ShrinkWrapped

Earn This: Part VII

(This is my father's story, in his own words, of his time flying 50 missions, as a tail gunner, in a B-24 Liberator during WWII. This is from an interview he did for an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in downtown New York in 2003. My father passed away at the end of January and I am posting this as an homage to him, and to all the others who sacrificed so much for me and my country. The quiet courage on diplay is awe inspiring.

From time to time I will add some comments in parentheses and italics; all the rest is my father's voice. I can hear him still.

The first post in this series can be found here and all the posts in this series have now been collected in the Earn This archive.)

(The crew of Flak Happy.  My father if the second from the right in front.  The photo is unlabeled and I don't know who the rest of the crew were.)

It was in Laredo, Texas. I was friends with a Greek guy named Gabby. We were friends. Palled around, did everything. And toward the end of the school—all of us hated physical ed, you know, because the guy who was running the phys ed course could keep you there as long as he wanted until you did it the way he wanted—and everybody was making fun and so on. So I turned to gabby, and I said, “Gabby, we want to get the hell out of here. Let's do the thing and get it over with.” And he says, “Shut up, Jew.” I'm dumbfounded, “What?” He said, “You heard me, you fucking Jew.” I said, “Gabby, you know what you’re saying?” He says, “Yeah, you're a fucking Jew.” My feeling was that if I hit this son of a bitch, I will never be commissioned. That'll go on my record. Yeah, I’ll get off but they'll never … I'll never be commissioned. So I just said, fuck him. I didn't say a word. I turned away. And he kept yelling, “Jew,” and I acted like he didn't exist. He must have been the most frustrated guy in the world. And you know why I say that? Because I had a fight with one guy on my thrifty-fifth mission.

We used to have what we called two egg, three egg, and how-many-eggs-do-you-want missions. You knew if they said how many eggs do you want, it meant Vienna, Munich, or Ploesti. You just knew that. They get you up at four o'clock in the morning to fly a mission. You're out, you're off the ground at seven, you're over the target at twelve, you're home by three. And I’m standing there and it's pitch black, and we're shuffling and shuffling. So I said, “I wonder how many eggs they're going to give us this time?” And Bob Polk said, “What do you care?” I said, “Bob, I'm just talking.” Bob was my nose gunner. And he gives me a push. And I said, “Bob, leave me alone.” He says, “I don't want to leave you alone.” Now, I know, years later, we were all tense. We were all … you know, about every eighth or ninth mission, somebody would refuse to fly, and you'd ignore him and he'd get up and he'd fly. I remember my ninth mission. I wouldn’t get out of the bunk, out of the cot. I said, “I'm not going to die. Go ahead. If you want to go, go ahead.” And they don't say a word. They get dressed, and then you get up and follow them. That's what everybody did. But he kept hitting me. I said, “Bob, leave me alone.” He said, “I don't want to leave you alone.” And I just made a scream! And I jumped him. The guy was a lumberjack, remember? And I got him in a neck lock and I was going to kill him. Realize I as also nervous. To make a long story short, they pulled us off. He was mad. I was mad. But when I shot the guy down, because that was the same mission I shot the guy down, he said, “Oh, Abie, I love you. I love you. You're wonderful.” But this Gabby was a son of a bitch. We were buddies! We, we did everything together. Never once said a word. We were pals at gunnery school.

 (In retrospect I suspect my dad's temper was, in part, affected by PTSD. He was a very patient man but on rare occasions he would lose his temper, and then he would just scream in inchoate, surprising ways. I can imagine him reaching the end of his tether and going off at Bob.

Dad was also extremely sensitive to anti-Semitism; having lived through the 1930s and 1940s, that should not be a surprise. I doubt Gabby was an anti-Semite.  I suspect Gabby was simply using the type of racial/ethnic epithet common to that time when we were all less sensitive to how our words sound to others.  After all, Gabby knew Dad was Jewish and yet they "did everything."  Differentiating the genteel anti-Semitism that kept Jews out of colleges and Golf Clubs, from the kind that led to gas chamberts, was problematic for Dad.  Until he died my father worried about anti-Semitism, which he saw only on the right; he could never come to terms with the flourishing of anti-Semitism on the left.  Despite his sensitivity to the world's indifference to the Holocaust, he could never accept, even when faced with piles of evidence, that the "sainted" FDR did not do many things that might have helped save some of European Jewry; he could never assign any responsibility to FDR.  Cognitive dissonance is not only for the non-Psychological minded.)

