Robert Traeger Sr.—American Hero | 2002 Interview
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Bob: The first day at the base [North Pickenham], we were waiting for the group to come back from a raid. We were watching the sky with everybody else, and two planes finally landed. We asked, "Where's the rest of them?" They said, "That is all of them." We wondered what we'd gotten into.
Reed: They [the 492nd] lost 50+ planes in 89 days. The biggest loss in the Eighth Air Force during that time period, according to a couple books I've read.
Bob: They said they were going to... We were marked, and they were going to wipe us out, and they did. They'd tell us the day before, you know, Axis Sally. She would tell us what was going to happen.
Reed: And they'd identify the group and everything?
Bob: Yeah. Even the plane that they would take out. I don't know that they did it every time, but...
Reed: Did you remember the mission where you lost your flak helmet out the window?
Bob: No. No, I can't remember. You know, I thought that... That's another thing he [Paul] never mentioned. We lost our one engine, and another one was going out, and we were worried about getting over the cliffs, getting back to base. So we started throwing everything loose out. And I thought maybe that was what he was talking about. Threw flak jackets out and everything. Boxes, ammunition boxes.
Ruth: That was the white cliffs of Dover.
Bob: I suppose. I think that's the one where he said they took them up in a plane and flew them. We had to stop at another base.
Reed: You got diverted.
Bob: At English.
Reed: To the RAF base?
Bob: And they took us up, too. The enlisted men, we got to... I don't know that it was the ride that he was on, but they took us up. They were really good to us.
Reed: That Lancaster, is that the one you flew up in? He seemed to think that was a pretty nice plane.
Bob: Ohhh. That thing was maneuverable, light.
Reed: You were the assistant engineer. So then what did you do as the assistant engineer?
Bob: Well, in case the engineer was disabled or killed, I was supposed to be able to take over for him.
Ruth: He's got a certificate there on the wall.
Bob: I wanted to show you something. [Signed by] Peck. General Peck? He flew with us that last mission.
Ruth: Bob, weren't you a waist gunner, too?
Bob: Waist gunner, yeah. You see, our bombardier, Rock [Rauch]. He was the bombardier. Towner flew his position in the nose position the first thirteen missions, all the time we were at the 492nd. Because all you do is, when you see the lead plane drop bombs, you just toggle on them. He flew back there in the waist with me. [With a laugh] I used to stand right close to him, because he was so big. He'd weigh about 300 pounds.
Bob: [Looking at the crew picture] Now, this is Bye. He lived in Gilbey, North Dakota. I used to see him a lot. It was potato country then. When I had my grocery store, I had a couple trucks, and I'd go up and buy potatoes. He ran a hardware store, and then I think he inherited some land. He told me that they didn't buy land. I said, "What's it worth?", and he says, "I don't know." He says, "Nobody sells. They just pass it down." He passed away about a year ago.
There's Rock. He's the big guy there.
Now that was the navigator. And that's Perry. That's the bombardier. That's Kelly. We never did know what happened to them. He split and... Towner. He just lived the other side of Floyd. He was a farmer.
Ruth: Rauch came to Des Moines a few years. He had a daughter getting married. Then we never heard from him again.
Bob: We used to hear from Bye and Towner, Durtsche and Camp. And Rauch.
Ruth: Camp's wife died, and I'm sure that's why we didn't hear about him more. Every year he wrote, and then my card came back.
Ruth: What a guy that Paul must have been. I mean, the way he flew and the things he did, and how well he got through school.
Reed: Pretty good pilot you think?
Bob: Oh, he was terrific. He was terrific.
Ruth: Bob's credited Paul with his life many times. Said if he hadn't been the pilot, they'd have never made it back.
Reed: You can't tell that much from the diary. Of course, he was a pretty modest guy, I think, overall. You can't tell that much from the diary.
Ruth: What a diary. It was just fantastic.
Bob: A lot of things that he talked about, I didn't know. But now, I thought one thing that was important. We left Goose Bay, Labrador. We were weathered in up there for, I don't know, several days. We were supposed to refuel at one of those islands going over. And the weather was so bad we couldn't. They had these sight gauges-you could see the fuel. And when we got over there, that was going down, down out of sight. And he never mentioned that [in the diary]. It didn't seem important to him, but I tell you, we were sweating. Ohh... We thought it was over with before we even got there.
