When Two B-17s Piggybacked

On the last day of 1944, the sky over Germany looked deceptively calm.

From the cockpit of the B-17 they called “The Little Skipper,” Second Lieutenant Glenn Rojohn could see the pale winter sun glinting off the silver wings of the formation, the North Sea a gray smear far behind them, the city of Hamburg a dark smudge on the horizon ahead.

He sat with his gloved hands resting lightly on the control column, feeling the tremor of four Wright Cyclone engines through the metal bones of the airplane. A rosary hung from the compass bracket, swaying gently with each small bump of turbulence. Beside him, co-pilot Second Lieutenant William “Bill” Leek flipped a switch, checked a gauge, and glanced over with a crooked smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Last day of the year,” Bill said, his voice tinny in the intercom. “Everyone else is probably getting ready for a party.”

“Yeah,” Glenn answered. “We drew the short straw.”

He didn’t add the rest of the thought: if they survived Hamburg, maybe next New Year’s Eve they’d be somewhere with warm lights and a glass in their hands instead of an oxygen mask.

Behind them, the crew went about the ritual of a mission.

In the nose, Sergeant James Shirley, the bombardier, lay behind the plexiglass, his world reduced to crosshairs, switches, and the terrifying beauty of the frozen landscape below. The navigator plotted their path, pencil scratching across a chart as he tracked winds and headings.

In the top turret, the engineer scanned the sky, one hand resting on the twin .50-caliber handles, the other ready to adjust power if an engine coughed wrong. Waist gunners shuffled from window to window, peering past frost-rimmed frames. In the tail, a lone gunner watched their six o’clock, backward in time and space, eyes stinging from the cold.

And in the ball turret—a glass sphere hanging beneath the belly of the bomber like an eye—Corporal Joe Russo curled up in a space barely big enough to hold him, knees by his chest, guns pointed into the endless blue-gray.

“Russo, how’s the view down there?” Glenn asked, half to break the tension, half to remind himself his crew were more than call signs.

“A million bucks, Skipper,” Russo replied. “Just don’t shake me off this thing.”

The radio crackled. The target was close.

Ahead, little black puffs began to bloom in the sky, at first scattered, then thickening into a dark belt hanging over the land. Glenn swallowed. He’d seen flak before, but there was something about this line—dense, organized—that made his palms damp inside his gloves.

“Flak ahead,” the navigator called. “Heavy concentration over the docks.”

“Stay tight,” Glenn said. “We’re going through.”

They flew on, the bombers stacked in neat boxes, straight and level like a parade formation—except parades don’t march into gunfire.

The first shell burst close enough to rock “The Little Skipper.”

The sound was like someone slamming a giant, invisible hammer into the airframe. The airplane shuddered. Pieces of black metal tumbled past the cockpit windows.

“Jesus,” Bill muttered under his breath.

Glenn kept his eyes on the instruments, trusting his peripheral vision to track the shadows of other B-17s flanking them. Training had drilled it into him: hold formation, trust the group. A bomber alone was a dead bomber.

Ahead, directly over the target area, the sky turned into a black, roiling sea of explosions. Flak bursts were so thick they almost formed a wall.

In the lead squadron, a B-17 named “Fools Rush In” took a direct hit.

Glenn saw it in a flash: one moment the plane was there, a familiar silhouette, engines churning; the next, a shell bloomed dead center in the fuselage. The bomber lurched sideways like a wounded animal, veered to the right, and slammed into another Fort—“Kramp’s Tramps.”

The two planes locked together for one horrific heartbeat, then tore each other apart. “Kramp’s Tramps” was sliced almost clean in two. Wings snapped, fuselages split, debris spun outward.

“Dear God,” Bill whispered.

Glenn watched bodies and pieces of aluminum tumble in the air. For a second he thought no one could have survived that. Then, incredibly, small white flowers opened below—the shapes of parachutes blooming against the smoke.

“Navigator,” Glenn called, voice tight. “Count those chutes.”

“One… two… three…” the navigator said, pressing his face to the glass. “Four… five… six. Six chutes, Skipper.”

“Put it in the log.”

