Mr. Dart again drove up to our high school from Saratoga Springs, twenty minutes’ drive northward. Some of my senior students had expressed a desire to go to Saratoga themselves and pick him up; others noted that if he could fly a P-40 in a blinding Michigan snowstorm, he could probably make his way back. He did not disappoint, and picked up right where he left off, discussing life on base between the missions in wartime Italy.
Life between Missions
Hygiene was handled by taking the liners out of our helmets [gestures to his head] and getting some stones, and putting the metal helmet on some rocks and start a little fire to warm up the water for our hygiene. During the summer, what we’d do is take jerry cans of water and sit them out in the sun and let the sun heat up the water. Then we had a contraption that we made that was up on two poles with a rope on it and when the water heated up, you put the can [motions upwards, like putting can on the top of the poles] up there and take the rope, and this is all outdoors, and pull it to get a brief shower. Eventually the Corps of Engineers came around and they erected some tents—they used their water wagons and we got a real good shower, they had a way of heating the water—but that only happened once that I can remember. Most of the time we were on our own as far as our hygiene was concerned.
Of course, maybe you have heard your grandfather or somebody that was in service talk about the meals, about K-rations, C-rations, and ‘tropical butter’ and ‘tropical chocolate’, horrible stuff! [Smiles] The butter was just about like axle grease, so it wouldn’t melt. The tropical chocolate, I defy anybody [chuckles] to put one of those bars in your mouth and try to bite of a piece of it; it was hard! I don’t think it even melted in your mouth but you could grind on it for a while until you got the effect of a candy bar. But also we got a chance, oh about every two or three weeks, to travel over to the Mediterranean side and we could go down to the harbor in Naples, and beg ice cream from the sailors. They were very cooperative; sometimes they slipped us a steak or something like that. So it wasn’t too bad, except for the K-rations and the C-rations. I guess now they have what they call the ‘Meals Ready to Eat’ [MREs] for guys that are over in Iraq and Afghanistan, places like that. But I think they are a little better set up than we were.
When the weather started getting kind of rough, in order to keep ourselves warm we made little stoves. We would steal copper tubing [chuckles] from down on the line and [uses hand motions to depict the setup of the stove] coil it up, and hook it up to a can of gasoline. As it came down through the tube we would have a little fire down at the bottom that would heat it up and give us pressure so that would keep the tent warm, until it went out. But it didn’t last too long, so you would try to get in your sack as soon as possible. Also during the summer I remember, of course we had mosquito nettings and stuff like that, but once in a while we would get a visitor, somebody that liked to enjoy our [chuckles] our sacks with us. You know what a gecko is? They used to have a lot of those things over there, and if the nights got kind of cool, when you go to get into bed, you might have a visitor. You get used to things like that.
But the biggest thing that I remember about Italy, outside of combat—did I mention about the kids? I didn’t? Well in the mess times, those kids would come around with little pails that they had made from discarded cans or something like that. [Pauses] Before we put a stop to it, they had been going into these fifty-five gallon drums where all the garbage was thrown, or where we would scrape our mess kits in after dinner. Of course, that was our one big meal during the day; most of the time, we didn’t even get breakfast. But it bothered me and the other guys too, that these kids were diving in to that mess, of you know, coffee grounds, grease, and bread crusts, scavenging in there to get something to eat, and if they got a good piece of meat I guess they would take it home. So the way we finally put a stop to it—and it was against the rules but we didn’t care—after we had our meal, we would go back for seconds and rake our mess kits into to these kids’ little cans. We just couldn’t stand to see them diving into all that mess just to get something to eat—that is how horrible it was for a lot of the people over there. After the war got going good I guess they lost most everything, they couldn’t grow anything. It was just horrible to think what, what war does to people, especially people on the losing end, and they lose practically everything.
