William "Dub" Vandegriff and Ed Grant
95TH BOMB GROUP (H)
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2001 REUNION LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
KS: This is Karen Sayco for the Legacy Group Oral History Project at the Monte Carlo Casino. Sitting in are David Vandegriff and Ed Grant, Jr.
EG: Ed Grant III.
KS: Ed Grant III. Our guests today – William Vandegriff and Ed Grant. For the record, could you please both state your name?
DV: Dub Vandegriff.
EG: And Ed Grant.
KS: And we’re at the Monte Carlo Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 2nd, 2001. First of all, Ed, when did you join the Army/Air Corps and how old were you?
EG: I joined – I believe I was nineteen – and I joined, what I put down I think it was October 1942 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
KS: And Dub?
DV: I actually tried to join the US Naval Air Corps and I couldn’t seem to get a birth certificate. So I was drafted in June of 1943, and was not assigned to the Air Corps, to the Air Force, until probably around July, the middle of July, of that same year.
KS: Dub, would you give us some of your dates of service for the Army/Air Corps, and dates of service with the 95thBomb Group?
DV: I was assigned to the basic training unit #10 in Greensboro, North Carolina, which was a Army/Air Force base probably in July of 1943. We immediately were installed into a cadet-training program. Most of us, in the process of becoming pilots, the rest of us either a navigator or a bombardier or one of the other categories. We started on the training that they gave us there, which was actually Army basic training – just some Air Corps training. One of the major things I remember about our training there was that they taught us how to bail out of an airplane – put us up high in a tower, drop us in a sheet and let us see how we could land. And over a period of time, we learned how to survive that sort of ordeal very well. We also had been told that we were in the process of being sent to college, for some college training. Our class were some boys that were at the University of Pittsburgh up in Pennsylvania. It just so happened the Army had called – we didn’t realize – people in other areas, especially in the Infantry group. We were told our class would be disbanded and reassigned. My class, most of them went to the Infantry, and were famous for being the victims of the ___________________ assault. I just happened to be on the tail end of the alphabet in that shipment, and as an extra; I ended up going to radio school in Scott Field, Illinois. That was probably about two weeks later, which would have been in the neighborhood, let’s see, July, August, about September ’43. And I stayed there for a good six months, learning how to operate the type of radio gear that we’d use over there fighting, as well as to learn code. When I graduated from that class, I was made Corporal. And they sent me immediately to the gunnery school in Yuma, Arizona, where we were immediately channeled into the gunnery school program to learn how to fire all types of firearms, including small arm fire as well as 50-calibre machine guns. When we graduated from that class, I was made a Sergeant, a Staff Sergeant. And then they sent me to MacDill Air Force Base – this was probably in – when did we get together, do you remember?
EG: Yeah. About in – let’s see. That was in ’44 probably in what, August maybe?
DV: Something like that. So at that point, why, I picked up my crew commander – Edward Grant, Jr., and from there on it was just history. We were together with a crew-training daily, constantly. And when we were finished with our crew training, we were ordered to go to Hunter Field in Savannah, Georgia where we picked up a brand new B-17, as you recall. And had the privilege and obligation of flying that as a ferrying operation to get the plane to the European Theatre of Operation. We flew that across the North Atlantic route. It was a separate story altogether, trying to get that airplane off the ground in, what was it?
EG: Get it on the ground (chuckle).
DV: On the ground in Canada up there, and delivered to the depot where we were supposed to deliver that flight. After we finally got the plane to the British Isles and turned it over to the proper people, we were assigned to the 95th Bomb Group in Horham, England. And that’s where we started our combat series.
KS: About what were the dates of service with the 95th?
DV: Well, approximately – let’s see, we left the week after, a couple of days after Christmas of 1944 from Hunter Field. And it took us probably three weeks before we got to Horham, which would have been the latter part of January. And from that time until May of ’45 we were assigned to the 95th Bomb Group in Horham, England.
KS: And which unit, squadron were you in?
DV: We were in the 412th Bomb Squadron.
KS: Now Ed, could you tell us some of your basic dates of service, and your ______________ to when you caught up with Dub?
EG: You’re asking old people for dates, and that’s pretty tough. I was in Davidson College as a sophomore in 1942, having gone in, what, September I guess of my sophomore year. And they began at that time to draft people out of school. I did not want to be a walking soldier, and I thought being a flyer would suit me fine. And so about half of my little fraternity went over to Charlotte and volunteered for the Air Corps – Army/Air Corps – the cadet program, I guess they called it. And I was fortunate enough to pass my test – I could see, and stand up, and my knee jerked when I hit it. So I was inducted then in Charlotte in ’42. My – the old Sergeant said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I’d like to get a Ph.D. in chemistry. And he said, “What year are you?” And I said, “I’m a sophomore.” And so he got his book and he went through for chemistry – Bachelor’s, Masters, and Ph.D. He said, “That takes seven years.” And I said, “Yeah, I understand that.” So he said, “You’re deferred then for six years.” Damn. So I left. (Chuckle) And that was in, must have been October I guess, or November. And they notified me within three weeks that I was to report in Richmond, Virginia, which was my home then – January 3rd. And that was the shortest seven years I ever lived. I reported in then, went to Miami Beach to learn which was my right foot and my left foot. Then we went to the CTD, which you referred to – Civilian Training Detachment. They wanted to be sure everybody could read and write. And so I went to western Missouri College – University, I guess it was – in Cleveland. Everybody who had any college time was let out quickly. We were supposed to be there for four months, I believe, or five. But I had a little college, so I only stayed there about a month. And then went – I guess we went from there to Nashville to the transportation center. And you came out of there having been classified either a trainee as a pilot, or a bombardier, or a navigator. And then we were assigned from there. That’s where I saw a great many grown men cry. They came in, having gotten that far, and their eyes didn’t work, or they couldn’t coordinate. And I never saw as many young men come out in, really in tears because they had washed them back. And some they put back into the gunnery school. Some couldn’t even see that well. Anyway, I went from there then to primary training down in Florida, and basic training in – no, I went to Maxwell Field, I guess, for preflight in Montgomery, Alabama. From there I went to Florida for preflight, called primary; back to Montgomery at ______________ Field for basic, and then went to Georgia to – I don’t remember that field – Turner Field, in Georgia where I graduated and got my commission and got my wings.
KS: And Dub, and you arrived in late January of ’45 with this brand new airplane at Horham.
EG: We left the states in late December of ’44. And – do you want to tell them about that trip from Iceland to Scotland? Do you remember that terrible trip?
DV: Oh yes. We had some problems with the B-17 that we were trying to fly over. Ed was up front, and he knows the story better than I do, but we had to land off the coast of – I think it was off the coast of Eire, wasn’t it?
