You can be a good CO, and still be a regular guy. You can command respect from your men, and still be one of them.
Crew Training
Train your crew as a team. Keep abreast of their training. It won't be possible for you to follow each man's courses of instruction, but you can keep a close check on his record and progress.
Get to know each man's duties and problems. Know his job, and try to devise ways and means of helping him to perform it more efficiently.
Each crew member naturally feels great pride in the importance of his particular specialty. You can help him to develop his pride to include the manner in which he performs that duty. To do that you must possess and maintain a thorough knowledge of each man's job and the problems he has to deal with in the performance of his duties. —Duties and Responsibilities of the Airplane Commander and Crewmen, 1943
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Earl M. Morrow
I went to school in Hartford, New York, and I graduated in 1939 as the valedictorian. It was a small class; I think there were 19 of us or something like that. I stayed around for a year and took postgraduate course and tried to pick up some of my grades a little bit, and then I went to Iowa State College studying mechanical engineering. I got through the first year there and I started the second year, and that Sunday when Pearl Harbor was hit, I sat there and listened to that on the radio and I made up my mind right there and then that at the end of the semester, I was going home and get in the service.
As soon as the semester was over I got out on the road and hitchhiked from Iowa State and made it in three days to the farm up here in New York. Back then, people would pick you up. [Chuckles] I got home and told my dad what I was going to do, and my dad informed me that I wasn’t going to do that—I was going back to school! He was the director of the Selective Service for Hartford, and he told me he knew the rules and regulations and he informed me that, he would have to sign it, for me to go in the service and he wasn’t going to do it.
‘I’m Not Going Back’
I was 20. Dad was the kind of man that, well, you did what he wanted. Put it that way. But this was the first time that I [went against his wishes] and told him that I wasn’t going back to school. So I went down to Schenectady, and got a job at General Electric as an apprentice machinist, and I enjoyed it. The instructor I had, he picked me and another guy, and we were doing real serious work in the machine shop eventually on the lathe. But the day I turned 21, I went down to the Armory in Albany and I applied for the Aviation Cadet Program, there were thirty-some of us that went in that morning. Six of us out of the thirty-some got in and the rest were rejected. And they told me, ‘Be down to the railroad station ready to depart on Wednesday at 0900’, this was on a Friday. So I went home, and told my family what I had done, and Mother was all upset. I told her, ‘Look, there was one boy in that group who was athletic, played every sport that there was, and they found he had a heart problem and he could drop dead at any minute. I’m one of the few that got through, and I’m healthy, and I’m going!’ And that made her feel better. The next day I got my orders to report to the draft board, and Dad couldn’t do it, so I had to go to Granville to their draft board. So I went over there and I told them what I was doing and I showed them the paperwork, and they didn’t do anything except tell me ‘good luck!’ Wednesday morning came, and Mom and Dad took me down. And one of my little girlfriends went with us. Walked into the station, and a guy in uniform had a pack of manila envelopes and he walked over to me, and he said, ‘You have 30 people you need to get down to Fort Dix in New Jersey.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Why me?’ He said, ‘Because you had ROTC in college.’ Well, I got them there, but I don’t know how. [Chuckles] We had to change trains down in New York City .And we got them down there and delivered the papers. I got all thirty of them there, and delivered the papers to the proper people, and that’s the way I entered the service.
There were delays with the Cadet Aviation program, so they sent us over to Aviation Field on Long Island, and gave us a .45 automatic, showed us how to use it, and put us on guard duty. I had never fooled around with guns—Dad and I had a little rifle I shot once in a while—but they gave us pretty good instruction on the .45, and we’d go out there at night and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, it was so dark out there. And they said, ‘If you hear movement or anything at all that’s not right, you holler ‘HALT’ three times, and then shoot!’ And so I killed a cow one night. [Chuckles] He was just outside the line— I hollered ‘HALT!’ three times, and it didn’t stop! But there were some fellas that actually shot people trying to come over the fence, and what happened was they were tried, found guilty, and fined a dollar and shipped out. I made up my mind early on that I wasn’t going to be shipped out of this Aviation Cadet program. So I was real careful and eventually they shipped us out and sent us down to Nashville, Tennessee, on another train.
