Melvin Spencer
95TH BOMB GROUP (H)
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2002 REUNION ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI
(Interviewed by Sam Tarkenton)
ST: We’ll just get started here. I’m going to just ask you some basic questions, and then I kind of will get into just what you want to talk about. We’re anxious to listen to anything you have to say. Can you tell us your name?
MS: Melvin Spencer.
ST: And the date – today is…
MS: September 14, 2002.
ST: And how long did you spend in the Army/Air Corps?
MS: I enlisted in September 1942 and was relieved from active duty in early January of 1946. I was in the Reserves until 1955, when I resigned my commission.
ST: How much of that time was with the 95th Bomb Group?
MS: I arrived in Horham about in January 1944, and was evicted, I guess, on February 10th, 1944.
ST: In what squadron?
MS: The 336th.
ST: And your position with the 95th?
MS: I was a navigator.
ST: When did you enlist in the service?
MS: What?
ST: When did you enlist in the service?
MS: Well, September 1942.
ST: And then you went to training?
MS: Right. Well, actually, I enlisted in the Air Force and – Army/Air Corps it was. And there was such a backlog of enlistees, and the training facilities weren’t available. So they sent me back home, and I was called to active duty in March 1943. So, from that point, I went to San Antonio for the, what do you call it – what does the infantry call it? Basic, basic training, in effect, for a month or so. And then they sent me to Ellington Field for preflight training. I was there for 12 weeks. And again they had a backlog, so they kept us there for three extra weeks. Then, went to San Marcos, Texas for navigation training. And I was there until November 1943, when I graduated and was commissioned, and got my wings as a navigator.
ST: Is that when you were assigned to a crew?
MS: No. I mentioned last night, and I guess repetition is okay, on the day we graduated, our CO called three of us in, and said you all have done so well that we’re going to send you right over into combat. I think he was kind of softening the blow a little, or something. So, we received a ten-day delay enroute, and were sent overseas immediately – or almost immediately – as soon as they can process you through their usual processing. Went over by ship – took us six days to get to England. We went from there from wherever we landed, which I don’t remember, to a training facility for training in British system of navigation – the GE system – another peculiarity of navigational work in England. And from there, then we were – actually, at that point, they said where do you want to go? They let us choose the Bomb Group to which we wanted to be assigned. I guess everybody needed personnel, they’d had such terrible losses. And we looked and studied, the three of us together, all of that, and found out that the 95th Group had the least loss rate of any of the groups at that time in England. So that’s the one we picked. We figured that was our best option. It turned out not to be that way for me, but the other two fellas that I was with both finished their tours of duty in the 95th.
ST: When you got to the 95th, what crew were you assigned to?
MS: I was assigned to the crew of Jim Connelly. Bill Woods was the copilot, and their navigator was in the hospital. He’d been injured in a previous mission. In fact, I think this was their third plane and second navigator. Something like that. Anyway, they’d had some rough missions, as I recall. So I was assigned as their navigator. And we flew several practice missions in England, back and forth. Because, as I mentioned last night at the Legacy meeting, I first walked inside of a B-17 in England. That was my first encounter with a B-17. So there was some familiarization to be done. The compass was different. We had to swing the compass one day, and just kind of get accustomed to that environment, and the guns and all that. So that was kind of an interesting experience.
ST: How many missions did you actually go on?
MS: This was – the one on February 10 – was my fourth mission. The first mission was to Wilhelmshaven, and I talked about that last night. I don’t know whether you want to go into any detail…
ST: Anything you want you want to say.
