We were sent to a place called Boca Raton, Drew Field in Florida. It was on the east coast of Florida near Tampa. As a matter of fact, we used to live on the spring training grounds for the Cincinnati Reds. It was on second base that we had our tent pitched.
We flew missions. A bunch of bombardiers came in, a bunch of navigators and a bunch of pilots and they formed crews and that was going to be our crew that we were going to go to combat with.
So, I ended up with Lt. Tuttle as pilot and Lt. Burkes as co-pilot. We had a good crew. Then there is Zielinski and Donovan. We were really like a family and blended together good.
‘Who’s Our Navigator?’
The first [training] mission, we didn’t have a navigator and I looked up on the board and we had a navigational mission that night. We had to take off at midnight. I went back to the pilot and said, ‘Bob, I think we got a navigator’ He said, ‘How come?’ and I said, ‘Because we’re going on a navigation mission’. We went up to the instructor there and said, ‘Who’s our navigator?’ and he said, ‘What crew?’ I said, ‘92’. ‘You don’t have a navigator’, he said. I said, ‘But we’ve got a navigation mission.’ He said, ‘Who’s your bombardier?’ I said, ‘I am’. He said, ‘You’d better know what navigation to learn because you’re the navigator.’ I said, ‘Oh boy.’
So, we had to fly from Tampa over to just below Miami, I’d say 20 miles. You could see it all lit up and then out in the ocean out there 50 miles or so the land disappeared. Then I had to head north in pitch darkness to a point where you turned a little bit north northeast and headed down toward the Alabama area—the swamplands down through there in Florida and then we had to go out into the Gulf of Mexico. From there we turned into our home base.
Where we were stationed, there was St. Petersburg not too far away and they had a long bridge in St. Petersburg. I think it was the Gandy Bridge, and way off in the distance as dawn was breaking, you could see that string of lights. So Tuttle says, ‘Marty, what’s those lights ahead?’ I said, ‘If that’s not Gandy Bridge, we’re lost.’ So we landed right on course and I felt pretty good since it was the first mission, and we did that good on it.
But we had some trouble—it was B-17s that we were flying. We were dropping bombs. No matter what I did, I followed all procedures and did everything we were supposed to do to make the bomb run, but the bombs wouldn’t leave. I think it was about three missions we wasted where we never could get the bombs off.
I remember the co-pilot was getting a little grumpy about it. They were short of instructors and we were one of the few crews that never had an instructor. They take you out of an AT-6 and put you into a B-17, which was quite a difference. They finally gave us this one plane and we went up night bombing. We had to fly to Orlando, Florida and the targets were all around Orlando. My job was to call the station as soon as we reached the area. They taught me how to do that and say, ‘Bezon, ask permission for bomb the target’. You couldn’t go on a target until they gave you permission and told you which one. They would tell you what elevation so you wouldn’t be on the same elevation as some other plane. The planes going around the target would be pretty close to each other at times. There was one time the pilot happened to go down to see if there was a broken wire or something. I didn’t realize that and looked ahead of me a few miles. I saw lights, and when I looked up, I said to myself, ‘Holy Jesus, where the heck am I? What position?’ I see the lights below me and that’s a plane coming. He kept coming head-on and as all pilots know standard operational procedure they follow—that no matter how distant even 10 miles away, you need to make a left diving turn, both of you, so you go away from each other. I’m waiting for him to make the turn and I look and he’s getting a lot closer. I’m looking and thought I can’t make it now, so I grabbed my parachute and put it on, which was foolish because if we were going to hit then we’re not going to have time to parachute. In the meantime, somebody woke up and they did the dive but didn’t flare off to the left. So him and I are still coming right together, and it was close. At the last minute the pilot was underneath us, and he’s probably wondering why he was bumping his head as he stood up. He saw our plane and he revved it right up. I could see that plane. It was closer than that wall [points to wall in room]; we went belly-to-belly. So it shook us up, because in just a matter of another 30 seconds we would have been killed.
I called and called and called and couldn’t get anything. So I called up the pilot and said, ‘I don’t know if they are reaching me and I don’t realize it. The pilot said, ‘I’ll try’. He tried. He couldn’t do it. The co-pilot finally made contact.
In the meantime, I’m over my bombsight and look up see the lights down below, over here or over there. So I knew the plane was twisting around, but you don’t realize it right away because they are not sharp turns.
So we landed and the instructor came out and asked, ‘What’s the trouble?’ and we told him. He said, ‘Get in the jeep. Get another plane. You’re getting back up.’ He said, ‘Don’t land for six hours’.
We flew up with another load and this time the plane worked good. I dropped the bombs quick—twenty of them—twenty runs. So I asked the pilot where we could go to get loaded up for twenty more. Like I said, we were two missions behind already. We landed again and they loaded up quick and I dropped 20, 40 bomb loads that day and from then on, I had no problem.
