THE FLYING PARSON
CAPTAIN DEAN HESS, A MAN OF GOD PILOTING A LETHAL KILLING MAĆHINE, SCANNED THE GERMAN CITY BENEATH HIS REPUBĹIC P-47D THUNDERBOLT.
Born and raised in Marietta, Ohio, Hess had been trying to save souls since he began preaching at the age of 16. Yet in December 1944 his mission was to destroy Nazi forces in support of Allied troops advancing into the Reich.
Kaiserslautern, an important industrial city, had already been worked over by Allied bombers, making it difficult to find inviting targets. Hess and flight leader Bill Myers had ventured away from their squadron to check out the city’s railroad marshaling yards. Amid bursts of flak, they were rewarded by the sight of two trains in the yards.
After a strafing run with their .50-caliber machine guns, Hess followed his leader down to deliver the 1,000-pound bombs they carried under each wing. His first bomb launched cleanly and speared toward a locomotive below. The second was slow to release. Pulling out of his dive, Hess glanced back through his bubble canopy in time to see the bomb plunge into a neighboring seven-story building, followed by an explosion. “I wondered whether I had killed anyone,” he recalled in his autobiography, Battle Hymn, “but I was more concerned whether I had fulfilled my mission.”
Weeks later, touring the occupied city in a jeep, he was stunned to learn that the building he struck had served as a school for orphans, and that a number of them had been killed during his attack. He looked up at the gutted structure, “trying to keep my eyes away from the black hole where my bomb had hit,” he wrote. “But it seemed to stare at me like some malevolent eye.”
Images of that bomb damage,