EG: Off the coast of Scotland.
DV: Scotland. In a snowstorm. We’d never been there before, and you couldn’t see the runway, yet they wanted us – Ed and our co-pilot – to land that plane on the runway so they could work on it. It had problems with the engines, or something.
EG: One engine went out on the way from Iceland to…
DV: And we had some problems with the radio. We had a genius at the controls of the plane, and he told them, if I remember correctly, “Look, get a jeep or something and run some tracks down through that runway – the middle of the runway – so we know where the runway is.
EG: Solid snow, everywhere.
DV: We had what, about one best effort try, or we were in the drink, or something to that effect. We can describe…
EG: You left out the most important thing. Between Iceland and Scotland, the remains of the Gulf Stream flow north, and they’re warm. And the air is cold as thunder. And so you had this warm wet air coming off the sea. And it forms what you call towering cumulous. And these were solid clouds – looked like thunderheads, but they weren’t. They were just cumulous clouds, you know, that billowy kind? And when we got up to about 22 or 23 thousand feet, you crossed over the top of that thing. And we got up there and lost #3 engine. It just refused to continue to run. So we couldn’t keep our altitude. At that altitude, you needed all four engines. And there was nothing to do but to dive into that soup, which about shook us all to death. That was the worst ride in the world. The airplane was just about to – vertical and up and down currents. And we were in the thing, and we didn’t know where we were. We had no radar. And so continually, _____________________ get close to when we land in Scotland. And when it got close, I began to call to see if I could get anybody to answer, and did get an answer in the little Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides – the northwest coast of Scotland. There was a little town of – well, I’ll tell you in a minute. Anyway, there was an airbase there – RAF field there. And they had Halifax bomb groups there, remember? And they were raiding the German shipping north of there. And – Scalway, Scalway was the name of the town. And I got an answer from them. They said, “The weather here is very bad. We have a 200-foot ceiling.” And there are many antennas that stick up over 200 feet. So he said, “Let me get you in touch with a man. Hold by at stand by, and I’ll have him call you.” And in two or three minutes, this fella called – he had a Scottish accent. And he was in one of the early, early radar stations. Remember radar was originated in Scotland, and they were just as advanced as anyone. And he said continue to fly – he gave me a heading – and he said, “Continue to fly and I’ll tell you when I pick you up.” And maybe in twenty minutes or so he said, “Fly a triangle,” which was a normal recognition system. And I did. And he said, “I’ve got you.” He could recognize me. And he talked us in, in the clouds, between radio antennae, a little over 200 feet off the ground into this airbase. And as ________________ said, he lined me up. He said, “I think you’re lined up,” on his radar. And we couldn’t see anything but flat white sheet. They couldn’t get a jeep out fast enough. So there was not but one thing to do. I could – I went around one time, and came back and we, all of us had our fingers crossed – toes too, I guess. (garbled) And so we lined up on the right heading, and let down. And when I started to round out, I could see runway lights begin to flash past me. And I was afraid to look further over. I was afraid I was going to see another set. It turned out they were on the right, and we hit right in the middle of the runway. And that red-haired Scotsman saved all our lives. We would probably never have lived through that. We’d have ditched, or we would have crashed and landed because we had 200 feet of ceiling. That’s all it was. And it was over the whole area, north __________________________. So we owe our lives to somebody else.
KS: Did you meet that gentleman when you landed?
EG: You bet I went and found him. If it had been proper, I’d have kissed him. (Laughter) He was a grand young man.
KS: Great. Now, when did you fly your first mission from Horham?
EG: It had to be in January of 1945.
DV: The first mission was the city of Elm – E-l-m. I think the target was a railroad marshalling yard. In the briefing they told us the most likely places that we would hit flak, and the probability of being hit by fighters. Well, everything looked real good until we got over an uncharted flak area, and _______________________ unloaded on us. I don’t know if you remember this or not. I was sitting back in the radio room, and I heard this loud bang outside the airplane. And I thought, well, one of them must have hit pretty close and I heard a lot of ___________________________________________. I never thought much about that, but I just sat there and hoped that we’d make it through that. And as we went along on the course to the target, I noticed a ray of sunlight coming through the plane in a place there was no place for the sunlight to come through. And I was – mainly I sat up straight in my chair like this. At that particular time I was leaning over for some reason, like this. So I looked up above my head, whichever it was, and I saw a hole. And I looked down in the floor in the room – I heard a lot of ricocheting around in the radio room, but I didn’t want to get too involved in that. I looked down at my feet – I don’t know if you remember that, or knew about it – and there was a piece of shrapnel with my name on it. And if I had been sitting back just a little bit more upright in my chair, I would have been hit the first mission. You would have required the services of another radio operator.
EG: That’s right.
DV: But that wasn’t the end of it. We went on past that point where we flew over this _____________________________________ and we got hit by ME-102’s, I mean ME-109’s - two ME-109 fighters. I can remember it just as clear as day, looking out that window, and seeing those two guys coming straight at us. Do you remember that?
EG: I don’t forget those things.
DV: And what happened, back at that time of course, we didn’t have the fighters that they had in the early days. And that had to be two single, one – what do they call them – pilot with his wingman. And that’s all they sent up – probably all they had to send up ____________________________________. We had thirty-six bombers – three squadrons flying _______________________ come up to the top. Well, they got shot down, and I think some of our people in the lower group got shot up pretty bad as they made their first and only pass. That first target – there are some other things I won’t mention. I’ll let him talk about that, that happened. Because when we lined up on the target, the _________________ we had in the nose of the ship were supposed to drop the bombs. We called back on the radio, “Bombs away,” and I opened my door, and the bombs didn’t drop. And so I reported to Ed that the bombs were not gone, and he said, “Try again.” So we tried again, and nothing happened. This was the first mission, now. So, I think you called the mission commander, and he ordered you to leave the formation and jettison the bombs.
EG: Cargo them out.
DV: Yeah, cargo them out. So he ordered me immediately to go back into the bomb bay, with the bomb bay doors open – no protection – and in the wide open spaces, one at a time, jettison those bombs, which we did.
KS: I’ve got to ask you, Ed, as the pilot, you and the copilot went to the briefing and found out what the target was for the day. Now, it was my understanding that the first mission was usually a milk run, maybe over France or something, just to get your first run. How is that you drew a real target on the first mission?
EG: There was no discrimination. It didn’t matter if it was your first mission, or your last one, or your middle one. You went where the group went. And it just so happened that's where the group was going. We had no choice.
DV: By the way, I noticed – I’m sure you’re not aware of this – but I noticed that same plane, on two other separate missions had the same exact problem – the bombs would not release on the target at the proper time.
