Somebody was a carpenter or something. Yeah, that’s what he did the rest of his life. He built fine homes in Seattle.
He’s still alive today. I talked to him once in a while. But he’s in real bad shape right now.
And there was a German supply depot right near our base. And that winter was the coldest winter in Europe in I don’t know how many years. And it was all living in tents.
But at this supply depot, Germans had prefab buildings there. It came in panels, double-walled with fiberglass insulation. That’s where I learned what fiberglass was.
Yeah, it itches. Anyway, there was poodles of them over there. And Hank was a carpenter.
And I was his best friend. And so the CO said, we wanted to build a barracks for us to live in. And they said, OK, we’ll let you have it.
We had a bomb trailer we could use, haul it with. And you go over there, and you build you one. But you’ve got to build us an officer’s club.
And they were good-sized buildings. We built us one. And for us, we had to put support in it.
So several of us lived in it. But then we took, we quit flying combat for about two weeks to build you on a carpenter’s spree. And we hauled us two of those sets.
And they were just a single roof going on like this, shed-type thing. But we put two of them and put them together, joined them in the cinder. And we made us an officer’s club, a dining hall and an officer’s club out of that.
And so Hank and I worked on it all putting that. They went together pretty quick. You know, there were panels there.
I made them. They’re made to go in. Yeah.
So we put them all in there. And I know somebody wanted it for electricity. And we found different talent now to do different things.
And we needed one of the bars, a nice big bar. Well, so we, they said, well, they went down to the supply. And they got a box with a P-47 propeller in it.
Well, we put the box into the propeller and all was still in the box. That was our bar. And we had, oh, we had dancers in there.
And I had a nurse, army nurses would come by and visit us. And we’d have parties there. Of course, there was a lot of stag parties.
There were lots of liberated booze we got to take care of. And we had French cooks. I would find some French cooks.
And they did a pretty good job. Given what they had to work with. Except when Patton was real, using up all the supplies, there was very little anybody else was getting.
And we didn’t get much, you know, more. And the only thing we had was Vienna sausages. And one of the cooks asked me, what can you do with these things? And we had them French cooks stuffed with Vienna sausages.
What to do? I’m not sure that’s food. They weren’t either. Anyway, it was fun.
But we had, it snowed there, and it froze there. It was cold, the coldest winter they had in, I don’t know how long. I know the CO was in a tent.
We were living in insulated bergs. We did a pretty good job. I know Morgan was one of the pilots.
And he was a transfer pilot, he was a P-51 pilot. And they, I don’t know why the units quit, and they send you over. And he came up to the 47s with us.
And he was quite a character. There was two Morgans. They both were 51 pilots, came over there.
And one of them had a big, big mustache. And oh, God, no, he’s a raunchy, raunchy guy. And one of them came in drunk, then.
We had little old stoves, as I know. They had to use this damn coke. You know what coke is? It’s cold when the oil, the gas is taken out.
If you ever get it going, it would burn like a terrible hot flame, you know. It’d heat up the stoves. I think they used it to make iron.
Right, right. Refining of iron, well, that’s what they used for fuel a lot. That little old kid.
And I remember him drunk. He was big off iron. So he had a skillet over there.
And he finally threw the eggshells and all. And made him scramble the eggshells and all. Oh, and here’s a curse.
Here’s one of our roommates. I had about, well, we shared about four. And we’re getting a petition of two sides.
And Hank and I, and Walt Cunning, my good friend, and Brian, and Harry, both of those kids killed. And we lived on one side. I’m so glad I had that thing, to live in that way.
And, you know, see, we was there for, that’s when the German Battle of the Bulge started. And we couldn’t fly. It was the weather was slow, terrible, and we couldn’t get off the ground.
And, you know, the 101st Infantry got airborne, got caught up with Bastogne. And we were surrounded, turned around and went along. Yeah.
And my first mission to lead the group, not the group, the squadron, was in support of the 101st over there. And God knows that I have held it. Everything was snowed, was covered, everything.
And we didn’t have nothing to navigate, but look at the maps and see where you’re at. Yeah, try to identify the roads. And it’s just a visual.
