Ellis B. Scripture

95TH BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

1999 REUNION         PITTSBURGH, PENNSLYVANIA

Interviewed by Russ McKnight

RMcK:  This is Russ McKnight together with my sister, Nancy McKnight Smith. We will be interviewing Ellis B. Scripture. Ellis, could you please tell us your name, the date and place of the recording today:

Ellis B. Scripture .  We’re recording on September 10, 1999 at the hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

RMcK:  Just to get some basic things on the record, what were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps.

EBS:  I joined in February of 1942 and was discharged, I think it was February 1946

RMcK:  Which Unit or Squadron were you in in the 95th?

EBS:  I joined the 95th when it was initially formed at Geiger Field.  We signed the register - I believe it was October 12, 1942.  I was assigned to the 335th Squadron, 95th Bomb Group.

RMcK:  And what did you do in the 335th?

EBS:  A ship’s Navigator.  I was Navigator on a crew that was called “Charles Reuben Crew”.  If I recall, we had nine Crews per Squadron and we were each assigned to a pilot for a trial period.  If we did not like the pilot or the pilot did not us for some reason, we had an opportunity to transfer to another Crew.  Quite a few people did.  I was very pleased  with my pilot.  He was a young man from New York City, probably 20 years old  He had about 150 hours of flying time total when he came to the Group. His co-pilot, we called him Willie Wilson, had even less hours flying.  I think he had  maybe 35 hours in a B-17 when they took over the Crew.  We got along very nicely. All of us were beginners and it just jelled pretty quickly.  I think we did change ball turret gunners and tail turret gunners after a reasonable period of trial.  We felt the first few didn’t fit our scheme of things within the crew.  Charlie felt that way because he was the boss.  There was no question - the pilot was THE boss.  

RMcK:  Scrip, those early days of the training and the Group itself are very interesting to us.  There were probably some non-combat type of experiences that happened after you rotated over to Europe.  Would you like to tell us about that transition to Europe and what the early days might have been like?

EBS:  The early days at Geiger Field at Spokane, Washington, were a breaking-in period for everybody.  We were all learning to know each other.  We were learning to do what we had been trained to do and we were trying to be a crew - a compact unit - that would fly and fight together.  We went through terrible weather in Washington.  We had snow and rain.  It was just unbelievable that we were able to accomplish

anything because we flew very few missions.  Finally, in December of 1942 they moved the group from Geiger Field at Spokane, to Rapid City AFB in Rapid City, South Dakota.  I never questioned the Air Force in their wisdom, but sending a training group to South Dakota to train in the middle of the winter could not be the smartest move they ever made.  We experienced there as much as 30 below zero. We each experienced for the first time a phenomenon called Chinook.   A Chinook goes from extreme cold to extreme warm within a very few hours.  It’s a wind that comes from somewhere and this happened that we had snow piled up to the windowsills all over the place.  We could fly very often and all of a sudden it became warm - just in a few hours.  It was absolutely an amazing experience. In spite of all that we got some flying.  I might say that the 95th Group being one of the early Groups in the war did not have what many felt was basic experience.  I had never fired a machine gun when I went overseas.  We had no gunnery training whatsoever.  We were able to shoot shotguns once in a while at clay pigeons.  Never shot a 50 caliber gun until we got overseas.  

    We were given no navigation flights except on one occasion they turned us loose and said “Today, you have X number of hours to fly.  You can go anywhere and do anything that you want.”  Each of us picked someplace to go. We did have flights to Colorado; we had flights to Montana; so there was some navigation training.  We had no training in oxygen as an example.  In those days we had an ancient oxygen mask with a very small feed tube. We would have to keep squeezing the tube all the time because it would ice up if you got above a few thousand feet, especially in that part of the country.  We survived.  When they turned us loose that day (early in the spring) for us to go where we wanted to go, one of our gunners was from Nebraska so I said, “I’ll take you to Nebraska.”  So we took him back to his ranch.  It was not in a town.  It was on a farm and we found the farm.  He wrote a note to his mother.  We tied it around a wrench and threw it in his front yard from very low altitude.  That was a wonderful thing to do because the young man was killed soon after we got overseas.  His mother never saw him again.   

    That was a very interesting day from Rapid City. We flew over to Iowa and tried   to see how high the airplane would go.  We got it up to 33,000 feet.  Everybody was squeezing the tubes on their oxygen masks up a storm so that we could breathe.  We finally decided that was as high as it would go, so the pilot brought it back down again.  Incidentally, we had no altitude formation experience.  The pilots never flew together at high altitude until we got overseas.  It was just an absolutely amazing thing that they were able to do what they did.  I thought Charlie, my pilot, was awfully good, and we flew right wing off of the lead plane in the lead squadron generally - I’m getting ahead of myself - but he was able to tuck that plane in pretty close which we were supposed to do, of course.  A lot of the guys were not sure enough of themselves in their skills as a pilot to keep that plane close in, but Charlie did a good job always.  As I say, I was very proud of him.  I was very proud and pleased with every man on the crew.  It was just a wonderful experience.

    I think one other incident in Rapid City that I remember and cherish the memory: Gutzon Borglum was carving the Great Stone Faces on the mountain out of Rapid City.  Gutzon passed away and his son, Lincoln, took over the job.  Members of the Group got to know Lincoln  because he would meet us at the bar in the Alex Johnson hotel.  He invited us up to his house.  He and his wife had a little baby maybe 1-1/2 or 2 years old.  We would go to Lincoln Borglum’s home on top of the Great Stone Faces and have parties. We had a great time!  One of our men, Jay Schatz, in the 95th who was 412th Squadron Navigator, named his eldest son Lincoln Schatz after Lincoln Borglum.  It was most interesting that we would go to Lincoln’s house, party with him at night and have to go back to the base, of course.  I would say there were ten or twelve of us - it would be in those groups.  The next morning as we went out for our flight, on those days that we could fly, we would go by the Great Stone Faces and see the men hanging down on the walls carving away at the faces and we would waggle our wings at them.  They would turn around and wave to us.  It was, I thought, a very interesting experience for a young man. I’ve never been back to see the Great Stone Faces and I would love to do that sometime.

    I could tell you about so many things at Rapid City. It was an experience that a great number of people in the group did not have. We had, if I recall, 360 flying men in the group other than the Headquarters group.  I mean there were 360 actual flying combat crewmen - 36 airplanes.  As I say we were trained somewhat but we sure were not trained the way that one, looking back, would like to have been trained.  That did not deter us at all.  We were proud; we were happy; we were just so pleased to be going out and doing what we wanted to do.  That was to get into the war.  We had 360 men who were fliers and some of those faded out of the way for various reasons.  Incompetence was minor.  Most of them were personal problems where a man would have a problem with alcohol or something like that and they would have to let him go.  

    We finally got orders early in 1943, I think it was in early March, to move overseas.  We had never been told where we were going but we assumed, training in Rapid City, that they were going to send us to Alaska. We were amazed when they sent us down to Nebraska for staging and on to Mississippi on our way over to England.  We did not know that before.  Each of us got a few days at home before we left and, as I recall, we left March 21 for the area overseas.  First we went to Hastings, Nebraska, for staging.  That was one time where Dave McKnight really got mad.  They had brought a man back from combat to brief us. This man got on the stage and he was flak-happy if I ever saw a flak-happy individual.  He broke down, cried and carried on.  It was a terrible scene and Dave became incensed by the whole thing.  This combat veteran was not good for the morale of the group, it was just that simple.  Dave shut the man up.  He shut him up and got him off stage real quick.  That was really the thing I remember most of Hastings, Nebraska.  

    We went on from there to Gulfport, Mississippi. Gulfport, incidentally, was not finished as an airport at that point.  We were the first B-17s that had ever come into the base. Everybody in town was out gawking at these big airplanes.  We were all pulling in going to our various parking places.  They were dumping rock, or something, near where we were supposed to be. As we landed, and taxied to our stand, one of the truck drivers was gawking at the airplane,  had the dump up on his truck, went under our plane and cut a little hole - it looked like a deep scratch, or slash on the metal, I don’t know what you call it - under one of our wings.  Charlie immediately shut down the engines and all of us got out to see how much damage had been done.  It was very minor.  I would say there was a little cut in the bottom of the wing - perhaps 2 inches long - but was on a joint  where wing parts join.  The poor truck driver got out of his truck, looked up and he said, “That’s not much damage.  If you’ll keep quite about it, I’ll pay for the damage.”  He took out his bill fold and said, “how much do you think it will be?”  Charlie looked up at that wing and said “Oh, I would say it would be about $100,000.”  This poor guy almost fainted.  We had to report it of course.      

