Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505080029
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The day was Monday, May 7, 1945.
Adolf Hitler had been dead for a week, and the war in Europe would end within 24 hours.
The job of Lt. Russell Cook Jr. and his B-17 crewmates that day was to drop food to the starving people of Holland. Cook had flown eight combat bombing missions since arriving in England at the end of January. This was his third mercy flight.
The food drops by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Eighth Air Force were given the operational name Manna Chowhound. Dutch people still memorialize them every May.
The German and Allied forces had declared a truce to provide safe passage for the flights, and by May 7 the fliers had the added security of knowing that the German army in West Holland had surrendered two days before.
Lt. Cook was the navigator on a B-17 which carried the identifying number of 448640 and had one olive drab wing, a replacement for a wing damaged during a bombing mission a few months earlier. The plane was relatively new and had no nickname, unlike bombers earlier in the war.
To comply with the truce, all the gun barrels on the B-17 had been removed.
Cook had joined the Army Air Force in 1943 just after his graduation from Jefferson High School in Roanoke.
He had grown up in a house at 201 Otter View, now Maiden Lane, in the Raleigh Court section of town with two brothers and a sister. His father was the principal of Woodrow Wilson Junior High School.
Ambitious and hard-working, he had paper routes and raised chickens to make money and later worked at W.B. Clemens Auto Supply Store in Roanoke. "He was very much a go-getter," remembers his brother, William R. Cook of Blacksburg.
After the Air Corps, Russell wanted to study at Virginia Tech and then buy a farm near Staunton, his brother said.
Fate had other plans.
The mercy flight on May 7 began uneventfully. After dropping their cargo of food at Utrecht, the bomber's crew members decided to tour the countryside as far as Amsterdam and then follow a canal back to the North Sea coast.
They flew low and waved to people on the ground. They marveled at the miles of tulip fields in full bloom. Then Cook gave the pilot a course for England.
The flight path took the bomber over a base for German E-boats, which were similar to American PT-boats, at Ymuiden. German SS troops defended the base with a battery of 20 mm guns.
Apparently the SS fired on the plane and struck its No. 2 engine; at the time, though, the crew was unaware that anything was wrong.
As the plane headed for England, its crew and passengers were in a happy mood and sang and clapped along to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."
Over the sea and several miles from the English coast, oil pressure to the engine dropped to zero and the engine caught fire. The plane's pilot, Lt. Lionel Sceurman, feathered the prop and activated the fire extinguisher but that failed to put out the fire.
Sceurman then put the plane in a dive, restarted the engine and dropped the landing gear in an attempt to blow the fire out, but this, too, failed.
Fearing an explosion, Sceurman ordered the crew and passengers to bail out 500 feet above the waves.
Cook and two others dropped through the plane's forward escape hatch. The co-pilot and another man left the plane through the left side of the bomb bay.
Sceurman, meantime, prepared to ditch the plane in the sea. As he lined up for his final approach, the wing exploded in the area of the damaged engine, causing the left wing to drop into the water. The plane cartwheeled and sank quickly.
The two men who left the plane through the bomb bay, including the co-pilot, James Schwarz, who now lives in Florida, were picked up by an American Air Sea Rescue PBY Catalina seaplane.
The pilot escaped through a window but drowned before he could be rescued. His body and those of other crew members and passengers were picked up later by a ship or washed ashore. Other crew members and four of the passengers never were found and are believed entombed in the bomber's remains on the sea floor.
Cook, the young Roanoke man who would never have his Shenandoah Valley farm, was picked up alive by a British Air Sea Rescue plane but died before the plane reached England. He was four months short of his 21st birthday.
This morning, two of his surviving brothers, William Cook and Sam Cook of Russell, Ga., will attend a ceremony at Wright-Patterson Air Base near Dayton, Ohio, at the dedication of a memorial to the dead of the 8th Air Force's 95th Bomb Group.
The ceremony will be held at 10:27 a.m., the time it is believed that Russell Cook's B-17 plunged into the North Sea and became, according to the Center for Military History in Washington, D.C., the last Allied plane lost in Europe during World War II.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Information and photographs for this story were provided by William Cook, who has researched and written about the loss of his brother's plane.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB