The Forgotten 500 by Gregory A. Freeman Read Free Book Online

His chute wasn’t opening.
    Furiously, as fast as he could while in a free fall from about ten thousand feet high, Musgrove reached into the parachute pack and dug out the cloth with his own hands. He grabbed the soft silk and pulled over and over, until a pocket of the cloth caught the air and the rest exploded out above him.

Chapter 3
    Counting Parachutes
    The young men parachuting into the hills of Yugoslavia had no idea what awaited them. They knew only that this was their last chance to live when their bomber was on fire or the engines went out or they had lost too much fuel from shrapnel on their bombing runs over Romania. Some, like Musgrove, made several death-defying missions before they were forced to get out of their crashing planes, while others like twenty-one-year-old Tony Orsini had to bail out of his bomber on his first mission.
    Orsini had been in Italy for only a week when he was assigned to his first bombing mission over Ploesti. A navigator, Orsini had guided a B-24 from Lincoln, Nebraska, across the Atlantic Ocean and up the coast of Africa. The crew of green-horns reported to an air force base in southern Italy named Grottaglie as part of the 716th Squadron of the 449th Bomb Group. Orsini had been there for only a few days, waiting for more orientation and local maps, when he was awakened at four a.m. on July 21, 1944, by someone shouting, “Briefing at 0600!” At the briefing, Orsini learned he had been assigned to fly a mission with a more experienced crew. They would be bombing the Ploesti oil refineries.
    In addition to all the usual information about the target, the bomb loads, the route, and what resistance to expect, the officer briefing the crew gave them a curious warning, one they had never heard before.
    “You’re going to be flying over Yugoslavia. If you have to bail out, avoid the Chetniks. They’re the followers of General Mihailovich,” the officer said sternly. “Seek out the Partisans. They’re the followers of General Tito.”
    The advice was completely wrong, but the officer believed it and was trying to be helpful. It would be years before the source of the misinformation became clear. But at the moment, Orsini didn’t give it much thought anyway. Orsini had heard only the sketchiest information about the ongoing civil war in Yugoslavia and the two factions that were fighting for control of the country while simultaneously fending off the Germans who occupied their land. He took note of the warning, but gave it much lower priority than everything else he had heard that morning. This was Orsini’s very first mission, and the rest of the crew would be depending on him to navigate their B-24 skillfully. He didn’t want to miss anything.
    Orsini was scared to death as the plane neared its target in Romania. He tried to focus on the maps on his small desk in the plane, checking and double-checking everything he could think of, but he was terrified by the thought of the air defenses around Ploesti. When his map coordinates showed that they were nearing the oil fields, Orsini looked out a window and saw his fears take form. The sky was filled with exploding shells, the shrapnel tearing through anything in its path—aluminum, steel, or flesh. German fighter planes were zooming through the bomber formation, strafing planes as they held their course and attempted to drop their loads on the target. Orsini was waiting to hear the bombardier call out, “Bombs away!” over the intercom, because that would mean their work was done and the pilots could hightail it out of that god-awful mess. After what seemed an eternity, with explosions booming all around and buffeting the plane back and forth, Orsini heard the bombardier’s call.
    And almost immediately after, he felt the plane shudder violently, a sensation he hadn’t felt before. He knew right away that the bomber had taken a direct hit from the antiaircraft fire. The explosion knocked the B-24 out of formation and the pilots