Doral A. Hupp

Interviewed by grandson Luke Hupp on June 15, 2002

LH:  Hello, my name is Luke Hupp, I am interviewing my grandfather, Doral A. Hupp about his experiences in World War II.  Grandpa please tell us about yourself.

DH:  I was the forth child of Albert and Velma Hupp.  They eventually had four boys and four girls.  I attended a one-room schoolhouse in the area before graduating in the eighth grade.  I went to the high school, Wirt County high school.  

LH:  What war were you in?

DH:  I was in World War II.

LH:  Were you drafted or did you enlist?

DH:  I was drafted.

LH.  Did other members of your family get drafted?

DH:  Yes, I had my oldest brother went into the Army, he was drafted.  My next to the oldest brother was in the Army also.   He was drafted, one of the first men drafted in World War II.  Then I had a younger brother that joined the Navy and I think he joined on his own.  

LH:  What branch of services were they in?

DH:  I was in the Air Force.

LH:  OK.  How old were you at that time?

DH:  I was 21.

LH:  Where were you living at that time?  

DH:  I was living in Dayton, Ohio, working for Frigidaire, making 50-Caliber machine guns.

LH:  Why did you choose the service branch that you joined? 

DH:  I was drafted (smile and chuckle).

LH:  Where were you inducted into the service?

DH:  I was inducted in Columbus, Ohio.

LH:  Do you recall the first days of service? 

DH:  Yes, I sure do.  

LH:  What did it feel like?

DH:  I felt like I was kind of free and I really didn’t understand what it was like to in the military.

LH:  Tell me about your boot camp training experiences.

DH:  Well I went to a small town in northern Kentucky to get my clothes and to be tested and everything and then we took a train from there to New York where I took my training up there.

LH:  How physically and mentally challenging was your training?

DH:  Well there really wasn’t much to it.  All we did was march around in Hatten Hall and we took some instructions on how to be a military man.

LH:  How long did your training last?

DH:  It lasted two weeks.

LH:  When did you get assigned to a crew?

DH:  I was assigned …  I went to Basic Training in Lincoln, Nebraska where I went through an Airplane Mechanics School and from there I left and went to Kingman, Arizona where I was assigned to a school for 50-Caliber machine gun school.  I took training to be a gunner on an airplane.  

LH:  How long did your crew train together?

DH:  Our crew stayed together only about three months.

LH:  Can you explain a little more about your training before you went overseas?

DH:  Yeah, we left our basic training in New York and went by boxcar out to Lincoln, Nebraska where we were assigned to the air base there as a mechanic for airplanes.  And I stayed there for about six months, through the winter and we went from there to California were we waited for about four weeks to go to gunnery school.  We went to gunnery school in Kingman, Arizona.  I guess they picked me for gunnery school because I had built 50-Caliber machine guns and knew quite a bit about them….and they even wanted me to stay there as a trainer.  We also did a lot of flying out there.  One pilot took me down through the Grand Canyon, flying in a single engine aircraft.  So we finally graduated there and we were all assigned Sergeants for training in the gunnery school.  Ok.  

LH:  When did your crew go overseas?

DH:  We went overseas in October, 1943 and we went the northern route, up through Maine and Canada and we landed over in England, right on the northern part of England.

LH:  What branch of the Air Force were you assigned to?

DH:  That was…. I was assigned to the Air Force at Walla Walla, Washington, the Eighth Air Force when I went overseas we were assigned to the 95th Bomb Group, and the 412th Bomb Squadron.

LH:  About how many planes were in your squadron?

DH:  In our squadron there must have been about 15 planes.  But there were many squadrons over there and at times they would send up at least 300 or 400 planes, from all different squadrons.

LH:  What type of planes did you fly?

DH:  I flew in a B-17F.  That was the plane they were using at that time.  

LH:  Where was your bomber group based in England?

DH:  We were at Horham Air Force Base.  That was a little town on the eastern side of England, because it was not too far from the English Channel.  

LH:  Do you remember arriving and what was it like?

DH:  Yea, well we flew around…did a lot doing a lot of training over in England and it was very comfortable and it was very beautiful.   They were … in England, when you look down on it from an airplane it looks like a garden patch and it was very beautiful.

