24. A Severely Stricken Flying Fortress
On the way back, the formation’s lead navigator mistook the Breton Peninsula’s coast in northwest France for the southern coast of England. Thinking they were over home territory, he brought the bombers down to 2000 feet, straight over what turned out to be German-occupied Brest, France. That’s when the plot took a dramatic turn for the worse. The formation was immediately engulfed in murderous anti-aircraft fire, while dozens of Focke-Wulf FW-190 fighters fell upon the B-17s and began to tear them to pieces. Snuffy’s Fortress caught it bad, as German flak ripped its fuel tanks and ignited a massive fire in the fuselage.
Snuffy scrambled out of his ball turret after it lost power. While Snuffy juggled fighting the flames and tending to badly injured crewmen, three airmen parachuted out of the stricken bomber, never to be seen again. The heat was so bad that it threatened to melt the fuselage and break the bomber in half. Smith threw burning debris and exploding ammunition out of melted and blasted holes in the fuselage, and sprayed the fire with extinguishers until they ran empty. He even peed on the flames in an attempt to put them out, before he finally got it under control.