Sylvanus C. Walker

95TH BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

1999 REUNION         PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA 

MW:  I’d like to state for the record that this is Margaret Blagg Weaver from the Legacy Committee, along with Karen Sayco and Rob Cozens.  We are interviewing at the 1999 Pittsburgh Reunion on September 10th, 1999.  We’re interviewing S. C. Walker, and his daughter, Vanna Brackney is also in the room with us.  Mr. Walker, could you just please state your name for the record?

SCW:  Sylvanus Caves Walker.

MW:  Thank you very much.  And can you tell us what your dates of service were with the Army/Air Corps?

SCW:  In so far as the Air Corps goes, I was transferred to pilot training after I had a year and a half or so in the service with the Ordinance Department during World War II.  So, I don’t remember exactly what month of 1943 that I was transferred to pilot training.  But it was in 1943.  I was in the 44-G class.

MW:  Okay.  And what about with the 95th Bomb Group?

SCW:  I got to England, I believe it was the first part of March in 1945.

MW:  And your ending dates were?

SCW:  I flew via _____________back to the states the latter part of June 1945.  So the stay was rather minimal.

MW:  Okay, and what squadron were you in?
SCW:  The 336th.

MW:  And your principle job was?

SCW:  Airplane commander, I guess you could say.  The first pilot.

MW:  Thank you.  Let’s go back to the beginning because you said you were off on a first track before you got into pilot training.  Tell us about how you joined the Army/Air Corps, how old you were, where you were living at that time.

SCW:  At the time I was transferred to flight training, I was living in, I was stationed at the desert center and living in Indio, California.  I was a combat vehicle maintenance officer in the maintenance battalion, Army maintenance battalion.  I was transferred from there to Santa Ana for pre-flight and went through the Western Flying Training Command during pilot training. 

MW:  How were you able to make that transfer into the cadet program?

SCW:  By making application for pilot training and waiting and waiting.

MW:  What about your training?  Did you have any memorable training experiences?

SCW:  Of course it was all memorable.  I guess the thing that stands out in my mind was, I went to primary training at Thunderbird II northeast of Phoenix.  And I think it was either the second or third flight that I made.  The instructor told me that he was going to give me the entire course before he could solo me.  And when he soloed me, he didn’t want to see me again until the 40-hour check, which was quite unusual.

MW:  How did that work out?

SCW:  I had a lot of fun during those 30 hours.

MW:  I bet.  Had you always wanted to fly?
SCW:  Probably not always, but since I can remember.  

MW:  Okay, so after you got through your training, your pilot training, what the procedure after that for getting a crew and getting to England?

SCW:  I graduated from flying school at Marfa, Texas in bamboo bombers, the AT-17’s.  I went to Hobbs, New Mexico for B-17 transition.  And from there to MacDill Field, Florida where I picked up a crew.  

MW:  Tell me a little bit about that crew.

SCW:  I had a crew of nine.  This was after they reduced the crews from ten to nine.  The co-pilot had been flying bombardier cadets out at Childress, Texas.  But he beat on the table and said he wanted to go to combat.  So he joined the crew.  The navigator was a relatively old man.  I think he was a few days older than I.  The bombardier was under twenty.  And the rest of the crew averaged a little over nineteen and a half.  The radio operator was the oldest man in the crew. 

MW:  How old was he?

SCW:  He was almost 26.  I was 24. 

MW:  Were they from all parts of the country?

SCW:  Yes, they were.  One was from Oklahoma City.  The co-pilot was from Oklahoma City.  His name was Bob Dorn.  And the navigator was from Tennessee.  I don’t really remember where the rest of them were from.  There were three or four from the northern mid-west states.

MW:  Pretty typical crew, I guess.  So how did you get to England once you formed at MacDill?

SCW:  After crew training at MacDill Field, they sent us to Savannah, Georgia to pick up a new airplane and fly it.  They wouldn’t tell us where.  We flew the airplane from Savannah to New Hampshire where we loaded the airplane for overseas.  And they gave us orders that said don’t open until you get out of the states.  So we flew from there to Goose Bay, Labrador.  And then directly to Valley, Wales.  It was about a thirteen and a half-hour trip.  We parked the airplane on a strip in Valley, Wales with probably five or six hundred other brand new B-17’s and then rode a train to Horham.  

