Eddie West: A fateful switch

By Chris Rosenblum

The little metal fragment should have penetrated Eddie West's flak helmet.

He should have been slumped over in the B-24 Liberator bomber, unconscious.

The moment shrapnel pierced his plane high over Vienna, he should have been sitting on the flight deck behind the pilots.

Instead, the bombardier was there.

"The terrible thing was, I had asked him to change positions with me on that flight, so I was responsible for his death in a way," West said.

It had seemed like a good swap. West thought he could plot the flight better from his customary position below in the nose, rather than on the deck, where navigators usually sat when their planes weren't leading formations.

West said he could toggle the switch that released the bombs once the lead plane in the 717th Squadron dropped its load. The bombardier, perhaps seeking a safer position than the nose bubble, agreed to move.

The bombadier died of his injuries the next day.

West, now 80, lived to become a doctor in State College. From 1944 to 1945, as a second lieutenant, he flew 55 missions with the 449th Bomb Group in the 15th Air Force.

Based in Grottaglie in southern Italy, West directed the lumbering "Iron Gray Bird" to Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia. From six miles up, through carpets of flak bursts, destruction rained down on aircraft factories, rail yards and oil refineries.

But at one time, West just wanted to fly.

He was a highschool senior in State College in 1943 when he read about the Army Air Corps in the library. The $250-a-month pay particularly caught his attention.

"Back then, that was a lot of money," he said.

Plus, he wouldn't be drafted. West finished basic training at "Camp Mud" in Greensboro, N.C., then continued his training at Marshall College and in San Antonio. He showed an aptitude for navigation but held out hope for the pilot's chair.

Finally, the day came for posting the cadets' assignments.

"There I was -- navigator," West said. "I was disappointed because I thought, 'Oh, I would love to be a pilot.' Actually, it was wonderful because I was best suited to be a navigator."

He quickly took to "dead reckoning" -- calculating the plane's position by wind direction and velocity -- and celestial navigation. In Walla Walla, Wash., he met his nine crewmates and learned to spread his charts out in their Liberator.

Classes, however, could only teach him so much about the reality of flying in an unheated bomber through air as cold as 30 degrees below zero. Their lives depended on electric flight suits and gloves plugged into the plane.

And nothing prepared him for the sensation of dropping out of the sky.

The co-pilot, as West remembers, made one maneuver too many.

"He wanted to be a fighter pilot, and they put him on the B-24s," West said. "To him, that was like driving a truck, and he was very unhappy.

"I think he was so frustrated one time that he was trying to put the B-24 through some fighter movement, I suspect. All I knew was I was up in the nose of the plane, and all of a sudden the wing dropped and we went into a spin."

West, thrown to the floor, wondered what the folks back home would think upon hearing of his death.

"But our pilot managed to get us out of the spin into a dive, straight down, and then he was able to pull us out of it before we hit the ground," West said.

Having survived training, he put his navigational skills to use flying to Newfoundland, the jumping off point for a transatlantic hop.

West altered the course so that the plane flew near State College. The pilot granted his request to make a pass over his College Heights home.

"I think I could see my girlfriend's house, which was only a block away from where I lived, and I dropped a note down," West said.

It wasn't long before 500-pound bombs were falling from his Liberator.

Crews would rise before dawn for briefings and, for those who wished, prayers. Soon, they were into their flight suits and planes.

"I remember it was exciting," West said. "You'd line up, and then they'd rev up the engines ... to make sure they're working. And they'd roar."

Flights could last as long as 10 hours. The time over targets could seem like an eternity.

"You'd get closer, and you'd see the sky ahead of you was just filled with black bursts of flak," West said. "It was like a box filled with explosions."

Crippled bombers, fortunately, could depend on the famous Tuskegee Airmen -- black fighter pilots based in Italy -- to escort them in their P-51 Mustangs.

"They were tremendous," West said.

A religious man, West also relied on his faith for comfort. He prayed to help calm his fears about bailing out over the Adriatic Sea in the winter and freezing.

"I asked the Lord, 'Dear God, please help me to face whatever I have to,'" West said.

Over Vienna, it was 400 antiaircraft guns.

His plane returned from one run with 200 holes and two shot-up engines. And one fatally wounded bombardier.

"To make matters worse, he was the only man in our crew who was married," West said. "And just before coming overseas, he and his wife had their first baby."

West wrote an apology to the man's widow, whose kind response helped ease his mind. He also came to a decision, a turning point that led to Penn State, medical school and a practice he still maintains out of his childhood home.

"When Bill was killed, I felt a strong sense of responsibility," West said. "I had been spared, and I felt, 'Gee whiz, I ought to try and do something worthwhile with my life,' because I wasn't killed and he was."

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.