War Stories III (24 page)

741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group
Cerignola, Italy
20 March 1945

 

In April of '42—four months after we were at war, ten of us who had been in the Civilian Pilot Training program decided to volunteer for duty as military pilots. We thought we were ready for combat. We'd all had thirty-five hours of CPT instruction and soloed in a single engine aircraft. Our only question was whether to be Navy flyers or Army flyers. We borrowed a car from the college president and another one from the dean of the school, and took off for Omaha—all ten of us.

The Army and the Navy had recruiting offices there for our area. After we got to Omaha, one of the guys picked up a rumor that if you signed up with the Air Corps, they'd give you a complimentary ticket to a cafeteria near the recruiting office. So, on the strength of that unsubstantiated rumor—for a meal that was probably worth about a dollar—all ten of us joined the Army Air Corps. That was the scientific basis we used to decide we wanted to be Army flyers.

Because there was a shortage of instructor pilots, we didn't get sworn in until February of '43. When we arrived at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, we were put in the charge of a tough, old, hard-bitten Army sergeant. That was a rude awakening from life on the campus at Dakota Wesleyan University and I initially despised him—until we'd been in there a couple of weeks and came to realize he was trying to train us so we'd stay alive. We left there with a lifelong feeling of affection for Sergeant Trumbull.

After Basic in Missouri, we were sent to pre-flight training at the San Antonio Air Cadet Center, in Texas. From there we went to Southern Illinois University, where we learned navigation, meteorology, aircraft mechanics, and did a lot of physical training.

It wasn't until we were sent to Muskogee, Oklahoma, that we flew for the first time—in single-engine, open cockpit PT-19s. We then went to Coffeyville, Kansas, and multi-engine training at Pampa, Texas. Finally, at Liberal, Kansas, I got introduced to the B-24 bomber. The instructor was Norman Ray, the guy who had gotten me into the CPT two years earlier. He'd joined the Air Force a year and a half earlier than I had—and he was my instructor on the B-24 bomber. He was really tough on me—but I'm alive today because of Norman Ray and all those other good instructors I had.

I graduated in April of '44 and went to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was assigned a B-24 and a crew. I was scared to death about what these guys would think. I was just twenty-one. Our flight engineer was thirty-three years old. The rest were eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.

They sent us to Mountain Home, Idaho, to the 2nd Air Force so we could all work together for six weeks—learning the plane—and how to become a team. We then went to Topeka, Kansas, for a final briefing before being shipped overseas out of Norfolk, Virginia. By the time I left for the war in Europe that summer of '44, I'd seen more of America than I'd even heard of just two years earlier. It was like that for a lot of us in World War II.

The Liberator was a good airplane, but it was very difficult to fly. We had to use every muscle in our bodies to keep that plane on course and altitude for eight, ten, or twelve hours. You had to keep it in formation in bad weather, and with people shooting at you. Later in the war, they added hydraulic controls. That was the equivalent of adding power steering to a Mack truck. I've seen 200-pound football players, solid muscle, who had to be lifted out of those cockpits after a mission—they were that exhausted. I was a little thinner and wiry, so it was easier for me to move around than some of the others. I was glad for every one of those physical fitness tests we took—because it took all of it to fly that airplane.

The B-24 wasn't heated, so when we flew at 20,000 to 25,000 feet, the temperature outside and inside would be around 45 or 50 degrees below
zero. We were on oxygen from 10,000 feet on up. We had fleece-lined helmets with goggles, an oxygen mask, sheepskin-lined boots, and flak vests over a lined, leather jacket. It was very uncomfortable—particularly in turbulent air.

The Air Force had a practice when we first went into combat—we had to fly the first five missions with an experienced crew. So I went up five times in late October and early November of '44 as a co-pilot, with an “old” veteran pilot—he was probably twenty-three years old by then. He had circles under his eyes, and he'd flown about thirty missions. Those first five missions—one over Austria and four into Germany—weren't too bad—we saw some flak, but encountered no enemy aircraft.

The first mission that I flew as the pilot with my crew was to hit the aircraft assembly plant in Regensburg, Germany—a very heavily defended target.

I had thought, up until that point, that, “You know, this isn't going to be so bad. You see this flak all around you, but it hasn't hit us. So maybe this isn't going to be as bad as everyone said.”

We were just pulling in on that bomb run when a piece of flak—molten metal—smashed through the middle of the windshield, hit a big steel girder right over our heads, and fell to the floor. If it'd been six inches to the left or right, one of us would have been beheaded, literally, by that piece of shrapnel. Our aircraft engineer was standing behind the co-pilot and me, leaning over looking at the instrument panel, and it went maybe an inch above his head. I turned around and his face was snow white.

