Issue 12.12
We spent Christmas with our daughter and her family of all boys. Santa brought some of them state of the art video games, which in turn they played all of the waking hours. When I saw these games being played, most violent, it caused my memory to drift back to my playing games in the years 1943 and 1944 and relive those days.
Like all new soldiers in basic training, I learned to be expert in rifle, carbine, 45 cal. Hand gun and sub machine gun with live ammunition. Next when I got to aerial gunnery school the games became more realistic. I fired box after box of twelve gage shotgun shells at clay pigeons, then fired machine guns with live ammunition from an airplane gun turret mounted on the back of a
GI truck at a cloth panel that showed above the horizon mounted on a speeding powered car going around a track. Then more shotgun shooting. Next was shotguns mounted on airplane gun turrets that were hand and foot controlled and we shot at lofted clay pigeons. Then more hand held shotguns. Next was hand held shotguns firing at more lofted clay pigeons while standing in a stanchion on the bed of a pickup truck going 60 miles per hour. Then more hand held shotguns. The next step was to fire live ammunition machine guns from the waist window of a Flying Fortress at a sleeve towed by another airplane while flying over a non populated area. I got so good with a shotgun that I could hit twenty-five out of twenty five every time and could hit twenty- three out of twenty- five from the hip.
While training as a complete crew in hot and humid Louisiana we trained on “Jam Handy” which was a full sized movie screen showing different fighter planes coming at me at different angles. The object was for one at a time from a group of twenty young men to stand at a mounted machine gun and fire at the enemy planes coming at you. Instead of real bullets being fired, a red dot was projected onto the screen that registered hits and gave a score. The other nineteen guys had to practice their aircraft recognition and call out what plane it was. It was difficult to stay awake in that hot humid darkened room determining whether it was an FW 190, an ME109, P51 or otherwise. It was very easy to fall asleep but the Brass found a way to keep everyone awake and alert, they occasionally inserted the image of a naked girl onto the screen for only 3 seconds at a time.
After all that playing games, then came the more realistic game when at an altitude of 30,000 feet and 65 degrees below zero and with an oxygen mask on to keep me alive, it wasn’t “Jam Handy” but real bandits (enemy fighters) over Germany coming at me. One bandit came so close that if my lower ball turret guns were pointing down instead of at six o’clock they would have tangled with the propeller of an FW190.
Sam Wyrouck can be contacted at 801-707-2666.