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By Al Zdon
Lyle Pearson looked at the pilot's escape hatch. It was blocked by a ball of fire.
He checked out the hatch in the part of the ship where the waist
gunners worked. It too was blocked by an inferno.
Meanwhile, the B-17 was free-falling to earth after being hit square by a German 88 millimeter shell.
Pearson had his parachute on, but with both
exits blocked by flames, there was nothing he could do but look out the window at the ground coming up – fast.
That day's flight had been scheduled to be his last mission, after which he had a
ticket home. Thirty seven times he had flown his bomber into the flak, and thirty six times he had made it back to base.
But it wasn't going to happen this time.
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Lyle
Pearson was born in Montevideo and grew up during the Depression near St. Peter. Times were tough, and were made tougher when his father left the family when Pearson was a child.
"Later, when I was in
prison camp, and we didn't have any food, I'd say that I'd already gone through this a couple of times when I was a kid."
He graduated from St. Peter High School in 1938, spent some time at a CCC camp
near Ely, and worked at the state hospital in his hometown. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, he had some choices to be made.
"I was 20-years-old and we were at war. I knew I was going to
have to go anyway. I'd always wanted to fly, but I couldn't afford it. So in May of 1942, I joined the Army Air Corps."
Pearson was ready for the Army, but the Army wasn't ready for him. Weeks
dragged by while he was waiting for an opening at flight school. In the meantime, he journeyed to San Diego to visit his girlfriend, Katherine, who already had a wartime job at the Consolidated Aircraft
plant making B-24s. As these things happen, the two got married during his visit.
Finally, on Feb. 5, 1943, he got word that there was an opening. He was on his way to ground school in Santa Ana,
California, then primary flight school at Oxnard. "I had never flown, so it was tough. It was an accelerated program, and if you can't keep up you get bounced."
The only part of the curriculum that
was hard for Pearson was math, but a fellow cadet from Texas took him under his wing and tutored him. "Other guys would be going into town for fun, but we'd stay behind and learn math. He sat there and
beat it into me. He saved my soul."
Pearson moved on to Taft, California, for training on the BT-13, the legendary Voltee "Vibrator." It was at this point in the training where the Army would
determine whether a trainee become a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot.
"Of course I wanted to fly fighters, but I was about six feet tall and 190 pounds and they told me that big guys fly bombers. So
then I told them I'd like to fly the B-25 which was a two-engined bomber. I didn't want to fly a multi-engined plane, I didn't want to be responsible for so large a crew."
The Army had other
priorities, and sent Pearson to New Mexico for training on B-17s -- at that time the largest bomber the U.S. had.
"The first time I saw a B-17, I couldn't believe how big it was. I didn't know how I
was going to fly it, but it worked out fine. I mastered the plane."
Pearson picked up his crew in Salt Lake City and did three more months combat training in Texas and Mississippi before taking the
bomber to Gander, Newfoundland, on their way to the war. "They told me not to open our orders until we had been an hour in the air. We were all sure we were going to the 8th Air Force in England, but
when we opened the orders it said we were going to Tunesia to the 15th Air Force.
The way to get to Africa was to make a fuel stop in the Azores. Pearson made his pit stop, and took off for Tunesia,
only to look out the window and see oil spurting from the number two engine. A mechanic had forgotten to replace an oil cap.
Pearson brought the huge bomber back to the field, had the oil problem
fixed, and tried to take off again. "The co-pilot was calling off the miles per hour, and as we reached the end of the air strip, we realized we weren't going to make it. There were a bunch of workers at
the end extending the runway, and if we'd hit them, they would have all been dead, so I aimed for a wall."
The bomber hit the wall at about 60 miles an hour, sheared off its landing gear, and careened
on its belly for some distance. "When we came to a stop, I looked out and saw the number two engine had caught fire. I made sure everybody was off the plane, and then I tried to get out, but my parachute
harness got hung up on the escape hatch. I was running, but my feet weren't touching the ground."
He finally broke loose and got away, but the plane was severely damaged.
Pearson later figured
that some personal gear the crew had thrown in the bomb bay had interfered with flight controls. "All the crews did it, but we paid the price."
Undaunted, Pearson and his co-pilot led separate groups
on their way to Tunis, a trip that took several days. When they finally arrived, they couldn't seem to find the 15th Air Force. "Finally we went to the British air force people and asked. They said the
15th had moved to Italy two days ago."
