Issue 9.13
Sweating out a mission has a different meaning to different people and at different times. Before I enlisted at age seventeen, I knew there would be some danger to wartime, combat flying. During my childhood, I was so enamored by airplanes that every time I heard a plane overhead, I would run out of the house to watch it. It was only natural that I would go into the Army Air Force and do my part in the air. It looked like It would be a long war so I would surly be in it. Reading of America’s losses made me more resolute.
When I thought of the dangers, I felt a twinge of apprehension. The Air Corp let me finish high school and then I was called to active duty. The day of my departure from Butte, Montana, to Kerns, Utah by train, my sister, her husband and two boys were at the train depot to see me off. That was the only time in my life that I saw tears come to the eyes of my brother-in-law. During my training in the states, I kept track of the war news but the war was still a long way off. After ten hours of pilot stick time, then armament school and gunnery school and training as a complete B-17 crew, our pilot, Robert Parnell flew our crew, number 5383 to England. We then began to see the frightening side of combat flying when the bombers come home with gaping holes in the metal and saw the wounded taken to the base hospital. During the ten days as new members of the 351st Bomb Group before we flew our first mission we received a steady diet of information and practice meant to help keep us alive.
We gunners were given a daily turn at the skeet range with shotguns. Skeet shooting was the best practice a gunner could do to sharpen his Ariel gunnery skills without actually shooting at an enemy plane. Each day as the mission went out, we watched the ground crews sweating out a mission. They hated to see any losses and certainly wanted their own bomber to come home.
On some missions, every bomber from our group that was sent out came home but on some missions, there may be multiple losses. As far as I know, there was never a mission from our field that some didn’t come home with holes in some of the planes. Those B-17s were tough old birds and could take a lot of punishment, but yet I’ve seen planes go down that didn’t look that badly hit. During those ten days we had much knowledge crammed into our heads. We had basic German language instruction so that in case we were shot down and walking around in Germany we could at least read signs. They told us that it was very important to always wear both dog tags. Each enlisted man had two pairs of G.I. shoes and we took one pair and scuffed them up. That would be the pair we tied together and would stow at a handy place because if shot down, we would need a good pair of walking shoes but a high shine would-be a dead give away if we were evading capture. In case of going down in Germany we could snap them onto our parachute harness. When we flew, we wore electric heated boots along with the rest of our electric heated clothing. This would be needed to keep us from freezing at temperatures of 65 degrees below zero for ten or twelve hours at a time at altitudes of 30,000feet or higher.
We were told that one evade walked across part of Germany and occupied France by pushing a wheelbarrow. If captured we were ordered to give out to our captors no more information than name, rank and serial number. The 36 bombers then took off in 30 second intervals.