Old friends...

[B-Man2]

Sorry chaps but having considered the matter, this will be my last contribution to this thread. Rest assured this is not a slight against anyone but I now feel uncomfortable with the prospect of continuing.

Steve
I hope your decision isn’t based on my asking about the rest of the crew. My apologies if that’s the case. I wasn’t trying to push you on providing information you didn’t feel comfortable giving , I was just wondering if the rest of the crew survived the mission .

 

[Micawber]

Steve
I hope your decision isn’t based on my asking about the rest of the crew. My apologies if that’s the case. I wasn’t trying to push you on providing information you didn’t feel comfortable giving , I was just wondering if the rest of the crew survived the mission .

No not at all Burt! Rest assured there was no connection with your request at all, in fact I am more than happy to share the info and really should have included it beforehand

 

[falcon_ib]

Hope it's alright to post an old friend of mine:

My friend Jack flew 28 missions in a ball turret over Europe with the 535th BS/381st BG, from December 1943 - April 1944. He had many close calls and participated in some of the most dangerous bombing raids of the war; he joined the caterpillar club as well as making a forced landing in an English field!

Here are some of his hilarious stories from training that I transcribed:

"[Our pilot] Liddle was originally a fighter pilot, but he wanted to get into P-38’s, so he had to ask for a multiple engine transfer and they put him into B-17’s and they wouldn’t let him out. That’s why he flew the plane like it was a P-38. That’s why we stuck with him because he wanted to put some excitement into things. He was a hot pilot.

"Liddle would take the B-17 on a training mission and we’d be so low, we’d be below the telephone poles with all of us in our gunner positions tracking the cows. So that’s how we got a lot of our training because we had to follow the cows. Well, they had an argument about what the kind of tree was on the prairie. So they say, ‘what is this Burke,' and they flew the ball turret through the tree! And I said, ‘I don’t know, it was too damn fast!’ Well what happened was when we landed; the crew chief reported us because there was a tree branch stuck in the ball turret! So Liddle got in trouble for that too.

"We had to go down to Galveston Texas, but on the way down, our pilot Liddle said that he had a girlfriend in Oklahoma City and how we could go see her. So as flight engineer, I said lets turn a mag off one of the engines, and about an hour later we turned it back on and nothing happened and it was running real good. This was number three engine. So I said, 'Lets turn both mags off and let the engine windmill for an hour.' When we turned it back on it was backfiring and spitting and sputtering, so we radioed Oklahoma City for an emergency landing with an engine out. We told the crew chief to take his time fixing the airplane.

"So we had about three days going around and having a good time while he was out seeing his girlfriend. The family invited us to dinner the night before we left, and so the six of us enlisted men got a cab and got part way out there because the gas rationing would only let him go so far. So the cab driver leaves us off and he said it’s about 10-12 blocks over to the house so we could walk over. As we’re going by we pass a trolley barn. I’d worked for the a trolley company so I stole the trolley and we all piled into it and drove it as far as we could go to the girlfriends house, dropped the trolley off and walked over to the house. So about a day later Liddle runs into the barracks saying, ‘What did you guys do?’ He shows us a headline that says “Missing Trolley found in Middle of Street with Engine Running!” It was a big mystery how the trolley had gotten there from the barn!

"Another time was in Kirksville Missouri. What happened was we were going on a night flight up to Milwaukee and back again. When we got part way up to Milwaukee and O'Phelan says, ‘I live in Milwaukee’ and so does Homdrum. So what we did in the middle of the night, O’Phelan, our bombardier, picked out the tap room he hung out at with his friends. So what Liddle did was fly down right at telephone pole height going like hell right over this tap room. We had our landing lights on so no one could catch our tail numbers. Then we circled around and went to the college where Homdrum had a girlfriend and buzzed the dormitories. What happened was after we’d done all the buzzing we came back somehow or other we got lost and we’re running out of gas. So Liddle says to everybody to get ready for a crash. The engines started quitting on us and he spots this little CAA field and he brings in on the tarmac runway. We stop at the end and we all get out and walk up to this little shack and we woke up the night watchman. You should have seen the look on his face with ten guys standing in front of him with parachutes on and a B-17 at the end of the field!

"He called us a cab and we all went into town and called the outfit. What happened was we couldn’t get any more gas because we needed 100 octane gas. So they had to have a plane fly in from Nebraska. A bomber came and we hooked up hoses and transferred gas back and forth. We discovered we had 1000 gallons of gas left because they had installed the Tokyo tanks, and they had never made a note that it was full. We had gas all along, and the crew chief caught hell for not making a note in the manifest.

"I landed once in a ball turret. They bet me I wouldn’t do it, so what we did was I turned it forward and we landed - but man that was something. I watched that runway come up and I stuck my rear end up! I landed facing forward. So when had to do was taxi around to the back and put the ball turret around to the position for landing. So when we pulled up to the parking space I opened up the door and dumped out that way and closed it up quick so no one would report me.

"It was these adventures that made us into a tight crew."

"That’s when we went overseas before out training was complete. They could court martial Liddle for it or send us overseas. They were done with us."

Crew of "Phyllis"

Jack was an amazing guy, always laughing and full of kindness, and I miss him dearly.