So now it was more hitchhiking, and the crew finally made it to Bari, Italy, their new home. They were assigned to the 301st Bomber Group. For Pearson, it was a
little embarrassing to show up without his aircraft. "That made me really popular."
By the end of July, 1944, the Pearson crew was ready to make its first mission. Pearson went to the pilot's briefing
and found out the target: Polesti, Romania, Nazi Germany's major oil hub in Eastern Europe.
It was not the simple, easy mission you'd hope for on your first try.
"They had 1,200 guns there, and the
Germans defended it brutally. We had done all this training, but nothing prepares you for going over the target. You go in straight and level and there's no evasive action. When an 88 shell explodes
beneath you, it's like a telephone pole hitting the bottom of the plane. Once you go through it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, my gosh, how many of these can I handle?'"
The crew survived Polesti, and
then bombed it again the following week. And then it was week after week of missions, some as far away as northern Poland.
"One thing I remember is how cold it was up there. We had little gas
heaters, but they didn't work very well. So you'd bundle up as much as you could, but the pilot couldn't wear clothing that was too heavy or he couldn't fly the plane. When we were at altitude, it could
be 70 below zero outside."
On one mission, Pearson ran into a thunderstorm, and the bomber was thrown into a deadly spin. "I knew how to get a small plane out of a spin, but a B-17 isn't made for
that. I looked, and all my needles were in the red."
Pearson fought the controls and finally got the ship righted. "I wasn't sure if the wings would hold or not."
In the meantime, the two gunners
in the middle of the plane had blown a hatch, thinking they would have to bail out. In fact, they did try to jump out, but the centrifugal force of the spinning plane stopped them.
"They called and
said that it was mighty cold back there. But there wasn't much I could do. We had to finish the mission."
On a typical mission day, the men would rise at 2 or 3 in the morning, eat breakfast (powdered
eggs) and go to their briefings. The bombers would take off, meet at an "initial point," and then head in for the bombing run. "You'd see that black cloud coming up in front of you, but there was nothing
you could do, you had to fly the mission."
"For me it was kind of like going into suspended animation. I'd be concentrating so hard on keeping in the formation and making sure we did everything
right."
Some missions could last as long as nine hours. The bomb group would always take off over the Adriatic, a fact that was not popular with the crew in case the plane went down. "But at least we
were in 17s. They floated a while. Those B-24s went straight down."
After the crew had been flying a while, Pearson was taken aside at a briefing. The group leader said they had a plane that was
burning too much gas, and they wanted an experienced pilot to take it on the next mission to see what was going on.
The mission went fine, but on the way back, Pearson started getting a little nervous
about the gas gauges. "As we approached the coast, I saw that all four gas tanks were empty. As soon as I could, I put her down at a fighter base on the coast. One of the engines quit while I was
landing, and another quit while I was taxiing in. I found out later that two tanks were bone dry and the other two just had fumes. It's hard to say why. Every plane was different."
Pearson had a lot
of respect for the Wright radial engines. "It was a good motor. They tended to leak a lot of oil. In fact, we called it the Wright Cyclone externally lubricated engine. But it could take a beating and
get you home. I think I landed with three engines six or seven times on our missions."
Flak was another problem. After one mission, the flight mechanic came up to Pearson and asked if he had flown in
the 306 plane. The mechanic said they had found 50 holes in the plane, some of them quite large. "And one had gone right through the cockpit. The shrapnel must have gone right in front of me or right
behind me."
The other danger was German fighters. On a bombing raid to Yugoslavia one time, Pearson's bomber was coming back with three engines, meaning it had fallen behind the rest of the formation
and was a sitting duck for enemy fighters. "We saw three fighters coming out of the cloud and the boys were pretty nervous. But it turned out they were American P-51s. They were those red tailed planes.
They settled right on top of us, and protected us all the way home."
The red-tailed fighters were the famous Tuskegee Airmen, for whom Pearson and the other pilots had the highest respect. They were
an all-black group of fighter pilots.
At the end of 25 missions, Pearson had a four or five day rest at the island of Capri, and then it was back to business. The 8th Air Force demanded that pilots
fly 35 missions before being send home. The 15th Air Force required 50 missions.
But there was a catch. Because the 15th flew much longer missions, many of them actually qualified as two
missions.
"As you got near the end, you did get a little fidgety."
