Maynard D. Stewart

95TH BOMB GROUP (H)

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2003 REUNION          RENO, NEVADA

Dick Stewart in 2018

JM: This is Janie McKnight for the Legacy Committee of the 95th Bomb Group.  And today we’re interviewing Dick Stewart.  Dick, will you state your name, for the record, and today’s date, and where we are.

DS: My name is Maynard D. Stewart.  I’m known in the Association by my nickname, Dick.  And today is Wednesday, September 10, 2003.

JM: And where we are?

DS: At the Hilton Reno in Reno.

JM: What were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps?

DS: From - I don’t remember the month - but it was 1943 through 1945.

JM: And with the 95th Bomb Group?

DS: I joined the 95th Bomb Group, I think, in January of 1945.  I left England soon after the war ended in Europe.  That was sometime after May.

JM: And what squadron were you in?

DS: I was in the 335th.

JM: And your principle job with the 95th?

DS: I was a waist gunner on a B-17.

JM: Tell me about your enlistment - how old you were, where you were living, and the training that you had.

DS: I’m a Utahan, and I was living, I was born and raised in a little town called Kaysville.  And I enlisted at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City.

JM: And from there, where did you go for your training?

DS: From there I went to Buckley, near Denver.  I was classified then into cadet training.  I was a classified as a bombardier.  But, at that time, the Air Force, the Air Corps, was discovering they had too many bombardiers - they didn’t need them.  The put me in a category called “On The Line Trainee.”  And I was disappointed with that because, naive as I might have been, I wanted to get in the war.  So I volunteered to take gunnery training and they sent me to Las Vegas aerial gunnery school.  

JM: And when did you get connected with your crew?

DS: I got connected with my crew in 19 - yes, late 19 - no, early 1944.  I’m not sure of the dates precisely.  And for a while, I taught ring and post firing at Las Vegas.  I grew tired of that too, because, again, I wanted to see the action.  And then, I think they sent me to Lincoln, Nebraska.  And I was processed there and assigned a crew.  As I recall, I was on a troop train, headed for Alexandria, Louisiana.  On that train, the crew walked through the cars, and gathered up everybody.  I think I even learned earlier that I was assigned to the crew of George Brumbaugh.  And that is exactly what came to pass. 

JM: Was there any particular incident that you remember in training, or was it a fairly routine training time before you were sent overseas.

DS: No, it wasn’t routine at all.  Towards our training, one night we were flying a navigation mission to Big Spring, Texas.  As you know, we flew different kinds of missions.  A mission was designed to give the gunners a certain kind of training, or the bombardier, or the navigator.  And this was a navigation mission.  We reached Big Spring around two o’clock in the morning, and turned around.  But on the way back, we caught fire.  And the whole crew was forced to bail out.

JM: And how were you rescued after that?

DS: Well, do you want me - you don’t want any details to this story, or do you?

JM: Well, details are great.

DS: Well, I’ll tell it as briefly as I can.  But it’s a very interesting story.  Because I had nothing to do, and several of the other gunners had nothing to do, except those who were posted on watch, we were really kind of sacked out in the radio room.  But while we were there, we smelled smoke, and looked around - couldn’t see any fire.  Finally somebody opened the bomb bay doors, and saw a roaring fire in an area around the upper turret, right behind the cockpit.  At that point, Quentin Warta, who was the co-pilot, said, “My God, I’ve left my chute in my seat.”  And he gets up, and runs through the bomb bays, and disappeared.  The rest of us put on our parachutes.  Of course we tried to get contact with the pilot through the intercom, but the intercom wasn’t working.  And finally, one of the gunners - a little guy called Smokey Davis from Cumberland, Maryland - he went up through the bomb bays, and in less than a minute, he came running back and he said something like, “Nobody’s flying this damned airplane.”  And at that point, we had jettisoned the waist door.  He dived out the waist, and I think the radio operator, Mel Glyman, went second, and I went third.  We were flying about 10,000 feet.  I remember there was a very strong wind.  And the wind would collapse my parachute like that.  That was frightening, because I’d never jumped out before.  I saw a river below me.  I thought at the time it was the Red River – I’m not sure about that.  And I rigged myself up in the parachute for a water landing.  But instead of landing in the water, I landed in trees that were just alongside the river.  And I landed safely, and after a few minutes, I managed to get myself out of the harness, leaving the parachute in the tree.  I was just wearing a blue leotard-like flying suit -  I didn’t even have my regular flying clothes on - and proceeded to wander over the hill of that West Texas area.  I remember in doing this, herds of cattle would rush by.  And I would get behind a tree, you know, to protect myself from the stampede.  This went on for about an hour, just wandering around in the dark in the wee hours of the morning.  

