B-17 POW reunion       

Earl Morrow                Sam Lisica               Jerry Silverman

                        Pilot                             Bombardier                 Navigator

Interviewed by Matthew Rozell at Earl Morrow's home,

Hartford, NY

July 31, 2001

Jerry Silverman - Some of the things that shake you.  My younger son, I use to look down on him, now he is looking over me…  I’ve found the packet with my old record and ID and so on from about 1943. I was 5’ 10 ½”.  I think I’m about 5’ even right now.

Sam Lisica - They say you shrink, gravity’s pushing us down.

JS-I think I’ve taken too many baths and I washed away, I was not born preshrunk.

SL- My kids all called me “Shorty”, their mother’s short.  They’re all over 6 feet.

JS - I use to have 3 sons and a daughter, now I’ve got 3 fathers and a mother.

Matthew Rozell - (laughs)

JS -Your day will come, don’t snicker, your day will come.

MR- I know, I know…

MR – You were in the US Army Air Force?

SL – USAAC, United States Army Air Corps.

JS- They have a monument in Nassau County, with my name in a nice place, US Army.

MR - Do they really?

JS - And I told them to change it and they said they can’t.  They would have had to change a plate with 15 names on it.

SL - I want to go out to Colorado Springs for this coming re-union.

JS - Say that again?

SL -I want to go out to Colorado Springs...

(Earl Morrow, pilot, enters)

EM –(shows photograph) We got lucky- I found it.

MR - Is this the original, Earl?

EM –Yes.

SL -That’s the one we got in 1944.

MR -You each got one?

EM - Yes.

JS – Well, I don’t have it with me. Do you know what I did with this girl? I showed her a picture like that and I said “you know when you see the parades and you see all these old people you see these people marching with the flags and the hats all this stuff on, I said that’s what you see and you pass the cemetery and you see all the old people, grandmas and grandpas in the cemetery.  Well when I was in Cambridge at the American cemetery all those graves, the kids, were 18, 19 and 20 years and ....

EM – (interrupting) Everybody wrote their names on it (pointing to picture) see even Sam.

SL - Oh I could write back then…

JS - ...and then I showed her a picture of a reunion, you know, and you see all the dressed up business suits, you see all these old people at the time about 75 years old, maybe 70 years old.  Then I put this picture next to that one and I said “next time you see a parade of old men, this guy here was 18 flying combat, this guy was 19 flying combat”.

EM – (points to picture) This man was 18.

SL – Yes, he just came out of High School.

SL - He was the voice man,  he died the day we went down.

EM - These three were killed the day we went down.

This one retired in the 1980’s as a brigadier general.

MR - Which one is you?

EM – (pointing) This is me, this is Sam, Bob, George is gone , Bill is gone, he was shot up real bad, but we got him out and he survived and he died in about 1978 or 1979-he was playing golf and he had an heart attack… and George Schaffer the one next to him, he just passed away. Was it 2 years ago?

JS - Was it 2 years ago. I think so.

EM - He was in the hospital for a long time he had a lot of problems.

SL – Cancer, wasn’t it?

EM – Yes, cancer and blood problems, he had a whole lot of stuff.

JS - See that picture, every crew had a picture like that. The army did that. The four in the front were generally (but not always) the pilot, the copilot, the bombardier and the navigator or vice versa. These would be the enlisted men here (pointing to top row). See these are the enlisted men, these are the officers. 

EM -Radio, waist gun, ball turret, waist gun, ball turret these two switched off and they were both killed, he was qualified as an engineer also, but he didn’t go with us that day.  This is the tail gunner...

SL -We had ten men, but only 9 flew so every mission, someone would go.  Did you just have ten men in your crew?

JS - Say again?

SL - Did you just have ten men in your crew?

JS - Oh yes.

SL -One guy sat down, just one guy sat down.

EM -Our group, they always pulled one waist gunner and left him home.

JS - Never with us.

EM - One crewmember stayed home.

JS - Never with us, we always had ten.  I never flew a mission with nine people.  Back when I was leading, we had 2 or 3 navigators.

EM – (ribbing) Well, they probably needed them, with you.