*
The missions evolved with the nature of the war as the Allies gained more ground, and the airmen found themselves assigned to escort heavy bombers deep into enemy territory. The pilots were ordered to stay close to the bombers at all costs, and soon earned a reputation for not turning away to chase after enemy ‘kills’, at great peril in many cases to themselves. While the myth that they ‘never lost a bomber to the enemy’ persists (due to sensationalistic wartime journalism and subsequent repetition), the fact is that they lost far fewer than other fighter escort units.[13]
‘You’ll go with the bombers’
But that was when we were based at Cercola a few miles away from Naples. That was when I was in the 12th Air Force and we were flying dive bombing and strafing missions and until the middle of I think June of 1944, and then they transferred the group over to the other side, the Adriatic side where our field was at Ramitelli. This was when we started flying long range escort for the bombers, which was a whole new aspect of the war for us, because we hadn’t been trained or told about how to escort bombers. But we soon figured it out, because a lot of things we had to learn on our own, just like I told you about dive bombing and strafing before.
The reason why we got our reputation was when we first got over there [to Italy], we used to take the bombers to the ‘IP’, which is the Initial Point, where they start the bomb run to the target, and them pick them up when they came off the target. We wouldn’t go all the way to the target, but then Colonel Davis said, ‘From now on, you’ll go with the bombers through the whole mission’, because the Germans were sending their fighters up into their own flak—they were getting desperate. Our mission was to keep the fighters off the bombers, and not to disrupt the formation, because when the bombardier took over the airplane at the Initial Point, he flew the bomber through the Norden bombsight. Once he started on a target, he couldn’t deviate because he’s figuring out the wind drift and everything, so the bombs will hit where they’re supposed to; that Norden bombsight was flying the airplane. They couldn’t deviate from the course because once they were on the line to the target, they were compensating for wind drift, all that kind of stuff so that when they dropped the bombs, and they would be as close to the target as possible. Large targets, like railroad yards and stuff like that, the accuracy wasn’t as important, but sometimes if they were trying to hit a specific target, like a building, that the intelligence had pointed out was a prime target, they tried to be as close and accurate as possible. There were a lot of stories about that Norden bombsight, where they can drop a bomb from so many thousand feet into a pickle barrel. Well that didn’t happen, they missed a lot of times.[17]
The flak around like the oil fields and the factories was very intense. After the first mission Colonel Davis told us, ‘From now on you are going to go with the bombers all the way through the mission.’ [Long pause] It didn’t always work, but that was our mission—we kept the Germans off the bombers. At first they didn’t want us, but toward the end, they started asking for us as an escort, because we protected them to and from the missions. Of course, we couldn’t do anything about the flak, though. In fact, we lost some of our own guys getting hit by flak.
I’m trying to think how I can describe escorting bombers through the flak. It made for a very intense, intense situation. Of course we were always maybe two or three thousand feet, well maybe not quite that high, above the bombers. But you could hear the bursts of the flak [pause] and you could see the bursts, and you were just wondering when you were going to get hit. You could see some of the bombers when they got hit, especially before they drop their bombs [pause]—it was a horrible sight. Wel
l, you didn’t see anything except a big bright flash, then you looked again, but there is nothing there. Sometimes if the bomber didn’t blow up you would see guys jumping out or sometimes when you did get a good look at some of the bombers, all you would see is just, like—streamers, you know, when you go to Fourth of July and you know you see these things blow up in the air. That’s just what you’d see from the bombers, you know; ten or twelve guys are gone.
Our main mission was to keep the German fighters off the bombers because early on, the Germans were taking a big toll because they had a very good air force. They had the experienced fliers, ones who had fought through the Spanish revolution and their attacks on troops in Russia and Poland.[18] But after our bombers started blowing up their oilfields and whatnot, they were getting short on supplies. But we never did blow up all the manufacturing facilities because the Germans were smart enough to move them into the mountains and places where the bombers couldn’t reach them.
*
Our missions started getting longer—we started flying into Poland and Romania. Well, Ploesti was in Romania, and that was one of the worst missions I have ever flown. That was a long mission, a little over six hours. [Pause]
Have you ever seen a cockpit of an airplane? Do you know how much room is in there? Not a lot. I had to explain to some little kids one time that you can’t get up and walk around like a commercial airline or something. It was very confining; you had a lot of stuff on, especially in the winter time. There was hardly any room to move your arm sometimes. The parachute packer, he put that cylinder for the dinghy packs in the middle, but just squirming around in the cockpit trying to get comfortable, that thing would wind up in one corner [chuckles] and when you got back from a mission, you were pretty sore because it always seemed to come up at an angle at you; it seemed like you were always sitting on the rim of it!
