David MacHauer, second from right, and his fellow crew members of the Miss Bea Havin’, a B-17G bomber of the 487th Bomb Group, U.S. 8th Air Force, that was shot down over Belgium on Christmas Eve, 1944. Back row from left: Howard A. Turnquist (pilot), 2nd Lt Thomas C. Chatterton (copilot), Parker (navigator), 2nd Lt Richard E. Ceder (bombardier). Bottom from left: T/Sgt. Warren J. Stanton (flight engineer), S/Sgt. Stanley Kleinman (radio operator), S/Sgt. Neil F. Matz (gunner), Cpl. Robert E. Sellers (gunner), Sgt. David H. MacHauer (ball turret gunner), S/Sgt Jefferson G. Gregory (gunner). (Photo courtesy of Cheryl MacHauer Schexnayder)
Christmas Eve, 1944, behind enemy lines near the Germany-Belgium border at an altitude of about 25,000 feet, 20-year-old Loyola New Orleans law student David MacHauer was manning two machine guns from the belly of a B-17 bomber nicknamed the “Miss Bea Havin.’”
An anxious voice cackled through the intercom: “Company front of 30 to 30 coming in at the tail!” MacHauer rotated his gun turret toward the tail of his airplane and saw a large formation of fighter planes quickly approaching.
For a fleeting second, he thought perhaps they could be friendly aircraft.
At this point in World War II, the B-17 heavy bombers would typically fly in large groups under the protection of smaller, nimbler fighter planes that would escort them from a base in England to their targets in Germany to engage any enemy aircraft that approached. The lumbering B-17s had machine guns mounted on all sides that could, at least in theory, defend against almost any angle of attack from enemy planes. But in practice, they were often at a disadvantage to German fighters that had much greater speed and bigger guns, so the best defense for the American B-17 was to have its own American fighter flying alongside it.
This would have been the case on Dec. 24, 1944. However, a thick layer of fog on the ground in England delayed the U.S. fighter group that was supposed to escort the bombers. For this reason, MacHauer thought the planes he saw in the distance were the tardy escort fighters — until the first flash of their cannons dispelled that hope.
MacHauer trained his gun sight on the enemy planes and fired back until he suddenly “felt a shock,” according to an entry in his war-time diary.
This moment was the culmination of a series of decisions he had made just hours earlier that some would later call “fate” or “luck.” Or, as one newspaper described, a “Series of Fantastic ‘Ifs.’”
MacHauer manned the ball turret gunner position on the aircraft. This position required that he wedge himself into a spherical plexiglass dome that hung from the belly of the aircraft with twin .50-caliber machine guns protruding through the dome. He would enter through a small hatch and sit in the fetal position with hand and foot controls to spin the turret in almost any direction and fire — like a large pan and tilt camera that shot bullets instead of photos.
With a diameter of only 3.5 feet, the ball turret was a very cramped space cut off from the rest of the airplane and crew with no room for a chest-worn parachute, which all the other crew members wore.
The ball turret gunner typically had to leave his parachute in the cabin of the plane and hope his buddies could pull him back into the cabin and help get his chute on if they needed to escape the bomber.
But to bail out with no assistance from someone in the aircraft and assuming the hydraulics still worked, the ball turret gunner would have to spin the turret to position its hatch inside the airplane cabin, open the hatch, disconnect his flight suit heating system and oxygen system, unclip himself from a safety strap, climb inside the plane, retrieve the parachute — hopefully still where he left it — connect it to his flight harness with two fasteners, and then bail out through an exit door.
All this had to take place in an airplane falling to earth, likely on fire.
Three key changes
For about a week prior to the Christmas Eve mission, MacHauer and the U.S. 8th Air Force were grounded, unable to fly due to poor weather. Germany’s Adolf Hitler took advantage of this and launched his last great counteroffensive of the war, the Battle of the Bulge, pushing the Allies back from Germany’s border and trapping an entire division of American paratroopers numbering around 14,000, near Bastogne, Belgium.
One of MacHauer’s crew mates, waist gunner Neil F. Matz, described a feeling of anxiousness among the airmen at that time because they were hearing daily reports of heavy losses among the Allied ground troops and were unable to assist.
