Larry Stevens
95TH BOMB GROUP (H)
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2005 REUNION DAYTON, OHIO
(Interviewed with Leo Makelky)
JM: This is Janie McKnight with the 95th Bomb Group Legacy Committee. Today we are with Larry Stevens and Leo Makelky, who were crewmates. Leo, for the record, will you state your name, today’s date, and where we are.
LM: Leo Makelky, Friday September 30th, 2005, Dayton Ohio.
JM: What were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps?
LM: April 1943 through September, October, 1945.
JM: And your dates of service with the 95th?
LM: We went overseas in April ’44, and I came back the last part of August of ’44.
JM: What was your principle job with the 95th?
LM: I was a gunner, ball turret gunner.
JM: And the squadron?
LM: 412.
JM: Tell me about your induction – where you were when you went in, and your training.
LM: When I received my induction notice I was working for Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo, California. And they offered me a deferment if I’d have stayed and worked because they were building aircraft – Douglas fighter bombers for the Navy. And I could have stayed. But I was 18. I didn’t want to stay, so I went home to North Dakota. I waited around and waited around, and I finally couldn’t wait anymore and I told them I wanted to go. So they took me with the next bunch, and that was in April of ’43. I went to Fort Snelling, Minnesota for induction. From there I went to Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Missouri for Basic Training. And they forgot to take the damn drill instructors away. It was an Infantry base. And we had the Infantry drill instructors. And he hated the Air Force, so he took it out on us. But anyhow, when we got done with Basic, I went to armor school in Buckley, Colorado, out of Denver. And then from there we went to Lowry Field, Denver for more training. And after that I went to Fort Meyers, Florida for gunnery school. And after gunnery school we went to Avon Park – wasn’t it? And we formed a crew at Avon Park. Flew there for training. And then we went to Savannah, GA, and then eventually to Camp Kilmer, was it, New Jersey, and then overseas. Went directly to Horham with the 95th, and flew 35 missions there. And then after that, I flew back to the United States. Spent two weeks of R & R in Miami Beach in one of the resort hotels. And from there I went back to Denver. I was at Denver for awhile. Then they shipped me to Biloxi. I was in Biloxi as long as I could stand it. Then I got shipped back to Denver and from there I got discharged back to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then back to North Dakota in 1945.
JM: Any interesting stories about your training? Did anything unusual happen?
LM: The only interesting thing about training was, well two things. I’d never been in an airplane. This was my first trip. And I went up in an AT-6. Do you know what an AT-6 is? It’s a two seater single engine plane. And it was at Fort Meyers. And it had a mounted 30 caliber machine gun on the back that you had to stand up and swivel with a strap tied to the floor. And I had an Indian pilot who, I didn’t know at the time, but they only let them guys go up with a certain amount of gasoline so they wouldn’t spend too much time in the air, you know. They had to take us to shoot this sleeve target. And he told me before we left, he said “We have 200 rounds.” He said, “If you shoot that first 100 rounds fast, I’ll take you in close for the second hundred, and you’ll get a good score. Well that’s what we were after – a score. So I did that, but in the process I lost everything. I stood up, the slip stream threw me back with the gun, and I had a hell of a time. I finally got it done. But what he didn’t tell me is that when I got all done, I had to stow the gun to the back of the AT-6, you know, facing the tail. And I didn’t get that done before he peeled off. And when he peeled off, the gun’s flapping, and I’m totally gone. Now when he pulls her out, I’m in the bottom of the plane, sicker than a dog. We got back to the base and my gun is still flopping. And he comes up to me and he pats me on the shoulder, and he says, “Nice job, sergeant. Now clean the goddamn thing up.” So I had to clean the airplane (chuckling). It was a mess, I’ll tell you. I had a pint of ice cream before I went up, I was so nervous. The second experience was in Fort Meyers. Remember we went in that oval screen where we shot the darts across they screen trailing fighters? We had a gun that had a spot on it. And we followed these planes across the screen. And I ate a pile of shrimp before we got in there. Don’t ask me why, but I just all of a sudden fell for shrimp. And when I come out of there, again, I was sicker than a dog. And I’ll