    They grounded the aircraft, had to remove the wing; and bring in an entire new wing.  When they put the new wing on the plane at the little hinge system that controls the flaps - the mechanic had put one bolt on backwards or something.  We took it up for a test flight a few days later.  We were to go out over the bay and slow time that thing and I guess, break it in, to make sure everything was alright.  After the plane took off, we were maybe 70 or 100 feet in the air, the pilot banked and couldn’t come out of the bank because the thing that had been put in backwards locked with the flaps down.  In the turn position, the plane stayed there.  They couldn’t bring it out.  It took as many as two men on the wheel trying to pull it to get it loose.  They couldn’t get it loose.  We were flying all around just over the trees.  They cleared the tower except for one man.  We were not sure that we were not going to hit it.  It’s a very interesting story because several of us had our wives with us, including Jack Gibson who was the Executive Officer.  His wife  and my wife had adjoining rooms in the hotel.  They were sunning up on the hotel deck  and as we would fly over in this hazardous position - very low - they thought we were greeting them and they were up waving at us.  It was a circus that afternoon - but serious.  They decided that probably the best thing to do was take the plane up and let everybody jump except the pilot and co-pilot and then they would try to bring it down.  We were given the option at that time that everyone could jump - we could take the plane out over the sea and we could jump into the shallow water of the sea or we could jump on the land.  They would crash the airplane in the sea.  After talking about it for quite some time, they decided the choice was they’d like to try to land.  They were given permission.  Finally, I’d say we’d been in the air for an hour, something like that, he brought it in and maneuvered it into enough of a landing position that he could get one wheel on the ground.  As he did, the low wing hit the ground and we ground looped.  We had pulled off the doors of the plane and got ready to exit quickly.  We had taken the crash position.   All the men sat in each other’s laps with their arms around the man ahead and covered our heads and so on like that.  As I say, we hit the ground, rolled just a little time, then the wing hit the ground and the thing spun out and completely destroyed the airplane. We all jumped out and ran real quickly.  Of course, we didn’t know if it was going to catch on fire.  

    We were delayed probably 10 days in getting another airplane. Several other planes were having trouble at that time with the cylinders on the motor of a B-17. There was something wrong.  Two or three other planes had that problem.  They had to bring in new motors for them.  They had to bring us in a whole new airplane.  Then we had to take the time to test it, pack it, etc. We were there another 10 days after the Group had left.  It gave me an opportunity to get to know Jack & Helen Gibson better.  Helen and Peggy were next door neighbors.  We had dinner together several nights.  Of course, being a brand new 2nd Lieutenant, I had  no experience with high rank and he was a Lt. Colonel at that time and a delightful person.  Jack had been Chief Pilot on American Airlines.  He had 10,000 flying hours before he came to the Group.  He was an experienced man and I had the privilege of navigating with him as our pilot on the trip from Spokane to Rapid City.  I had gotten to know him a little bit - but we got to know him quite well and it saved my life.  I will come to that story later.

    After we got our new airplane, got it checked out, got ready to go, we flew on over to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. We took off at night again from Ft. Lauderdale down through the strait between Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic and we went on down to land at Trinidad.  It was a thrill for me to see the islands.  Being an inland guy, I had never had an experience over water.  The weather was delightful and we were all enjoying the trip.  When we came to Devil’s Island, and other interesting islands, we were not flying very high, so we circled the island to look at the buildings, palm trees and the beaches. I made up my mind that after the war I was going to come down and enjoy the easy island life.  It looked awfully good to me.  We landed and learned that Tommy Harmon’s (the great football hero) plane had gone down.  They put us into special duty the next day to go out and search for Tommy Harmon’s airplane.  We did not find it.  Many planes were searching.  We each had a sector that we were to search. They did not know whether he went down in the jungles of South America or in the ocean, but we were to find Tommy Harmon if we could.

    We stayed at Trinidad about 48 hours, took off for Belem, Brazil. Belem is just over the Amazon River and we flew over the jungle all the way.  An interesting incident in that flight, we passed Devil’s Island where they used to keep prisoners.  For many years they would just ship prisoners out of England or Europe and send them to this island which was renowned as escape proof.  I told the guys we were there, so we had to go down and fly around the island 2 or 3 times so we could get a good look at the prison.  Then we went on to Belem and again we were told to search for Tom Harmon all the way.  

    We were all amazed at the size of the Amazon River.  It’s like an ocean.  You’re in the middle of the Amazon River and you can see nothing but water in any direction. It was probably 50 miles wide at the point where we crossed it.  Of course, we landed at Belem without incident.  They had cut an airstrip right out of the middle of the jungle.  We landed there and took a little time to go into town.  I remember I smoked at the time and I was trying to buy some native items for myself or for my wife and I knew the prices would be real cheap.  I found a nice little cigarette case, like silver but it wasn’t, it was an alloy of some kind, that looked great to me.  It was very sophisticated looking.  I bought it for $1.00.  When I got back to the base I looked at it and it said “Made in USA”.  That was a fun incident.  

    One other thing:  the children of the natives would go into the jungle and capture animals and bring them to us for sale.  I bought a little animal - I wish I had learned the name.  It was the cutest little thing.  It was probably four or five inches long but it had a tail about ten inches long.  It was a pretty thing.  It had kind of a bushy tail.   It fitted down into the breast pocket of my flight suit. I found out by pigeon Portuguese and pigeon English what to feed the little thing.  It was some kind of a fruit that they have down there.  I bought some of that and I would put that little animal in my flight suit and we would go along and I’d let it out every now and then to eat something .  Then he’d go back into my pocket.    

    We went from Belem to Natal  - that was our takeoff place for overseas.  Again, very interesting for all of us because we had never seen jungles before.  Those two flights from across  the northern part of South America into Brazil and then across Brazil into Natal were most interesting.  As a child I was never able to travel anywhere so here I was a man of the world all of a sudden, traveling down to Brazil.  I was thrilled beyond words.  

RMcK:  How old were you then?

EBS:  I was 24.  I was the oldest man on the crew.  Al the other guys were 18 - 19 - 20 - 21.  I was the old man I guess.  We stayed in Natal probably 48 hours - repacking our plane, making sure that we were not overloaded.  There was a lot of detail that we had to check before we took off over the ocean.  My little animal got away from me.  Somehow he got out and got back into the jungle where he belonged.  But some of the guys got parrots; some of them got other birds and so on like that.  Each crew had its own little thing.  I remember Bill Lindley saying that he bought a big bird of some kind.  While he was flying overseas  the bird did a dirty job on his pants and he opened the window and threw him out.  

    We took off about 10 o’clock at night from Natal for Dakar and it was a straight shoot over water.  When we took off from the runway we were over water.  When we got to Africa we landed over water, so to speak.  The two airports were right on the water.  It was around 1100 miles in-between. We did not have Tokyo tanks in those planes in the early days.   We had barely enough fuel to get there.  In fact 6 of our 36 airplanes did not make it.  They went into the water.  Fortunately, the Group lost no personnel but those six crews lost all their personal things when the planes had to make a water landing because they ran out of gas.

    That flight had two interesting incidents that I recall.  The bombardier rode in the nose with the navigator, of course.  Bill McDonald was the bombardier on our crew and we used an old kerosene compass that sat on the floor opposite the navigator’s table.  I could move my chair around and look at the compass.  We had been out about 30 minutes and I went over to look at the compass.  I looked and behind it Bill had taken the fixture of the Astrodome that held octant and put it behind the compass.  I very carefully lifted that piece of metal, it was about 15 inches long and 6 inches wide, and moved it away from the compass. The compass swung 15 degrees.  I carefully put it back and the compass swung back 15 degrees.  I called the pilot and said, “ I think it would be a good idea for you to come down and talk to me for a couple of minutes,” because this was private.  Charlie came down and I told him what had happened.  I said,  “We have been flying off course 15 degrees now for  half an hour.  We could make one of two decisions here, but I think you and I have to make them together.  We can go back and start over again tomorrow night or I can try to make a course correction here and hope that it puts us back on course.  The simple thing to do would be to make a 30 degree correction for 15 minutes and then I will pick up the 15 degrees that we lost.”  Charlie said “I think it’s your decision. You know best what to do in this situation.”  I said, “Well, I think we ought to go ahead.”  He said, “OK.”  I first gave Bill McDonald hell for doing what he had done.  I said, “Don’t you ever move anything in the Navigator’s compartment or do anything again without my knowledge and my OK.”  He learned and he learned quickly.  We did make the correction.  We got to the point where I could use celestial navigation.  I was able to get a few star readings, get some fixes and I felt we were pretty much back on course.  I again was a proud guy when we arrived in Africa.  I had given an ETA (estimated time of arrival) and we missed the ETA by only three minutes and came down exactly over the center of the runway.  We had been flying all night long.  I was pretty proud of that.  Upon landing, we found a very friendly country.  A lot of the men over there are probably at lease seven feet tall.  Tremendously tall men, black men, who wore white robes.  Our top turret gunner and engineer looked out and saw those big, tall, black men in white robes and he got a gun real quick and said, “We’re going to arm ourselves against these guys.”  I said, “No, no, no.  Please.  They are friends and they’re probably begging.”  Sure enough, when we got out of the airplane the big tall men that came to the airplane were looking for a handout.  So that is the story of one major overseas flight.

