Are you interested in this war stuff? Yeah, oh yeah, that’s part of what I wanted to call. Oh, well, I can detail that a little bit more and describe some of the more interesting missions. So anyway, like I said, we went up there to support Montgomery on his trip up down to northern Germany.
When we were at Saint-Isier, I made some missions. One of them, we bombed the old forts over at Metz that used to be part of the Marginaux line, the French line, and the Germans took it over to the Israelis. Anyway, we went there.
One of the missions was with the German headquarters that we were supposed to hit. And when I came off the target and dropped my bomb, I got hit by a shell right in the fuselage ahead of me. And the P-47, that is a fuel tank in front of you, and you sit on the fuel tank in back of you.
It had no wing fuel. It was all in the fuselage and you sat right in the middle of it. Of course, they had self-sealing tanks on them and we had some armor plates.
But anyway, a shell came in and hit me right ahead of the wing where the wing comes out. And I looked out and I saw the fuel just pouring over the top of my wing from that hit. And I was only about 100 feet off the ground when this happened.
Anyway, I decided it didn’t catch on fire and it was still running, so I just headed for home. And I made it home and landed wheels down. That’s amazing.
Yes, it is. But they had to salvage the airplane. It was a brand-new airplane.
First mission it was on. Because where they hit, it weakened the structure in there where the frame supports on the wing. And they had to salvage the parts of it, but it never flew another mission.
They had to take the engine off and put it somewhere. Well, yeah, the wings and everything like that, but they couldn’t use it as an airplane. And another mission where it missed, we were bombing, I don’t know, something on the ground.
And we were using delayed, 8-second delay fuses on the bomb. We were doing it low. We didn’t dive bomb.
We did level bombing. You were low to the ground or just? I would say 100, 200 feet off the ground. Okay, so you weren’t way up.
No, we were down low. And the first flight went in and dropped the bomb, and the flight leader that I was in, he came in a little too soon with us. When we dropped, just as we got over the target, remember, the bombs went off.
And the bricks and everything kept flying up. And it went through a black explosion that I went through. And it flew all right.
And I got home and they had to take all the bricks out of the engine. Oh, no. You flew it all the way back to the bricks.
Yeah. That’s the one thing about the Thunderbolt. It was a tank, flying tank.
It was real heavy, but it was hard to bring down. And it was real heavy. It didn’t have a liquid-cooled engine.
The P-51 I was telling you about took our role of supporting the bombers. It had a Merlin liquid-cooled engine. And any little .30 caliber shot into that radiator and it’s through because you lose your liquid and then you lose the engine.
Burn your engine up. It can’t fly. But these here could take flight.
Before we moved to France, while we were still in England, I was on a mission. They gave the Germans an ultimatum to surrender the Cherbourg Peninsula and they didn’t do it. So they sent in everything they had, from light, medium bombers to the fighters.
We went in on one side of Cherbourg Peninsula. It was supposed to go across and shoot at anything that you think might be a target. Well, we were down on the ground, real low, and I was strafing them hedgerows and things like that.
And I got hit. And the minute it hit me, it was a hit in the engine, all the oil just came right over the windshield. I couldn’t see a thing, so I had to open the canopy and look out the side.
Wow. And I knew they were building airstrips. They had an invasion.
But this was a peninsula. The Germans weren’t surrendering up north of that place. And they were building an airstrip down there.
And I said, Hey, maybe I can land this thing over there. And I knew that I didn’t have an engine for long, that oil was going to go out and it was going to be gone. And they had the bulldozers still working on the runways, and they got off.
And I was going to come in to make a landing. And there in P-38, it’s a twin-boomed Lockheed. A guy, he was hit, too.
And he came in from one end and landed with the gear up on that thing, tore up about half of the runway. And I said, I still got to get down. So I went around the other way and I dropped my gear and I landed it safe and sound.
Hit it before I hit that P-38. I was stopped. Did your engine survive? Huh? Did your engine, was your engine gone? They probably should have put in a new engine.
I don’t even know whether the airplane survived, but it was an interesting thing going on. So what did you do once you were down? Did they come pick you up? Yeah, I had a transporter flying back. I went back to my base, and that night I was back home.
But it was an interesting thing. I was flying on the squadron commander’s wing. I was his wingman.
And we were strafing the hedgerows. And see, when I went one way, I couldn’t see him here. And he pulled up real fast, and I didn’t anticipate.
And I saw my tracers go right through his wing. Wow. And right after that, I got hit.
So I just, but after I got to be a… He didn’t shoot back, did he? I didn’t see none, but later on, and I had a little rank in the outfit, and it was Blackburn, Major Blackburn was his name. We had parties at night a lot of times with the booze and so forth, and the nurses would come over for dances and so forth. I’d tell them, Hey, Major Blackburn, remember when we went over Cherbourg on that trip that time when we were strafing everything? And he said, Yeah, only time I ever got hit.
