THE THINGS
OUR
FATHERS SAW
Volume II:
The UNTOLD STORIES OF THE
WORLD WAR II GENERATION
FROM HOMETOWN, USA
WAR IN THE AIR:
FROM THE DEPRESSION TO COMBAT
Matthew A. Rozell
Woodchuck Hollow Press
Hartford · New York
Copyright © 2017 by Matthew A. Rozell. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following: Andy Doty in Backwards Into Battle and various short quotations credited to other previously published sources. Please see author notes.
Information at [email protected].
Photographic portrait of Earl M. Morrow used courtesy of Robert H. Miller.
Front Cover: B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 398th Bombardment Group fly a bombing run to Neumunster, Germany, on April 13, 1945. Credit: Public Domain, U.S. Air Force photograph.
Additional photographs and descriptions sourced at Wikimedia Commons within terms of use, unless otherwise noted.
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rozell, Matthew A., 1961-
Title: The things our fathers saw : the untold stories of the World War II generation from hometown, USA- / Matthew A. Rozell.
Description: Hartford, NY : Woodchuck Hollow Press, 2017. | Series: The untold stories of the World War II generation from hometown, USA- | Includes bibliographical references.
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American. | World War, 1939-1945| BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Veterans. | HISTORY / Military / World War II.
ISBN 978-0-9964800-4-8 ebook
www.matthewrozell.com
www.teachinghistorymatters.com
Printed in the United States of America
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW II
WAR IN THE AIR:
FROM THE DEPRESSION TO COMBAT
For the mothers who saw their children off to war,
And for those who keep the memory alive.
Twenty-year old waist gunner Clarence McGuire,
(tallest in back row, center)
and the crew of the ‘Pugnacious Ball’
England, springtime 1944
Dying for freedom isn’t the worst that could happen.
Being forgotten is.
― Susie Stephens-Harvey, reflecting on her brother,
Stephen J. Geist
MIA 9-26-1967
I think we shall never see the likes of it again.
― Andy Doty, B-29 Tail Gunner
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW II
The Storytellers (in order of appearance):
Andy Doty
Dick Varney
Richard Alagna
Ken Carlson
Earl Morrow
Martin Bezon
Seymour Segan
John Swarts
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW II
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction:
Hometown, USA
Twilight
The Ripples
Air Power
Hard Times
‘Ye Shall Hear of Wars’
A Sunday Afternoon
The Tail Gunner
‘Take Care of Yourself’
The Flight Engineer
‘There Are No Heroes’
‘Something Always Goes Wrong’
Flak
‘The Guy Who Will Kill My Son’
‘I Don’t Brood About It’
The Ball Turret Gunner
The Funny Things
‘Malfunction’
The Crew
Westover Field
The Navigator
‘Your First Mission’
Flak
The ‘Nine Old Men’
Meeting the Enemy
The Pilot
‘I’m Not Going Back’
‘You Did The Right Thing.’
‘People Were Shooting At Me’
The Final Mission
Prisoner
Death March
‘He Saluted Me Back’
Coming Home
The Last Close Call
The Extra Gunner
‘Dropped Into An Insane Asylum’
An Aborted Mission
An Old Friend
Guard Duty
Sergeant Grayboy
The Radar Man
‘The Black Cloud Arrived’
‘As Long As I Fly’
‘Who’s Our Navigator?’
‘The Last I Would See of My Mother’
Radar Man
The Buzz Bombs
Dresden
‘I Cried Like A Baby’
Berlin
‘Thanks, Van’
The Russian Lines
‘Crazy Amerikanski’
‘We’re Going To Crash!’
‘We Were All Killed’
Coming Home
‘They’re All Gone’
The Bombardier
‘Controlled Fear’
‘Maximum Effort’
‘Like Ants Scurrying Back and Forth’
‘Missing in Action’
Epilogue
Resurrection
About this Book/
Acknowledgements
NOTES
Twenty-year old waist gunner Clarence McGuire,
(tallest in back row, center)
and the crew of the ‘Pugnacious Ball’
England, springtime 1944
Author’s Note
Twenty-year old Clarence McGuire was always lurking around the periphery of my childhood. My knowledge of my father’s older cousin begins with the memory of a familiar far-off sound. From several blocks away, my brothers and sisters and I could pick out the bass drums punching faintly into the air. Our eyes travelled the length of Main Street, lined with cars parked on either side for as far as we could see. A police officer stood in the intersection, arms folded with little traffic to direct, and turned towards the thickening beat. Kids began scampering for the best car rooftop positions, though our neighborhood gang had the best seats all around. Our family address was 2 Main Street, Hudson Falls, and for one day of the year, we were the kings.
