Martin, Roland H. oral history

              Roland H. Martin

[b. 10-29-1923]

[00:05]

	Today is August 2nd, 2007 and I am Kathryn Lerch and I am interviewing Roland Martin, who is an acquaintance of mine. Mr. Martin was born October 29, 1923. He served in World War II and attained the rank of 1st lieutenant. He was in the Eighth Air Force, the 379th Bomb Group, Squadron 525th.

KWL: Mr. Martin, why don’t we start off with a little bit of jogging your memory. Where were you on December 7th, 1941?

[00:38]

RHM:  Very little as a matter of fact. The—in 1941 I graduated I guess from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California in June. I had a pretty good idea we were going to go to war. I can’t tell you where I was on December 7th, and obviously was as shocked as anyone at the abruptness of the happening, but it was totally expected. At that point, I was still 18. I had planned to—at some future date I wanted to be an airline pilot. As such, I thought the best way to prepare for that was to join the Air Force. But I couldn’t at that time. Air Force recruits were required to have at least two years of college. But I knew that wasn’t going to last too long. I went to work in the shipyards in Richmond, California—for—when I was in high school, this as you say, this is really a memory jogger—because I had no thoughts about this starting out. I came from sort of a hard scrabble family and the period—I had a newspaper route all during my high school years. After leaving high school, I got a job as a ship fitters helper in Richmond at a Henry Kaiser shipyard. As I recall, I was making about $850 a month. This was an absolutely, an unbelievable amount of money. So I was in no hurry, of course, to give up $850 a month, but I found that they lowered the requirement for entering for Air Force training somewhere in early in 1942. In April 1942, with a friend of mine, I went to Hamilton Field, California and joined the army. I was told that only way to progress as I wanted to, was to first join the Army and then put in a transfer to Air Force. I was at that point 19. I didn’t realize that some people joining the army who had skills who would request something rather esoteric, but they’d end up maybe as a cook or, you know, just an infantryman. I had no thought at all that I was going to do anything but become a pilot. I did—I spent a few days, or maybe a few weeks as a private—not even a first class and was then—I took whatever testing was required at the time and qualified as an aviation cadet and then boarded a train to Santa Ana and spent a period of time there (I can’t tell you how long). It was very interesting because this was a world I had never before. We were packed into barracks like sardines, but it was all very exciting. I had never been a particularly good student in high school, but I found I was absolutely fascinated with the process of becoming a pilot and did very well. 


 [Additional comments submitted in writing: Primary training: Mira Loma Flight Academy (Flight time 60 hrs. PT13, Stearman bi-plane)  Oxnard, CA 6/26-8/22/1942; Basic training: Gardner Field, Taft, CA 9/1-10/22/1942 (Flight time 70 hrs BT-13’s, Vultee); Advanced training: Douglas, Arizona 11/4/1942-1/1/1943 (Flight time 74 hrs AT 17’s Cessna) Graduated, 2nd Lt. Class 43A. Operational training B-17’s Blythe, CA (Dates?) and Dyersburg, TN (dates?). From Dyersburg to Grand Island, Nebraska – Overseas staging area. From Grand Island to Camp Kilmer, N.J. for shipment (boat) to England – July 1943.]

[05:14]

The time is very indistinct, but I was one of a group that was chosen to go to Oxnard, which was considered to be the West Point of the West, if you will. It was the finest training field in the West Coast training command. I didn’t realize how fortunate I was at that time. But with a group, we went to Oxnard, and flew—oh, the name of the airplane I will never forget—my training plane—PT-17s and soloed in pretty average time, I think it was six hours—six hours of flying and I had never flown before in my life. I was on a high, if you will, for all of that time period. Then went to basic training in Gardner Field and anyway, it’s near Bakersfield and then from Gardner basic advanced training in Douglas, Arizona—I think it’s Douglas, Arizona, but maybe that’s not it. But anyway, I have forgotten how large our class was, because it was difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will—the pilots and the non-coms and the engineers and it was a good sized field. But I would say we certainly had less than a hundred pilots and it may have been as few as fifty. At the time we were graduating from –this was the end of 1942—the time I graduated from Douglas, we were all asked where we wanted to go in the Air Force—whether we wanted to go into fighters and/or whatever it might have been. Bombers were a part of the—one of the options and out of that class whether it was fifty or whether it was a hundred, I think ninety-nine or forty-nine, whatever fits wanted fighters. I was the only one in the class, I was told, that opted for multi-engine. As I recall, they said “well, twin-engine, four-engine. . .” I said, “if they had six-engines, I’ll fly that. I want the biggest airplane that you have.” I didn’t say because I intended upon flying commercially when I finished, but I want to get that kind of training. But anyway, they were very surprised and lo and behold, I was probably the only one in the class who got the option—the choice that was given. So, I–and then I went to Blythe, California for four-engine training. We flew for a period of –I don’t know if it was a period or two or three months—all of this was very rapid. We put in maybe thirty or forty hours of flying and then went to—I picked up a crew—was given a crew and we went to operational training in Dyersburg, Tennessee. I am sure, by the way, there are some stops in here that I have missed, but we flew out of Dyersburg for once again several months and then went to Grand Island, Nebraska, for a short period of time.


 [Additional written comments: Months in England: Aug-Oct 1943.]

[10:04] Heading to England

We were supposed to be given an airplane—a B-17—fresh from the production line and take that to England. They were short of airplanes, so we entrained for New York—whatever the embarkation point was and went overseas on a liner—it was the Inchcliff Castle (I can’t even think of my neighbor’s name sometimes). The Inchcliff Castle was a mail boat that sailed between London and South Africa. Interesting enough—and you can boil some of this down later on—but the reason the Inchcliff Castle rings a bell, is that I used to read stories in the Saturday Evening Post and there was a series where the Inchcliff Castle was a very major part of this story and I practically knew the Inchcliff Castle before I ever boarded. Anyway, we sailed for England and I had never lived as grandly as, believe it or not, we did on that boat. It was first class all the way. There were probably five or six thousand non-coms below decks. I know out of a crew of ten, there were four officers and six enlisted men. My enlisted men were all in the bowels of the boat sleeping in hammocks and the officers were in state rooms. We ate with fine silver and napery at—I can remember having kippered herring for breakfast if I wanted it, which I wanted by the way. I enjoyed that very much. Anyway, it was a very interesting and very fast passage. I think we made it in four or five days; I’ve forgotten now the time. It was a very fast ship and we sailed independently; we were fast enough and didn’t have to go over in convoy.

[12:43]

I arrived in England and went to some sort of marshalling point. We were there a very short period of time and the 379th Bomb Group had just lost five or six crews and I was one of the five or six that transferred immediately. The weather was atrocious. We did all of the training that could be done in that time period under conditions that I had never flown before, but let’s see, this would have been June-July-August, probably August. I think my first mission was September—about September 3rd. It was a milk run over France.

[13:44]

KL: Was this 1943?

