Eldon Broman
95TH BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION
95TH LEGACY COMMITTEE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
1999 REUNION PITTSBURGH, PA
MBW: This is Margaret Blagg Weaver conducting the interview at the 1999 Reunion in Pittsburgh. It’s September the 10th, 1999, and would you please state your name for us, for the record.
EB: Eldon Broman.
MBW: OK, Mr. Broman, and what were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps?
EB: Well, I enlisted about the day after that they lowered the age limit for flight training from the age of twenty to the age of eighteen. I had just turned eighteen, and that would have been about a month after Pearl Harbor, in January of 1942. That’s when I enlisted, and I was actually released from extended active duty a little bit over four years later--late in February of 1946. But I did remain in the Air Force Reserve until--that would have been on my birthday [chuckles] in 1970.
MBW: Good. OK. Well, what about dates of service with the 95th Bomb Group?
EB: We arrived at the 95th as a replacement crew--one of the many replacement crews that was sent in as a result of the heavy losses that the 95th experienced in early June, at Kiel. I don’t recall exact number of losses, but I think there must have been ten, eleven, or twelve--one or the other--and so there were quite a few of us that came in at the 95th shortly after that. So that’s when we began our service with the 95th; and our particular crew was assigned to the 335th Squadron, and at that time Dave McKnight was the Squadron Commander of the 335th.
MBW: OK, and what was your principal job?
EB: I was a first pilot. And I was a 1st Lt. at the time.
MBW: OK. So, let’s go back a little bit before that, though, before you get to England, and tell me again about joining the Service and a little bit about your training.
EB: Well, pre-flight training hadn’t been established yet, so that oddly enough I had never ridden on a Pullman Train car even before I was on my way down to San Antonio, Texas, two or three days after I took this exam. You qualified for flight training via--in those days--via a paper-and-pencil test. I had just completed my first semester of college and I thought it was a very difficult test, but I must have done well enough on it [chuckles] to qualify. And the very next day, the train left from Milwaukee. I lived in a little town in Wisconsin at that time. So before, within just a matter of a few days after I enlisted, why, I was down in San Antonio, and at Kelly Field. They had just established a pre-flight training center there, and we had just started classes. I was in Flight Training Class 42-I, which meant that I was slated--if things went well--to graduate in October of ‘42. We just started flight training, pre-flight training, and they moved the graduation dates up. They were really accelerating. So, the next thing we knew, why, they shipped us all out to primary training, which I took in Coleman, TX--flew PT-19s. So, I don’t think it was over two weeks after I enlisted, that I was flying. That little PT-19 was a great little primary flight trainer--a real pretty little plane. And, I was fortunate enough after finishing that to be sent to Randolph Field, and you know that was every young man’s dream, in those days, to go to Randolph Field. I don’t know why this is bothering me, but it is. And, I finished at Randolph Field and I have to say that I was shoved a lot of responsibility off on me, way beyond my years. I was just, you know, just a few months beyond my eighteenth birthday. I guess maybe because I found the ground school portion of the training to be kind of a piece of cake and they knew that if [chuckles] they made me Squadron First Sergeant that I could stay up late and do all this hunt-and-peck typing and it wouldn’t interfere too much with my ground school activities. But, I remember near the end of my flight experience at Randolph Field--which was wonderful, by the way--I had a funny thing happen there, though. I know Grace [Hammesfahr, Legacy Committee member] asked for what’s the most hilarious thing that ever happened to you during . . . and, do you want me to tell you about that now, or is this taking too much time?
MBW: No, not at all.
EB: We were put on a, we were sent out on our first cross country after we had become familiar with the BT-14 and the town that we were supposed to turn around at--it was a triangular cross country from Randolph Field up near the end of the, near the northern border of the map that we were given, and back--and I was enjoying the day so much that I flew clear off the map before I realized. Then, of course, I really got lost. And they had always told us, if you get lost, take a heading and fly in that heading. Don’t wander around and waste gas wandering around. And, I thought, well, I’ll keep flying north. I don’t know why. That was a dumb decision. I should have turned around and flown back south, but I kept flying north, and the next thing I knew I was in Fort Worth, TX. That’s a long ways away from San Antonio. [chuckles] And, I was low on fuel and I had never landed on a runway before. In those days, Randolph Field was a great, big, enormous horseshoe-shaped grass field. At night, when we flew at night, they put flare pots down to simulate runways, but I had never landed on a runway before and I couldn’t contact the tower. I didn’t know what that field was down there, exactly. I found out later it was Meacham Field. So, I thought, “Well, which one of those runways am I going to land on?” So, I just circled a little bit and I saw a DC-3--you’re probably too young to know what a DC-3 is--but it was the first commercial airliner, twin engine. So I thought, well, I’ll follow that thing in. And, that’s how I figured out which runway to land on, and touched down there and taxied over where I saw some other military planes and a fellow came driving up in a gasoline truck and I said, “Fill it up.” [chuckles] And then I thought, well, what do I do now? I signed the little form at exactly the time I had turned off the engine. I just didn’t know quite what to do. Well, I finally decided that I would walk over to the administration and better call P Squadron back at Randolph Field and tell them where I am. I didn’t even have a nickel to put in my flight coveralls to use in the pay phone, but I borrowed a nickel from somebody and called the P Squadron and was told, “Stay where you are. Somebody will come and get you.” And, lo and behold, about an hour later, why, one of the instructors from Randolph taxied up, and he--I was standing in the shade of a hanger--and he taxied up beside my BT-14. The first thing he did was look in that cockpit to see if I had had the presence of mind to sign that form. I think if I hadn’t signed that form I probably would have been cashiered out [chuckles] right then and there. So, of course he threw me in a brace. Do you know what a brace is? Well, we were subject to quite a bit of hazing at Randolph. It was the West Point of the Air, then--that’s what it was called. But, from then on I became known as the Fort Worth Kid [chuckles] around Randolph Field. And I couldn’t shake that all the time I was there.
