The Piggyback Fortresses: Two Locked Bombers and the Two Pilots Who Dragged Them Home
CHAPTER 1: LOCKED ABOVE THE SEA
The cold grease on the throttle quadrant smelled of aviation fuel and burnt wiring. Glenn Rojohn slammed both palms against the four metal levers, jamming them back until the engines coughed out a thick plume of black smoke.
The cockpit didn’t level out. It leaned left, heavy and dead, dragged down by twenty tons of shredded aluminium hanging directly beneath his boots.
“Hold that column, Bill!” Glenn grunted, his boots bracing against the bottom of the instrument panel. “She’s trying to nose over!”
Co-pilot William Leek didn’t answer with words. He wedged his knees straight up under the heavy control column, his knuckles turning chalk-white against the worn leather wrapping. The rivets along the main bulkhead popped like pistol shots, one after another, as the two fused B-17s plunged through the grey clouds over the North Sea.
Glenn reached down with a gloved thumb and flicked the cold wheel of his scuffed brass Zippo lighter where it lay in the recessed ash tray. No flame—just the dry, metallic click of flint against cold steel to anchor his hands. He couldn’t touch the intercom; the wiring harness had snapped off at the junction box during the impact, hanging down like severed veins.
Below their floorboards, the nose of Nine Lives was wedged solid into the belly of The Little Skipper.
“Hydraulics are empty!” Leek choked out, his chest heaving against the harness strain. “Pressure gauge is pinned at zero, Glenn!”
“Then use your legs!” Glenn barked.
He grabbed his side of the dual yoke with both hands, throwing his full body weight backward. The aircraft didn’t snap responsive like a scout plane; it groaned, a slow, agonizing resistance that vibrated straight through his collarbones. The left control column felt unnaturally light—slack, like a snapped clothesline—but the right side fought him with every ounce of momentum two four-engine Fortresses possessed.
Through the side window, the left wing was already turning dark. Sheet flame licked past the oil-streaked engine nacelle, blackening the silver skin of the wing in long, bubbling blisters.
“We’re dropping a thousand feet every twenty seconds,” Leek gasped, sweat dripping off his chin and freezing in the draft from the cracked plexiglass. “If we hit the water locked like this, we’re concrete.”
“We aren’t hitting the water,” Glenn said, his teeth clamped tight. He set his boot harder against the bulkhead, muscles tearing across his shoulders as he forced the yoke another inch back. “We’re turning this double-decker around.”
CHAPTER 2: THE TURN AT THE COAST
The wind howling through the cracked cockpit glass tasted of salt and raw engine grease. Bill Leek leaned his forehead directly against the cold instrument housing, his teeth grinding together so hard a thin line of red leaked down his jaw.
“She’s not banking!” Leek bellowed over the roar of eight roaring radials. “We’re heading straight for the deep water, Glenn!”
Glenn didn’t waste breath shouting back. He kicked his right foot higher on the copper pipe, leveraging his knee against the lower panel until the rivets popped against his thigh. He throttled back engines three and four on the upper wing, starving the right side to force the combined bulk into a drag-turn.
The airframe didn’t yield easily. It gave a sickening, metallic screech as the nose of the Nine Lives shifted underneath them like a anchored barge in a rip tide.
A sudden violent shudder rattled through the floorboards—not from flak, but a sharp shift in wind as they crossed the jagged grey shoreline of the North Sea. The change in atmospheric pressure caught the dead left wing. The column in Glenn’s hands didn’t just feel light; it snapped back three inches with zero resistance, completely detached from the outer control cables.
“The wing spar,” Glenn muttered under his breath, his eyes locking on the white-hot sheet of flame spreading across the engine cowlings. “It’s not just burning. It’s structural garbage.”
“What?” Leek spat, his eyes wide, sweat stinging his brow. “Speak up, Glenn! I can’t hear a damn thing!”
Glenn reached out with his left hand, grabbing the cold brass Zippo sitting in the ash tray. He didn’t light it. He shoved the cold metal wedge under the dead throttle latch on engine one, forcing the cut-off valve to lock down so the left wing stopped feeding fuel to the fire.
Below them, through the shattered plexiglass floor, he could see movement in the waist of the lower Fortress. German battery emplacements on Wangerooge Island loomed up out of the sea mist—black boxy silhouettes lining the dunes. Dark puffs of flak began to blossom in the sky ahead, but the double-bomber was dropping too fast, sliding underneath the main box of black smoke.
“We got land under the nose!” Leek screamed, his hands locked in a death grip alongside Glenn’s on the main column. “We made the coast, Glenn! Tell the boys to get out!”
Glenn slammed his open palm three times against the side bulkhead—the manual signal for bailout since the intercom was dead copper wire. “Out!” he yelled at the floorboards, knowing the men in the waist were watching for the wing movement. “Get out now!”
