Issue 5.13
Once when we were on the far reaches of a long mission I was in my cozy little doghouse, the ball turret, using my hand controls to keep me rotating and moving the turret and my guns up and down and wishing I could wear dark glasses because of the intense glare of the bright sun reflecting on the cotton white clouds. The reason I couldn’t wear dark glasses was because the tightness of the oxygen mask pushing against my ears and my ears pushing against the ear-piece meant that an hour was unbearable, let alone eight or ten hours. Things were going smoothly until suddenly a lone F. W. 190 came right through our formation toward our plane and it looked like directly right into my ball turret. My guns were pointing to 6 o’clock level and by the time I recognized him as a bandit, he was close enough for me to touch him in could have reached out to him. He passed so close underneath me that if my guns had been pointing down, his propeller would have cut them off I could see his eyes in back of his goggles. I spun my turret around to 12 o’clock and some gunners in the groups got one burst off but that was all because one of our P-51’s did what I had never seen before. He must have wanted a kill so much that he came right through our bomber formation. He could have been shot down by us either by mis-identification or because we were firing at the bandit and he in the line of fire. Fortunately, the P-51 was faster than the F.W. 190, which took hits from eight .50 caliber armor piercing incendiaries. The bandit blew up in a ball of fire. The whole thing took about 15 seconds and the P-51 pilot deservedly got credit for the kill.
Earlier in the war, enemy fighters was as big of a problem for bombers as was flack fired from the ground but when I was flying combat, flack was both more intense and much more feared than was enemy fighters. We never flew one mission of our thirty-five where we didn’t encounter flack. Flack was always with us and caused us to have great fear. Everyone had a piece of flack that he kept to help him tell a story. Wally Sanchez, our radio operator, kept a piece of flack that had hit his steel helmet from the bottom inside. The piece then curved inside between the steel and his head and stopped but not before it had scraped his scalp, removed the hair and left a scar which he carries so far 57 years later. Wally didn’t get a Purple Heart because there wasn’t enough blood shed.
At a different time when we were in an intense flack barrage, a near miss blew in the windshield in front of Lt. Kihm, the co-pilot and filled his eyes with glass and cut his face. Upon landing he was taken to the base hospital where they dug out the glass and patched him up but again there was not enough blood for a Purple Heart. When I had completed my 35 missions, I turned in my flying clothes and equipment, including my Mae West CO2 inflatable life jacket. At that time it was customary to pull the ring to inflate the Mae West at the completion of a tour. Well that’s what I did and when I did, I found that it didn’t inflate because there was a hole caused by flack. Another name for flack is shrapnel. Our waist gunner, Ted Johnston, who flew as an extra and sometimes with Parnell’s crew, had a great respect for flack (That’s the polite way to say it.) There wasn’t room for a flack jacket in my ball turret so I left it in the comer by my chute. Ted would wear his jacket and he spread my jacket on the floor in front of the waist window where there was a sheet of armor plate. When we were in a flack barrage, he would kneel in a fetal position and make of himself a small target. When the other guys in our barracks found out how Ted did, they accused him of having s_t for blood.