The full story of Norville Gorse, uncle of Lt. Col. John Gorse, current Air Force Reserve C-130 Hercules pilot himself and Commander of the 440th Operations Group at Pope Army Airfield, North Carolina, has emerged after the wreck of his B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was discovered on the floor of the North Sea, off the coast of Norfolk, U.K., last fall.
"There's a lot more to my uncle's story than finding his crashed plane, though," said Lt. Col. Gorse on his uncle's World War II service. "He went right back to flying bombing missions."
Gorse said that if he learned anything from his uncle, it was that humans have the capability to live through a lot.
In May 1943, 2nd Lt. Gorse co-piloted that aircraft, a B-17 of the U.S. Army Air Force's 96th Bomb Group, tail number 42-29752, during its final flight. The aircraft was forced to abort its bombing mission and make a controlled crash into the sea after a malfunctioning machine gun shot off one of the plane's horizontal stabilizers and severed control lines. Gunners had primed the defensive guns before takeoff in anticipation of heavy fighter attacks. Because the aircraft's controls were damaged, there was no way to safely land ashore. The pilot, Capt. Derrol Rogers, perished in the controlled crash, but Gorse and the seven other crewmembers survived.
The young aviator was quickly returned to flying service in the USAAF, again as a B-17 bomber co-pilot.
Two months after that ditching incident, Gorse was again in the cockpit of a B-17, flying his twelfth bombing mission during when yet another emergency forced him to ditch.
However, this one ended much differently.
On July 28, 1943, Gorse was piloting B-17 Dallas Rebel, tail number 42-30355. The bomber, which flew in a flight of four planes within a larger wave of 300, had taken off from RAF Snetterton Heath to strike the Focke-Wulf warplane assembly plant at Oschersleben, Germany.
When the flight of bombers approached Germany's northern coast, approximately 30 miles west of the islands of Heligoland, German fighters intercepted and attacked the flight of bombers. One by one, fighters knocked out the three other aircraft in the 96th Bomb Group formation, leaving Dallas Rebel to defend itself.
To counter their vulnerability, Gorse flew his aircraft into a larger formation of bombers, but shortly thereafter three enemy fighters singled his aircraft out, and 20 millimeter cannon fire from the German fighters punched holes in Dallas Rebel from its left wing across to its right.
Gorse wrote of the attack:
"I started evasive action and slid under the lead ship for protection, but not quickly enough to avoid cannon fire through the radio room and out the right wing. [Ball turret gunner] Maxwell had time to blow up the lead fighter, but the other two got away."
As the bomber started to descend from its damage, its gunners continued to defend the Flying Fortress, and managed to shoot down two more of the attacking German fighters:
"Three more followed us down; Maxwell saw Youngers, the tail-gunner, blow up one and he got another."
The attack set fire to the bomb bay and disabled the bomber's intercom system. Gorse, to try and extinguish the fire, set the aircraft into a dive, and the crewmen on board saw that the left wing had been partly burned away, its internal structure - including fuel tanks - exposed. Shortly thereafter, the fire spread:
"Suddenly, large quantities of fuel poured out of the left wing tanks; we felt a large bump when the fuel ignited, and all four engines stopped."
Gorse and his co-pilot, 1st Lt. Nance, had to quickly decide whether to bail out by parachute or to try and ditch the crashing plane into the sea below.
"I grabbed Nance and Maxwell and talked Nance into staying with the ship by showing him that the fuel coming out of the wing was burning about three feet behind it, not the wing; Our survival chances in enemy waters were non-existent without a dinghy."
Gorse and his crewmen controlled the diving plane as he set it up to ditch.
"I continued in a redlined airspeed indicator dive, with the flames slowing due to lack of fuel, and asked Nance if he wanted the ditching honor; he said 'No, you're in the pilot's seat,' and I continued down my flight path."
While the aircraft was headed for a controlled crash into the water, four of its crewmembers - two of which had also survived the May accident - chose to bail out by parachute and were never recovered. When the aircraft was nearing the water's surface, Gorse leveled out to burn off speed and set the aircraft up for a smooth water-landing:
"I opened my side window and propped it with my elbow to keep it from jamming during the landing so I had an escape path. The warm air outside rushed in, condensed on the cold windshield and turned to frost. I scraped it with my cap and the emblem on its front, then proceeded to set the plane on the water while checking height and water conditions."
