Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojkt
My Dad was a Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II and flew 35 missions over Germany as a bombardier in a B-17. He wanted to be a pilot but a deviated septum kept him out of the cock pit. He celebrated his 20th. birthday over there at the end of 1944 and kept a diary of his missions, summarizing the first 11, and then documenting each one after that in a 3” X 5” brown spiral notebook written in pencil. When I was in 8th grade I was home sick from school one day and, being a “nosey parker”, was going through his photos of the war and came across his little book. The front page simply said “Secret!” and so naturally I spent the rest of the day reading it and even took it to school the next day to share with one of my classes. Boy, did I get into a lot of trouble for that. Shortly before my Dad died I again rummaged through all his war memorabilia and put together a beautiful shadow box piece for him for Father’s Day. We invited a lot of his friends and our family over to honor his life and his service but I couldn’t find the diary. I asked him about it but he indicated he didn’t know what happened to it. A few weeks after his death I finally came across it again, a little post it on the front with my name on it, and to this day it is a treasured keepsake in our family.
Here are just a few of the entries.
September, 1944
The raid on Magdeburg was very successful. Visibility was good but flak was very accurate. Think it was as rough as any mission we have been on. It was on this raid that we believe we saw a “jet plane”, the first and only enemy aircraft to be seen by any of our crew so far.
Next day came Ludwigshafen, a target which has been attacked again and again by the 8th Air Force. I have never seen it hit really successfully. Again the flak was very accurate. Tail gunner saw a B-17 go down in pieces and flames and I saw one circling slowly with #3 engine spurting flames and also saw three chutes.
It was on the 17th of Sept. that we got our Air Medal mission. Was a milk run to Holland. We bombed flak installations around the Arnhem. This was in preparation for the great airborne invasion. Arnhem later became quite the headline news.
October 4, 1944
We have now earned a cluster for the Air Medal. Could have been a rough mission but I guess we were just lucky. The bombing was done PFF and the target was marshalling yards at Koln (Cologne). They briefed us on 290 guns but the gunners must have been out to lunch. Some of them came close but there wasn’t too much. Barney picked up a few holes and was forced to feather #4. It was colder than it has ever been so far, -40 C. The flag’s up so maybe will get #13 in tomorrow. Could hope for an easy one but I think they are a thing of the past. By the way, the bombing today was in support of the attack on Aachen.
November 5, 1944
We just got back from a rough one to Ludwigshafen. They really threw up everything at us. I believe there was more flak than ever before. We lost two ships over the target. They were out of the low squadron. Our primary target, visual only, was in direct support of a drive by Gen. Patton. However it was 10/10 and we had to go on to Ludwigshafen. This broke clear and all 270 guns had a shot at us. Am anxious to hear how Patton did without us. We were to bomb some big guns north of Metz. That was number 19, getting right along.
December 4, 1944
Not a bad mission! Things went fairly well until we made the bomb run, didn’t drop the bombs and made a tight 180 turn. Our squadron was flying the high and we were on the inside of the turn. The air speed (115) really dropped and our formation broke all to hell. We were really wide open for fighter attack. Luckily none were around. There was a big hole in the clouds and so we visually bombed the marshalling yards at Friedberg. There was no flak over the target and therefore we were able to enjoy the impact of the bombs. Was the first time I had seen incendiaries hit. First came the usual upheaval of the dermis and then these hundreds of little fires like fire flies all over the area. It is indescribable. The only difficulty was in the fact that we hit a little short. We did start a fire in the middle of the yards though, all in all not bad.
December 16, 1944
Well we really flew a good one today. The weather was such that the whole 8th. Air Force consisted of but 9 groups, 3 from each division. Even at that, the 1st. scrubbed and we think the 2nd. did also. Had a hell of a time forming because of all kinds of clouds and contrails. After we left England and hit the continent the high and middle clouds broke up and we almost had a visual run. In fact the high squadron did final bombing visual. They hit the target but the lead missed it.
The rough part came on return when we ran into these clouds which we could neither climb over nor go beneath. We peeled off here (near Brussels) and came back individually. I really started to sweat when we hit the English coast at 250’ and were still in the clouds. We could see patches of the ground which made it a little better. We were sort of afraid to let down much lower. Well anyway, we found the field, made our landing and now have in 29 missions. The flak was very light which made things rather nice over the target. I would have hated to fly through that stuff with a feathered engine or the like.
Gen. Partridge commended the group for this mission. He did this without knowing any of the results. It was purely because of the adverse weather conditions. Col. Good said it was the first time he had heard of a mission being flown in such lousy weather. Ain’t we good? By the way the target was the R.R. Marshalling Yards just north of Stuttgart and was in direct support of Gen. Patton’s Army. Seems they are having a little trouble with the Huns in that area. Number 30 tomorrow, I hope.