And then there's one time we were going in on a mission. I forget which one it was. And we couldn't... He said something [in the diary] about going up to 24,000 feet. I didn't realize we could get up that high. And we couldn't get over the weather. And here the '17's, they always would go out... They had a longer range than we did. They'd go out earlier. And they were coming back, and we were just going in, and at the same altitude. Ahh, that's one... And he never mentioned anything about that.
Reed: That would put your heart in your throat. That particular mission, I think he talks about a little bit in there. Because that was when you were at Attlebridge, I think. I'm not sure. I'd have to look it up.
Ruth: Seems I remember that, too.
Reed: They talked about that in the book, The Attlebridge Diaries, a little bit, how fouled up things got. Because there was supposed to be some radio communication, I guess. But he didn't mention those '17's being at the same altitude.
Now,he talks about the 467th cutting across the front of you guys in one of your formations, when you forming up, and running into another group when you were over in Europe.
Bob: That was scary, too-forming up. You'd get up there, and the sun would be so bright. And you couldn't see. You'd look and the planes there would all be going, scurrying around trying to get in formation, and we had some close calls then, too.
Alice: Now what's the significance of the B-17's and being at the same altitude. Of running into each other?
Bob: Yeah.
Reed: That happened?
Bob: Oh, that happened a lot. That happened... I think that happened that Munich raid. They had a bunch of them-that we aborted. We weren't on that one.
Alice: So navigation and those kinds of purposes, did you only have eyesight, or did you have... ?
Bob: When we made lead crew, I think we had two or three navigators - one for visual, that'd be Buck Rauch, Rock, there. And then we'd have one for... It was going through the clouds. Radar type stuff.
We had thirteen on our crew when we were leading.
Reed: What was it like when you became a lead crew? Was that anything you talked about or discussed?
Bob: That's another thing. I thought that when they transferred us from the 492nd that they stood us down for about a month it seemed like, and we took this lead crew training. But according to his diary, it didn't sound that way did it?
Reed: [Looking at the mission map from 10/22/44] Did you guys throw the chaff out the waist windows?
Bob: We did. They didn't give us enough chaff. We were supposed to throw it out and then wait awhile and throw out some more. We'd get so nervous, about five minutes it was all gone. [Said with a laugh.] It was something to do, you know.
That's why it was so bad. I suppose we suffered a lot more back there in the waist, because we had nothing to do.
Reed: All you could do was sit there and watch that flak come up and wait on the way to the target.
Bob: And we'd throw that chaff out. One time we were cleaning up, and we'd have to kind of tidy up the ship when we came back from a mission. We threw an ammunition box out, and it hit a another plane. Did he mention that anyplace? Right in the windshield. I think those windshields were probably bullet proof. It didn't hurt anyone, but we heard about it. They talked to us, and they let us know about it.
Reed: It [the mission map] has all the instructions. Here's the chaff: "Two minutes before IP for 16 minutes."
Bob: It never lasted. It didn't last 16 minutes!
Reed: Here's the IP. This is 1408. So probably right about here is where you were supposed to start pitching the chaff.
Bob: Now, this is what they called the dog-leg. A lot of times there was cloud cover, and you'd have to fly through what they called a box flak. They just put it up, and you had to fly right through. They knew we had to go right through there to hit what we wanted to hit. And that was scary.
Alice: I'm afraid to fly, and I can't imagine being up in an airplane that's getting flak.
Bob: You know, I didn't mind flying with Perry at all, but now, commercial, if I don't know the pilot, I don't go.
Bob: He did mention something about going slow on some of those missions. I remember that. He didn't say we were going after a bridge. There was a bridge that seemed to be important, and they'd been several times to get that bridge. And they'd always miss it.
So we were going in real slow, and all of a sudden our plane just dropped right out of the formation. It was just too slow. And he just brought her up around like this here and back, and plunked her right in formation.