We graduated from there and we’re ready to go overseas. We went up to Langley Field and they took me off the crew. I didn’t know why but they said, ‘You’d be notified.’ But then I noticed all of my buddies that were bombardiers from several of the crews. So there was about ten of us that knew each other and we were all taken off and the rest of our crews left.
We were taken into a church and they used that for a hall. All of the officers had to be there. They said, ‘You’re here for a four week course in radar and after that, you are going to have two weeks’ furlough. I am going to name all of the names of the guys first who are going to start school and then I’ll name the guys who are going to go on furlough for two weeks first.’ I wasn’t in either group! So after they got through, I walked up to front of the church and asked the sergeant, ‘Sarge, you didn’t read my name’. He said, ‘What is your name?’ So, I told him, ‘Lt. Bezon.’ He said, ‘You’re going overseas right away.’ I was happy as heck. He put me with my buddy ‘Broadway’. He and I went through everything all the way. They told us, ‘They are out on Langley Field waiting for you.’
‘The Last I Would See of My Mother’
So, we left. We didn’t get in the training program there; we got to Langley Field. We were going to fly a brand new B-17 over in a few days. We went out that night and partied up pretty good. We had to take the plane for a thousand-mile hop. They named three places—one west, one down towards the south, the other up here near Burlington, Vermont going right by the town here. So, I asked the pilot if nobody has any choice, I’d like to make one. I said, ‘How about going to Burlington?’ I called up my mother on the phone and told her that I would be flying over Port Henry and we had permission to drop a little bit low. We could get down to ten thousand feet. I said that I would be in a little window in the middle of the plane, the waist, and I‘ll be waving a white flag. I said, ‘I’ll drop something from the airplane with a little white chute on it.’
I made a parachute out of some silk I found there and put a little gift for my mother in there and calculated the wind; I knew how to drop it. We were coming up and we flew across the bridge [over Lake Champlain, connecting New York to Vermont] and made a few circles. We dropped down over the village of Port Henry to about two thousand feet with the B-17—I see my mother! She is shading her eyes, looking up, waving, and I’m waving back. Then I threw the thing out and I saw that she got it. That was the last I would see of my mother for quite a while.
Then we flew around the bridge once more and I tried to get the pilot to go underneath the bridge. He said, ‘Geez Marty, we won’t fit.’ We had seco
nd thoughts and decided we better not, so we went to Burlington. Everything was good; everybody checked his position to make sure that nothing was wrong with it. That was the reason for the test flight [to Burlington].
The next day we took off for Bangor, Maine. We still didn’t have a navigator; I was doing the navigation with my radar set. We got to Bangor, Maine and stayed overnight and loaded up our plane with a bomb bay full of mail for the GIs overseas.
We took off the next day to Labrador—Goose Bay, Labrador. We had a near miss up there. They gave us a navigator; he’d never flown with us before. My orders were not to use the radar and to help the navigator. We started and got up to elevation and all of that and headed down across the ocean, to go across the ocean quite a long time before landfall would be seen. I went up and asked the navigator, ‘What do you want me to help you do here?’ He said, ‘Never mind, you’re a bombardier. I don’t need no help.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be down in the radio room.’ After I got thinking about it, I thought we’d been flying quite a while. We should have seen land. I waited there and then I went back up and said, ‘Are you sure you don’t need help?’ ‘Nope, I don’t need help.’
So, I told the pilot, Bill Tuttle, ‘We should be seeing land somewhere. It seems like we’ve got quite a-ways to go from land yet.’ He said, ‘Lower the radar set.’ I had to get the enlisted men to lower my scope. In the bottom of the ship, the scope hangs way down. Inside of it, it’s a scope enclosed in this cylinder that they lower down. I warmed up my radar set. It takes five minutes for the first switch to go on. You wait five more minutes before you throw the primary in. [Points to documents on his desk]. If you see land, you see all of that light; water, you see all black. When I send the pulse out, if it’s water at 90 degrees, none of that comes back [to me]; that’s always black. Over cities and ground and terrain and all of that a lot of them come back to you. The rest go up. So, you could see well-lit areas. When you hit a city, about 75% or better of them come back at you. So, the city’s much brighter. It’s a great navigation tool. We never got lost.
He said to lower that down. So, they lowered it down. By the time they got it down there about 15 minutes later I got it set it. You have graduations on your picture and you can make these settings10 miles, 50 miles, 100, 150, 200 miles.
I put it on 50 miles each and looked out 200 miles. There was nothing is sight but water. I finally went up to 500—nothing—and then 600. All I see is a boat out there 550 miles away from us. We were over 600 miles away from shore and we’d been flying too long! I went back top to the pilot and said, ‘Something wrong. I can’t get landfall.’ He said, ‘Go up there and I’ll call him on the speaker to let you look at what he’s doing.’
So, I went up. In the meantime, the Air Force got a new type of compass. Flying over here [in the North Country], there is so much ore in these mines up here in the hills that the compass is off fifteen, sixteen degrees. If you don’t realize it, you get lost flying around here. All over the world, there are these little deviations plus or minus. Up here it is high. The new compass that we got had a little furl nut on the side and a little window on the inside of the thing and you could preset the variation. Then you read the true heading.