EG: They may not have washed – they had to wash the bomb shackles in gasoline. If they lubricated them, it got so cold, that they’d freeze. They’d wash them off in gasoline, and if they failed to wash them – the final wash in gasoline – they’d freeze up and you couldn’t – they would not ______________________. We had to assume that somebody had lubricated the fool things.
KS: Ed, your first mission was very memorable. Were there some other memorable missions?
EG: Yeah, I guess so. One of the things that sticks with me is – Dub may had seen it, though he was restricted in his ability to look out. We were in one element – an element was four airplanes. And the element immediately to our right – to our right, or to our left, I forgot – anyway, we were in heavy flak, and one of the airplanes just, as you say, peeled out. He just pulled off like this. And he hadn’t gone, I don’t know, he hadn’t gone a mile - disappeared - blew all to pieces. When you were in a war – yeah. Every time an airplane would go down, everybody tried to count parachutes, and determine where the airplane was, so we could report back.
KS: Did you ever have any emergency landings, or anything like that?
EG: One time we had – there was an old airplane that was the last choice of everybody – I’m not sure that it was an F maybe. I don’t think it was even a G. And it was called “Blues and Reich” – R-e-i-c-h. And everybody cussed it. It did not have automatic manifold pressure control; that is for the superchargers. And so they would constantly run away. You know, they’d get up terrific speed, and when you were taking off, the co-pilot spent his whole time trying to keep those things from getting up to 20,000 RPM or something, and disintegrating. Anyhow, we got the thing off the ground, and we made our bomb run. And in the process, there is a tank in the two engine compartments where the wheels come up. And that tank is an oil tank – a hydraulic oil tank. And in order that you don’t lose all your hydraulic oil if you get a hole in it, they put a standpipe in it, up in the middle. And we got a piece of flak that day that went through the tank and through the standpipe. So, immediately, we lost all pressure in that engine – an engine will run 30 seconds maybe without oil pressure. And so we had to push the ________________ button, and push the pump all the way down. And nothing happened. And that oil that was supposed to be in that standpipe was the emergency oil to feather your engine. And we didn’t have any. As a result, the engine began what you call “windmilling.” We had to cut off the source. But you can’t stop it because the prop goes into full lull position, and it just windmills. And that is as much resistance to movement as a piece of plywood that size would have been. So it severely restricts your airspeed. And we were only cruising about 260, as I recall, and I think we were down to 180 maybe, or so with that thing windmilling. And the problem was that, as they windmill like that, the engines will tend to set up – that is they have no lubrication in them. So all moving parts now are going dry. And as we watched the thing, it began to slow down. And you’re sitting at it, looking at the end of it, right here. And it got going slower and slower, and all of a sudden it stopped. It froze. And when it did, there was a terrible snap – you remember that? And the main shaft in the engine, that connects the engine to the propeller, snapped. And so then it began to windmill really, because it had nothing except the prop to turn. And it began to vibrate so badly that I was fearful – __________________ - the dome, the front of the engine was a piece of cast iron, cast steel – sometimes they would break, and you could pull the airplane into a stall, and the prop would fly off – just break loose and fly off and leave you alone. And I think I must have pulled that thing into a stall half a dozen times, trying to get that prop to fly off, and it wouldn’t. And we ended up then, with that and the weather deteriorating in England, and our inability to get reasonable airspeed even, I had to make the decision that we were going to put it down in France. And they had a little air base at a town whose name I do not know. I wish we knew.
DV: L_____, France.
EG: Was it L_______?
DV: L_____. Actually, we went to L______, but I think we landed in _________________.
EG: No, we weren’t. We were in France.
DV: It was near the town of L_________.
EG: Near L_________, okay. I know the town. I lived in France for a year. Anyhow.
DV: I have some pictures of young boys that we gave chewing gum to. They wouldn’t chew.
EG: Yeah. I’ve got another story, and I don’t think you were there. Anyway, we landed there without problems. They directed us in, and our navigator, a ______________ young fellow named __________________________, gave me a heading, we got in, landed. And the thing just kept turning. And finally, while we were taxiing, it finally stopped. And that was the story of our day in France.
DV: I remember another thing about that mission, too.
EG: Tell me.
DV: You know, I remember the exact form you had to leave the formation, or at the formation. But we were told that we would have fighter support to come and come after us. Did you ever see any fighter support?
EG: Yeah, we did.
DV: Did you.
EG: They had seen us leave, and I think probably the lead plane – I didn’t do it, because we were on radio silence. You weren’t supposed to use the radio – the Germans could zero in on you. And a fellow named Matt – what was that tail gunner’s name, last name?
DV: Matlack.
EG: Matlack, was the tail gunner. And we were flying by ourselves. We couldn’t keep up of course; we were very low speed. And Floyd said, “Tail gunner to pilot.” He said, “I see two contrails high and to the right.” And so we got everybody getting those guns pointed at those contrails. We didn’t know who they were. And if they came down, they were smart enough to get down low, way off to one side. They were two P-51’s. And I can remember telling the fellas, don’t take the sight off their eyeballs, because the Germans occasionally would get wrecked airplanes and rebuild them, and come up in our airplanes and sidle in close to you and shoot you down. And we didn’t want any of that. And so all the gunners on one side, and all the gunners on the other had these fellas. And they weren’t – I think they weren’t 100 feet off the wing. They were right there. So, evidently American – took their hat off and waved it, and all sorts of stuff.
DV: Took us out of the guns.
EG: They got us out of the combat zone.
KS: Now…
EG: Just one more thing.
KS: How did you get back to England?
EG: Oh, they flew us back. They took us back in an old stagger wing Beech, which you don’t know. It was a Beech craft - single engine Beech craft.
DV: Did they take us all at the same time? I don’t recall that.
EG: I went back in a stagger wing Beech. I think there were just four of us in that. And how the rest of you got back to Horham, I’m not sure. I don’t recall.
DV: We were walking around a little town that night. It had – the airport had been liberated literally less than ten days before. It was the biggest, filthiest mess you ever saw. And Ed Roustowski, our navigator, and somebody else – maybe Holcombe – and I walked into this little town. And there was a bar. And so we decided we’d go in and see what it looked like, and maybe have a glass of wine. We walked in, and the lady who ran the place was sitting on a stool up in the front – a high stool. And she had the worst looking head of bright red hair you ever saw in your life. She was a fright! And we learned from some other Americans that were in there, that they had reported her as a collaborator with the Germans. And the minute the Germans were gone, they took her out, stripped her, shaved every hair off her body. And she had taken the only thing she could get, which was a mop, and taken henna dye, and made a hairpiece out of it. That was the frightful looking thing that we saw in that little bar. You weren’t with us, were you?
