This is Ed Metzler. Today is the 26th of
October 2012. I am interviewing Mr. John Wells in
Austin, Texas. This interview is in support of
the Nimitz Education and Research Center
Archives for the National Museum of the Pacific
War, Texas Historical Commission, for the
preservation of historical information related
to this site. So, John, let me start by first
thanking you for spending some time to share
your experiences with us and let's
get it started by having you introduce yourself.
I need your full name, date, and
place of birth and we'll take it from there.
All right. My full name is John B. Wells Jr. B
stands for Barnard, B-A-R-N-A-R-D. I was
I was born on August 31st, 1919 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
My father at that time was a sales engineer
for Lucy Manufacturing.
For who manufactured?
Lucy, L-U-C-Y.
Lucy, okay.
It was a heavy machinery manufacturing outfit.
And I guess I was about two years old
about two years old and we moved to California.
My father was sent out as the sales engineer
representing Lucy and the Signal Hill oil
field, which was drilling and production.
We lived in, I believe, in the Torrance area
along the coastline in Southern California
at the time.
Shortly after that, probably late in 1922, my
grandfather and his brother and my grandmother
And three other businessmen in Bakersfield
had formed an oil company and had property
on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.
And the company's name was Kern Sunset Oil Company.
And they were looking for a general manager.
The first two general managers had retired in
10 years,
and that's only significant in that
that was the only reason my mother agreed,
because we had to go up and live in Maricopa, California
on an oil lease and with the idea of retiring
in 10 years.
Lucy Manufacturing, I know I had a letter in my file
from them congratulating my father on the position
and also cautioning my mother
because the man that wrote the letter from Lucy
had been in that oil field and knew what she's
moving into.
And so that sort of supported the family tale
that mother agreed to 10 years.
Unfortunately, 29 occurred before the 10 years
were up,
so we spent a little longer at Maricopa than that,
but it was good for me because I learned very quickly
in 29 the value of money.
There wasn't any.
My father and my uncle got together and signed
a production,
or a operation contract with Kern Sunset Oil Company
to operate the oil lease and pay Kern Sunset a royalty.
So that's how we survived.
Now, did you have brothers and sisters, or were you?
I had one sister who passed away several years ago,
but she was about three years younger than I was.
So we lived on the Oileys, and I grew up there
as a young kid.
We were fortunate.
Things went along well, and they built a little
house up on Marin Street up in Monterey, and
we used to go up there in the summertime to get
out of the heat in the valley.
But after 29, things started to change a little bit.
I was ten at the time, and about twelve years
old, I started working with my father on the
oil leases on weekends.
They went out and did the pumping work, had
three men working for them.
We got fifty-two cents a barrel for the crude
oil at that time, and my father and uncle
made a deal with these guys they'd pay hourly
rate of ¢52 an hour or whatever they
got per barrel accrued.
So as a young man, after a couple of, three or
four months I guess, one summer working
with my father on weekends on the lease, I went
to work in the holidays and so forth
and so I learned a little bit about the oil business
just from getting dirty and made ¢52 an hour.
Which is good money back then.
Which was pretty good money, four bucks a day
and I've got some old payroll vouchers
that the kids have seen and really them will laugh
at social security had come in shortly after that
and income tax was taken out but it was just in pennies.
there was one voucher that showed a penny credit
because they'd over withheld a month before.
And I use that really because it kind of shows
what the valuation was of money in those days,
that a penny amounted to enough
to make it worthwhile making an entry.
Keepin' track of it.
And it was enough.
I paid most of my way through college that way.
So when did you graduate from high school?
What year was that?
It was 1937 and went into college.
So where did you go to college?
I went to Berkeley, in Berkeley, California.
And kept working on the lease,
all the vacation times and Christmas holidays
and so forth.
It was in 1940, my cousin and I decided
we were going to try something
besides working in the oil fields.
So he went down to Santa Monica and got a job
with Douglas Aircraft in the manufacturing
of stuff.
And we lasted there about a month and got bored
stiff and didn't figure we were getting
paid very well compared to what we could make
in the oil fields.
So he came down to Texas and went to Tyler,
Texas and went to work for Delta Drilling
Company and it was run by an uncle of mine.
And I remember that I was working in Eldorado,
Arkansas, we were drilling on a contract basis
in wells for a line oil company, and living in
a boarding house in town, it cost me eight
dollars a week, and that included 3 meals a day.
And a sack lunch was one of the meals, but it
had a sandwich and a piece of pie, and
an apple, or a piece of fruit, a tomato, and an onion.
So, and I was making about $200 a month.
And, so it was a pretty good deal.
I had more surplus cash in those days
than I think I had in a long time after that.
And, but at that time, I'd finished my junior year
my junior year in college and so now what were
what were you studying in
college I was studying really international
relations and political
science in that area okay I don't know didn't
get into engineering but it was
pretty obvious I think to all of us that there
was some real trouble brewing yeah
and I'd always wanted to learn to fly.
And so in 1940, that summer I was down here,
after we finished the well,
I'd gone to Tyler and visit with the relatives
and was going back to Elroy, Arkansas
and went through Shreveport and Barksdale Field
was there.
It was a Saturday, I dropped in at Barksdale
and went to look at the recruiting office
And they turned me over to an old sergeant
that was in there.
He took a look at me and said, what do you want?
And I said, I'd like to get the papers to sign up
and see if I could become a flying cadet.
And he said, you look pretty healthy and pretty good,
so here, here's some papers.
But show up on such and such a day.
So I showed up on such and such a day
and went to the building he told me to go to.
And I walked in and there was probably,
time when I got there probably 50 guys are all
stripped down and a couple of
three doctors and some medical assistants
working around poking in all
the private spots yeah and I stripped down and
got going and pretty soon there
guess there was a total of a hundred of us in
there going through the physical
exam and they called a halt to the whole thing
lined us all up and started
calling off names and John Wells wasn't called
off and they said what in the
hell are you doing here or some appropriate
phrase like that and so I
explained to him the sergeant had told me to
show up and here I was and so they
got off in a huddle and looked at the papers
and then came back and said well
you're doing okay on the physical so we'll put
you on the orders and lo and
behold I passed the physical if it was a few
weeks later I got a official
notification to report to be sworn in I think
it was on the 28th of December at
at the courthouse in Totter, Texas.
What year was this now?
That was 1940.
And so we came down here for Christmas from California
and I got sworn in and in those days
we had to buy our own cadet uniforms.
I had two pairs of gray slacks
and a couple of designated gray shirts
and some dark black socks, two pairs of black shoes,
I think four or five white undershirts and shorts,
and that was a uniform.
And so Uncle Sam wasn't spending a lot of money
dressing you if you're gonna get possibility of
washing out.
So they sent us by train out to L.A.
and we took another train up to Santa Maria
and I went through primary flying school in
Santa Maria
and flying old PT-13s and got through that all right
and hoping to come back down to Texas
to go to one of the Storied pilot training schools
in San Antonio, but that was not to be
because I'd come out here with a bunch of kids
from Louisiana and Texas and they'd ship them
all to California to go through flying school.
And so Maricopa was about 60 or 70 air miles
Santa Maria and my last day there flying to get
in some extra time in the PT, I took it
as high as I could get and I could actually see
over the mountains and I could see into
the San Joaquin Valley, we were that close.
So I got my training there, then I went to the
field up by Sunnyvale, Moffett Field,
They had the great big old dirigible hangars
from World War I and got my basic training there.
I passed all that and then went on to Stockton
for advanced training in AT-6s and I was in
the class of 41F, so I should have graduated
probably in maybe August of 41, but I tore
up a cartilage in my left knee, I guess it was, and...
How'd you do that?
Damned if I know. Really?
It just happened.
And all of a sudden, I'd gone, I had a Sunday
pass, and a bunch of us went into town to
go to a movie, and I climbed out of the back
seat of a car, and this leg wouldn't straighten
out, and I ended up on my face in the sidewalk,
and it locked like this, and the cartilage
It just slipped into the joint and didn't feel
very good, but I finally beat on it and
broke it loose and learned that from football.
But anyhow, somebody noticed it and I had to go
to a sick call.
And I know this old doctor there in Stockton
put me into the hospital and I had my leg
and traction and so forth, damned uncomfortable.
And they finally released me, and he said,
do you think you're all right?
And I said, yes, Sir, in his office.
And he said, all right, squat down and jump up
and kick yourself in the ass.
And I did, and I wasn't all right.
That leg hurt like hell, and I crumpled up,
got back up again, and he said, here.
He reached in his drawer and pulled out a
bottle of whiskey.
He gave me a shot of whiskey.
And said, we're sending you to Letterman.
you had to have some surgery on the knee.
So I did that, ended up then graduating
with a class of 41H, I think.
So I got my wings and my commission.
I'm surprised it didn't put a bigger delay into it.
No, that was all I got, and I was fine.
I healed up quickly and did the surgery.
And so I graduated, and we got our wings on
December 12th.
December 7th, that morning, Saturday before,
there was a bunch of young bucks, generally did.
We got a pretty good head on the night before.
Woke up with somewhat of a hangover in the morning.
And with the news, the first thing we heard
was, gentlemen, pack all your civilian clothes
and mail them home.
Get them out of here.
and we're at war with Japan and so things
changed very rapidly and I got a, I'd signed
up all through advanced, I signed up to go to
the Philippines, I signed up to go fly
airplanes in Panama, I signed up to ferry P-40s
across Africa for the British forces.
But every time I was first or second or third
on the sign-up list, I always ended up out
of the running.
And I found out that evidently a colonel who
was out in charge of the training command
in California on the West Coast or so,
thereabouts, somehow or other knew my uncle
from World
War I or something.
at any, I guess it sort of trickled down to me
that I was probably asked for and tabbed
to go into the training command.
I've always laughed about that because World
War II bailed me out of that problem, and
I got orders to report to Muroc Lake.
There were four of us from my class assigned to
Muroc Lake, and we got down there.
I was first given an assignment as a pilot with
a group flying Lockheed Hudsons.
They were going to patrol the coast out here,
and before I had a chance to do anything with
that, orders came through changing that and
assigning me to the 18th Reconnaissance Squadron
attached to the 22nd Bomb Group.
And that's how I arrived at the beginning of
the war at Muroc Lake.
A buck-ass Green pilot out of AT-6 is put into
the hottest airplane in the Air Force
inventory at the time, a Martin B-26.
Fortunately the men that flew that in the 22nd
Bomb Group, starting in late 1940 when
when it first came out, had a lot of experience.