Glenn forced the horror down, pushed it into that compartment where combat pilots stuffed every image that would destroy them if they stared too long. Later, maybe, there would be time to think about the men falling through a sky filled with burning metal. Not now.

“Bombardier,” he said. “You see the smoke marker?”

“Affirmative,” Shirley answered from the nose. “Right over the docks.”

“Your plane,” Glenn said, relinquishing control for the run. “Call it.”

He could feel the change as the Norden bombsight took over, tiny adjustments tilting the Fort, streamlining it toward the target. The world narrowed to a line, a crosshair, a speck of smoke in a city that had just become a bullseye.

“Bomb bay doors open,” the bombardier called.

Levers clicked. A cold rush of air roared up from the belly. For a moment it was as if the floor had vanished, the earth yawning directly beneath them.

“Steady… steady…”

Flak hammered around them, closer now. The smell of burnt cordite seeped into the cockpit, mingling with sweat and the sour tang of fear.

“Bombs… away!”

The B-17 lurched as the load of 500-pounders dropped from their racks, a sudden lightness lifting the nose.

In the ball turret, Russo watched the bombs fall, a lethal stream tumbling end over end toward the refineries below.

“Right on target, Skipper!” he shouted. “Right in their backyard!”

“All ships, turn to heading two-seven-zero,” came the call from the lead. “Form up and head for home.”

The formation banked in a great, slow arc, bomb bay doors closing, engines straining as they clawed back toward altitude, away from the worst of the flak.

For a moment, there was almost a sense of relief. The bombs were gone. The target was behind them. All they had to do now was run the gauntlet back to the sea.

“Bandits, eleven o’clock high!”

The warning cut across the intercom like a knife.

Glenn and Bill swung their heads left and up. A formation of dark shapes was slicing through the sky, contrails streaming. The first Me 262 they’d ever seen up close screamed past, its jets shrieking, cannon blazing.

It was beautiful in a terrible way, a glimpse of a future nobody on that mission wanted to live long enough to see.

The jet roared through the line, too fast for the B-17 gunners to track, its MK 108 shells punching holes in wings and fuselages before pulling away in a long, arrogant arc.

“That thing’s like a damn comet,” Bill said, eyes wide. “How do you hit something that fast?”

“You don’t,” came a gunner’s grim reply. “You just pray it doesn’t pick you.”

Then the piston-engine fighters came—Bf 109s diving out of the sun, Fw 190s rolling in like a swarm of angry hornets.

“Faithful Forever,” the Fort on their right, took more hits. Glenn saw fragments fly from its wing. Over the radio, the voice of Second Lieutenant Leo Ross came through, ragged but controlled.

“‘Faithful Forever’ going down,” Ross called. “We’re hit bad. Dropping out. See you on the ground, boys.”

Glenn watched as the wounded B-17 slid out of formation, dropping altitude, trailing smoke. At 5,000 feet, it leveled out. Tiny dots began tumbling from the fuselage—parachutes opening one after another.

“Looks like they all got out,” Bill said softly. “Ross might just pull it off.”

“Bandits, six o’clock!” the tail gunner yelled. “They’re all over us!”

The sky disintegrated into chaos.

Tracer fire crisscrossed in red and white lines. B-17s broke formation, some by necessity, others by panic. There were too many fighters, too much damage. A Fort here, another there, spiraled away, engines on fire.

“Big group at eight o’clock high!” someone shouted.

Just when it felt like the Luftwaffe would tear them apart, another sound entered the mix—a different engine note, higher, smoother.

“P-51s!” a waist gunner cried. “We got our angels!”

Silver Mustangs slashed into the fight, their long noses and bubble canopies shining as they dropped onto the German fighters. The hunters became the hunted. The Me 109s and Fw 190s peeled away, diving for home or for cover, unwilling to tangle too long with the nimble escorts.

“Thank God,” Bill breathed.

The relief was short-lived. The American fighters, tasked with protecting bombers along the entire route, couldn’t linger forever.

“P-51s leaving to defend the Forts up front,” came the call. “You boys keep your eyes open.”

“We’re almost over the sea,” Glenn told his crew. “Hang on. Just a little more.”

