The interview was recorded in 2003 when he was 82. He served aboard the B-24 Liberator.
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Duties of the Navigator
Navigation is the art of determining geographic positions by means of (a) pilotage, (b) dead reckoning, (c) radio, or (d) celestial navigation, or any combination of these 4 methods. By any one or combination of methods the navigator determines the position of the airplane in relation to the earth.
The navigator's job is to direct your flight from departure to destination and return. He must know the exact position of the airplane at all times.
Pilot and navigator must study flight plan of the route to be flown and select alternate air fields.
Study the weather with the navigator. Know what weather you are likely to encounter. Decide what action is to be taken. Know the weather conditions at the alternate airfields.
Inform your navigator at what airspeed and altitude you wish to fly so that he can prepare his flight plan.
Learn what type of navigation the navigator intends to use: pilotage, dead reckoning, radio, celestial, or a combination of all methods.
Determine check points; plan to make radio fixes.
Work out an effective communication method with your navigator to be used in flight.
Synchronize your watch with your navigator's.
Miscellaneous Duties
The navigator's primary duty is navigating your airplane with a high degree of accuracy. But as a member of the team, he must also have a general knowledge of the entire operation of the airplane.
He must be familiar with emergency procedures, such as the manual operation of landing gear, bomb bay doors, and flaps, and the proper procedures for crash landings, ditching, bailout, etc.
After every flight get together with the navigator and discuss the flight and compare notes. Go over the navigator's log. If there have been serious navigational errors, discuss them with the navigator and determine their cause. If the navigator has been at fault, caution him that it is his job to see that the same mistake does not occur again. If the error has been caused by faulty instruments, see that they are corrected before another navigation mission is attempted. If your flying has contributed to inaccuracy in navigation, try to fly a better course next time. —Duties and Responsibilities of the Airplane Commander and Crewmen, 1943
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Kenneth R. Carlson
I’ll never forget where I was when I heard [about Pearl Harbor]. My father had died in 1939 unexpectedly when I was 18. The only asset that we had was a brownstone home on 73rd Street and Lexington Ave. So I had my mother and grandmother to support and we lived in a 4th floor tenement, a walk-up. It was Sunday and I was in the front room listening to the radio. Being a former athlete, I was listening to the Giants football game and during that game there was an announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Even though I’d had a great education I wasn’t sure where Pearl Harbor was. As a matter of fact I thought it was in the Philippines. So that’s how I found out and that’s where I was. With no television, we had to wait for radio reports and read about it in the newspaper the next day. So it really didn’t make that big an impression on me at that moment; I had no idea of what the magnitude of this bombing was until a day later. I felt this was unbelievable because although I was well educated and was aware of the problems we had been having with Japan over the last few years, I felt that this could not have happened.
I decided to enlist. It took me a couple of days to think it all through and to read and to see newsreels and see what really had happened and the damage that had been done, what was really going on and how it related to the war in Europe. We declared war on Japan and they were negotiating in Washington when the surprise attack took place. Two days later Germany declared war on the United States. That made my decision to go to war. I picked the Air Corps, I guess, because my father had taken me to see Charles Lindbergh take off when I was seven years of age, to fly across the Atlantic. Being Swedish-American like me, he was a hero figure to me. And with my education I understood all about Billy Mitchell and the power of the air force and how it was going to be the future of any war. So in my own mind I decided the best thing I could do was to become a fighter pilot and shoot down the Japanese who had attacked us, so two days later, I enlisted in the Air Corps, [even though I had never flown before].
When I enlisted I was just about to be married; I was 21 when I got married. But the Air Corps did not call me until January, 1943, so it was a little more than a year before I was called to active duty. The reason for that was that they had very limited training facilities. So in January, 1943 I got on a train with orders to report to Nashville, Tennessee, which was a reception and classification center. When I got there they took away my civilian clothes and gave me my uniform, which was two sizes too big. It was a GI uniform because at that time you enlisted as an Army private at $21 per month until you were accepted as an Air Corps cadet. That meant that you had to qualify as a pilot, a navigator, of a bombardier. Though I qualified to be a pilot, based on my gifted mathematical skills they wanted me to be a navigator. I didn’t want to do that because in my own psyche I was set on being a fighter pilot and shooting down Japanese. But they told me I would have to wait six to nine months to get into pilot training, whereas if I accepted navigator training I could go immediately. So I accepted navigation.
