Interviews of Oscar by Dennis Cordes in 2007.
This is Dennis Cordes of Austin, Texas. For a number of years I’ve wanted to make a recorded interview with Oscar Theis of Thorndale, Texas. My father-in-law, J. David Theis, had told me that his cousin Oscar had also been in the Army Air Corps during World War II, but he flew in Northern Europe.
David had been stationed in Casablanca, Morocco for much of the war, but their paths never crossed. I called Oscar on the morning of September 1, 2007. When I called, he told me that I could come out to visit him on the farm, and I brought my tape recorder.
Oscar was able to remember a great deal about his World War II training, experiences, and close calls. This taped interview was recorded in four segments, or tapes, and it accounts for some of the pauses along the way. As often happens, we begin talking about his experiences a little bit before I turn on the recorder.
When we start this segment, we’re talking about a model of his fighter that was displayed on his coffee table. I hope you enjoy the tape.
I don’t know if they have an organization of model plane builders. They took a picture of my airplane and they ran off all the insignias and the serial numbers and everything on that airplane. Just exactly like the one I flew with my missions on the side.
Oh boy, that is great. Now what is the plane? That is a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter. Any other specialties on it? Well, it was designed to escort bombers and that’s what I did with it a few times.
Then we were the ones that did the dive bombing and the strafing of the trains and bombing the bridges. When the P-51, which was a North American inline engine airplane, it had more range. We used a lot of gas on it.
That was real heavy. They could go further in. They changed our mission from escorting to supporting the ground troops and that’s what we did.
We would strafe trains and dive bomb bridges and forts and whatever needed shooting. Sort of clear the way a bit for the ground troops? Yeah, we supported George Patton’s Third Army across France. We were the top cover for him while he was going on his tour through France.
Of course we did other things too, but that was one of the things we did, supporting the Third Army. We would fly over the tank columns and go look what’s ahead and shoot up things that they wanted shot up. Do you do a little aerial reconnaissance and identify things? Yeah.
They’d have some gun positions and we’d try to knock them out and things like that. We caught a lot of the German troops in the convoys. If you notice, I don’t know if you’ve got enough light there to see, all the missions and everything are just like it was on my airplane.
One of my airplanes. What was your name on this thing? It says L. What? There’s a detail on the front. It’s like a Woody Woodpecker or a hat or something? No, up there is a Disney thing.
It’s El Texano. That’s the name of my plane, El Texano. It was a cartoon from Disney.
I can see it now because it’s in a rope script. On the side there’s a lot of planes and a lot of bombs. Yeah, those are bombing missions and dive bombing and reconnaissance and whatever the different missions that I flew.
I hadn’t had that in maybe a month before I got shot up. Really? That many things happen in a month? I went through a lot of airplanes. Well, when you first come in the outfit and you’re a junior pilot, you don’t have your own airplane.
I wasn’t the only one that just flew this airplane. When I flew, I flew that airplane. It has your name on it? Yeah, but somebody else may fly it when I’m not flying it.
When I flew, I flew that airplane. So when you were flying, you were the prime person on this plane, but you shared it with another junior pilot or just whoever? Well, yeah. I mean, somebody else flew it at maybe the next mission or something.
I didn’t fly it. But you got to have your name on it, huh? Yeah, but it was assigned to me. That was my airplane.
I didn’t know how they did that. See, I stayed there a long time, and so I got to be where I had my own plane. But like I say, it wasn’t solely my own plane, but just when I flew, I flew that airplane.
So where were you based from during the time you flew? Well, I started over in England, Christchurch, England, and then we went over to Normandy up there when they built some airstrips over there. We moved over there, and then I was at Saint-Isier, France. We was there during the winter, during the Battle of the Bulge, and then we went up to up in not Netherlands, but Belgium.
In the Belgium, we moved up there to support Montgomery’s one bridge too far thing up there on the north end. We supported that operation over there. And then we crossed on over.
I went over that Brumagen Bridge that they captured from the German across the Rhine. I went across it in a jeep. I didn’t fly down there.
I wanted to go underground. Then I went down into Germany and based over there, and from then I went to Regensburg, Germany. That was the last place where the war ended over there.
So that’s where the war ended when you were in Regensburg? Well, actually, I believe it was when we was at Kitzingen, because when we was at Kitzingen, Germany, we had a bunch of German pilots surrender. They brought their Falkuhl 490s, their best fighters. One of the top German aces was flying one of them and some Stuka dive bombers.
They were on the Russian front and they didn’t want to surrender to the Russians, so they flew back and surrendered at our base. And we had these German fighters over there, a couple of them, and I was just foaming at the mouth to fly one of those. And I could read German.