    When we took off from southern Africa we had to go across the desert and it was a long trip all over sand.  Of course, none of us had ever been over a desert before, so we again enjoyed the geography.  In those days of navigation, we had radio navigation;  we had dead reckoning; we had pilotage (which is seeing the ground) and we had very little help.  Flying over desert is much like flying over water - no distinguishing landmarks for guidance.  After we had been out for quite some time, we ran into a sand storm.  I guess we were flying at perhaps 8,000 feet and it was absolutely a blur underneath - nothing.  I could get no reference points.  I tried the radio compass and it wouldn’t work.  With a radio compass you take three settings and get a pinpoint position, but it wouldn’t work.  The flight plan was to go through a pass in the Atlas Mountains to get to Marrakech.  The plan was, you came over the desert, then all of a sudden here are the mountains and you go through this pass. I was in a sandstorm so I called Charlie down for another conference.  “Charlie, I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to hit that pass.  If we miss it, we’ve got a problem.”  He said, “What would you suggest?”  I said, “I suggest turning left (to port) and go until we hit the ocean, follow the coast up, and cut back into Marrakech.  I think we can do that.”  He said, “Fine, let’s do that.”  We cut left and sure enough when we got away from the desert, again, into more normal terrain, the sky cleared, the ground cleared, but I still had no idea where I was. There are no locations, there are no towns, there are no railroads, there are no anything.  It’s just jungle and desert.  Finally we got to the coast and I said, “Let’s go up the coast and maybe I can find someplace for us to hunker in for a while.” We were going up the coast and I was straining, straining, straining but I couldn’t find a thing.  Finally we saw one little tiny sleepy town but there was not a soul showing anywhere. There was a small airport there.  I said, “Charlie, think you can put her down there?”  He said, “I think I can do it.”  I said, “Well, let’s land at least and let me try to find out where we are and we can take off and be on our way.”  At that time in the war Spanish Morocco was in enemy hands.  They were supposedly neutral as Spanish, but the Nazis of course had been helping the Spanish and we had been told - whatever you do, don’t go down in Spanish Morocco because they’re going to intern you for the rest of the war if you do that.  Well, we were on final approach going into this tiny airport and I was straining to try to find out where we were.  I looked up and saw the words SIDI IFNI and I said, “Pull up, pull up, I know where I am.”  I looked at the map and I could see Sidi Ifni right slam in Spanish Morocco.  We went on about 50 miles until we found another tiny airport in a place called Agadir.  Agadir is in French Morocco and should be friendly.  We got into Agadir and barely made it into the airport just at dusk because he didn’t have an inch of runway to spare.  We decided we were going to have to stay there all night, take off early in the morning and get on over to Marrakech.  We had honkered down for the night, had the plane all closed up and all of  a sudden there was someone beating on the door saying, “Hello, cheerio, cheerio”.  It was the Red Cross girls from inside Agadir.  “We are glad to see you Yanks.”  They escorted us into town and put us into this gorgeous hotel. It was absolutely beautiful.  We learned that Agadir was a town that had beautiful beaches and, for instance, Winston Churchill  took vacations there.  Of course, it was good for us to be back in bed again after quite a few days of sleeping under the airplane.  We stayed there overnight;  planned to have breakfast the next morning and take off and go to Marrakech.  We called the airbase at Marrakech - got them on the radio or something - and they said OK.  

    That day we were called upon by a young man and a young lady who were Muslim, obviously, and they said, “We would dearly love, since you are here now, that you would come to our wedding tonight.”  We just couldn’t pass it up.  The four officers were invited to their wedding.  “You cannot come to the wedding, but you can come to the reception.  We would love to have you do that.”   That evening we were all dressed ready to go.  A young Arab appeared to guide us through narrow streets to the place where the reception was.  We went down all these little old streets maybe 8 feet wide, cobblestones or dirt or whatever, and the houses built right up to the curb.  For the four of us it was a wonderful experience.  We had never been outside the United States, any of us.  I hadn’t been much out of the mid-west.  We went to the reception;  danced with all the girls;  and we were thrilled.  All the guests seemed to be glad that we were there.  I would say about 11 o’clock at night we said we’d better go back and get a night’s sleep before we have to leave.  They bade us goodbye.  Another young man showed up to guide us back to the hotel.

    Debriefing on the trip and the briefing for the upcoming trip to England, each of us being prepared in our own way:   as navigator, pilot, co-pilot radio operator, etc.  While we were in Marrakech we had one interesting experience that I need to share. We went to the local market and we met there a young man who was talking to us in reasonable English.  He was an Arab.  I was amazed that when I went down through the market, the market shelves come down to the street and all of their merchandise is shown on these slanting shelves going away from the street.  Where they sold fruit or figs or vegetables, it was loaded with flies.  The merchant would sit there with a fan and sweep the fan to the left and the flies would fly up and after he got to the left the flies would come down and he’d sweep the fan back again and the flies would go up and come right back down.  All day long the flies would go up and down, up and down.  We thought that was interesting.   

    We met this young man, who, during the conversation said to us, “Would you like to see a native home?”  We said, “Yes, very much.”  He said, “Well come, I would like to show you where I live.”  He took us into his home.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  We find out that he was called a Shariff.  I guess he would be a Baron, a Duke or something. He was a big shot.  He took us on a tour of his home which was beautiful. One of the places he took us has intrigued me for all these many years.  He took us into the basement where they were weaving rugs.  He had a crew of people whose family for generations stayed and made rugs for this one household.  I don’t know whether they sold them or what they did, but they were making this one large rug with these hand spindles going back and forth.  I said to him, “My goodness how long does it take to make a rug that size?”  He said, “About 120 years.”  Absolutely fantastic, I could not believe it.  He said,  “We have rug makers who live here.  Generation after generation they pass the trade secrets on to their children.”   He said, “They weave our rugs for us.”  I thought that was very interesting.  

    I bought some gifts again.  I found that the purse I bought for my wife, that I was so proud of, when I got it out of there - it stunk up a storm because it had been cured with camel dung.  I did send it home to Peggy but she took it out of the package and had to store it carefully until after the war.  There was no way she was going to get the smell out of it.  She’ll tell you more about that.

    The next night we took off and flew from Marrakech to England.  It was a very easy navigation flight because all we did was find the meridian and I stayed on that meridian and that took us back into where we wanted to go.  I made one turn and we  were into England.  We first went into southwest England and into a very large old English house and had a good night’s sleep; got up the next morning for breakfast and we had porridge but there was no milk.  The people over there were eating porridge with warm water on top of the porridge.  That was what we had for breakfast the first day.  That day we took off and flew to Alconbury.  And that is the story of the trip overseas.  Now that is a long, long tale, but I thought it was a very interesting story.  It has been impossible for me to put all of that in writing over the years, but it is nice to have a chance to tell the story.

    We arrived in Alconbury (near Peterborough) as one of the first crews there in spite of the fact that we had left late.  Everybody else had gone when we left the United States.  We left Rapid City on March 21st, if I recall, and we got to Alconbury  early April.  We were assigned a barracks about 3 miles from the Operations shack.  They had our planes all scattered out because of enemy bombing.  We really had minimum training until sufficient crews arrived.  We were able to go up in Squadron formations or individual flights once in a while to look around and get some experience.  Again, we had no gunnery experience, we had no high altitude bombing experience.  Our bombardier had never dropped bombs from high altitude.  I don’t know that anybody had in those days.  We marked time until more of the crews came in.  Colonel Kessler and Joel Bunch who was Acting Operations Officer were already there.  Jack Gibson arrived about the same time that we did as Executive Officer.  So we did make some flights.  The 97th Bomb Group was stationed at Alconbury and they tried to teach us as much as they could about combat conditions.  We appreciated those men very much.  

    We flew our first mission from Alconbury on May 13, 1943.  The 94th and the 96th Groups had also arrived at their bases and we were all put into combat at the same time.  One group each day and they put us on a short first mission - supposed to be a honey run - but one of my classmates had become ill and they asked me to fill in for him as Navigator on this first mission over to Belgium.   My crew was not assigned to that first mission.  It was very  interesting.  We were a ragged formation, we were not very good at anything at that point.  My pilot who I was flying with at that time had a hard time staying in formation.  We were attacked by the really experienced fighters that were stationed in Belgium at that time - the Luffwaffe.  We were knocked out of the formation and we were going alone, kind of trailing behind the formation,.  They kept hitting us pretty good.  We did make it back but the plane was pretty well shot up.  They counted several hundred bullet holes.  We had a hit in the wing -  we had no Tokyo tanks at that time, so they got a shot through the wing and we got a large hole in there, I’d say 15 inches round.  One wheel was shot out so the pilot brought it in on one wheel, again ground looped and pretty much wrecked the airplane.  Many years later I looked at the report for that mission and they said “minor damage.”  It wasn’t minor for us at all.  

    I joined my own crew after that.  There were so few crews in the Group, we flew every mission.  Every time the planes went up our crew was involved.  I flew 7 missions with my own crew.  Then came Kiel.  We had gone to Williamshaven;  we had gone to Emden on the coast of Germany;  France, Belgium, etc. not very far in.  In the meantime General Nathan Bedford Forrest III joined our Group. He came over from Air Corps Headquarters, The Pentagon, to be trained in our Group to be the Commanding Officer for the 4th Bomb Wing, which we were to be called at that time - the three Groups - 94th, 95th & 96th.  General Forrest was an interesting person.  Had been in the Air Force quite some time.  Was an outgoing - I called him kind of a braggadocio type of man.  I did not respect him very highly, but played poker with him.  I probably did not take much of his money in those days.  I was not an accomplished poker player.  We had to do something, I guess.  

