Valgene Mathews

95th BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2002 REUNION         ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

RM:  Can you tell me your name please?

VM:  Valgene Mathews.

RM:  And the date?

VM:  September the 14th 2002.

RM:  And you were in the Army Air Corps for how long?

VM:  Well, active duty and reserve time 32 years.

RM:  Of that time, how long did you spend with the 95th Bomb Group?

VM:  Well over a year.

RM:  And you were in which squadron?

VM:  The 336th Squadron.

RM:  And your job with the 95th was?

VM:  Just a co-pilot.

RM:  Tell me when you went into the service.

VM:  I went into the service July 2nd of 1942.

RM:  And where was that?

VM:  At Jackson Barracks.

RM:  And where did you go to training.

VM:  Well, I went to start with - I went to Camp Crowder (sp?) before I was ever drafted and took the pilot’s exam, and then was drafted July that year, so they sent me to air mechanics school at Lincoln, Nebraska, and from there, I went to Buffalo, New York, to go through the Curtis Wright – they call it the P-40 specialist when they come out of there.  Then I went to – well, while I was up in Lincoln Nebraska I took the pilot’s exam and flunked it again.  So then, went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, ready to ship up overseas, and I saw on the bulletin board they had room for another pilot’s exam so I took it, and they had changed it, and I passed it then.  So I had to start all my cadet training then Southeast Training Command to Montgomery, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated Columbus, Mississippi.  And they told us down there if we wanted twin-engine fighters, we’d have to do twin-engine for advanced training.  Well, [NOT UNDERSTANDABLE] so instead of getting twin-engine fighters, they made co-pilots out of all of us that signed up that way.

RM:  And you were put in a crew then?

VM:  We went to Salt Lake City and that’s where we formed our crews.  Then, our crew went down to Dalhart, Texas, for our overseas training.  The crew is pretty bad then; we just had three or four months for overseas training, then we went to Kearney, Nebraska, and the B-17s were up there, except we didn’t fly one.  We come back and went over on the boat, and some other crews flew the B-17s over, I guess, cause we didn’t get to fly over, we had to go over on the darn boat.  And we got to England on D-Day – or we got to our base on D-Day, and then we saw all the planes coming back with the ropes and the stringers flying over.  But we had just got there to our group on D-Day.

RM:  Then when did you fly your first mission?

VM:  In the St. Lo bombing just about a week after that, and we thought it was low altitude, but it was 10,000 – we call that low altitude.

RM:  Was that a memorable mission?

VM:  Well, not really. You know, our first mission we thought was a ??? but we didn’t see anything, fighters or flak or nothing.  The second day, we bombed a little old railroad bridge over in France, and we didn’t have any opposition there.  But then the next two or three days, we went to Munich, Germany, and things changed as far as flak.  They didn’t…those 88s, they just put up a barrage; they didn’t track us as bad, but the air got so thick over Munich, you could not fly the airplane cause there was so much flak in it.  That’s the only place that we really went and dropped right in the center of the city – that’s the only place.  The rest of the time, we picked targets, you know, in the cities, railroad terminals, and oil, and that kind of stuff.

RM:  How many missions did you fly?

VM:  Thirty-five missions.  Finished January 19th 1945.

RM:  Any missions that were particularly memorable?

VM:  Well, one thing was kind of interesting.  We went on one of the shuttle runs ??? Russia – we flew one mission out of Russia, then Rumania, and really struck oil that day.   We did a big run that by the time we left, you could see the whole sky was black with all the oil we hit.  Then went back to Russia and the following day went to Italy, Foggia, Italy, dropped bombs on the way.  Then we got down there, they didn’t have any bombs for us.  There was a strike here in the States, and they didn’t send any bombs over.  But we got to go swimming in the Adriatic Sea; that was kind of interesting.  So we went back to England, and that was about the center of our missions.  It was kind of an interesting trip.

RM:  Did you have any close calls on any of these missions?

VM:  Well, I think the worst one was that I remember, you know, was over Hamburg.  Our three ship formations – one of them had a direct hit - he had blown up.  The second plane had two engines out, and we had one engine knocked out, but wasn’t a problem - we came back to England.  We had no problem really.  And the flak was real thick.  A few weeks later, we had another mission to Hamburg, and they come out of a cart rail – the Germans caught on later, but that particular mission, we got in - there was all this flak ahead of us.  I thought, boy, here we go again.  We got in there.  It was just a big “V” – the flak was on the side of us and underneath us, but we didn’t get a hit.  But I think the Germans finally caught up for that particular time that cart player was some kind of thing we had on the plane - it worked and nobody got a hit that day.  We thought that was great.

RM:  Did your crew stay together for most of the 35 missions?