So I went out there and I checked myself. I took one of them up for a flight. They let you do it, huh? I flew a Falkuhl 490, one of the few people in the Air Force that did that, I’ll guarantee you.
But I didn’t stay up long because I needed somebody to explain the airplane to me, how the systems work. So after the red light started blinking at me, I said, Hey, I flew 117 missions and didn’t get killed. I don’t want to do it now.
So I brought it back home and landed it. What does that red light mean? Maybe I better take it. Well, I didn’t know.
I think it was a low fuel, because that’s what ours did. It had a number of tanks on it, and it seemed like that engine wasn’t used to this 150 octane gas that we were using. They had about 60 or 70 octane, so I didn’t fill all the tanks.
I thought I had the system figured out, and I kept me one tank of the German fuel for takeoff. I thought I changed tanks, but maybe I didn’t do it right. That tank kept going down and gave me that red signal.
I wasn’t getting the fuel out of the tanks that I serviced. Did the Army or the Air Corps interview you about it? Were they interested in your experience, or was that sort of on the out there? If I had gotten killed, I probably wouldn’t have gotten no insurance. However, I had the squadron commander.
He flew in a Thunderbolt next to me, and he had a camera. I got pictures of me flying it in there. I wasn’t picturing me flying it.
Most people don’t believe that I did that, but I got a picture. Of course, you can’t see me in it, but my crew chief painted my number from my airplane on that Focke-Wulf. They painted it just on that one, that G-9T.
That was on that Focke-Wulf on the side. You were G-19? I’m that G-9T on that one. That’s your identification number? I don’t know.
They identified the airplane. I kept flying that G-9T. I had to paint that on that German plane, that same number.
It’s a number for this one, but you just put it on there just so they know who you were. I believe I got a picture of it. When did you enter the Army Air Corps? I went to San Gabriel High School.
I graduated from Lutheran School in 1933. We moved from Thorndale, my parents did. That house I was telling you about, that you passed on, that bungalow house, where you went too far, there was one on the left.
After I hung up and said, hey, I was going to tell them, I kept telling them there was a house up there. I looked at it, but I didn’t tell them. Anyway, that’s where we lived.
My daddy bought that land and farmed it. I went to San Gabriel High School. In 1937, I graduated.
I helped my dad on the farm for a couple of years. In 1939, I enlisted in the Air Force. It was a $21 a month private.
Where did you enlist? Was it in San Antonio? I went to Taylor’s where they had a recruiting office. From there, I chose the Air Force as a branch. It was called the Army Air Corps then.
I was sent to Randolph in San Antonio, where I was stationed. Over there, I was an airplane mechanic. The Air Force was really building up for anticipation of the war.
There were lots of people coming. I was there in 1939. The Air Force was full of these old guys.
They were the dregs of the society. They had to go to the prostitutes every day. They came and so forth.
That’s the kind of people who were there. It wasn’t but about a year in the influx of all new people. It was still a volunteer thing.
It wasn’t a draft. They were all volunteers that came in. But the class of people got to be better that were there.
I got to be a crew chief. I had my own airplane and a crew chief. From there, I was an inspector.
When I got through for a lift there, I was an inspector. I’d inspect the airplanes. After the mechanics worked on them, I’d look them over before they were released to fly.
I was a squadron inspector. During the time I was there, I went to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on South Tressa. If I wasn’t here, I went to church over there and I met all the people.
I had a car, which was very rare in those days. You were popular. Yeah.
We’d go down to the young people. We’d go to church and after church. They’d all pile into my car and we’d go and they’d get us a hamburger and a drink.
I was in love with one of the girls over there, but she didn’t care for me. But that’s all right. It’s one of them stories.
From there… What was the unit you were with when you were the chief inspector? What was that? What unit was it that you were… I was in the base squadron. We took care of the transom airplanes that came in from… Randolph was a pilot training. So you weren’t necessarily assigned to a certain group or number? In a way, 90% of the people were working on the training planes that the cadets were learning to fly in.
I was in what they called the base flight. We had a bunch of old bombers and old cast-off airplanes over there that the pilots would fly for. They wanted to fly something besides that trainer.
We had B-18 bombers and we had B-10, Martin B-10 bombers. I had an observation plane… No, an attack plane, A-17 was the plane that I was working on. Anyway, I took an exam and it got me an aircraft mechanics reading which gave me a lot better pay.
I went up to $60 or $70 a month. I was a rich son of a gun. Anyway, in the course of events, the Air Force came out with the sergeant pilot program.
I tried the cadet program. I didn’t have any college. I was going to try to get to be a flying cadet.
I wanted to be one of the pilots. Instead of the mechanics. But I flunked the physical.
They had a very rigid physical cadet for that. They were going to be officers when I would graduate. I flunked that and then they came out with the sergeant pilot program.