    On June 13, 1943, we went to Kiel.  In the briefing room, the four officer crew members sat at the table generally with an Intelligence Officer and some other folks.  As the Group leaders were going through the procedure of briefing for the mission Jack Gibson (I’d gotten to know him quite well) came over and said “Scrip, you’re not going to fly with your crew today, you’re going to fly with Bill Lindley.  We’re putting up a composite group and you’re to lead the Group.”  I had never done that before.  I said,  “Jack, please.  We’ve got 7 missions behind us.”  I had 8 at the time. All the rest of the guys had 7.  “Let us just go ahead and fly our mission and enjoy.”  He said, “Lieutenant, I told you get over to Lindley’s table and you’re going to fly with Lindley today.  Now, go.”  That was all  that was said.  I got up, said “good luck” to my crew, left the table, went over to Lindley and was briefed as his navigator.  Of course, my crew was lost that day.  We lost 10 airplanes on that mission.  It was horrible.  It was horrible.  You can’t imagine - flak and fighters - it was absolutely indescribable.  Of course, General Forrest’s plane went down, my crew was lost and I didn’t learn until just recently - 56 years later - that while they were in formation a pilot whom I lived with, John Adams, flew on the left wing of the lead ship in that flight and Charlie was on the right wing.  John took a flak hit, apparently lost control of his airplane, ducked under the lead plane, came up under and crashed into Reuben’s plane and they both went down.  So, I never learned that until the last issue of  95th News when one pilot recalled  that’s what happened.    

    Anyway, we were hit pretty badly as everybody was.  I’m not sure that we hit the target.  We gave it a good solid try.  There were a few of us left.  Bob Cozens - the alternate lead - took over the lead of the whole thing and started leading us home.  When we were going over Denmark, I realized that something was wrong.  The plane wasn’t working right.  I called Bill and asked if everything was OK.  He said, “No.”  “Do you think we have a problem, because if we do, the thing for us to do is stop here rather than head for several hundred miles of ocean out there.”  He and Griff, (Griff Mumford) the Commander of our composite Group that day, talked for a little while.  They called back and said, “Scrip, I think we’re going to be alright.  We’ll make it.”  In the meantime, I’d slipped on my chest chute just to make sure.  I had gone out and sat in back of the escape door.  I had released the latch just to make sure that it released right and that I knew how to do it.  Then I locked it back up again.   I took one quick look out at Denmark .  But we did make it back!  

    In those days, we had not learned flight discipline for an entire mission.  The planes were scattered all over hell’s half acre over the ocean.  We flew along for a while and I called Griff, who was the Commander.  I said, “Griff, we’re not on the right course.  That guy who’s leading the parade up here is taking us right back into the Friesan Islands.  That place is just loaded with fighters.  We are going to be hit again as sure as shooting.”  We were only flying at a couple of thousand feet.  We had gone down - out of oxygen.  So many men smoked in those days that they were glad to get out of oxygen so they could light a cigarette real quick. “ I think we’ve got to do something.”  I had a conference with Griff Mumford and Bill Lindley.  I said, “We can’t get going fast enough to take the lead of this thing.”  They were miles ahead of us.  We could see them but they were heading right slam for the Friesan Islands.  “That navigator must be sound asleep up there.”   Bill said, “What do we do?”  I said, “ Just ease off to the right but notify everybody that you can notify to keep their guns loaded, cocked and ready to go because we are going to get hit sure as can be.  If they do hit us, take off on a heading of 300 degrees and let’s head straight out to ocean.  We’ll run them out of gas if we possibly can.”  Bill said, “That’ll run us out of gas, too.”   I said, “Let that be.  But let’s not get shot down in the meantime.  Please take off and fly at 300 degrees until I tell you to change course again.  Let’s get down lower. Let’s get as close to the water as you can fly safely so they can’t fly under us.  They’ll have to come from the top and we’ll have a better chance of getting a shot at them.”  We all looked out and the gunners started yelling, “Here they come.”   We could see them coming in again from the shore.  Bill took it down - I guess he was about 100 feet off the ocean - or less maybe.  He was down pretty low.  He hauled it around to 300 degrees and started heading out to sea.  We had another fight.  There was no question.  I was glad that we had our guns loaded because in those days the gunners on the ship had a tendency when the bombs were dropped and they were heading home over the ocean, especially, (which we did quite often)  to take their guns out and start cleaning them so they could get to the sack quickly back at the base. I said,  “Let’s make sure those guys keep those guns ready.”  I’m sure glad they did. We came through.  I think 7 more planes were shot down from the three Groups during that brief fight.          

    An amusing incident - I was firing the navigator’s gun on the port side and all of a sudden I heard the gun on the starboard side start firing. Normally I worked the two guns.  I turned around and there was Bill Lindley firing a gun.  I said, “Get back up there.”  He said, “No.  I always wanted to kill one of them Germans. Let me get one before I quit.”  He kept on firing and finally he got back up into the cockpit where Griff was flying the plane.  Bill was a real winner.  Bill Lindley was a winner in every sense of the word.  He loved to fight the Germans. We came though that one OK.  We lost some more airplanes.  Then, I put them back on course and we stayed away from the Friesan Islands.  We were one of three airplanes out of our entire formation that made it back to base.  There were 5 that landed in the ocean or near the beach; or on the beach, or at another alternate airport.  There were only 3 of us got back.  
    Of course, the Colonel met our airplane and started saying, “What happened?”  We couldn’t tell him off hand real quickly.  Pretty soon Charlie Conley as an example and several people that I knew started calling in saying, “We’re safe”. “We’re at another airport.”  “We crash landed.”  “We’ll be OK.”  It was a harrowing day.  Absolutely terror to the highest degree.  You just can’t imagine a thing like that.  We got  back into the briefing room and there were only  I think 3 crews there at that time .  Jack Gibson again came over to my table and said, “Scrip, you know we lost the lead plane on that mission. I’d appreciate it if you’d make out the navigation report for the day” which I did.  I had to go over to Headquarters to do it.  I had no idea of what I was doing but fortunately there was a real good Sergeant in the Group Navigator’s Office who ran things and ran them right.  He knew what I should do.  The report had my name on it, but he did it.  I just told him what had happened.  

    One other little thing.  After each mission, we were each offered  a shot of whiskey. I took my one shot of whiskey and got in the truck and went back to the barracks.  I was the only one there.  All the rest of the crewmen in the barracks were gone;  had been lost that day - everybody else.  They had already cleared off the beds.  My bed was the only one that could be slept in that night.  So I sat on the bed for a while and realized that I couldn’t sleep there.  I turned around and walked back up to Headquarters and I think it was Dave McKnight at the time said, “Come in.  Sit down.”  Which I did.  I stayed in the war room all night.  I remember, Colonel Kessler calling Third Division Headquarters and giving the report of the mission.  “We have lost nearly everyone - I only have a few airplanes here.”  General LeMay (Colonel at that point) he had been the Temporary Commander of the 4th Bomb Wing that General Forrest was scheduled to take over - General LeMay’s staff called in that night and said, “We’re on the alert again.  How many airplanes can you put in the air?”  Colonel Kessler said, “We can put one airplane and one crew  - that’s all I’ve got.”  “Tell them:  Be prepared.  We’ll fly.”  It was Bill Lindley’s crew.  We were to fly the next day.  Fortunately, the mission was cancelled and we didn’t have to fly the next day.

    That has to be the very worst experience that anyone can imagine.  We lost 10 aircraft on the Kiel mission.  Several  crashed and had to be junked.  It took us a while to build the Group back up again. I think one of the most important points that I can possibly make at this stage would be that those of us who were still there realized that there were only a few people around; that we had to carry on; that we had to be as good as we could possibly be, or better; we had to do everything exactly right and on that day what I call “The Spirit of the 95th Group” was born.  I think that I can say whole wholeheartedly that the person who initiated the Spirit of the 95th and epitomized the “Spirit of the Group” would be Dave McKnight.  He just was wonderful in every possible way.  Much, much credit to the Group, to the spirit of the Group, goes to him because he was a strong person in every possible way.  

    From that day he was a major leader in the development of the “Spirit of the 95th Group”.  From that point on it took several weeks for us to find the airplanes and the crews to fill in the blank spots.  That was when we had to determine if we had the emotional stability to continue to lead and be led into a fierce war.  The crucial moment in the life of the 95th Group was June 13, 1943. My crew was all killed we learned later.  In total, the Group lost 103 combat crewmen and ten B-17s.   We had very little experience so it took a lot of time for us to build everybody up to speed so that we could continue the war.
    Colonel Kessler told me we have to go up for a debriefing at the 3rd Air Division Headquarters tomorrow.  We did and I got through that OK. Then, of course, I became the Acting Group Navigator at that point.  The Colonel never said that I was the Group Navigator. About 3 or 4 missions later (we were doing them every day or two) we went up for another session with General LeMay (he was a Colonel at the time).  After it was over LeMay was talking to Kessler & myself  and he said, “Aaron is this young man going to be your Group Navigator?”  Kessler said, “Well, yes.”  LeMay said, “Well, he can’t be a 2nd Lieutenant and be your Group Navigator.  You’ve got to have some rank in that job. Other guys coming along will think they’re in a dead end.”   Aaron said, “Curt, (Aaron had been Curt’s Commanding Officer many years before) you and  I worked for 7 years to become a 1st Lieutenant.”  Curt said, “Aaron, this is war!  We don’t do things like that anymore.”  

