2nd Lt. Robert E. Femoyer was bleeding out on the floor of his B-17's nose when the crew tried to give him morphine. He waved them off.
Three flak bursts had just torn into the Flying Fortress over Merseburg, Germany, on Nov. 2, 1944. Two of the four engines were damaged and the plane’s navigation instruments were failing.
Shell fragments were lodged in Femoyer’s side and back. He was not able to stand. The bomber had dropped out of formation, alone, roughly 500 miles from England. The pilot needed a course home. If Femoyer took the morphine, he would likely pass out and no one could plot the way back.
For the next two and a half hours, propped up by his crewmates so he could read what was left of his charts, the Huntington, West Virginia, navigator steered the bomber clear of enemy flak on the route home. The B-17 made it back across the English Channel. Femoyer accepted a sedative, was carried into the base hospital at Royal Air Force Rattlesden in Suffolk and died about an hour after landing.
Femoyer, 23 and on his fifth mission, is the only American navigator to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II.
From Huntington to RAF Rattlesden
Femoyer was born Oct. 31, 1921, in Huntington, West Virginia, the older of two children of Edward and Mary Femoyer. He attended St. Joseph's High School, made Eagle Scout and went on to Marshall College for a year before transferring to Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now Virginia Tech, in 1940 to study civil engineering. At both schools he played tennis and earned high marks in class.
Femoyer joined the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps on Nov. 11, 1942, and reported for active duty that February. He wanted to be a pilot. He went through basic at Miami Beach, Florida, then aviation cadet training at the University of Pittsburgh and an Army Air Forces base in Nashville, Tennessee, then pre-flight at Maxwell Field in Alabama. At primary flight school, he washed out.
The Army Air Forces reclassified him as a navigator. He completed gunnery school at Fort Myers, Florida, and the AAF Navigation School at Selman Field in Monroe, Louisiana, earning his second lieutenant's bars in the summer of 1944.
After combat crew training at Lincoln, Nebraska, Femoyer shipped to England that September and joined the 711th Bombardment Squadron, 447th Bombardment Group, at RAF Rattlesden in Suffolk.
The Mission Over Merseburg
The Eighth Air Force put more than 1,100 bombers and nearly 1,000 escort fighters into the air on Nov. 2, 1944, in a mission to hit synthetic oil targets in central Germany. The largest target was the I.G. Farben Leunawerke at Leuna, a sprawling chemical complex outside Merseburg that was the Reich's largest single producer of synthetic fuel. Over half of the planes targeted that specific site.
By late 1944, flak gunners pulled from the defense of Paris had been moved east to thicken the rings of guns around the facility, according to a postwar account by Alan Cook, a 447th Bomb Group veteran.
Femoyer was navigator on a 447th B-17 piloted by 2nd Lt. Jerome Rosenblum. It was his fifth combat mission, just two days after his 23rd birthday.
Three antiaircraft shells hit the Fortress as it neared the target. Femoyer was thrown to the floor of the nose, shell fragments pierced his body in multiple places. The bomber lost altitude and fell out of formation, alone over Germany.
Morphine was offered by his comrades. Femoyer refused it, determined to keep his head clear so he could direct the plane out of danger. Femoyer told the crew to prop him up where he could read his charts and scattered maps. From there, he plotted the course for the next two and a half hours, guiding the B-17 around enemy flak on the route to the English Channel. The bomber took no further damage.
Once over the Channel, Femoyer accepted a sedative. The bomber limped back to Rattlesden "with just enough gasoline to land," Boyd Stutler wrote in West Virginia Review in November 1946.
Rosenblum's plane came to a stop partly blocking the runway. Femoyer was lifted from the aircraft, carried into the base hospital and died there.
Cook called Nov. 2 the 447th's third-worst mission by casualties. A 447th pathfinder B-17 took a direct hit over the target and exploded with the entire crew. Two more group aircraft collided in midair en route to Merseburg. Across the day's operations, the Eighth Air Force lost 40 bombers and 16 fighters.
Femoyer’s Legacy
Femoyer's parents had relocated to Jacksonville, Florida, by the war's end. On May 9, 1945, an Army Air Forces major general presented them with his posthumous Medal of Honor. Femoyer also received the Purple Heart and Air Medal.
His remains were returned from England in 1949 and interred at Greenlawn Cemetery in Jacksonville.
That same year, Virginia Tech opened Femoyer Hall on the Upper Quad in Blacksburg, a brick residence hall built and named for the Class of 1944 alumnus. Over seven decades the building housed cadets, academic offices, the Naval ROTC unit and a tutoring center. With no major renovation and mounting deferred maintenance, the school demolished it in October 2021.
The 711th Bombardment Squadron itself was inactivated after the war and was later reinstated. Today it exists as the 711th Special Operations Squadron, an Air Force Reserve unit that moved from Duke Field to Hurlburt Field, Florida, in 2025 to fly the AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.
The squadron's former operations building at Duke Field is the Femoyer Complex. Femoyer's Medal of Honor and Air Medal were displayed at the east entrance of the base prior to the move.
In 2001, West Virginia designated a stretch of state Route 152 in Huntington, from the Fifth Street crossing with Interstate 64 to the city limits, as Robert Femoyer Boulevard.
Eighty-one years after he bled out on the floor of a B-17 so his crew could make it back across the Channel, Femoyer remains the only American navigator of WWII to receive the Medal of Honor.
