Alice from Dallas
The story of Alice from Dallas is a prime example of how entangled the fates of individual crews and their planes can be if they served over the same period with the same squadron and also how difficult it can be for historians to position all the pieces of the puzzle to form a clear and accurate picture, telling a story set in the time context with events as moving and surreal as were the skies over Europe in 1943.
B-17F Serial Number 42-5867 was one of the original B-17s that was delivered to the 100th Bomb Group in April, 1943, to Kearney Air Base, Nebraska. She was assigned to crew No. 17, commanded by Lt. William D. DeSanders of Dallas, Texas. Twenty-two-year-old Bill, a 1940 graduate of the New Mexico Military Institute, married Alice Madeline Jones, a native of the same town, in October, 1942. A few months later, he named ‘his’ brand new airplane after her. The white lettering on either side of the front was supposed to bring good luck to DeSanders and the remaining nine men of his crew. Later, on both sides of the nose, just in front of the pilot's and co-pilot's side windows, there appeared a white drawing of a gremlin type figure from the 350th Bomb Squadron emblem, releasing bombs from a chamber pot.
Alice from Dallas was unusual in her front end configuration. As an aircraft built in the 30 F-series production block at the Vega factories in Burbank, it carried one of the evolutionary stages of the development of the nose gun on the left side of the nose. The machine gun was placed in a convex semi-bubble in the shape of a teardrop, which was supposed to give the navigator, who was tasked with its use, a better view of the space between 9 and 11 o'clock. However, development did not stop there and a satisfactory designed was realized only by a diagonally raised firing positions, such as those found on aircraft from the late production blocks of the F series. Thanks to this, Alice from Dallas was quite unusual among the other machines of the unit.
On May 29th, 1943, the crew initiated their move to England with their Alice. They arrived at Thorpe Abbotts on June 8th and took off together on their first combat mission two weeks later. It was not yet a bombing attack against German military targets, but a decoy mission to lure German fighters. It was not a rule for 350th Squadron ground crews to decorate the noses of their aircraft with mission markings for those they had flown, and Alice was no exception. She was not decorated with either bombs or duck symbols indicating participation in those decoy missions. Alice suffered her first serious fighter inflicted damage during a raid on Le Bourget on the 14th of July.
After a very long and difficult raid on Trondheim, Norway, on July 24th, 1943, Bill DeSanders fell ill with an unpleasant virus. The following morning, his crew flew with a replacement pilot, the 350th Squadron's Operations Officer, Capt. Richard Carey. They flew in a B-17F borrowed from the crew of Lt. Roy F. Claytor with the name ‘Duration + 6’. DeSanders' men never returned from the mission to the port of Warnemünde. After heavy flak hits, the plane crashed into the North Sea. Five men from the crew perished. The only one left of the original crew besides DeSanders at the base was the radio operator, Sgt. Rudden, who also did not fly that day. He was soon assigned to another crew as a substitute.
Alice from Dallas and Bill DeSanders were orphaned. Because he was not yet in good health, his Alice was flown by others. This was also the case on August 17th, 1943, during an attack on Regensburg. Alice was one of nine 100th Bomb Group B-17s lost that day.
The irony lies in the fact that Roy F. Claytor's crew, who lost their Duration + 6 with the original Alice from Dallas crew three weeks earlier, was flying Alice that day.
When the 100th Bomb Group formation on route to Regensburg reached the eastern part of Belgium, a group of German fighters attacked the low squadron of the formation, led by Maj. Gale ‘Bucky’ Cleven. Its rearguard was led by Roy Claytor in Alice. And it was on him that the current fighter attack focused and sent all three of his planes to the ground. At the same time, the fighters shot down one of Bucky Cleven's wingmen, leaving only two machines of the six plane formation of the low squadron.
The initial rounds that hit Alice from Dallas were very serious. Roy Claytor later testified: ‘I had not seen any enemy fighters nor had any been called out but then I suddenly felt the ship being hit hard… I pushed the nose down to get out of formation and at the same time saw that the left wing was on fire. The ship was trying to go to a spin to the left. I gave the order to bail out. I got up, standing between the seats, flying the plane, when the nose went up and I was thrown to the accessory compartment. From there I worked my way out of the nose escape hatch…’
As more parachutes appeared behind the plane, the burning Alice from Dallas pitched up and down furiously with the landing gear extended, making a 360° turn back toward the formation before finally spiraling toward the ground in flames. At approximately 8,000 feet, her fuel tanks exploded and the wreckage crashed near Langerloo, Belgium. What was left of Alice from Dallas also buried tail gunner S/Sgt. Musant, whose parachute opened too soon and snagged the horizontal stabilizer. The second crewman to fall was the ball turret gunner, S/Sgt. William M. Hinton, who probably did not manage to bail out in time.
Five of the eight surviving airmen managed to escape capture with the help of the Belgian and French resistance movements.
Bill DeSanders, who first lost his crew and later Alice from Dallas, did not return to combat flying until September 3rd, 1943. He flew as a replacement pilot with other crews, and later as Commanding Pilot for the 350th BS. As October arrived, so did a new B-17G, which inherited the code LN-O from Alice and was named Alice from Dallas II. It was with her that Capt. DeSanders flew his twenty-fifth and final mission. It was February 13th, 1944, and the Commanding Pilot for the flight was Capt. John C. ‘Lucky’ Luckadoo, who appears in this intertwined recounting in connection with Sunny II and who, like DeSanders, completed his operational tour that day.
Bill DeSanders lived in Dallas with his wife Alice, his ‘Alice from Dallas’, until his death in 1983.