Mel is traveling this week on an American Airlines charter flight for a non-profit organization to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings. As former Army Air Corps member Oscar McClure of the Old Glory Honor Flight stood next to me in my living room this spring, still looking like a soldier at age 102, he showed me photos of himself as a young man in his Army Air Corps uniform and told me about his good friend, Oscar McClure.
Oscar was a turret gunner with Mel’s 8th Air Force Squadron. He was in a plexiglass hemisphere suspended under the fuselage of a B-17, a job even tougher than that of a turret gunner. You’re trapped there, in an unnatural position with your knees up to your ears, for hours on end. But the crew was needed. Turret gunners helped protect the big planes from attacks from below.
During a mission over Chateaudun, German-occupied France, in the spring of 1944, just before the Normandy landings, the squadron encountered heavy flak and enemy fighter planes. Squadron doctrine dictated that the closer the formation, the better the protection, so dozens of B-17s flew in close proximity. Mel saw his friend Oscar, hiding in the underbody gun turret of the plane next to him, just a few meters away.
Then flak began to roar, black smoke exploded around the plane, and in a terrifying moment, an explosion struck Oscar’s plane, blowing off the entire right wing. For a moment, the detached wing hung strangely above the torn-off fuselage, the propeller still spinning in space.
Mel looked over at Oscar, who must have realized his life was about to end, and saw his friend pull out two .50-caliber machine guns and move them up and down, side to side.
As Mel told me this story, he held his arms out in front of him, as if they were the barrels of his friend’s guns, and he moved them slowly, ever so slightly, up and down and side to side. “And then he just waved goodbye,” he said, his voice trailing off.
For 80 years, Mel Jenner has been reliving the moment he witnessed a friend’s death during wartime, but it still gives him pause: some things in life are never normal.
