Clyde Gilmore

95TH  BOMB GROUP (H)

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2008 REUNION         TUCSON, AZ

Interviewed by Clarissa Gilmore Stevens

April 11, 2008

CGS: We are in Tucson, Arizona at the 95th Bomb Group reunion. My name is Clarissa Gilmore Stevens and I am the proud niece of Clyde Gilmore. We are going to talk to him today about his experiences. Clyde, do you want to tell us how, and when, and where you decided to enlist?

CG: I decided to enlist in the Air Force in the first of June 1941, in Palestine Texas. You went to the post office in those days to register. From there we went to Houston, Texas. That was the initiation. From there, two days of the usual things, where they take information about you and your family and all that. This was June 3rd. It was about a week after graduation from high school. I spent 2 days in Houston waiting for the train to leave for Riverside, California. That’s where I took basic training.

CGS: Why did you decide to enlist?

CG: Well I wanted to become a pilot! [laughs] The reason why was because, I suppose, Life Magazine— remember that magazine?—they were covering the events in all of Europe and all the activity. Everybody was preparing for war actually, so I decided to go into the service. And the draft was coming up, so I thought it would be better just to go ahead and enlist.

CGS: What happened when you got to Riverside?

CG: Well, it was just basic training, I mean, marching and introduction to the rules and regulations of the service, and interviews to determine what we might like to do. For example, they had the opportunity to go to Burma. That wasn’t available to me because they wanted the Army people who had been in for some time to go over and to make contact with the Chinese at that time. That happened even before we left Riverside, California for assignment in Hammer Field, Fresno, California.

CGS: How long did it take before you got overseas?

CG: It was in May of 1943 because we were trained in the organization, not the 95th Bomb Group but we were eventually supposed to be the service company for some group like the 95th or 100th or so forth.

CGS: What was the route you took to get over there?

CG: The route was first, after leaving Hammer Field we had assignments in Walla Walla, Washington, but I was there, of course, at Hammer Field and war was declared on December 7th 1941. The captain of our squadron I was in, headquarters squadron, decided I would like to go to radio school at Scott Field Illinois, and I said Yes, I would like to very much. That would give me an opportunity to start flying and so that’s where I went. It was in September.

CGS: You went to radio school there, and then what?

CG: When I returned to my squadron in Fresno, California, and they were preparing to go overseas, that was 41 and it took from 1941 to1943 before we were trained as a group. It was the 49th Service Group. We first stopped in Walla Walla, Washington, and spent time there in Sioux City, Iowa, spent time there, Rome, New York, spent time there, then we were ready to go overseas. We took the Queen Elizabeth from New York to the Firth of Clyde in Scotland and disembarked there, and went by train, eventually we got to Horham England.

CGS: Do you have any memorable experiences from your training?

CG: No, nothing in particular, except we had the opportunity to be entertained by the movie stars from Hollywood and such as that, but we were eager to get abroad and get this fighting done and get the war over! [laughs]

CGS: What was it like when you first got to Horham? What did you think?

CG: First, we stopped at an airfield. We were not assigned to that particular field right then. We went to the first one that was available and they were making preparations because a British unit had moved out of that airfield and we joined in the 95th Bomb Group, the 49th Service Group, because the facilities were there to repair the planes, except when you had an engagement in Germany or something.

CGS: And when was that, March of 43?

CG: We landed in England, in Scotland, you see, and took the train ride down south to England, which is a vast distance of about 800 miles, I think.

CGS: When did you get there? I think it was May 1943.

CG: It was about May the 20th we left, it took us about 7 days by boat, the Queen Elizabeth. Oh, that was a little bit exciting, had 17,000 people on that boat, it was a little crowded! [laughs] We had just lots of fun, playing cards and gambling and a lot of things like that we did!

CGS: When you got to Horham you were first with 457th subdepot?

CG: No. They didn’t call it the 457th, it was 49th Service Group, for a year to two.

CGS: What did you do there?

CG: I was in the service headquarters squadron when I went back there to Hammer Field and stayed in that capacity until I got to Walla Walla, Washington, and then, from there on it was just routine things, working in the office with records and trying to arrange the activities of the group.

CGS: How did you get on a flight crew?

