William F. Cely |
| Posted 2009-12-04 by Pat Wilson |
| WWII flying hero William F. Cely dies at 76. Services will be held tomorrow (Apr. 1, 1992) for World War II hero William F. Cely, who kept his crippled B-17 bomber in the air after it was nearly shot to pieces over Germany. Cely, whose return flight in a plane "held together with holes" drew national media attention 48 years ago, died in Tucson Saturday after a long illness. He was 76. In January 1944, Cely was a U.S. Army Air Forces first lieutenant piloting a Flying Fortress over Brunswick, Germany. He and other members of the 94th Bombardment Group bombed an aircraft plant and came under heavy attack by German fighter planes, which outnumbered them 8 to 1. Cely's plane, the Frenesi, was "a mess of holes and ribbons" as B-17s on either side of it went down in smoke, Sgt. Everett Hudson Jr. recalled in a 1944 interview. The Frenesi, with its oxygen system gone and one of its four engines shot out, went into a steep dive, tossing the crew around inside the fuselage as Cely tried to shake the fighters. Crew members began bailing out. Cely, known as "Papa" to his crew because at 27 he was older than most, remained in the cockpit. Hudson, the gunner, stood wounded and poised to jump when he noticed his parachute was torn. "Then the plane leveled off a little," the gunner recalled. "I took off my chute and went forward to the pilot's compartment. The radio room was a mess, every loose thing smashed and thrown all over the place. "I told the pilot that I didn't have my chute. And he said, 'That's all right, Papa's gonna take you home.' " After dropping from 20,000 feet to 10,000, the B-17 made a second dive to 4,000 feet, where it lost the fighters in cloud cover. By then, the navigator, four crew members and a cameraman had bailed out. Carrying five others, including three wounded, the plane limped 400 miles to its home base in England. At the base, soldiers came by to look at the battered plane. "They had seen a lot of shot-up airplanes, but nothing like her," a United Press correspondent wrote. "Nearly the whole tail was gone. You could crawl through the holes in the wings. A wing tip was knocked open. An engine was dangling. The ship even had started to break in the middle." The London News-Chronicle named Cely its "Man of the Week" as news spread of his flight. People in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas, bought $600,000 worth of war bonds in a "Buy a Bomber for Billy" drive. The flight earned Cely a Silver Star. He also won the Distingished Flying Cross. He served as a reserve officer after the war and retired from the Air Force in 1971 as a lieutenant colonel. Cely retired in June 1979 as a shipping and receiving manager with Tucson Newspapers Inc., where he had worked since 1948. Survivors include his wife, Ruth; sisters Dorothy Parsons of Louisiana and Johnnie Davis of Texas; a daughter, Catherine Smith Tucson; and a son, Frank, of Dallas. Memorial service was Wednesday, April 1, 1992, at Bring's Broadway Chapel, 6910 E. Broadway. Remains are to be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on a date not yet set. The family suggests memorial donations to the Arizona Kidney Foundation, 4019 N. 44th St., Suite 100, Phoenix 85019. Arizona Daily Star March 31, 1992 |
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