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Squadron Commander Major John Egan, best friends with Gale Cleven, was everybody's idea of the devil-may-care wartime bomber pilot.
Short and skinny, with thick black hair combed into a pompadour and a pencil-thin moustache, he was the role model for the newly-arrived air crews joining the 100th Bomber Group at Thorpe Abbotts in the East of England.
Callum Turner as Major John Egan in Masters of the Air.
It all began for John Egan in March 1940 as a Flying Cadet at Randolph Field, Texas, as it did for Gale Cleven who was to go with him all the way. Egan was attached to the Eighth Air Force, a bomber command formed at Savannah Army Air Base in Georgia a month after Pearl Harbour.
In May 1943, by then a Major, he flew with the advance party to England, and in June took command of the 418th Bomber Squadron with the 100th Bomb Group at Thorpe Abbotts, Norfolk in the East of England.
Egan, in his trademark white fleece-lined flying jacket, flew on a dozen combat missions with the 100th, usually in the co-pilot’s seat. When his boys went into danger, he wanted to face it with them. ‘Anyone who flies operationally is crazy,’ he confided. He then proceeded to be crazy. When they went down in flames, he didn’t send file letters to their mothers and wives, he wrote, personally, in long hand.
On nights he wasn’t scheduled to fly the next day, he frequented the local pub in nearby Dickleburgh, sometimes rolling up in a jeep, then singing songs in the bar with the locals and Irish labourers until the taps ran dry or the tired publican threw them out. At twenty-seven, he was one of the ‘ancients’ of the outfit but could ‘out-drink any of you children’.
Major John Egan wearing a fez on his return from a mission to Regensburg and then on to North Africa. The attack was on the Nazis’ largest Messerschmidt aircraft factory.
The nickname ‘Bucky’ was acquired when as a cadet he reminded a team-mate of someone known as Bucky – three of the cadets would henceforth be known by that soubriquet, another of them being Gale Cleven.
Egan was present on an ill-famed raid on Regensburg on August 17, 1943, when nine B-17s in the Group went down. He described the experience later, ‘We were under fighter attack for three and a half hours and saw three Fortresses immediately around us shot down between the German border and the target. No one turned back, although some of us thought we were as good as dead’.
The survivors flew on to North Africa as planned. ‘I never saw such a feeling of fraternity as when we landed’.
In the first two weeks of October the Group was again decimated. Only three of the 140 officers who had arrived four months earlier were still operational.
Egan had been on leave in London when he heard about his best friend Cleven being shot down on a mission to Bremen. Speaking to his commanding officer on the telephone, Egan asked, ‘Does the team have a game scheduled for tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ came the reply.
‘I want to pitch.’
Egan wanted to avenge his friend’s loss and ensured he was The Hundredth’s Command Pilot on a raid to Munster on October 10. He told his co-pilot, ‘We are going to get the bastards that got Buck.’
It didn’t happen. On their way to the target they were attacked by more than two hundred FW 190s. The Hundredth was decimated. In 12 minutes the group lost twelve of thirteen planes – Pilot Robert Rosenthal’s ‘Rosie’s Riveters’ was the only plane that got back to base, albeit on two engines and with two badly wounded crewmen on board.
The Group had lost 20 bombers and two hundred men missing or killed in the space of one week.
Egan survived, being taken as a Prisoner of War. When he arrived at Stalag Luft III, Gale Cleven reputedly greeted him with the words, ‘What the hell took you so long?’ The two buddies were to spend the next eighteen months as POWs in each other’s company.
Stalag Luft III Sagan, located some hundred miles south east of Berlin, had been the home of downed RAF airmen since 1942 and the aim of one occupant – Squadron Leader Roger Bushell- was to tie up as many Germans as possible in hunting escaped POWs. He had initially escaped in October 1942 but was re-captured. He put the experience to good use and was the instigator for the long term planning of tunnels Tom, Dick and Harry which were eventually to be used in the ‘great’ escape of March 1944. Three men got away. 76 were recaptured as they emerged from the tunnel. Another 50 who were recaptured after escaping where shot dead on Hitler’s orders.
Major John Egan centre (squatting, second right) plans a route with his crew under the engines of their B-17 Flying Fortress. The fact they’re wearing fezzes suggests they’re just back from North Africa after a combat mission over Germany.
During the winter months 1944/45 nobody knew what to expect as the Allies were advancing from the west and the Russians closing in from the east. On the evening of January 27, 1944 the order came to evacuate. An estimated 10,000 men marched out of Sagan in a line fifteen miles long.
The horrors of that journey in freezing temperatures are well documented as the roads west became jammed up with fleeing German civilians as well as the vast numbers of POWs. There was often nowhere to shelter at night, frostbite and dysentery rampant and the guards were trigger happy.
Some men did get away, many more died. The men from Sagan were on the road for five days and nights – Egan recalled one night spent in a ‘building so infested with bugs that the bunks and straw mattresses were moving by themselves’ – before being entrained for Moosburg. Somewhere along the way Gale Cleven got away.
Egan survived, and was repatriated home where he continued to serve in the Air Force and married Josphine Pitz, who had been a pilot herself, and they had two daughters.
