Mickey Mouse Radar

Written by: Kelly Durham

In November 1943, the US 8^th Air Force sent aloft Pathfinder aircraft equipped with new technology, an air-to-ground radar system to enable bombers to drop their deadly payloads through an overcast.  No longer would cloudy skies over the target area determine whether a mission would be launched.  The new apparatus was designated H2X, but it was code-named “Mickey Mouse.”  Clemson alumnus George Joseph Safy, Class of 1941, would become an expert in navigation utilizing Mickey Mouse.

Safy was a civil engineering major from Kingsport, Tennessee.  He played in the band and was a member of the campus chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers.  Safy left Clemson after his junior year.

By 1944, Safy was a member of the 847^th Bomb Squadron of the 489^th Bomb Group.  The group trained in the United States with B-24 Liberator heavy bombers before deploying overseas in the spring of 1944. Based at Halesworth, Suffolk, just eight miles from the English Channel coast, the group began combat operations on May 30, only a week before the planned D-Day invasion.  The 489^th initially concentrated on transportation targets in France in preparation for the Normandy landings.  Once Allied ground forces were well-established in France, the 8^th Air Force’s heavy bombers resumed their focus on strategic targets such as factories, oil facilities, airfields, and railroad marshalling yards.

Safy was a lead navigator trained in the use of the Mickey Mouse system.  Flying aboard Pathfinder aircraft, Safy would help a command pilot guide an entire formation of several bomb groups, composing a full wing, to its target in Germany.  While less than precise, Mickey Mouse enabled the bombers to strike targets even when cloud cover made it impossible to see them with the naked eye—or the sophisticated Norden bombsight.

On September 9, 1944, two B-24s from the 489^th’s Pathfinders were ordered to lead a wing formation of 265 aircraft to bomb the railroad yards at Mainz, Germany.  Safy was the navigator on a Mickey Mouse equipped B-24 piloted by Captain Thomas Plese.  Also on board was the mission’s command pilot, Major William Blum.

As the formation neared the target at approximately 1055 hours at an altitude of 22,100 feet, the other aircrews kept their eyes on the Pathfinder plane.  When it released its marker flares and bombs, all the other bombers would drop theirs.

Staff Sergeant John Davis, the left waist gunner on Safy’s crew, recalled that “As we came in on the bomb run, the flak started bursting around us, and the plane rocked from the force of the explosions…Suddenly there was an explosion right on us, and our aircraft started down immediately.  It must have been a direct hit.  We were going straight down, because I could see the formation of planes that we had been leading passing overhead and I was on my back.”

The flak had cut  the airplane in two.  Davis and two others from the aft section of the plane bailed out.  Miraculously, Blum, the command pilot, and one other crew member from the front portion of the bomber also managed to escape.  All five were taken prisoner by the Germans.  Safy, Plese and three other crew members were killed when the plane crashed at Bauscheim just east of the Rhine River from Mainz.

First Lieutenant George Joseph Safy was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters, and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his parents and was buried in the Lorraine American Military Cemetery in France.

For more information on George Joseph Safy see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/george-joseph-safy/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/