But, near the end of that experience at Randolph, I got a big disappointment. I wanted to fly fighters. After all, what eighteen-year-old kid wouldn’t want to fly fighter planes? They sent me to twin-engine school and I thought, “Uh oh. No P-38s for me,” even though that was twin engine. It was just--my advance training was in multi-engine, so I knew that I was slated for some kind of multi-engine operational aircraft. So, I went up to Lubbock and finished that. Got my wings in October of ‘42, right on schedule and was transferred down to Hendricks Field in Sebring, Florida. The big road race is there now. That’s where I took transition training in the B-17s. And from there, when that was over with, up to Salt Lake City, which was kind of a gathering area for crews that were destined to be replacement crews for the 8th Air Force, or wherever. And the crew was essentially put together at Salt Lake City and we were all transferred, almost overnight, as soon as they could cut orders to Gallen?? Field, in Boise. And, we started our crew training there. The weather was bad--this was during the winter. And, let’s see, I was in Salt Lake City all my myself on Christmas Eve of 1942. The crew hadn’t quite been put together yet. But at Gallen?? Field, a few days later, I met up with the rest of the crew and we started our training together. And I think that was about the same time that the 95th started their training together. I was in a group called the Barnnick?? Group, named after the man who was the leader of this particular group of combat crews and who was to take us through phase training. And, since the weather was kind of shaky at Gallen?? Field and we weren’t getting the flying time they wanted us to have, they transferred us over to Casper, WY, and all I remember about Casper was a lot of flying and bitter, bitter cold.
But one thing happened at Gallen?? Field before we left. I had been assigned to slow-time the engines on a brand-new B-17. And we were up doing just that and that meant we had to fly so many minutes at a certain RPM and a certain manifold pressure, and then you went up a little bit and then you went down a little bit, then up a little bit more. And we were out there just enjoying the scenery, doing that. My co-pilot was keeping the log, and the tower called me and they wanted me to return. And, I thought, “Why? What’s this all about?” I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. [chuckles] But, I returned as quickly as we could. Landed; taxied to the parking ramp; and just then, up came the Base Commander’s car, and he pulled up to the plane almost before I had shut the engines down. And, who was with him but Jimmy Stewart. Stewart had just come into the Air Force and the Colonel wanted to take him up in this brand-new B-17, and I guess it must have been the only one that was brand-new that they had because they didn’t have a high priority at the training bases to get planes right off the line. So, that was my introduction to Jimmy Stewart. [chuckles] But shortly after that--in fact, he bought me a drink that night, in the Officers’ Club, so that was my claim to fame.
Then, after that came Casper, WY. We spent quite a bit of time at Scott’s Bluff, NE, and then from Scott’s Bluff, we were transferred down to Salina, KS, which was a staging area for overseas. We still didn’t know where we were going to go, but by then we knew that most B-17 crews were going to the 8th Air Force. A few were going to the Pacific Theater; but, after we got our injections and they issued sidearms and things like that to us, we received orders to go to Gander, Newfoundland. And, of course, that did it then. We knew where we were going. And on the way there, I was to stop in Presque Isle, ME and pick up some Tokyo tanks. This was a brand-new plane that we had been assigned while in Kansas. And I never will forget signing for one B-17 and four engines. I had to sign five pieces of paper and that meant that I was responsible for that aircraft and, you know, that’s really something. By then I was just barely nineteen. Lo and behold, what happens, about midway between Salina, KS and Gander, Newfoundland is Whitewater, WI, my hometown. [chuckles] Well, what good red-blooded boy isn’t going to beat up his hometown with a brand-new aircraft? So, I did just that for a while. It was raining that day. I was going to stop at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee and call the folks and I thought, “I don’t think I had better”--after beating up that town--“I don’t think I better stop that close.” [chuckles] So we went over to Selfridge Field, which is across Lake Michigan, if you know the geography up there. I didn’t think anybody would call Selfridge to complain, but I figured that someone might call Mitchell, and it so happened, they did.
But, after stopping there for just overnight, we went up to Presque Isle and they put the Tokyo tanks and the Tokyo tank valves in. This plane was so new and they didn’t have the valves to control the gasoline flow out of the wing tip tanks, which added a thousand gallons of fuel to a B-17. But they had some of those valves in Bangor, ME and that’s why I had to stop there to get the valves installed. Then to Gander, Newfoundland. And we sat there, waiting for the right weather, for almost two weeks. This was in the real, or spring, of ’43 and the weather is pretty bad over the North Atlantic in the spring; but eventually we were cleared to fly and we were cleared to go to Prestwick, Scotland and we did just that. It was a long flight and we got a little bit south of our route and hit some weather that I knew was to the south of us. We were told, “Don’t get to the south,” but evidently there was problem with swinging our compass, and I could see from the plane ahead just as the sun went down that we were veering off to the right just a little tiny bit of that plane. So, when we hit some weather, I knew that we were too far south, and I tried to climb over the weather. Iced up real bad. But we had deicing boots, but the problem was when I got up to--I had told our crew, “Don’t bury your oxygen mask. Have your oxygen masks handy in case we have to climb over some weather.” And we got up to twenty-some thousand feet and I get a call on the intercom, “Lt., Belore?? is sick.” “What’s he sick from?” “He doesn’t have an oxygen mask. He left it in his luggage.” Well, I said, “Well, can you get by by sharing, you know, taking turns with one of the other men?” He said, “We’ve been doing that and he’s still getting sick.” So, down through the soup so that we don’t lose him. But we did get there. It took us twelve hours and fifteen minutes. It wasn’t supposed to take us that long, but we were south of our course and I used the radio compass to get back on. So we had some fun before we even got over there.