They did the service testing on the aircraft,
suffered the problems with it as they got
it going, and so I had some really strong
manners, and flying co-pilot was the way you
transition into being the pilot. And it took
about, in those days, about a year flying
that thing.
Was that true of any aircraft, or was that
because the B-26 was a big challenge?
No, I think it was probably any combat aircraft.
My guess is. I wasn't associated with anybody
else, but I kind of think that's the way the
system worked at that time. You're an apprentice
as a co-pilot.
And I got quite a bit of stick time with the
gentleman I flew with, so it went along well.
They took our-I flew a couple missions out of
Muroc Lake.
We were flying patrol down over Baja,
California, as far to south as we could get,
and then
we cut across and come up the inside and land
in Yuma or Tucson and gas up.
Actually when we went down, we stopped at the
Naval Station in San Diego and refueled,
and that gave us about 1,100 or 1,200 miles,
600 down and back to Yuma.
And we'd have to refuel there and then fly back
up to Muroc.
And we got back-generally got back to Muroc
late in the afternoon.
And Muroc's a great, flat, expansive desert.
SHORT And it's a dry lake-oh, it's a lake bed.
It's a dry lake bed.
GRIEBEL Yeah, it was just a dry lake bed, yeah.
And it was very difficult having depth perception.
So you just sort of had to bring the thing in
and touch it down when it hit.
So, it was an interesting place to fly out of.
That's December in Miracle, it was colder than
hell, the wind blew out of the Sierra Nevadas.
We were in parambular tents.
There were two barracks buildings there.
One was headquarters and the other was, lived
in, it was a senior officer's quarters.
They did grant commissioned officers the right
to use the showers in the latrine in that
building, which is a blessing to get a shower
with hot water.
We were on cots in these perimeter tents, and
we had a space heater in the middle of
the damn thing, and you had three alternatives.
it would blow up if you didn't do it right.
The second, when it was smudged,
which it was designed to do, take care of orchards,
and if you did it just right,
you got a lot of heat out of it.
So it was always a nice operation
trying to get that thing going.
Too good, yeah.
Got to go to bed, it was colder than hell,
and they took our sleeping bags away
because the manufacturer hadn't met specs,
and it put snappers on it instead of zippers.
So they took them away and gave us two army blankets.
Two army blankets on a canvas cot in a tent
just wasn't enough in the wintertime.
So we had, fortunately we had flying gear,
winter flying gear.
Pull on the boots, the pants, and the jacket,
and curl up in the bed with the blankets over you.
And pretty soon you'd be wringing wet with sweat.
So you'd take all this clothing off
and throw it on the floor.
And climb back in the other,
and then you'd get cold again,
but all the sweat had frozen in the blankets.
So there was a transition period
of getting from cold to warm to the...
So it was okay there for about 30 seconds.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And it was interesting out there.
One of the, as a junior officer,
I was assigned in December,
end of December, I guess it was,
to work the payroll.
And I'd never done that.
It was all in cash for the enlisted men, and
you had to figure out exactly how many ten
dollar bills, how many $5 bills, how many $one
bills, how many 50
cent pieces, how many quarters and dimes and
nickels and pennies that you had.
And that morning, early morning, I guess three
or four of us in a command car, all armed,
drove into the town in Lancaster, I guess it was,
and went to Bank of America,
went down in the basement in the vault,
and sat down there and counted all this money.
The bank had been notified ahead of time and
had it,
but we had to count it to make sure they had
873 pennies
or whatever it happened to be.
And so then you go back into the area
where we're gonna have the payroll deal,
and all that list had been lined up alphabetically
and had all this money stacked out.
And if you came through the line
and you were owed $19.78 or whatever it
happened to be,
you got a 10, a five, 4 ones, a ¢50 piece,
a two bit piece and whatever, and then three pennies.
And it had to be accurate
because you had to come out of nothing.
It was a very antiquated way to handle a
payroll, but you sure didn't have any change left
over to have to contend with.
Here you are a trained pilot, and they got you
wasting your time on that kind of stuff.
Oh yeah, it was additional duty, and the junior
officers had to be involved in this
thing and so that's where you did your learning
and then they took the
airplanes up to Sacramento to the depot and at
that time they didn't have the
technology together yet to allow the B-26 to
fly itself to Hawaii. Very shortly
after that they figured out how to put Bombay
tanks in it and get them down
there but we didn't. So ours were taken apart
put on a freighter and
coordinated with our getting on a train in Los
Angeles and we took the train up
to San Francisco and once we got on it we
couldn't talk to get off or talk to
anybody or anything else it was all hush-hush
secret. Did they tell you where
you were going? No and they we got to San
Francisco and we thought oh good we'll
have a little time in town. Train took us right
down to the Embarcadero. We got
off the train and marched down and climbed a
gangbang and got on the USS
Grant which was a troop transport that they'd
gotten as reparations from
Germany in the World War One. And I think the
paint on the damn thing was thicker
than the iron that was under it. And we were
the slowest vessel in the six-ship
convoy, which included our freighter with our airplanes.
And it took us six or eight days, I think, to
get to Hawaii.
We had two four-stack destroyers on either
side, one on either side, and we were zigzagging
our way across the Pacific.
And I've forgotten what night it was and what
time now, but it-
So what time frame are we in now?
Is this like Mid-'42s?
This is late January or first part of February
of 41, just about 30-40 days after the war
broke out. Forty-two.
Forty-two, I mean.
Forty-two, yeah.
So I've got some B-26 time in 41.
So I'm probably one of the few survivors of the
guys that Piloted or flew the airplane
back in 1940 or 41.
all those other guys were gone and a lot of
guys flew the airplane afterwards but they
all went to Europe and we were the only group
besides two squadrons of B-26s that were originally
with the 38th Bomb Group.
They were known as the Lost Bastards of the
Pacific because they were put on a couple
of islands and the Navy took charge of them and
they were involved in the Battle of Guadalcanal
and several other activities over there, and
our four squadrons were what it was, and that's it.
When we got to Australia, we were the first
full group of combat aircraft to be able to
go out after war broke out, and they'd left
Langley Field on December 8th, in the morning
of December 8th and the whole damn group had
flown across to Murrock Lake and there was
nothing there, just tents and this big old dry
lake and no lights.
So it was right at the beginning of the thing
and we had one, on the convoy we had one alert
Sometime late one night, the horns went off and
the report was through that somebody spotted
a wake of a torpedo that went through the deal
and didn't hit anything.
And I'm not sure if it was a torpedo or
something, I just didn't see a dolphin or something
flying across the air or whatever it was.
But it all broke loose and there were four of
us in one small cabin and we all hit the
deck at the same time and all grabbed for life
vests at the same time and all hit the
small door about the same time.
There goes your knee again.
It was a fire drill getting up there and all of
us got up on deck.
And fortunately it wasn't cold so it was all
right out there in the Pacific.
Now where were you enroute?
I mean how far?
We were enroute to Honolulu, yeah.
We were probably, I can't remember now, but my
guess is we were a couple of days out before
we got in.
When we finally pulled into Pearl, not into
Pearl, but into the harbor there in Honolulu,
they had a whole bunch of trucks lined up for
us, and we unloaded and went to Hickam Field.
I was in a barracks, just maybe all the flight
officers were in that same barracks building.
And it was right along by the,
it didn't come in as far as I'm concerned. Interview?
Okay, thanks.
So we were in this barrage right by the channel. Yeah.
Going into Pearl.
the place was still a bloody mess.
I was gonna ask you, what did it look like?
Because it's pretty, pretty fresh.
It's that, one of those other interviews
I told you about, it looked like a junkyard.
Pearl, there was some smoke still coming up.
The hangars were all blown to hell, and junk
aircraft still lying around, mostly been pushed
into a pile.
It worked with the pace of getting things put
back together, but it was a real mess.
And one of the things we had going for us is
the Hickam Field Officers Club had booze,
and you could buy a bottle of booze.
And we were all supposed to carry gas masks at
that time, too.
We had a tin hat and a .45 revolver.
What were we afraid of, a gas attack by the Japanese?
Yeah, they just wanted everybody to be prepared
for anything the Japs might do.
You could trust them after what had gone on,
you know, was the attitude.
And, but it was probably,
we very quickly found you could take the canister
and the gas mask out of that canvas case
and you could put three bottles of bourbon in there
and look just as though it was filled
with a canister and a gas mask.
That's what we packed into the Moana Hotel
when we got a 48-hour or 24-hour pass to go
into town.
And a friend of mine from high school
was a staffer, tech sergeant, I've forgotten
which now,
at the motor pool at Hickam.
And I got in touch with him and we got chatting
and he said, you're gonna need a GI driver's license,
so let me give you one.
And so I got the GI driver's license,
I could drive everything up to it,
but not including a half-track.
It's up through a two and a half ton truck
and all the rest of the stuff.
So, if we got a pass, I could call a motor pool
and generally get some sort of a vehicle
to drive us into town in.
So, that helped.
And I remember one time we went in
and had a two-and-a-half-ton truck and there
were about five of us in this
two-and-a-half-ton truck driving into the Moana
Hotel where we stayed and we
met a bunch of nurses from Schofield and we're
having a good time having a lot of
fun and but all of a sudden they said oh my god
we got a curfew we have
to be back at Schofield and we're late so we
said oh hell we'll take you back
in the truck and we can get you in so instead
of going in the main gate of
Schofield we drove around they knew where a
back gate was so I drove this
truck up to the back gate and the guard came
out and I said we have supplies for
the hospital and he just waved us through and
the nurses hopped out but
they got caught by the head nurse and we found
out later they got a little
trouble out of that, but we did our best to get
them in there on time and put
good use to the truck. Commander Ford with his
camera crew was over
there for the Navy photographing all the damage
at Pearl Harbor and I guess in
the process of some of that old film at that
time he used grain alcohol because
he also used to use that with pineapple juice
and we drank a little
green Alcohol, pineapple juice with him, and
sort of get a base, so to speak. And
then we had scotch and bourbon, and he liked
Scotch, so we'd switch over and go on
up. One time we were in the Moana Hotel, and in
this process, we came out of
the room to go downstairs to get something to
eat and smell smoke, and
And there was a transom open in the hall,
and a door just across from our room,
and you could see curls of smoke coming out.
And there was a fire hose on the wall down here,
so we ran down, grabbed the fire hose,
threw it through the transom and turned it on,
and then called management and said,
you got a fire in such and such a room up there.