I heard that they didn’t take the astigmatism test on that. I said, hey, I’ll try it once more. I did and I got selected.
I was already a staff sergeant. I’d gone to the rank of staff sergeant three years ago. That’s what they’re going to make out of me, a staff sergeant pilot.
But anyway, I was selected. I was one of the guys that got to go. They sent me out to Santa Ana, California for pre-flight.
From there I went to Hemet for primary flying. I went to Bakersfield, California for basic training. I went to Lukefield, Arizona for advanced flying.
That’s where I graduated and got my wings. About a month before I graduated, they cut the sergeant pilot program out. They made us all flight officers.
It wasn’t quite a second lieutenant, but we wore a blue bar. It was kind of like a warrant officer. So there was another move up from sergeant.
We got to be officers. Were you training on specific planes or just in general? No, these were all training planes. They had three different planes.
They had the primary plane, the Orion. Then at Bakersfield, the basic training was a Volte. It didn’t have retractable gear.
It didn’t have automatic pop. Then I went to Luke with a T-6. They advertised you to take a flight and fly in the paper.
They’d take you up for a flight. That was a T-6. That’s what the advanced trainer was.
It had a retractable gear and had an automatic prop on it. It had a gun in it. We fired gunnery in it.
Not for shooting anybody. It was for target practice. I learned to shoot.
Anyway, in December of 1942, I graduated and got my pilot wing. I was all hipped up to get into a fighter squadron. What happened? They sent me to Las Vegas, Nevada.
There we flew gunners, trained gunners that flew the B-17 gunners. Do you train people? My job was to take them flying, let them shoot at a target. You were training the gunners who weren’t to fly.
You were piloting. They were shooting. We had the same old plane that I flew in advance at Luke, that T-6, that they’d take you flying for a couple of hundred dollars and that lasted a day if you wanted to.
We had a gun in the back, a 30-caliber machine gun. We’d fly at somebody’s auto target. Sometimes I’d fly gunner.
Anyway, I stayed there and did that. Oh, man, we got so much time, didn’t we? They made us say, that’s too many hours. You can’t fly that many hours.
I built up a lot of hours. We’d go and fly until about 4 o’clock. We’d dogfight all the way out there.
Them poor gunners, I don’t know. That’s all. They’d all get sick on the way out there.
They’d hit out the barf bags. They’d let them through. This was December of 1942 when you… This was in 1943 now.
The war in Pearl Harbor was what, December of 1941? I believe it was 1941. The war had begun. This is during the war, you’re training for flying.
Yeah. Some of my classmates went to fighter. Some went to undergraduate.
Some went to bomber. Some went to transport. Different things.
Mine happened to go to Las Vegas to teach gunners. Did they have a number or any kind of squadron number or anything? No, over there we were just sort of in a pool. They had… I hate Las Vegas.
That was a bad town. We had no air conditioning. Las Vegas ain’t cool in the summer out there.
It’s cool. Well, we had heat in the winter, but I wasn’t there that much in the winter. Anyway, it was hotter than a firecracker out there.
They had all kinds of things for the gunners to train on. It was really unique. They had these ball turrets that they had on the bottom of the bombers.
They had the top turrets. They had them mounted on the back of trucks. The turret itself.
The gunners would get in that. They had a railroad track a couple of miles this way and that way. In the front they had a dirt barrier so you couldn’t hit the train, but it carried a flag up on top.
They didn’t make this triangle thing. These guys would be sitting in these turrets and shoot at that track going around like that. In the air, of course, we flew them in this little T-6 is what it was.
They had a 30-caliber, and we shot at a target that we towed. Later on, when I first got there, it was real primitive. They didn’t have much equipment or anything, but they needed gunners so bad, and they needed them trained better than they had been.
So they really put the bucks into that and sent B-17s with turrets on them, and one of the B-26s stripped to two targets where they could tow them at a higher speed than we could just barely fly with them, you know, just towing them with them little airplanes. But anyway, I didn’t get into that. But I want to tell you that they had one thing that I really thought was neat.
They had one of these turrets. It was a Morton Baker turret. It was a little bit smaller type turret, and they put a Browning shotgun in it, and you’d shoot skeet with that thing.
Officially or unofficially? Yeah, they’d shoot the bird that came out, and you’d track it with a turret and shoot that shotgun at that turret, which was really neat. It was just a plain Browning automatic shotgun in there, but it worked. It was instead of the machine gun that did that, and it was really good practice for them.
The thing is, they had to learn, just like a pilot has to learn, that you want to go there, you go there. You don’t think that you’ve got to put the stick, you’ve got to put the rod. You don’t think about that.