Finally, the weather had cleared enough by the morning of Dec. 24 that MacHauer’s unit received orders to bomb an enemy airfield near Frankfurt, Germany. This would be his 17th mission.
Before taking off, he made three changes to his flight gear.
First, he traded in his standard issue chest-worn parachute for a back-pack parachute. He wrote in his diary that he was experimenting just to see if he could squeeze into the ball turret with a parachute on his back. He could.
Second, on all previous missions, he had kept his .45-caliber pistol unloaded with the magazine of bullets tucked away in a pocket because he “felt it was an unwise thing to fly with a loaded gun.” But for this mission, he loaded the pistol.
Third, when a passerby from a separate bomber crew offered his chest holster to whoever wanted it, MacHauer accepted it. He had always carried his pistol in a waist holster, but for this mission, he decided to try out the new holster, which put his loaded pistol directly over his heart.
These pre-flight changes, some more thought-out than others, would work in harmony that day to save MacHauer’s life. Any one of them removed would have made the others meaningless, resulting in certain death.
The sudden shock he felt as the German planes attacked his squadron came from several 20 mm exploding shells that crippled the Miss Bea Havin’, sending a molten fragment through the ball turret, then through MacHauer’s left boot, striking him directly in the chest and delivering what he would later describe as a “terrific blow.”
Not yet dead, he thought he was badly hit and tried to communicate through the intercom, but it was no longer working. He positioned the turret with its guns pointing straight down, opened the hatch and tried calling for help. He could only see one person, the radio operator, who signaled to him with a “hopeless gesture.” In his written accounts, MacHauer never really specified what that gesture was, but signs of doom were everywhere.
The plane was in rapid descent; fire engulfed the entire right side of the aircraft. Later, it would come to light that the co-pilot, Thomas Chatterton of Oregon, was mortally wounded. Knowing he wouldn’t live, Chatterton gripped the flight controls with whatever strength he had left and kept the airplane from spinning wildly, hoping it would give the rest of the crew a chance to bail out, according to a written account from Matz, the waist gunner.
Without assistance to get out of the turret, MacHauer closed the hatch, and repositioned the turret with the hatch facing away from the plane to allow himself to simply fall out into the blue.
But when he tried this, something caught him — the safety strap. He had forgotten to untether himself.
“After enough pushing and pulling” he got it unfastened, but then he faced a new obstacle. The plane was on fire and falling, and flames were blocking his escape.
The ground was coming up quickly. It was either risk the flames or meet certain death.
He pushed himself through the hatch.
MacHauer felt his face burning as he passed through the flames and fell away from the aircraft. He immediately pulled the ripcord on his parachute and watched it blossom.
“I was soon floating comfortably down to earth,” he wrote.
Here is where another chance circumstance came into play. The bombers had faced a pretty strong headwind as they crossed into enemy territory near the border. A tailwind could have nudged MacHauer into German territory, where he would likely be taken prisoner, but that headwind assisted him in floating westward across Allied lines.
He landed in an open field where two American trucks soon pulled up. The soldiers on the ground that day watched the air battle unfold and the bombers get shot down. They saw several parachutes open and sent vehicles to track them down before the Germans could do the same.
They drove MacHauer to a field hospital in Liege, Belgium, to have his injuries treated. When he removed his flight jacket, a piece of metal fell to the floor with a clang.
That’s when he first noticed his .45-caliber pistol, still holstered directly over his heart, had a large indentation in the steel grip where he had earlier inserted that fully loaded magazine of bullets. There was also a large tear in his boot and about a 3-inch hole in his flight jacket.
It soon became clear what had happened. The German 20 mm fragment went through his boot and somehow missed his foot. After tearing through his flight jacket, it struck him flush over the heart where it bounced off the loaded grip of the pistol and then exited through the shoulder of his jacket, leaving a scratch on his left shoulder.
After getting an X-ray and undergoing interrogation, which was a normal process for documenting such events, MacHauer was released that night and taken to another unit on the outskirts of Liege, where he ate a warm meal and went to bed.
The following day was Christmas. He caught a ride on a cargo plane back to England that night.
“What a way to spend Christmas, but we were thankful we were able to spend it at all,” he wrote.