And they came charging up, but by that time,
I guess there was about this much water.
And when they opened the door, water all
spilled out,
and I don't know whether they wanted to sue us
or thank us,
but there was a big burn spot in the carpet
where I guess a cigarette butt had fallen.
People were in there and started to say,
and that was an old wood building,
and that's the reason we acted first and told
them second.
But those are some of the things I can remember.
Now where was the hotel?
Located down right on Wahkiki?
Yeah, it was right on Wahkiki.
Moana was just past the Royal Hawaiian.
Okay, it was right in the neighborhood.
Yeah, it was a good hotel,
but it wasn't as expensive or dooky as the,
and we could get a room there,
Jeremy, if we had a 24-hour pass.
But anyhow, then as fast as our airplanes
were put back together again in the depot over there,
they were flight tested,
and all the bugs worked out of them,
And then we started island hopping down to Australia.
Now, how long were you in the Honolulu area in Pearl?
Probably, I think I was there until March.
I left just before the Battle of Medwin.
Not just before, probably a week or 10 days before,
because we were in Australia when it happened.
That was June, I think, so June of 40.
Yeah, so it was before that that we went down.
I got to Australia, I guess it was in March of Australia.
I went down with a, I was put on a detached service
with a second squadron and went down as a co-pilot
for a guy that was flying down with his plane,
but his co-pilot got ill and put in the hospital.
So at the last minute, I got notifications.
In fact, my gear, I was going with Captain Anderson,
I think his name was, ended up as a general.
And there were four of us in the flight.
We'd had a flight before with six in it, and I
think one or two got lost because we never
knew what the weather was on one of those
little islands we were landing on.
And if the weather was bad, then you had to
circle and wait and hope that your direct
navigation and your navigator were correct,
that you were in the right spot circling.
And if it varied from that, you could get lost,
and a couple of guys got lost and went
down. So then one guy went down by himself and
blew it up, lost it somehow. And so then
it came out that no less than two or more than
four in a flight going down. It was all
radio silence, didn't want the Japanese to know
they were using these little islands.
Hell, they could have taken a submarine and
half the crew could have gone ashore and captured
Island, with the possible exception of Palmyra.
But Canton Island was just a spit, sand spit
out there, and the Pan American had used it
as a base, and there was a little facility for
them on one side, and then this strip
along one edge of the thing, we landed on that.
But it was a tiny speck, and it was about, as I
recall, around 700-800 miles from Palmyra.
So those two legs were about equal.
When we left Canton, we flew to the Fijis, and
that was a little over 1,000 miles.
So it was getting pretty close to our range at
that time.
That's about the range on a-
Yeah, there were two islands, Pigeon and Beeloo
is the name of the island on the west, so we
aimed for the middle and got that, then we just
by line of sight you could see the other
island, so we went over and flew around that
and landed at Nandi.
And Nandi had a strip that went from the ocean
up, and you parked uphill up at the top, and
there's a little town up there, and we stopped,
we spent the night someplace there, I don't
remember where we spent the night.
I do remember going into the little town, and
we were looking for something to drink,
and all they had was gin and lemon Squash.
So we ordered a gin and lemon Squash, but it
had a room temperature of about 85, and
it was the worst thing I ever tried to drink in
my life.
No ice, huh?
The British had that with no ice, no.
No, the British are not big on ice anyhow, I've discovered.
But then you were parked up there, when you
took off downhill and just hoped
to hell everything kept going because there was
only one place to go.
If it didn't, that was in the water.
And so you took off over the water and formed
up and then flew from that to, I guess, yeah,
it was New Caledonia, went into Nemea there.
And we landed there, and the next morning we
were getting ready to take off, or maybe
Maybe that afternoon we were going to take off
and go on to Brisbane.
But our left engine, the starter, didn't work.
So obviously we were grounded.
The other guys went ahead.
Somebody reported that they'd seen a B-26
engine crate on the dock down at Noumea Harbor.
So our crew chief and the pilot and a couple of
others hopped in a jeep and went down there
with the old red tag starter and opened the box
and took out the good starter and put
the red tag starter in there and took that one
back out and put it on our airplane.
But while we were doing nothing that time,
there was, I guess, a bombardier and a navigator
and myself, one of the field officers, said,
hey, you guys want to look around a little
bit around the French community here in New Caledonia.
So we drove out in the countryside and we were
looking at it and it was all agriculture
and we got talking to some French farmer out
there and he invited us to come back for lunch.
And I remember going back to his little house
and his wife and his family or kids were there
and a lot of cheese and bread basically was
lunch, maybe some tomatoes, but in the middle
was a jug about this big around full of red wine.
And so everybody, including the kids, they had
water glass tumblers.
Kids got about this much.
We all had a full tumbler full of wine poured
for us and took a drink of that and stopped
real sudden.
It was full of quinine.
That's how they got their quinine for the day.
And just so they wouldn't get malaria. Yeah.
Wouldn't get malaria.
But I'm sure Parker, when it first hits your
mouth, damn, this is bad wine.
But they were very, very cordial people, and
delighted, I guess, to see us down here, as
most all of them were, because there wasn't
much of anything else to defend them.
And you were the Japanese.
Yeah, that's right.
I do remember there the money.
The Bank of Indochina was the bank that was
furnished the currency for all those French
protectors down there. And they, I guess they
ran out of small coin, small change,
small bills and change. Those are very short
supply. So they had five and
ten thousand franc notes that they put an ink
line through and written a new
number in, which was smaller, to get the
currency they needed to take care of the
day-to-day operations, which weren't
5,000-10,000, yeah, that's right, so it's sort
of a
reminder of how society can be disrupted by
things like a war and the inability to get
currency, even to take normal transactions when
you have those things going on, and how they make
do with it. Obviously they didn't take the
little ones and make big ones, but they took
big ones and made little ones.
And anyhow, then we flew on to, when we got
everything put together, we flew into Brisbane.
And I didn't know anything about the Brisbane
line at the time or anything else, but old
has been colonels down there from World War I
briefed us on, I can't remember, very uninteresting
and non-informative.
The only thing I do remember was his statement
as he started to leave the podium in the briefing
room was, a gentleman, if I ever see you again,
you'll be walking.
So on that note, we left and we flew to
Townsville and got to Townsville and they said,
oh no,
the 2nd Squadron of the 18th Recon are out at
Reed River.
They're camped side by side out there, so
that's where you go.
So we took off, everything was fine, and found
Reed River very easily and came in for a landing
and landed fine, except the left rear tire had
gone flat in that short less than 30 minute
flight from Townsville takeoff to landing, and
hit on a dirt runway is all it was, and
we started to swerve and it couldn't hold it.
Had me yank the emergency bottle, lock up all
the brakes, found two mains, so we blew
out the right tire and started to skid straight anyhow.
And I remember three great big old eucalyptus
trees ahead of us, and I thought, Jesus, one
of them is going to hit the bombardier's nose,
and the other is going to hit between me and
the right engine, and the other one is going to
hit maybe out on the wing.
And we're sliding pretty good.
And fortunately, our slide didn't take us
straight, but off this way a little bit.
And we hit one tree right on the prop nose on
the right engine, and we stopped just like
that, I remember.
It was fortunate, because probably-thinking
now, it seemed like ten feet, but it was probably
thirty or forty feet at least ahead of us-was a
pretty good drop-off into a dry Barranca
that ran down into Reed River in rainy weather.
If we hadn't hit that tree and we'd nosed into
that thing, I probably wouldn't be sitting
here talking to you about it now.
I was talking to my godson who's here, Rocky
McCutcheon, his dad was one of my best friends
in the squadron and we remained friends after
the war.
I was asked to be Rocky's godfather and the
story goes I agreed as long as it didn't mean
I had to give up drinking.
So we, anyhow, I was telling him last night,
the only reason I remember, I guess, I do
remember taking, I think it was a Form 5 that
you had to ride down at the end of the flight
and any problems on it, I just wrote snafu on
the thing, close it up and put it back
in the pocket, and climbing down the steps out
of the cockpit, down the drop onto the
ground, I was about two steps down, and all of
a sudden both knees just went like this,
And the shakes were just about that long.
And I got back on the ground, down on the
ground, and I was okay.
But it was just that kind of a nervous reaction
to that kind of a crash.
Kind of a delayed reaction to your near miss.
That's right.
Real near miss.
And went back out the next morning to look at
what they were doing to the airplane, and
the thing was already up on cribbing.
And it was a supply depot.
And I guess that shock on that right wing, it
distorted it to the point it could never
fly again.
So they didn't scrap it, they just put it up on
trimming like this, and the wheels in
the main landing gear were taken off, and all
that stuff went into the second squadron
supply pile.
So you just leave the rest of the Skeleton, if
you will, to-
No, I think that didn't stay there long.
They cleaned everything out of it, I guess,
that they wanted, and then maybe the depot
at Townsville came out with some trucks or
something to haul the rest of it in because
they could use it for patching skin and stuff.
Some of our guys up in New Guinea, if they had
bullet holes to patch, they just flattened
out a tomato can or something of this kind and
fastened it on just to keep the air from
blowing through it, the supplies were
non-existent, it was pretty tough in those days
and we did
have, so I told the Australians when I was down
there that here in March, April, May
probably of 42, roughly 35,000 American troops
landed in in Queensland. And I
said, you know, that's a small town. Plus the
fact we are homeless, we had no food,
and you made some tremendous sacrifices. You
had to because we were buying our
food in the open market. And as I said, we knew
that there was a problem because
because the bread we started to get had weevils
in it.
And we were buying the same bread
you were having to buy and eat.
And so we accommodated that on the junior
officer's table.
And I said, I can't remember whether I was the one
to take blame for it or somebody else,
but we'd go into the mess and sit down at the
junior table,
which was just a table with a bent seat side to
it, you know.
And everybody put a florin in a bowl.
And for the florin, you got one slice of bread.
And the guy that found the most weevils in that
slice of bread
got the pot for that meal.
And I said, some of the bread looked like Swiss cheese
when you got done with it.
And that went on for a short time.
And all of a sudden, a ship did come in from
the States
with supplies.
And somehow or other, we got apple butter in big,
as I recall, big tins.
They were probably smaller than that now.
God, that tasted good.
We hadn't had anything sweet or anything like
that at all.
And so the hell with the Florence,
we'd just take a knife and bapple butter
and got a little extra protein that way.
A little extra crispness in there.
That's right, a little protein in there.