Gorse carefully laid the aircraft into the North Sea, and its survival dinghies were deployed.
"The water was calm with a slight swell, and I landed smoothly. Most of the flames were out when the dinghies were released, but the left dinghy fell into the flaming fuel, which burned a hole in it. Nance, Maxwell, and the rest of the crew escaped through the radio hatch while I squeezed out the pilot's window."
After escaping the sinking plane, the six men crammed onto their one small survival raft. As they righted themselves in their dinghy, the sinking plane exploded in the water beneath them. They had paddles, a flare gun, hand-powered radio, 2 parachutes, and a small survival kit with chocolate bars and fresh water. They resourcefully used parachutes and oxygen bottles floated up from the plane to make a rudimentary sea anchor and measure their drift.
The six men floated in the cramped rubber dinghy, hoping for another rescue. They decided to paddle and crank their radio in two-hour shifts.
Their first afternoon adrift, the men spotted a large predatory shark that had taken an interest in them. The downed airmen helplessly watched the shark as it approached their raft.
"We clearly saw his mouth, fin, and that he was ten to twelve feet long. He swam in a wide circle around the raft, coming to within a few feet of the boat, but not touching it. We were still, and he swam away after circling only once."
The men were keenly watching for any sign of rescue. The next day, while adrift, they spotted a German fighter plane in the distance, and then a storm brought fifteen-foot waves that threatened to capsize the dinghy. The men were drenched by rain and sea spray by the storm, which lasted all day and all night.
That first evening, they saw several British aircraft, hoping that one would spot them and call for a rescue.
"British fighters which had bombed Jutland dove down close to us on their way home, but didn't see us... That night, a stream of British bombers flew over... One was shot down in flames overhead, broke into two parts and fell close to our raft."
Nance accidentally punched a hole in the bottom of their rubber raft with the heel of his boot, and they subsequently were forced to constantly bail water to stay afloat.
The following morning, July 30, nearly 72 hours after crashing, they awoke to the sound of explosions along Germany's northern coast.
"Three [Luftwaffe] Ju-52's, each with a mine detector ring under it, were exploding mines with machine gun fire. When one noticed us, it left the formation to return to its base while the others dropped green and yellow sea marker around us."
The men knew they had been marked, and that they likely faced capture. Half an hour later, a German plane showed up:
"A DO-24 twin engine seaplane soon returned and landed close to the raft. Two guards stood on the pontoons with machine guns and motioned us to board the plane. After we boarded, one guard watched with his gun pointed at us while the other cut up the dinghy and threw it back into the water."
Gorse and the crew were taken into captivity, interrogated, and put on a train to the prison camp Stalag Luft III in what's now Poland, the camp in which the 1963 film The Great Escape is based.
He was later transferred to another prisoner of war camp, Stalag VII-A near Munich, where he stayed until his liberation when the war ended in 1945. He and his fellow prisoners were flown back to the U.S., and he left the military shortly thereafter.
In his years following the war, Gorse went to work as a NASA engineer, helping to design rockets used in the space program. Later he worked for General Electric corporation.
Family separation meant that the nephew, Lt. Col. John Gorse, didn't learn of his uncle's wartime experience until he began researching his family history. The younger John first met his war-hero uncle at his pilot training graduation, class 91-08 at Laughlin Air Force Base, Del Rio, Texas, having invited him to the ceremony.
John Gorse remembers his uncle as a disciplined man who would do 50 situps and pushups daily, even into his 70s. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 79.
Part two of a three-part series.
| Date Taken: | 04.06.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 09.19.2016 18:48 |
| Story ID: | 210026 |
| Location: | POPE AIR FORCE BASE, NC, US |
| Hometown: | POPE AIR FORCE BASE, NC, US |
| Web Views: | 187 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Rescued WWII Aviator Returned to Service, Later Taken POW, by Capt. Justin Clark, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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