JM: Were you alone?

DS: Yes, yes.

JM: So none of the crew connected on the ground?

DS: Not that I saw, no.  I didn’t see anyone.  And finally I saw light – a pale light off in the distance.  And I walked in that direction.  It turned out to be a small house.  And as I approached, the dogs started barking.  And pretty soon, a man came out of the house, and he had a rifle across his arm.  He asked who that was, and I identified myself, telling him an American flyer, and that I was forced to bail out, and could he give me some water, could he help me.  It’s been a long time ago, and I can’t remember precisely what he said, but the essence was what he did say was this: I don’t believe you.  I think you’re one of those reform school guys.  He thought I was an escapee from a reform school in the area, apparently.  I said, “Well tell me where the highway is.  Where’s the nearest highway?”  And he pointed to the west, I believe.  And I went to the highway, found the highway.  And pretty soon I saw headlights, and I thumbed a ride into a little town.  At this point, I’ve forgotten the name of that town.  But I went to the telephone office, and there were three or four young women there - the telephone operators - you don’t remember, but they used to plug the wires, you know.

JM: I was one of those.

DS: You did that.  Okay.  And then, also, were a couple of other of my crew members there.  And they were being served coffee.  I was delighted to see them there.  To make this story a little shorter, we were gathered up and taken to the nearest Air Force Base - it was Blackland Army Air Corps base.

JM: Lackland?

DS: Blackland.  Not Lackland, but Blackland, yes.  And there I met the rest of the crew, and learned what had gone on.  And it was there that my pilot and the navigator and the engineer had tried to get a hold of us in back, and couldn’t.  And the fire looked very bad, so they just figured that we smelled the smoke, and, you know, go out on our own recognizance, which we did.  And so they went out the nose hatch.  But we’re all gathered together.  There were one or two sprained ankles, but otherwise, we were all in good health - every single one of us.  

JM: An amazing story.

DS: We stayed in Blackland for a week or so.  It was kind of an unusual incident, and on the inspection - people from the Inspector General’s office came down to interview us and see what the hell happened.  We all testified that what happened was natural, and that George, our pilot, did the right thing. We all had great faith in him, as I have today.  He’s here at the reunion.  And so then we were sent back to Alexander, and a few weeks later we left for Lincoln, where we were processed.  And eventually to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.  And we left for England on the Queen Elizabeth.  However, we left Smokey, the little guy from Cumberland, Maryland, because while he was there, I guess he didn’t wash his socks, and he got a bad case of athlete’s foot.  He wanted desperately to go with us to England, but he didn’t make it.

JM: So he never served on your crew after that?

DS: No, but he still attended some reunions.  He’s very ill now.  In fact, he may be dead.  We lost track of him.  But he didn’t get to go to England with us.  

JM: Well tell me about arriving in England.  Did you fly some training missions after you got there?

