Interview with Jim Fontana by Steve Showers for the Voices from the Second World War: An Oral History, Center for Oral History, University of Connecticut, 24 February, 2000.

 

 STEVE SHOWERS:   All right. So last time we talked about the war and what you did before, during and after, but today we’ll talk about the pictures a little bit.  Why don’t we just start with your first one, about the picture of the B-26.

JIM FONTANA:  That’s a picture of a B-26 sitting on the ground.  It belonged to the French and was given to the French Air Force.  It’s one of the very few that’s in existence today.  There’s only one in Wright-Patterson, one at the Smithsonian Institute, and there was one that the Confederate Airforce reconditioned.  It was flying last year but it stalled and crashed, killing the five pilots flying the aircraft.

SS:       So this one here is over in France on display?

JF:        No.  It is at the Wright-Patterson Museum.  It came from the French and when we first got it here, it had the French markings on it.  It was later changed to the American markings.

SS:       You said they had the free French markings on it?

JF:        Yes, but the 394th had a white stripe on the tail.  Other groups had a triangle, straight line or checkerboard pattern for identification.

SS:       So this looks like most of the B-26’s that you flew back in the war?

JF:        This is exactly like the one we flew, except it doesn’t have the package guns.  All the guns were removed after the war.  We had eleven .50 caliber machine guns.  One in the nose, four package guns used for strafing, two in the upper turret, two in the waist and two in the tail gun. 

SS:       That one looks like it’s in pretty good shape.

JF:        That’s in great shape! 

SS:       When did you get a picture of this? 

JF:        Somebody sent that to me.  But the rest of the pictures I took. I took all the other pictures during my military career.  I carried a Kodak 620 camera and the sergeant said to me: “Don’t send the camera home, it’s your camera.”  I said that you can’t take pictures, but he said: “Take it with you”.   So I took pictures every place I went.  These two here were taken at Logan, Utah at the State Agricultural College and this was a cadet I met while there. We hung around for the two months we were together.

SS:       And what year was this?

JF:        1943. 

SS:       When you were going through the school, were you already considered an officer?

JF:        No, no.  When we first enlisted, we were considered enlisted personnel and our title was aviation student.  We went to Kearns, Utah for Army basic, from Army basic we went to the State Agricultural College located at Logan, Utah and that’s when we were considered aviation students.  We stayed there for two months, taking all kinds of courses in English, weather and navigation.

SS:       So these are more pictures here.

JF:        Those are pictures taken at Logan, Utah.  This one is the class that I was in, 44E, which meant that if everything went according to schedule, we would graduate in May of 1944.  This is the field house at Logan.  Because there wasn’t enough room in the dormitories, they put most of us up in the field house.  One time we slept in classrooms in the school.  But at the end they put us in the field house. 

SS:       Were there a lot of students going through this process at the time?

JF:        There was the upper class and the lower class and there was probably two hundred students in each class.  There were also Marines, Navy personnel and Army personnel at the school.  We spent two months there and that’s where we first got our ten hours of flying in a Piper Cub.  This was the first time I’d ever been in an airplane.  After graduating from Logan, Utah, we were sent to Santa Anna, California for evaluation. There, we took all kinds of psychomotor tests to determine whether or not we were going to become a pilot, a navigator or bombardier.  I think we spent two weeks testing and then they brought us altogether and said, “Today we’re going to tell you the results of the testing.  If you accept our decision, sign the paper and if you don’t agree, go to the back of the room and we’ll talk about it later.”  When my turn came, the officer in charge he said, “Your scores show that you passed to be a pilot, a navigator, or a bombardier in that order.  We would like to use you as a pilot.  Do you accept?”  I signed a paper “yes” and that was it.  From then on we became aviation cadets.

SS:       Were you an officer then once you were an aviation cadet?

JF:        No, we were still enlisted.  We were cadets getting $75 dollars a month.  After two months at Santa Anna, we had our choice of primary flight schools and because we were the best group of cadets, based on drilling and evaluation, we chose Hemet, California because they flew the Ryan PT 22, which was a low-wing aircraft with a wide landing gear.  Otherwise, we would’ve flown the Stearman trainer, which had a narrow landing gear.  It had a reputation of ground-looping when you landed a cross-wind.  We chose the Ryan PT 22.  It was a hot little airplane for cadets, but it turned out to be a real good flying airplane.  We spent two months at Hemet.  We graduated from there, and we were split up.  A lot of us went to Bakersfield, California to Gardner Field where we spent two months in basic flying.  I think that’s where you really become a pilot.  You get your instruments, flying, night flying, formation flying, and cross-country flying.  You get all there is to know about flying and after two months we graduated and were sent to Douglas, Arizona for advanced flying.  We now flew a twin-engine airplane, the UC 78 or Cessna Bobcat.  We spent two months there and graduated. That’s when we became officers.  We transitioned from the cadet phase to the second lieutenant officer phase. 

SS:       Now you don’t have any pictures of some of those training planes.  Did they stop you from taking pictures?

JF:        No, I have them but I don’t have them in this book.

SS:       O.K.

JF:        And then they asked us what we wanted to fly and although they told us we were going to train for heavies, B-24 and B-17s, I didn’t want to go into heavies.  When they asked us what we wanted to fly, I asked for the B-26 Marauder because I had known about the airplane.  Before the day was over, they gave me my orders and sent me to Del Rio, Texas for B-26 transition.

SS:       That’s right, you knew about it because you had made those models.

