World War II crews remember air battles

Jace Radke

Friday, April 20, 2001 | 10:58 a.m.

Mac Meconis and Mac Dike were about 15,000 feet above the English Channel as they piloted a B-24 Liberator through thick cloud cover in a sky packed with aircraft during the early morning hours of June 6, 1944.

The two pilot's, nicknamed right hand Mac and left hand Mac for the side of the cockpit in which they sat in a bomber nicknamed the "Snark," participated in the first bombing sortie on D-Day, despite the fact that they had lost their navigation charts.

The Snark was the third plane in a group of more than 20 bombers. It was to take the lead and guide the group to its objective if the first two aircraft were shot down.

"It was a dark night and the clouds covered everything, so we had to fly in strict formation to avoid collisions in a sky full of planes," Dike said "We were on the lookout for other planes, and we opened the bomb bay doors so the bombardiers could get a look below us.

"The problem was that the navigator had just opened the top secret navigation papers and information and it all flew out the open doors. It was lucky that we didn't lose any planes in our group, because if we had to lead we wouldn't have known where the hell we were going."

The two Macs are among a group of about 75 pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio operators and gunners in Las Vegas this weekend for a reunion of the U.S. Army Air Corps' 466th Bombardment Group.

More than 175 former airmen who made bombing runs in the skies above Europe more than a half-century ago began their reunion Wednesday by swapping stories and memories at the San Remo hotel-casino.

Meconis was 26 and Dike was 24 when they made the D-Day flight. They both spent about three months flying missions in the European Theater, although all of their flights weren't as tense as the D-Day mission.

"You look down and when there was a break in the clouds you could see the huge Naval armada moving toward the coastline, and you could catch the orange flashes from the German batteries," Meconis said.

The Snark's crew of 10 met for the first time in Alamogordo, N.M. From there they zig-zagged across the United States, through South America and Africa before touching down at Attlebridge Air Field in England.

During the journey the Snark, named for the the Louis Carroll poem, "The Hunting of the Snark," stopped in Kansas City, where the crew picked up a large mattress; they thought they could catch a couple winks on the way to the war.

"They thought it was a good idea, but as we got close to our next stop in Palm Beach the guys got a little nervous about having the mattress, so we shoved it out the bomb bay over Florida," Dike said. "It ended up in a tree in a park."

Later the crew thought that a mascot might be a good thing to bring along, and they bought a monkey in Brazil.

"We had the monkey, but it took a crap all over the radio operator," Dike said. "When we got to Marrakech, Morocco, we tied the monkey to a tree and left it there."

The crew also faced its share of danger, including a mission over Brunswick, Germany, from which they almost didn't return. The plane had been flying through heavy flak, and then everything got quiet, Dike said.

"I saw what looked like a flock of black birds in the distance, but it was 25 ME-109 fighters," Dike said. "We were hit with three explosive shells. You'd see those little fire flies bouncing around the plane, and those would be the tracers.

"When the fighters came in you'd duck because they came in at an angle, and as they completed their passes they were close enough that you could see the whites of the other pilot's eyes."

The Snark managed to limp back to base, with three injured crew members and more than 500 countable holes in the plane as a result of enemy fire.

"We sounded like a set of bagpipes when we landed," Meconis said.

The crew of the Snark survived that attack, and a total of 33 missions, although the Macs are the only two who stay in touch today.

Lou Loevsky, a navigator on a B-24, also survived the war; he spent 13 months as a German prisoner of war after the bomber, nicknamed "Terry and the Pirates" for its pilot and crew, collided with another bomber and went down over Berlin in March of 1944.

Loevsky bailed out, but he had to make a life and death decision as he parachuted while Germans rained fired on him.

"The adrenaline was pumping and I was thinking clearly, so I remembered that my dog tags were marked with an 'H'," Loevsky said. "That 'H' stood for Hebrew. I had to decide if I wanted to toss my dog tags away and face being shot as a spy, or keep them and risk being shot because I was a Jew. It was one of those frying pan and the fire situations."

Loevsky kept the tags and was sent to a prison camp, where he stayed until being liberated by the U.S. Third Army and Gen. George Patton.