William H. Rich

95th BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

1999 REUNION         PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Interviewed by Margaret Blagg Weaver

MBW:  I’d like to state for the record that this is Margaret Blagg Weaver from the Legacy Committee interviewing today. And we’re doing this at the 1999 Pittsburgh reunion.  The date is September the 11th.  Would you please state your name for the tape, please sir.

WR:  My name is William H. Rich

MBW:  And could you tell us what your dates of service were with the Army/Air Corps?

WR:  I enlisted the first day of April of 1942.  I received a separation from active duty after combat, September the 9th, 1945.  But I was also listed in the inactive reserve and recalled when the Korean campaign broke out; I think the first day of October 1952.  I served one year at Denver, Colorado in research and development as a gunner instructor, but it was in the research and development department, and what we were trying to really do is build and perfect a slave turret that would monitor all the gunner positions on the B-29, and I would tell them what they were doing wrong and what they were doing right.  But I don’t know that it was a full success – I’m not sure.  

MBW:  That’s interesting.  Well, what about your dates of service with the 95th Bomb Group?

WR:  I went over, well I’ve got it in notes here.  This crew met in Rapid City, South Dakota.  I was only overseas for about 11 months, but we did fly 35 missions together.  There are some very interesting things that happened while we were flying missions, and I have a lot of them jotted down here, for memories’ sake.

MBW:  Good.  We’ll talk about those in just a minute.  Would you tell me which squadron you were in?

WR:  412th squadron

MBW:  And what was your principal job?

WR:  My principle job as I went over was a gunner, but our bombardier was transferred to another crew, and I took his place as a togglier.

MBW:  Okay.  Now back up just a little bit and tell me about where you were when you enlisted, how old you were.

WR:  I was a native of Asheville, North Carolina.  I was born and raised there, but I spent seven years as an orphan in an orphan home.  But I was in Asheville when I enlisted the first day of April – I became an April Fooler, I guess – 1942.  I was inducted in Charleston, South Carolina – Fort Jackson.  My first movement from there was Keesler Field, Mississippi and to really bring this about, I had to argue with the C.O. for I don’t know how long.  I was told that if I would volunteer before I was drafted, I could get any branch of service that I wanted if I could physically and mentally qualify.  And I told them if I didn’t get into the flying or the Air Corps, that I was going to be a real goof off (chuckle).  So he finally consented and sent me to Keesler Field, Mississippi.  

MBW:  Takes persistence, huh?   

WR:  That’s right.

MBW:  I’d like to know, in your training, do you think your training prepared you well for the combat that you faced?

WR:  Well, let me go into detail about what happened to me in training.  First of all, I went to Keesler Field, Mississippi, and I went through AM school[1].  And the day that I graduated, we noticed a notice on the board that said we’ve got airplane mechanics, more than a dime a dozen.  We don’t need you as that.  I said “Well I want to fly.  What can I do to fly?”  And he said, “Go to gunnery school.”  So I went to gunnery school.  But now this school that I went to was at a little place called Camp Seven-Mile, Spokane, Washington.  It was an operation of the 95th Bomb Group.  And in this gunnery school, we were taught to not only be a gunner, but to instruct other gunners.  And I did quite a bit of, what you might say, teaching other gunners to maintain, operate the turrets and the flexible guns, even to install them blindfolded with gloves on and everything.  And I think that was a very good course.  But as soon as I finished that, we got another notice: We don’t need gunners.  I said, “Well how can I fly?”  They said, “Well, go ahead and go through the school again as an instructor’s aid, and learn to instruct gunnery, and you can fly.”  So I did.  After that I was transferred to Blythe, California.  We made from scratch, building a gunnery school.  We built the butts that we fired the guns into.  We put up mock turrets on trucks.  We built a simulated target of a ME-109.  And built a track and put the target on top of a jeep, way up high so the butts would protect the jeep.  And I was there for about 13 months and wanting to get out of there and into combat all the time.  And I finally did.  

MBW:  Tell me a little bit about your crew.