‘You Did The Right Thing.’
We’re still in ‘42. And I’m down there and that’s where you get classified whether you go as pilot, bombardier or navigator. And everyone wanted to be a pilot of course, including me, and I made it, and they shipped us out of there to California. And this was a real enjoyable trip, because the train didn’t go straight to California. It would go south, and then it would go north, and then it would go south, and so if the Germans were watching, they wouldn’t know that this was a troop train and they wouldn’t know exactly where it was going. And it took about seven days to get out there, so I got to see a whole lot of the U.S. on that trip. Once we were there, we went through pre-flight school where you took courses in Theory of Flight, Weather, Meteorology, and so on and so forth. Then about January 1st, I guess it would have been in ‘43, I got my first flight. I had never been in an airplane before in my life, and this was a single engine, open cockpit and the instructor was sitting in the front seat, and they showed us how to start it.
The second day after I had been up twice, the instructor told me I would never make it. I asked him why, and he said, ‘You’re afraid of the airplane.’ And I asked him, ‘Well can’t you do something about it?’ He said, ‘With your permission, we’ll make or break you this afternoon.’ I said, ‘Fine, let’s go.’ Man, I’ve never been afraid of an airplane since. We did everything that an airplane can do in that airplane. We rolled, we looped, we dove, we flew straight up and then let it fall back down, and then he went down and actually landed on a big truck going down the highway, just touched the wheels down to the truck long enough and let it sit there a few seconds! And then we found a farmer down there, and he threw a hammer at us and it went over the top of the airplane, so you know how low we flew! And within two days I had soloed on the airplane.
I think I had about six hours total [in the air] when I soloed. And we had class work and we had flights. We did night flying, we did day flying, we did short landing and I learned in a hurry! The first time right after I soloed, I’m out there flying by myself, and here comes a thunderstorm, came right up on me, sitting right there, and I said, ‘What do I do now?’, and I looked around and I spotted another plane with two people. That told me that one of them was an instructor, so I got right on his tail and stayed there and we went into another landing field. And he said, ‘What are you doing following me?’ I said, ‘Look, I just soloed, I didn’t know what to do, I saw two people in the plane, and I figured one was an instructor and I figured he knows what to do, follow him.’ And he said, ‘You did the right thing.’
I got through the primary training and then we went to Chico, California, for basic training, into bigger airplanes, enclosed cockpits now. The instructor sits behind you and you sit up front, a bigger airplane, it’s got more power. It’s a fixed gear though, a P-13 and it’s a real nice airplane. Now I got a little more of formation flying, quite a lot of night flying, and a lot of maneuvering, precision flying, so on and so forth. I got through that. But I couldn’t get through lazy eights the way I should have been doing them.[15] The instructor had
me out there and we were working, and we were just about to do the lazy eight and smoke started pouring up into the cockpit from underneath the plane and he said, ‘Get back to the field!’ So I turned around and we flew back to the field and I had a good landing even with all the smoke, and he said, ‘If you can fly under those conditions you’ve passed.’ From there we went down to Martha, Texas and got into a multi-engine, five or six passenger aircraft with retractable landing gear. And this is where I was really learning to fly now, I had a whole lot more to handle. The day we got down there we had a hail storm and all these planes had fabric wings, which got all torn up. My last day there a new plane came in, it was really nice to fly around in, an airplane you could do things with. this was at the end of June, exactly six months from when I first got in an airplane, and I got my wings and a rating as a 2d Lt. They sent us down to Roswell, New Mexico and had me doing takeoffs and landings and in a B-17; I had never even seen one before in my life! But after two months I was qualified, but instead of sending me overseas, they sent me up to Las Vegas to fly gunners in training, which was a real plush deal. When you come out of the B-17 training, you’re listed as a 1st Pilot. I was a 1st Pilot all the way through, but up there in Las Vegas there would be times I would be sitting in the co-pilot seat. We had a lot of fun up there training gunners—you’d get 10 or 12 guys on Monday morning and they’d never been on the airplane before, so we just flew around and got them used to flying. The next five or six days would be real serious—they would be towing targets behind airplanes, and they had to shoot and hit stuff, and they had cameras so they could tell if and where they were hitting or not. We had a lot of fun—we would go and fly down in the canyon and go into Death Valley and fly below sea level and let them see what the countryside looked like, and so on and so forth. Then all of a sudden they picked five crews to go fly some new B-17s down to Tyndall Field in Florida, so now the only people that I had on the airplane was a co-pilot and a flight engineer. [16]We flew from Las Vegas down somewhere in Virginia or somewhere—I forget where it was—but before we landed there, we really dragged it down below because but my co-pilot’s hometown was nearby, and we flew real low over there. We saw people were running out of their houses and falling on their face, because they were wondering what the heck [the roaring of the multi-engine bomber was!] After we landed, that night we went to see his family and we stayed over there. Then we went over to where he went to school, and one of his teachers saw him and said, ‘I was on the third floor when you went by, and I was looking down on you!’