EG: No, no.
DV: I remember Ed bought some perfume there to take home to his family. And that was the wildest experience I think I ever saw. (chuckle) I do remember being on that base. The fact that, the plane we had, for some reason or another, there was another plane that had to land there. He didn’t have too good a ________________ position. His wing went right into our nose.
EG: He was taxiing.
DV: He was taxiing. Taxied into our nose – big hole.
KS: Now where did you spend that night in France?
EG: There. In the camp.
KS: In the camp, okay.
EG: They had cleaned up enough of the toilet facilities to let us get in.
DV: We were extremely fortunate that that crew had been taken over and was available, because had we gone down that late in the war, we had a terrible thing to face if German citizens go a hold of us.
EG: Yeah, they were pitchforking people late in the war. The civilians had just had all the American bombs they could stand, and just went crazy. We were most fortunate.
KS: You’ve mentioned a few of your crewmembers. Are there any other of your crew that stands out in your…
EG: They all stood out. We had a marvelous crew. No man ever shrank. No man ever panicked. One incident that we know of, beside from the two of us, and this fella, who signed in here, we had an original co-pilot, who was very capable, I believe. But he showed up one morning having not slept, and smelled of beer. He loved to gamble – loved to play poker, and he’d played all night before a mission. And I wasn’t going to accept that. If something happened to me, and it could any second, I didn’t think he’d be able to handle it. So I called, and had another co-pilot brought out, and dropped him off the crew. And then this young fella named Curly, who is here, incidentally, but we can’t find him. He registered in the hotel. So he’s one member of the crew. He only flew, what, two or three missions with us, I guess, and the war was over.
DV: He helped us fly the plane back.
EG: Oh yeah. We brought it back
DV: _____________________________________, which we flew several missions in, and he and Ed flew the plane back to the states.
KS: Now you were flying – towards the end of the war, how many missions did you …
EG: Did you count? Nineteen?
DV: I think we actually had seventeen combat missions, and one mission where we were recalled – the mission where we went down and picked up some liberated some POW’s. Where did we bring them back to? Somewhere near Paris.
EG: In what was then the Charles – just named the Charles DeGaulle airport. We had a group of Frenchmen – I don’t know whether you’re interested, but there’s another story here. We picked up – they must have had about – we took a short crew because we need room coming back. And we went down – this was a sort of a prison camp. There was a prison section in it, where they had some of the walking dead. And I had little enough sense to walk down there and see it. And I immediately wished I never had. Of course it was covered up with our medical people, trying to keep these people from dying. But it was about four or five or six blocks away. And they would bring the fellas down. DDT had just been ___________ developed and was available. And these fellas were just absolutely lousy. They were Frenchmen that had been sent down there – kept them in relatively good health because they had to work the farms. And they were raising food for the German army, is what they were doing. And when they got them along side, their health officer came, just poured DDT on them, down in that, you know, under their shoulders, down their pants, in their shoes.
DV: They were covered with lice.
EG: Lice and fleas and everything known to man. But they were reasonably healthy. And I think we had nearly forty of those people.
DV: I think so.
EG: Everywhere a man could sit down, there was a man sitting down. And they were just as docile as though they had no mind. They had been living under these German prison restrictions. And when we got back, we flew to Paris – we knew some of these fellas had to be from Paris. And only Ed Rouslowski, the navigator, had ever had any French. He knew how to say Paris, you know? And so I circled, and kept the wing down so that the fellas could look out. And Ed kept calling to them and said, “Paris, Paris.” And not a soul moved. Not a soul moved. It wasn’t until later that I just figured that they were automatons at that time – they didn’t know who we were. We weren’t Germans, but they weren’t sure who we were or what we’d do to them. So we landed, and as they got off the airplane, do you remember the people greeting them were giving them a little tiny thing to attach to their lapel in the shape of a piece of barb wire. They offered me one, and I didn't take it. Now I wish I had it today.
KS: And this was at __________________ after that they had been – and so they must have been prisoners for probably four, maybe even five years.
EG: May well have been.
DV: Along that line, I don’t know if I ever told Ed about this, but one of the men that happened to be riding with us in the radio room handed me a book. The Red Cross gave them these – they were just little books that they could write or make notes in or write whatever they wanted to write in it. This was a _________________. I didn’t speak French, and he didn’t speak English. But he handed me that book, and opened the cover, and in sign language we did a little discussion there about what it was. It was a book that a ball turret gunner had written – poems about the way he had been shot down on his last mission, the place – it showed where it was. It didn’t give the name of it. It showed whose crew he was on, and the other crewmembers, and several other things that he had written about that, as well as his life as a POW. And he gave his name, and his rank, and some of the history of his life in that POW camp. This prisoner, ____________________
wanted me to try and find the man who was in the camp he was in also and had given it to him. He’d come by it somehow, and he wanted to see if I could give either to that man or his family. To this day I’ve never been able to find any member of his family. I came pretty close one time in Ohio. ________________________________. I still have the book
EG: And covered with lice.
DV: Inside and out. I’ve still got the lice too. (Laughter)
(David Vandegriff?): It had some very good drawings in it too. I mean somebody was trained as a sketch artist. ________________ planes, and other things. A lot of good drawings in there.
EG: Well I’ll be doggoned. I’d never heard that before. I’ll tell you one more coincidental thing. After I sold the business and retired in ’88, in ’89 I had to go to France. (Break in tape) So we went, and I had to go over and accomplish a “Due Diligence” because it was a purchase of this plant from Chevron, on the West Coast – who owned it. And to do a “Due Diligence” is to assure the buyer that everything the seller says is there, is there. You go over and verify. So I had taken about five or six people with me and had hired a law firm in Paris who had been highly recommended to me – all spoke English. One of them was and Englishman, an American. And when I took this group over – it was the second or third trip I’d been on, I guess – we met with them because we wanted to know each other if we’re going to work together. And they took us to supper – great big table. Maybe as big as this one – a little larger. And we were all sitting around talking, getting acquainted. And one fella asked me, he said, “Mr. Grant, have you ever been in France before?” And I said, “Yes, I’ve been here. I was here during the war.” And immediately they began to ask questions about it. And I said my first time to touch the ground in France was flying men out of Lintz, Austria – repatriated. And one of the young lawyers just absolutely froze. And he said, “My father was flown out of Lintz on a B-17 and repatriated.” We may have brought him. He said too, that’s interesting, that his father had gone to work that day in Paris and never came home. They had no idea where he was. He was a little boy at that time. But there was no notification, no nothing. He just disappeared. And they never knew where he was until they reported that he was alive – reported to his family he was alive down there in Lintz.
