Mr. John Lime
[b. 03/22/21]
Recorded on 01/29/05
[Interview starts at 001 on counter]
Dan Tapiero: Today is January 29, 2005 and this is the beginning of an interview with John Lime at Park Tudor High School [Indiana]. My name is Dan Tapiero and I’ll be the interviewer.
Dan Tapiero: Were you drafted or did you enlist?
John Lime: I enlisted in September of 1940.
DT: Where were you living at the time?
JL: In Indianapolis, Indiana. 3649, North Grayson Avenue. I was living at my parent’s home.
DT: Why did you enlist?
JL: I saw an Ad in the morning paper for opportunity to join the army, Army Air Corp and get Aviation mechanics training at Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois.
DT: Why did you pick the service branch you joined?
JL: I liked the Air force, I mean Air corps.
DT: Do you recall your first days in service?
JL: There wasn’t too much to it because we didn’t get any basic training until several months later, but we got into school in a matter of about ten days later we were already in mechanic school over at Chanute Field.
DT: What did it feel like?
JL: Just in school away from home I guess, nothing extraordinary.
[015]
DT: So Mr. Lime which war did you serve in?
JL: The Second World War.
DT: Where exactly did you go at the time?
JL: Well I went to my school over at Chanute Field and at the completion of the nine months of school I went to Hawaii and I was at Hickam Field on December 7, 1941.
DT: Do you remember arriving and what it was like?
JL: Just getting off the ship and bringing my bags back down with me and they assigned me to where I would be going to from the dock.
DT: What was your job assignment?
JL: They assigned me to a crew on a B-18 and we started working on the plane. They were all in need to work.
DT: What kinds of assignments were you doing before the attack on Pearl Harbor?
JL: Well we had KP and we all had to pull our own territory of KP, and I hadn’t gotten around to get a long stretch on mine just yet.
DT: Did you see any combat?
JL: Yeah, I saw beginning that day yes December 7th, 1941.
[030]
DT: Do you remember the attack on Pearl Harbor?
JL: Very definitely, very definitely. The Navy had a habit of when they had a carrier coming in they would launch the fighters thirty or forty miles out at sea. They would come into Ford Island at Pearl Harbor but on the way in they would buzz Hickman Field. That morning why that’s what we thought we were beginning to see was a bunch of fighters coming in for giving us a buzz job before they went into Ford Island. How mistaken we were. When we saw that meatball on the side of them things why gee, and what they were dropping underneath them. Phew!
DT: Where were you at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor?
JL: I was in the squadron day room ready to go to church. The first mass was scheduled at 8:30 on Sunday mornings and I was sitting there reading the front page of the paper the morning paper and they hit us at 7:58.
DT: How did you react to the attack?
JL: I was wondering where I could find a gun and trying to keep myself protected from getting hit with anything.
DT: What shocked you the most?
JL: Them guys coming down here trying to shoot down our flag of the flag pole which was at the far end of the parade ground. Then the torpedo planes were going on into (Burrough?) and laying their torpedos on the battle ship row.
DT: Did you and your colleagues begin to feel the war coming before the attack on Pearl Harbor?
JL: Suddenly and swiftly. That morning was suddenly and swiftly. And we thought they would be bringing in land troops later in the day, but thank the good Lord they didn’t make it. They didn’t have any with them.
DT: What was the media like after the attack?
JL: What was the media like? Wondering what in the heck was going on. Like all of us were.
[54]
DT: How much time did it take for things to get back to normal?
JL: All things started to settle down about in four days. We were still hunting for things. We had no fighter protections there on the islands because they knocked down all our fighters up at Wheeler Field. There was a carrier in San Francisco at the Naval Station there, that when they got word of the attack they loaded all of the Navy planes they could get on board in the hangar deck, they called Hamilton Field, which was just up river from Cisco on the Sacramento river, and they wanted them to get fighter planes over to the long side of the carrier where there was a landing strip there with pilots and with mechanics, and they brought on board 75 B-40’s, and tied them all down at the rear end of the flight deck, and headed them for Hawaii on force draft. Wednesday morning they launched those planes as they were headed towards the islands in close to the islands, they launched them off their carrier deck no loss and the navy pilots had talked to air corps pilots on how to make a take off of a carrier, because they didn’t have catapult gear on there to launch them. With the forward speed of the carrier as it was they all made good take offs and flew into Hawaii, and landed down at Hickam and Wheeler fields. The tower operator at Hickam field made the statement at about noon time that they had hit an air raid and then they backed of the put on an all clear immediately on it. He commented that it was a beautiful site and up over the Nariwa range of hills there on the Devizi Islands, Hickam had almost 75 B-40’s in formation. That was quite a show!
DT: What were the hospitals like?
JL: I never went to hospital over there. I had no need to. They missed me all the way around. I did not get not a hand of any kind. All my clothes got messed up.
