B0737M5NDQ

by Matthew Rozell

  We went down across Yugoslavia over the mountains. We came over the top of a mountain and looked down and saw the bluest body of water that you’ve ever seen. You couldn’t see the other side and I remember the co-pilot saying, ‘Marty, what’s that blue water?’ So I told him, ‘If that’s not the Mediterranean Sea, I don’t know what country we’re in.’

  We flew across it and once we got over the Mediterranean, we still couldn’t see land yet. He said, ‘What’s our ETA and course?’ I said, ‘The course looks pretty good but I have been taking a drift of the top of the white caps on the Mediterranean’ and I could see we were drifting a little bit more than we did before. I gave a one degree correction and checked my ETA and gave the time we should be there. We came into Bari right over the runway and our time was off by half a minute. It was a perfect hit.

  We landed and they gave us hell for coming in with that plane. We had no parachute. Nobody had a parachute. They told us to get out of the plane and gave somebody orders to tow that out to the junkyard and junk that plane. Everything was beat up on it but it made it.

  [The war wasn’t over yet.] They took us up to Naples and they deloused us. They put us naked into a shower with a strong stream of water and they deloused all of us—head, ears, everything –any crevasse in the body to make sure. There was a lot of louse; we were loused up from Russia. They gave put some kind of powder[29] on us and put it under our arm pits and stuff like that. Before we went into the shower, we had to take all our clothes off and shoes and stockings and put them in this rubberized bag, and then they sealed it off so no air could come outside of it or anything. Inside of it you could feel a little tube, a hard metal cylinder. They said, ‘Put it on the ground and put your heel on it.’ That was before we went in the shower. We had our shoes on yet and stomped on it. It opens up and puts whatever it is to delouse our clothes. Everything was clean. We then went in the shower and put our clothes back on. It did a good job.

  In Naples they gave us a couple of days there and we went into town—Chappy and I. We got a little bit looped. We were so happy to be back in American hands.

  ‘We Were All Killed’

  [We flew to England and] we went back to the base. It was at supper time. Of course, we weren’t dressed in Class A uniforms. We went up into the hallway and they lined up to go into the mess hall outside and the line goes into the door. You pick up your metal plate. We were walking up and everyone turned around looking at us. They were all young kids, Christ, they looked they must have just gotten out of school or something. I didn’t see any of the old timers. They were all gone. It was about eight weeks that had gone by.

  When we got shot down, word came back that we were all killed. As we turned to go in the mess hall, I could see inside. There was a long table in the front. It had the CO, Colonel Shower and all the brass from the base, all on that long table. They were waited on while the rest of us had to go through the line.

  The minute I walked in, I noticed this Captain Novak looked up. He said something to Colonel Shower and Colonel Shower jumped up and came running over to us. They were notified we were dead. He took us back to the table and we were waited on that night. Captain Novak asked who spoke Polish. I said, ‘I did’. He said he was Polish too. I asked where are our clothes and all our belongings were.

  He said, ‘I think they are up in the post office. I hope they haven’t sent them out yet.’ I got out of there as quick as I could and Chappy said, ‘Where are you going, Marty?’ I said, ‘I am going to see if I can get up to that post office.’ So, I took a bicycle; I don’t know who it belonged to. There used to be a lot of bikes taken but they turn up at the end of the month. They had about three hundred bikes that people would have to claim. I took somebody’s bike and I rode off because the post office was on the outskirts of the base. I knocked on the door. It had a screen wire mesh glass on the front of the door and way in the back I could see one guy working.

  He points to his watch and says no. I kept banging and banging and banging. He finally comes up to the door and says, ‘Sir, we’re closed.’ I said, ‘No, no, I just want to ask you a question. Do you have any boxes of clothes that are going to be shipped out here yet?’ I gave him the names. He said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got ten boxes out there.’ I said, ‘What’s the names on them?’ He went back and said, ‘There’s a Chapman, there’s a Twyford.’ And he named three or four. I said, ‘Geez, don’t ship them. Please don’t ship those clothes out. Ship Van Tress and Fuller. George Fuller and Harold Van Tress. Ship them home but the rest of them, we’re all back on the base.’ He said, ‘I’m glad you came here because in the morning, they were going out.’

