Lt. B-24, B-17 Pilot 2003 Combat Aircrews Preservation Society Tell me about your duties as pilot in command. Well I was captain of the ship, you might say. And at times they call them aircraft commanders, and I guess my duty was to keep everything going the way it s supposed to go. At times I had to get after the navigator or some of the gunners, and so fourth keep them in line. Was discipline important for an air crew to have? Oh, yes. Discipline? Oh, yes. We had what we called once we passed through about 10, 12,000 feet, we donned our oxygen masks, and we had, I guess it was about every 30 minutes to an hour, we d have oxygen checks, have everybody check in and so fourth. We saved a top turret gunner s life one time. He was not answering the oxygen check, and his plug had pulled out, and I looked back, and I told the navigator, Lou Lattis, I said check the top turret gunner. And he didn t do it. He saw the turret going around. And I looked back one time it s kinda hard to do and his hands were shaking like this on the he could have deployed those guns and shot down a couple of our bombers. He was passing out because of anoxia lack of oxygen. Finally, I got the navigator to plug him in again. We saved his life; he would have died up there. What happened when the flack hit the oxygen bottle? Oh, common thing, when this red-hot flack hit an oxygen bottle, the oxygen tank turned into something similar to an acetylene torch. And the flame could burn a crewmember if he was in front of it or alongside of it. Or it would burn electrical wiring in aircraft and create quite a problem for the operation of the aircraft. We ve had that happen a few times. Plus, you loose the oxygen. Tell me about the first mission you remember. The first mission? Well, it was D-Day, and something we d always waited for with quite a bit of anticipation. And I never will forget 1
they woke us up about 4:00 in the morning. We were in the briefing room about 3:00 in the morning we were in the briefing room, and Commander Watney, commander of the group, stood up and he says, well, gentlemen, this is it. This is the day we ve been waiting for. This is D-Day. I never will forget that. What was your mission D-Day? To bomb German positions near what they call Pas-de-Calais, Cherbourg Peninsula. The weather turned out to be rotten. We could not see anything. We flew over there and flew around for a while. We became disoriented as far as trying to keep the group together. We d fly into these clouds, and you couldn t see the wingman. So we ended up dispersing. We went down, but remember, as I said, we re getting out of here. So we went down, went down on the deck with our bombs. Nobody could drop the bombs. We didn t not know how far in the Americans had gone. When we burst out and turned around and headed back toward England, we looked at this armada of ships. If we had ditched in the ocean, we could have got on the ships and jumped from ship to ship back to England. That s how close they were together. Thousands of ships of all sizes coming in toward France. I never will forget that, and I m sure Bud will always remember that. And we got you talk about having a view of an invasion, not realizing that our soldiers were being killed by the hundreds trying to land, it makes you wonder. I ll never forget that. That was my first mission. When you went back, how did the mission go? We came back and a couple of our ships, for some reason or another, ditched in the English Channel, whether or not they were shot up, whether or not they ran low on fuel. And one of them well a B-24, it breaks in the middle like this and sinks. There s no chance (for escape). A couple of them lost their lives. They would have stood a better chance if they had ditched near one of the ships that was in the invasion out of Southampton, out of southern England. We made it back to our base and stuck around a few hours. The same bombs we landed with the bombs very carefully, and we refueled. And that afternoon about 2:00 we took off again and 2
went over and dropped our bombs on this town and this bridge inland from the coastlines and the invasion. That was two missions on D-Day. Did they let you apply both missions to your 35? Right. Did you feel that 35 was a fair number of missions to fly? Well, we got over there with 25, and shortly after that they raised it to 30. And then when they raised it to 35, I believe Bud (Bill s Copilot) made a remark one time, we ll never get out of here. But 35, like Bud said, was like maybe flying 15 or 20 missions back in 43. They it was nothing for them to lose 50 planes (per mission). And we would lose three or four or five on a mission sometimes. Tell me about your responsibilities as the lead pilot in keeping the formation tight and flying steady? Well, like Bud said, of why we flew deputy lead a number of times, and if we were if I was on the inside, then I would do the flying. If Bud was on the, the plane was flying like this, we were on his side, then he did fly it, because he could gauge (the distance between aircraft), so forth. And we could fly a pretty tight formation until the bomb run, and then we d spread out. Everybody d spread way out, drop the bombs, get