I don't know what happened to him. I was shipped to a good place. I became a gunnery instructor. I did that from 1944 all through till October 12, 1945, and then I came home. And that was good duty. I had two lovely friends. We were buddies. Johnny Barrell and Franklin Benjamin. Just nice guys. We all did the same thing. Never a thing about Judaism.

I wanted to join and help Israel during the war of 1948. They told me they didn’t need me. I walked over. They didn’t need me. They had three airplanes. What could I give them? A tail gunner? But I wanted to do what I could. By then I was married and my wife said, “You can't do it.” They told me I’d be about three thousand on the list to get to be a tail gunner, so I never bothered.

I want my kids to feel proud. I want my kids to appreciate it. Proud, because if it wasn’t for guys like me, there wouldn’t be any Jews around. That's my honest feeling. I'm one little tiny cog in the whole wheel, but there were enough of us that to me that's what's important. What does it mean? If it wasn’t for us, there wouldn’t be an Israel. If it wasn’t for us, there wouldn’t be a Jew. I could cry half the time when I think of it. That's really what it's about. And if the Goyim read this or the antisemitin, good for them. Let them know. And I want also the Jews who say, “Oy, military is no good and the Jews should try to hide and never go ...” You know, hey, there were Jews that fought and we fought the same as everybody else, and we did the same job and we got the world safe, safe for however long it's going to be. 

(When the Korean War began, my father was recalled.  He had a Masters Degree in Psychology and was stationed at Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu.  My younger sister was born in Hawaii when it was still a territory.  We were there for about two years and then moved to Syracuse where he supported three children [my youngest sister wasn't born until a few years later] and got his Ph.D in Psychology.  He later trained as a Psychoanalyst at the Alfred Adler Institute in New York and worked for many years as a Professor of Counseling at Queens College in New York.  He set up the Queens College Counseling Service and was one of the pioneers in training students to be peer counselors.  He had a private practice in Psychotherapy and helped raise four children.  

I hope to add some recollections, reflections, and comments in my next post.) 

Earn This: Part VI

(This is my father's story, in his own words, of his time flying 50 missions, as a tail gunner, in a B-24 Liberator during WWII. This is from an interview he did for an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in downtown New York in 2003. My father passed away at the end of January and I am posting this as an homage to him, and to all the others who sacrificed so much for me and my country. The quiet courage on diplay is awe inspiring.

From time to time I will add some comments in parentheses and italics; all the rest is my father's voice. I can hear him still.

The first post in this series can be found here and all the posts in this series have now been collected in the Earn This archive.)

Interestingly, I met a man who was a prisoner in the concentration camps. They took the Jews in Vienna and made them clean up where we had dropped bombs, and he remembers my group—he didn’t know who it was—but he remembers that day. And he said, “I hope you dropped the bomb on me.” He told me that. He had a cleaning store here in America. And I said, “I'm glad I didn’t get you.” But interestingly, when I became a psychoanalyst, I was interviewed by this woman (in order to be accepted for psychoanalytic training) and she had a real accent. They were all Viennese, but I didn’t know they were all Jewish, you know. And she said, “What did you do in the war?” and I told her. “Did you ever bomb Vienna?” I said, “Oh, yes, I bombed Vienna.” And she says, “I hope you got my house.” And I just felt so good.

