Keith Murray
95TH BOMB GROUP (H)
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2008 REUNION TUCSON, AZ
KEITH MURRAY
April 11, 2008
Interviewer: We are in Tucson, Arizona. It is April 11, 2008
I: What is your name?
KM: Keith Murray.
I: What were your dates of service with the Army-Air Corps, approximately?
KM: I went in the Army January 28, 1940 or 1939 …
I: What dates were you in the 95th?
KM: I don’t remember.
I: Does it say in there? We have Keith’s scrapbook here. In which squadron did you serve?
KM: 335th.
I: What was your job with the 95th?
KM: I was the squadron bombardier.
I: Do you remember other crew members or your pilot?
KM: McKnight was my first pilot. When we got down to Florida, he was gone on
account of ulcers, and I didn’t have a pilot. I didn’t have any pilot from there on, because they took…the other pilot’s name was Fred. I went over with another fella just riding, I was just lost….
I: Just lost getting to…?
KM: I didn’t have any pilot or any squadron, anything.
I: That was when you were in Florida?
KM: That was when I got all the way over, in Horham. The second mission I got shot in the eye, right here, and my eyeball came out through a hole. They put me in the hospital for 3 months, in the second evacuation hospital. When I got out I flew with another…just subbed in. Whatever mission it was, I didn’t have a regular crew.
I: You were substituted in?
KM: I was substituted in. The last time I got on, the one I got shot down, everyone else was second lieutenant but me. I was the only one with combat experience. My pilot called the navigator and said “Give me a course for home” they turned 180 degrees when it’s 12 o’clock I’m going son-of-a-bitch _________. So I went back up our top engineer was afraid to jump. So I pulled him down to the escape hatch and shoved him off then I jumped. I was the next one out, the rest of them all afterwards. I fell for about 9 minutes free-fall without pulling the ripcord. You just plain fall and fall and fall and fall and fall, until you get down to about 13,000 feet then you pull the ripcord, the parachute opens up. When I got down to the ground, a bunch of women came over and I gave them my parachute. They wanted that to make dresses and stuff out of. I went up to an old Napoleonic outer cave and a bunch of men were up there and they brought me some cognac and some wine. They were going to get me drunk. We looked out across the street and there were a bunch of Germans coming. So they took off and I hid back in a bunch of weeds. And the guy sat down, one of the German sat down about 4 feet away from me and he sat there. I couldn’t talk! I was afraid he would see me!
I: He didn’t see you?
KM: He didn’t see me. Finally he got up and walked off! I came out and we started walking. We would sleep in haystacks at night, for about 3 nights. They told me that I had a wedding ring and a high school ring and I tied them around my leg and they came loose and are sticking in a haystack somewhere in France.
I: You landed in the Pyrenees? Where did you land?
KM: I landed over near the Swiss Alps, not too far away from the coast of France. I got down there and then I passed out somewhere and I didn’t get my chute open fast enough and I jammed my legs. I passed out. A fellow picked me up and took me over to his house and I don’t know how long I stayed there, whether it was one day or a week. We rode bicycles about 5 miles over to another point and he’s over back to a haystack and said Wait here. He brought Hoover over, he was staying with a blacksmith and he identified me as American, B17. I went over to stay with him, and a couple of days later two fellows came down from Paris, and they were going to take me back up to Paris. We got about a block away from the house and he said Have you got any money? You won’t need any money from here on. You might just as well give it to the blacksmith, so we gave it to these two men. Come to find out they were just pocketing it. When we got up to Paris they shot both of them. They didn’t let anybody in the underground that they couldn’t trust. They said if he was stealing money, they would just shoot him. They shot both of them.
I: That’s scary!
KM: We got into Paris. We stayed there in Paris about two months. We lived with this lady that owned 5 cabarets. There were some others they were harboring too. And we called him Flak Happy Joe because he would sleep on the floor with the best looking women in France. We called him Flak Happy Joe. They caught him, they caught her, they threw her down three flights of stairs. They pulled her fingernails out with a pair of pliers, just pulled her fingernails out.
I: Why?