In our small town near the falls, the traffic began thinning out in the morning hours. Our front porch steps were prime real estate for the parade, and my parents’ friends in town would come over with lawn chairs for the best views in the village. The front door of the house led directly from the porch into the foyer and thence the kitchen, where my mother had her crockpot cooking up hours in advance with hotdogs; rolls and condiments and sides were piled high on the table nearby. Our American flag on the white front porch column fluttered softly in anticipation in the late May morning breeze; the maples that lined our street gently sent their seedlings helicoptering to the pavement below.
An all-American Memorial Day morning was underway. Soon enough, a crawling police car with its flashing emergency lights appeared in the distance as the marching band grew louder and the first flags swayed forth in a rhythmic cadence in step with the beat. The firemen in their snappy uniforms with brass buttons and white gloves waved out of their gleaming red trucks, following the rescue squad and their ambulances, the Little League teams, the pickup trucks pulling the flatbed floats, adults flinging penny candy from baskets into the street at the children’s feet. My father’s friends in the fire company and ambulance corps tipped their caps in our direction. The parade climaxed as the grand marshal for the year was chauffeured past, waving to the crowd. We knew he was important, but
had little idea of who he was, from year to year, just an important old man, decked out in his finest, a military style cap peaked on his head.
All this meant that summer was finally here. The holiday known originally as “Decoration Day” originated at the end of the Civil War when a general order was issued designating May 30, 1868, ‘for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.’ When Congress passed a law formally recognizing the last Monday in May as the day of national celebration, we effectively got our three-day weekend and our ‘de facto’ beginning of summer.
As American schoolchildren of the 1970s, we had a vague ‘something is important here’ feeling, but like a snake that slowly winds away and retreats out of sight, that feeling dissipated with the rearguard of flashing police cars, the highway truckers and the ‘stuck behind the damned parade’ summer travelers anxious to get to wherever they were in a hurry to go. The cars lining Main Street started up almost on cue, pulling away from the curbs as our family and friends made their way to the kitchen to gorge on my mother’s picnic fares. But Cousin Clarence never came to our Memorial Day get-togethers. He was dead. I never even knew him; I was born twenty years after the war that killed him began.
*
I don’t quite remember the year that it dawned on me. I forsook the family picnic and folded in with the tail end of the parade after it passed the house, walking a few blocks on slate slab sidewalks to the black wrought iron entrance to Union Cemetery. Here I was notified by a volley of shots that I was too late for the words of wisdom from the town fathers, but that was okay. Amidst the parade flotsam on the side of Main Street, I saw a small American flag lying in the sand. I stopped to pick it up, and continued on further to the smaller cemetery behind Union where I knew a special grave marker was located, the one my father would bring me to on our occasion walks in my boyhood:
SGT. CLARENCE B. McGUIRE
A COURAGEOUS AND GALLANT GUNNER
WHO GAVE ALL FOR GOD AND COUNTRY
JULY 29, 1944
MAY HIS SOUL, AND ALL THE SOULS
OF THE GALLANT MEN WHO DIED, REST IN PEACE
Clarence B. McGuire. Dad remembered Clarence coming to visit and teasing him in a playful manner, when Dad was only in grade school. We had a crew photo of him, which I saw from time to time growing up, and which I rediscovered in cleaning out Dad’s desk after he passed. It was the only photo I had ever seen of Clarence; tall, centered in the rear row, just beaming and smiling. ‘Clarry’ was one of the waist gunners in this B-17 crew; you get the impression that they all got along, that maybe they were pals, teammates, probably friends for life. But somebody—maybe his mother?—anointed this picture with a cross over his head. He didn’t come back, you see. The entire crew in this picture was killed on a bombing mission when the plane exploded on July 29, 1944, somewhere over Germany.
Friends for life. Blown out of the sky, just parts of twisted metal and burning chunks tumbling to the German soil. Even as an adult, the photo always haunted me a bit. All died in an instant, probably only months after this was taken. Flowers scythed down in the springtime of life. All gone.
Or so I thought. I planted the tiny flag at his memorial, and walked away. A seed was also being planted. I would be back.
***
I’ve given a deal of thought on how to approach telling the story of the Air War in Europe in World War II. In my first book, I unfolded the War in the Pacific through the words of the veterans, specifically using the wartime prisoner diary of Joe Minder as a chronological guide. My original goal was to do something similar here, but it was proving more difficult. I had different airplanes my subjects were on, different theatres and Army Air Forces, different times and objectives during the European war. Some readers may be disappointed by a lack of technical detail or a political history, but my focus wound up being drawn onto an entirely different path.
As it turned out, most of the veterans interviewed for this book served in the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force based in England. But rather than serve up to the reader another rehashing of the Mighty Eighth’s story (there are already many detailed books out there—and I’d probably recommend Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air over most of the others), I decided it would be fairer to our storytellers if they could share their own experiences individually. As I wracked my brain for a narrative thread, I walked away and sat down to do some proofing. Then I noticed something. As it turned out, each of the men I was drawn to held a different crew position on the heavy bombers of the B-24 Liberator or the B-17 Flying Fortress. I had a new angle; I went with that.