RMcK:  Were you standing there at the time?

EBS:  Oh, yeah, the three of us were standing together.   Anyway, when I got home that day, I was a 1st Lieutenant.  LeMay had done it. It was about  three weeks later that we were up for another debriefing at 3rd Air Division Headquarters and LeMay came over and he said, “Are you still a 1st Lieutenant?”  And I said, “Yes”.  He said, “We just can’t have that.”  I got home that day and I was a Captain.  It was about 3 months later, I guess, that we were up there again for another debriefing (the C.O. and I went to all critiques at Division Headquarters with the Lead Crew and Mission Commander) and he said “Are you still a Captain?”  I said, “Yes, sir”.   He  said, “We can’t have that. You’ve got to have rank.”  So, I became a Major that day.

RMcK:  That’s a great story.

PART 2

FEBRUARY 26, 2000          YORK, PA.

ELLIS B. SCRIPTURE

RMcK: This is Russ McKnight, and I’m meeting today with Ellis B. Scripture, and this is Part 2 of our interview with Mr. Scripture.  Our first interview was done on September 10, 1999.

RMcK:  Good morning, Scrip.

EBS:  Good morning, Russ

RMcK:  Could you state your name and date, for the record, please.  

EBS:  Okay.  My name is Ellis Scripture, and we’re recording this on February 26, year 2000.

RMcK:  During our first interview, we covered a number of very interesting stories, and we got as far as the Kiel mission.  Would you like to take us on from there?  

EBS:  Needless to say, the return from Kiel left a great number of people in shock.  I remember seeing Colonel Kessler, the Commanding Officer of the group, cry like a baby.  And that evening, he kept saying, “My group is ruptured.  My group is gone.”  But, we had to keep on going, and we, we did.  I remember distinctly that Colonel Kessler came to me after the briefing, or the critique, and said, “We have to go make a report to Colonel LeMay at Elden Hall and you will report on the navigation part of the mission.”  We did this.  I believe it was the day after the Kiel mission, which would be June 14, 1943, because we were on alert that morning.  But the mission was scrubbed, fortunately.  When we got to Elden Hall, there were several people in the critique, because three groups had taken part in the Kiel mission, and all of us had suffered greatly during the mission with lost planes and lost personnel.  Actually, in looking at the records, I find that the 95th group that day lost 78 men killed in action, and 23 men who ended as prisoners of war.  But going back to the group, the critique at Elden Hall was rather uneventful.  We reviewed what we had done wrong, and I think that we learned much during that mission.  We learned number one, that we had to pay more attention to navigation, because it was obviously a navigation error that was bringing us too close to the Farutian Islands on the way home.  Number two, we learned that all of the gunners had to stay alert, and everyone had to stay completely alert until we were pretty much back to England.  Because, in those days, the Luftwaffe had the superior hand, and they were on the attack, wherever we might be, in the English Channel, as well as over Europe.   We spent some time in rebuilding the group, and this involved, of course, a great number of replacement crews, and it also involved training those crews for life and combat in the ETO.  We finally got the group built back to the point where we could go back into combat about two weeks after the Kiel mission.  And we struggled over the next several weeks, getting things back in order and getting into, what I would call, an aggressive state of mind.  But, I believe that one of the great incidents in so far as I was concerned, happened early in the summer of 1943 after the Kiel mission.  Colonel Kessler had been replaced with John Gerhart, Colonel John Gerhart, who remained as our Commanding Officer for quite a few months.  He asked me, in mid-summer, to go to a secret school.  He could not tell me where it was, what it was, but he said it’s a volunteer activity, and if you would volunteer for this situation, it would be helpful to the group.  And of course I said sure, I’ll go.  And so, on a Sunday afternoon, I was dressed in full dress uniform, picked up by an airplane.  I was instructed, incidentally, not to say a word to anybody about where I was going, or what I was going to be doing.  I was picked up by this airplane, flown to a vacant field, where I was picked up by a second airplane, and taken to another airfield, obviously near London.  From there I was put into a closed van, and driven to an undisclosed destination, which turned out to be a rather impressive, large residence – I would call it a big townhouse – in some section of London.  I was greeted by English people, and told to get ready for dinner that evening.  At dinner, I learned that Francis Hapner from the 95th Group had also been requested to do this special enterprise, and neither of us knew that the other had been invited.  So, after arriving, again we were dressed in full dress uniform, and what’s called class A uniform, and went to dinner, and I would say, there were probably as many as 18-20 people at dinner that evening.  And a very dignified gentleman was the Master of Ceremonies, and after dinner, he said, “You’re attending a very secret conference, and it is strictly volunteer on the part of every person here.  If you wish to leave, you may leave during the night.  Nobody will ever say anything about it.  But if you wish to stay, you are committed for the entire structure of the program.”  Nobody left.  We were all ears, and anxious to see what was going to transpire.  Later on he told us we were attending an escape and spy school, and class would start the next morning.  It was an extremely interesting week.  We were instructed over and over again that if we revealed that we had been there, and word trickled to the Germans, and we were taken prisoner at any time, it would mean instant firing squad.  And I’m sure everybody was like me.  We didn’t say a word. Even Hapner and I never discussed it again after we left the school.  But during the week we were taught by former prisoners of war, prisoners who were actually serving term in British prisons, because they were experts in cracking safes, cracking locks, making keys, we were taught many, many things.  Most of all, it was how to escape, number one.  Oh yes, we were told also, that after, if we were shot down, and were made prisoner of war, after a reasonable length of time, we could reveal that we had been to this school to the Senior Escape Officer of the prison camp so we could serve on the escape committee, and be helpful in any way possible.  But we did learn to make keys with wax impressions.  We learned how to crack locks, how to pick a lock, how to kill.  We were taught how to make one blow, fatal, to an individual, how to wrap a wire around a man’s neck and choke him, quickly.  It was a very revealing situation.  But we were also taught a secret code in writing letters.  And we practiced that intently in the school, but we were also instructed that we were to write an individual, if possible about once per week using the secret code that we were taught.  And I remember I did write many, many letters to a female name that I never saw, I never saw.  And I was able to translate the code in my own mind satisfactorily.  So that I never did hear great critiques on the letters, and I did not know whether they passed muster or not.  But it was a most interesting experience and I still remember the code today – that if I was to be a prisoner of war, I was to write to my wife and the outside of the letter would have a code that was written in the return address, so that the interceptors of the mail, could open the letter, translate the code, and then pass it right along to my wife, and she would never know that there was a code there.  And I never revealed the code to her, to this day.  And as I said, we never spoke about the school again.  Even Hapner and I did not discuss it until many, many, many years after the war.  I remember one time recently talking to Dave McKnight, and I mentioned to him that I had been to this school, and that it was secret, and he said, “Well it must have really been a secret as far as you were concerned because it’s been 58 years and you never told me this before.”  Fortunately, I never got shot down, and fortunately I never had to use the information that was passed during that school.  But it was quite, quite an interesting thing.  

There were many missions after that, during 1943 and up into early 1944.  I would say that probably the most interesting things that happened were two fold.  Number one, in early August, I was going to fly as second navigator with Cliff Hamilton on a mission that he was leading the air force.  And Cliff was one of our great pilots, from the original group.  And as we were on the end of the runway, with the motors running, an urgent message came through from the towers, and said to shut down the motors.  And in a couple of minutes a jeep pulled up and said “Scrip, you’re not going on this mission today.  You’re assigned again tomorrow with General Gehrhart, Colonel Gehrhart.  And he wants you to fly with him, so you can’t fly two days in a row.”  And so I was taken off of the airplane.  Later that plane was shot down.  Several of the men became prisoners of war.  Cliff, unfortunately, was killed.  It was a very narrow escape as far as I was concerned, because we were on the end of the runway, ready to take off when I was taken off the plane.  