Reed: He didn't mention that - that you stalled out - but he mentioned that... he complained a couple times at the 466th. He apparently preferred the 492nd methods. They [the 466th] were flying so slow.
Bob: Yeah, we just stalled out.
Reed: You stalled out, and you couldn't get where you needed to go. Anyway, I brought that copy along for you [the mission map]. This has all the chaff stuff. [Pointing at map]: So, you know, you'd be starting here, and it was supposed to go past here, but I'm guessing from what you told me, you probably ran out right about there [just past the IP instead of the full 20 minutes or so].
Bob: (with a laugh) Yeah.
Reed: And then here's the codes. If you're going to bomb visual-'Hot Lips', Pathfinder-'Cold nose'. Fighter reference points, everything. There's a lot of neat stuff on there.
Bob: He never mentioned... The fighter planes didn't bother us - the German fighters. Because they'd come, and they'd kind of circle around. We could see them, they were circling us. But they were looking for cripples. And Perry - we always called him 'Skip'. I'd even forgotten his first name till now. I mean, not in public, we didn't do that, but he was always Skip. We called him Skip or Skipper.
But one year... one time in briefing, they told us-of course, we had separate briefings from the officers. They told us that the Germans had got some of our planes, and if any of them should come in - they liked to come in and act like they're friendly, and then all of sudden they'd let loose and shoot.
That day a P-47 did come in, right off my waist window. And I called Perry, and I said, "Skip, it's a P-47. It's one of ours. But they told us to shoot them if they came in." And so I had the other guys verify that it was one of our planes, and it was. And he kept getting closer and closer, so he told me, "Well, let him have it." And I shot across his nose. It took him a little while to realize I was shooting, then he just put it straight down. He went right through the clouds. I never did see him again.
Alice: So you said earlier, when you were looking at these maps, that the box - you were talking about the flak coming up, that that was quite nerve wracking. But then when the German pilots came in, it sounded like you weren't very worried about that.
Bob: We weren't too worried then.
Alice: Why not? Why would that German pilot coming in not worry you?
Bob: Well, they were just looking for cripples. And then we always flew a real tight formation. Yeah, Perry, he'd called the boys in and say, "Tighten 'er up." And they'd almost stick their wing right into the waist window.
Alice: So the tight formation protected you.
Bob: That gave us more firing power. We were crippled a couple of times, and he'd get it right down on the deck, take us home.
Reed: He never mentioned much about that in the diary.
Bob: And then another thing he never mentioned, we always had a primary target, secondary, and target of opportunity. We never took bombs back. We always dropped. But in his diary...
Reed: On that first mission, I think he said. Was it the first mission?
Bob: That Beaumont. He told me... He says, "You go out and kick those bombs loose. And I opened up that bulkhead door there, and I put on a... I had a little walk-around oxygen tank. And I opened that door, and that air hit me. There's no way I could have stood up in there. I could see the bombs out there, and it looked to me like the tops ones released, the bottom ones didn't. And it was kind of a nuisance raid. We were just going to drop them on this airfield and give them something to do. I thought he sent Camp from the front back there, and he kicked them loose. But according to his diary, we took part of them home.
Reed: Put the pins back and took ten. I think ten.
Bob: I could see those little propellers going around in the back of those bombs. I thought, "Oh, oh, I wonder how many times they go around before they off?" [Said with great laughter.]
Reed: That was your first mission, too, right?
Bob: Very first one, Fourth of July.
Reed: Supposed to be an easy one.
Bob: And it would have been if it hadn't been for that. Because we took the bombs back. But normally, we didn't... we weren't supposed to take bombs back. We'd go to the North Sea and dump them. We'd disarm them and just... There must be a lot of bombs in that North Sea.
Ruth: Have you been through a B-24?
Reed: Just once.
Ruth: We were once in Waterloo, and they had one there, and our friend called us and we went down. I told Bob, "I can't imagine you going out with all that air coming in that plane, and going out of those little catwalks to... I can't imagine.
Bob: Yep. I just talked to my son last night. He lives between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. They had a B-24 in Cedar Rapids just last week.
