Daring Young Men by RICHARD REEVES

Author:RICHARD REEVES
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon   Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

“Flying to His Death”

December 6, 1948

ON DECEMBER 3, 1948, R UBY PHELPS OF LONG BEACH, California, received a letter from her husband, Captain Billy E. Phelps, an airlift pilot who had won a Distinguished Flying Cross in the war and had escaped death a half-dozen times as a B-17 pilot and prisoner of the Gestapo. But, this time, the letter was different. Phelps, who was waiting for his replacement to arrive at Fassberg, had already flown 167 coal flights to Berlin. He wrote that he was tired and the planes were “flying wrecks” being overused to try to make it to Berlin anytime there was a slight break in the fog.

He had flown twenty-four bombing missions over Germany, including the deepest penetration mission of the war, been shot down once, crash-landed once and been turned over to a Gestapo jail. He waited his turn there as his cellmates—a Frenchman, a German, a Belgian and two young Frenchwomen—were executed. Each, in turn, gave him a “V” for victory sign as one by one they were taken outside to a courtyard and tied to a post in front of a firing squad. He watched from the cell window; the women smiled at him as the shots were fired. Then the Gestapo came for him.

He was taken upstairs, away from the killing ground. He was classified as a prisoner of war and turned over to the Luftwaffe, which sent him to Stalag Luft III. Phelps was there for nine months, until the emaciated American airmen in the camp were marched through knee-deep snow from camp to camp as Russian troops advanced through eastern Germany. He was in a camp outside Nuremberg as American and British bombers came over night after night, killing more than one hundred thousand residents of the city. Phelps escaped twice and was caught twice. On April 19, 1945, at 11:58 A.M.— he remembered the time—his last camp was liberated by the Third Army under General George S. Patton.

Captain Phelps recuperated for more than a year after returning home, had two children with his wife, Ruby Lee—his B-17s were both named “Ruby Lee”—and eventually became operations officer at a U.S. base in Veracruz, Mexico. He volunteered for the airlift, but his letters home told a different story about the men and the flying conditions than the one being told so proudly by the Air Force. In the frenzy to make up for lost time in getting any cargo into the city, the planes weren’t being maintained, he wrote. Ruby Lee Phelps, who expected her husband to be home for Christmas, was extremely upset when she read a story in the Long Beach Independent of December 6 that a C-54 had crashed near Fassberg the night before. On December 8, the Air Force informed her that Billy was the pilot of that plane. The Skymaster crashed immediately after takeoff at 11:13 P.M. less than a mile from the end of the runway in a light, foggy drizzle. The ceiling was two hundred feet.

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