KS: Could you tell us a little bit about living on the base and what you did when you weren’t flying?
EG: What did we do when we weren’t flying?
DV: Well of course everybody had a bicycle. Did you have a bicycle?
EG: Oh yeah, sure. Everybody did.
DV: If you didn’t have a bicycle, you weren’t with the “in” group.
EG: ??
DV: It was a pretty good-sized base, so if you wanted to go anywhere, it was a long walk. And they had people selling the bicycles, you know.
EG: That’s right
DV: What was it? About $40…
EG: About 8 pounds, as I recall. Yeah.
DV: And so everybody used their bicycles to ride around on the base. If we were going to the mess hall, or if we were going into town – whatever we were doing, for whatever reason. And that was a unique thing because everybody just about had a bicycle. And when I got ready to leave, also I had a little __________________ that picked up my laundry every week. You see my father was in the laundry and dry cleaning business, and that was our family business. We had two large businesses – one in the city of Knoxville, Tennessee and one in the city of Chattanooga. So I was used to being clean and neat, you know, and well dressed. Although I never did get a commission. I made every effort to be just as sharp looking. I never did succeed to be as sharp looking as this guy.
EG: Oh yeah.
DV: He looked more like an Army/Air Corps pilot than anybody I ever saw.
EG: I said once before today that the truth’s not always in you. (Laughter)
DV: But anyhow, this young boy used to come over and pick up my laundry, and take them over to his mother, and his mother would clean them, press them, and bring them back to me. When we got ready to leave, you know we finally were told when we were going to fly out of there, he came by to pick up some laundry. And I gave him the bad news. I said, “Look, before you leave, I’ve got something I want to give you.” I says, “First of all I want you to tell your mother how much I appreciate what she did for me while we were over here.” And I said, “I’ve got a gift for you.” So I walked outside. And my bicycle was virtually new. I’d had it for five or six months. It still looked new. I really hadn’t banged it up or anything. I says, “I’m going to give you this bike.” “What? You’re going to give me the bicycle?” “Yes, that’s yours.” I says, “Now come on back inside. I want to show you something else I want you to give your mother.” You know how you went to the PX and you got all the rations your could get? I didn’t smoke, but I bought all the cigarettes they would sell me – a nickel a pack, they were better than money, you know? So I had soap, cigarettes – everything we could get.
EG: Candy bars.
DV: Lined up on a shelf – I don’t know how much of it there was. I got a big bag, and I says, “I want you to take all that down because I won’t need it anymore, and put it in the bag, and you take that and give it to your mother as a show of appreciation for what she did for us.” And he just broke down in tears and cried like a baby. Nobody had ever done that to him before. Aside message about that bicycle. I tried to sell that bike and get what I could out of it. The guy offered me 20 shillings for it.
EG: He didn’t.
DV: I says, “You’ve got to be kidding.” What would that be about?
EG: That would be a pound – in those days.
DV: I says, “There’s no way I’m going to sell that back to you” - It’s the same guy that sold it to me – “for 20 shillings.” So I says, “Rather than sell it to you for that, I’d give it away.” And that’s what I did. And that kid was delighted. You know, I tried to find him, and I think I did. Al Keeler, the Historian for the Group, had a picture of a young boy that he put in his book. And I think it was the same boy that used to come by and pick up my laundry, because he was in the 412th Squadron too. Even Griff Mumford asked me one day, he said, “Dub did you ever find out who your laundry boy was?” I said, “I think________________________.”
KS: You know, _________________________over the last ten years, none of you have ever claimed the term “hero” even though we feel you are. But can you recount for us any courageous acts that you saw or witnessed during the war?
EG: Honey, they were all around you all the time. We were so fortunate. We never had a man hurt.
DV: We had one that was almost hurt on the first mission, remember?
EG: Yeah, yeah.
DV: It wasn’t almost hurt. It was a – we had to replace a radio operator.
EG: I had a piece of flak that chief pulled out of the airplane that had come right in the front and tore up one of my instruments. And he dug it out for me. It was a piece of flak with my name on it too. And I have it today, yeah.
DV: Well my boys played Army/Air Corps a lot (garbled) and somehow some of my ribbons and wings have disappeared. And especially that little piece of flak that was about so big, that had my name on it. __________________________ number and name.
That was my number _____________________________________________________. We had some very close calls.
EG: __________________ your airplane would be full of holes, and if you happened to be in front of one of the holes, it could kill you. It could hurt you, or it could kill you. But we never had a man, never touched, with a bullet or with a piece of flak.
David Vandegriff: Can I ask you, as you all were flying missions, what was the most strenuous for you as a pilot?
EG: I guess the – for all of us, the pilot, and the co-pilot and ______________, the engineer could all look forward. And so did the navigator, who was in the nose – the big Plexiglas nose. And somebody usually _____________ who was designated to go up and hit the toggle button when he was told to, to drop the bombs. And often the Germans, instead of shooting at an airplane, just filled a spot in the air with flak. And you’d see it and it was just black with smoke. And of course on a bomb run, you fly straight and low, and at the same air speed, straight in. And the hardest thing I think for a number of people on the crew – Rouchowski particularly – our navigator – was seeing that out there and knowing we were going to fly into it. It was unnerving to some extent, but I was lucky because I was busy all the time. And Ed didn’t have anything to do but look at it. So as soon as he saw a barrage of flak, he’d immediately start navigating. And I’ve seen some of the navigational charts that he did…
DV: You could tell when he was in trouble.
EG: You could tell when he was in trouble because he was navigating. Doesn’t make any difference what air plan, but he was making, he was working on his maps. That was probably the most unnerving thing. That, and seeing other planes explode. That was terrible.
DV: I recall seeing one plane go down, and recall seeing one of the crewmembers – of course I don’t know which one it was – immediately bail out and pull the ripcord immediately, and what were we – twenty five, twenty six thousand feet in the air, and it was maybe 55 – 70 degrees below zero. He had to immediately become an ice cake, because he hit the ripcord immediately.
EG: Probably died of anoxia before he got down.
DV: I had always been told that if you had to bail out, you ____________ slowly – one thousand, two thousand. And when you get to two thousand, then you open your chute, because that guy had to freeze, or a fighter pilot, a German fighter pilot shot him. I’ll never forget seeing that.
EG: But you can die of lack of oxygen pretty quickly. And at that altitude, if you’re floating up there, those chutes drop you about 32 feet a second.
DV: But this poor guy, this poor kid, he pulled the ripcord, and I know. I never forgot that. I thought about that the rest of the whole mission. Not counting all the other things I had to do. We were hit a couple of times – I don’t know how well you remember that. And one time we had something come through our formation and made a terrible sound. Everybody said, “What in the hell was that?”