Reed: I was in one one time. I was up towards the cockpit. And I was looking at those thin sides. There wasn't much protection - all the way back, and in that cockpit, you're just right out there on top, and I just wondered, how you could ever fly...
Ruth: And it was about 50 below, he said in [the diary]. And Bob had those great big gunner gloves with the finger here and the thumb, and this was all one piece, wasn't it? And it was all fleece - lined and real heavy leather.
Bob: Did we wear those? I don't know if we wore those on missions or not. We had electric heat, everything was connected. But we'd disconnect going in on the bomb run. We'd pull our heat connections, because the sweat would just roll off us. And then we'd get going home, and about halfway home, and you'd start freezing, wondering, "What's wrong? Maybe the heat is shot." And then you'd remember, "Oh!"
Reed: I remember in a book, one guy saying he was surprised he could sweat at 50 degrees below zero, but he could.
Bob: (with a laugh) It's possible..
Alice: I suppose that's why war has to be a young man's business. Because if you were older, you'd probably just die of a heart attack right there, you know. You'd never make it.
Bob: How old was Perry?
Reed: Twenty-six. He had his twenty-seventh birthday right as you were nearing the end of the tour.
Bob: See, we were all in our teens. I was twenty-just turned twenty. He was older, and that was comforting. Now, that one plane. He talked a little bit about that in his diary. They wanted us to fly it. Well, the ground crew hadn't done anything. Our putt-putt, our generator, wasn't even fueled, didn't have fuel in it. And he couldn't get the thing to rev up to where it was supposed to be, and they said, "Oh, it'll be all right. Take it." And he refused. Now, a younger pilot might have, a younger guy, see... There were some pilots over there that were only nineteen or twenty. Those were young guys. But he just absolutely refused, and we had to transfer to another plane.
Reed: Then he sticks in the diary, "We were still the third in formation."
Bob: That was something. It was nice, because... We always felt so sorry. We could look down and see those fellas, you know, the Battle of the Bulge. That was miserable down there. You could see the snow and then where the bombs had hit. One time, the Battle of the Bulge... We weren't supposed to drop our bombs unless we could see. This one run we didn't. We took them back and dumped in the North Sea. But another time, they shot flak up - our people shot flak up, it was colored, different colors. And when we got over that area, then we could drop through the clouds any time. And we hit some of our own men. That was bad.
Reed: That happened a lot, too, after Normandy, I think.
Bob: We didn't have a lot of discipline you had to have with the Army. We never saluted our officers or anything. He says, "Somebody's around," he says, why, "Salute." But he was just one of the boys. Our crew was...
We'd go on a mission, then we'd have interrogation when we got back. Then we'd carry our passes right with us in our wallets. We weren't supposed to, but we always did. So we'd look to see if we were to fly the next day. If we weren't up to fly, we'd go up to eat our supper. Sometimes we wouldn't eat supper. We'd just jump on the bus and go to town. We might send somebody in the next morning to see if were up for the next day, and if we weren't we'd just stay in town. It was great. It was nice.
Got to show them the lucky rabbit. [Mr. Traeger went to the basement and returned with a stuffed rabbit about eighteen inches or so high.]
Ruth: Lucky rabbit flew every mission, I think. He never had it cleaned. It's just like it was.
He always said they really had it good. They'd come home to a clean bed, and a lot of those guys out in the... And he always felt fortunate that he was where he was at.
Alice: Rather than on the ground.
Reed: There a book Stephen Ambrose wrote on B-24 crews. And he talked with a guy - it was in Italy, Fifteenth Air Force. The crew said they'd fly over and look down and say, "Look at those poor guys down there." And he talked to guys down there, they'd look up, say, "Look at those poor guys up there. Twenty-two thousand feet."
Bob: (returning with the rabbit) He flew with us, every mission. Sometimes forgot him, and they sent me back to where we dressed for the mission, and it was in my locker. And I got him out and had to take him along.
Reed: He flew all thirty missions with you guys?
Bob: I don't know how we happened to get him. Picked him up someplace in our travels.
Alice: A little worse for wear. He's got one eye.
