The Hero Who Peeled Potatoes: How the “Most Hated Man” in the Air Force Saved a Burning B-17 and Shocked the World

ENGLAND, 1943 – The English Channel is a cold, unforgiving expanse of grey water, a graveyard for countless aircraft during the Second World War. On May 1, 1943, it was poised to claim ten more souls.

High above the chop, at 20,000 feet, a B-17 Flying Fortress was dying.

Smoke poured from the fuselage, trailing behind the bomber like a dark shroud. Inside, the world had turned into a hellscape of screaming metal, exploding ammunition, and roaring flames. The radio room was an inferno. The oxygen system was gone. Three crew members had already looked death in the face and chosen to jump into the freezing void below rather than burn alive.

The pilots were trapped in the cockpit, cut off by a wall of fire. The gunners were dead, wounded, or gone.

Standing alone in the center of this chaos was a 5-foot-6, 130-pound man named Maynard “Snuffy” Smith. He was 31 years old, balding, and by all accounts, the most obnoxious man in the 306th Bomb Group. Nobody liked him. Nobody wanted to fly with him. But in the next 90 minutes, this “spoiled brat” from Michigan would perform one of the most gritty, bizarre, and heroic acts in military history—saving a plane that had no business staying in the air.

The Man Nobody Wanted

To understand the miracle of May 1st, you have to understand Maynard Harrison Smith. He was not your typical G.I. Joe. Born in 1911 to a wealthy family in Caro, Michigan, Smith grew up with a silver spoon that he frequently used to stir up trouble. He was entitled, arrogant, and lived off his inheritance after his father, a successful attorney, passed away.

He didn’t join the Army out of patriotism. He joined because a judge gave him a choice: jail for failing to pay child support, or the military. Smith chose the latter.

He arrived in England in 1942 with a chip on his shoulder the size of a B-17. He was older than most of the boys he served with, and he made sure they knew he thought he was better than them. He was insubordinate and lazy. His fellow airmen nicknamed him “Snuffy” after the comic strip character “Snuffy Smith,” a shiftless, unlikable hillbilly.

For six weeks, he sat at the airbase at RAF Thurleigh. Replacement gunners were usually snapped up immediately to fill the empty bunks left by shot-down crews. But Snuffy? Crews would rather fly shorthanded than take him.

Finally, on May 1, 1943, the war forced their hand. A B-17 pilot, First Lieutenant Lewis P. Johnson, needed a ball turret gunner. Snuffy was the only option.

The Mission to Hell

The target was the U-boat pens at Saint-Nazaire, France. The mission itself went smoothly—at first. The bombs were dropped, and the formation turned for home. But war is a game of inches, and a navigational error changed everything.

Thinking they were approaching the safety of the English coast, the formation descended to 2,000 feet. They weren’t over England. They were directly over Brest, a heavily fortified German naval base on the French coast.

The sky erupted.

German anti-aircraft batteries opened up, and Focke-Wulf 190 fighters pounced on the low-flying bombers. Lieutenant Johnson’s plane took the brunt of the assault. Cannon shells ripped through the fuselage, puncturing fuel tanks and igniting a massive fire in the radio compartment. The plane shuddered violently.

Down in the ball turret, the power cut out. Snuffy was trapped in a glass bubble beneath a burning airplane. With adrenaline surging, he hand-cranked the hatch open and scrambled up into the fuselage.

He emerged into a nightmare.

90 Minutes of Madness

The interior of the B-17 was a smoke-filled ruin. Snuffy saw that the waist gunners and radio operator—Sergeants Bean, Foliard, and Bukacek—had bailed out. They would never be seen again, presumed lost at sea.

Up front, the pilots were wrestling with the controls, unaware that their plane was burning from the inside out. In the tail, Sergeant Roy Gibson was bleeding out from severe wounds.

Snuffy Smith was alone.

Most men would have frozen. Many would have jumped. Snuffy Smith went to work.

First, he tended to Gibson. He administered morphine and bandaged the gunner’s wounds, stabilizing him amidst the turbulence. Then, he turned to the fire. It was melting the aluminum skin of the aircraft, threatening to reach the main fuel tanks. If it did, they would vaporize in a pink mist.

Snuffy grabbed a fire extinguisher and attacked the flames. The heat was blistering. The smoke seared his lungs.