They crossed the coastline to the northwest of Hamburg, flak still reaching up from angry batteries below. Black bursts stitched the sky behind them as they pushed out over the water.

When they finally left the worst of the guns behind, the turbulence took over.

The air above the cold North Sea was churning. The B-17s bounced and rolled, struggling to maintain formation.

“Can’t hold it,” one pilot reported. “This air is chewing us up.”

“Stay as tight as you can,” Glenn said. “But don’t hit anybody doing it.”

It was then that the words no bomber crew ever wanted to hear came again.

“Bandits eleven o’clock.”

“Bandits one o’clock high!”

Another wave of fighters, launched from bases in Bremen and Oldenburg, had climbed to intercept the limping formation, catching it in the worst possible place—over the sea, with no cover, no room to maneuver, and wounded planes everywhere.

“This just isn’t our day,” Bill muttered.

Plane after plane took hits. Engines streamed oil that looked black against the gray ocean. Gaps opened in what had once been a tidy box formation, ragged holes that enemy pilots dove through like wolves finding holes in a fence.

“Nine o’clock! They’re everywhere!” a waist gunner shouted, his voice slipping toward panic.

Up front, the lead ship in their element, “Nine Lives,” drew fire like a magnet.

A Bf 109 lined up on its nose and raked the cockpit with cannon and machine-gun fire. Glass exploded inward. Metal pinged and shrieked.

Both pilots died instantly, slumped where they sat, hands still wrapped around the controls.

But the B-17 flew on.

All four engines were still running. No one in the back knew that the men up front were gone. They kept firing, kept calling out targets, kept doing their jobs in a ship that had lost its brain.

In the confused mêlée, “Nine Lives” started to creep upward, its nose rising at a slight, almost lazy angle.

Without conscious hands on the yoke, the pressure trim and the dead pilots’ last pull on the column sent it climbing, just enough to drift out of place.

Glenn scanned for the lead, trying to keep the remnants of formation together.

“Pilot to crew,” he said. “Anybody see McNab? Where the hell did ‘Nine Lives’ go?”

No answer came from the other cockpit. Just static and the distant sound of guns.

Nearby, in another B-17, Captain Ethan Porter watched in horror as “Nine Lives” and “The Little Skipper” edged closer and closer, their paths converging like trains on the same track.

He grabbed his microphone.

“McNab! McNab, for God’s sake, look out! You’re gonna collide!”

Static. No acknowledgement.

Porter could only watch.

At 12:44 p.m., the world turned to violence for Glenn and Bill.

There was an almighty shudder, a sound like the entire airplane had been picked up and slammed against a wall. “The Little Skipper” jumped upward, throwing Glenn’s hand off the throttles. Bill’s knees smashed into the control column, pain shooting up his thighs.

“What in God’s name was that?” Bill shouted.

“Pilot to crew—report!” Glenn barked. “Top turret, waist, what just happened?”

He tested the hydraulics. They responded. Electrical systems flickered but stayed alive. Yet when he tried to correct their pitch and bank, the Fort felt sluggish, wrong, like it was suddenly twice as heavy.

“Holy… you’re not gonna believe this,” came the amazed voice of a waist gunner. “Skipper… we’re riding another Fort.”

Glenn craned his neck, peering past the left side of the cockpit, down and back. His breath caught.

Another B-17 was jammed beneath them, its nose buried in “The Little Skipper’s” belly. “Nine Lives” had plowed up into their aircraft in mid-air, its top spine fused into their underside, the two great machines locked together like some insane, eight-engine monstrosity.

“Geez, Glenn,” Bill said, staring. “We’re stuck together like mating dragonflies.”

In the ball turret of “Nine Lives,” Staff Sergeant Edward Woodall Jr. regained consciousness to find his world a screaming, grinding nightmare. Metal shards had sprayed through his turret with the impact, cutting into his arms and face, pinging off armor.

He tried his foot pedals, then his hand controls. Nothing. The impact had knocked out hydraulic and electrical power.

He grabbed the emergency hand crank.

Please, he prayed silently, don’t let this damn thing snap.