JS - If you’re leading a group, it’s one thing, but if you’re leading a division or a wing, that’s another one.  One was the lead navigator, one was the DR (dead reckoning) navigator and one would just read our radar.

EM - You see, when we got over there, we always left one guy home, because we pulled the gunner off  the radio, so if you get under attack, he goes back to the waist…

SL- Both sides of the waist would be...

JS- You always have two waist guns, always.

SL - We had one.

JS - As a matter of fact, I was amazed at how many bullets I could shoot off.  We went onto the back of the ship; you could kill yourself on all the shells all over the place. They’re like marbles all over the place.

EM – See, that’s why Belinger wasn’t with us the day we were shot down.

JS - You have to remember at this point I was the lead navigator and I didn’t have any clue who I flew with, I didn’t know any of these guys.

EM –Yes, well you lead crews, it didn’t pertain to them what happened to us.

JS - My crew long since went home, the co-pilot and I came back for second tour but he and I didn’t fly together because he was on lead crew and he was on a crew that flew together.

MR – Jerome, you’re from Long Island you said?

JS – Yes, but you better call me Jerry because two people call me Jerome, my ex-wife and my mother…

MR – OK..

JS -That was when I was in trouble.

MR - What’s your date of birth?

SL - A long time ago.

JS - April 15^th, 1919.

MR - So today you’re 80...?

JS – Two.

EM - Two… He’s the old man of the bunch now.

JS  – If I keep my mouth shut I might make 83.

MR - You were the navigator, right?

EM - But he was on the…

SL - Group navigator.

JS - No I was not a group navigator.

SL- Squadron.

EM - Squadron navigator

JS - And I was isn’t a squadron navigator.

SL – Lead…

JS – No, not at that time.

EM –Then what was your title then?

JS - I was a specialist navigator, but I navigated as a lead navigator. 

EM - Lead navigator…

JS- He’s got more experience. They put you more forward to lead the pack because we always went in groups.  There was the lead navigator and the lead bombardier.

EM -They really didn’t do anything.  The navigator did nothing unless you had to leave the formation then we really put in for war.

JS - Except we had to fly the target and help the bombardier fly the target.

EM -All we really needed to do was follow the lead ship.

JS - We had to look at the pictures and see what the Germans were doing.  River would be like this and the target would be here.  Many times we would have problems with clouds under cast because we flew 20-25 thousand feet. There would be a hole in the clouds so they’d set up a whole city dummy, really, set up a whole city dummy and if you see a whole in the clouds or you see this or you think this is it.  It’s a bend in the river same as this they’d duplicate it. There was a movie “Command Decision” with Walter Pigeon and I forget whom, it’s exactly what happened to the navigator.  They thought they hit the target and they get all excited and then the navigator says that’s its “gross error”. He says, “That was a dummy I hit”.  It’s in the movie.  I have a copy, if you give me your address, I’ll make a copy of the movie and send it to you.

MR - And Sam, what’s your date of birth?

SL -May 23^rd, 1921.

MR -It’s your eightieth year?

SL –Yes.

EM -Your birth date is the same as Jess’ (Earl’s wife).

SL -Jess’ birth date is in May?

EM -May 23^rd now the year, I won’t tell you.

SL - Why not, that’s simple?  Why she doesn’t want anyone to know?  We’re going to ring it out of her.

EM - She doesn’t care if you know when her birthday is, she just doesn’t want you to know when it happened.

SL - We want to know the year. So in other words, what your saying is she’s an old chick.

EM - But it’s May 23rd.

JS - There’s a gross error in the United States Government, my birthday is April 15th the country’s birthday is July 4th.  April 15th they should send me the money, not the IRS.  July 4th they can send it to the IRS.

MR - What was your job, Sam?

SL - Me?  Navigator, bombardier.

EM - He was trained in either one.

SL – No, took both of them at the same time.

EM - Like I said, you were trained in either one.

SL - But we didn’t learn celestial navigation, we learned dead reckoning and other ways you could navigate.

MR – Earl, when is your birthday?

EM - June 27^th, 1921

JS -27^th? The newspaper had the 21st.

