Dateline 31 December 1944: The Eighth Army Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group were part of a “maximum effort” bombing mission over Hamburg. First Lieutenant Glenn H. Rojohn was the pilot and Second Lieutenant William G. Leek, Jr. was the co-pilot of their Boeing B-17G According to Rojohn, “maximum effort” meant that everyone flies, thus hundreds of B-17s took off from England.

The risk cannot be overstated due to the heavy anti-aircraft defense effort on the part of the Germans, which played out with heavy losses of the bombers and crews. Leek stated that they flew through flak clouds and airplane parts for “what seemed like an hour.” Still they managed to drop their ordnance and turn around to head back home.

As they moved out over the North Sea, German Messerschmidt Me-109 fighters jumped them at 22,000 feet. Lots of German fighters, wave after wave of them, and B-17s started dropping out of the sky again. Rojohn said that they were flying so close he could see the faces of the German pilots as they flew by them.

In the process of trying to maintain formation for defense, Rojohn felt a huge impact and quickly understood that a collision had taken place. In fact, a B-17G below him had slammed into the belly of his fuselage, and the two planes were jammed together and could not separate. The belly gunner of Rojohn’s plane was jammed through the top of the lower plane’s fuselage and the top turret of the bomber underneath protruded through the bottom of the other one.

The two airplanes were essentially flying stuck together; seven of the eight engines were still running, but they were losing altitude. Rojohn performed several maneuvers, trying to break the two airplanes apart, but they were not successful. He instead concentrated on heading back toward land and keeping the two aircraft under control long enough for the two crews to bail out.

Rojohn and his co-pilot struggled to keep the plane under control and airborne, until only the two remained aboard, then Rojohn order the co-pilot out, but he refused. Together they struggled with the controls until the double wreck hit the ground. As incredible as the whole situation was to begin with, what happened next was unbelievable.

The bomber on the bottom exploded when it hit the ground, and Rojohn’s plane was thrown clear, forward of the point of impact. Neither Rojohn nor his co-pilot was injured seriously, and in fact several other men who weren’t able to bail out survived as well.

They were all captured immediately by the Germans and were in some extra danger due to the Germans’ fear that the double airplane was some sort of new secret weapon. When captured, they were taken to a building and a German captain entered and said something to his troops, whereupon one of the Americans fainted. As it turned out, that GI was the only one who was fluent in German and he understood the German captain when he said, “If they move, shoot them!”

After the war ended and Rojohn was released to return home, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart, but he maintained that he owed his life to his co-pilot, who had refused to leave him alone in the cockpit. Leek knew that alone, Rojohn would never have survived. Neither of them reportedly considered themselves heroes, but their fellow airmen respectfully disagreed, knowing that had the two of them not maintained control of the jammed aircraft, none of the crew would have survived.

Leek and Rojohn met again at a 100^th Bomb Group reunion in 1987, and Leek passed away the next year. Rojohn himself died in 2003.

We have many reasons to call people like these our “greatest generation.” Rojohn and Leek were two of them.

No other tale of the high seas has spawned so many novels, movies, stage plays – even musicals – as the historic mutiny of the Bounty’s crew against her Captain, William Bligh, led by First Mate Fletcher Christian in late April 1789.

HMS Bounty was originally known as the HMS Bethia, employed as a collier, and bought by the British Royal Navy on 26 May 1787 and renamed Bounty. She was a comparatively small ship with a displacement of 215 tons, armed with only four 4-pounder cannon and ten swivel guns. The Royal Navy appointed William Bligh (then 33) as Commanding Lieutenant of Bountyin August 1787.

TheBounty was purchased specifically for the mission to transport breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies, where it was hoped that the trees would thrive and become useful as an inexpensive food supply for slaves. To that end, she was refitted in June of 1787, her great cabin converted to carry the potted breadfruit plants.

Bountyset sail with 46 officers and men in December 1787, with her charted course set toward the west, planning to round Cape Horn. But bad weather stopped her, and after a month of failing to get through, Bligh turned her about and headed east, round the Cape of Good Hope. Bounty crossed the Indian Ocean, reaching Tahiti after ten months at sea. During the voyage, Bligh promoted Fletcher Christian from First Mate to Sailing Master.

The Bountyand her crew spent five months in Tahiti, collecting over 1,000 breadfruit plants and preparing them for the voyage. During this time the crew conducted “cultural exchange” with the Tahitian population. Some of the crew even had themselves tattooed like the native men, and Fletcher Christian married Maimiti, a Tahitian woman. A few of the men even deserted the expedition and rather than hang the offenders, Bligh ordered them flogged.