never forget those two experiences. Those are the two experiences I had in training that really stuck out in my mind. Except that when we were in gunnery school, I was from North Dakota, and I was familiar with guns. So guns didn’t mean that much to me because, in my case, it was a common occurrence. And when it came to shot guns – I wasn’t bragging, but I was pretty good at skeet shooting and pheasant shooting, because that’s what I did for four or five years at home before I went in service. And we had one guy there from – I forget where the hell he was from – but he didn’t know a damn thing about guns. In fact he would lay his chin up against the butt. Every time that thing went back it hit him in the chin. And we couldn’t teach that guy no matter what how to hold that damn gun. And then when we got to the 50 caliber machine gun, I don’t know if you remember that or not – remember it was mounted on a stand, and the jeep went around and we followed – it was a 50. Well this damned fool was right up front with his chin on the plate. And a 50-caliber’s got a hell of a kick. And he pulled that trigger, and it just come back and busted his jaw. It was terrible. Needless to say, he didn’t stay around. He was done. That was the extent of some of my experiences in training. And one thing more. We started out with a 22 rifle, shotgun, 30-caliber, and then 50 caliber. We graduated from gun to gun. And it was the best thing that ever happened because I spent all my weekends on the range with a shotgun. We used to have piles of shotgun shells like that on the field, shooting skeet and trap. It was really something. We’d come home at night, our shoulders were just……
JM: How did you get to England?
LM: By boat. We went over on the – what was the name of it? Queen Elizabeth? QEII? QEI. Yeah, we went over on the QEI. And it was – how many on there? 18,000? I’ll never forget the top two decks was it, were WACs. WAVEs, WACs – WACs. The top two decks, as I recall, were all WACs. You know what a WAC is? That’s female. And at each promenade deck there were guards stationed to keep us from going up to them. And there was a standing bet about who would be able to get to them gals up on those decks (chuckling). And it was really a challenge. A lot of the guys challenged it, but damn few made it. And another thing was that every – were you ever on a cruise ship (no). From deck to deck they have a promenade they call. It’s kind of a hallway going up from one deck to the next. And each one of those were several poker games going steady. We were on that boat, what, six days? Five days, and some of those guys never went to sleep. They just played poker all day. You could follow our ship by looking for the – we had gas masks, which was stupid because we never wore a gas mask the whole time we were over there. So we dumped them overboard, most of us did, going overseas. Remember that?
LS: I don’t remember that.
LM: You could trail the ship by looking for gas masks. That was – it took only six days, and the ship would zigzag. It would take at that time a submarine – how long to line up on us before he could fire? A certain amount of time, and by that time we had turned. So we went alone. We had no escort. And that’s the way we went over. We go over there in Scotland – wasn’t it Scotland we landed? Took a train down to down to Horham – not Horham, close by. Or was it Horham?
LS: I think it was Horham.
LM: And that was it.
JM: How was your first mission?
LM: Ohhhhh. Scary. It was D’jon, France. Do you know where D’jon is? D-J-O-N? It’s in the west central France? Yes, it’s in west central France. And I think it was a marshalling yard, wasn’t it?
LS: I think so.
LM: Yeah, it was a marshalling – do you know what a marshalling yard is? A railroad yard. And that was our first mission. My worst mission, for me anyhow – I didn’t see everything he saw- was, I think, Berlin because I could see all the flak coming at us all the time. And they would start out in batteries of four – one, two, three, four – and about the time you think the fourth one’s going to hit, it would drop back and start over. And you think the next one’s going to hit, and it would drop back like that. And it was like that all the time we left the IP until we left Berlin. We went to Berlin, what, three times?
LS: Three times.
LM: Three times. To me, that was the worst one. Weep has a different theory. Because he saw more than I did. All I could see was what was in front of me in that hole. I couldn’t see behind me unless I turned the turret, but then again my view was restricted. I was in the ball turret. Yeah, that’s all.
JM: Were there any other memorable missions that you recall, or people?
LM: A mission – Russia was one.
LS: Oh yeah.
JM: Tell us about that
LS: It was a shuttle run.
