February 1st, 1943 began in the pre-dawn stillness of Vistra airfield in Algeria.
Four right cyclone radials shook desert sand out of every seam of RB17F5BO serial number 406.
The aircraft the ground crew had painted with a name that sounded like a promise.
All American FG III to carry it after two predecessors already lost to war.
Atwater 25’s first lieutenant Kendrick Robertson, Bragg Jr.
moved through his pre-flight with the steady confidence that had once carried him through Duke’s legendary 1938 arm season.
He knew this bomber by feel, every sound, every quirk, because it had been his since August 24th, 1942, after crossing the Atlantic as part of Operation Bolero.
Beside him, Second Lieutenant Godfrey Engel, Jr.took the right seat.
Technical Sergeant Joe C.
James watched the engineers panel, ready to shift to the top turret when they reached enemy airspace.
Lieutenant Harry C.
News as navigator, carried an engineer’s mind into the map case.
Bombardier Ralph Burbridge, only Stanton has yet already experienced, trusted the Nordon bomb site like a second set of eyes.
Radio operator and Staff Sergeant Paul A.
Galloway checked the temperamental liaison set.
Waste gunners.
Staff Sergeant Michael Zuck and Hay Sergeant Elton Condor, a lastminute substitution from the sick 341st squadron ran hands over their HAR 50 caliber Brownings.
And farthest back, isolated in the bombers’s most vulnerable post, tail gunner and staff sergeant Sam T.
Sarus settled into the cold metal cradle that would soon earn him the nickname Lonesome Sam.
The 97th Bombardment Group, first American heavy bomber unit to see combat in Europe on August 17th, 1942, now fought from North Africa after an Operation Torch.
Today’s targets, the port facilities at Tunis and Bers were lifelines feeding Axis resistance.
Every ton unloaded there prolonged the struggle.
Every warehouse destroyed shortened it.
12 B17s of the AOTH Bombardment Squadron formed a defensive box over the Mediterranean overlapping arcs of 50 caliber fire meant to replace what they didn’t have.
Escort the ARB 38 Lightnings that should have guarded them were grounded with mechanical trouble.
At 120,000 ft, the temperature dropped to 440.
Breath froze in oxygen masks, and electrically heated suits fought a losing battle against altitude’s cruel arithmetic.
Still, the formation held straight toward the busiest docks in Tunisia.
Arab chapter 2.
Bombs away, then the swoosh.
Target in sight, Burbridge called as Tunis emerged through scattered cloud.
Below the port churned, ships unloading, trains waiting, trucks threading toward the front where the Africa Corps clung to its last margins.
For the bomb run, the B7s had to fly at straight and level.
3 minutes of rigidity while the Nordan bomb site matched machine logic to the Earth.
Flack blossomed as black puffs around them.
German 8 Demra and bursts fused to a killing altitude.
Shrapnel hunting aluminum and flesh.
Burbridge held his timing.
Then bombs away.
All American thri lifted as gousb fell from the bomb bay.
Smoke and flame rose from warehouses.
Secondary blasts hinted at stored ammunition.
Ships listed at their moorings.
It was a clean strike, perhaps their best.
Then as the formation turned west for home, the warning arrived with the suddenness.
Fighter pilots relied on bandits high fast.
Messesid BF109’s diving from the sun.
The Germans had learned the B7’s defensive geometry.
From the front, the fortress was weakest.
Nose guns limited in depression.
Turret tracking challenged by speed and angle.
One attacker Olo Julius Mimmerberg of 11 JG Du attached to Yaged Gashwada 53 Picas ace of spades drad the lead bomber flaming the other Feldwable Eric Patzia of 6 JG-53 came straight at all American three Patzia was no beginner he carried hard 16 confirmed victories and the honor goblet awarded to successful fighter pilots he knew where to kill cockpit it, engines, wing routts.
At roughly 300 yd, the BF 109 should have broken away in a practiced escape roll.
