 courtesy of Michael J. Dancisak, |
In a letter home to a friend of Howard Hartman's dated May 10, 1944, pilot Lt. Laszewski wrote, ". . . we started off on a raid on Budapest. Things were going along fine till we had crossed the coast of Yugoslavia and about 20 miles or so inland, we received a direct flak hit in our nose of the plane. It seriously injured our navigator but no one else was hurt. The burst however badly crippled our ship. It disabled our entire electrical system and knocked out No. 2 engine. We turned back for home but lost altitude rapidly. We had to fly clear across the Adriatic to do this but Howard and I couldn't see how we could make it without crashing in the sea. So we salvoed our bombs to lighten the load and we turned back inland just off the coast and I told Howard and five others to bail out rather then wait till it was too late."
A member of the ground crew, Bob Perry, who later flew as a turret gunner with Lt. Laszewski and Sgt. Dancisak on the aircraft Reluctant Beaver, wrote in a letter to Michael Dancisak : “Before I was flying with him, Lt. Laszewski bounced the remains of his B-24 along the runway, with the help of your dad (George Dancisak).”
Ironically, it was George Dancisak’s birthday.
Laszewski and Dancisak would never fly in the Boojum again. On April 12, 1944 on group mission #29 to Bad Voslau, Austria, Lieutenant Meyers and his crew were shot down while flying Boojum. To read the statement about the incident from a pilot and co-pilot who saw the plane go down, click here.
Bob Perry in an email related the following about a mission on May 27, 1944 while flying as a nose gunner with Lt. Laszewski and Sgt. Dancisak in the Reluctant Beaver, Aircraft # 42-78239: "Once while scanning to my left, port side of the plane, I saw a cylinder detach from the number one engine (outboard on port side) I don't remember if it was fighter or flak that caused it, but the darn thing just popped straight up and then drifted back as the plane left it. The prop was immediately feathered and then we had turned back to Corsica. We jettisoned about everything that could be detached, and limped in to Ajaccio (Corsica)." Bob Perry also remembers that Lt. Oran R. Key, Jr. was the co-pilot and Jonas A. Leopold, Jr. was a crew member on the Reluctant Beaver.
courtesy of Michael J. Dancisak, |
On a mission to Ploesti on May 5, 1944, George Dancisak captured a picture of a B24 that had lost its wing tip and was falling out of control. To view the picture, click here.
Laszewski and Dancisak went on to complete the required number of missions and were eventually rotated back to the states. Michael Dancisak remembers that his "dad said he locked the hatch and walked away without looking back."
Robert W. Reichard, bombardier on the B-24 Phoney Express II, echoed the same type of sentiment on May 8, 1945 when he was informed that the war with Germany was over, "It was as if someone had let the air out of an over-inflated balloon."
A similar testiment can be found at the 456th Bomb Group Association's web site where the motto reads, "We had a job to do. We did that job."