Oscar Discusses his life

This is Oscar Theis. I’m 91 years old, and I’d like to leave a record of my life. Maybe someday some of my descendants would like to know how things were in my days.

I was fortunate to live in a time when great changes took place. It began at the close of the horse and buggy days and the start of the Model T forward time. The world went from horse and buggy times to the jet age and to the space travel age.

I was born on the 6th day of January, 1920, on my grandfather John Melde’s  farm. My parents were Gus Theis and Tilly Melde Theis. I had a two-year-old sister, older sister, Mildred.

We lived in a three-room house. It had no running water, electricity, telephone, or bathroom. Mother prepared meals on a three-burner kerosene stove.

We got our water by drawing buckets full from a well. Body functions were taken care of in a outhouse, and we used pages from a Sears Roebuck catalog for toilet paper. It was a time of the Great Depression going on in the United States, when most folks couldn’t find work all over the United States.

It lasted until about 1940, when America started preparing for World War II. People were glad to work all day for $1 a day. We lived in a farmhouse.

We, living on the farm, fared somewhat better. We had a garden and raised hogs, chickens, and cows, which supplied us with vegetables, meat, butter, eggs, milk, and so forth most of the time. I don’t remember a day when we didn’t have something to eat.

I started attending St. Paul Lutheran School when I was six years old. It was a three-mile walk going to school. I was bilingual, English and German.

We were taught to read and write in both German and English. In 1933, I graduated from St. Paul and was confirmed. That fall, we moved to a farm three miles west of San Gabriel that my dad bought.

So I attended San Gabriel High School. I graduated in 1937. After graduation, I stayed at home and helped my father farm.

I was happy when my dad bought the first farm tractor. I didn’t have to work with mules as we did until then. I always wanted to join the military service, but my parents wouldn’t sign the papers giving me permission as I was under age 21.

In 1939, America started increasing its armed forces, and there was more recruitment. They offered enlistment and assured being stationed at Randolph Field in San Antonio. I finally persuaded my parents to let me enlist as San Antonio wasn’t that far away.

Randolph was a wonderful place. It was new and a show place for the Army Air Corps. It was a place where they trained pilots and also their officer training. It was known as the West Point of the Air Service. I lived in a nice steam-heated but not air-conditioned barracks, ate in a nice dining room. I was assigned to be an airplane mechanic.

We worked in nice hangars. Fortunately, I was assigned to the base flight, which maintained the planes the staff officers flew. This gave us a variety of different planes to work on and made it much more interesting. Most of the other mechanics worked on the training plane.

Some of the planes I worked on and flew in were old classics like the Martin B-10, the Douglas B-18, the Northrop A-17A, and other oldie goldies. After being an assistant crew chief for some time, I became the crew chief of the A-17A, an attack plane. It was no longer considered combat capable, but was used by staff officer for training in cross-country. I accompanied it on several cross-country trips.

Being stationed only 150 miles from home, I would hitchhike home on weekends quite often. On weekends when I didn’t go home, I would ride a bus into San Antonio, about 20 miles from the base, and walk down to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on South Preston for church service.

In the fall of 1940, my parents surprised me by buying me a new 1940 Chevrolet sedan. I was one of the few that owned a car. Sunday nights after church service, the young group from church would pile in my car, and we would go get Cokes or burgers. Most of the young men from the church were in the service, so I always had plenty of girls in the car.

I remained a crew chief for some time and then was promoted to be one of our squadron aircraft inspectors. I passed on maintenance works on the planes by the other mechanics before the plane was released for flight.

After being around the planes and riding in them and flying, the flying bug bit me. I wanted to become a pilot. I applied for the cadet program. The qualifications were very tough. I flunked the first test, an eye exam. I had astigmatism.

A bit later, the Air Corps started a new program. It was an enlisted pilot program where you received the same training as a cadet program, but instead of becoming officers upon graduation, you would serve as a staff sergeant pilot. I already was a staff sergeant, but I wanted the pilot wing. I applied, and to my surprise, was accepted.

This was in early 1942. That was one of the most demanding and wonderful years of my life. I was sent to Santa Ana, California for induction. We were either in class or doing P.E. or military drills. There was no spare time.

When I arrived here, all incoming students were treated the same, whether you were an aviation cadet or enlisted pilot training or even some West Point cadet there for pilot training. Everybody got the same treatment and training. We studied meteorology, air flight, mechanics, navigation, taking and sending Morse code and P.E., P.E., P.E., and military drills. They ran us ragged.

