Re: Black Tursday

Date: March 29, 2004

"Vet of famed flight dies at 82
By Glenn Rolfe, The Leader & State Register

SEAFORD - Western Sussex County and America last week lost an honored World War II veteran - a B-17 turret gunner who braved enemy flak and fighters and whose crew's "Black Thursday" bombing mission made the pages of Readers Digest through the eyes of a Swiss boy.

George H. Blalock Jr., a survivor of "Black Thursday" and German imprisonment, died at his Woodland home March 25 following a six-month battle with cancer. He was 82.

Family members were at his bedside.

"We lost a good one," said Joel Gossett, Mr. Blalock's stepson-in-law. "He fought right up to the end."

Military services were held Monday for the North Carolina native who spent the last three decades of his life in the Seaford area.

In the Army Air Corps, Master Sgt. Blalock was a top turret gunner on Lazy Baby, a B-17 that was one of many planes lost to anti-aircraft flak and German fighters during the planned air strike on the ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt, Germany, on Oct. 14, 1943.

That mission - Mr. Blalock's seventh - went down in annals of war as "Black Thursday" in the wake of the staggering loss of American planes and crews.

Seriously damaged by flak over Holland, Lazy Baby and other bombers pressed on - without escort fighters, which had to turn back for England due to fuel limitations - meeting fierce opposition from German fighters.

"The plane was hit and he was given the order to jump, and the pilot and co-pilot sailed it on into Switzerland," said Mr. Gossett.

Mr. Blalock bailed out, landed in a turnip field near Aachen, Germany, and was immediately captured by German soldiers. He was officially listed as missing in action for six months before his parents learned he was a prisoner of war.

After about 19 months in captivity, Mr. Blalock - and other POWs - were liberated on May 3, 1945, by American troops, barely escaping the scheduled Allied artillery shelling of the area.

Mr. Blalock was awarded the Air Medal following his first five missions.

The "Legacy of Lazy Baby" was chronicled in the October 1993 Reader's Digest.

The author of that article was Jean-Pierre Wilhelm, who as a 13-year-old Swiss school boy had witnessed the crash-landing of the mortally-wounded plane.

Forty-five years later, while leafing through a scrapbook in 1988, that fateful day in 1943 vividly came back to life when Mr. Wilhelm spotted a newspaper clipping with a fuzzy photograph of a B-17 in a field. He recognized it as the Lazy Baby.

Mr. Wilhelm wrote that he was lucky enough to locate most of Lazy Baby's surviving crew.

In 2002, Mr. Blalock received a Christmas greeting from Jean-Pierre Wilhelm.

"And dad had heard from him in 1990, before he wrote the Reader's Digest article," said Mr. Blalock's daughter, Laura Burke of Seaford.

In the years after the war ended, Mr. Blalock worked 25 years as a lineman-foreman for the C.W. Wright Co., of Richmond, Va., returning in 1983.

For 20 years, Mr. Blalock and his wife, Pearl, operated the Dairy Bar restaurant in Seaford.

"He enjoyed gardening," said Mrs. Burke. "He grew most of the vegetables for the Dairy Bar."

Mr. Blalock's name is on one of the bricks lining the walkways at Kiwanis Memorial Park, memorializing local veterans.

Staff writer Glenn Rolfe can be reached at 629-5505 or grolfe@newszap.com"

AND

"60 YEARS ON ... REMEMBERING THE NIGHT WE LOST 97 PLANES IN JUST ONE RAID

Sixty years ago tonight, hundreds of airmen took part in a mission that was to incur RAF Bomber Command's heaviest losses of the Second World War. Almost 100 planes - each carrying seven or eight men - were lost in the raid over Nuremberg. Matthew Bayes speaks to one Lincolnshire man who made it back and the brothers of another who did not.

High in the skies above Nazi Germany, Halifax bomber HX 272 took a hit on its inner starboard engine.

Flames and smoke belched from the engine and as the plane launched into an unstoppable dive, pilot Christian Nielson ordered the eight-man crew to bail out.

They were still 40 miles from the target, Nuremberg - the city infamous as the venue of pre-war Nazi rallies.

But as Flight Engineer Chris Panton (19) from Old Bolingbroke, near Spilsby, was getting out of the stricken plane, it blew up at 15,000ft.

His body was recovered and buried a few days later in the town of Bamberg, a few miles north of Nuremberg.

His younger brothers Harold and Fred Panton, who were just 10 and 13 when he died, run the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre as a tribute to him and his war-time colleagues.

Mr Panton, posthumously received his commission as Pilot Officer, of 433 Squadron was just one of 535 allied airmen who lost their lives on what became known as Bomber Command's blackest night.

