Saved as: 440th on Northern Route.214 1533 words OCR Scan of dot matrix original with minimum search for typos! ONLY TWO 440TH PLANES FLY NORTHERN ROUTE Late 1942 saw the 319th BG beginning to fly the Northern Route to"Little Pie",E gland (wartime code name for Norwich, England).By about mid-October most of the 437th, 438th and 439th had made it through except a few stragglers at Goose Bay, Labrador, Bluie West - 1 Greenland and Reykjavik, Iceland. Then ,came "tail end Charlie" the 440th Bad weather was really settling in and by early December flying the Northern Route had ground to a complete halt. The bulk of the 440th planes were in BOO-1 and had been sitting out 60 to 80 mile an hour winds and blowing sand for the better part of a month. On December 7th everyone was alerted for an early morning take off then canceled. Then came the illfated day of December, 8th Dawn was calm and clear at BOO-1 and we were briefed that there would be low clouds over the ice cap. We could see the clear sky over the dark clouds and it seemed at first as though we would easily climb over it. What a misconception! We began hitting patches of the clouds as high as 12,500 feet and before we reached 14,000 feet, we were in the stuff solid with very hea- icing conditions. The plane began to shudder with loss of control The deicer boots cracked the ice off the wings very briefly, then it would form back immediately. Since it was apparent that we could not make it due to the thick soup, the group of planes broke up and headed back to the base each on his own. Then by radio came the order to return to base or so it was reported later. Apparently, several of the pilots were real hard c) hearing or maybe just too eager-beaver types to sit at BW~1 any longer. Hence several pilots came hack over the area of the base and proceeded down the Fjord headed south to Cape Farewell at the southern tip of Greenland. I was on board one of those planes with Joseph Popovic as pilot and Capt C. D. Hamilton in the c -p lots seat. Bill Hinton was riding passenger after Hamilton took over his co-pilot seat. About half way down to Cape Farewell, Popovic called over the interphones and said "Williams (Gilbert) give me a course to Reykjanik." At that time, we had been airborne about 35 minutes and I was not very, sure exactly where we were. We had been in clouds most of the time but as Popovic ask for directions, the sun began breaking through and for some 5 to 7 minutes we were in clear sunshine. I grabbed our astrocompass (sextant), climbed into the top gun turrets and took three quick shots of the suns position. With this information and the time of each shot in hand, I determined what I thought to be our position from some navigation tables we carried. Then a simple line from our position to Iceland gave me a heading to fly which was immediately relayed to Popovic He set our plane compass on that course with a comment from me that he would get a correction for drift as soon as it could be determined. We were already out over water, but lining up on the waves with the drift meter clearly showed only a small correction was needed which was relayed to him. During this period I was too busy to think much about what was happening and in that short lapse of time, we had lost contact with all the other planes in our area and we were not sure where they had gone. The weather was getting decidedly worse with vicious looking squalls, snow and lower ceiling and visibility and very probably icing conditions. Popovic continually dropped down in altitude until we were sometimes no more than 25 to 50 feet off the water. Thus continued our flight for nearly seven hours when we should have been nearing our "estimated time of arrival". At that point Popovic called me on the intercom and said "Williams where the hell are we, we should be within site of the base in Iceland and we haven't even been able to pick up the radio beam that extends 100 miles out. Are we off course headed past the island or what?" As it turned out I was not very sure of my navigation skills myself--especially the part where I determined our position from astro-navigation. Gordon Hunter had briefly introduced me to that science back at Baer Field before we left there and my confidence was not at a very high level since my very first practical application of it seemed to be failing in getting us where we should be. So my answer to Popovic as to where we were ran something like, "Popovic, you are the commander of this aircraft, if you don't trust the heading I gave you, you come up with a better one". Needless to say he was no more certain where we were than I was. Sooo--we didn't change course--thank goodness. All earphones aboard that plane were clamped over someone's ears straining to hear the sound of an A or N Code Signal. Lew Robinson our radio operator was frantically trying to tune in the radio beam from Iceland. Then all of a sudden there it was very faint, but the sweetest sound you ever heard--maybe a lifesaving directional signal--the radio beam from the base on Iceland. One big problem still remained. We were still probably a hundred miles from our destination and getting very low on fuel. Popovic had pampered th se two old engines all day, and stretched every drop of fuel as far as it would go, yet we were in a very precarious position fuel wise. We later learned that very inadequate weather information had put us in a position of flying over seven hours with an almost direct head wind of about 60 miles per hour. Back to the immediate action included transferring and equalizing what fuel we had left so that we didn't let an engine die on an empty tank. We were probably approaching seven hours 20 minutes in the air when the first red warning light came on our right wing tank. The flight engineer, Forest L. Foreman, switched to the regular right side tank and everything seemed O.K. Then shortly a red warning light came on the !eft wing tank. The Iceland base lights began appearing in the distance and Popovic called in to inform them of our emergency fuel problem. Some controller in the tower came back with detailed instructions on which runway and what direction to land. Popovic shot back, "Just get the damn field cleared. I'm coming straight in or we may not mate the runway." By this time we had a third red warning light on with both tanks on the right side showing red. About three miles short of the field tee right engine suddenly started to sputter showing that the wing tank it was on was completely empty. Engineer Foreman quickly switched the valve over to the regular tank on the right side while frantically working the wobble pump. Everyone held their breath, hoping as the engine caught back up with full power. Now we were on the approach keeping all fingers crossed that an engine didn t quit on the approach. Finally we were on the ground and rolling down the runway. It was the greatest feeling to have something solid under you after about seven hours and forty minutes of the most horrible weather one would ever expect to experience. Then as we came to a -o}ling stop near the end of the runway with our fuel comp:etely depleted on the right engine it coughed and died. It is not clear whether we taxied back to the hangar on one engine or maybe they retrieved us with a tow tractor, but the feeling of solid ground under you after such a harrowing experience was great. Back in the hangar we learned that one other plane had arrived from BOO-1. About ten or fifteen minutes before us Buck Buchanan, Pilot; Fred Morris, Co-pilot; Theodore C. Warren, Bomb-Navigator had arrived The bad news we learned later was that two other planes that took off with us that morning were missing. James L. Hearne (440th) and Homer R. Davison, Jr. with crews had apparently crashed either near the coast of Greenland or at sea--maybe ran out of fuel or perhaps caused by vi ious we ther and icing conditions. Our two planes (Buchanan and Popovic) and their crews would eventually prove to be the only two planes of the 440th squadron to fly the North Atlantic Route all the way to North Africa. The bulk ' the 440th Squadron shortly after the aborted December 8, 1942 attempt was ordered back to the States from BWI. They would regroup with refurbished aircraft and fly the southern route. added: Written by Gilbert D. Williams - bombardier. Published in 319th BG "Flyer" #77 & 78 (two installments)

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