RHM: 1943. As a matter of fact, I graduated class of 43-A—the 43-A and then on to England. I was nineteen; my tail gunner was a few months younger than I. Everyone else on the crew was older by two to five or six years. But I didn’t see anything strange in that. I felt perfectly confident, if you will. I really enjoyed doing what I was doing—even to the point of taking our first missions. We bombed, I think, an airfield initially and then we made several runs over submarine pens in St. Nazaire [actually Nantes, France] in that area. We saw some action. On an early flight, as I recall, (you can scratch all of this out if you want) the—we were flying at altitude—20,000 to 25,000 feet and the oxygen went out in the ball turret for the ball turret gunner. We were told how important it was to maintain formation and at that point it was understood that the tighter the formation the less likely our group would be attacked. Fighters always looked for the sloppiest flying fliers and went after them first. We were over France, my ball turret gunner—Elihu Peacock—from Mystic, Georgia—it was at that point were we going to stay in formation and lose Peacock, or was I going to abort. The question was, if you dropped out of formation, you’d be the first one picked up. Well, I decided that it wasn’t for some reason—it made sense to me at the time. It wasn’t worth losing a man and possibly saving nine—it was a case of saving someone’s life. So out of the formation we went and hit the deck as fast as we could. We got back to England without a problem and as I recall there was never even a thought about a cut and run and dropping out of formation. But that was probably one of the tough decisions I had to make and obviously, particularly for Peacock, we all thought that we one for all and all for one. I mean, it is amazing how tightly a group can grip you when it is that everyone is depending upon you.

[17:34] Later missions

[Added in writing: Ten missions in sequence: Vitry en Atois, Nantes (sub pens), Nantes (France), Emden, Emden, Bremen, Frankfurt (railroad yards), Munster, Anklam (aircraft factories), Schweinfurt (ball bearings) (all Germany). Anklam was not a night mission. I remember a wakeup call – early a.m.  The mission was day and our longest ever.]

Well, anyway so we began to feel pretty confident as time went on and made some raids where we had some substantial losses over Germany. And back in those days, when we left it took an hour or two to form up groups into wings and so we would be circling and it was Spits [Spitfires] mostly and Hurricanes would be circling overhead in England and over the Channel. When we got to Holland, the—you could see the contrails—see our little friends overhead, but you could look up ahead a couple of thousand feet higher and you could see what we were going to run into very shortly. The Luftwaffe was sitting up there and once we got into that situation, it got pretty hairy and I remember –and we had the usual problem with FlaK. I remember on one raid and I have forgotten which one it was and we headed into Germany with high-altitude head winds of 120 mph. We flew 150 mph indicated which meant that we were driving about as fast as you might on a Sunday afternoon in your car. We took a number of hits on that raid, I can’t tell you how may planes we lost or were lost on that raid, but I can recall thinking, this would never end and I believe on that particular day we didn’t hit our target—there was an under cast, but when we turned and ran for home, we were headed home at 150 plus 120 [mph]—this is called ‘high-tailing’ for home, but  I can remember the differences in the time it took to go in and out. That’s an aside that just popped to mind. I am certain I could spend all day at this, but this is not where you want to go.

[20:11]

KWL: That’s fine.


RHM: The first raids were over France; all the rest were over Germany. I can remember the second to the last—this would have been a night mission [see earlier note; this was a day mission]. We flew into Anklam, Germany. It was deep in Germany. I think a little north and east of Berlin, but I haven’t looked it up. It was the deepest raid we had made into Germany and it was so deep there was another—I don’t know how many wings were attached to this Anklam raid and how many went on to another target, but I can’t recall that it was even deeper than Anklam. They went on into Russia—I think this was the first over-flight of Germany with a Russian landing. We, however, and by the way, they had the easiest part because no one expected them to over-fly Germany and continue into Russia. We, however, bombed at 12,500 feet, which was the lowest we had ever bombed. There was very little FlaK because we were unexpected—we hit a Messerschmitt factory, I believe and at 12,500 feet we obviously hit our target. By the way, that obviously wasn’t so obvious on most of the raids. We did not bomb all that precisely in spite of the Norden bombsight. But, the 379th lost a number of planes. I think we were under attack for three and a half or four hours total. I know when I got back to the base—and I was amazed that we did get back—because I was seriously thinking that if things did not get better we would head for Norway or Sweden. But, we got back to the base. When we landed, I couldn’t open my hands—the fingers from the wheel and the throttles. They were locked on and someone had to peel them back.  It was the—I guess coming back on that raid, too, we were so low on fuel because of the constant adjusting—the throttle adjustments to maintain some semblance of formation flying. It used up a good deal of fuel. We dumped everything on that airplane on the way back. This happened more than occasionally. The last thing we threw out were our machine guns, but we did this over the North Sea. By that time we were flying alone; the formations had broken up pretty well. We let down gradually, as I recall, and I can’t tell you what the averages were—we were burning something like 95 gallons of fuel an hour and which was very, very low and cut back to two in-board engines, dropped anything that could be thrown out including the oxygen bottles and we were one of, I think, two planes that made it back to base. When—the B-17 was tail dragger—when the tail dropped on the runway the two remaining engines cut out. I remember, I think, the plane held about 1525 or 1575 gallons and there wasn’t enough gas to feed the engines when we tail dropped and we were no longer in level flight. So I was very lucky—we were very lucky. I didn’t realize how close it was going to be. That was an interesting situation. Anyway, Anklam was the second to the last—our second to the last mission—the last mission was Schweinfurt.

[25:17] Schweinfurt mission

RHM: Even—even today I get very emotional. Can you cut that off for awhile? [tape paused and resumed 25:56]