MS: Well, it was an interesting mission for a rookie, fresh from – not even wet behind the ears. Of course it was February 1st or 2nd - somewhere early in February. And the weather was really terrible. The navigation data we got was all wrong. The wind was wrong – the wind direction, the wind velocity. And we took off in clouds, and flew all the way to Wilhelmshaven, trying to find enough clear sky to fly in. And the clouds just kept looming ahead of us. We climbed to around 29 or 30 thousand feet on the way there. Managed to stay in formation until we dropped our bombs, but by the time we got there, according to my dead reckoning data, which was all wrong because the information on which it was based was all wrong. As far as I could tell, we weren’t anywhere near Wilhelmshaven when we dropped our bombs, but obviously the lead navigator probably could see – use his radar – and see where we were. Soon as we dropped our bombs, the person leading the mission told us to just scatter, because we couldn’t maintain formation in all these clouds - the clouds were just solid – which we did. So we were on our own, and somewhere up in the North Sea around Wilhelmshaven, couldn’t see the sky, couldn’t see the ground. The pilot kept zigzagging and swerving back and forth, trying to find an open area in the clouds in which to fly, and never could find anything. Meanwhile, we were just going every which way, and of course the plane was constantly swerving, turning, banking. You couldn’t get even a good compass reading. So, he finally wound up about a hundred or two feet above the North Sea, where we broke out of the clouds. And said how do we get home? And of course at that point, I was about as lost as you could be. I knew we were somewhere in the North Sea. So I finally, I just decided, well, you know, I hope I can find the British Isles from here. And so I picked an arbitrary spot, plotted the course to our base, and off we took. As we flew along, there was another B-17 crossed our path going about 40 degrees different from us. And I thought, oh no, I’ve either made a terrible mistake, or this guy’s head for France, which I think he was. Anyway, we stuck to our guns, and stayed on this course. By the time I was able to check it out through the GE system in England, which was a very precise navigation system, I was only six miles off course to our base, which was kind of a miracle. There’s no way to explain it. It wasn’t common sense; it wasn’t intelligence; it was just a miracle. And we got back to the base, and the crew was so happy because this was a guy they didn’t even know and had never flown with before, and we got home. So they – the enlisted men made me take off my bars, my rank and insignia, and took me into the enlisted men’s club, which was forbidden for officers. That was their reward, because they felt like they had some confidence in their navigator. So that was the first mission.
ST: And then?
MS: Well, the next one we flew was to Frankfurt. And the first mission had no flak or fighter problems. (Interruption) The second mission was to Frankfurt. We flew right over, or near, the Rohr Valley, which was heavily, heavily infested with flak. And so we got a big dose of flak on that mission, and some fighter opposition, but not too bad. We got to the target, dropped our bombs, and got home. So it was a successful mission. And then the next mission was to Villa Coublay in France – kind of a milk run mission. And that was pretty uneventful. And then finally, I don’t know what happened, but according to Ed Charles, they must have moved me into his barracks the night of February 9th, because he wrote in that book, Bombs Over Berlin, or whatever it’s called, about the man who came to breakfast, and that happened to be me. According to his version, on the night of February 9th the CQ came and yelled at the door, “Is there a bed in here? I’ve got a new person, just arrived.” And took me in, and I went to bed. Three hours later I was waked for this February 10 mission. I was not supposed to fly. The crew I was with was not supposed to fly. And Connolly didn’t fly. But the crew and another – they cobbled together a crew in another – I think it was the 334th squadron. The pilot was gone, the tail gunner – they had no tail gunner; they had no navigator. And they were not supposed to fly either, but apparently they needed a, had an empty spot. Somebody faked out or something. And so they got this, cobbled this crew together, as I say. The Tuberose, Mike Tuberose’s crew. Mike was gone and they had to locate him in condition to fly. And Kutka is the copilot – Charles Kutka. And Bill Whitman was the bombardier. I’d never met these people before. I met them the morning we flew, and never did really get acquainted with any of the crew, until