JF:        I made a B-26 model in high school, I knew all about the airplane. It’s strange, when I arrived at Laughlan Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, I went to the gate and instead of saying “Good day, how are you lieutenant”, they said “Aren’t you afraid of this airplane?”  And every place I went on that field, the girls in the PX and the barbershop and the Officer’s Club, it was “Aren’t you afraid of this airplane?”  Well, I didn’t know that much about the airplane until I got in.

SS:       How old were you at this time?

JF:        I was 18 at this time. Eighteen, and I went through two months of transition in the B-26, and it turned out to be a real good airplane once you got to know it.  After two months we were sent to Shreveport, Louisiana to Barksdale Field.  We assembled a crew.  I was sent as a co-pilot, and I still think it was because of my age, and we spent two months there learning combat tactics.  After graduating from there we went to Hunter Field, Georgia.  We picked up our overseas gear and were sent to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.  We spent some time there and then one night they put us on a train and took us across the Hudson River where we boarded the Queen Mary and sent us overseas.  We landed at Glasgow, Scotland.  From there we were sent to Stone, England.  We lived in these barracks better known as Quonset huts.  We stayed there for a month.  One day they shipped us out and sent us to France where I joined the 394th bomb group and the 586th bomb squadron. 

SS:       So you got pictures of that too when you went over to England?

JF:        Yes, this picture here is just an ordinary farm house in England, typical of the area that we were in. One Sunday a group of us took a walk and we came around this building and looked and here’s this church.  We recognized it as the Winchester Cathedral.  They started to build it sometime in the year of 900 and they are still working on it to this day.  These officers are all wearing the new Air Force jacket.  We always wore the leather jacket that you’re probably familiar with that most air crews wore with the name of their airplane on the back.  The Air Force took them away and gave us these green jackets with the fur collar.  It probably had something to do with animal rights because of the leather.  They issued us these.  They were nice and warm for flying.  These are a couple of the fellas that were in my outfit.

SS:       Was England in fairly good shape then, at the time?  I mean, were there bombed-out cities?

JF:        There were, in London you’d see buildings that were bombed out but they had cleaned up the mess and started to rebuild.  We saw very, very little of the destruction in that country, even in London.

SS:       Because it was already 1945, the war was pretty far along.

JF:        Yeah, when I went over, it was 1945.  It was January of 1945 and the war was well on its way. 

SS:       When this all was going on, were you guys aware of what was going on with the progress of the war and everything like that?

JF:        We pretty much followed where the Allies were, where the bomb-lines were, and especially where Patton’s Third Army was.  Of course when we got over there, it was just at the end of the Battle of the Bulge and we knew all about that.  We knew what the bomb groups were doing, like the heavies.  Every day we’d read a report they’d bombed this target, they’d bombed that target and since we were 9th Airforce B-26s, we were interested in what they were doing and we knew which targets they were hitting.  Although, we didn’t know where we were going to go or what outfit we were going to be in.  They sent us over to Cambray, France.  We didn’t know until we got there where we were going to be or what we were going to do.  But we were assigned to the 586th Bomb Squadron.  There was four squadrons to a group, the 584th, 585th, 6th and 7th.  We were the 586th and we were stationed right in the town of Cambrai, France.  The other squadrons were maybe five or six miles away.  So we never really got to know any one in any of the other squadrons.  The only time we saw fellows from the other squadrons was when we were on a combat mission where we all attended the same briefing.  This picture shows what we wore when we flew combat.  We wore the flight jacket, and regular trousers.  Some guys wore boots to keep their feet warm, or gloves.  I never did because I couldn’t feel the controls.  I felt I had better control without them.  It never got cold in the airplane.  You wore the helmet because that’s how you attached your oxygen mask.  Air Force regulations say that you wear oxygen from 10,000 feet up in the daytime and if you’re flying at night, you have to wear oxygen from the ground up.   We carried a .45 pistol with us in case you got shot down.  You use that mostly for survival.  I also carried a knife.  I don’t know why I carried it, but if you’ll notice the gun is always in the front.  I kept it there in case a piece of flak came in.  I figured that would stop the flak from doing any damage.  There were six of us on a crew.

SS:       O.K. and this is you here?

JF:        You’re looking at the three officers.  There were three officers and three enlisted men.  There was the pilot, Charles Boring. He was twenty-six years old.  We used to call him “pappy”.  There was Kenny Tevebaugh, our navigator-bombardier, and then myself, the co-pilot.  Most of us had just turned 19.  I still correspond with Ken Tevebaugh today.  He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

SS:       Have you seen your pilot since?

JF:        The pilot?  He died.  I thought he died right after the war.  But it’s strange.  He was an instructor pilot in B-26 Marauders at Barkesdale Field, Louisiana, and I could fly the airplane better than him.  The enlisted men were telling me at the last reunion that there was a lot of time I grabbed the controls on him when his flying became erratic.  I don’t remember that.  Because my philosophy was always, “Never touch the controls until you are in trouble.”  These are pictures taken on missions.  This picture was taken on a mission while getting ready to take off.  It’s strange because when we were at Barkesdale Field, we had a runway that was 10,000 feet long and 500 feet wide and they would not allow any more than one airplane on the runway at a time.  We sat waiting for take-off clearance sometimes over an hour.  When we got to combat, the runway was 200 feet wide, about 5,000 feet long and there was three airplanes on the runway at a time.  We took off at 15 second intervals.  If the guy in front of you had trouble and went down, he would take the guy in back with him.  It didn’t happen when I was there but it did happen and they would divert you to another runway and take off as if nothing happened.  We would take off, circle the field one time and then head toward the target and you can see where the airplanes are starting to form up.