LM: That was a shuttle mission. Well, we took off from England. We went up over the Baltic; came down into what, Danzig?
LS: Danzig.
LM: Danzig. And we flew into Poltava, Russia. And we were there – of course we hit – where’d we hit going in? We hit Danzig, wasn’t it? Yeah. We hit Danzig going in, and flew on into Russia. And the next day, or two days later, we came back and went to Tresbania, Poland. And we hit an oil field. And they hit us. We caught fire. And the bombardier and the navigator bailed out because the pilot told them to. They hit the top turret oxygen tanks, and they caught fire. And he gave the order to bail. But not all of us bailed. Wouldn’t you know it was only the officers that bailed (laughter). Yeah, right. I saw them go by too. And when they went by, I came up out of that ball turret. I couldn’t wear a parachute in the ball turret. So when I came up out of there I grabbed my parachute; I strapped it on; I went back to the door, pulled the lever and I looked out and I said, no way am I going out of this damn airplane with four engines still going. So I didn’t, and neither did anybody else except the bombardier and the navigator. So we finally got back to England. They got the fire out – top turret gunner. I’m sorry, back to Poltava, the top turret gunner helped put the fire out, with fire extinguishers or whatever. And we were there four days? Three or four days? And of course there’s no bombardier now. I’m the armored gunner on board ship now, so I wind up being the bombardier. All I do is pull the damn switch, really nothing at all because when the lead guy drops the bomb, everybody else drops their bombs. And that’s what we did. And we went and hit the place in Romania called Brux. Wasn’t it Brux? B-R-U-X.
LS: That was a different mission. A different mission than Poltava.
LM: No, it was after we left Poltava on the way to Italy.
LS: Brux (Czechoslavakia) was about our eleventh mission.
LM: Well what was – well, anyhow I was next to Ployesti. Ployesti, Romania, which was an oil refining place. And they were pretty strong at shooting at us, but we got by there and we went to Italy. We were there four days in the Adriatic. And they had American booze – remember that? We couldn’t get American liquor in England. All we had was that Scotch, and I hated Scotch. And every time we came back from a mission the guys would line up behind me to get the Scotch, because I didn’t drink it. So when we got to Italy, them guys had American beer, American brandy. You name it – they had it all. And we loaded up with it. Put it in the bomb bay. And we had some in the radio room with Joe, remember that? And some of it popped. Joe calls me up, the radio man. He says “Say Mac, you better get up here.” So I come up out of the ball turret- this is after we hit Bordeaux.
LS: We were from Italy back to England.
LM: Yeah, we were on our way back to England. And we hit Bordeaux, France – Toulouse, France. Toulouse, France. And I get up there and Joe, he’s pretty well snokkered already. He drank some of that booze that popped. (Chuckling) And of course, I helped him.
LS: He didn’t invite me.
LM: Well you were too busy in the back. Anyhow, that’s what happened. And another thing, when we were in Russia – my Dad came from Russia, came over when he was 20 years old. And his Dad bribed his way out of Russia. At that time the Bolsheviks were running the country. And if he’d have stayed, he’d had to join the Russian army. So my Granddad paid to sneak him out. And when I went there, I was bound and determined to go see him – my grandparents, never saw them. My Dad never saw them after he left there. So I was going to go see them. So I proceeded to leave the base. And I got no farther from the gate and I had a bayonet in my back. All I knew was the word stoy in Russian, which meant stop. So I stopped. Then this guy starts giving me a bunch of bull. Finally he got an interpreter to come and talk to me. And she says, “Where are you going, Yank?” And I told them,, I says “Somewhere near here is where my grandparents live, or lived.” She says, “There ain’t no way you’re leaving this base.” I says, “Well why not? They’re our Allies.” She said, “That may well be,, but you Yanks aren’t leaving base.” And that was the extent of my visit. When I got back home I told my Dad about it. He said that’s not surprising. That’s the way the Russians were. They weren’t really our Allies. And that’s the extent of it.
JM: Before we go on, how was it at the end of the war?
LM: When I got out?
JM: 35 missions?
LM: Yeah, we flew 35 missions, right.
JM: And how was that last mission and….
