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

  ‘We're all in the same boat. We all did what we had to do. I was telling this to a friend of mine the other day, that when we entered the service back in 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, all my friends and buddies and classmates, we went in and there was no doubt about what we had to do. I've never seen that much cooperation and patriotism until the September 11th. That's the only good thing that come out of September 11th, was the country coming together like it did back in 1941.’

  *

  Charles P. Corea

  My godfather owned the creamery in Macedon, and my father was a cheese maker, and that's how I happened to be born in Macedon, New York. He came to this country back in the late 1800s, 1898 or 1901, and I was born there in 1921, and at the age of 18 months, we moved to East Rochester, where he worked for the dairy there. And that's how I became an ‘East Rochesterian’, and I've been there ever since. Grew up in East Rochester, married the police chief's daughter—he gave me an offer I couldn't refuse. [Laughs] One of those things, and we've been living in the same house she was born in since then.

  I graduated from East Rochester High School in 1940. For a short time I worked in the Merchant's Dispatch Transportation Company, making box cars and rail cars.

  I was living with my mother and dad and Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday. East Rochester on Friday and Saturday nights was a busy town. It was a working man's town. I used to do a little work for this fella who ran the hotel, like a gopher for the guys that played a little poker, so I generally got up a little later on Sunday morning. I remember getting up. I don't know what time of the day it was. I heard it on the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Being a youngster, that was not as serious in my estimation as the recent happenings of 9/11 were because the implications actually seemed a lot less to me as a person at the time. [But] the war had begun.

  I remember playing cards that evening and there were a couple of guys [who were anxious] to sign up. We were the first ones there at the draft office about 6:30 in the next morning. I got called up in September of '42.

  ‘Colorblind as a Bat’

  We went to Fort Niagara and we took some aptitude tests. At the time I was gung ho, I thought maybe I'd get into the [Air Force] cadets. I'm a young kid, I thought maybe I'd get one of those P-40s and play around with it right? When you're young, you think you can do anything. I took a written test and passed that okay. Then I had to take a physical. At the time Fort Niagara was busier than heck. I took my eye test, passed that okay and I was walking out the door and the guy called me back and says, ‘One more test.’

  That test was for color vision. He said, ‘What did you see? See any numbers there?’

  I kept wincing and stuff and he kept flicking the pages over. He put me down, ‘Failed.’ He said, ‘You're colorblind as a bat!’ He threw me out.

  I got back [to the barracks] and the major said, ‘Why'd you take the test if you knew you were colorblind?’

  I said, ‘I'm not colorblind. That guy was [too busy] and pushed me through like crazy.’

  He picked up a yellow pencil and says, ‘What color is that pencil?’

  I says, ‘Yellow.’

  ‘You want to take the test over again?’

  I said, ‘Sure.’

  The next day I got shipped out to Atlantic City. That was the end of my second test but it turns out I am colorblind, browns and greens and stuff like that. Yellow, blues, and solid colors I can get away with.

  I ended up in Atlantic City and I was with a couple of friends of mine. We stayed together, we all went in together. I remember we passed an aptitude test on whether you were a good candidate for radio or armament or photography. Having a decent education I had my choice of about seven or eight different qualifications. I remember talking to my buddy who wanted to go to radio school into switching over to go to photography school. I said, ‘That way we'll get to do photography and we'll still get flying around taking pictures instead of something else.’ I talked him into that and he switched his number one choice from radio to photography. When I made my first choice, photography, the guy asked me, ‘What do you want for a second choice?’

  I said, ‘I don't care.’ We put down aircraft mechanics.

  Well, the next call up was for aircraft mechanics and I went and said, ‘Hey Jerry, why aren't you packing?’

  He says, ‘I wasn't called up.’ The irony was that he ended up going to Denver to become the photographer! I ended up going down to Seymour-Johnson Field in North Carolina, helping build that airfield because it was new in the war. I ended up being a mechanic for that duration they taught us. Then when we finished that particular school, they asked us, ‘Who wants to take some examination for aerial gunnery?’

  I says, ‘I do, but I'm colorblind.’

  He says, ‘Go down and take it anyway.’ They needed gunners pretty badly and I passed that; instead of 20/20 I was 20/15, and he was very easy on me when I started going through the chart, ‘Take your time, read the chart.’ I ended up only missing four or five out of twenty. He passed me okay.

  We became aerial gunners. We went down to Fort Myers, Florida, and went to school there and did some practice flying and shooting at targets. Then they took us from there and sent us to Lambert Field in St. Louis. It was at the Curtiss-Wright [plant]; they put us in that technical school. There were only 30 or 40 of us and we had civilian instructors and they really taught us like you were going to a legitimate [military] school, the aerodynamics and the systems and the whole thing. We were the only Army personnel in the school. I got corporal stripes at Fort Myers gunnery school and after getting out of that St. Louis school, they gave me sergeant stripes.

  *

  The war in Europe was going badly for bombers and they needed the B-17s. Everybody that had any knowledge of gunnery and stuff, they put them on B-17s. We went to Salt Lake City to get put on crews. Because of my training, they made me first engineer on a B-17. I had been carrying around this big technical book all the time about hydraulic systems [from the previous school] and I get on B-17 and it's all electrical. They gave me an assistant engineer who didn't know as much as I did, you know what I mean? But they needed personnel, they needed numbers.

