World War II navigator recalls deadly run over Germany

As Hertzel Harrison ponders Veterans Day, you can be sure the 97-year-old World War II vet will think about the young bombardier he’d promised to look after.

In 1944, Harrison was an old guy aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress dubbed “Special Delivery.” The bomber’s navigator, he was 26 and had left behind his wife, Virginia Dorothy, and their two children in Peoria, Ill.

One of 33,000 veterans who live in Sonoma County, Harrison is today a steadfast front-desk volunteer at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and a long-widowed resident of Rohnert Park. He recalls that he enlisted in the war largely because of his two sons. He’s Jewish, and he remembers looking at his sleeping boys - Hertzel, or “Trip,” who was 5, and Robert, 1 - and thinking about Adolf Hitler’s genocide of Jews.

“I said, ‘Bullshit, he’s not going to do that to my kids,’?” the wiry and genial Harrison said from beneath a tan flatcap.

“Really, that’s the reason I enlisted. What a coward he (Hitler) was!”

He joined the Army and trained in the Air Corps for service aboard a B-17. Before leaving for England with the Eighth Air Force’s 303rd Bomb Group, he and his fellow crewman were given a chance to say farewell to family at Dyersburg Army Base in Tennessee.

It was there that Harrison met the parents of bombardier John Cornelius Rhyne Jr. of Charlotte, N.C. The couple, John and Ethel Rhyne, approached Harrison with a request.

“They saw that I was a parent, so they said, ‘Will you keep an eye out for our Johnny?’

“I said, ‘I sure will.’?”

Harrison and Rhyne became friends as they served in close quarters in the belly of a B-17 that bombed Germany from the 303rd’s base in Molesworth, England. Rhyne “was just a very kind person,” Harrison said.

The target of their mission on Aug. 24, 1944, was the well-defended Leuna synthetic oil plant at Merseburg, east of Leipzig. Harrison’s B-17 was one of 39 dispatched.

Harrison remembers that German antiaircraft shells were exploding when a large chunk of flak pierced the bomber’s skin and struck 2nd Lt. Rhyne in his head. He died instantly. He and Harrison had stood within inches of each other.

“Oh my God,” Harrison said more than seven decades later, “I promised his parents I’d take care of him.”

The B-17 landed safely, and the crew of Harrison’s plane and the others from the mission hung their heads at the loss of the young bombardier from Charlotte. Harrison received permission to attend Rhyne’s funeral in Cambridge, England.

On a bombing mission six weeks after Rhyne’s death, Harrison, too, was struck by flak shrapnel. Wounded in his face and legs, he was removed from combat status.

His heart sank at word that his former crew was sent over Merseburg again on Nov. 10, 1944, and didn’t come back.

During the run, the bomber’s right wing was clipped and damaged by another B-17. Pilot Andy Virag was having trouble controlling the plane when German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters attacked, causing so much damage that Virag ordered the crew to bail out.

All of Harrison’s former fellow crewmen parachuted safely but were captured and interned as prisoners of war.

Harrison returned from the war scarred, but whole, and burdened by the loss of Rhyne and the hardships his buddies suffered as POWs.

“They’re always saying war is hell and, boy, it is,” he said.

He rejoined his family in Peoria, then found his place in civilian life as an architectural engineer specializing in the design of hospitals. An observation that hospitals struggled to keep patients’ food safe and properly heated or chilled led him to invent and manufacture a cart with both refrigerator and oven units.

He was 63 when he sold the successful business in 1980 and relocated to Sonoma County with his wife, Virginia. They’d been married 56 years when Virginia lost a battle with colon cancer in 1991.

She had been cared for at Memorial Hospital. Her husband’s gratitude to the hospital and his eagerness to stay useful prompted him to join its volunteer corps.

By now, Harrison has put in more than 4,000 hours, mostly helping visitors and patients on weekends at the hospital’s front desk. The combat veteran will turn 98 next month.

He said he doesn’t regret having gone to war, though parts of it were miserable and he has never stopped thinking of the young bombardier he’d vowed to keep safe.

“I came back alive,” he said. “What can I complain about?”

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.