As well as those killed, another 180 were wounded or taken prisoner as 97 of the 795 bombers failed to return.

But a tragic irony of that disastrous raid of March 30-31, 1944, is that some who took part suffered few problems.

Former RAF navigator Douglas Hudson - a man who had endured terrible privations in three North African prisoner of war camps - remembers the eight-hour flight as "uneventful".

"We flew in, bombed the place and flew out again," he said. "For us it was a piece of cake - but for others it was absolute hell."

Mr Hudson, then a member of 100 Squadron, based at RAF Waltham, near Grimsby, attributes the ease of his own raid to the fact that his crew was one of the first into Germany.

It was not until Mr Hudson (87), who now lives in Heighington, near Lincoln, returned to his base that he discovered the truth.

A colleague who was not on operational duties broke the shocking news.

"He came in with a cup of coffee for us and asked how many planes we thought we'd lost," said Mr Hudson.

"We said 'about 20,' he replied 'no'.

"'Thirty?' 'No'.

"'Sixty?' 'No'.

"When he said 97 we just didn't believe it."

The massive death toll was a sickening blow for the men of Bomber Command, coming as it did just six days after 72 planes failed to return from a raid on Berlin.

Mr Hudson remembers there had been "a good deal of doubt" whether the raid would take part - even after the morning's meteorological briefing.

Adverse weather conditions had ruled out targets in northern Germany but the Met men predicted there would be enough cloud cover to protect the bombers on their outward run.

As events turned out, the weather betrayed the allied airmen. The absence of cloud was exacerbated as the aircraft produced contrails which acted like fingers, pointing them out to the waiting German defenders.

They also suffered from a strong wind that blew many of the force off course.

In such conditions, the fate of Chris Panton and his crewmates was effectively sealed.

"There were about 300 German night fighters waiting for them," said Fred Panton.

"They also brought in some of the day fighters to help them. Chris and the others flew straight into it."

Amazingly, the plane yielded three survivors: pilot Nielson, rear gunner Jack McLauchlan and Harry Cooper, the plane's wireless operator.

Of the 12 Halifaxes which took part in the raid, Chris Panton's was the only one not to return.

In the run-up to the anniversary, Harold and Fred attended a memorial service at his old base, the former RAF Skipton On Swale, near Thirsk, North Yorkshire, on Sunday.

"There was about 450 people there in total," said Harold Panton (70). "It was a very moving service."

The brothers' museum is perhaps best known as the home of Avro Lancaster Bomber NX611 Just Jane, which used to stand guard at RAF Scampton, near Lincoln.

On a visit to the centre, arranged by the Lincolnshire Echo, Mr Hudson admits to mixed feelings about the plane.

In his war-time memoirs There and Back Again - A Navigator's Story he described the Lancaster as "Our cradle, our salvation, our coffin". But his views on the small blister-shaped casing that houses its H2S radar system are unequivocal. "It told us where we were," he said. "I have no doubt it saved our lives."

Even now, 60 years on, Mr Hudson is a strong defender of Bomber Command and cites Nuremberg raid is an example of the sacrifices its crews made.

"I am aware of the damage we inflicted on German civilians but we lost 55,000 young during the Second World War," he said.

"Bomber Command did a hell of job, took a hell of a risk and paid a hell of a price," he said.

There and Back Again - a Navigator's Story is published by Tucann Books and costs £12.

Find out more by logging on to www.tucann.co.uk

For details of the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre log on to www.lincsaviation.co.uk

Losses that led to policy change

The raid over Nuremberg was the final mission in the Battle of Berlin.

The battle raged from November 18, 1943, to March 31 the following year and stretched the resources of Bomber Command to breaking point.

During that time there were 16 major raids on Berlin itself - and the same amount on other large cities.

In total, Bomber Command flew more than 9,000 sorties against Berlin and dropped almost 30,000 bombs on the city.

The battle was one of the key examples of area bombing, the strategy developed by the head of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris.

Harris argued that the main objectives of night-time blanket bombing of urban areas was to undermine the morale of the civilian population

As well as the Battle of Berlin, the RAF targeted Dresden and Hamburg, as well as other major cities.

The air campaign killed an estimated 600,000 civilians and destroyed or seriously damaged some six million homes.

It was also a highly dangerous strategy and during the six years of the war Bomber Command had 57,143 men killed.

Of these, the Nuremberg raid of March 30 and 31 1944 saw Bomber Command's single biggest loss of life and was a contributory factor when Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Harris to end the policy of area bombing in March 1945."