WR:  My crew consisted of 10 young men to start with, from several different states.  My pilot was named Roy E. Squyres.  He was from Mineral Well, Texas.  My co-pilot was named David B. Metheny from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.  Now my navigator was named – I’ve got it down, I’ll have to look it up – my navigator was named Dick Serowski, a Lieutenant from Minnesota.  The bombardier at that time was name Tommy Wilson, he was from California.  The engineer was from West Virginia.  The radio operator was from Illinois.  The ball turret gunner was from the Bronx, New York.  I was at the right waist position at the time, and I’m originally from Asheville, North Carolina And the tail gunner was from Pennsylvania.  And the ball turret gunner was from New York.  Some of us were a Protestant faith, some Catholic, and some Jewish, but each believed in freedom and were willing to fight and die for that freedom if necessary.

MBW:  Were you a pretty close crew?

WR:  We became, after we had to weed out one or two incompetents, we became, I think, very close.  The ones of us that still survive contact each other very regularly.  And I’ve enjoyed their fellowship and friendship for many years.  

MBW:  That’s wonderful.  Well, tell me a little bit about your missions.  Tell me about your very first mission.

WR:  The first mission that we went on was flown, I believe it was July the 31st of 1944, and I know the target was Munich.  And I also made a diary of every mission that I flew and kept it a secret.  It was illegal at the time, but it’s not any longer, so (chuckle) I hope that I have not caused anybody any trouble for doing this, but we cherish this very much, and I’ve given each of our surviving crewmembers a copy of this.  I do have the plane number that we flew on that first mission, if I can find it in my notes.[2]  But I know the target was Munich, Germany, and it was on the 31st day of July. But we had a very, very, interesting, if not traumatic experience when we were going overseas.  And I’d really like to tell you about that.  Well, first of all, we met in Salt Lake City, Utah.  We went to some place in Nebraska and picked up a brand-new plane.  And we were routed from there to Bangor, Maine, and then to Gander, Newfoundland and then across the Atlantic to Prestwick, Scotland.  Now, on this crossing, before we left, we had installed a 1,000-gallon bomb bay tank, and full tanks and every possible gallon we could get in.  But on the way over, we lost a lot of electrical equipment, including our navigational aids and it was really a difficult job to be real accurate on that navigation.  So, one thing that it really caused, we had to fly a perfect square, four minutes to each leg of this square so that our navigator could determine wind speed and wind direction.  Of course this consumed a lot of extra time, and a lot of extra fuel.  But when we reached Prestwick, Scotland, we were so near out of fuel, that the pilot told us “Everybody prepare for bail out, but don’t bail out until I ring the bell and tell you to.”  So we all put on our ‘chutes and our Mae West survival jacket, and stood by for the signal to bail out.  Just after the pilot had told us this, I called the navigator and I said, “I would like to know if we’re over land or water.  I’m not a good swimmer, and I’d certainly hate to have to land in the water.”  He says, “Well, you could really be over either” because our visibility was zero, solid undercast, we could see no ground.  But just in about one minute after he had told us to prepare to bail out, I went to the escape hatch or the exit door at the waist of the B-17, had my hand on the handle to pull and let the thing go, and just happened to see a small hole in the cloud cover, and saw a C-54 setting on the runway, and I recognized it as an American airplane.  I called the pilot and told him, I said, “At five o’clock low, there’s a little hole in the cloud, and I seen a safe landing.”  So we immediately put the plane into a sideslip and steep dive, and landed without any radio connection or instructions whatsoever.  We had been airborne for 14 hours and 17 minutes.  And as we were trying to taxi to a parking area, every engine quit on us.  I am sure that we could not have been airborne more than a couple of minutes.  Now the Lord was really with us that time.  

MBW:  My goodness, and that was just trying to get you over.