Bob: Yeah, just one eye. He got us through.
Ruth: Thirty-some missions and sixty-some years later.
Bob: They send those buzz bombs over. And I think it was the 492nd - they hit our base. It was just luck. We were near London, and they'd fly over. And they'd cut out, and everybody would stop and listen. And then they cut back in again, and then go a little while, and you could hear them hit them ground. But as a rule, we didn't even pay any attention to them.
Reed: He said in the diary that a couple lit close enough to shake the barracks once.
Bob: He mentioned that Park - Hyde Park - where they'd get up on boxes. The officers stayed in a right in a big hotel right close there. We'd go over there and meet them. But we stayed down a couple blocks from there in a different hotel.
The park was something. These guys would get up on a box, and they'd holler. They'd talk about anything they wanted to talk about.
Reed: Did you go into King's Lynn on leave when you were with the 492nd? He mentioned that, getting dry cleaning and going into different restaurants.
Bob: We used to do our own dry cleaning. We'd get gas. That's another thing. You'd just walk up with a bucket and then pull a string and it filled up your bucket. And the gas would be running down. It was dangerous. Our heating-for heating we had a big barrel outside, and fill that with that gas, and then they had the tube coming, and it had a little petcock here, running into the stove. And it would drip in there, and that's our heat.
Reed: Dripping raw gas into the stove?
Bob: Yeah! And we had caught - well, they didn't do anything to us. They had coal, and we had to go steal that. So that put an end to that. I don't know who got the coal. Probably officers got that.
That gas was dangerous. Of course, we'd get it and do our cleaning, our wash, our clothes in it.
Then I suppose we were using it for fuel, too. Because I know they didn't deliver it to us.
Bob: We didn't have to... if we got shot, we didn't have to look at dead bodies or anything like that, like the ground troops had to. It was sometimes just a puff, and they would... You'd be looking at a plane, and he'd 'puff', just be a puff of smoke, and they'd be done. Didn't suffer much.
One guy, he made it out, and he opened his chute right away. And he caught it on the tail, and you could see him. He was swinging all the way down.
Another fellow went out - there was an escape hatch in back. And he was going to jump out at that. Apparently he was going to get out a little bit at a time, and he hung on for a long, long time. You could see him. And finally he lost his grip. Of course, he had a chute. I'm sure he had a chute. He probably made it all right.
Reed: He just couldn't bring himself to let go of that airplane.
Bob: I always said I'd never do it. But Perry told us once, "Anybody who wants to leave can jump out, can bail out. As long as you're going to stay, well, we're going to stay, too."
I always said I'd never jump. But a couple times I put... See, we had the harness. We'd wear the harness all the time. It was a chest pack-snaps, and you'd snap on. And there was a couple times I put it on. So I suppose I would have jumped.
Alice: You were almost on your way.
Bob: (with a laugh) Oh, yeah. We thought were going to have to do that in our training. So we asked the instructor, "Do we have to practice jump?"
He said, "Nope. If you don't do it right the first time..."
I just wondered. I don't know how often they repacked those chutes. You'd think they might get moisture in there, and it would freeze. You'd pull the cord and nothing happens.
It seems like they were in our lockers. I don't remember if we locked our lockers or not. But I don't think they repacked them.
We used to have to take a big duffle bag with us with hiking shoes, in case we ever did get shot down - because you couldn't hike in those boots that we were flying in - and other clothes. But I wondered how in the world you'd find that stuff. When your chute opened, even if you had thought to get ahold of that duffle bag, why, when that chute opened, it would yank you so that you would probably lose it. But we always had to take them.
Alice: Maybe you were supposed to put them on before you jumped?
Bob: What's that?
Alice: The shoes.
Bob: (with a laugh) Well, I don't think you'd have time.
Bob: That last mission, I always we thought that we led the whole Eighth Air Force. But we had these, what was it? One or two generals?
Reed: Peck was with you.
Bob: Yeah, Peck was with us. They brought him out in a big old limousine. See, they had to fly so much. They had to get in flying every month. They had to fly so much. And that was comforting. The last two missions we had the big shots with us.