  I still have the board where the address was marked ‘Killed in Action’ that they were going mail to my mother. I hadn’t been able to get in contact with her. I did send her some letters from Italy and England. She finally got two of them. The rest of the letters, I gave to the guy that used to audit all of the mail going out. They checked the Polish letters and said that they were alright. So, we mailed them out.

  I went to town that night. I knew my old buddy would still be worrying the hell about me. He was over in the corner of the bar crying his head off…he jumped up [when he saw me] and boy, did he cry! We saw each other, but it was the last time that I saw him. We were supposed to head out. They weren’t going to form any more crews here. The front lines were moving so fast, they did very little bombing after that.

  After the war [in Europe] was over, everybody went celebrating but they restricted us to the base and wouldn’t let us go out. But we all had .45 revolvers and we went around shooting the smoke stacks on the buildings. Then they thought they’d better let us go in to town or we’d kill ourselves.

  *

  Coming Home

  I asked to go back by boat. I flew over, and I’ll never be able cross the ocean on any kind of ship again. I got on this ship, I think it was the USS Frederickson. We did see a whale. I was seasick for about three days. I lay on my cot and never moved. We slept eight above on little cots. I think it was eight above each other—one on top of the other. I was on the very bottom and only had about that much room [makes gesture with hands].

  So I came back and put all of the clothes down in the hold. Somebody, during the trip, took whatever they wanted and that’s how I lost a lot of the stuff.

  I came home and landed in Boston. They had to give us furlough papers to go home for a month. I went home and then back to Langley Field. There was a sergeant interviewing all of us getting information from us. He said, ‘Where do you want to go? You can go be based anyplace you want.’ I said, ‘No, I got a little more [fight] left in me, I would like to go to the South Pacific.’ He said, ‘You don’t have to go down there.’ I said, ‘I want to go down there.’ He said, ‘Wait a minute, you were missing for over six weeks. I said, ‘Yeah. Missing in action. Eight weeks.’ He said, ‘You can’t go. You have to go home for two months—one month at home and one month in the recuperation center. You can go to Long Beach, Atlantic City—of course, there were not casinos there then—or Lake Placid, New York for a week. Do anything you want. Say anything you want. Dress the way you want. You just have to have one month of recuperation. Then you come back and get reassigned.’

  I said, ‘No, skip that. I want to go to the South Pacific.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy!’ So, they assigned me to a group in Boca Raton—B-29s. I was going to be trained there for combat in the South Pacific.

  I was going down, I was a couple of days ahead of schedule, so I stopped in Atlanta, Georgia. The guy that sat next to me in preflight—he was a kid that was killed; Devine, I think his name was. Him and I used to talk many a time lying in the bunks at night. I thought I would find his folks and go over and visit with them and tell them about their son, and maybe I’ll get a supper out of it.

  I bought a quart of whiskey first— $2.49. I put it up in my room and I went downstairs and was going down to have dinner, and thought I would make the phone calls first. I went into the
phone book and I thought that there would be two or three but there were a couple of pages of Devines so I said forget it. My God, there must have been fifty of them.

  I went down to order a steak dinner, and I put the fork in and I noticed going in that there is a package store across the street—a liquor store. I was just ready to cut the steak when Harry Truman came on the air and announced that the war in Japan was officially over. We are now at war with no one.

  So, I didn’t even cut the steak. I went across the road and bought eight more quarts of whiskey and took them up to my room. Ten minutes after it became known—maybe fifteen minutes—liquor went up to $20 per quart. I got them for $2.49!