WR:  Just trying to get there. But we thought we had a real good plane maybe we could keep during the entire missions, but it was taken away from us and sent to a modifications depot.  So we flew some – well, one particular was the Berlin Bessie, which was the oldest plane in our outfit.  And we had some very interesting experiences with that plane.  Would you like for me to tell you about that?  On one mission when we were flying Berlin Bessie, this was about maybe the third or fourth mission, when we went to land on the return, after the mission was completed, the pilot switched for gear down, and it was the duty of the engineer to go to the tail wheel, check it for down, and lock.  He peaked through the radio room door, and looked at the tail wheel and said, “Pilot, the tail wheel’s down and locked.”  I was standing right by the exit door, very close to the tail wheel.  There is definitely a definite sound when it goes down and locks.  It goes zoooop.  But this time, it just went brrrrr and stopped real slow.  He had already announced to the pilot, it’s down and locked.  I got on the intercom and I said, “Waist to pilot.  I’m afraid our tail wheel is not down and locked.  I need a minute or two to try to finish it up with a hand crank” because I knew exactly how to do it, so I proceeded to do it and it took me three or four complete revolutions on the steering to lock the tail wheel down.  So, we went in and landed.  The very next day a crew that we were well acquainted with named Billy B. Layl from Arkansas had to fly Berlin Bessie.  I remember going to one of his crewmembers, and I believe it was the engineer, but it’s been such a long time, I couldn’t be positive about that.  I said, “Watch that tail wheel.  It may not lock.”  Well, they flew the mission, and when they came in, it did not lock, it malfunctioned, it threw them off the runway to the right, and the engineers, or the ground maintenance or someone had taken up a hard stand parking area, and piled a big pile of cement and tarmac and rubbish, and built a new parking area because the others, the planes were sinking through it when they loaded with bombs.  Berlin Bessie, this plane hit that, completely demolished the plane.  It broke open somewhere in about the radio room or the front turret.  One man was thrown out of the plane, and he broke a foot.  But the rest of them weren’t hurt, the best I can remember.  

MBW:  My goodness.

WR:  Close call. 

MBW:  It could have been you all the day before.

WR:  I started to say, and maybe not for my being very alert it could have happened to us.  And I’d like to tell you about some experiences we had other than that.  And I look in my notes for a little bit of help here because I remember this about the Berlin Bessie being so traumatic.  And then I begin to thinking of some other things that I’ve been through. And so on one mission, we landed on a snow-covered runway, with ice and snow and we couldn’t stop in time.  We skidded off the runway, and immediately at the end of the runway, the plane mired up in snow and soft mud, and turned exactly 90 degrees across the end of the runway.  At the time, I was flying in the nose, as I had been transferred up to the nose to be the togglier.  And I said to my navigator, I said, “We better get out of this thing in a hurry because if we couldn’t stop, I believe there will be some others that will have the same trouble.”  So, we had not cleared that plane more than about 30 or 40 steps when another plane saw that he was having the same trouble.  The pilot tried to gain speed and altitude to go around, and he didn’t accomplish that.  His right wing hit the pilot’s compartment and the upper turret on our plane.  It broke the wing off between #3 and 4 engine.  That part of it just skidded just a little ways beyond our plane and caught fire.  The rest of that plane skidded sideways for a good half a mile over a lot of hedgerows and through a lot of mud.  It did not catch afire.  A lot of people ran to try to help, including the medics.  Every one of those guys got out without a scratch.  It’s amazing!  Of course, now after we had had the trouble with this engineer that we had, we grounded him, and we picked up a replacement engineer by the name of John Murphy.  He had already completed one complete tour of 35 missions and volunteered to continue flying.  He was very competent and very good, and I admire the man.  And when we had flown about 11 missions, another crew needed someone that was qualified for a bombardier and a navigator.  Our bombardier was qualified.  So they transferred him to the other plane, or other crew, and they moved me up to be the togglier.  And on that promotion, or transfer to that position, it was my job to be sure that everybody was safe when we came off the bomb run and every 20 to 30 minutes or less, give them an oxygen check.  And I did that.  On one occasion, our ball turret gunner didn’t respond.  I’d always start with the tail.  “This is an oxygen check.  How about a tail gunner?”  The tail gunner, “Okay.”  Waist gunner said okay.  Ball turret did not comply at all.  I kept trying to get an answer from him.  No response.  So, being that we had already dropped our bombs, we’re on our way home, I requested permission from the pilot to get a walk around bottle and go to his aid, and see what I could do, because I had had a lot of experience with turrets and guns.  And I wasn’t needed particularly in the nose anymore because I felt like that my, you know, job was complete, what I was primarily supposed to do.  I got a walk around bottle after the pilot gave me permission, walked through the bomb bay, back through the radio room, and I saw that the turret was in a position – part of the access door was above the floor, and part of it was below the floor.  We beat on it and tried every way to get some response and couldn’t.  With the help of the waist gunner, I finally pulled a gun from the waist, and saw that it was completely unloaded and everything.  I disassembled it until I had only the barrel, and I beat a hole in the door of that turret that was above the floor.  I reached in and displaced the handles enough ‘til the turret guns pointed straight down so the rest of the door came above the floor.  And with the help of the radio operator and the other waist gunner, we managed to get the ball turret gunner out, but when he came out, he had frost and icicles all over his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his fingernails were blue, the earlobes were blue, and we were afraid he was past ever surviving.  But we moved immediately on the 100% oxygen, moved him to the radio room and turn his heat as high as we could.  In a few minutes he did survive and as far as I know, he had no permanent ill effect of it.  But it would have been very different if I, and the help of the other crewmembers, if we hadn’t been able to get him out of there when we did.  

