Joe Mutz
95TH BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2000 REUNION ORLANDO, FLORIDA
Interviewed by Russ McKnight
RM: This is Russ McKnight, and we’re in Orlando, Florida on the 16th of September. We have the honor of interviewing Joe Mutz. Joe, will you tell us what years you served in the Army/Air Corps?
JM: I enlisted in the Army/Air Corps January 26th, 1942 and I was discharged four and a half years later in March of 1946.
RM: What was your time in the 95th?
JM: I was a graduate of the Lowery Field Armament School in the summer of ’42; also, the Emerson Electric Pilot Turret School in St. Louis. And then we went out to Gowan (?) Field Idaho where it was apparently learned that they were organizing the 95th Bomb Group at Spokane, Washington. I, with many of my other armament – gunners – were transferred to Spokane, Washington to work in the armament shop. One day in 1942 a notice was put on the operations bulletin board that they needed volunteers to make the 10th man on B-17 crews, and they had to be armorers. So I qualified for that, and signed up that day. And at that point, I started training with the original combat crew of the 95thBomb Group.
RM: And which crew was that, Joe?
JM: The number of our crew was crew number 24. The aircraft commander was O.B. Robeson(?).
RM: So, you were early to going to England?
JM: Yes.
RM: Can you tell us about your trip over to England. Did any memorable things happen?
JM: Yes, we left with all the crews that took off from, well we started at Rapid City, South Dakota down to…we ended up at Palm Beach, Florida. (It) was our final jumping off place as understand it and I remember. Just as an aside comment – My pilot wanted to get married. The group commander gave him permission to apparently leave the base and have his girlfriend come down. They were married in a church in Palm Beach, Florida, and I happened to be the best man because I was the only other Catholic on the crew, so he needed a Catholic best man. And then the next day, we started out down the southern route: Puerto Rico, South America, Africa, and on up to Scotland. We lost our plane down in South America, so we had to hitchhike, so to speak, the rest of the way with air transport command, so our crew stayed together. We ended up, all this time – it took a couple of months, but we ended up at Alconbury in England, which would have been May of 1943. Then of course the group moved from Alconbury to Framlingham, then Horham. And that was our final base.
RM: How did you happen to lose the aircraft in South America?
JM: We had taken off on this one leg of the flight from Natal, Brazil to Dakar, Senegal. That’s from land to land. There’s no place, if you’re going to bail out, the only place is (?) where you’re going to end up. And so you did need good navigation, as I understand it. We had a navigator and without mentioning his name, I’d rather not, who had a, I understood, a nervous breakdown about four hours out. It was raining rather heavily, it was about midnight out over the south Atlantic and our bombardier called the pilot and said “Roby, you better come down here and take a look at Sip. He’s got his head on the table, and he looks pretty bad.” So Roby, our pilot went down and took one look and could see. I talked to our pilot Roby about a year ago and I asked him about this. And he said, “Well, I don’t know about the nervous breakdown thing, but it was fear.” He said his eyeballs were almost popping out of his head and he was just flat out gone. So Roby had to make a decision: either carry on to Africa or go back. Without good navigation, planes did drop in the water before they got to Africa, you know. I forget who they were. Anyway, We went back, did a full circle and went back to South America and landed about four in the morning, and they took the navigator off in the ambulance, and that’s the last I saw him. So then they took the plane away from us. We ended up hitchhiking from South America to England (chuckle). And then, the crew stayed together. But we did have to fly B-24’s and all different planes that the air transport command were using at the time.
RM: I see. That’s quite a story. I’m glad we got that. Once you reached the base, as an early crew, were you a part of helping set up the process and the rules of engagement?
JM: No, once we got there, like I said, we were late arrivals with all this other stuff. And all this was apparently taken care of, all the details (?) because some of our crews were already down and had been flying, I think, since early May. And we got there, I think it was the day after the Alconbury disaster where the planes blew up and killed so many people, you know. And that was a real eye opener. We no sooner got on the base, and everybody was telling us about the, you know what happened yesterday. So that’s how we learned about that. But that was our beginning. So we missed the early indoctrination, or whatever, at Alconbury.
RM: Oh that must have been a shocking way to enter into the first day.
JM: Yeah.
RM: What about your first mission?
JM: The first mission was kind of an easy one, if any of them were. But I think it was to Hüls, I believe, in Germany. Yeah, the first one. I only got through eight, and I was shot down the eighth mission. Our crew went down.
RM: Tell me about that.
JM: You want to know about that mission? The eighth mission, about that one?
RM: Would you like to tell us about that one?
JM: Well, I can tell you about it. You see, many times over my lifetime, people have asked me about this. And if you live long enough in a military wartime situation, you begin to believe in miracles. So if you want to hear the full story, I’ll tell it to you.
RM: That sounds like a story we’d like to hear.
