Voices of the WW2 Veterans

Our first day we arrived on Saipan, we were picked up at the airport by one of the sergeants from the base, and they brought us to our quarters and said, “This is where you guys are going to be.” We walked in, and all the beds are made, the uniforms are hanging up, and everything’s in place. And I said to the guy, “Hey, we can’t go there, this place is occupied.” He said, “Don’t worry about it, they’re all dead.” That’s our first day. And I really got a little bit discouraged, you know. What the hell am I doing here? Mommy, I want to go home. The whole crew was 18 or 19. We had an old guy of 26, and we called him Pops.

There were 11 people on that plane. I was left gunner and my friend was right gunner. My twin brother was tail gunner. On our first raid, our best crew members that we’d gone through training school with collided with another B-29, and 22 guys died right then—our first mission, you know. We were 18 years old, what do we know about war? It was tough. We were all crying and, oh boy, it was awful, but what the hell. It happens….

The B-29 was the best airplane made at the time. It [had] remote control gunsights. It wasn’t hand-held like a B-17, where it’s 65 below zero and you’ve got this heavy suit on and you’re freezing to death. We were air-conditioned and heated. My guns were 40 feet away from me. I never touched a machine gun. I had a control. As long as I kept [Japanese airplanes] in the reticle of the gunsight, theoretically the computer would track it and would shoot it down. Theoretically…

There was a constant fear of [kamikazes]. See, the Germans and the B-17s in Europe, at least those guys knew they were fighting a normal war. I don’t know of any case of a German fighter plane crashing into a B-17 purposely. But the Japanese would do it. If they could knock down a B-29 with one plane, they would do it. Anything.

We destroyed that country. We absolutely decimated it. That war was won by Air Force power alone—not the atomic bomb. All the atomic bomb did was destroy a city and hasten the surrender of Japan. Toward the end of the war we’d go over five or six targets a night, drop pamphlets and say: One of these cities is going to be bombed tomorrow, we want women and children out of this town.

Never considered as to whether I was killing babies or dogs or animals or nothing. We were doing a job and that’s all we cared about. We wanted to go over there, destroy the cities, burn the cities. We had fire raids over Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Nagoya, where 300 to 500 B-29s flew over there and dropped fire bombs. We destroyed 27 square miles of Tokyo, one night. We could see the flames for hundreds of miles. We could smell the smoke. We were only at 10,000 feet. We just burned the bejesus out of that town. But that was war. We weren’t contrite, we were happy because we knew we were doing a great job. (Source: LOC)

In gunnery school, they would take the hatch off of the back [of an AT-6 Texan], and you stood up in the air in the slipstream behind the pilot. The only thing holding you in that airplane was a belt around your waist bolted to the floor. You had this 50-caliber [machine gun], and another AT-6 would come up towing a target, and he would get out there a distance, and the idea was that you had to hit that target with so many shots, in so many flights, to qualify as a gunner.

And, believe me, some of us were just kids that didn't know [how to shoot]. Some of these young fellows, they were gunnery people from the start. They had been raised with guns. They knew how to lead a target.

But we were hurting for gunners. We were losing B-17 crews so fast in Europe that you just couldn't believe it. You'd read it in the intelligence reports and it boggled your mind that nobody over there in the beginning was flying over eight or ten missions and they were dead. We were losing them that fast.

It's really a shame to say this, and it may disturb some of the parents of youngsters that were shot down at the time, but if you were on your last [training] flight and you needed your 600 required holes in the target, the pilot towing that target would bring it in and put it right on the wing of that plane. You couldn't miss it if you wanted to. You just pointed that 50-caliber right at it, pulled the trigger, and ran your whole belt of ammunition out. Then you were a gunner. (Source: LOC)

Every [B-17 bombing] mission we went on, the flak was so heavy you could put your wheels down and taxi on it. It was a black cloud. And out of that came all of these fighters. We went to Wiesbaden on the 15th of August, 1944. My squadron, the 360th, had 36 airplanes in it. And the first time we ever saw any Focke-Wulf 190s was over that target. A hundred of them made one pass, and shot down 12 of those 36 airplanes. Our number-3 engine quit, and we feathered the prop and made it back. The tire was blown on that side, and we ended up in a field.