MBW:  What had happened to him?

WR:  He had lost his electric power, and for some reason, somehow or another, his oxygen failed.  Maybe it was due, because he had crimped the hose so bad, he couldn’t get oxygen.  That was the main thing.  He could probably have been all right without the heat for a little while, but he couldn't survive long without oxygen.  We were still at very high altitude.  We had just cleared the bomb run and the rally point and headed for home, toward home when this happened.  So we’ve had quite an experience.

MBW:  That must have been gratifying to be able to help him.

WR:  Yeah, and I was very happy to know that he survived and got back because there was another very interesting story about him.  Due to this little incident that happened to him being off the oxygen, he missed about 3 missions with us, or maybe 4, I’m not sure how many.  He was making those other missions up to complete his 35-mission tour so he could come home and was flying with just anybody that needed a ball turret.  And on his 35th mission he was shot down.[3]  He became a POW.  He was a Jewish boy.  He had been scared to death to what had happened if he’d been shot down.  But he survived.  He was a POW for a little while.  And I had the privilege of visiting him in Miami, Florida some time later. But he’s passed away now.  He was a Jewish boy.  He was good.  I understand that he was a volunteer too, that he wasn’t drafted.  And I’m sorry for this little bit of being broken up.  

MBW:  Please don’t apologize.

WR:  Well, we’d become very close.  I think that I was privileged to fly with one of the best crews that ever flew, and certainly with a good organization in the 95th Bomb Group because I don’t know of another Bomb Group that was awarded 3 Presidential Citations.  And I had the privilege of going on a mission to help the Polish underground in Warsaw.  And I remember on that mission we were flying in at fairly high altitude, but we were supposed to be able to see 3 smoke signals or fires that were giving off a lot of smoke, in a triangle for mission.  And we were supposed to try and drop the supplies for the underground in that area.  But the cloud cover was so bad that day that we had to go in at about ten or eleven thousand feet, maybe a little lower, I’m not sure.  And I could see those people running to pick up that supplies.  We had ammunition, small weapons, blankets, clothing, medicine, and some food for those people.  And they’d stand down there and wave at us.  I also had the privilege of going on 2 of our shuttle missions to Russia, and helping up on the eastern front, and then go on to Italy and Africa, and then come back to England.  So I really had a very pleasant tour, although some of it was very traumatic.  

MBW:  You had a very full experience on that tour with those different kinds of missions, and those shuttle missions were very long I understand.

WR:  Yeah, I think we were gone 5 days on one of them.  And I remember when we landed in Russia, some of these Russian girls, I mean they were built – great big stout and heavy.  And one of them came up to me as I started to exit the waist exit door.  She looked at me, and all she could say that I could understand, “Bomb, bomb Hitler.  Bomb, bomb Hitler.”  And I said, “Yes, bomb, bomb Hitler.”  She grabbed me up, just under the arms, all my luggage, B-4 bag and my barracks bag and whatever I had, carried me about 10 feet and set me in a GI truck.  They were really hefty gals, I’m telling you.  And there’s 3 of our crew that we know, as of now, do not survive.  There’s 3 of us that we know are surviving and keep real close contact - the pilot from Mineral Wells, Texas, the tail gunner from State Line, Pennsylvania, and I, thank goodness am still in good health, and I was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, but now I live in Florida.  The 3 of us that still survive do keep in real close touch.  But there’s 3 that we cannot find, and I sure wish we could.  And I have kept in touch with the 2 that are surviving with me.  I’ve visited in their homes.  And we’ve been together on 2 or 3 different occasions; particularly on the 50th anniversary of the mission we flew to help the Warsaw underground.  We were together at the Air/Sea/Space Museum in New York, and we were given the Warsaw Cross, which I have here in my hand right now.  

MBW:  That’s wonderful.  I want a photograph of that when we’re through.

