Through the cockpit windscreen, Capt. Robert Morgan saw flashes of light from the wings and engine cowling of a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 at his 12 o’clock and closing at an incredible rate. Each wink of light from the fighter’s wing root meant another 20mm cannon shell was heading directly at his B-17F Flying Fortress at over 2,300 feet per second.
Having no room to dive in the crowded formation of B-17 bombers of the 91st Bomb Group, he pitched up. The Luftwaffe fighter’s shells impacted the tail of the aircraft instead of coming straight through the windscreen.
Over the intercom Morgan heard his tail gunner, Sgt. John Quinlan, yelling that the aircraft’s tail was shot to pieces and what was left was in flames.
ENLARGE Staff Sgt. John P. Quinlan in his tail gun position on the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress “Memphis Belle”, pictured during a bond tour of the U.S. after the plane and crew returned from Europe after completing 25 bombing missions.U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES PHOTO
It was January 23, 1943. Morgan and his nine crewmen aboard the “Memphis Belle” had just fought their way through a swarm of Luftwaffe fighters, dropped their bombs on a Nazi submaAirman Magazinerine base in the coastal city of Lorient in occupied France and were fighting to survive the return trip to the Eighth Air Force base in Bassingbourn, England. Morgan began calculating if the crew should bail out and become prisoners of war before the tail tore completely off the bomber trapping the crew in a death spiral culminating in a fiery crash.
A moment later, Quinlan reported that the fire in the tail had gone out. The “Memphis Belle” and its crew would survive the mission; the crew’s eighth and the bomber’s ninth.
ENLARGE Capt. Robert Morgan does a preflight check in the cockpit of the Boeing B-17F “Memphis Belle” at the U.S. Army Air Forces base in Bassingbourn, England in 1943. A photograph of Morgan’s girlfriend, Margaret Polk of Memphis, Tenn., for which the “Memphis Belle” was named, is above the windscreen.U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES PHOTO