The second mission that I recall vividly is what is now known as the Munster mission.  Munster mission took place on October 10th, 1943.  And the air force, well actually, the air force was divided into sections.  But the third, but the fourth combat wing was leading the mission.  It was a beautiful day, and Munster is a city that is about 75 or 100 miles inside the German border between Holland and Germany.  It was about 100 miles inside Germany, and was a central transportation hub, and a training school for some of the German command.  We got along fine until we crossed the German border and we were immediately attacked by, probably the greatest number of fighters that ever participated in a mission.  There’s been no accurate count on how many fighters attacked our task force, which was something like 63 airplanes, or something like that, that day.  Colonel Gerhardt was leading the mission, and I was riding as lead navigator, and we were in a real ferocious air battle – planes coming from every direction.  I have described it as like a, a beehive coming loose.  They were everywhere.  The 100th Group was flying low on our left.  The 390th Group was flying high on our right.  The 100th Group, at that time, did not fly a good, tight formation.  And the fighters particularly attacked them, ferociously.  The 100th Group was wiped out that day.  One airplane survived, and he survived by leaving his formation and coming over and joining our formation as an extra.  And, if I recall correctly, they had 19 airplanes in the target area, and lost 18 of the 19.  But we lost three or four airplanes that day.  I don’t recall exactly how many.  And I think the 390th lost seven airplanes.  But fortunately we came through.  Relatively speaking, we were unharmed.  But it was one of those missions that has been sighted as being the most ferocious air battles of the entire World War II.  As I said, there were many missions following, and they kind of run together, one after another - some good, some bad, some with many casualties, some with very few casualties.  But, when we came to the spring of 1944, I had finished my first tour of duty, and the Colonel asked me if I would volunteer to come back for a second tour.  And I said yes, I would.  So, Major Fitzgerald and I were sent home on Rest and Recuperation.  This was the first group of Eighth Air Force people that were sent back to the United States for a 30-day R & R tour.  And I did not have time to tell my wife that I would be coming home.  But I guess she learned about when she hadn’t heard from me for a while.  All of a sudden I turned up in New York.  And so, it was a very happy day to have lived through one tour of duty.  And so we, but there were a group of 160 odd men who were sent back from the Eighth Air Force in this one group, and the Commanding Officer was a man known as Colonel David Schilling.  Dave Schilling was one of the more famous fighter pilots from the 56th Group, and there were I think about five men from his Group that were in the group that were sent home on tour.  And it was a very interesting time.  We were free to do whatever we wanted for 30 days, and then we regrouped at the R & R camp, one of the big hotels in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which was lovely beach, and sunshine.  It was just a very nice time.  I remember D-Day, which was June 6th, 1944, we were on the beach at Atlantic City and sunning and having fun.  And all of a sudden the loud-speaker system announced that the invasion had begun.  And Dave Schilling, at that time, had 22 or 23 victories to his credit, and was one of the leading aces in the European Theater, and just loved flying and he loved fighting.  And he says, “They can’t do this to me.”  Dave said, “They just cannot have an invasion without me.”  And he came to me and he said “Scrip, would you be a navigator if I can get an airplane and go back to Europe right now?”  I said “Sure.”  And he found another man who said he would pilot the plane, and he found other volunteers to man the airplane, an engineer and so on like that.  So he went to the telephone and called Washington, Washington D.C.  And he got a hold, I cannot remember the man’s name, but it was a Major General who had been the head of Fighter Command in Europe, and was now reassigned to the Pentagon.  But he finally got this man on the telephone, and said “I’ve got to get back to that war.”  And the General said, “Now Dave, I just came from the War Room, and the invasion is going very nicely without you.  And my suggestion would be that you go back to the beach, and you enjoy the rest of your leave.”  And that ended that right there.  

Another interesting thing about that R & R time, before we left England, I went to Jiggs Donahue, who was our Chief Intelligence Officer, who was a Major.  And I said “Jiggs, can I bring you anything when I come back?  Can I bring you anything from the United States?”  And he said, “Yeah, one thing we can’t get here is bourbon.”  And he said, “You could bring me a small bottle of bourbon.  I would dearly love it.”  And he gave me the name and the telephone number of the Chairman of National Distillers, who was a friend of his in Washington.  Jiggs had been a very successful lawyer in Washington, and National Distillers was one of his accounts.  I called the man from Atlantic City.  And he said “Yes, I heard from Jiggs, and I was told that probably you would call me.”  And he said “We would love for you and your wife come down to Washington to be our guests for a while.”  And Jiggs had left a beautiful apartment at the Shoreham Hotel and National Distillers had paid for the apartment all the time that he was gone.  And he said, “The apartment is there.  Jiggs wants you to use it.  I want you to use it.  Please come to Washington.  And I said “Unfortunately I can’t do it, because we’re on the alert to go back to Europe at any time.”  But I said “Jiggs did ask me for a bottle of bourbon, and he said maybe you could tell me where I could get one.  And the man said, “Where are you?”  And I gave him my telephone number and he said “I will call you back in a few moments.”  So in a few moments he called back.  And he said, “Here is the name of the man and the company who are the distributors for National Distillers in the Atlantic City area.  And if you go call on him, he will give you whatever you want.”  And so we said good-bye.  I called the number, and told the man who I was, and he said, “Yes, I’ve been expecting your call.”  So I said “I’m going to come over and talk to you for a little while.”  I asked Dave Schilling if he would like to go, and he said “Sure.”  So together, we got a cab, and went over to visit with the National Distillers distributor.  It was a, looked like a fort.  There were iron bars everywhere, and very small windows.   I went to the door, knocked, and had the secret door opened, the window opened.  We were brought into the man’s office and again I told him, I said “I need some bourbon for Jiggs Donahue.”  I didn’t specify how much.  And he said, “Well I have been told by the Chairman of the Board of National Distillers to let you have all of the bourbon that you want.”  And he said, “All I have right now is 490 cases, but,” he said, “I have been told it will be replaced if I let you have it.  And I said, “Well, I would like to have a price list because,” thinking very quickly, I said, “we want to go back and find out what our group needs.  The man said “Okay, but please take it easy,” he said, “as you know bourbon is hard to come by, and I do not want to be out, even for a little while.”  So Dave and I went back to the hotel.  He called a meeting of the group, got up on the table, and said “Men, I have, we have found bourbon.  Now, if each of you want to buy some bourbon, that’s fine.  And remember now, there were 160 some odd people in this group.  All of them weren’t there at that moment, but a great number of them were.  And Dave said, “We’ll operate this just like an army pay day.  You place your order, move down the table, pay for it, we have a price list here, pay for it, and we’ll go get it.”  And we had orders for, I would guess perhaps as many as 40 or 50 cases of bourbon.  We hired a truck, went back to the warehouse, paid the man for the bourbon, and with great tears in his eyes, he let us have it, and so we took it, went back to the hotel, and passed it out to the men.  I had bought, I think I bought. 12 half-pint bottles, because I didn’t want to have all that heavy bourbon to carry back in my luggage.  And I needed enough to make Jiggs happy.  But I think it was about a dozen half-pint bottles.  One man bought a full case, and bought a footlocker to put it in.  And every time, as we were coming back on the boat, every time we would stop, he would have to have two guys lift that footlocker up to his back so he could carry it onto the ship.  But before we left New York for Europe, to return, there was one other incident that was very interesting.  Uh, while we were in New York, uh, Bud Maheron showed up one afternoon.  Bud had been shot down, probably 30 days previous to this, on a mission, and I happened to be leading that mission also. It was way down into the Bordeaux area of southern France, and he had been shot down.  And we assumed that he had made it out safely.  But here, all of a sudden he showed up when we were out as a group – a few of us were out as a group one evening.  Here was Bud Maheron.  And that was a wonderful reunion for all of the boys from the fighter group and for those of us who had met Bud, but didn’t know him intimately.  

RMcK:  How’d he get back, Scrip?  How’d he get back from southern France?

EBS:  Oh, I did not hear the story.  Now, he has written a book, and it’s in the book.  But I’m sure, because he was one of the premier fighter pilots, of course, in the European Theater.  But another interesting thing happened.  We received a phone call one day, and we were invited to a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game.  And so several of us accepted the invitation.  We went to Ebbot’s Field, had box seats right in back of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.  And I remember Fat Freddy Fitzsimmons was the manager of the Dodgers at that time.  And so, we were all introduced at ball game, and after the game, Freddie Fitzsimmons and his wife owned a restaurant just across the street from Ebbott’s Field.  And they invited us over there for dinner that evening, which we accepted.  And had a wonderful time with several members of the Brooklyn Dodgers and of course Freddie Fitzsimmons and his wife.  But that was not too long before we embarked for Europe.  And we had a rather uneventful trip.  We went on one of the Elizabeths, either the Elizabeth, or the Queen Mary, and I cannot remember which one it was.  But, when we arrived back in England, we didn’t look forward to the long train trip down through the west coast of England and back up to Horham again.  So I called my good friend and roommate, Dave McKnight, and told him that we had arrived back.  And he said “Where are you?” and I told him, and he said “Stay right there and I’ll come get you.”  And so he commandeered a B-17 and flew over to pick us up.  But he also picked up all the men from the 56th Fighter Group.  And we dropped them off at the field on the way back to Horham.  And that was the first time Dave had ever met Dave Schilling, and they became great friends following that day.

RMcK:  I presume that you had the bourbon with you at that point.