And then we went--and sure enough, they took the plane away from us. [chuckles] And we had been led to believe that that was going to be our plane, but we wound up in a replacement pool at Bovingdon. Has anybody ever mentioned that to you before, Bovingdon? But we weren’t there very long and the 95th requisitioned a bunch of crews. So then when we got down there we were assigned a plane that had actually come off the production line several days after the one that I flew over. It was at least a higher number. So that’s how we arrived at the 95th.
MBW: How long after that before you started flying missions?
EB: Well, that was the first mission that we flew--let’s see--we must have gotten there about the middle of June and one thing that was really lacking in our training was practice in formation flying. And, of course, they were aware that we hadn’t flown formation very much and this was a rather complex formation that we flew that was engineered by, well he was then a Bull Colonel, LeMay, Curtis LeMay. And so we flew several practice missions to get used to flying formation before our first mission, which was, I think, the first mission in July that the 95th flew. It was a long mission. It was to La Pallice, I remember that--sub pens. That’s how we got started. And, we didn’t miss many raids from then until we got shot down.
MBW: Tell us about some of the missions between the first one and the last one.
EB: Well, I remember, you know, I can’t remember the names of all the cities. Most of them were in Germany; a few were in France. But our targets were normally submarine pens, aircraft factories, oil refineries, marshaling yards--you know, strategic bombing--aircraft factories primarily in those days. We wanted to try to cut down the opposition a little bit. Of course, the Battle of the Atlantic was going on hot and heavy, so that’s what the sub pens were all about. But, one of the things I remember was taking off on a raid--and I don’t remember which raid it was--but we blew a tire taking off at a very, very crucial point speedwise. It was at a point on the runway where I couldn’t possibly stop, and the plane wasn’t quite ready to fly. The right wing--I had trouble holding the right wing up when the tire blew. And, you know, the Lord intervenes at times, and I just screamed at the co-pilot, “FLAPS!” Well, he heard me and he started to milk the flaps up and the second thing I screamed at him when I felt the lift from the flaps, “Enough!” And, we just kind of staggered off the end of the runway. See, if someone hadn’t told me to tell the co-pilot “flaps,” we’d have been a big bang at the end of the runway, but--and I can tell you a little story about Dave McKnight related to that. Well, that was one thing I remembered. And I think that raid, though, was to France, and I think it was the Renault plant at Paris, at Le Bourget, where Lindbergh landed. Dave McKnight broke radio silence--he was in the tower--to ask me if I knew that we’d blown a tire. And I said, “Yes, sir, I know that we’ve blown a tire and I’ll worry about that later.” And, that’s all that was said, and then when the Group got back, who’s on the radio but Col. Gerhart. “Broman, I want you to land first, on the first pass over the field. I want you and only you to land.” And I said, “Colonel, I have enough fuel to circle until all the rest of the planes touch down.” I didn’t want to tell him that I was afraid I would bust the plane up. [chuckles] But, he scolded me and said, “I told you to land first.” “All right, sir.” And the first pass over the field, I peeled off and circled around and put it down on the runway and remembered to keep that wing high and had a little power on. See, usually we landed totally dead stick, but in this case I left some power on because I wanted to drop that wheel down last. And, nobody told me what to do after I got down. So, we got down and I didn’t even run off the runway. I just kept juicing those right engines a little bit and then I thought, “God, I don’t want to taxi this plane on a flat tire.” So, I pulled off onto the grass near the end of the runway and as I pulled off another plane whistled past me going about sixty miles an hour. So, I thought, “Lord, what would have happened if I had shut down those engines as soon as we got near the end of the runway?” But, here again, the Lord intervened. So, that’s one little anecdote.
Another one, I don’t know if you’re aware of the first shuttle raid that the 95th flew. It was down to Regensburg, Germany, and it was so deep in Germany that even with the Tokyo tanks, which gave us, as I said, an extra thousand gallons--do you have any idea how much fuel we could carry even in those days? 2,725 gallons. We weighed about sixty thousand pounds at liftoff. In those days--I don’t know what a 747 weighs, but I imagine a 747 will go probably about 500,000 pounds, so there’s a little difference. But, we were alerted on the 16th of August, which was my 20th birthday, for a raid the next day, and we were told, “Take some blankets. Take a change or two of underwear. Take your toothbrushes and your razors and things of that nature.” So, we knew something unusual was up. And that was the day the Third Division, our division, went down to Regensburg; and we had no escort in those days. The First Division went to the first Schweinfurt raid. Well, to make a long story short, they lost thirty planes going to Schweinfurt and back. We lost thirty planes in our battle, throughout Germany, clear from one end to the other. But when we got down to Regensburg, they didn’t expect that we would ever bomb them and so there was no flak. It was sort of like a practice bombing raid for those of us that were left, and we really did a magnificent job on Regensburg. And, I don’t know if anybody’s ever told you--you’ve heard about the ME-262, the first jet fighter? We didn’t know it at the time, but we got the jigs and fixtures for that plane, so that set that program way back. It was a Messerschmitt factory, and a big one. North Africa had just been secured. They hadn’t started to fight yet in Sicily. That landing wasn’t too far off, though. I think they landed there in September of ‘43. But we were to go to Tulerdma??, down in Algeria, I think, yeah. And, after we crossed the Alps and headed down the boot of Italy, to the west of the boot, we got down off of oxygen. By then our oxygen was just about gone anyway. But, every place that you’d look, there was a B-17 ditching. We managed to get through to Tulerdma??. A number of the B-17s--they had emergency strips right along the shore of the Mediterranean--and a number of the planes landed there. They didn’t have enough fuel to go on to Tulerdma??, but we did. Got there and we sat there licking our wounds for a couple of weeks. We only received minor battle damage on our plane; didn’t require any repair work. But, we started for Regensburg with about 140 planes, and on the way back we bombed the sub pens at Bordeaux and there were 80 of us. So, on that day, in essence, the 8th Air Force lost--let’s see, what’s 80 from 140--sixty. And they lost thirty at Schweinfurt. Ninety B-17s were lost that day. But all you heard about in the papers was thirty and thirty.