DT: What were your job assignments after the attack on Pearl Harbor?
JL: Working on B-18’s and we started getting in B-17’s. The B-18’s were used to train pilots for [Interrupted by the PA system] multi-engine aircraft. The B-18 was a twin engine and they learned how to fly and handle a B-18 and then graduated on to handle B-17 which is a four engine aircraft. Training on that and gradually we got started getting in some B-17’s. At that time we had the antique B-17’s, B-17 C’s and D’s, which have no power assist anywhere on the plane.
[102]
DT: So Mr. Lime tell me a couple of your most memorable experiences.
JL: Well we just worked on planes there and went over to Maui for about four weeks to Naval Air station at Punnanai. Then flew out of there and come back to Hickam Field and they moved us over to Bellows field at the other side of the island. We were training out of there, on multi-engine aircraft and sudden flight cruises in, and after landing in downs in on the canal in August of 42. The Battle of Midway we had several planes that went up to the island of Midway from Hawaii and bombed out of there on the Japanese fleet, and we had one fight crew that was a pilot and co-pilot was a pair of brothers, the Sprint brothers, and they nursed a plane back from Midway that in the process of getting to Midway he lost three engines on a four engine aircraft. They are not made to fly on one engine and he was losing altitude on that one. Being that he was born and raised in Hawaii, he was to make his landing up air strip called Bark and Stands on the island of Kauai and was floating at 17 and to make his landing and one of those good Hawaiian gusty winds caught him and started touching down at the end of the field, he touched down almost 4000 foot up that 7000 foot runway. They like to set the brakes on fire on that thing to get it stopped. But it was close, but they made it safely. We had to send parts and all kinds of stuff to Barks and Stands from Hawaii to get that plane repaired. At Hickam Field is the Hawaiian air depot and they did a lot of rebuilding of aircrafts there, engines, brakes, and everything else.
DT: How did you stay in touch with your family?
JL: By mail, and I’m a poor letter writer.
DT: Was it hard for you to be so far away from your family?
JL: Yes and no, you kind of get used to it after a while. At that young age why, I didn’t pay to much attention to it. I’m not as close as a lot of them now.
DT: Did you feel pressure or stress?
JL: No. No, just tried to behave myself and do a little site seeing as I was there, not as much as I would’ve liked to. I got more later, but some site seeing then.
DT: Was something special you did for good luck before battle or combat?
JL: Do what now?
DT: Something special for good luck before battle or combat?
JL: Say my prayers. You never forget that. Better not! There is no atheist in a foxhole. When you forget to manage prayers then you’re in instant trouble. Believe me.
DT: How did people entertain themselves in Hawaii?
JL: Go to movies. Back then that was all we had was movies. There were some stage shows come through with the USO. I seem to move out just ahead of them and never got to see any real good ones. Saw some good entertainment, but not some of the ultra-stars that were making the trips.
[157]
DT: Do you recall the day your service ended?
JL: Yeah, I was down at Camp Edberg the end of the war they set a standard of you had to have so many points to get your discharge. I was at Bowling Field at Washington D.C at the time, and they said you had to have 75 points and somebody says “Hey, he’s got 92!” The next day I had word to pack my bags and go home. I was discharged from Edberg on Labor Day, 1945. My three year enlistment turned into four years, eleven months, and thirteen days.
DT: How did you feel after your service ended?
JL: To a degree I would’ve liked to stay in. Yet again they bossed me around and I didn’t get advancements like I thought I should. But oh well, its part of life.
DT: How did you react to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
JL: Good. Good for them. They deserve what they got. The people well they, the way those people live and the way they are raised, their beliefs, and all of that are so much different then what we have. To a degree they still are. But, just a necessary loss of life if we hadn’t dropped the A-Bombs, why how many of men we would of lost trying to invade them. They had a lot of stuff still stored up.
DT: Did you hear about the attacks in Europe and the battles in Europe while you were in Hawaii?
JL: Well the daily newspapers carried the information on that. We did scull about that got information on others through the historical society.
DT: How did you react to the newspaper?
JL: Newspapers said to keep up and keep up the good work. That’s all they could do.
DT: What did you do the days and weeks after your service ended?
JL: Within a week afterwards I was employed by the Indianapolis public transportation driving a city bus. I drove there for four and a fraction months and then I thought I found a better going in the shipping department and within two and half months, I found out they were planning on moving back to their home office area in Dayton, Ohio. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to transfer in, so I went back and approached the transportation system and heard back down with them. Then I spent forty one and a third years with them as a re-hire and retired off of the buses in August the first of 1987.
DT: Did you ever go back to school?