DS: Yes.  I remember we landed in Liverpool.  The thing I remember most as we came down - with many other American troops, not just Air Force.  There were just thousands aboard that ship.  As we came down the gangplank, there was a band there.  And they were playing “Pomp and Circumstance” - The same music that is played for a graduation in a university.  And I since I later had a career, an academic career as a professor, every time I attended a graduation ceremony and heard “Pomp and Circumstance,” I thought of Liverpool.  That’s always been amusing to me anyway.  We are processed in another place - I’ve forgotten the name - too bad I don’t have my notes.  They’re at home in Santa Clara.  But sent down to Horham, and assigned to the 335th squadron.  We flew several training missions.  Our first regular mission was to Kiel - northern Germany, a very famous target for the 95th.  It was a very important target for my good friend, Harry Conley, who died a year ago.  I lived near him in the Bay area of northern California.  In that mission, we did okay - quite a bit of flak, but we did okay. But the second mission was to Hanover, bombing martialing yards in Hanover, Germany.  It wasn’t actually in the city. But I think just to the west.  And Hanover is just, if you look at it on the map, it’s just to the west of Berlin.  There was a great deal of flak.  And we were shot down over Hanover.  Am I talking too much?

JM: No...

DS: We were shot down, that is, we were forced to leave the formation.  And in the waist I could see fire and smoke pouring out the right side of the airplane.  I thought surely, to use the expression of those years, we were going to auger in.  I didn’t know what was going on. There was no talking on the intercom.  And it wasn’t a straight dive, but a spiraling dive. And I remember the centrifugal force would slam me against the ceiling of the fuselage.  And then against the floor.  It was a very frightening experience.  But finally, George managed to straighten the plane out, level the plane out – I think it was around 3,000 feet.  However, he would be a better source of information for that.  And I remember him - I learned at that time that what had happened - that we had been hit, the number three engine.  And in fact, it was suspected at the time that it was a direct hit because it knocked the propeller shaft up, and then the cell was all very badly - the engine in the cell was very badly damaged.  I’ll make this as short as I can, too.  George asked Tom Landwehr, the Navigator – Tom was from Minnesota - to give him a heading to get out of there.  We couldn’t follow the 95th because we were badly shot, just full of holes – badly shot up.  And Tom, as I recall it, told George that he was just so nervous he couldn’t hold his pencil.  But George, the great pilot that he was, on his own, and using dead reckoning – maps – took us in a southerly direction, headed for Belgium or France at that time.  Most of Belgium and France was in Allied hands.  We were very near Frankfurt, Germany when we saw, I think it was two fighters on the horizon.  And we thought they might be Germans. We couldn’t identify them.  And there was a lot talk on the intercom whether we should stay and fight it out with them, or bail out.  Anyway, the decision was to have our ball turret gunner, Edward Kuzma, get out of the ball.  And he did, and he was stowing his guns and standing on the catwalk around the ball.  If you’ve been in B-17, you know that. And a couple of, several flak bursts hit the airplane.  One of these wounded Kusma.  This happened right in front of my eyes.  And he fell on the floor of the waist.  I could see that he had a terrible wound.  He was hit in the buttocks.  I could see around the fuselage, and particularly on the – this makes me kind of emotional to talk about it.  I could see his flesh, hanging on the wires, you know.  But I reported this to George, the pilot.  And he sent another gunner, Dell Siadak, the nose gunner, back to help me.  And Dell and I, we got the morphine out, and saw they were frozen just as hard as a rock, you know.  But we put them in our mouths.  We thawed them out and gave Kuzma morphine. Finally, there’s just a lot that happened.  We were shot at a great deal, but no really bad hits after that one hit.  And George – what I’m forgetting too - right at the time Kuzma was hit, George made contact with the fighters.  They turned out to be P-47's – our guys, you know.  Little friends.  And so George learned from them that we could go to an air base in Brussels - not in Brussels – in Belgium near Liège.  And so George headed for there, and he found the air base, and they had a steel mat runway - a temporary runway made of kind of steel mesh.  And George tried to shoot a landing there, but the landing gear wouldn’t come down, at least on side wouldn’t come down.  So we ended up doing a belly landing in a field just beyond the air base.  That was quite exciting in the waist, you know, because the way the ball turret hangs down - even when it’s stowed, that made for a rough landing.  Having bailed out before, and having crash landed, I feel that bailing out was easier to do than crash landing.  And within just a few minutes, a squad of infantrymen from the air base came and took us out and took us into the air base.  We stayed there oh, a couple of days.  I don’t remember exactly how many.  And then we were moved to a hotel in Brussels where they collected American airmen who were waiting.  The RAF would fly them back to England in a C-47.  So we hung out in Belgium, spending our escape money, and moving around town.  There weren’t any Americans in the town, at least where we were.  So we’d go into a bar or nightclub, and as soon as they’d see us, and see that we were Americans, they’d play “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” or “The ______ Polka” - something they thought we’d like.  It was a great experience.  We eventually got back to England and we flew, I think, 14 missions more.  And the war ended.  But I think we were on the continent close to two weeks, which gave us kind of a vacation away from war.  But we earned it the hard way.