And I said, oh, damn, and there wasn’t no snow down there. And I had hell of trying to find Bastogne. Everybody was following you.
You know, I was leading the outfit. And then they gave me some coordinates to the bomb. And, jeez, I don’t know what I helped them any amount.
It was a horrible mission to break in on. I know that. And I bet landing wouldn’t have been fun either.
No. Finding the runway. We didn’t have no eyes on the runway.
Oh, OK. It was a hell of a tour north of us. Well, it wasn’t quite as bad.
I don’t think it wasn’t flyable or whatever. It was real marginal flying on this mission. We were the first ones who flew after.
It was right after Christmas when this happened. I know we had to scare them. We were about to pull out of there.
The Germans had a big air offensive going at the same time. We were afraid we might get bombed over there. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Had to take precautions for that. Anyway, that’s how that went.
That was their last big push. Yeah. They were through after that pretty well.
You know, Patton, he wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to stay put down there while the other ones were fighting up north. He was down in the south end.
We were supporting him mostly. He somehow or another got him a couple of boats across the Rhine. He got across the Rhine before the rest of them did.
He wasn’t even supposed to be pushing down there. He was a kind of maverick in that outfit. Yeah.
That’s what I understand. He got things done. You know, all the way across France.
So many sad things happened there, too. I know how intense their enormity at the Strip. And I know when the 3rd Army landed over there in enormity and they moved the unit in.
It was past our base there. It all day and all night, the 3rd Army. That’s how big it was, the tanks and trucks and everything.
Driving by? Went by from day and night, one after the other. And they were getting ready for a St. Louis breakthrough with the Germans were holding them, keeping us from breaking out over there. And we had a big buildup over there to make the breakthrough.
And they were going to start the breakout with a big, heavy bomb raid. Hit the Germans there where the breakpoint was. Well, the first group of bombers came over and dropped a bomb.
Probably hit where they were supposed to hit, but it was a south wind blow-up. And all the dervish and smoke rifted. And so the rest of the units couldn’t see the grass.
They said, oh, well, here’s where they bombed, so they dropped it. Well, it knocked the Americans out of the way, I think. And really, they nearly stopped that whole push.
We stopped ourselves. Yeah. The gentleman got killed on that.
He was one of the guys that got killed. But they made the breakthrough. And from then on, after they got through with the Germans and everything congregated up there, and they had to build back defenses back to that.
And once Patton broke through that, he just rode day and night with his tank. He didn’t pay. All the whole southern end is flanked on the south.
He didn’t have nobody protecting his flanks except us. And we’d fly patrols there and take care of anything. And he didn’t have no window attacks from the south.
He made it all the way across France. We were the southern flanks, fellas. And I don’t know.
Sometimes we’d get up to come out. We brought down about eight ships is all. We wouldn’t send a big outfit out there.
And we’d pick them up. We was in contact with them over the radio. And I know one morning, they was all huddled up over there.
And we was ready to go fight. And we called them, and they said, they’re still eating breakfast. So we had to circle around.
They got ready to crank the tanks up and start going again. I was an introvert. We’d go fly up in front of them.
We’d see anything that looked like it needed shooting. We’d shoot it. And that helped him a whole lot getting across there.
Oh, yeah. He didn’t have to get distracted by fighting. Well, it was hard for them to get a concentration of defenses against him that way.
We could keep them pretty well scattered up there. Right. It worked out fine.
You know, it was never, never planned to be like that. The Thunderbolt was not built to be a dive bomber. No.
Not at all. That’s the least thing it was built for. It was meant to be high altitude.
Yeah. And all those super charges. Because, boy, we had to carry two 500-pound bombs.
And we’d see our targets down there. And I had my way picked on doing it. I’d see, like, this is my target.
It went to fly around 10,000, 12,000 feet. And I’d wait until that target went by my back wing. And I could see it down there.
And I’d pull that old Thunderbolt up and stalled it right up there to kill all the speed that I could on it. And then it flopped right in. So you had speed immediately.
Yeah. Going down, it had no problem. Whoo! It picked up speed so dang fast.
