B-17 American bomber crew not lost to history
On Sept. 9, 1944, a dozen B-17 heavy bombers thundered toward the mammoth I.G. Farben industrial plant sprawled along the Rhine River at Ludwigshafen, Germany.
Enemy anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with flak.
As on every mission, the big bombers had to fly straight through the storm of metal. Only the target mattered.
For most of the nine men aboard the aircraft, named the Strictly GI, this was their first combat mission. And their last.
“Flak crashed through our windshield and through my desk, throwing my papers everywhere,” recalled the late Lt. Robert Keith Hankey, of Butler, the navigator, in his war diary. “It knocked my maps off my desk.”
No one was hurt in that initial blast. The plane flew on to drop its bombs.
“Then WHOMP, the plane just seemed to drop from under me,” Lt. Hankey wrote.
Flak knocked out two engines and the interphone. Mortally wounded, the ship fell out of formation and began losing altitude. Fire broke out in the bomb bay, separating the officers in the cockpit from the enlisted men inthe rear of the plane.
The pilot, Lt. Niels Jensen, gave the order to bail to those nearest him in the cockpit.
Lt. Hankey dove through the hatch. Lt. Jensen and two other officers also parachuted out.
They became prisoners of war in Germany.
Five others remained trapped in the back of the plane as it descended to 14,000 feet, began to spin and then exploded in the clouds. Among them were Sgt. Joe Kasperko, of McKees Rocks, the radio operator and gunner.
He was 23.
In the annals of World War II, Strictly GI became just another
bomber casualty. American industry pumped out 12,731 Flying Fortresses, and more than a third of them were lost in Europe. The U.S. 8th Air Force, which was responsible for bombing Germany with B-17s and B-24 Liberators, lost a total of 6,537 heavy bombers by war’s end. But their crews are not lost to history. German researchers still find old crash sites in the countryside, and last year they located the remains of the Strictly GI in some woods near a village south of Ludwigshafen.
Erik Wieman, a former Dutch marine and founder of a team called Historical Research Community Rhineland-Palatinate, has been excavating the site with local archaeologists and tracking down the relatives of the crew with the goal of erecting a monument.
He’s done the same for other wartime wrecks in the area, reaching out to hometown newspapers in England and the U.S. for help in finding families.
“Our main goal is to find these sites, inform the families and plant a memorial stone,” he said by email from Germany. “We do not want the names of the airmen and this historical and tragic site to be forgotten. They paid the highest price for their country and for our freedom.”
Now the families of the lost have the final piece of the story to go with their old telegrams, the War Department letters, and the anguished correspondence between families desperate for news and clinging to hope in 1944 and 1945.
“The story is so tragic, it’s so sad,” said Barbara Kasperko O’Connell, 66, of Fox Chapel, a neurologist at West Penn Hospital and Sgt. Kasperko’s niece. “He was just so young. He had no chance to live his life.”
Lt. Hankey was fortunate: He spent the rest of the war in a prison camp and came home to live a good life as an aeronautical engineer in Ohio. He died in 2010 at 89.
“Sept. 9 will be the 75th anniversary of the crash,” said his son Terry Hankey, 73, a retired doctor in Wisconsin. “My dad was very reticent to talk about the war and his experience as a POW. I and my family are thankful to finally learn more information, and we are glad that this organization in Germany is pursuing this previously unknown history.”
B-17G 43-37594
The Strictly GI — officially B17G 43-37594 — was part of the 91st Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force, which bombed Germany by day from bases in England while the Royal Air Force bombed at night.
The 8th Air Force suffered heavy losses to the German Luftwaffe in the early years. Although the bombers bristled with machine guns, they flew without fighter protection and were sitting ducks for
expert German pilots, many of whom had been flying in combat since the Spanish Civil War in 1936. That later changed with the arrival of the P-51 fighter, which could provide long-range escort protection.
Bymid-1944, the Luftwaffe threat was no longer as potent.
But anti-aircraft guns set up around key German targets remained deadly. The guns hurled huge amounts of metal flak into the air that knocked hundreds of bombers out of the sky and damaged thousands of others.
By the end of the war, the 91st Bomb Group had lost 197 planes.
Their crews represented the typical hodgepodge of America — young men drawn from every state and background.
Joe Kasperko was a city boy from McKees Rocks and the son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia. He had an older brother, John, who was Barbara Kasperko O’Connell’s father. He had been working a dairy store when the war came and enlisted in the Army Air Corps in August 1942 with the hopes of becoming a pilot.
His training took him to various air bases in the Deep South, South Dakota and Arizona. He ended up as a radio operator and gunner assigned to the 91st Bomb Group in Bassingbourn, England.
Letters home, kept in a carefully indexed book by the late John Kasperko, chronicled his moves from base to base, his daily life as a trainee and his hopes for the future. He was good-natured and positive but did his share of grumbling, as every military man did.
In Tennessee, he told the folks back home that his barracks mates were all “spoiled brats from well-todo families.” He complained that, after a night out, an officer told him he had K.P. duty the next morning: “God, did I swear at him.”
He later had trouble with the math and physics courses air crews needed to master and asked his brother to go to McKees Rocks High School to get textbooks so he could study.
Arriving in England in the summer of 1944, he told of visiting Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace. Being a young man, he also noticed the opposite sex — although he wasn’t particularly impressed.