KM: To make her talk, where these other men, these other women were. We moved 5 times that night. We got down to the railroad station the next morning and they told us another fellow would come up from the southern edge we would meet with them and he was going down to fight with the French, free French. They made this one fellow they were good for 1942 and ours was 43. They said _____________ they just point to _____________ good for 43. We got back to the, this fellow, sure enough they get 77 of the papers and he says Right there it is! in English. We felt scattered, we figured he would catch him he said and handed back to him. He didn’t even recognize that he spoke to them in English. We got down to the Pyrenees and I had a pair of French shoes on and they had wood soles. And they started out in these blocks, just cut the soles off and I just had a pair of tops shoes. I went over the mountains barefoot. It was supposed to take us a day to get over the mountains. It took us 3 days. We ran into a snowstorm. You would think it was level and there would be snow on it and you would just fall into a hole! We finally got over the mountains. There were 22 other fellows with us and there was three of us made it. The rest of us froze to death. It took us that long to get over the mountains. Three days and three nights. We got down to a little country called “Swissance” just 10 miles long, a little country just 10 miles long. We stayed in there. They came down with a car that night and took us over into Spain. That was with the English we were escorted that far with the English. They took us over to the Americans and we were then with the Americans. We stayed at that time the men in Spain were more human than American. They hid us more in Spain, these women. We finally got down over in the American, over in the English, they flew us back up to England. Everyplace I went, this guy would come over and sit with me. Got to England, landed, got in a taxicab, came over he would get out someone would take his place. We got up to the 8th Air Force headquarters my squadron adjutant identified me as an American. This fellow come over and introduced me. He thought I was a spy. He thought I was a German trying to find how to get over the mountains. [laugh] He introduced himself.
The first thing they did was to send us to school to teach us how to escape. [laugh] We had already learned how to escape! We sat there and the wing commander, he was teaching us, and he said, You Americans, you think it will never happen to you? and I said Where the hell do you think we just came from? [laugh]
They had one fellow with a medical record, a young fellow that got shot down, an Englishman, he just took his money and went over to the train station and bought a ticket to Spain, and then rode and didn’t get caught at all! It took us 3 months to get over the Pyrenees!
Anyway you are considered an international spy. You couldn’t fly again because you were given information of enemy territory and you couldn’t fly again. You were confined to the continental United States.
Because you knew about the resistance. Because if you were caught again, they were afraid that they might torture you and get that information.
I was just useless. I might as well just get kicked out.
I: What did you do after that?
KM: I went to school and got to be a B-29 gunner, learned how to identify the gunnery system on a B-29. Each one of the guns would turn and fire and another one. I made an invention on B-29, I put a full action inside a 50 caliber machine gun, so instead of fire all the time, with the exception of this 50 caliber would hold us on the battery started firing. Captain sent one of my men to school, he came back and he got a promotion. I had a blot on my drawing, the drawing he went back with had the same blot on it. He got an invention…
I: He got the credit?
KM: He got a promotion and I didn’t. At that time we had a second Air Force headquarters that you couldn’t hang up on that until you got permission and I told him what I though of him. I went to San Antonio to a P2 school. I was going to be a PT officer. Prisoners of war could request their dates, so I requested Fort Wayne Indiana. Went up there, there was a Jewish fellow, he was the first, he got sent overseas he would just say a prayer in the gymnasium I would take all the men and we would go _____________.
I: How long were you overseas?
KM: Maybe until…I got sent back in December. I got back in time to get to Indiana for Christmas.
I: February 1941 is when you enlisted, or when you went in?
KM: It’s when I went in.
I: How long did it take you from when you parachuted out until you got to Spain and to the Americans?
KM: I think it was about 4 months.
I: And you were barefoot through the snow?
KM: I was barefoot through the snow.
I: Did you get frostbite?
KM: I got frostbite, but I wear socks all the time.
I: OK, so those insulate.
KM: At night, I sleep in bed and I have three sets of blankets over my feet. And I have an electric blanket turned on all the time at my house, because they just don’t get warm.
I: Are there any other memorable moments that you had at Horham that you can remember? Something fun or funny?
KM: McKnight sent me _____________ I was outranked a whole bunch!
I: You can tell us about Dave McKnight and his B17…
KM: At Denver, at Washington, when he got up there he got one of the engineers and he had them in a B17 and they looped.
I: And you were on the ground watching this?
KM: I didn’t watch them; I just know that they did. They weren’t supposed to loop a B17, but he did. He had gone on a mission over in England. He had erased his name so he wouldn’t get credit. As near as I could figure, he was supposed to be home at 25 missions. As near as I could figure, he had 72. Never got the Purple Heart. We would go on a mission, and he would sit up there with a camera, run around taking pictures. I would say Mac, get a goddamned gun! Shoot! [laugh] He never did.
I: Thank you so much for this interview. We really appreciate it.