EM – What?

JS - The newspaper had it as the 21st they never get anything right.

EM - At least they got the year right, 1921.

JS - The fellow that came here, he was taking notes and everything so I was kidding him I says well it’s like Holly, I don’t care what you write about me just spell my name right and he spelled it wrong. He spelled it with a G instead of a J.

MR -When you went over to England, if I’m looking at the article correctly who flew with Earl before you got shot down, anybody?

SL -we were crew men .

MR -You guys were on the same crew, that’s why I have you in this photograph, and you  had 17 missions before you got shot down.

SL - He had seventeen, I had twenty-three.

EM - There was a little period there where I got grounded.

SL  - They were going to shoot him.

EM - I tore up two airplanes one morning.

MR - Tore up?

SL -Wrecked them while we were taking off.

EM - It’s simple, I just caught the tail section of the airplane in front of me with the wing tip because we came up, your runway is here, came up this taxiway and there is a portable tower sitting here, and we get into our right turn behind the next airplane, and we had no brakes, everything was gone. The tail wheel was turned, to keep us turned to the right.

 Well, we don’t want to really tear up that tower there and the airplane’s in front of me and the tail’s wrong so at the last second, just to save everything we could, I had to gun the hell out of the two right engines and swing her around and my wing tip caught the tail of the one of the planes front of me.

SL - Took the rudder off.

EM - The problem was, the night before someone came in and landed and took a building off its foundation and the colonel said “next time there is an incident it’ll be pilot error, one hundred percent” and it was me. I fall into those things.

JS -The commanding officer of any unit is responsible, no matter what, and the pilot is responsible.  Now if the mechanic does something wrong and the pilot, he’s sleeping, and the mechanic is working at two o’clock in the morning, working on that airplane to get it ready.  If something goes wrong, in the end result in all commanding officers opinion, he’s the pilot, he’s responsible.  In other words, Harry Truman said, “the buck stops here”, that’s what happened. 

Unfortunately, he had something mechanically wrong, but the colonel, even though he didn’t know anything, it’s going to be pilot error; otherwise some general’s going to say, “Colonel, what’s going on”?  He would then pass the buck.

EM -The co-pilot makes a mistake; it’s my fault for letting him make it.  So you know when you get up there, you take the gaffe.

JS – So, as I said, that’s a diversion.

EM - So that’s why we didn’t come up with the same number of missions.

JS – (Agreeing) That’s why you didn’t have the same number of missions.

EM - Another reason is when I first got there,  when I went on my first mission I went as a co-pilot as a experienced crew and they didn’t and the next day I go out and I got all my crew, except my co-pilot. I got an experienced co-pilot, then the third mission; the crew was on their own.

MR - And what was the target when you got shot down? It was November ‘44 right?

EM - It was November 2^nd 1944.

JS – Mergsburg.

EM - Mergsburg synthetic oil field.

JS - You can give him the printout of the mission we got yesterday.

EM –You’ve got the 457th Bomber Group, or you have my description of it?

MR - I have your description of it in red.  I’m just reviewing a little bit.  You said you thought you had the best crew over there. You still think that?

EM – Yes.

JS - Say that again?

EM - Best crew.

JS - Who said that?

EM – Me.

SL - And I second that.

JS – (joking) And who gave you the authority?

SL - Him (pointing to Earl).

MR - Is this the bombardier who had the amnesia?

EM – Yes.

MR - After you were shot down?

EM - This was on the force march.

JS – (joking) To this day he’s got amnesia.

EM - He was on the march too (pointing to JS). There were about 10,000 of us on the march.

MR - So how did you two meet up? Because you shared...

JS – (interrupting) Let me give you a little background.

MR – Yes, I’d like that.

JS - I came over before he did, when a group came over originally you came over in one group.  As you lost people, you got replacements.  They came over as another crew, as a replacement crew.  I had been there a while; I had never set eyes on him.

MR - Where you at the same base?

JS - Same base, same squadron, same everything.  So a whole crew got shot down, they put another crew in their beds.

MR -Did you know him at all before?