“Speaking of women, you should really see them,” he wrote. “They have a few beautiful girls and as yet I have not seen a beautiful pair of legs. I’ll take the American girl any time.”
He and Lt. Hankey became friends, and he talked of them meeting two English sisters from well-off families who “got quite a kick” from their American expressions. He said the women had only associated with other uppercrust types and so talking to Americans was a novelty. The experience seemed to have inspired him to improve his speech.
“I’m beginning to talk just as the English,” he wrote. “I hope I can just so as I can get better diction.”
That was Sept. 7, 1944, his last letter.
Two days later, Joe was dead.
Keith Hankey grew up in Lick Hill, north of Butler, and graduated from Butler High School in 1939. He left home for Dayton, Ohio, to train as a draftsman at Wright Field and joined the Army Air Corps in February 1943 at age 21. Like Joe, he wanted to be a pilot but washed out in California, where he and his high school sweetheart, Marion, later married.
Air training during the war years was dangerous. More than 3,500 men died in the U.S. practicing for the real thing. But Keith became a lieutenant and a navigator on B-17s.
In Nebraska, he met his future air crew and then shipped off to Maine, Newfoundland, Iceland and finally England. The crew members were stationed in England for about a month before they were listed for their first combat mission, Sept. 9, to Ludwigshafen. Only the pilot, Lt. Jensen, and Sgt. Stanley Morris, the waist gunner, had seen action before on other planes.
“They got out of the sack at 3 a.m., had breakfast and went to the briefing session,” Terry Hankey wrote in a historical account based on his father’s diary. “A groan went up as they saw that the target was Ludwigshafen, a critical but heavily defended position deep in Germany.”
The I.G. Farben plant made synthetic oil on which Germany’s military depended. The plant and the surrounding region had been targeted many times before, as had the train yards across the Rhine at Mannheim.
This time, 12 ships from the 323rd Squadron made the attack. The Strictly GI would be the only one lost.
Flak hit the plane initially at 11 a.m., when the windshield was shattered, and then again at 11:15.
In a letter to the Kasperkos in July 1945 — after he had been freed from a POW camp — Lt. Dale Burkhead, the co-pilot from Ventura, Calif., said that the Strictly GI was hit in the right wing near the main gas tank and that a fire started. The men had been taught that they had 30 seconds to get out before the ship would explode, he said. Lt. Hankey dove out first, followed by Lt. Richard Klein, the bombardier from Detroit, and then Lt. Jensen and Lt. Burkhead.
In his diary, Lt. Hankey said he put on his parachute and bailed at 24,000 feet.
“I tumbled end over end in the slipstream until I got myself under control,” he wrote.
He said he looked up and saw the Strictly GI explode.
At 5,000 feet, he pulled his ripcord.He was captured immediately after he hit the ground and spent the rest of the war at Stalag Luft I, where thousands of aviators were held. Lt. Hankey’s diary recounts his POW experience while the war raged across Germany until the Red Army liberated the camp in the spring of 1945.
No one knew
Back home, no one knew what had happened to the Strictly GI for months. The War Department listed the crew as missing in action. It wasn’t until the prison camps were liberated that the families finally learned the fate of everyone on board.
The Army identified Joe’s remains from his high school class ring. He was initially buried in Mussbach, Germany, with the remains of the others killed in the crash. Later, his remains were exhumed and reburied at an American military cemetery in Belgium.
The others who died with him that day were Sgt. Herman Valentine, the top turret gunner from Canton, Ohio; Sgt. Donal Laird, the ball turret gunner from Franklin, Ind.; Sgt. Rollin Wright, the tail gunner from Thermopolis, Wyo.; and Sgt. Stanley Morris, the waist gunner from Spokane, Wash.
The last entry in John Kasperko’s book of correspondence is a citation from Gen. Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces.
“He lived to bear his country’s arms,” it reads. “He died to save its honor. He was a soldier and he knew a soldier’s duty. His sacrifice will help to keep aglow the flaming torch that lights our lives that millions yet unborn may know the priceless joy of liberty.”
Shortly after the war, Lt. Hankey visited the Kasperko family. Barbara O’Connell said Joe’s mother was grateful for the visit but also felt badly for Lt. Hankey.
“She said he felt guilty for having survived,” Dr. O’Connell said.
Strictly GI is found
More than seven decades have passed since then.
Of the survivors from Sept. 9, 1944, only Lt. Klein remains. He’s 97 and living in California.
Last summer, Mr. Wieman’s research team found pieces of the Strictly GI in a forest near Speyerdorf, about 20 miles south of Ludwigshafen. Erik Wieman said the area had been replanted with trees after the war, but a retired forestry worker remembered the old crash site from the war years and pointed out the location. The team got to work identifying the plane and excavating.
The German military removed the larger parts of crashed planes after the war but some evidence always remains. The team has found small pieces of the bomber, personal equipment and exploded ammunition.
Barbara O’Connell said she appreciates the painstaking work.
“I’m very grateful to the people [in Germany] for putting in all that effort to find it,” she said.
Mr. Wieman said he is racing against time to track down as many crashes as he can before those who experienced the war are all gone.
“In a few years, it will be much more difficult to find these sites because there will be no more eyewitnesses left,” he said. “So we try to find as many sites as possible, before they are forever forgotten.”