Well, Schweinfurt was—this was the second Schweinfurt raid. There was an earlier one on August 17th when they lost sixty airplanes on that battle, on the second Schweinfurt we lost another sixty. Those are just airplanes that were lost over Germany. Many of those that were able to get back to their bases were so badly shot up that they were junked. The ah—we knew that it was going to be very difficult and the—and we were prepared for it. We were not very well organized from a wing and I have even forgotten now the battle groups; we had I don’t know how many wings—two battle groups were going in. They were supposed to be one right behind the other [tapping table for emphasis] and I forgot whether we were lead or followed. It turned out that one of the groups had such a difficult time forming up over England that there was almost an hour difference between the two and so instead of supporting one another, the Germans had a free shot at let’s say 120 airplanes. And then they, then those German fighters that were left had another shot. Anyway, it was—airplanes were falling out of the sky and blowing up and I think—well, we all questioned whether we were going to make it. But, we flew under attack and by the way, with more different kinds of attackers than we had ever seen before. There were the [Me-]109s and the 190s that were the predominant fighters—first line fighters, but they had Me-110s, they had Heinkel 111s, they had—then there were 210s (a later version of the twin-engine fighter bomber) and the fighter bomber types didn’t attack on—head on or en masse, but they flew over or along side and fired rockets, they dropped bombs attached to parachutes on long cables. If you happened to hit a cable, it would either slice the wing or it would slide along until the bomb was pulled into the airplane. But, the—we made it to the target and I don’t know whether we lost an airplane or not [referring to the bomb group] going in in spite of the attacks, but I can recall watching five or six fighters come in line astern and you could just see them firing and coming in and almost you would be looking right into their eyes. We were all over the sky. There was a lot of physical work moving that airplane back and forth and yet staying reasonably close to the formation. But with all of that, and you know, if we were hit, where we were hit and how we were hit, I really don’t recall.  But we did get to the target. As we were on our bomb run, I could see a three-burst 88 elevator FlaK bursts ahead of us. And the bursts were brilliant red with black smoke and not very large, but lethal. And I could look right down the line on the one-two-three and I could count each one of them—and they were all in line and all right at my altitude. And at this point on the bomb run you couldn’t change. So that was the first one. The second one I saw two flashes and then there was an explosion and we lost the two starboard engines and with that, about that time, it was also bombs away, I think—or at least—I don’t know when we dropped our bombs because that was something the bombardier did—he toggled off the lead ship. But, we immediately began losing speed. Within a minute maybe less than a minute—whatever it took for them to reload, this same battery had us dead on and they were cutting the fuses for our absolute almost exact altitude. I could see two more explosions and another one which rocked the ship and we lost the two port engines. With that, of course, we were dead in the water. The group kept going and we were there and at that point, I had—I could look out the left side—the pilot’s side—and the wing was shattered, the gasoline was pouring out. I could look back and there was a hundred yards of fuel just spraying out behind and we and there was a mop-up plane, you might call it—it a JU-88 which is a bomber, but they were fitted with forward firing guns, came in to finish us off and they normally—and at this point I can’t tell you whether they were using tracers, but normally, you know, every fifth or tenth, whatever it might be—a shell was a tracer. I knew that if those tracers hit a wing or even fired through this gas—and by they way, whatever was also flowing out of the left wing, was also flowing out of the right wing. So we were spewing gas and I had seen enough airplanes blown up that that’s where I thought we were going. But for some reason that didn’t happen and I do remember saying (I’m not a religious person at all. I have a certain amount of faith), but I can recall saying, ‘God, if You ever help me, help me now!’  That was—I may have even said it out loud. The FlaK from the gun had shredded the wings, knocked out the engines, and I could see—and knocked out the instrument panel, and I had—I could smell cordite, but also, and I didn’t know at the time, but it had nicked my jacket and also cut my leg enough that there was some blood . . .

[35:35] Disabled plane crash lands

With no power, normally what one does is bail out, but on one of the shots—by the way, the top turret is right behind the pilot and co-pilot—you could turn around and touch the gunner. On one of those explosions, the top turret dropped about eighteen inches. It just blew the base out of it. (I have some pictures of the airplane here to show it to you.) But, I couldn’t bail out until I knew how the rest of the crew had fared. So the top turret gunner—and I mention in that “Two Weeks on the Run”, that Macri—that he and I were the ones who spent the two weeks together.  But, Macri—an Italian—swarthy, you know, good tan and I looked at him and he was pea green—absolutely pea green. And I said, I yelled at him to go back and see what’s happened in the back, see who’s there and let me know. So he couldn’t go back with a parachute on, because he couldn’t get through the bomb bay door—the bomb bays, so I was taking evasive action, because every time this plane came in, I’d put the nose down to pick up some speed and every time the 88 came in firing at us, I’d pull the nose up and I found, by the way that—I think the reason he was firing at us, was because Rittenberg, my bombardier, was firing at him. If I’d been the [German] pilot, I’d be firing back. I mean it—we were a wounded duck, but the wounded duck was trying to—was firing at the German mop-up. So, I was going up and down as violently as possible. I had no aileron control on one side, but I had on the other and I have forgotten which was which now at this point.  But, anyway, I could let the plane drop quickly and gain enough speed that when the mop-up—I can’t even call him a fighter bomber—came in, I could raise the nose, and he’d have to keep raising or we would run into one another and so, many of these shots were going astray. But, it was very, very rough and Macri was on his way back on his hands and knees and he got back and checked out—turned out that everyone had bailed out. But by the time he got back to me, we had gone from somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand down to about 1500 feet. There was no room to bail out or no altitude. When he got back and said it was clear, there was only one thing to do and that was to crash land and I had picked out a field as we were trained to do in primary training, (we had very good training, by the way.) I had picked out a field—this was in sort of mountainous area—forested, but there was an area that was being farmed and I pulled in—there was a slight up slope and brought it in so that I could slam it down into the up slope in order to shorten whatever the landing might be. It wasn’t until I got very close that I found that this area was terraced—there was about a six foot terrace between each one of these areas and I thought I was going to go right into one of these banks, but anyway, we came in. I laid the plane down and fortunately, it didn’t blow up and it was a pretty good landing. It was supposed to be wheels up, but I found out later on that the wheels had dropped to some extent and I think early on, the German pilot thought that this was a surrender—when you drop your wheels this is an indication of surrender—I didn’t realize the wheels were down, so we hadn’t surrendered, when we fired at him, he fired back at us. Anyway, this [JU-] 88 was still circling us and had fired—and I was afraid he was going to fire at us on the ground, but it turned out that this field was being worked by a dozen, fifteen or twenty people. They were all, fortunately for us, old men and old women. Everyone else was on the Eastern Front at that point, and they surrounded the airplane. By the way, there were still—the ones that went down were my bombardier, co-pilot, Macri, the top turret gunner, and my self. Well, the moment we hit the ground, Price, the co-pilot, and Rittenberg, the bombardier, were out of that plane and off like rabbits. I mean, they really hit the ground running, as they well should. But I was trained to see that the plane was destroyed before leaving it, so I tried to—I wanted to fire the airplane. Macri stayed with me. With the gas flowing out, I took a Very pistol and thought if I fired that into the area into the tank it would go up. In fact, I thought it would probably go up pretty good. In the air the Very pistols, shots these— what?—signal flares into the air beautifully, but on the ground, they knocked them out—they went off at about a ninety degree angle. I couldn’t point it accurately at the gas, so I went back into the airplane, pulled a chute—my chute—which was not used and I fired the Very pistol into that and it started to smoke. I took a—I was equipped with a Colt .45 and I took that Colt .45 and threw that into—I was not about to shoot a German deep in Germany—and then with that, I told Macri, “Let’s go, we’re going to walk right to the forest. Don’t run, just start walking.” The German farmers were as stunned with us as we were with them and they just stood there—they had hoes and shovels and God knows what else. They didn’t attack us and the 88 couldn’t shoot us because of—they were around—anyway, we went into the forest and we spent two weeks on our way to Switzerland. We didn’t make it. We were captured somewhere in southern Germany. [advanced tape briefly to next side]

[43:41]

[Side B, Tape 1]


[00:03]

KWL: I know that many pilots often carry silk maps with them that would have routes on them. Did you have something like that?

[RHM added in writing: I mentioned staying awake 72 hours then the next morning we awoke. I skipped past the next three days as we tried walking at “all hours” to avoid human contact and ultimately decided traveling at night was our only “safe” option.]