SS:       How’d you guys get along on the crew?

JF:        We got along fine.  Each crew had six men, three officers and three enlisted men and we hung around together-terrific guys.

SS:       Did you work together really well too?

JF:        We worked well together in the air.  It was strictly business.  There was no fooling around.  The only problem we had was the tail gunner used to like to come up and sit in back of the pilot seats to keep warm because it was cold.  This was not in combat, this was when we were flying a practice mission.  He would come up without his parachute and I would say to him, “Randy, get back and get the parachute and don’t come up here unless you have a parachute.”  He’d come up the next day and he didn’t have his parachute.  So after telling him for a while I said, “Look I’m going to tell you something right now, and I don’t want you to forget it.  If this airplane goes down or anything happens and we give the signal to jump, I’m going and I’m not waiting for you to get any parachute.”  And from that day on he wore it.

SS:       That seems like it would be pretty important because anything could happen.

JF:        Well, we wore our parachutes.  We had the backpacks, but they had the chest packs and they just wore the harness.  They couldn’t get in the turret or the tail position with a pack on because it was on their chest and it was in the way.  So, they kept it right close to where they were working and if something happened, they would grab their chute and snap it on and they would go.  So, it was difficult for them, walking around the airplane, to pick it up and carry it to where they were going.  So you didn’t do that.  You can see here they’re forming up.  When we took off from Cambrai, France, in 15 minutes we were in enemy territory.  The next two or three or four hours were spent in enemy territory and then we’d come home.  The heavies would take off from England and would come over France and you could see them forming and they’d spend two hours, two and a half hours forming and then they’d go over to Germany, drop their bombs and come back and that’s another two hours to break up and land.

SS:       How soon would it be once you guys started to get into these formations that you would come under enemy fire?

JF:        Fifteen minutes.  As soon as we got into enemy territory, we’d start getting hit.  In fact, there was a little corridor between Mannheim and Frankfurt, and if our navigator was on the ball, he would take us directly between the two cities.  We’re at 12,000 feet by then, and if he was on the ball and split that right in the middle, the flak would come up and you could see it on both sides but not anywhere near the airplane.  If there was a wind blowing and we got blown off course or we went too far to the right, then you’d get hit from Frankfurt and if we went too far to the left you’d get hit from Mannheim.  You can see that there are six airplanes to a flight, and we used to fly with our wings a foot apart, when we got close, especially in enemy territory for protection, unless of course we had a lot of turbulence.  All of the missions that I flew were at 12,500 feet. 

SS:       Was that the range of the B-26?

JF:        The B-26 range was 1,000 miles.

SS:       What about altitude wise?

JF:        It had a service ceiling of 26,500 feet but we very seldom went that high.  One mission we went as high as 19,000.  One mission we went on we dropped down to 1,000 feet because of cloud cover.

SS:       This plane here, is that coming up into a formation?

JF:        He’s either coming up to join a flight or he’s the spare.  We always sent a spare, when you got to the bomb line, if nobody aborted then he turned around and came home.  I went on many flights where we were spares and flew all the way to the bomb line, turned back home and didn’t get credit for a mission.

SS:       So that didn’t count toward your total?

JF:        You’re looking at six ships here.  The only ship with a bombsight would be the lead ship. Everyone dropped off his lead airplane.  If he got shot down, the #4 plane would pull up and fly lead.  He did carry a bombsight and used it only in an emergency.

SS:       Were you keeping in radio contact this whole time while you were flying?

JF:        It all depended.  If they said: “radio silence,” then you didn’t use the radio at all.  We kept it on, though, in case they called you for recall, or there was a change of plan.  But the radio was always on where you could be talking to the crews.

SS:       These are good close-up shots.

JF:        Well, yes it is a close-up. This airplane is Slow Starter, that’s the name of the airplane.  His wing would be about a foot away from this wing.  I found that the closer you fly, the easier it is to hold formation.  Flying formation can be very nerve wracking.

SS:       Was it tough to keep everybody in line and keep going on the same track?

JF:        No, once they all got in together it was fairly smooth and fairly easy to keep in there.  What hurt though, was when you started to get hit by flak, if a burst was like underneath the airplane and close, it would throw the airplane off course.

SS:       You said it was better to fly in a group for safety?

JF:        For protection, yes.  Because you had eleven guns in each airplane and if you were in close, you had all those guns that you could use.

SS:       And these here are the markings of your group? 

JF:        The marking of the group is the white diagonal across the rudder.  That indicates the 394th bomb group.  The H9D, indicates the 586th bomb squadron.  Everybody had nose art on the aircraft.  This happens to be Slow Starter.  It was named by one of the crew members.  During my time, we flew a different airplane on every mission, because there were more crews than airplanes and everybody didn’t fly every day, and the airplanes were needed.

SS:       Who usually named them? 

JF:        The pilot and crew.

SS:       Were you on the ground taking the picture of this landing?

JF:        Yes.  Sometimes we’d be on the airfield watching the guys come back in or take off for a mission.  That’s one thing about the Marauder that was exciting to watch.  We came in at the final approach for landing at a hundred and sixty-five miles an hour.  We hit at 135.  We were known as the fastest landing airplane in World War II.  With a full bomb load of four thousand pounds, we could cruise at about 220 to 225 miles an hour.  Without a bomb load, with a fairly well stripped down airplane, a normal cruise was 250 to 265 miles an hour.  When we dropped a bomb, we always turned left off of the target, unless there was a hospital or prisoner of war camp below.  We would lose 1,000 feet and push the throttle up to 355 miles an hour, that was the redline speed. Anything over that you took a chance of causing structural damage.  We would come out at 355 miles an hour and the saying was that “On the way in we’re working for the government, on the way home we’re working for ourselves.” 

