A bad day at the office

Author guest post from Eric Ratcliffe.

September 27th 1944 was the scene of a bloody battle between the Liberators from the USAAF 445th BG and the German Luftwaffe this is the story of one of the aircrews involved.

Limping across the Channel, one of the few survivors from the Kassel Raid’s 6 minutes of slaughter was 1st Lt. Stanley Kryvic’s badly damaged B24 Liberator 331 U “Percy”, they hadn’t intended to be heading for a early bath in a freezing North Sea, at the early morning briefing it had been announced that Brussels airfield had been liberated with intact runways and this was now the intended destination for the heavily damaged bomber.

The sole surviving Liberator from the annihilated 702 squadron, was in deep trouble with three wounded gunners T/Sgt’s. Puto, Paul and Rand. Radio Operator John Cadden still dazed having taken a hit on his flak helmet and also covered in Hydraulic oil from the shot out system, John was trying to take care of the wounded gunners injecting the most badly wounded Harry Puto with a shot of morphine.

Meanwhile up front in the “ office” Stanley and his co-pilot 2nd Lt. Leonard Trotta had their work cut out keeping Percy in the air, with one engine shot out and feathered, another with low oil pressure and producing little power, with no hydraulic assistance on the controls it was just sheer muscle power keeping Percy aloft and trailing behind the few flying remnants of the 445th BG.

Slowly descending through the overcast, the sight of a grey North sea greeting them when they finally broke through into clear air, setting a course westward was the best option until hopefully England would come into view, before Percy would run out of altitude and they would have to ditch.

To try to arrest the slow descent, the guns and ammo and anything else not needed was dumped over the side, John having to fend off the disposal of his radio set so he could keep communication with the air- sea rescue incase they didn’t make it across the water, managing to arrest the descent to just over a 1000 feet by this action, the welcome site of the coast of England hove into view and Kryvic saw that they were not far off track to get back to the runways of home base Tibenham, so they pushed on in the direction of home.

A few miles out because of the lack of hydraulics the undercarriage was manually lowered as Stanley set a heading for the threshold of runway 33, the extra drag caused meant that Percy was not longer able to maintain altitude and the aircraft arrived at Tibenham at just a few hundred feet, seeing that the runway was blocked by contractors vehicles, with minimum airspeed and too low to do a circuit onto a different runway Stanley’s only option was to keep flying straight ahead in the hope of make it onto Old Buckenham’s runway 6 miles ahead, this proved impossible and Percy gave up trying to be an aeroplane in a field at Yew Tree farm Carlton Rode just 2 miles from the safety of Old Buckenham, breaking up in the crash and catching fire, it was the bravery of Stanley Krivic in pulling a trapped John Cadden and Leonard Trotta from the burning wreckage that prevented the casualty list being higher than navigator Daniel Dale , who didn’t survive the crash, the rest of the crew transported to the 65th Hospital at Redgrave near Diss. Stanley was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry, Daniel a 6 foot plot at the American war cemetery at Madingley Cambridge R.I.P

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