JS - No, I never knew him. Anyway I came home, I’ve completed one tour, came home on what they call rest and recuperation.

MR - How many missions are in a tour?

JS – After 25 missions I could go home, I could fly 5 more and stay home or I could fly 5 fewer and come back again. If I chose to fly to thirty, I figured I could get killed on number 26, 27, 28 etc.  I figured take what you got, you know, take your winnings and get off the table.  So I went home then I came back to the crew.  Now I didn’t come back with a crew, I came back as a lead navigator and I was put on, I was already a lead crew navigator, they have crews that are trained to lead, they have another guys that come in to navigate.  They have two guys navigating, one guy looking out the window, another guy doing the paper work, the third guy was on the radio to make it as good as we possibly could get it.

 I came back for a second tour each time I flew. I flew with different people. I didn’t even know the people I was on the plane with that day, but that’s just the way it works. You know, when you fly you have specialists; you have a special bombardier.   The best bombardier in a crew, that sort of thing.  What happened was here we are in a group of thirty six aircraft in our squad. We had twelve and twelve and twelve, so we were in the same unit.  It was called a ‘low box’, they called it a box because twelve (points up) twelve (points middle) and twelve (point low), high box, lead box and low box, when the Germans came they came from behind and they hit the low box and they took out I think seven planes, plus two more from our squadron.

MR - Were they fighter planes that brought them down?

JS – Fighters, yes.  We got hit from behind-I never saw them. I heard them yelling, then the shooting, everything going on back there. I’m up at the front of the plane, this is going on in the tail.  The Germans at this point- previously they used to come in and attack individually-but at this point in the war they didn’t have years to train their pilots, number one; number two, they didn’t have a safe place to train them because our fighters were ranging all over, so they have inexperienced pilots. So they take a few good pilots and tell the rest of the guys to ‘string out and stick with us’ so they just his us in waves.  And the first thing I knew [we were being attacked in a fashion] which I haven’t seen before and then an airplane hit ours, or one of their fighters hit our wing.  I didn’t see it happen, but I felt the whole airplane shake and I said “what happened” and something hit our wing-the plane was on fire, and we bailed out. When I got on the ground, to answer your question, he (points to Earl Morrow) was having his own problems in his plane and they bailed out. When I was on the ground, I got picked up by some civilians, well, not civilians- they were coming towards me but there was one guy who was police and they say get in the hands of the police or the military, don’t let the civilians get a hold of you because they have pitchforks and they were pitching things other than hay. I didn’t see them luckily, but there were American fliers hanging by the necks from telephone poles and trees because of what we were.  When I got picked up two German soldiers came around in a Volkswagon, which like a jeep,  and he (points to Earl) is sitting in the back of the thing, and that’s where I met him.

MR - So it was the same exact day, the same mission you were on?

JS – Yes-then we were collected and put with other guys, and then put on a plane, and each section was a whole story in itself, what happened here, what happened there.

MR- What happened when you were on the Jeep?

JS- Well on the jeep, that story was in the newspaper, but this one German the guy riding shotgun had a patch on his eye, big guy, and he took his (points to Earl) watch, he took my high school ring, he said he would keep it so some other guy wouldn’t just come and steal it from me, and I would get it back after the war. 

I’m not going to argue with the guy.  He goes over to him (points to Earl) to get his pilot wings and this big dumb jerk (referring to Earl) he’s pushing him away and I’m saying “these guys have guns for God’s sake, give him the damn wings before they kill us”.  And he said “they’re not getting my wings,” I repeated “don’t be so damn stubborn, give him the damn wings!”  And he wouldn’t give him the wings and the guy backed off.  But if this guy was in another frame of mind you (points to Earl) wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t be here, and Sam wouldn’t be here.  He could of just shot us and nobody ask questions, then. So that’s where I met him. Then we would collect in and go to central point and they would ship you across country to a place called Dusseldorf, which is an interrogation center.  And they keep you there a few days while you get interrogated.  And depending on what happened, they would send you to another place, until they got enough people together so they could try the freight train, or passenger train or something, and then they send you off to your destination.  That’s how we all ended up in camp. 