The following day, MacHauer was glad to see a few guys from other downed bombers in his squadron had returned, but it also made him wonder about his own crew mates. Before turning in for the night, he recorded an entry in his diary that he cut short in a manner that so remarkably depicted a quiet consciousness to which he was unwilling to yield his pen.
“I feel like a ghost without my crew. All my friends …”
Word of the incident, which MacHauer called his “close shave,” travelled quickly to war correspondents in Europe, who pushed it through the wires back home. Those early press reports contain a few inaccuracies. The MacHauer surname, being an unusual one, was prone to misspellings.
They also initially reported him as the lone survivor because he was the only one who had returned at that point. But over the next several days, Matz and two others trickled in. The remaining four crew members had either perished or were missing in action.
Although he received a Purple Heart medal, MacHauer had to fly 16 more missions before the Army sent him home to New Orleans in 1945.
As remarkable as the events of that Christmas Eve were for MacHauer, his greatest act of courage was yet to come.
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His most courageous act
Straight news journalists almost never break from the third-person perspective of storytelling, so I ask our readers to allow me this rare exception.
David MacHauer was my grandfather.
He died in 1972 before I was born and while most of his four children were still relatively young. My mom was just a teenager at that time.
My grandfather’s World War II story was part of what compelled me to join the military. It is well known on my mother’s side of the family and was required learning for all of us growing up, though in considerably less detail. The instruction came from my grandmother, Muriel Bonie MacHauer, a former math teacher who turned 100 in August.
She also made sure we knew he became a Louisiana state senator and a city traffic court judge in New Orleans.
My mom and uncles could recount some anecdotes from memory. He was stoic, faithful, assured, and a stern disciplinarian at home and in the courtroom, according to their accounts.
That was about the extent of what I and the other grandchildren knew about him.
I had always assumed my grandfather had shaped the politically conservative views of our family. He was a registered Democrat, but party affiliation back then was not the same as it is today.
When I began reporting for the Illuminator at the Louisiana State Capitol, I would often stop to look at his photo that still hangs in the ground floor hallway of the Senate chamber (near the Hainkel Room). It recently occurred to me how little I knew of his political career, which was during some of our nation’s most tumultuous times.
With this Christmas Eve marking the 80th anniversary of my grandfather’s scrape with death, I set out about a month ago to do some research, mostly through digitized newspaper archives and some diaries and letters my grandmother gave to me a few years ago.
What I discovered was, at least for me, quite shocking.
After finishing law school in 1946 and practicing law for a few years, MacHauer was elected to the Louisiana Senate in 1952. Just two years into his political career, he became embroiled in a political firestorm when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that said racial segregation in public schools was illegal.
In immediate response, the all-white Louisiana Legislature began drafting a law to defy federal authority and engrave racial segregation into the Louisiana Constitution. The many news articles I found on this situation indicate my grandfather was the only senator, and perhaps the only lawmaker, to publicly oppose the legislation on the ground that racial segregation was discriminatory and immoral.
“I can’t vote to sustain a principle that has long been immoral and I now feel is illegal,” he told his colleagues at the time, according to an Associated Press report from July 6, 1954.
Just to be clear, there was one other senator and a handful of House members who voted against the bill, but they did not cite any beliefs in racial equality or acknowledge the immorality of segregation, according to news reports from that time. Rather, they questioned the legality of defying the U.S. Supreme Court or argued that more time should be spent trying to reach a compromise. Some called it a waste of taxpayer money.
“I don’t agree with what the court did, but we won’t get anywhere by defying them,” Sen. Laurance Eustis of New Orleans said, according to the same report.
Some who supported the segregation bill claimed to have no strong feelings about it but said they believed the people of Louisiana should get to decide on the matter.
But my grandfather wasn’t entirely alone in his stance. An Aug. 4, 1954, letter to the Times-Picayune from Prince A. Taylor Jr., who was the editor of a Christian publication, pointed to MacHauer’s statement from the month before and called it “the one bright spot in the action of the state Senate.”
“Despite my grave disappointment, I take hope in the courage and conviction of this one man,” Taylor wrote.
Even after it was clear his vote against the segregation bill would not affect its outcome, MacHauer still didn’t waver on what was an obviously lonely position in the Legislature, according to follow-up reporting in the Times-Picayune on Oct. 29, 1954.
