Ken Allebach WW2 Memories

WORLD WAR II – A PERSONAL RECKONING

By Kenneth Allebach

1919 – 2005

3rd Final Edit

December 2008
Doris J. Allebach
Contents



Draft Thoughts…………………………………………………………... i.
Foreword………………………………………………………………… ii.-vii.
A Note Of Explanation……………………………………..................... viii.
WW II – A Personal Reckoning…………………………………………1 - 48

Exhibits:
Exhibit 1 – Mission Log………………………………………………... 49
Exhibit 2 – Boeing B-17 E……………………………………………… 50
Exhibit 3 – Facts & Figures of B-17……………………………………. 51
Exhibit 4 – Navigators at Work……………………………………….... 52
Exhibit 5 – Diploma – 390th Bomb Group……………………………… 53
Exhibit 6 – as Aviation Cadet, Philadelphia Navy Yard, July 1941
                  and Army Air Corps  Cadet, 1942-43………………………. 54                            
Exhibit 7 – Crew B-17………………………………………………….. 55
Exhibit 8 – 1st LT. Kenneth Allebach…………………………………...56
Exhibit 9 – with brother Charley, in Oxford, England
               Ken, lower right in hut………………………………………57
Exhibit 10 – as college student in post-war years, 1947 ………………..58
Exhibit 11 – as Urban Renewal Director of White Plains, N.Y…………59



Draft Thoughts

This was written, in part probably, as an exercise in personal vanity, but mostly for my son, Fred, who seemed curious to know how that big war affected the life of his old man. I’m not sure that it will satisfy Fred’s curiosity any more than it has bloated my vanity. It’s neither particularly perceptive nor analytical. But, the more time I spend on it, the more I think I remember and the more I probe; that’s why there are so many longhand additions. This could be an endless process. Some of my recollections are indelible in my mind; some are, no doubt, mildly exaggerated, while others are likely to be understated. Some may be only what I now think I thought then. I did not keep either a personal journal nor any notes during my service tour and have no contemporary letters (as many others apparently do) to refer to, which is probably good since much of such stuff would probably be embarrassing to read today. Consequently, much of this memoir is an exercise in recollection and, as such, may or may not be accurate given our propensity to forget as to have an innocently selective memory. This is a second draft and was finished in October, 1989, as noted, and has been hanging around, for one reason or another, ever since. It ought to be typed over, but I’m not likely to go through this exercise a third time, if only because it’s too frustrating to type some sixty pages with two fingers on a 1940’s portable Smith-Corona.
It’s curious that I should wrap this draft up just as we are blasting away at a new enemy in yet another military adventure. Fighter pilots still seem to love their work and have the same thumbs-up, cocksure killer instincts as their forefathers in WW II, though this new batch seem to be well into their thirties, and have consistently higher ranks, and are dropping low-level bombs instead of protecting their big friends. The B-52s, not B-17s, are the big friends today and seem to disgorge endless strings of bombs, something like a Galapagos turtle laying eggs. At the end of this fracas, it will be interesting to learn if our new high-tech bombing techniques are any more effective than we were in Vietnam.

     KA - January 1991

i.

Foreword
During my stint in WWII, Lady Luck was my tail gunner, which is to say that she successfully guarded my tail from beginning to end. In the first place, she washed me out of the Naval Air Corp (for ground-looping my Stearman on the twenty hour solo check) just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, otherwise I would now probably be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after missing a carrier’s deck by a mile or so. I was subsequently discharged from the Navy, went home to the Pennsylvania Dutch country and immediately enlisted in the Army’s navigation cadet program where I spent over a year waiting for an opening in one of their navigation schools. Finally, in July 1943, I got my wings at San Marcos, Texas, and was sent to Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington, where our crew was formed and put in some 144 hours of flying time in    B–17s.
Our first pilot was Ralph (Red) Whitehead, a former University of Nebraska football tackle, who played in the Rose Bowl in 1942, if I remember correctly. (After the war, Red went with United Airlines, where he ultimately became a first pilot and stayed until his death from cancer in 1974.) Our co-pilot was Scott Gerhardt, from Pittsburg, PA. (Scott trained as a P-47 fighter pilot but apparently the Air Corp needed B-17 co-pilots and he was transferred accordingly. He was a typical hot fighter pilot and scared the hell out of all of us, buzzing local airfields with reckless abandon. He retired to Tampa, Florida where he owned a gas station and car repair shop. He died of a stroke on June 29, 2003.) Charles (Chuck) Lufkin, from Buckport, Maine, was our bombardier. He lost an eye in a bike accident and became retired bombardier; he died many years ago. Cecil Sharpe, from North Carolina, was our engineer and a dedicated soldier. He lived with his wife Laurie in Charlotte, NC, and both were unrelenting B-17 fans. Cecil died in the 1990’s. The rest of the crew are also dead: Ed Quigley, from Philadelphia, PA, the radio operator; Jimmy Mallos, from Missouri, and Bob Carlson, from Iowa, were in the waist; Bill Wright, from Phoenix, AZ was in the tail; and, the old man of the crew (born 1911), Clarence (Hink) Fisher, from West Virginia, was in the ball. (Kenneth Allebach the author of this story died June 9, 2005 in Medford, NJ, after a long career with governmental public service.)


ii.
In general, we were a motley bunch from all over the map, with neither a hero nor hotshot in the lot, though, from Air Corp records sent to me by Whitehead’s wife, Whitehead was rated at Geiger as an “above average officer and airplane commander” with “a well knit crew”; Lufkin was rated “above average – was bombardier instructor” and “squadron bombardier material”;
 Allebach was merely an “above average navigator” whose longest trip at that time was 1,000 miles. Other members of the crew were not rated. For reasons unknown.
We spent August and September, 1943, at Geiger and in early October were off on an apparently leisurely trip to England, with several stopovers and one last stateside leave. We arrived at the 390 Bombardment Group (H), 568th Squadron, near Framlingham, England, about mid-November, 1943 (which was about two and one-half years after I enlisted in the Navy and is in stark contrast to a then nineteen year old cousin of mine who was killed in action in the Battle of the Bulge less than a year after he was drafted.)
We flew our first mission on December 5, 1943, (two days less than two years after Pearl Harbor day), prior to which we had flown a dozen practice missions over England and the nearby North Sea. Although I have no personal recollection of it, Gerhardt has told me that early in our tour Whitehead was invited to take his crew into lead crew training. Always sensitive to his men’s wishes (and perhaps it was a Group policy), he put the matter to the gunners who apparently said no, they wanted to get their tour over with and not stretched out as lead crews had to do.
I have a copy of Fisher’s discharge, which states that he was wounded in action on 1/11/44. This was our mission to Brunswick and, unaccountably, neither Sharpe nor I remember this incident. Whenever or wherever it was, he apparently required lengthy medical treatment and received a disability discharge on 3/8/45. At which time, his physical condition was described as “poor”. Note that his tour ended after 1/11/44, which was his tenth mission.
Lufkin tangled with bramble bush on his bike and lost and eye sometime after 3/4/44, when he also disappears from our crew list, having flown twenty missions.
There was a noticeable time gap in my mission dates, between 1/14 and 2/20. On 1/15, I was hit in the leg with a thermite bomb fragment and was hospitalized from 1/15 to 1/21. During my recuperation, it appears that my crew flew two missions, as noted above, to Frankfurt, so they were two ahead of me and subsequently were required to fly one less mission when the length of the tour was increased.
iii.
 (Except Glass, Christian and Gerhardt, who missed four missions in the middle of our tour, all three had to fly thirty.) But my flight record shows that I did fly two hours, twenty minutes on 2/15 and 5 ½ hours on 2/16. These were not combat flights since the Group did not go out on either of these days. Were they just gently bringing me back to operational status and testing my leg at altitude? I believe that sometime between 1/21 and 2/14, our crew was sent to the flak house for some rest.
Of our original crew, one was killed in action and two were seriously wounded. Lufkin lost and eye in a bike accident and I was wounded at ground school. That’s five casualties out of ten men, with three combat related. Of the rest of the men I flew with, as nearly as I can read the record in the 390th  history, eleven were killed in action (Johns, Joyce, Goldinger, Wade, Means & Walker, plus: Swavel, Mann, Miller, O’Brien and Gibbs.) and one received the Purple Heart ( Higginbotham).
However, I’m not certain as to the accuracy of this record. (e.g. Goldinger is shown as KIA on 4/11/44, on which date he was the co-pilot on my last mission and I’m certain that he came back alive. That date must be wrong. I note too that Wade & Walker were killed just two days after my last mission.) Moreover, something like six of the men listed on my chart seem not to be listed in the 390th history roster, so that the total casualties may be altered accordingly.
Twenty-two and probably twenty-three, of my missions were in B-17G, numbered 42-39819, which I usually show as just #819. It was called the Anoxia Queen, named, I am told by Bill Wright, after Fisher passed out in the ball because of faulty oxygen supply early in our tour.
Note that on 3/19/44, we carried an observer. This was 1st Lt. John M. Green, who was a ground officer in the 568th. I have no idea why he went on this mission, nor where he was stationed on the ship, nor what his job was on the ground. He is pictured on page 178 in the 390th history and his face does seem familiar. Maybe we were drinking buddies, of which there were many, but I doubt that there were many ground troops who were lusting to go out on a combat mission; it wouldn’t make much sense.



iv.

In the chart of my last ten missions, the target on 4/10/44, was shown as Reims, France. That was the primary target and we flew down there but clouds obscured the target, so we flew up to northern Belgium and bombed an airfield in Maldegem. It was all that flying around over France that consumed five and one half hours.
           


KA, October 1991



Sources of missions and crew lists for Allebach’s combat tour

Lucky Bastard Diplomas. I have a copy of my own “diploma” and Sharpe & Glass sent me copies of theirs. I flew 28 missions, Sharpe 27, and Glass flew 30. These “diplomas” list target cities only.
Copies of mission Interrogation Reports, obtained by Tom Childers from original Air Force records. These reports list crew names, targets, dates, enemy action, crew observations & complaints, ect, but are often spotty in details.
A copy of my own flight record showing dates of flights, flying time, location, and type of aircraft flown from cadet training thru discharge. This record shows only hours and minutes flown, which is the source of that line on the chart.
The Story of the 390th Bomb Group, published in 1947, which is comprehensive history of the Group’s operations.

Information on the 4/1/44 mission to Ludwigshafen is incomplete; I have no interrogation report on that trip and previously considered it as an abort. But the Lucky Bastard Diplomas for Sharpe, Glass and me all show it as a mission and so it is listed. Whitehead also went out that day. (Actually they did. Info from 390th library, Tucson) Note that I flew to Ludwigshafen three times (12/30/43, 1/7/44 and 4/1/44); the first took 8 hours and 30 minutes, the second took 6 ¼ and the last took only 5 hours. On the second of these missions, Mallos was killed and Carlson seriously wounded, which may account, in part, for the shorter time; we may have left the formation early and poured it on to get Carlson tended to. Accordingly the 390the history (p.52), the 4/1/44 mission was recalled over Belgium because dense clouds made “formation flying impossible”. The brass may have decided to credit us with a mission if only because we survived hazardous flying conditions.
During my tour if my count is correct, I flew with 45 different men; six pilots, seven copilots, five bombardiers, three top turret gunners, five radio operators, fourteen ball gunners, ten waist gunners and four tail gunners. Note that Worthington flew co-pilot on 4/1 & pilot on 4/10& 4/20, 22, 24, 27 & 29.

vi.
A couple of the gunners switched positions; for example, Colvin flew both the ball and the tail, as did Daugherty complained that he had never been in the ball before and that was too big for that position. Motyka also flew in the ball and the waist. From this chart, it seems clear that the ball turret was troublesome spot and not very popular with the men. It would be interesting to learn how many men flew a complete tour in the ball.
I flew all of my first 20 missions with Whitehead, Sharpe, Quigley and Wright, by which time the five of us should have been reasonably comfortable together. All told, I flew 23 with Whitehead; twenty with Gerhardt; eighteen with Lufkin; 25 with Sharpe (Sharpe’s tour was 27, and he flew 2 missions, both to Frankfurt on 1/24 & 1/29/44, while I was out of action, which accounts for his 27.) I flew 23 with Quigley; ten with Mallos, Fisher & Carlson; and 25 with Wright. This seems like a pretty good record for our original crew.
Glass and Christian replaced Mallos and Carlson in the waist, and I flew 14 missions with Glass and 15 with Christian, who both logged more ours with us than our original waist gunners.

vii.

A Note Of Explanation

It is difficult to separate the various drafts of this paper. The 2nd draft, is dated December 1990, with additions January 1991. (One note says the 2nd draft was finished October 1989) These 2nd drafts contained handwritten corrections and additions and they have been incorporated into this, the final draft. (Doris J. Allebach, Ken’s wife, arranged to have this copy typed and reproduced, with support from their son, Frederick C. Allebach.) It seems likely that no further work was done by Ken on these memoirs after October 1991.
It might be interesting to note however, that Ken and Doris moved to Tucson, Arizona in August 1993. Ken connected with the 390th Memorial Museum, part of the Pima Air & Space Museum there and volunteered in the research library. Whether any of the information from post August 1993 is included in the 2nd draft comments is unknown.
Kenneth (Ken) Allebach was born on July 24, 1919, in the Pennsylvania Dutch town Souderton, PA, which is in Montgomery County, close to the Bucks County line. Ken’s Pennsylvania Dutch roots were deep, the original immigrant landed in Philadelphia in 1685.
Following WWII, in 1947 Ken graduated from Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. His resume includes years spent working in public service for The Philadelphia Housing Authority, the U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency in Washington, D.C. (HUD), and on the local level as director of the White Plains, New York Urban Renewal Agency. Finally in the private sector, for a real estate appraisal company, in Ossining, NY.
Ken lived in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and then White Plains, New York from 1960 to 1982 and then moved back to Philadelphia. In 1993 he and Doris moved to Tucson, Arizona and in 2001 to Medford, New Jersey.
Ken died on June 9, 2005, at Medford Leas in Medford, New Jersey at age 85. He would have been 86 years old on July 24, 2005.

