Valor Friday

John C “Red” Morgan was born in 1914. Hailing from Texas, he graduated from a military high school before bouncing around several colleges in Texas and New Mexico. In 1934 he dropped out of school, but not before learning his pilot’s license.

Finding his way to the South Pacific, Red worked as a foreman on a pineapple plantation until 1938 when he returned to the states. He attempted to enlist as an aviation cadet with the Army Air Corps, but was refused due to his…colorful…education history.

Meanwhile, Red took to the Texas oil fields for work. While a roughneck for Texaco, he suffered a broken back due to an accident. This injury would later lead to him being declared 4-F (i.e. not physically fit for military service) by the Selective Service System.

In 1939, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany started the Second World War. The Japanese were marching across the Pacific Rim, and the Germans conquered much of Europe. As the British and Soviets were the only thing stopping the complete takeover of the continent by Hitler, the US sat aside.

American politics meant that the US was going to completely avoid the war, at least overtly. Lend-Lease allowed American war materiel to be sent to her allies, but official entry to the war was not forthcoming.

Morgan, like many young Americans, was watching freedom fall to fascism in Europe and the Far East, and felt like he had to do something. As the war was nearing the two year mark, Morgan ran to Canada to join the war effort.

Canada, part of the UK’s Commonwealth of Nations, was providing men and equipment to the war efforts. Among the most needed skills to aid in the Battle of Britain were pilots. Many Americans with aviation training joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) to fight.

In August 1941, Morgan started his Canadian service. After flight training he was a sergeant pilot assigned to the British Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command in England. While he was completing his training, the US had been attacked at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. This led to the American entry in the Pacific War, and days later, the European War.

The first Americans engaged in combat in continental Europe were airmen. Among their number were many American pilots and aircrew of the Canadian, British, and Australian military already in-theater. These men were transferred into the American Army Air Force, to start to fill the ranks of the massively expanding service.

Morgan was made a flight officer (a warrant officer rank) in the US Army Air Force in March 1943. He was assigned to the crew of First Lieutenant Robert Campbell of the 326th Bomb Squadron. Campbell’s B-17F Flying Fortress was named “Ruthie II.”

Morgan was flying as co-pilot on his fifth combat mission on 26 July 1943. The crew of Ruthie II was part of a large formation attacking Hanover, Germany. As they neared the German coast, a large group of Luftwaffe Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters attacked.

Attacked from their right, the Fortress was devastated by a burst of fire. All at once, chaos erupted in the plane. Towards the tail, the oxygen system for all the men behind the bomb bay (the radio operator, two waist gunners, and the tail gunner) was severed.

In the cockpit, the top turret gunner took a shell to his shoulder, ripping his left arm fully off his body. One of the German bullets had also come through the cockpit’s window, shattering it, and narrowly missing Morgan, before hitting aircraft commander Campbell in the head.

Campbell slumped forward, onto the yoke that controls the aircraft, sending them into a dive. Morgan yanked back on his control to counter the dive and looked over to see Campbell’s skull blown open.

The B-17 is an entirely cable-driven aircraft. There’s no hydraulic assistance for the flight controls. That means that Morgan, in pulling back on his controls, was fighting not just the weight of Morgan on the controls, but also the weight of the bomber itself.

Morgan succeeded in bringing the aircraft back into formation. If they’d fallen out of the protection of the formation, they’d surely have been shot down completely in a matter of minutes.

Despite the head-splitting wound that left his brain exposed, Campbell was still alive. The young officer was, even with his grievous injury, still fighting for control of the aircraft. The injury left him in a raved state where he doggedly fought physically to remain at his post as pilot, but without the conscious awareness of such. This left Morgan flying the plane with only one arm as he tried to wrestle Morgan off of the controls with the other.

The only other man in the cockpit, the top turret gunner, Staff Sergeant Tyre Weaver, was incapacitated by his injury, which completely cut off his left arm at the shoulder and dropped him out of the turret. He was thus unable to help control the plane.

To make matters even worse, the interphone system that allowed the crew to talk to each other was destroyed in the attack as well. Morgan had no way to call for help, and if he had, the men in the rear of the plane wouldn’t have responded, as they were all suffering hypoxia from a lack of oxygen at 26,000 feet. Morgan, hearing no fire from the guns behind him, thought that all the men in the tail were either dead or had bailed out.

