HIS LAST MISSION ... NEVER FORGET
Mashpee’s Alfred Benjamin recalls the details of war
Alfred Benjamin’s “sortie reports” of his 31 aerial missions navigating B-17s over Europe during World War II are snapshots of one miracle after another — except for the nightmare of his 13th bombing run.
“I can’t even put it into words. It was just so horrible. It was a tough long war … and we saw planes go down, we saw people jumping out of planes and hopefully we were hoping that we weren’t going to get hit,” he said of what awaited him that day.
It was Aug. 19, 1944. “We were hit over the target,” he said of bombing a railroad yard in Hamm, Germany. “We lost two engines and we were limping home … we got hit again (over the Rhine River) and lost the third engine.”
Benjamin, who is Jewish, said B-17 crew members feared that if a Jew was captured, the Nazis would exeThis cute them. So when his pilot wanted to ditch over the front lines in Belgium, he pleaded for more time.
“I said, ‘Look I’m Jewish. We can’t go yet. We’ve got another minute or two to go. Let’s see how far we’ll get,' ” said Benjamin, now 95. “So that’s what he did.”
His log states: “Joined formation. Aircraft struck by flak … After dropping bombs on target, left formation … crew bailed out over Binche, Bel., all crew returned to duty except ball turret gunner, who was seriously wounded.”
The pilot let that wounded “Flying Fortress” — the workhorse bomber of the war — rumble along until the last engine burst into flames. Benjamin, who grew up in Boston and now lives in Mashpee with his wife, Lorraine, parachuted into the safety of the local brigade, injured but alive. He made his way to Paris and then back to his base near Kettering, England, to fly again.
gregarious father of four sons is one of the Heroes of a Generation, the focus of a continuing series in the Herald chronicling the lives of those who served during World War II.
He was honored at Fenway Park last weekend for his heroics. He said the standing ovation from the 38,000 in attendance was humbling. His story is equally mesmerizing, and he recalls every detail as if it were yesterday.
“I was one of the youngest officers in the whole Army and I was a kid. I didn’t realize I was in danger,” he said of becoming a second lieutenant serving as a celestial navigator at 19. “We flew missions that were impossible missions — they knew they were impossible missions and they sent us out anyway.”
His meticulous logs tell of bombing runs over France, Holland, Belgium and Germany flying in B-17s named The Tremblin’ Gremlin, Screaming Eagle, Spam-OLiner, Little Kenny, Big Dog, Hotnuts and the Fightin’ Hebe.
“A Jewish guy named that one,” he said of the Fightin’ Hebe.
The one that crashed was The Tremblin’ Gremlin II, he added.
He bombed German troops, rail yards, a V-1 rocket factory and the chemical
plant that made the poison gas used in the concentration camps. He didn’t know then just how horrific the enemy could be, but he prayed he’d make it back home to Boston one day.
“I was hit three times, just pieces (of shrapnel) falling, coming through the skin of the plane and just hitting me,” he said. “That didn’t even break my skin because it was just falling from the sky.
“You can’t think you’re not going to make it, you have to think, ‘Well I don’t know who’s going to make it today, but I’m going to make it,' ” he said, an uplifting attitude he still embraces today. “I just had to keep track of where we were all the time and get us home. I’m the navigator, my job was to get us home.”
He said his bomber was separated from the pack 13 times — a deadly hazard of the air war that exposed any lumbering B-17 to German fighters.
“So 13 times the pilot had to say to you ‘Get us home,' ” he said.
As navigator, Benjamin sat in the nose of the plane next to the bombardier. Each B-17 had 10 crew members and 13 guns and every battle unfolded before his young eyes 25,000 feet up.
He was a member of the Eighth Air Force tasked with taking out the German Luftwaffe to clear the way for the invasion and pound Germany into submission. The casualties were staggering: 44,472 men lost their lives.
“You’re so busy that you can’t really dwell on these things, because you’re so busy doing what you have to do. You’re going there, you’re shooting planes and planes are falling out of the sky in front of you,” he said.
“It was a horror. I remember going on a mission and ahead of us there was a group under attack, they were under attack from antiaircraft gunmen first and then they were under attack from fighters. And I could remember airplanes falling out of the sky in front of us,” he said. “I was lucky, in the whole war I never was attacked by fighters.”
He won his ticket home after completing 31 missions. He earned 10 medals, including the Purple Heart and French Legion of Honor. He’ll be married 70 years soon. He opened his own audio-visual business in Boston, moved to Newton and wrote a play — “In the Dark of the Night” — about his time in the belly of a B-17.
“We leave one by one and soon we will all be gone,” he writes in his play. “They are men now but they were really just boys … Many went to serve and many never returned. They fought for America and the world.
“Their mission was to win a war. Our mission is to never forget.”