recently. So that was kind of a new experience too, to be shunted around from crew to crew. This was a disastrous mission. As I mentioned earlier, it was ill-timed, ill-conceived, ill-planned. And the results were terrible. It probably should never have happened. But apparently, General Doolittle was so anxious to get us up there and engaged with the Luftwaffe that we were told he told them we were coming and where we were coming to. Now whether that’s true, I don’t know. But certainly they were ready for us. We took off in a snowstorm before daylight. And could not rendezvous with our formation. It took us an hour. We flew all over south England, trying to find a break in the clouds so that we could rendezvous. We finally succeeded, but we were just about an hour late leaving the English coast, which is kind of where you start your timing. The meantime, the fighter cover we were supposed to have – they were supposed to really give us protection that day because there were only, what, one wing – 180 bombers. We were supposed to have a huge amount of fighter cover. But they had all come and gone. We had very little, if any, fighter help. So as we got over – incidentally, the engineer told me a week ago, one of the problems was our plane wasn’t really ready to fly. We had engine trouble with one engine. We were having trouble keeping up with the group before anything happened. So this was kind of an ill-fated venture, the whole thing. As we got over past the Zeiderzee, and just over and getting into Germany, we got were struck by, or attacked by dozens and dozens, it seemed to me, of fighters, Focke Wulf 190’s, and ME-109’s. The final straw of all of this is, I think I said, that we were assigned to the coffin corner position, clear down at the lowest outside plane – the first one that would be attacked by enemy fighters. I don’t know why that happened, because the crew with which I was flying was on its 23rd mission. And they should have been in a lead position, or whatever. But it happened they had taken their navigator to be the lead navigator, but the crew was buried in coffin corner, along with their temporary navigator. Well, the first pass, they shot us up pretty badly. We just could not keep up with the formation. So Mike pulled out and tried to head for some cloud cover, which was down around 10,000 feet or so. They had shot up, they had come in and not only hit an engine, but they killed the tail gunner. And they shot up both waist gunners – one was killed, the other one was injured. And the top turret gunner was injured. In fact, I talked to him a week ago. His name is Gerald Benson. He said that for several years after that, he was having pieces of Plexiglas and shrapnel coming out, surfacing in his skin. He never could get adequate medical care, because we were in Germany. So as we tried to head back home, Bill Whitman dropped our bombs, and we tried to hide in these clouds. But there weren’t hardly enough cloud cover to do any good. And the fighters would just follow us right along above the clouds. We’d be in them; they’d be above them waiting for us to emerge and hit us again and set an engine on fire. So we bailed out. Mike told us to bail out. And I was the first one there at the hatch, and I pulled the pins on the hatch. Of course we had British type chutes. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. They hook in the front. The chute is separate and you just hook it easily on the front. Not a back chute – a front pack. So I got my chute on and Whitman got his on. I pulled the hinge pins on the escape hatch there, and it wouldn’t come out. It was stuck. The top turret gunner, the one who was wounded, was there ready to bail out. He motioned me out of the way. I was tugging at it. He just reached and kicked it, and it fell off. So I bailed out head first, and fell freely for several thousand feet because we were all concerned about getting shot up by the fighters. They were flying close enough to collapse our chutes. So I thought, well I’ll just fall as far as I can – as far as I think is feasible – before I open my chute. And I did so. So I was down around, probably four or five thousand feet before I opened my parachute. Meanwhile we were going through the clouds, and as you fall through the clouds, it looked like it was snowing in the clouds, but the snow was falling up, because obviously you were falling faster than whatever snow or condensed moisture there was in the clouds. So that’s kind of an unusual experience. And, as everyone has said, the overwhelming sense is one of quietness and serenity, after the bedlam in the plane, you know – the noise and the guns and the engines and so forth. I hit the ground, and my chute collapsed. The British chutes were ingenious in that they had a round disc