JL: No, I started too but I gave it up as a bad job. It wasn’t that interesting to me at the time. I had a family to rise too. I got married while I was in service in 1943 and through the course of years, why we had six children and lost one little boy still born besides. Now I have sixteen grand children and last Tuesday I got my tenth great grandchild. Unfortunately I lost the better part of the combination back in 1984 my wife pasted away complications of Diabetes Mellitus, or the dirty one as it was referred to then. It was always fatal it still is fairly well fatal. She made seven years and a month after the day she was diagnosed. And phew, what she went through the last couple of years she was alive was something else. I haven’t found anyone since that could put up with me.
DT: Did you make any close friendships while in service?
JL: Yeah. Yeah, there’s an annual get together of 5th bomb group people, and there is also an annual get together of 13th air force personal. I try to make both of them, besides Pearl Harbor survivor association. It meets three in a five year period, but the 13th air force and the 5th bomb group meet annually. The 5th bomb group this year is meeting down in San Diego, and I won’t be going down to that one. In October the 13th air force will be meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, and I intend to make that one.
DT: Did you know any people that were killed in action?
JL: Yeah several.
DT: Was it hard to keep up with that?
JL: It’s a shock you don’t like.
[236]
DT: Did you join a veteran’s organization after the war?
JL: No, the only thing I belong to is the Pearl Harbor survivors association, the 13th air force association, and 5th bomb group association. I do not belong to the legion or the VFW.
DT: Were you awarded any medals or citations?
JL: No. I was not long enough on any one station to get a good contact group and you had to be there for three years, and I was never on a station for three years. I did some part time assignments with the intelligence service, and with them your eligible to go on a promotion if your there for six months. They always had happened to moving me before the six month period was over, so I never got anything of that. I came out about sergeant.
DT: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or the military in general?
JL: Not really. Not really.
DT: How did your service and experience affect your life?
JL: I don’t know. Behave myself and try to stay on the street narrow. Try to keep people entertained while I was driving the bus. I had a good time with that. Which I still try to do at my, since I’ve retired off the buses, I volunteer at St.Francis hospital at Beach Grove. I’ve been a volunteer at St.Francis hospital now [Interrupted by PA system] 15 years. I have over 7000 hours of volunteer time. I volunteer in there 2 days a week in the emergency room. I work inside the emergency room and not out the transports section, but I assist patients inside the emergency room.
DT: Is there anything you would to add that we have not covered in this interview?
JL: I do have volunteer service with the Beach Grove police department. I assist them in traffic control at accident and fire scenes, and for that matter they gave a couple of months ago, a plaque for 40 years of volunteer service with them. It doesn’t give you any freedom of “Oh I could bust this speed lower” or anything like that. You still have to stay on your good behavior because my car is semi-marked and I don’t want to leave the wrong impression on that. There’s a sticker on my back left window “Beach Grove Police Department”, and I try to behave and do what’s proper, and I don’t push my locket.
DT: Is there anything you would like to add about your experience in the war?
JL: No, I just remember a lot of funny stories about things that happened during the war, but nothing serious, no.
[286]
DT: Would you like to share a couple of your funny stories?
JL: We had a B-24 pilot, Billy Wilson, and he had a girlfriend in Honolulu. He told her that where she lived why he would buzz the valley before he left to go south, which he proceeded to do one day. But he forgot that the back end of that valley she lived in was the communications tunnel for Fort Shafter, and he took down, I don’t know, a couple of a hundred telephone lines. He really messed them up. The plane he was flying was an older model 24. They did not have a power turn at its nose, it had a 50 caliber gun on the ball-joint, and the barrel on the 50 caliber gun was curled like this. We had to take that window a part to take that gun out of there later on, because it was absolutely useless. Never broke anything out there, but boy it sure did curl that barrel around. They fined him a hundred dollars for his flight, and that was the same month that he got a promotion to a captain. This more than took out the money that he lost from the fine. But while we were down under, he went down to Oakland, New Zealand on a rosily. We were still flying B-17’s at that time. He told a girl that he was dating down there that he would buzz Queen Street as he left. Now one point on Queen Street in Oakland, New Zealand, there are two business building one hundred feet apart, and a B-17’s got a 103 feet wing span. Five blocks down the street is the Church of England. So as he took off up at Whenuapai, which is the airport, its back up south up of town and 2500 foot above Oakland. As he come out of Whenuapai he came down to Oakland, stood that 17 up on a wing tip and went through between those buildings, flipped it around the other wing tip and went out behind the cathedral and on out to sea. Now instead of carrying a nine or ten men crew he had nineteen people onboard. Oh, there were all kinds of problems with the military over that crazy stunt. They were getting all set to Court Martial and everything else. Then we got a message from an Air Vi-sub Marshall of the Royal Australian Air Force. He had seen that pass that he made, an ultra combination for beautiful flying. His left wing tip as he went out to sea between the buildings was about ten foot above the trim wires. When he flipped over up on the right wing tip and went behind the cathedral, and he said gorgeous flying on out to sea. This was considered as an ultra combination for the man’s flying ability. Oh boy! He stayed pretty quite after the war, but in Vegas three years ago he came up for the reunion. He lives in Oregon at the present time. He said you guys aren’t supposed to remember such things as that. So it makes a difference when you can remember some of those memories.