We were sitting in the officers’ club that night, and the crew chief comes in and says, “I found out why your number-3 engine quit—I dug this out of the supercharger.” And he held up a 20-millimeter shell. He says, “It went through your number-3 main tank, blew the tire on the right side, and stopped in the supercharger. And here’s why you’re still alive.” He pours out a bunch of sand [from the shell] and says, “Some Polish slave laborer had filled it full of sand instead of gunpowder.” That’s why I’m still here. (Source: LOC)

[Early in the Pacific war] we still had this gunsight in our SBDs [Dauntless dive bombers], and we’d usually go into a strike [from] above 20,000 feet. When we went into a dive, because of the cold air in the cockpit [and] on the gunsight and the glass, as soon as we tipped over and came down, everything fogged over. That was a deficiency that was critical, so for a while we had to roll the [canopy] open. That’s not very comfortable diving in the SBD with the cockpit open, but we had to…

We tried various types of tactics [to fight against Japanese Zeros]. We learned certain things that we couldn’t do, more than anything else. He could out-turn us, but we could meet him head-on with the [Dauntless]. This actually worked pretty well…

[On one bombing run] my gunsight fogged over, so I pulled out and went back up and rolled over for another attack on a ship down below. And when I pulled out of that one, I heard my French gunner in the rear seat who, when he got excited, never said a word in English. He was on the speaker really going at it in French, and I looked back and here was a Zero on my tail…. We ended up making three or four head-on runs [at each other], and I finally got on him and I hit him. I had him on fire leaving a smoke trail. As he dove away, he was burning.

With the [faster] F4F [Wildcat] we had the firepower, 50-calibers, and we could fire at quite a range. The nice thing about the gun on the F4F, with those guns in the wings, they were at a level, and pairs could be aimed to cross at different ranges to achieve a cylinder of fire.

One thing we learned about the Zero, if he got on your tail at altitude, you might as well dive away, because you could probably out-dive him. At high speed he was a little less maneuverable than was the F4F. On straight and level, of course, he was a little faster too. So it was a real contest as far as fighters were concerned. A lot had to do with pilot ability. (Source: NMPW)

On my second tour…I picked a brand-new [P-51] D-model, a classic Mustang. We were still camouflaging them dark green, [but] we were [also] starting to get all-silver airplanes and not bothering to paint them. In November of ’44 I was flying a mission, and the first big snow had hit Germany—I mean, it was just solid white. I looked down at these two airplanes [in our formation] that were silver, and two that were dark camouflaged, and which ones stood out? It was the camouflaged ones.

So I got back from this mission and said to the crew chief, “Hey, if this thing’s laid up for heavy maintenance, down for a couple of days, would you please de-paint it and put it in a natural aluminum paint scheme?” I put it to him on the basis of “It might save my butt,” but frankly, I thought the silver paint scheme was a little cooler than our green paint scheme.

I come out [the next] morning, and there’s my Mustang in gleaming aluminum. I looked at these guys, and they were kind of standing there at attention, and I looked at their hands, and their hands were raw, bloody [from the steel wool used to strip the paint]. The moment I left that afternoon they had started working on that airplane…. I always tell that story about how motivated our support guys were. I can’t say enough about our crew chiefs. (Source: NASS)

Larkin describes flying his Waco CG-4A glider into Normandy on D-Day. The glider, attached to a 350-foot nylon rope, was towed by a C-47.

We got to the French coast and we were all in formation, and…we flew into a hail of anti-aircraft fire the likes of which you’ve never seen. Then we hit a cloud bank that wasn’t supposed to be there. Supposed to be no clouds, and we hit a cloud bank.

I was talking to my pilots [of the C-47 towplane], and they stopped talking when we were in that cloud. The next thing you know, my airspeed needle was up, up, up, up, from 105 miles an hour—which was supposed to be our cruising speed—my airspeed indicator was reading 190. And it was redlined at 175 or something. You talk about wild! Every shudder and shake, I thought the [glider] was going to come apart. But I didn’t know what was going on. I had no idea. I was in a cloud and I was following the rope.

All of a sudden the rope starts [climbing] up. I follow off after it and we come out of the cloud up on top. There’s the [C-47], both engines running, and I’m still [attached]. Back into the cloud the airplane goes again, then it picked up airspeed and pulled us down with it and ran our airspeed indicator up against the peg. Came out [of the cloud] a second time. Crazy deal! But there’s my [tow] airplane, both engines running. Moon shining. I could see him. He rolled over on his side and disappeared into the cloud. When that rope came tight, it broke. And there I was, 900 feet over Normandy and 25 miles from the landing zone.

