Bombs dropped on a B-17

Hi,
Im in the middle of an assignment researching the history of the B-17, and i found a site with numerous battle damage pictures of all these different aircraft managing to land.  http://www.daveswarbirds.com/b-17/tail3.htm At the end of 1 section it has a series of 4 pictures showing a bomb being released, the next one shows the bomb hitting the left elevator and stabilizer completely removing it. I was just wondering would anyone know if the pane manages to make it back to its base? it looks like the bomber is descending throughout these pictures.
Thanks

That is a very famous and sad set of pictures,    I dont know as much about it as im sure you will soon be told,  but no.  The plane did not make it.  From what ive heard, it almost immediately rolled over and went in.  A true tragedy.

Michael.........this was Mission 358 to Berlin May 19th 1944.....the lower B-17G was "Miss Donna Mae II "  (42-31540 ? ) 331BS / 94BG (the square A is visible on the tail in the second photo ) (Lt.  M.U.Reid ).
The 1000 lbs were from Lt. J. Winslett's B-17F  "Trudy" ( I think 42-97791 ) of the 332BS.
During the subsequent spin a wing came off, needless to say no-one got out.                      Nick

buckeyeuk
I have seen thoes fotos many times  and have them on my website, but never knew what planes were involved until now, Poor crew to be knock down this way. are there any documents  of  there sqn beeing the wrong place or the hi sqn comming in  for a second bomb run  ? 
 
Heinz

In the PBS film, B-17:  Flying Legend, the fellow who took those photos says that the plane below was out of position and should have been over on the right wing.  From the photos you can see it was moving back over to right when hit.

Some B-17s made it back minus a single horizontal stabilizer and elevator.  B-17G # 42-39789 of 379th BG is one such B-17.  A good photo of this damaged B-17 can be found on page 158 of Roger Freeman's book "B-17 Fortress at War."  The right elevator of that 94th BG B-17 might have been jammed in the nose-down position by the impact of the bomb on the port elevator/horizontal stabilizer, preventing the pilots from recovering the ship.  Tony Mireles

A good friend of mine's dad flew as a tail gunner for the 94th BG on this mission.  He thought when the bombs hit and ripped off the horizontal stabilizer and elevator, the force of the impact also must have cut the control cables for the rudder controls, which is why he thinks it entered into a spin then violent spiral and crashed.  Unfortunately, no one got out of that plane alive. 
 
Jim 

gentlemen the man who was the tailgunner on the Donna Mae was my uncle.  His name was Willard Christensen from Osnabrock, North Dakota. his rank was SSGT at the time of his death.  Willard had 3 other brothers in world was 2 also.
Ole Christensen US Army in New Gueinna,  Anthony [Tony] Christensen was also stationed with Willard but I do not know the plane he rode in.  Tony and Willard enlisted in the Army Air Corp together.  My father was a Marine Corp Medic and served in the Okinawa campaign.

Michael,
 
Usually the blame for such incidents would be the sqdn leader. In my sqdn we had a poor pilot who flew lead quite a few times because he had seniority.One time he led us over another sqdn, we dropped our bombs, fortunately we were lucky that no planes were hit. If the leader errs it messes up the integrity of the formation because we keep the planes very tight for our protection.

my brother has information on this raid from someone in Belguim and as we understand the Donna Mae II had just dropped her load of bombs.  Information we have is that when the B-17's dropped their loads the altitude changed and depending on winds caused them to drift.  The plane above was dropping her load almost at the same time and maybe both planes drifted.  It really doesn't matter men gave their lives providing freedom for us all.  I have my uncles watch which he gave my Dad before going overseas to give back to him when he came home.  Willard provided for his mother in an insurance program that gave her a little each month.  He was looking ahead into whatever destiny provided for him.  I grew up on stories of the brothers and life on the farm in North Dakota.  God Bless those that gave all and those that came home providing me with my freedom from tryanny.  I carried on the tradition of military service and served in Viet Nam.
 
Does any one have pictures of the crew and the plane Donna Mae II  it would be much aprreciated

A Marine Corps medic is actually a Navy medical corpsman.
 
Greg

In 1958, my mother bought an encylopedia set for me as I was a kid in school and liked to read.  The set was named The Book of Knowledge... don't know if the books are still being made.

Being a kid, whose Dad and uncles were all in the War, I was interested in the WWII parts of the books.  A couple of the photographs of this plane being struck in the stabilizer were included, along with either a caption or a short story.  There's no mistake about the photos or the story, and I must have looked at both hundreds of times over the years.  Find the books at some flea market/garage sale, and you'll have the photos and the short caption/story about this plane.

Anyway, the books were printed only 14 years after the War, and told the story that the B-17 DID make it back to base.  Now, that doesn't make it true, but it does show that if the survived-the-hit story is correct, then its origins may go back much further than we might think.

The photos of this incident have been well known over the years, and the story was always that the plane and crew survived.  It's been in the last few years that the story has changed to one of a loss.  Was the story bad history then, or poor memories now? 

For what it's worth from an old man.

Those photos of the 94th Bomb Group B-17 were published in LIFE Magazine (and no doubt elsewhere) with the false story that the plane and crew had survived. It was typical of wartime censorship.

If you look closely at the photo series of Donna Mae II you'll see that the right elevator is definitely in the nose-down position after the bomb takes off the other stabilizer. One possibility in this case is that the elevator torque tube was bent so severely that it jammed and wouldn't allow the pilots to control the remaining elevator. There is also a trim cable that runs from the left to right elevator trim tab drum that could have caused the right tab to go full nose-down. Along with the other damage the crew was powerless to maintain control.
 
Scott

My father (Henry Arnold) was the ball turrent gunner on Miss Donna Mae. He was part of the original Lt. Don Gavits crew. Miss Donna Mae was named for Gavits little girl, born 6 months before he went to England. The original Miss Donna Mae was a new F model when the Gavits crew named her in Sept of 1943. In Nov of 1943 the plane suffered flak damage. The right main gear gave way on landing. The ship was totaled and used for parts. Miss Donna Mae II was flown by the Gavits crew until they finished their missions in April 1944. The ship was taken over by Lt. M. Reid and went down over Berlin on May 19 1944. I have heard that Lt. Reids body was recovered in 1949 and buried in the U. S.

Steve Arnold

I have a copy of the USAAF Impact magazines that were bound into a series of books.  The sequence of photos is in one of the books and has a description of what happened.  The photos in the magazine were to be used to illustrate what can happen when well trained crews forget some of their training.  
 
The title of the comments in the Impact book (No. 5, Originally the September 1944 Issue) is:
 

Discipline Lapse Downs This B-17

 
The story of a tragic double error is told, unfortunately not for the first time, by the stomach-jolting sequence just below.  In the first picture the bomb that is going to do the damage is shown just before the impact, with the second on the way.  Next, the bomb has carried away the left horizontal stabilizer, clearing the way for those following.  In the third picture the stricken ship, knocked off course by the impact, sharply has lost altitude, and in the last one the dive has begun.
 
The place, over Berlin.  The date, 19 May 1944.  The cause, as indicated by 8th AF sources: heads-up-and-locked in the ship above, the lower plane out of position.
 
Thus what the Germans failed to accomplish, we somehow managed to bring about.  This plane had arrived at a distant target through intervening flak and safely past German fighters.  It carried a crew trained individually at many places and now brought together to form, with the plane, a striking unit of fine balance and power.  Then at the instant of potential impact it was betrayed by slips in air discipline - a discipline in itself the fruition of endless plans and study, as essential in the air as in any other form of attack, both to avoid enemy defenses and to make possible the massive concentrations of our planes in the missions of today.

Marty