He reiterated his opposition to segregation, saying it is wrong to “relegate people to second-class citizenship.”
If there were any doubt that racism was the driving force behind the bill, one need look no further than the last sentence of the Oct. 29 article, which quotes Sen. Gove Davis Sr. of Olla, who supported segregation and warned his colleagues against mixing races.
“Just look at your Bible if you don’t believe me,” Davis told fellow senators. “Once you intermingle the races, within not too many years, the dark race will be obliterated. The white blood shall predominate.”
The 1954 Louisiana Legislature ultimately passed the segregation proposal, which then received overwhelming approval from Louisiana voters. Despite subsequent federal court rulings, it would be several more years before segregation ended in Louisiana schools.
My grandfather’s position was deeply unpopular at the time. Although lawmakers did not call him out directly by name, which legislative decorum rules would have prohibited, some suggested he was a communist sympathizer. Prominent politicians across the state branded him and other opponents “traitors” to the South and said they were “selling out the white children of Louisiana.”
Some of the more vicious attacks came from Leander Perez, a prominent Democratic Party boss and district judge at that time. Perez was later venerated with a public park, statue, and a major thoroughfare in St. Bernard Parish bearing his name.
My grandfather’s legislative career ended with his first term. In 1956, he went to work as an assistant city attorney for New Orleans until 1960, during which time he made headlines for prosecuting associates of mafia boss Carlos Marcello. He was then elected city traffic court judge, an office he held for 10 years before illness forced him to retire.
A history once lost to time
According to his political track record and statements he made to the press, my grandfather held many views that, even by today’s standards, would be considered liberal or even progressive.
He believed in government transparency, sponsoring legislation that would have allowed grand juries to publicly disclose their findings on corruption investigations into public officials. He supported criminal justice reforms, passing laws that lowered sentencing for nonviolent narcotics violations and eased mandatory penalties for certain drunk driving offenses.
He was a loyal supporter of labor unions and opposed a so-called “Right to Work” bill that corporations and employers used to weaken union membership in Louisiana.
He also supported legislation that would have established citizen ballot measures in Louisiana, allowing citizens to petition for a new law or constitutional amendment.
Later, as a judge, MacHauer lobbied for state financing of political campaigns as a means to reduce corruption and the influence of wealthy special interest groups.
“If the men you send into office are already bought in advance, you’re never going to obtain the upright, progressive, creative legislation you need,” he said, as quoted in an AP report from June 20, 1969.
When I shared these findings last week with my uncle, Vernon MacHauer, he was also surprised. He wasn’t aware of his dad’s stance against segregation in 1954 but said it does fit with some things he remembers growing up.
“He was definitely a man of principle,” Vernon said.
He recounted an incident in which his older brother, who would have been about 8 or 9 at the time, had drawn a Swastika in a notebook, not understanding what it meant. When their father saw it, he “flew into a rage” and took his brother to a separate room for discipline, Vernon said.
The family was constantly turning away lavish gifts that people would try to deliver to their house, and refusing them would often lead to threatening phone calls, Vernon said.
My mom, Cheryl, corroborated this and said her dad’s unwillingness to accept bribes angered a lot of people.
So on the occasion their dad spoke about politics, it was often with aversion for the corruption he saw, Vernon said.
It’s easy to look fondly upon the past as if it were a simpler time vacant of the complicated problems of modernity. It’s also easy to elevate the legacy of a deceased relative. But it’s just as easy to lose an otherwise accurate legacy to time.
I’m sure there were incidents in which my grandfather erred or committed transgressions, and he may have held some opinions that would be considered offensive.
But why or how we overlooked his political record is unclear, and with Christmas Eve approaching and 2024 coming to a close, perhaps we can remember David MacHauer for his unwavering courage in the face of overwhelming adversity both in 1944 and 1954.
Although I’ve had his wartime diaries for years and have read them several times, last week I noticed for the first time a small inscription at the bottom of the page on which he began his entry for Dec. 24, 1944, the day his plane was shot down. The inscription states: “Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”
This story first appeared in the Louisiana Illuminator, a member with the Phoenix in the nonprofit States Newsroom.
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