What happened is, the pilots must have been killed, and had the power settings all set. And the airplane just went crazy without any control. Anyhow, they found the airplane a couple months later, in a patch of woods about 30 miles from where the line broke. And all the guys in it, they were all dead. (Source: RWN)

It was not too many days after D-Day, maybe a week or 10 days. We went out on a strafing mission somewhere in front of the troops off of Normandy. I was flying on the left flank—that was the lowest guy in the squadron at that time. Coming down a road over to the left was a car, three or four miles down the road. And whoever was leading the squadron said, “Whoever is on the left flank take that staff car out—it’s a German staff car.” I peeled off and went on down and got my guns in position. On the P-51 we carried four 50-caliber machine guns. As I pulled the trigger to get the staff car it came to a stop and three guys jumped out. And this large amount of 50-caliber stuff hit them.

I didn’t tell my family about this for 50 years. I couldn’t talk about it. I have trouble now with it. That’s the first time I’d ever killed anybody, and it wasn’t a nice looking thing, because those shells are heavy, and the [Germans] were just dancing in that [fire].

I think I froze on the guns, and there was a building right behind [the staff car] and I just barely pulled up. Then I threw up in my oxygen mask, and that’s not a place to throw up. I ripped it off, and then I threw up again and sprayed it all over. Being a sophisticated fighter pilot, to throw up was an embarrassing thing. You had to take the airplane home for somebody to clean up. If you [threw up] in training you had to clean it yourself, but I never had that problem.

I knew I was through for the day, and I just asked the commander, I said, “I want to abort and go home.” And he said, “Fine.” They sent two airplanes, [flying] much higher than I was, to escort me back to England. The crew chiefs who took care of my airplane were much more sophisticated than I was. They just lifted me out and said, “Don’t worry, everything’s okay.” I wanted to clean it myself. They didn’t take me to the ready room, which they normally would. They didn’t want anybody who looked like I did and smelled like I did in the ready room. The hell with that. So they took me to my room. I went and sat with my flying suit on under the shower and got cleaned up, then went back to my room. The chaplain showed up and tried to get me to discuss this with him, and I didn’t want to at the moment. Finally, I asked the chaplain, and he was sitting on the bunk with me, “Have you ever killed anybody?” And I remember this so well, he said, “No, that’s not my mission. When you get ready we’ll talk.” (Source: LOC)

Douglas MacArthur’s return to the Philippines in October 1944—[for] the Battle of Leyte—didn’t get the publicity the Normandy landing did, but it was the largest landing in the Pacific. The airdome on Leyte was supposed to be complete three days after the landing. Our Ninth Fighter Squadron was ordered to be ready to go then [flying P-38 Lightnings]. But one of the Navy carriers had been sunk, forcing all those pilots to land on this little mud strip before we even arrived. It was just a sea of mud, so they all crashed, of course. I don’t think any were killed. There was a pile of about 15 F-6Fs all stacked and crashed all over the place. They had to take bulldozers and push them off to the side to make room for our aircraft.

We got there, and [the controller] said, “We’re not ready for you.” And our squadron commander said, “You’d better be, because we don’t have the fuel to go home.” So the controller said, “We’ve got 1,500 feet of [temporary runway] for you to land on.” All of us cringed, because it takes 2,200 feet to land a P-38. But we had no choice.

When it was my turn to land, I saw this narrow strip of metal, which turned out to be a line of wrecked Navy fighters. But all 16 of us landed. There were a couple of smashed noses and some smoking brakes, but we all made it. That was the good news. The bad news was, we had barely gotten our aircraft lined up when the kamikazes came in and blew up about half of them. We were almost back to square one. It was a mess. And it was just one raid right after another, of kamikazes and then Japanese bombers, all that night. We were bombed 52 times that night…. I think I saw more action in the Battle of Leyte than I did all the rest of my tour in World War II. (Source: NASS)

The first time I went over [to Europe] was D-Day plus five, because they had to get landing strips [ready] for the planes to come in. We were in old cargo [airplanes], and we converted them into air ambulances. We had about 24 litters. The [ground] ambulances would come up with litters, and we would put them on our planes.

They were bringing [wounded soldiers] into the field hospitals, and they were just kind of cleaning them up and sending them to us. Some would have grass all over them, and they all looked alike. You know, they were just men in uniforms. My second time out, we had a whole plane full, and this one on the very bottom was moaning and groaning. I looked at his card, and he had just had morphine, so I couldn’t give him any more for a while. So I said to him, “Now, let’s change your position. These are awfully uncomfortable, these old canvas stretchers. Maybe this will help.” And he started talking in German…. I didn’t know he was German till he started talking, because [the medics] were just bringing us wounded.

[An American soldier] over on the litter next to him had just been fighting…. His buddies had been killed, and here was a German, and he was going to kill him. He got up, and I was pushing him back, and I said, “I need help.” The [airplane’s] navigator came back and he helped me. I remember he said, “It’s Sunday. We’re going to England. The war for a while is over for you. Just take it easy.” He calmed him down.