Bounty set sail from Tahiti in April 1789, and a little over three weeks later, the mutiny was set in motion and completed without shedding blood. Of the 42 surviving seamen, eighteen joined with Christian whereas twenty-two remained loyal to Bligh. Even so, the mutineers forced several of the loyal sailors to remain on board to help sail the ship, and Bligh and eighteen of his loyal men were set adrift in a 23-foot launch. That Bligh managed to navigate the overcrowded boat over a period of 47 days to Timor with only a sextant and his pocket watch is testamentary to his skill. He covered over 3,600 nautical miles, with the only casualty a man who was stoned to death by the natives of Tofua when they put ashore for provisions.

Christian and his fellow mutineers sailed around the southern Pacific, looking for a likely place to land and settle without risking discovery by the British Navy. They put in back at Tahiti released 16 of the crew, and took on several Tahitians. They eventually found Pitcairn Island, and stopped there. Pitcairn had somehow been deleted from the Naval charts, so they decided to settle there. They burned the Bountyin what is now known as Bounty Bay, and it is said that some of the hardware, anchors and guns can still be seen.

Lieutenant Bligh, meanwhile, reached England in March 1790 and reported the mutiny, and an expedition to recover the Bountyand her mutinous crew was launched in November of that year aboard the HMS Pandora, commanded by Captain Edward Edwards. Pandora docked at Tahiti in March of 1791 and captured and imprisoned 14 of the mutineers. Pandora then set sail again in search of Bountyand the remainder of the mutineers. After about three months, she ran aground and sank, and the surviving ten prisoners along with the rest of the crew sailed to Timor in four small launches.

Lieutenant Bligh identified four surviving men who were innocent of the crime and were acquitted; three others were found guilty but pardoned, and the remaining three men were found guilty and hanged. Ironically, Bligh was again later involved in a mutiny and accused of oppressive behavior tends to lend credence to the charges leveled at him by the mutineers, though not justifying their crime.

As for Fletcher Christian and his mutineers, an American whaler rediscovered Pitcairn Island in 1808, the sole survivor of the mutineers was one John Adams, who was eventually granted amnesty.

I was just an airman, another enlisted worker bee stationed at Strategic Air Command’s 43rd Bombardment Wing (Medium). That and the 7th Bombardment Wing (Heavy) shared Carswell AFB at Fort Worth, Texas, whose airplane was the (even then) venerable old B-52. Ours was the crash-plagued mighty go-faster called the B-58 Hustler, the four-engine delta wing whose top speed was classified, although the government would only admit to Mach 2. In truth, it would fly much faster, but the real top-end figure never really got out. A telling feature was the fact that its only gun, a really fast-firing Gatling model, was at the rear and could put up a wall of lead faster than a fly can get itself airborne. Still, when I encountered someone from the 7^th Bomb Wing, they’d kid around about how they intended to paint the B-58s yellow and use them as entrance stands for the B-52s. Those 7^th Bomb Wing guys were such clever punsters.

Things were fairly quiet during those years, for the most part. Viet Nam had yet to really heat up, thus the radical hippie protesters hadn’t slithered onto the scene. But late one Monday afternoon, while we “intellectual” airmen were watching the Three Stooges on TV in the dayroom, President Kennedy appeared, interrupting the show. This of course caused a lot of booing and hissing, and attempts to change the channel to something else.

But there was nothing else; Kennedy was on every channel then offered over the North Texas airways. Realizing that this must be something important, we listened to our commander-in-chief as he explained the crisis of major proportions that we faced at that moment. We were all moving when he signed off, and as soon as he did so, every telephone in the barracks started ringing. I let someone else answer them, because it didn’t take a genius to figure that the callers were the section chiefs calling to tell us to get to our assigned duty stations. I changed to my fatigues and double-timed it to the flight line.

One thing that usually happened during an Operational Readiness Inspection (ORI, a.k.a. “alert”) was that there would always be technical problems and SNAFUs that kept the aircraft from making it to scramble status on time. Some would, but the performance was generally terrible, and it must have frustrated Wing HQ quite a bit.

But not this time; this was for real. What was really amazing was that each and every Hustler on the line went up and was certified ready to fly on time. And fly they did, with real nukes and their fail-safe orders on board; no play-acting this time. Our information was that the USA was at DefCon2, and that the next step up was all-out war. Subsequent reports have since confirmed that the October Missile Crisis was the absolute closest the USA got to all-out nuclear war during the Cold War.

The world knows what happened next, of course. Kruschev blinked and Kennedy prevailed. There are some bloggers on the Internet today claiming that Kennedy made plenty of mistakes, and of course hindsight is 20/20. Joint Chiefs member General Curtis LeMay, among others, was convinced that the president had not come close to handling the situation correctly and was pushing hard for an invasion. It was later discovered that there were several tactical nukes on the island, and LeMay’s desired invasion would’ve resulted in catastrophic losses. As far as I was concerned, President Kennedy kept us out of war and got the missiles out of Cuba, and life went on.