John Chaffin

95th BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2000 REUNION                     ORLANDO, FLORIDA

(Interviewed by Karen Sayco) 

KS:  Please state your name, the date, and where we are conducting this interview.

JC:  My name is John Chaffin, and the date is September the 16th, 2000.  We are at the Grosvenor Hotel in Orlando, Florida at the reunion of the 95th Bomb Group.

KS:  What were your dates of service with the Army/Air Corps?

JC:  I enlisted on July the 3rd, 1940 and was released into the Air Corps Reserve in February 1946.

KS:  When were you with the 95th Bomb Group?

JC:  I flew with Eldon Bromin – he was the pilot, I was the co-pilot.  He and I had joined together on January the 22nd, 1943.  We never flew with anyone else.  All of our training was together.  We joined the 95th Bomb Group about 6 o’clock in the evening, Squadron #335 under the command of Major David McKnight.  We served in the 95th, we flew 22 missions and we were shot down on our 22nd on October the 10th of that same year.

KS:  What was your job with the 95th?

JC:  We were combat pilots.  I was co-pilot.  About midway between our service, Dave McKnight was moved up to the administration headquarters and Captain Robert Cozens became our Squadron Commander.  Captain Cozens gave me my check ride and certified me as a B-17 Commander.  But I didn’t want to fly with another crew at that time because Eldon and I had been together for so much of our experience.  So he and I were still together when we were shot down.  

KS:  How did you come to be shot down?

