Eighty years ago today, Earl G. Russell suited up in a leather bomber jacket and goggles, and climbed into a B-24 Liberator at Harrington RAF air base in southeastern England. He took his position at the tail of the converted bomber and manned a machine gun that he’d learned to shoot just 10 weeks earlier from the rear of a bouncing pickup truck at an Army training camp in Texas.
Three French Resistance agents climbed in behind him.
My father was 19, six weeks shy of his 20th birthday. A year or so earlier, he had been attending Overbrook High School in West Philly. Now he was gearing up for his first mission in one of the most daring clandestine efforts of World War II:
Operation Carpetbagger.
Over the next nine months, he and his seven crewmates would fly more than 40 missions across Europe – to France, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Germany – dropping spies, canisters of weapons, fuel and supplies to troops and Resistance fighters. Their squadron was part of an Army Air Force group under the direction of General "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.
Together, Carpetbagger crews flew more than 2,000 missions in the last year of World War II, dropping more than 600 agents, weapons and supplies, propaganda leaflets and even carrier pigeons. They flew in stripped-down bombers painted black, to hide themselves in the night sky as they soared above enemy territory. Cruising just a few hundred feet above the trees, they followed rivers and railroad tracks toward Resistance groups who signaled their location on the ground with flashlights and torches. The ball turret in the plane’s belly had been removed, leaving a plywood-covered opening known as the Joe Hole.
The three agents who huddled in the rear of Dad’s bomber said nothing. Even if he could’ve heard over the roar of the plane’s four engines, he wouldn’t have understood; he didn’t speak a word of French. To him and everyone else in the battalion, they were just “Joe.”
By the end of the night, these anonymous agents would drop through the hole and parachute to the ground. Their destination, the gear they carried, their mission – Dad had no idea. That info was above his rank, and he was ordered – no, threatened – not to talk. Never say anything about the Carpetbaggers. It must’ve stuck with him because it wasn’t until I was in my 40s, a grown man, before I began to hear even bits and pieces about his WWII service.
Indeed, after moving to France, I wondered whether he’d flown to my neck of the woods, Brittany. Imagine the irony if my new hometown had been liberated by my father! He’s been gone for seven years now, so I can’t ask him. The details would’ve been sketchy, at best, as he left the military behind after VE-Day and enjoyed a lifetime of peacetime memories as a husband, father, professional engineer and community volunteer. It was only in the last 15 years of his life - as he encountered now-talkative former Carpetbaggers at occasional reunions - that he felt free to share his exploits.
Thanks to recorded memories with a historian, as well as in-depth records collected by World War II archivists, I’ve been able to piece together some of the details of his secret wartime service. His crewmates, the missions, the harrowing moments when his plane was hit with enemy fire.
These are matters I might not have cared about when I was younger. I was your typical Vietnam-era malcontent, opposed to the war and uninterested in the military exploits of the Greatest Generation. My favorite wartime movies were the anti-establishment “Kelly’s Heroes” and “M*A*S*H.” I sat when they played the National Anthem.
And, frankly, as I left America two years ago in the threatening grip of fascist Trumpers, remorse over the state of my homeland – not pride – was my prevailing sentiment.
Moving to France has shifted my perspective on patriotism. As I walk around Rennes, I see poignant examples of heroism, especially among members of the Resistance. I’ve heard the stories of their loss, their shame of collaboration, their resilience and their open arms that welcomed American GIs. The memorials with the names of executed railway workers, the rebuilt streets named for martyrs, the tributes to Allies who sacrificed their lives while liberating this soil, the soaring strains of La Marseillaise – they’ve given me, in my senior years, a new, unexpected outlook on love for country.
And I find myself, more than ever, wanting to talk to my Dad.
Two days before his first mission, Dad posed under the wing of their plane, the Br’er Rabbit, with his seven crewmates. The photo shows a group of young men; no one looks older than 30. They had arrived at the airbase north of London about one month earlier, after flying across the Atlantic.
On the afternoon of September 9th, their pilot, Victor H. Hansen, and his navigator, Richard E. Bellgardt, attended a briefing in which they were given the details of their mission.
Codename: Percy 65.
Destination: Soubrebost, a farming village in central France, about 300 kilometers west of Lyon.
Takeoff: 22h00, military time.
Theirs would be one of 15 Carpetbagger missions that night, with each B-24 flying solo into enemy territory.
Until he joined the Army, Dad had never been further away from his home in the Mantua section of Philadelphia than Boy Scout camp in Bucks County. Now, as Allied troops spread across France, chasing the Nazis toward the Rhine, he found himself preparing to fly over the Channel in support of a secret mission to provide the French Resistance with weapons and supplies.