And I said, Guess who did that? He didn’t know? No. And I told him it was me. And I saw them tracers go through his wing.
And he said, Yeah. And he almost got mad, and he said, Oh, I forgot about it. The poor guy got killed there.
He was a squadron commander, and he got killed. So that was in the first few days after the D-Day invasion, right? No, no. This was maybe two or three.
They didn’t break out of that Normandy so easy. The Germans was really… Did they go to Cherbourg first or earlier? No, Cherbourg, you see, we landed back in Omaha Beach, and all of those were back there. Cherbourg sticks way on out.
There’s a peninsula that sticks out. And the Germans were holding, boy, man, they had some force on that son of a gun. The Germans were holding out on that end.
We had crossed it, cut them off. They were cut off, but they wouldn’t give up. Cherbourg is up on the tip, so they were holding out up there.
They were holding on at the whole peninsula was sticking out there. Now you had a… Until your plane went down, do you fly back to England each day? I mean, when you’re trip, or do you have a land… Well, once they got an airstrip built, we moved over there, in the apple orchard over there. Was that on the Cherbourg Peninsula side, or was it over by Normandy? No, we were down in St. Mary Glees is the name of the town.
It’s where that paratrooper got hung on a church steeple. That was before, and that’s when the paratroopers were in there. But that’s where we were.
Our base was right there at St. Mary Glees. You’ve got Cherbourg Peninsula here, and then it comes around, and La Havre, and then it goes back down. Our base was right in there.
There were several of them in there, more than one. So they were constructing those pretty quickly, to get in there. When they first came over, the engineers were right on the back, coming in behind the troops.
We fought a lot of times. I flew missions from there. It was practically over the enemy lines when you took off.
They were right there. We’d hear the shells at night. We were far enough back where they couldn’t.
We didn’t get any shelling from them. We were right up close to the front lines. That was the one that we stayed there.
Tim went to Saint-Duzier, France. Oh, it was a cold, cold winter. It was one of the coldest winters they had over there.
Where is Saint-Duzier? Is it down in… It’s from Paris, southeast, down there. Metz is further on. Let me ask you something about between time here.
Do you know about Operation Cobra? The breakout? Yeah, yeah. I guess I told you my uncle was killed as they were bombing, the carpet bombing. Oh, yeah.
That old, what’s-his-name got killed. I was there in Normandy when that happened. McNair or somebody like that? Yeah.
He was up front and they were real close. Yeah, the first railroad bombers came over and dropped, and then the wind blew the dervish over and they couldn’t see the ground. They said, oh, well, this is where they bombed.
They bombed, but it had moved over the American side and killed an awful lot of Americans. I was there when it happened. I wasn’t on a flight there, but I was there on that day.
It was just maybe 100 miles from where we were at. Because he was in the artillery and they were ready to go on through. Of course, that was the opening, I guess, for Patton to go on through.
And it worked, although we had this new path. Oh, yeah, it really missed. I mean, there was a big boo-boo there.
That was one of the things about the war. He’s buried at the big Omaha Beach Cemetery, the big American cemetery there. My son wanted me to go up there.
I made it a couple of years ago, and it was an anniversary. I didn’t know, but I should have went, I guess. You were on the ground, so you weren’t actively involved.
You weren’t part of that mission or opening that breakout. No, no, we weren’t involved. We didn’t have no cover or anything.
I just turned in on the radio and was recording on it. So then as Patton went through, and of course they’re using tanks and they’re not on cavalry, on horses anymore. So you said earlier that you did a little cover for Patton.
Yeah. Was that there, or was that further down? That’s all the way across. You see, Patton went through and just disregarded his right flank.
There was the Loire River down there, and there was a whole lot of German troops in there, and we was keeping them at bay. To keep them from hitting his flanks on the side. He was going on down, and he got into, where was it? Anyway, he ran out of fuel down there.
And they finally stopped, and they ought to supply. The Germans counterattacked him down there. And he sent out the planes.
He needed some planes to stop the Germans. And the weather was terrible. It was no flying.
There was no flying, hardly, in that weather. It was so bad. And he told them, and the Air Force generals told him, that we can’t fly.
And he said, you’re going to. And we were the first squadron called out. You flew them out? I wasn’t on.
We rotated. We had two different, one bunch flew 24 hours, and then the next bunch flew 24 hours. Did that squadron have a number or any kind of identification? I was the 509th squadron.