LM I think the last one was the worst – not the worst, but the most stressful because we didn’t have Morrison (the navigator). When the bombardier and navigator bailed out in Poland, they didn’t come back to us for two weeks later in England. By that time, we had flown three or four missions.
LS: When we came back, we finished Poltava to Italy, Italy back to England,, and then they sent us to a flak shack.
LM: We had four missions that they didn’t fly with us then. The one going to Italy, and then Toulouse, that’s two. And then another one in England after we got done.
LS; Thirty four missions – we had one more to go. ??
LM: Okay, but he didn’t go with us.
LS: No. I think we all went the last mission.
LM: So we had to sweat him out to see if he would finish so he could go home with us. Well, as it turned out, they forgave him for one mission. They let him go at 34. We went at 35. And that’s the way it was.
JM: And did you go back home on the boat?
LM: No, I flew back on a C-54. I had – I’ll never forget that either – I had a 45 caliber pistol that I was bound and determined I was going to keep. I had that sucker dismantled. I had it in my toothpaste box. I had it in my gear – I had it all over me. And the suckers found every piece and wouldn’t let me take it. (Chuckling) I was so damned mad. But I didn’t go home with a 45. And if you stop to think about it, I could have stole the thing when I was in the States, and I didn’t. But anyhow, I was honest and turned it in
JM: And how was your homecoming?
LM: Oh, not that eventful. Just family and that’s it. That was all there was to it. There were a bunch of us young guys that came home all at the same time, and that helped. That left together and came home together at the same time. So that helped. Then we went to school and blah, blah, blah.
JM: Anything else that you’d like to say before we switch?
LM: No, not really. Those are the highlights.
JM: Okay Larry, for the record, will you state your name, today’s date, and where we are
LS: Okay, I’m Laurence R. Stevens. And today is Friday, September the 30th, 2005. And we’re in Dayton, Ohio.
JM: What were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps?
LS: Well, I went in the service in April – I was in high school, and I had, I was going to graduate in June, and all my friends were going in the service. So I went in with them and signed up. So my date of time in the service was April 10thof 1943. I went back, finished my schooling, finished one month more, and then graduated with the class, except I was in the service actually in April or May 10th of ’43 to 1945, September, October 1st.
JM: And your dates of service with the 95th?
LS: April through September of 1944.
JM: Your principle job with the 95th, and what squadron were you in?
LS: I was with the 95th Bomb Group. I was in the 412th squadron. And I was a tail gunner.
JM: Any interesting stories from your training days?
LS: Sure. I have, when we were going – what happened with me, my two friends that I went in with – I was a very average student. I was a C student. And I had two friends that were A students and we all took photography, and we said, “Hey let’s see if we can’t get in the Air Corps.” Everybody wanted to be Air Corps. So when we went for introduction, our induction in the service, the fellow questioned me and he said, “What do you do in the outside?” I said, “I’m a student.” So he says okay. He says, “What do you want to do in the service?” I says, “I want to be a photographer on airplanes.” So he says “I’ll have to ask you twelve questions.” Well, in school, studying photography, I got 12 questions right. My very good friends that were A students didn’t pass the test. I can’t understand. (laughing) I’m just an average guy. So anyways, the next thing I knew, about three days later, I was on a train with eleven fellas. We went to Atlantic City, New Jersey from coast to coast. We were at the Claridge Hotel, I’d say, three football fields from the water. The boardwalk was the only thing between the Claridge Hotel and us and the water. I was on the boardwalk one day with the whole group of fellas. We were put at ease and a buck sergeant walked by. And this fellow next to me says, “Look, he’s got wings.” He says, “That’s for me.” And I says, “He’s a pilot.” I says, “I’m not going to be a pilot.” He says, “No, he’s a gunner.” I said, “No, he’s got wings. He’s got to be a pilot.” He says, “They all have different markings on their wings. His is a bullet.” So I said, “Oh, man!” He had said to himself “That’s for me.” And I said to myself, “That’s for me.” And a couple of days later, after they tested us and found out that our fingers were nimble enough that we could be gunners. A fellow asked me “How would you like to be an aerial gunner?” I said, “That’s for me.” Went back to the Claridge Hotel and there were big headlines there saying 60 airplanes lost over Schweinfurt and Regensburg. And I said, “I don’t think that’s for me.” (Laughing) So I guess we have our times that things look good. But when you analyze them they’re kind of not so good. Okay, then one other time, when we were going through training for armament, I always chewed Chicklet gum. And this one fellow kept coming up to me and asking me for Chicklets. So I put two Fenemints on top. They looked just the same. And so we went into class, and he said, “Hey Larry,” he said, “How about a couple of Chicklets.” So I handed him the two, and he was standing there chewing away. And all of a sudden his eyes got real big and he said, “You son-of-a-bitch.” (Laughing) Out the door, holding both cheeks. So those were my two fun things – interesting things.