a bigger pattern, and then after dropping the bombs, make a turn as quick as possible and get out of there cause of, of the flack and so forth. Did your have any particular fears about flying combat missions? I ve often thought about that today, but you have to realize Bud was 20 years old; I was 22. We were young. I don t think I would do it if I had it to do over again. I would not I d find some way to get out of it. I really would, because I think that guy upstairs has something to do with the survivors. And I m speaking for all that survived. And we lost a lot of friends, and it would normally, I don t you know you d lose, like you lost a roommate. And I think the next day we went on a mission. And it was just something that was accepted at the time. And like Bud said, let s hope we don t have any more wars. 3
Do you feel like you were well suited to your crew station as pilot? Well, like I said, I was young then, and 22 and, I ve always, been a good pilot. I ve flown for the airlines for 30 years. Never had an accident. Never hurt anybody and, but back then, I had a lot of confidence. Bud had a lot of confidence. We knew each other very well. We knew our job, and our crew liked us. I remember some of the other crewmembers would like to have had another captain or another copilot. We didn t have that problem. Course, you know, those things are going to take place, and anything, even today, even on an airliner. I ve been flying for 30 years. Every once in a while I d get a copilot and I d have to straighten him out. So if you re a captain, you re a captain. And you do what you have to do. Explain to me about discipline on board the aircraft. Well, we ve had some pilots I don t think knew what discipline was. They should never been a pilot in the first place. And we had our share of them in the 490 th. And, I, even when I few for the airline, if something wasn t safe, if something was not right, well, I was right there. And it was the same way back then. There s nothing you can do in combat about getting shot down or seeing two aircraft run together in front of you. And over Mersberg one time, Bud said look at that! Still flying formation, I looked out there, and there was a parachute coming by. And the closer it got, there was nobody in it. Remember that. Nobody was in the parachute. It went floating by, and it wasn t going down with the weight or anything. It was just setting there. You often wonder what happened to the guy that that parachute belonged to. What was it like seeing someone you knew go down in a plane? The one I remember happened right in front of us almost over our home base. When we transitioned from the B-24 to the B-17 s, the B-24 was basically in a turn, a rudder aircraft. You had to use rudder to make a turn. You could take the aileron and go like this, and the airplane would say, what are you trying to do to me? Finally it d start turning. If you kicked the rudder, it d kick right in there. 4
The B-17 was an aileron airplane. If you wanted to make a turn, you didn t even touch the rudders. You just turned it and it beautiful. It flew better in that respect. And the rudder, you could push on the rudder, and you could hardly push on it. Well, Norman Cosby was flying in this airplane, and a guy named Ketus, who was not too good of a pilot, one of that we brought up a few minutes ago. Not to mention any names, but he come sliding into the formation ahead of us. Come sliding in like this, and he never stopped. He just slid right into Cosby, and the two airplanes just broke up. We saw a couple of bodies - they weren t in combat or anything, and they weren t wearing their parachute fall out of the airplanes and just fall down. The pilots. And we flew through some of the debris. Bud saw it before I did. Look at that! And I looked out there, and there it was in front of us. Later we went to the hospital to see how many survived. Ketus did not remember pulling his chute. He survived. Both captains survived. Norm Cosby he survived. And that was we knew everybody, knew all of them. That was hard to take. Was there a chaplain or any available services to help you guys when you saw these things happen? The only time I can remember going to the chapel was after briefing on a mission, we went, and the Catholic priest blessed us. We kneeled down there; it took, oh, three or four minutes at the most. You remember that? We had members of my crew that had never been in a church, but they ended up after a few missions going into the chapel, saying a little prayer protect us on this mission, bring us back, so forth like that. And so forth. But I don t remember there was too much of it going on. I don t remember going to a chapel to a funeral, as you might say. Are all our boys were buried at Cambridge or at some cemetery and later moved to Cambridge. We ve got a number of our boys buried at Cambridge now at the national cemetery, Cambridge. Did they have funerals? Nope, no, didn t have time for that. Didn t have time for that. Didn t have time for that. Not that I not that I know of. We weren t there to visit. 5