Instead, the attack unraveled in an instant that would later be described in fragments.
Burbridge remembering a face through the windcreen, the top turret opening up, the fighter twitching as if yanked by an invisible line.
Joe James firing from the top turret drove a burst into the cockpit.
Whether Patia died instantly or went limp behind the controls, the result was the same.
A fast fighter became an unguided projectile.
What followed lasted less than 2 seconds and would be studied for decades.
The BF 109, rolling out of control, struck all American just after of the waste positions.
Crewmen didn’t hear an explosion.
They heard something worse because it sounded physical.
A distinct swoosh.
Then a tremendous jar.
A wump through the plexiglass nose cone.
A wing here.
A chunk of fuselage there.
Pieces of German aircraft tumbling past toward the desert.
5 miles ours below.
The fighter hadn’t simply been shot down.
It had collided.
And somehow the bomber was still flying.
Chapter 3.
A tale that shouldn’t exist.
The collision carved the B7 open like a blade.
The BF 109’s left wing sliced a diagonal gash from the base of the vertical stabilizer across to the left horizontal stabilizer, severing it completely.
The tail was nearly cut free, connected by only a few metal spars and thin strips of aluminum skin.
Control cables to elevator and rudder were severed or mangled.
Hydraulic fluid leaked into the slipstream.
Daylight appeared where airframe should have been.
Bragg forced calm into the intercom.
Pilot to crew, check in.
One by one, voices answered astonishingly.
No injuries from the impact.
Then the silence from the back.
The tail gunner didn’t respond.
The interphone line had been cut, yet the waste gunners could see movement through torn metal.
Sam Sarilus was alive.
Trapped in a tail section that moved independently, swaying like a kite on a string in a hurricane, nearby, another B7 flying flit gun moved close.
Lieutenant Charles Cliff cut forth.
Its navigator captured a photograph that would become one of the war’s most famous images.
All American 3, when level flight, tail offset at an impossible angle, fuselage ripped open, left stabilizer missing.
An aircraft that looked already dead yet refused to fall.
Engineers would study that frame for decades because it seemed to contradict aerodynamics and common sense.
Inside the cockpit, Bragg and Engel improvised with what still worked.
Traditional control surfaces were compromised, but the autopilot linked to the Nordan system used electrical servos rather than the severed mechanical cables.
By engaging it in partial, careful ways, they could claw back a degree of stability.
They also used differential engine power, pushing the left engines harder than the right to counter yaw.
Every input had to be gentle.
Too much force might tear away the remaining connections.
Major Robert Coulter, leading from flaming, asked the question every formation commander dreaded.
Could they make it? Bragg checked gauges.
No major fuel leak.
Engines still running.
Electrics alive.
The airframe, what remained of it, was the only catastrophe.
We’re going to try, he answered.
In the tale, Sarulus faced a choice measured in seconds and inches.
Stay in a section that could separate at any moment, or crawl forward through a torn fuselage with open sky beneath.
He grabbed his chest parachute, his gear, and detail made unforgettable by its ordinariness.
A borrowed jacket belonging to Bragg.
Then he began the most dangerous 30 feet of his life.
Wind howled through ripped aluminum.
Spent casings and debris skittered and lifted.
The floor flexed underweight it was never meant to bear without intact structure.
One failure and he would fall into h five miles into air.
Waist gunner Zuck watched him inch forward, unnaturally calm, dragging his gear through wreckage.
After nearly 10 minutes, Sarulus reached the forward section.
His first act was not triumph, but procedure.
He handed the jacket over and told them, “Make sure the skipper gets this back.
He might need it when we land.” All 10 men were now forward, together, and ready to bail out if the aircraft finally obeyed physics.
Chapter 4.
90 minutes to the runway.
Standard doctrine said damaged ships that couldn’t keep pace were left behind.
They slowed the formation and increased risk for everyone.
But the Wu14thwire did not abandon us all American three.
