I was looking at the calendar and today is the date incidentally [December 16th], that the Ardennes offensive started, the day when Hitler tried to break through to split the Allies. They were going through the [U.S.] First Army. They did go through pretty well. And we stopped them at Bastogne. Have you ever seen that movie about that? Well, that’s where General McAuliffe was the commander there. The Germans had them pretty well surrounded and beaten. The German commander asked for his surrender. Then General McAuliffe made the very famous remark [laughs]—he says, ‘Nuts,’ the General did, when asked to surrender, that’s all there was to it. That actually happened. And that was of course the time when Patton was racing across France to relieve Bastogne, and he got there. But in the meantime, we’re bombing. We couldn’t get off the ground for about a week when that started because we were socked in with the bad weather, so we couldn’t take off, we couldn’t land. And of course it didn’t bother you once you got in the air because we didn’t have to see the ground to bomb, because we bombed by radar. The cloud cover didn’t matter, but you did have to land. So we couldn’t get off the ground. But when we did, we just bombed everything in sight.
Most of the missions we flew were around 20,000 feet and believe me, in the winter time at that altitude, it’s about minus 70 degrees. That’s cold. But we did have heated suits, heated clothes. And of course under those circumstances we still had our job to do. As an engineer, I had duties at the time. I had to check to make sure the generators were synchronized, I opened the bomb bay doors, and I transferred fuel. All of these things were part of my job. I won’t speak for the other people; they had their own jobs. But that is what I did.
*
‘Something Always Goes Wrong’
Interviewer: Did anything ever go wrong during your job?
Did anything ever go wrong? [Chuckles] Oh, something always goes wrong. Yes, I remember one time when we got ready on the ‘IP’, which is the Initial Point, where we start the bomb run to the target—I forget where the mission was to—well, they loaded the bombs all right. But there's a propeller on the back of it, and when you drop them, the wind screws the propeller off. When that propeller comes off, that bomb is armed; it won’t go off otherwise. But when the group crews load them, they’re supposed to put a safety wire through it, in each thing. Well, somebody on that mission [laughs], they didn’t put the safety wires in. So when I opened the bomb bay doors, the wind hit them and I called the pilot on the intercom and I said, ‘I got news for you, we got 10 thousand pound bombs here that are now armed. The propellers are all off.’ Any piece of flak coming through would hit the nose of them and… [Makes the sound of an explosion] that would be all she wrote, you wouldn’t find anything! It didn’t though. But that’s one time I sweated a little bit, I can tell you. [Chuckles] You couldn’t fix anything. We were on the ‘IP’. You couldn’t take evasive action, you couldn’t do anything and we’re flying right through that flak. But when they dropped the bombs, it was fine.
That was one system that they used—the other system, that’s visual bombing. They had two other systems, they had one where you bomb by radar and the other, I forgot what they called it but they used radio signals [radio navigation]. What they would do was pick a point say in England somewhere, and put a directional beam. And you would fly along this leg [motions with fingers], and this one would maybe be giving you signals like ‘Da-da-dit. Da-da-dit.’ And then this other one over here would be, ‘Dit-da-da. Dit-da-da.’ So as you came closer, they joined all of a sudden and that was your target. You didn’t have to see the ground. As soon as you hit those signals together, you dropped because you were over the target. Does that make any sense to you?
Flak
I learned more about the German anti-aircraft than I did about anything else because that was the only way you could defend yourself against anti-aircraft; oh yes, we picked up holes, sure. Flak holes. And they generally fired in bursts of three. They used their 88s, they called them, and at different levels. The first one would be 18,500 feet, and another one would be at 18,700 and so on; three. They’re like steps. And they would try to bracket you with the target. And each battery they had of anti-aircraft was three guns, usually. But they so had many of those batteries at some of our targets! When they started firing, you would have thought there was a thunderstorm up there, you know what I mean? But I never lost it, I never lost an engine. I did lose the oil out of one when we landed because there was a hole in the oil reservoir, but the pump in it was strong enough so I didn’t lose the engine in the air. No, I made sure the engines were alright before we went up. As I said before, I don’t make that much of that because there’s not many heroes up there. You’re doing your job, that’s all. But for flying personnel, we had the highest rate of causalities than any branch of the service, because there’s no foxholes up there either, no place to hide, but [we were lucky.] Out of our original crew of ten, we only lost two. There was a bomb group that was short a co-pilot and a tail gunner. And we weren’t scheduled to fly that day, so they assigned them to that other aircraft, from the other group. And they got shot down. They didn’t come back.