MW:  You didn’t get to keep your plane.

SCW:  No. In fact, the man before me said that they gave you the old planes.  I picked up the airplane that I flew most at Horham with 101 missions.

MW:  My goodness.  So, how long was it before you started flying missions?

SCW:  I don’t really remember.  It was two or three weeks.  We had a couple of training flights.  And then as was normal, they put the first pilot of each crew on with an experienced crew as co-pilot for his first mission.  After the first mission, they put the crew back together to fly various missions.

MW:  Tell us about that first mission.

SCW:  This was a mission that took us over France where it was still – some of France had pockets that had German resistance.  And it took us over France where it was pockets of German resistance.  I was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, shaking (phone rings)

MW:  …that interruption.  You were talking about your very first mission.

SCW:  I was sitting in the right seat, having really nothing to do except to watch and alert the crew if something happened.  There were some puffs of flak around the formation.  I was just kind of flinched up, you might say.  Suddenly the airplane jumped and just whomp!  And I thought, “We’re hit!”  And I can testify that you can wet your pants (laughter).

MW:  Very understandable, I’m sure!

SCW:   But it wasn’t hit at all.  They had siloed the 6000 pounds of bombs, so the airplane just jumped twenty to forty feet.

MW:  Now was that typical every time?

SCW:  Yes.

MW:  The first time you’d experienced it?

SCW:  I had dropped bombs, of course, practice bombs.  But never siloed 6000 pounds of bombs.  

MW:  That’s funny.  You’re daughter just mentioned that there was a story in regard to your landing at Valley, Wales.  

SCW:  Well that’s another scare.  Of course it was intended to scare me, or scare the crew.  You see we didn’t know where we were going until we got outside the United States.  It was about two days from the time we opened our orders until we got to Wales.  I made the call to Wales for landing instructions.  Almost immediately there was a transmission in fairly broken English with a German accent that said, “Welcome to the European Theatre Lieutenant Walker.”  It says, “We will see you over Europe in a few days.”

MW:  And where did that come from?

SCW:  It came from a German station that knew the aircraft number, when we were going to be there, and knew my name.

MW:  That’s very frightening.   Well let’s go back to missions again, and you’ve had your first mission, your initiation mission.  But what about your first mission with the crew?  What was that like?

SCW:  It was rather uneventful.  We went fairly deep into Austria, but had a fighter escort all the way.  At that time during the war, the long range P-51’s and P-47’s could escort us continuously.  At that time, the Germans were pretty much whipped anyway.  So we had essentially no fighters to watch.  There was a ME-262 that came up through the formation that we saw.  Of course they were fairly ineffective.  That’s about the only fighter that we saw.

MW:  Was that just on that mission, or in general afterwards.

SCW:  No, on that mission.

MW:  What about other missions?  Were you so lucky?

SCW:  Well, I guess you could say that I was lucky enough to have only one more combat mission.  I had three combat missions before the war ended, and they were all inconsequential so far as having flak or fighters because the war was just about to end.

MW:  This might be a good time for your question, Karen.

KS:  Yes, you mentioned that there was someone that you knew that was actually pounding on the table, demanding to go into combat.  And also you had transferred from maintenance, I believe, into pilot training.  I just wonder about the thinking and the psyche, especially that late in the war when it was really well known how horrendous air battles had been, what would be the thinking of volunteering to put yourself into that?

SCW:  Well, Bob Dorn was an eager 20-year-old.  And he had heard all about, I guess you could say, the glory of combat.  He really wanted to fly fighters, but he was in multi-engines so he didn’t have a chance to get into fighters.  When he joined the crew, I showed him number four throttle and said, “That’s yours.”  But our first mission with the crew was over 12 hours long.  We would trade off flying formation from pilot to co-pilot because we were in close formation essentially all the time and it was quite stressful mentally and physically.  So when we got back to Horham, we were pretty tired.  So Bob dropped out of the nose hatch, and collapsed on his parachute and says, “Boss, I’ve been to combat.  Can I go?”

