The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion

by Matthew Rozell

  Before I left Fort Sill I tried to give my overcoat back. I told the quartermaster, or the guy that worked in the quartermaster’s section, that I didn’t need it anymore because I was going to Southern Alabama where it was nice and warm. He made me keep my overcoat. When we got to the field there was nobody who had been designated to start a fire in the furnace in the barracks. They were brand new barracks. So we had to sleep in our clothes the first night. The next morning we woke up they had these big water barrels at the corner of each barrack. There was ice about an inch thick on the water of those barrels. I guess they were supposed to be in case of a fire, to help put a fire out. I learned about the South that it can get just as cold down there as it does up in the north! I was glad I had that coat.

  Eventually, they got us settled down. Some of us were transferred to the campus of the Tuskegee Institute for our ground training, to learn navigation and communications and stuff like that. I didn’t have any trouble because I had had the experience of radio and so forth. Eventually, while we were there, after we passed our tests in ground school they would truck us each day out to Moton Field, the field which I told you is going to be a national [park] monument. We trained in PT-17s which were biplanes built by Stearman Company.[8] It was the thrill of my life!

  PT-17 trainer. ‘Spirit of Tuskegee’. Credit: Rennett Stowe

  When I was going to the ground school, I used to work at Harris Hill during the summer. They used to have the world gliding contests. But I had never been off the ground. My first flight, there was nothing like it. My instructor says to me, ‘You know the way back to the field?’ ‘Oh yes!’ And hotshot me, I pointed and he laughed. He turned the plane up in a vertical and he pointed right over to the home field. I was really embarrassed. [ Laughs] Eventually I went through training and the day came when we taxied out in the middle of the field. He says, ‘Okay, take it around and don’t break up the airplane.’ That was when I soloed. First time in the air by myself and the greatest thrill I ever had! The people who even learn to fly today, the first time you are turned loose, you fly by yourself, and it is a big thrill.

  Then they transferred us to the Army Air Corps field for basic and advanced training. Our basic trainers were BT-13s, Vultee Vibrators as they were called, where we learned instrument flying and night flying. I had a little trouble in my basic training because learning to fly instruments, it’s like learning to walk blindfolded. You had to navigate and control the airplane solely by your instruments. One particular day I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t hold a heading, and I couldn’t hold an altitude. When we came back I had tears in my eyes because I knew that I was washed out. I told the instructor what he could do with his airplane, which wasn’t nice. [Laughs] When you come back with your instructor, you usually have to stand there and you critique your flight. You have to salute him and then go back to the ready room. I didn’t even give him the benefit of that. I just turned on my heel and like I said, I told him what he could do with his airplane! I went back up to the barracks and started packing my clothes because I knew I had washed out. The next day my name was on the board and I went back and had a good day. I went to advanced training in T-6s.[9]

  North American AT-6C-NT Texan trainer, 1943. Credit: USAF, public domain.

  When I first got to advanced training, the instructor I had was a real short guy. He was just a little over five feet six inches. He was demonstrating how safe the airplane was. He rolled it on its back. The T-6s didn’t have an inverted fuel system, so the engine quit. I’m looking strapped in this seat and the ground is coming up. He is gliding this thing upside down. I see the trees coming up! Pretty soon he flips the airplane back over. He restarts the engine and said, ‘See, you had nothing to worry about, because the airplane is safe.’ [Laughs] For about five minutes I was questioning his method of teaching me to fly. He was a good instructor and in fact our training group was the only one to do formation aerobatics, nothing exotic like you see at air shows, but loops and formations.

  I finally graduated from advanced and eventually I got my commission on November 3rd, in 1943. We transitioned into P-40s. That was an experience, because in the military in those days when you transitioned into another airplane, they just showed you to start the engine and gave you some of the air speeds that you should fly at for approach and take off, and away you go, there is no instructor in there with you! Nowadays in the military you have to go to school and simulators. That’s why they require everyone to have a college education in the Air Force today because it is very complicated. There are lots of buttons to push. If you ever get to see the cockpit of those fighters nowadays you just wonder how the guys ever have time to do anything, but just watch all these little screens [laughs], and push all these little buttons and whatnot. Doing the things they have to do is very complicated. My class fell as we graduated. We took our transitioning into this one beat up P-40 that they had there.

  Curtiss P-40Fs near Moore AAF 1943. ‘The lead aircraft in a formation of P-40s is peeling off for an ‘attack’ in a practice flight at the Army Air Forces advanced flying school. Selected aviation cadets were given transition training in these fighter planes before receiving their pilot's wings.’ Credit: USAF, public domain.

  Then we were sent to Selfridge Field outside of Detroit, Michigan for overseas training. From there every day we used to fly up to a field called Oscoda, which is north of Detroit, in the winter time. That was an experience because they didn’t have very good snow removal systems up there. Sometimes coming into land it was really an experience if you weren’t lined up, if you were a little off line, the next thing you know you would be going down the runway ‘round and ‘round like the cars do on the Northway![10] [Laughs] It was fun. But a lot of times we’d fly back in snowstorms, so our instrument training was very valuable to us.