JM: Okay. It was on our eighth mission. I was a waist gunner on crew #24. We had our crew all intact that we started with, except we had taken on a navigator, Captain Emmett Desmond. He was well known at the time in England, I guess. But he was transferred to the Army/Air Force from, what did they call them, the British, early people who went over there when the war started and they joined up with the British forces? Anyway, Emmett was our navigator at the time. We went to Hanover, Germany July 26th, 1943. We never got to the target. We got about a half-hour, I would guess, from Hanover. I believe our crew was the first crew to get shot down that day. If you look in the records, there were four crews that went down from the 95th on that very raid. And most of them didn’t make it at all. But our crew was lucky enough to, I guess having a pilot that recognized we would never get back if we didn’t bail out, because our plane was on fire, and all (?) were blowing, and the oxygen was gone, and we were in pretty bad shape. There was no question whether you were going to be able to turn around, hit the deck, and go back. You could never make it in this case. So Robeson, our pilot, gave the order to bail out, which would be, like I said, before we got to the target. I was tall – six foot three – I had a parachute that was not adjusted properly, and I knew that, but I said, “Oh well. All the disasters happen to somebody else, not to me. So why worry about it?” The parachute harness didn’t fit. I always flew with the chest buckle unbuckled, that goes over your shoulders, you know, the straps. And I left that chest buckle unbuckled with the thought that if I ever have to use it, I’ll remember to buckle it. However, things happen pretty fast when you have to get out, you know. So when Robeson gave the order to leave the plane, why I disconnected my oxygen and my interphones and everything, and I went over to the waist – the door in the waist, the escape door. And pulled the release handle, pulled the pins out of the hinges and kicked the door off, you know. And I looked around me and I said, “Why aren’t these other guys doing something else?” Bob, the waist gunner was on the other side. The radio operator was up front, there was a little smoke up there, and the ball turret man was just hopping out of his turret, so they got the message. And I looked and I said, “The plane is flying okay. Maybe I heard him wrong.” So I, right away, because you can’t be off oxygen, what, 20 to 30 seconds at the most at that altitude, I went back and reconnected to communicate with the pilot and find out if I heard him right, but nobody was there. He was already gone. Apparently we were on automatic pilot and they got out up front. Then I went back again, lined up to bail out of the escape door. But you know, at that moment, you really don’t want to do that. That is not the best sight to see. (Chuckle) You only have a moment to think about it; (continuing to laugh) but you see 25,000 feet below you… Anyway, this all happens in split seconds you know. You think about these things. The guys are lining up in back of me, and Kildiner was coming up from his position in the back, getting between the tail wheel and so forth, and he was all bloody. He had his elbow shot off, and he was pretty badly wounded in his hip. Then I said, “My God, I’ve got to go. If I don’t jump, I’m blocking the door for everybody else. I gotta go.” In the meantime, I forget to buckle my strap here. So what you do then, you know where the door is. It’s kind of small. Like I said, I was six foot three. So I hunched over and rolled out. I rolled out of the door, and I made the worst mistake you’d ever make. I pulled the rip chord immediately. Now you really shouldn’t do that. I should have dropped down another 15-20,000 feet, then pull it. And I apparently blacked out. When I came to, lower, I’m dangling upside down in the parachute. And I remembered now, I had passed out from lack of oxygen, it had to be. I’m swaying in the breeze; I’m hanging upside down in my parachute. The one leg strap was caught in the crook of my knee. The weight of my heavy flying boot kept it bent so I didn’t fall out of that part. All the other straps were gone. So immediately, I took this leg, crossed over, and pulled my other leg down. The shoulder straps are dangling above me, so I grabbed on to one of them. This arm was broken, dangling loose and useless. So I’m hanging onto that. Right away I thought, “My God, I’m in pretty bad shape here,” knowing full well I’m going to hit the ground before too many minutes. I hung on that way. It was kind of quiet. I said, “Where did everybody go? I’m all by myself.” I didn’t know where the rest of the crew was, but probably they were off to the side. Maybe they had bailed out and didn’t open their shoot until they got down. But I made the mistake of opening too soon. Then, whatever time it takes to get down to land, I right away knew I was upside down and was going to hit the ground upside down with my head. And that wasn’t too good of a thought. So I hit the ground, and I tell you, you see stars. You really see stars when you whack that ground coming down that way. And I honestly tore my arm more up when I hit the ground that way. I broke my shoulder, you know. So I’m laying there. I’m still conscious, but not totally, but I know what’s going on around me, you know. I just kind of had a feeling that I’m on the ground. Maybe I’m safe. Maybe. You don’t think about all your injuries and so forth. But I looked up, and standing in front of me, because I had landed, obviously, in a farmer’s field somewhere near Hanover, and there was an older man, German, with one of these land army guy uniforms, not the regular German military uniform. And I looked up, and I could still see him, and I’m laying there. I can’t get up because I’d hurt my back and everything else. And he raises his rifle. And he shot me twice. I’m kicking, I’m laying on my back, and I’m saying, “No, no.” I was trying to get up, and I couldn’t get up to move away. You got a guy pointing a rifle at you and he’s going to let you