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When we moved to Saipan. Well we became in range of Truk and we kept bombing it. So, they didn't use these, you would see some ships in the harbor, but they weren't using it as a big naval base as they did once before. They still had the aircraft and everything else on there. They would put up quite a resistance. So, after that, we stayed around there, and we moved to Guam and stayed there until it was the last part of June of '45. We made the move to Okinawa, but we were flying off Yontan strip in Okinawa and now we were going to Japan. Man, we were flying such long missions before were 8 to 13 hour mission all over water, now we were only 400 miles from Japan like in the backyard. So, we flew to Japan and got there and we actually saw both atomic bombs. Northeast of Hiroshima the day they had dropped that one, we did not know anything about it and we looked and we didn't see the flash or anything we just saw the column going up you know. We did not know what it was. We thought it was a fire raid, because when we burned those cities they would set fires and smoke would come up like that. When we got back they told us it was an atomic bomb. We said, "what in the hell is an atomic bomb?" We have never heard anything about that. Nobody knew anything about it. So, then 4 days later when they dropped the one on Nagasaki, they told us they were going to do that so we were supposed to stay at least 60 miles away. So, we were still up there in that area and we saw the column when it came up you know. We had quite some hairy times out of Okinawa. I guess, the roughest mission I ever flew over the war was over Kure Naval Base and there was stuff that would haunt you there. They had the battleship Horuna in and that
was the last remaining battleship of the Japanese Navy before they moved it. The way they had it was up against a mountain and the Navy tried to get it, but they could do it because they couldn't fly over it.
The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Doyle Ebel. Ebel was drafted into the Army Air Forces in March, 1943 and trained at Miami Beach before going to radio operator school in Missouri. He also attended gunnery school before becoming a crewmember on a B-24 and shipping overseas in July 1944. He was assigned to the 26th Bomb Squadron, 11th Bomb Group at Saipan in October. Ebel recalls an emergency landing on Iwo Jima. He flew 37 combat missions before the war ended and returned to the US in November, 1945.
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Ebel, Doyle.Oral History Interview with Doyle Ebel, July 30, 2013,
text,
July 30, 2013;
Fredericksburg, Texas.
(https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1606583/m1/32/:
accessed July 16, 2024),
University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu;
crediting National Museum of the Pacific War/Admiral Nimitz Foundation.