EBS:  And I had the bourbon.  When I got back to the base, of course, they had a jeep pick me up quickly, and took me back to the quarters.  And the first thing I did was take 12 bottles of, half pint bottles, of bourbon and put them on Jiggs’ bed, which was in the next room to ours.  And laid them out on his bed, and quickly unpacked and got in the jeep and went back to headquarters.  And I had been told that, by this time, we had a new Commanding Officer – I’m trying to think of his name – but he was a man who had flown with General LeMay, or Colonel – he was a General by that time - had flown with him back in the mid ‘30’s, and was quite a guy.  And I walked into the war room for the first time.  He was sitting at the head of the table, as usual, and I went up and saluted and said “Colonel, I’m Major Scripture, reporting for duty.”  And he looked up, and with a kind of a snarly look on his face, he said “I understand you’re the hottest goddamn navigator in the ETO.”  And so, I thought real quickly, and I said “Colonel, they may be right.”  And so, that was the wrong answer.  And he said, “Okay, you’re gonna get to prove it tomorrow.  You’re going to lead the mission tomorrow,” which happened to be to Munich, which was a deep penetration.  And so I found all of the facts about the mission, briefly, and prepared, as best I could, and went back and tried to sleep that night.  The next morning I was awakened quite early.  The pathfinder crew was leading the mission, and they were stationed at Alconbury, and they had flown to Horham to be ready to lead this mission the next day.  I do not remember the Captain’s name, or any of the crewmembers names.  But anyway, it was a, it was an interesting mission, and by that time the fighter cover in Germany had diminished somewhat.  And even though we had an air fight, there were two men on the crew that were injured, gunners, and were attended to.  The plane was pretty badly damaged, and we did get to the target, drop the bombs, and the pilot called me and he said “Major, I don’t think we’re going to make it back home today.”  At high altitude, we could see Switzerland, and the lakes, the big lakes of Switzerland right on the border between Germany and Switzerland.  So he said, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”  And so we talked for a while, and finally things quieted down a bit, and I said, “Well let’s see if we can get back to occupied France.  Let’s try to get back there as quickly as we can.”  So we continued to lead the mission, got back to France, and by that time, the pilot had more confidence in the airplane, and he said, “I think we can make it back to England.”  So we did get back to England, made an emergency landing.  I believe it was at Framlingham, got the wounded men attended to, and then they took off again, and dropped me off a Horham and went on to Alconbury.  But that was my reintroduction to my second tour of duty in Europe.  And it happened on, I think it was July 1st, 1944.  I didn’t fly too often after that.  I was mostly doing training, various and sundry things.  I was still group navigator.  I had a good staff.  So it was a rather leisurely time.  One other thing I remember vividly was when the breakthrough came at St. Lo, and it was probably mid July, 1944.  The invasion had been on for about four weeks.  The ground troops had gotten about 15 miles inland, but were stymied by the hedgerows and German opposition along what is called St. Lo Road.  And so the Commanders decided that the way to break out was to have the air force come through and just cut a hole in the German lines.  This has been written up in many ways, many times, but we were chosen to lead the mission.  We were leading the air force and the Third Air Division.  But the second wing, which were B-24 bombers, were involved also.  We were supposed to bomb at about twenty, twenty-two thousand feet.  And it was a rather clear day, but there were some layered clouds in there.  And as we crossed the coast from southern England, heading for France, I called Colonel Truesdale that was leading the mission, and said “Colonel, we’re not going to be able to see the target.  I can see ahead there that there’s a cloud cover.  And we are not going to see it at this altitude.”  And he said, “Well, what do you suggest?”  And I said, “Well, let’s just start going down until I feel that we have a better view.”  And he said okay, so they started down, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 feet.  And finally we got down to 12,000 feet.  And 12,000 feet, we learned all too soon, is just about point blank range for a German 88-millimeter gun.  But we could see the target.  It was a square mile area, imaginary boundary around a square mile area, and oh, I might say that, before this, we had had a conference with some of the ground commanders.  And the ground commanders said “How far back should we pull the ground troops.  And the General asked me, and I said “ Well, I think they ought to come back 5000 yards.”  And I remember distinctly the ground commander saying, “No way.  This ground has cost us terribly for every foot, and we’re not going to give up that much.”  He said, “We can pull back, probably 1000 yards, and,” he said, “that’s as far as we’re gonna go.  You’ll have to live with it.”  So we said okay.  So, as we crossed the Channel, we opened our bomb bay doors to make sure that, if we had a malfunction, the bombs would drop in the Channel, rather than on the American troops.  But, we came to the target, and it was rough.  It was really rough.  The flack was as bad as I have ever seen it.  But, the bombardier did a great job – hit the target right on the nose.  And, as the history books tell today, it was the reason that the American troops moved out of France and I think it took, I can’t remember how long, but it took just a relatively few days to get from there to Paris.  And General Patton, of course was leading the ground troops.  And the only thing that kept him back was lack of gasoline.  They didn’t have enough gasoline for the tanks.  And we were trying to find ways of dropping gasoline in all kinds of containers and things like that to see if we could furnish him with gasoline so that he could continue the advance.  Finally they got enough gasoline to him, and got the supply chain working.  And this was the birth of the Red Ball Express that has been written up in many different kinds, many different ways.  That 24 hours a day, trucks ran across France.  But we, going back to St. Lowe, it was very interesting that we did break through, and it was a one way traffic deal.  We came from southern England across to St. Lowe, turned right, went out the Briss Peninsula, and back into Land’s End in the western sector of England.  And it was just, there were so many airplanes, I think there were something like 2200 airplanes, total, that we had to have one way traffic.  But when we got back to base, General LeMay was there to greet us.  And I remember him talking to Truesdale from the tower.  And he said “Carl, do you have any casualties?”  And Carl came back in his usual way, and said “Curt, we just had one casualty on board,” and he said “Scrip shit his pants.”  He said “The flack was so bad that Scrip dirtied everything.”  I hadn’t, of course, but it made a good story.  So that was in July of 1944.  It was a very interesting way, but I have realized that I had been there long enough, I guess, and didn’t particularly relish the idea of going up and being shot at over and over again.  Fortunately, the great number of fighters had been shot out of the sky – German fighters.  And we had no air to air opposition in those days at all.  But we did, at the same time – I think it’s very interesting – at the same time, the American forces, and the Russian forces, realized that with our long range fighter escorts, since the P-51’s had arrived rather early in 1944.  And they had belly tanks, and of course they fitted the P-47’s with belly tanks also, and the fighters, especially the P-51 could go almost unlimited mileage.  So we, they developed what they called the frantic missions, and the frantic missions were based both in Italy and England.  The Eighth Air Force had flown one frantic in June, in which they flew from England, bombed in Germany, landed at Poltava, in what is called “White Russia” with fighter escort.  That was led by the 390th Bomb Group.  They were planning a new frantic mission and I volunteered and was assigned as the lead navigator for the Eighth Air Force, which would be a limited number of planes.  I think there were something like 69 or 71 airplanes on the whole flight with maybe three groups involved.  The 100th, the 95th led, the 390th was again flying high, and the 100th had a few airplanes flying low.  We went up on the 7th of August, I believe it was, in 1944, bombed the power plant at Pinamundi, which was the German base where they developed and made V-2 rockets.  We bombed their power plant on the way through.  It was a beautiful day.  But the man who was commander of the flight was the General, the Brigadier General at that time, who was Chief of Staff for General LeMay at Third Air Division.  He had never flown a mission before, as far as I know.  And was rather quiet for the whole mission.  But it went off without a hitch.  We had a beautiful clear view of the target, 75 miles away.  We could see it for 75 miles, and I kept trying to point it out to the bombardier, and he just couldn’t quite see it.  And I kept telling him where it was, and so on like that.  Finally, when we were getting to the critical point, I said “Well why don’t you do this:  Tune your bomb site into the general area, and maybe I can get the target, and then I’ll slip out of the way, and you come back in and zero in, and I’ll check it and make sure that we’ve got the target.”  And it worked.  I didn’t know how to work a bombsite, except I could do some things, and that was one thing I was able to do.  But anyway, he did a good job and hit the target right on the button.  We went on through and landed at Poltava in the afternoon – took the, we had P-51 escort all the way.  And we had one brief encounter with three German fighters, but they made one pass, and then abandoned the whole thing and went on home, I guess.  But we took the fighters by their base in Russia, and then we landed at Poltava.  And uh, that was a most interesting experience.  The Russian Commander at Poltava was a man named General Perminov who was known as a rough, tough, General in the Russian Army.  The American Commander was General Alfred Kessler, who had been our Commanding Officer when we went overseas.  Of course it was a joyous homecoming for me to see General Kessler again, and to have some time with him.  I had not been to bed for 72 hours before that mission because we had three different targets assigned on three different days.  The first two had been scrubbed, and the third one took.  But I lasted through the mission, and when I landed, we went over immediately to the critique area, and the Commanding General of the whole operation was a man named General Walsh.  And General Walsh took one look and me and he said “Major, you look like you haven’t been in bed for days.”  And I said “General, you’re right.  It’s been three days since I’ve been to bed.”  And he said, “Well, you need sleep, young man, and you need it right now.”  So he drove me over to his quarters, and put me in his bed, so that I could get a few hours sleep.  I was really bushed.  But anyway, while we were there, we had one more mission into Poland, and back again.  And then I think it was the third day, we took off from Poltava, and that is another story.  But, while we were at Poltava, General Perminov had a dinner for all of the Senior officers in the group.  And I was invited.  It was quite an evening.  It was a nice, if I recall, it was a, a good dinner, served in the very best fashion possible, under the circumstances.  But, during the evening, the one thing the Russians enjoy is vodka.  And during or after dinner, General Perminov got to his feet, and in long Russian, he proposed a toast.  Everybody pounded on the table, stood up, and had a big toast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  After that was over, General Kessler got to his feet, and oh, incidentally, the toast was a full glass of, I’d say, about four ounces of vodka.  General Kessler got to his feet, had a big long introduction, and a toast to Josef Stalin.  Everybody drank their vodka.  This time I poured mine on the floor.  Sat down again, General Perminov jumped to his feet, had another big long toast in Russian to Winston Churchill.  Everybody had another glass of vodka.  This time, those people who didn’t have a good background in drinking vodka were pretty well gone.  I had kept pouring mine on the floor.  Fortunately, I knew that I had to fly the next day and I sure did not like to drink before flying.  So, but anyway, it was a most interesting evening.  They had another affair while we were there, in which they had Russian orchestra, dancers and so on like that.  And they put on a beautiful evening of entertainment of Russian folklore music and song.  It was just a very delightful evening.  We took off from Poltava the third day, flew down and bombed in the oil fields of Rumania, and flew on to Fogue, Italy, the Headquarters of the 15th Air Force.  We were pretty well bushed by that time, so they gave us a few days to rest, tour some of Italy.  We did get a chance to go into Rome.  We visited the Vatican.  Some of us were able to go up and stand on the balcony that Mussolini had used for his many, many speeches to the throngs in Italy.  We saw some of the antiquities, the centuries old buildings of Rome.  But then we, after, probably five days, four or five days, we took off and we did not know what was happening, but as we started to go into the coast of southern France on our way back home, we realized that the invasion of southern France was on, and our target was assigned – an airport about 50 miles inland that we bombed, and did a good job.  One incident that had always bothered me is that, on this entire trip, we had a weather plane go with us.  Weather planes were very fast.  The thing that I remember so distinctly – we had a British airplane, very fast, that was our weather plane that would go to the target area ahead of us about 20 minutes, stay in the area long enough to observe the weather conditions, radio them back to the mission commander, and then head on out.  And he had been with us for the entire trip.  And he was ahead of us on this mission to southern France when we bombed the airfield.  And he was over the flight, over the target area reporting the weather, and there were two men aboard, Britishers from the RAF.  And we could hear the fighters, the P-51 fighters call out that here was a bogey over the target area.  And obviously they were going to shoot it down.  So we got on the radio, our commander got on the radio, and kept yelling to the fighters, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, that’s our weather plane.” But they went ahead and shot the guy down.  And it was a real tragedy.  In later years, I had correspondence with the historian of the Bomb Group, I mean the Fighter Group, where the men shot the weather plane down, and I cut a record, and sent to him, similar to this, telling him about the fact that the fighters were, we were trying to get in touch with them and tell them “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!  That’s a friendly.”  But they shot him down anyway.  It was a real tragedy.  But anyway, we bombed, and again hit the target right on the nose.  But it was a great thrill seeing the invasion fleet coming into southern France, for the invasion of southern France.  We got back to England, tired but happy.  We had had a very successful total of 7,000 mile bombing missions.  And it was very nice.  Soon after we got back, the 13th Bomb Wing, which included the 390th, the 95th, and the 100th, was moving their headquarters into Horham, the 95th base.  And the General who was then in charge of the 13th Combat Wing, asked me if I would come up to be 13th Combat Wing Navigator?  And I was plenty tired of combat at that time, and said “Sure, I’d be glad to go.”  I was there for (end of tape).