Suddenly, the plane lurched—German fighters were lining up for a kill. They saw the smoke; they knew the bomber was a sitting duck.

Snuffy dropped the extinguisher and sprinted to the left waist gun. He unleashed a burst of .50 caliber fire, driving the attacker off. Then he ran to the right waist gun to engage another fighter. Then back to the fire. Then back to Gibson.

It was a macabre dance of survival. For 90 minutes, Snuffy Smith was a one-man army.

“Piss on the Fire”

The situation worsened. The heat in the radio room became so intense that the spare ammunition boxes began to “cook off.” Bullets were exploding in the heat, sending shrapnel pinging around the fuselage like angry hornets.

Snuffy didn’t flinch. He ran into the burning compartment, grabbed the exploding ammo boxes with his bare hands, and hurled them through a hole the fire had burned in the side of the plane.

He threw out everything that wasn’t bolted down to lighten the load. Typewriters, sleeping bags, guns—it all went into the Channel.

Then, the extinguishers ran dry.

The fire was still smoldering, flaring up again. Desperate, Snuffy grabbed a water bottle from a canteen. It hissed into steam. He looked around for anything liquid. There was nothing left.

So, Snuffy Smith did the only thing he could do. He unbuttoned his flight suit and urinated on the flames.

It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t pretty. But it worked. He beat the remaining embers with his hands and clothes until, finally, the smoke began to clear.

The Crash Landing

When the B-17 finally limped over the English coast, it was a wreck. Lieutenant Johnson spotted the airfield at Predannack and brought the bird down.

The landing was rough. As the wheels touched the tarmac, the structural integrity of the fuselage—weakened by the intense heat—finally gave way. The B-17 snapped in half, the tail section breaking away from the rest of the plane.

Miraculously, everyone on board survived.

The ground crews were stunned. The plane had over 3,500 bullet and shrapnel holes. The center section was a charred skeleton. Standing amidst the wreckage, covered in soot, blood, and burns, was the man nobody wanted.

“Snuffy Smith,” Lieutenant Johnson later said, “was solely responsible for the return of the aircraft and the lives of everyone aboard.”

The Kitchen Hero

The Army Air Forces needed heroes. The war was brutal, and morale needed a boost. Snuffy’s story was perfect—the little guy who fought off the Luftwaffe single-handedly.

On July 12, 1943, it was announced that Staff Sergeant Maynard Smith would receive the Medal of Honor. He was the first enlisted airman in history to receive the award.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson flew to England personally to present the medal. The press was there. The cameras were set up. The band was ready to play.

But there was no Snuffy.

Panic set in. Officers ran through the barracks, checking the latrines, the flight line, the local pubs. Where was the guest of honor?

They finally found him.

He was in the mess hall kitchen, wearing a dirty apron, surrounded by a pile of potato peels. He had been assigned “KP duty”—Kitchen Patrol—as punishment for being late to a briefing earlier that week. In true Snuffy fashion, he had either forgotten about the ceremony or simply didn’t care enough to get out of his punishment.

They dragged him out of the kitchen, cleaned him up, and marched him to the parade ground. With potato starch likely still under his fingernails, Secretary Stimson placed the Medal of Honor around his neck.

The Lonely Aftermath

You might think this is where the story ends happily. The “troublemaker” reforms, becomes a model soldier, and lives happily ever after.

But real life isn’t a movie.

The trauma of that day, combined with his already difficult personality, sent Snuffy into a downward spiral. He flew only four more missions before being grounded for “operational exhaustion”—what we now know as severe PTSD.

He didn’t handle the fame well. He became even more arrogant, signing his name with “Medal of Honor” on routine paperwork. In 1944, he was demoted to Private for “poor job performance.” It is a rare and tragic distinction to be a Medal of Honor recipient who is busted down in rank.

He was discharged in 1945 and returned to a civilian life that never quite fit him. He struggled with business failures, legal troubles, and the ghosts of the war. He died in 1984 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

A Complicated Legacy

Maynard “Snuffy” Smith was not a saint. He was flawed, difficult, and by many accounts, not a very nice man. But heroism isn’t about personality. It isn’t about being likable.

Heroism is about what you do when the world is burning down around you.

On that cold May morning in 1943, when the fire was hot and the odds were zero, Snuffy Smith didn’t ask for permission, and he didn’t ask for help. He just did what needed to be done. And sometimes, that’s enough.