EG: A rocket airplane.
DV: Yeah, that was one of those rocket planes.
EG: Straight up, and then it came down like a falling leaf. And when it went through a formation, they generally would take a plane or two with them. They were terrible. They went so fast.
KS: I do want to get back, but how difficult was it physically and mentally to hold your plane in formation, because you know that was the key to success.
EG: Honey, you work so hard, because formation is a taxing operation. You were constantly manipulating engines, constantly moving the airplane. And the pilot is really very lucky. He is so involved with keeping that airplane where it belongs that you don’t have much time to think about anything else. You’re really just doing your job. Because if you didn’t, you could slide sideways and run into one of your wingmen. Or not paying attention and start being impossible to call. We had to hold that airplane steady so that our wingman and our tailman could keep in good close formation. You want to fly as close together as you could. So, when you’re busy, I guess when you’re busy you’re not afraid. You don’t have time for fear.
KS: Now getting back to a courageous act, and also possibly a humorous incident that you remember, either on a mission, or around the base.
DV: Well I’ve never forgotten _____________, our ball turret gunner _____________________ and he couldn’t get out. Of course the ball turret is right behind the radio room. Of course the ball turret gunner is in the same Quonset hut that I’m in. We sleep together; we eat together…
(Break in tape)
KS: I heard about those rockets that they had toward the end of the war.
??: That was not the V-1’s or V-2’s.
KS: A new jet…
EG: This was an airplane. It was really not a jet. It was a rocket. It had no landing gear on it. One pilot. It was a fighter plane that had a skid on it – it had no wheels. And it took off from a pre – either they dropped a set of wheels, or they took off on a vertical incline.
DV: They launched it.
EG: But when they poured the coal to it, it burned up all its fuel on its flight up. And they said it would go as high as 50,000 feet. Whether it did, I had no idea.
DV: They’ve got one in the 98th Air Force Museum in Savannah.
EG: Do they?
DV: You’ll see one. You’ll also see the M2-62 fighter jet. Side by side. A rocket ship, and it was a rocket engine in it. It was not the V-1, V-2, or V-3. That was what we call the intercontinental ballistic missile. But they were sharp and they had _____________.
EG: They had speed.
DV: Did you ever read about what one of the young generals in the German air corps said about the M2-62, that is their fighter jet? Hitler wouldn’t let them build it as fast as he wanted – as the German Air Force wanted them. He said if we had had enough of those M2-62’s, he said we could have blown the Eighth Air Force out of the sky, and they could have. So we were extremely fortunate that they didn’t have as many of those as they could have. Also that – I talked many a time with the P-51 fighters, who were our escorts at that time if you remember. You didn’t have a prayer of catching those guys. What sort of strategy did you have in combat? He says, the only strategy we could ever have. We would catch one, because they didn’t go full power all the time. They’d go full power, and coast a while, and go full power again and coast a while. And he said it was easy to catch them in one of those lapses, when they didn’t know we were around. Or wait until they ran out of fuel and had to land. Then we’d shoot them down as they went to land. But we had no defense against the 2-62. And of course we couldn’t hardly even see the rocket ship.
KS: To get back to your ball turret gunner.
DV: The ball turret gunner – yeah. He was a fiery little guy, and one of the things I always remember about him is he played blackjack until sometimes – I didn’t tell you this, but – maybe an hour or two before the mission. But he carried all the money in that barracks ____________ with him right straight to the post office and sent it all home. If he won it, nobody ever got a chance to win any of it back. If you won some from him, you just won that night. I learned to gamble. I used to try to shoot dice with him. I never really put any time to it. But that kid, he must have had a fortune by the time he got back home. When he got trapped in that ball turret, and couldn’t get out of there, I was the first one back there to him. Do you know how big that waist gunner was? He was a lineman on the PTU football team, and in fact he was the captain of the PTU football team. That _______________ was out there. He didn’t know anything about anything. He was just a big guy who was strong and healthy, and I was glad he was there. He was my bodyguard, if I ever went into Paris, I’d make sure ________________ went with me. But anyhow, that kid got trapped in that ball turret gunner, and it wouldn’t move – the ball turret – it would not move. He started panicking. And I got on the intercom and talked with him. Got back to where the ball turret was, and started talking to him through it. He was just panicking something awful, because his guns were pointing straight down. And we were getting ready to peal off on the final approach after our mission. And I had talked to him; ________________ had talked to him. Cranking that thing, because you can move it by hand. It’s very slow. We didn’t have much time to get him out of there. It would ____________________ is all if we hadn’t got him out of there. We finally got him out, and he told me, he says, “Dub, I’ll never get in that ball turret again.” Well it took me two days to talk him back into staying on the crew, because he was going, said that he was going off the crew.
EG: One time we had our oxygen system shot, and lost oxygen pressure and altitude. And we had to make an emergency descent to get back down to where there was enough air pressure to be able to breathe. And do you remember that he stayed in that ball turret? We were still in combat zone. And he stayed in that ball turret, and it evidently blew out one of his eardrums, because he was, his whole side was covered in blood when he came out of that ball turret. And he never said a word.
DV: He was a tough little guy.
EG: He sure was.
DV: He was the only one who ever came back to see me after the war was over.
EG: Is that right?
DV: He walked in there one day. I’d just got married a short time after that. He came walking into the apartment we had. Just out of the clear blue sky he called me, and said I’m in town and coming by to see you. I think that was just his way of showing me that he appreciated the fact that we didn’t leave him in there to his own fate.
KS: What was your homecoming like? When did you get home, and what was it like?
EG: Well, we got home in what, June? Late June of ’45. But my homecoming was interesting because he’d been born in the process. He was born when I was in England. And so when I got home, Ed, my wife and my baby, Ed, were living with my parents in _______________, Virginia. And the first thing I saw was this little old tiny kid (chuckle). He was a mighty cute little boy. It was a fine homecoming. And I guess we had, what, 30 days?
DV: 30 days.
EG: Yeah
DV: Well I don’t know about you, but they ordered me, after the 30 days was up, to report to Sioux Fall, South Dakota, to start training in the B-29. You know where we were heading then. I believe you had a little different assignment. I don’t know what yours was.
EG: I went from Sioux Falls to Nebraska. And I was assigned as a, technically assigned as a B-29 trainer. And I’d never been in one. (Laughter) I had five students whose names and everything, and locations were already assigned to me, and they were due to get there about a week or ten days after I got there. Oh, that was a bad week or ten days. And just about that time – I guess at that time – VJ Day came along. And everything – all 29’s were shut down. There was no need for them. Seventeen’s had already been shut down, and they were beginning to gather them out in the dessert, you know, by the thousands, by the thousands.