[Another time] I had a whole planeload of Germans. It was a hard thing for me to do anything for them. I said, “I don’t think I can do this.” But then, I think a couple of trips later, we had some [American] infantry men, and this one boy was talking to me. They would all talk if you weren’t busy. He said that [his squad] had been cut off, and they had a lot of wounded. And over the loudspeaker, this German doctor had said, “I know you have wounded, and I know you don’t have any medic. I’m a doctor. They’re going to cease fire. I’m coming over to take care of your wounded.”

That was the best thing I could hear. I thought, “This is what it’s all about. We’re all human beings, and this is what I’m here for, just to take care of the wounded.” So I could handle it after that, and I felt that God had sent this patient to help me. (Source: WVHP)

At 1:45 we were rolling down the runway. Four hundred B-29s met in the air just south of Japan and formed formations before going on to the target, which was Kobe, Japan's fourth-largest city with heavy industrialized areas. We had the unfortunate wing position in the formation, which meant we were the last plane out on the edge and the most dangerous spot to be in. In addition, we were having trouble with one of our engines and were not able to keep up with the rest of the formation. We developed an oil leak and the entire underside of the plane was black with oil. The Japanese fighters took advantage of our predicament and came at us with full fury. As radio operator I was the only crew member with no job to do over the target because of radio silence, so it was my duty to sit up in the navigational astrodome and call the approaching fighters for the gunners. Bullets were flying everywhere, and one came through the plane and skimmed my arm.

Being the first-aid man on the plane, I received the dreaded call that the radar man and the tail gunner had been hit. I immediately proceeded to the back of the plane to the radar position with my first-aid kit. To get to the back of the plane I had to crawl through the tunnel over the bomb bays to the radar position. This was a fruitless trip because the radar man was dead. A 20mm shell exploded in his stomach. The tail gunner reported he could take care of himself, and I was thankful for that. To get to him I would have had to crawl through a non-pressurized section and the tail gunner's position was just large enough for one person with the door as his backrest.

When we left the target we had lost nine B-29s and the Japanese had lost 16 fighters. Smoke was rising to 25,000 feet and spread out over a 10-mile area. A total of 3,000 tons of incendiary bombs had been dropped. (Source: unpublished memoir)

On my 16th mission, May 11th, 1943, my luck almost ran out. Catania, Sicily, was the target. It was a milk run, lightly defended, with five ships around one dock in the port. We picked up our Spitfire cover from Malta. We were flying low element at 19,000 feet. Anti-aircraft fire was light. Bombs were away and we headed out to sea.

A burst went off right in front of us, and my compartment was full of flying Plexiglas and metal. The bombardier tried to cry out, fell, and did not move. I saw a hole in my right thumb and my right arm felt like it had been slapped. I could get no response from the bombardier. I could not contact the pilots who were in direct line of the burst. I realized I was starting to pass out due to a lack of oxygen. There was no command to abandon ship, but it felt like we were falling off to the right, and I felt that everyone in the front of the airplane had probably been hit. And the fear was, if you go into a spin in an airplane, the centrifugal force pins you against the wall and you can't move, and that's probably why the other people in the back of the airplane did not get out. I remember jumping. There’s two little red handles; I opened the nose wheel door and out I went. The last thing I did before I went out of the airplane, I saw my thumb was hanging off the side, I put it on straight and bailed. My eyes wouldn't focus and I passed out, came to in the water. Of Lieutenant [Roland J.] Ingerson's crew of ten, I alone survived. If I had been the hero type, I would have crawled back up, pulled a dead pilot out and flown home, but I wasn't a hero type. (Source: LOC)

While I was at Majuro [in the Marshall Islands], before going for Saipan, I volunteered my division to do some practice bombing.  Of course, I had another motive too. One of the Padres out there, he used to say that in the outer atolls, the girls would be just in their grass skirts, no muumuus or anything like that. I kept it kind of quiet. I would take my division there after doing our combat air patrol. As we were coming in to land back at the field, we’d go down and wave at the girls. And they’d just all line up and wave back, you know, and wobble a few things in the process.

Aboard ship I had them make a little parachute that I took, filled up with sweet-smelling soap and whatever other little goodies that I could.  And on our last time out of there [Majuro], I’d open the canopy and there the girls would be on the beach, you know, waving. I’d come down real low, with wheels and flaps down. I dropped it and I got the funniest feeling when the little parachute landed on the beach, right near them. They opened it up and they all lined up and went into a little salaam, a little thank you. You have to have a little excitement. (Source: NMPW)

McGinniss was shot down and taken prisoner during a bombing raid over Schweinfurt, Germany on October 14, 1943—so-called Black Thursday, when the U.S. Eighth Air Force lost 60 B-17s in one day.