We were the 405th group, and we had the 509th, 510th, and 511th squadrons, three squadrons. And anyway, our squadron was the first one called out that morning. And they flew through that weather, and they were successful in slowing the Germans down.
And then the weather got a little better later on, and the other two squadrons went out and stopped that counterattack. So the Germans were more on the west side of, you said, the right flank. He was going north and south.
In other words, he got stopped down in France before he got in town. He said right flank, he’s coming down from the north, so it wouldn’t be western part of France that the Germans were still occupying. And it was down there.
I don’t know just where it was at anymore. Anyway, we got the presidential unit citation for that, our group did, for that flight. Wow.
I was going to tell you, if you were a pilot assigned to our outfit, and you came in there, of three pilots assigned, the outfit two went home. That’s our characteristic. Oh, you mean the one third didn’t make it, huh? Yeah.
So for every three, one of them didn’t make it home. Okay, and your squadron? Of all of them. Well, of the unit, of our unit, there were four fifths.
It’s one out of three that didn’t make it home. That’s not as bad as bomber people. They didn’t have it that good.
Was the bomber 50-50? I would imagine so. You see, a lot of people don’t realize that the Air Force, in World War II, flying over Germany, the German theater, not the Pacific, we lost more people than the whole Vietnam War of all branches. We lost 60,000 people.
And the Vietnam War, the casualties were about 58,000 of all services. Just the European theater exceeded Vietnam. I mean, European theater casualties were more.
Just the Air Force. Oh, just the Air Corps at all. Just the Air Force.
Wow. Lost more people. Oh, the ground troops, we lost terribly more.
D-Day took them. It was awful. And then, you know, Okinawa and some of those over there.
But, I mean, just the flying end of it in Europe took more casualties than the whole Vietnam War. I used to escort the bombers, and that was pitiful. We’d fly out here, and they had to go through the flak, anti-aircraft, and, boy, you’d see them just, black smoke just rolling down, parachutes coming out.
It was awful. I don’t see how, I don’t know if I’d have had enough nerve to fly that kind of a mission. That took some nerve to do that, I’ll tell you.
Because their casualties were terrible. Did they fly out of England? They flew out of England. They flew out of England, and you’d pick them up if you were going with them? Well, we were in England at first when we did the escort.
In fact, one of my, about the second or third mission that I was on, we were going to escort bombers all the way down into Germany. I forgot what town. And the whole group was going to go.
And we had terrible weather that day, that morning. We had two gas tanks, one under each wing, extra fuel. External? Huh? External fuel tanks? Yeah, droppable tanks.
They made them out of paper. English didn’t think of anything. But it was about 150 gallons in each one.
And anyway, we was going to take the whole group on this mission. And it was about my second or third mission, and I flew. And we took off, and we wasn’t in soup.
Oh, man, we were hardly airborne. And right away, we formed up underneath the cloud, and we flew four-plane flights, a leader and a wingman in another two-man flight. Well, to keep the sky from being so full of airplanes in the collision, they flew flying instruments.
They flew the whole flight at one time. The leader flew instruments, and we tucked in there and flew on his wing. But it got so thick, you had to overlap wings to see him in there.
And we were taking off, and we hit icing. And I got a kind of a break in there. I looked around, and I said, in front of my machine gun, there’s that much ice on each one of them.
And the wing was covered in ice. And I was nearly at full throttle trying to keep in formation with the leader. And we finally broke out at about 30,000 feet.
Oh, we broke out on top of this overcast line. And I would never have believed it, but the whole group got together. We found each other after flying through all of that instrument.
These were just you guys, the fighters, and you got up together, and did you pick up them? Oh, we went way down before you picked up the bombers. Okay, the bombers. Hundreds of miles away.
You still haven’t joined up with the bombers yet. Anyway, we finally got together, and we flew on top of this overcast. Are you in radio contact with each other enough? We had radio with each other, but that’s all we had.
We had no navigational equipment on board, none, except the compass. All you could do is ask or check in and out that you were still there. Well, I wasn’t concerned with that.
I was just flying into flight, man. I don’t know how they got together with the bombers. Anyway, we picked up the bomber, and when we got down over there a little way before we got to the target, one of the guys in our flight couldn’t get fuel out of one of his wingtangs.
And so we had to abort, and we left. And they don’t just send the whole flight back in case the German fighters would pick you up if you’re flying single out there. So all four of us took off and headed back for England.
And one of the wingmen couldn’t get fuel out of one of his tangs. And so we started back. Well, here was that overcast over at England, and we decided with all being low on fuel, we didn’t want to get caught on top of that overcast and try to find our way down through it.
So we stayed under that. It was clear over in Germany, but it was picked up as overcast. We stayed underneath it.