Agonizingly, painfully slowly, he cranked the turret until the guns pointed straight down. When the barrels cleared the turret ring, he forced the hatch open and crawled backward, squeezing through into the fuselage.

What he saw when he stood up made his stomach flip.

The interior of “Nine Lives” was a twisted maze of metal, torn stringers and broken ribs, the skin buckled inward where it had rammed into “The Little Skipper.” And there, directly above him, he could see the other bomber’s ball turret—Russo’s turret—pushed down through their roof, clamped by warped aluminum.

Russo was inside, sealed in a glass bubble now wedged between two dying airplanes.

There was no way out.

Woodall and Russo locked eyes through the plexiglass. Russo’s face was pale, his lips moving.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” Russo whispered, the words coming over the intercom as well, reaching every headset in “The Little Skipper.” “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…”

In the cockpit, Bill heard the prayer clearly. Heard the tremor in Russo’s voice.

He felt something inside him twist.

“I could not help him,” he would say later. “And I felt that I was somehow invading his right to be alone.”

“The Lord is with thee…” Russo continued, voice steadying as he gave himself to the only comfort left. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

“Bill!” Glenn shouted. “Bill, snap out of it!”

Bill’s eyes were far away, fixed on nothing, listening to a man he couldn’t reach.

To give Russo privacy for his last moments, Bill reached up, pulled off his headset, unplugged his intercom cord, and set both aside. The cockpit fell half-silent for him, the roar of engines now the only sound.

He later said it was the hardest part of the entire ride.

Down below, engine number one on “Nine Lives” was on fire, flames licking back along the wing. Heat rose, blanketing the underside of “The Little Skipper.”

Locked together, the two bombers began to lose altitude, falling out of formation, alone in the buffeting sky at fifteen thousand feet.

Glenn and Bill braced their boots against the instrument panel, straining against the control columns, trying to keep the nose from dropping too steeply.

“Come on!” Glenn grunted. “Level out, you bastard!”

He tried rocking the combined mass, gunning “The Little Skipper’s” engines in an attempt to shake free.

“Bill, keep pulling!” he yelled. “We’re gonna break apart or die trying!”

Nothing worked. The two Forts were welded by twisted metal and brutal physics.

“Damn it,” Glenn hissed. He looked out toward the sea, flat and unbroken beneath them. “If we hit water, we’re done. Everybody. No chance.”

He made a choice.

“The fire’s gonna take the wing,” he said. “We shut our engines down, try to turn this double-decker around. Get over land. It’s the only way anyone gets out.”

“Kill our engines?” Bill stared at him. “You sure?”

“No,” Glenn answered. “But we’re out of good options.”

They pulled back the throttles on “The Little Skipper,” bringing the engines down toward idle, leaving “Nine Lives’” still-running engines to drag them forward. The sensation was strange—like hitching a wagon to a runaway team and trying to steer from the back.

“Slowly,” Glenn said through clenched teeth. “Easy on the controls.”

In an incredible display of instinct and skill, the two pilots coaxed the interlocked machines into a gentle turn. The columns fought them every inch, metal protesting. But the nose began to swing, the horizon tipping.

“It’s working,” Bill said, disbelief in his voice.

They watched the coastline appear again in the distance, the thin line of German land creeping into view ahead.

The fire on the left wing had grown. Flames licked along the underside, paint blistering, aluminum skin starting to buckle. Glenn could feel the heat radiating through the cockpit floor, a dry, relentless pressure against his boots.

As they grew closer to land, the flak started up again, guns on the coast awakening at the sight of an easy, lumbering target.

Then another sound cut in—a sharp, erratic popping.

At first Glenn thought it was more gunfire. Then he realized it was coming from their own wing.

“.50-cal ammo,” he said grimly. “It’s cooking off in the heat.”

Bullets stored in the wing began detonating in their belts, shooting randomly into the air, tracers streaking across the sky in chaotic, lethal patterns.

Glenn and Bill locked eyes for a moment, sharing a silent, unvarnished terror.

This was beyond any training scenario. This was the place where men met the edge of what they could control and stared down the rest.