The same way the gunner had to be. He didn’t have to think, I’ve got to push this lever, that lever. It had to come automatic, you know.
You just look at the target, and your reactions are that you’re going to get there. So that’s what the training was. Anyway, I was there a little over a year at Las Vegas, and I was real unhappy over there.
And I wrote a letter to the commanding general that I wanted to go to a fighter unit, and I was the only pilot that ever got out of there that went to a fighter unit. It worked. Yeah.
And then I got sent to Norfolk, Virginia, and that’s where I took fighter training. And what year or month was that? Huh? What month or year was that? That was the beginning of 1944. Like early, early… That was before the D-Day invasion.
Okay. Anyway, I was there in the wintertime. I must have got there about February, and did my training.
And I went over to Queen Elizabeth. Oh, really? Yeah. Of course, it wasn’t even tourist class.
It was bunk stacked up to the top. But we got to eat in the mess in the dining room, the officers did, and we got served by the English waiters and so forth. And they ate the kippers for breakfast.
Kipper dairy. Oh, yeah? Did it sail out of New York, or where did you eat? It went out of New York, and it went over there. In five or six days, we made it to Scotland.
It went without an escort. It put the coal to it, and the subs couldn’t catch it. So we went across without any escort or anything, and it was a beautiful ship.
I’m sure they said that it sank down there. They burned it up or something. Anyway, I got over there.
Where did you land in Scotland? I landed at Glasgow. And from there, I went to a couple of weeks of training at a base in England. They finally told us, now you can get in this fighter and do anything you think you’re big enough to do.
Oh, really? Yeah. And so, anyway, from then, I went down to Christchurch, England. That’s down on the southern coast, near Bournemouth Coast, on the Isle of Wight.
It was right on the English Channel down there. That’s where our base was. That’s a beautiful church.
Christchurch is a beautiful place. Anyway, from there, I started flying. That was before D-Day.
And I don’t know. I had, I guess, about two or three weeks of flying. Then on D-Day, I flew two missions on D-Day.
Did you know about D-Day in advance? No. We knew it was coming sometime. Okay.
They was about to sink that island, England, on that end for the equipment they had sitting down over there. So there was preparation that you could see? What? You knew about all the preparation of other… Oh, yeah. We could see it when it flew into the land.
So many units in there, the whole… See, we had a… Everybody else got to be on a nice air base. We didn’t even get an air base. We had a pasture for them fighters.
Okay. The Horsa Glider Company that the English built, the Horsa Glider, we was part of that, where they built the glider. And we used a grass strip over there.
They put steel mesh, not planking like you have, but just plain wire mesh, like concrete reinforcement mesh all over the base to keep us from sinking into the mud. Because we weighed seven tons. That’s what that fighter weighed.
And we had no runway. And on D-Day, we drew an odd mission. They were afraid the German submarines were going to come in there and mess up the convoy going across over the invasion.
So they had B-24 patrol bombers over there, anti-submarine-type planes. And then they said, Well, the German looked like they were going to come shoot them down. So we need some fighter escorts.
So we flew escorting those bombers to keep the fighters out. There was no fighter show. All we did was put holes in the air all day long.
Anyway, but we came in. I was on the second—the first two flights going out there. And on the last one, we came in at 12 o’clock at night, pitch dark.
No runway lights, no runways. You coming back to England? Yeah, coming in from the mission. So they took two Jeeps and put them on, turned on the headlights and said, Land between the lights.
And that old P-47, when there’s a gear way out there, you can do anything to it. It would land. So we all made it on.
Landed. Wow. Anyway, but from then on, we were there in Normandy on my strip for, I don’t know, for a number of months.
Then we went to Saint-Denis, France. There was an old German air base that the Germans had taken over. Was there a name of that first one you were in Normandy? A name of it? A town nearby? I have it someplace.
I don’t know. It was just—they had a number on them, like A so and so and so and that. I have it on.
Anyway, from over in Saint-Denis, we flew until after the Battle of the Bulge. I flew my first leading squadron, a squadron leader, to help the 101st over at Bastogne when the Germans had them surrounded there at Bastogne. I flew a mission in support of that.
It was my first time in the air. That was terrible because it was all snow. Everything was nothing but snow.
The roads were all covered. Everything was covered with snow, and navigation is terrible. You got nothing.
Everything’s white, and you still wanted to check. I was glad when that was over because I didn’t want to hit no American troops because of not knowing where you’re at. So anyway, from then, like I said, we went up to Belgium, and we stayed in a— I don’t know what they named it, Masaryk or something was the name of that place.
We stayed in a Belgian school. That’s what we used for barracks, and we had steel planks out in the mud for takeoffs. Better than this.
It rained a lot. I know. I was an assistant.