And you had to be careful because you had to make sure you started pulling out in time. Because that booger ate up the altitude in a hurry. Yeah.
And you had to pull out pretty hard. There’s lots of blackout out on the pull-outs. And I couldn’t bombsight the rivet up there on the collie.
You know how accurate we were. Yeah. Accidentally, we’d hit a target occasionally.
But it scared the hell out of them. Yeah, I bet it did. So if you rolled over and see a target, we’d use a rivet on a collie to kind of line up on.
And I’d get it down. The steeper you could make your dive, the little more accuracy you got out of it. When you start pulling out and you start dropping, it really, really spreads out.
So I tried to drop one at a pretty steep angle. But, boy, I tell you, you had to pull like hell to get that judge that right that you didn’t fly to the ground. Couldn’t you fly so fast that your control surfaces wouldn’t work anymore? Yeah, you could go in there.
Compressibility, they called it. Which was the speed of sound. But that generally happened from a high dive.
You couldn’t quite pick that up on a short dive. But if you were taking 20,000 feet or something for a dive point, you could hit that pretty quick. That’s like flying a plane at high altitude.
Well, those planes at high altitude, like up around 30,000 feet and above. You’re just barely flying. You’re just barely staying airborne.
Yeah, there’s hardly any air. Yeah, the airspeed is just about 150 miles an hour. That’s all you can get on it.
And the slightest little turn, you’re a little tight. You just stall out and it turns. Dogfights up there were very gentle.
You didn’t do no fast flying around up there. You were just barely flying. You see, our Thunderbolt was a turbo supercharger.
And the air came in and ducked in the front, and went by you on each side, which was great. It went back to the turbo, which is right in front of the tail wheel. It ducked the exhaust back to the turbine.
And then the compressed air came back on another set of ducts on the side of us, and they had intercoolers to cool that. Because you need compression, it gets hot. So they had intercoolers up there.
And that made for a lot of ducting and so forth. But it turned out to be pretty good. That gave us double walls.
Some of that 20-millimeter flak that had hit us had exploded, and that second wall kind of kept it out of the cockpit a little longer. You know, it was an extra protection to us. But anyway, the RPM on that turbine had a max of 25,000 revolutions a minute.
After that, it would go to pieces if you turned it any faster. So we could get full power on that engine. That turbine would keep us at 100% power up to 20,000 feet.
It could maintain the pressure on the carburetor. But after that, you started to lose. The turbine would quit going any faster, and you’d start losing air and horsepower on your engine.
When it was up to 30,000 feet, you weren’t getting 2,200 horsepower anywhere near that anymore. Well, you never flew any bomber escort, did you? Huh? Did you ever fly bomber escort, ever? Oh, yeah. Oh, you did fly bomber.
Oh, yeah, I flew about five or six of them. That’s ugly, too. Oh, man, I tell you, that poor devil.
Man, we’d get up there, and we’d stay up there over 30,000 feet. We’d stay a little higher than them. There were around 30,000 in their formations.
We never had any German fighter attacks, but we would escort them in case they were. Yeah. And, God, when they hit the initial point, the pilot quits flying the airplane.
The bombardier takes over and flies automatic. The bombsight flies automatic. And they have to go from the checkpoint to the bomb drop.
They couldn’t make no turn, no altitude change. It was a straight flight. They all made minor corrections.
And the German knew where that point was, and they could concentrate them damn A.D.A.s. The sky had turned black, explosions in black. I saw them old bombers go into that. Gee.
I don’t see how in the hell they did that. Boy, I’d see them come out of the wings, coming off, on fire, spiraling down. And we’d watch to see how many parachutes were coming out of them.
And we just didn’t bother. Well, yeah. There wasn’t any danger.
You didn’t need to go there. But it was not a pretty thing to watch. Yeah, I didn’t realize you had done some of that.
Oh, yeah, I did about. I escorted 17s and 24s. Oh, that one mission I got shot up so bad it was I didn’t make it to the rendezvous with the bombers.
But one of the guys couldn’t get fuel, and we had to abandon the abort and came home. That’s when I got up shot up so bad there and coming back into England. But what we did until the invasion, we did quite a bit of escort work.