SS:       Is this on the way in?

JF:        That’s the Rhine River right there and you can see that this is smoke from the town.  All the towns were burning.  Every single town that you flew over was on fire or burning from bomb damage.  You can see the clouds here and this is the smoke down here.  There was a time when the river was the bomb line.  Anything over on this side belonged to the Americans and anything over here was the Germans.  Of course, we’d look out and see the river and say: “Oh God, I hope we can get to that river.”  Once we were at the river, we knew we were safe because by the time we got there, there was hardly any German fighters, so we didn’t have to worry about them following us back to the base.  We used to get hit by 262’s, the German jets.  In the fifteen missions that I flew, I saw only two Messerschmit 109s.

SS:       And all the other times?

JF:        All the other times it was the 262s, and I think we saw them on every mission.

SS:       Did you guys have American fighters to combat those fighters?

JF:        We had fighter cover on just about every mission that we flew.  Most of the time it was P-51s.  One time when I saw the 109s, we had P-38s as cover and as soon as the P38s came in, those Germans disappeared.  We had P-47s as fighter cover too, but they had the same engines that we had.  We had the R2800 Pratt-Whitney engine.  They had the same engine, and at low altitude, they had to s-turn across the top for protection.  It was hard for them to keep up with the bombers.  This is the Sheboygan Redskin, which we flew on this mission and you can see a hole where a piece of flak went through and just missed the bombardier who was sitting right inside the airplane.

SS:       What were all of the bomb markings?

JF:        Whenever an airplane went on a bombing mission, regardless of who flew it, they put a bomb decal indicating that airplane went on that mission.  Those are the missions that the airplane went on, not by the pilot, because like I said, it was flown by a different pilot on every mission.

SS:       But the flak damage, that was on one of your missions?

JF:        The flak, yes.  You notice that these markings are on this metal plate over here which is about a half an inch thick and was to protect the pilot if he was strafing.

SS:       Any out of your fifteen missions, did you ever do that?  Any strafing missions?

JF:        No, we never strafed.  The very first mission that the B-26 went on was a strafing mission over Holland.  They all got back, but they were heavily damaged.  They really missed their target, so they had to go back a few days later, and all the airplanes got shot down.  So they never went strafing again.  Those are just shots of the B-26.  That’s the front end of the Marauder.  And that, you’re looking at the bombardier’s spot right there.  Right there is where the Norden bombsite would be, and of course he had the gun here that he would use if he had to.

SS:       .50 caliber?

JF:        That’s the .50 caliber gun.

SS:       So right now there’s no Norden bombsite in there?

JF:        No, the bombsite is not in there.

SS:       Was that something that was taken out after ever mission, or put in at every mission?

JF:        Yes.  They never left them in the airplane, and the Norden bombsite when it was first used.  You probably saw guys taking it to the planes.  They had the side arms with them, and it was highly protected.  If they got shot down, they had to destroy it.  It wasn’t like that when we were there.  They would take them, put them in the airplane, and take them out and store them for the night.  But like I said before, the lead airplane had the Norden bombsite.  All the other airplanes dropped, when they saw the bomb bay doors open, then they would open theirs.  When they saw the bombs drop out, they would toggle their bombs.  It was all done on the lead ship.  If he overshot the target then everybody overshot the target.

SS:       A close up of your instrument panel right there?

JF:        Yes.  That’s the instrument panel on the 26.  It may look a little complicated to somebody that is not familiar with that but it’s very, very simple because you’re looking at instruments here like the oil pressure gauge, your landing gear indicator gauge, your cylinder head temperature gauge.  You have to have two of them, because you had two engines, but all the instruments here and over here are the flight instruments, so if you were flying in bad weather, you could keep the airplane on a normal flight pattern.

SS:       And what are the lever controls?

JF:        These are the throttles here.  These are the mixture controls here to regulate your gas flow and these are your propeller pitch.  This is a light here, I think this is part of the bombsite that you use if you were strafing.  I think it was a fairly easy airplane to fly except you had to fly it every inch of the way.  I’m standing on the pilot seat here with my head out the escape hatch.  You would never bail out of here in the air because if you did you’d slide into the propeller or you’d hit the radio antennas or hit the stabilizer.  You only got our here if you’d ditched in the water or on the ground.  This is Holland.  The Germans opened all the floodgates and flooded all the land when they occupied Holland.  Here’s some of the nose art that we had.

SS:       Who did the paintings?

JF:        Some of the enlisted men.  We probably had one or two enlisted men that were real adept at this kind of stuff and they would do the paintings.

SS:       Was there anybody who told you what you could or couldn’t put on a plane?  These pictures are actually pretty good.   Did they restrict you at all?

JF:        I never heard of any restrictions but I’m sure if there was something on there that wasn’t agreeable to the commanding officer, he’d tell you to take it off.  But there were some pretty risqué airplanes.

SS:       These look pretty good.  Now did you guys know the planes by their names?

