¡Colores!; 1008; Mayhem was Our Business: Memorias de un Veterano; Interview; Part 4

Well, this is great. I don't have to be on camera this time, so you get to be flying solo. I think he's used to that. All alone. I'm liking the ball turret. I want you to hear sound so we can both on the same page. Enough telebards? Yeah. In the manual, I was. We had just finished talking about how you got hit. The hole in the wing, you just made it over the tree tops and you were straking the company of soldier as you then finished by landing and going in and seeing your name on the wall as if you hadn't returned as you were missing. What is the job of a ball turret gunner and what are some of the things that you had to do in the turret?

Well, the ball turret contains two caliber 50 machine guns and they are operated mechanically. The same grips that turn the turret around also contain the triggers. The triggers are buttons that you push with your thumbs. And your job is to circulate all the way around 180 degrees one way and 180 degrees in the other way, so that makes it 360. And you come up and down 180 degrees all the way around the circle. And your job is to scan the skies to see for enemy action. And the skies are endless.

And you strain yourself. You can't afford to make any mistakes because a little dot in the far off distance may become a menace any moment. And also the enemy planes would hide behind banks of clouds and then jump on you when you least expected them. And they also attack from the direction of the sun so that the sun would blind you. And my job was to be eternally alert, alert in a way. So tell me about some of the things that you encountered in the turret. What kind of action did you see where you're shooting at fighters? Have you got any examples of what you encountered? Well, most of the time in the turret was just sweating to get out. They were long periods when we were just flying, flying, flying, flying. We'd fly up into the north, into the Ciders A, and then come down into Germany from there.

And then there was a time when we were protected by our own fighter planes and then came the time when the flag would hit. And going over the target where the flag was coming from every direction. That was very scary because these bombs were exploding up in the air. And you would see the black puffs of smoke. You couldn't hear the explosion, but you could hear the shrapnel getting the plane and perforating the plane because the skin of the plane was aluminum and very thin.

And these little tiny pieces of shrapnel would hit and penetrate the plane all over. And some of them were big chunks as big as your fist that would come and dig a hole. And sometimes it was a direct hit. And that would leave big gaping holes. Were you in the ball turret when the flag was hitting? Oh yes. I had no protection. I was wearing a steel apron that protected me from shrapnel. There was a panel up front and a panel in the back. And I was wearing a leather helmet, but it had steel underneath inside. So that protected my head. What were you thinking about when the flag was going on? You were sitting in the ball turret.

I don't think you think. In the midst of the action, your attention is focused on the firepower coming at you. And I don't think you have time to think. Maybe you do. I don't remember. It's all encompassing. It just grabs your entire mindset, your attention, your everything is focused. You become in a sense part of the gun that you have in your hand, your part of the firepower fighting back. Well, those planes would come in at very high speeds. And they would start firing at you from a long distance all. And you could see the bullets coming because every fifth bullet was an incendiary. The idea was that the big bullets would perforate the gas tanks and the incendiaries would set it on fire.

And these incendiaries looked like ping pong balls. So you see an arc of pinball balls coming at you. And you started firing then at the same time. How close did you get to seeing that the German planes did you hit any? Did they keep their distance? What was it like? Well, I got credit for bringing down three and a half German planes. The half is explained that two of us were firing at the same plane when it went down. So we each got a credit. What was it like shooting at the planes? How did you try to hit them? How did you gauge the speed?

Well, you never shoot at the target. Because if you shoot at the target, your bullet, by the time your bullet gets there, your target will have moved on. So you got to shoot ahead of the target. And above it, because of the law of gravity, you see that the path of your bullet is always an arc that starts going down. The law of gravity starts pulling it down and the wind velocity and other items. So you're shooting above the target in a head of it. But I had an electronic sight that figured out all of that, all of those ballistic for me. It was, I had a little screen with a horizontal line across it and a vertical bar going up this way and a vertical bar at this end, turning this way. And the idea was for me to frame my target, my plane, wingtip to wingtip between those two bars and on the horizontal bar.

And the target, I mean the gun sight would figure all the mathematics and all the ballistics that went with it. And all the flack, and then there's a German fighter shooting at you. How close did they get to you? The bullets come through the ball turret, what kinds of things that? Oh yes. I was knocked out once. The chunk of flack came in through the side and hit my parachute. I was wearing my parachute. It was one of those breast parachutes that fit over your chest. And I would unhook it on one side and put it on my left side, hoping that if I had to bail out. I would just open the door of the turret and drop out, hoping that I would have enough presence of mine to hook it on this other side before I pulled the string.