During my interrogation, I was interviewed by a German that could speak perfect English. He was blond, good-looking man. And he spoke better English than I did. He started talking about my name, and said “I know a clan of McGinnises” in Scotland and so on and so forth. And he kept on talking small talk. “Where did you bomb today or yesterday? What kind of plane were you on?”

They gave us a form from the International Red Cross. They had all kinds of questions. And I knew we were supposed to fill out the name, rank, and serial number only. And he said, “Don't you want your family to know you’re a prisoner of war?” I said, “Well, they will find out one way or another.” I was scared to death, by the way.

He said, “Fill out the rest of that.” I said, “No, I'm supposed to fill out my name, rank and serial number. You probably know that.” I was wondering what he was going to say. He said, “Where did you bomb?” I said, “You know where we bombed.” He said, “Put it down.”

So I wrote it on the form: S-W-I-N-E-F-O-R-D. I didn't even know how to spell Schweinfurt, Germany. He got so mad, he broke out in German. And he couldn't hold it. He said, “You people come over here and can't even spell the name of the target you are bombing!” (Source: LOC)

D-Day morning was wild, it was wild. Airplanes everywhere! We came close to running into several of [our own airplanes] that morning, but we broke out and were going over the channel and boy! All the ships were down there.

….I didn’t get to bomb [my first target] because there was cloud cover and we had to bomb on [following the lead of] a radar ship. We got in behind him and we bombed on him. We went back to the base and landed and started to get briefed for another mission. They refueled and re-bombed our airplane and we went on our second mission that day. It was for an inland target, a railroad I think, intersection. We bombed that and came back, and then we thought we were through, and they called us back and said we got another bridge that wasn’t knocked out the first time around. We’d go get that one. The flight surgeon put a benzedrine [tablet] in our mouth and had us swallow it while he was right there. Everybody on the crew got a bennie to keep us awake. We got in the airplane and started the engines and everything. Then they scrubbed the mission because one of the bomb groups going after their target had knocked the bridge out and we didn’t have to go. So all of us went back to quarters and we’re lying there, eyes wide open. We couldn’t sleep. We cussed that flight surgeon all night long! The enlisted men were just the same way. They said, “We couldn’t sleep at all.” But that was my first dope, and my last. (Source: RWN)

People don’t realize the fortitude and the conscientiousness and the necessity of the ground crews. We’d bring an airplane back. One time we came back a little worse than usual. I started counting the holes from the nose to the trailing edge of the wing. We had 189 holes and that airplane was flying within two or three days.

We had flown a “war weary”— a dog—on a practice mission. It burned 50 gallons of fuel an hour, more than anything we’d ever flown. The next mission was a “maximum effort.” That meant every [airplane] that could go went. We went to the briefing. Looked up, and there was that dog we’d been flying. I looked at the pilot. We looked at the navigator. We knew where we were going—northern Norway, almost all the way up the North Sea. We knew it would run out of fuel before it got back. And 15 minutes is the maximum you’d survive in the North Sea.

After the briefing we went out to get the airplane ready to go. And the crew chief came in. He remembered I was the engineer. He said, “You coming back?” I said, “No.” He said, “That’s what I thought.”

He said “Come here, I want to show you something.” He dropped the flap on the wing, looked up in there and saw some fuel lines. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a screwdriver, and disabled the hose. Then he said, “Oh. Got to ground the airplane. It’ll take me six hours to change that hose.”

He could have just [let us fly], gotten rid of that dog, and never worried about it again. But he knew we wouldn’t get back. (Source: LOC)

[After the war ended] they put me on a train, a troop train, to Fort Smith, Arkansas. And I was in charge of the GIs on there. It was quite an experience. They were all hardened [infantry] troops, you know, and I was an Air Force officer [and fighter pilot]. The first time I let them get off the train, I couldn’t get them all back on. So I decided: Well, I’ll just appoint one of them to get off and get food and cold drinks, and the rest of them can’t get off anymore. They told me I better not go to sleep, they were going to kill me. I think they would have, you know!

Coming back [from Europe] on the Liberty ship, I had had a captain with me who was an infantry officer. They had assigned us to get these ground troops to do chores on the ship, sweep and mop and so forth. When I got the troops up on deck, they threw all the mops in the ocean! And [the captain] said, “I’ll take care of that.” You know, he knew how to handle them better than I did. I never had been in charge of troops. (Source: RWN)