But that led me into telling these people in Australia
when we dedicated the plaque,
I kind of wanted to thank them for what they'd
done for us
I knew they'd sacrifice a lot to make our
existence even tenable and the 33rd squadron I think
it got a stand down and they released the kids
and they all went into the little town of Ingham
and they descended on one pub and they drank up
all the beer and an Aussie went in and I had the
thing it would have been in our bulletin so I
had a copy of it took it down with me with intention
And I said, I want to read this.
I said, this is World War II, written by one of
your own people.
And if he hasn't gotten credit for it, he sure
as hell ought to, and it ought to be
in your historical files and so forth.
And it was entitled, There's Nothing So Drear
as a Pub with No Beer.
And he goes on in about, oh, three stanzas or
so in this thing, written out purportedly
on a cocktail napkin about what a terrible
thing it was to have a pub with no beer. They
only got two beer deliveries a week, and these
kids had drunk the whole damn thing dry, I
guess, on the first or second day of the
delivery, so there was no beer for another day
or two.
But that sort of symbolized some of the
problems that occurred because transportation
was very
Very limited in Queensland, they had a
narrow-gauge road, little freight didn't have
any signals,
they had stations.
And if you were a station master and they knew
the train was coming to you from this
direction, another one coming from this
direction had to stop at your station until the other
guy got there, or vice versa, whoever got there
first had to wait for the other one.
And we did make friends with the station
master, and our guys from the mess hall would
go up
with him, up to him, and he found a train there
that had freight on it, almost all of
it was freight, but we were getting an awful
lot of mutton, and the station master said
it's okay, you can take the beef off the train
as long as you put the same pounds of mutton
back on.
So this train was going into Charter's Towers
and on farther out, and so we did have a chance
to vary our diet a little bit. I believe he was
the guy, too, that was the mayor of that
particular area. There was no real town there,
but it was the mayor of a district. And he
was running for office, and so we maybe grabbed
some handbills for him in the tent and took
him up, and he guided us around into B-26 over
these various farms, and we dropped some
of the handbills out on the farms, and he got reelected.
I think he would have anyhow, but he was a
great friend of ours from then on.
There was never any problem, and we always
played it square.
We didn't steal anything, we traded, and same
way we got a generator.
Some of our guys were downtown at the
quartermaster base in Townsville and saw a
generator sitting
out there in the back corner and got a
two-and-a-half-ton truck and went back into town.
And how they got in, I guess they just said
they came for supplies and they let them in.
And they had enough to be able to manhandle a
generator of the two-and-a-half-ton truck
and brought it back out.
And we set it up, as I recall, between the 2nd
Squadron and the 18th Recon.
And there was a bracket going down to the Reed River.
We put a screen down here for the movies, and
then we could sit on this bank, kind of
a-we had a very fine movie deal a lot of nights.
Yeah, amphitheater. Yeah.
And we had this generator.
And finally, I think every tent probably in our
camp and the second camp had at least
one light off this generator, so it would run
for a few hours every evening.
And you had a little light to write a letter by
or go watch a movie. And-
So what was it, an internal combustion engine?
Yeah, it was an internal-
Just like a gasoline engine?
Yeah, we used gasoline.
And I guess we used 100-octane watered-down or
something, but I don't know.
I don't recall all that.
But those are the sort of the-
So how long were you guys there in Australia
before going up to-
New Guinea?
I guess that's where you were headed.
Yeah, we were based there at Reed River, and
33rd Squadron is in by Ant Hill Plains or
Woodstock a little farther towards Townsville,
and finally the 19th was about 700 miles north
of us up in a deal in the jungle up on Iron
Range, and they had us, so our group was scattered
out all over that corner of Australia, and I
think, well, we'd been there, I'd been
there maybe, I guess, three or four days, and
signed to the first mission.
Okay, that quick then.
Oh yeah, sure.
There was nobody that had any knowledge of how
to fight a war.
We knew how to fly airplanes, we were damn good
pilots, and we had a hell of a piece
of equipment.
But even some of our gunners had never fired a
gun out of a moving aircraft.
And I remember we did go out and there was a
rock out in the ocean off of Townsville
that was uninhabited and completely bleak, and
we were able to go out there and fly a
circle around that so even a pilot could get up
and go back and fire the waste gun.
So what did the B-26 have for armament?
Oh, we had a .30 caliber in the nose with a bombardier.
We had a twin .50 top turret, power turret.
We had a single .50 on a pivot in the tail.
And we had ammunition cans that slammed on the side.
They didn't have any feeds in the original ones.
And we had a couple of .30s in the waist to get fired.
lots of guns on this medium-sized yeah he had
two 50s and and I see one three
50s counting the tail gun and three 30s 30
caliber machine guns and which
worked a lot later on they beefed up the nose
so they could have a 50 in the nose
and he had to put a turret, twin turret, in the tail.
But the ones we had, the first ones we had,
didn't have that, and
it was interesting, there was no fighter cover,
there was no escort.
You were your own fighter cover, yeah.
Right, if you ran into Zeros on the way to the target,
you fought your way through the Zeros,
got to the target, and you got shot at by flak,
And then when you came back out, the Zeros, if
they were still around, we would be after
So, where were the initial missions going to, then?
Well, we would fly up late in the afternoon.
It was really very formal, because there was a
rock outside of Port Moresby, and I have
got an old set of orders that the
identification for that day was a right turn
around the rock.
It might be the right turn around the rock for
two days, then it might be the left turn
around the rock the next three days or
something, but they'd keep veering at it.
So that was identification as you came in.
Nobody bothered you if you did that.
So we'd fly up, we'd land there late in the
afternoon, because then probably the Japs
weren't going to come until they came at night
with a flying boat or something to bomb us.
And there were a few P-40s, a few P-39s, but
they were not really that effective against
the Jap Zero unless they were way up high on a
combat patrol and then could dive down
through them.
And if they made that one pass through them,
chances are they were going to be able to
live to fight another day because they wouldn't
stay around a dogfight to zero.
And they were escorting their own bombers, so
they'd shoot at the bombers and then
scoot on out.
And I think there was some light machine guns,
rifles, and pistols for anti-aircraft fire,
and there was a gun down by the harbor.
My recollection is that was about all of the
protection we had.
So we'd come in late, and we'd gas up, load up
with bombs, and we'd know where we were
going for the next day.
It might be to bomb the airdrome or the parking
facilities and so forth that lay airdrome,
or maybe go to Buna or Salamao or wherever it
happened to be.
Now where were those?
Those were on the north coast of New Guinea.
So we'd take off early in the morning,
daylight, and hopefully we'd have a chance to
get through
the weather because the Owen Standing Range is
rugged damn mountains and we'd try to slip
through some of the passes so we wouldn't have
to go so high.
And we also had to hope to beat everything held
together on the airplane.
Maybe on average if four of you were assigned
to go up and meet maybe four planes from the
33rd Squadron or maybe the 2nd Squadron being
the next door to us were committed to the
the mission, maybe three would get off the
ground from home base Reed River and fly up
to Moresby.
If the three survivors were all able to take
off the next morning, that was probably a
a miracle, maintenance, and they were flying
off dirt strips and a lot of gravel and dust
and Crap.
Very touchy engines and if you didn't, when you
started them you had to idle them just
right very quickly or they'd load up and the
spark plugs would get burned and this sort
of stuff and they wouldn't function properly.
You had a hell of a lot of trouble keeping
generators going, and you couldn't afford
to go on a mission if you only had one generator.
In fact, you're taking a hell of a risk taking
off if you only had one generator.
So all those things would come into play, and
the guys that did maintenance at Moresby
was absolutely unbelievable what they had to do
and work in, out in the sun, or at night.
Sun they get burned, and hotter than hell,
Humid, and at night the mosquitoes were absolutely
voracious, and there was no, nothing to keep
off mosquitoes, and they were out in it.
So the maintenance guys were all Americans, or
did some of the Australians get involved
in it?
Most all Americans.
Most of the Australians that were able-bodied
and were in the military were all in North Africa.
You know, and scattered around Singapore
and other areas of the Naval and, you know.
They got a lot of them captured by the Japs.
It, they came down through Dutch East Indies. And,
so it was, it was, those parts were hard.
Three of us went up, got off the ground okay
in the morning early and flew up to bomb
Herbal, and we hoped to surprise them.
So we flew up and we went across the island
considerably to the west of Herbal and turned
and came in from the north, and everything was
going fine until we were on our final
approach over the Vuna Canal Airstrip, coming
into it, and three Jet Bettys were flying
It had already taken off, so we went in on that.
That was the last B-26 raid for my outfit when
we were down there on Rabaul.
Massey and his plane on the right wing were
shot down, and they crashed in the Bay West
of Rabaul and got ashore, except for a couple
of them that got killed in the water crash.
Massey and one were those that got captured by
the Japs after they got ashore and they
were looking for help from the natives, and
some natives turned them in.
Japs interrogated them, and we found out later,
not too much later, through Australian coast
Watchers who were in touch with a German
Catholic priest that had a mission there, and
we were
informed that they were beheaded by the Japanese.
Gene Wallace, who was a classmate of mine from
flying school, he was one of the four
of us that were assigned to Yurok Lake, and he
was a co-pilot in that plane, and he survived
with two other guys from the crew for ten
months on New Britain by living in the jungle
with some of the natives, and he finally went
down to the west end of the island and joined
up with a coast watcher that had been using a
radio and had been chased by the Japanese
and it avoided being captured, even on a
triangulation form.
And he was building a boat to sail it down to
New Guinea, and so they went down to join
up with him.
And while they were there, the story goes that
the B-24 on reconnaissance came across
and they heard it coming and they stood out on
the beach waving and the
crew of the B-24 spotted what they thought were
white men on the beach
so they reported back when they got there and
then they went back over
and dropped some
supplies and some
requests for information
And they said, we're coming back such and such.
Would you put the serial number of the ranking officer
on the beach?
So they, I don't know if they gave them some
material to write on or whether they just
scratched it in the sand.
But they put Wallace's serial number on there,
so that identified them as
who they were.
And then they came back and said,
we're coming back up and we'll pick you up.
to send in a flying boat, so they communicated
with him and they picked up the three Americans
and the Aussie Coast Watcher and his native
number one guy.
I think that was all they could put into
Catalina and still get it back off.
It was kind of a harrowing story just for that.
They came in and dropped some flares for a
flight landing path, didn't know where the
the wreaths were or anything else, landed in
the dark, and they were in a canoe, and
the skipper didn't want to shut off one engine,
he just shut one off.