You didn’t do too much worrying because it’s something that you were trained to do, and you had to do it and you’re busy and taking care of the duties of the job. You didn’t have much time to think about anything else. No, I don’t think we always wondered—of course, it crosses your mind naturally, why wouldn’t it? When you look out the side window and see a plane going down, it isn’t you, but naturally you’re going to wonder about it, you know… But as far as that, that’s all there’s to it. I mean, the way the job was—what in retrospect, what I did like about the air corps was that despite the hazards, if you went over and came back, you did have a place to sleep. You weren’t like an infantryman sleeping in a foxhole! You ate in the mess halls; you did get your hot food. But outside of that, as I said, I don’t think there were many heroes flying up there—I can’t say I worried too much—because what are you going to do? If you don’t like it, are you going to get out and walk? You’re going where the plane goes, that’s all there is to it. And that’s it. But I can’t say I got to take much credit for that. The only thing you can take credit for is being able to function under those conditions. You take 70 degrees below zero and you’ve got murderous work, and if you take your gloves off, it wouldn’t be for two minutes and your hands would be frozen. Outside of that, that’s the part of it.
As the air crew, of course, we couldn’t afford to get sick. But one time I went up in the cold, and I was stone deaf for a week when we returned. You see, you could take a balloon at ground level and it’d be about that big around [puts hands together showing a small width]. And you tie it out there in the plane where you can see it; when you get up to 20,000 feet that balloon is that big [shows with hands a much bigger width]. The air pressure is so much less, but the air pressure inside the balloon stays the same because it can’t escape, and that’s what happens to you when you have a cold. Your ear tube—your Eustachian tubes—you can’t clear them, so you can’t balance the pressure in your outer ear, so what it does is it stretches your ear! That happened to me and you can’t turn back and it’s very painful—you can’t turn back because you can’t abort the mission for that! That happened to me and that’s why I am having difficulty hearing you today, probably. They grounded me for a week until I could hear again, then I sat through missions. And then the stupid commander at that time, when I couldn’t fly missions, they had me out there at nighttime manning machine guns to guard the base! That wasn’t a good thing. In the wintertime in England it is damp and miserable, cold, and they have a longer night. People don’t realize that, but it’s true. But what are you supposed to do? It’s like everything else—you either do your job, or else. Every member of that crew has a job to do, and he has to do it because everyone depends on everybody else.
Did your heated suit ever malfunction?
[Chuckles] There isn’t anything ever made by man
that didn’t malfunction at some time, but not very often. Not very often because you were careful to test them before you went out. If you had any brains, you tested it. And your oxygen, you had to have oxygen. We went on oxygen at 10,000 feet and from 10,000 feet on up, we stayed on oxygen. Otherwise, hypoxia is a horrible thing. If you didn’t have oxygen at 20,000 feet, you’d pass out never knowing it. It’s amazing; you wouldn’t even know it. You’d just go to sleep and that would be it. If anything ever happened to your oxygen supply and you didn’t know it, which could happen. But like anything made by man, it is going to malfunction occasionally. We didn’t have the technology in those days that you have now. Our protection was a skin of a piece of aluminum about that thick and that was it [Holds two fingers together closely]. And those planes were all aluminum, except for the engines, of course. But it didn’t provide much protection. We did have flak suits, flak vests they called them. I always used mine to sit on because that’s where the flak was coming from. [Chuckles] But they were very heavy, very cumbersome. And of course the gloves were heavy too. But, outside of that, there’s not much I can tell you. We flew over and we came back, if you were lucky.
*
Incidentally, sometimes for a mission the only warning you got was when the C.Q. in charge of quarters would come along and shake you about 4:00 in the morning. That’s the way my day started, although we may not take off until 8:00. But we went and got our breakfast. We went to our briefing where they explained where the target was and how we were going to get there. They explained the route they picked out, to eliminate as much flak interference as possible. And they told you all this sort of stuff. If everything worked right, we were back by 1:00 anyway— if you came back.
After the morning briefing, I pre-flighted the plane, checked it out all over. Our crew assembled and we got into the plane and took off, and we went up and circled around until we got all the other elements of that particular group together, so we would fire a color-coded flare and these other planes then would see that and they would come and join us. When we got all assembled and took off over the Channel, then we really started climbing to our altitude. From then on nothing else mattered, because you were busy.
*
We were the lead crew from our seventh mission on. I don’t feel we were doing anything heroic or anything like that. We were doing our job, but the job had risks. Statistics ruled.
There was another mission that I remember when we were establishing a bridgehead across the Rhine.[6] The front was only about a quarter-mile wide. Two hundred and fifty Liberators were sent up for this mission with no bombs, but we had wicker baskets filled with ammunition and supplies and food, and one thing or another. And we flew that mission over the Rhine at about 500 feet in the air, right down in the deck. And they were throwing rocks at us we were so low! [Laughs] And we were the elite crew in that mission. We had everybody and anybody important in the squadron who wanted to go on that mission, all the ‘big wheels’. So we could have a full colonel as a copilot, or something like this, because all the brass wanted to go, you know? We dropped these baskets of supplies in that perimeter, but they were so low half the time the chutes didn’t fully open. They’d hit the ground and they’d start bounding across and we would see people running for dear life every place we could look. I remember that one. We lost 25 planes in that mission because before we could even turn, we were over the German lines. And they were throwing everything at us! Fortunately I was in the lead plane so they’d shoot at us, but it would hit the plane in the back of us, I imagine. I remember I wasn’t too concerned about it at the time. That’s part of history that bridge at Remagen. We did take that bridge—the ground troops did, but I guess we had a hand in it.
