November 15, 2009

Prop vs. Jet

In a battle at the tail end of World War II, Larry Bellarts met the future of military aviation over the barrel of a gun

By Rodger Nichols
The Chronicle

     Thursday morning finds a group of veterans called the Hi-flyers gathered around a long table in the dining room of A wing at the Oregon Veterans Home in The Dalles.
     They’re not residents; this just represents an appropriate gathering place.
And they’re not all former pilots, despite the name. They represent all branches of the service, and though some members use canes to get around or hearing aids to catch the conversation, this is a lively bunch, with an easy cameraderie.
     On the day after Veterans Day, talk around the table is lively. One member reports a phone call from Dave Toomey, who now lives too far away to attend their meetings. He was excited because an Italian film crew had called him with plans to dive on the site where a pilot here parachuted from splash down.
     Others pass around printouts from Internet sites with bits of military history or reviews of books members might find interesting.
     On this day, though, the focus is on Larry Bellarts, who’s driven in from Boring to meet with the group.
     Bellarts came to live in The Dalles at the age of five, and an uncle got him interested in airplanes and flying.
     He eventually ended up in the skies himself, piloting in combat conditions in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
     Bellarts has written several autobiographical books including “Bird With a Broken Wing,” “Broken Wing II” and “Red-Tailed Peacemaker,” the latter about the B-17 Flying Fortress.
     Bellarts was the pilot of one of these four-engine heavy bombers flying over Europe with the 490th Bombardment Group (Heavy), part of the 8th Air Force.
     After arriving in England in January, 1945, Bellarts was flying missions within the week, bombing targets in the heart of Europe.

Bombers vs. jets

     Bellarts’ last mission of his first war was almost his last altogether, when his bomber group was jumped by an ME 262, a jet fighter that the Germans were able to get into limited production in the closing days of the war.
     The date was April 19, 1945, just two days before the Soviet army reached Berlin. The target was a rail yards at Aussig, Czechoslovakia.
     Four hours after takeoff from their base in Eye, England, the bombers reached their target. They had been briefed that jet fighters were reported in the target area.
     Bellarts was flying lead in the third element of the bomber group, a diamond formation of four planes.
     On his right wing was a bomber piloted by Lt. Burfurd E. Stovall. On his left wing was Lt. William E. McAllister.
     Behind and below him was Lt. Robert A. Norvell.
     The bombers had already braved heavy flak at the target site, and had released their bombs and started their turn for home when the attack came.      Here’s how Bellarts describes it:
     “As we completed the turn, one of the gunners reported seeing some fighters in the distance. I happened to be looking out to the right and saw a German fighter coming at us from the from two o’clock high direction. He fired the guns in the nose of the fighter and the entire front of his plane was covered in flame from the muzzle blast of his guns. He was firing at Stovall’s plane on my right and I could see pieces of metal being torn from the B-17 as the bullets hit the cowling and other places. I recognized the fighter was an ME 262 jet as it dived slightly to go under the squadron. Stovall’s plane rolled to the right, away from me and started down.”
     Bellarts reports that Lt. Norvall then moved up and into in the empty slot on his right wing. The ME 262 came in again, this time from ten o’clock high. Lt. McAllister, on Bellarts’ left wing, was hit and went down.
     The enemy fighter swooped in again from the two o’clock position and Lt. Norvell’s plane went down.
     Then the German pilot came around again, aimed at Bellarts’ plane, all alone in the sky. Instead of the slashing side attack that had worked three times in a row, he approached Bellarts’ plane from the rear, in range of the bomber’s heaviest guns.”
     “I told all the gunners to start firing even before it was in range, and I think that might have saved us,” Bellarts said. “It came toward us, but it didn’t fire. It passed just under us, it was close enough for me to see the shattered cockpit, with the black-suited pilot hanging lifeless out of the left side.”
     Bellarts said he believes that the fighter pilot changed his tactics because he had shot his whole store of 1,000 rounds of 30mm ammunition through the jet’s four nose cannons and planned on flying into the tail of the B-17, then bailing out of his damaged plane.
     Bellarts has done heavy research for all his books, and believes he has found the name of the German pilot, Col. Gunther Lutzow, a highly skilled fighter who earlier had been awarded Germany’s highest medal.
     He has also researched the fates of other members of the flight. Some were able to parachute to safety, including pilots Norvell and Stovall.
     “McAllister was on his first mission,” Bellarts said, “and pretty near everyone in his airplane died. The tail gunner got out and a few years later he gave me a phone call from somewhere in the Midwest.”
     Bellarts said Stovall had not returned to flying.
     “He didn’t want any more of that after getting shot down,” Bellarts said. “I don’t blame him a bit.”
     Bellarts’ plane did not escape unscathed. Though he made it back to England, a shell had gone through the flap mechanism and the flaps weren’t working on the left side and the right wheel and tire were badly damaged. It was a rough landing.
     “I started walking around the plane,” Bellarts said. “I was going to count the holes, but there were too many little ones. So I decided just to count the ones I could put my fist through. I got halfway around the airplane and counted 43 off them. The left side of the stabilizer had a piece of shrapnel two or three times as big as my thumb in it. I wiggled that thing out, and thought it would make a good souvenir.”
     It was Bellarts’ last mission of the war, but it wasn’t his last war.

Korea and beyond

     He was called up from the reserves in the Korean War and flew supply missions with old C-46s that the government had declared surplus after World War II. He has many tales of close calls and the difficulty of flying out of barely standard airstrips with sometimes overloaded planes.
     “But I got it in, I got the stuff there,” Bellarts said. “I did that time after time. They got all the weapons we could haul as fast as we could haul it.”
     He also made two flights to islands of North Korea, landing on the beaches, picking up and dropping off spies.
     “I wasn’t over there for that reason at all,” he said, “but the intelligence officer said he needed some help so I did. It was way over the line, and I probably shouldn’t have, but that was the life of Korea.”
     After Korea, Bellarts was in the missile program, and commanded a Titan missile base during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
     “We had all the missiles retargeted,” he said. “They never explained fully what the target was, but I know what it was. We were ready to fire anytime the President said go. I had five megatons each on three missiles. That would have pretty near eliminated Cuba.”
     Later he trained on T-33 jets, and C-30 transports, before going to Vietnam.
There he picked up wounded soldiers from jungle airstrips and brought them to the larger bases where they could be treated.
     He was then shifted to combat patrol, flying at 8,000 to 10,000 feet.
     “The Viet Cong knew about us and any pilot that flew that airplane had a $10,000 in gold price on their head, dead or alive. We had to stay in our own special tents in Da Nang. We were guarded by U.S. troops, nobody else.
     “One day I was coming back from a mission, making a big circle to come in to land. And some guy out in the bushes started firing. Little red things trying to take my plane out of the sky. I was lifting my legs trying to make sure I wasn’t hit.”
     After some more stateside duty, Bellarts retired from the service as a lieutenant colonel. He found a new profession as a bank examiner, and is now retired from that.
     Asked to compare his experiences in the three wars, Bellarts said, “By far, I consider World War II to be the most important and meaningful war we were in. We knew who the enemy was and where to find them.
     “I was very proud about everything everybody did.”