DJA, December 2008


viii.

World War II – A Personal Reckoning

During the Vietnam War, many guys burned American flags and draft cards in symbolic protest, some moved to Canada, and some went underground in an effort to avoid what they perceived to be a meaningless war. There was not much of that in World War II. Most of us were children of the great depression and accepted authority more readily than subsequent generations; besides World War II was generally considered to be a necessary war (Studs Terkel called it "The Good War"). It never occurred to me, for one, to try to avoid military service. In general, patriotism was a matter taken for granted, if we were even conscious of such a concept. We all pledged allegiance to the flag at school assemblies and on special public occasions, but that was just a matter of going through the motions and had little meaning, unlike many old geezers today who seem to stiffen with sentimental pride at the passing of Old Glory.

There were a handful of men around town, including an uncle of mine, who were in World War I. One of them was killed and had the local American Legion Post named after him. The others never talked about the war, my guess being that it was too horrible to discuss. On returning from my war, I decided that they didn't talk because they had little to talk about; they were not in combat, maybe not even near combat. On the other hand, I never talked much about my experiences mostly because people didn't bother to ask.

World War I had it's own peculiar horrors, like poison gas, and the veterans of that war who had sons sent them off to the next war. They were also alert to the signs of the times. I recall, as an older teenager, a local chapter of the German-American Bund, an American version of the Nazi party with the objective, I would guess, to keep the United States out of the war. Many locals were scandalized at the proximity of this outfit. As I remember, the Bund's national leader was a crackpot named Fritz Kuhn, which profoundly distressed my employer, also named Kuhn, who feared that his reputation might be smeared by the other guy, if only by name association. Since virtually all of the Pennsylvania Dutch in my part of the province could trace their ancestors in America for two hundred years or more, they had no connection with nor affection for Germany. Consequently, that particular branch of the Bund found little fertile soil and was soon disbanded. I recall frequently driving by the Bund headquarters out in the country, with vague fears for my safety, since they were reputed to have guns and guard dogs and hob-nailed boots. I also seem to remember that people braver than I would, from time to time, try to vandalize their property and harass their members.

In October 1940 (almost fifteen months before we entered the war), my draft number was 270 and my draft status was 1D. This meant that I would have been the 270th person drafted in my locality, but would be deferred until I finished that school year in June, 1941. It occurred to me that I would probably be called up long before 269 other guys, since there would be a number of 4F's (those who were physically, or otherwise, not acceptable), that others were married and had dependents and that, in my Pennsylvania Dutch homeland, there were many Mennonites, Brethren and others who would not bear arms on grounds of conscience. Given these realities, my options appeared to be limited - either enlist or wait to be drafted.

But there were some practical limits to my patriotism, like avoiding muddy bloody battlefields when we inevitably got into the war with Hitler. (I am not conscious of being other than vaguely aware of what was going on in Europe. Most Pennsylvania Dutch boys did not have much of a worldview even though we may have been vaguely aware that war seemed to be just around the corner. In the main, most of us were young and considered ourselves immortal and I don't remember any of us who looked to the future with any particular anxiety. I did, however, tend to look at the WWI veterans with a new respect; they had been there.) Basically, I tended to think of Hitler and Mussolini as far away troublemakers and Stalin was a total unknown. News was not instantaneous as it is on television today. The foremost radio newscaster was Lowell Thomas who was on the air every weekday evening from 6:45 to 7:00; we were regular listeners at home on our old Majestick radio.

But time was running out for me and I had to make a decision. Through advertisements I learned that the Navy had a pilot training program conveniently located at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and this seemed like an unusually glamorous opportunity to avoid a messy battlefield, so I enlisted in the Naval Air Corps with no conception at all of what that might involve. I had no long smoldering desire to fly; it was the money and the glamour. All I knew about airplanes was that a local young man had his own airplane and flew over town once in a while. When I was a kid in the twenties and thirties the sound of an airplane brought virtually the whole town into the streets gaping and pointing in wonder.

School ended as scheduled, in June 1941, and I was one month short of age twenty one. On the war scene, Hitler had just broken his non-aggression pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union; the European war now had two fronts and most upper classman at the college were required to register for the draft on campus.

Notwithstanding my age, it was only the end of my second year at Kutztown State Teachers College, located in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country in Berks County, where I felt altogether at home among people who were even "Dutchier" than I. I was at that place not because I had an irresistible urge to become a teacher but because it was cheap way to get a college degree. Had the war not intervened, I may well have gotten into something involving speech since I had taken a few courses in phonetics, philology and other related subjects which were interesting and absorbing. Likewise, that school had a program called "library science" which also seemed a likely prospect if I ever got to be an upper classman.

The reason I was older than most of my classmates was money, or the lack of it, to be more precise. On graduation from high school in 1937, I doubt that more than three or four in a class of sixty plus went on to college, in part because our culture had a limited focus on education but, in larger part, because the country was in a deep depression and money was scarce. My first job, after high school, paid ten dollars a week, half of which went to my parents; at the end of two years, I was up to twelve dollars a week, of which six went into the family coffers. Without a car or even a bike, I could make out okay on five or six bucks a week and even saved some, so this was a reasonably good deal all around. Five or six dollars was a meaningful contribution to the family at the time and it never occurred to me to leave home. There were no greener pastures. Besides, I am told that when my mother went to work as a teenage girl, she was required to give her father her entire pay each week. She got whatever change there was in an envelope and her father kept the rest, so that my arrangement was a decided improvement over earlier family practice.

During those two working years I had a small handful of college friends (one of whom, after the war, became my brother-in-law, Vernon Groff, and repopulated the country with five Groff boys) who stimulated me into action and I discovered that it was possible, even for poor kids, to go to a state teachers college. A local childless philanthropist agreed to lend me four hundred dollars, at five percent, over a two-year period, and that cash, with jobs at school and summers, saw me through those two years, after which the war turned my world upside down.

I recite these non-war experiences only to put the impact of the war into a real world perspective, however limited that real world may have been. Those two years at Kutztown were halcyon days for an awakening, small town kid. It was fun and serious and sentimental in one small package. At the same time, it was not very challenging. I had many warm and mostly uncomplicated friends, most from the Pennsylvania Dutch heartland, and a couple of very good teachers. On the whole, that little, undistinguished school apparently met my needs, at that time, on a more responsive level that Swarthmore College did, where I finally graduated in 1947, ten years after high school.

Before the war, life, for me, was relatively simple, secure and insular, following the general pattern of my ancestors, from early colonial days. Our lives were dominated by church, home and school and work after school and beer drinking and girl chasing after work. No big deal; it was typical small-town America.

On returning to civilian life after the war, I now see myself as something of a man-child, with lots of half-baked ideas but no fixed goals, limited inner discipline, and no longer a small town kid. The war had been a total waste in terms of personal growth and development - four of my most formative years were shot to hell for all practical purposes in an aimless pursuit of military glory, after which the government spent our country's substance rebuilding the economy of our former enemies and wasting our substance in quarrels with our former allies. For better or for worse, that quiet Quaker college in suburban Philadelphia provided little of the transitional experiences I needed at that time. The ambience was too traditional and I'm now inclined to think I'd have become more directed at an urban university like Chicago or Columbia - a clean break with the past.

As a veteran, I did manage to lead a movement at Swarthmore to eliminate gym classes from our schedule on an assumption that such classes were not essential to the higher education of war vets. At one point, I also attended a local meeting of the Air Force Reserve, thinking that it might be helpful if the Korean War expanded and I were called back and also considering the prospect of a modest pension at some future date.

That meeting was a total turn-off - no fire and no substance; in all it seemed like a dumb way to spend my time and I never returned and never regretted it. Shortly after being discharged, I also joined the American Legion, which was principally a drinking and social club. At first, I was a little miffed at their apparent lack of interest in the experiences of the new crop of war heroes, at their seemingly limited outlook, and some of their practices at business meetings including pass-words and secret handshakes, all of which I soon forgot by not going to meetings and concentrating on attendance at the bar. Since then, many guys have made a career climbing the Legion's political ladder.

By far, the most significant consequence of the war, for me, was the so-called GI Bill, which provided extraordinary educational opportunities for the survivors. In my case, it meant moving up from the modest teachers college to one of the top schools in the country with the government paying virtually all my expenses, plus some spending money. In one respect, that apparently advantageous move only resulted in exchanging one level of public service for another - government for teaching - and perhaps a broader range of interests over the long haul, which is no small matter, if true.

By the middle of June 1941, I was in the Navy. But getting there was not altogether a piece of cake. During the first comprehensive physical exam in my life, I worked myself into such a nervous frenzy that my blood pressure went out of sight and I had visions of a naval career blowing up before it began. However, the doctor was unconcerned and sent me out to walk around the block and relax, which I did and it worked. I was normal after all. Prior to that experience, no one had ever wrapped a mysterious black band around my arm and pumped it up. What crucial information was this apparatus revealing? I didn't know what was going on. As I remember, I had seen a doctor only a couple of times in my life: once as a kid for smallpox vaccination, as required by law, and once as a young teenager to have a foot sewn up after I stepped on broken glass while racing around barefooted. We were not big on doctors when I grew up, partly because we were healthy, outdoor kids and partly, I suppose, for reasons of money.

The program in the Navy was to give the cadets a month or two of what was called primary training at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which included some ground school and ten hours of flight instruction. We flew neat little airplanes, made by a company named Stearman and affectionately known as Yellow Perils, after their color and probably because of the danger to the instructors created by eager young flying students. These light weight, canvas-clothed airplanes had two wings (one above and one below), two open seats (one behind the other), and one engine. It was a very stable aircraft and almost any reasonably coordinated person should be able to fly it as almost as easy of riding a bike. I turned out to be the one who couldn't. When flying, we wore sexy leather jackets (like those that now cost several hundred bucks), a white silk scarf, an aviator’s leather helmet with earflaps that buckled under the chin, and goggles. We were all budding Lindberghs and had our pictures taken in flying gear next to a Yellow Peril to be sent by the Navy to hometown newspapers, to the delight of the cadet's family. (See exhibits)

My instructor at the Navy Yard was not a very genial fellow and was old enough, as I recall, that he was not likely to see combat and would probably spend the rest of the war harassing would-be pilots. I think he thought that I had suicidal tendencies. But he was mostly cool and self-confident, typical of Naval officers I met before the war. I was duly impressed by his detached manner. I recall one of his comments to the effect that he was not yet ready to die and if I wanted to kill myself I should wait till he was on the ground; that was probably a time when I was trying to drive the airplane instead of flying it.

After ten hours of dual flight instruction, we were required to solo - to take that machine into the air alone - to taxi out to the runway, take off, fly around for fifteen or twenty minutes and land, with no instructor to get us out of trouble. I did it, with no little trepidation, but seem to remember a fairly hefty bounce on landing. I must confess that I never did feel very secure flying alone and never really enjoyed it. It was unnatural not to have the earth under foot. The guy who wrote that air corps song about going off "into the wild blue yonder" and "going down in flames", was cut from a different cloth than this aviator.

I got by that checkpoint okay and was sent to Jacksonville, Florida, for more ground school and reassignment to another naval air station for what was called basic training. Ground school down there must have been a lot of Navy indoctrination that I've long since forgotten. As I remember, we were at Jacksonville for a month, more or less, and it was one big boozy party, with no flying. I have a vague recollection of visiting St. Augustine, the oldest European settlement in North America, where there were stone ramparts and Catholic churches. I also remember a friend from the south who was a virtuoso on the soprano recorder, long before that ancient instrument became generally popular. There was also a favorite nightclub, where jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt's teeth (she was somewhat buck-toothed till she got a major overhaul later in life) brought the house down. The stand-up comic, imitating FDR, said: "My wife, Eleanor, can eat apples through a picket fence. Show them your teeth, Eleanor." This was a pretty dumb and cruel scene, in retrospect.

After Jacksonville, I was off to the naval air station at Corpus Christi, Texas, where I learned some rudimentary celestial navigation, among other things. I enjoyed plotting those problems and did some pretty good work; the Navy might have done worse than to have me as a navigator on one of their big flying boats called PBYs. At Corpus Christi, I also learned the fun and savage competition of bridge, which we played every night till 'lights out'. In the air, I had ten more hours of instruction before going up on my fateful twenty hour solo check, which I blew for ground-looping on landing and I washed out, as the saying went. This happened in November 1941, just about two weeks before the Pearl Harbor disaster and our official entry into the war. (Today, as Congress asserts its sole constitutional authority to declare war, I recall an obscure historical note from days gone by to the effect that the U.S. had never declared war; it only officially recognized the existence of a state of war, a distinction that presumably puts us on a higher moral level than the savages who attacked us. Bush says he believes we only declared war about five times in the 200 or so military adventures we engaged in. I would think he has to be wrong.) After Pearl Harbor, I suspect that the Navy commissioned many pilots who were no better coordinated than I, and consequently wound up dead. It has been my unshakeable opinion since, that the Navy, in sending me home, saved me from a premature grave at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

A Navy personnel officer suggested that I might want to become a seaman doing stuff like swabbing decks on some battleship. I said, no thanks, and suggested that they transfer me to lighter-than-air training at Lakehurst Naval Base in New Jersey, I thinking it might be a good deal to fly blimps up and down the Atlantic coast, watching out for Nazi submarines. That did not work out, so I took my discharge papers and went home.

It’s obvious that I was not meant to fly military aircraft with only twenty hours of instruction. A good flyer, it was said, flew by the seat of his pants; he had to have a certain 'feel' for the limits of his mechanical bird. We were required to practice loops, i.e., to dive at full throttle, then pull up into a loop, hanging upside down momentarily, then gliding out of the loop. We also had to climb at a steep angle until the engine was about to stall, then push the stick forward, kick one of the rudders and fall into a spinning dive, which almost everyone pulled out of before they crashed. Personally, I did not care much for such aerial acrobatics and never did adjust to life as a bird.

But there were other more practical problems. Once in the air, you then had to get back on the ground and, on landing, one should not bounce the aircraft once or twice before settling down; one should know how far the bottom of the wheels are from the seat of one's pants and set the bugger down gently. Also, on coming down the runway after landing, the plane is apt to drift from one side to the other requiring the gentle application for one of the brakes so that the bugger goes straight as an arrow down the runway. (Unlike a car, each front wheel on those jobs had its own brake: left foot, left brake; right foot, right brake.) Uneven braking brings the plane into a ground-loop, i.e., the wing on the side braked too hard dips, sometimes scraping the ground, and the machine spins around on the ground, which could be dangerous and also result in costly repairs. I seem to remember reading of modern airliners ground-looping on occasion.

Well, I proved myself an expert at both bouncing and ground-looping, which the Navy appeared to consider a serious deficiency. It is, no doubt, sour grapes on my part to observe that the Navy was essentially an elitist outfit in those days (and probably still is, although I'm not sure why after the Iowa gun turret explosion and a bunch of other recent foul-ups) and they were not bothered in the least if they lost a half-educated Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a German-sounding name and heavy feet.

Undaunted, I was still determined to evade the infantry, so I went to the nearest Army Air Corps recruiting office in Philadelphia and signed on there. This time I did not have high blood pressure. For reasons I can't remember, I was not inducted until April 1942, as an air corps cadet, to be assigned to one of their navigation schools. As I recall, there were a number of bomber navigators who were washed out pilots, which made sense, since we already had some presumably useful flying experience.

With the nation now at war and with some previous instruction in aerial navigation, I did not expect much trouble this time around and did not get any. True to my Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, I never even accumulated any 'gigs', I think they were called, for improperly made beds, unpolished shoes, or messy foot lockers, where everything had its own place. Attesting to our unreadiness for war, there was such a shortage of navigation schools and instructors, it was not until March 1943, that a class became available at San Marcos, Texas (between Austin and San Antonio). There, after an eighteen week training program, I was finally commissioned as an Army Air Force navigator in July 1943, almost two years after I first enlisted in the Navy. Navigation school itself was uneventful, the instructors were not much older than the students, if any, and none had been anywhere near a combat zone.

I do remember one of the instructors who interviewed me just before graduation; he was a little guy and something of a wise guy. Among other things I don't remember, he also said something to the effect that he could wash me out, you know. Well he was apparently serious, but I was familiar enough with my work and that of many of my classmates to know that such an event was not very likely and told him so. I did not particularly care for such humor.

At that time, there was a practice to give a dollar to the first enlisted man who saluted a newly commissioned officer and many hung around after the ceremony to collect their bucks. Well, there I was, with a girl on one arm and a smoke in the other hand when some G.I. popped his best four-bit salute. I got all tangled up dropping the girl’s arm and damn near burning my new pink trousers but flashed him a half-assed salute, but he got his buck and a good laugh.

With no effort at all on my part, I seemed to have evaded both the draft and the enemy a good deal longer than would have been possible had I deliberately set out to achieve such a goal. If Hitler had been a Mexican, he might well have occupied the United States during those two years. But even then, as I recall, Hitler was still some nebulous bad guy; we were exposed to no political indoctrination, no propaganda films or the like. The most frightening pictures we saw were those showing advanced cases of syphilis. Our particular enemy was the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, which was acknowledged to have many of the best airplanes and pilots in the world and we did have enemy aircraft identification sessions.

The interim between April '42 and March '43 was orchestrated entirely by the Army. There were no trips home, no extended leaves (weekends, at the most), and no illnesses; just waiting around. We got up before sunrise and did calisthenics, ate, played football (in one game I tore or ruptured a hamstring which never has healed properly and still bothers me at intervals) and volley ball, ran cross country and dashes, scrubbed the barracks, policed up the grounds, stood inspection (including unannounced short arms in the middle of the night to make sure we were free from clap or syphilis). We may have had some ground school but I don't remember it if we did. In general, it was a pretty sterile life and almost entirely physical so we were all in top shape, even the lard bodies from the Bronx who never did anything more strenuous than stick ball on the street. In contrast, any games or exercise we may have had while I was in combat was strictly on our own account.

Part of that long waiting period, perhaps as long as a couple of months, was spent living in a tent city at Kelly Field in San Antonio. There were six or eight of us in a tent, many of which were blown away during a mini-hurricane. Tents and hurricanes are not particularly compatible.

Most of that year of waiting around was spent in more civilized accommodations, in barracks, at Ellington Field in Houston. There I started collecting classical records (the old style 78 rpms, which were heavy and fragile) and bought a portable record player (which was still operating in 1953, to provide mood music from the classics at my wedding in the Friends Meeting House at Woodstown, N.J.). At Ellington, there was a glee club whose members, including me (though untrained, I have never missed an opportunity to join community choruses and have been in groups singing with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Kansas City Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic), were the only cadets to get regular Saturday night passes to go downtown for public relations concerts on the local radio. (There was no television at that time.) I particularly remember a beast of an Irishman, named Hickey, who was a natural songster and had the biggest untrained tenor voice I ever heard; we always tried to stand next to each other in the glee club for some heavy bass/tenor barroom harmony.

Navigation school was something of an anti-climax after almost two years of waiting. It was mostly drudgework but morale was reasonably high and there was a growing realization that this work had no other purpose than to prepare us for war. The school was obviously under the gun to produce bodies for a lot of big airplanes. Our days ran from reveille at 5:30 am to lights out at 9:30 pm. Classes and flying were from 7:15 to 9:15. We did some night flying on an apparent assumption that U.S. bomber crews would fly night missions, which the heavy bombers never did in Europe.

There was an interesting little town near San Marcos called New Braunfels, with a lot of people of German ancestry who still spoke their native tongue. (These people, I believe, came to America considerably later than the PA Dutch and came from different parts of Germany.) The German speaking people, who came to be known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, settled in southeastern PA during the first half of the 18th century.  Many including the Allebachs, were of Swiss origin and because of religious persecution, fled their native land and probably lived in a German duchy known as the Palatinate, along the Rhine, for several generations before immigrating to America. They came to Penn's colony where land was fertile and cheap and where they were assured of religious freedom. They were mostly farmers with the usual variety of related skills - weaving, carpentry, masonry, tanning and the like. The newfangled tag "PA Germans" seems to have originated by the second great wave of German immigrants who arrived in the 19th century, who were more educated and wanted to improve the image of my ancestors who were sometimes referred to as the "dumb Dutch". However, within the culture, we have always considered ourselves to be Pennsylvania Dutch, which has nothing to do with Holland but derives from the old English translation of the word 'German’. While I never learned to speak Pennsylvania Dutch, it was still in common use when I grew up and I heard a good deal of it and understood some, so this scene in Texas tended to fill me with great nostalgia for my homeland.

There was also a little wisp of a girl from Austin with a neat convertible automobile and a full tank of gas who filled my spare time with lighthearted pleasure, and to whom I eventually gave a pathetic little diamond ring, which she returned a few months after I started flying combat, proving, I suppose, that war produces quick passions and few regrets. By that time, on the other side of the ocean, I was busily messing up international relations with English-speaking girls from England, Australia and New Zealand. By coincidence, my little rose from Texas had given me a St. Christopher medal, said to have been blessed by an authorized representative of God, which I faithfully carried on every mission (I figured it couldn't do any harm and just might be helpful). By some misfortune, I lost that icon sometime after getting the news that my post-war wedding plans had collapsed and I worried a little, fearful that my luck might not hold out.

From San Marcos, I went to Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington with Mt. Rainier visible in the distance, where B-17 crews were being formed and serious combat training began. This was the first time I had flown in a four engine aircraft and these were monsters in that day; they were noisy and powerful and took some getting used to. Flying in formation seemed dangerous and, at first, I was more worried about crashing into another B-17 that in navigation. Night flying was particularly scary and I had some bouts with vertigo but soon got over those problems.

Navigating a B-17 was basically routine; on a clear day, when the ground was visible, it was a cinch - we just matched what we saw on the ground with checkpoints on the map. In some respects, the navigator was the flight historian; he plotted the flight plan on the map before take-off, recorded places observed on the ground with time, altitude, air speed and compass heading; he calculated wind speed and direction, and recorded other useful data personally observed or reported by other members of the crew. In combat, he also worked his machine gun when enemy fighters got too close. In formation, we simply followed the leader and verified his flight path; if we were in a lead position, the job was correspondingly more responsible, though no more difficult. If it became necessary to fly alone in enemy skies, as we once did, navigation was critical.

Aside from that, life in the nose of a B-17, where the navigator and bombardier worked, was not unlike labor in a heavy foundry, with four 1200 horsepower engines pounding away outside the thinly clad nose. The ends of the two inner propellers were not much more than a foot from my little windows. Blimps, no doubt, would have been much more peaceful.

We had somewhat a motley crew that never did quite jell as a unit, as in the movies, although we got along reasonably well. Ralph Whitehead (known as Red), from Nebraska, and a former all-star football tackle, was the first pilot and crew commander. After the war, he became a commercial pilot and died of cancer. I talked to him by telephone from White Plains during his terminal hospital stay in California and he was inconsolably depressed. He died on June 22, 1974 at age 53. Scott Gerhardt, from the Pittsburgh area, he was co-pilot, with a good seat in his pants and a stolid personality. He could not stay away from engines and operated his own garage in Tampa, Florida for many years after the war. We have regularly exchanged Christmas greetings over the years and last winter, (March 1990) we had a long lunch with Scott and his wife, Betty, and refought the war over beer and hamburgers in Tampa. Chuck Lufkin, the bombardier, came from Maine and had all the laconic qualities often attributed to that northern race. He was knocked out of the war when he lost control of his bike, flew into a bramble bush and lost an eye. My recollection is that he spent too much time at the bar that night. Since the air corps had little use for one-eyed bombardiers, he was sent home. I am told that he died some years ago.

Cecil Sharpe, from North Carolina, was the flight engineer and top turret gunner, two of the most important jobs on the bomber; he was numero uno among the enlisted men. We, too, have exchanged cards each Christmas since the war and we had a long lunch with Cecil and Laurie, his wife, in Charlotte, North Carolina during our recent trip south. He remembers many things I forget and am now able to include here. Sharpe and Whitehead had a rapport and mutual confidence that provided most of the glue holding our crew together. Sharpe knew his work and did it very well; he returned to the states after his tour and helped train new combat crews. Quigley, from Philadelphia, was the radio operator / gunner and second senior enlisted man (that made three of us in the crew from Pennsylvania). I called him once during the fifties but the conversation was strained and nothing came of it. Mallos, from Missouri, and Carlson from Iowa, were the waist gunners, and probably the coldest place in the bomber. The guns were mounted at unprotected openings on each side of the fuselage so that each of these gunners was exposed directly to the elements and the extreme cold of high altitudes. Mallos, as I remember, had his moments of heavy fatalism and sometimes talked of getting killed, whereas Carlson was quiet and unassuming. Mallos was killed on our tenth mission and Carlson lost a leg as a result of a major wound from the same flak burst. Fisher was in the ball turret, hanging underneath the fuselage, the loneliest of all places in the Flying Fort. He is not listed on the group roster in the 390th history, for unknown reasons, and my recollections of him are vague. Wright, from Arizona, was the tail gunner. He was a tall, gangling guy, out of the west, and I could never figure out how he ever got stuck in that cramped location. The tail gunner was the eyes in the back of the pilot's head and kept the cockpit informed of any happenings in the rear of the formation. On one mission, Whitehead called Wright on the intercom to ask if the tail wheel was up and locked. Wright, according to Sharpe, responded, "Yeah, it's up, but still on the ground", which made no sense at all. Something like the old Pennsylvania Dutch expression about "tying the dog loose". Wright was obviously either nervous or confused or both. But taking off in the dark with a load of bombs was always a little unnerving, particularly in poor weather. (When a command officer flew missions, he took the co-pilot's seat on the right side of the cockpit, and the regular co-pilot went into the tail to help the group leader in controlling the formation.)

Sharpe, Gerhardt and Wright were the only married members of the crew, and Gerhardt took the precaution of impregnating his wife before he left for England, a variation of the old admonition to keep the woman pregnant in winter and barefoot in summer to insure her fidelity. In general, we were ten average GI Joes, doing what we had to do, with not one bona fide character among us. We did not even have a memorable name for our airplane, which came to be named Anoxia Queen early in our tour, after Fisher passed out in the ball because of a defective oxygen system.

As near as I can calculate from my flight record, I flew about ninety-two hours as a cadet in navigation school, all in two engine airplanes carrying, if I remember rightly, six student cadets, our instructor and a pilot. At Geiger Field, where the action became more intense, I flew 115 hours from August 7, through October 2, 1943, all in the nose of B-17s. That was relatively hard work, day and night, without much nonsense. We flew in formations; we dropped bombs, and shot at targets towed by other airplanes. We flew over Mt. Rainer (14,500'), and places with exotic names like Walla Walla and Coeur D'Alene. We got out to the west coast for a look at the Pacific from the air and flew over some of the most desolate country I've ever seen, in Idaho.

After completing our work at Geiger, we started the long trip east, by train, if I'm not mistaken. I know we made a stop at Grand Island, Nebraska, where Whitehead and Gerhardt were checked out on instrumental flying and where we met Mallos's father, who treated us all to a fine Greek dinner, and also at Bangor, Maine, from which we visited a then posh seaside place called Bar Harbor. In between, I somehow managed to spend a few days at home with my family, where life was more prosperous, with war jobs, but unchanged in style and culture.

From Bangor, we went up to Presque Isle, in Maine, where we picked up a ferry crew, whose job it was to fly new B-17s and new crews across the ocean to Scotland. We made one stop at Gander, Newfoundland (where I took a puppy, adopted by the crew, into the officer's mess and fed him some chow from the table, whereupon I was unceremoniously kicked out of the dining room and told not to bother returning), and from there to Prestwick, in Scotland (where I returned some thirty years later for a tour of new towns in Scotland and England). I recall being unimpressed with the quality of navigation on that trip across the northern Atlantic, having followed the navigator's work with more than passing interest. From the change of course during the last hour of the flight, it was obvious that he was a couple hundred miles off course. It was a night flight and he had an octant aboard but made no attempt at celestial navigation; he simply flew the predetermined course till he could pick up the Prestwick radio, as I was to do later under more harrowing circumstances.