You have to understand, we're a bunch of kids. We were kids. I wouldn’t do that today. (He was here referring to the entire experience of flying B-24s in WWII; I don't know how anyone could get into the plane day after day while their friends are disappearing all around them, but these young men did it.) I got to be meshuga. But a bunch of kids? We would take a watermelon up there so it would be ice cold when we landed, you know. We'd wrap it in a towel. It was that kind of thinking. And we would land and of course we got priority, because if you had wounded abroad or something you landed first. And then we got down and we got to the base and then we went to the Red Cross where they gave us coffee and donuts. My missions were so terrifying, between you and me, that for years I couldn’t take donuts. I could never take … eat a donut and have coffee together because that was the first thing they gave you was coffee and donuts. (I never knew my father couldn’t eat a donut and coffee; he never spoke of it. I do know he never liked flying and would hold on for dear life on take-offs and landings.) And I remember coming back from a mission over Ploesti. We couldn’t make Ploesti because we'd lost an engine—half my missions were on three engines—and that's why I say my pilot was good. And we landed. We got … I don't know how many holes in the plane. We're miserable. Unshaven. We fell out and we dropped our bombs. We didn’t know where, but we dropped them somewhere in a farmland somewhere because I saw them go. And we're going down and my bombardier is saying, “Oh, we're crossing the Blue Danube. We're crossing the Danube.” I looked down and said, “Oh, Shorty, that’s not the Danube.” He says, “Come on, what are you talking about?” I'm doing dead reckoning. We didn’t have a navigator. I said, “Shorty, that’s not the Danube. The Danube is dirty brown. That's got blue water. That's not the Danube.” It was a river near Sofia, which was right over a thirty-five-fighter base for the enemy. What do I have to say? I'm sitting there listening to Bing Crosby, because we would always be able to fool around with the radio. We could listen. The Germans loved to play Bing Crosby records. But then I hear, “B-vier und zwanzigvierzehntausend fusse.” I said, “Oh shit, that’s us.” We're down to fourteen thousand feet. So I yelled to my pilot, “They have us. The B-24 at fourteen thousand feet.” Well, he pulled up. They took off, and we got into the clouds and we flew in the clouds. And thank God they got so bollixed up they never … they never shot us down.

I came home September 1944. When I came home they sent me for three weeks to Atlantic City for a break, and then they offered me another stripe if I would go out on a B-29 or become a gunnery instructor. At that point I felt I had pushed my luck a little too far. I said, “I'll take the gunnery school.” And so I ended up being a teacher anyway when you think about it. (Dad was referring to becoming a Professor at Queens College after he got his PhD in Psychology after the war. He loved teaching and was a natural at it.)  And I went through gunnery school, gunnery instructor school quite well. I had no problems with it, learned it cold. And that's when I had the only anti-Semitic thing I had in the service.

To be continued...

Earn This: Part V

(This is my father's story, in his own words, of his time flying 50 missions, as a tail gunner, in a B-24 Liberator during WWII. This is from an interview he did for an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in downtown New York in 2003. My father passed away at the end of January and I am posting this as an homage to him, and to all the others who sacrificed so much for me and my country. The quiet courage on diplay is awe inspiring.

From time to time I will add some comments in parentheses and italics; all the rest is my father's voice. I can hear him still.

The first post in this series can be found here and all the posts in this series have now been collected in the Earn This archive.)

We were sent to bomb the Moosbierbaum oil refinery in Vienna. We got there and it was the most brutal flak and fighters we'd ever seen. It was loaded. The smoke from the fire and the oil was over thirty thousand feet high. We were flying at twenty thousand feet. And we had blasted it. And I'm sitting there going over the target when all of a sudden just below me the guy blows up. I start to press my button (to radio the crew what had just happened) when my pilot says, “The guy in front of us just blew up.” I turn around. This guy starts getting flames, it starts to spin down, and this guy just turns on his back and falls all the way down in less time than I'm telling you. Like boom, boom, boom, boom, and it's over. And we are alone, because from being in the number seven spot, we're now all by ourselves. Stragglers are dead meat. My nose gunner calls in, “Fighters coming in twelve o'clock high.” So we get prepared for twelve o'clock. I'm at six o'clock, if you look at it. (If you think of the airplane as superimposed on a clock, the nose gunner is at 12 o'clock, the tail gunner at six o’clock.) They start coming. My … my tail gunner … my nose gunner, my ball-turret gunner yells, “Fighters at six o’clock low.” And I look and I see fighters coming up six o'clock high, six o'clock level, and six o'clock low. And we're alone. So I yell, “Fighters at six o'clock high, level, and low.” They came around and they lined up and they started to make a pursuit curve at me and I started to shoot. I didn't think my bullets were going out fast enough. They were three-second bursts, and I felt I wanted it more than three seconds but I knew I couldn’t afford to. They get so close that the first plane … peeled off. I saw him hunched over in his plane. He had come in and then he went just like that, and they all broke up. I had killed … I got them. I got them. Don't ask me how or why. I think God watched me because I couldn't aim. They were coming in like crazy, but he was the lead. And I realize now, you know, years later, if I was the pilot and the guy in front of me got hit, I'd pull away. How do I know I got him? Because my ball turret gunner and my waist gunner said he went straight into the ground. My pilot had pushed the RPM to fifty-three inches, which on a B-24 is like you blow your gaskets, and he pushed it so we, we pulled into what was left of the group. And that was probably the most frightening time I had of all. To see those four guys go down so fast, it was mind boggling. And I don't care what anyone says, you see a bunch of fighters like that, it's not like one comes and you're shooting and another comes in like in the movies. They were lined up. There were twenty of them. It was scarey. And we got home, we got home with thirty-five holes in the plane, but we got home.