JC:  (Laughing) We was on the wrong mission.  The 95th Bomb Group was leading the mission, the division on the Munster raid, which has been written up as one of the great air battles of the war.  It was the second mission in which the 95th was given a Presidential Citation.  The 95th was later, in March of 1944, given a third Presidential Citation.  We were flying off the left wing of the low squadron leader.  I began flying the airplane – Eldon and I always flew in 15-minute intervals – I began flying the airplane at 4 o’clock.  And that’s when we started our bomb run.  Almost simultaneously, our T-47 escort turned to return back to England, and as they were going one direction, the Farquoff(?) 190’s and the ME 109’s came from the other direction.  Now later we heard that it was estimated that it was anywhere from 300 to 700 fighter planes attacked our wing.  We were the first group over the target.  During the bomb run, our squadron leader, Lt. Adams, had his number two engine shot out.  He feathered the propeller, but he was able to continue until we dropped our bombs, and then we began our left turn off of the target.  As long as we were in our left turn, Adams could keep up with the group, because, being on the inside of the turn, our speed had to be a little lower than the rest of them.   After we leveled off, the last that I could see of Adams was a string of fighter planes like little arrows, coming straight for the nose.  And I remember thinking, “They see that feathered prop, you poor devil, and they’re gonna shoot you down.”  And about that time, he peeled off and went down.  I told Eldon that Adams had just left us, and Eldon reached over and patted me on the hand about that time.  I looked at the clock and it was 4:15.  My fifteen minutes were up.  He asked me if the rest of the squadron was still there.  I couldn’t see any of the other airplanes, and I understand later, that ours was the last airplane shot down.  I think the wing lost about thirty airplanes.  It was described later as one of the most fierce air battles of the war in that so many airplanes were shot down in such a short period of time.  One time during the bomb run, our tail gunner, Staff Sergeant Kelley called and said “The 100th Bomb Group were all shot down.”  I couldn’t believe that a whole group was shot down.  We had flown missions on the 8th and the 9th and the 100th had lost planes on both of those.  They had only 15 airplanes that they could put up, and out of those 15, 14 of them actually were shot down during the bomb run.  They never reached the target.  The 15th airplane returned to England, but he had several wounded crew members.  So Kelly was right in saying that they…  Also during the bomb run, our top turret gunner, just a young fellow, he was 18 years old – Ray Richtmeyer – called and said that his turret was jammed.  I glanced over my shoulder and saw that he had gotten out of the turret.  I told him, I said “Get back in the turret and keep it moving,” because the Germans would pick out when anything was wrong with one of the airplanes, that became their prime target.  He explained that it was jammed with the guns pointing straight up, which meant that there was no room in the turret for his head.  He couldn’t stay in the turret.  I had to devote my attention back to the lead airplane at that time because we were nearly ready to drop a bomb.  I never knew for sure, until much, much later after being on the ground and talking with fellas in prison camp, exactly what Reichmeyer had done.  Apparently he crouched down behind Eldon’s seat, the left side of the airplane.  After we dropped the bombs and we began to turn off the target, and Adams finally left us, we decided to do what we call “fill the diamond,” move up into the lead squadron where there the “V” formed by the element leader and the two wing leaders and we were going to start in the position of a leader of a third element, filling the diamond.  We had almost reached the point of joining that group when, I heard over the interphone “Jesus, Chaff, that’s close.”   And I look up, and there’s great big propellers.  It looked like just ready to start chewing away at the top of our cockpit.  An airplane out of control had come down from the high group.  Both of us, Eldon and I, almost simultaneously shoved the control column forward, and put us into a rather steep dive.  The tail gunner told me later, I met him at Frankfurt at the interview station, and he told me that the airplane almost took our tail off.  It went right past where he was sitting.  Now we’re out of position again.  Once more we level, and start to climb.  I recall seeing something that looked like golf balls going past the nose of the airplane.  I realized these were rockets that the Germans were, at that time, using to attack the B-17 group.  Right after I saw one go past the nose, the next thing I heard the tinkle of glass, the explosion.  It is almost impossible to describe how suddenly that cockpit turned into a roaring inferno.  It’s almost unbelievable.  But around the turret we had the hydraulic system, and we had oxygen bottles.  And they fed this fire.  In talking with Red Dillon, who was our substitute ball turret gunner, and also with Warren Thomas who was our regular radio operator – as a matter of fact it was his 25th mission – he would have been finished – they talked about how rapidly the flames moved from the cockpit through the bomb bay, through the radio room.  Thomas was burned on the face rather badly.  And Dillon talked about how dark black smoke just come pouring back in through the waist section.  It knocked out our communications system.  I reached down and took the carbon tetrachloride fire extinguisher from under my seat and turned.  This thing is very small, I mean it just puts out a little squirt.  If you don’t mind a little bit of French language in this interview, the thought that went through my mind was “My God, I might as well urinate on it!”  (Laughter) And about that time…when this rocket exploded, it threw flames up over my helmet and shoulders, and I slapped that out.  About then, Eldon pulled me by the arm, and I looked around and my first thought was “He’s on fire too.”  And I started to squirt him.  I realized that wasn’t what he wanted, he was pointing down.  Our radio was out, everything had been knocked out.  We had lost the #2 engine during the bomb run.  I didn’t know that until Eldon and I met in San Antonio in October 1945.  He told me that, while I was flying, this flak burst had knocked out the engine, but it was still developing a little bit of power.  Rather than feather the propeller, I knew that we’d been hit because our rudder control was gone.  I felt the rudder pedals go completely slack.  Eldon was pointing down.  And now the story gets a little bit more confused.  We wondered about Reichmeyer.  Reichmeyer was killed.  How badly he was wounded, I have no way of knowing.  I know that he was crouched down behind Eldon’s seat.  I dropped down, and he had not left that position when I dropped down onto the catwalk where I had my parachute stored.  I put my parachute on and I pulled on it to make sure the snaps were holding.  I went on out the nose hatch.  A lot of it is a little bit fuzzy because Eldon and I had been off of oxygen for five to ten minutes, and at 24,000 feet, anoxia begins to do some funny things to your mind.  Right after I dropped down, Eldon was busy.  He put the airplane on autopilot so that it would continue flying level.  He had stored his parachute underneath the turret.  He had to reach back into these flames to get his parachute.  But fortunately his chute was underneath it.  It did not get burned, but he got burned.  His face was – it didn’t leave any permanent damage, but it turned him kind of black.  He dropped down onto the catwalk.  And by now, Reichmeyer is there.  And Eldon, and he has told me he doesn’t remember a great deal about it, but the navigator and a Lieutenant Chuck Forney, who was an extra pilot who wanted to volunteer to fly on a mission that day, were in the nose, they both told me – I was with them in prison camp – they both later told me that they saw Eldon struggling with Reichmeyer’s body, trying to get him through the hatch.  They also said that his parachute had been spilled.  I don’t know whether he was dead at that time, how badly injured he was or anything else.  I do know that the Germans later told the navigator that he was killed and showed him his dog tags.  Right after that, Eldon went out and then the three fellas in the nose:  the navigator, the bombardier, and this extra pilot all went out through the nose hatch.  Dillon has told me since the war, that he saw the airplane explode.  Warren Thomas also told me that he saw the airplane explode, and he was afraid that we were still in the nose.  When my parachute opened, now the rest of the story is going to be just about me…

KS:  Before we get on with that, you sound very calm about it.  You would think there would be a little bit of panic.  You were highly disciplined.  When did Eldon call for you to abandon ship, and what was the procedure?