Reed: You had Colonel Cleveland with you the one before that. It seems like people really had a lot of respect for Colonel Cleveland. He sure thought highly of your crew, apparently.
Bob: He gave us a nice compliment, didn't he?
Reed: I don't know if you've read the diary, Alice. But the last mission Brigadier Peck flew with them. And Uncle Paul wrote, "Yeah, he was late, and we were sixth taking off instead first." You flew lead, I think, for the whole raid on that one.
Bob: I thought it was. It made it a little easier, because the first one in, they don't have a bead on you yet. Those later ones, they got... You're in there and out before they, really, there wasn't too much flak. Although I think he said we got a few holes on the second to last mission.
Sometimes,when they can see you visually and they shoot visually, it's a lot more accurate. Coming over the coast, there was a plane flying-he was late, he was alone-and they put up three bursts. And he was up here, and they shot 'here', 'here', and 'boom'. That third one. We were just going in, over by the coast there.
They said they had old women and kids shooting those guns down there on the coast. I don't know...
Bob: They fed us good. They had to feed us good. They didn't dare feed us beans, because we were flying in airplanes. You'd blow up like a balloon.
One morning - Perry mentioned that we didn't get fried eggs - we had to eat scrambled eggs. What were they? Dehydrated eggs, or whatever. Powdered eggs. Normally, we'd get fresh eggs. I could see on the egg case: "Bookhide Produce, Kalmar, Iowa", just up the line. I knew Mr. Bookhide.
Reed: Got some home-grown eggs, even over in England in '44.
Bob: That was really just like a letter from home, to see that.
Alice: You couldn't eat beans.
Bob: No. Heavens know. No, they fed us good. They had to.
Reed: There's a book called Wings of Morning. (It's in that book list I gave you.) It's about a B-24 crew in the 466th. Their very first mission is one of the longest chapters in the book, and it goes into it in great detail. It was one of the missions you guys were on. It was the November 5 mission. Uncle Paul only wrote a few lines in the diary about it - mentioned there was some flak, not a big deal.
But this crew, it was their first mission, and the description in this book... These guys looked ahead, and they thought there was a storm or something like that. And then they realized they had to fly through it. It must have been that box flak like you were talking about. And they went in, they were all just scared to death, dropped the bombs. I think you guys were probably flying at least squadron lead on that mission. And he said they got through, and all the planes had made it through, and he couldn't believe it, that everybody could have made it through there.
Bob: I know it. It was just unbelievable.
Bob: I have a friend out here in the country-Clarence Shookman. He was a B-17 pilot. He said that... he came back from a mission - they'd take a lot of punishment, those B-17's. And he says it's just like a flying a corn crib with wings. When they got back it was just riddled.
Alice: The plane itself is fairly big.
Bob: Well, it was for the time, but not anymore. The B-29 was - they didn't use it in Europe, but I had a friend, Johnny Nezik, he was an engineer, I believe, on a B-29.
I had a lot of friends in my class that were gunners. Les Shriner, Earl Halverson, and Johnny Nezik. We all made it through. But they're all gone now.
Reed: Now, you weren't married at the time.
Bob: I didn't even have a girlfriend.
Reed: So did you guys meet after the war?
Ruth: Yeah. He says I picked him up.
Bob: She did.
Reed: And you have one son, at least.
Bob: Two. Two boys. Don and Bob.
[Notes:Have lived at the acreage for 40 years. Used to have cattle. Had a country store. At least two grocery stores and a hardware store. Goes to Missouri three times a year, a couple times to Minnesota, and once to Wisconsin for camping and riding. Mrs. Traeger opens up downtown restaurant at 5:00 a.m.]
Reed: I don't think they could find anything out about Kryshinski. He was that replacement... radio operator?
Bob: Radio operator.
Reed: Glass and Kryshinski were the two guys that came for awhile.
Bob: It mentioned Kryshinski. We used to take our bicycles and go to a little pub at night out in the country, and of course everything was dark. Well, coming home, why, he couldn't control his bike. And it [the diary] mentioned, he broke his arm.
Reed: Yeah, it didn't say how, though.
