Bomber pilot recalls WWII service

MOSES LAKE - Set the scene, like they do with CGI in the movies, only this time it's real.

May 30, 1944. A B-24, 10 guys on board, laboring along with two of its four engines shut off; it's been dropping down from 25,000 feet to 5,000 feet all the way across France, the crew throwing out everything that isn't bolted down and some stuff that is. They've made it as far as "somewhere over England," as the reporters would say in 1944, actually as far as the approach to Old Beckenham airfield near Norfolk.

So far so good, except things get worse. The plane in line ahead of them has crashed and caught fire on the runway. There is another runway, but the wind is blowing like crazy in the wrong direction, and landing a big bomber in a crosswind is tricky even with four engines.

Nevertheless, the runway is there and in sight. All that's needed now is to lower the landing gear, which will at least be stable when they hit the ground. So the pilot gives the order.

And one of the wheels falls off.

"We didn't really know we only had one wheel until we put the gear down, and then it just fell off," said Lester "Cub" Baer, the pilot on that fateful mission, now a 91-year-old Moses Lake resident. Five thousand feet in the air, two engines, one wheel, wind blowing the wrong direction and there's nowhere to go but down.

So Cub Baer came in, bumped along on that one wheel, nice and light and slow, and kind of laid the big plane down on its side. He explained what happened in a subsequent radio interview.

"The engines kept us balanced until we slowed down. Then the left wing started dragging the ground and finally the number one (engine) prop dug in and spun us around like a top," he said. The moderator asked Baer if the crew walked away. "We ran away. But we really didn't have to. Only the number one engine caught on fire and the fire fighting crew put it out in a hurry," he said.

It was the crew's fifth mission since joining the 453rd Bombardment Group. They only had 30 more to go.

Lester Baer is part of a generation that lived through severe economic crisis as teens and were called upon to fight a world war in their 20s. He is retired after a 30-year career in the Air Force.

The crew's fifth mission and his landing earned Baer a Distinguished Flying Cross. The 453rd Bombardment Group went on to support the D-Day landings, flew missions over Berlin and Munich, and took part in the successful campaign to ruin Germany's oil and gas production and distribution. The group was slightly more glamorous than some, because one of its commanders, at least for about four months, was Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart.

"He was group operations officer. He usually did the morning briefings" on the upcoming mission, Baer said. "He flew when he felt like it," but he made sure to fly at least one mission with each new crew. The air war killed guys who made mistakes, and any pilot and crew had to know what they were doing. Jimmy Stewart did know what he was doing, Baer said.

Cub Baer is originally from Minnesota, a town called Waseca. He entered the U.S. Army Air Forces (the forerunner to the Air Force) soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said. He took a test and a physical, and did an interview, and officially joined the USAAF. "Then they said, 'go home and we'll send you orders,'" Baer said. The orders came in November 1942.

The B-24 Liberator is legendary to students of World War II, one of the heavy bombers that fought a four-year campaign over Germany. For its day it was huge, with four engines and the ability to carry a maximum of 16,000 pounds ordnance. For a four-engine airplane it was relatively easy to fly, Baer said. "It just took a lot of muscle," he said. "Physically it was hard work."

To fly, navigate, protect the plane and drop bombs took 10 people. Baer's copilot also was a native of Waseca, "Cliff Bartell, he was a year ahead of me in high school. We teamed up and we fought the war together." Crews were assigned more or less alphabetically, he said.

And all these guys were young. Really young. The B-24 had a gun station in the tail, and in Baer's crew the tail gunner was a guy named Jones. "Jones was the old man (in the crew). He was 27 years old."

The air campaign required a lot of hours getting to and escaping from a target. Baer said a mission to Berlin or Munich usually took between eight and 10 hours. From Cub Baer's perspective, the crews were too busy to be really scared, for most of the ride.

"The real easy ones (missions) were the buzz bomb sites," he said. "You only got a few of those." (V-1 and V-2 weapons were pilotless drones full of explosives, and mostly were aimed at southern England, chiefly London.)

Most of the time the crew was too busy to be scared while in flight, he said, and his crew rarely saw enemy fighters. But it got real scary real quick when the flak started. Anti-aircraft weapons were designed to disable planes with ammunition that threw out shrapnel when it detonated.

Crews were focused on other things "until the doggone bursts of flak got to where you could smell it," he said. When the flak was thick "it looked like you could walk on the black smoke." Baer coped with a combination of fatalism and skill. "Nothing you could do about it. You flew and hoped it missed."

B-24 crews also feared the B-17s that could fly at higher altitudes. They weren't always careful about where they dropped bombs. "That was even worse than flak, as far as getting your attention and being scared," he said.

But it was flak that got them on that fifth mission. It hit them just as they released the bombs, Baer said. "The bombs were gone, but they hadn't hit the ground yet," he said. The hit blew off a chunk of the plane's nose and damaged the two engines. Two crew members were wounded, but the crew got back to England in one piece and the pilot got a DFC.

Baer's crew completed their 35 missions, and Baer made a career in the Air Force, eventually being stationed in Moses Lake, he said. His late wife Camilla Kearns was a native of Ellensburg.