RHM: Yes. Everyone had an escape kit which included the maps. It included a—tablets for water purification—water purification. There was a little chocolate in there and some energy bars well before we started buying them at the local grocery store, but you could take that whole thing and almost put it in your hip pocket. I mean, it was a very small package. We each had one of those, so we had a map, we had compasses and such; we headed for the hills. I knew we were going to be tracked, and presumed they were going to use dogs, so we got to a little creek. We walked in the creek—you’ll read some of that in here a little more of it—for a period of time. I don’t know whether it was a hundred yards or two hundred yards, or—we walked until I found a tree large enough—with a limb large enough so that we could raise ourselves out of the water onto the tree limb and then clamber along the tree limb to a limb on the other side and I wanted to get as far away from the bank as possible, which we did. When we dropped to the ground then soaking wet, of course, then we took off up a hill and down these little—they were mountains, but it wasn’t like the Sierra at all. And fortunately we did this, because all night long we could hear the dogs barking and they were covering this area; they NEVER did pick up our scent, fortunately. That allowed us to spend two weeks—well, we at first we—well, this was daylight—it was getting evening—we ended up in a thicket some place and it was in October—the wintertime in the mountains in Bavaria—it was cold. Our feet were wet and we huddled together and kept one another as warm as we could and shivered all night long. I did not sleep for I figure it was seventy-two hours. Just, there was—wide awake as a hootie owl. The—so the next morning we awoke—or we got up and walked, but we couldn’t walk in a road. There were very few houses in that area or farms, but it was very tough going and we were afraid of being spotted, so we moved cautiously and kept going more or less south.

[3:35] Escape account

Ultimately, we found that daylight was out of the question—and the first—if we couldn’t walk during the daylight, then we had to find a place to—at least try and sleep. Early on we would did out a little—scrape away the soil, I mean the dust and leaves and such, and scrape what soil we could—and then try to pull the leaves in over us just for warmth, but it was not very warm. Ultimately, we decided that what we needed to do was find a barn or something—we had passed barns. We had to get into one of these barns, if we were going to sleep during the day and walk at night; we needed to barn up someplace. So, we broke into a barn (the first one) and really didn’t know, you know, if there would be animals or dogs or such around—we had to be very careful. We also wanted to be hidden if a farmer came in with an animal. So we burrowed down into the hay as deeply as we could. I tried to get down below what I thought was pitch-fork length. That worked pretty good and I think maybe after the third day, we began to get some sleep. We found a few barns. I can remember waking up every morning—well, we were there in the morning and I could smell bread baking coming up from a farm house which was fairly close by. It was all I could do to go over—to keep from stealing it off the—it was right there! It was on a ledge—but so we didn’t have anything to eat except these energy bars and they didn’t go any place at all. We found in walking at night that there were a lot of apple trees, so we ate apples and they were little shriveled up apples, but we found them and ate them. We would walk along the roads at night and every now and then there would be a vehicle come along with what do you call them?— We did this on the West Coast as well—little slit lights—black out lights. You could hear a car coming and so we could very quickly get off the road. But I remember one night we didn’t hear a car. There were some bicyclists that came along and we just threw ourselves off the side of the road. How they didn’t hear us or I guess they didn’t see us, but instead of—we didn’t know we were throwing ourselves off a slight incline into what you would call bramble berries. I mean, it was just—this was like ‘brer’ rabbit saying throw me in the briar patch.  We worked ourselves out of that in the slowest most painful fashion you ever saw, but we laughed. I mean at this point something like that was funny. We really got a kick out of—we almost got it then. So we were very afraid of bicyclists. We were getting after a few days of this, we were getting pretty weak. Normally when we came to a town and the towns were all very small, we would walk around them. Finally, we just decided we were just going to walk through this next town. We walked through, got through part of it and may have been, I don’t know, whether it was ten o’clock at night or two o’clock in the morning or whatever it was, but it was dark and we were walking. There were some Germans on the other side of the street. Obviously we were very suspicious. We had a hard time seeing them so they really couldn’t make out who we were, but we didn’t look right there particularly in a small town. Well, they muttered among themselves and then turned around and went some place and we knew they were going to pick up some reinforcements, so we really took off. We got out of town as quickly as possible; got on the far side of town—the village—and then kept looking back and we saw flashlights. We took off to the side of the road into a field and walked as far into the field as we could quietly while they were walking up the road and threw ourselves onto the ground. I was there looking toward the roads and you could see them talking and walking and they were flashing back and forth, but the lights weren’t bright enough to pick us up even if they had shined in our direction. But right in front of me was a little mound—I thought it was some brush and it wasn’t. I guess we looked at one another or at least it looked at me for a good minute or two and then all of a sudden with a huff and a puff and a grunt, something jumped up and ran away. Well, now I think it was a badger, because it was pretty good sized and the searchers on the road must have known it was a badger, but they thought that they had startled it instead of understanding that I had been with him—almost nose to nose with this thing. So, I— being more knowledgeable than I would be under those conditions, I think they felt that we couldn’t be there if that badger was there, because had we been there, the badger would have been long gone. Anyway, they finally went their own way and we got up and brushed ourselves off and continued.

[10:29] Captured on Fourteenth day

About the fourteenth day, we got to a river and I thought we were close to the city of Ulm, almost on the border with Switzerland—close, but the river was deep and the river was fast and there was a bridge—a good sized bridge—could have been fifty, a hundred yards long—I don’t know. There was a bridge, but—so we came up to it, settled down. I waited—we waited I guess an hour, two hours and I thought okay, it’s clear and so we got up and started across and all hell broke loose. Lights came on; the Krauts [called] ‘halt’ and whatever else went with it. Well, we knew enough to halt.  I believe the reason that this bridge was being guarded at that point was that the previous night or two, within the sound distance and sight of anti-aircraft fire, we could see lights and the British were attacking somewhere north of us. I think they were looking for British fliers unfortunately for us because we were—they got us instead of the Brits. Anyway, they picked us up and we were pretty well shot at the time and they took us to a house and there was a family there—these were all once again old men—the Volksturmleute—with old rifles and they were pretty proud of themselves, but we were dead tired and we found it strangely almost relaxing—at least something, ‘okay, it’s over.’  We found that the women and children in this house were just fascinated with us. Before long ‘Amerikanski’, ‘ja’—‘Terrorflieger?’—no. We began talking with the kids and the women and finally, I thought, you know, this isn’t giving away any war secrets, get a map—they had a map, I guess.  I pointed to California and they were just thrilled to meet someone from California. We were there for hours. They had obviously sent for someone to pick us up—some trucks picked us up and took us from there into Frankfurt and to the Dulag Luft. There Macri and I were separated at that point.