KS: And Dub, how about your homecoming?
DV: Well, my homecoming was hilarious. My family was so thrilled to see me. If you remember, they drove from Knoxville across the mountain to Savannah, to see me off. I don’t remember how they found out that we were getting ready to fly overseas into combat. My father, he had connections. He found out somehow. But I didn’t tell him. And he and a couple of members of my family came over to see us off. Do you remember seeing them?
EG: No.
DV: I think I had to sneak around and go out…
EG: You probably did. You weren’t supposed to be off the base.
DV: …and see them for a little while. And my father was really – he just knew he’d never see me again. So when I came home, I was just treated like royalty. Anything I wanted – movies, or wanted to do – I got it. I had a wonderful reception from my family, from my church, from my high school friends that survived the war. Most of them weren’t home at the time, because the war still wasn’t over with Japan. But I had a wonderful reception, coming back from Europe. When I got out of the Air Force, of the service, it wasn’t too much of a reception because it was all moot then. The war was over. But generally speaking, my family and my friends, and the people in my neighborhood welcomed me home with open arms.
EG: They were mighty kind to all of us.
DV: Absolutely.
KS: How long have you been coming to these reunions, and what do you feel is the most important…
EG: This is my first one. I wouldn’t be here if Dub hadn’t found me. I guess you were the one that found my telephone number.
DavidV: Between the two of us.
DV: Yeah, my son David got on the Internet one time and said, “Let’s see how many Ed Grants we can find.” And we came up with a list of Ed Grants, and I noticed one of them was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I said, “That’s probably the most likely one.” He’s the first one I called, and immediately we made contact…
EG: You won’t believe that telephone conversation. I was sitting at my desk doing something. And I’d retired then. And this man’s voice says, “I’m trying to locate Ed Grant.” And I said, “Well, I’m Ed Grant.” And he said, “Have you ever flown a B-17?” I thought, that’s an outlandish question. So I said yes. And he said, “Have you ever been in the 95thHeavy Bombardment Group in England?” And I said yes, I was. He said, “I’m your radio operator.” ???
DV: He was looking for me, and I was looking for him. And I had moved, and he had moved. But it was a wonderful reunion.
KS: And how long have you been coming to the reunions?
DV: I didn’t know anything about the Association myself, because my father immediately engulfed me in the family business. And immediately I put a full year in the business, and then decided that I was going to go ahead and finish my education. And I started at the University of Tennessee. So I forgot all about the war. One of the best things that happened to me after the war was I was so busy, I started forgetting. And I didn’t think much more about the 95th Bomb Group after that. Later on as I sold out my business and got into other ventures and decided to retire, the last one of which of course was my wonderful service, working with the Hilton Hotel company. That was like working for the United Nations. And it was a very well run, very well organized. Had a wonderful, almost unbelievable history to become a part of. And got all the fringe benefits. If I wanted to go somewhere, all I had to do was ask. Even toured Europe – all our facilities. I found out about it when I decided to retire from the Hilton. And I thought, while we’re in Washington, I’ve got a good opportunity, two blocks from the White House, I think I’ll see if we can get enough guys together to have a reunion. I hadn’t heard of any reunion. Nobody ever mentioned a reunion to me. So at that time, President George W. Bush had just been elected – not George W., but George Bush – the older Bush – had just been elected, but had not been sworn in as the President of the United States. I called his – I thought, why don’t we get him – he’s an old Navy pilot – and see if he could come to our reunion, because he’s going to be here in town. So I called his advance crew. He said yes, I think he would be interested in speaking to your group. I said great. So I called the Air Force about the possibility of getting the Singing Sergeants and the Air Force Band to play for us. Yeah, we would be glad to do that. Then I got to thinking, well let’s see. I’ve got all the elements of a good reunion here. What am I going to do now to get all these guys together? I don’t know where they are. I haven’t seen them in years. I thought well, the best bet would be to go to the Air Force Association here, which is in Arlington, right outside of Washington. So I got on the phone and called. And the lady who answered the phone said, “Let me let you talk to our librarian.” So she did, and I asked about the 95th. “The 95th. The 95th. I think I’ve got something on them. Hold on a minute.” So she was gone for a few seconds, and came back and she said, “Yeah. Here, the 95th has been having reunions since so-and-so and so-and-so. I said, “You don’t mean it.” I said, “I’ve never heard a thing about it.” She gave me Dave Dorsey’s name – name and number – and I called Dave, and the rest is history. That was in ’89 when I was getting ready to retire. I’ve been to every reunion since.
DavidV: Did the President-elect ever attend the reunion then?
EG: He’s talking about the U.S. President.
DV: Oh, you mean – we never had the reunion. I _________________ all those plans when I saw the group was already organized and the Association was having the reunion. I told them about it, and offered to have a reunion there, but they said they’d already had a reunion in Washington, so I just forgot it. Very hard for me to find the guys. I was very happy to be a part and just to become a member and to attend the reunions there.
KS: I want to turn the table just for a minute for David and Ed, because you mentioned that you just went into the family business and put it all behind you, What was your experience growing up with your Dad. Did he talk about the war? You played war.
DavidV: Right. I was born a few years, you know, 13 years after the war, so my Dad had gone off it then. But occasionally, you know, I think he would tell us little bits and pieces about the war. I always remember the story about him having to bend over and ______________of flak. You know he told us that little story. I remember looking through all his records and medals, you know, and watching movies and thinking about it. It was always pretty emotional and _______________, just thinking about it. As you get older, you realize the history behind it, more than you really did when you were younger. And even now, I appreciate it every day, just a little more.
KS: Who was in the doghouse for removing the piece of flak?
DavidV: It was probably my older brother. He was more mischievous than I was. I just kind of tagged along and he would ______________________ and I was right behind him, you know.
KS: Ed, how about you growing up?
EdG: I do recall as a child seeing opening this velvet case with the silver and the gold flight wings and having this antiqued burnished finish. I guess they hadn’t been used in years. I recall being very impressed by that, as a child would be. But basically my Dad wanted to avoid talking about the war. And __________________ didn’t get the stories we’ve heard today. It’s a great function of a reunion to get the history. I myself believe, like Stephen Ambrose, that it’s a sacred obligation to talk and report about the terrible experiences so that you do recognize what the price of our freedoms are. The terrible price.
KS: Do you have anything else that you would like to add for the record, and then I have one final question to ask both of you.