Once I started shooting, boy, I was right there. That was the difference. When you could do something, you were there. I felt I could get them back. It was that kind of a feeling. And there was no fear. They said I saved the plane. I don't know if I saved the plane. I think everybody saved the plane. Everybody shot. Everybody was doing it. And we got in under the group so that the other people could shoot also. And they put me in for a decoration and, of course, there were no pictures. If you don’t' have pictures … the fighter pilots, they get credit because they have a picture. They took our cameras away. They used to do that. They took the bombsight away. Our bombardiers, we used to call “targetiers” … we only had a bombsight in number one, number two, and number five.

It was never “bombs away.” We go to the target, and the engineer would start to pull the pins out of the bombs that were ready to be dropped, and he'd go back and he'd watch. And when the first lead plane dropped the bombs, he would drop the bombs. Nobody ever said, “Bombs away.” He would say, “Let's get the hell out of here,” and the word wasn’t “hell.” That's how we knew he dropped the bombs. “Let's get … get the fuck out of here.” Yeah. “Let's get the fuck out of here.” And that's what we would do. And we'd just pick ourselves up and just move. And that was my … my roughest time, I think, was that time. It was the most scary thing.

I think that when my father told this story during the interview for the museum, he was there again. I watched the tape and I saw an intensity and engagement I never recall seeing when my father would tell his war stories to me, and later to my sons when they were young. His comment about God was interesting. My father never was particularly observant as a Jew. He was at best an agnostic but I don't ever recall him having much to say about God one way or another. “No atheists in fox holes is a cliché”, but this comment was long after the incident in question. I think my father, at that moment of recollection, believed that God was looking out for him, and when you are one of 7 out of 390 who come home, it is easy to see why God's presence would be a bit more real.

To be continued... 

 

Act of Valor

I saw Act of Valor with the youngest son and was left pretty much speechless.  I am simply in awe at what these men do for me, and everyday appreciate more and more how my freedoms depend on them and the other warriors who put their lives on the line on a daily basis.

What he said. (HT: Bill Quick)

Earn This: Part IV

(This is my father's story, in his own words, of his time flying 50 missions, as a tail gunner, in a B-24 Liberator during WWII. This is from an interview he did for an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in downtown New York in 2003. My father passed away at the end of January and I am posting this as an homage to him, and to all the others who sacrificed so much for me and my country. The quiet courage on diplay is awe inspiring.  

From time to time I will add some comments in parentheses and italics; all the rest is my father's voice. I can hear him still.

All the posts in this series have now been collected in the Earn This archive.)

Just before the invasion of southern France, we were given supposedly a target in Toulon, and for days we were attacking the beaches at Toulon. And we went over the target. They told us there's be no flak and no fighters, that this was a milk run. Well, they didn’t tell us that that's where the Abbeville Kids were stationed. They were a German group that was Goering's personal group. In order to be a pilot in the Abbeville Kids, the “Yellow Noses,” you had to have five Allied planes to you credit. Then you could transfer to them to fly. Well, nobody told us that that’s where they were stationed. I have never seen such accurate flak. I saw four puffs of flak and four planes went down. You know, the majors are firing and the sergeants are loading, because they had fantastic flak. And we were hit by the Abbeville Kids. We got over the target and one of our engines was knocked out, and as we pulled out, they jumped us and they hit another engine. So we lost two engines. And we were then hit by six 109s and three 210s. They were twin engine. And they chased us because we couldn’t stay with the group. They chased us back over Corsica where some of our planes came from. But we couldn’t maintain the altitude because our number three engine, which everything works off, started to shoot black oil out the tail. And we just didn’t know what … we tried and tried to get the plane back, but it was really going down, down, down. You couldn’t keep the altitude. Finally, the pilot said, “Who wants to bail out? You better bail out now.” Well, you don't tell that to guyslike us because if you're told, “Bail out,” none of us will do it, because everybody knows we had a twenty-four-foot chute, and bailing out is like jumping from two stories. You don't walk away too well.  But heroic Bernie said, “I'll stick with the plane.” That's all the rest of the crew needed to hear. If Abie sticks, they're all sticking. The pilot brought her down. He belly-whopped her in, and every one of us was okay.