[13:59] In solitary prison

[Added in writing: In researching letters I had written to my mother, I find I was “barracks mail officer and ration officer. Jim Lash may have been Compound mail officer. The trumpet was most certainly supplied by the Red Cross. John Fontenrose was a roommate along with Lash.]
I was in solitary—well, they are all solitary, I guess—but I was in solitary for—I can’t tell you it was four days or ten days. There were some threats, I was interrogated at first and then marched into solitary. They had a technique that seemed to be effective; and that is and if you don’t—they had good cop/ bad cop interrogations. Bad cop: ‘you’re spies’ and we can shoot you. They had a company—a group walked by us and all of them wore hob nail boots and sounded on the floors or the streets. They were great to listen to when they marched. When they marched, it was with emphasis, but they slammed a door and march through as if they had had someone—I don’t know, there would be some target practice and you can just imagine that maybe they’re shooting the guy and they’re working their way towards you. I did talk—I was interviewed by someone who, I guess, became rather famous, but I don’t know who he is and I can’t tell you the name now. He was smooth, he was knowledgeable. He sat me down, told me where I had come from—I had dog tags obviously—name, rank and serial number. He told me I was from the 379th Bomb Group and he said, “You know, the clock in the mess hall was five minutes fast, wasn’t it?” Yes, it was. Fast, slow, whatever it might be. He knew how our clocks worked! I don’t recall that I was ever in a position of having to give any information other than name, rank and serial number, American, and all that stuff. But he told me more about my base, I think, than I knew myself at that time. It wasn’t that I was a John McCain at this point, but on the other hand, I could tell him quite honestly there wasn’t anything that I knew that he didn’t already know and he could tell me something, Yes, I was on the Schweinfurt raid and so whatever the time may have been, they then shipped a group of us in forty by eight (or whatever it was called) a cattle car up through Berlin. There was some light bombing going on—we didn’t know where we were going and we ended up in Barth.

[17:23] Stalag Luft I – Barth

And as I told you, we walked through at night—I can still remember the hob nail boots on the cobblestone streets. We were told this was done for our safety because there were so many people from the Hamburg area who had been moved into this area. Well, I can remember Hamburg—a real firestorm. So we went into camp, you know, and that was pretty much it. I can’t say that we were mistreated. We were treated roughly more than rudely—roughly. We had to stand for hours and sometimes in the cold. They had every reason for keeping us out in the formation while they searched with the dogs because we—not me—but our—we had a military discipline set up in the camp. I remember some of the names, some of the people. I was not one of the camp officers, but if anyone wanted an escape try, they went to the escape committee and discussed their plans and were given an okay or not okay, or “Your’s is okay, but right now we’re busy, you know. Shelve it for a while.” We used to walk around counterclockwise around the compound and there was the usual barbed wire, the guard towers and such, and a couple of areas where you couldn’t go beyond this particular wire and there was about ten feet, or it wasn’t ten yards—it was a few feet before there was another set of wires and double wires and if you got inside the first wire, you were going to get shot, you know that. They did shoot, I think, just one person.  I think he probably lost his mind and decided this was the best way to get out of it and he ran toward the fence and they killed him—that was to my knowledge. Well, we’d walk around. Well, when we started it was perfectly flat and I can tell you in May of 1945, you went up and down like this because there were more tunnels that had been found and collapsed and when you collapsed the tunnel there was a little dip. They were all over the place. No tunnel did I ever knew—ever got past, you know, a certain point and we all really felt that they just let us do this to keep us occupied—for us to keep ourselves occupied. When they felt we got far enough they would discover the tunnel and collapse it. In one case, we had to go to great efforts to get rid of the sandy earth which was a different color than the surface earth, but we walked around dribbling it down our pant legs, I think as you know. There’s some pretty interesting stories about the escape attempts, but in once instance one of the barracks decided to put all of this dirt up in the attic of the barracks, and you might know it collapsed ultimately.

We traded with some of the guards. A number of the guards—well, they had interpreters—every interpreter there had been trapped in Germany just prior to war breaking out and they unfortunately wished they were back in Detroit again or someplace, but no, they were trapped in Germany. We went along with the gag, I’ll tell you.   We traded for—in my case, one of the fellows that I was with, a fellow named Jim Lash, who was also from the 379th—I don’t know on which raid he was shot down, but he was a negotiator par excellence. I didn’t smoke and we got Red Cross parcels occasionally, so my cigarettes all went for trading. We traded for food, and not a lot, but an onion was a big deal. We traded for radio tubes—this was pre-solid state, but we had a radio installed—not in our area, but it is just amazing how ingenious a group of people can be. They took out the bricks in a chimney in one of the barracks—took the bricks out and built a radio, put the radio into the hollow, brought the wires out to a couple of nails, and hung their hats on those and got ear phones. I guess, like in American jails you can get almost anything you want if you know how to get it and someone’s willing to trade for it. But, some of us listened to BBC every night, so we were well informed to the point that we knew when the Germans were losing on the Eastern Front. We could tell by the change in demeanor of our guards, well our guards particularly with our interpreters. They began to cozy up to us—both of them—the guards and everyone. By the way, this camp had been—I don’t know whether it was poorly run initially, but the regular army—whoever was in charge of the POW camps, was replaced by SS personnel somewhere along the line and they were really nasty. But when things got really bad, the hard core SS never tried to cozy up. The lower echelons who reported to them were quite willing to do so. Jim Lash was, as I say, a great negotiator and we’d have a number of things that were not Government Issue. The guards knew that there was a penalty if they were ever caught doing this. Some of them were caught—I don’t know how many, but I know at least one was killed. I know if they were caught they’d all be executed immediately. Then Lash was also—one of us (not me) because we were there early became in charge of mail call for the barracks and it was during one of these mail calls that a fellow came into our room, to pick up the mail—however it happened—his name was John Fontenrose and he lived within two blocks of where I had lived in Berkeley. He had been shot down on the first Ploesti raid. Anyway, there was a neighbor. One of our fellows was a Jewish trumpeter and anytime you say “Jewish” it has a certain meaning there, you know, and so, he was a Jewish trumpeter and he could [play]—well, there at night when he was blowing that trumpet—it was like— what’s his name? I didn’t mean Harry James when I started—Louis Armstrong. He was like Louis Armstrong. Oh, he was good and that trumpet, the sound floated through the air. Obviously, he didn’t bring it with him. We got it from the Germans.

[26:56] Diaries & food

 They also supplied later on a few things like—well, I guess most of this came from the Red Cross—drawing materials and diaries. I guess we all had a diary and some people made very good use of their diaries, but all I did was write down recipes of what I was going to eat when I got home. I don’t know whatever happened to that diary. But I know it was filled with recipes. We did not eat well and there was a time period in early 1945 when we hardly ate at all. I strangely enough was about the same weight when I  was in the service as I am today, except that it is totally redistributed. I went from about 195 pounds to what I don’t know, but I do know that my upper arm, my bicep was the size of my wrist, because I could put my fingers around it—my bicep. So I was pretty emaciated at one time, but I never really thought I was being starved to death. Among other reasons, the Germans weren’t eating very well either. There wasn’t—they may have stolen our Red Cross parcels, I don’t know, but we had barley soup—an awful lot of barley soup. Initially, some of the fellows wouldn’t [eat the soup]—and by the way, the barley soup came in big, I was going to say five gallon cans, but they were bigger than five gallon cans—I don’t know—very large cans—milk cans and initially when they would bring it in and distribute it to the barracks, there were barley worms floating on top. Have you ever seen a barley worm? Well, anyway they could be—they were a little like a tape worm, six or eight inches long some of them—usually broken up. Well, you know, people would gag at that. Well, before long we were looking for barley worms—because we thought it was protein. I remember when they brought in—when animals were killed in the fields; there were quite a few raids around us mostly at night—the British—they would bring an animal that had been killed with shrapnel and bring it in generally on a sled. They were all horse drawn. This army of the Germans was vaunted [?], but not at all what people think of today as an army. They lost something like twenty million horses and we ate a few of them. We had no difficulty at all eating horsemeat or, I was going to say steer, they weren’t steer, they were oxen. I can remember most of them had been skinned obviously and if you have ever hunted, when you skin a deer, the flesh forms a glaze over it, which is sort of protective and it doesn’t keep the flies off, but it keeps them really from burrowing into it too much, I guess. Well, anyway we carved this thing up and I broke a tooth, probably more than one on shrapnel, you know, chewing a piece of meat.  My teeth really suffered during this time period, but I cracked a couple of them. I don’t know, some people may have had real difficulties with this, I somehow or other did not, and in large part it was because I could put myself in the position of the Germans. We were just beating the hell out of them—that is the German populace. What else?