JC:  Eldon tried to call over the interphone to abandon the airplane while I was trying to do something with the fire, but the interphone didn’t work.  He couldn’t hear himself on it, so he knew it wasn’t working.  We didn’t have any communication.  All of that had been knocked out.  He simply pulled me by the arm and pointed down, and that’s when we left.  I can’t explain it.  The only way that I could try to explain is that we were disciplined.  A military pilot, you’ve gone through primary and basic and advanced, and then we were fortunate in flying together as a crew through about 200 flying hours.  Eldon and I sat side by side and we lived together, we ate together, we even got a little bit drunk together.  And for over 400 hours, we sat side by side, operating that airplane.  We did a lot of it for fun.  We used to take our airplane up in the evening, just he and I, go up and play.  And then we had close to 200 hours in combat.  We didn’t have to talk.  We knew what we had to do.  A lot of the crews didn’t have that kind of background and experience.  I know that I met fellas in prison camp, and they’d only graduated from flying school about four weeks before.  They were sent straight overseas and assigned to a crew as a co-pilot.  They couldn’t have done anything.  You can’t fly an airplane like that in formation with no experience.  Whether we were calm or not, I don’t know.  I know that he and I had faced death on several different occasions in which the air discipline was required.  We flew the Regensburg mission.  We started out in the third element, and we ended up as squadron leader.  The rest of them were shot down.  Coming back from Africa, we had a life raft to come loose as we were making a bomb run over Bordeaux.  Our bombs wouldn’t drop.  We couldn’t stay in formation with that life raft hanging on to the horizontal stabilizer.  The control column was shaking so hard, we had to slow the airplane down.  There were ten or fifteen fighter planes that had been picking around at the formation, and now they all picked on us.  They were turning inside so close to us that you could literally see the rivets on the airplane as they were doing lazy eights in front of us.  I kept thinking “What are we going to do?”  We were out over the ocean.  We can’t bail out.  They’re going to shoot us down before we can get the airplane down another 20,000 feet.  I don’t really remember, but Eldon gives me credit for pointing out that there was a cloud cover above us.  So instead of going down, we went up.  We got into the clouds.  We got the life raft loose and the fighters left us.  And we survived.  We did things to the airplane that the other crews later reported they couldn’t believe.  One instant it was standing on its tail and the next instant it was pointing straight down.  One of the guns in the waist section came loose from its mount and hit the gunner in the face.  One time I saw the navigator come floating up into the astrodome.  He spilled his parachute down in the nose.  Some of the fellas were bringing us some watermelons back from Africa.  Well, those watermelons got smashed up pretty good in the radio compartment.  But it wasn’t the first time.  We flew a mission to Austerschlebin (?)  and we lost a lot of airplanes.  And Eldon and I, we were picked out by the German fighters.  We had one shell explode in the soundproofing of the cockpit.  We had another shell explode in the waist section between the two gunners.  A piece of shrapnel hit one of them in the head, knocked out one of their oxygen systems back there.  We had to have the navigator take a portable bottle and go from the nose all the way back to the waist section because he knew how to render first aid.  He stopped the bleeding.  We got the airplane home.  We were the first ones in the whole Eighth Air Force I guess that had a tire blow out on take-off.  We completed the mission and we landed the airplane.  No one had ever landed one before.  It was after dark.  Eldon was doing the landing, but it took both of us.  He was applying full left brake.  It was the right wheel that had blown out.  He was applying full left brake and I was applying full throttle power on the two right engines as we brought the airplane to a stop.  Those things are what just made the actions automatic when it came time to leave the airplane.  Whether it was panic or not, the adrenaline was going.

KS:  When did you first meet?

JC:  We met on January the 22nd in Boise, Idaho in the pilot ready room, 1943.  I had just graduated from flying school.  I graduated from Williams Field, Arizona on January the 3rd.  Eldon was two classes ahead of me and he had been sent to transition school in Sebring where he learned the B-17.  That was the way the Air Force did it.  We both arrived at Gallen Air Force Base at Boise.  I had flown one time, an experience I guess I’ll never forget.  I was pretty naïve about people that flew B-17’s.  I thought that only four or five thousand-hour pilots could be the airplane commander on those great big old bombers.  My first flight, I found on the bulletin board I was supposed to fly a co-pilot with a Lieutenant.  My first surprise came when I met him.  He was a Second Lieutenant, the same rank I was.  He must have really been a foul up.  He was still just a Second Lieutenant, but he was still an airplane commander.  Later we were to do practice bombing.  Now Boise, Idaho, in the wintertime, everything’s white.  There’s lots of snow up there.  He kept griping about the bombardier not being able to operate the bombsite correctly.  I didn’t know what he was talking about.  It was the first time I’d ever been in one of them.  Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he says, “You fly the airplane, I want to go down and straighten the bombardier out.”  He got out of his seat and he said, “Just stay in the sunshine.”  Well, he was down there discussing things with the bombardier for about ten minutes, and I’m up there all by myself, I’m driving this big airplane around.  Finally he came back, buckled himself down in his seat and he says, “Where are we?”  Excuse the French, but I said, “You dumb bastard, how do I know where we are.  You told me to fly around and stay in the sunshine.”  (Laughter)  We never did find that bombing range.  We had to go back and land.  This fella, we won’t tell his name, but he used to make his crews stand at attention as he inspected each one of them before flying.  When we got to Salina, Kansas, his whole crew went to the commanding officer and said, “We will not fly into combat with that man.”  I don’t know whatever happened to him.