I can’t imagine the nerves. Crashes were not uncommon, not just from enemy fire, but from collisions with trees and hillsides as the Liberators flew close to the ground. Just the day before, another B-24 from his unit had left Harrington, trailing bright red flames from an overheated engine. The crew managed to bail out as it went into a tailspin, but the 20-year-old pilot, who held the controls long enough to avoid a small village, was killed as it crashed into an open field.
Documents show the Br’er Rabbit took off at 22h07 with no incident and headed southeast toward France. It dodged the Channel Islands, still occupied by the Germans, and flew over Normandy as it headed to the drop zone. The plane raced through the moonlit night with no lights, just 500 feet above the ground to avoid other aircraft. The crew kept its eyes on the ground, to spot checkpoints that would guide them along the way.
As tailgunner, Dad handled the only weapon onboard - a 50-caliber machine gun fired from an opening at the rear of the plane. The other weapons were removed to lighten the load as the bomber was filled with supplies that would be airdropped to the Resistance.
Many years later, I took Dad to an airshow that included a refurbished B-24. As we climbed from the tarmac into the craft, I was struck by how small it was. It seemed flimsy, with all of the structural integrity of an old VW van. He showed me where he was positioned, how he could watch as the Joes parachuted to the ground.
The agents’ mission was, naturally, a secret. At this point in the war, with the Nazis on the run, they were almost certainly ferrying weapons and equipment to comrades in support of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of Provence from the south. A dozen canisters in the bomb bay were packed with supplies.
After about three hours in the air, Hansen and his crew spotted a line of red lights. Nearby, a white light flashed the Morse code signal for the letter A. Dit-dah… Dit-dah. That was it – the secret code from the Resistance that confirmed the drop zone for this mission. It was 1:18 a.m. The bomber, moving at 145 mph, descended to 400 feet above a field just outside of town - not far from the spot where, two months earlier, the mayor of Soubrebost had been executed by the Nazis for hiding supplies dropped in an earlier Carpetbagger mission.
The Br’er Rabbit took two passes above the site, and within two minutes it dropped everything on board - including the three Joes. Dad watched their parachutes open from his perch in the B-24’s tail.
He would never see or hear of them again.
The B-24 turned back to the north, toward the Channel, but the mission wasn’t over.
Hansen knew that, even three months after D-Day, the Germans still occupied Jersey and Guernsey, the two largest of the Channel Islands. Somehow, though, the bomber strayed too close to Alderney, a 3-mile-long speck where Hitler had forced 6,000 slave laborers to build fortifications – and anti-aircraft batteries.
Though the B-24 had climbed to 6,500 feet, the German artillery reached the bomber. The mission report describes the flak as “moderate.”
Dad later told a historian, almost casually, that shrapnel had pierced the fuselage just three or four feet from where he was standing.
No one was injured. The plane made it back to Harrington with no further problems. By tradition, he and the crew were given a shot of liquor to calm their nerves. (I have doubts he downed his; he was not a drinker.)
After the war, as he returned to Philadelphia, put himself through night school, raised a family with Mom and built a long career as a structural engineer, Dad spoke very little about his service – even as a grainy black-and-white photo of him and his crewmates under the wing of the Br’er Rabbit hung on his office wall above his desk until the day he died.
As a boy who often sat beside him in his office, the photo led me to wonder: What did he actually do during the war? Did he ever shoot down an enemy plane? Was Dad a hero?
Some of those questions were answered in 2015, when the French government named Earl G. Russell a Chevalier in its Legion of Honor for his role as a member of the Carpetbaggers. The ceremony at the French Embassy in Washington was a great moment of pride for him and his entire family.
Now that I’ve begun sifting through his wartime records, I’ve learned that, no, he didn’t liberate Rennes. That happened a few days before he arrived at Harrington.
But in living in a nation with ever-present reminders of the war that ended almost 80 years ago, I’m struck by something more poignant. And that is how much France values the service of men like my father. Americans who served in World War II are beloved here. Everywhere, there are memorials and plaques marking their sacrifice. The gravesites where the remains of American G.I.s rest are cared for by local school children. Our library displays newsreels of flag-waving citizens of Rennes welcoming the troops as they ride their Jeeps into the Place de la Mairie. At the town’s most recent V-E day ceremony, a military band played Stars & Stripes Forever.
It’s more than patriotism. France is grateful.
And I wonder if that’s what’s missing in America these days.
Note: I am not a military expert. I relied on research from a variety of sources, most notably the late-Thomas L. Ensminger, a military historian who painstakingly compiled a trove of materials at his Carpetbagger website. If you spot an error in this report, please let me know.
A fascinating story, you are the son of a true hero - and this would make a great novel or film script if you're so inclined - I know you have the writing talent for it !
This is a very interesting piece, Don. It's funny how much we skip along in life and miss asking about the big story until we suddenly realize that "big story" was one that we would love to know and cherish. You are fortunate you were able to research so much of your Dad's service and story. Thanks for sharing!