David M. Taylor

95TH BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

1999 REUNION         PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Interviewed by Margaret Blagg Weaver 

MW:  Okay, I’d like to say for the record that this is Margaret Blagg Weaver from the Legacy Committee conducting the interview today at the 1999 Pittsburgh Reunion.  The date is September 11th.  Would you please state your name for the records?

DT:  It’s Colonel David M. Taylor, Retired US Air Force.

MW:  Good.  Thank you.  Could you tell me what your dates of service were with the Air Force?

DT:  I came in the service in 1940 and retired in 1972.

MW:  And what about dates of service with the 95th Bomb Group?

DT:  With the 95th Bomb Group, it was ’44 to ’45.  We came in the fall of ’44 as a replacement crew.

MW:  Okay, and which squadron were you in?

DT:  The 336th squadron.

MW:  Okay.  And what was your principle job?

DT:  I was a pilot.

MW:  Okay, fine, thank you.  Can we go back to the beginning of your time in the Air Force and tell me how you enlisted, how old you were at the time, where you enlisted?

DT:  I enlisted in Dallas, Texas in 1942 and went to aviation cadets and graduated with the class of ‘43-E on May the 24th, 1943 at Ellington Air Force Base, Houston, Texas, and got my pilot’s wings and my 2nd Lieutenant’s bars.

MW:  And when did you meet your crew then?

DT:  The class of ‘43-E went to Moses Lake, Washington to B-17’s.  And we took first phase training at Moses Lake, Washington, and then went to Rapid City, South Dakota to second and third phase training as a group to go over to England.  The 95th left there about the time I got to Rapid City, South Dakota.  On our last training flight in the RKU, they cancelled it and made it us a RTU.  They pulled me out of there – the Colonel pulled me out – and a 2nd Lieutenant, and we went to this school of applied tactics in Orlando, Florida to form a cadre to form another group at McDill to go overseas.  And we got through school, and went to McDill, and started the RTU and – we thought we were going to fly, and they made us a RTU.  So I’m stuck as an instructor pilot and operations officer.  And I worked my way around to get overseas.  The Colonel that had been carrying me around with him took me to Gulfport, Mississippi and formed another RTU, a Replacement Training Unit where we trained just crews.  And he kept me there.  I made 1st Lieutenant in Gulfport, Mississippi.  Finally he agreed to let me pick my crew.  So I picked my crew in Gulfport in ’44 and we went to Hunter Air Force Base, the nine of us.  And I flew them to England in a new B-17.  Then, that was in the fall of ’44.  And that was when we were assigned to the 95th Bombardment Group, as a crew – my original nine.  And I want to be sure to mention that we flew 27 missions – 17 of them were lead missions, 3 of which we led the entire 8th Air Force.  And I brought all nine of them back after the war in a B-17, and brought them to the states.  I flew a flight of, led a flight of twelve B-17’s back.  But I brought my crew back, and the first time we got together after that was in ’92 at Boston at a reunion, and I had all nine of my crewmen were there.  In the newsletter, they had our crew picture, each person, and our names were on that.

MW:  That’s wonderful.

DT:  Where do I go from here?

MW:  Well, tell me, were any of your crew ever wounded, or did you have…?