“We’re almost over land,” Glenn said, reaching again for the intercom. “Everybody get ready to bail out. You’ve got to go out the tail. It’s the only exit.”

The tail door was in the wash of smoke and flame cascading from the crippled wing and torn fuselage above, but there was no other way. The nose was crushed against “Nine Lives.” Side doors were blocked by twisted metal.

In the waist, three crewmen—Elkin, Neuhaus, and Little—fought desperately to free Russo.

They knew what awaited him. They heard his prayer over the intercom, the steady, rhythmic recitation of words most of them hadn’t said since childhood.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death…”

They grabbed the ball turret frame, heaved with everything they had. The metal didn’t budge. The turret had been driven deep into the carcass of “Nine Lives,” locked in place.

“It wouldn’t move,” Elkin would say later. “There was no means of escape for that brave man.”

There comes a point in battle where willpower meets the hard limits of physics and time.

They had reached it.

With the floor shuddering under them, with the smell of burning fuel filling their lungs, the three men looked at one another, then back at Russo, still moving his lips, still gripping his controls like a man at prayer clings to a pew.

Reluctantly, with one last, helpless glance at the trapped gunner, they turned and moved to the tail.

One by one, they jumped through the wall of heat and smoke, bodies vanishing into the rushed air.

On the ground, German gunners on the North Sea island of Wangerooge watched the spectacle unfold.

They had seen B-17s before—whole formations of them, wings high and steady, a terrible, slow beauty in their mass. They had shot at them, cheered when one fell trailing smoke, cursed when the bombs fell true.

They had never seen anything like this.

An eight-engined monster, two bombers fused together, one aflame, staggered toward them, dropping lower with each second. It was less an airplane than a wounded myth, some metal dragon that had been mortally wounded and was now stumbling toward earth.

A Wehrmacht captain stepped out of a bunker and stared upward, sharing the stunned silence of his men.

He saw flames, saw falling parachutes, saw the impossible angle of the combined planes.

“Cease fire,” he ordered, voice flat with something like pity. “Stop shooting. Those poor souls have no hope now.”

The big guns fell quiet. Only the engines roared, the sound rising and falling as the doomed bombers fought gravity.

Inside the cockpit, the ground was ballooning in the windscreen, green and brown and gray rushing up to fill their world.

“Bill,” Glenn said, turning to his co-pilot. “You gotta jump. Go now. That’s an order.”

He knew the math. Another fifty seconds, maybe less, and they’d hit. If Bill got out now, he might survive the fall. Glenn couldn’t leave. With both hands and all his weight, he was barely keeping the nose from dropping too steeply. If he let go, the tangled aircraft would likely roll and spin, killing everyone still aboard—including Bill if he hadn’t managed to get clear.

Bill looked at him, jaw tight.

“I’m staying, Glenn,” he said quietly.

“Damn it, Bill—”

“You can’t hold this thing alone.” Bill dug his boots in harder against the panel, wrapped his hands around the column again. “If I go, we both die. We ride it together.”

There wasn’t time to argue.

In the shattered underside of “Nine Lives,” encased by metal, Russo perhaps mercifully couldn’t see the ground rushing up. His world had shrunk to a narrow ring of glass, a prayer, and the vibrations of two dying bombers.

“Lead us not into temptation,” Glenn whispered hoarsely as the earth filled his view, “but deliver us from evil…”

The impact tore “Nine Lives” apart.

The lower bomber hit first, exploding in a blossom of fire and fragments, the force of the blow vaulting “The Little Skipper” upward in a grotesque leap, like a pole-vaulter launched by his own shattered pole.

For a brief, insane instant, “The Little Skipper” was airborne again, freed from its piggyback burden, flying by momentum alone.

Then it belly-flopped back to earth, smashing into a field. The left wing scythed through a wooden building, slicing it apart. The fuselage twisted, cracked. The nose tore forward, then finally, mercifully, came to a stop.

Silence roared in the sudden absence of engine noise.

Smoke drifted. Pieces of metal clinked as they settled.

In the cockpit, Glenn’s first sensation was pain in his ribs and the copper taste of blood in his mouth. He blinked, expecting darkness, and instead saw daylight leaking in through torn seams in the fuselage.