JM: When did you meet up with Leo here?
LS: I saw him, I’m sure, in Colorado. Then I knew him in gunnery school, definitely seen him in gunnery school. And Leo was one of these kind of guys that if he didn’t like something, he just said it like it was. If it was coffee and it was too strong or too hot, he said, “Goddamnit! I don’t like this stuff!” And I thought to myself, man, he’s kind of strong in what his thoughts are. So, anyways, all of a sudden we get out of gunnery school. We go to Avon Park and there’s a list there as to who your crew members are. And I said, “Leo Makelky.” I said, “Wow, that’s the guy that’s very vociferous in what he likes and doesn’t like. But he’s straight.” And we all become, not necessarily friends, but just crew mates. But when the war was over, he and I have become the very best of friends. We see one another now – this is 50 plus years – and we see now each other probably two to three times a year. And it’s always a very good time that we have together.
JM: So when you got to England, tell me about that period.
LS: We went over on the Queen Elizabeth I. And we landed in Scotland. And we listened to the bagpipes, and it was like being on vacation. I mean it’s hard to have thought that all this stuff that I’d never encountered anything – we were Depression year kids. Vacations were small and not money wise,, but here we were. We were already traveling the world. And we went from Scotland to the 95th Bomb Group. We got there in the evening. And there were 40 wallets sitting on the counter. And I said to the fellow that was going to issue our bedding, I said, “What are the 40 wallets?” And he says, “We just lost four crews yesterday.” Four airplanes. So, ten men to an airplane, so that was 40 wallets. He said, “You’re the replacements.” (chuckle) That kind of gives you a different thought – they’re shooting back.
LM: Tell them about how we used to split up the stuff that was left over when they got shot down.
LS: You know, I don’t remember splitting – somewhere, this is where everybody sees things a little – somehow or another I don’t remember seeing any of that. The biggest thing was the following day. There were two crews to a Nissan hut. A Nissan hut is like a big barrel cut in half long ways. And we had two crews. The crew that was in our hut had gone on the – we arrived in April. And the first Berlin mission was March 4th. And they said, they had one fellow there that they called Flacky. And you could walk up behind him and clap your hands, and he’d jump up in the air. Just like you see the cartoons. He was, in a sense, like a cartoon. He’d just jump up in the air, and just put his arms out and ooohhhhh. Anyway, they were telling us about the first Berlin raid. They went through clouds. Everybody was recalled, but they went through clouds. And when they came out, they were directly behind a B-17. And they hit the prop wash and went into a flat spin. And they went all the way down to 5000 feet before the pilot and co-pilot pushed the nose forward and put it in a dive. But he said, Flacky was telling me, he says, “I was on the ceiling with my ammunition box beside me, and my parachute.” And he said, “I kept telling myself, just take that parachuted, put it on, and then bail out.” But he says, “I couldn’t move. I was just all centrifugal force. I couldn’t move.” So anyways, they brought the plane home and scrapped it.
LM: He was flak happy. Ever heard the phrase?
JM: Yes.
LS: And he was flak happy. I mean, he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t making any jokes out of any part of it. I mean he was flacky.
JM: So tell me about some memorable missions you had over there.