Well, that saved my life because this chunk of flack was about the size of my fist and it hit the parachute. And the parachute hit me on the side so hard that it knocked me out. And I just went out like a light. And right after every combat, we would check in by the intercom to see what the results had been. When we checked in, I didn't answer. And the new eye was in trouble. So they went in, they brought me out. We had portable oxygen tanks. And they brought me out to the waste compartment. And I came too. And I thought I was morally wounded because the blow that hit me was so violent that I thought that I was in the first thing that I did, I was feeling myself, my body all over, expecting to find broken bones and couldn't find anything.

There was a great relief. So I got my air back and I went back into the turret. Well, after that, anything was the delight, the fact that you could do it. Tell me about the plane. Did you get hit often? Oh, yes. I told you that the name of our plane was in logo. And we had a logo painted on all the leather jackets. Let me start you again. Because I'm going to be editing this instead of saying I told you earlier, just say the name of our plane. The name of our plane was in logo. And we had a logo painted on the back of our leather jackets. And also the number of missions that we had fought and that we had flown.

And we would have painted the same logo on the side of the plane except that we never had a plane long enough to paint the logo on it. We brought back so many battered up planes that they would take it away from us and give us another one. And we were flying patched up planes all the time. Tell me about what happened to the plane. So you told us to go dramatically about that one incident. What are some of the other things you had on your plane? What are the kinds of things that happened to the plane? Well, some things came back with the whole tail missing or a wingtip missing or the nose missing. The mortality in the Eighth Air Force was probably the highest in the entire war.

When we left, we were 50, 50 crews, combat crews. And we went into combat at about the same time. My crew was one of the first ones to finish. And when we kept in touch, we were scattered all over England in different bomb groups. But we kept in touch. When we finished, and we were among the very first, there were only 25 combat crews flying. That meant that 25 had been brought down. Any kind of armed forces that lose 50% of their combat power. That is tremendous, tremendous casualty rates. What other kinds of things happened to your plane? Are there kind of damage that it received?

Well, sometimes pipelines, brake fluid or other fluids would be cut off. Or sometimes wires, switches that toggle switches. The wires would be flipped off. So sometimes many pipes on the plane wouldn't operate because the fluids that operated them were the wires cables that operated them had been cut. So was it like landing in a damaged plane? Oh, it was a wing in a prayer. There was a song coming in on a wing in a prayer. And that's the way it was a lot of the time. And incidentally, that is the reason that we got the name Lobos. Because my crewmates, they didn't know nothing from nothing when it came to Lobos. But everyone in our squadron started calling us alone wolves. And I explained to them that the lone wolf in Spanish was a Lobo.

And I convinced him, and that's how come we ended up with that name? You were called the lone wolf, why? Because we came back by ourselves that our plane couldn't keep up with a flight from the way back. Okay. So are we called the lone wolf? Well, it seemed that we were jinxed. Over and over again, we were hit so badly that our plane couldn't keep up with a flight from the way back to England. And we trail behind. So the rest of our friends in the squadron started calling us the lone wolf. And from lone wolf to a Lobo was a very short step. Okay. Thank you. Perfect.

Thank you so much. Nice, charming adventure with a young lady. Tell us that story. Maybe let's try another shot. Well, where do we go? All right. So tell me about your other work experiences in particular this charming lady with that. We would get three day passes to London about every ten missions or sometimes when we had been flying too many days in a row. And that's when the B2 bombs were falling on London. And we could have gone anywhere else in England and been safer.

But London was a legendary capital of England. That's where the action was. So that's where we went. And the bombs were falling like leaves all over London. And before we went on pass, we went to our mess hall. And our mess sergeant would provide us with food. Stakes, a roast, salmon, butter, bread, regular food. And when we checked in at our hotel, we turned in our package and that they put our name on it. And it was cooked for us for dinner.

Because in the very elegant hotels, there was a lack of food in England. The ham was sliced so thin, it was transparent. And the sausage tasted like sawdust or rope. A lot of potatoes. But who likes potatoes that much? In fish and chips. And fish and chips can be very appetizing once in a while, but not on a steady diet. So we run around London during the day and then we come back to the hotel for dinner and we would have a full meal. And if you didn't take your own food, you were sorry because you came back pretty hungry. And that was one package that the guys would take.

They'd take another package. That was called wench bait. Didn't call the girls chicks, they call them wenches. And that's what the guys did most of the day. They'd go up wenching or wenching. And at night, at night there was a blackout. And the blackout in London was a blackout. Because it was usually a fog. And it was black. Black could be without the lights being turned off. So as you walk the streets, all you could hear was so sorry. So sorry. So sorry. People were bumping into each other. And some of the guys were making out leaning against the wall because nobody could see anyhow.

And what did you take in those packages for wenches? Well cosmetics, nylon stockings. All those were a big price.