Pearson's big day came on Dec. 29, 1944. It qualified as his 50th mission, although because of the two-for-one rule he had
actually flown 37 missions. His crew, because they had filled in on other crews along the way, had finished their 50. Pearson would be flying with a different crew.
"When they pulled the sheet off the
map, I saw that we were only going to northern Italy. I said, 'Holy cow, am I lucky.' When I took off, my bombardier, Harry, was there to say goodbye. I said out the window, 'Don't worry, Harry, I've got
her made today.'"
"We came in at about 27,000 feet, and there was some flak, but it was nothing like what we had gone through before. What we dreaded, of course, was the direct hit, where the 88 shell
actually explodes inside the airplane.
"And, of course, that's exactly what happened. It hit us back where the waist gunners were, and so I suppose they were killed immediately. In an instant, I lost
control of the airplane. It went up a little bit, and then it started coming down.
"We don't wear parachutes while flying, just the harnesses. So I got my parachute from under my seat and attached it
to my chest. I tried getting out through the hatch in the cockpit, but there was a big ball of fire there. Parachutes and fire don't do very well together, so I couldn't go that way.
"I went back
toward the bomb bay, but it was like a blow torch back there. I couldn't go that way either. We were over the Alps, and I could see the mountains coming up. I just said to myself, 'This is it. Here we
are.'"
Pearson said he was calm, resigned to his fate.
"Suddenly there was a huge explosion. I assume it was one of the gas tanks. I was knocked out, and when I came to I was in mid-air. I figured
I was either still alive, or I was an angel. Well, I knew I wasn't an angel, so I must be alive.
"I knew I was falling, but it didn't feel like it. It just felt like I was floating. I pulled the cord,
and I could see the white silk, and then I passed out again. When I came to again, I could see the chute over me, but I could also see the wing of my airplane was spiraling down, right at me.
"I
pulled at the shroud lines and got myself swinging back and forth, and the wing went right by me.
"I wondered how I was so I started taking a personal inventory. Left arm, okay. Right leg, okay. Left
leg, okay. Right arm, numb. Oh, oh.
"I looked down and I could see blood dripping from my fingers. It was freezing up there, so I managed to take my right hand and stuff it in my pocket.
"Then I
saw little yellow blobs going by, and I wondered what those were. Finally I realized that they were tracers. They were shooting at me. So I started pulling on the shrouds again, and swinging back and
forth. They kept missing me.
"These were just little chutes. In training, they told us that landing with these chutes was like jumping off a boxcar roof that's traveling 20 miles an hour. When I hit,
it was all of that. I felt something snap, I don't know if it was my back or my knees.
"I got out of my harness and I took a couple of steps and fell down. I got up and took a couple of more
steps and fell down again. Right about then I heard a shot. I looked and saw an old man and a young boy, and the old man had a rifle. I yelled at him and asked if he was Italian. He yelled back "tedesco'
which I think meant he was German.
"I put one hand over my head and yelled that I didn't want to fight anyone. I tried to raise my other hand, but the blood had frozen in my pocket and it was stuck.
I must have looked just like an American gangster with one hand raised and the other one in my pocket. He fired at me again, and it went right by my ear."
Pearson finally managed to yank his wounded
arm free, and get that one over his head too. It was just in time to greet a German soldier who had come up behind. The soldier leveled Pearson with his rifle butt to the head.
"I was out again. When
I came to, he tried to help me stand up. He had just smashed me with his rifle butt, but now he was trying to help me."
Pearson turned over his 45 caliber pistol. "I never planned to use it on
anybody. I wore it over my heart in case a piece of shrapnel ever came that way." And he turned over his knife.
In the later days, Pearson was able to find out what happened to the rest of his crew.
Four had been killed and six survived. The most amazing survival was that of Art Frechette who got out the plane, but whose chute didn't open. Frechette fell probably 15,000 feet but landed on the steep
slope of a snow-covered mountain where he slid down to safety. The story eventually was front page news in the Stars and Stripes.
Pearson was taken to a German medic, and he got a chance to look at
himself in a mirror. "We never shaved before a mission because then the oxygen mask would rub on our skin. So there I was with all this blood congealed in my whiskers. One eye was swollen shut. I didn't
even know who that was in the mirror."
The next few days, Pearson was transported down the mountain, and nearly froze to death at several locations. At one point, he told his captors he couldn't walk,
but a rifle butt to the kidneys convinced him to give it one more try.