The two locked aircraft banked in a wide, shuddering arc, leaving the white caps of the open sea behind as the brown, frozen marshlands of the German coast rose up to meet them.
CHAPTER 3: FIRE AND THE FINAL BAILOUT
Below the flight deck, a metal hatch slammed back against its frame with a sharp clack. Through the gap where the lower turret had punched up into the fuselage, the hollow pop of cooking-off .50-caliber rounds began to rattle through the airframe like loose gravel in a cement mixer.
“They’re hitting the waist door!” Leek gasped, his forehead slick with oil and sweat, both hands shuddering as he bore down on his side of the dual column. “Glenn, the wing box is melting—I can feel the heat right through the rudder pedals!”
Glenn didn’t take his eyes off the rushing green horizon. “You get out next, Bill. Once the crew clears the tail hatch, you go.”
“Like hell,” Leek spat. His boots slipped an inch on the fluid-slicked floorboards before he kicked his heels into the base of the throttle pedestal to lock his legs again. “You let go of this wheel alone, the air pressure on that dead lower plane spins us on our back in two seconds. You know it, I know it.”
Glenn reached down, his fingers catching the lip of the ash tray to grab the brass Zippo he’d wedged into the throttle linkage. He clicked the casing shut against his leg with one hand, jamming the metal body directly under the central elevator trim wheel to lock the cable in place before snapping his hand back to the main column.
Through the side window, a jagged strip of aluminum skin peeled away from the left wing root, revealing the dark structural void beneath. The main spar wasn’t holding the wing to the plane anymore—the tangled metal belly of Nine Lives was acting as a giant clamp, pinning the dying Fortress straight by sheer weight.
A sudden dull thud echoed from the rear of the cabin, followed by the rush of sub-zero air sweeping forward through the bomb bay.
” waist hatch is open!” Leek yelled over the wind. “Three chutes! I see three white silk canopies opening behind the tail!”
“That’s the crew,” Glenn grunted, his ribs aching as the yoke fought back against his chest with raw, unassisted aerodynamic weight. “That’s all of them who can jump.”
The ground was no longer a flat map; it was individual fields, dark pine tree lines, and the sharp red-tile roofs of coastal farmhouses rushing up at two hundred miles an hour.
“Nine hundred feet!” Leek screamed, his voice cracking from the smoke pouring up through the floor. “Glenn, we’re out of altitude! Jump!”
Glenn jammed his jaw tight, his shoulder muscles burning like fire as he held the two fused bombers level. “Get ready for the ground, Bill! We’re riding it in!”
CHAPTER 4: THE IMPACT AND THE COLD DIRT
The world flattened into a deafening roar of splintering timber and tearing sheet metal. The belly of Nine Lives struck first, disintegrating into a spray of earth and aluminum that catapulted The Little Skipper back into the air for one long, agonizing second.
Then came the ground again. The left wing sliced clean through a wooden farm building, splitting the bomber’s fuselage down its seams before the nose slammed to a dead stop in the frozen mud.
A heavy, ringing silence washed over the wreckage. Dust and the sharp smell of raw, high-octane gasoline filled the cockpit.
Glenn drew a ragged breath, his chest burning as he slowly unclasped his fingers from the bent rim of the steering wheel. Beside him, Leek let his hands drop, staring blankly ahead through the shattered framework where the glass used to be.
“You alive, Bill?” Glenn rasped, his voice barely a whisper over the hiss of steam rising from the crushed engines.
“Yeah,” Leek breathed, coughing twice as he unbuckled his harness. “Yeah, I think I am.”
They squeezed out through the jagged gap behind the cockpit, dropping down onto the cold, solid earth. The air was frigid, smelling of wet dirt, burnt rubber, and thousands of gallons of raw fuel soaking into the soil around their boots.
Leek reached into his pocket, his hand trembling slightly as he pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out, placing it between his lips, and reached toward Glenn’s hand.
“Hold on, Bill,” Glenn said quietly, reaching down to grab the brass Zippo he’d pulled from the trim controls.
Before he could flick the wheel, a sharp voice barked from the edge of the tree line.
“Halt!”
A young German infantryman stepped out from behind a shattered beam, his rifle leveled straight at Leek’s chest. His face was pale, his eyes wide with adrenaline as he looked at the massive lake of gasoline pooling around the two airmen’s boots.
The soldier gestured frantically at the lighter in Glenn’s hand, his voice sharp with desperation. “No fire! Are you insane? You’ll blow us all to hell!”
Glenn looked down at the brass casing in his palm. He slowly clicked the metal lid shut, sliding the cold object back into his jacket pocket.
“Fair enough,” Glenn muttered, holding up his empty hands.
The air was still. The long, terrifying descent was over, and under the pale winter sky, the cold mud of the earth felt firmer than anything he had ever known.