From there, we went down to Tyndall Field and we trained gunners down there for a while. We couldn’t get Pullman railroad car to get back to Vegas straight away, so I eased up there up to the farm in New York and visited my folks, and then got out to Vegas. From there, I got my overseas orders, and I went to Kansas to get my crew. All the pilots who went there got new crews; it was people coming right out of school who had just gotten their wings. I now had my crew, and I was really happy with them—they all seemed like a really great bunch of guys. There were four officers, myself, the navigator, my co-pilot, and the bombardier and the rest of the crew had a staff sergeant rating, an enlisted man. I got all my enlisted men off to the side on the first day where no one could hear me, and I said, ‘I don’t ever want one of you guys to salute me, unless there’s someone standing over there expecting you to salute me than you do it.’ I never once had a problem with discipline, and I think the guys really appreciated me doing that. When my officers found out about it, they fell right in with it, and we never had an issue.
We started training, hard. We did night flying, long distance flying, we did high altitude and a lot of formation flying. We were practicing dropping bombs, and doing navigating flights, and one night we had something break on the instrument panel, and hydraulic fluid just came flying out into my lap. The boys had an idea, and we took our parachutes and put them up under the pilot and co-pilot seat, where we could reach them easily but they would be safe. But those parachutes got soaked with hydraulic fluid, so we had a situation where we had a very flammable fluid all over the aircraft and I decided we had to get this thing on the ground. Luckily there was an emergency field up there right close by, in one of the middle states, but they didn’t even have a radio there, so we had to call our home base in Louisiana and they had to call on the phone to the emergency landing field. It was just a field with a flare on each end of the ‘runway’. We got the flares spotted and came in really low, and at about fifty feet off the ground a light turned on just below us in a house! So I gave it full power and we went around again; we went over the house again and got it down on the ground. We went to a hotel where we could sleep, and they said they would send parts up to us the next day. There were small crowds gathered the next day because it was a small town, so everyone came out to see us—we showed them through the aircraft, but we covered up the bombsight because that’s was secret, so the boys were telling the people to buy war bonds. That morning a stripped-down B-17 came in, there were no guns on it, and it made three passes over the field in daylight before it finally landed. A major was flying that and he had been in combat, and he came over and said, ‘Who the hell landed this thing in here at night?’ It was probably the best thing that could have happened before we went overseas, because after that the crew had absolutely no concern whether Bill and I could fly that thing or not—they didn’t have to worry about [our abilities], which helped a lot. Shortly after that we got on a boat with all of our equipment and we get in a boat in New York and in a whole fleet of boats go across.