But now we had an interesting experience coming back from Africa. We swung around Gibraltar; didn’t really want to fly across southern France and we had enough fuel to go around, and we came in over the Bay of Biscay towards those sub pens down at Bordeaux. And about ten, maybe twelve, German 109s rose to meet us. The first time my top turret gunner cut loose, we were on the bomb run. We had just started it; didn’t even have the bomb bay doors down yet. No, we were just starting to turn on the IP. We weren’t quite on the bomb run when they made their first pass and the first time my top turret gunner cut loose at one of them, all of a sudden that plane was bucking, you know, and jumping. I had to slow way down because I was afraid the plane would come apart. I got on the intercom and I said, “What’s wrong back there?” And one of the waist gunners said, “Lieutenant, one of our life rafts is caught on our right horizontal stabilizer, partially inflated.” Now these were five-man rafts and there was a lot of stuff in them--water and a great big old Mae West radio and food--and it was just caught on the horizontal stabilizer, kind of folded, you know. And, I couldn’t keep up, so I had to slow way down. Well, of course those ten or twelve fighters--and that wasn’t many; we were used to a lot more than that [chuckles]--but all of a sudden we had our own little private battle with those ten or twelve fighters. But, they were inexperienced, apparently, because they divided themselves into two groups and they made all their passes from the front. I told the co-pilot when I saw what their strategy was, “When you see one lining up to fire at us from your quarter over there, you do whatever you want to do with this airplane. And when I see one coming in from here, from my side, I’ll do the same thing.” So, we gyrated all over the sky there for a few minutes, maybe--I don’t know--ten, fifteen, maybe twenty at the most. And I thought, surely this thing is going to come off, but it didn’t, and we kept getting in more dire circumstances all the time because by then the Group had dropped their bombs and turned away from the target and had started down, you know, back over the Bay of Biscay. John, the co-pilot, said, “Broman, there’s some clouds up there just a little bit above us.” So, I had jettisoned the bombs myself--there’s a red ball down there--and I knew that we couldn’t get into a violent evasive action with six thousand pounds of bombs in the bomb bay, so I had jettisoned the bombs myself before we started the gyrations. It would have taken too long for the bombardier to open the doors--those doors open quite slowly--so I just grabbed the red ball and the bombs were gone. Then I got to thinking, “How can we get rid of that damn thing? If I try to have my waist gunner shoot it off, he’s going to shoot us down.” So, I thought, “Well, I could put the wheels down and give up. You know, turn towards France. By God, I don’t want to do that!” And all of a sudden again, the Lord told me, this may sound dumb--silly to you, “Fishtail this thing, you dumbbell.” So, I told John, “You get on these rudder pedals with me. I’ll keep the plane level, and we’ll make this thing fly sideways if we have to.” So we started to fishtail that thing. And about the third or fourth time we slewed around to the right--because it was caught on the right stabilizer--off that thing came. [chuckles] And I could immediately tell. Got rid of all that terrible jumping and vibration. So then we’re up in those clouds and I knew the fighters were waiting for us, and by then the rest of the Group is way down, way ahead of us. So, I put that thing down in a power dive and we went way past the red line, the bomb bay doors are open [chuckles]. We went way past the red line, but the fighters weren’t there. Evidently they were low on gasoline or something. Either that or they didn’t want to follow us back to the Group because they knew they’d get shot at and they didn’t go down over water either; you know, that was--even though the Bay of Biscay was warm water--they didn’t like bailing out over water.
So, we shuddered back into formation and then--we got the bomb bay doors open--and I looked at the gas gauges and I thought, “Oh my God, we’ll never, we don’t have enough to get back.” Because I had used a lot of gasoline jerking around up there. I called the bombardier and I said, “Paul, do you know how to get those bomb bay doors back up?” I said, “There’s some split nuts on those screws, and when I jettisoned the bombs, I opened up those split nuts.” And I said, “You’ve got to clip those, push those split nuts back together and then the bomb bay doors will operate.” Well, that took a lot of guts because if you’ve never been in an open bomb bay, on the catwalk, with nothing between you but ten thousand feet of airspace, that’s an eerie feeling, to walk through a bomb bay when you’re up there. But he said, “I know how to do that.” And I said, “Well, get yourself up there and do it and I’ll fall back a little bit and keep it real steady.” [chuckles] And he got all four of those split nuts pushed back together and went back down and raised the bomb bay doors, and I thought, “Well, that’s part of the problem gone.” So we finally made landfall at Lands End and I knew that I didn’t have enough gas to get back to Horham, so I thought--did anyone ever tell you about the Darkie procedure, radio procedure? A little bit?
MBW: Yes, but explain it again.