  They sent me up to Moses Lake, Washington. We trained there for quite a while forming groups; pilots, copilots, navigators and bombardiers and the rest of the crew, which was ten people. We did some high altitude missions and some hedge hopping. It was a fun time because now we're flying, we're doing down the Columbia River Basin, hedge hopping along the river and over the bridges and stuff like that. Here you are, 21 years old, and you’ve got the world pretty good. We'd go to places like Wenatchee, which only had about 50,000 people; we were the only Air Force personnel there. We couldn't buy anything, the people would just go to the bar, they would buy you a drink or you’d go to the restaurant and they'd pay for the lunches. That was about the time that the Philippines was lost, and I don't know if you remember [a hero from that period] in history, Colin Kelly. Colin Kelly dove his B-17 into a Japanese destroyer, got the Congressional Medal of Honor for killing himself, and now the people were all gung-ho.[40] It's just like the euphoria that we have now with the September 11th deal.

  We trained and trained and trained and now we're ready to ship out. We've got this group formed, overseas training group formed and the next thing you know I've got to take another physical. I go in and everything's the same and, boom, this time they give me a color test with yarn. They have different color yarns. Well, Christ sakes, dark green, light green, brown, just flunked me again. They grounded me!

  I'm saying to them, ‘Hey, I've got all this training. Why the heck do I need [to see] colors? I'm going to be in a plane, all I'm going to do is shoot some [colored] flares.’ Anyway, this buddy of mine got grounded because he had to go home; his wife had an emergency operation so he lost his crew. We were chumming around before we got placed in another group, because he was a first engineer too.

  He says to me, ‘Go in and tell them that you were i
n the sunlight and the light bothered you and ask them for another test.’ When they called me in for another test, he went in and took it for me.

  I went in and I remember Major Barry put a waiver on my records, waived the color vision. Ray keeps telling me he took the test for me; [later] he wrote a letter about doing this for me. Anyway, to make the story chronological, I got on the crew. First thing you know, we did our training, we were flying overseas in January of '44.

  Going Overseas

  We had a real pilot. He was a very quiet type of guy. He never said much of anything. The copilot and the bombardier and myself, being up in front all the time, we got closer together than I did with the rest of the crew. When we got to England, we would chum around together.

  I had to do a lot of jobs as the engineer. In normal duties, I logged everything. I logged the pilots, copilots, the names, the time, and all the crew. I put everything in a log, when we took off, and all the pertinent things. [I also did odd things], like during combat I remember a couple of times I had the tail-wheel pin sheared off. I had to crawl back in there and put a screwdriver in there so it would stay straight when we landed. A couple of times you had to turn the landing wheels manually to put them down; sometimes you get a little jam up in there or something like that. That was my job. In combat, I was also the top turret gunner.

  We went to a place called Thorpe Abbotts.[41] It's about 99 miles north of London. It was great but I wasn't there long enough to really enjoy it. What happened is we got there in January but after our training we didn't get to the group until February and they put us right into the thick of things. Everything was along pretty good until you got shot, until you went down, or until you got killed. The ‘Bloody Hundredth’ is probably one of your more famous groups; we ended up with something like 200% casualties.

  The Fifth Mission

  I was shot down on March 6th, just my fifth mission. It was the first daylight raid where the whole 8th Air Force got to Berlin. We tried to get there a day or two earlier and we had to abort because of bad weather conditions. A couple of wings did a couple of 180s right into each other and we lost something like 31 planes.—you couldn't see where you were going or anything. Worst feeling in the world; that was probably even hairier than the day I was shot down.

  Anyway, we were the in the lead group and on the previous mission, we had lost one engine and we had to borrow a different squadron’s plane to go on this particular mission on the 6th of March. If you had a crew able to go and another squadron had a plane that was in mechanical good condition and yours wasn't, you went up in the other plane. It happened to be an ‘all-out effort’, so General Doolittle didn't care who he sent up there; he sent us up there, 810 bombers, I think, and it was like 150 fighters or something like that. Out of those 810 bombers, we lost 69. Out of our group alone, we lost 15, most of that was due to German fighters.

  Our group had taken off with thirty-six planes, six of which aborted because of mechanical problems. Out of the thirty that continued on, only fifteen got to the target. Out of those fifteen, I guess only a handful ever got back to our base, because they all scattered to different groups.

  Our fighter support went a short ways with us, but they weren't there at that time. We were lead group. When you have that many planes in the air and that few fighters, you couldn't get them all. We got shot down around noontime by a Messerschmitt. I was in the top turret shooting at them, and I could see [their faces] as clearly as I'm looking at you. They wiped us out completely.