JF:        Yes.  Whenever you were assigned to fly an airplane, you would be assigned by the last three serial numbers on the airplane.  You could see on the tail end a six digit number.  The last three like 018 or whatever it was, that’s what you would fly.  But, if you were talking to other pilots and they said “What’d you fly today?”  You’d say, “Oh, I flew the Dragon Lady” or “I flew the Lil Lass.”   And we knew each airplane.  Each airplane flew different than the other airplanes.  Each had it’s own peculiarities.  Maybe one flew with a heavy right wing.  Maybe one flew that turned to the right all the time and we knew all of that so every time we flew, there was no problem.

SS:       How many planes were in your rotation?  You said you rarely flew the same plane twice.

JF:        There were thirty-six airplanes that we flew.

SS:       So, I guess then that would make sense because you only flew how many missions was it again?

JF:        I flew fifteen, but in order to come home you had to fly 65 missions.

SS:       Now we’re looking at more pictures of Holland?

JF:        Yes.  This is Rotterdam and the English Channel.  We used to fly to England and bring crews over for rest leave, so we had a chance to fly over the Channel.

SS:       D-Day in this picture?

JF:        D-Day on the Rhine was when they sent in all these C-47s carrying or pulling gliders, and they dropped them somewhere around the Rhine River.  We were in Holland.  They were taking off from England, from 7:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night you saw nothing but airplanes coming and going.

SS:       Did you guys participate in any raids or missions right around that time?

JF:        Yes.  We went on missions there but I don’t recall really what target we hit.  What they did for a while is they took some of the aircrews and sent them up to the front lines and some of the guys from the front lines and brought them back to see how each other lived. When the guys came back they brought souvenirs back.  I never did that but that was one of the souvenirs they brought back with them.

SS:       That’s where you got this flag?  Where’s that flying on, is that on a plane?

JF:        No.  That’s on a wall.

SS:       Oh, it’s inside?

JF:        When we were in Cambrai, France, we had a swimming pool in back of our barracks that was built by the Germans.  The Germans had built a whole complex there, and they had put this swimming pool in.  When we got there it was filled with cans and logs and debris, so we spent a couple weeks cleaning it out and scrubbing it down.  Then we filled it with water and the doctor gave us chlorine to put in.  We used it for recreation, and if we weren’t flying a mission and it was warm enough, we could use the pool.  Like I said, when we went back and forth to England, we landed over at Oxford.  It was a B-17 base, and we’d see B-17s on the ground over there all the time.

SS:       So that’s where you got this picture?  Was that a serviceable B-17 that’s right there?  It was just parked on the runway?

JF:        Yes.

SS:       Did you guys have a lot of free time in between missions?

JF:        If we weren’t scheduled for a mission, we had to meet at an 8:00 formation in the morning, just for roll call.  From then on we were free.  We could do anything we wanted.  And then at 7:00 at night, we would go to the ready room and look on the bulletin board, because they posted the schedule for the next day.  If your name was not on that schedule, then the next day you had off.  If you went on a mission, like we went on many missions, we would get up at three or four o’clock in the morning, take off at seven or eight o’clock, and then you’d be back by noon.  Then you had the rest of the day free.  Very seldom did we have to do anything else but fly.  Some of the guys might have had little jobs like operations officer or mess officer, something like that, but the majority of us had nothing to do and that was free time.  We could do anything we wanted.  When we were in Cambrai, France and we did have days off, we used to go out and hitchhike.  There was a lot of British vehicles going back and forth to different towns and a lot of American vehicles.  We went to Brussels, Belgium and spent time there.  They had an ice cream store in Brussels, so we used to go there to get ice cream.  These are just pictures of it.  This is the garden or market area where the people came to buy vegetables.  That’s Victor Hugo’s house where he was born. 

SS:       Everything looks like it’s in fairly good shape.

JF:        Yes.  I don’t think they were hit too much.  Once they surrendered to the Germans, I don’t think there ever was much bombing done.

SS:       How was it for Americans in the city?

JF:        It was good.  They were happy to see the Americans there, and they were very, very friendly.

SS:       Were there people around who spoke English?   (Interruption)

SS:       So we’ll pick up where we left off.  We were talking about various pictures.

JF:        These are of Belgium.  This is of France.  When we flew X number of missions, they decided to send us on a flak leave.  They sent us here.  Our crew was the only ones there at Neris, France, we spent a week there.  And that’s what we spent most of the time doing, out in the water swimming and boating and sunning ourselves. That was a nice week away from combat.  That’s the engineer-gunner.  That guy was a good engineer.  To this day I still correspond with him, and I remember back in 1944 when we first started he said to me, “When I get out of the service I’m going to be a minister.” And he became a Baptist minister and he still practices today.  He lives in Mississippi.

SS:       So you’re about nineteen, maybe twenty years old now?

JF:        Yes, I was nineteen at the time.  This fellow was 26, and he was the pilot.  This guy was nineteen.  These two were probably the two youngest on the crew and then me and then these two over here.  This fellow died, this one here died, and the other four, we’re still in contact with each other.  When I flew transition local hops, that’s the way I used to fly.  I’d just put on a T-shirt, throw a parachute on and jump in.  You can see the propellers on the airplane.  They were twelve feet in diameter.

SS:       So this was still during combat time, the war was still going on?

JF:        I believe that this was after.  This was at Venlo, Holland.

SS:       This is after the Germans had already surrendered?