He didn't want to shut the other off in case
the Japs showed up and he could get out of
there maybe.
So he was taxiing it in a circle, but he was
going so fast, even doing that, they couldn't
bisect the circle with a canoe paddling to
catch him and get aboard, so he finally shut
the other engine off and they all scrambled on
and they started up. By that
time the floor path had gone out and he just
took off blind in the dark and got
them back to Port Moresby. Wallace and Bordner
and the other kid
showed up in our camp shortly after that on
their way home and
they were skin and bones. Hell, they'd eaten
bugs and stuff because they
couldn't find anything to eat and he spent
quite a while in the hospital back
here in the States and finally got back on
flying status and it was and we got
shot up but we were able to get back. So what
is this, ground fire? Yeah it was
ground fire. We were coming down dropping
incendiaries over Moonee Canal
Airstrip and we were on the left side of the
runway and I could see tracers
coming up and I knew we were going to fly
through them and they hit us.
One of them went through a hole in the
hydraulic tank that was in the navigator's compartment.
Damn near drowned him in hydraulic fluid.
It made a hell of a mess back there.
You can laugh now about it, but at the time it
wasn't funny.
No, it wasn't funny.
We didn't get any wounds or anything and it did
hit a prop cuff on our plane, so it made
our balance engine on that engine bed and we
had to go back.
I think we were able to get 700 RPM out of it,
so it was giving us some help.
And we were down pretty low on this run with
these incendiary bombs.
So we had to climb to about 10,000 feet.
And our third ship on the left wing didn't get hit.
We had a distributor on the B-26 set up on top
of the nose with the prop out in front
of it, and it got nicked, so it was cracked,
and generally if you had a cracked distributor,
you lost the engine.
For some reason or other, this damn thing kept
running, and we climbed probably a hundred
feet a minute.
That's about all we could get, and to keep
enough gas to get there, too, we didn't do that.
balance the thing out and finally kept climbing
and we got up so we found a
hole in the pass that was the other thing we're
sweating out of the clouds
were down we're dead because we had to go
around and make it a water landing or
beach landing on there on the shore but at
least we were out over the ocean and
got through the pass and and our lead ship had
gone on ahead by then and
because we didn't need him anymore. We were
okay. Touchdown and Moresby. Spending the
night there, I guess, is when I got bit somehow.
I got malaria, and that put me in the hospital
for a couple of days. Then they put me on very
heavy doses of quinine.
Didn't they give you Adderbren?
Maybe adebrine came along later.
It might have been there then, but they didn't
have it, so we had adebrine.
And you take heavy doses of adebrine, you're
not supposed to...
You mean quinine?
But you're not supposed to fly over 5,000 feet
when you have adebrine.
Heavy doses like that...
Oh, really?
The doc said you'll have tinnitus in your ears terribly.
But I had to fly, so I did.
And he was right, I don't think I've heard a,
I can't hear a watch tick, and I can't hear a
bird chirp.
I've got a damn hearing aid in this thing,
and the loss in this ear, the anvil chorus
that played in my head for so damn long is gone.
Or either that, or I've just ignored.
But it used to sing like hell,
and nothing you can do about it,
so you just get along with it.
We went up to Darwin to-the Japs had bombed the
hell out of Darwin, and six of us went
up there, which was a long damn flight from
where we were.
We had to stop once, I guess, to refuel, and
got up to Batchelor Field, and then we flew
I think it was two or three missions over
Portuguese Timor, bombing the town of Dili,
which is a pretty concise harbor on the north
side of Timor, and I guess we hammered it
hard enough and well enough because the Japs
never came back to Darwin again, but flying
home from that, all of a sudden I got some
guttural belly cramps and got in and I just
We went to our tent, collapsed, and Wade got
the flight surgeon because I guess I was semi-conscious
almost I guess, or maybe I was out, I don't
know, he said, your knees were up under your
chin and you were moaning like hell.
And so the flight surgeon came and grabbed me
and put me in an ambulance, and the next
thing I do remember is bouncing around on a
dirt road in this ambulance going into the
the field hospital in Townsville, which is kind
of neat.
They'd taken over all the houses on one side of
the thing,
and most of them were up on stilts,
and then they connected them with walkways
and made surgery and wards and stuff like that
out of these houses, and that's where I found myself,
and two young doctors were poking around my belly,
and finally an old gray-haired old doctor came in,
And he said, all right, just what have we found?
They think, oh, we think he has appendicitis,
but we're not sure.
And so he started poking, and he said,
aha, there it is, he's got it.
And he said, there's a place about the size
of a half dollar that responds to a certain touch.
And he said, that's the way you determine
whether he's got a bad appendix.
And they hadn't quite found it, but he found it
real quick.
And he said, you're going immediately into surgery.
And from the description of the thing,
he said, it may have ruptured.
And we've got to get as quick as we can.
And I remember him telling me that they
were short on anesthetics.
And I would get about a half a spinal.
So they'd do the best they could.
So I said, well, that beats the bellyache I
got, so get at it.
And I do remember he showed it to me.
He says, yeah, he said, it ruptured.
But sure, one of those guys that were damn lucky
ruptured into a membrane that had formed around
the appendix.
And it was the ugliest looking goddamn thing.
He showed it to me.
Looked like a, sort of like an oyster,
but all bloody and crappy looking.
And probably bigger now than my mind,
you know, it really was, but it looked big.
And then I said, he said, well, how are you doing?
I said, well, I'm getting all right, I can feel it.
And he said, well, we only have,
I said, how many stitches are you gonna put in?
And I think he said 12.
And I said, well, you've got three more to go.
And he said, you can feel it, can't you?
And I said, you bet your sweet ass
I can feel those fucking things, you know.
About that time, a nurse whacked me on the side
of the head
and said, Lieutenant, clean up your mouth,
can't talk like that. I'm right up here." She said,
I know you're hurting, but please. And I said,
so he sewed me up. And I do remember going into
the ward
and somebody, I guess one of the nurses asked
me if I'd like
something to drink. And I said, Jesus, I'd love
a cold Coke,
not dreaming what would happen. And I guess she
didn't think
about it either, but you got all that
effervescent stuff in
in it, my stomach bulged up a little bit,
but they had a tube up my butt,
and it ran into a bucket of water down beside
the bed.
And I found out that if I just gently squeezed
on my belly,
I could blow bubbles in this bucket.
So every time a nurse or a corpsman came by,
I'd give them a little salute with this thing.
Yeah, you'd give them a few bubbles, huh? Yeah.
Well, I gotta say.
I just wonder what kind of reputation
I ended up with in that hospital.
You should have given a second thought on going
back to Australia.
They might have remembered you.
Well, no, those were all Yankee nurses.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, they were all scattered.
But those are some of the things I remember.
If you went into a grass hut, we did go into a
grass Hut one night, I remember, and had
some blankets on some GI cots to sleep on.
And got back to Australia and I found I had
lice and what do you do with those things?
So a couple of the other guys had lice too that
stayed in that same old crappy bunkhouse
they had up there on these dirty blankets and I
forgot where the hell we got dog flea
powder but we doctored ourselves with a dog
flea powder and or maybe the flight
train got it for us I don't know but one thing
about that you kill them all but
then you got to go back about three or four
days later and do it again because
the damn eggs will hatch so we got rid of them
that way and from then on though
as I recall most the time we just take a
mosquito net and drape it over us and
sit on the ground lean up against the main gear
and go to sleep. At least you
didn't have some of these other things to
contend with. And the mess halls, we
had a canteen and a canteen cup and regular
mess kits, but that was a pain.
They actually had that thing, a mess kit with a
double plate type bowl thing. So some of
of us just took the tip of the spoon and
sharpened the left edge of the spoon a little
bit so
you could cut with it and then jam it down
between the canteen and the cup so nothing
rattled and go in a charline and just hold the
cup up and whatever was first in the charline
went on the bottom and you went through it and
then you started with dessert and ate
your way back down the other way.
Ate through the layers, huh?
Yeah, I ate through the layers. It all tasted
crappy. All you're doing is trying to...
What's the difference?
What's the difference? And I remember that a
couple of times the cooks had, if they had
canned fruit, peaches or apricots or something,
they were attempting to make alcohol
and they had some big aluminum pots out in back
where they dump all this juice. You get the fruit,
but you didn't get the juice. They'd keep it
for this mixture and they'd throw some
yeast or something else in there trying to get
it to ferment and if you didn't
complain about the food and after you'd had a
cup of coffee in your cup and then
had washed it pretty good they just if you're
pretty nice about the whole thing
you might have a chance to get a couple of
tablespoons of this concoction that
they had behind here and have a drink so I
remember trying it a couple of times
it wasn't something that was going to be habit-forming.
I don't think there was much alcohol in it.
It wasn't worth the pain.
But I do remember one time we got there just at
the right time.
Some P-39s were stationed there,
and hopefully for some sort of air defense, but little.
But they'd take it late in the evening or
afternoon, they'd take one of the ammunition
boxes for the wing guns, and you could put four
or five bottles of beer in there, and
they'd take the damn thing up above 10,000 feet
or so, or it got cold, fly around for
a few minutes and come down quickly and you had
some cool beer.
And occasionally we'd get a chance to share a
cool beer with one of those guys.
So was it American beer that they brought in?
Well, probably it was not, probably it was
Foster's or something, an Australian beer.
And we got some Coke syrup, no Coke, but just
syrup in gallon jugs.
Somebody brought it back up from Brisbane, and
what to do with that.
So we got to try it in and took a life vest and
unscrewed the tube you could blow in.
And so we just opened it and slowly poured
water in the thing until you got a bunch of
water inside the vest and then pulled a pin on
it and got sort of a little carbonation
in the water.
A little bit of suction water.
And then drained it off into this Coke syrup
and between the rubber taste there was a slight
bit of carbonation to it, but a little better
than nothing.
Did you guys get liberty and go into Brisbane?
Oh yeah, after I got my appendix out, I got ten
days sick leave, so I flew down to Sydney.
I'd gotten south of Townsville, Mackay maybe,
or some little place, and got dumped off.
But there was an old, looked like a DC-3, but
it was actually a DC-2, the Australians
had an old American Airlines plane.
And the guy was in operations, and I said, are
you heading towards Sydney by any chance?
He said, that's where I'm going.
And he said, I've got a little problem, do you
want to help me?
And I said, sure, for the ride, I'll help.