EB: Well, all the towers in the United Kingdom monitored a certain frequency, emergency frequency. See, we couldn’t carry any code books or anything with us, so if you got in trouble and you wanted to land at another base, all you had to do dial up that frequency and use a unique radio procedure, “Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie.” Then you identified yourself three times. “This is Publish You for Uncle calling.”?? Do that three times and then, “Are you receiving me?” twice. And I went through that radio procedure just once and a pretty female voice came back at me, and “How can we help you?” And I said, “Two things. Do you have any hundred octane gasoline?” I could see that this was a Royal Air Force training base because there were small training planes down there--twin engine planes--but training planes, so I didn’t know whether they had hundred octane gasoline and that’s what we had to have. Said, “Yes, we have hundred octane gasoline.” “How long is that runway down there?” “3,500 feet.” “Oh, I think I can make that.” See, our runways at Horham were over 5,000 feet, but just circled once and dropped down there and dropped her in right on the end of the runway and pulled off on the taxi strip and all of a sudden I couldn’t taxi anymore because the buildings were too close to the taxi strip. We were--our wingspan was 103 and these training planes were much less than that, so I had to pull off on the grass. And there was a Group Captain there, right away, himself--and this was the Group Commander that came there--and he wanted to know how they could help us. They were very nice. And I said, “Well, I need some gasoline, hundred gallons in each of my four, our four main tanks, and we haven’t had anything to eat for a long time.” And he said, “How many officers and how many enlisted men?” I said, “We’re all officers,” because we were used to eating together, you know. He knew I was fibbing, but they took us all to the Officers’ Club. I had to leave one fellow back and I said, “We’ll bring you a sandwich.” But, he asked me, “Can some of my boys go through your plane?” Well, I said, “Sure.” But, we had been bringing watermelons back from North Africa--real treat--and you should have seen that plane when I went to get out of it and walked through the waist. Empty cartridges and broken up watermelons all over the place from the violent evasive action. It’s a funny little story but when I got outside and looked at the hole in that wing--not the wing, the horizontal stabilizer where it met the fuselage--I could stick my head in the hole and I thought, “Well, I don’t see any damage to any of the ribs, and I put that thing in a power dive beyond the red line, so it’s going to be all right.” I tried to close the life-raft hatch, but it had been sprung so badly that I couldn’t close it. And I thought, “Well, that’s been flapping around up there like that for hundreds of miles, so it can flap around for a couple of hundred more miles.” But after we ate and they gave me gasoline--they didn’t make me sign for it, by the way [chuckles], it all came from Texas anyway--we took off and I thought, “Well, I’ve got to give these guys a little treat, so we circled the field and buzzed the runway and they had a detachment of Royal Air Force Cadets down there, standing at attention, in a row along that runway and those guys saluted us as we came zipping by, so that’s my little anecdote for this taping. And then we went back to work, and when we got back to the Squadron area after being debriefed. Do you remember Ralph Kelley, remember the name Ralph Kelley?
MBW: I don’t know.
EB: Well, Ralph was our Squadron Adjutant, and we all thought the world of Ralph. He was a big, burly guy, and we got back to the 95th area there and he came running up to me and put his arm, his arms around me and he hugged me. He said, “You’re the first crew back from Africa,” from the 335th, so it was really a grand welcome home. But then we went back to work and I just don’t remember much about the time between then, and we were pretty busy and made some deep penetrations, and dropped a lot of bombs, and I think we shot down our fair share of fighters. And then came that week that has come to be called Black Week, I think. I don’t know for sure but I think maybe Muenster was the tenth of October, it was about the fourth raid in four days for the 95th. We were getting pretty tired.
MBW: Excuse me just a moment. [turning tape over]
EB: . . . and the life raft on the tail, or something, a little different.
MBW: They are, they are different. Would you like to tell us about the last mission?
EB: OK, it’s not a mission that I like to talk about because of what happened to us, because we were getting pretty confident that maybe we were going to be one of the lucky people.
MBW: Which mission number was this?
EB: Well, my co-pilot thought it was twenty-two and John was the one that kept a detailed log. And I was young and wasn’t worried about things like keeping track, but I thought it was twenty-three, but it was either twenty-two or twenty-three. But I did have one man who was on his twenty-fourth mission and two who were on their last mission, because in those days we only had to do twenty-five. I had already volunteered to do some more, because it didn’t really bother me that much.