LS: We had several, naturally. One was Brux, Czechoslovakia, and it was our longest mission – 10 ½ hours was our longest missions, and we had about three or four, maybe five. But Brux, Czechoslovakia, they got us up about 1:30 in the morning. We left at day break. I was half asleep in the tail. I had a piece of armor in front of me. And I reached around the armor for my guns. Anyways, I put my facemask on top the armor plating. I was looking out the back, but I think I was half asleep – ¾ asleep. And all of a sudden the sky was full of parachutes. What the heck is this? We’ve got a paratroop invasion going on. Well we were in touch, those of us in the ship were in touch with the co-pilot, and the pilot was in touch with the other airplanes. So I called the co-pilot and I said, “Are we having a paratroop invasion?” He says no. I have no idea why he didn’t inform us what was happening. But there were three wings of us – that’s three different groups. We’re the 95th Bomb Group, Square B. We flew with the 100th, Square D, and the 390, Square J. So we’re in the second wing of three. We’re in the sandwich. But the first wing was just really having a battle. So when he said, “You ought to see what’s happening up here.” So I put my face up against the window in the tail, looking forward, and I could see what looked like a bunch of bees just going at it. And I put my face from one side to the other, and pretty soon, here comes a fighter plane fully involved in flames. And he came by, and when he went passed, I watched him all the way until he hit the ground. And when he hit the ground, I didn’t think he was ever going to stop. He just kept rolling and rolling and rolling. Well, we got to the target, and – this is a 10 ½ hour mission – but we got to the target, of course this is only half of it. We split up. You have each group, like the 100th might have gone first, 390th second, and then we went third. Or whatever the timing was. We didn’t drop our bombs. So the co-pilot called us and said, “That dumb son-of-a-bitch didn’t drop his bombs. We got to go around again.” So we made a turn around, and came back, dropped our bombs. And on the second pass as we dropped our bombs, we got a direct hit with flak. And it took out a roll of wiring about three inches around. So we had no intercom. We didn’t have any way of communicating. So I thought, oh man, who knows, maybe everybody’s killed up front. Or maybe it’s my radio. I was having trouble with my radio. So I took my radio. I pulled up my armor plate and I was fiddling with the button with a screwdriver I had. And pretty soon something tugged on my leg. And I said, oh man, I’ve just been hit by flak. Well, it was the bombardier. He come back and he said, “We got no wiring.” But it also took the parachute of the top turret gunner and part of the flak went through the parachute, disabling the parachute. And went through his pant leg. But he didn’t get hurt. So we started home. My legs got tired. I sit in a bicycle seat, and my thighs of my legs would kind of cramp up. So I turned around and I faced forward. While I was facing forward, I looked up and I saw one of the airplanes in our group. And smoke was coming. And I said, “Oh, he’s ready to feather an engine.” Pretty soon I’m looking at it and I said, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s coming out in puffs.” So I had a little side window, so I opened the side window. And I could hear a machine gun fire. So I pressed my face against the front, against the side to look to the front, and here comes a group of FW-190’s. And they’re slow rolling. It was like a circus. It’s like I’m watching television. And they’re doing slow rolls. And they’re firing 20mm. Well we were – we were in an element, so there was a lead in front of us. Our pilot pulled up right behind the ship in front. How he didn’t hit the prop wash I don’t know. But anyways, I asked the top turret gunner afterwards, I says, “Why didn’t you fire?” He says, “I would have had me a nice B-17 painted on my jacket had I fired.” As they were coming over, I was wondering why nobody was firing. And I looked to the waist, I looked past the tail, and two waist gunners were talking, smoking a cigarette, and hitting one another on the shoulder. And we’re at 24, 25 thousand feet. So I took my machine gun belt apart. Took five bullets out and I threw them. I couldn’t get them past the tail. And I was trying to get their attention. So I hooked up as one FW-190 come through, because they come through in a string. No way I could hit them,, but I took my guns and I pressed my guns down as low as I could push them and I fired. That mainly was to let the rest of the fellas know that there was something happening. And I watched the one that come over that I was firing at. He made a turn and went straight down. I thought to myself, how can these guys do that? But I found out from reading at a later time that that’s what a lot of those fellows, a lot of the pilots did. They went in a straight nosedive. It must have been a lot of G’s. End that story (chuckle). Oh,, yes. Then a little further on, we’re over France – it was a beautiful, beautiful, - in fact, that’s what was so strange, was why did the bombardier not drop his bombs, because it was a beautiful day. But anyways, we’re on our way home, and I’m looking down and I’m thinking, gee, we must be at about 8 – 10 thousand feet. Everything was so clear. So I got out of the tail and I went to the waist and I was talking to the waist gunner. And I said, “What are we going through a cloud or something?” And he says, “No, we’re at 24,000 feet and you’re getting anoxia.” And he took his face mask off and pushed it in my face. (chuckle) But it was such a beautiful day. No time for combat.