Did the 10 th Bomb Group have a bad rap? Well on one of our missions we had the 100 th along with us. It was over the Ruhr Valley; I think it was Cologne. Never will forget this. The 100 th bomb group we were always, always happy to have them go on a mission with us somewhere along the line there, because the Germans had it in for the 100 th, and they would seek them out. I remember my tail gunner says called one time and says, there were 12 airplanes back here, and there s only three left. They re all going down. These Nazi pilots had flown in from the sun, went right over us, and all these guns they re coming from the sun so you can t see them all these guns shooting. You just picture airplanes just falling all over the sky. And my Davy calling us and said, My God, they re all gone. I can t believe it. And, course, we couldn t see it, cause we were up ahead. They were in back of us. Tell me what you heard about the 100 th causing that. Well, I heard that, looks like this story I told you about, Charlie Brown in Miami. B-17 was pretty well shot up and became a straggler and had left the squadron and had gone lost altitude and went down. And a couple of enemy fighters came up, and they wiggled their wings and then was going to escort them they love to capture an airplane gonna escort them down to the ground. And German airplanes got a little closer and kept getting closer and kept getting closer, and finally the B-17 captain gave an order, shoot them down. And they did. And I think one of the pilots, German pilots, bailed out and lived to tell about it. He told them about the markings on the airplane and so forth. And they found out it was the 100 th that did it, and that s, that s the story I got. Off-camera: Supposedly if you dropped your wheels down, you were ready to surrender. And this boy was flying with his wheels down. Yeah, yeah, right, that s right. And they had done that I think. Did you ever experience chivalry in World War II? No. I didn t understand that. Did you find that chivalry survived in World War II? 6
In some instances where, the Nazis had been known to shoot a guy down in his parachute and kill him in his parachute. Adolph Galand (a German Luftwaffe General and high scoring fighter pilot ace) said if one of his men if he ever heard of one of his men shooting a pilot bailing out, he would personally shoot him himself. there that s one instance. I don t know of too many more. I don t know too many more where chivalry had anything to do with it. It was war, airplane against aircraft, men against men, and even on the ground some Germans would kill prisoners, and some of our boys killed German prisoners. It s just war, and it was the circumstances that prevailed. Tell me about your experience when you lost your oxygen and became a straggler. Well, that happened a number of times. You talk about over one time when we landed in Brussels, we were a straggler. And, I remember one time we became we had some bombs. This happened quite often. We dropped our bombs on the target and left. Three of them did not drop. They hung up in the bomb bay, either frozen or what have you. So the bombardier went back there and fixed them, and we saw a bridge up ahead. Remember that? We saw a bridge; I don t know the name of the town, but I said, well, why waste them? Let s drop them on that bridge. So we lined up, the bombardier lined up, and he s headed for the bridge, and all at once this flack started coming up. And I told Sam, who was our bombardier, I said, "Drop them." We re getting out of here. And he dropped them, and we got out of there. the time we become a straggler we went to Brux or not that wasn t, that wasn t the time we became a straggler. We were pretty much in formation. Off-camera (Bud): That was the time we landed at Belgium wasn t it? I think it was Brux, Czechoslovakia, and we ran low on fuel. And we were having engine trouble, and we talked this thing over. And we decided we would land at Brussels, because we knew the British had just taken Brussels. So we came in from the south and landed at Brussels, and we were there about seven days, before we could get some fuel and have that engine worked on and fly the airplane back. But that was an experience. 7
While you were flying as a straggler, what were your feelings of apprehension? Well, naturally we kept a lookout for our little friends, the P-51 s, the P-47 s, and so forth, and also the German fighters, because that s what we were afraid of mostly. And a couple of time, we did all right; we made it back. We were lucky. Was it possible for your radio operator to raise the P-51 s on a command frequency if your were a straggler? Well, we had four channels an A channel, B channel, C channel, and a D channel, and I think the fighter channel was C channel. We could get on C and talk to them ourselves. We could get on A or B and talk to command or talk to the flight leaders and so forth. That s about all the contact we had there. Was it common practice to try to get fighters if you were a straggler, or did you not want to risk giving your position away? No, I wouldn t say that it was a common practice. Just your matter of luck. Either they re there, or they re not there. we did a good job of bombing airfields and knocking them out. The fighters did a good job of swooping down and putting these