The camps were set up this way, if you were in the army or an infantry men you were prisoner of the German Army.  If you were in the Navy and got picked up by the Army someway or another, you are a prisoner of the Navy.  We were Air Corps people, so we were prisoners of the Luftwaffe and I think we were treated better than anyone else.  Because the British had so many Luftwaffe pilots in their camp and Herman Goering  would make sure the British would take care of his boys.  We didn’t have a picnic, it wasn’t exactly the Hilton and it wasn’t Hogan’s Heroes, but we were much better off than anyone else in Germany.  We got the same rations that they (the guards) got, but they didn’t really have all that much either, to tell you the truth, the German population, if you were a farmer you ate, if you lived in the city, you didn’t get much either. 

We didn’t get much.  We had Red Cross parcels come to us, and they kept saying “no parcels this week, your bombers hit three things- schools, hospitals and supply trains” with Red Cross parcels, that’s all our bombers ever hit.

The Red  Cross parcels you are supposed to use to supplement rations they gave us, which was potatoes and soup and our lard or something. Everybody lost weight -I went from about 160 something down to 129, they (points to Earl and Sam) would have to tell you what they lost, but most lost from 30 to 40 pounds.  But we were still much better then those poor guys who ended up in Japan,  there is no question about it.  When they say “Geez, you were a prisoner of war, you had it tough” -I have a kind of a guilty conscience because I knew guys that were in Japan.

MR- Yes, I have interviewed a few guys that were on the hell ships, The Japanese…

JS- Correct.

MR- Bad news….What about the forced march?

EM – Well, they have heard my version of it, let someone else give them their version of it.

SL - Well this is in…January .

EM - The last of January.

SL- Last of January

MR- 1945.

SL- Right, and the Germans didn’t want us to be liberated in any way shape or form, so they were moving us all.  Going west over the …. forest.

MR- Because they wanted you as bargaining chips.

JS- Well that’s the rumor, The prisoner of war camps are the greatest rumor factories in the world.

MR- Sure, you don’t have any information.

SL – Well, we did have good information.

EM - We had a radio.

SL - Yes we had a radio, the Germans could never find it.

EM - They would ask it when we were moving  “Taking your radio with you?”

MR - Where did you hide it?

SL- You took it apart and put it together -everybody had a little piece.

JS- In our camp, it was in an accordion.  I always heard about it,  then a book got published … and in it they had the picture of the accordion and I start jumping up and down like a maniac.  I said “by God I heard about that thing!” and here it is, there is a picture of it.  The guys are sitting around and the Germans are taking everything apart, and one guy is sitting there playing “Home on the Range”, and the radio is inside the accordion that this guy is playing.

EM- And the BBC {British Broadcasting Corporation} knew it to, because they beamed stuff into us.

SL - We used to have a map on the wall, which is just off the point…

MR - Go ahead.

SL- This big map the guys have drawn …  and we knew where everyone was in the war.  Where the French were moving up, where the Russians were, where the Germans were.  They used to come to us to look at our map to find out what the hell was going on.  But the radio always picked up from outside, always like a newscast.  And there it was, we would have it.

EM - And on that same map it would have our line where we knew it was, marked.  Then we would have their line where they advertised marked and they didn’t agree at all.

JS - In many cases they agreed but the interesting part was we would get interpreters and we would get the German news.  And of course we would get our own news from the BBC and the Germans would say that “all victorious troop strongly defended this particular town” then the next day… “all victorious and glorious and loyal Nazi troops (or what ever they called them) successfully beat down two platoons of American infantry at this town” but now they were back over here.  The next day they beat the hell of us over here, and then they beat the hell of us over here, then over there.  When we look at the thing we laugh at the thing, but they haven’t won a battle and they are slowly losing the war.

SL- They’re backing up and backing up.  Funny how they came in one day and said “Everybody get packed because we are going to move out!”  So everybody starts packing and it started to snow in the afternoon, it was more like flurries and there was probably only an inch of snow on the ground, but as it got later in the day, the snow got heavier.  And we had to go, so when we left there the snow was about four inches deep, when we went out.

JS - Middle of the night, midnight.