  I went outside and saw a Marine and said to come on with me. We hugged each other and said that we did it. I said, ‘Listen, this hotel room’s going to be open and I got all the liquor in the world. You come here and take a drink any time you want.’ He took me in the pool room and there were quite a few rows of tables. He said, ‘Third table. Third table up, look on the upper left leg, reach down there, you’ll see a bottle of booze at the leg. You come in here and take a drink any time you want.’

  Then I met some sailors and I took them up. I wasn’t doing that much drinking but they were. The next day, they were really celebrating there. I got tangled up with five other people celebrating and dancing and eating and all of that.

  I was a day late coming down to my base in Boca Raton. The little sergeant says, ‘Sir, you’re a day late. I’ve got to mark you AWOL.’ I said, ‘Oh, Come on. The war’s over. I did my duty.’ I pleaded with him then I made up a story, ‘My car broke down up in Ft. Lauderdale and my wife’s there with two kids and you’re going to give me AWOL.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry sir, that’s what the rules say.’ The master sergeant came walking in. I look across his chest he’s got his name—Polish, a ‘ski’. He said, ‘What’s going on here?’ I said, in Polish, ‘I got drunk as hell and I’m a day late coming down for my arrival. He wants to mark me AWOL.’ He said, ‘Write in here that he came in two days ago.’ He signed me in two days early. I hung around for a while and asked for a discharge and I came home.

  *

  ‘They’re All Gone’

  [Near the end of World War II], I was put in for a captain rating. It had to get approval of headquarters. I don’t know if Doolittle had anything to do with it or not. Then we got shot down and word came back that we were killed. So, they put all that off. When we got back to England, all promotions were frozen. I got like a belated captain rating, which considered that I would have made captain, to appease me a little bit. I never got it. I was a first lieutenant [at the end].

  I came back at the end of ’46 and went back to Republic Steel. In between strikes and all of that, I worked construction here and everything and never drew unemployment. I had 31 years credit with Republic Steel. It wasn’t the actual time I spent on there because our service time was counted as years worked and they called me back during the Korean War. I had to go back again to serve. So, I trained on the B-29s. Then I became an instructor. I became the staff officer of the radar men. I know they grumbled at me but I put them through the paces every week. I said, ‘By God, I want to get home and I know most of you want to get home, too.’

  *

  Van Tress had a son born. He was married for a month. Chapman and I tried to talk him out of it, to wait until the war was over. He married this girl he was wild about. Then he died.

  After we got shot down and then came back to base, there were a couple of guys who came over from some other base and wanted to talk to me about Van. His mother asked them to go see me because Van slept right next to me. I gave them a whole bunch of pictures of Van and his new wife and all of that. So, they took them with them. The last time I talked to Twyford, he said he heard from Mrs. Van Tress. Her son’s wife and his son are coming over. So, he would be her grandchild.

  I could never find the co-pilot, Wallace. He sent me a letter in 1947. He was taking engineering up in college. He let me know that he and his wife Betty are good and he hoped that I go to college too. I wrote him a letter back and then we kind of let time slip by a little bit. I landed in St. Louis once where I last knew he lived one time heading out to Las Vegas. We had about a three hour layover and I called up his home. The people who were living there then never remembered him. My son found around ten Wallaces around the area. I called three but none of them were there. The next night I called three more so I gave it up. I even put an inquiry in American Legion Magazine and the VFW Magazine to see if anybody knew his whereabouts; called the 2nd Air Division Association which I belonged to and they tried to find him and they couldn’t.

  All the rest of the men are gone. Chapman was the last one. I used to call Chapman several times. We talked to each other quite a bit. I know the first time I sent him a Christmas card, he sent one back. He said, ‘Please if you ever come down and see me, don’t ever talk to my wife about what we did in the service.’ [Laughs]. He lived in Troy, Alabama. He became quite wealthy. He had a crew of men out—carpentry work, anything. He worked the whole of Alabama and even part of Florida doing construction or anything he’d want or excavating or whatever. He owned a local Howard Johnson franchise and he owned a big share of the local bank. He had a loan company and a motel. He said, ‘If you ever come down, I don’t want you paying for any meals or rooms. You come here, I’ve got a place and I am looking forward to seeing you.’ We tried a couple of times, but something happened. He wasn’t feeling good or I wasn’t feeling good or something.