From Santa Ana, I was sent to Hemet, California for primary flying training. The plane we trained in was a Ryan PT-21. We were the only base that used this plane as a primary training. We were taught basic flying.

The day you soloed at the evening meal, you stood on your table and got everybody’s attention and shouted, I’m a hot pilot. I soloed today. My next move was to Bakersfield, California for basic pilot training.

We were taught day and night formation flying, instrument flying, acrobatics, and navigation. Along with our classroom work, flying link trainers for instrument navigation training and more and more P.E. and military drills. We had a busy day. There was always the fear that we would be eliminated from the program. We referred to it as getting washed out. About one-third of the class was eliminated.

My last stop for my pilot training was at Lukefield, Phoenix, Arizona for advanced pilot training. We continued with what we had been doing before in basic training, but in a more advanced plane, plus gunnery was added. We were moved to Gila Bend, Arizona for gunnery training. We fired at both aerial towed sleeve targets and at ground targets.

About a month before our graduation, the staff sergeant pilot was discontinued. We would graduate as flight officers instead of staff sergeant pilots. Flight officers were about equivalent to a warrant officer. We were not considered officers, but had the opportunity to later meet a board and apply for a commission, which I did and succeeded.

December the 9th was one of the best days of my life, the day I got my pilot wing. I could hardly believe it. It wasn’t until I opened my duty orders for my first assignment that some of the air came out of my balloon.

Instead of going to a fire unit, I was sent to Las Vegas, Nevada, a base that trained gunners to man the guns on the bomber. Las Vegas may be a fun town to visit, but back in 1942, being stationed at a base which wasn’t complete wasn’t much fun. Varics had no heat when I arrived in December and much too much heat in July. No air conditioning.

We flew the same old T-6 trainers that we flew at Luke. The gunners rode in the back cockpit and had a .30 caliber machine gun. We flew up to the firing range and the gunners would fire at the sleeve targets towed by another T-6. Some days I flew the gunner and some days I flew the towed target plane. We flew up to four missions a day.

We flew on four ship flights and would act like we were fighter pilots and had dogfights all the way up and back from the shooting range. Poor gunners. For most of us, it was their first plane ride. I didn’t like my duty at all.

I occasionally dated a young lady that worked as the base commander’s secretary. I asked her to write a military form letter requesting my transfer to a fighting unit for me. She said, but Oscar, I want you to stay here. But she favored me and wrote the letter, which I submitted.

To my great surprise, I received orders to report to the 1st Fighter Command at Richmond, Virginia for fighter pilot training. I took my transition for the P-47 at Richmond, Virginia and was sent to Norfolk, Virginia for my gunnery training.

The thousand hours of flying time I got at Las Vegas paid off. The rest of the pilots there were just out of flying school. To my surprise, I qualified as sharpshooter in the P-47 in both aerial and ground target. The first and only pilot of four that made it to ever do that.

The commanding officer of the gunnery training squad asked me to join the unit and train pilots instead of going overseas. I didn’t accept his offers and was sent to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey to await overseas shipment.

While waiting for my shipping day, I was called up and told I would be one of the loading officers for the trip overseas. Several days before departure time, we were taken to the dock to get aboard. We drove along the dock and all the ships were tied up big and small. We went by a huge ship and the driver turned in and I saw Queen Elizabeth written on the bow. It was huge.

I boarded Queen Elizabeth and we had the run of the ship the day before boarding began. I visited the engine room and the command deck. It was beautiful, but the straight rooms we used had bunk beds all the way to the ceiling.

Queen Elizabeth was so fast that we crossed Atlantic without an escort. The German subs couldn’t catch her. We made it to Glasgow, Scotland in about six days. From here we went to an air base in Wales for further training.

The instructor pilots were pilots that had finished their combat tours and gave us tips on how to survive our tour of duty. From here we were assigned to fighter groups we would serve with. We were replacement pilots to make up for losses the unit suffered.

I was assigned to the 405th Group 509 Squadron. These units had trained together in the United States for a year or more. It was a bit difficult for us replacement pilots to be accepted into the group. We were housed in the Quonset hut while the rest lived in the Chateau.

Our base was a big grass pasture, no runways. We had tall trees taking off in one direction and city houses in the other. We were located at Christchurch, about a mile from the southern coast of England.

