Oral History Interview with Bill Brown, June 26, 2000 Page: 8

                                
they picked me up. I found out later that the Pipefish had picked up 9 flyers during their stint there in
the Pacific. It was marvelous getting picked up.
Mr. Cox: I bet it was because the way the Japanese were treating downed flyers at that stage of the
war was pretty bad.
Mr. Brown: Some of our guys met awful fates.
Mr. Cox: Let me ask you this. Were you wearing a Mae West also when you bailed out?
Mr. Brown: Yes. I had a Mae West. I had a bottle of water. I had Hershey bars. I had two pills to
calm me down. And, of course, when I hit the water those two pills were in my open pocket and they
just dissolved.
Mr. Cox: Let me ask you about the incident of your being shot down. You allude to the fact that you
were shot down by our own planes. I guess you would call that "friendly fire". What do you think
would cause them to do that? They didn't mistake you for another .....
Mr. Brown: When you are in combat, you are excited. When you see something and it is an air
plane, if you really can't identify it, you shoot at it.
Mr. Cox: Shoot first and ask questions later.
Mr. Brown: The 29 had a very good firing system for that time. It worked. And I was living proof
that it worked.
They wouldn't let us get off at Iwo, they took us on a sub to Guam. There was a sub base there.
They debriefed us down there. Then they flew me back to Iwo. The submarine in mid-Pacific
transferred us to another submarine. We got in a bigger life raft. There were about 7 of us.
I asked the Navy guy that rowed us over to the other sub, "do you do this very often?" He said "no".
I said "Do you know how to swim?" He said "no". Here we were in 30,000 feet of water in a life
raft in the middle of the ocean. There were a lot of guys with courage then.
Mr. Cox: Yes, there were. All you guys had courage.

Mr. Brown: In this submarine, we had a guy who was blown out of the tail of a B-29. The only guy
that got out alive. He stayed all night in the water with half of his leg gone and the other stripped of
the skin. He stayed alive for about two weeks before he died.
There were just all kinds of things happening. We picked up a B-29 fellow that knew how to work
the radar and the sonar machines. The fellows on the submarine didn't know much about it. So he
was a real asset to help work with them on that electronic machinery.
Mr. Cox: I bet he was. Let me ask you this. How long were you on that submarine?

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