Now that was ’44. It was about two weeks in the boats going across. And the closer we got over there, I began to get a little nervous about what are we getting into over there. Especially when one of the guys mentioned about submarines being in the area. But it was a really nice trip over there, because we were on what used to be a French luxury liner—but they pulled out all the luxury, and put in all the bunks. They kept all the crew, and I’ve never eaten so well in my life--three and four course meals, every meal. It was great. [Chuckles]
‘People Were Shooting At Me’
We got over there and we got in a couple of days of training. The first mission I went out on, I sat in the co-pilot’s seat and I was with a crew that had been out there for quite some time. I saw all these little puffs of black smoke, and I was wondering what it was—I figured it out real quick that people were shooting at me! We sustained some battle damage to the airplane that day but we got back okay. The missions I was on were all over lower Germany, in the 457th Bomb Group, out of the little town of Glatton, close to Peterborough, probably about 40 miles or so north of London.
I had my own airplane, but in 17 missions I flew it three times. The rest of the time they were putting it back together. The boys named it ‘SHAD’; I had gotten married just before, and I had skinnied down to just a shadow of what I was, so it was short for ‘Shadow’. [Chuckles] For my second mission, I had all of my crew, except I had an experienced co-pilot in the right seat. So we had a little battle damage on the plane, but what was bothering the crew was those short runways in England. The bombardier and the navigator had stayed down in front, but that was the only mission they stayed down in front on. We were carrying heavy loads, you know, and I had been told not to let the crew sit in the nose, but to sit in the back. You had to use every inch of the runway. We moved them back after that. We always left one man home, because there was a gun in the radio room that they had taken out, so they figured that the radio man could always get out and get on the gun.
I don’t remember too much about these missions specifically, with the exception of three. Once we were going pretty deep into Germany, and on the way in, we lost the #1 engine and it must have been a fuel pump or something, the way it just quit on us. So we were going in light on the power and feathering it in, because we only had the three remaining engines. We were in a formation of probably about a thousand airplanes and were in a squadron of twelve air
planes, in a group of 36 planes. We had to keep working on staying in the formation—you have to use full power just to stay in it if you’re on the outside, and low power if you’re on the inside.
My co-pilot was going to make this bomb run on this day. We came down in altitude, and just before we dropped our bombs, we got a direct hit on the #3 engine! I went through the feathering procedures. What I mean by that is, you shut the engine down and then set the propeller blade parallel to your flight, so they’re not creating a windmill and drag. I shut everything down, but we started windmilling. So now we had to get out of the formation, because there’s no way we could have stayed in. Luckily we had been able to drop our bombs and get rid of them.
The dome of the #3 engine started to get red hot, then white hot, and the engine started to break apart; pieces of it started flying into the aircraft and coming through the thin skin on the aircraft. So Bill and I decided to put the plane into a dive and then pull up, to try to break the propeller free. We dove twice and we lost a couple thousand feet, and I said, ‘Look Bill, we can’t lose any more altitude, we’re going to just have to leave it as is.’ That engine was still windmilling! So #2 was running and #4 was running, but #1 is feathered and #3 is out. We were now losing altitude all the way and we had to come across occupied Belgium to make it home. The Germans were shooting at us all the way, so we were turning every ten seconds; our fighters stayed up above us and covered us in. We had a spot about a mile and a half wide to come out of Belgium over the English Channel—there was a swamp or something there, and if you came out over the swamp, there were no guns there. My navigator brought me out right over that spot dead center, and we were flying real low now heading for home, but we have got to get over the Cliffs of Dover when we get across the Channel. Now just as we got out over the Channel, we lost the #4 engine! Unbeknownst to anybody, the Germans had flak barges out in the Channel, and they knocked out number four... It feathered; we had one engine running, two feathered, and one windmilling, so we weren’t doing too well. So now we’re over the Channel and we’re throwing everything out to lighten the weight. We threw the guns out. We all had flak suits and we dumped them, and everything we could throw out. And we finally got over the Cliffs of Dover and right in front of us there was a field, and a plane was in front of us! I told the engineer, ‘Throw him a flare!’, and the plane got out of the way. And I got it safely down on the ground, and the guys were getting out of the airplane, kissing the ground, running around and stuff like that. I couldn’t even get the plane off the runway with one engine! By the way, my bombardier had professed to be an atheist but he became a good Christian after that, and he was one until the day he passed away.
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