  To North Africa and Italy

  After that we were sent to Patrick Henry and were transferred overseas. We had to the good fortune to be on a luxury liner that had been converted to a troop transport, so we had good meals except that we ran into one big storm and—well, it wasn’t funny, because this one time in the middle of the storm the ship started to roll. Then it got worse and the next thing you know the chairs and tables, they weren’t bolted down, people were sliding from one side [laughs] of the ship to the other; oh what a mess! You could hear the crockery and the plates falling on the floor, breaking! Well, after about a couple hours of that, we got out of the storm into calmer water and after nine days we landed in Oran, Morocco. We were sent to the edge of the desert to train for a while.

  North Africa and the Mediterranean had been cleared by the summer of 1943, although the opening of a second front in Italy had been hotly debated among the Allied high command. Churchill famously characterized Italy as the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, arguing that it was imperative to take down Mussolini and knock Italy out of the war, and also buy time before the massive cross-channel invasion from England. Hitler would be forced to divert troops to Italy from Russia, and the oil refineries of Romania and industrial targets in southern Germany would be more accessible for Allied air power flying out of Italian bases. Others such as the US Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall opposed it as drawing off too many resources for the cross channel invasion. The Italian campaign would rage for over 500 days, with the Allies suffering over 300,000 casualties, slogging it out against the Germans up the ‘bloody boot’; the Germans would lose more than 430,000 killed and wounded.

  The 99th Fighter Squadron, which I was eventually transferred to, had come over earlier. They had fought with the 12th Air Force with the 79th Fighter Group and they had moved to Italy. We got a chance to do some dive bombing and strafing there on the desert and flying under a bridge, which we were told not to do, but we all did it anyhow, just the thrill of it, you know. [Laughs] There was nobody around to tell us really what to do. There were no officials, so to speak, except for the people running the field there, so once we got out of sight, [we had fun].We
used to do the same thing at Tuskegee; we used to buzz the people picking cotton in the fields [chuckles], stuff like that. There were all kinds of complaints, but people just didn’t know how to report us, because if they got a number off the airplane or something, you know, you’d be washed out right away.

  Combat

  The 99th Fighter Squadron got their first taste of combat in North Africa in April 1943. From there, they moved to Sicily to support the invasion of Italy, and then to the mainland to support combat operations there.

  We were put on a C-47 to catch up to the 99th at Capodichino [Field] outside of Naples, Italy on the day before Vesuvius erupted.[11] Just the weight of the ashes out of that volcano destroyed nearly every airplane on the field, broke the wings off, the tails off, it was a mess. So we didn’t have any airplanes to fly and we had to wait, oh, I guess it was over a week, and they flew in replacements for us. Then they moved us to a little town outside of Naples called Cercola, and we were based there for the first few months. That’s where I started my combat career.

  *

  The first time you find people trying to kill you, it puts you in a different phase in your life. You know, when I was a kid, I used read all these romantic stories about ‘G-8 and his Battle Aces’, about air duels in WWI, when the Germans were flying the Fokkers and the Allies were flying Spads, Sopwith Camels and stuff like that. Well, our job [at that time] mainly was to do dive bombing and strafing, so we were never more than two or three thousand feet in the air, and you would have to come down from that anyhow to strafe, except when you were dive bombing.

  I think it was on my fifth mission when we got a call to relieve some GIs who had been pinned down by the Germans. They told us to go give them some help. We had a new flight leader, and he should have known better, because he had been there about a month or two ahead of us. So he put us in trail, like in a gunnery school formation, you know, everybody nose to tail, but with, you know, some space. So we spotted the target—we went around the first time firing at, I think it was, a German machine gun nest; no return fire, so we went around the second time. I said, ‘This isn’t right’, because the in rules of combat, if you make the first pass, and you don’t get any return fire, you just keep going, you come back another day. Well, we went around a third time and the ground opened up—it was like the best Fourth of July sight you’ve ever seen! They threw everything at us, and it wasn’t long before I heard a big ‘bang’ and the cowling on my plane started peeling off, like somebody peeling a banana. Then another ‘bang’ and a hole opened up between my feet and the rudder pedals, and another ‘bang’ behind the cockpit, and the next thing I knew I was counting blades![12] There was a three-bladed prop on the P-40s; they shot out my fuel lines, oil lines, coolant lines, and the engine quit. And since we were strafing, I think I was down under five hundred feet! So I couldn’t jump out, because the kinds of ‘chutes we had in those days, if you weren’t at least two thousand feet, your chances of landing safely weren’t too good, because they were kind of slow opening, they didn’t pop open like the parachutes do today. So I had to find a field to put the thing down—I figured I had picked a good field, I thought it was a good field, from the air it looked like it was kind of smooth, but it turned out it was a plowed field. So I knew I was going to have to belly land this thing. I reached down, pushed this little lever that locked my harness and glided toward the field. One wing dropped; I think it was the right wing that caught the ground, and the airplane cartwheeled—a really rough ride. When it came to a stop, I was sitting there kind of dazed in the cockpit. I saw these guys running over this wall into the field, it turned out they happened to be GIs—but not from the place where we were relieving—this was another group of guys, who said the Germans had moved out of this field about an hour before. I was sitting there just in the cockpit because both wings were broken off, the engine was out of the mount, and the tail was broken off and they got me out of the cockpit! They had a medic with them who fixed up my few scrapes and bangs; well, they got me transportation back to my base. I was on crutches I think for about three days, because I was a little sore, before I was back in the air.