right here, and you just turned that a little, hit it, and that releases the chute. You don’t have to worry about unhooking your harness. So I got mine off. About that time the radio operator, George Calandros, landed just a few feet from me. But he wasn’t doing anything with his chute. He was getting blown across country. So I ran over and helped him, got him out of his chute. Meantime, we were landing – we landed in a farming area, kind of a rural area. No woods. No place to hide. And people all around us were kind of converging on us, so we threw our chutes down and tried to, started to figure out where we could go. But there wasn’t anyplace to go. We were picked up quickly. And were surrounded by curious onlookers. We tried to bribe our way by giving the kids all of our candy supply that we had in our escape kits so that maybe they’d treat us okay. Anyway, we got into the hands of the German military. They took George Calandros and me into town, stopped at a place where our captors were checking on something in a building. They left us in the car by ourselves. George had a knife, and he said, “I’ve got this knife. I’m going to get it out and we’re going to get these guys and then we’ll escape.” And I said, “George, no way we’re going to do that. Just cool it.” (Laughing) He agreed finally. And he wrote me a week ago – I reminded him of this in some correspondence, and he said you know, you saved my life. That was kind of an interesting vignette. We were gathered together. By the time they got us all together there was a whole busload of prisoners from this immediate area near Onsabruk, Germany. And we had with us a P-38 pilot and a ME-109 pilot in the group too. They got us all on a bus and took us to an airfield where we spent the night locked in a storage depot or something. The next day they put us on a train and to Dulag Luft. Meanwhile, of course, we had I think a sip of coffee, maybe, but very little, if anything, to eat. I think they gave us maybe some _______________. I’m not sure, but it was kind of sawdust. Actually, as hungry as I was, for about ten days I couldn’t eat that stuff, but finally you can eat it. The next day, as I say, they put us on the train to Dulag Luft/Frankfurt, where we’d been just the week before, bombing Frankfurt. On route, they gave us some wonderful tasting sausage. It was just the best stuff I ever tasted. I ate quite a bit of it. And then one of the other men on the crew, or men with us said, “You know what that is, don’t you?” He said, “That’s blood sausage.” Well, that just kind of turned my stomach and I couldn’t eat another bite of that stuff, no matter how good it was. We got to Dulag, and this P-38 pilot said – he injured his leg. I think he may have struck the boom with a glancing blow as he bailed out. And we had to kind of half carry him as they walked us to Dulag Luft interrogation center there. Took everything away. All I had was my purple underwear, you know – this purple heated flying suit that we wore. Then you wore flying coveralls on top of it. But they took everything away – watch, ring, whatever we had. I had that and my shoes. That was it. They put us – took us down a long hall in this place – and put us in a small, each one of us, in a solitary confinement cell that’s been described many times – a very small cell, nothing in it, high ceiling and a little tiny slit of a window way up there near the ceiling so you couldn’t climb up and look out. Just big enough to move around a little bit in. I was there, I think three days. The copilot said we were there eight days. I don’t know how to explain that, except I think maybe both of us is wrong. It’s somewhere in that time period. And finally they took us to interrogation. After that I think they brought me back to my cell. And then they came and got me and took me to this holding area. I think it was in a different building. It was kind of run by the Red Cross or the YMCA or someone. Anyway, they had Red Cross parcels there. We had – they gave us an issue of clothing, underwear, razor, just a few of the essentials, toothbrush. It must have been around 80 or 90 of us on a train – boxcars and old train cars. Shipped us around by Berlin and up to Stalin Luft in Barth-Pomerania in north Germany. We got there late in February, and were put into this camp. I thought it was an abandoned military camp, but apparently, I don’t know what it was for, but anyway, there was a camp there with eight barracks and a mess hall and a storage facility. We were the first ones to occupy that. They sent some - British prisoners were in a different compound, south compound. And they sent them over to kind of help us get organized. But there were 80 of us and we were the first ones in that place. Of course the food was very scarce on the