He eventually reached an interrogation camp near Frankfurt. "There were little heaters in the cells, but as soon as they started
making heat, they would turn them off. They were trying to tear us down mentally."
The interrogations got increasingly more violent as the week went on, but Pearson refused to divulge anything but
name, rank and serial number. They cursed at him, and threatened him. Finally, on the eighth day, the interrogator told Pearson if he didn't fill out the questionnaire in front of him, he would be shot.
A soldier put a rifle up to the back of his head, and cocked the weapon.
"I didn't think they would do it, but what did I know? What's another dead guy in a war?"
The interrogator relented. The gun
was taken away, and Pearson was sent to Stalag Luft 1 at Barth, on the northern coast of Germany.
"While I was in Italy, we made some modifications to the plane. We took out the ball turret and put in
a radar dome. Then we could fly missions in bad weather. If they knew I had flown those planes, I never would have gotten out of interrogation."
The train ride to Stalag Luft 1, with 60 men in each
boxcar, took three days and four nights. "When we'd be attacked by Allied planes, the guards would all run for the shelters and leave us locked in the cars.
"At one point, when we were going through
Berlin, they told us we could get out and relieve ourselves. While we were out of the car, we saw large group of German civilians coming at us. They had rocks and clubs. They didn't like us very much.
I'll give the guards credit, because they protected us."
The train finally delivered them to the camp. "When I saw that barbed wire and that Nazi flag, my heart just sank."
At the prison camp, 24
men were assigned to each room. There was a wood stove, and now and then a Red Cross parcel would arrive, to be shared by six men. By March, the parcels had quit coming.
"The food consisted of this
black bread, made partly out of sawdust, and a potato and rutabaga soup. The pieces that stuck up out of the soup were black.
"One time a horse was killed right outside our compound. It sat there for
three or four days, all bloated with its legs sticking up. Finally, they hauled it inside the barbed wire and told us, 'If you're so hungry, eat this.' Well, we did."
One of the barracks in the camp
had a clandestine radio, and messages were sent from building to building on tissue paper with the latest news. "We knew Patton was coming from one direction and the Russians were coming from the other
way."
On May 3rd, 1945, the German guards disappeared. The prisoners waited to see what would happen. "We were afraid that the camp would become a battlefield, and so we dug foxholes. We were so close
to the river, though, they filled up right away with water. We all agreed nobody would be using those fox holes. But when a bomb went off at the nearby airport, all you could hear was splash, splash,
splash."
Not long after, the Russians entered the camp. "What a bunch of savages they were. I tried to stay as far away from them as I could." Most of the prisoners stayed inside the barbed wire,
hoping Americans would show up. After some days had gone by, though, Pearson grew a little stir crazy and wandered out on the peninsula near the camp. There were Russian soldiers there.
"I walked past
a group, and I was informed that I had not saluted a Russian officer. I asked him what his rank was, and I figured that I outranked him. I started to walk away and I heard a click. I turned around, and
he had his pistol pointed right at my head. I said, 'Oh, I guess I owe you a salute.' Those dirty, rotten Bolsheviks."
Eventually, Americans did arrive and evacuated the men to Camp Lucky Strike on
the French coast. The men waited and waited for transport, but soldiers departing for possible action in the Pacific had first priority.
"One day, Ike showed up and saw that we were still there. He
told us that he had promised we would go home, and he said he made sure that happened that day. We all applauded, and he said, 'Don't clap for me, I'm a general not a movie star.'"
Pearson made it
home to Mankato, where his wife's family had a farm, and took 90 days leave. The Army wouldn't discharge him because the war in the Pacific was still going on. Finally, in December 1945, he was
discharged.
He eventually became a probation officer in southern Minnesota. His wartime injuries never left him, though, and he has been treated for bad knees and a bad back and herniated disks. He
was 6 feet tall as an Army pilot and he now stands 5 feet eight and one half inches. "They say I've got four sagging vertebrae in my back."
Pearson became active in the Disabled American Veterans, and
in 1975 he rose to be National Commander of the organization. He was a close friend and confidante of Sen. Paul Wellstone, known as one of the most veteran-friendly of all U.S. senators.
He and his
wife, Katherine, have seven children, 10 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Pearson has traveled back to wartime scenes, and in the Alps he was presented with parts of his airplane by a
local family. He still has a wheel hub in his basement.
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