fighters out of commission blowing them up and so forth while we were over there flying our missions. Tell me about your near head-on with the P-47 on landing. That was a mission where we had dropped the bombs and were turning away from the target, and all at once all hell broke loose. It sounded like a thousand hammers hitting on the airplane when that flack went off all around us putting 300 holes in the airplane. And the first thing I noticed was I tried to use the rudder on the B- 24, and I went all in and nothing happened. I kept moving the rudder, and I said, Bud, we don t have any rudders. And the trim tab cable was severed, the rudder cables, so where that flack coming in had severed these cables. And I remember a couple of boys in the back that s the time we had a fire, oxygen fire from the oxygen tanks and we had a couple of wounded men on board, not bad. And we naturally dropped down, and we ended up losing No. 3 engine. 8
And we got back, got across the channel okay, got to the base, and the base was socked in had about 300 feet visibility. And that was it. We could not see the airport, could not see the runway; we made a couple of approaches. We d get down there, and I d pull the power back, and the airplane would slide off the runway like this. So we d have to gradually we were using the two out boards as rudders put more power on the right, turn left; more power on the left, you d turn right. So we finally, we made a couple more approaches, then we abandoned. We said we got to do something, so we went up above the clouds. We were up above the clouds, and I Bud ll remember this I picked out a cloud that was obvious, and we set straight for it. And I d take and work the throttles around a little bit, trying to keep it straight for the clouds. (Editor s note: he was testing and practicing his control inputs, using the cloud as the test runway). Well, we were running low on fuel by now, so we decided to come in and try it. We talked about bailing out, and I said, well, when we re down we ll try a couple more times. We may have to come back up here, and we ll all bail out. So we re coming in for a landing, and we re lined up with the runway, and I said, oh, we ve got it made this time. And all at once Bud hit the throttle, pulled back on the stick. The airplane went up like this. I said what are you doing? He said did you see that airplane? I said no. And rrrrrh, we heard the vibration come under our airplane, and like he says, it could have been 15, 25 feet, something like that. The P-47 pilot coming this way and landing this way, and we re coming straight in. He s coming from over here. He s down low, and I don t see him Bud s tall anyway, and he s sitting up there and looking at the runway and so forth, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw this guy coming right at us. Well, then naturally we went around and went out again, came back, and came in and made an approach and finally got that thing on. On the seventh approach we got it on the ground. And we were on the left side of the runway knocking out the lights, but I was just happy, you know. We were probably hitting the bricks and causing it to move over a little bit. We went all the way to the end of he taxiway and went like this, turned a little bit, and stopped. And I just sat there just drenched. I had been just perspiring, and Bud, we looked at one another, and he got up and I sat there for a little while. I couldn t believe it. And neither of us, we had, must have had a thousand people around the airplane. And I remember the CO getting aboard and say how in the hell did you fly 9
this airplane? They looked at all the holes, you know, and they looked at the wires hanging around all over the place. And I said, well, we didn t have any rudders, and we just managed some how or another. With God s help we got this thing on the ground. Tell me about the DFC. Well, I didn t even know it. I did not know it. I don t think Bud knew it either. And they said they recommended me for a DFC. In fact, I was one of the first ones to get a DFC, and I ended up getting two. Everybody got one for completing 35 missions. But they should have given Bud the Medal of Honor. He s the one saved us, saved the whole crew when he saw that fighter come under the wing. Tell me about flack. Well, I, I know they had these gun positions, four guns, four of em would fire, boom, boom, boom, boom. In France they could send up one shell and knock an airplane down if you flew straight and level like that. That s how good they were in France. They could shoot one shell up there and knock an airplane down, so you had to keep maneuvering. A smart group leader would change course, fly a little never fly straight and level more than time to give them to let them aim on you. And then do like this, turn around this way until you get on the IP, the Initial Point of the bomb run, which could last five, six, seven, eight minutes, ten minutes. Then you were at the mercy of the flack. But I think the one I feared the most was the 155-millimeter. That was the biggest one. But all of them did their job, and over a target like Misberg, they would send out what they called box flights. They didn t care about shooting particular airplanes. They d just shoot the flack up. Some would go up to 25,000, some 26,000, some 23,000 and boom, just keep firing, just saturate the skies with them cause they knew that you were gonna have to come through that area on the bomb run. And we saw quite a few airplanes that were nothing but a puff of smoke as we went by, like the one with the parachute with nobody in it. So that s all I can say about flack. Flack s flack; it did its job. Give me a physical description of flack. 10