  Our particular squadron, the 349th, was lead squadron that day, but when we borrowed this particular plane from the 351st, they stuck us with that squadron. We filled in on the triangle of the 351st; they put us in the last plane in their squadron because we didn't belong to them. You can visualize the lower element being four planes. [Gestures with hands] One, then two on the side, and one on the bottom. That's where we were, and on the Messerschmitt‘s first pass, he knocked out those first three planes! Also, he hit the lead plane, knocked it out—hit the tail, the guys survived and got back to England, but the fighter knocked up their dorsal fin. They came in, they didn't care, they were just very [bold] because they didn't want us to get to Berlin.

  ‘They just devastated us’

  Now this is noon, March 6th, a very clear, bright, sunny day, very cold. Being the last plane in the element, of course, I was panning behind us, and as I'm turning I can see some flashes out of a waist gunner from one of the planes above in the upper element. I whipped the gun around as fast as I could from the back of the plane to the front of the plane, my twin .50s, and I just caught the fighters coming in, right out of the sunlight; they came swooping in wingtip to wingtip. You see, they had learned different tactics. Earlier in the war they would just dive in one after another. Well, one after another you could shoot each one at a time, but coming in this way they just strafed the whole group. They just devastated us.

  Anyway, as I'm firing the top turret at them, they're coming over and we're the last ones so now he's pulling up. As he's pulling up and making his turn, I'm following him the same way. God as my witness, as I'm following for a split couple of seconds or so, he's banking this way, I'm banking with him. I'm looking at him and he's looking at me. You could see him looking over with his mask on and he could see me obviously. I'm following him with the damn turret and you could see bits of the plane coming off his tail section, but not enough to bother him. As I'm turning, the electrical cord on my flying suit got caught underneath the swivel of the turret. As it got caught on the swivel of the turret, I couldn't turn it anymore.

  The first thing I needed to do was to get down and untangle it. I ducked down, I untangled it, and right beneath the flight deck, the canvas over the gyro-equipment was on fire from a tracer round from the enemy. I took an extinguisher and I put the fire out. This couldn't have taken any more than two or three minutes, whatever it was. I put that out. Now I got back into my turret. Fellas, the turret wasn't there anymore. That son-of-a-gun who had been eyeing me came in and he hit his 20 mm gun, took the top of that Plexiglas and tore it right off! Now I get up there, my guns are immobilized and there's no turret! That's when I say, ‘Oh boy.’

  I got down; now I'm helpless. Now we're defenseless. The planes ahead of us have been shot down, we're lumbering along at 180 miles an hour, and these fighters were just [warming up] for target practice.

  I got up between the pilot and copilot where I generally stand. I said to Lt. Coper, the pilot, ‘Hey Cope, I see some clouds down there about 10,000 feet below us. Dive down for those clouds.’

  In the meantime my bombardier comes down and he's just a step down to the front of the plane. He's a big fella about 6'1 or 6’2. He says, ‘Hey Charlie, what are we going to do?’

  [In the heat of things], I forgot about him, completely forgot about him. His flying clothes were all shredded like a cat had scratched him, from shrapnel, but he wasn't injured. I looked at him, I said, ‘What the hell do you want from me? Bail out!’ After I saw him in the [German] hospital later, he told me he kicked out the navigator’s hatch right then, which was fortunate for him because when it was time for me to jump, I couldn't get out of the plane because the plane was in a spin.

  I'm there for another three or four minutes when the fighters make another pass. In the meantime, they hit a couple of our engines; I think number three was on fire. Finally, they made another pass and they shot away our controls! We peeled off into one of these spirals—you've seen them on television where the plane will come over on its back and just spiral into the ground. That's when I decided it was time to get out; [the whole time before] I figured we'd get back home—you know, optimistic. I didn't figure we were going to [crash].

  We were at 21-22,000 feet when this happened. Anyway, I grabbed ahold of a chest pack parachute, because in a turret you can't wear a chest pack, there's not enough room. Trees are coming up at me and I can't get the damn thing situated! The plane kind of gave a lurch and all of a sudden I got
it snapped on. I had my hand on the ripcord and out I went, head first.

  Ordinarily the navigator's hatch is a couple of feet behind the number two propeller. Because we were spinning in, you're going down, so now you're actually going into the prop. I did half a flip, my foot was out and the prop caught my foot, split my foot, right down the middle!

  I pulled the rip cord as soon as I went out and the chute opened immediately and I said to myself, ‘I don't want to drag my foot,’ I landed and as God is my witness, I landed just like I stepped off this chair, into a plowed field. Never had a chance to look up at the parachute silk or even down at the ground. My copilot went out right after me and he landed about 50 feet away, and about another 100 feet from him was where the plane crashed. That's how close to the ground we were; [none of the others got out of the plane in time]. Now I'm on the ground and this foot is split wide open. I hobble over to my parachute silk and we're trying to tie a tourniquet around my leg when the bombs start popping. We were carrying twelve 500-pounders. There were some trees in between us and every time they would go off, the shrapnel would come down like rainfall.

  Anyway, from there we just missed this farmhouse. We were in this field in northern Germany. The people from the farmhouse, they had little shelter. They had dug a four-foot square hole in the back of their house where they were staying. The only male in the whole contingent was a guy probably running the Home Guard or whatever he was. He came down and the first thing he asked was if we had a ‘pistola’ or something. They issued us .45s but I never carried one. I said, ‘Nah, no pistola.’