Well, it got lower and lower and lower. And by the time we got over there to the Talais, where the Germans were expecting the invasion, they had guns on the ground just sitting side by side. And I was flying on the right wing of the leader, and they had two other planes on that side.
And here was the North Sea, just parallel on that North Sea. Boy, they were peppering me. Them red streaks was coming by there all the time.
And I said, you know, we don’t fly tight formations when we do the leaders. Spread them way out so you can see a German. You’ve got to be able to look around, not just watch the leader that you’re flying formations.
And I said, you know, if I go out here about a mile or so, I’d be out over the North Sea. And I wouldn’t have to be over here over that beachhead where all the guns were firing at me. So I pulled over and did a right turn.
And I saw all these guns down there. I just turned on my machine guns and raked through all of them. And I went over the top of them.
And they peppered me. Oh, Lord. I was right on the water.
I wasn’t 10 feet off the water. Oh, really? I was right on the ground. And I was just pulling, you know, evasive action.
I was just pulling white streamers off of my wingtips trying to get there. I mean, the red bullets was going by me all over the place. And I finally got out.
I got hit several times while I was in there. And I finally got out of range of them. And I leveled off.
And about that time, the flight leader, he was crossing over and looked over there. And it was black when they were shooting at him. And he was coming out over the North Sea.
And the other two went further on. And they didn’t hit it as bad. They got out pretty easy.
The leader got the worst? I got the worst and the leader, too. Anyway, I got over there. And the flight leader is going to call.
He saw what I went through. And he called to see whether it was okay. And when I answered, he said, I gave him my call.
Red, too. And he said, that’s all. The radio went out.
He said, oh, boy. He went into the brink right there. And so he called the Air Sea Rescue.
Anyway, I made it across the English Channel there. And it was real low and foggy. And I almost ran into these barrage balloons over these ships.
Those cables there. That’s what they’re for. To keep airplanes out.
So I made it through them. Wow. And when I got to England, there was an airbase right there.
And I landed right there. And I got stopped. And it was English.
They were making tea over there, offering me some tea. And I tried to get a call home that I made it. And I couldn’t get a call to get to my base.
English telephones were terrible in them days. Anyway, I decided, you know, they’re going to be worried about me. And so I looked out there.
And I had a wing with a piece of metal in the gap where the shell hit. The big piece was gapped up open. And I asked the guy, he got a hacksaw.
And he said, yeah. I went over and I cut that piece off with a hacksaw. And I crawled in the back end to see that none of my controls were damaged.
And I said, y’all got any fuel? And he said, yeah. So they filled me up, and I flew it home. Well, you were a mechanic.
I mean, you knew how to take care of planes, so you could check them out. Huh? You knew how to, you were a mechanic on planes. You knew you could check it.
I was pretty good at it, so. Anyway, I flew it back home. And when I got home, the squadron commander, I mean, the flight commander that I saw getting all that flack, when he came across the channel, there was another base.
They had a lot of bases there for these bombers that were crippled to land. There was one, and on the approach, his engine froze up. They’d shot all the oil out of it.
And the plop stopped, and he made the landing. Oh. Wow.
So that’s how flying went. Both of you just barely got across. Yeah.
Well, I was still flying all right, but I was out of gas, just about out of gas. You probably needed a little bit of relief from the tension you were under, too. Well, anyway, we made it out of that.
But that was my third mission indoctrination. Wow. You were a pro then.
Anyway, it was interesting. Now, was that plane the same plane here that you flew? What plane was that? Oh, no. I mean, was it the same type? It was the same type.
Okay, but not the same plane. It was not the same plane. I didn’t get one of these fancy bubbles until I got up.
See, that’s got a bubble canopy on it, where the other ones were humped. They called them humpbacks. You couldn’t see back.
They changed the plane design and called them a bubble canopy on it where you could see out the back. The other one was a metal thing. We called them humpbacks.
That’s the only one they had when I first started over there. They were all humpbacks. So this was after D-Day that you flew through the Le Havre? Did you say Le Havre was where you flew with all of them? No, this was before D-Day.
This was before D-Day. So did you get the Germans all excited? They thought that it was coming or something? Well, they were down there and they didn’t like to get shot at. I guess they were trying to get rid of any kind of planes.
Well, yeah, they sure didn’t let anything come over. Anyway, that’s it. Now, when you went over to the town or where they were, were you that low? I mean, were you so low they couldn’t even see you right over them? When they were shooting you, you said you were about 10 feet off the water.
Was that a little bit after you passed them? Well, I was… Once you get down low, you’re nearly better off to get real low. That’s what I’m saying. Almost too low for them to crank their… Well, not that, but you move… They have to swing their guns a lot faster to pick you up.
Having 100 feet is no advantage.