*
At the debriefing after the mission, the first thing they did was they gave us about three ounces of Irish whiskey; the beautiful part of that was we had six members of our crew who didn’t drink. I always brought my canteen with me and they took their whiskey and we poured it in my canteen. I shouldn’t tell you that but it’s true. [Chuckles] Incidentally, the bombardier became an Episcopalian minister. His name was Marshall V. Minister, and he became a minister!
They wanted to know everything that we saw in the flight. How heavy the flak was, how many fighters were in the air; anything that had to do with anything, but they were more concerned with the flak than they were about anything else. And well they should have been, because I think we lost more planes to flak than we did with anything because you couldn’t defend against it. But they wanted to know everything about the flight—they had officers’ debriefing in one group, and the enlisted men in the other group. They got every opinion on what happened and that’s what they used to plan the next mission.
Do you recall your feelings when FDR died?
FDR? He was a great president, great president. Now I see they got some jerk who wants to take his picture off the dime and put Ronald Reagan’s on it. Yes, that’s what these [politicians] are trying to pull now. And what they’re doing today is ridiculous and I’m not going to get into that, but anybody that can read ought to know what I am talking about… I get disturbed. I find it hard to watch—why are we doing it [Iraq War, 2003]? How long are we going to be there? Do you see the end of it? I can’t understand it. We’ve seen troubles over there for over 2,000 years, so what makes [the president] think we can change it? You can’t. I don’t know what the answer is; I don’t know when the end of it is going to be, either. I do know there’s going to be a lot more people killed before it ends.
What do you think about Truman’s decision on dropping the bomb on Japan?
Well I don’t think it was necessary at the time because Japan was already beat, and so was Germany. But I never knew of any weapon that was ever made that wasn’t used. It probably did save a few 100,000 American lives because they wouldn't have had to invade the Japanese mainland, which would have been costly—so for that part of it, maybe. But I think that we could have done the same thing with conventional bombs because actually they had no defense against the B-29 anymore. No, I don’t think it was really necessary—but I don’t think anybody ever made any bomb that they didn’t use. When they developed that, there were a lot of worries about it—some scientists were even afraid that it would set the atmosphere on fire, with the hydrogen in the atmosphere and one thing or another. They never knew what it exactly was going to do, but they did it anyway. Now what do we have now? Now it’s proliferated all over the world, and we can’t stop it. Why did Truman use it? I don’t know. Thought he was going to save some people and I guess that’s what he did. We were the only ones that had it. We thought we were, but we had a lot of people in this country that sold us out. They gave it to Russia, some of our own patriots. If there’s a buck in it, they’ll do it. I hope that answers your question.
*
‘The Guy Who Will Kill My Son’
There was a British lieutenant colonel I was talking to in London. That’s the period when they were bombing London with the V-2s. That was the rocket bomb; they went up into the air and came down. [Motions with hand] A big sign on the building fell down. I sit there looking at it and this colonel is looking at it.
‘Boy, they got that one.’ ‘Yes’, I said, ‘it happened nearby the day before, so it was weakened, so it finally fell on a bus.’ He says, ‘Tell me, Yank, what do you think about this anyway, when you’re dropping your bombs?’ I said, ‘I don’t think anything about it. I never see it, it’s impersonal to me.’ But I said, ‘I know that we probably killed a lot of innocent people. Women and children, they didn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘I kind of feel sorry for them.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘My God, they didn’t do anything!’ ‘No, but you want to remember something, out of their bellies will come the guy who will kill my son 20 years from now.’ They had 20 years apart, World War I and World War II, so he had no sympathy for them at all. That’s the way the British felt about it. Of course they took a lot more punishment than we did, rememb
er they got bombing and everything else you can think of. We didn’t get that in this country. This country never had that. And our attitude would change a lot if we ever did, believe me. And it could happen today. With the kind of technology we have today, there’s no place in this world that’s out of range. And we’re not exactly loved in this world and we did that to ourselves. We can’t run the world. I don’t want to tell you my politics, but…
*
I was in Liverpool Street Station in London when they announced that the Germans had surrendered. I was just coming back from a three-day leave. So I got right off the train, turned around and got right back to London and stayed three more days. [Laughs] I knew I was going to catch hell, but I did it. So they took care of me when I got back to the base; they asked me if I had a good time. I said, ‘Yes.’ [Laughs] Every day from then on for two weeks at 4:00 in the morning they had me flying with every pilot there was, up in the plane. They kept me going, I’m telling you. I didn’t say a word. I shouldn’t tell you that, but it’s true. [Laughs]
We loaded our planes up with ground troops, people who didn’t fly, non-flying personnel. Did you know that it took seven people on the ground to keep one man in the air? That was the ratio. So the people who flew were actually 12 or 13 percent of the fighting force. But these people on the ground who serviced our plane, who loaded the bombs, rebuilt the engines, all this sort of thing, they never flew. So after VE Day we loaded as many of them as we could get into the bomb bays as we could, and we flew them at 500 feet in the air up the Rhine Valley so they could see the different places that we had bombed.
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