DT:  I had my bombardier wounded.  We had tremendous things that happened to you.  If you want me to give you a story of a mission, I’ll give you a story of a mission that was pretty hairy.  It was before I was a lead crew.  We had a radio operator, extra radio operator that spoke German.  And what he did, he could hear the Luftewaffe coming in, and he would tell them in German “Break P-51’s” – that’s his job.  And so we were going on the target and all of a sudden we got hit pretty bad.  We lost our oxygen system, and lost an engine.  And the only thing I could hear was that radio operator saying “I’m dead, I’m dead.”  And I couldn’t get him off of there so I could find out because the ball turret gunner has got to get out of there.  He doesn’t have a walk-around oxygen bottle.  In the meantime, I’d lost an engine or two.  I had to get back there to the back, and I flew through the waist and had the airplane diving down with the co-pilot still in there.  And I got back there and my waist gunner, Dick Monroe, and it was his job.  He’d got the ball cranked back up and had gotten in the mass, and this radio operator was still hollering “I’m dead.”  Well, what had happened was a piece of flak came and tore a gaping hole right by his leg, and cut the electric cord to his seat, and the oxygen system was gone.  So he immediately got cold.  And there wasn’t nothing wrong with him, but my poor ball turret gunner, getting him out; it took him three days to get over the lack of oxygen at that altitude that he was in.  When he was all right, then I went back up and got in the seat and we came back, flew back, and got down to an altitude where we could breathe.  And we flew; I brought the airplane home to Horham.  As a matter of fact, I never avoided a mission, and I always brought the airplane back.  If it flew, I made it stay up there.  I had another mission that command pilot, who was a group commander, flew over Nurnburg, which was a long story, but I’ll make it short.  We dropped our bomb, and here it is, the town below us is nothing but flames and fire, and smoke came in the cockpit right after bombs away.  And I couldn’t even see him.  And he hit the bail out button, not me.  And I hit him in the face and knocked him back in the chair and told the crew “Don’t bail out.”  By this time the tail gunner just happened to hear me.  He’d already jettisoned his door and was going out the door.  And that was Dick Monroe.  I cancelled the jump – we were leading – and I just turned the airplane with the autopilot so it was just turning a little and the group was still with me.  What it was, the lead crew dropped a smoke bomb, and one of those had hung up in the bomb bay.  And so I just kicked it out (laughing) and we turned and I brought them all back, losing two hatches.  And I led the group back to Horham, England.  But it was a hairy for a minute, really, because you couldn’t see. The whole airplane was full of smoke, but it was from the smoke bomb (laughing).  We had another rather interesting mission right at the end of the war.  We went to Kiel Harbor twice.  I led the mission into Kiel Harbor.  The first time we went in there, we didn’t get the target.  It was a dummy.  We went back the next day – we led that day – and my bombardier happened to see the real submarine pins.  And of course he turned the bombsite real fast and we went over and we hit Kiel Harbor.  By the way, I had already got one engine shot out, and I was still on the bomb run and a big hole in the aileron and I kept flying that thing on in there and that bombardier was – well, he’s the one that guides it with the Norton bomb site – but I was keeping up with him.  And we hit that thing and blew it up, and everybody else came behind us and blew up Kiel Harbor.  This was towards the end of the war.  And then of course I was supposed to go to Sweden.  I came on back – North Atlantic.  I was doing pretty good.  Another B-17 joined up with me.  And a P-51 was sitting up above us.  And I thought everything was fine, except one engine, and another engine going out, and it was a long way back from Denmark to England over the North Sea.  And this B-17 pulled right up inside of us.  This would be great.  And about that time the P-51 came down and shot that B-17 right out of the sky.  It turned out the Germans had rebuilt the B-17 and they were ready to shoot us down.  But we didn’t know anything about it until we got back, because we couldn’t talk to our little friend, the P-51 pilot.  But he’d gotten word.  And I brought her back, and we landed back in Horham.

MW:  That’s amazing!  I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what it means to lead a mission.

DT:  Well, you practice every day.  If you’re not flying a mission, you’re out practicing.  And you’ve got to be just right.  You can remember how an accordion would be – if you’re not on the exact air speed, the exact altitude.  But you don’t just start off by leading.  The first thing you have to do is you have to take a squadron, and go ahead of the 8th Air Force, and you’re loaded with chaff - twelve airplanes.  And just about the time the first airplane comes over, you have to dive down to 20,000 feet or less, or wherever you can get, and drop all that chaff out so that the flak won’t get the first airplanes over.  And every lead crew had to go through this process.  And I did this and didn’t lose an airplane.  Every one of us got back.  There was some flak up there because they could see us and had our altitude.  And then the mission went fine.  But that’s the way you start out.  And then you lead a squadron, and you lead a group, as to whatever the commander feels your crew is capable.  And I had the best crew that could have been around.  And of course, I hand picked them in Gulfport, Mississippi and I was a mean old pilot.  We flew as a crew and we worked as a crew, and that’s the way that I was able to fly that many missions and get back, no matter what had happened to us, whether one of them was wounded or no matter what.  I brought the airplane back every time.  The leading, you’ve got a command pilot.  But he sets in the right seat.  And what he does is, he commands, the tail gunner relays to him what the positions are, and he directs all the groups that are behind us.  Of course he makes the decisions if we go to another target.  He makes that decision for the entire whatever unit we’re leading.  But as pilot, I just have to fly the airplane and do what he says, except that I’m in command of the airplane, not him.  He’s in command of the whole group.  But as lead pilot, I just fly that airplane, but I’ve got to be right on the money.  If I’m not, we have problems, and I have problems with him sitting over next to me, ‘cause he’s on me too. (Chuckle)  Leading as a pilot, and as a whole crew – because that crew, where they drop the bombs is where everybody else is going to drop.  You’ve got to be on the target.  And that’s the airplane – all the fighters, the flak, and everybody is after.  So they have to be real good at what they’re doing to be able to survive.  And we just got shot up all the time because they were trying to knock us down.  I even came back on one mission where I went out with three squadrons.  Ended up with just one with just twelve airplanes, formed a squadron, and I filled in with another group that had some airplanes in it, and flew as a low squadron when the first jet fighter attacked – the first time it was used.  And it was hit in the high squadron, and I was looking right at him when the airplane just blew up.  And I never saw the fighter ‘cause my eyes were not adjusted for that type speed of a fighter airplane.  And, believe it or not, neither was Chuck Yeager, because Chuck Yeager couldn’t shoot him down, but followed him back to the airfield where he was going to land, and when he had to slow down to let his gear down, he busted him (Laughter).  Chuck Yeager shot down the first one that the airplane hit the 95th.  I was in the 95th.  I don’t know what group of airplanes I put our unit with.  But it was quite amazing to see that airplane do that, because I couldn’t see it.  The airplane hit.

