A four-engine bomber with two engines gone also creates strong asymmetric forces.
If both dead engines are on the same side, the problem becomes especially severe because the working engines pull from the opposite wing. Even with engines lost in a more favorable arrangement, changes in power can produce yaw, alter climb or descent, and force the pilot to compensate.
Every large movement has another effect.
More power may help maintain altitude but can increase directional imbalance.
Less power may make the airplane easier to control but increases the rate at which altitude disappears.
A turn costs energy.
A climb costs more.
A rapid control correction can start an oscillation that damaged systems may not stop.
Douglas therefore needed the airplane to remain as stable and predictable as possible.
The mission had started with the B-17 as the formation's leader.
After the target, the problem became much smaller and much more personal.
Keep the wings close to level.
Keep the remaining engines producing power.
Keep the airplane pointed generally toward Britain.
Do not ask a damaged control system to do something it can no longer do.
Those goals sound simple.
Maintaining them for the entire flight home was not.
The bombing run continued after the aircraft was hit
Mission 59 took the 398th toward Villaroche, south of Paris.
The group was leading the First Combat Bombardment Wing that day. Colonel Hunter was therefore not merely another passenger in Douglas's cockpit. His aircraft had an important position in the larger formation.
Surviving accounts indicate that the trip to the target initially went according to plan.
Then the flak found the lead ship.
A 1992 reconstruction published by the 398th Bomb Group Memorial Association, drawing on crew recollections, states that the lead B-17 was hit hard around the target. Bombardier Gilbert Goldman continued his work, although the aircraft came away with one 500-pound bomb still hung up. Goldman and engineer Alfred Burke eventually managed to release it. During the same period, the aircraft lost two engines, one engine was on fire, and the pilots were experiencing control problems.
Colonel Hunter's later Distinguished Flying Cross citation provides another official view of the attack. It records that on August 1 he led the wing to its assigned objective, that his airplane was badly damaged by antiaircraft fire in the target area, and that the formation continued the bombing run despite the damage and difficult visibility.
The important sequence is clear even where individual recollections vary in small details.
The airplane was hit before its job was finished.
Douglas and Hunter did not immediately break away.
Goldman continued the bombing work.
The lead aircraft completed the run.
Only afterward did survival replace formation leadership as the main problem.
For Anderson in the tail, the emergency announced itself as fire.
He later remembered a sheet of flame extending perhaps 30 feet behind the aircraft. From his position, the sight was terrifying because he had seen other bombers catch fire and then disintegrate.
A B-17 carried large amounts of gasoline.
Fire around an engine or wing was therefore one of the situations crews feared most.
Anderson was close to the tail hatch, and the implication was obvious. If the wing fire grew, there might be very little warning before the order to bail out—or before there was no aircraft left from which to jump.
Yet the fire behaved differently from what he first feared.
The hit had damaged an oil tank. Oil spilled back over the hot supercharger area and produced the long flame Anderson could see. Once the escaping oil was consumed, the flame diminished.
Before anyone could know that would happen, Douglas acted.
He put the B-17 into a steep descent.
Anderson remembered the aircraft losing roughly 10,000 feet in the maneuver. From the tail, he initially believed control had been lost because the bomber entered a dive of roughly 45 degrees.
That descent illustrates the problem of reconstructing an emergency from different positions aboard the same airplane.
Douglas knew he was trying to save the aircraft.
Anderson, far behind him, could see flames and suddenly felt the bomber dive.
For several moments, the same maneuver meant two completely different things to the two men.
To the pilot, the dive was an action.
To the man in the tail, it looked like the beginning of the end.
The bomber eventually came out of the descent at about 10,000 to 11,000 feet.
The fire had eased.
The aircraft was still flying.
Then the crew began discovering how badly the flak had damaged everything else.
The control cables changed the entire decision
A bomber can lose an engine and still have options.
It can lose two engines and still sometimes remain airborne.
A bomber whose pilot can no longer be certain that his control column is connected properly to the tail and wings faces a different kind of danger.
Anderson's recollection contains the detail that makes the return flight extraordinary: control cables were hanging loose in the waist.
Douglas therefore did not want to take the B-17 out of automatic control. Anderson explained that the pilot feared losing the airplane completely if he attempted the normal change back to manual flight with so many cables damaged.
There was no dramatic conference in which every crewman voted on what to do.
There rarely is time for that kind of scene during a real aircraft emergency.
The practical choices narrowed on their own.
The bomber was above occupied France.
Its fire had stopped growing.
Some engine power remained.
The automatic pilot was still keeping the aircraft controllable.
England was west and north across the Channel.
Bailing out would place the crew on hostile ground, assuming every man survived the jump.
Continuing west offered another possibility.
Nobody could know how long that possibility would last.
That uncertainty is important.
It is easy to look backward from the safe landing and describe Douglas's choice as correct.
He did not possess the ending.
He knew only that the B-17 remained in the air at that moment.
He also knew that every additional mile brought them closer to territory where a forced landing, bailout, or crash offered a better chance of returning to Allied control.
The decision was therefore not simply between certain death and certain survival.
It was a choice between different risks.
A parachute could get a man out of a failing bomber, but it could not guarantee where he would land, whether he would be injured, or whether German forces would reach him first.
Staying with the airplane meant trusting two engines, damaged control connections, an automatic pilot, trim systems, fuel tanks that had been struck, and an airframe already punished by flak.
Douglas chose to keep the crew aboard while the airplane still offered a path toward England.