WR:  Okay.  All right.  We met at New York, spent 3 or 4 days together.  And I have visited my pilot a couple of times since.  He’s living in Texas.  He was going to be at this reunion, now, and we were all going to meet here on Thursday, the 9th of September of ’99.  Before I left Florida, he called my home at about 10 minutes of 6 in the morning.  He said “Bill, I just can’t make it.  I’ve either got a bug or some bad food.”  He said, “I’m sick, I’m afraid to fly.”  But he said, “If I can make it on Friday, I will.”  Thursday night about 10 o’clock, I called him at his home.  He apologized again, and said, “Bill, I’m just not able to fly, but I sure hope you enjoy yourself.”  And of course, I wish him well.  And I’m going to call him again today and see if he’s all right.  Now Kershner, the other member that flew with us and still survives, and lives in State Line, Pennsylvania.  He drove up with his son yesterday, and spent the entire day with us, and left going back home last night.  That’s the first time I’d seen him since 1994.  Dave Metheny’s widow, Mrs. Metheny, lives in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.  She and two of her sons drove up yesterday, spent the day, and are coming back today for the banquet.  I had visited in their home twice, on two occasions – once in 1963 and again in 1965.  I was going to visit again in 1980. And I called that home and asked for Dave, and when Mrs. Metheny answered the phone she said, “Bill, I thought you knew about Dave.”  I said, “Knew what?”  She said, “He had a massive heart attack and died in 1980, July of 1980.”  And I was sure very much hurt about that.  I think that we had as well a qualified crew, and as friendly a crew as any group of people that I’ve ever been with, and I’ve been in several military organizations.  And I know quite a bit about some of the crew since they have finished combat and returned to the United States.  

MBW:  Well there must have been something so powerful about going on those missions together.  

WR:  You learn to depend on the other people.  You also learn whether or not they are dependable.  One of the first things that Roy Squyres, my pilot, ever said to me, on the first time we were going to take off on a B-17.  He looked at me and the rest of us and he says, “If there’s any of you guys that cannot do your job and do it well, competent, and can be depended on,” he said, “There’s plenty out there that can.”  And he said, “If you can’t, I will sure get someone that can.”  And after we did get a replacement engineer, I think we had as good a crew as ever flew.

MBW:  And I think it’s wonderful that you’ve kept in touch all these years, too.