JF:        They had surrendered, yes.  And when we went to Venlo, Holland, we were given an area and said this is where you set up your tent.  We lived in tents.  The three officers to a tent.  The three enlisted men had their own tent.  Then we had this little pot-bellied stove for heating water, for shaving and for whatever we wanted to use it for like heating the tent. This is coming in for a landing on the airstrip.  This was an airfield that was built by the Dutch people and the Germans used it before us.  They flew the 163 Comet- the rocket airplane off the field.  But they flew many, many missions against London, and talking to the townspeople, I can remember they said they always knew when they were going to London, because they would be out getting drunk the night before.

SS:       The Germans?

JF:        The Germans, yes.  This is the way we lived.  I tell you, it was nice living there.  It was like living on a bivouac or going away for a summer vacation.  We were in the woods, and it was all pine trees.  You couldn’t see any airplanes.  It was like being out in nowhere.  We all had our own little tent and we could do anything that we wanted with the tent.  We had an electric bulb in there for light.  This is one of the buildings that the Germans had built, and I guess we used it as the officers club.

SS:       Do you know what that means by any chance?

JF:        No.

SS:       And this was?

JF:        That’s May in Venlo and the way we used to walk around during the day.  It was summer.  This was our bombardier and navigator.  If you remember, the heavies, they had a bombardier and a navigator but because we were limited for space, our navigator was our bombardier.  So, we called them bombagators.  This fella here, Captain Hensel, was our Operations Officer. 

SS:       So you’re still flying the B-26?

JF:        Yes.  When we were in Venlo we were flying B-26s, and most of the time we’d go up on transition flights just to keep busy.  We’d take a night flight and day flight and most of it was a formation across country or ferrying other crews to different areas, like England for a rest leave or down to the French Riviera or over to Paris.  Now you can see what the tent looks like.  That was our home and you see Boreing here is wearing the Eisenhower jacket.  We called these the pink and the greens, the pink trousers and the green jacket.  These jackets, we had them tailor-made in London.  They cost $40 dollars a jacket.  We would fly a crew over and would put our order in for a jacket and then when we went over to pick up the crew, we’d pick up the jacket.  We had these jackets lined with a bright, bright red lining, a silk lining.  We’d walk down the street with the jacket wide open.  It used to drive the infantry officers crazy.

SS:       Is that the jacket you still have?

JF:        Yes.  You see the Army guys were told what you have to wear today, but we could wear just about anything we wanted.  We could wear the green jacket with the same colored trousers.  We could wear the olive drab shirt with olive drab trousers or we could mix any combination we wanted.  So, if six of us went out, it was conceivable that six of us could be wearing a different uniform.

SS:       How did you guys all get along with people?  Infantry?  Regular Army guys?

JF:        We got along great because the infantry used to call us the “fly boys,” or “glamour boys” and they used to look up to the Air Force.  I remember going into town and meeting GI’s going to and from the front lines, this is when we were in Cambrai, France, and we’d be in a bar or a restaurant or something and they’d say, “Oh gee fly boys, can you take us up for a flight?  We’d like to see what the area looks like.”  And we’d say, “Yeah, tomorrow we’re going on a two-hour transition flight.  Come on down to the airfield.”  I’d see them coming toward the airplane and the minute they saw they were B-26s, they’d go the other way.  We never took anybody up.

SS:       Because the 26 still had a bad reputation?

JF:        They knew it and they had the bad reputation.

SS:       What was a transition flight?

JF:        Transition was just a local flight.  It could be practice gunnery, it could be practice navigation, or it could be practice formation, whatever they decided you had to do.  This is an A-26 Invader.  It is the airplane that replaced the B-26 Marauder.  That was a terrific airplane.  It had one pilot, and it had a top speed of 425 miles an hour and it was a good airplane.

SS:       Did you get to fly it?

JF:        I just got to fly it.  We came in for one landing, blew both tires off the airplane and we hopped down the runway.  I said to the pilot checking me out: “How many hours do you have in this airplane?”  He said: “nineteen.”  And that was the only ride I had in the airplane.

SS:       So, you weren’t piloting it?

JF:        No, he was piloting it.  He was checking me out and after that I went home.  These pictures are just showing some of the destruction in Germany.  You’re looking at probably a middle-class area where people lived before the war.  There’s no roofs on the houses, there’s no windows, everything is bombed out.  This is the main street in Nuremberg.  You could see there’s streetcar tracks there but no wires, no windows.

SS:       And American vehicles?

JF:        That was the Red Cross building there.  They always picked a good building and put the Red Cross in.  You could see they cleaned it up.  I’ll give the Germans credit, they cleaned everything up and they cleaned it up fast.  They are a very, very neat, clean people.(End of Side One)

JF:        This building was in Nuremberg, and it was said, Hitler was building the buildings and when it was completed he was going to rule the world from this building.  These blocks were all imported from a country like Italy or someplace else.  They were each numbered and all the workmen had to do was take block one and put it in and then take block two and put it in.  Of course, it was never completed, and he never got to rule the world.  You’re looking at Krupp works and a regular street in the town.  This is the old part of Nuremberg.  Nothing was spared, they bombed everything and anything that was down there.

SS:       Were any of these sites targets of yours?

JF:        No.  Our targets were railroad yards, bridges, and what we called no-ball targets which were the V-1 and the V-2 rocket sites.  However, one mission I went on we dropped leaflets and one mission I remember we dropped incendiary bombs on a communications center in France.  When we were walking around when we had free time, we ran across these old airplanes here that the Americans had apparently put their markings on and test flew the airplanes.  But that’s all part of the German Air Force.

SS:       Did you ever see any downed jet pilots, the kind that you faced?