trip. They would give us a little ____________ coffee at night, and a piece of _________________ and a bowl of watery soup sometime during the day, and that’s about the rations that we had on the trip. That’s what we had when we got there. The German rations were potatoes, or barley soup, made into soup, _______________ coffee and a ration of __________________ for each individual for a week period of time. And that’s how we existed for the first few months there. Finally they let us open, or gave permission for the prisoners to open the mess hall, and operate the mess hall. And then, whatever rations we got were delivered there and were put in a big common kettle. So we were fed twice a day there with whatever was available. At times there were some Red Cross supplies; sometimes there were not. There were some good times and bad times. I was real anxious to do something, and of course the officers were not permitted, were not supposed to work because of the Geneva Convention. So we just had time on our hands. So I volunteered to work over there in the kitchen, scraping out these big vats and doing whatever was necessary – building fires. So every morning or so, the German guard would come and open the shutter and call me and wake me up and get me over there to the mess hall to work in the food detail. And I did that for all the time until the mess hall burned down in the spring of 1945. I was there for 15 months – Stalig Luft in Barth, Germany. And there were some good times, some bad times, and some not so good times. One good occasion was in the summer of 1944, the Germans allowed us to go swimming in the North Sea – no, the Baltic Sea. Not the North Sea, the Baltic Sea. We had to sign a release, or a form that we would not try to escape. So once we did that, they marched us a mile and a half outside of camp and stripped off all our clothes, and all went swimming. It was a great experience, you know. Just a wonderful change for us. And there were some sports. We did some sports. There was softball, and I think they had a basketball goal set up maybe, and some soccer. The night I arrived in Stalig Luft, we were very hungry, and we had these little chunks of bread. And I was trying to cut the bread, and I cut my hand here. So I had to have stitches made in that. It was memorable, because it seemed like it took forever to heal. We were out playing soccer, trying to play soccer in the cold weather, and this thing just kept throbbing all the time. Just one of the other little irritation of poor medical care, I guess. It did finally heal. Let’s see, I’m not sure of exactly how much detail I should go into.
ST: Whatever you’d like.
MS: We had our own, obviously, our own military organization in the camp. We had a chaplain, who was first the Church of England, I believe. He was sent home, and we had a South African Episcopal, no Catholic chaplain, I believe. And we had church service occasionally, and that was good. We enjoyed that. I appreciate that very much. As time went on, the ingenuity of some of these people was really, really amazing. They formed a band called the Round-the-benders – got some instruments from the YMCA and had a great band, playing Glen Miller music and some of that great music of that time. We had a dramatic group, the Table Top Thespians that performed – put the tables together in the mess hall, and that was our stage. That’s where they got their name. They performed theatrical productions and they were very good. On July 4th, 1944, we had a great gathering of our group. Colonel Byerly, who was then our CO, gave a resolving patriotic speech. We were forbidden to sing any patriotic songs, but we all started singing them, and they couldn’t stop us. So we had a great, encouraging, patriotic July 4th celebration together. In fact, I have a picture of that in one of the books I have. Christmastime 1944 was really, really a bad time, because we had not had Red Cross parcels, and we were very – had a lot of problems with food, which we did all through our stay. But somehow at Christmas time they found a few Red Cross parcels and they gave each man and eighth or a ninth of a parcel. It was supposed to be one man per parcel per week. Anyway, each one got a little tiny portion of a Red Cross parcel. They had one portion left over, so we had a drawing, and I was the one who won that drawing. So I got a little extra food – prunes or something. I think it was prunes. So those of us in my group whipped up some prune juice with some powdered milk that we had. Prune whip, I guess they call it. And we ate that, and we got so sick. It was just so rich; we learned our lesson (chuckling). Food, sometimes, is not always the best remedy for what ails you. Let’s see.
ST: ________________ liberated? ______________ heard your story.