SL - And everybody has their sack…everything they could carry. We were figuring we were going here, and then there, so we could only carry so much…

MR- Did they indicate how far?

SL- No.

EM- We really didn’t have any idea where we were going, or anything.

SL- We were back six to eight buildings from the front, and as we went along, we could see where guys would be dumping stuff along the side of road- they took extra food, we had a warehouse for canned food…and they were taking the sugar.  Because while you were walking you wanted energy, so you would eat the sugar.  So I packed I would say probably 200 cubes of sugar in my pockets, and that is what I ate as I went along.

We walked and walked and I found it getting cold, and everybody is getting tired, and we keep going.  It’s like five, six, seven o’clock in the morning.  It’s getting colder out- I had a scarf around my face and it was just a ball of ice- I would have to reach up and break it so I could get air to my face. My feet were frozen.

MR - How many hours had you been walking?

JS - About three days.

SL - Well that was during the same day.

MR - Same day?  So ten hours later?

SL - And you never got warm, we just kept going and going, we couldn’t even change socks if you wanted to, so we had wet socks in cold weather -so as far as I’m concerned, that’s what happened to me…

The next day we marched almost twenty-some hours, so now we were coming up to some town, now everybody is falling over. Then I did something that I didn’t even know I did…  I was in a group where everybody made a pledge to watch each other.  I didn’t know anything about it when I started, but anyways…I found myself off the side of the road and I lay in the snow and I said to myself “wow this is so warm”- I was so damn cold I could hardly do anything. In the meantime, when I laid over [some guys saw me], one was a captain and one was a major, they saw me walk over and lay down, and they grabbed me. They stood me up and shook me, they asked me questions and I … I didn’t know anything, so they picked me up and made me walk. We got to this town and that’s when he (points to Earl) came around, he was looking for me and he was hollering my name.

 I was standing there and he come over to me, “Sam,” and I knew, “You’re Earl, you’re the pilot”. When they questioned me I didn’t know my name or anything, where I lived, I was gone.  The only thing I knew is, (points to Earl) “You’re Earl, you’re the best god damn pilot in the whole Air Force.”

MR- Well how many days had you been there?

SL- Well, that was some 20 hours, we froze walking.

EM- As far as… hollering his name, I wasn’t hollering his name, they were hollering his name trying to find someone who knew him.  

And when I heard  that, I went right to him…  I went through the same procedure [as Sam]… I actually sat down [in the snow] and they came to me and I said “hell, I’ve got to get away from this guy one way or another” so I got up and I moved again.  About at this time they’re yelling “Sam Lisica” and I woke up and got hold of him, I was all right by then.  When you see someone worse than you are…

SL- When I…

EM- I kept him moving then.

SL- When I started getting all mixed up,  I do remember this- I knew I was walking fast but I guess there were five, six, or seven barracks. We went out in barracks, we went out so everybody stays together…  I walked through these guys and all of a sudden, I’m the leader. I’m out in front of everybody and that’s how they saw me take off to the side of the road, and that’s how they got me.

MR- How many people would be on this march?

JS- From the camp…

EM- They estimated about ten thousand, didn’t they?

JS- Stalag 3 had a north compound, a south compound, a west and an east compound- we were in the west, this was the newest one.  The north compound was the one that was all British and that’s the famous “Great Escape” occurred- where they all went through a tunnel and 50 of them were caught and were murdered.

MR- That was true?

JS- And I guess three guys made it to, I think, Sweden- they made a movie out of that, Steve McQueen, there’s another movie about the same compound we were in - Bruce Willis is in it, which is going to be interesting because nobody was in the place as old as Bruce Willis is right now…

 But anyway, when they took us out, one of the compounds went directly from there all the way to a place called Mersburg, the rest of us went on the march. We took stops- we had no idea, no recollection of them.... We eventually marched for about three days and the next town- we were going to stop, the next town it was bitter cold. Another ten would come out and another two, you know.  They kept us in a church one night, on marble floors.  If you want to freeze to death, I’ll tell you what, that’s the place.  Some miracle happened.  They put us into a factory, it was a pottery factory and the floors and everything were warm, actually warm.  All the time in Germany we never saw warm, we were always freezing to death, and they kept us there for three days and I’m thinking that’s what saved a lot of our guys, we would of died from pneumonia or what-ever.  We got our chance to get our strength back.  

