Peter's eyesight was so impaired that he had at first been rejected from any kind of military service. He had barely squeaked by when the Army lowered its eye-sight requirements. Still he had been told he would "never fly." But by October, 1943 Peter had talked his way into an assignment as a combat B-17 waist gunner, had shot down a German fighter, survived a bomber ditching in North Sea and now he was on board Lieutenant Giles F. Kauffman Jr's bomber, headed for Schweinfurt, Germany. Sixty of the American Flying Fortresses in the Schweinfurt formation would not return to England. Sixty B-17 crews would be shot from the sky by flak and enemy fighters. Many American airmen on the doomed bombers would die, hundreds more would spend the rest of the war in German stalags. But fate had a very different future in store for Peter Seniawsky.
© 2005 Travis Ayres