[31:30] Newsletter

KWL: There was a camp newsletter. Did you ever see any copies of that?

[Added in writing: What I remembered as a copy of the newsletter was in fact a copy of an article about the newsletter. Lt. Col. Ross Greening – his later drawings and materials were supplied by the Red Cross I am quite sure.]

RHM: Yes, in fact I have some someplace. We produced—we—I didn’t, but once again it was done. I don’t know how—they did it on very fine paper. You could swallow it if you had to, you know, you could eat it. There was a—one of the officers I remember a Lieutenant Colonel Greening was an artist. As a matter of fact, I have, if you’d like to take a look at it after this is over, I have a collection of his paintings, his drawings in the camp. He started out by making his own colors by taking the labels off cans and cutting out the reds and the greens as such. Ultimately, the Germans provided him with some material to really draw. I had wanted Col. Greening—what the hell was his first name?—anyway, I had wanted him to draw a picture of a B-17 for me. But he was busy doing a lot of other things so I never did get one of these, but years and years later within the past ten years here, we met a fellow who was part of the first Tokyo raid with General Doolittle. It turns out that Greening—our friend—was a good friend, Brick Holstrum, was a good friend of Greening’s—they were both on the Tokyo raid. He said—I told him, one of the things I that I remember and always regretted was never getting a drawing from this fellow Greening. He said, “He was good friend of mine. I have some productions, copies of his work while he was in prison camp. Would you like one?” Well, I said, “Absolutely.” And, anyway I have it. So this one of the—not only one of the few things, maybe the only thing I could remember bringing back from that experience.

[34:22] Russians arrive

There were a number of other experiences. When the Russians were approaching, the Germans left and I remember when leaving what was that anti-aircraft camp next to the camp? Anyway, next to Stalag Luft [I], but they took off; the Germans took off about two days before the Russians actually arrived. Well, we could hear the guns at Stettin for two weeks before (the Russians were crossing the Oder)—before they ever arrived and they were steady night and day. The Germans left. The camp was locked down, but some of us and I don’t know whether we did it with authorization or we just did it—we unlocked the camp and went out to look around. We were very careful to stay on the roads because we thought the area might well be mined, and it turned out it was. Anyway, we stayed on the roads and there were maybe three of us, four of us who walked a couple of miles out and headed east—in the direction of the Russian approach. We were like— hostages is not the right word—we ran into a Russian patrol. They had three trucks, maybe two-three-four people per truck. There may have been a dozen of them. They were an advance group; they were not hauling, they had Kalashnikovs and I guess some other weapons as well. But they had no heavy armament. We saw them, they saw us. We hailed them. They looked at us���some of them were very Mongolian looking. “We Amerikanski—Ruski” –all of this business back and forth. We sort of high-fived one another and they were happy to see us. We were happy to see them. We were out and thirsty and someone wanted something to drink. Ah, yes. They had a little—the last truck had a little red wagon behind it. Two-wheeled barreled wagon and he went back with a canteen cup, filled it half-way full and gave it to the guy who said he was thirsty. He went like this and just blew it out. It was vodka!  By the way, it may have been vodka mixed with water, but it was vodka. These fellows really were traveling on—well, in the west, as we would say, with the heat on—half bombed. They obviously were not going to get water from any German well and they were feeling no pain and pretty soon we were feeling no pain, except we—I couldn’t drink any at all. This was before my martini days. But this was so surprising and before we knew it, though, we looked at the trucks—at least one of them was a Dodge. “Dodge—an American”. They’d hail us and then we’d say, “Stalin” and they’d say “Stalin and Roosevelt.” Before you know, we were throwing names back and forth and in effect communicating in that fashion. Anyway, they went on their way and then we turned around and went back to our camp. This was our first meeting with a Russian group and now this suddenly opens up a whole n’other chapter, because we went out of the camp looking for food—chickens—anything we could find.  We had found a couple of bicycles—two of us—and we were moseying around and if we had found a small pig I think we might have grabbed that, but we went to a German farm house and there were Russians there. They had bivouacked a company. There was one officer and the rest were all enlisted men—a rough bunch. But we were welcome. They had taken over this German farm house and seemed to be well-equipped. They had food. An elderly German couple was serving them—doing whatever they told them to do and absolutely scared spit less.  The Russians were more brutal than anyone could possibly describe, as well they should be, because they lost something like 25,000 people coming across the Oder River. So, what’s a death of two more? We were invited for dinner and we stayed, and this time I drank, and I don’t know how. Because there were lots of toasts, everything was a toast and when we finished, I couldn’t ride a bike, or could the other fellow and we started out, “adios” or whatever the words might have been at that time and I heard something from one of the soldiers. He wanted the bicycles and I just had enough that I said, “Let’s walk along your bike”—in fact, I think we had to hold onto the bikes to stand up. I wasn’t thinking too clearly and I said, “Look, let’s just keep right on walking.” We started walking and heard this “click-click” charge—you know exactly what that is, I mean when you hear the sound of a gun being armed. I turned around and the Russian—the lieutenant I will call him—the only officer there, was standing in front of him and saying, “No, no, no.” This guy was going to get our bicycles. How dumb lucky can you get, because two of us lying by the side of the road wouldn’t have meant beans to anyone. Anyway, we got back with our bicycles and I guess I had a head the next morning because I was not used to this. If I had had any sense at all, if I hadn’t had a drink, I would have given him the bicycle, you know, regardless of what the walk back might have been. But that was another one of the little efforts.