Well, it s a shell. You can take a.45 or a shotgun shell and enlarge it, and a 155-millimeter, I guess, is about, oh, six, seven inches by about like that, fired out of a big shell boom, boom, boom, boom. And the other guys were loading it, and they keep going. And these shells come traveling up; by the time they get to your airplane s height at night you can see it glowed. And a lot of times the shell would go right through an airplane and not explode, cause it wasn t timed to explode yet. It would just go right through the wing and maybe knock out a couple of engines. This happened to Kilpatrick, David Kilpatrick. But anyway, that s flack, and when it exploded, it came up and God help you if it exploded here, cause when it explodes it s still traveling up. So, if it explodes right here, you re okay, because it s all going up. But if it gets right here, and you fly into it, you ve had it. But actually it had all it looked like a hand grenade, but not as deep of grooves, but it s made so that when it explodes, it breaks into a few hundred pieces. And it could be a piece an inch long and usually about, a 155-millimeter shell is about a half inch thick. And it s like a bullet going through the air, only it s red hot. If it hits you, it not only will enter your skin, but it will burn you. We had a crewmember that got hit with flack. He was, I think it was the navigator, and he got hit right here (motions to his upper right thigh), for instance, and they put a tourniquet on him right here (motions to his lower right thigh). But the flack went in here (upper thigh), went under his leg, and out over here. So they didn t know that. They had him laying down in the catwalk. They didn t know that; they put the tourniquet on here (upper thigh). They figured well, we ve stopped the bleeding, and they just left him laying there, bleeding to death. When they got on the ground, he was dead. And as the airplane taxied in, the blood was dripping out of the airplane. This happened a lot on wounded men that were bleeding badly. Taxi in, and the blood was dropping out of the airplane and onto the runway, onto the taxi strip, and when it stopped, the puddle of blood kept building up. Never will forget that. Another time the tail gunner got shot, killed, and he was still in his turret. Half the turret was gone; he was dead in there. I remember that one. And he sat there for, oh, a half a day, so headquarters wanted to come in and inspect the airplane. That was, that was bad. 11
Give me a brief description of the responsibilities for each crew station in the B-17. Well, I have often, in thinking about this, been of the opinion that they did not need 10 men on a bomber. I think six would have been more like it. A bombardier, pilot, and copilot. We didn t necessarily need a navigator on every trip; it was nice to have one sometimes, you don t know a radio operator, he could have doubled as a turret gunner. The waist gunners I have my doubts about those and, and the belly turret - forget it, and maybe a tail gunner. I would say you could get rid of two of the waist gunners, the belly turret that s three, and maybe, one more. I didn t know much that the radio operator did really. The navigator could have been trained to take care of a radio. I don t know what Bud s thoughts are about this. What was the job of navigator? Well, he s the one, if it hadn t been for our navigator on that trip when we almost collided with the thunderbolt the P-47, he s the one; we had no ILS modern systems that they use today. He brought us in over that airport each time within that airport. One thing I forgot to mention was that as we made a couple of approaches they threw flares up at the beginning of the runway. And then we called them and said throw a flare up at the other end. We could line the flares up. Back here when we broke out, we got down pretty low to line up, and with two flares going one over here and one over here, we could line it up. See, we come in. I don t think we d have ever made it, if they hadn t thrown those two flares up. But the navigator says, You re right over the field. So we start letting down, we d glide around. I d say I m gonna go out and make a base downwind leg, come out here and make a base leg, and then turn into the final, want a nice long final of about, oh, a mile. And so he d line us up and say the airport s right ahead. That s the navigator, that s the time when we needed a navigator, and I m glad we had him on board. What role did the flight engineer play? Our flight engineer was the oldest man on our crew. He was 36 years old, 35, 36 years old, and he had a young daughter, beautiful daughter about 14 or 15, remember? And he kept a running account of the fuel burned and that was his main job. And he kept 12
