Frank Knox
95TH BOMB GROUP (H)
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2004 REUNION WASHINGTON, D.C.
(Interviewed by Karen Sayco)
KS: Please state your name, and the date, and where we’re at.
FK: My name is Richard Frank Knox. This is September 12th, 2004. We are at the Hilton Hotel in Tyson’s Corners attending the 95th Bomb Group reunion.
KS: Could you give us your dates of service with the Army Air Corps, and with the 95th, and your job with the 95th?
FK: My service in the military during World War II began January 15th (in the year) of 1942 when I entered a communications cadet school at Scott Field, Bellville, Illinois. That continued for a four-month period so that I graduated from that program on May 15th of 1942, which happened to be father’s birthday. I continued from Scott Field to Orlando, Florida where I spent a month at a special radar school. And interesting aside I think to that is that we were issued notebooks in which to take our notes. That they were picked up at the end of the class period in the afternoon and were stored under lock and key; were reissued the next morning for us to use during the next day. Then four, well, not four, I’ll say two years later, when we were in England, a courier searched me out to deliver to me my copy of the notes I took at the radar school.
KS: And what dates were you with the 95th Bomb Group?
FK: My first station assignment was at Geiger Field, Spokane, Washington and was in a parent group there where the cadres were formed to activate new bomb groups. 95th Bomb Group was activated in October of 1942 at Geiger Field. And it was immediately assigned to a new base at the town of Ephrata, Washington. It was definitely under construction. And in relatively short order, our commanding officer, who was A.A. Kessler, known as Uncle Aaron, pulled strings and got us reassigned back to Geiger Field for training where we could get our training done. We were there until Thanksgiving time of 1942. But by that time, it became apparent to the commander and others that Geiger Field happened to be in a fog pocket. And we again were having difficulty in getting flight training accomplished. So again, strings were pulled and Colonel Kessler got us reassigned to Rapid City, South Dakota effective in December, so that we were moved from Geiger Field to Rapid City before Christmas. And we spent Christmas and New Year’s at Rapid City. An interesting point there, if I may interject. The air crews, of course, flew the planes from Geiger to Rapid City – Ellsworth Air Base or Field. And all of the ground personnel were put on a troop train in Spokane to be transported to Rapid City. Upon the train moving out of the station, the ground executive officer, may I name him?
KS: Sure.
FK: One Lt. Colonel Covington informed me, a second lieutenant, 22 years of age, that I was in charge of the troop train, and that he was going to his compartment, and did not want to be disturbed. That’s my last recollection of ever having had anything to do with Lt. Colonel Covington, because our ground executive officer then at Rapid City turned out to be Lt. Colonel Lester “Curly” Burt.
KS: And once you got to Horham, which squadron did you serve?
FK: Well, that was a big jump from Rapid City to Horham because I was a member of the advance party, which was assigned to head overseas from Rapid City to establish our new headquarters, or our new base. Little did we know where it was. And so, after six weeks of sort of floating around, we finally were flown across the Atlantic Ocean to Prestwick, Scotland and subsequently down to London for overnight and then the advance party was transported to Alconbury, 95thBomb Group location, where we met all of the air crews, which had arrived well ahead of us.
KS: You were right on the ground floor there, pretty much.
FK: Yeah, we were on the ground floor. We were – I feel like I was among the cadre, but we were certainly late in getting to our first assignment. And I mention that because after the crews were oriented and put through a particular program under the auspices of the 92nd, then we were transported to Framlingham, which was our first station on our own. That was in the county of Suffolk. And the ground personnel must have arrived by this time. They came by boat, of course. And so we were there at Framlingham, and sent out our first several missions from Framlingham. And then there is a fruit basket upset in that we were reassigned from Framlingham to the new base in Horham, Diss, Norfolk. I think probably we went to Framlingham because it was a base that was completed and was established, and we were waiting for the final establishment, construction and all of Horham before we moved in. The 390th moved into Framlingham after we vacated it.
KS: Now were you, you were at Alconbury for a while. Were you there when they had the accident on the runway with the bomb explosion? Could you tell us about that?
FK: Yes. That was my first experience at war. And I was in the operations headquarters, operations building when the explosion occurred. And of course, everybody immediately responded – went to see what it was all about. And I remember walking around the operation building, the outside of the building, heading toward the scene of the accident. And as I came around the corner of the operation building, well, I might say, it was like seeing a rattlesnake in front of me, and taking an extra big step in order not to step on him. What I was doing at that point was to step over a ribcage by itself there on the ground. And I thought, oh, you know, didn’t know first of all how to react. But I decided, well, this is wartime, and I might see much more of this. So roll with the punches. But that was my experience.