ICG: worked as a radio mechanic when we arrived in England at the air base which eventually Horham. I got on because I pestered the 49th Service Group, he was a very fine person. He was a very well educated man, I mean, he’d been graduated at some university in California and he had several assignments, became like _____________ general for the services there, and I kept asking him about getting a transfer to a flight crew as soon as I got over there. And he said, Well, OK, it’s fine. Go take a physical examination, and so I did, and I couldn’t pass the eye examination. Remember the Air Force was under the command of the Army at that time, and you had to have exactly the specifications for your eyes or something. Well, I had one weak eye and one strong one. It wasn’t weak, but it had some flaws in it. [laughs] And so I was held back for all this time. I asked him many years after, at some of the reunions, why wouldn’t he ever let me go? And he said because we didn’t have enough radio mechanics and so I said OK. [laughs] Anyway, finally I got transferred over then as a radio operator because I had trained some people that came over as radio operators. How did I get on a flight crew? I got there by, I think they were short of radio operators. One of the crew that I joined after that was, they didn’t have a radio operator, because the radio operator and the waist gunner bailed out on a mission, it looked like they were going to have to, they got either the impression or they requested it because the plane was out of control and, this is the story I got anyway, they bailed out because they asked permission and the pilot gave them permission to do so. And so the group was short of radio operators, and that was where we joined that crew with the radio operator.

CGS: What squadron and crew was that?

CG: That was 412th, the 412th squadron, but I didn’t get on there until January of 45. I transferred over just before, in 44, because they were short of radio operators. And it didn’t make any difference whether you could see or not, as long as you could operate that radio, you see. But my eyes were OK, the only thing is, I couldn’t pass the depth perception. Anyway, that’s how I joined the crew.

CGS: What was your first mission like?

CG: The first one was not with the crew that I…it was Frank Geer who was the pilot, it was not that one because they had another mission to go up and they had a short of radio operators so I took my place on that one. And what was it like? We went over the target, dropped the bombs, and then the planes were all scattered out because we turned the wrong direction or something, got mixed up, the flak was so heavy that I guess maybe the leader got confused or something. There was some reason for it, perhaps the flak was heavy and he was trying to get away from it, to lead the group away. As we were leaving the area where the flak was less intense, somebody said Oh, there’s a plane on fire! And I stood up to look through the window from my radio room and that’s all I remember, because they made an oxygen check later on, and I didn’t answer so, I think it was the engineer came back and found me on the floor because I didn’t have enough oxygen.

CGS: That was your first mission?

CG: That was the first mission. He connected me back up to the oxygen and that was the only time I was ever airsick and it was very severe, because when you get cut off from oxygen, you know… So we flew back to England. That was the first mission.

CGS: What was your most memorable mission?

CG: Well that was one of them! I suppose the most memorable one was when we went to Nuremberg—I believe that’s where it was—anyway we were hit by flak and some missiles of some kind and we had 2 engine failures, one of them on each side fortunately so that left us 2, and we flew around and looked for an airfield to land near Brussels because we were getting low on fuel. We couldn’t find it, but anyway the pilot decided that it wouldn’t be a wise thing to cross the North Sea, so we were looking for a small airfield, and we flew around a little while and finally spotted some kind of landing area and he put it down and we ran the wheels up, either that or they pulled them up after we landed, but the landing area was too short, so we ran through a couple of hedgerows and stopped and we were…I had sent a message to the airbase asking for directions to…you know, a course to fly, and they sent it back. I didn’t get their reply but they got mine because at that time, it was just desperation, whether they’d find a way to get back or either find a place to land. So the pilot decided we would go ahead and land, and we did, and it worked out very well. We spent the night in Brussels that night because this was sort of like no-man’s land, this area was occupied by the Germans and they had fled or they were pushed back. We stayed at the Metropol Hotel, if you remember that! [laughs]

CGS: When the pilot decided to land, what were the instructions to the crew?

CG: Oh, just prepare for an emergency landing.

CGS: Where did everybody go?

CG: Everybody went to the radio room.

CGS: Kind of crowded in there?

CG: It was a little bit crowded, I had some problems even getting a message through because everyone rushed to the radio room and this was the time when I was trying to get a message through to get a direction that we should take if we were going to try to make it across the North Sea. Then you’d brush up against the table, the radio operator sits, and  key had been practically torn off so I had to try to get it back on, and I did and it was a little bit, it wasn’t like normally using the keys. And then there was another incident on that, when they said to prepare for emergency landing, I remember that we had what we called a VHF, very high frequency radio, and it was supposed to be hush-hush back in those days. [laughs] It had a button on it that you could push that would blow the thing up, and when I stepped back in there to do that, and just about that time we hit the ground! [laughs] But it was a good landing. Everybody started falling out of the airplane because somebody said Get out, because it might catch on fire! you see.

CGS: How did you get back to England?

CG: Well, I think perhaps they knew where we were, because I’d sent a message and also I suppose there was an Army unit came by with a truck and put us on it and took us into Brussels. And so they sent a B24 the next day over to pick us up from Brussels air force. They were about, oh must have been somewhere around 20 miles or 30 miles from Brussels where the plane went down.

CGS: And how many missions did you fly?