By the second week in November 1943, we were at our operational base near Framlingham in Suffolk County, (East Anglia), some ninety miles northeast of London. War was becoming a reality and I viewed my veteran bunkmates with some awe (they had already survived a bunch of missions including terrible trips to Munster & Schweinfurt). This was the 390th Bombardment Group, Heavy, in the 8th Air Force, and was the closest heavy bomber base to the North Sea, about ten miles due east. There were four combat squadrons in the Group, from the 568th, where I was assigned, through the 571st. Each combat squadron had from fifty to twenty crews, with ten men each. The 390th had a total complement of over 3,000 men, a small town, in effect, which illustrates how many men were needed to support the flyers. Still, that may have been a primitive war machine from the point of view of modern technology, since I've read that modern carriers have as many as 5,000 men.

Starting on November 15, and ending December 1, 1943, I flew some thirty hours of intense combat training at the 390th, before my first mission on December 5, 1943. My good fairy somehow managed to keep me out of combat (I missed by less than two months a raid on Munster, where the 390th lost eight B-17s and claimed sixty-two enemy fighters plus several other very bad trips); it was then nearly two and one half years since I joined the Navy in 1941. Compare Uncle Sam's leisurely timetable for me to that of an unlucky cousin of mine who was killed in a German counter-offensive that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, in the winter of '44-'45, at age nineteen, less than a year after he was drafted.

A couple of weeks before my first mission, the Group hit a target at Rjukan, Norway, where the Germans were said to have a 'heavy water' plant, which, I understand, may have given them the first atom bomb. The returning crews were not so much concerned about the nature of the target as they were about the unheard-of low temperatures at bombing altitude. They were particularly eloquent in describing the problems when they had to drain their bladders. (We had relief tubes for that purpose so we could spray the enemy skies with warm American piss. But that was awkward and I generally kept a can in the nose and set it out of the way after use, where it promptly froze and was forgotten. Unfortunately, with all the shaking and rattling during flight, the can often upset, much to the distress of the ground crew who had to clean up the melt - a disgusting duty for guys who otherwise kept the Forts flying.)

My first mission was to Bordeaux, France, a considerable distance south of Norway, and I was concerned about freezing, not enemy action. I dressed in long johns, a woolen shirt and trousers, and two pairs of wool socks. On top of that, I climbed into an electric suit and, on top of that, a sheepskin flying outfit. With a parachute harness and a Mae West (an inflatable, yellow jacket for use if we had to land in water), I could barely stuff myself through the entry hatch in the nose. Obviously, that was rookie overkill. In the target area, with an armor-plated flak jacket and steel helmet over all the other stuff, my normal weight of one-fifty must have ballooned up to nearly two-fifty. The temperature on that trip was never much less than ten below, as I recall, and I was soaked with sweat. After that, I never wore much more than the electric suit.

According to my records, that mission to Bordeaux consumed over nine hours of flying time. The target was completely overcast and we jettisoned our bombs in the ocean, actually, the Bay of Biscay. (We did not bomb in occupied countries, if the target was not visible - a humanitarian policy not granted to German civilians.) So my first mission was notable only because it involved an overly long flight and I was substantially overdressed. There was no enemy action that I can remember - neither fighters nor flak. It was an auspicious beginning for my personal war and the only anxious moments, if any, were in taking off and landing, which I have never particularly enjoyed under the best of conditions.

It would probably be wrong to assume that fear dominated our lives. Anxiety might, perhaps, be a better word but, even then, only at understandable moments. We spent most of our time on the ground under more or less normal conditions. In the air, I, for one, was generally too busy to think about being scared. Obviously, no one wanted to be killed or maimed, but I never talked about that nor did anyone talk to me about that. I may have been insulated from reality during my tour but I only knew of one navigator who got himself so worked-up that he had to be sent home. In the main, we were young, healthy guys doing what we were trained to do, which, in its simplest terms, was to get to the target and to get back, with emphasis on the latter, and there was some comfort in the knowledge that the B-17 was an incredible flying machine, capable of getting us back even under the most adverse conditions.

The B-17 was sleek, trim and graceful; a thing of beauty and our protector. In combat, it often kept flying with huge chunks shot out of its wings, tail, engine and fuselage; it was frequently brought in on one wheel and even on no wheels. Not big by today's standards, it stood 19' high, was 75' long and had a wingspan of 104 feet. It could operate up to 35,000' and had a top speed of 290 MPH at 25,000 feet. We carried a crew of ten: pilot, co-pilot, bombardier, and navigator; engineer / top turret gunner, radio operator / gunner, ball turret gunner, two waist gunners and a tail gunner. We carried twelve .50 caliber machine guns (thirteen when they put a turret in the nose for the bombardier). The top and ball turrets were equipped with twin guns that could swivel through 360 degrees, so that the top turret could fire at anything in the sky above the Fort and the ball anything below. In formation, a group of B-17s could bring enormous firepower to bear in all directions. The bomb load varied up to six thousand pounds. (In contrast, the B-52s carries a-bomb load of 60,000 pounds, ten times that of the B-17.)  Fully loaded, the B-17 weighed in at around thirty-five tons; it was commonly known as the Flying Fortress.

In essence, then, it might be said that one B-17 required the services of ten men and twelve or thirteen heavy machine guns (and they were heavy, a .50 caliber shell must have been nearly five inches long and a newspaper account I have read said that a burst of fire from one of these guns had an impact equal to that of a ten ton truck hitting a stone wall at 40 MPH, which would be a lot of power, if true. With six of eight of these guns firing simultaneously, there was not only a lot of racket but considerable shaking from all that recoil.) to protect and deliver two or three tons of bombs to the enemy, which averages about six hundred pounds of destruction per crewmember per mission. I might guess that mules did not average much less during the Civil War, at the cost of a pile of hay.

Aerial war in heavy bombers was very impersonal (so impersonal as to be detached from the ordinary conception of war in that we did not experience the grim realities known to those on the ground: the stench of death, the mangled bodies, the horrors of concentration camps and the endless skeletons of buildings where people once lived, loved and worked.), unlike fighter pilots who matched personal skills and machines on a one-to-one basis with the enemy. In bombers, you don't hear flak, you only saw it, but you know it can mean death and you have no defense against it; you can't duck and you can't hide. You don't hear enemy fighters and only see the pilots fleetingly as they are diving through the formation at high speed; you only see some of the best fighter airplanes in the world, hell bent on shooting you out of the sky. But against fighters we, at least, had substantial defenses. In bombers, we couldn't see people in the target area, only masses of buildings. I was neither conscious of nor concerned about the destruction we were raining on the people below; I only wanted to be out of that cloud of flak we were forced to fly through. On the way to the target and back, we often saw a beautiful German countryside and, toward the end of my tour I sometimes thought of the fear those great formations of heavy bombers must have brought to the people on the ground who, in the main, were no more responsible for that goddamn war than I. The first and only time I saw German soldiers face to face was at an officer's mess in Washington, D.C., where I was visiting with my sister (a Navy WAVE) near the end of the war. There were German prisoners of war, waiting tables; they were young, clean, neat, handsome and courteous and didn't seem like enemies.

Air war was also exhausting at times. There was one week in the winter of '43-'44 when we barely saw daylight on the ground (in that latitude, days are very short in winter and long in summer) and nerves were more than a little frayed. All combat crews were interrogated after each mission to gather a comprehensive analysis of the groups work that day; by the end of that week, we tended to regard the interrogation officer as an enemy but he never lost his cool.

On the other hand, we had our fill of fresh eggs that week. Breakfast before missions was usually a quiet time, in part because we were not fully awake since it may have been three or four o'clock in the morning and partly because we were thinking about the day ahead and what it might bring. We bitched about the ungodly hour, worried about the weather and hoped we'd be going on a 'milk run', as short and easy missions were called. But we did have fresh eggs (ordinarily we had powdered eggs, a poor imitation of the real thing) bacon or sausage, fried potatoes and other goodies to fatten us up for the kill. I wonder if it is uniquely American to prepare special meals before bad occasions like combat missions and electrocution.

The 8th Air Force was said, by one source I have read, to have lost over forty thousand airmen, (160,000 is the figure stated in the book Black Thursday by Martin Caidin, the story of the October 14, 1943 raid on Schweinfurt in which sixty B-17s were lost, published by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, NY, in 1960.) either killed or missing, in the European theater. According to the published history of the 390th, some 370 of our men were killed in action and over 1,000 missing, in the three hundred and one combat missions its crews flew between August 8, 1943 and April 20, 1945. I began my tour on the Group's 35th mission and finished on April 11, 1944, credited with twenty eight missions, though I went out thirty four times during my tour. Six of the missions I started were aborted and, so far as I can figure, only two of those aborted missions involved the entire group, so that our pilot must have turned his back on his own on the other four. The Group only turned back because of weather and was presumably ordered back at a higher level of operations; individual aircraft turned back, presumably, only because of mechanical failures.

For my trouble, I was given the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters and the Distinguished Flying Cross, none of which were big deals. Thousands of other guys have the same awards, and more; one war-hungry airman in our 569th Squadron flew over 100 missions and was bedecked with medals. In my time, the Air Medal came after five missions with an Oak Leaf Cluster for each five more up to twenty. The DFC came on completion of the tour - a survival memento, in effect. Sometime after I finished my tour, they stopped the automatic DFC - survival apparently got to be too routine. If you happened to be a command pilot, there seemed to have been other automatic decorations, such as the Croix de Guerre with Palm from the free French, in what might have been a bit of politicking by the wily DeGaulle, who was then hanging out in England and annoying his allies.

         I've attached a chart (see exhibits) listing all my missions which I've had to refine from several sources, including a semi-humorous document known as the ‘Lucky Bastard Diploma’, which lists missions flown and 'certifies' that the recipient was a member of "Wittan's Walloper Bombing College who successfully completed his tour of operations against Hitler's hot shots and is now eligible to return to God's country (the lucky bastard)". Wittan was the commanding officer of the Group during my tour and the whole idea of such a fake award nicely illustrates the underlying lightheartedness of young airmen at war. I also took data from my official flight record and from the 390th history. There are some apparent discrepancies between these records (For example, on 12/30/43, the flight record shows that I logged 8 1/2 hours and the history indicates that this was a mission to Ludwigshafen; on 1/7/44, I logged 6 1/2 hours, presumably to the same place. Why should one of these missions have required two hours more than the other?), so I can't vouch for the accuracy of all the data on the chart.

Note that I went out on four aborted missions in less than three weeks between 2/29/44 and 3/18/44. My records seem to suggest that all four of those aborts were solo decisions by our pilot; the Group apparently went on and completed each of these missions. I don't know when Whitehead was grounded but it may have been after that series of aborts. More and more, we were flying ass-end Charley positions, i.e. the very last plane in the formation, where the turbulence (called 'prop wash') from the forward planes was intense. It made flying very strenuous for the guys in the cockpit and scary for the crew. Whitehead frequently tried to avoid that prop wash by flying above, below, or to the side, obviously breaking formation, thus loosening the group's defense of spoiling bombing accuracy, neither of which went over very big at headquarters. But, in all fairness, this was a tough position to fly.

During the one bomb run, Sharpe recalls, the prop wash was so bad that not only did Whitehead have major problems staying in formation but the crew was scared out of their wits trying to stay at their posts. Sharpe says that I finally called up to the cockpit on the intercom suggesting that the Germans on the ground were not really much interested in this solo-flying circus and couldn't we settle down. I doubt that Whitehead thought my comments very helpful but, the way Sharpe recalls it, it may have helped to break some of the tension since that kind of flying, under heavy ground fire, was rough on everyone.

Another trial for the last plane in the formation is that it is closest to any pursuing enemy fighters, some of which carried cannons with considerably longer range than our weapons. Sharpe recalls a time when a German ME-110 was on our tail lobbing 20mm cannon shells at us. Unlike flak, cannon shell bursts were white so there was no question as to the source of the fire; flak, from guns on the ground, was black or, at least, dirty. It seems to me that almost any pilot with half a brain would engage in some evasive action rather than sit there like a duck in a pond and get shot down. In this case, the ME-110 apparently ran out of cannon shells and decided to close in with his smaller guns, at which point one of our own P-47 fighters seemed to come out of nowhere, dove in and blasted that ME-110 out of the sky. That's why we called our fighters 'little friends'. This confrontation was out of my line of sight so it hardly bothered me at all, but Sharpe witnessed it all from his spot in the top turret and was thoroughly bothered.

Whitehead and I were warm friends; we took weekend leaves together, drank together and chased girls together but he never indicated to me that he was having problems and I don't recall ever associating our ass-end positions with pilot mind-problems. Perhaps, as 'commander', he did not want to alarm his crew or, perhaps, over the years, I have simply blocked out any disagreeable knowledge I may have had of this matter. Many years later, Gerhardt told me that he and Whitehead were called to headquarters to discuss either grounding Whitehead or demoting him to co-pilot status. Gerhardt said that he suggested switching seats, i.e., that he would be pilot and Whitehead co-pilot, but that idea was not acted on. (In retrospect, this method of operation made non-persons out of the other crew members, especially the navigator and bombardier, who were officers of equal rank. It obviously didn't matter what we may have thought; our input was not sought nor wanted, even though the combined efforts of the crew might have helped Whitehead get over his problems, had we known.) Gerhardt also said that Whitehead was criticized for what was deemed excessive fraternization with the enlisted men on the crew, which is even more elitist that the frigging Navy. We put our lives on the line, together, every time we went out but were not supposed to be friends on the ground? I cannot believe that such a policy came down from Wittan but from his underlings who were not yet mature enough for their own rapid promotions.