We were flying at about 250 miles an hour, minus-50 degrees temperature outside—and we had to complete the mission. We went over the target, dropped our bombs, and came back. That first brush with death in an airplane sobered me up in a hurry.

Our base in Italy was cold, windy, and wet a great deal of time—lots of rain in southern Italy, where we were. But our living conditions were a lot better than the soldiers fighting at the front north of Rome.

In December of '44, we were speeding down the runway when, just as we were about to lift off, the right tire blew to smithereens. I had to
make a quick decision—should I hit the brakes and try to stop the plane before the end of the runway, or should we yank it into the air? I chose the latter. I pulled up and we skimmed the ground for a long ways before we finally got up enough airspeed to climb. We missed the trees at the end of the runway by inches.

After we got some altitude, I called the tower and told them what happened. And they said, “Yes, we saw the blow-out.”

I asked, “What do you think I should do?”

The tower replied, “Well, Lieutenant, that's up to you, but there are several options. You can head your plane out towards the Adriatic and bail out with your crew. Or you can go on the mission, drop your bombs, and when you get close in on your way back, bail out over the Adriatic. Or you can go on the mission, drop your bombs, and then try to land when you come back. We've had bombers come back on one wheel and land.”

Since we were already in the air and getting into the formation to go attack Wiener Neustadt, in Austria, I decided to go ahead with the mission. I told the crew, “We've got a seven- or eight-hour mission ahead of us. When we get back, I'm going to land this plane. If any of you guys want to bail out before I try, you're welcome to do so. You have plenty of time to think about it and let me know.” They all decided to stay with the plane.

When we got back, as I approached our field, I slowed the plane to just above stalling speed and touched down right at the end of the runway. As it turned out, it was the best landing I made during the war.

Our worst mission was probably over the Skoda Ammunition Works in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, on our eighteenth mission in January '45. We lost an engine on the way into the target and so I advanced the other three engines to stay in formation. But over the target, right as we dropped our bombs, we got hit hard and lost another engine and got a number of flak holes in the fuselage.

On two engines we headed back to our base in Italy, but just as we reached the Adriatic—over the coast of Yugoslavia—we lost a third engine. We started losing altitude fast. I didn't want to ditch in the Adriatic because there were fifteen- to twenty-foot waves that day and figured
if we hit one of those waves, the airplane would break to pieces and we'd freeze or drown in the water.

I asked the navigator, “Is there any place we can land this airplane?” He looked at the chart and said, “There's a 2,200-foot runway at the Isle of Vis, off to our left. Can you land this plane on twenty-two-hundred feet?”

I said, “Well, it's better than no feet. Let's do it.”

As I lined up with the runway, I could see the carcasses of other bombers that had smashed into a hill at the end of the strip. Well, we put that plane down right at the end of the runway and my co-pilot and I both got on the brakes as hard as we could press. We were up out of our seats, jamming the brakes all the way down. She ground to a halt just a few feet from the end of the runway.

The crew was very appreciative—and gave me accolades for my skill as a pilot. It was the only time I saw that crew leap out of the plane and bend down and kiss the ground. But when you walk away from a landing like that, you don't worry too much about who gets credit for it—you're just glad to be alive. The next day they sent in a DC-3 in to pick us up.

There were two things that kept me steady during the war. One was the knowledge that every minute we were in the air, taking off, or landing, there were ten young lives that depended on me—and all ten of us would die if I failed or made a mistake.

I won't tell you that I wasn't afraid. I was afraid a lot of times. Anybody that tells you that they flew thirty-five combat missions over Germany in World War II and they never had a moment of fear, they're either crazy or they're prevaricating.

The average crew with the 15th Air Force only got to complete seventeen missions, so you can tell the casualties were heavy. We weren't fully aware of that at the time. We would see a couple of planes go down. Maybe a week later we'd see three or four more go down. What we didn't fully comprehend was how cumulative the losses became. Over a period of thirty-five missions, which was the quota for a crew, we had a casualty rate of around 50 percent.

I came back in '45, and went back to school, finished my B.A., and then went to Northwestern and got a Ph.D. After that I taught history and government for five years. I went into politics full-time in '56, ran for Congress, and to everybody's surprise, I got elected.

My friend Tom Brokaw talks about my generation being the Greatest Generation. I don't know about that. I don't think we were any greater than your generation, and others that have come along. It's just that we triumphed in a war that the country was behind.