He counted down every mission until the 35th. and always wanted to fly every chance he had. There were a few close calls, but in general he thought he lead a charmed existence to live through it and took that confidence and what he liked to call luck with him and went on to live a great and happy life.
Happy Veteran’s Day to all you guys and gals out there who had the courage to serve your country.
Filed under: Veterans Day, WWII |
All Things in Moderation 
What great first hand accounts. My grandfather was in the Signal Corps under Patton in France and my father was a pilot in Vietnam. I have the greatest respect and admiration for anyone who has served our country.
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lmsinca: That was awesome. Thanks so much for sharing that. My father was in the accounting corps during the Korean war, so he was doing financial stuff while he was in the army. He's never made any bones about trying to stay out of combat. Can't say I blamed he. Even then, he contract pneumonia and said the military's quality medical care at the time almost killed him. 😉 Mot of my knowledge of WWII comes from the movies, history I've picked up over the years, and Thomas Childers' Teaching Company lectures, World War II: A Military and Social History. And A History of Hitler's Empire. I highly recommend them both.I also recommend Bob Brier's Ancient Egypt courses. They are amazing.
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*Mostt of my knowledge . . . heh. My typing skills are totally self-taught.
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*Most, not mostt. I is an excerlint typisst.
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These excerpts are an amazing gift that you share with us, lms. Thanks.My family all came from a pacifist background, which I do not have positive feelings about. Save for a great uncle who was a black sheep, joined up and was killed in France by a landmine, and an uncle who later was drafted and served in the 101st in 60s, military service was foreign to us. My father was 17 at the end of WWII, and I don't know what he would have done had the war not ended. He was a rebel, too, but I never talked with him about it. I suspect he would have fought, but I'll never know. When I was 18, I was very confused by it all.
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this is great. thank you for posting. You might want to look into the libary of congress veterans' project. http://www.loc.gov/vets//vets-home.htmlthey collect letters, diaries and things of this nature. i don't know the details but I don't think you'd have to part with the anything permanently. it's more like they are trying to preserve a record.
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This line almost gives me goosebumps:"It was on this raid that we believe we saw a “jet plane”, the first and only enemy aircraft to be seen by any of our crew so far."What a piece of history.
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Amazingly different attitudes between WWII veterans (my father Army Staff Sgt. in the Pacific) and those that came later. My father always considered himself lucky, and agrees with those who say that Brokaw's book should have been named "The Luckiest Generation" because that's how they saw themselves.
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Thanks you guys. All I can say is my father's life was shaped by his service. He went on to USC on the GI Bill and received a BS in Chemical Engineering which lifted all of us out of a blue collar future, not that there's anything wrong with that. He was very smart but came from a very poor family, as did my mother.Coincidentally, my grandfather was in the Navy in WWI and kept a scrapbook which he bequeathed to me. It's full of photos and news clippings but alas no diary. He was a real SOB and I'm pretty much the only grandkid in the family who gave him the time of day, lol.Also, my husband was drafted in '68 and was turned away at his first induction physical for high blood pressure, it runs in his family. He could have stayed out because of it but went to the doctor instead and got it under control and went back again and they took him. He got lucky though and became a personnel manager and though he went to Vietnam, he didn't see any combat.
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john — i've never heard that. what is meant by lucky. that they survived? QB — that line jumped out at me too. make me think of the museum efforts.
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Awesome, lms. What a treasure.My favorite uncle served in WWII in the Pacific but did not leave any memorabilia like this. My mother had saved the few letters he had written home but I don't have them. I don't recall them having any info like this about the war. My brother was career Army (airborne, Green Beret) and voluntarily served many tours in Viet Nam. It is only in the last few years that he has been willing to talk about it at all, I think primarily because he was so often in places the government was swearing publicly we were not. The code of silence is lifelong, and he felt he could not speak of it until it came out publicly so many years later. Viet Nam was a huge rift between us for many years for all the wrong reasons, which we later sorted through.
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I asked my father, a navigator in the Army Air Corps over in the Pacific theater if I could share his journal. He said not until after his passing.So thank you for sharing your dad's words, lms. I hope you all won't think me selfish when I say I hope many Veterans' Days pass before I do the same.And thank all of you here who have served.
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NoVA, my dad and mother are buried together at Riverside National and we had his memorial service at the March Air Force Base Museum. I have already turned over most of his memorabilia to them, except the diary, they only have a copy of that. At the time of his memorial service they even had an old B17 on the premises and most everyone went inside and got a real flavor for what it was like.