I remember one time a kid asked how we went to the bathroom. Well, we had what is called a ‘relief tube’. In the summer time you could access the darn thing but in the winter time, when you had all the stuff on, you couldn’t access it. So you tried not to have too many liquids in your system when you went off on a mission because you couldn’t reach the relief tube. It was uncomfortable, and if you couldn’t make it you had to suffer the consequences [chuckles]; you didn’t smell too good when you got back to base.
It was very cold when you got up to around 25,000 feet, you know, the higher you go, the temperature would drop. We had some heat; we had switched over from P-40s to ‘51s when we went in the 15th Air Force—there was some heat in the airplane from just one side, I think it was from the left side. That foot would be warm, but after about a half hour or so your right foot would have no feeling in it! So you would just cross it over to [laughs] and change until you got your right foot thawed out. Also there was another thing, the parachute packer would pack the dinghy, there was a, we called it a dinghy, but it was an inflatable boat and in a pack under the parachute. It was blown up by a CO2 cylinder. If you had to ditch in the water, and you survived the impact, you would grab this little lanyard and pull it and that would allow this, CO2 cylinder to blow up the dinghy. You would crawl in that until somebody came to rescue you. But in the ’51, not too many survived the impact because the airplane was just like a submarine, once it hit, it would just go right under. [Chuckles] I came very close. That is why I believed somebody was watching over me; I’m trying to make this as cohesive as possible. [Pause]
Flying up there, especially in winter time, going up over the Alps, sometimes we would have to break up the bomber formations and have them circle and take the bombers through the pass sometimes, just to get them to the other side of the Alps, because we would get into what they call ‘ice fog’. You couldn’t see anything and if you couldn’t fly instruments you didn’t know up or down. A couple of times I saw contrails that were going straight down [makes a downward hand motion], and you begin to wonder, ‘Was that guy going straight down or the way you should be going?’ But I was pretty good, after my experiences in training I got to be a pretty good instrument pilot. So I never had to succumb to vertigo. Some people would, you know, just lose their sense; if they didn’t know how to fly instruments they would lose their sense of whether they were up or down or making a turn, and we lost some people that way. They lost their sense of direction and the airplane would stall out on them or something and you would see this contrail going straight down and in the Alps, you know, it didn’t take long before you hit something. But once we got on the other side of the Alps we would finish the mission.
*
Ploesti’s oil refineries were a major source of the lifeblood of the Reich. In 1943, low level Allied raids from North Africa ended in disaster for B-24 bombers and their crews. Allied planners realized there would be no quick knockout blow; rather a ‘rinse and repeat’ approach had to be cultivated. As the Allies advanced towards more accessible airfields in eastern Italy the distance lessened, but the risk did not.
We were talking about Ploesti a few minutes ago. That was one of the worst missions I have ever been on. The Germans had about two rings of anti-aircraft guns around the oil fields there at Ploesti, and when the smoke from the flak blew together there was just one big black cloud in the sky. You could see the bomber formations going in one side and then there would be big holes in the formation as they came out the other side and you knew that a lot of them got hit. After they got off the target, we would have to go around and round up the bombers that had straggled away from the formations, and take the long trip back home. Like I said, those missions were at least six hours.
Then we had a strafing mission in Athens, Greece—that was a long mission; we lost a couple guys on that mission. Intelligence would tell us where the headquarters of the German group was, and that was our job to strafe those places. I did not like strafing missions too much. I remember we had one mission around the shores of Lake Balaton.[19] The Germans were retreating, and what they would do was have civilians in the long line of guns and whatever they were moving, as they were trying to get back to Germany. Of course, our orders were to hit anything moving, and we would go down there and make a pass and they would have horses pulling some of their artillery pieces, and you would see the horses laying on the ground and kicking and whatnot. You can imagine what kind of sound that was. I think we must have hit some of the civilians too, but it was our job to do it, and I had to be sort of counseled; because I didn’t think that if they had civilians in those convoys that we should be strafing them. But they tell you this is war. I can remember one time, before I became a flight leader, I was flying wing with a guy who was a flight leader and we hit a motorcycle, one of those side-car motorcycles. I can remember that thing looked like somebody just took it and tossed it up into the air [makes upward hand motion]. We got to see the results of that, we got a jeep and went back up the road. This was when we were flying P-40s. But I just think about how horrible war is, and what you are forced to do against your own will to accomplish a mission.