WR:  Yeah.  I’d like to tell you something about 2 or 3 of us.  First of all, the pilot, Roy Squyres, from Mineral Wells, Texas.  He came back, went to Texas A & M.  He received, I guess you’d call it, an aeronautical engineering degree.  And he flew with General Dynamics on B-36’s and B-47’s as a troubleshooter.  And he helped design and improve some of the lift capacity of the B-36.  At the same time, he was a member of the reserve, and he qualified as a B-36 co-pilot and a B-47 co-pilot.  He lives in Texas today with his wife and he had 6 children.  He has lost 2 daughters.  But he has 4 fine sons, and I love them all.  Walter Kershner came back, went back to State Line, Pennsylvania.  He married his long-time sweetheart.  They have one son, Dennis, who I’m well acquainted with.  They’re all very good people.  And Walter went into the building contractor business and stayed with that until he had a heart attack and was forced to retire because of health reasons.  I went back to Asheville, North Carolina to my hometown and lived there.  And did, I guess you’d call it, over the road 18-wheeler driving for several years until my wife had a stroke and was unable to be by herself.  And until this day, she’s in a nursing home.  She’s been in this nursing home for 2 years and about 4 months.  I think, unless I have miscalculated, today is my 24th day without visiting her.  After I got home, I was recalled into the service.  I was in active reserve.  And after I had finished up my service in Korea, I went back home and got out again.  But I got some questionnaires.  And I figured I was going to have to go back in service anyhow, so I went in and intended to make it my career.  I was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina with the 746th Troop Carrier Wing.  Again, I was needed, according to the management, in research and development.  I very distinctly remember Captain Baker, who was the engineering officer for the 746th Troop Carrier Wing, made an announcement one day that everybody that was s Tech Sergeant or a Master Sergeant needed to meet him in the maintenance office immediately after lunch on a Friday.  And the best I remember, there was 53 Techs and Masters that were in that meeting.  And when he kind of related to us what our duty would be and what we were going to be into, he said, “Now how many of you would volunteer to fly?”  And we were going to be flying C-119’s, which he had already told us, and nobody volunteered.  He said, “Well, if nobody volunteers, how many of you would refuse if we asked you to fly?”  Nobody made a move.  It just happened that I was sitting on the floor, the next man, next to his desk, the closest man to him, and he knew everyone of us by heart – name just about.  He looked at everybody and he says, “Well, I’m going to have to name you everyone by name and see if you will refuse to fly if we ask you to.”  He looked at me first, and he said, “Sergeant Rich, how about you?”  I said, “Captain Baker, I’d like to ask two questions.”  I said, “Are we going to get hazardous duty pay?”  He said no.  I said, “Well, it is a hazard to be on these C-119’s.”  He said, “No, you won’t get hazardous duty pay.”  I said, “But we will get flying pay.”  He said, “Yes, you will, and you will earn it because you will fly plenty.”  So our mission with the research and development department of this organization was called Operation High Man.  We were the forerunners of what has been the space administration in Florida right now.  And what we would do, we would launch scientific data recovering or gathering packages by high altitude helium filled balloons.  They would go up into the jet stream, circumnavigate the globe several times.  We knew where they were at all times.  We had a system that we could dial a certain frequency and shoot that balloon down, cause it to blow up.  And when the package got down to approximately 26,000 feet it would deploy a parachute that were real highly, strongly reinforced in the apex with heavy nylon ropes and weaving of some description.  And we could fly into that with a recovery winch.  It’s called a C-80 recovery winch with an action like our grappling hooks, which we had 3 on a big line, spread out 36 feet apart from one end of the circle to the other.  They had one at each end, and one in the middle.  If we flew over that, and engaged that grappling hook into this strong, reinforced nylon chute at the apex or anywhere on it, we could collapse that ‘chute.  It was still anchored to the package.  We could draw the package into the C-119 and recover everything.  Now if this package happened to land in the water, or land on the ground anywhere where we could get to it by flying close to it with the C-119, we could recover it off of the ground or out of the water.  And I have done all three.  I have picked them up from the air, from the water, and from ground.   We had to redesign the C-119 to do this.  The original one came out with the doors that swung open from side to side.  And we had to make one that was in the action of a beaver tail, kind of.  Then we could open up, by part of it going up and part of it going down, by hydraulic controls, and get it to enable us to bring the package in.  But after I had been through All American Engineering School, the lighter than aircraft training, and everything that was needed to accomplish this mission, and learn the C-80 recovery winch so good, they named me Mr. Winch.  And I was an instructor for the entire operation.  But on August the 23rd 1955, my permanent crew and myself and all of us were taking off on a mission to go to Kisco, Alaska to retrieve some packages.  On take-off, we lost both engines and we crash landed trying to get back in on a 180 half circle, you know, and go back in downwind.  We didn’t make it.  There was 5 of my crewmembers killed, and there was 4 people on the ground that were killed.  We wiped out 4 homes.  And I received wounds in the right eye, the right shoulder, and the back.  It caused me to have to take a disability retirement.  But I was retired with a grade of Master Sergeant, E-7.  I enjoyed my military career.  I’m proud that being it needed to be done, that I was involved with some of the best personnel and people that I’ve ever met.  

MBW:  It sounds as though you really were, all along the way.

WR:  Well, when I decided that I was going into the Air Force, the Army Air Corps, I decided to take the advantage of everything that I could do to better qualify myself to perform whatever was required or whatever I was asked to do.  After I finished high school, I did go to a business for about 11 months, but I also made up my mind that I would never sit behind a desk in building because I was always an outside man.  I was raised in an orphanage home for awhile, and I did learn to plow and to milk cattle by the time I was ten years old.  And when I got home to my grandfather, he had a little farm near Asheville, North Carolina, and I did the same for him.  And I enjoyed it.  Until this day, I work every day, and enjoy working.  

MBW:  That’s wonderful.  Well Mr. Rich, I’m sorry we’re at the end of our time, and I just wanted to say that I appreciate so much your giving us your account today – your recollections add to our record in so many ways, you can’t even imagine.  

WR:  I’m certainly happy that I could help in any way that I can.  

MBW:  Thank you so much.  

[1] Aircraft Mechanic

[2] s/n 231462, “Roarin’ Bill”

[3] Bernard Glanzer, BTG, POW on 15 Feb 1945 with Carlyle D Schaad (P) crew in B-17G s/n 231887, MACR 12378  

Note:  The following publication was written by Mr. Rich:  

“All Out for Freedom” by William H. Rich, © 2004, private printing, 109 pp.