  *

  Nothing else happened until May of 1944 when we had another mission. The Germans had this big railway gun going, I don’t know if you ever heard of it, it’s on display down at, I forget that place in Maryland, just outside of Washington, where they have all these exhibits of WWII.[13] But anyway it’s a big railway gun, and the Germans would hide it at night in this railway tunnel, which was up over the beachhead at Anzio and our job was to try to collapse the tunnel and keep this gun bottled up in there.[14] So we started on our run because this was going to be not a dive, it was going to be to try to skip the bomb into the mouth of the tunnel. Just as we got about half way there I heard a ‘bang’ and I didn’t know what it was, but I found out pretty shortly afterwards, because the next thing I know, I could see flames coming out from under the cowling. Then I said, ‘Uh-oh, I better put this down on the emergency field’, back at beachhead there, on the beach. I could see this big black cloud trailing behind me as I made my turn and the guys were yelling at me to get out, but I couldn’t, it was too low to jump out. So I made one circle and I figured I’d put it down in a bunch of saplings, I thought to cushion my impact, but just as I was approaching, all of a sudden I looked and I saw these 155 ‘Long Toms’ [British artillery] in the midst of the saplings—they were using that as a camouflage spot, and I had to drop my bombs safe, but thankfully I didn’t pull the arming wires—there’s a wire that goes in the little propeller on the end of the bomb that sets up the firing mechanism; when the bomb impacts, its pin pulls and the bomb explodes—well, I dropped them safe, but I think the guys thought that I was going to bomb them [laughs], but the bombs didn’t hit them. I found a little dirt road going east of there. I put this thing down on the road. I thought the fire had died down enough, but as soon as I hit, the fire flared up! Also, I had rolled the canopy back and locked it into a detent—that’s the way you hold the canopy open on a P-40—but the impact, I guess, dislodged the handle. The canopy slammed forward and jammed and I said, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in trouble’. But I managed to get out of my harness, I got my feet under me, and with my back I popped that canopy off the airplane and I was down the road about an eighth of a mile before it blew up. Again I was rescued, so to speak, by some GIs and they came out with a 6x6 truck. They took me to the beachhead where the Americans were using this big granary, which the Italians used to store their crops when they harvested them, but they were keeping their trucks inside. That dog-gone gun came out that night and fired at the ships in the harbor! We were supposed to have destroyed it, I don’t know why the guys didn’t finish the mission but, that gun was firing that night. Every time one of those shells went off, the truck would jump about six feet off the floor because those shells were about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and that’s the kind of shells that that gun was firing. They were firing at the ships that were supporting the beachhead. So the next day, of course, the gun wasn’t firing, because they pull it back into that tunnel.

  The GIs had a beat up P-40 that had landed there before, and they tried to get started, but they couldn’t get it started. So they gave me a ride back to my base about 50 miles down the coast; I got back to base, I wasn’t too banged up this time and I was back flying the next day.

  Anyway, I got back through Rome. Mark Clark had taken Rome, liberated it, and the Germans were on the run.[15] I got back to my base and flew a few more missions. Then in June, they brought over three other squadrons. Meanwhile, Colonel Davis had gone back to the States; he was my commanding officer early, but they [ordered] him back, because there was a lot of criticism about us—of course it was all made up—just like it was before we got trained, when one senator said he had done a study and he found out that black peoples’ cranial cavity was too small to hold the knowledge to fly an airplane![16] But see he didn’t know that black people had been flying ever since every
body else had, because there were two schools in the country, one in Chicago and one in Los Angeles. When they brought the other three squadrons over, we got brand new P-51s like the one in that picture [points to photograph on the table].

  (L-R) Tuskegee Airmen Clarence Dart, Elwood Driver, Hebert Houston, Alva Temple discuss kill of Me109, summer, 1944, Italy. Courtesy Clarence Dart.

  Now this was a P-51 ‘C’ or ‘B’, not the ‘D’s that everybody thinks of [points to photograph again] when they talk about P-51s. These were the Razorbacks. But they were good airplanes. In fact, I liked them better than the newer ‘D’s—to me, they were more maneuverable, it was more like a Spitfire—because the ‘D’s were heavier and they didn’t feel as agile as the ‘C’s were and I felt comfortable, because I thought you weren’t as exposed in these airplanes. In the ‘D’s you had that bubble canopy, you had that 360 degree view but, like I said, it was heavier, and I didn’t like it, but eventually I was given one and told I had to keep it and they gave my airplane to my wingman! But anyway –

  Our time was up for the day. We talked Mr. Dart into coming back again for another session, right before our Christmas holiday break. He was happy to oblige.

  Clarence Dart, Part II