If you didn’t use that, on your log the first thing is our observed heading. The next column down is deviation and it was subtracted or added on to it. That’s your true heading. If you don’t use that, you could see how far off you’re going.
I looked down and saw that he’s got the fluxgate compass, [an electromagnetic compass]. Good. I said, ‘Let me see your log.’ I looked over there and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘What’s the first column?’ He said, ‘Heading’. I said, ‘What’s the second column?’ He said, ‘My deviation’. I said, ‘What did you put it in the compass for? You’ve got it both places. You’re going off 16 degrees since we left Goose Bay!’
We were way off course. I said, ‘I am going to tell the pilot take it 270, give another heading.’ So, I went up and told the pilot to take it 270 degrees, and to start praying.
We made it. The land came in and we came in right on target. We landed and the engines all conked out after we stopped—we couldn’t even taxi to our revetment. As a matter of fact, we would have all died [if we had not seen land within those few minutes]. They got rid of him pretty quick when we got overseas.
Radar Man
From there we went from Goose Bay to Reykjavik, up in Iceland. We landed there and had something wrong with one of the engines, so we stayed there two or three days. Then we took off and headed down to England and landed there and they took me off the crew again. I was sent to a one month English radar school to learn their type of navigation and everything. I remember when we were first taking radar classes; they told us that if we ever say the word ‘radar’ in town, we would face a court-martial. It was very secretive. You had one classroom where you had to go through a MP. If you want to go from this classroom to the other one, there would be an MP just across the hall. You would have another MP checking you very close. The radar man was known as a ‘Mickey operator’, ‘H2X operator’ or ‘Pathfinder’.
We arrived in England about July of ’44. We were all stationed just outside of Norwich—all of the bases of the 2nd Division. I used to meet my buddy there every time I went into town we went to the same pub. I don’t think I ever got into trouble with anybody. I had an argument with one of the guys in the barracks but we settled it all up. That’s the way we lived.
The Quonset huts were very cold huts, just a little metal inside and outside covering it. It had one stove in the middle. They would give you a quota of just so much coal. You would burn it up in a day or day and a half and then you were going to be cold for a while unless you could find wood, and where were you going to find wood in England? So, you had to kind of conserve it. Toward the evening just before you go to bed, you just had to warm it up a bit. It was cold in the barracks. Somebody came up with the idea of taking the discarded oil from the oil changes on the airplane engines. They had barrels and barrels of it available. It took a certain amount of oil and a certain mixture of high octane gasoline. We stirred it all up and put a can up near the top of the roof and piped it into the stove. Oh, that was good. We rigged one up and we had a red hot stove all day twenty-four hours a day. Somebody put too much octane in one of them and it blew up, then they made us take them down. [Laughs]
*
We were assigned to the 466th Bomb Group, in the 8th Air Force. I went up to headquarters the next day after I got settled down and ask if could get on a plane and start flying my missions as quick as possible. I said that I’m a qualified navigator and qualified bombardier. I’m a qualified air to air gunner and I said that I would sure like to start ‘em up. They said that they can’t do it, that there was ‘too much money spent on you guys’—that there was a lot expense to train one of us. He said, ‘Are you anxious to start your missions’? I said, ‘Yes, I am’. He said, ‘The next group to us—the 467th—has a crew which is waiting for a radar man. Do you want to transfer?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do’.
That was the first time Broadway and I split. I went over to the 467th and got on with [pilot] Bill Chapman and his crew and flew my missions with Chapman. We flew together until our 18th or 19th mission when we got shot down.
What they do is get these planes for radar men, planes that have proved themselves a little superior to the rest of them. They pick them out for lead planes, the first or second planes. They both are equipped identically alike, so if one gets knocked out, the other can take its place. So, they were all lead crews and all lead crews were in the 791st Squadron of the 467th Bomb Group. And that’s how I went into the 467th Bomb Group, as a radar man in a lead plane.
I met the crew and all of that and we started our missions. I was not very happy with the navigation. With radar, you couldn’t really navigate. You would see little spaces sometimes on the map with a small channel to go between two cities. On
the way to a target, you would pass pretty close to the different cities or town. They’ve got flak guns around a lot of them. They know the distance that the flak could reach us at the elevation we’re flying. You can only be so far. If you get closer to them, they are going to reach you. If you head right between those areas, marked with the red, you were okay. There was one [corridor] that was very narrow but [my crew] always liked to go through there because I always hit it dead center.
For our targets, the objectives were in different phases. First of all, it might be oil, and then we would only have oil production facilities as our targets. Next would be industrial and we would bomb only industrial targets. So, I think there were three different phases that we went through. Later on it was some pinpoint bombing, like bombing a bridge going over some waterway. They kept sending squadrons until they finally blew it up.
The Buzz Bombs
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