EG: Yeah, one thing I’d like to say. That I think those of us who were privileged to be in the Air Corps, were probably the most privileged of all service people. We could come home to a warm bed, and dry. We got good food – well, it wasn’t good – it was hot. And it was nourishing. And I have friends who slept so long in the Black Forest that they froze their feet - _______black. A Lieutenant in the ground forces. And we never saw anything like that. Now the poor fellas that got shot down and lived – many of them did. But the majority of us didn’t. And I come back and I say we were the most privileged of all the people in the war, as a group. We were insulated from it. There was fighting on the ground. You could often see where the front lines were for the smoke and everything. We were 23 – 24,000 feet above it. And the flak – we talk about flak and how terrible it was. At the speed we were traveling they could only get in two bursts at us, unless we were in a terrible headwind. Your speed forward was such that you would get a burst when you came into their range. And then, as you moved out, they got one more burst. And then you were gone. So our chances of survival were, were terrifically good as compared to the folks who were on the ground who were getting shot at, run over, getting bombed. I feel like we were privileged people.
DV: Absolutely. I do too.
KS: Anything else you would like to add?
DV: Well, my closing thoughts about this whole thing is this. Ed, do you remember when you – I think we had delivered our liberated POW’s to the base. As I recall, you decided to give us sort of a tour of Paris. And we flew around, especially the Eiffel Tower, and I never forgot that. But the most important thing that I can remember is on the way down to pick those people up, we flew over some of the most divisive areas when I was a 19-year-old kid. We had virtually destroyed one whole country. And I’ve never forgotten it. The city of Cologne – there was just absolutely nothing left of it, except that beautiful cathedral. All down through the Rohr Valley, just destruction ___________ destruction. And I wasn’t prepared for anything like that. I was a kid.
EG: 22 years old maybe.
DV: I can only imagine what could happen to us now with the weapons of war that we have. It’s terrible.
KS: That dovetails into my final question. Could you recount where you were, and your reaction to Pearl Harbor, and then where you were and your reaction to 9/11/01?
EG: Pearl Harbor I was in Richmond, Virginia. Just a kid, just having been inducted and just going into the Air Force. Incidentally, my wife was in Pearl Harbor, and is one of the survivors. She and her brother, her stepfather was stationed there in charge of the Naval shipyard in Pearl when the Japanese attacked. And their houses got machine- gunned and all the rest. But I had no reaction to Pearl, except as everybody else had. Your hair stood on end, and you were, I guess, as unreasoning kids, you were ready to go kill every Japanese in the world. I can vividly recall my reaction and my feeling about the Japanese. I tried never to have such a revulsion with anybody else. It was a terrible feeling, really, to have that awful desire to rid the world of the Japanese. And as to this, in our home in Maine – we live in Maine in the summertime – when all this happened. How do you describe your reaction to a tragedy like that? It’s disbelief at first. It takes a while for it to soak in that it really, really happened. And then I guess, my next reaction had to be the great hope that the folks that are leading our nation today have the verve and the intelligence and the perseverance and the means to get this thing under control in the world, because you can’t put out a forest fire in one spot. It’ll burn somewhere else. And I’m terrified that the Americans – and we’re noted for it. We get tired of combat. We get tired of worry. We lose interest. Look at Viet Nam. Kids came home and had to apologize. And that just must not happen again. And I think that was the primary thing that bothered me, and still does terribly – that we’re going to have the stick-to-it-tiveness to do the job we’ve got to do. Because we’re not protecting just ourselves. This could happen to anybody – anybody in a developed nation. They seem to resent us so terribly.
KS: Dub, Pearl Harbor first, and …
DV: The way I got the news about Pearl Harbor. I was in my base _____________. Maybe this was why I was a radio operator instead of a pilot. Everybody had a little crystal set. And I had made one. I had had some electrical courses in high school. I guess it was junior high school. And I knew how to make a little – just to buy a crystal and to get a piece of wood and put some nails in it and connect some wires, get a cat whisker and a set of headsets, and that’s all you needed. You didn’t need any ____________. All you needed was an antenna. And I had just bought – Sears and Roebuck had just come out with a brand new push button radio. I had just bought it. I’d been working that summer. It was the first time I’d started working. And I had my own money, so I could buy whatever I wanted, and I bought that nice little push button – I forget the name of the Sears radio. It was a beauty. Everybody was just as jealous as they could be. But I enjoyed it. But I was down in the basement fiddling around with my crystal radio set, just listening to what you could pick up. You couldn’t turn it like a dial. You just picked around with that little whisker, and you picked up whatever you got – whatever frequency it happened to work on. Down the street from me there was a short wave radio operator. And he called himself the Little Red Rooster of Fountain City, Tennessee – that was the little section we lived in in the city of Knoxville. And I knew every time that he’d come in on, because he had the power to do it ________________ frequency. I had that little crystal set on. So he had just come in and had a message to somewhere off in China or someplace. I don’t know where it was. And went off the air. And then I got back on the radio station, local radio station, and that’s when they announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I couldn’t believe that I was hearing it on that little crystal set. ??_________________________________________
________________________. That was my first introduction. All by myself, down in the basement, just fiddling around with that little crystal set. That’s the way I got the news.
KS: Probably ran up and told your parents?
DV: Oh, I was just as excited as I could be. Shocked to begin with.
KS: Where were you when you heard about the World Trade Center?
DV: It’s quite a contrast. I just had been notified by my youngest son, who lives in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, that I had another new granddaughter. My wife and I were very excited to see her. So we waited until his wife had had her child. We immediately started making plans on going up there, and that’s what we did. We went to Ft. Wayne, Indiana to see our little granddaughter. Beautiful little doll if there ever was one. And then came back home. We stayed there for part of the weekend, through Sunday, and left on Monday, the 10th. A twelve-hour day – it’s about a twelve-hour drive for us, back to Washington, back to northern Virginia. ???___________________________________
________________________________. But the next morning we woke up, and my wife had an appointment at the Doctor’s office, so I took her down to the Doctor’s office. And just as we drove up to the Doctor’s office, apparently that’s when that first plane hit the tower – the first tower. Of course we didn’t know anything about it. By the time we got to the Doctor’s office, they had a TV set up in the main area – the lobby area. And it was already showing videos of it. And it was showing - by that time I guess the other plane had already hit too – it was showing videos of that plane actually running into the second. What a horror everybody felt, that was in that medical section, waiting on the Doctor, sitting there watching those video shots. We were all in shock. We knew that this country would never be the same. It would never have the privilege it had, because there were too many things that had to be done to protect us. We immediately began to realize we were going to have to share some of our feelings toward some of the people who were trying to protect us. It’s quite a challenge ahead ______________________________
KS: This is Karen Sayco with the Legacy Group. Sitting in is Dub Vandegriff, Jr. I’m sorry – David Vandegriff, Ed Grant III. We’ve been interviewing William “Dub” Vandegriff and Ed Grant Jr. at the Monte Carlo Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s been a real privilege. Thank you very much.