  I called him up. Every Christmas Day I’d call him up; after twelve noon, I’d call him up and have a talk. The last one I called just a few years ago; it can’t be over five years ago. His wife answered. Of course, down there they don’t use your first name. They just go by your last name. She said, ‘Who is this?’ I said, ‘That Polish Yankee from upstate New York.’ She said, ‘Oh, Bezon! Just a minute. I’ll see if Bill can get on the phone’. So, I said to myself, ‘Oh, sounds like he is not good.’

  He got on and he said, ‘Martin, you don’t know what this means to me when you call.’ I think it bothered him what happened the time that I was [reprimanded] and got chewed out and I think it might have bothered him quite a bit later in life. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Bill?’ He said, ‘I just had open heart surgery and I’m recuperating.’ And then he had something wrong with his leg. I said, ‘Geez Bill, we’ve got to get together at least once.’ He said, ‘Boy, we’ve got to!’

  I got worried about him. A few days later I called up again. I said, ‘I just want to know how’s Bill doing.’ His wife said, ‘I am sorry to tell you, he died last night.’ So then Twyford died and that was the last of them.

  Anderson was on the police force and died from a heart attack. Yarcusko was out in California laying rugs and he died. So they’re all gone, and I stay here.

  *

  Marty Bezon passed away at the age of 90 in April 2012, only three weeks after this interview took place.

  Seymour ‘Sonny’ Segan, World War II.

  chapter Eleven

  The Bombardier

  I got to know Seymour Segan during a visit to his house in the fall of 2002. A former student worked at the local copy center, and Mr. Segan had brought in some World War II era photographs to be reproduced. ‘He asked me if I’d be interested in talking to you. Even the manner that he asked me was with the right courtesy, you know? Not imposing—he thought it was very important. I think you had an influence on him; he was on the ball.’

  He invited me to his home on a chilly November evening in 2002, about a week before a planned symposium on the air war at my school, which I had invited him to be a part of. We sat down in his living room; his wife Shirley joined us.

  On December 7th, 1941, Mr. Segan was nineteen and leading a troupe of Boy Scouts in New Jersey on a camping trip. A forest ranger told him about the attack, and he decided to enlist. He went into the Air Cadet program. ‘I’ll bet you that three-quarters
of the guys in my crew, if not all, volunteered. Definitely the pilot, the co-pilot, the navigator, and myself. Because you weren’t drafted to get into the aviation cadet program. When I went into the aviation cadet program, you had to have two years of college or an equivalency test to do it. Originally, it was four years of college, in order to become an aviation cadet. Willow Run was knocking out B-24s like crazy, Ford Motor Company. And they needed you fast, so you made it two years of college or an equivalency test, which I was able to pass. I didn’t have any school or college at the time.’

  Segan wound up in the 485th Bombardment Group flying missions on the B-24 Liberator out of southern Italy with the 829th Squadron. He opened up about the trauma of World War II, and the miracles that saved him.

  ‘I ended up in I think 22 or 23 different hospitals. Service related, but mostly for my leg. Post-traumatic war syndrome was the worst. A combination of that with alcoholism; I found AA. That was a deciding factor in my [post-war] recovery.’

  ***

  Duties of the Bombardier

  Accurate and effective bombing is the ultimate purpose of your entire airplane and crew. Every other function is preparatory to hitting and destroying the target.

  That's your bombardier's job. The success or failure of the mission depends upon what he accomplishes in that short interval of the bombing run.

  When the bombardier takes over the airplane for the run on the target, he is in absolute command. He will tell you what he wants done, and until he tells you "Bombs away," his word is law.

  A great deal, therefore, depends on the understanding between bombardier and pilot. You expect your bombardier to know his job when he takes over. He expects you to understand the problems involved in his job, and to give him full cooperation. Teamwork between pilot and bombardier is essential.