KS: These were actually the first casualties of the 95th?
FK: Yes, they were. And I, as group communications officer, lost at least three radio maintenance crewmen who were in that plane setting up the radio equipment for the mission. And at the same time that the armament crew was there loading bombs into the bomb bay. That’s about as much as I am aware of.
KS: What was, in your job, what was the day to day routine like?
FK: The day?
KS: The day to day routine like at Horham?
FK: Well, most of my work during the war seemed to be evening or night time work, because I was responsible for the briefing of the crews. So when a field order came in, along about 8 o’clock in the evening, then we all went to work to do our part in preparation for the briefing – mine on radio aids to navigation. And, among other things, we had what is know, was known by the crewmembers as a flimsy, which was a transparent case, rigid case, with a hinged lid inside of which you could place a sheet of rice paper. On that rice paper was typed by my office staff, all of the necessary information on radio aids, frequencies and the like. And then you could have both sides of the paper. But you could turn your flimsy over to read either side through the clear plastic material. The idea being that, when a crew was shot down, it was their responsibility, whoever had that in their possession – probably the navigator or the pilot even – he was to dispose of that piece of sheet of rice paper, probably by eating it, if by no other way. Now that was one of my responsibilities. Furthermore, you asked about what squadron was I assigned to. Well, I was in group headquarters. And then in the organization, there were the four squadrons, each one which had an assigned communications officer. What we did was to divide up the various, the major tasks, so that one officer was made responsible for the maintenance of radios aboard the planes. Another officer was responsible for maintenance of the radio school, because we had to provide refresher instruction to the radio operators and give them an opportunity to maintain their Morse Code speeds and things like that. We also were responsible for operating the telephone system on the base. It had been installed by the British Post Office, as it was called. But we had to provide personnel to operate it so that we would have crews on duty at the switchboard to answer the phones and direct the calls – send them to wherever. We also had a teletype system that needed an operator. Any sort of communications of that nature was a responsibility. I had a staff sergeant and then a couple of other airmen – I think to take care of office work. In addition to all of this as well, I was finally, ultimately responsible for the radio direction finder station on the base. Now, the radio direction finder station was located at the end of the runway and was there to provide communications to any airplane, any pilot, who asked for a direction to the base. That was manned by RA – Royal Air Force sergeant and his crew of personnel. They lived there and they maintained it, kept it in operation anytime it was needed. And I went out once a month to that station to inspect it and to report in my monthly inspection sheet that it was operating satisfactorily and so on.
KS: Skipping toward the end of your tour there. I understand you had an opportunity to go along on several missions. Could you tell me which ones of those stand out in your mind?
FK: Oh, yes. The summer of 1944, our bomb group, the 95th, went on three different shuttle missions – a shuttle mission being one that took off from England, bombed in Germany, and landed in Russia. Stayed whatever time it took to get prepared for the next leg of the journey, and from Russia, we would get the field order and we would then brief the crews, just as we did on the first one, to get the bomb group, the mission from Russia across the, I call it the Ploesti oil fields – anyway, the southern Europe area, southeastern, where the oil fields were, you see. And then we bomb there, dropped our bombs, and then went on to Italy, where we were billeted with a resident bomb group. And I understand we were assigned to the 99th Group, which was a B-17 unit of the 15th Air Force. And we stayed there until we got our orders to head back to England. Now we’d had two bomb runs on this occasion. On our first one, which was a bit earlier, well, in fact it was in June, because we were in Foggia, Italy waiting in part for the weather to clear in England so we could get back home. But we spent the Fourth of July of 1944 in Foggia, Italy. Leaving Italy, we dropped bombs on a port near Marseilles on the Mediterranean because we still, all of France was still under the German control. And then we flew on back home to Italy, back to England. We had to wait in Italy nine days for the weather to clear so we could accomplish our mission and get back.
KS: You were there a little over two years, I believe. In those two years, did you see any changes and/or improvements in the radios that we used in the planes?
FK: Well yes. And that’s in part because, well, there had to be improvements, of course. But one of our problems was any piece of equipment, whether it be a radio transmitter which might have, say, a motor driven fan for cooling purposes and all, we had trouble with the brushes on those fan motors sparking over at high elevations, because of the condition or the quality of the material used in the brushes. One of my squadron officers thought that he might get a handle on the problem if he could go along on a mission and observe personally what was going on, what was happening. That young officer, that plane, got shot down, and that young squadron communications officer spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. He was, of course, absent without leave because nobody had given him - he had no orders to go on that mission. Now may I – that was one of the missions, the shuttle missions. I went on a second one. The first time I was simply extra baggage up in the nose, and I was curious about what those black spots were up ahead of us, you know. Well, that was flak I was told. Fortunately none of it got to our plane.