Morgan’s options were limited. He briefly entertained the idea of cutting off his pilot’s oxygen, which would stop the man from fighting him for control, but would likely kill the already mortally wounded officer. If he dropped out of formation and turned back towards England, they would become the prime target for all the enemy fighter pilots looking to earn their Iron Cross. Morgan decided to remain with the other bombers and hope one of the other crewmen could come to help.

For two hours, Morgan flew one-handed as he wrestled with Campbell over the yoke. Eventually, the navigator, Second Lieutenant Keith Koske, came up from his position in the nose.

Crawling into the cockpit, Koske found Weaver lying on the deck, bleeding to death. He immediately assessed that the man was losing so much blood, and that his injury was so far up his arm that a tourniquet wouldn’t be possible to use, that the man’s best chance of survival was to be jettisoned over dry land. Koske knew they were at least four hours from home and that Weaver wouldn’t last that long.

Koske put Weaver’s parachute on him, put the ripcord ring in Weaver’s right hand, and pushed him out of the plane over Lower Saxony. He saw Weaver’s chute open up, and then turned his attention back to his job in the nose.

Koske’s quick thinking would indeed save Weaver’s life. Weaver was taken prisoner, but survived the ordeal. He would spend 15 months as a POW before being repatriated in a prisoner swap.

Koske manned his gun in the nose of the bomber as they neared their target. The men in the nose knew from the plane’s erratic flying that there was something wrong, but they were all too busy defending the bomber from repeated enemy attacks to leave their stations.

After the bombardier released their bombs, Koske returned to the cockpit. There he was able to finally give some relief to Morgan, and removed Campbell from his seat. The formation flew lower over the North Sea. As they descended from their bombing height of 26,000 feet, the gunners in the rear of the aircraft regained consciousness and came forward. They continued to restrain their injured comrade for the rest of the flight.

Morgan landed at the first base on the English coast. The plane was too damaged to ever fly again. All of the men had survived the mission, but Lieutenant Campbell succumbed to his severe injuries about an hour and a half after landing.

The story of Ruthie II was written immediately after the mission when a reporter for Stars & Stripes interviewed the crew. The reporter was Andy Rooney.

Morgan received the Medal of Honor for his heroism. He was presented the medal on 17 December 1943 by the commanding general of the 8th Air Force, then-Lieutenant General Ira Eaker. By this time, Morgan had received a commission and was a second lieutenant.

Eaker ordered Morgan to not fly any more combat missions, but Morgan didn’t listen. He continued to volunteer to fly, including the first large-scale Berlin raid on 6 March 1944. On that mission, Morgan’s aircraft was shot down. He would spend the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans. He’d flown 25 ½ combat missions in total. He was the only person during the war to become a POW after receiving the Medal of Honor.

Morgan returned to Texaco after the war, but was recalled to active duty during the Korean War. The Air Force denied his request for a combat assignment, so he flew transport aircraft in the United States for the duration of the war. He left the Air Force in 1953 as a lieutenant colonel.

Morgan died in 1991 from Alzheimers and a stroke. He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His wife, Gladys, died in 1993 and is interred with him. They were survived by their only child, son Sam Morgan, who retired from the Air Force as well. Morgan had four grand-children and three step-grandchildren, four of whom continued the family tradition of service in the military.

After surviving the war, Tyre Weaver took up flying. He used his aircraft to campaign successfully for tax collector in Chambers County Alabama by dropping leaflets on people. He married, had seven kids, and twenty grandkids before he passed away in 1993 at age 74.

Koske returned to his wife in Colorado after the war. He died in 1989 at age 74. He was preceded in death by his wife Elizabeth, who died in 1961.

If any of this incredible story of bravery and determination sounds familiar, it was used as a narrative element in the 1948 novel Twelve O’Clock High and its 1949 film adaptation, starring Gregory Peck. In the film, the B-17 crash at the beginning of the movie by Second Lieutenant Jesse Bishop (played by Robert Patten) is modeled after the 26 July 1943 mission of Ruthie II. Bishop’s character (including his continued flying and eventual downing) was based on John Morgan. Interestingly, the actor Robert Patten was a WWII veteran of the USAAF where he served as a navigator. He was the only member of the cast with aircrew experience.

 

Category: Air Force, Historical, Medal of Honor, Valor, We Remember