And he said, okay, well, I put this thing,
I bent the prop in a hole the other day,
and it's rougher than hell out there,
and I need some help in straightening it.
And we went out there.
He had a gas drum, and then a can,
and then a small can, about a beer can, I guess,
and a matchstick stuck in it.
And then the prop was up here.
And so he'd pull the prop through,
and have the line for the two good blades,
and then see how far the third blade was bad.
And he had a four-by-four, about eight or 10
feet long,
I guess, fastened to the bad blade, lashed onto it,
and said, I need a little extra help
on the leverage on this thing.
So he'd pull this thing down.
I said, well, I've got, just had the stitches out
on my belly being operated on.
I can't pull too much, but I'll help you.
I have 12 stitches.
So here we go.
And so we tweaked that blade enough
So it got within about that much of being spared.
He said, oh, hell, it'll fly as good as it ever
did that way.
Let's go.
So I got in with him.
And it's just the two of us.
He didn't have any other crew.
And they'd been firing freight for the Aussies.
And he was a motorcycle racer in civilian life.
And he flew that goddamn airplane the same way.
And we ripped across a couple of portions of Sydney
because he wanted to let his girlfriend and his mother
know he was back.
And then we went out and landed.
And so I had probably nine days of leave in
Sydney after that.
What was Sydney like?
It was a big city.
Once you could meet some gals and stuff down there,
you could have some fun.
I met some gals that worked with a Dutch airline.
and they had an office there. I still got a
little wooden shoe that they used for
advertising and the manager of the office threw
a couple of parties we all
came to and and that sort of stuff and I do
remember one nightclub that we used
to go to and and it had a dance floor and it
was on Springs so you'd sit at
table and have a few drinks and stuff and get
up to go dance and all of a
sudden the floors going this way bouncing up
and down on Springs. It was
pretty wild joint and never seen one like it
since. Bondi Beach we finally
the squadron got rented two apartments one for
the enlisted men one for the
officers on Bondi Beach and so when he went
down we were being on a cycle basis
So you have generally one or two crews at a
time could be on leave, depending on what the
activity was, and go down for a week.
And we made it better there, because if you
just came in on your own, you had to go to a
building officer, and he assigned you a hotel
room, and you used that.
Can I take a time-out?
Yeah, sure. Let's do that.
Sydney and Bondi Beach, some of the other
things we did around Reeve River, we tried
kangaroo, had a hind leg of kangaroo, tried
boiling it and then baking it, and I don't
think we could ever cut the leg, the muscles
are so hard, I don't know how you cook that
sucker to eat but it wasn't done in one piece
and we went around took a truck
went around to all the farms one time and we
must have bought I forgot maybe
30 or 40 chickens put them in the back end of a
two and a half ton truck and
brought them back and the chef said yeah you
kill them we'll cook them we'll fix
them. So we had these machete like jungle
knives trying to hold this chicken up
like this and whacking his head off but the
chickens flopping around too much we
quickly found out was very inefficient. There
must have been one of you guys
was a farm boy. Yeah a lot easier but we didn't
do that we just grabbed by the
head and snap it like this. Yeah and we had
these chickens flopping around
bleeding out on the ground but the cook guys
came on out and they got them
and cleaned them all up and we had a hell of a
fried chicken dinner.
Then some guys would get canned food and stuff
like that in the mail occasionally.
I know one navigator used to get canned tuna
fish and canned peas or something and he wouldn't
serve them, he wouldn't do anything with them,
he'd take them on leave with him wherever
He was going in to have some cook in a
restaurant making cream tuna fish and peas, and
we never
could quite figure out why he liked that so
well and wanted to keep them all to himself.
Well, he didn't get anything of yours, right?
Everybody had to do what they had to do.
Did you correspond much back home during the
years when you were stationed?
If we were talking earlier about additional
duties I had working the payroll that time,
Tom DeWan's father, Merle DeWan, was one of our
senior navigators, the hell of a guy.
And I didn't know it, but he kept a diary.
And nobody knew that until Tom found it.
Of course, you weren't supposed to, and that's
one reason why it was kind of a secret.
And his additional duty was squadron intelligence.
He did stuff in that intelligence area I never
knew anything about.
I was an assistant I.O., but all I did was
censor mail.
And you didn't mark it out, you cut it out with
a pair of scissors.
That's what I've heard, yeah.
And that was one crappy job.
All these guys you knew they were part of your
crews and part of the other crews and
stuff writing home, and I went up to visit that
port, and Uncle Moresby and this sort
of stuff would be in there, and you'd have to
chop that out, but you had to read a lot
of personal stuff to do that, and that is a
crappy, crappy job, but it was done, and
And those are the tough parts.
That diary was one thing-I wouldn't be sitting
here talking to you like I am right
now if I hadn't read that diary.
If you read the diary, you'll see in there the
doubt and the uncertainty and the uneasiness
as to what we were doing, what we were
accomplishing, there was no feedback, no, well
most of the
time the tail gunner would say, geez we started
a hell of a fire back there, or something
like that.
That's all we did.
And we didn't know whether you were successful,
whether you really accomplished anything when
you lost another plane off your wing or
something of this kind.
And I came home before the war was over.
I never really thought about those questions he
had and doubts, never put them in context,
I guess, until I read the diary.
A short way in the diary, all of a sudden,
Boingo, the light went on.
a guy I was associated with and had a lot of
respect for, too, had the same questions
and the same problems and wonder.
And reading that, then all of a sudden things
started to fall into place.
It really is hard to explain.
I was telling your general that the other day
in a meeting with him.
the, you know, reports of combat fatigue and
all this thing.
This wasn't that so much as that self-doubt, I
guess, that was in there.
And all of a sudden it actually felt like I
lost a load.
And okay, what the Japs, reading what the Japs
had to say and what we did to them, and
Well, we knew, okay, I can accept the fact that we,
as I put in the newspaper article,
I call this a raggedy-ass bunch of Yanks
stopped the Japs on the north shore of New Guinea.
They never got farther south.
And the Navy, Marines, the Army, and the Air Force,
with little help from the Australians,
because they just didn't have it to give.
It wasn't that they didn't want to.
They just didn't have it.
They had damn few troops down there to do it.
They fought like hell on the Kokoda Trail.
But it, we did do something.
We stopped the Japs and nobody else had stopped.
And if they hadn't been stopped,
it would have been a real mess.
Oh yeah, that's right.
They got into Australia, all hell.
That's what that colonel was talking about.
He knew something about the idea
they had a defense line for Brisbane
to give them the rest of the country.
Japs didn't just take part of a country.
So, how many missions would you estimate you
flew when you were?
Well, I flew 13 or 14 completed missions.
Looking back at my logbook and trying to
interpolate the hours and so forth and when
they occurred
and looking at the other activities and so
forth they had, I probably started out on
on twenty-five missions that, due to weather or
maintenance or whatever, were cancelled
and didn't work completed.
I know I turned back, re-turned back, probably
on four or five because of engine trouble,
things of this kind, or malfunction of
something that wouldn't allow us to continue
and be effective.
So it was not because of those maintenance guys
on the ground, both at our home base
and also at Moresby.
They worked their living butts off.
They were unbelievable.
So am I hearing that the B-26 wasn't the most
reliable aircraft around?
I wouldn't say that.
I would say that it was state-of-the-art in
that our 2800 Pratt & Whitney engine would
take a hell of a beating, but it had a lot of
moving parts, and all of them had to work.
Jim Murray got shot down-or didn't get shot
down, he got back to Midway in the Battle
the midway, and they counted over 500 bullet
holes in the aircraft before they quit counting,
strapping on the bullet.
The engines were shot up pretty bad, things
broken off and so forth, and every prop had
at least one or two holes through it.
He pushed everything to the firewall when he
dropped his torpedo and was heading into
of the four Japs carriers, he knew if he got in
the middle he was going to get killed because
the flak was so heavy.
He pulled up and flew down the deck of the
Iagagi, and his bombardier was strafing him
with a .30 caliber machine gun, and there's a
guy that's working on that now.
That took all that time period of that bomb run
for the four B-26s and those six Navy
torpedo bombers that flew out of wake to
challenge the fleet.
The combat period only lasted about five
minutes, but during that time, with him raking down
the deck, according to the Japanese side of the
thing, and another one, I think it was
Mays, that came across, we think he was dead at
the controls, because he just barely missed
the conning tower on the Jap carrier, but his
left wing took out all the antenna.
And so the Admiral was down on radio, he had a
signal the rest of the week by his semaphore.
And but anyhow, that's a long story, but when
Jim got back, the airplane was a wreck.
He couldn't get one main gear down or anything,
and so it was wiped out, and his crew was
injured, but not in a crash, but in a gunfight.
And they took those engines back, Ford
manufactured them, and they miked them all, and
the report
came back from Jim that the things had not
suffered any damage at all.
And he'd put the blowers on it, ground level,
weren't supposed to touch the blower knobs
unless you were over 10,000, and just pushed
everything to the firewall, and was doing
about 330 miles an hour flat out on the water
when he pulled up and went down to Yagogi
and up into some clouds.
It got away from those aeros that way, but
those, so the engines, the airplane was not
hypersensitive, but it did have to have all the
moving parts working.
What about the sensitivity to, let's put it
this way, the quirkiness of flying it versus
flying other aircraft?
I mean, because of its wing design and the
shortness of the wings, I mean, all of this
is, you know, some of this is probably just hearsay.
It was one hell of an airplane in combat.
It would take a tremendous amount of beating.
It was fast.
It was fun to fly.
It was like flying a fighter.
We had a wing loading.
It was higher than anything in the inventory
except the P-39, the gun with the cannon in
the nose of the thing.
That had a higher wing loading.
So it was very maneuverable that way, and it
was a boot to fly.
I loved the airplane, and I flew a lot of hours
in that, and I flew a lot of hours in
the B-25 after I got back in the Proving Ground Command.
In fact, I got checked out, I think, in
twenty-two different aircraft, everything
except I didn't
get checked out in the B-29.
I got an hour and a half in that one only, and
I didn't check out, never flew a B-24,
but I had seventeen time in B-25, B-26, A-20,
A-26, and almost all the transport aircraft
because I was, for quite a while I was at
Eglinton Field after the torpedo test section
disbanded in operations, and I was flying
errands all over the damn country.
on a single and ready to go anytime.
So Colonel would say,
well, take X out there and go get something.
And yes sir, but I haven't been checked out in that.
And he said, I got a co-pilot.
He'll tell you how to fly it.