JM: Any other missions that were …..
LS: Well, our fourth mission, we went to the coast. We were bombing submarines – a base. We were being shot at with flak. They have two methods of flak – they either trail you and catch up to you, or you go into a box where they just shoot flak up in the air and hope maybe they’ll hit you. Well we were being trailed. I called the co-pilot and says, “Hey, they’re trailing us with flak. You’ve got to do something up front. We’re on a bomb run.” Bomb run takes two minutes. So we were probably a minute and a half in the bomb run. So four shots of flak come up, and I’m looking at it. I mean, it’s coming right to my tail – my end of the ship. But I’m part of the whole thing. So then the second row comes up. I told them again, I says, “Hey, you’ve got to do something up front. You’ve got to get us out of here.” I says, “Move off to one side. Do something.” And the next two come up. Two, four – they shot all four at us. Two of them come up, and they were right on us. They’re going to nail us. But at that time, for some reason or other we were on our fourth mission. We were what they call “Tail’s Ass Charlie.” So we were low of the low. And we slid under the whole formation. I looked up and all the bomb bays were wide open. We’d already been over a minute and a half on the bomb run. It was like the pilot put the brakes on. Of course he slowed it down. I’ll use the words, he backed up. He didn’t back up; the other planes went ahead of us. And he put the airplane on a wing. And as he flipped off to one side, the next two shots of flak would have been us. You can see them, but you don’t hear them. When you hear them, they’re right there. And you heard both of these, and you could hear the spray of the metal as it hit, and feel the lift. We were on a wing, and the co-pilot says, “Hey, those were meant for us.” And I says, “That’s what I tried to tell you.” (Laughing) I guess that’s about – of course Russia, Russian mission. When we flew over Poltava, Poltava – we were the second of three shuttle runs. The first one was in June of ’44 and we were in August of ’44. And in June, they crippled and destroyed I think 47 B-17’s. They were all on the ground laying there when we flew over. I was looking down and saying to myself, “We’re not staying here, are we?” And then we had mats,, heavy steel mats that we landed on. So we come down, we landed, hence I got out of the tail. One of the Russian kids come up to me and he saluted me. Well, we saluted our pilots, our officers with right hand, left hand – it was just to acknowledge, just to say basically hello. But if you’re in the real army, it’s right hand salute, or else. So this Russian come up to me. I don’t know why he chose me out of the tail. And he saluted me. Well I had my bag, overnight bag called B-2, and I saluted him, but I saluted him with my left hand. And as I did it, I looked over at my pilot, and my pilot’s eyes went up in the air. I says, “You don’t want me,” I says, “That’s the man you want over there.” (Laughing). And of course they gave us a nice show – Russian dances that night. And we saw the Russian girls that were big and strong.
LM: To put it mildly.
LS: They fed us our food. They had big, what do you call them, pots. And they would come by and they would put the food down on your plate. But they always gave you plenty. But that was about it.
JM: Did the whole crew come home together, come back to the states together?
LM: Well, we didn’t come together. We came individually.