JM: And how about the young man that was shot?

DS: We put him - we left him at the air base.  We later learned that he was in the hospital there.  And then I think they later sent him to a hospital in England.  But I never heard from him until soon after I joined the 95th, and he showed up at one of the reunions.  He was all healed, and didn’t even walk with a limp.  But he died of natural causes about four years ago.  He lived his civilian life in southern California.  There are only four members of our crew left.  And George and I, the pilot, are here at this reunion.  

JM: Have the others come to the reunions?

DS: Oh yes, in years past.  But they’ve tapered off.  And, as I say, several of them died.  But George has been president of the Association; I’ve been secretary and vice president; and Mel Glyman, who’s not here, has been a 2nd vice president. So we’ve been loyal supporters of the Association.  I think I’ve told you more than you’ve really wanted.

JM: No, not at all.

DS: Well, I hope not.

JM: Are there any other incidents that you remember that you’d like to mention on this tape?

DS: Oh, there are a lot.  But those are the two that were, you know, that were on the more terrifying side.  Actually, there are lots of happy moments.  I had - my career in the 95th wasn’t distinguished so much for having been a waist gunner as it was – I was a nose artist.  I had artistic interests way back then.  And I painted two – we had two airplanes.  We lost the first one, called Piccadilly Commando – left it in Belgium.  And our second airplane, which is the one we refer to was called Belligerent Beauty.  So I painted the nose art on both of those.  I painted another airplane – I don’t remember, it’s been so long ago.  But I had the reputation for being a nose artist in the 335th squadron.  

JM: That’s a nice reputation.

DS: Yeah, I’m proud of that.

JM: How about after you - how many missions did you fly?

DS: Just 14.

JM: And then the war was over.

DS: And then the chow hound missions.  I think all together there was 18, yes.

JM: How were those chow hound missions?

DS: I enjoyed those a lot, and they weren’t dangerous, so it was mostly entertaining.  We flew practically tree top level.  That was fun to do.  George has told me since that he enjoyed that too.  I remember dropping food in a – it looked like a racetrack area.  Holland was all flooded then.  You know that.  The Germans had broken the dikes.  So we would drop this as a clear area.  There were dozens of boats out on this lake, in the middle of the racetrack, in just, I imagine, a foot or two of water.  I remember dropping parcels, and seeing them scramble out of their boats and having fights, you know, to claim the bundles we dropped.  On another occasion, I recall seeing German troops coming out of their barracks and raising their rifles, and firing at us.  But we never got any holes in our airplane from that.

JM: And that was after the war, the German troops firing at you?

DS: No, the war wasn’t over.  We declared, on British radio, that we were coming – the Eighth Air Force did.  And don’t shoot at us, because we were on a mission of mercy.  But some of them shot at us anyway.  I’m not sure all of them got the message.  