Whatever the real facts may have been, my only specific recollection is that our crew was broken up and I flew my last eight or so missions as a fill-in navigator with other crews and that the war was getting all screwed up for me. Whitehead, for reasons unknown, is not listed in the 390th history roster, and I have no idea whether or not he finished his tour.

To paraphrase Douglas MacArthur's sappy statement: Most of our crew didn't die, we just faded away. I have no recollection, fond or otherwise, of a farewell with any member of my original crew; we just went our separate ways without note. Perhaps it was the policy of the Group to break up troubled crews quickly and get them back in the air before any morale problems had time to fester. I note, for example, that my last eight missions included every mission the Group flew, except one, for which, I have no doubt, there was no need for a fill-in navigator. The aim of the Group was to keep every able-bodied man in the air and my aim was to get out of the war alive, and hopefully, in one piece. At that point in my career, it occurred to me that war was not only dangerous but also lonely, particularly when every time you go out, it's with different people - people you hardly know as persons & even less of their skills. My impression now is that I never flew with a crew any more competent than our original ten.

It was on or around Easter in 1944 went the Group was scheduled to hit a German officers training school. I believe that the 390th history shows the target as an airfield; in any event, the briefing officer clearly stated that an important training center was located on that field. For reasons I'm not entirely clear about (whether it was the religious holiday, the nature of the target, or both, I don't recall), there was some grumbling among the crews as to the appropriateness of the mission. This quickly came to the attention of Colonel Wittan, the commanding officer, and he was furious. Before the briefing ended, he said to the crews, in effect: "I understand that some of you do not think it proper to bomb these poor Germans on Easter. If any of you do not want to fly this mission, see me after the briefing and I will relieve you of this and any future missions this Group will fly." To my knowledge, no one acted on his suggestion. I think he must have been under unusual tensions that morning, since such anger was uncharacteristic. Most of us felt that he was an exceptional leader. He was killed, not too much later, in a mid-air collision, over England, on a routine, non-combat flight.

The ranks among officers in the Army run, from bottom to top: second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel and general. Combat crews seldom saw a general; in fact, I don't recall ever seeing a general during the entire war. The commanding officer on a bomber base was usually a colonel and there were no other full colonels around. There were a bunch of lieutenant colonels and even more majors. There were many more captains than majors and so on down the line. The place was infested with lieutenants. Promotions from 2nd to 1st lieutenant, among flyers, were generally automatic; I got mine shortly after completing twenty missions, which, I assume was a standard procedure. Further promotions depended entirely on the status of the pilot; if he got to be a squadron or group leader, he and his crew were promoted accordingly. Our crew was obviously not destined to achieve any notable rank, which, unfortunately was of little concern to most of us.

But rank, it would appear, had its privileges beyond more pay and special perks. According to the list of men in the Group who were killed or missing, the higher the rank, the longer one lived, except for two very unlucky lieutenant colonels that were killed in action. (I don't count Wittan since he did not die in combat.) No majors were killed and only four captains. It follows that all but six of the 370 men who were killed from the 390th were either lieutenants or sergeants or others in lower ranks. Among the 1,000 who are listed as missing, the highest rank was captain, of which there were only four. Thus, it seems apparent that the safest rank among combat crews in the 390th was that of major.

There were no particular advantages accruing to junior officers, except that, as combat flyers, we got relatively little chickenshit, as the saying went. I was treated well enough, mostly, in all likelihood, because I didn't screw-up very much. However, I do recall one time when our squadron commander came into the men's room and stood next to me at the wall (in England, they didn't have separate urinals; you just sprayed the tiled wall which was periodically flushed). He had apparently been waiting to get me alone in a more or less informal setting, I gathered, as there were no other guys around. He said that a letter of mine had been censored in London in which I had made some vague reference to a new navigation aid. He indicated that he didn't know what I was supposed to have said so I blustered a bit about desk jockeys opening officer's mail. He didn't seem particularly upset and I gathered he was making it easy for both of us. A chickenshit would have made a federal case of it.

Officers censored their own mail by simply signing their name, rank and APO (Army Post Office) number at the upper left corner of the envelope. The gunners on the crew frequently brought their letters to us to censor. Since I had no desire to read their letters, I usually just signed and sealed the envelopes with the understanding that they were not revealing any restricted material, as I allegedly did. I recall one of the guys in my hut saying that he was once given two letters to censor from one of his men, both pretty passionate, one to his wife and one to his girl friend. He thought it would be cute to switch the envelopes, but resisted the temptation.

While on the subject of passion, I might also note that several times a year the group sponsored dances and sent a fleet of trucks out into the countryside to pick up local girls, without whom there would be no dance. These affairs sometimes became mini-orgies. Some of the more frustrated studs would start drinking as soon as the bar opened and already had a hefty glow by the time the women arrived. There was usually a sizing-up period, checking out, assessing the field, fetching drinks, before the dancing began. By the end of the evening there were a few dreamy-eyed couples floating around but many more drunks, both male and female, and more than one girl nearly missed the truck home by dragging out her visit to a nearby hut or haystack. There were occasional disgusting scenes at the tailgate with a couple in a pawing embrace, when the guy breaks away, retches by the side of the truck, wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand and returns to his battlefield. It was then I knew that war is hell.

Perhaps one advantage we flyers had over our brethren in the infantry was that we got to sleep between clean sheets after our encounters. But even that had its disadvantages: It brought two opposite worlds into stark contrast; especially after Mallos and Carlson were gone. Between those clean and comfortable sheets, I often worried about what the dirty mission would bring in the morning. The bed was cold and clammy and sometimes sleep was elusive but still, I had no doubt that almost any infantryman would have traded places with me in a flash.

We also had our beds made and huts cleaned by U.S soldiers who were called ' bat men', (These were all white kids; there were no black men on the base and I wouldn't be surprised to find that the 8th Air Force was 100% white, whatever that may say about the official state of race relations in the forties.) a quaint expression borrowed from the British military vocabulary. In retrospect, that was unseemly luxury for most of us as well as a demeaning use of drafted civilians. As the ground war in Europe became more intense, many of these guys were transferred to the infantry, where they may have been assigned to more important wartime duties, like being shot at.

Prior to each mission, we were briefed on every aspect of the flight: the importance of the target, the number of defending guns, potential fighter interference, altitudes, winds, timing (as much as possible, as I recall, we tried to hit German cities around noon to achieve maximum civilian disruption), fighter protection, and coordination with other bomber groups on the same mission. On the front wall of the briefing room was a huge map of Europe covered by a black curtain, which was kept closed until all the crews were assembled and the door to the room was closed. Only authorized personnel were present and this was top-secret stuff till the mission was completed. At that point, we had only one concern and that was to see the ribbon on that map behind the curtain. That ribbon showed the flight path of the Group from the base to the target and back. Since the map also showed all the concentrations of flak in Europe, we could see at a glance what to expect all around the route. Likewise, a long ribbon meant a deep penetration into Germany and there was a perceptible groan from the flyers; if the ribbon was relatively short, there was silence, maybe a sigh of relief. Still, we did not know the name of the target city until it was announced; it was a tense and dramatic moment.

Before closing the briefing, we 'hacked' our watches so that everyone would be on the same time, to the second. Pilots were given taxi and take-off instructions, and navigators drew up their flight plans. We checked in our money and other personal stuff, picked up our escape kits, Mae Wests, parachutes and were all loaded into trucks and driven to our hardstands where the loaded bomber was waiting. Our last act prior to climbing aboard was to water the weeds at the edge of the hardstand, and I can't remember anyone failing to take that last nervous piss on the ground.

Our most disastrous mission came on 1/11/44. It was my eleventh and the target was Brunswick (Braunschweig), in the heart of Germany. The 390th history describes it thus:

“On 11 January mishaps dogged the formations sent out to this city. Weather was closing in over the English bases so that a recall signal was sent out. Some groups heard it and returned. 

"Others did not pick up the message and, as they were near the target area, continued their flight. Sadly, many fighter escort groups caught the signal and returned.

"The enemy threw ups its greatest interceptor force since Schweinfurt on 14 October 1943 and many groups were engulfed in one of the big battles of the war. The Air Force lost 60 bombers while claiming 152 destroyed, 48 probables and 47 damaged.

“Twenty-one planes from the 390th in addition to 5 that were part of the 95th...met 20 enemy planes and claimed 4-4-0 for the loss of one straggler.

"A bomb rack malfunction on the lead ship caused the Group to overshoot its incendiary load into fields near Peine."

         Note that we were officially recalled but apparently did not get the message; there is no explanation as to why none of the radio operators in the Group failed to get that very crucial message, nor whether the base cleared up since all of us, except the straggler seemed to have returned and landed okay (I wonder if the Group leader didn't actually get the message but decided that he had gone too far to abort and not get credit for the mission); and (2) we bombed some fields about fifteen miles west of Brunswick (credit the Group historian and his censors for their honesty) because of a bomb rack malfunction in the lead ship. I suppose we must accept that explanation although it does seem strange that none of the other bombardiers realized what was happening and did not drop on the designated target. It was a long, deadly trip just to plow up some German fields, but that mission seems to have been screwed up from start to finish.

I may have used up more ammunition that day then on any other mission I flew, with about as much accuracy as the Group's bombs. (Through out my tour, our crew never claimed any enemy kills despite a good deal of firing.) Flak was very heavy over the target. (Anti-aircraft shells are timed to explode at the altitude of the formation and when they burst, they send out deadly fragments of metal that kill people in airplanes, that fill airplanes with holes and sometimes blast them out of the sky. You don’t hear these shells explode, there's too much noise from your own engines, you only see a concentration of dirty, black puffs of smoke. That's what we called flak.) German guns were radar-controlled and extremely accurate. It almost seemed like black magic the way those shells got into a formation of B-17s five miles high in the sky.

Over Brunswick that day, we were severely rocked by a burst of flak near the waist. That was the shot that killed Mallos and crippled Carlson permanently. There was some intense talk on the intercom, but no screaming and no panic, and Sharpe went back into the waist to check out his friends. He still recalls the entire spent-.50-caliber shell casings on the floor around the guys from the fighter engagements. For some unremembered reason (I’m sure it was because his guns were too important to leave unmanned) he returned to his station in the top turret and it became my duty to go back and see what I could do. My gun was expendable and I could always pick up the navigation later; Lufkin was apparently busy at his bombsight and Quigley had the only remaining gun in the waist. So I hooked on a portable oxygen bottle (normally we drew oxygen from fixed locations at our stations), squeezed through the bomb bay and went into the waist. (It would have been impossible to survive very long without oxygen at that altitude. I remember one experience during training at Geiger when several of us were in a room where the oxygen level was reduced to simulate conditions at very high altitudes and we were required to perform certain functions, including switching from one oxygen source to another. In one such switch, the guy next to me failed to make the new connection properly; he turned very pale and seemed paralyzed, whereupon I completed the hook-up and he promptly recovered. Sharpe also recalls one incident when Gerhardt's oxygen was apparently severed by flak. Scott, at that time, didn't seem to know what happened and just sat there looking out his window like a zombie. He happened to be holding a toostie roll from the chow package we were given to sustain us in flight. He didn't respond to Whitehead who then asked Sharpe to come down from the turret and see what was wrong. Seeing Sharpe, Scott immediately sat on his candy, saying, "Ain't nobody gonna get my toostie roll!” Somehow, Sharpe managed to repair the hose and Scott recovered, toostie roll and all.)

When I got into the waist, it was obvious that Mallos was dead from a bloody wound in his belly. His eyes were turned up and he had no pulse; he had apparently met death quickly and with little suffering. Carlson appeared to be in shock and did not indicate that he was in pain, although there was a tear in his left leg and some bleeding. I would guess now that the low temperature helped to lessen his pain. I felt utterly helpless and had had no training for this kind of critical emergency. However I did know that we were a long way from home (maybe three hours) and Carlson might have bled to death before we got back if something were not done. Carlson's eyes told me (I can still see them in my mind) that he was very scared, but he was uncomplaining - a Viking at heart. The one obvious action was to apply a tourniquet, which I did. I also gave him a morphine capsule to use himself if he felt necessary; at the time, it didn't seem necessary although I'm damned if I would have known where to stick it. I tried to make him as comfortable as possible for the flight back and returned to my place in the nose. In retrospect, I have often wondered if I handled that crisis properly. Could I have done anything to save his leg? Was the tourniquet too tight? Did I tell him to release it from time to time? Did I tell Quigley to check him out and go to Carlson's aid before we landed? That was a very traumatic experience but I recall no further discussion among the crew about it, if only as a learning experience. Such an event could easily have happened again.

We had no real choice but to stay with the formation coming back over Germany and occupied Belgium, although Gerhardt has told me that there was some talk about leaving the formation to make better time, a potentially foolhardy suggestion in enemy skies. But as soon as we felt reasonably safe over the North Sea, we left the formation, went down to normal oxygen levels, poured on full power and went back to base ahead of the Group. Coming home, we normally made one pass over the field in formation, peeled off individually and landed. In emergencies, we zeroed directly down the runway, firing red flares from a Very pistol so that an ambulance would be waiting. We landed without incident and the medics removed Carlson and Mallos; we never saw them again. We were all extremely upset and, in true American style, were given an extra shot of whiskey during the interrogation.

We learned later that Carlson's leg was amputated. His war was over and, to my knowledge, none of us ever heard from him again. Did he become embittered? Or go off the deep end? Or just decide to have nothing more to do with anything that reminded him of the war? Not long after that mission we had a letter from Mallos's father, who it will be recalled, we all met during our earlier stopover at Grand Island, Nebraska. He sent the crew a box of chocolates with a fake flower on the lid, and asked that the flower be placed on Jimmy's grave, a poignant gesture, which I'm not sure we were able to do.

So there you are: two crew members lost on a mission that was recalled but which we finished by bombing vacant fields fifteen miles from the target. Mallos had died in vain and Carlson's lost a leg for nothing.