We were assigned to the low squadron on the tenth of October of ‘43. I was deputy squadron leader. I knew the squadron leader quite well. His name was Adams. And everything went just fine and we turned on the IP, opened our bomb doors, dropped our bombs. While we were on the bomb run, number two engine, I lost half the power in number two engine just like snapping your fingers but I didn’t ask the co-pilot to feather it because we were still getting some power out of it and I figured what happened, a chunk of flak must have taken out the supercharger on that engine. So, at that altitude, if you lose your supercharger, you’re going to lose a lot of power. So, I had never, we had never experienced such determined fighter attacks as we did on that raid. They were flying right through our formation and there were twin-engine planes sitting out of range, lobbing rockets at us. It was--we were busy. And then all of a sudden, they noticed, after we had dropped our bombs and made that first turn that you make away from the target and you drop down, slowly drop down a thousand feet, I noticed that our--the four planes behind us had already been shot down. And I noticed that Adams couldn’t keep up with the rest of the Group anymore, and I thought, “Well what do I do? Do I stay with Adams or do I leave him and go back to the Group?” And, you remember Twelve O’Clock High and all that talk about group integrity? Well, I thought, “Well, I’ll stay with him until he starts bailing out his men,” because I just knew that he was a dead duck, and we still just had three-and-one-half engines. But, I asked the co-pilot--I couldn’t see his escape hatches from where I was sitting--“John, just let me know when he starts bailing the men out.” He said, “There they go,” and he started to count, “One, two, three, four, five, six.” And I said, “That’s long enough. Give me full RPMs and full power.” Give me RPMs and I took care of the power myself. “We’re going to climb back up to the Group.” By then the Group was above us, maybe a thousand feet, off to our right. We had drifted down and to the left, following Adams. But we had been watching a twin-engine fighter out there lob rockets, and every once in a while he’d turn toward us and lob a rocket. Well, you could see him coming. So, I would just bounce up or bounce down and the rocket would miss. But, when I turned back towards the Group, I couldn’t see him anymore. Meanwhile, Red Dillon is back there peppering away out of his ball turret, and he was a good shot. He had hunted quail in Texas for years and years. Well, it couldn’t have been years and years, he was a kid, you know, but he probably started to hunt quail when he was, you know, about eight or nine years old. We got about half way back on our three-and-a-half engines and all of a sudden, KAPOW! Bad, big explosion, and we had a roaring fire in the cockpit, right behind, in the top turret area, right behind the pilot and co-pilot’s seat. The co-pilot was a good thinker. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, and I can still see him like this, with that fire extinguisher, and every time he pumped it, it seemed to burn faster, or harder, and I knew we were done. We lost most of our electrical power; we lost our hydraulic power; it took out our oxygen. I just tried to call the crew. I couldn’t hear myself on the intercom so I knew that I had no intercom. I reached down for the alarm bell; flicked the switch up--no alarm bell--so I pounded John on the shoulder and pointed down. And I don’t know--have you ever been in a B-17? Well, then you know that you’ve got to step down into the nose, and he jumped down into the nose, and I was relying on him to tell the other guys in the nose, “We’ve got to get out of here.” And I stayed up there and I didn’t have complete electrical failure because the one system that seemed to be operating was the autopilot. The lights were blinking, and I thought--I throttled back and put the plane into a shallow dive, trimmed it up so it would stay in a shallow dive, and it was getting hot, hot, hot. Then, after I lined up the autopilot, I went to flip the main gyros on to have the autopilot take over and I flipped them on and I tested the wheel, and, “Uh oh.” It didn’t take over. [chuckles] So I thought, “Well, we’ll have to hope that this trim job that I’ve done will last long enough for us to get out of here.”
But I had a problem. I kept my parachute pack underneath the top turret floor, the round floor that the gunner stood on, and there was about eight, maybe nine, inches of space on either side of the post that supported the top turret. There was room enough for two parachute packs in there. And I kept mine--as you looked at it--I kept mine on the right. John wore his. When we got in--he was a smaller man than I am and he could wear his parachute--when we got into trouble, that is, under fighter attack, he would get his parachute and clip it on, but I couldn’t wear mine because I couldn’t fly with the darn thing on. So, I had to get into that flame, those roaring flames, to get my pack, which I did. But, I got out of the plane and out of the nose hatch, and I made a delayed jump, because I had seen a number of our people gunned at when they were in their chutes and I thought, “Well, if I ever have to do this, I’m going to make a delayed jump.” But, it didn’t even occur to me to pull that ripcord right away. And I can recall falling for a long time until I started to--I was low on oxygen, out of oxygen for quite some time and I was really kind of not myself, hardly--and I started to see red and I thought, “Well, the next thing you’re going to see is black and then it’s going to be too late,” so I pulled my cord and popped the chute. I think I must have popped it at ten to twelve thousand feet. I was in the chute maybe, I don’t know, maybe ten to twenty minutes. So, for me, you know, I heard the aerial battle going on, and the jerk of opening the chute tore my oxygen mask partly off and it was up kind of across my right eye. I couldn’t see out of my right eye, and I realized what the problem was, so I took--I just ripped it off, and the helmet, of course, came with it and that hurt like the devil when I did that. And then I looked at it in my hand and I thought, “Well, I don’t need this anymore,” so I dropped it and it fell away from me so slowly. And I thought, “Well, what’s that all about?” It’s kind of funny how you think at a time like that. All of a sudden it came to me, “Well, you dummy. You’re falling, too!” So, terminal velocity being what it is, if you’re falling at twenty feet per second, it is going to look like it’s falling slowly--at any rate. But, I landed in Germany in a big woods that cut across the--partially in Germany and partially in Holland--and I came down into a big pine tree. Hit the ground pretty hard, kind of bunged up my right ankle and right knee a little bit, and then the branches of the tree jerked me back up off the ground. The canopy got caught in the branches. I had a British chute, thank God, and that had a neat system. There was a big, metal round disk over your abdomen and all of the harnesses--there were four members, two leg straps, two shoulder straps--they all clipped into that big, round disk and all you had to do was turn that a quarter of a turn and thump it with your fist and you’d slip right out of the thing. So, I had no trouble getting out of my harness even though I was hanging off the ground a few feet.
I heard burp gun fire off in the distance, so I knew that the Germans were having some fun with somebody. That German burp gun, it looks kind of like--what they used so frequently, it was kind of a slow-firing weapon--it looked like a caulking gun almost. But I heard that slow automatic weapon fire and I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.” I couldn’t get the chute out of the tree, so I dropped the, I took my Mae West off, and, of course, my name was all over everything. Then I just took off running. I didn’t really know--I found out sometime later; the adrenaline really flows at a time like that--and I didn’t know that I had a banged up ankle and a banged up knee and I didn’t know that my face was all burned, up here, above my oxygen mask. This pell-mell flight through the wood--and the woods over there are easy to run through because they take such good care of their woodlands. You know, they keep the brush down and things like that. I ran until I just thought my lungs were going to burst, but then I got a second wind and ran some more, and I finally found a depression site up there in the woods. It looked like it had been a machine-gun nest, maybe back in 1939 when the Germans swept through there. Dove into that hole; took off my flight coveralls; took of my flight boots; got my little pearl-handled knife out; cut all the insignia off, everything; and continued west. Got out my escape kit; took a couple of Benzedrine pills; got out that little button compass, and I knew that I had to go west.