JF:        No.  I went to lunch one day over in Danbury and I met Rudy Opits who flew the 163 Comet and I met another German airline pilot who said he flew 262s in the German Luftwaffe.  When I said to him something about I heard that 262 pilots were told that if there was any B-26 Marauders in the area to drop what you’re doing and go after the Marauders.  His statement was, “No, no, no I never fired on any American airplane.”  (both laugh)  He was being very defensive, but we all knew different.

SS:       He didn’t want that to get out if he did. 

JF:        Oh, he was being cautious see.

SS:       So these are all post-war pictures?

JF:        Yes, these are all after the war.  This is the Nuremberg stadium where Hitler had all his rallies.  This is the Rhine River.  Every bridge on the Rhine River had been hit, and every bridge was down.  Of course you know the story about the Ramagen bridge.  That’s the one that the American troops got across and then it finally fell.  But here again, we went out on leave, and they sent me down to the French Rivera.  This is the Monte Carlo casino.  They took us through Monte Carlo in a bus. We couldn’t get out of the bus because that country was neutral and as long as we were in uniform, they wouldn’t let us out.  We had the Americans bring in entertainment.  Somebody said Glen Miller was at this place.  He might have been here when the Don Cossack choir was here but I don’t remember.  They did everything they could to entertain the troops.  That’s an old German tank that we ran across on one of our days off.  We had this glider on the field, I don’t think it was Venlo, I think it was in Kitzingen, and we started to fly it and one guy almost got hurt flying, so the commanding officer said “That’s it.” and we had to burn it.  We then moved to Kitzingen, Germany because we were slated for Army of Occupation and this is at Kitzingen.  There was four of these barracks there and the 584th, 585th, 586th and 587th each had a barracks.  It was nice living there, it was a nice airfield and we really didn’t have much to do except fly.  I became the tower operations officer while there.  Then everybody was sent home except me, and I asked the commanding officer why and he said: “We want you to stay to fly the C-47.”  I said: “I never flew a C-47.” and he said: “You’re going to learn.”  I checked out on a C-47 and from that day on I flew all over Germany to pick up parts for theA-26s that were going to fly back to the United States.  They told us that six out of ten would go down in the drink, but we didn’t have to worry because every 200 miles or so they would have a picket ship that would pick up any downed pilot.  Flak Bait was flown into our hanger.  We kept it in our hanger in Kitzingen and the commanding officer said “How would you like to fly it home?” I don’t know if he was kidding or not, but I said, “Yeah, I would.”  But I don’t think anybody flew it home.  I think it went home by crate, by ship and it’s now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.

SS:       That’s a B-26?

JF:        That’s the 26.  And this is one of the buildings there at Kitzingen.  The Germans blew up all the buildings when they left the field.  Our commanding officer had the T-6s toy and he used to fly that around just for hours.   And then a B-29 was sent overseas just to show everybody what a B-29 was.  That’s the only B-29 over in Europe at the time.  It just flew to different airfields on exhibit.  Of course, to us it was huge compared to the biggest thing we saw the B-17 and that was huge.  After a strange airplane comes into a field it takes off and with everyone watching it buzzes the field.  Of course, the pilots love to do that. 

SS:       You didn’t get to fly a B-29?

JF:        No, that was four engines, and I never got into flying anything over two engines.  I used to go down to Munch a lot to pick up clothing for some of the other officers and while I was there, I went by the Dachau Concentration Camp and this is what I saw there.  This is the building where they did all the cremation.  These are the furnaces they used.  The guard told me that they looked into that little window to see if the body was completely cremated before they put another one in.

SS:       Do you remember actually going through there?  What it felt like?

JF:        Oh yes.  When I got there, it was right after they had liberated the camp, and the people that ran it were the ones behind the barbed wire.  They were holding them there. 

SS:       These are the ovens?

JF:        The ashes.

SS:       Were these signs put up by Americans?

JF:        I guess so, yes.  That’s an A-26 Invader.  And that’s the camera.  See that camera there?  That’s the camera that I used to take the pictures.  When we had been there about six months or so, someone made the decision to destroy the B-26 Marauders. They weren’t worth taking back to the States, so they took them out in the field, put a dynamite charge to them, they didn’t try to take off any engines or any critical part.  They just dynamited them, and then bulldozed them into the ground.  That’s the Dragon Lady that you saw at the beginning.

SS:       Were you sad to see these things go?

JF:        Oh sure, because that was the airplane that we flew and today there are none around.  But the B-26 was obsolete when we started flying them back in 1944.  I think they built 5,700 total.  I was sent down to the French Rivera for a couple weeks.  I stayed in this hotel here, no this is the Carleton Hotel, we ate here and stayed in the Martinez Hotel.  This one down here.  And these two fellas here were B-29 engineers, and they were sent overseas and there was no B-29s over there other than the one that was on exhibit and they sent them away on a rest leave when they never even flew a mission.  This is just some of the Mediterranean. 

SS:       So how much longer did you wind up staying overseas?

JF:        I stayed almost another six or eight months.  All I did was fly a C-47 all over Europe.  This other pilot and I were the only two pilots that were checked out on the airplane.  We could do anything we wanted, go any place we wanted.  We used to go down to Munich because they had an ice cream bar there.  We’d get up in the morning and if it looked like a cloudy day we wouldn’t fly.  We flew only on nice days.  They sent me to Switzerland.  I went to Switzerland for a week or two weeks.  I used to go to Switzerland.  I used to go to Paris.  I used to go to London.  We had that swimming pool in back of our barracks, and we had days off when we weren’t flying.

