John ‘Reds’ Urban helped fly a B-17 that nosed up and into a loop after another bomber crashed across its tail. The photo shows Urban’s plane after making it back to England. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO / March 3, 2011)
In the nearly 20 years Ed Krupa knew him, John Urban never let on that he had done anything extraordinary as a World War II bomber pilot.
"He never said anything about the loop," Krupa said.
Urban, a civic leader and lifelong Nazareth resident known as Reds, died in 2001. Krupa learned his secret last year: On a fiery mission over Germany in 1944, Urban's B-17 performed a feat so spectacular it made headlines around the war-torn world.
With much of its tail section sheared off, the four-engine Flying Fortress — a heavy aircraft not built for aerobatics — shot straight up and onto its back, then swooped down in an arc. It was a complete, accidental inside loop.
"I thought, wow! It was an amazing thing to do a loop, and John never talked about it," said Krupa, a private pilot. "The story was hidden in history."
Krupa read about the maneuver after Urban's widow lent him her husband's scrapbook.
"Flying Fortress does inside loop: Navigator sticks to ceiling, drops on his head as plane swings back to normal," reads a headline from the Omaha Daily Journal. The Daily Express of London reported: "Battered Fort does full loop, but gets home." The Easton Express ran a photo of Urban and crowed, "Nazareth pilot on B-17 which did 'impossible.'"
"John and I would discuss aviation," said Krupa, a retired dentist in Nazareth. "But John never said any more than that he flew a B-17. He just said that he was a copilot and he flew so many missions to Germany, and just left it be."
Krupa and his wife, Dee, knew John and Anna Urban from Holy Family Catholic Church in Nazareth and a church-related charity fundraiser both couples helped run. Last year, Krupa asked Anna: "Whatever happened to John's stuff?"
"I have a book," she said. "I'll get it to you."
The scrapbook is a neatly kept but time-worn collection of photos, reports and clippings chronicling Urban's service with the Army Air Forces, including his flight records and even a fabric map of Europe he carried in case he was shot down.
Its contents include proof of Urban's valor: a July 1944 report by the operations officer of the 364th Bombardment Squadron certifying Urban had completed 25 missions. It lists the date and destination of each, as well as Urban's decorations — three Air Medals for meritorious achievement and the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism.
There's also a six-page typewritten account of the loop attributed to Urban, who was a second lieutenant and the plane's copilot, and 1st Lt. John W. Raedeke, the pilot. It's posted on numerous websites.
In technical detail, the undated account tells what happened on the Jan. 11, 1944, mission to Halberstadt, Germany. But Raedeke, 28, of Waterville, Minn., summarized the drama in a wartime interview with the United Press news agency. Here's what went out on the wire:
"Fighters were pouring in from all directions. Our top turret gunner hit a Focke-Wulf 190 which exploded right in front of us and shunted off to the right, colliding with the Fortress next door. That Fort went up on its tail and fell across our tail, taking away most of the stabilizing rudder and one-third of the left horizontal stabilizer and elevator.
"That sudden pressure on our tail threw our nose up and put us in a complete loop. [Urban and I] realized we could not bring her back, so we grabbed the control column and helped the plane continue through its arc. When we came out, we slipped into a left wing spin. After two turns, I ordered the crew to prepare to bail out and put all possible pressure forward on the controls.
"We dropped [from 19,000 feet] to 12,000 feet and began a straight dive. The tail gunner yelled that five German fighters were on our tail, so I let the ship continue to dive. The air speed indicator showed well over 400 mph. We finally hit a cloud at 4,500 feet and stayed in it until we shook the fighters."
John Urban was 22 at the time, and on his fifth mission.
The B-17, nicknamed Hit Parade, reached England and landed at a Royal Air Force base with a flat tire and only five minutes of gas in its tanks, Urban noted in his scrapbook alongside photos of the plane's damage. One of the 10 crew members was injured — a waist gunner, who broke his heel during the loop. The Hit Parade was junked.
The UP reported the loop tale was the topic of "much scientific debate among fliers in London bars … who shook their heads in disbelief." Until then, they hadn't heard any reports of B-17s doing loops and assumed such a maneuver was out of the question.
But aviation expert John J. Ruddy of Leesburg, Va., said recently that the story makes sense.
The plane had already dropped its bombs and burned off thousands of pounds of fuel, making it less resistant to the doomed B-17 crashing down across its tail, he said.
The impact forced Hit Parade "to immediately rotate to an almost vertical nose-high position …and around its pitch axis, sort of like a seesaw going up too high and wanting to go over backward," said Ruddy, a retired United Air Lines pilot, aircraft mechanic and aerobatic flier.
As a result of the "rotational impact," Hit Parade could "simply flip over backward and wind up positioned as if it were approaching the bottom half of an intentional loop maneuver," Ruddy said.
"I am inclined to buy the guys' story."
Anna Urban, a spry 90, has no doubts about it. Her husband had told her once about the danger his plane was in that day, and he was a straight shooter.
"He never bragged about anything, and I never asked him too many questions, because I thought if he wants everybody to know, he would tell us."
Anna met John in the Holy Family grade school in the 1920s. She was Anna Karlowitch then and lived in the borough's ethnic west end. Her father, a native Austrian, walked to work at the Lone Star Cement mill.
Urban was 6 weeks old when his father, also an Austrian immigrant, was killed in a Bath car crash. His mother then married a widower with children of his own.
The family lived in Dexter, a row of crude company houses built along Route 248 for workers at Dexter Portland Cement, later Penn-Dixie Cement Plant 4. In Urban's house, only a parlor heater kept the family warm. To get to school, he walked through a quarry. Other kids called him Reds because of the tint to his face.
Urban graduated from Nazareth High School in 1939 and signed up for what was then the Army Air Corps. His stepfather wanted him to have a better life than his own.
"His father would not let him go to the cement mill," Anna said. "He told the supervisors: 'Don't you ever hire my son.'"
Urban became an aircraft mechanic, then a pilot. Returning after his 25 combat missions, he wrote to Anna in the fall of 1944 from a string of stateside bases. In February 1945, they were married.
The couple raised a son and a daughter as Urban worked in the plant office at Penn-Dixie, keeping the books. When the cement maker closed, he got a job at the state unemployment compensation center and Anna sewed at a small Nazareth factory.
All the while, Urban served as a borough councilman and auditor, as chairman of the municipal authority, as a member of the Civil Service Commission, as secretary of the school board — and held leadership posts at Holy Family Church.
"He was always involved with something," Anna said. "He knew what the town was all about."
After almost three decades in the Air Force Reserve, Urban retired as a major. He lost a leg to diabetes, and prostate cancer came later. He died at age 80.
Paging through Urban's scrapbook, Ed Krupa, 76, gets misty-eyed over the sacrifices his friend made for his country.
"Me being a pilot, I know what it's like to fly an airplane. I put myself in John's position. When I'm up there flying, I can't imagine what it's like being at 25,000 feet, freezing cold, flak all over the place, people trying to shoot you down. I just can't imagine what it's like to be in those conditions, not once but 25 times."
Like millions of other World War II veterans, Reds Urban came home and got on with his life.
"He never wanted to say much about it, because he figured, hey, it's over," Krupa said. "But I read about him and I thought, this is really something. It should go further than just me."
david.venditta@mcall.com
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THAT would be interesting to witness!!!
