Six miles above Budapest the air was forty degrees below zero, and the sky around the Flying Fortress named Mizpah had turned into a wall of black smoke and orange fire. It was 14 July 1944, and the flak over the Hungarian capital was the kind of fire that gunners on the ground walked across a formation methodically, box by box, daring the bombers to hold their line.

First Lieutenant Ewald Swanson had just felt his B-17 lift as the bombs fell away when an 88mm shell found the nose of his airplane and detonated. In a single white flash the bombardier, the navigator, the Plexiglas, the instrument panel and most of the forward fuselage simply ceased to exist. Where the cockpit had been there was now open air, screaming past at 200 miles an hour.

By every law of aerodynamics, Mizpah should have rolled over and fallen four miles into the burning city. Instead she kept flying — long enough for the men still alive behind the bomb bay to clip on their parachutes and jump. This is the story of the headless Flying Fortress, and of the airmen who refused to ride her down.

A milk run that turned into a massacre

The 483rd Bomb Group had been in combat barely three months, flying out of Tortorella in southern Italy. On the morning of 14 July 1944 some sixty Fortresses lifted off to strike the rail yards feeding the German war machine through Budapest. The target mattered — troops, oil and equipment all funnelled through those tracks.

Hungary, however, was ringed with anti-aircraft batteries, and the flak that day was murderous. Long before they reached the aiming point, holes were punching through Mizpah’s tail and wings. The combat box held formation anyway, because a B-17 on the bomb run could not jink or weave; it had to fly straight and level and trust the man beside it.

Then, in the final seconds of the run, bombardier 2nd Lt. Kenneth Dudley toggled the load. That is the instant the shell arrived.

The story of the headless B-17 “Mizpah,” reconstructed with period photographs (FlakAlley).

The shell that erased the cockpit

The 88mm round struck squarely in the nose and exploded. Dudley and navigator 2nd Lt. Joseph Henderson were killed instantly. The blast peeled the entire nose section up and back over the windshield, leaving the two pilots staring into open sky with the wind tearing at their oxygen masks.

The men flying alongside watched it happen, and their later sworn statements in Missing Air Crew Report 6901 are some of the most vivid records of the war. One of them, flying directly opposite Mizpah, described the moment the Fortress was decapitated.

Goodwin counted the parachutes as they came: “five good chutes and one tattered chute.” A second airman, ball-turret gunner S/Sgt. Charles L. Stoll Jr., remembered the same horror from a different angle.

Flying a Fortress by hand

Here the legend of the B-17 earns its name. With the instrument panel gone and the control column shattered, Swanson should have had nothing left to fly with. But the Fortress was famous for one quality above all others: stability. Heavy, broad-winged and forgiving, she wanted to keep flying even when her crew could barely hold her.

According to the histories of the 483rd Bomb Group, the pilot, co-pilot 2nd Lt. Paul Berndt and flight engineer Frank Gramenzi kept the airplane under control for some ten minutes — long enough to drag clear of the worst of the flak and put open countryside beneath them. Some accounts describe the surviving crew hauling on the exposed cables by hand to answer what Swanson needed up front.

A second shell knocked out an engine. Mizpah sagged behind the formation, losing speed and height. Swanson held her level just long enough.

A second telling of the same incident, drawing on the 483rd Bomb Group records (The Military Channel).

“Bail out”

Once friendly ground — or at least open ground — was below them, Swanson gave the order. One after another the survivors went out: the radio operator George Simonelli, gunners Kelley, Hish, Tucker and Bell, the engineer Gramenzi. Eight men in all cleared the dying aircraft.

Swanson stayed at the controls until the last possible second. When he finally jumped, his parachute snagged on the torn metal of the shattered nose and ripped. He fell most of four miles, regaining consciousness only moments before he crashed through the treetops near what turned out to be a prisoner-of-war camp. He broke a leg; German medics saved his life.

All eight survivors became prisoners. They were held until U.S. forces liberated their camp on 30 April 1945. Swanson would later rise to lieutenant colonel and live until 2009.

Not the only headless Fortress

The story of a nose-less B-17 is so astonishing that several incidents have blurred together over the decades, and it is worth keeping them straight. The most famous photograph — the one that ran in American newspapers in October 1944 — is not Mizpah at all.

That image shows B-17G 43-38172 of the 398th Bomb Group, flown by 1st Lt. Lawrence DeLancey, after an 88mm shell tore the nose off over Cologne on 15 October 1944. DeLancey did not order his men out; instead he and navigator Ray LeDoux flew the wreck all the way back to England and landed it. The togglier, S/Sgt. George Abbott, was the only man killed.

Both stories are true, and both turn on the same astonishing fact: a four-engined bomber, gutted at the front, that simply would not stop flying. Where Swanson’s headless Mizpah bought her crew the seconds they needed to jump, DeLancey’s carried his crew home. A separate and even older legend, the B-17 All American, involved a mid-air collision that nearly severed the tail — a different aircraft, a different kind of miracle entirely.

Why the Fortress could do the impossible

What ties these episodes together is engineering. Boeing built the B-17 with a generous wing, a massive tail for high-altitude stability, and a structure that distributed loads so well that the airplane could lose huge sections and still hold the air. Pilots trusted her precisely because she flew straight when everything else had gone wrong.

For the men of the Mighty Eighth and the Fifteenth Air Forces, that trust was not abstract. It was the difference between a death plunge and ten more minutes — ten minutes in which a doomed bomber could become a platform stable enough to step off of, and live.

A note on sourcing: the photograph of a headless Fortress most often shared online as “the” headless B-17 is in fact DeLancey’s 398th BG aircraft. Period captions of an unidentified 463rd Bomb Group Fortress that held formation while survivors bailed out describe a similar event, but that particular aircraft and crew have not been positively identified in the records consulted here. The named, fully documented case of a headless B-17 whose crew bailed out is Swanson’s Mizpah, recorded in Missing Air Crew Report 6901.

Sources: Missing Air Crew Report 6901 (eyewitness statements, via b17flyingfortress.de); American Air Museum in Britain (aircraft 42-32109 and 43-38172); 398th Bomb Group Memorial Association (Allen Ostrom, “It Was a Fortress Coming Home”); National Museum of the United States Air Force; World War Wings.