MW:  Well you mentioned that you had handpicked your crew and they were such a good crew.  Can you talk a little bit about your crew?

DT:  I had been with this one Colonel and was an instructor and an operations officer.  And so I knew every thing about each one of the men at Gulfport, Mississippi.  So I picked them out because of their skill, flew them together, switched back and forth until I got a group of cohesive crew members.  And we worked together just tremendously.  And when I took them over, we played together, we fought together, and we were a crew.  And every one of them would do exactly what I told them to do.  The ball turret gunner, he was real good.  He came back after the war and got out of the service and married this young lady.  Then in 1992 he came to Virginia with his wife, Norma, and he wanted to look up his old pilot.  And Norma thought I was an old man, which I am now.  But they came by.  Of course they went to that reunion.  He died in ’95.  My wife had Alzheimer’s, and she died in ’95, within a month of each other.  And at the ’95 reunion in San Antonio, she came to the reunion.  And in ’96 we got married.  We’ve been married three and a half years.  

MW:  That’s wonderful!

DT:  But it was because of the reunion that got us together.  She had seen me, but I was in a pretty horrid situation because I had kept my wife, with Alzheimer’s, at home.  She died at home, and I had had a hard time, and had a hard time after that.  She had had a hard time because he had had a heart attack and just all of a sudden…  So now we’re happily married, traveling everywhere, doing everything, enjoying everything.  And that’s what the crew did for me.  That ball turret gunner got me a goooood wife (Laughter) of which I adore!

MW:  That’s wonderful!  I wanted to say for the tape that Karen Sayco from the Legacy Committee has also joined us. Do you have any questions, Karen?

KS:  Not so far.  Thank you.

MW:  Do you want to go back to the days in England?  Is there any other mission that you’d particular like to tell us about?

DT:  I’m kinda getting tired.  I was in and out of trouble all the time over there with the missions they put me on. But I never avoided a mission.  And I brought that whole crew and airplane back on every mission.  And I’ve seen them go over and get across the English Channel and turn around and come back.  We did all of our missions.  

KS:  Have you talked about your free time on the base, and how you relaxed?

DT:  We went to London and got drunk (Laughter).  Well, that’s what we did, and we played.  I can tell you an interesting story about the time the V-1’s came over and the air raid came off – and I never went to the air raid shelters.  And a V-1 came by and I was in the Quonset hut, and smoke from the V-1 came into the Quonset hut, and the engine quit – and that’s when they go down.  And I jumped out of the window into this ditch of cold ice water.  And it went right over us and landed in that field right behind the 336th.  And when it was all over, Dirty Gerty go on the radio and announced to the people of the United States that the 95th Bombardment Group had been wiped out by V-1 bombers.  And they did – but they just missed us and went into the open pasture.  But that one did come close enough.  So later on, I got in the habit that that’s where I was going.  I still wasn’t going to air raid shelters.  We got a trip down to London, my bombardier and I, which, he had me tell his wife when we got back that he only went to operas and sent stuff to his wife – he got married just before we left.  But we were in the same hotel room together with a double bed.  And all of a sudden that whole block just exploded where we were, and our hotel room was shaking.  I jumped out of the bed, heading for the window. I wanted my creek.  And as I was going out the window, he grabbed my feet and pulled me back in.  The only trouble – we were eight stories high.  (Laughter)  So he saved me in our leisure time.  