VM:  We stayed all together.  We had the group commander with us once, and I flew the tail position.  Probably everybody should sit back there since you can see more sitting back there.  And then we had another gunner with us one time from another crew, but the rest of the time, we ??? a full mission.

RM:  Did you guys hang out together when you were in England when you were on the ground?

VM:  Well, pretty much.  We stayed in Quonset huts – officers of about three crews - the officers stayed in one tent and the airmen stayed in another one.  We pitched horseshoes together and so forth.  I’ve still got a silver dollar in my pocket that I found it on the ground pitching horseshoes in England, and I’ve carried it ever since.  Been a good luck coin to me.

RM:  Any funny stuff happen while you were at the base?

VM:  Well, while we was over there, for the 200th mission they closed the base down.  Glen Miller’s band was supposed to have been there, except he come up missing so he wasn’t there, but his substitute band was there.

RM:  Any other interesting things happen to you while you were in England?

VM:  Well, I remember our last mission, that’s when our army was surrounded in Bastogne, and so we went in, we were leading a three ship element attack that day, and the flak was right ahead of us, you know.  As soon as our bombs away, we did a right turn and we got out of there.  Our wing ??? if we got out of there, that’d be all, so we made it.  That’d be terrible to get shot down in the last five minutes, you know.

RM:  What was it like emotionally to finish those missions?

VM:  Well, when you say you’re not scared, you know, you are.  You have to be scared.  When the flak comes up, and you see it all in front of you, you’ve got to be scared.  We had that one mission, we did get a direct hit, we got just “sieve-it” - flak all over the plane, and they had to put in four new gas tanks and four new engines, nothing big, we just hit all over – just like a sieve.  I think that’s Regensburg, I’m not sure.  We had one – well, I guess we got hit sort of twice – on one instance; it’s kind of interesting to talk about.  A piece of flak come up through the nose of the plane, came up to the navigator’s flight suit, never touched him except come through his flight suit, and caught up and hit her rudder pedal on the plane and tore it loose, and it hit the pilot’s shoe, it tore it but it didn’t…and then the piece of flak stuck in the window.  We’ve still got it at home.  But the navigator said, “I’ve been hit.”  Well, I said, “Jack Cotner’s (sp?) been hit,” you know, and they thought that was me that said that, so they thought both the pilot’s had been hit, and they thought, “Well, who’s going to fly the plane home?”  We lucked out on that one, though.  And then, I had to fly it home from the right seat cause the rudder pedal was all knocked loose.

RM:  You didn’t have any trouble flying it home, did you?

VM:  No, no, no.  Another time, the ball turret gunner he just went out and burned his motor out on him, so he got up in the waist gun, and just as soon as he got up there, a piece of flak come up and hit his leg, and I got a picture at home.  Just his whole leg was blue, you know, but it hit flattened, and we tried to get him a purple heart, but they wouldn’t give him a purple heart cause no blood was drawn.  His whole leg was blue.

RM:  What did you do when you finished all 35 missions?

VM:  Well, I signed up for a P-51 weather ship, and you got a tour out of it.  They took the guns out of them strictly for speed.  I don’t think they ever lost one.  They go ahead of the formations and call back the weather and so forth.  But instead of getting that, they sent me over to Cambridge, England, and I flew navigators around in some kind of special training for three months.  That’s before I come home, so I didn’t get back to the States until ’45.  When I got back to the States, I just thought we’d re-crew the B-29s and go to the Pacific.  That’s what most of them were doing.  I got to Santa Ana, California, and I knew they was going to drop the Atomic Bomb, so when they said, “Do you want out?” I said, “Yes, I do.”  So I was home in July of ’45, before the war was over.  I couldn’t understand it.

RM:  Was it a good feeling to be home, though?

VM:  Yes, it was.  I was ready to get out.  Then I turned around and went back in, for another 25 years.  I was getting out of World War II, but as a reservist, I signed up for a two-week tour in a C-124, and I hauled two loads of cargo into Viet Nam, Tansun Nhut (sp?), and, well, I guess both loads went in there.  But I see them – they’re shooting at us all the way down.  Finally I said, “What am I doing here as a civilian?”  You know, I wasn’t on active duty except for two weeks active duty.  That was about as hazardous being in World War II.

RM:  Was it as scary as going through flak?

VM:  Well, not quite, but almost.  I had 4500 hours in a C-124 airplane – that was the old ??? and drop plane.

RM:  Anything else you want to tell us about being in England with the 95th?

VM:  Well, it’s a good experience.  We’d go off base and buy eggs so we’d have some fresh eggs before we went on missions at four or five in the morning.  They was better than those powdered eggs.  But I had quite a career.  Before I got out of the reserves, I commanded the 303rd military airlift squadron, so I got full colonel out of it before I retired, so I’m getting a good retirement.

RM:  That’s great.  Well, anything else to add?

VM:  No, I think that’s all.