MS: Yeah, let’s get to that. The Russians liberated us on the night of April 30th. They got so close we could hear the firing. We had been out digging foxholes out in our compound. They told us to do that just in case. We never knew what was going to happen, you know. But apparently the night of April 30th, Colonel _________________, our CO, met with the German CO and he said, “We’re leaving. We’re going to take you out of here.” And ________________ said, “We’re not moving. We’re not going anywhere.” So the German CO said, “Well, we’re not going to have any bloodshed.” So, he took all of his people and guards and everything and left. So when we woke up on the morning of May 1st with empty guard towers and the Germans had just disappeared. Our commanding officers took over, and maintained the camp much as it was in the sense that we all stayed right there until the Russians arrived physically in a day or so. When they came, they just, they were very, very wild and rowdy. The first thing they wanted to do was tear down all the fences. So they tore down all the barb wire fences, and just let everybody loose. And I understand quite a number of the POW’s left the camp and went on their own toward the east to try to join up with our, with the Allied forces. But most of us stayed. And that was what we were ordered to do. Many did not follow those orders. But nobody really, I guess, cared particularly. Some of us – I was one of the group – that was led out to the airfield to see that it was safe – check it out, see what was there, what the equipment was, check the runways for mines in preparation for evacuation. We were out there for several days. And it was the middle of May, I think, about two weeks before finally the Air Force flew some B-17’s into that airfield and evacuated our people. It took several days, I think, and many, many planes – loaded them up. We were some of the last to leave Barth by air. There was a story about one of the prisoners. We had some famous people there – you’ve probably heard of them. Colonel Zimky; Gabreski, Frances Gabreski was there; Red Morgan, Medal of Honor winner was one of the POW’s. There are some others that I’ve probably have overlooked. But one of the prisoners was Lowell Bennett, who was an INS news correspondent who was flying for purposes of whatever he did, and was shot down and captured. He wrote an article –several articles – I have some of them. In one of them, he describes how, when this camp was liberated, we captured occupied 500 miles of German territory. We liberated three prison camps. We captured a bunch of German military people. We captured the airfield. We captured the weapons depot there. I mean it sounded like we were just out in force as a big army, you know, just occupying Germany. The fact is, none of that happened (chuckle). I don’t know where he got all that stuff. As far as I know, none of it happened. All we did was went out to the airfield. It was abandoned. There wasn’t anyone there. We didn’t capture it. We just went out there and took over and prepared it for evacuation. But that was one of the amazing things that – the stories sometimes get pretty wild. Anyway, we were flown into a de-lousing camp somewhere – I don’t know where. All I remember about it is they took us out, ran us through a tent, took all our clothes off, and ran us through this de-lousing procedure. Then they took us to Camp Lucky Strike. And I was there several weeks. We had an option – there was such a backlog I guess – we were just one of thousands of people going back to the states. They gave us an option. We could go to Paris, or we could go to England. A friend of mine knew some people at the base, this base in England. So we went to England and spent a few days there. We were, ultimately went down to London, and then were put on – there were about five of us, six of us – put on an LST – Landing Ship Tank – a five hundred foot boat with about a five foot draft, just like a raft almost. And we came back to the states, and it was, the ocean was very, very rough. All of us, including some of the crew – I was sick the whole time, from the time we left land until we got to Hampton Roads, Virginia. I mean I just wished I could die, it was so bad. Nothing worse than seasickness. Anyway, we got back to Hampton Roads POE – Port of Embarkation – that’s where we were processed there. From there I went to, was sent to Fort Snelling, because that was the closest military base to my home. And then was sent to where I live – Mason City, Iowa – for a 60 day delay enroute to report back for, I suppose, further processing and being sent to Japan. That’s what we all fully expected. But during that 60 days, the two bombs were dropped – the two atom bombs were dropped. The war ended, so we went back to San Antonio, was processed there for a couple of months. It always takes the military forever to get anything done. Finally, was discharged in, I think, January of 1946. I was released from active duty, and stayed in the military reserves for ten years. _________________ resigned from the military. So that’s the story. There’s a lot more detail, but that’s probably the essence of it.
ST: Mr. Spencer, thank you then.