KS: Tell us a little bit about the mission where you were assigned to be a tail gunner.
FK: Oh yes. On the second shuttle mission on which I participated was after the German fighters, the Luftwaffe, had been shot out of the sky. So, I was assigned to ride as tail gunner. But there was never any need to, even to charge the guns in the tail. So I was just riding back there in a very lonely spot the full length of the flight. We again bombed in, oh, let’s see, I think it was somewhere near Dresden, on our way into Russia. And I know that we were located, stationed at the town Poltava on the second one. The first one was a little bit more extensive. But we repeated again, and we bombed in southeast Europe, landed in Italy. But then, since the Germans had been driven out of France, we had no targets in France on which to drop bombs. So we did a dead head from Italy back to England. However, I did get in, grand total, five bombing missions for which I was awarded the air medal. One of the few non-rated officers who received the air medal.
KS: Could you tell us a little something about the air crews, which has been what I have done most of the interviews with. They were there for shorter periods of time. But you were there VE day. Could you tell me what you did VE Day during the celebration? Were you in London?
FK: Oh, alright. Of course we could go to London - whenever we could, we’d go to London and I went and I know some of us men went together one time and spent Sunday afternoon at Madame Toussaud’s Wax Museum in London. And there was always the plays, the theatre to attend. I also became friends with a group of people in the community of Diss near Horham station, and would go to dances there and other parties. I remember Boxing Day, the day after Christmas was one that was important. And so, well, let’s see…
KS: VE Day itself…
FK: On VE Day, at that time I was attending a special school at a RAF station. And all I can say is that it was an advanced school – it may have been radar, or what have you. But the moment that VE Day was announced, or occurred, the RAF base was closed up tightly. We could not get in or out. And there we were for three days with nothing to do but sit and wait and maybe play billiards, or what have you. Whereas those people that were able to get out and get to London, you know, in the celebration.
KS: What do you remember about your return home, back to Washington state?
FK: Oh, yes. Alright. Well, now, because I was a technical officer, along with others like all the communications officers, all of the engineering officers, armament officers, were then sent back to the states post haste in order to be retrained to go to the Pacific. So I’ll say that this happened within, at least within two weeks of VE Day. I was reassigned from the 95th Bomb Group and was headed for the states in the belly of a B-24 – one which, fortunately, had never been in combat. But there weren’t seats or anything. We just sort of lolled in there, and I think there was a lot of sleeping bags and stuff like that. But the details of the trip were that we went from Wales. We took off then from Wales – probably had topped off the gas. But we landed in Iceland and stayed overnight. Then the next morning, we left Iceland and flew directly west across the very southern tip of Greenland, and landed in Goose Bay, Labrador. Now as we approached Greenland, it was a beautiful day, and we could look down, and we could see these white icebergs floating down in the current, you know, from off of Greenland on south. But we landed then in Goose Bay, Labrador, and from there went down into Maine. That name escapes me. But I ended up at Fort Dix, we did. And those of us headed for the west coast were put on a train then, which took three days to get across to Ft. Lewis in western Washington.
KS: And how close did you get to being shipped to the Pacific theater before VJ Day?
FK: Well, they were good to me, kind to me, because the first thing was that I was assigned to a Rest and Rehabilitation program and sent down – well, I was give, I’ll say maybe a month’s vacation, or leave time, which I had earned a lot of in all that time. And I was at home and here and there. But then I was sent to Santa Ana Army Air Base in the summer then of ’45. And we didn’t have anything to do except go to Bing Crosby’s race track or tour, take a bus tour and go visit, see the movie stars’ homes in Hollywood – things like that. So that was getting kind of monotonous in a way. Finally I got orders to report to Colorado Springs, Colorado. That was Second Air Force Headquarters. I shipped out of Los Angeles one evening, and the next morning the train pulled into Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was quite evident from the sight of things that there had been a big party going on, and it wasn’t until then that we learned that the war with Japan was over. I think the train crews didn’t want to let us know, or their train would have been in shambles, you see. So I got to, well from Albuquerque then on a branch line I went to Colorado Springs, and what do you know, everybody there was on a three day pass because of the end of the war. So I had to sit around and wait for people to come back to know what was going to happen next.
KS: Well, thank you very much Frank. We’ve been speaking with Frank Knox from Washington state. On behalf of the 95th Bomb Group Legacy Committee of the Memorials Foundation, this is Karen Sayco, and we thank you for taking this time and opportunity to share your story with us.
FK: Thank you.