You just have to adopt a fatalistic view about what you have to do and what is going to happen to you, like I told you last week about my two crashes and getting shot down twice. I remember one time coming back after we had been on a mission to Vienna—and this time it was just a milk run because although we had flak, we didn’t run into any enemy fighters or anything.[20] So we were coming back, we go to the edge of the Adriatic on the Yugoslavia side and we were just getting ready to tell the bombers that we were going to leave them. We were on the left side of the bombers, so I dropped down and slid under the belly of the lead bomber—to come up beside the pilot side, because we couldn’t raise them on the radio—to tell them we were leaving, and that they were safe to go back to their base. I felt a shudder and I told my wingman, I said, ‘Cut the playing around out!’—because just for stress relief sometimes, we tapped wingtips or something like that, which is against the rules! [Chuckles]
But my wingman said, ‘I wasn’t doing anything, I am
back where I am supposed to be!’
So when we got back to the field, my crew chief said, ‘Oh my goodness, you guys were in it again today.’
I said, ‘No, it was just a milk run.’
He said, ‘Well, look at this!’
I don’t know how I didn’t see it in the air, but there was a line of bullet holes from the [points left] left wing tip on a diagonal right across down the wing behind my cockpit [points behind him] and the tail sections! My airplane was out of commission for about two weeks until they got new parts. In fact, they had to put a whole new tail section on it. I think when the sleepy belly gunner or one of the guys in one of the Plexiglas side windows had seen me or the silhouette of my airplane, he thought maybe I was a Me109 or a Focke-Wulf 190 and he let me have a burst! [Laughs] I still don’t know to this day what caused him—he must have been asleep and woke up and all of a sudden, the reflex, you know—to take a shot at me. I put in a complaint, but nothing was ever done about it. Those were things that happened all the time in the war, friendly fire. You read the things in the paper about in Iraq, about the guys getting in trouble by killing or dropping bombs on their own troops. But war is a dangerous thing and I have always said when I got back, I said something has got to be done. People should not be doing this because too many people get killed for no reason at all. A lot of civilians, especially the civilian population, especially when you hit targets in populated areas you don’t always hit the target that you are supposed to hit. Sometimes you are killing people that do not deserve to be killed.
*
Let me tell you some of the dumb things that I did. We were coming back from a mission one time, and it was a nice sunny day; we did not have any encounter with the enemy. We were letting down from about 25,000 feet and, in a ‘51 what you were supposed to do every now and then is to gun the engine to clear the plugs, otherwise they could foul out, and this is what happened to me. We had just gotten to the Adriatic side by Yugoslavia and then all of a sudden, the plane got real quiet and I started counting blades—naturally, the engine had quit! I just had not cleared the engine because, you know, after a while, I guess you get kind of lackadaisical about things. The engine had quit and we were just starting to go across the Adriatic! Now the P-51 is a nice airplane and it glides for a long ways but to this day, I just say the Lord was on my side, because I fought that engine all the way across the Adriatic! Now I was not supposed to glide that far and just as we got to the other side, the engine finally caught on! Meanwhile I had dropped my gear to let the Germans below know I was going to land on the beach and I was going to be a prisoner of war. Well that did not mean anything to them! [Laughs] Just as I got the engine started there was a big BLAM and so I took off [makes a peeling away motion to the left] to go back to our base, which is on the other side of the Adriatic, there at Ramitelli. Our runway ran right down to the water’s edge [gestures across body at a diagonal motion]. When I landed, my crew chief said, ‘Oh, you’ve been in it again!’
The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion Page 4