It's got a stick and a throttle.
You can do it.
I'd go.
And so it was good that way.
It was good that way.
So how did you come back to the States?
Did you meet a certain number of days of duty
or missions or something?
How did that work?
Did you have a point system that I've heard so
much about?
I don't think it was that refined at that point
in time.
Looking back on it, and at the time we came back,
The pilots that were coming back were guys that
had trouble and had survived.
I was checking out a new pilot that had come
over from a training command assigned to our
squadron in early 1943 before I came home.
And I'd already been certified in the B-26, and
so I was up showing him all around Reed
River and let him do a little stick time on a
thing and flew confident in the airplane.
I came whipping down the downwind leg and just
made a fighter turn, 180 degree turn
in one big bank and dropped a gear and a flaps
all at the same time and came in to land.
Only trouble was the torque rod for the right
hand flap broke just about the time I was
up like you're dropping them and there was kind
of a bad scramble for a minute or two
as the airplane flew, went up this way and
lurched around and I finally got it flying
again instead of just lurching.
And my crew chief climbed up and looked out to
the dome of the turret gun, said, the lieutenant
said, the right flap's hanging down.
And I moved the flap handles again, and the
left one worked, but the right one didn't.
So that was what the problem was.
So we climbed up a little bit and dropped the
gear and slowed it down, and I played
with the flaps so I could sort of balance them out.
As we slowed up, the right flap kept falling,
and so that's how I brought it in.
and instead of coming in at 140 knots
or miles an hour or whatever it was we used,
I came in about 160 or 65,
because a little extra speed made it handle easier,
and got the damn thing on the ground,
taxied it back to the revetment,
left flap was up and tucked away properly,
and the other one was hanging down like a barn door.
Like a broken wing, yeah.
If it had been the other way around,
I'd have been in the ground.
There was no way to stop it,
I think those things-because they wanted us in
the 3rd Air Force because that's where
the replacement training units were stationed
to train the B-26 guys who were going to Europe
and North Africa.
That's where I ended up as a flight commander
in a bomb group replacement training unit
down at Avon Park, out in central Florida.
And I.
Okay, so you came back in what, 43, late 40?
43, yeah, late 40.
Late, probably, I think I reported in down there
around July of 43, maybe a little later.
Because I got a couple of weeks leave,
or months leave, or something when I got back.
And that was with them until
the end of the year.
I had forgotten how it came about, but Jim
Murry had been our squadron mate, had been
in that battle and had set up the torpedo test
section at Eglinton and he needed a pilot.
I got recommended to him somehow and he asked
for me and I got orders to transfer me up there.
So I served with Jim for four or five months
and then we were testing a glide torpedo and
It had a wing on a torpedo and a tail section
and so forth, and a paravane that hung down,
so when it touched the water, electric current
was closed, and you'd blow the bolts, and
the torpedo would drop as though you'd been
down within fifty feet of the water anyhow,
and enter the water and make a run.
But the glide angle on it, you could sit out
here ten thousand feet, and a hundred thousand
feet out in front of you is when that thing
would finally end up.
And so we were doing a lot of test work on that.
I thought, Jesus, if we had that sucker sitting
out for a ball and gliding these goddamn torpedoes
in a roll ball harbor, we'd have cleaned out
the whole Japanese fleet.
And never even have to show up.
No, no flak, no nothing.
That's right.
Jesus, what a deal this is.
So I was really gung ho.
And we trained a squadron out of every group of
B-25s that were going overseas to drop torpedoes.
And we had a little-on the hangar floor we had
a mock-up ship that was powered by
electric battery and wire control.
And then we had a bug that you sat on that was
the aeroplane, and the speeds of these
they were all relative to the actual speeds.
And then between your feet was another bug that
was a torpedo, and you had a sight up
on there.
And on the hangar floor, the exercises were
to-here's a ship steaming across, and
you're coming at such and such an angle, and
you drop the torpedo.
And if you do everything right, then the little
buggy hits the fish.
So it was kind of fun doing it, but it was serious.
But these guys, the pilots, were all taking
that training, and then the last of their
training was the hard part about it.
You took them out, they flew an hour south over
the Gulf, and I've forgotten, it was
somewhere between a fifty and a hundred feet
off the water, and they'd be in line of
abreast and you were the escort ship, you had
to stay up above and watch all the time.
And if you saw one of them dropping down, you'd
call in quick, get your eyes back on
the horizon, don't look at the water, look at
the horizon, always look at the horizon.
And otherwise you don't have any depth
reception, you'll go in the water.
So, an hour out and an hour back, if there were
thirteen airplanes in an escort airplane,
there were fourteen pilots that were wet as
fish from sweat, and it was damn hard work.
But it taught them what they had to do, and I
don't think they ever had to drop torpedoes,
but they knew how to do it and they knew how to
fly low
without getting killed.
You can't look at the scenery,
you gotta look at the horizon,
and especially on a desert or anything
where there's no buildings or anything like that
to give you depth perception.
So where were you when the war ended?
Were you still in that area or had you moved?
In England? Yeah.
Oh, England's on the, it was down there,
Pensacola, Florida.
But what I mean is, were you still assigned to
Eglin when the war ended?
Oh yeah, I'd gone out to, I'd done a lot of,
after that was over, then I did a lot
of work with the Chemical Warfare Service, both
down in Florida, we were developing methods
of dropping mustard gas because the only way
they knew how to do it was the old artillery
square from World War I, and they wanted to
make sure that if the Germans or the Japs
use gas that we could retaliate and do it properly.
Stuff that OSHA and EPA were around, they'd go ballistic.
They'd go white. Yeah.
I remember a very scientific testing.
We had 100-pound bombs with cyanide, and if you
dropped a bomb with a full burster, that
would burn all the cyanide, so it was ineffective.
So in order to change the length of the
burster, you had to put something in to substitute
for that part of the burster, and a broomstick
was about the same size.
It went down the center of the bomb.
So he cut a piece of broomstick about like
this, maybe a foot long, and then he had about
six inches of burster on the thing, and I guess
that's about where we found all we needed
to do was have that much to crack the case and
let the cyanide out.
And you could tell that we got the cyanide out
because the goats that they had tethered
around where you dropped it were dead.
There was some pretty bad stuff going on.
That's like the canary down in the mine, I think.
When the canary quits singing, you know you're
in trouble.
That's right.
Then I was sent up to Denver to work doing a
lot testing on the 500-pound clusters and
do experimental work for them, dropping on
those incendiaries they were building to burn
down Japan, and I had forgotten how many tons
of those damn things I had dropped, but out
of every lot you had to trust, as I recall,
five random selected bombs to make sure everything
went off.
Then the rest of that lot could be shipped to combat.
Then they already had figured out they could
put a little white phosphorous cup in along
with a group and that added to the crap as it
went off and then they got the
idea of running a burster cord through the
canister and those were set to go
off as I recall it 10 15 and 20 minutes after
the after the fire material was
expelled in case they got any firemen there
there would be like people
throwing hand grenades at them. We tested those
things. And then I got transferred out
to be the commanding officer of the Air Corps
Detachment at Dugway, Utah, which is the headquarters
for a lot of the testing that was going on with
chemical warfare. And we tested some
some cyanide stuff out there, and also got
involved in the preliminary work on orifice
size and so forth of spray tanks, because they
were looking at putting crap in those
to put on reservoirs to poison water and crops
and things of this kind.
Some of that testing was done kind of fun.
chemical warfare guys, they'd go out and put
white cards, six by six, I think, cards
on one-foot centers or something like that over
a flat field out in the desert there
in Utah.
And then they'd have a flagman, and I'd go out
and he'd flag and I'd fly over him and
spray that section ahead.
And they had a guy on the other side, I'd go
out and make a turn and, like crops ran,
and come back in.
And we didn't have anything in the sprays
except we had methylene blue so it would show
up on the cards.
coverage was.
One of the things we occasionally tried to do
was delay it just long enough so that the
last of the spray would get the guy with the
flag and he'd be all spotted up.
The other side of that too was there was about
six young Navy ensigns that were meteorologists
And they were doing meteorology one meter above
the Earth.
And they found there was inversions.
There was different wind currents down there in
that one meter.
And that was all done based on these droplets
coming down.
What would happen to them is they got close to
the Earth.
They got close to the ground.
So there were some interesting things going on there
that we had a chance to work with and see.
And, uh, Dugway, that was a pretty good assignment.
It was a small task.
You had a lot of signups trying to Bang, Bang,
Bang, Bang, didn't you? Yeah.
All of this was still while the war was going on?
It was still going on, yeah.
And, uh, it, uh...
So where were you when the war ended?
Or when they dropped the bombs?
Well I was at Dugway and when the British War,
the European War ended I was still in
Denver working at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal
and it was subsequent to that that I went
out to Dugway, and I guess when V-J Day came,
probably celebrated in Utah, Salt Lake City,
as I recall.
I don't remember.
Was there a celebration?
Boy, you drank all you could hold.
Or maybe you didn't hold.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I guess, a strange thing probably. There
was probably a sense of, obviously a hell
of a sense of relief and euphoria, but you had
to recognize too that your whole life
was going to change. So I guess there must have
been a sense of loss along with those
other things.
least a sense of uncertainty as to what the
future has. That's right, exactly. You
had a pretty good knowledge on the future and I
know that mentally I was
prepared to be put back into combat if we had
to invade Japan. Almost every
pilot that had any experience at all was gonna
go back over there. Yeah. And I would
have gone over, I'm sure, in medium bombers and
that's where most of my
hours were and experience, so. But it was,
yeah, it was an end of a way of life.
Right. And passing of an era. That was so, that
change in life was so
concentrated, and we were so pea green when we
started. There was no combat
training there was no nothing. Went through
flying school and we were damn
good pilots when we came out of Air Force pilot
training and I think that's
what saved us because we were our group was
fighting a probably the cream of the
crop of the Jap fighter pilots down there.
Because it was early on it
was before they'd gotten decimated. Yeah that's
the best thing that ever happened
to us. The carriers are going down a midway
they lost all those damn good
pilots and when we killed a bunch of them down
in New Guinea so that you have
a hell of a time convincing a guy that was
under a kamikaze attack though that
they didn't have somebody that's all they could
do was kill themselves a lot
of people killed our philosophy really was if
those guys wanted to die for
their Emperor we were gonna help them help them
along best way to go do what
do you think about the Japanese now they were
your mortal enemy there for
four plus years. How do you feel now?