Actually, I was there just 24 hours when the General that had been the Commander on the frantic mission, called Frantic Five, called and informed me that he had requested, and it had been accepted that I would be assigned to the Third Air Division as Third Air Division Navigator.  So I left immediately, and went to Eldon Hall and spent the rest of the war at that location.  While I was at Eldon, every once in a while, I would request an opportunity to fly another mission.  And the General said it just was not possible because I was staff now, and had so much information, that it would be a terrible thing if I had been shot down.  But every once in a while, I did fly one.  And I cannot remember how many missions I flew, but no record was ever kept a Third Air Division of the missions that I flew.  But I remember some of them.  General Earl Partridge replaced General LeMay about three weeks after I arrived.  And of course, General LeMay was reassigned to the 20th Bomber Command, which was a B-29 Bomber Command in the South Pacific, and became a very famous commander in that area.  But he had left his mark on the Eighth Air Force from the word go.  There was no question about that.  

A couple of things I would like to mention.  Number one is that we had two pilots at the Third Air Division Headquarter that were fighter pilots.  One came from the P-51 Wing and from the P-47 Wing.  And these fellas always had a little banter going back and forth about which was the better airplane.  Of course both of them were very proud of their airplane.  And, in early 1945, I remember saying to them one evening, “ You know you guys are always talking about your airplanes and how wonderful they are,” and I said “What you need is a third opinion about just which airplane is the better.”  And so Major Smith, I believe his name was, was the man from the P-47 Wing, and he said, “If you’re willing, I have in Wing Headquarters, we have a P-47 that’s built for training, and if you want to ride rumble seat, I’ll take you for a P-47 mission.”  I said, “Okay with me, if it’s okay with the General.”  And General Partridge said, “Well, it’s okay with me.”  By that time the Germans had pretty well been cleaned out of the skies.  And so I went down to his base with him, sat in the rumble seat of a P-47, and flew a mission in a P-47.  It was a real thrill, believe me, to be able to fly in that particular airplane.  But, the Captain, who was from the P-51 Wing, kept saying, “Well now, look, I have checked around, and we also have a P-51 with a rumble seat as a trainer, and I want you to fly with me and prove that the P-51 is a better airplane.  I said, “Okay, let’s go.”  So, General Partridge had never flown in a bomber.  He did not fly, he flew many, many, many missions, but he always covered them with a P-51.  So General Partridge said, “Okay, if you’re going to fly in a P-51, you’re going to fly on my wing.”  And the Captain, who was my pilot that day, said, “Fine, let’s go.”  So we went to his base, got in a P-51, and that was another thrill, absolutely beyond words.  It really was.  We, the mission that day, I remember, was to Munich, and we did not go all the way to the target.  But the General always went far enough to make sure that the groups were together, and that everything was as well as it could be in the bomber formation.  Then he turned around and came home.  But on the way home, the pilot said to me, he said, “Well what do you want to do?”  And I said, “Well, I’d kinda like to see what it feels like to strafe something.  And he said, “Okay, let’s go down and strafe something.”  So, he took off, went down to the ground, and he shot the guns for me.  And we went back up, and I remember that day, we had to enter, they had a system that airplanes had to have a particular code word, and fighters had to fly in at a specific altitude to get into the English coast.  And we entered the coast at 19,000 feet, and the pilot said to me, “Now is there any particular place that you want to go?” and I said, “Well, I’d kinda like to go back to my old base at Horham.”  And he said, “Well, you point it out to me, and we’ll get there.”  So we flew over to Horham, and he rolled it over, headed straight for the ground, and I think he red lined the thing that day.  Of course, I had never done that before, and when he pulled out at the bottom, he was going to show the airplane off to the boys in the tower or something, and when he rolled it out at the bottom, I puked, just messed up the whole thing.  I was not very happy about that, but I had never done that before and I don’t know whether I had ever been airsick before in the entire time I was in England, but that day I was.  I always thought it was a kind of an exclamation point on the end of a P-51 mission.  But it was a thrill.  I think I’m probably the only navigator that ever flew a couple of missions in fighters.  A few things I would like to say before we finish.  That this was not one man’s war, it was many men’s war.  There was such great spirit.  There were so many men.  Our replacement crews did an excellent job in the 95th, and I have looked at many, many situations.  And I just am proud of all of the people in the 95th Group.  The spirit that we had was unbelievable.  People would pick up on the spirit of the Group, soon after they arrived, and would just fit right in.  There was no question.  I know that the Group never turned back from a mission because of adverse conditions or combat conditions of any kind.  And we were not unlike other Groups, but we were just terribly proud of the 95th, of course which got three Presidential Unit Citations and was the only combat outfit in the ETO to get three Presidential Unit Citations.  But also, one thing I’d like to mention is that there were many interesting visitors that came to visit the Group – entertainers and people of note.  I remember we had several congressmen come in and visit with us.  Congressman Baldwin was one, and he happened to be a brother of Sandy Baldwin, who was a member of the staff in the 95th Bomb Group.  And Congressman Baldwin represented what they called the Silk Stocking District of New York.  And we had dinner together one evening, and he was a very interesting person.  We also had Cardinal Spellman, Roman Catholic Church, the Archbishop of New York came to visit us one time.  Many of the great orchestras came to play for special occasions.  And one thing that always has impressed me – it’s been fifty, how many years now, 57 years since we went overseas, is the Group hung together in spite of every adversity that one can imagine.  And we flew 321 combat missions as a Group, did admirably under all conditions, and had experience.  I can say that in the dark days of the early war, I thought, many times that I should keep a diary of what was going on.  But I honestly felt that I probably would not live through the war, because we were just being massacred by the overpowering Luftwaffe in the early days.  But fortunately, I did survive, and terribly, terribly proud of the Group, the people within the Group.  And many have remained close, close friends – you just can’t imagine how close people become when they face combat together.

RMcK:  Scrip, I’d like to say, as one of the interviewers, how, how proud we are to be associated with the men of the 95th, and to be able to take your stories.

EBS:  Well, thank you.

RMcK:  And we certainly, we certainly honor those that didn’t make it to the end of the war, but are grateful for those that did, that can tell the story of the heroes.  Thank you very much.

EBS:  There are many stories that haven’t been told, and the real stories are buried with the men who didn’t make it.  I think we’ve counted 618 men that were killed in action.  And I think there were 851 who became prisoners of war.  We miss them all.

RMcK:  These stories are truly dedicated to them. 

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