MW: (Laughing) That’s pretty good.  Well, since you only got three missions in and the war ended, what did they do with you when the war ended?

SCW:  Well, actually we were given assignments to feed the Dutch.  The mission was called Chowhound.  They dropped food through the low countries in La Zeitzerzee because early in the war we had flooded Zeitzerzee.  We broke the dikes and essentially rendered all of the low countries unproductive, and people were starving.  So we got plywood floors in the bomb bays, loaded them with sacks of food, and dropped them at various places in the Zeitzerzee.  I believe I did four of those missions.  And then after VE Day, we began to haul POW’s in Germany and Austria back to Spain and France.

MW:  Tell me about that – how that worked.

SCW:  Well, the B-17 wasn’t built for passengers.  We put the plywood floors back in the bomb bays, and the POW’s sat on those and back in the waist area.  Of course they kind of piled into the area around the flight deck also.  But we managed to get 35 POW’s in a B-17.

MW:  Thirty-five!  I guess you had a stripped down crew.  You wouldn’t have had your gunners still, I guess.

SCW:  No, we had pilot, co-pilot, and engineer.

KS:   Where were you bringing them from?  I’ve heard that a lot of the POW’s ended up at a place I think in France called Camp Lucky Strike.  Was that where you were flying from?

SCW:  No.  There was a strip near Lentz, Austria where we picked up most of the POW’s.  They were transported into the airfields.  We picked them up there and dropped them off in various places in France. 

MW:  Were they American POW’s?

SCW:  Mostly they were French.

VB:  Tell what happens when you have 35 POW’s in a B-17 and you’re trying to take off.

SCW:  Well having so many people in the waist and toward the tail section, the airplane gets kind of tail heavy.  So far as load goes, of course, it’s not consequential.  But the weight and balance is not what you’d like to have.  So you have to know that and take care of it with controlled forces.  It got a little bit exciting one time when I took off from a fighter strip after picking up POW’s.  Normally it shouldn’t have been a very bad take-off.  But just as I got into position to take off, there was a train – a big steam engine – that came right across the end of the runway, and stopped.  So I had to clear him to get off the ground.  And I think I excited him (chuckle).

RC:  I imagine the POW courier trips were done at lower altitudes than the bombing runs?  Or did you provide oxygen for everybody on board?

SCW:  We did those at five to eight thousand feet.  In the latter part of the war, the bombing runs were made at thirty to thirty-five thousand feet.  We as B-17’s like to fly near a B-24 outfit, because they had to fly at some 3,000 or so feet below us, and they caught most of the flak.

MW:  You did mention before that there weren’t so many fighters at the end of the war.  What about the flak?  Was that still heavy then?

SCW:  No, it was fairly light.

RC:  At this stage of the war, were B-17’s getting P-51 or other fighter escort all the way into the targets and back.

SCW:  Yes

KS:  Either in the states or on arrival in England, was there any preparation for the mental and physical stress that you were going to encounter.

SCW:  So far as consultation goes, no.  Now if someone showed an inordinate reaction to the stress, then he got consultation.  But otherwise, there was little preparation.

MW:  You mentioned how physically exhausting it was, as well as mentally exhausting, those long missions, which I can imagine.  What was life like on the base when you weren’t flying missions?  How did you relax and relieve that stress while being around the base?

SCW:  Well, I rode bicycles a lot, and I would ride around the countryside.  Also, I made friends with some of the maintenance people and worked with them.  There were things to do on the base, of course, at the NCO Club and the Officers’ Club. 

KS:  Did you have to have a pass to go off the base?

SCW:  Yes.

KS:  That was fairly easy to get?

SCW:  Yes.  Long passes were pretty hard to get.  But so far as one day passes, they weren’t hard to get. 

KS:  Was there a curfew or was it just up to you as to whether or not you went to bed before you had to be at briefing?