JM: So tell me about your, how you got home, and your homecoming, once you got back to the states.

DS: Well, after the war, we were assigned to fly home rather than go home by ship.  I just wish I could remember the date.  We loaded the airplane up with the crew.  Many of the ground pounders, the name we’d use to refer to the guys that didn’t fly – ground pounders.  You’ve heard that term before, I’m sure.  And so we had, the plane was loaded, and they were sacked out all over.  That was exciting too.  But I think I’ve really told enough.  No?

JM: No, keep going.

DS: I’ll tell it as quickly as I can.  We left Prestwick, Scotland and got to Iceland.  And then took off for Greenland – I think that’s the way it was.  But it was very cold and the carburetor froze up on one of the engines, and the wings were iced up, and we were losing altitude.  The crew really thought we were going to have to ditch in that freezing water.  But George got the plane right down almost on top of the waves.  And it began to thaw out.  We made it into Greenland.  The interesting thing about it – the ground pounders never heard, and I don’t think they ever knew what was happening.  They were oblivious to it because they weren’t in radio communication.  

JM: And once you got back to the states?

DS: We landed in a field in Connecticut.  I think either Connecticut or Boston.  I called up my sweetheart.  I was kind of engaged to a girl.  Her name was Helen Smith.  And she didn’t have an engagement ring, but she was wearing my fraternity pin.  I had a year and a half at the University of Utah before all of this started.  Because I’d had some higher education, my nickname on the crew was “Professor.”  Everybody had a nickname, and mine was “Professor.”  So, I got on a troop train, and went to Salt Lake City.  It took four or five days.  All along the way at stops people treated everybody on the train like they were royalty. I just have never seen anything like it.  Quite different than the way the Viet Nam veterans were treated.  I arrived home, and within eleven days I was married.  I had a good and happy life.  Raised two children, two daughters.  But my wife died a little over ten years ago.  So I’m now a widower.  The 95th Bomb Group Association helped to fill that gap, you know, created by the loneliness, and the death of my wife.  And for that, I’m very much grateful.

JM: How long have you been coming to these reunion?

DS: I was discovered about twelve years ago.  George, who was living in southern – George, my pilot – in southern California at the time, called me up.  And I was just delighted to hear. It was just before Christmas.  And then I started to attend the reunions.  I think my first reunion was in Colorado – Colorado Springs.  I met Dave McKnight and Grif Mumford and Bob Cozens and many others.  Early on, Grif Mumford asked me to be the secretary.  I’ve been having lunch with Grif and Harry Conley, and sometimes Bob Cozens would come up from San Diego, for the past, oh, ever since I joined – the past twelve years.  And even though Grif isn’t here, I see him once – I have lunch with him once a month.  Yes, I enjoy this Association very much.

JM: Family. Before we end up here, are there any other incidents that have come to mind that you’d like to mention, for the record?

DS: You know, I could talk for several hours about life on Horham base, and the great time I had with passes in London, but it’s really too much to do now. 

JM: Maybe you can come to the Legacy group tonight, to the fireside chat, and share some of those stories.

DS: Well, I don’t mind – I’ve enjoyed talking with you here, but I even felt a bit uncomfortable having someone else here.  Talking intimately like this with you, I felt at home in doing it.  

JM: Thank you so much for doing this interview.

DS: You’re very welcome.  I’m not sure I got all the facts right. I couldn’t remember everything, and sometimes – but I’ve told the stories as best I could and as accurately as I could.

JM: Well, thank you.  Thank you for your time that you served our country, particularly the 95th.

DS: I’m very proud of that, and I’m glad I did it.  I’m very glad I did it.  Sometimes when I would get together with our crew and we agreed among ourselves that we would like to do it all over again. (Chuckling) But I think part of this was the effects of alcohol (Laughing). 

JM: Okay, Dick.  Well thank you again.

DS: Yes, I’ve enjoyed it.  Thank you, Janie.