But we also did armed reconnaissance, went over to Europe, over Normandy, and shot them poor Frenchmen up. The French? We didn’t know who was on the ground. Anything that moved was a target.
We should have. They should have had more restrictions on what we were. We was truly what was targeted.
If it moved, shoot it. Huh? If it moved, shoot it. I think it was a joke, but they’d shoot people on bicycles.
Yeah. Another nasty thing we did was, you know, over in Europe there was lots of barge traffic. They moved a lot of equipment.
See, we was trying to keep the Germans from moving more stuff into Normandy where the invasion was going to take place. And they used a lot of the barge traffic. So we’d shoot bombs and shoot those barges.
But then we got the big idea, we can make it even more interesting for them. We’d take a 500-pound bomb and put eight 10-hour delay fuses on them, and we’d drop them in the channel over there. So it gave them some excitement.
They’d move at night. They wouldn’t move in the daytime. Right.
So you timed it so that at night they’d have a big bang there. Didn’t know where they were bombing. It was a hit-and-miss proposition.
Yeah. It unnerved the guys on the barges a bit. Yeah.
See, all kinds of nasty things like that we did. Well, that’s not too nasty. You were there.
You had the bomb. You put the delayed fuse on it. See, the bomb wouldn’t go off if you didn’t have the fuse set on them.
Well, unless you got them in a big fire or something. I guess it would. But, you know, they had a little propeller on the front, the fuse, and they had a wire in there to keep it from turning.
And we had to control the arm of the bomb thing. The wire ran into our bomb shackles. And unless you put the thing in armed, while the wire would pull off and go over the bomb, it wouldn’t go off.
If we armed the bomb, then it would hold the wire. And then when they dropped the bomb, the pin came from the propeller, and the propeller started, I don’t know how many revolutions, and it would arm the bomb. Was it an impact bomb? It was impact then, yeah.
After it was… You know, the one time, I believe I told you, when I flew into the bomb blast of the flight ahead of us, I see that was an eight-second delay. We used eight-second delays on those. We got in there a little too soon.
Eight seconds is not a long time. No. Well, I just wanted to get away from it.
You didn’t want to blow yourself up, because when you’re dropping at low altitude, the bomb follows you. Oh, yeah, it skips along the ground with you. Well, when it hit then, it exploded while you were still… You wouldn’t be but just a little bit ahead of it when it hit the ground.
So we put a delay on it so we could get away from it for a bit. I see. We did that a lot on… We did a lot of disrupting the rail traffic.
That was an easy trip, too. We’d go where the embankment had to build the dirt up to put the tracks up on top. Shit, we’d come scooting over the eight-second delay bombs.
They had no problem hitting that. Because you’re flying right over the top of it. No, we went across it.
Oh, you went across? You see, we’d hit that dam and let the bombs drop down into that buildup ramp where the railroads were. You understand? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’d just drop just before you hit that and let them go.
They’d slam into the… We went 50, 100 feet off the ground. There was no problem. You’d drop them and whack them right into the embankment.
And then you could, with the eight-second delay, you could get away there before it exploded. Oh, we were just cutting son of a gun. Well, you always find the way to do it the easiest.
There’s an easy way. Then after we had to be… Finally made my mark in the outfit. It took me a long time.
That was close to the end of the war. And we’d never been to Berlin. I always wanted to take a flight into Berlin.
And so the mission came up. There was one P-38 photoship. It was going to take pictures in Berlin.
And they said they didn’t want the German fighters to shoot it down, so they gave us the mission to escort it. I don’t know how many ships we all got. It’s about eight Thunderbolts.
And we all went in. So on that flight, the three squadron commanders, the three operation officers, I got to fly, too. So I got to make that mission.
We had 350-gallon tanks on them. Had the belly tank and the two-wing tank. Had all three inside.
See, we carried around 400 gallons inside of the thing. And then we had 350-or-so-gallon tanks on the outside. And that’s when we flew to Berlin.
So I didn’t see a damn thing. All the bombed-out buildings? No. Probably.
They escorted one P-38. But I got to see Berlin that way.