Then from there they marched us a day or two then they took us to a place called (sprenburg) and they put us into boxcars, 55 to 60 guys in a boxcar. Which only really held 40 or 8, 40 men or eight horses. We had 50, 55, 60 men depending, with one little slit everyone could look through. Everyone could not sit down at the same time, and we were trapped in this thing for about three days.

MR – Was the train moving?

SL – Oh yes, they were taking us west.

JS – They were taking us down to Nuremberg. Then we would end up in a prison camp in Nuremberg.

SL – That’s when we all had discipline.

JS – This was… between the train ride and the marching. Then one thing, then another, and the train having to stop to wait for the soldiers to move so the train could continue moving again, all plugged up. Our train was strafed, lucky for us and unlucky for the guys at the other end. Our end, we were not hit. In the other end, they were hit by our P47’s. The Germans did not go through the trouble putting red crosses on the trains with prisoners, but they did on their own two [troop] trains.

SL – Then we all got dysentery. They stopped one time and everybody had to go and they would open the door. Everybody would run out sitting by the railroad track…

JS – I’ve been waiting for years to hear from somebody of one of the funniest things I saw in the war. There were so many out of the train at one time and we were on this track. The train was standing still, a bright sun shinning day, Germans guards in the field with their guns and everything and the guys come out to relieve themselves. About 150 guys sitting there with their pants down all sitting straight, mooning the guards. When a screw comes out… (Laughs)

SL - The best part was when we were done, we would come walking and they would say nothing to us. When you’ve got dysentery, you could knock a fly dead from 50 paces because all the pressure and water and…zoom.

JS – You talk about the American sense of humor, if it wasn’t for the American sense of humor… We always had names for people and you knew something to say, so you could always find a funny moment. I told a story, there was an air raid and this [one of our own] group came at us, they were turning and dropping bombs around Nuremberg, but one [plane] didn't and it was coming at us. I did see this happen…some creepy guy grabbed a hold of a guard and started shaking him yelling “Where’s the Luftwaffe, where’s the Luftwaffe”…

MR – And he was an American?

All – Yes.

SL – He told him to take that bomber and to tell him not to drop bombs on us.

JS – I’ll tell you one thing, this is documented. The 8^th Air Force, I don’t know about the others, but I imagine the same thing… we would never turn back from a raid.

MR – Why not?

SL – If we were told to go, we just went.

JS – The only time we turned back was because of really bad weather. That was the only thing. We had a recall for weather.

EM – We couldn’t see the ground unless we had the new radar, which they were just coming in with. There was no way to hit the target.

JS – Well, we still bombed, we just bombed through the clouds. There was never really bad opposition from flack or fighters. We in the Air Command would say we can’t backup. In the Air Command, it’s not like the Infantry, you can’t say “let’s backup and regroup”.

SL – …except to the rear.

JS - Each time we went through, we lost 50, 60, 70 bombers at a time. Each carrying 10 men, and at the end of 1943 and three raids, if we had two more raids like that, we would have had no more air force. We would have been completely wiped out. So they just stood down. When we were in the air … we never turned back. They would put up so much flak and we would never go around it before we hit another target. We went through the flak, straight for that target, we never dodged it.

(All talk)

SL – They thought we were crazy, we thought they were crazy. Always doing it at night…

JS – I copied [our high causality rate] out of the book, about the 8^th Air Force.

EM – You mean about the 457th?

JS – No, something I brought with me from that book from Switzerland, Rescue from the Reich where the squads were…He said the air force had the highest casualties of any branch of service. There were more guys… and I was stunned to read this in another book too- that the 8^th Air Force had more casualties then all of the Marines landing in the Pacific. It’s in another book and he says the same thing… 

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE WITH B-17 REUNION, PART 2

Click here to read local newspaper story

transcribed by David Demers '02,   Royce Lawrence '04, TJ Ferguson '04