SCW:  Well, they didn’t have to encourage you much to go to bed.  They’d pry you out of bed at 2:30 and 3 o’clock in the morning for briefing.  We would always be briefed on early take-off.  We’d get up and go to breakfast, and then to the briefing room.  And then after briefing it would take us an hour or so to get to the airplane and get ready to fly.  So you don’t have to be encouraged much to go to bed.

KS:  Now were there two or three separate briefings?  I can understand that probably the pilot, co-pilot, and navigator would be briefed together as far as the target and the route and everything.  But were the enlisted men, the gunners and such, briefed as to what kind of – what’s the word – flak and opposition to expect?

SCW:  Well, at that time, we had essentially two phases of briefing.  One was a full crew briefing where they would tell us where we were going, what route we were going to take, and what to expect so far as anti-aircraft fire and fighters.  Then the navigator would have a specific from navigation on techniques and what to expect.  The gunners would essentially leave the briefing and go to the airplane.

MW:  That’s when they prepared their guns and did all their work?  So we were talking with the gentleman before you about this formation business – getting in formation formed and how long that took.  How did you figure out how to do that?  Just trial by fire?

SCW:  Well, we had a pretty good procedure for joining, particularly through the clouds.  By the time I got over there, all of the bases had ADF station on the base.  ADF means automatic direction finding.  All of the airplanes had what was called a radio compass that they needle would point to the station.  So we would take off and start a more or less standard raid.  He described the needle and ball.  You could control the rate of turn with the needle.  And we’d start a standard rate turn holding the radio compass at the nine o’clock position, and just climb around the field, just spiral up around the field.

MW:  Is that something you were taught to do in your training, or did you learn that once you got to England.

SCW:  Well of course the use of the radio compass was taught in training.  That particular use, we didn’t have any use for until we got to England.  It worked quite well because the bases were far enough apart that you could spiral up over the base using the radio compass and stay pretty much out of other people’s path.

MW:  I’m still just trying to imagine all of these planes.  Once you got up above your base, did you just circle above your base for an hour or so until everybody got in place?  Or how long did that take?

SCW:  The squadron could form in less than ten minutes if we were clear.  And of course we would climb through the clouds depending on what the top of the clouds were.  We’d form as soon as we got on top.  And from there we could wait for other squadrons to join the group.  But it didn’t take an awful long time.  And by the time you broke out at the top, you’d look around and see probably three or four more squadrons forming over another airfield.

KS:  Now you were flying from March through May of ’45.  Would you say predominantly the weather was bad during that time of the year as far as cloud cover?

SCW:  It was variable.  Now all of the missions, all of the Chowhound missions, the weather was good.  We had to fly in less than 400 feet, or get shot at.  This was actually before VE Day that we were doing the Chowhound missions.  If we got above 400 feet, the Germans would start shooting us.  So we had to have pretty good weather for that.

KS:  Now what, I’m trying to remember because I’ve read something about those Chowhound missions.  Those were sort of done in agreement with the Germans.  They pretty much knew they had lost the war by then.  They were still occupying Holland so you had to stay at a certain level so they – am I remembering that correctly?

SCW:  Well, we didn’t know that the war was about over.  We knew that we had air superiority.  But we had no idea how long that it would take before VE Day.  So there was essentially a truce to get through to the starving people.  And if we stayed below 400 feet, they would recognize us as mercy missions.  So some of us had some fun.

KS:  Tell us about that (laughing).

SCW:  Well, my crew always was encouraging me to buzz something.  Well, I’m not a buzz boy.  But we were coming back from one of the Chowhound missions one day.  I saw probably a company of German soldiers marching along a little road.  So I got the idea, well maybe I could satisfy the crew and kind of be a little bit sadistic (chuckling) so I did a wing over that turned us back to come along the road.  And just about the time I reached the troops, I was somewhat under 50 feet.  I pulled up, nodded to the co-pilot to pull the props through, in other words, pull the propellers up to high RPM, and then back down.  And I pulled up and kind of dusted the German soldiers.

MW:  That got their attention.