I had no feeling for bombers and I had no idea where that was going to take me. They sent me to San Marcos, Texas, which was a navigation school. It had just opened, located between San Antonio and Austin. There I underwent six months of navigation training. In August, 1943, I was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant. From there I was sent to Boise, Idaho where the crew would be assembled; when I got to Boise I found out who my pilot was. He became my best friend and was just an unbelievable pilot. He was a small guy; his parents were from Czechoslovakia and his father was a bartender in Hollywood, California. All he wanted to do was fly, and his instructor was Jimmy Stewart, the actor. He didn’t drink, he didn’t carouse and he was single. I met the rest of our crew and we were sent to a new air base in Mountain Home, Idaho, south of Boise. It had the longest runway in existence and that is where we did our crew training. From Mountain Home we were assigned to Wendover, Utah, a little town one hundred miles west of Salt Lake City at the end of the salt flats right on the Nevada border. We lived off base in this place called the State Line Hotel. On the Nevada side they were drinking, gambling and doing anything they wanted, but on our side, because of the Mormon influence, it was ice cream sodas and going to bed early. This is where we learned to operate as a bomber crew. Wendover later became the secret training base for the crew that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The scary part about training in those days was that so many of us had [been brought up] to do things individually, but were hard-pressed to learn how to work together. We lost a lot of airplanes through poor maintenance, false navigation, and pilot error into the surrounding mountains of Nevada, so we experienced losses right there in training and we understood that not everyone was going to go down because of enemy fire. After we completed that training we were then sent to Harrington, KS, where we would pick up our own airplane and fly it to wherever it was ordered to fly. In Harrington the thing I remember most was sitting in the room while the pilot Joe Roznos signed a piece of paper that said he was responsible for a B-24J, which was a four-engine Liberator bomber. The J signified that it was a later model which had a turret in the front with two machine guns instead of just two flexible machine guns that the navigator shot. He signed a paper for $250,000 worth of government property and that we would return it, and the question was what if we don’t come back? [Chuckles] They said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ When we picked up the plane, said goodbye to our wives or girlfriends (five of us were married and five were single), we were given orders to fly it to West Palm Beach, Florida, to Morrison Field. When we got there our passes were taken away and we were confined to the f
ield, awaiting orders to see where we would be sent. At that time we were all hoping that we would be sent to the South Pacific and that we would be killing Japanese. When we got down the runway and opened our orders, we were sent on a southern route; our final orders indicated that we were to report to the 8th Air Force which was headquartered in England, so we knew then that we were not going to be killing Japs—we were going to be killing Nazis.
The trip over was an unbelievable experience. As navigator I had to plot our southern route which took us into Trinidad, then Brazil, and over to Africa. It took us 45 days because there were weather delays all along the route. This was the first time that I had ever left the U.S., the first time this city kid was about to see the world. The thing I remember most was when we got to Brazil, where we saw three different towns before flying to Africa, was the tremendous poverty, disease, and filth. Young people were walking around naked; they were going to the bathroom in the streets, and diseases such as elephantiasis, which I had never heard of.[10] So that was a big shock. When we left Brazil it was the moment of truth for me as navigator, using celestial navigation.[11] We had no radar or radio or anything like that. We would see if I could navigate our way across the South Atlantic, which was eleven hours, and arrive where we were supposed to. So that memory remains a very dramatic one for me, of being alone in the nose of that plane with my sextant; I felt so alone and so at peace at the same time. The stars were so bright over the South Atlantic Ocean! I had this tremendous worry about knowing where we really were when I looked down at that ocean. So when I would plot these fixes that showed where we were according to the stars, that’s when I found that we were not on the course that was planned. So now the moment of truth was, do I accept that as fact and correct it, or do I pretend that maybe I didn’t shoot the stars correctly and stay on the course? I decided to do what I was taught and that was to correct the course based on the star sightings taken. After doing so, eleven hours and some odd minutes later, on the far horizon there was Africa, and there was Dakar and we were on target! We landed and everybody thought I was just terrific. Five of them thought so because they couldn’t swim and all they could think about was that we were going to run out of gas before we got to Africa!
There again it was the poverty. There were young people who were pimping their sisters, pre-teens almost, to make a living off of those who were passing through there. They were sailors and soldiers, Americans, British, or Dutch. Leaving Dakar, our next stop was Marrakesh which took us over the Sahara Desert and over a mountain range called the Atlas Mountains. We flew through them and into Marrakesh which was in a beautiful area of Morocco. That trip I will never forget either. I plotted the course and, it being daylight, I went to sleep. When I paid more attention to where we were and looked at the maps it seemed to me that we weren’t really where we were supposed to be. This was not looking at the stars—it was looking at the mountains and fixes on the map. So I found that I had made a mistake. Instead of taking the deviation between true north and magnetic north adding it, I had subtracted it, so I was basically twice as far off the course as I should have been! So I didn’t notify anybody else and made a correction and the correction worked, taking us into the mountain pass through the Atlas Mountains and into Morocco. So once again my navigation was working, what I had been taught was working, and I was becoming relatively confident. The last leg was to go from Morocco up over Portugal, the Atlantic and on to Prestwick, Scotland. That was a long flight and gas was a factor. It was uneventful until we got to Prestwick, where there was fog and drizzle and it was difficult to get clearance to land. One plane in front of us ran out of gas and crashed, but we landed okay and that was it.
