Flier’s Last Big Mission : A WW II Bomber Pilot Who Beat the Odds Will Return to His Old Air Base

Half the world away and 47 years removed from the rural fields and hedgerows of Britain, James A. Myl still thinks of that wind-swept countryside he knew as a young man.

“It was always good to see Polebrook when coming back from a mission,” he said recently. “It meant we were home safe.”

Now 68, Myl was only 21 when he flew the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber out of Polebrook, a makeshift air base carved out of the English countryside a few hours outside of London. He has not seen the air base since that summer of 1944 when he beat the odds by surviving 35 bombing missions in the Allied air war over Nazi Germany.

But next month Myl and his wife will return to Polebrook, in part to participate in a memorial service for the American servicemen who were based there, and in part to relive a time of his life that is so etched in his memory.

“It will be my last mission to Polebrook,” Myl said.

A retired real estate entrepreneur, Myl says he has enjoyed a full, rich life. He has a wife of 43 years, six children and 10 grandchildren. But in a recent interview at his Los Alamitos home, it became clear that the brief time Myl spent at Polebrook remains one of the watershed periods of his life.

It was Polebrook, after all, that was his destination when Myl steered home an “unflyable” B-17 after it was shot up over Nazi Germany during a bombing raid. And it was Polebrook that offered him warmth and safety after Myl survived a harrowing bailout in a crippled bomber and spent three hours in the frigid North Sea.

The place that was known as Polebrook Air Base no longer exists in today’s England. During World War II, it was a hastily built American airfield, located about 75 miles north of London near the village of Oundle, constructed to host the American bombers that took the war to Germany.

During the heady months of the air war over Europe, the base sent out B-17 and B-24 bombers in massive raids over Germany--usually up to 1,500 bombers a day. The bombers encountered furious counterattacks by Nazi fighter planes. Flak and other ground-to-air bombardments also took heavy tolls.

“We’d usually lose about 50 of our planes each mission,” Myl said. “You figure that with 1,500 planes going out a day, you were living on borrowed time by the end of 30 missions.”

Myl said he himself was among those living on “borrowed time” because he survived 35 bombing runs over Nazi Germany. Some fliers, including those depicted in the recent movie “Memphis Belle,” had to complete only 25 missions to win a rotation back to the States. But when Myl was at Polebrook, the quota had been raised to 35.

“I completed those 35 missions between June 15 and Aug. 25, 1944,” he said. “I flew all my missions in 72 days. It was right at the peak of flying (for the American forces in England)--the summer of 1944. We flew every day when weather permitted, and some days when weather didn’t permit.”

Myl was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Long Beach. After graduation from high school in Long Beach, he was attending Long Beach City Junior College when World War II broke out. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in the summer of 1942 when he was 19. After two years of training, he earned his pilot’s wings, learned how to fly the then-massive B-17 Flying Fortresses and was sent to England for combat duty.

“Polebrook was out in the country,” he said. “There were hedgerows and some forested land. I really didn’t get to see much. My whole memories of Polebrook are sleep, eat, fly, shower--and noise. There was a lot of noise from so many planes there. We used a different airplane every day, so I really never had a single plane I was attached to.”

Two days in August, 1944, stand out in Myl’s memories.

“We were on a mission to Berlin on Aug. 6,” he recalled. “In my squadron of 12 (planes) over Berlin, five planes got shot down right away.” Myl’s B-17 was also riddled by German fighter planes, and two of the four engines went out. The remaining two engines barely functioned.

Myl described the incident briefly, in almost matter-of-fact terms. It was his wife, Dolores, who noted that he had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for bringing the plane home that day.

Three days after flying the crippled B-17 back, Myl and his crew were on another B-17 mission. The plane again was riddled by fire but this time could not be nursed back.

“We had to bail out, and the plane exploded in the air a few seconds after we all bailed out,” he said.

At the time, the crew of nine was over the North Sea, about halfway between England and Nazi-occupied Belgium.

“The water was 54 degrees, and we were in that water three hours,” Myl said. “Two of the men died of exposure. Luckily, the rest of us were rescued and survived.”

Nineteen days after the North Sea rescue, Myl completed his 35th and final mission. He left Polebrook for the United States. But the memories of those intense, life-or-death days have never faded.

Recently, he and his wife learned that a memorial to the 6,000 American airmen who served at Polebrook had been erected at the site of the former air base. The English landowner, Miriam Rothschild Lane, leased the 4 acres for the memorial to the 351st Bomb Group Assn. for a token amount of “999 peppercorns.” Peppercorns are the tiny berry of the black pepper plant--the material from which fresh black pepper is ground.

On May 10, Myl and his wife, on behalf of the 351st Bomb Group Assn. and the National Flag Foundation, will present a framed tribute to Lane near the site of the old base, thanking her for her generosity.

The document is bordered by 999 little peppercorns. Other U.S. armed forces representatives will take part, and British Prime Minister John Major has indicated that he may be on hand for the event.

Myl said he expects the day to produce a flood of emotions. After 47 years, he will be back at at a place where, as a very young man, he rose daily to fly above the puffy clouds of eastern England to challenge the odds of life and death.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Many people didn’t come back. I guess we learned to deal with that because so much of what we were doing didn’t seem real.”