Bob: (with a laugh) No. Well, that's what happened. He wrecked his bike, broke his arm coming home that night.
Alice: Out in the country, at night it's so pitch dark, even if you're in the car with the headlights, you can barely see anything. So I can't imagine on a dark night, coming home on a bicycle, you know, how you find your way.
Bob: Well, we didn't always find our way.
Reed: You rode your bike into town and to the pubs.
Bob: It was just a pub out in the country there.
Ruth: This Randolph, Bob, what was he? I've heard you talk about him.
Bob: He was the navigator.
Bob: Bye was a real... He was a...
Ruth: He was something.
Bob: He wanted to be a pilot, and he could have been. His brother was a pilot. He used to hunt coyotes from an airplane, and he crashed his plane and killed himself. And Arel - Harley, we called him - he wanted to be a pilot and he washed out - airsickness. The poor guy just loved to fly, and he was the tailgunner. The tallest guy, I believe, on our crew, and he was in that little tail turret. And some days, you know, just walking out the plane he'd start throwing up. Must be a mental thing, that airsickness.
So we'd have an oxygen check every once in a while during the mission. And we'd call him, and by golly, he didn't answer. So they told me to go check. So I go back there, and he here was all slumped over. He passed out. He'd been throwing up, and he threw up in his oxygen mask, and it froze the thing up. So we had to put an emergency thing on him. He was all right.
That's a wonderful way to go. You don't know. You don't feel the pain, nothing.
They used to put us in one of these tanks, these big tanks, and then they'd tell you to start writing your name - take your mask off and start writing your name. You'd write your name, finally, you be writing way out here. They'd turn the oxygen back on, then you go back to normal writing again, just like nothing happened. You don't remember a thing.
Reed: When you got to England, did you do special training for gunner, or had you pretty much had your training by then.
Bob: No, there wasn't much we could do. It was mostly the pilot and the officers.
Reed: Get the formation flying better, operational flying there. He said he went to extra classes over there.
Bob: Yeah, he did. I thought they had us down for a month for training, but apparently, according to the... You know, your mind kind of plays tricks on you after you...
Reed: Well, there is a little bit of a gap in there, but it sounded to me like you flew a few missions with the 466th before you got picked out as a lead crew. But I couldn't tell that for sure, because he didn't mention that specifically.
Bob: Well, did we lead crew from the 466th?
Reed: 466th, yeah. I don't think the 492nd, though.
Bob: I'm thinking the 492nd. I knew we were in the 466th.
Reed: He didn't mention it. Now, I don't know that you weren't, but he didn't mention it.
Bob: I wouldn't be surprised if we did, because there was such a turnover.
Reed: You weren't there very long.
Bob: About a month. That group only lasted about a month or something like that.
What was it? They had monkeys. They had a monkey or a parrot or something, and I can remember that. And it was just about every week, it would be with a different group, because they were gone. They'd inherit that.
Bob: Did Paul do any flying before he joined the service?
Reed: Not a bit.
Bob: I'd never been up in a plane till I...
Reed: I don't think he had been either. He tried to enlist as a pilot, but the standards when he first tried were too high. And then when the war started, then when he enlisted, they'd lowered the educational standards. He had no college, and I think before, you had to have at least one. But they lowered the standards, then he took the aptitude tests and did real well. He took right off from there. But he flew his whole life after that.
He helped put in the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning line up across the Arctic Circle. There's a little bit about that in one of the things I left.
There's a man named Elgin Long was his co-pilot. In Atchison, Kansas... Elgin and his wife Marie were writing a book about Amelia Earhart, and I just happened to get assigned to be his driver. I drove him and his wife around town the weekend. And I found out he'd been with Flying Tiger, and I said, "Did you know Paul Perry?" And he said, "Yeah. I was his co-pilot." And when they put in the DEW line, they were flying C-46's and C-47's off frozen lakes. In '71, Elgin was the first man to solo circumnavigate the globe over the poles. He won the French Air Medal in Gold-I and think there's only three Americans who've ever won it - Lindbergh and Dolittle, and he was the third.
Bob: He said once he made a dead-stick landing in a B-24.