And as I started west--and this was at kind of at a dog trot now--I came to a fence, rather impressive fence. I had no trouble getting underneath it. Turned out that was the border fence, and I crossed over into Holland. Didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was, that it was a pretty impressive fence. It had kind of a bicycle path along it. I came to a big road, pretty heavily traveled road, big ditches on either side and I got to thinking, “There are a lot of trucks there. I’ll try to get into that ditch and peek out and see if I can read the lettering on the side of those trucks to figure out whether I’m in Germany or Holland.” I knew it had to be one or the other. And it turned out the trucks had--I could pick out the name “Netherlandish”--you know, “The Netherlands” in Dutch. Well, I knew that I was in friendly territory, so I crossed the road and went north a little bit on it, and then came to another west, came to a west road. They had told us how to approach somebody in an occupied territory. Never talk to two of them. Look for one person by himself or herself, because they can’t trust one another. This account, by the way, is in Ian’s book [Ian Hawkins, Courage, Honor, Victory]--I don’t know if you’ve read it, cover-to-cover, or not.
The first person I saw alone was a woman milking a cow in a farmyard. I thought, “Well, let’s give it a try.” So I went up there and tried to--she was very intent on what she was doing--so I kind of stood off to the side and made a little noise and told her--she looked around--and I told her I was an American airman and in need of some help, and she started to scream and holler. I scared the tar out of her, and I thought, “Uh oh. This isn’t going to work.” So, I took off down the driveway and kind of trotting again, and all of a sudden I heard someone hollering at me. Well, her husband was in the barn, milking the big herd. This must have been the family cow, the pet cow, that she was milking. Her husband was in the barn with the main herd. I looked back over my shoulder and here this fellow is up there--“Come on back, come on back.” Just beckoning me to come back. Well, what would you do? [chuckles] I went back. And they no sooner got me in the house and she wanted me to come with her--just with hand motions, you know--so I went with her and what she wanted me to do was look at myself. She took me into the bedroom and they had, you know, a big mirror there, and, God, I looked at myself and I couldn’t recognize myself. I was really a mess. [chuckles] I really looked bad, and I thought, “Well, I guess I can understand why she screamed and hollered.”
The next three weeks--he had a telephone and he called. I didn’t know who would come; you know, I didn’t know whether it would be the Resistance or whether it would be the Gestapo, or whoever. It just so happened that it turned out to be a member of the Dutch Resistance, and he came just before dark. He came riding a bicycle, towing another bike with his left hand. And, he was very leery of me because I didn’t have a gun. They had taken our .45s away from us--and they had good reason for doing that--and I didn’t have any ID other than my dogtags because I had buried everything. I had my wallet. I had my DOD ID. I had a lot of things I shouldn’t have had, and I buried them all back in that hole. His name was Patrick Laming and he was, and of all the people that helped me, with one exception, he was the only person whose name I ever knew. Spoke five languages. English-born Dutchman. Eton; Cambridge; all the very best schools in England. He spoke Dutch; he spoke German; he spoke French; he spoke Flemish. What did I miss--English. I lived with him for three weeks out in the woods. He had a little shack. But, he really wasn’t in the business of helping distressed airmen. He was a tough guy. He was in the sabotage business. The Germans--he showed me a poster, a Post Office-type poster--six thousand guilders on his head; that was a lot of money in those days. So, I had an interesting time with Pat, and it took him that long to find fake ID for me, and to find clothes that would fit me. So, I exchanged my clothes for a salt-and-pepper tweed suit. [chuckles] And, he wanted me to get rid of my shoes; he said they looked too good. I said, “I’ll make them look bad, but I don’t want--I’m going to have to do a lot of walking and I don’t want to get rid of these shoes.” So, I made them look bad. [chuckles]
He turned me over to the Dutch Resistance people that specialized in helping evaders. So, I was an evader for about six weeks and then was betrayed. Got clear down to Liege, Belgium. Our next move would have been to cross over into France, but someone betrayed us. Now, Ian’s latest book--he’s got quite a long write-up about the Resistance Movement and about people who were involved in betraying other members of the Resistance Movement. Then, after I was taken--there were three others with me then. We all came into this apartment from different directions. We followed; basically, they led us around. We weren’t supposed to talk to these people. But, I rode bikes; I did some crawling across the border; did a lot of walking; Pontiac automobile; rowed a boat across the Ruhr River one night; and about every mode of transportation--streetcar, train--about every mode of transportation that was available then, we used, with the help of the Resistance people.
I remember one time a fellow that was with me, and he had been with me on a couple of legs, zigzag legs, his name was Ross Repp--he was with the 301st Bomb Group. Ross was a smoker. Well, I was, too, but I didn’t smoke when we were traveling, and Ross lit up a cigarette on a crowded train one day, and there were a bunch of German soldiers on that train, and it was so crowded that a lot of people were standing. Ross and I were standing, and the Resistance man we were following was standing, ten feet away, and there were a couple of Jerrys in between us. Ross lit up a cigarette and the German soldier that was nearest him--they were short on matches--and he--I couldn’t speak much German, but--he talked to Ross and he said, “Haben sie Licht?” And Ross kind of looked at him and I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “He wants a light.” [chuckles] Ross gave him his light and we got off the train and I told Ross, “If we ever travel together, you’re not to smoke; not if I’m traveling with you.”