CG: I flew 21 missions and then some missions of supply, five of those after the war ended. To the Dutch, for example, because they were eating tulip bulbs or anything else they could get. I lived in Holland after that, after the war. They used to tell me about that.

CGS: Can you think of any humorous incidents that happened while you were there?

CG: I never saw anything humorous about the war.

CGS: How about homecoming? How did you get home? Anything exciting about that?

CG: Nothing exciting. When the war was over and we flew, of course we practiced flying to make the trip back but it was some time in June of 45, and in addition to our own crew, we took a number of the people who worked in the hangars and so forth, and the repair people, and we flew from England down the coast of Spain down to the Azores, which was a Portuguese island there, and then we landed in Newfoundland, and from Newfoundland we went to _____________ Connecticut and that’s where we landed there. From there they said, Go home! They gave us a few days off! [laughs]

CGS: Were any of the experiences useful later in your life? Did you learn anything during that time that helped you later?

CG: Not that I know of! I got a job as soon as I could get out, I was discharged in September 45 and I went, actually I was discharged and it took 30 days which they gave us. The war was over. They had already dropped a bomb on Hiroshima because we were going to be held over there to go to the Pacific, but no one went except the captain and I guess he picked up another crew. Perhaps anyway they flew a B17 down. I talked to Colonel Malcolm Wagner since then, about his activities over there. He enjoyed it very much but he stayed on as a reserve. Eventually he went back to civilian life too.

CGS: Anything else you can remember that you want to share?

CG: Well, there was nothing except, I mean, just the activities that were at the base, and when you got some leave time or something like that, we had R&R after the flight that we took, the mission that we were on and had to leave the plane in Brussels.

CGS: What did you do on R&R?

CG: Oh, I went down to _____________ Land’s End down there on the seashore, a very nice place. The people in England were gracious enough to, they had a very nice, it was at _____________ they had a very nice place there, that they put at the disposal of the United States Air Force for that purpose, rest and recuperation. We spent about a week off and then we were back flying again.

CG: It was the 412th. Then they had the 334th, the 335th, the 336th, and that was it.

CGS: When did you transfer from the 412th to the 335th?

CG: Right after the war was over and we were going to be sent, what they did, they took everybody out of the 412th and put them into the 335th, all the flight crews. It was just because, I think the 412th was inherited by the 95th Bomb Group to add to the original 334, 335, 336 to make up 4 squadrons. But they arrived about the same time in England. They flew all through the war on the same missions, the 334th, 335th, 336th. And the 457th, they call it a, they _____________ different because the 49th service group became so big to take care of all these repairs and so forth, they had the radio maintenance, even though each, the 95th bomb group had radio people too that worked on the ground, you see. Everybody was trained in radio, in parachute, we had people that worked and packed parachutes and things like that because of the service thing, I don’t think they had anyone that was assigned to the parachute maintenance or packing of parachutes and so forth, except maybe what was the 49th service group and then it was called the 457th. We had several divisions for maintenance and so forth, you had the food supply, the maintenance of vehicles, the maintenance of aircraft, they had to change the engine, that was 457th that did that, any type of maintenance work that we had. Like aircraft experts, we had I would say a master sergeant _____________ service group that would take over maintenance of the aircraft, they would have an officer then over that, all the service people. Might be an aircraft engineer. And then we had what you would call engineers that flew, but they didn’t, there was an enlisted man they used as…but he was actually a machine gun and probably went through school and the maintenance of aircraft.

CGS: When you got home you ended up gettting a pilot’s license. What made you decide to do that?

CG: Something to do, it was free! [laughs]

CGS: How was that?

CG: It was the GI Bill, just like going to college, but I was working and in my spare time I took flying lessons. You got a pilot’s license, you got a commercial rating, and a seaplane rating, and an instrument rating, and an instructor’s rating.

CGS: Where did you do that?

CG: This was in Baytown Texas right after I got out of the service, just got the private’s license, all that you had to do, to do that you had to pass navigation, you had to pass weather and radio, the whole works, and then after after I got into the, oh yeah seismic work, and then from there I went to the oil fields, then went to school to study drilling fluids and when I did that with my pilot’s license they paid me I think it was $75 more a month or something [laugh] to fly a plane to get to the locations, because this was in the swampy areas of Texas, and we used planes also to fly in Oklahoma, because I went up there to fly with the, because I had so many pilots to fly with after I got the instructor’s rating, because the company sent me to get an instructor’s rating, which I did at Mitchem Field. So I had to fly with every one of those engineers, mud engineers as we called them. They would teach maybe a couple of times a month and they were trying to take lessons, I gave them lessons too because I was an instructor at that time and they got their license at that time I didn’t have to actually work on the wells so much as a what you call it, we call ourselves flight engineers, drilling fluids….