(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.)
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