(My father used to tell the story a little differently. I suspect he cleaned it up for the Museum archives. In his telling, a week before this incident, he and his crew had been on the ground watching some wounded B-24s limping back to the base. If the number three engine was hit, the plane was essentially unflyable because the hydraulics, which ran all of the aircraft flight control surfaces, were run off of the number three engine in the B-24. No number three engine meant no hydraulics which meant no control. In the incident that occurred one week prior, a plane was wobbling in with smoke and oil trailing from the number three engine and the pilot told everyone to bail out. Several men parachuted down but one unfortunate young man's chute didn’t open and, in my father's words, they “watched him bounce down the runway."  Then the pilot, who had stayed with the plane, landed it safely.  A week later when faced with the choice of bailing out or staying with the plane, that earlier incident made the decision an easy one.)

We were outside of Rome. Marcigliana Air Base, it was called. Marcigliana was the Rome airport. But there was nothing there when we came down. And here's where it's fuzzy. I don't remember everything, but I know we got out and we ran and the partisans helped us, but I can't remember exactly where. And we came out of hiding and this Italian man yells, “Hey, Joe.” I look, “Yeah?” He says, “Sholom aleichem.” I said, “What?” So my friend Irv hits me, he says, “Tell him, 'Aleichem sholom.'” I didn't know what to do. So I said, “Aleichem sholom,” and we talked a little bit in Yiddish, a little bit of English. He had hid out, he was hiding out in the Vatican. And he hid out till the Americans came. Rome had fallen. So right away we go back to the air base because Rome fell. We were the first Americans into Rome that came from an airplane.

(When I was much younger my father told this story with some additional, fascinating embellishments. In those tellings, their plane crash landed just past an anti-tank mine field. They were indeed picked up by the partisans and smuggled back into Rome, where they were hidden for three days on the third {top} floor of a town house, the bottom two floors of which were being used as a brothel for German officers. Possibly out of consideration for the indelicacy of intimating infidelity to my mother, even before they met, he merely commented that they were all too frightened to avail themselves of the services offered on the lower floors of the establishment, even after the Germans mysteriously disappeared three days after their arrival. In this telling, my father arrived in Rome three days before the Allied armies! In addition, he and his crew had particularly dramatic residence in Rome. 

I have no idea which version is more accurate and no interest in fact checking. In reality, immediately after seeing so many friends shot down and crash landing in foreign territory, where to be caught was to find a miserable and painful death, it would have been remarkable if my father had maintained the presence of mind to even take note of his surroundings; survival was gift enough, the rest are just details.)

Most of the missions were over Europe, over Romania, Hungary, Poland, parts of Germany, Bulgaria, all of that whole area. In fact, my group was also one of the first ones to bomb an area and land in Russia. The Ploesti oil fields were probably the most important oil fields in all of Romania and all of Europe. It took care of most of the oil that the whole Axis powers used. And we … I hit that six times. We really had to give it a pounding. It also was one of the most heavily defended. They used to shoot red, white, and blue flak. Nobody ever knew why, but the flak was red, white, and blue. And you knew when you went there you were going to lose planes. It was just one of those things.

Their fighters would come in under their own flak to shoot you down. And many times we would be hit. It depended on where you were. There was always a couple of what they called dead man's corners, and you always hoped you didn’t get that corner. One of the most frightening things is to be the last guy in the last plane in the last group over a target, because everything out there is not yours. I remember that once in Greece, we bombed Athens, and I remember we came through a gap and they had the guns in the mountains and they were shooting. And I'm sitting there and watching the flak blow up. They got our altitude and they'd send up flak and we'd keep moving, and I'm watching it get closer and closer and I can't move. And that was scary. That was horrible because you … you think the next one's going to get you. We were lucky. We got through. We bombed and went home.

(The story gets more harrowing yet; Part V to follow.)