I started flying missions several weeks before D-Day and went on several heavy bomber escort missions. We flew at about 30,000 feet and the poor bombers had to fly us a straight level course when they were on a bomb drop run. The German anti-aircraft gunners knew this and would feel the sky they had to fly through with anti-aircraft fire.

We fighter pilots could stay away from it but the poor bombers, I saw quite a few getting hit while coming off. Wings coming off and on fire. You want to see if any of the crew parachuted out. I suppose this is probably what happened to my Lutheran school classmate, Edward Murby, who was a bomber pilot, was lost in the war. His body was never found.

We were in the 9th Air Force and our primary mission was the support of ground forces for the invasion of France. We flew missions, dive bombing bridges, railroad yards, and shooting everything that moved on the ground.

Though I flew 117 missions in all, I’m thankful that not all of them were hairy ones, were hair raisers. In fact, only four or five of them were particularly frightening. Most of the time, we’d only get a small amount of anti-aircraft fire. The dive bombing mission had the hazard of knowing when to pull out of the dive and not hit the ground.

Our dive pullout caused us to black out at times. A plane could carry up to three 500-pound bombs, a fuel drop tank. I’d like to describe the missions that scared me the most.

The first one was my fourth mission. I was a… It was a long-range bomber escort mission that went deep into German-held France. To reach our bombers, we carried two 250-gallon fuel drop tanks in our bomb racks. It was to be a group mission where each of the three squadrons in the group sent up 16 planes.

The weather was very poor, really low ceilings. We took off squadron after squadron and circled under the overcast, and we formed four-ship flights in close formation. As each four-ship flight got in in close formation, it would start to climb up through the overcast. Each flight took a different compass course to prevent collisions during the climb. This proved to be a quite difficult… This proved to be a quite difficult thing to do.

With our heavy load of fuel, we had to use very high power settings to climb. This made formation flying more difficult. The clouds were so dense, we had to almost touch the lead plane to stay in visual contact. At times, the cloud was a bit less dense and gave me a chance to look around a bit, and I saw eyes building up on my guns and on the wing. This made it even more difficult to stay in formation. At 30,000 feet, we finally got over the cloud.

I could hardly believe it, but all 64 planes made it, and we formed our combat formation and proceeded to meet the bombers. We were about to rendezvous with our bombers when one of the pilots in the flight I was in discovered he couldn’t get fuel from one of the drop tanks. In order to get him back to friendly territory, we had to abort the mission.

So our flight of four planes headed for home. As we neared the French coast, the same cloud cover was still there. We kept flying lower and lower to stay in there. Finally, we were so close, the German anti-aircraft guns were starting shooting at us. So we dropped all the way down to the deck, feeling it would be safer there.

In flights like this, we flew in a spread formation, which gives us better visibility, seeing any German fighters that could surprise us from the rear. I was flying on the right side of the formation. The French coast was approaching, therefore the place the Germans felt the invasion would probably occur, so they had plenty of defenses there.

As I was on the right side of the flight, it put me flying almost over their position. They were loading the sky with anti-air fire at me. The coastline was just to my right, and I decided I’d take my chances, and I’d head over the top of the German guns and head over the sea. No guns there, if I make it.

As I made my turn, I fired my 8.50 caliber machine guns at the gun pits on the ground. This brought on even more action. As I crossed over the gun emplacement, I started making very tight turns, hoping to become a more difficult target to hit.

I still can see the white streamers I was pulling from my wingtips. I was only a few feet above the water while doing this. The German firing was very intense, and they hit my rear fuselage with an exploding shell. One hit my right wing and opened a large gash. One exploded near my cockpit canter and cracked it. I finally got out of the range, and the plane was still flying okay.

I got time to look to my left to see if the rest of the flight made it. The flight leader was just crossing the German defenses and was getting his dose. It wasn’t but a short flight over the English Channel. Just as I made landfall, there was an airfield straight ahead. I landed okay. It was a Royal Air Force base there for emergency landing for our returned damaged bombers.

I tried calling my base to let them know I made it okay. I knew that Air Sea Rescue would soon be looking for me. The telephone service wasn’t too good in England during the war, so I didn’t get my call made.