The box tightened around Bragg’s wounded bomber, accepting extra minutes in hostile airspace so their combined guns could deter another attack.
The BF 109s eventually broke off.
Mmberg survived the day despite severe burns when defensive fire ignited his oxygen system later claiming a B17 kill in his postwar memoir.
Half right because Flaming Ka did go down with Coulter and Konism crewman.
All American Fannadori did not.
Once clear of the worst danger, the other bombers peeled away toward Biscra, wings rocking in salute.
Bragg continued alone, flying slower to reduce stress on the near severed tail.
The return that should have taken an hour stretched into 90 minutes.
That felt endless.
Every bump was a test.
The tail kept shifting, aligned one moment, caned the next.
Each movement a reminder of how little metal still held it.
Musel recalculated constantly.
The damaged bomber flew slightly sideways, crabbing, changing speed and consumption.
Galloway kept a steady voice on the radio, feeding Biscre their position and condition.
On the ground, the airfield prepared like it expected a funeral.
Ambulances, fire trucks, crash crews lining runway 27.
The base commander in the tower.
5 minutes out, the bomber called.
The tower cleared them straight in and asked how many wounded.
Bragg gave the answer that sounded like a joke in the face of what the aircraft looked like.
None, only structural damage.
The landing checklist became ritual.
Gear down.
Hydraulics separate from the destroyed control lines.
Three green lights.
Confirmed.
Locked wheels.
Flaps were refused.
Changing air flow over the broken tail might finish what the collision had started.
They would come in hot and use every foot of runway.
The approach was not smooth flight, but constant correction.
Yaw, roll, pitch, fighting one another.
Each fix demanding a counterfix.
Ground crews watched a bomber with daylight showing through its fuselage descend like a wounded animal refusing collapse.
The main wheels touched at roughly arm 10, faster than normal, but as gently as Bragg could manage.
For a brief moment, it looked like they might skate through intact.
Then the missing piece asserted itself.
The whole tail wheel had been destroyed, and the rear dropped onto the runway.
The B7 became a tech 5,000B sled, grinding in sparks and shredded metal.
Bragg and Engle stood on the brakes and fought to keep it straight.
Compromised rudder control made a ground loop a death sentence.
The bomber finally stopped, tail down, nose high.
An aircraft posed like a warning sign.
10 men scrambled out and formed on the runway, turning back to stare at the thing that had carried them home.
The tail hung at an angle that looked theatrical until three curious ground crewmen climbed aboard to examine the damage.
Their combined weight, perhaps 500 lb, was enough.
With a tearing groan, the tail section separated and collapsed fully onto the runway.
The airmen fled, pale, suddenly grasping what the crew had been riding for an hour and a half.
The question became whether the bomber could be saved.
Crew chief as Master Sergeant Hank Highland walked the wreck with a clipboard facing the obvious verdict.
No aircraft should return from that.
But 1943 America lived by a different rule.
If it could be fixed, it would be fixed.
Over 6 weeks, the hard 50th Air Service Squadron performed major surgery.
grafting on a tail section salvaged from another B17 damaged in a landing accident.
Crude by factory standards, exhausting in desert heat and freezing nights, but relentless on May 10th, 1943.
All American 3 flew again, heading on another mission, this time to Sicily, then later relegated to easier duties, transport, training, milk runs where fighter opposition was unlikely.
Her war ended on the March 6th, 1945.
Retired and salvaged at Holucira airfield in Italy.
Chapter 5.
The enemy pilot, the photograph, and the lesson.
The German pilot whose death intersected with this story was Feldwell Eric Paxia, 24 years old on February 1st, 1943, born May 7th, 1918.
trained through glider clubs in a Germany reshaped by national socialism.
He flew with Wixiagdashwada 53 Picus, one of the Luftwaffer’s most successful wings, credited with over 4,000 Allied aircraft destroyed.