have it, you know. The first shot went underneath my knee and came out my hip, and the second one hit me in the head right here and just a miracle, a fraction of it went through my head. But there’s still a graze you can see how it went this way, you see. So it grazed my skull. Why he stopped shooting, I’ll never know. Maybe he was out of bullets. I don’t know. But either that or, I vaguely remember a crowd starting to gather of people that lived in the immediate area probably. That’s why he took off after he did his dirty work. So my next recollection, because I had kind of lost it a little bit, passed out, you know, was an activity, they kind of loaded me on some boards or something. There were a couple of German soldiers there that were in control of the situation. And thankfully for them, I wouldn’t have made it. Where they got the military guys, I don’t know. Anyway, they loaded me on the wagon, and hauled out of the field that way. And they started collecting members of our crew at some small town building of some kind where they had the guys together. Our engineer had gotten killed, the radio operator, who was good friend of mine, he died laying next to me. And then I still have a letter that was written to me when I wrote to our bombardier, Bob Katz. He was really very surprised. “We thought you died, we never thought you made it.” He said, “I never saw anyone so beat up. Never.” He said, “In the letter I got, you were the next to go after Smitty died." ”(Laughter) Evidently, I was kind of a mess. Then I ended up where they collected the wounded of our crew in some kind of an infirmary. Remember now, my recollection of all this stuff exactly would be difficult where they took us, but I do know they took us to an infirmary, and dressed my wounds – my leg wound and my head wound. But they didn’t do a thing with my arm; just left if loose, just didn’t do a thing. Apparently it wasn’t a big enough infirmary that had casts that fixed broken bones, and so forth. So we were all then gathered together that could walk, that were injured, and taken to a, I refer to it as a multi-national prison camp called Sanbostel Stalag 10B in Germany. We were put in a room there, which was just an absolute nightmare. Filth, bugs, bed bugs, dirt. That’s where they gathered us together, fellas that were wounded. The other guys that could walk were taken on to prison camp. The four officers in front didn’t get scratched or hurt in any way, and they took them right away to probably Stalag Luffte 3 or wherever they went, I’m not sure. But they left us wounded guys there in this place. And I still remember the Yugoslavian doctor, a fella by the name of Colonel Zerovich, who was a prisoner there also in this multi-national camp. I say camp. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of prisoners – emaciated prisoners. These guys were laying outside of these buildings and they kept carrying them off on a daily basis to bury them. We happened to be American and British in this room, and of course eventually we realized that, according to the Geneva Convention, there’s only one way you can treat a prisoner of war. And that I think is what saved us and bailed us out of this place. There were fourteen of us, and only one of the guys that was there died in that room. After many, many weeks, I lost weight from 180 pounds down to 120 when I was weighed at the German Air Corps hospital where they took us later, many weeks later at Bismark on the Baltic Sea. That’s where they collected a lot of the British and Australian, Canadian, American, British bomber crew members. That’s where I finally got some medical attention. That was many weeks later. It was then too late to help me, you see. I had a couple of operations there. Then I ended up in various (?) the paralysis I had in my arm. The had a British operated bone type clinic. A place called Obermisfeld, near Memmingen in Germany, and that’s where I had more surgery and decided nothing could be done for me. So I ended up getting a ticket out of Germany in March of 1945, which would be about 19 months later. I came back on a prisoner exchange on the Gripsholm, a Swedish liner that was used for the repatriation of prisoners, wounded prisoners, and whatever else they wanted to move back. So I ended up on the last one, exchanges out of Germany. That was in the spring of 1945. I ended up eventually in – oh I finally, after I got my ticket out, I still have that ticket framed, it took several months to put this whole thing together and I was transferred to a place called Annaberg, a big old kind of castle thing in Germany, in eastern Germany. Finally we were put on trains, we were taken up through, up to Lake Constance on the border of Germany and Switzerland, and we were met there. When I walked through the fence I was a free man. I was still able to walk. And then we spent a day there, and they fed us there, and put us on a train down through Switzerland, down to Marseilles, France and got on the grips home, and then we were passengers on an ocean liner. It was quite a difference, quite a contrast to the black bread and whatever else they had. Then we came back to the states. I got back and spent many months in several hospitals in the states. And was eventually discharged in March of 1946. I have to be careful of these dates; I’m likely to get screwed up and won’t know what I’m talking about. It would have been March of 1946. I took a few weeks off, went back to work, the job I had before I went into service. I had a department in the JC Penney Company, in the work clothes department. I went back to work. And my old time manager said, “My God Joe, you had quite a trip.” Then I stayed with (?) for 40 years and retired in 1980. To wind it up, during that time I married, had a family of five kids – they’re all over the country. I better be careful; I don’t know how many grandkids we have. I believe it’s ten now, ten grandkids and two great grandkids. So that brings me up to date. Now I’m down here in Orlando. (Laughter)
RM: Joe that is just a great story. Thank you very much for sharing it with us.
JM: You’re welcome.