Reed: I heard that, too, but I never saw any confirmation of that.
Bob: He told us that. They were training, and they shut the power off, there's no power. And that's something to do with a B-24. But that was comforting to know that he could do that. [With a laugh]: That was in the back of my head all the time, too.
Alice: It would seem like when you're in that kind of situation that you count all the debits and credits. You want to get a good line of credit going.
Bob: He had a good line of credit. I don't know any bad ones.
Ruth: Bob was always impressed with his flying. Through the years, he told me a lot about it. He'd say, "I was lucky we had Paul Perry for a pilot."
Bob: I wonder if it wasn't our first mission, or one of our first mission. We'd take off, and you could just feel if you were going fast enough by the sounds of things and the feel - and we weren't. And all of a sudden - they just have a booster of some kind up there - they hit that baby. Boy, zoop! We did take off.
And then we had two close calls. When taking off, you get that prop wash. And that was terrible with a bomb load, and just barely laboring to get off the ground, and then you hit that.
Ruth: What was the prop wash?
Bob: That's from the plane ahead of us, yes.
Alice: So the prop wash was not enough air or too much air, or...?
Bob: Well, too much. That's turbulence. That's what it is.
Alice: When you were trained as an engineer, the assistant engineer...?
Bob: They didn't give me as much schooling as the engineers got.
Alice: So when you were on the plane, what exactly did you do as an engineer?
Bob: Well, the engineer, he was responsible for when they take off. He stood between the two pilots, and he gave the airspeeds. And the same way with the landing. So the pilots, they didn't have to be looking down. They could pay attention to the flying, and he would call out the air speed to them and whatever other information.
And then, of course, we'd start that putt-putt, that generator. We just ran that while we were on the ground. That was power before we take off, and then after we landed, we'd turn that on again. And parallel generators. And I don't know what else. All mechanical stuff.
I suppose he had to know how to crank... They didn't really give me too much training. But there's a way of turning, like, if the wheels didn't go down, you could crank them down.
Bob: That's what those were. They had a V-1 and a V-2, something like that.
Reed: That was one of the missions he mentions in there, that was supposed to be short. It was a No-ball mission. It was supposed to be short, but it turned out to be six hours. That was going after the buzz-bombs.
Bob: I remember reading that. That was exciting. When we'd walk into the briefing room, you go down and sit down. And then they had a curtain, just like a show, you know, and then they came into brief you, and they pull that curtain open, and, ohhh, sometimes that line would go and go and go. Sometimes it was short, but everybody would sigh when they see that long line.
We had problems, according to his diary, we had problems with fuel one time, and he said we had forty gallons in one tank and fifty in the other.
Reed: He was pretty nonchalant. He says, "Well, the gauges must have been wrong, because we made it back."
Bob: I'm glad he didn't tell us. Apparently the pilots were the only ones that knew it.
Bob: This Durtsche, he was our Sperry ball turret gunner. Of course, when we left the 492nd, I think they took the ball turrets off. I rode in it going over there. Oh, that's scary. You get in there, and it's hydraulic. They got to pump you, pump a pump to get you out there. You'd go 360 degrees, and oh, you got quite a view from down there. You can take that thing, and you'd just be looking right straight down.
Alice: So it's under the plane?
Bob: It's under the plane.
Alice: What would happen if the plane had to land, and it had no landing gear?
Bob: Then you couldn't get out.
Alice: Didn't some guys get stuck down in there?
Bob: I wouldn't doubt it. I'm sure some of them did. But he wore a flat 'chute. I don't know if it fit on his stomach, maybe on his back, I don't know. But he wore his 'chute all the time, in case... He could just pull it back if we had to leave, and just open the door. He'd just fall out backwards.
He was here, and we took him over to the river. The folks had a cabin over to Harper's Ferry. And we took him over there and spent a couple days-him and his wife. They just appreciated it so much. He'd sit in the back of the boat, and he'd sit there and fish for hours, all by himself. He was a waiter in a fancy restaurant.
Sources:
• Reed Hammans, great nephew of Paul Perry
www.492ndbombgroup.com
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