LH:  What aircraft were you assigned to?

DH:  B17F.

LH:  The name of the aircraft you flew.

DH:  Oh, it was the Lonesome….. I was assigned to the Lonesome Polecat.

LH:  How many missions did your crew fly?

DH:  We were on our first mission to Bremen when we got shot down. 

LH:  Do you remember how you felt when you took off for your first mission? 

DH:  Yeah, well I was very excited.  Everybody was very excited because that was our first mission.  

LH:  How was the trip on the way to the target?   Did you encounter any enemy fighters? 

DH:  No, we took…..our squadron went north…in the North Sea out over the water so we could prevent from getting hit by flak and aircraft.  We took the northern route to get to Bremen and we went ….we had to drop down to hit our target.  

LH:  Was your plane damaged before you got to Bremen?

DH:  No, no it wasn’t damaged.  It was damaged at Bremen.  When we were ready to drop our bombs on the submarine docks it was ….we encountered a lot of flak and aircraft, enemy aircraft, so it wasn’t an easy flight.  

LH:  Was your plane able to drop its bombs?

DH:  Yes, yes it did.  We dropped it.  But this was after the plane got hit and was damaged severely.

LH:  What happened after you dropped your bombs on Bremen? 

DH:  Well we were…we turned south and got hit very hard by enemy aircraft and the co-pilot was killed and the engines, number one engine was feathered and number two engine was wind milling and number three engine was good.  And number four was completely shot out.  The pilot calls me and asks me….says he could not get anyone on the intercom and he asks me to come out of the ball turret and see what I could do.  He thought that the bomb-bay doors was stuck and I think they were.  And when I came out of the ball turret that’s when I found Darter, Eugene Darter, the radio man.  He was laying on the floor in a pool of blood.  He had been hit severely in the right arm and his left leg.  He was bleeding quite profusely.  So I stopped to fix him up, that’s when the pilot came up to the bomb-bay doors and looked … and somebody did close the bomb-bay doors and I took care of Eugene, back in the radio room.

LH:  Did your crew shoot down any enemy planes?

DH:  Did what?

LH:  Did your crew shoot down any enemy planes?

DH:  Did we shoot them down?

LH:  Any enemy planes?

DH:  Yes, we shot down 2 or 3.  I shot down 2 myself.  One was a real small observation plane and I could never understand why he came up there, so close to me.  I could see his face.  But he other one was a fighter, way off in the distance.  But I shot him and smoke started pouring out and he went right on down through the clouds.  

LH:  How far from Bremen did the first guys bail out?

DH: Well he bailed out about 10 minutes after we left Bremen.  I don’t how exact that is, but it was a few minutes after we dropped our bombs. 

LH:  How many men jumped out of the plane?

DH:  There was three of them.  The navigator, the bombardier, and the engineer.    

LH:  How was the weather at that time?

DH:  The weather was very nice but it was completely cloudy underneath.  You couldn’t see the ground at all.  

LH:  When did you bail out yourself?

DH:  I bailed out after…..about an hour, after we got back across the Zieder Zee and we hit the island of Texel, T - E - X - E - L.  Four of us jumped out there.  The radioman jumped out there and apparently hit water back in the Zieder Zee.  The pilot and co-pilot of course….the co-pilot was dead and they went down with the plane and neither one lived.  

LH:  What happened on the ground?

DH:  Well, after we hit the ground … Frank Lee and I hit very close together and we buried our parachutes.  We joined each other about 100 yards apart and came together and we stayed there.  We found a hole in the ground and we got in that hole and we stayed there 2 or 3 hours. 

LH:  How were you captured?

DH:  At about seven o’clock that night, maybe eight, Frank and I came out of that hole and we started looking around.  We saw a farmhouse there.  We went over to it and found some turnips there and we pulled a few.  And after we had passed this farmhouse we were in some woods and some Germans located us in the woods.  That’s were we were captured.  

LH:  What happened then?

DH:  Over the next week I was transported to Stalag 17B, a German prisoner of war camp near Krems, Austria.  I was a POW for 16 months until I was freed in May 1945.