission to bomb a factory at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, when a prop flamed out on him. Using every ounce of his piloting skill, McGovern recovered and guided the Dakota Queen to a forced landing on a fighter strip on the isle of Vis, a mountainous island off the coast of what is now Croatia. He managed to land, tires and brakes smoking and screaming all the way down the runway.
"They had a 2,200-foot runway staffed with British Spitfires," he recalled. "They could land on a runway that size, but it's not smart to try to land a four-engine bomber on it. But we got it done and that's why I got the Distinguished Flying Cross."
McGovern's last mission might have been his worst. On April 25, 1945, the Dakota Queen joined all four squadrons of the 455th, in an air assault on heavily defended Linz, Austria—Adolf Hitler's hometown. The flak was intense, riddling shrapnel into the Dakota Queen and its crew.
"We had 110 holes in the fuselage from antiaircraft fire," McGovern said. "Why it hit just one guy (Sgt. William "Tex" Ashlock), I'll never know. You can't put a hundred holes through an airplane without wondering how it didn't hit more people, or hit the gas tanks and blow us up."
The Dakota Queen's hydraulics were ruined, nearly crippling it. McGovern had no control over the flaps or the ailerons, the brakes were shot, and the crew had to hand crank the landing gear down.
"Everything was well paralyzed when we hit the ground," McGovern remembered. "We had a parachute on either side of the plane, tied to a stanchion. We threw those out the waist windows to help slow the plane down since we didn't have any brakes. We ran the whole length of the runway; at the end, the plane went into a little ditch and we heard the tail slap down. I had one waist gunner who was badly hit over the target; another guy had a bad leg sprain when we hit the ground."
War's end
With that last mission, the war was nearly over for George McGovern. After 35 missions, each crewmember was eligible to go home. Ironically, the war ended just weeks later, when Victory in Europe—now known as VE Day—was declared on May 8, 1945.
McGovern's most vibrant memory of the war is of a terrible, unsuccessful mission. On March 14, 1945, the Dakota Queen was badly hit during a mission over Austria, and one of the 500-pound bombs jammed in the rack. Knowing that landing the heavy bomber with an armed bomb loose in the rack could be fatal, the crew jimmied it loose. It fell into the middle of a small cluster of farmhouses.
"I looked at my watch," McGovern recalled. "It was noon, on a beautiful, sunshiny day. I thought, 'That's terrible. We probably killed someone's young family, having lunch, thinking they were safely out of the war zone.'"
 | | Layne Library, Dakota Wesleyan University | | | Just days before the 1972 election, George and Eleanor McGovern wave to the crowd from the steps of their campaign plane, the Dakota Queen. | | He felt even worse after he landed, when he received a telegram informing him that Eleanor had given birth to their first child, Ann. For years afterward, he felt regret about the accidental bombing. In 1985, when he was lecturing at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, a television reporter asked if he had any regrets about bombing beautiful cities like Vienna, Salzburg or Innsbruck.
"The shorthand answer is no," he replied. "I thought Hitler was an inhuman monster, so I'm pleased that I played some small part in breaking up his war machine. But there was one mission I regret."
He told the story of the failed bombing mission over Innsbruck. That night an elderly Austrian farmer called the television station.
"Tell the American senator that it was my farm," he said. "We saw this low bomber coming, where all the others that had come over earlier were way up above. I got my wife and three daughters out of the house and we hid in the ditch, and no one was hurt. You can tell him that I despised Adolf Hitler, even though my government threw in with him."
McGovern breathed a sigh of relief, letting go of a worry that had haunted him for 40 years.
"After all those years, I got redemption," he said.
In a coda far different from his war experience, McGovern volunteered for a few last missions at the request of General Nathan Twining, commander of the 15th Air Force. His task was to fly the government's war supplies of food, clothing and medications to drops in northern Europe, where civilians were suffering in the war's aftermath.
"As much as I hated to delay going home, I've always been glad I did that," he said. "In some cases, we were dropping food and clothing to people we'd been bombing just a few days before. I've always been glad that the war ended for me on that humanitarian note."
airportjournals.com |