DT: What were some of the pranks you and your friends would pull?
JL: Well, I had a guy in my section of intelligence, Mr. 5 by 5 literally, he stood 5 foot 5 inches tall and he was brood as a barn, his shoulders were out of the word, his nickname was the gorilla. When he would straighten out his arms, he would always walk with his arms back, but when he straightened out his arms, the palm of his hand was below his kneecap, that’s how long his arms were. But he got in a hurry because we had a meeting down in Honolulu, and he got in a hurry to go down to the garage to get something. He would take a run and he would run down those steps and it would make a noise like. It sounded like something else! He was a character. Unfortunately he got killed over in Europe.
DT: Did you keep a personal diary?
JL: No. No.
DT: Have you seen the movie Pearl Harbor?
JL: The last one that was out. It was a love story!
[384]
DT: Do you think it represents… [Interrupted by Mr. Lime before I could finish my sentence]
JL: No. No, because the B-25 bombers that Doolittle had with him, off the hornet, they were all bomber pilots. None of them had ever flown fighters. In the movie they got the other way around. They got a fighter pilot going to bombers. No they did not. We did have people during the war that flew bombers and that converted to fighters, and some the other way around, fighter pilots converting to bombers. It did take special training. The 5th Air Depot in Australia converted a bunch of B-25’s into literally attack planes. They took the bombardiers equipment out of the nose of the plane. Where the window was at the nose of the plane, they took that out and replaced it with two medals panels with four holes in them. In the nose of that plane they stagger mounted four 50 caliber guns. They put a package on the outside, under the pilot and co-pilot seat, that twin 50’s in it, stagger mounted. When I say stagger mounted I mean the gun barrels were like so. The whole nose of that 25 was 50 caliber ammunition. They stuffed every bit of in there they could get into it. The bomb release panel was up on the Ezamer panel of the plane. They did no carry their bombs in the bomb bay compartment. They carried them out under the outdoor panels of the wings. They could carry four, five hundred pounds on each outdoor panel of wings. The pilot would drop his bombs in accordance with some of the bombers that were along with him, or they did a lot of skip bombing with those things that flied so low. They would hit with all those excess guns up there. They had a reputation for tearing up craters. They would cut them in two with all that fire power. They even sunk two tin cans, two Japanese tin cans. They blew then out of the water, which is gee! They played rough kind of game with it. They flew them accordingly. I heard a bunch of them talking and I fighter pilot standing near them, flying a F6F, he said “What the hell do you think you guys got, a fighter plane?” and the guy on the B-20 said “Yeah, I could offer a demonstration!” There was air raid at Bougainville one day. In the process a bunch of Japanese fighters had jumped the formations over there, and one of the Japanese fighters made an attack on those 25’s. A fighter in that particular bunch said “Hey, that’s mine!” and he dropped down about 50 foot, lined up on that fighter plane, and hit him with one of his first guns and it blew the Japanese fighter out of the sky. When they come back into Henderson Field for landing, the fighter pilots all got down in a line and wonder if they got a victory roll. One or two or how many planes you shot down. On the tail end of that batch of fighters come through, here was that B-25 coming through there and he slow rolled that thing right off the deck. The tower operator saw him start and almost reach the crashing line. He didn’t crash! [Interrupted by PA system] Yeah, later on they put a roll that said you should not roll B-25s. They didn’t say you can’t, but they said you shouldn’t, but they would still do. They would fly them things everywhere. In the bomb bay compartment, instead of bombs there was a 585 gallon gas tank, which made the range on those 25s enormous. They would go bomb targets on the Japanese. They did.
[482]
DT: How did you react to the atrocities that were happening in Europe such as the concentration camps…? [Interrupted before I could finish my sentence]
JL: Well, I didn’t know about them until later. Phew! Oh man!
DT: How did you react to them later?
JL: Well, the Japanese were treating us a little the same over there in the POW camps. Starving to death and beating up, almost the same but in a different manner. They didn’t gas us or anything in that nature. They might as well have, the treatment they were giving the POWs over there. Put them on death march and phew! There are horrors in all kinds of war.
DL: How did you react to D-Day?
JL: D-Day was the landing over there in France. It was wonderful. It didn’t affect us back in the islands. I was back in the states. The others were running over the Germans, which was alright with me.
DT: Thank you Mr. Lime for coming here today and letting me interview you.
JL: You’re welcome!
DT: It was great hearing your stories and your accomplishments. Thank You!
[Interview ends 517 on counter]