His BF109 G4 powered by a Dundameler Benz DB 605 delivering 1475 horsepower carried a fat 20 cannon firing through the prop hub and a two3 Amenan machine guns in the nose.
In the logic of air combat, he did what doctrine demanded, pressed the front attack until a burst from Joe James ended his war and in a cruel twist turned his aircraft into the weapon that nearly killed the men he was trying to destroy.
Paxia’s body was recovered and buried at Bourj Cedria German War Cemetery in Benerus, Tunisia.
Plot 3, row 8, grave 15.
On that March 1st, 1943, he was postumously awarded the honor goblet.
The paperwork recorded an aerial death against enemy bombers, not the collision that created aviation history.
For the Luftwaffer in North Africa, reports of a B7 continuing flight after losing half its tail were initially met with skepticism until multiple witnesses, radar tracking, and later allied evidence made denial impossible.
Incidents like this fed the psychological strain described by figures such as General Adolf Galland.
Young German pilots would pour ammunition into bombers, score what should have been fatal hits, and still watch the Americans fly away.
The frustration helped push tactical evolution, heavier weapons, concentrated attacks, and new doctrine.
The pay 30minut MK 108 cannon designed to tear meter wide holes into bomber structures emerged as part of that response for American crews.
All American threes became a morale legend proof that flying fortress was not a slogan.
A new emblem appeared in the forhan or a puppy praying at top a tail section echoing the phrase on a wing and a prayer.
Myths accreted over the decades.
Parachute cords holding the plane together.
The bomber completing the bomb run after the collision.
A flight to England until Burrbridge, the crew’s later historian, spent years stripping away embellishment.
The truth was already enough.
The collision happened on the way home.
Not on the runin.
They were returning to Algeria, not Britain.
and nothing cinematic needed to be invented.
Engineers studying the incident pointed to what survived.
The cow swing to fuselage junction, the main wing spars, and the rigid bomb bay structure that acted as a box holding the airframe together when other load paths failed.
The B7’s semi monocco design let skin, frames, and stringers share stress when primary members were compromised.
Survival also depended on choices made in seconds.
Bragg reducing speed, avoiding violent control inputs, using the electrical autopilot servos, and the crew moving forward, shifting weight away from the broken tail.
Smooth desert air mattered, too.
Severe turbulence would likely have ended them.
The story unfolded against a decisive campaign.
Tunis and Bersera were struck to choke Axis supply in North Africa.
Within 3 months, Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered.
May 13th, 1943, nearly 250,000.
German and Italian soldiers capitulating.
The war’s industrial scale loomed behind every detail.
12th 731 B17s produced.
Fort 735 lost in combat.
At peak output, Boeing, Douglas, and Loheed Vega are completing COM 16 fires a day.
By wars end, B17s dropping satics 4036 tons wad of bombs in Europe.
Numbers that turned individual miracles into part of a larger brutal equation.
And yet the human details endured.
Brag returning home, later serving as an instructor pilot, speaking rarely of February 1st, and reducing it to a single line.
Good airplane, good crew, luck.
Newsel’s letter signed by all Hammer Tennu.
Preserving the raw immediiacy of daylight where airplane should be.
Engel living quietly, hands sometimes moving unconsciously as if still working the controls.
Joe James carrying the paradox of doing his job perfectly and triggering catastrophe.
Anyway, Zuck and Condor never forgetting Sarulus’s crawl and the way he thought first about returning a jacket before thinking about his own escape.
The photograph cut forth captured, cataloged as US Air Force photo 050524 F134P01 fired remains the bluntest evidence.
It has been miscaptioned, cropped, and mythologized.
Yet the original frame needs no help.
A bomber missing critical structure, still level, still flying, still refusing to fall.
All American threes didn’t just carry 10 men home.
It carried a message both sides understood.
Sometimes in war, engineering, training, discipline, and luck align so tightly that even the laws of physics seem forced to negotiate.