*
In this and the upcoming books in The Things Our Fathers Saw series, we visit with more of the people who were forged and tempered in the tough times of the Great Depression and went on to ‘do their bit’ when even rougher times came calling. Most hailed from or later settled near or otherwise have a connection to the ‘Hometown USA’ community where I grew up and taught in for over 30 years. (So that readers of all the books in this series can start in any place, the background chapter on the origins of the ‘Hometown USA’ sobriquet from the first book is condensed and re-presented in the introduction).
I don’t know how to explain the feeling of sitting down and going back to re-listen to and edit these conversations, which in many cases took place years ago. As the writer/historian you spend days if not weeks with each individual, researching their stories, getting under their skin. You really have the feeling that you are doing a kind of cosmic CPR, taking their original words and breathing new life in a readable format that places readers at the kitchen table with that person who had something important to say. The reader shares the intimate moments with them as he/she gets absorbed in a real story being told. As an interviewer it happened many times to me directly with our World War II veterans, in living rooms, kitchens and dining rooms all over ‘Hometown USA’, in the classroom, and at reunion ‘hospitality rooms’ and breakfast tables across America. As a history teacher I also turned loose a generation of young people to bond with their grandparents’ generation in the same way. We gave all of our first-person interviews to research institutions so that they might not be lost. The New York State Military Museum was the primary beneficiary, with over a hundred interviews deposited for future generations to learn from. As one of the most active contributors to the program, I also leaned on them for video recordings of some of the interviews I edited for this book. My friends Wayne Clark and Mike Russert, the workhorses of the NYS Veterans Oral History Program, traversed the state for several years gathering these stories under the leadership of Michael Aikey; they know the feeling of bonding with these extraordinary men and women well. In bringing these stories back to life, I hope I did a service to them as well as to the general public.
But memories are short. A World War II memoirist once wrote, ‘Ignorance and Apathy are the greatest dangers to Freedom.’ I agree, but as a lifelong history teacher, I contend that it begins with people simply not being exposed to the history to begin with. For how could one not be drawn into these stories, the human drama, the interaction and the emotion that goes into putting an ideal first? How could you not, after sitting with these men and women, listen to what they have to say about what they have seen, and where they think we are going, as a people, as a nation? I saw this spark kindled time and again in my classroom, when we got to hear from real people who had a front row seat, who acted in the greatest drama in the history of the world.
Perhaps now I ramble. Now it is better to have them tell you themselves, about the world they grew up in, the challenges and obstacles placed on life’s course, and how a generation of Americans not only rose to the challenge, but built the country and the freedoms that we enjoy today. They truly saved the world. Be inspired. Share their stories; give them voice. Lest we forget.
Matthew Rozell
August, 2017
‘General Electric’s For
t Edward plant is the only completely government financed factory in the Glens Falls area. A half of its workers live in Glens Falls. Above, Jean Fitzgerald, Eleanor Penders, Phoebe Francato and Ruth Lopen test synchronized motors for automatic gun turrets on our largest bombers.’ LOOK Magazine, 1944.[1]
Introduction:
Hometown, USA
During the greatest conflict humanity has ever known, a cluster of small towns in upstate New York sent its sons and daughters off to war. In 1945, after six years of savage fighting, the devastation was unprecedented and incalculable. Between sixty and eighty-five million people—the exact figure will never be known—would be dead. Overseas, the victors would be forced to deal with rubble choked cities and tens of millions of people on the move, their every step dogged with desperation, famine and moral confusion. American servicemen, battle hardened but weary, would be forced to deal with the collapse of civilization and brutally confronted with the evidence of industrial scale genocide.
John Norton, American sailor at Hiroshima, after the atomic bombing: We walked around. The people, the civilians, were looking at us wondering what we were going to do to them. And, oh my God, the scars on their faces and burns. Oh God, it was sickening. Women and children—it was just sickening.
World War II would become the gatepost on which the rest of the 20th century would swing.
Just what did our fathers see?
*
In the study of World War II, we are tempted to teach and learn the history as if the way things turned out was somehow preordained, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Americans and their allies were destined to win the war from the outset. As historian (and Pacific Marine veteran) William Manchester noted, because we know how events turned out, we tend to read the history with a sense of inevitability. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is easy to forget that during World War II the United States would be essentially engaging in two full-blown wars at the same time, taxing America’s resources and families to the hilt. The story of World War II has been told many times, but only recently have we allowed those who actually lived it to speak for themselves. The narratives in this book are reflective of many of the places in the United States 75 years ago, but most have never been heard before. Most of them are drawn from those who share a connection to the communities surrounding the ‘Falls’ in the Hudson River, some 200 miles north of where the river joins the sea at New York City. Over a span of six months in 1943 and 1944, LOOK Magazine dispatched a team of photographers to Glens Falls, New York, and its environs for a patriotic six-article series on life in what was then dubbed ‘Hometown, USA’ to a national audience.[2]
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