Gonzales - Deep survival: who lives, who dies, and why: true stories of miraculous endurance and sudden death

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HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

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SURVIVAL

MOST CHILDREN ARE TOLD fantastic stories, which they gradually come to realize are not true. As I grew up, the fantastic stories Id heard as a young child turned out to be true. The more I learned, the more fantastic and true the stories seemed.

They were unlike the stories other children heard. They were gruesome, improbable, and sad. I didnt repeat them because I thought no one would believe me. They were the stories of a young man falling out of the sky. Unlike Icarus, who had flown too high, he had not flown high enough. At 27,000 feet, his wing was blown off by a German Flakbatalion , which was firing 88-millimeter antiaircraft shells over the rail yards outside of Dusseldorf. And unlike Icarus, hes still alive as I write this.

Federico Gonzales, my father, was a First Lieutenant near the end of World War II. He was piloting a B-17 for the Eighth Air Force, when that organization had evolved into a marvelous machine for turning young men into old memories. He was on his twenty-fifth and last mission, which he was eager to complete, because he and his buddy, David Swift, were going to sign up to fly P-51 Mustang fighter planes, the knights of the sky. My father was like that, despite having been shot down before. Hed enlisted in the last cavalry outfit before the war. He rode horses at a gallop while emptying the clip of his .45 Model 1911-A, reloading while turning to come back and hit the targets again. When the war started, the cavalry was mechanized, and he began searching for the next best thing. He discovered airplanes. He went out for fighters, but they needed bomber pilots, and as his commanding officer told me forty-five years later, Your dad had a flair for flying on instruments.

When his B-17 was hit on January 23, 1945, he was the lead pilot for one of those enormous air raids that the United States was conducting at the time. The Commandant of the 398th Bomb Group, Colonel Frank Hunter, had asked my fathers regular co-pilot to stand down so that he could fly right seat in the lead plane and see the action. The bombers had taken off in great waves of smoke before dawn, formed up, and churned out over the English Channel from Nuthampstead Base.

Theyd reached the target area and were on the bomb run when ground fire from the Flakbatalion cut the left wing of my fathers B-17 in half just inboard of the number one engine. It was rotten luck. During the bomb run, you couldnt take evasive action or the bombs would go astray. Moreover, his was the first plane in the formation, and the hit was the very first firing. It was a mortal wound to the plane and 90 percent fatal to the crew. The blast was deafening, and my father saw immediately that there was going to be no flying out of this. He turned to his boss beside him and said, Well, I guess this is it.