I have no problem with him. If he, if he kept a
hatred that long, I think he'd be
a bitter... How did you feel when the war was over?
Did you feel, how did you feel when the war was over?
Bitter? I hated him. From what they did to the
guys in the Bataan
death march, and to our people that they
captured, and other airmen they
caster and the fact they would never rescue
anybody if they sank them with a
sub or anything of that kind. A dead Jap was
the best Jap. But that changed as
you went through life? Yeah, you can't can't
hold things like that and after
the war if you read anything at all you started
picking up bits of information
that showed how the military spirit was beaten
into these guys, they really had no choice.
If they didn't do those horrendous things, they
were going to get bayoneted themselves
or shot by their officers.
And it's not excusing them, but by the same
token, I think that you have to recognize
that they were under some pretty brutal
conditions just serving in their own military.
I can also think that the oriental mindset
towards humans is different than ours, probably
He still is.
Some of the things that happened to the guys in Vietnam
were maybe not as bad as the Japanese,
but they were pretty barbaric.
It's a different culture. Yeah.
Kids, I've talked to ROTC units in high school
and people like that, and the Rotary Clubs
and stuff occasionally, and a lot of Crestons
come up.
One of those,
That was, you know, these guys that shot kids
on Okinawa because they came close to them
after they invaded, that was immoral.
We can't do things like that and I said, you've
got to remember one thing, you can speak about
morals and there's a moral basis for going to
war to justify it within your own country,
But once you go to war, there is no morality.
The only person that wins the war is the one
that lives.
And you got to remember that those kids on
Okinawa, the G.I.s always give kids, little
kids come up and their G.I. makes friends with
them, so it's natural.
But a couple of them came up and opened up
their kimonos and pulled the pins on grenades.
And once that happens, just self-preservation,
a kid comes up to you and 50 feet away you're
going to shoot them before he gets close enough
to kill you.
You want to say that guy's immoral?
He's not.
He's a survivor and there's no morality in war.
There is beforehand, perhaps, and you can use a
religion justification for it and so
forth but once you pull the gun it's gone and
that's not taught, it should be.
I don't think there'd be as many wars if people
really understood how bad they are
and how the rules are, there's no markers at
Queensbury and we're kind of brought up
that way as kids even in street fights you
generally don't kick some guy in the nuts
too quick a journey, hit them with your fist
first, at least I did in my year.
Certain code of ethics anyhow. Yeah.
Do you feel like the war changed you as a
person and how you viewed life?
Oh, yeah.
I was a callow, naive kid.
Even though I'd worked hard, I knew what the
whole thing was about that way.
You mature very quickly and you probably
adopted the philosophy that the day you were born
you were beginning to die.
You had to have something like that going for
you somewhere along the line.
So it was not going to be an unnatural thing.
Sure as Hell didn't want it, but people say,
were you afraid?
Yeah, in various forms of fear, sure.
When you're flying in, there's excitement,
obviously, because you know you're going to
get shot at and maybe run into the enemy fighters.
So I never checked my pulse, but I bet it was
higher many times, and probably my blood
pressure too.
But I said, as soon as you get shot at, you get
so damn busy, you don't think about being afraid.
And even though you're not doing anything, if
you're a co-pilot, you're sitting there,
you're having to watch these guys and help call
out where the fighters might be coming
from and what the other airplanes in your
formation are doing close around you to keep
your pilot informed.
So you're busy, and bombardier's busy,
he's dropping bombs, and after he drops those,
he grabs a machine gun and he's looking
for something to shoot at, so you come out of it,
you look back at it, it was just like
climbing out of the airplane when I wrecked it.
Then he catches up with you.
My knees banged together, yeah, that's right.
But it,
It made a more mature person out of me, there's
no question about it.
Maybe it made me less dogmatic, more able to
accept change.
Accepting change is something that's hard for
people to do sometimes, but if you can
be pragmatic about looking at it. You have to
pick out the good things that are going
to happen and change. Sure, the questions I
told you earlier about where you're wondering
whether you've done enough or whether you've
done everything you should have done. You're
transferred from a situation before it's
finished. It's like for a kid who's
playing football. If he's yanked out of the
game before the game's over, he,
there's a sense of not completion. Yeah, lack
of closure, huh?
I mean you can't say you're not happy you were
taken out of it, but that doubt was there
as to whether I performed properly and done as
well as I could.
I got excellent ratings as an officer and a
pilot on my performance sheets and so forth
to the extent that they made them,
unfortunately those all got burned up with the
rest of my
records other than the fact I enlisted, yeah.
But the ones I saw and the ones I got in my
own F-201 file were all favorable that way, so.
Must have done all right.
You got to think you did.
And do you think you did all right?
I do now.
But it took a while?
I don't think I could have done any more than I did.
Could it take you a while to get to that point
in your mind, that you'd done all right?
time up until I read the one's book about two
years ago. You know that's right you mentioned
that that was a turning point. It was a big big
I told Tom that and everybody I've talked to about
that diary. That's a long time to be kind of
twisting in the wind a little bit like it kind
of sounded. I said it was almost like a weight.
There was no barrier then to to thinking about
the war, talking about it. I wrote a deal for
my kids all my life. I dictated it on
a little dictaphone. Every time I thought of
something, I'd do it. Then I had a cousin that
offered to transcribe it and put it into some
sort of order. It was a hell of a job.
And kids got it, and they came back and said,
Jesus, that was wonderful,
but you didn't talk much about going to war.
We want to hear what you did there.
And I have to go back and read what I told them
at that time.
I hadn't thought about that.
And I know why I thought about it,
because you guys at the library yesterday
were saying you wanted histories of if you
could get it.
And I've got one written.
I said I'd send to him.
But it doesn't have as much as I've told you.
Well, that's why it's sometimes good to sit down
and just focus on one particular thing, you know,
and that's what we've done.
No, it's,
I can talk about it in a positive manner,
and I'm proud to be one of those raggedy Ass Yanks
Yankees to stop them and that's really all that matters.
In fact, I'd like to use that as a way
to end our interview here.
I want to thank you for what you did for our country.
I and my generation and the subsequent generations
still don't thank you guys enough.
Thank you very much.
So I'm saying it again, by golly, and it's on there.
So now I feel better.
Most of it's on there, that's for sure.
So anyhow, do you have anything else you'd like
to say before I shut her down here?
I can't think of anything. I think, as I said,
hangar doors have been open. I've been blowing
air out of them for quite a while.
That's the whole idea, though. That was the objective.
So it's, I think I've given you just about
everything I did.
That's a fascinating story. Don't get too many
stories of guys that spent all of their overseas
combat time in Australia. I mean, usually
they're island hopping or, you know, that kind
of thing.
And so there's a real insight of the, you know,
it's a bit of a different planet down there.
Oh, that's right. At least we had a home base
to come home to. And that's the story that
is not told yet. And I was talking to the
general about it yesterday that the
effort made by the Air Corps units, and I'll
use the 22nd Bomb Group, they
converted to B-24s and by that time the Seabees
and the infantry and so forth
they'd move forward and so they were able to
put bases on the north Shore of
New Guinea, take over the jet bases, and then
they were driving forward. When they
capture a couple of islands, first thing on
those things would be Seabees or
or engineers, and they take the high ground
and blade it flat so they can make a runway on it.
And then say the campers are down the goddamn swamp.
And these kids that were living in tents on an island,
and that was their base, they just, you know,
stabbing enough wood to get half a floor in there,
maybe a little box to keep some personal stuff
in between their cots and so forth.
All of a sudden they'd get orders and they'd
have to move.
they have to load all that up
and try to take some of those personal things
and sneak them on board to 24s and C-47s.
They were there to haul the whole goddamn group
up to another island, dump them on a dirt strip,
and put the tents back in those swamps again,
because that's, couldn't make it a runway down there.
I think that's very tough,
because you never have a sense of being
and having a kind of your own tent and my own digs
that I can crawl into every now and then
when you need a little private time.
You're moving all the time,
and about the time they'd get settled in,
bam, the infantry would be another landing
and they'd have another island
with another goddamn strip on it
and they'd have to go up and occupy it
and fly out of it again.
People don't realize,
take 3,500, 5,000 men,
Because there's a lot of ground operations in
an Air Corps unit, not all flying.
And pick all those guys up and move them, and
then keep on flying combat missions at
the same time.
There's a lot of stress involved in that.
And it's a, you know, by the time the kid knows
where the water canteen is and where
where the latrines are and where the mess hall is.
And the nearest place maybe he can get some
local woman
to wash his clothes for him.
And those sort of home-like things are established
and he's picked up and moved and has to start
all over again.
Yeah, but they say war is hell.
And it's maybe better than being in a foxhole.
That's right, absolutely.
But how long do you get to stay in the foxhole?
Well, even the foxhole has to move.
That's right, you keep moving.
And especially if you're with somebody like Patton,
they had the same thing.
They never even got the foxholes.
They never knew where they were gonna spend the night,
except it would be in the dirt someplace.
Even guys in submarines, they went home,
they got a bay someplace.
That's true.
But this constant moving like that,
and flying missions at the same time,
and coming back to a strange field.
And they called them bases,
And they weren't bases, they were encampments
on islands, and a base kind of takes a cement
runway and a brick barrack building sort of,
but they weren't.
And that story is not told, and the story of
the maintenance men and the conditions
they worked under, Europe was bad, but it was civilized.
Where we were out there, there was no civilization.
And as you went up in those islands, you didn't
know who you had, didn't know who you could
trust, really.
Some of the Japs did get out of there and
they'd come back down and raid the camps every
now and then.
So, it's a story that needs to be told, and I
was talking to the guy down at the museum
in New Orleans, and he said, yeah, we're
working on all of those things, but he said, think
for a minute, there was an invasion of
Normandy, that's known as the D-Day, so there
were maybe
five or six D-Days in the Mediterranean." He
said, in the Pacific War, as I remember
the number, there was a hundred and four D-Days.
And admittedly, they weren't as large as the
ones in Europe until yesterday. And your
general said, I've got one exception to what
you said
there. He said, did you know that Okinawa was
the largest invasion ever made, but either
man or ship or whatever plus the fact it wasn't
26 miles from your base it was a
couple of 3,000 miles across the Damn ocean and
the thought then occurred to
both of us two of us I guess that that's
probably damn true and that was just a
preliminary what was gonna happen if you had to
go into Japan the big one would
have been much worse yeah that's right and so
okay those are the things you
to think about. Thank you again, John. You're
welcome. I