They took our plane away from us, and that we didn’t expect. Then they put us on a train and sent us to a reassignment center for the 8th Air force in England. So we lost our plane, which we had named ‘Myrtle the Fertile Turtle’.[12] That was our first disappointment. The plane that we thought was going to be ours for our missions was not going to be ours. When we got to the center where crews were assigned to established bomb groups, we waited and finally got our assignment. We were assigned to the 93rd Bomb Group. We were sent to a little town about twenty miles south of Norwich in East Anglia, which is where most of the heavy bombers were stationed. They were all within about a 50-mile radius around Norwich in the northeastern part of England. It was easier for them to form up and go out on a mission together. When we got there we learned two things. First, that our airplane was an old airplane that had survived 25 missions. At this point in the war, late 1943 to early 1944, if you completed 25 missions you were promised that you could go home and become instructors for new cadets who were learning about combat.[13] We did the math at that point and we were losing airplanes at the rate of 5 to 10% every mission. The actual math worked out that most people either got killed, wounded or captured by their eighth mission. So we got this old airplane called the ‘Judith Lynn’ that had no nose turret. It just had the two flexible machine guns, one on either side, that the navigator used, or the bombardier if he wasn’t at the bombsight. But it had been a lucky ship because it had completed 25 missions. So that was our first shock, that we had an old airplane.
We were in the 93rd Bomb Group, which by the way was called ‘Ted’s Traveling Circus’, because it had moved from England to Africa where it had made raids on the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, then back to England, and back to Africa again. This takes me up to what I guess was the moment of truth, which was our first mission.
‘Your First Mission’
Your first mission is one that you never forget because it starts with a wake-up call. People talk about how we got a wake-up call at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11. A real ‘wake-up call’ began in the 8th Air Force with a hand on your shoulder while you were sleeping on a little cot in a cold Quonset hut. A hand shakes you and someone says, ‘You’re going to fly today’ and you have to get up. So it’s 3:30 am and you get up and go to a cold stove and try to find water to shave, because you have to be clean shaven in order for the oxygen mask to fit closely when you are up high in the air. So your wake-up call starts with a soldier waking you up, shaving, going to eat breakfast, and then going to a briefing room. By this time it’s 4:30 to 5:00 am [pauses], and there you are, locked in in a secret way, and the map is in front of you, and uncovered [makes sweeping gesture with hand]. The commanding officer and intelligence officer show you where you are going and what the route is. So now you find out what your first mission is, which in this case was Nuremburg, which was far inside Germany. That was where the war trials were held later, but it was also near an industrial city with factories that made ball bearings. So this was our first mission. You get up, get dressed, and put on your electric flying suit, and heavy clothes after that. The navigators go to a special briefing where they plan their course. Then you go to your airplane. You are in your airplane by 7:00 and you look for the weather. It is normally rain or drizzle, or snowing, as it is never clear in the morning in England. You wait to find out if you are actually going to take off because many times the operation is what they called ‘scrubbed’. If it never takes off it is scrubbed; if it takes off and then the whole mission is called off it is called ‘aborted’. So you are waiting to see if the mission is scrubbed and never takes off. There was nothing worse than having a mission scrubbed and knowing you were going to go back and have to do the same thing the next day. So, we took off. On that first mission [you get a feel for] the power, and it makes you feel terrific. A B-24 starts down the runway and it only gets halfway down the runway when another starts down the runway and then your plane starts down the runway, so at one time there are three B-24s on the runway, one taking off, one halfway, and one starting out. This sense of power that you have, going down that runway with four tons of bombs is quite overwhelming. From there you work your way through the clouds and come up above and there is an airplane up there with a big yellow body on it with zebra stripes. That is the plane you are going to fo
rm on. It doesn’t go with you; it just circles up there until you get into formation and ready to go, and then you are on your way over the Channel. And this sense of power really is overwhelming. You are happy that you made this decision and you see all the hundreds and hundreds of bombers that you have with you. And you have air cover. In those days it lasted for 50—100 miles over the coast and then they run low on gas and have to return to base and then there is no air cover. That is when the German fighters of the Luftwaffe would begin to attack the bomber formations as they came in. Then you begin to see the losses of your power because you look and see planes on either side of you being shot, being on fire, going down. Or you feel that yourself, which we fortunately did not on our first mission; we did not feel any hits directly. But I did see planes going down that were in formation with us. So the mission was long and it was successful. We hit the target, everything worked, we came back, and we landed. It was a very powerful experience.
When you come back however, the letdown is tremendous. There is nothing to look forward to except doing it again, and you don’t really want to do it again. You wanted to do it and you did it and it was terrific, but knowing that you have to do it another 24 times, knowing what you have seen, is not something you look forward to. So in between missions, one of the paradoxes is that you are at death’s door and the next night you are down at a British pub drinking yourself silly because you are not going to have to fly the next day. You are with other fliers, British, free Poles, and you are having a great time. So from that experience you learn that maybe today is the day you are going to live or today is the day you are going to die. Most people drank a lot when they weren’t flying. Alcohol became pretty much a way of life for people in the Air Force who were not on missions. I won’t bore you with other missions, but we were on the first three raids on Berlin. March 6, 1944, was referred to as ‘Bloody Monday’ because we sent 600 airplanes up and 69 did not come back. That was not the worst experience I had because our group was not damaged. A lot of groups were, so we were very fortunate. But on our eighth mission we were sent to Freiburg in southern Germany, near the Swiss border. And it was there, just as we were going over the target…
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