a constant check on all the instruments and so forth. And he did not have a modern panel like the DC-10 has or the DC-8 had for an engineer. I think he sat there in the middle and looked around at everything and would tell you if something didn t look right and so forth. That s about it. In fact, sometimes I think maybe we could have gotten by without him. Did he serve any purpose as a technician on board for necessary repairs? No, I don t think so. No, I don t think so. I was a mechanic for a year and a half before I became a pilot, and I could have probably done some of that work. But there s not much you can do, there s not much you can do for repairing, even replacing in those bombers. If something went wrong, it was just too bad. What do you remember about the cold and being on oxygen? It was a problem. It affected certain crewmembers more than others. And I can remember my hands getting cold, my feet getting cold, even in training back in the states when we went up. And we didn t have the heated suits; all we had was just our clothing, so forth. And the temperature would get down 25, 35 below zero, and that s cold. And icicles hanging from your jaw, breaking them off and all, so forth. And it was just something we learned to live with. Couldn t wait until we got down out of there, you know, and down especially when you went through 11 or 12,000 feet, and you ripped that oxygen mask off and come on in. Tell me about the feelings you had on your last mission. It was a fairly short mission. It was Hamm H-A-M-M which is, I think, just south of Hamburg. Anyway we went in over Holland, something. We went in and bombed the target, and a couple of guys says great, we ve made the turn, you know. And all at once, we got hit by about four shells bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Hit the airplane, put a few holes in it, you know. Bud and I sat there, just paralyzed. I said, My God, they re gonna shoot us down. And finally we looked around there, and everything seemed to be all right, and we came back to the base. Well, we lagged a bit behind, and we were the last ones to land, and we came in and buzzed that runway and took off, made a turnaround, and came 13
back in, and landed. Went over the hard stand; everybody, jumped out of the airplane, jumping on one another and hanging on the guns up there. I ve got pictures of it. And I remember Sam had to go to the bathroom. He ran over to the side of the airplane and had to tinkle. And that s another thing - about going to the bathroom. I asked Bud, I said, You ever remember going to the bathroom on a mission? I don t, and we ve been on a couple of 10, 11-hour missions a few of them. Never entered my mind to go to the bathroom, till I got back. I was I guess I was too scared. I m not kidding you. I thought about that. I said I it didn t have a bathroom. We didn t have relief tubes. I never got up to go in the back. Think about it. I guess they I guess we were trained not to go to the bathroom for 10 or 12 hours. Tell me about the relationship you had with the ground crew. I m wracking my brain trying to think of his name the head the lead man. The lead crew chief, he was a sweetheart, played the guitar, and I played the guitar. And we d get together quite often, a little crap penny-anti crap games. Course pounds were $4 then. If you bet a pound, that was $4, and you win four pounds, you got $16. Didn t seem like it, but we got together quite often with them at the pub, have a few beers sometimes and they were always sitting there waiting for us and praying for us. And we had the reputation, Bud and I, "Just don t go on a mission with those guys." They attract flack. And we came in one time with all those holes in the airplane, and the crew chief says, Oh my God, I see me working now. So our plane was in the hangar for, oh, a couple of weeks anyway while they repaired it. In the meantime we flew other aircraft on a mission. And, Snaphufaman. Remember Snaphufaman? We got it all shot up on one of our missions. Came in, and do you know that crew got after my crew, what did you do to that, do that to our airplane? Why did you mess up our airplane? Why did you let the Germans shoot you full of holes? They got downright angry. They loved that airplane. Still, Stewart was the captain. Didn t they have some sort of kinship with you, too? Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. So it wasn t just the aircraft they worried about but the crew that might not return. 14
I can t answer that myself, because I only know of the one instance on Snaphufaman when we got a few holes in it and came back, and the crewmembers, the flight crewmembers got after my gunners and so forth, why d you let that guy get our airplane full of holes? It, it sounded kind of funny at first, but they meant it. They were ready to fight. I don t understand it 2003 Combat Aircrews Preservation Society Combat Aircrews' Preservation Society reserves all rights to this transcript, and no part may be edited, duplicated, bartered, exchanged, sold or reprinted without the expressed written consent of Combat Aircrews' Preservation Society. 15