KS:  I bet there were a few people who changed their underwear that day (laughter).

MW:  Oh that’s funny.  I’ll bet that felt good.

SCW:  Well, it kind of satisfied the crew.  

MW:  Mr. Walker, I can’t believe our hour has gone by so quickly, but it has.  Is there anything in particularly you’d like to tell us about?  We have a little bit of time remaining.

SCW:  Well, I flew the old War Weary back to the states.  We flew it to Prescott, Scotland and then supposedly to Iceland and then back to the states.  But at that time, Iceland was so jam packed with B-17’s that, if you had enough fuel when you got to Iceland, they’d send you on to Greenland.  And somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, a plane did go down.  Somehow the report got two serial numbers of the airplane transposed, and it fit mine.  So, they were surprised to see us.

MW:  My goodness, that was a shock.  Did your family, was your family notified then from that?

SCW:  Oh no.  We showed up within hours at Hartford, after the report came in.

KS:  Did you use the GI bill after the war?

SCW:  I did.

KS:  What did you study, and what did you go on to do?

SCW:  Well I had started mechanical engineering at Oklahoma A & M College prior to active duty.  I just hadn’t completed the ____________.  So I went back to Oklahoma A & M and continued my mechanical engineering study on the GI bill.

MW:  And you mentioned that you were in the reserves.  Did you continue to fly all that time?  Yes.  I was flying B-29’s when VJ Day came.  I was on my way to the Pacific – ended up in the Philippines for a year or so, and then back to the states and released from active duty.  I continued to fly and am continuing to fly.  

MW:  What do you fly now?

SCW:  Bonanza.  Actually, Vanna is my living, breathing, medical certificate.

VB:  Will you ask him to add two things?  In a way they’re connected.  You had given your entire crew some extra training.  I’d like you to mention that.  And how well the crew knew the sound of the airplane, like the waist gunner saving the airplane from a watery demise.

SCW:  Of course we had various occurrences.  I taught every one of my crew how to land the airplane.  So far as the waist gunner saving the airplane, he didn’t really save the airplane.  He saved losing a tail gunner (chuckling).  We were in crew training and I would periodically have emergency procedures to a point.  So one morning early I had alerted the crew to a possible bail out.  The tail gunner had to leave his headset in the tail and come up to the entry door to bail out.  So everybody got into position and reported.  And then I told the crew over the intercom, “Okay, fine.  Everything is all right.  Just return to your stations.”  So the waist gunner yelled to the tail gunner, says, “Okay!”  (Chuckling)  So the tail gunner started to bail.  And he stopped, and he says, “Wait a minute.”  So fortunately he didn’t bail out.

VB:  Actually I was talking about how well they knew the plane and the sounds of the plane – when he had to wake you from resting.

SCW:  Oh, that.

(End of side one)

SCW:  We were flying at about fifteen or sixteen thousand feet.  To get a reasonable alert for the landing, I thought I’d go back into the waist and get a nap.  So I was asleep back in the co-pilot was flying the airplane.  And we flew into the top of a thunderstorm.  And the co-pilot I think became unsure of what to do.  And the waist gunner shook me and says, “Boss, something’s wrong.”  And I woke up and I knew something was wrong because the airplane was screaming.  So, I got up into the flight deck, and we were iced up.  All the windows were iced up.  The air speed was zero.  We had no indication on the airspeed indicator.  The co-pilot was diving to try to get the airspeed up.  I knew that the pito tube was frozen up.  I got him to turn the pito tube’s heat on so it would thaw out.  And I opened the window and with a flashlight, I saw that we weren’t heavily iced.  So I took it over and pulled the throttles back and started to pull out.  Well, the airspeed did finally indicate and it was only about 50 miles an hour over the red line of the airplane.  And as I was pulling out, we came out of the bottom of the clouds, and about maybe 200 feet above the water.

MW:  My goodness.  Well that was a close call wasn’t it?  And that’s where your skill and your training came to bear.  Well thank you so much for putting this on the record for us today.  We really appreciate it and it will be a valuable addition to our archives.

SCW:  Thank you.