This would be a grim tale indeed, if true. For many years, I was under the impression that this disaster occurred during my tenth mission on 1/7/44, which was to Ludwigshafen in Germany. Of that mission, the 390th history states:

"...the 390th dispatched 20 planes in a force of over 400 that dropped over a thousand tons of bombs. Results could not be observed because of 10/10ths cloud cover over the target area, but pathfinder crews believed that the city was well hit. "Enemy fighter reaction was nil, as crews reported particularly efficient escort. Anti-aircraft fire was moderate, and only accurate on the first formations over Ludwigshafen."

         Both Gerhardt and Sharpe also recalled that we lost Mallos and Carlson over Ludwigshafen but I cannot believe that they were so unlucky to have been taken out on a mission as described above so I have taken it to be the Brunswick trip and not Ludwigshafen. Could it be that the 390th history mixed up the description of these two missions? If enemy fighter action was 'nil' on the Ludwigshafen trip, what were all those spent shell casings doing in the waist? Were they shooting at flak? It would be doubly sad if we lost two guys on what seems to have been a relatively quiet mission. Moreover, much of my account of this experience doesn't make much sense if our fateful mission was to Ludwigshafen as described in the 390th history. I can only conclude that either our memories over the years have become warped (Gerhardt's notes on his missions had the bombardier going back to the waist) or the 390th made an error in this instance, or Mallos and Carlson were very unlucky indeed to have been wiped out on an otherwise uneventful mission.

Incidentally, the 'pathfinder' mentioned in the quote above was a special navigation aid said to be able to identify built-up areas hidden under clouds. My guess is that bombing by pathfinder would have been totally indiscriminate and laid waste to many more homes that factories. Nor am I surprised that the pathfinder crews "believed that the city was well hit", an obviously self-serving conclusion in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.

It was apparently not the policy of the air force to give combat crews a rest following such disastrous missions and I can understand why. The dead are to be mourned, but not at the expense of the war effort. If we lost our two gunners at Ludwigshafen, we flew the next mission the Group flew, which was to Brunswick (where we clobbered a farmer's fields), and we also went out on the next mission the Group flew to Quoeux, France, a heavily defended rocket site. However, my records show that I flew no missions between 1/15/44 and 2/19/44- more then a month of combat relief. During that time, the group flew ten missions, two of which were to Brunswick and were apparently as fruitless as the one I flew on January 11. I believe it was during that period of inaction in the air that I was shot in the leg at ground school, which would of kept me out of action for a week or two in any event.

Also, during that time, we were sent to a rest home, more affectionately know as a 'flak house', near Salisbury. This was a great old English country estate, no doubt loaned to the air force by its patriotic owner for just such a useful purpose. The ambience was ancient, rich and comfortable, the service was beyond any in my previous experiences, the food was far better then at the base, and we enjoyed a variety of relaxing activities. At Salisbury, there is a famous, ancient cathedral, which I did not then know about or, in any event, failed to visit, if it was on any agenda. Ditto for Stonehenge, which is also in the neighborhood. In general, I can hardly count the number of opportunities I missed to soak up British history - a little noted war casualty for many of us. In any case, at the end of that good vacation, I suppose I was ready as I could be to put my life at risk again.

At the 390th, we were generally required to attend ground school when no missions were scheduled or when the weather socked us in. Ground school was meant to sharpen our skills and to keep us up to date on any new technical developments. At one of these sessions, a new thermite bomb was set off to demonstrate its intense burning power. The demonstrator was a small six-inch stick that was only supposed to burn but no explode, and burn it did, carving a good-sized hole in the concrete pad where it was ignited. All of us thought it had burned out and moved in to examine the damage, when the damn thing blew up and sent several of us to the hospital. I came out of that with a bloody flesh wound in my left calf, which an alert Sharpe tended to temporarily till I got to the base infirmary. Later that day, I was transferred to a nearby army hospital where I met an old friend from cadet school who had one of his heels shot out by flak and would be heading home for recuperation and discharge. That hospital ward was generally ok during the day but a bad scene at night with moaning, groaning and even screaming (nightmares, I suppose). After a couple such nights, I finally told the doctor that he better get me out of there or I might decide not to fly combat again. He apparently understood, wrapped up the half-healed wound and sent me back to the base where I was put back into the nose of a B-17 without much delay. This had me mildly concerned, since I would like to have been whole in the event I had to bail out over Europe, where a number of our guys managed to walk out, via Spain, with the help of the French underground.

My second most memorable mission was number fifteen, on February 24, 1944. The primary target that day was Poznan, Poland, which would have been the deepest penetration into Europe that the 8th Air Force ever made on a two-way mission. (There were a couple of one-way missions flown after my tour when the 8th landed in Soviet-held territory and flew back another day.) Poznan was lucky; it was completely covered by clouds and, since we did not bomb in occupied countries if the target was not visible, we turned to Rostock, the designated secondary target. Rostock is on the Baltic seacoast, north of Berlin, in Germany. Over the target, which was also cloud-covered, one of our engines was crippled by flak and we were forced to fly most of the way home alone, at low altitude. But I’ll get back to that.

On a number of missions, we may have seen enemy fighters out of the range of our guns but for some unknown reason they did not choose to attack. My own conclusion was that they did not feel like committing suicide. On some missions we did not see any fighters, except our little friends. On bad missions, German fighters attacked most of the way into the target and most of the way back. Then, they gave way only in the target area to avoid their own anti-aircraft guns. On the bomb run, the entire formations flew straight and level and were tucked-in formation tight as possible for maximum concentration of bombs on the target, whether it is a factory, a railroad siding or a cornfield. Flying straight and level over a heavily defended target is not much fun and, for the most part, I kept hunched over my little working table thinking, perhaps, that what I couldn't see wouldn't hurt me. By the time the last elements of the formation got over the target, the enemy gunners had us pretty well in their sights.

During the bomb run, one of the responsibilities of the co-pilot was to watch the instruments (in formation, the pilot's eyes were glued on the lead ship and wing ship pilots were constantly manipulating the throttles or banking in and out to avoid collisions - Whitehead was frequently dripping with sweat from the sheer physical labor and tension of keeping in formation, and he was big, strong guy) and notify the pilot of any problems. On this trip to Rostock, we had a rookie co-pilot (Gerhardt was in the infirmary at the time) who was apparently mesmerized by his first experience with enemy flak.

In the target area, our right outboard engine was hit by flak and was losing oil pressure rapidly. Normally, the co-pilot would then have feathered the propeller, i.e., turned the sharp edge of the prop into the wind so that it would create no air resistance. But, by the time the guys in the cockpit realized what happened, the oil pressure was too low to feather the prop, which was then windmilling out of control. I was later told that a windmilling propeller has the same effect as a solid sheet of steel in front of the wing which, obviously, would foul-up the plane's stability and require much more power to keep flying. I'm sure that they were able to shut off the engine but that would not stop the prop from spinning (windmilling) in the air stream. Had the prop been feathered, we would have had no problem staying with the Group on three engines; as it was, we could not draw enough power and kept dropping back into formation behind us, until there were no more friendly airplanes in the neighborhood.

Rostock is on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, approximately six hundred miles, as the crow flies, from the 390th bomber base. It is almost directly opposite Malmo also on the Baltic, in neutral Sweden, which was a designated landing area for crippled airplanes not likely to make it home. But life as an internee, I have since been told, was not exactly a bed of roses.

During our luncheon last winter, Sharpe recalled an incident that completely slipped from my memory and that was that Whitehead called for a vote to let the crew decide whether we should try to make it back to England or go to Malmo and be interned for the duration. Sharpe reports that five voted to go home, four to go to Sweden, and one abstained. What the hell would we have done in the event of a tie? I have no idea how I may have voted but I am inclined to hope that I abstained. In retrospect, that little scene must have been a bizarre display of democracy in battle. The basic question was not whether we should go home or go to Sweden; the question was, whether we had enough gas to get home and you can't vote on that. Had we gone to Sweden and it had then been determined that we had more than enough gas to get to England, it is not hard to imagine that someone may have faced a court martial after the war.

Between the pilot, the engineer and the navigator, it was determined that we would be able to make it back to the base, if no other major problems developed and provided we would not have to push the three good engines too hard and waste a lot of gas. Perhaps it was because of this iffy situation that Whitehead called for a vote.

Finally we were a lonely bomber in the sky, somewhere west of Rostock, with a couple of German fighters behind us spoiling for a straggling B-17. One, as I remember, was a JU-88, a twin engine German fighter, with a cannon that had considerably greater range than our guns. Since there was a 100% cloud base below and we had no desire to take on even a part of the Luftwaffe single handedly, Whitehead, without calling for a vote, elected to dive that Flying Fortress into the clouds below in a race with a fighter designed for the stress of diving. I was certain that our fort was about to fall apart and that this was probably my last mission. Never have I experienced so much vibration and so much speed in a machine that big. Determined not to be last to leave the sinking ship, I hooked on my parachute and hunched over the escape hatch, ready to jump when a wing fell off. It was our good luck that a wing did not fall off and the big airplane beat the little airplane to the clouds and we leveled off at about 2,500 feet, if I remember rightly, where we could not be seen and where we could see nothing. This was good on one hand and bad on another: Good because enemy fighters could not see us and we were probably too low for ground gunners to get us on their radar; bad because we were not used to flying low over Germany and could not see any checkpoints to get a fix on our location. Our radio was of no use that far from England so we were flying blind in more ways then one.

Since I had plotted our course on my map before taking off, I was reasonably sure of our position when we had to leave the formation. The only trouble was that winds at 2,500 feet are usually quite different than at 25,000 feet. Wind was the crucial factor; if it was on our tail we would get home sooner; if we had a head wind, it would take correspondingly longer. A heavy crosswind could blow us off course. So we had no choice but to duck below the clouds a few times trying to locate a recognizable check point on the ground. It was a dark, dreary day on the ground and I did not see anything recognizable though there was no evidence of a bad cross wind, so we kept with the flight plan.

After what seemed like a eternity, droning along in the clouds over northern Germany and Holland (Since I logged eleven hours flight time that day, I figure that we must have been on that solo trip for some three or four hours.), I finally calculated that we had probably reached the North Sea and we decided to go below and have a look. No sooner did we get under the clouds, perhaps under 1,000 feet, when all hell broke loose. There was a German convoy gunboat below with gunners who were, no doubt, just as excited as we, which accounted for their bad aim and our second lucky experience in one day. None of us thought to return the fire, which would have been very easy from the waist and especially from the ball, but I’m reasonably sure that the ball gunner had long abandoned his post, given the circumstances. Whitehead immediately poured on full throttle and jerked us back up into the clouds. This attack occurred as we passed over the Frisian Islands at the northern tip of Holland.

Over the North Sea, we soon picked up our homing signal on the radio and landed not too long after the main body of the Group. I seem to recall someone on the ground crew saying that there was only enough gas in the tanks for some fifteen or twenty minutes more flying, which was cutting it too close for comfort.

While it did not occur to me at this time, hindsight seems to suggest that that might have been considered a fairly workmanlike job of navigating, even if I did nothing more then stick to the flight plan, but I can't recall anyone, including the crew giving the navigator a special pat on the back. Perhaps it was considered routine for a B-17 to fly back from Rostock alone, on the deck. In any event, as I said, I didn't expect any particular recognition, although it may now seem that the Group might at least have stuck something in my DFC citation like: "He was navigator on a B-17 that returned from Rostock, etc." Then I could have forever bragged to my friends and neighbors about my heroics and clearly demonstrated that I was not just out there for some flying Sunday School picnic.

But, as I see it now, navigators were really low man on the totem pole in bomber crews. The bombardier had charge of the bombs and let go the destruction, the gunners shot the enemy out of the sky in the face of intense hostile fire, and the pilots were really the hot shots, they brought their ships home. But the navigator? He apparently just went along for the ride and was once or twice recognized when he landed the airplane after the pilots were killed, but hardly ever for the work he was trained to do. I only half mean this little tirade, and simply mean to suggest that we also served who only sat and scribbled. (As if to compensate for our general anonymity an Air Force Navigators Handbook: San Marcos, Texas, 24 June 1943) defines the navigators job: "The navigator, who is just now coming in to his own as a specialist, often gets less credit then he deserves. Everyone knows it is his function to guide the ship to the target and then back home again, but few people realize how vital a role he plays in every aspect of the bombing mission. To do his various tasks, and to do them well, the navigator must be a qualified mathematician, a reporter, a gunner, an expert in map reading, an astronomer, a meteorologist, and above all, a man capable of applying his technical knowledge swiftly and with proper judgment to a given situation." The author of that piece of fiction must have been the deputy-recruiting officer at San Marcos. While there may have been a handful of such paragons in the 8th Air Force, most of us were run-of-the-mill journeymen who, in a pinch, could manage to find our way home with little fanfare.)

I have no particular recollection of other memorable missions. Over the years, they all seem to run together, as in a dream sequence.

 Sometime after the Rostock flight, the high brass in the 8th Air Force decided that the missions were getting too easy and increased the tour of duty from twenty five to thirty missions. It was rumored at the time that a similar recommendation had been made earlier but the general who came up with that bad idea went out and got himself shot down and the decision was consequently postponed. Under the new policy, anyone with less then fifteen missions would be required to fly thirty; those with over fifteen were prorated. Since I had eighteen to my credit, I was required to fly three more then I had counted on and I was mildly upset. Ever since, I have always figured that I flew twenty five for Uncle Sam and three for Doolittle, who was the commanding general of the 8th Air Force and ultimately responsible for endangering my life longer then necessary.

My twenty-eighth and last mission was to Rostock, for a second time, and their anti-aircraft guns must have been smoking. We were hit in several places but there were no injuries and no notable damage. One stray hunk of flak was deflected, possibly by the bombsight, and fell, spent, at my feet. I’ve kept that jagged little piece of German metal ever since, as a reminder that staying alive in a B-17 over Germany was often more a matter of luck than skill.

After I got my DFC and Lucky Bastard diploma and didn't give much of a damn if I ever flew again- except for four hours a month, which was the minimum required to earn flight pay. Flyers and, I believe, submarine crews had their paychecks swelled generously for the extra hazards they endured even in the ordinary course of duty. I recall making a couple of whiskey runs to pick up booze for the clubs on the base; otherwise such flying was routine and boring.