[42:10] Labor camp

Then I can recall some of us went down to check out an airfield which was three or four or five kilometers south of us. The Germans had been flying jets off of this, among others. When we first saw a jet, we thought it was a bumblebee. It was very small in the air and went like scat. The—then, as I told you, we had seen rocketry from V-1s and V-2s from Penemunde. These things were really strange. I remember walking through—this was a slave labor camp—they had been finishing or constructing—it wasn’t an airplane manufacturing place, but they did a lot of work. There was a big stack—they had stacks of aluminum and machines to work it and such, but also walking through this, there were barracks that had one time been filled with slave laborers—mostly French, I think. They were dressed in—they were in the barracks, if it had held hundreds earlier, there may have been a dozen people all lying in there, and they were all there because they couldn’t move. I thought they were dead until I could see that their eyes were following me. I didn’t want to get too close because I was afraid of typhus or whatever else it might be and just frankly I didn’t know how to cope with it. So, I walked through and left it and we went outside and there were at least two mass graves, I think two that were open—or maybe one that was open, but there were a number of mass graves un-mounded and in these graves were the same thing that you saw at Auschwitz—people, skin and bones and not a stitch on. They had all been stripped naked and thrown in there like wood.

[End of side B, Tape 1  44:32]

Tape 2, Side A

[00:10] Slave labor camp & return home

I was at this slave labor camp and if anyone says the holocaust did not happen, I am here to tell you that it did and we just saw a very, very small part of it. But these people were starved to death, they may have died from something else—some disease, they starved. So maybe the German public was unaware of this, but not all Germans were unaware of it. We were flown out from that airfield. The—I have forgotten the date, but—May-June [1945]. It was within a week or two, I think, of the end of hostilities, but we were behind Russian lines and the Russians wouldn’t allow anyone in. There was a lot of negotiation about this. Finally, the 379th was involved in this, but some other troops also, they cut a deal and the Russians allowed us out and they [Americans] flew in B-17s and without ever cutting the engines, we were all lined up and they’d roll up and we’d load twenty-four into it or whatever the number was—when that number was reached the door was slammed and that would roll away and another rolled up. They really had a production line. I had two things which I was going to take with me: one was a radio, a Blaupunkt or something of that nature—a magnificent waterfall front—an old 1930 design from the United States, but this radio was really a wonderful piece of equipment. I had built a case for it in the aluminum shop, put it together with self-firing rivets or percussion rivets and had a handle on it—the works. It was stood pretty well—it was good sized. I was very proud of that piece of work. Also, I had a case of cigarettes that I had gotten—not a carton, a case. I don’t know how many cigarettes you can put into a case, but there are twenty cigarettes in a pack and twelve cigarettes in a carton—twenty-four, oh, I don’t know—cigarettes were worth, I don’t know, somewhere between our money $1 and $5 thereabouts per cigarette. If you just take one buck, I figured I had 5,000 cigarettes in this carton and I was taking this to Paris with me, ‘cause that’s where we were going and I sure had sugar plums in my eyes with this thing. I was kicking these along. The radio weighed as much as the carton of cigarettes, I mean, I will call it a carton. A carton of cigarettes is only a dozen—this was a box—thousands of cigarettes. We got down the line and there the Russian soldiers were with their ever-present Kalashnikovs and when I was pushing this by, it didn’t even take a word. We didn’t say anything to one another. It was just, “oh-oh, okay, you got it.” There went my cigarettes; there went my radio. I didn’t even have a tooth brush; there was nothing. Well, they flew us into Camp Lucky Strike and I remember out of all the foods we could have��first of all, my stomach was so shriveled that I really couldn’t eat anything. But out of—and they had everything—ice cream, ice cream and more ice cream, but the thing I really relished the most and I remember to this day, and I wish that steak tasted half as good as plain old white bread. White bread tasted to me like lemon chiffon might or whatever they call that. Anyways, it tasted more delicious than any cake I can remember. It took us quite a while to begin to be able to eat.

[05:06]

We were able to go into Paris and we were issued kakis and clothing and we stayed at the [Hotel] George V. How we got in there, I don’t know because most of the people I saw there had stars on their shoulders. (Betty knows this, I think.) A couple of us stayed at —we went out on the town and just walked down the Arc de Triumph and we were free. We, instead of going back to the hotel, we had money in our pocket; we ended up in a little hotel. It was an attractive, very old building near the Arc de Triumph and we couldn’t speak a word of French and they couldn’t speak a word of English, but we wanted to overnight. I didn’t realize it but we had probably walked into something that was akin to a whore house. When I got in there, the linen hadn’t been washed I am sure in a long time. There was lipstick on the pillow case and sometime that night there was a knock on the door or after we had retired and I got up and “No, I am not interested” and closed the door again. I was not a man of the world at that point, but it was an interesting experience. Life—once again entering the real world—we had a wonderful time in Paris. I had orders cut to come home, unfortunately for me, once again on a ship rather than being flown home. There was this time not an Inchcliff Castle but something like a converted Queen Mary, I think it took twelve or fourteen thousand people. We were all on a deck or on a jetty and it was a little like Noah’s Ark, you know, two by two, four by four, or whatever the numbers were, they marched up the gang plank and showed their records—their orders. And that ship filled and it took hours and hours. I was for some reason at the back of the line—when I say this there wasn’t really a line, but I was in the rear and I was not going any place so it really didn’t make any different to me. But, anyway, when I got up and showed my orders, there was something wrong with the orders and they wouldn’t board me and when that ship pulled out and it did while I was there, there were not fourteen thousand people all leaning over one rail or it would have capsized, but anyway, there were thousands of guys saying, “So long!” and I was one lonely GI on that ramp. I think I was the only one whose orders were not in order. Maybe they might have done this to someone else, but I remember this. So, back I went to wherever I came from—I don’t know, and I don’t know whether it was [Camp] Lucky Strike—I don’t know, it may have been Lucky Strike at that time. A new set of orders were cut and this time I was to go on a Liberty ship—the same kind of ship that I helped build in Richmond, as a matter of fact—I just thought of that. Some of these I was not to sure they would make it over and back, so I was sort of feeling sorry for myself, because instead of  a fast five-day trip home, this thing would take a couple of weeks—well more than a week. I think top speed was eighteen knots and we were lucky to be doing twelve. Once again, the hold was filled with grunts and there were six-eight-ten of us who were put into what would have been an infirmary. The whole thing was painted white; it was very neat and clean, lots of mattresses, because they had put a lot of people in there. I mention that because it becomes very important in the story.  Anyway, we set out. We grabbed a bunk, grabbed a mattress. We headed first to—it wasn’t Portsmouth, but we headed to England—I can’t remember the port. We were locked down on the ship. No one could go ashore, but we were close enough to a loading crane; we could reach the crane from the ship and ‘zoop’ over the side and down the crane, into town. We came back with booze and by this time I was getting used to it. We had—and I don’t know—we had a lot of booze and I didn’t differentiate then between scotch, bourbon, gin, or vodka or anything else. We had plenty of booze and we had figured a week, two weeks or whatever it might be back to the States, and we started out. This little ship got into bad weather and we were drinking and having no pain and that night the rain came down and we went out on the deck for what reason I have no idea, but we were concerned about our friends below decks and the crew had left the hatch covers off so that there’d be a little air circulation down there. Well, the people right under the hatch covers were getting wet and anyway, six drunken airmen picked up these hatch covers and put them back on the hatches—now these were pretty good sized and the ship was rolling and we were walking around barefooted.  I don’t know what else we had on at that time, but we got the hatch covers back and we went back and it had been a tough night and we had worked hard and we were tired and we also went to sleep. Well next morning, we were awakened by someone pounding on the door or maybe they just walked in, and they looked around like, “What in the hell has happened?” There was blood all over the floor, the hatch covers were on and people were asphyxiated down below and “What had you guys—where have you been? What happened?” Well, we really couldn’t say “nothing happened” because someone had dropped a glass or a couple of glasses or a bottle or something. My feet were lacerated; most of them were, and these mattresses, which we, and by the way, had put up on the walls and if you had fallen out of your bunk, all you hit was a mattress. You couldn’t hurt yourself in there. It was a padded cell what it was. Well, they were very kind to us, they didn’t throw us into the brig and I don’t know if there was anything much they could have done with us. Our feet healed. We didn’t drop a hatch cover down on the deck on anyone. We, as a group, of six, eight or ten of us, as I said, had a wonderful trip home. We felt those poor guys on the ocean liner just didn’t begin to enjoy it as much, but I can tell you that I am another one of those that when we came through New York and saw the Statue of Liberty, it was really a moment.  I got back me back into the United States, what do we do now?