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This is so cool, lms! Thank you so much for sharing it, and I agree with NoVA's comment about the veterans' project. This diary deserves its own place in posterity!A bit of translation: bombing PFF means using radar; it was developed by British and American scientists and was originally called BTO (Bombing Through Overcast); "visual" refers to the requirement that the bombardier have eyes on the target to verify it before releasing the bombs (which makes PFF bombing the earliest version of our current drone technology, Kevin!). And I'm with qb: the line about the jet plane really reminded me how "new" much of the modern war technology we (I at least) take for granted really is.
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Btw, let me show my ignorance. Why does a deviated septum preclude pilot service? Respiratory issue?
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that's really great that you were willing to share. I find the personal accounts so much more compelling and important anything else. it's weird being around the equipment, isn't it? I took my grandfather, a Marine, to the USMC museum that's near Quantico. He was a mechanic and started tinkering with one of the landing craft they had on display. next think we know,he is holding court with tourists and staff and explaining how the thing worked and how they modified it, etc.
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I don't know qb, but he used to get pretty bad nose bleeds so maybe altitude or something. Remember they didn't have pressurized cabins and had to wear oxygen masks above a certain altitude which was most of the time. They also were colder than hell generally.michi, from his diary they flew PFF about 80% of the time and never knew positively if they'd hit the target or not unless they got a report back from brass.
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NoVA, I wish I had been one of the tourists in that crowd.
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qb: speculation on my part, and hopefully lms will set me straight if I'm wrong.Pressurization in airplanes could be very spotty in those days, and a deviated septum could be dislodged if the pressure were to suddenly drop (which wasn't too uncommon in bombers flying high altitudes to their targets) inside the cockpit. At the least, I would imagine that would be incredibly painful, and it might cause a nosebleed at exactly the wrong time. I know a nosebleed doesn't sound like much, but imagine getting one right when you're starting a bombing run and a squadron of fighters comes out of the clouds at you. . .
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Corked!
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My mother's father was a radioman in the Pacific for WWII. His ship was an LST – which delivered landing craft full of marines to islands like Iwo Jima. I'm unaware of any memorabilia; one of the few things I recall him talking about was his luck at getting into radio school & not ending up as a tail-gunner over Europe.
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Last Thanksgiving we came home from our son's house to a message on the home phone from some guy in Texas whose uncle knew my dad in basic training. His uncle was killed when a bomb bay door caught fire over France and while most of the crew parachuted out his uncle and the pilot didn't make it. Anyway, he was going through some of his father's papers who had recently passed away and found a letter from my father to his uncle. He scanned it and emailed me a copy and I sent him a copy of my dad's diary for some research he was doing. He found it very useful because of some of the details my dad's words provided. We've kept up a correspondence ever since and he keeps me posted on any new information he's discovered.
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Thanks for the great post. Just an incredible piece of history. My grandpa was the only one in my family to have served. My dad was not drafted during Vietnam and probably would not have been allowed to serve even if he had due to a heart condition. My Grandpa joined the Navy at the end of WWII and ended up on a PT boat in the North Pacific. He never saw any combat, but managed to break his leg while skiing on the the Aleutian Islands. He would joke that he ran into the only tree on the Aleutians.
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bsimonOne of my Dad's best friends from High School, Rick Nelson, was the radio man on the Enola Gay. He had some stories to tell. It was essentially a suicide mission they volunteered for even though he didn't know the details until a couple of days before they took off.
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The only other member of my family to have served was my uncle (Dad's older brother) who was a Marine in the Korean War era. He didn't serve during the war, but spent time over there immediately post-war; I wish I knew more about his service. He didn't talk about it much–although I never really got to know him well until I was an adult–and he passed away a year and a half ago. I'm spending Thanksgiving with that part of the family, so I'm going to have to do some research and find out what they've got about his time in uniform. That group of veterans is one of the most forgotten ones.
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All posts prior to this one have disappeared from my pageview (although I can still get to them via "older post" or going the long way through edit blogs). Same thing happening for anyone else or is it just me?
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lms:Thanks for the vignettes. It is really cool to hear first hand accounts of missions, knowing what part they played in the war. So, thanks in particular for sharing December 16, 1944.
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okie- The same thing has happened to me.
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Thanks, ashot. I'm using a different browser recently and trying to sort out whether that is the cause of some new glitches for me.
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same here. wasn't an issue until sometime between my last comment on this post and now.
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No problems for me here (Google Chrome/Windows Vista)
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OK, now it's happening to me, too. Shades of PL!
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