KS:  This is about the third story I have heard that mentions how much the Germans seemed to know, and I just hope that our intelligence was as good as theirs, because we had the incident of the German voice, the plane coming into Wales saying “Welcome to the European Theatre.”  We have this one, and it just amazes me.  We had the posters about “Loose lips sink ships” and we were trying to be as secretive about everything, and your parents didn’t even seem to know where you were.  The newspaper clippings said and 8th Air Force field somewhere in England and the Germans knew that the 95th…

DT:  They would bomb us.  We had B-24’s that were equipped to carry cargo.  So they would go to Sweden, and Sweden was giving the Americans ball bearings that they were making, and they were flying that back to England at nighttime. And what would happen was that the German bombers would get underneath that B-24 as it was coming back from Sweden at night, fly right underneath it and peal off, and bomb one of our airfields.  They knew exactly what we were doing all the time.  If you want to talk about intelligence, I went all the way through the Viet Nam War, and the Korean War, and everybody has better intelligence than we have, because I’ve been shot up, shot at, shot down, over the years, and mostly because of the lack of intelligence.  The Germans, the Chinese, the Russians knew more about what we were doing than anybody.  Of course I’ve got some tales about the Korean War that would curdle your ears, because I flew covert missions.  I did fly combat in Korean War; I was in covert activity there.  I set up the Belgium Congo where I got arrested because this dictator’s country we went in said they didn’t support the United States.  They supported the United States and we couldn’t come on his base, but we were there.  That was the Belgium Congo.  He arrested us.  We got out; the British got us out.  Of course after that was the Korean War.  And then I was in Okinawa, and I got sent to the Viet Nam war from Okinawa.  About 10 o’clock at night is when they told me what happened.  And at 12 o’clock that night they told me to take the F-102 Delta Dart south to __________.  So at 3 o’clock that afternoon, I had air defense of all of Viet Nam with F-102’s.  And what people don’t know about the Viet Nam war, when we went in there, it was a holy war.  The Catholics and the Buddhists were fighting in downtown Saigon like you’ve never seen before.  I could go back to the base one day, my driver, he didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t have a gun, and they took us – the police directed us – right down through this demonstration they had of 1,000 Vietnamese – South Vietnamese.  And they surrounded us in that staff car and they were pushing it over, trying to get to us.  Why, I don’t know.  But the situation we were in was never publicized – nobody will talk about it.  I told my sergeant “Floorboard it.”  And we had people flying off the radiators.  We still had bicycles on the staff car when we got back to the air base.  But that’s the way the war started.  Everybody hollers about – I came back from all of these wars, so I know what the condition is of how you come back.  When the 95thcame back, we went into Providence, Rhode Island.  And it’s in the newspapers that here we are.  I had 12 airplanes that I led back to the states.  We had them all loaded with POW’s that had gotten to England, and let them come back.  Of course my crew, your crews got to fly back, but then they load the airplane with POW’s that had been the longest.  Puerto Ricans had been the longest POW’s and we brought them back with us.  That was a railhead that they put us at, and I was in charge of the train.  I'd made Captain by then.  That was a lot back then.  They put us on this train.  The first thing that happened when we got to this compound, they had us locked in there.  And the German POW’s were just running around everywhere.  And these Puerto Rican POW’s came into the mess hall the next morning and they reached in with their hand and slapped the pancake on this Puerto Rican’s plate.  And they got mad and went across the counter, because the had been POW’s for many, many years over in Germany, and they took butcher knives and, the military police at that time, had to come in there and get the German POW’s and they had to protect the German POW’s from us (Chuckle).  But anyway, the train that they put us on was an old World War I coal car.  And we pulled into Grand Central Station in New York, and up beside us come plush Pullman car with a great big dining room with all the food and everything on it.  And we had a boxcar that was our kitchen, and none of our bathrooms worked in this train.  And these people got mad, and went into that dining car and tore it up.  And the New York police came out just by the droves, and I told them what the situation was.  So they didn’t do anything.  “Get your people on the train.”  And they moved us out of Grand Central Station.  We were sidetracked all the way down to Georgia.  Everybody was sidetracking us, and most horrible ride that you’ve ever seen.  Nothing but coal dust and no bathrooms and nothing to eat.  It was the most horrible way, just having come from flying all these missions.  All twelve airplanes were crews from the 95th.  And it was in the newspapers after the war.  But we didn’t get greeted very well when we came back from the 95th. 

MW:  That’s surprising.

DT:  But it’s documented in the papers in New York, back in ’45.  And I’m about out.

MW:  I hate to say it, but I’m afraid our time is up this afternoon.  Is there anything else you’d like to…

DT:  No ma’am.  No ma’am.  I’m wore completely out!

MW:  We wore you out.  I’m sorry to hear that (Chuckle).  Thank you so much for giving us this account.  We really appreciate it and we very much appreciate all that you’ve done for us.