On finishing my European tour intact, my next personal goal was to avoid getting killed in the Pacific war. Nothing I had learned or experienced seems to have enhanced my desire for more combat. From the point of view of a navigator, the Pacific was a vast, trackless waste with virtually no landmarks. Moreover, following the official propaganda line at the time, most of us were inclined to regard the Japs (as they were then called) as inhuman fanatics. All in all, the Pacific seemed a good place to avoid. Given my choice, I would have returned to the states and taught a new generation of navigators how to fly back from Rostock alone. In retrospect, it is doubtful that the air corps would think it a good idea to have battle-tested guys in their navigation schools where they could screw-up the minds of cadets; in addition, there were new navigation aids which ass-end Charley crews never got to use.

Still, I made an effort to get such a transfer and sought out recommendations over at headquarters. The Group navigator, apparently not often called on for such letters, released a burst of rhetoric better calculated to get me into a B-29 (which was a blown-up version of a B-17) over the Pacific rather than in some safe navigation school. If everything he said is true, it seems to contradict some of my present recollections. He wrote, in part:      

"Lt. Allebach has been with this group through five months of his most intensive operations in the E.T.O. During his operational tour this officer has navigated in wing ships, element lead ships, and squadron lead ships. He has repeatedly demonstrated his ability as an excellent navigator, bringing back valuable information in his log. He has consistently carried on accurate D.R. navigation, and checked his winds at high altitude; his log kept in our mission folders bear out the fact that he is an above average navigator, accurate to the letter, cool and calculating in the face of intense ack ack fire and pressed fighter attacks.    Most of his navigation was done at extreme altitudes of 20,000 to 29,000 feet with temperatures as low as 54 degrees C below zero and with wind velocities as high as 130 miles an hour. Much of the time he navigated above 10/10th's cloud deep in the heart of southwest Germany and round trips of 1700 miles into Poland. The performance of his duty on these missions was excellent."

Half of that stuff I never heard about while I was flying and I now wonder if he might not have mixed me up with some other Allebach in the Group, in the unlikely event there could be two such names anywhere outside the Pennsylvania Dutch country. In any case, it is somewhat satisfying to have such a handsome bullshit job in my files; but it got me neither to a navigation school nor to the Pacific. Instead, a better opportunity presented itself, which permitted me to stay in England for another year. (I was there, in total, just about eighteen months.)

Probably through some politicking at the officer's club, I managed to get to a flying control school and, on completion of that program, came back to the 390th as a flying control officer. At that school, we learned the fundamentals of controlling air traffic at a heavy bomber base. Our two major functions were (1) to get the Group into the air in an orderly fashion, and (2) to get them back on the ground at the end of a mission, no matter how disorderly the fashion. We had none of the fancy radar apparatus in modern-day towers; our communication with the aircraft was entirely visual and by short-range radio microphone. The training school was located at a little place not far from the university town of Oxford, known as Watchfield, appropriately enough. The program lasted some six or eight weeks and was run by a relaxed gang of Royal Air Force personnel (whose favorite song ended with the line: “So we made a fucking landing in the Firth of fucking Forth.")

While there I had a reunion with my brother Charley, (see exhibits) who was stationed nearby. We tramped around the grounds at some of the colleges at Oxford and had a boozy time at an ancient pub called Mitre Inn. Charley had bad eyes and was assigned to some rear echelon paper-work outfit. He eventually got to France where, I am told, he learned to speak a little peasant French, with a Pennsylvania Dutch accent, if that can be imagined. There, I also met Katherine Brown, the former dietitian at Kutztown, who used to get me paying jobs at school to help cover my modest expenses. She was a commissioned officer in the army in her chosen profession and fixed the best powdered eggs I ever ate, most unlike the usual bane of our breakfast. (Normally, chow at the base was typical G.I. hash and was noticeable only on festive days such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and mission mornings. But forbidden fruit was always tastier than available stuff, so we occasionally planned raids on the kitchen when a couple of us would distract the cooks while another grabbed a stash of food. I recall one time bringing back a fine fully cooked roast of beef, which we enjoyed for several days.) I also met an old Kutztown classmate, Karl Geisinger, another Dutchman, from Emmaus, who got his PhD at Penn after the war and eventually became head of the psychology department at Drexel University here in Philadelphia. It was like old home month in England and a good way to fight a war.

On returning to the 390th, I was assigned to the 30th Station Complement Squadron, which, I suppose, is where they put anyone who could not be properly assigned to one of the technical or combat squadrons. Four or five of us shared a one room Nissen hut (a little metal structure that looked like a giant corrugated pipe sawed in half lengthwise and was like an ice box in winter), heated by a small pot-belly stove that sat in the middle of the room. These stoves were normally fueled by coke, which did not create a very hot fire and always burned out at night, forcing us to make occasional raids on coal piles reserved for more privileged people on the base. Coal burned hot and could be banked for the night so that we had a reasonably warm hut in the morning.

Because we were more or less permanent personnel on the base, we hired one of the natives to build a fireplace at the back end of the hut, where we burned all the scrap lumber we could scrounge. We also acquired a couple of fairly comfortable chairs and, in no time, created a very satisfactory living arrangement. At Christmas of '44, we even had a Christmas tree decorated with pieces of cotton and silver strips, known as chaff, which was otherwise thrown out of airplanes to screw-up enemy radar. (See exhibits)

In a typical hut, if you wanted to socialize, you sat or lounged on the beds. If that was not satisfactory, we could always go to one of the clubs, of which there was one for officers and a couple for enlisted men and never the twain did meet. (I could never figure out why they called it enlisted men since, in all probability, not more than one in a hundred actually enlisted; most were probably drafted. They had an even fancier name for sergeants; they were non-commissioned officers.) As non-combatants, our hut was located across the yard from the officer's club (the combat squadrons were dispersed in more isolated locations nearer to the runways), where the booze flowed freely so long as the red flag was down. A red flag over the club meant that the base was on alert for a mission the next morning and the bars were shut down for all personnel. I may have been innocent, but I never saw or heard of a flyer with a hangover on the morning of a combat mission; why put lives in double jeopardy?

Life as a flying controller was not very difficult or eventful. Each pilot was assigned a specific spot in the formation and we instructed the pilots as to the order to take off. The Group assembled into formation by circling over a special radio beacon called a 'splasher'. If there was cloud cover, which was not unusual, we obviously had to climb through the clouds and assemble well above them. This is always a very scary experience with a load of bombs aboard and with other B-17s flying around in the same clouds.

The Group formation comprised a series of elements of three planes: one leader and two tucked in on each side of and behind the leader. In that way, the entire Group assembled and then joined up with other groups until a strike force of hundreds of B-17s sailed off for the target carrying an incredible load of destruction. Let the record show that those who were carrying the bombs in my airplanes took no pleasure in their occupation and were solely concerned with getting in and out and not getting killed themselves.

Only once during my tour in the tower was there a crash during take off. Then, a fully loaded B-17, with ten men aboard and five tons of bombs, lost power over the end of the runway and crashed into a field with a terrifying explosion. All ten lives were lost, but, within a matter of minutes, the rest of the Group resumed taking off and the mission proceeded. War will not be interrupted by the accidental death of ten men and the loss of one heavy bomber.

When the Group returned from a mission, the tower radio was fairly bursting with talk (contrary to take offs, when radio silence was observed, except in emergencies). Planes with injured aboard, or badly crippled aircraft, were given priority for landing. Fire trucks and ambulances were standing by, ready for action, if needed. Generally, the tower microphone was worked by skilled and experienced enlisted men but hardly ever by the control officer on duty. On occasion, the base commander exercised his rank and grabbed the mike to take personal control in a perceived emergency. Only once that I can recall was a senior pilot required to race out to the end of the runway and literally talk a pilot down to a safe landing, which must have required exceptional skill by both the talker and the flyer.

One night when I was on duty in the tower and the base was not on alert, I was napping, when one of the men rushed in saying he had just received a message that enemy aircraft were in the area (‘intruders’, in officialese). He asked if he should sound an alert, which I thought would be a very good idea, grabbing my trousers. Alerts, and other emergency announcements, were broadcast over a series of loudspeakers around the base (called the tannoy), so that all personnel would get the message and make doubly sure that all lights were out. Not that the base was normally lit up at night but there might have been an open door, or dim lights on jeeps or trucks making their rounds, or lights on the hardstands where ground crews may have been working. After some twenty minutes, while we were nervously searching the sky, an ' all clear' call came in, so we figured the intruder had gone home.

We sounded the all-clear on the tannoy, followed by a green flare from a Vary pistol, which was a standard procedure to make sure that the men in the gun pits out on the edges of the base would be sure to know that the alert was cancelled. Well, that flare turned out to be the dumbest thing we ever did. It happened that one of the intruders had not gone home and we had given him a beautiful target. That German fighter dove right for the tower and released a string of bombs. We could hear him roaring in at full throttle. Luckily for us, either his aim was bad or his bombs hung up (as on our trips to Brunswick), since the bombs went off in an adjacent farmer's field, wreaking some modest damage to British agriculture.

Back in the tower, we were falling all over each other trying to get down the narrow stairs and presumed safety. As it turned out, we may have been in greater danger of killing each other in that mad dash than of getting killed by enemy bombs. But that untidy incident did manage to give the tower staff a little direct taste of war. I doubt that a flare was ever again used to close out an alert and I did suffer the indignity, for a time, of being dubbed Green Flare Allebach.

About that time, the Germans started launching their new V-1 (V, for vengeance) rockets, which we came to call 'buzz bombs'. These were low-flying pilotless bombs and were relatively slow. It was an eerie sight to see them putt-putting over the countryside with a comet-like flame coming out their rear. Presumably they were timed to run out of fuel over predetermined targets, like cities, so they were mainly morale busters for civilians. It would have been sheer luck had they hit any military targets and many were shot down by RAF night fighters. Hitler would never win the war with such a weapon.

The V-2s were much more destructive; they were big rockets against which there was no defense. Had they been activated twelve months earlier, England might very well have been decimated. The V-2s carried a much heavier load of explosives than buzz bombs and apparently could not be directed to any target more precise than cities. Most, I believe, hit London causing large scale civilian casualties. Those rocket attacks were an ironic commentary on the accuracy of our daylight precision bombing. During my combat tour, I went on five missions to rocket launching sites along the French coast, where we dropped, in all, maybe thousands of tons of heavy bombs. It would appear that there were either too many such sites to take them all out, or the pads were too well protected and sustained only minor damage, or our bombing accuracy left something to be desired.

I recall during one leave in London I was sleeping off a moderate binge in an upper floor of a hotel when the air raid sirens started wailing. With mixed emotions, I tried to gather my wits and get the hell out of that building, but it just seemed like too much trouble and I wound up under the bed hearing huge explosions in the distance and, finally an all-clear, after which I was reasonably sober.

London, and virtually all of England, was blacked out during the entire war. But London was the place where most of us gravitated whenever we had two or three day passes. Many of these trips involved searches for women and one of the favorite gathering places for women in search of Yanks was Piccadilly Circus, in the heart of London. These were the women we referred to as Piccadilly Commandos, many of whom were able to make their conquests only because of the blackout; they were ‘dogs’ in daylight, as the saying goes. There was little opportunity to inspect such goods before purchasing and many of these liaisons kept the venereal wards of the GI hospitals on a steady schedule. These women were usually very persistent and I recall one, after being turned down, tried to settle for a "quickie around the corner standing up".

During my stint in the control tower, I was invited, along with a handful of other junior officers on the base, to tea at the fine old home of Sir Basil and Lady Eddis, in a nearby town on the North Sea coast named Aldeburgh. That place is now known internationally as the home of the Aldeburgh Music Festival, which was first organized some years ago by the British composer, Benjamin Britten. Sir Basil seemed elderly and was very serious about the war; he was 'veddy' British and very gentry. He might easily have just stepped out of a 19th century novel by Jane Austen. His wife was a handsome, regal character who clearly controlled the family. In fantasy land, I liked to consider the prospect of seducing this blue-blooded lady of the manor, who seemed to need more attention than she apparently got. Such fantasies have never seemed to work out for me and sort of outraged one of the girls with whom I casually shared this confidence; perhaps because she too thought I was right and might be successful.

At that party, I met a girl from New Zealand who was attached to a British ground-watch outfit in the area. (England was paranoid about a potential Nazi invasion.) My new friend had wide-ranging interests, wrote some poetry and subsequently, regularly beat me at tennis. Her background was clearly more advantaged than mine. She introduced me to T.S. Elliot's work, whose mood fit me perfectly at that time. It was Elliot who wrote the oft quoted line: "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper." Not entirely appropriate for Mallos.

         At one point, Judy suggested that we spend a holiday (the British do not take vacations, they go on holidays) together in the British Lake District, which I thought was a great idea, perhaps having things in mind that did not necessarily correspond with what she had in mind. Somehow, we managed to coordinate our schedules and went off to London to catch a train north. In London, we stayed overnight at the home of friends of hers who were very accommodating and even lent me civilian clothes for the trip. The next day we got off the train at Windermere, which has the largest lake in the district, and took a cab to the Kirkstone Pass Inn, which was to be our base for the next week or so. It was a small, remote place in wild, desolate hills, from which no other buildings were visible, except far down in the valley - a perfect spot to forget the war.

The Lake District has some fifteen lakes, with such quaint sounding names as Ullswater, Derwentwater, Buttermere and Thirlmere; it is sparsely populated and boasts England's highest hills, way up there in the 3,000 foot range. It used to be a favored gathering place for many of England's most famous poets. All of the hills were manageable, much like Vermont, except these English hills are not heavily wooded, a legacy of that country's sailing past, when many of their forests were denuded for ship masts and building lumber.