He turned his head.

Bill was there, eyes open, chest heaving, a thin cut on his forehead trickling red.

“You alive?” Glenn croaked.

“Think so,” Bill answered. He flexed his fingers, winced, but nothing felt broken. “You?”

“More or less.”

They had just ridden two interlocked bombers into the ground and survived with little more than cuts and bruises.

It didn’t feel real.

Bill unlatched his harness, pushed himself up, and crawled toward a jagged hole behind the cockpit. Cold air rushed in, along with the distant sound of shouting in German.

He pulled himself out onto the crumpled wing.

It sloped toward the ground, fuel pouring in a steady sheet from shattered tanks, puddling around the wreck in a glittering, deadly lake.

Instinctively, Bill reached for his breast pocket. His fingers found the familiar shape of his cigarette pack. His hands were shaking, but he got one out, stuck it in his mouth, flicked his lighter.

A shout froze him.

“Stop!”

He turned his head to find the muzzle of a rifle pointed between his eyes. A German soldier in a gray uniform stared at him, eyes wide, gesturing frantically toward the spreading fuel.

The meaning was clear enough in any language.

“What the hell are you doing, you idiot?” the German barked. “You’ll blow us all to pieces!”

Bill snapped the lighter shut, heart pounding. For a second he almost laughed. Survive fighters, flak, a mid-air collision, and a crash landing in enemy territory, only to die because of one cigarette.

He raised his hands slowly.

“All right, all right,” he said. “No smoke. Got it.”

Around them, other figures were emerging from the wreckage—six in all from “The Little Skipper,” four from “Nine Lives.” Dazed, limping, bleeding, but alive.

They were taken prisoner, their war now confined to barbed-wire fences and the long, grinding wait for liberation. The horror of that day became something they spoke about only when someone asked, and sometimes not even then.

Rojohn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions, for the impossible piloting that had steered a broken monster of metal away from the sea and toward land, giving his crew a chance to jump, to live.

He didn’t talk much about it.

“In all fairness to my co-pilot,” he would say whenever someone pressed him, “he’s the reason I’m alive today.”

He meant it.

It took both of them, braced shoulder to shoulder, boots digging into the panel, hands clenched around those columns, to bring the piggyback bombers around. It took both of them to ride that last, terrible glide without surrendering to panic.

And it took the courage of men like Russo, praying in a trapped turret, and Elkin, Neuhaus, and Little, who jumped through flames knowing a friend could not come with them, to fill out the story.

Years later, when the war was something in books and movies for most people, when B-17s at airshows carried tourists instead of bombs, an older Glenn might sit and look up at one circling overhead.

He would see the elegant curve of the wings, the big tail, the sunlight winking on the glass nose. The announcer over the loudspeaker would talk about “the Mighty Eighth,” about daylight precision bombing, about “Flying Fortresses” that bristled with guns and brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep.

Most people in the crowd would nod, impressed.

Glenn would remember December 31, 1944.

He would remember the flak over Hamburg, the jet that screamed past too fast to track, the white flowers of parachutes blooming under shredded bombers.

He would remember the sickening jolt when “Nine Lives” climbed into them from below, the moment he looked down and saw another airplane jammed into his, two machines built for war suddenly shackled by accident.

He would remember Bill’s quiet, stubborn, “I’m staying,” when there was still technically time to jump.

He would remember the voice of Joe Russo, calm and steady in the midst of chaos, reciting words that had comforted other terrified men in other wars, long before airplanes existed.

“Hail Mary, full of grace…”

When two B-17s piggybacked across the sky that winter afternoon, it was more than a bizarre footnote in aviation history.

It was a story about what men will do for each other when there is no way out that doesn’t hurt, no choice that isn’t soaked in fear and fire.

The war ended. Europe rebuilt. The North Sea waves kept rolling in and out against the German coast, erasing the scorch marks and footprints on islands like Wangerooge.

But that day, in that ragged formation limping home from Hamburg, two pilots and their crews carved their own strange, defiant path through history—fused together, falling, and somehow, impossibly, surviving long enough to tell the tale.