So, those were the funny little things that would happen, but then after I was taken that evening--I wound up--there was an SS detachment that stormed that apartment and there was a lot of shooting. They took me that evening to a Luftwaffe base and threw me in solitary confinement, but it was a clean jail. It was their own jail for their own GIs that went to town and imbibed a little bit too much, you know. I still had my hacksaw blade out of my escape kit, in my shoe, so I went to work on those bars and the German guard wore hobnailed boots on that concrete floor. He knew I was doing something, but I could hear him coming. When he’d start down the hall and I could hear his boots--click, click, click--so I’d get on the bed, and when he’d go back the other way--click, click, click--I’d go back. . .but I only got halfway through one bar of that thing. I left the hacksaw blade on the window sill there for the next person.
And they took me to prison in Brussels--St. Gilles, an old medieval prison, and it wasn’t a very nice place. Slept on a straw mattress on the floor; cold water tap; and a small steel bucket, and that was it. And I was interrogated intensely, but I was threatened with all kind of mayhem, but that’s all they did. They pushed me around; they did not beat me; they did not injure me in any way. What they wanted, of course, was “Where have you been?” As soon as I gave them name, rank, and serial number, the next time guy came back he said, “You were shot down on the tenth of October. We want to know where you’ve been.” And this was late in November, but I’m telling you something, though, that you probably already know. But, we got out of there. It took an appeal to the Kommandant of the prison, who didn’t have any more use for the Gestapo than we did. And it was near Christmas. I knew it was near Christmas, and I appealed to him to let us go. I said, “Either shoot us, the way we’ve been threatened, or let us go so we can be with our fellow POWs at Christmas.” This was the Christmas of ’43, and a day or two later we were on our way. We did a lot of things, and we were in prison trying to get out.
MBW: Were you in prison ‘till the end of the war?
EB: Um-hum [yes]. We were liberated by Russians. By Marshall Rokasovky’s forces. The Germans were absolutely terrified of them; and with good reason.
MBW: What happened to the rest of your crew?
EB: Well, there were eleven of us aboard. I had the Group photographer on board that day and one man--Roy Rightmire, the top turret gunner--did not survive. All I can tell you is, we got him out of the plane. But, he was in that area where that rocket hit, and when I got ahold of my chute and got down in the nose, the navigator was in the process of trying to get him out of that nose hatch, and I helped the navigator. I don’t know what kind of shape Roy was in, but he did not survive. All I know is, he got out of the plane, with our help. Ten out of eleven of us. The way we were hit, we were the most fortunate people in the world, for ten out of eleven of us to survive.
MBW: And all were captured and imprisoned?
EB: They were captured in Germany. I was the only one that managed to get away and I think it was probably because I made a delayed jump, and I wasn’t blown back in by the westerly winds, quite as far as they were. I was the only one that came down in the woods, and it was that woods that kept me from being taken right away. I just happened to talk to the right person and, that’s kind of mysterious the way things happen once in a while.
MBW: That’s such an amazing story, and I know there’s more but we’re coming to the end of our time here.
EB: We sure are.
MBW: Is there anything else that you would particularly like to tell us?
EB: No, not, if you saw the TV series--what was it, “Stalag 17” or something like that?--actually, there was a lot of valid information, especially the circumstances we that lived in, the clothing and the furniture and the trading with the Germans and digging the tunnels and how to get rid of the dirt. But we were fortunate at Stalag Luft 1, which was on a peninsula out in the Baltic Sea, that we could see the Germans from Warnemünde and Peenemünde experimenting with rockets. We could see the vapor trails. Being basically on the shore of the Baltic, we probably got more than our share of Red Cross parcels, because we were close to the port of Stettin where the Swedish liner Gripsone?? docked to bring in Red Cross material. We were probably the closest prison camp to that dock and to that port. So, if we had had to live on what the Germans gave us, we would have come out looking, you know, like the Japanese prisoner came out--I mean the prisoners of the Japanese. And we did better than that. I lost about twenty pounds in that year-and-a-half; well, that isn’t too bad. I think I was about 185 when I was shot down and I was like 165 or so when we got out. That’s about all that I can think of. I’m sorry I took so much of your time.
MBW: Well, I was glad that we were at the end of the day and we could take this time because it’s an important story and I really appreciate your telling it and you told it so well. And I just want to thank you again so much for doing this for us and adding to our archives and our knowledge.
EB: Well, it’s very comforting to us to know that there are people in your age bracket and younger who all of a sudden seem to be interested in World War II. I read Tom Brokaw’s [The Greatest Generation] book and I guess I’d like to think that since we lived through that Depression with our parents that that did give us some advantages.
MBW: I think it did. I think it gave you the grit to do what you had to do. I just hope that a little bit of that has rubbed off on our generation [chuckles], to help us go through.
EB: Well, as I mentioned to a couple of other people. You know, I live in a little town of five thousand and the teachers at that school have taken an interest in World War II and they asked a bunch of us old guys to come in once a year and talk to the kids.
MBW: That’s great. I’m so glad to hear that.
EB: And I thought sure that these middle school kids would be difficult to talk to. They weren’t. Lots of questions when you finished, so maybe if they start talking a little bit about it in the schools--although it would be interesting to know what the Germans are teaching their kids about World War II, and what the Japanese are teaching their kids about World War II; probably not much.
MBW: Well, we have your recollections. Thank you.