SS:       Did you get along well with people in Switzerland?

JF:        Oh yes.  Switzerland was good.  They were sympathetic to the Americans.  I think we got along good with everybody over there,  even the German people.  After the war they were very, very friendly.  You could talk to them.  The only thing that I get a big kick out of is when we were in France flying combat, and we’d go into the center of Cambrai, France, which was all bombed out with most of the building destroyed, that here was nothing but the older generation in the town.  When the war ended, we went back to Cambrai, France.  We had to pick up some parts or we had to do something there.  We went into town and it was loaded with all these young girls and young men.  It was like they kept them hidden during the war, away from the Americans.

SS:       Yes.  That could be possible.  Maybe they were involved in something.

JF:        And the Dutch people were very, very friendly because we took a walk into Einhoven. One weekend a woman came up to us, she was riding a bicycle.  She stopped and she says, “Oh, Americans.  You’re the first Americans that we’ve seen wearing your class A uniforms.”  And she invited us to her house for dinner.

SS:       So, it seems like it was a pretty decent atmosphere towards the end?

JF:        It was.  The only thing that I didn’t like was that when we were at Kitzingen, we were in the barracks that was on the end of the line next to a wooded area.  And one night someone came in and stole a radio and stole a lot of stuff from some of the officers.  From then on, things didn’t seem right.  We had a girl that committed suicide in our barracks.

SS:       A German?

JF:        A German girl.  And things didn’t seem normal anymore and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. 

SS:       So they treated the Americans well but the German people themselves, were they tense or depressed?  Did you notice after losing the war?

JF:        No, I think they were relieved that the war was over and you could sit and talk with them.  For example, I had a letter opener made at one of the local factories.  It looked like a little bayonet.  It had my name on the side, it had the 9th Airforce patch on the other side.  We went in and the German worker said that he would make it for us, but they were very, very happy to do stuff like that for the Americans.  They weren’t aggressive.  I never met anybody that didn’t want to talk to you. They were very friendly.  I could never understand why they ever went to war.  They had the cleanest and nicest country of all the countries I visited. 

SS:       Well I’m glad you got the pictures, they tell a great story.

JF:        It was too bad.

SS:       Yes.  It is too bad, that there had to be so much destruction.  You got pictures of some of the destruction of the cities.  Well great.  I’m glad we got to talk about the pictures.  They add a lot to the overall story.

JF:        Well they do, because you talk to a lot of fellas and they say, “Well I was here, I was there.” But they have nothing to show for it.  I was fortunate that I had the camera, and I took pictures wherever I went.  I’m almost sorry now I didn’t take more, and of course I’m sorry we didn’t have colored film then.  But that’s another thing.  When the war ended and we were in Kitzingen, they didn’t know what to do with the air crews.  They were trying everything to keep them busy.  They would send people away on rest leave for a couple weeks at a time, or let you go a week here or there.  They brought in all kinds of photographic chemicals and stuff like that and they let us play with it, do whatever we wanted.  We went down in the basement of our barracks and we set this photo room up and we did our own developing, our own printing, our own enlarging and we did everything.

SS:       Does it bring back a lot of memories and feelings of the whole time period for you?  How does it feel to look back and see yourself this young and realize what you had to go through?

JF:        Oh sure.  You really change and you know I’ve talked to these guys, part of the crew here, and they tell me things that I don’t remember, or I tell them things they didn’t remember.  For example, I don’t think you saw the picture in here but one of the pictures shows a hole in the windshield where we got hit.  A piece of flak came through the windshield and it cut my hand and face and they had a hole in the back of the plane.  That’s when the radio man asked for some extra flak suits, and the navigator stole four of them out of another airplane and they put his on top of the four and that’s what he sat on during a mission.  A piece of flak came up through four of the suits and stopped at the fifth one.  We had a hole in the windshield big enough to put your fist through.  It smashed the instrument panel.  When we got home, they counted 219 holes in the airplane.  Now I don’t remember that but. .

SS:       All from flak?

JF:        All from flak, yes.

SS:       Was it more dangerous to face the flak or face the fighters?

JF:        Yes.  No, the flak.  We didn’t have that many fighters to worry about anyway.

SS:       No, because you had fighter escorts.

JF:        But I talked to the only Congressional Medal of Honor fighter pilot in World War II, James Howard, in Florida.  I bought his book, “The Roar of the Tiger”, and I called him and asked if he would sign my book.  He said, “Come on over to the house.”  So I went over to his house.  And here’s a guy that was in the Flying Tigers, and he was a P-51 pilot in the war, and all he talked about how sorry he felt for us guys because we had to go through the flak and as a fighter pilot he could get away from it.

SS:       That shows how bad it must’ve been.

JF:        And you know it’s funny.  People say, “Well gee, how did you feel?”  You almost wished you would see a burst of flak because you were so tense at the moment and if you didn’t get any flak or fighters and you went home, you were tense all night, you couldn’t sleep. The minute you got a burst of flak or you saw a fighter, it seemed like all that relieved out of your system, and once that was gone, then you felt a little bit more relaxed.  But again, like everybody says, you always figure it’s going to be the other guy that gets it and not you.  You never figure you’re going to get it. 

SS:       Is there anything that you wanted to add about any of the pictures or anything like that?

JF:        No, I think we covered just about everything.

SS:       Yes, there are some excellent pictures.

JF:        Like I said, I have the negative to every one of these pictures in here because these are all my pictures.

SS:       Well great, you did a good job.  I’m happy we got a chance to talk about them.