We walked and walked, up in the hills, down in the valleys and along the lakes. We visited Swarthmoor(sic) Hall (after which Swarthmore College is named), the home of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, and also visited the first Quaker Meeting House, established by Fox. (George Fox, incidentally, was a friend of my first known ancestor in America, named Peter Schumacher, a Mennonite turned Quaker, who settled in Germantown, now a part of Philadelphia, in 1685.) We saw many other places celebrated by the poets but are now faded from my memory. One day we walked so far that we had to take a cab back to the Inn to be on time for dinner. I was in civilian clothes and the cab driver, not able to account for my accent, asked what part of England I came from. Apparently I was the first Yank he had encountered and I was flattered not to be immediately recognized as one of the reputed despoilers of British womanhood.

Fully refreshed and with me as strong as an ox, we returned to London, where we had tickets for the London Philharmonic at Royal Albert Hall. This was to be my first live concert in a symphony hall. Especially in wartime, this was what might be called a major experience for small town warrior just back from the Lake District. (It was not until after the war when I became aware that the music of Richard Wagner was informally banned in the U.S., and Britain, and that this continued for a long time, a modern version of book burning. War, it seems, has boundless consequences; we were no longer permitted to hear Wagner because his music was too heroic, to Teutonic and know to be favored by Hitler.) In any case, after that holiday, it was a massive letdown to return to life on a dreary bomber base.

It was not long after that that my war ended for good. I received a wire from home asking that I request an emergency leave because of the impending death of my father. (In true Pennsylvania Dutch fashion, my mother wanted one of her own men around in a time of crisis.) My father had cancer of the throat, a terrible affliction for anyone, but especially for one who loved to sing. He hung on until November 1945, and died at the age of forty-nine, weighing less than ninety pounds.

I flew back to the states via Prestwick, Scotland, where, some eighteen months earlier, I first set foot on the British Isles. In the waiting room at the airport, we were all stunned to hear on the radio that four-term president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was dead. (FDR died late in the afternoon on April 12, 1945, so I must have been in Prestwick on the 12th and 13th.) I distinctly recall hearing the voice of Harry Truman, the new president, for the first time. Somehow, his midwestern twang sounded small, strange and insecure after twelve years of the self-confident, patrician presence of FDR. Truman proved to be more than well enough equipped for the job, though I might wish that he had had the power and desire to destroy everything having to do with the atom bomb.

In the waiting room at Prestwick, I also saw an old friend from the Navy, known as 'Tiny' Smith, who was easily recognized, since he stood nearly six inches above most crowds. Tiny wore Navy navigator wings on his uniform (he must have washed out of pilot training after Pearl Harbor but stayed on to complete navigation school, which might have happened to me under similar circumstances, to the dismay of the 8th Air Force) and would not discuss the reason for his presence in Scotland, so assumed he must have been involved in some dark affairs of state. He was a very bright and quiet guy with whom military secrets would have been secure.

After my initial leave at home, I was assigned to a replacement depot at Miami Beach. Why Miami Beach? Why not New York or Boston or even Philadelphia, which were a lot closer and would have saved some travel costs? I was certain that it was Miami Beach so they could get me in a relaxed state of mind before sending me off to some more hazardous duty. It transpired that those worries were for naught. On May 8, 1945, the war was over in Europe and rumors were rife that demobilization would begin. I arrived at Miami Beach on May 12 and it wasn't long before word came down that all navigators with a certain number of points (I don't recall how the points were calculated but I had more than enough) were now eligible for discharge. Without hesitation, I was among the first in that discharge line. No more war for me; my dues were paid, my job as a citizen solider was performed. I suppose I might have been called back had the Korean War gotten a lot worse, but that didn't happen. Besides, I am convinced that mortal combat generally is only for men under twenty-five, excepting war lovers and professional soldiers. After that they start thinking too much and begin to realize that war is a pretty dumb way to make a living, or put it another way, a sorry way to bring life to an abrupt end.

My parents had six surviving children (two others died in infancy). There are still three boys and three girls in 1990. All three of the boys and one of the girls were in uniform during World War II, two of us in combat, so it might be said that, in spite of his early death, my father served his country well. On the subject of parents, both of mine quit school at fourteen (the youngest age when working papers could be obtained), following the general practice in that place at that time. After the war, I remember my mother saying, with some obvious satisfaction, that, with all those kids, she would have been proud if just one of them finished high school, (a fine example of the high standards established for that particularly Pennsylvania Dutch family) only to find, in her later years, that all six of them did and three, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, also had college degrees - a significant fringe benefit of that war. Brother Charley, who did not get the college bug, fooled around in insurance and banking as a sideline to his major interest, which has been being the Republican mayor of our hometown for something like twenty years. Who the hell needs an education to be a Republican politician? Everybody knows that Republican politicians know everything, without benefit of too much formal education, which might actually get in their way.

My brother, Bud (he is really Earl - for some unknown reason, none of us were given good Pennsylvania Dutch names like Jonas, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah or Elizabeth), almost six years younger than I, was an engineer and a top turret gunner in a B-24. This was another of our four engine bombers and was known as the Liberator. It was a weird looking vehicle, unless one perceives a hippopotamus with wings to be a thing of beauty. Bud began his combat tour at a base not far from Norfolk, in northern England, sometime after that I went into the control tower at the 390th. He was just out of his teens and I was outraged that such kids should be exposed to such a dangerous occupation.

We were in regular communication and, somehow, I learned when he went out on his first mission, whatever that may say about security at his base. I also learned that his plane had not returned to its base after the mission but was reported to have landed at an emergency airstrip not far south of the 390th. I called the airstrip, outside of Woodbridge, and was told that the crew was okay but could not take off because their new home base was socked-in by bad weather. I was also told that I could pick up the crew if I could arrange transportation. I did that and brought his entire crew back to the 390th for a very sloppy party, which is apparently still a high point in their memories of the war. It turned out that they made that emergency landing because Bud, as engineer, calculated that they didn't have enough gas to get home. (Unlike Sharpe at Rostock!) It happened that his gas gauges were faulty and there would have been plenty of gas. But no fun.

In retrospect, I must have been a pretty efficient operator in those days. I now have no idea how I managed to follow the flight of his craft that day, or to commandeer a truck, or to acquire a few bottles of scotch; any one of which probably required breaking some rules. Bud and I later spent a three-day leave together at a North Sea resort named Great Yarmouth, with the usual consequences. Happy and hungover but hardy.

In a sense, my stay in England seemed to be a succession of reunions with family and friends. During the war, England was a great gathering place. While there, I had several visits with a pre-war friend, Don Cook, who was a correspondent with the now defunct New York Herald Tribune, which was then next to the Times in devoted readership. Sometime after I finished my combat tour, he came up to the 390th and was taken over by the base commander, much to my annoyance. It wasn't much of a visit for me but the CO probably got a story datelined 'A heavy bomber base in England'. I also recall a visit with Don in London when he took me into a room where they were telephoning stories back to New York. The trans-Atlantic lines were in such demand that newspapers had only limited access to them, so they employed exceptionally fast talkers in London and particularly adept listeners in New York. I could not understand a word the talker spoke; it seemed like unbroken garble, but it apparently worked.

In England, it was not unusual to see huge formations of bombers in the sky but never as it was on D-Day when the allied troops landed on the French coast and the sky was literally black with aircraft. The 390th history puts the total number at 12,000. I was not on duty in the tower that day, June 6, 1944, but I do know that the Group went out three separate times-a good way to pile up missions. The narrative in the 390th history is vague as to the results of these missions but Paul Fussell, a University of Pennsylvania professor of English, and author of a recent unconventional account of WW-II called Wartime is not vague. He relates that 480 B-24s (including my brother?) dropped 1,285 tons of bombs in support of the landings, which U.S. General Bradley called "completely ineffective" and succeeded in killing only French civilians and their livestock. I would hope that the B-17s did better.

I am not ordinarily a very introspective person (I’m perhaps better described as a "meat and potatoes” type, without too much emphasis on the more subtle edges of life.) and generally accept most conditions as I find them, with a moderate amount of bitching when the occasion warrants. So it was during that war. I was called (in a way) and I served my time competently without undue personal stress and with no particular distinction. If travel is broadening, as is said, then my life was significantly broadened as a result of the war but I would be reluctant to admit that WW-II was the high point in my life. It generated no long-term friendships (though I value the few intermittent contacts I've retained), nor can I identify anything I learned that was particularly useful in later life. Instead, I tend now to resent those four years that were torn out of my life to no lasting purpose.

World War II, it might be said, did little more then get rid of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini. Hardly had the shooting stopped then our former ally, the Soviet Union, became our mortal enemy and our former enemies became our valued friends. Between arming to protect ourselves from our former ally and financing the rebuilding of the economies of our former enemies, we became the biggest spending people the earth has ever known and are now reaping the whirlwind. Now we are again friends with our apparently impoverished former ally/enemy and are rapidly becoming poor cousins to our prosperous former enemy/ally. An intelligent being from outer space observing this scene would surely conclude that this planet Earth is one big, round insane asylum.

From my perspective, World War II will always be remembered, not in an orgy of flag waving, but more in the spirit of holocaust and as a perversion of the meaning of civilization. It was a war that devastated Europe, the Pacific islands and Japan. More than fifty million people were killed, mostly civilians. The Soviet Union alone is said to have lost twenty-seven million. Hitler exterminated six million Jews. China had 1.3 million dead, Germany almost three million and Japan 2.1 million. The United States lost over four hundred thousand of sixteen million in uniform. In that context, World War II was a time in history more to be mourned than celebrated.

Mission Log

Combat missions logged – Kenneth Allebach

390^th Mission     390^th History      K.A. Mission     Date      Flying Time                   Target

Number             Page No.            No.

35                     42                     1                      12/5/43  9:15                  Bordeaux, Fr., Aircraft factory

37                     56                     2                      12/13    7:30                  Kiel, Gr., Shipyards

38                     56                     3                      12/16    6:45                  Bremen, Gr., Shipyards

39                     56                     4                      12/20    6:20                  Bremen, Gr., Shipyards

40                     83                     5                      12/22    5:30                  Munster, Gr., Rail yards

41                     77                     6                      12/24    4:40                  Quoeux, Fr., Rocket site

42                     51                     7                      12/30    8:30                  Ludwigshafen, Gr., Chemical plant

43                     69                     8                      12/31    5:15                  Paris, Fr., Ball bearing plant

45                     51                     9                      1/5/44   5:45                  Elberfeld, Gr., Ball bearing plant

46                     51                     10                     1/7        6:15                  Ludwigshafen, Gr., Chemical plant

47                     42                     11                     1/11      7:00                  Brunswick, Gr., Aircraft plant

48                     78                     12                     1/14      3:20                  Quoeux, Fr., Rocket site

59                     42                     13                     2/20      9:45                  Rostock, Gr., Aircraft plant

60                     43                     14                     2/21      7:40                  Hannover, Gr.,   “                    “

61                     43                     15                     2/24      11:00                Rostock, Gr.,      “         “

62                     36                     16                     2/25      9:00                  Regensburg, Gr., “        “

63                     79                     17                     2/28      4:00                  Grand Parc, Fr., Rocket site

64                     43                     A                      2/29      3:30                  Brunswick, Gr.

66                     71                     18                     3/3        6:15                  Berlin, Gr., Electric plant

67                     71                     19                     3/4        7:00                  “          “          “

69                     71                     A                      3/8        0:30                  “          “          “

70                     71                     A                      3/9        3:20                  “          “          “

72                     43                     20                     3/16      9:15                  Augsburg, Gr., Aircraft plant

73                     44                     21                     3/18      4:15                  “          “          “

74                     79                     22                     3/19      3:00                  Mimoyecques, Fr., Rocket site

75                     72                     23                     3/22      8:30                  Berlin, Gr., Aircraft plant

77                     79                     24                     3/26      4:00                  LaGlacerie, Fr., Rocket site

78                     84                     A                      3/27      4:00                  Cazaux, Fr., Airfield

79                     84                     25                     3/28      6:30                  Chateaudun, Fr., Airfield

80                     52                     A                      4/1        5:00                  Ludwigshafen, Gr., Chemical plant

81                     85                     26                     4/8        5:15                  Quackenbruck, Gr., Aircraft plant

82                     44                     A                      4/9        5:30                  Marienburg, Gr.

83                     85                     27                     4/10      5:30                  Maldegem, Be. Airfield.(Rheims,Fr.)

84                     45                     28                     4/11      10:00                Rostock, Gr., Port area

Notes:    The first column is the mission number the 390^th flew. The Group’s first mission came on August 8, 1943; its

301^st, and last, was on April 20, 1945. My first mission was the Group’s 35^th and my last was the Group’s 84^th. The second column is the page number in the 390^th history where the mission is briefly described. The third column has my mission numbers; ‘A’ means that my plane aborted the mission and returned without reaching the target (no mission). The fifth column is shown as hours and minutes flown, as shown on my flight record.

About the B-17 “Flying Fortress” – some Facts and Figures

¨     The prototype of this plane was built and flown by Boeing Aircraft Company of Seattle

on July 28, 1935.

¨     A total of 12,677 planes were built by Boeing, Lockheed, and Douglas before the last

one was delivered on April 13, 1945.

¨     Production began with the Model E, then hundreds of modifications were made and the new Model F and G* went into mass production. A total of 4035 B-17s were built by Boeing; 2395 by Douglas, and 2250 by Lockheed – Vega.

¨     Wing span: 103 feet, 10 inches.

¨     Length: 74 feet, 9 inches.

¨     Height: 19 feet, 1 inch.

¨     Weight: Empty – 32,720 pounds. With “normal” load: 55,000 pounds.

Maximum: 72,000 pounds.

¨     Bomb Load carried: 6,000 pounds (three tons)

¨     Power: Four 9-cylinder radial Wright Cyclone engines – each 1200 horsepower.

¨     Altitude: Could fly up to 35,000 feet.

¨     Speed: Up to 300 miles per hour.

¨     Cost: $238,329.

¨     Armament: Thirteen 50-caliber Browning machine guns.

*      “I’ll Be Around”, on display in the 390^th Memorial Museum, is a model G, built in 1945.