Having been an airplane mechanic, so I decided to check things in the fuselage for severe damage. No flight controls were damaged, and I asked the Royal Air Force folks if they had any fuel and a hex on it. They filled my tanks, and I climbed on the wing and saw it all part of the wing skin that was sticking up. I got back in the plane and flew back to my base.

The next day, I talked to the pilot that led our flight. Coming out, he got a hit in his engine and started losing his oil. He said just as he reached England, there was another airfield, and he came straight in. The engine froze on the approach, and he glided in for a landing. That was my first serious baptism of fire.

My next thriller came about a month later. Our forces had successfully invaded France and were busy building airstrips for us so we would be close to the ground troops. However, there was the Cherbourg Peninsula the Germans still had. We needed this to keep from having enemy troops on both front and back sides of us.

The Germans were threatened with devastating air attacks that they didn’t surrender. They didn’t surrender, so we carried out our threat. All of our medium bombers and fighter units assembled on the west side of the peninsula and flew to fly across, bombing and shooting anything that moved or looked like it could be a target.

When our squadron in turn came, we started across. I was flying wingman on the squadron commander where real low, strafing all the hedgerows where troops could be hiding. As I turned left, I lost sight of the leader. I was firing machine guns at what looked like it could have been German troops when all of a sudden I saw the wings of my flight leader.

I stopped firing, but I saw the last two rounds of my gun sparkling on my leader’s wings. I knew I was in trouble now, but didn’t have long to worry about it as I received a large caliber gun hit in my engine compartment. It ruptured the oil lines. Oil immediately covered my windshield and I had to open my canopy to see out.

I immediately started gaining altitude for a bay lot and also heading for the American front line. I didn’t want to become a prisoner of the Germans. I crossed the front lines and spotted an airstrip the engineers were building. I circled it and saw that a good portion of it could be landed on.

So I made my approach and as I was getting ready to land, a P-38 fighter with one engine feather came in from the other direction and landed wheels up and tore up a good portion of the landing strip. I put the power back to the engine and hoped it would last just a little bit longer, and it did. I came around to the other side and landed wheels down on what was left on the runway.

The first thing I did upon landing was getting out of the plane and opening the compartment where my gun camera was mounted. I exposed the field in it as I didn’t want to show that I had put a few bullets in my commanding officer’s wing. I got a ride to my base in England that evening and was glad to sleep in my cot that night.

On a mission near Metz, we were supposed to bomb a German Army headquarters. The weather was very poor, so we had to use bombs with eight-second delay fuses as we couldn’t dive-bomb but had to release flying level at low altitude. There were two flights of four planes. I flew wingman in the second flight. The first flight flew over the target and dropped a bomb.

The second flight that I was in followed only a flight leader falling too close, and as I was over the target to drop my bombs, the bombs from the first flight exploded. I thought I flew down a well. Bricks and derbies hit my plane, but it kept flying, and I made it back to base. The mechanic showed me a number of bricks that they recovered from my engine.

The next carrier flight came soon after and in the same area. This time I was flying at a supposed German Army division building. As I pulled away from the target, I received a hit just forward of my right wing root, and the P-47 carried all our fuel inside of the fuselage.

Our seat was in front of a 200-gallon tank and another 200-gallon tank between the cockpit and the engine. This shot I received hit right in the front tank. It ripped about a four-inch hole in the fuselage and ruptured the tank but didn’t catch on fire.

I looked out and could see a stream of fuel going over my right wing. As I wasn’t over 100 feet of the ground, I immediately started climbing to do a bailout. When I got several hundred feet altitude, this plane seemed to fly okay, and the fuel spill slowed, so I thought I may try for a return to base.

That good old Thunderbolt made it back to base okay. It was a brand new plane on its first mission, but it had to be scrapped because of the location of the damage. These were the most severe enemy action encounters I had. There were other incidents that were almost as scary.

While on a mission, I spotted a German tank and I went down for a firing run. I didn’t see any return fire from the ground, but as I pulled up, I could not level the plane. My control stick would not move past center. I noticed as I gained speed, it would level itself better.

The flight leader told me to bail out, but I told him I’d like to fly back to our base and try a landing, which we did. If I flew at a higher speed, it would level off better, so I made a landing approach at about 75 miles, faster than normal, and I flew it into the runway on its wheels. Now I had the problem of stopping it before reaching the end of the runway. I thought that I would probably hit the trees at the end of the runway, so I unlocked my tail wheel and hit the right brake. This spun the plane.