KS:  After the war, did you stay in touch with Eldon?

JC:  Oh yeah.  Not real close, but occasional letters and telephone calls.  He and his wife, and my wife and I in 1989 went to England together.  We made a tour over there.

KS:  You mentioned Bob Cozens having taken over from Dave McKnight.  I think you mentioned earlier that, during this reunion, that – I may be mixing you up with somebody else – but it was Bob Cozens that saw you off on the flight line.

JC:  Two things about Bob Cozens.  He was a Captain.  He’ll always be Captain Cozens to me.  He gave me my check ride and certified me as an airplane commander for B-17’s.  He also was the last person that I talked with before we boarded the airplane getting ready to go on the Munster mission.  I mentioned we had a third pilot.  This fella, Lt. Chuck Forney, had come with the group, and then he’d been grounded because of his eyes. He finally could pass the eye test, and was getting back on flying status.  He flew with us on two or three missions, just as a volunteer.  I flew with him once on a practice formation flight.  He had volunteered to fly with us on this particular Sunday, and I’ll always remember him.  Captain Cozens came up and he saw Chuck and I standing there at the nose of the airplane talking.  Cozens got out of his jeep and came over and stood and talked to us for about ten minutes.  I finally said to him.  I finally said to him, I said, “Cozens, what do you think about a guy that volunteers to fly in Purple Heart Corner, a mission over Germany.”  And Chuck, he was such a beautiful man, tall, six feet two, blonde hair, blue eyes, brown face, just an absolute beautiful hunk of a guy.  He scuffed the ground a little bit and looked at his feet and he says, “Aw, I know what I’m doing.”  Chuck and I ended up in the same barracks at Stalag Luft 3 and I used to repeat that to him every once in a while.

KS:  We’re going to have to wind it up, and I just want to ask one final question, and that is when was the next time you saw Captain Cozens?

JC:  Day before yesterday.

KS:  What were your thoughts?

JC:  Right here at this reunion.  Well, I knew he was going to be here.  I get the directory of the 95th Bomb Group along with the membership.  And I called and he answered the phone a few weeks ago.  I asked him if he was going to be here.  Of course he didn’t remember me.  I was just one of so many that he had.  But he was important in my life.  One of the things we never know is how much influence we have on someone else when our lives cross.  He said that he was going to be here.  I said that I wanted to meet him.  I do have quite a bit of variety of various types of material, and I’ve written quite a bit.  I kept diaries when I was in the service, and I kept a war logbook that’s a combination diary and scrapbook while I was in prison camp.  And I’ve used that material for books that I’ve written.  I put together a book just a couple of weeks before coming here that I call “Bro and Chaff”.  That’s what we called each other.  I called him Bro and he called me Chaff, pilot –co-pilot and so forth.  It details that time period, January through October and it’s just about Broman and I.  I told Captain Cozens, Robert, that I’d prepared this book, and that I was going to give Eldon a copy of it, and I would give him a copy of it because on one page in there is the certificate that he signed certifying me as a airplane driver.

KS:  I think I’ll just ask one final question since we have Janie McKnight in the room, David McKnight’s daughter-in-law.

JC:  Oh, I couldn’t read that.  I thought so much of him.  My son, a number of years ago, and his family moved from New Jersey back down to San Antonio.  I was visiting with him and I knew that David and his wife lived at the Air Force retirement center and I called.  My wife and I went out and spent a wonderful afternoon and evening with them.  And then of course, I saw him at the Boston reunion, Eldon and I.  That’s the only other reunion I’ve gone to, and we joined together up there.  I thought a lot of him.

KS:  Thank you, John.  We’ve been listening to John Chaffin and I’d like to thank him on behalf of the 95th Bomb Group Memorials Foundation Legacy Committee.  Also here are Janie McKnight and Dave Vandegriff.  We look forward to having you sign up…

JC:  When you get to be as old as I am, you count each day at a time.