LS: I’ve got one story on that. Leo left before I did. Makelky and then Stevens. They had a holding location for us when we left the 95th Bomb Group. A holding base. And so Leo got in with the people in the main office, and he was a runner. So when he left, he got me the runner’s spot. And they had all kinds of 45’s . Like Leo said, he took his apart. And they said, “Hey, if you want a ’45 – they had a trash barrel there – there were stacks of 45’s in there. And I thought, if I’m going home, I don’t want to fool with nothing. I just want to get out of here. Well anyways, so from there, I went to lunch. And when I went to lunch, now we were staff sergeants and going home. This young kid come up behind me and he was a buck sergeant. I said, “Are you coming or are you going?” And he said, “I’m going.” I said, “Well how come you’re only a buck sergeant?” And he said, “Oh, I only got one mission in.” And I says, “Well, what happened?” He says, “Well we got over the target, we got hit by flak, they disabled us, the put a couple of motors out, and we got over the Channel and the pilot rang the bail out bell. So I went to the waist door, and I pushed out this one gunner in front of me. I went out and the plane blew up.” He said he didn’t wake up until he was almost to the water’s edge. He looked over to the side and there was a touring car with three people – 2 fellas and a girl. So they got a boat and they rowed out to him and got him out of his harness and everything. And the other fellow they went to, but he was dead at the end of his shroud. Anyways, they couldn’t speak any English, but it was after D-Day, after June 6th. This was August, our shuttle run. It was in August. The kept saying, Americans, Americans. And they pointed in a direction. So they stopped at an inn that evening and they had something to eat and they went to a hallway of apartments or whatever you’d call them. The two fellas turned and walked off and the girl took him by the arm and took him into the room and took her clothes off and got into bed. And I says, “Oh man, that’s a chance of a lifetime. What did you do?” He says, “I got in my side and I never moved, not the whole night. In the morning the two fellas come back in the room, they said something,, they all turned, and they all laughed at him. (laughing) That was my life I was fooling with, and I wasn’t going to fool.” That’s about it.
LM: We shouldn’t belittle D-Day. We were on D-Day. That was by every stretch of the imagination, something to remember. That was really something. A couple of things I remember. Being in the ball turret when we come back from a mission we would drop down in the Channel. And I could see fish like you wouldn’t believe,, being in the ball turret. And I burned out several barrels fishing. We’d get back to the base and the crew chief says, “Jesus Macky, you must have had it rough today didn’t you?” And I says, “I sure as hell did.” (laughing) On another occasion, being in the ball turret when we were in combat, everybody was so busy that sometimes I would sneak up into the waist and I would pinch the oxygen hose on one of the gunners. And he’d just pass out, you know. Then I’d let it go and he’d come back up and finish. He never knew – you had no idea you were out, you know. And if you want to die some way, that’s the way to do it. No pain, nothing. You just go. You just go out. No feeling whatsoever. And then the other one was that drop we made to the underground.
LS: Oh, yeah.
LM: I’ll never forget that as long as I live. Being in the ball turret, we went around once and we come and all I can see is land. I can’t see nothing. We’re in the Alps. All I can see is land around me. The first time around – nothing. Second time around, all of a sudden, here was an army coming out of the woods. And we dropped supplies to them. And as we were pulling out of this valley, there was a huge cross at the top of the mountain. And I’m going like this in the ball turret trying to lift that airplane up so I don’t get my ass dragged on that cross. I’ll never forget that. And I kept just telling Danny, “Lift, Danny, lift!” (chuckling). That was really something. But anyhow we got out of there in good shape. Those are the only two things I remember.
JM; You were going to tell us about D-Day?
LM: Oh yeah. On D-Day – that was the day before or was it the same day? It was the same day, wasn’t it? It was the day before and the day after?
LS: D-Day we had two missions.
LM: Two missions on D-Day. It was a short run for us. So we went twice. The first time we went over, they weren’t near the coast yet. We were bombing the coast. The second time we came, they were all over the place. You could start from England and walk from boat to boat. It looked like you could. Because we were up, what, 24-25 thousands, and you could see just boats all over. We had no opposition at all, so it was a free ride for us, you know. It was a mission, but it was a free ride because we didn’t encounter any enemy opposition. And it was really something to see. All I can think of was, those poor bastards going up on that beach with all that fire power coming at them. And here we are, sitting high and dry.
LS: We’re looking out the window…
LM: And watching. It was really something. So I didn’t mean to belittle it by not mentioning it. Those guys really went through something. A hell of a lot more than we did. That’s about it.
JM: Thank you so much.