[14:21] Return to states

KWL: Do you recall the day your service ended? When did you leave the service? What did you do after?

[Added in writing: Checking records, Jan. 13, 1946. I am not sure why I noted these: St. Maries, Utah and Leo J. Mayberg, Co., RCA distributor.]
RHM: Well, officially, it was January, I think, January 5th, 1946. We had the benefit of the GI Bill of Rights if we chose to exorcize it, which I did. I couldn’t get back into civilian life and get on with my life quickly enough. I went to Cal [UC Berkeley]. I had the opportunity to live at home. I lived close enough to campus to get to campus. I had saved a good deal of money—obviously, I couldn’t spend it, but when I went back to school, I spent it in a hurry. I took, as I recall, something like eighteen plus units each semester and got through in three years. I got a—I remember—and I mentioned much earlier, I wasn’t much of a high school student, but when I got to—I had to take English A—I had to take a class to avoid taking English A all over again. I sat down and I had never really been much of a writer but whatever was required of this—a little blue book. I think we had an hour and thirty minutes or something to do whatever the requirement was. Well, I went through this like gang busters.  I didn’t look up until I was finished. When I looked up everyone was still writing away and I was finished. I sat there for awhile thinking something was wrong and anyway, I turned it in and left. I passed that first hurdle and got into the classes that I wanted. At that point, while I still planned to be an airline pilot, I took something called banking and finance. I worked a summer or two in the woods as a lumber jack at Tahoe for extra money and then one—my last summer—that year I worked at Blyth & Company at San Francisco in their back office, and had a job with them— if I wanted it, not if I wanted to—I had a job with them and I started out working at Blyth and Company with dollar signs in my eyes until I found that I could draw up to $1,500 a month—that was a lot of money. I didn’t necessarily draw $1,500 a month, but I could draw that much. Except, it didn’t take me more than a couple of weeks to find out that everyone there had family money that they could bring to the party and they in effect they could cover their draw. I didn’t have two nickels that I could bring to this thing and I thought, if I go to work here, I am going to start from the basement and work up but I don’t know whether I have the will [?] or the time to do this. So I looked around. I had all the financial analysis that anyone could want and I decided that I didn’t want to move to either Chicago or New York, I wanted to stay on the West Coast and San Francisco was a very nice place. So I looked in the city for the companies or the company, if I could find it—that had the most people making $100,000 or more a year. Interestingly enough, the Emporium was that company. They paid a higher percentage of their people a $100,000 dollars or more—the merchandise manager of the men’s department made $250,000 a year. A woman handling girdles and God knows what else in the women’s fashion area made just about the same amount. They all made better than $150,000 a year. I went to work for the Emporium. I worked there five years. They retired all of the $100,000+ people, and replaced them with two or three others; I was one of the two or three others. I worked six days a week and the seventh day I planned on what I was going to do the next week. We went on a vacation—the first vacation I took and visited Jim Lash, of all people, my ex-POW friend in the Pacific Northwest. He came home, didn’t go back to school; didn’t go to college. He obviously already had a high school diploma—graduation. He borrowed some money, set up a hamburger stand next to Fairchild Air Force Base and with his mother on the first day, he bought—I got this story from him as I visited with him on this vacation—he bought fifty pounds of hamburger and fifty pounds of potatoes. Before the day was half out, they had sold fries and hamburger, and other the stuff. So they went back immediately with the cash they had and bought another fifty pounds, and then the next time it was a hundred pounds, and so forth. Anyway, this place was called the Spin Inn and highly successful. He ran it for a few years and sold it for a lot of money. He moved to Ste Maries, Idaho near [Lake] Coeur d’Alene. He got a beer distributorship and at that time and it was an Olympia Beer distributorship, it was one of the leading brands certainly on the West Coast. When we visited him and his wife, he had two Weimaraners—two beautiful dogs, he had four or five of the fattest Black Angus cows you ever saw, he had three freezers: one for fish, one for bird, and one for meat (bear, moose). He was an outdoorsman—fisherman. He had a boat, a big one that he could pull a couple cars with. This guy was living the life of Riley, and I was working my tail off at the Emporium. I got—we got back to home, I walked into my boss and said, “Frank,”—Frank Brown was his name, “Frank, I am giving you two week’s notice.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I had shown some promise there.  And I said, “I had found out what it was like to live outside.” And anyway, I left the Emporium and I went to work for a period of time working for a television distributor in San Francisco. The name is unimportant, but it was the biggest RCA distributor on the West Coast at that time. Did very well there, the money poured in, I loved the job and then I went to work��I didn’t want to be a wholesale salesman all my life, and ultimately I went to work for Sony Corporation and spent eighteen years with Sony: the most wonderful company that I ever worked for—they were outstanding. The two founders became friends of mine, [Masaru] Ibuka and [Akio] Morita and this was the most—it was a wonderful job; I loved it.

[23:23] Refocus on story

KLW: Before I forget about it, you mentioned you hadn’t talked about this story for years and years, of course, until you met someone in Germany. Can we side-track for just a bit (perhaps for about ten minutes and then wrap it up?

[23:43]

RHM: Sure. Yes, really quickly. I did not talk—today, you and my wife know more about (some of this I have discussed with Betty), but my children have never shown any interest in it and I have never discussed it with them. I have talked very little about it with anybody until two years ago I got a telephone call from a lady on the East Coast and she introduced herself as Ellen Sirianni. Sirianni is a name that I knew very well—Dan Sirianni was my waist gunner—another crew member. She said she had been working with a fellow in Germany who’s Norbert Vollmann, who lives in Gerolshofen. He is a reporter for Gerolshofen-Schweinfurt newspapers. Recent[ly]—sometime—a couple of years, he had been doing some research on an airplane, a bomber that dropped near Gerolshofen in 1943. He had located Dan Sirianni who didn’t show a whole lot of interest in this, but his daughter, Ellen, was very interested in what her father had done. She set about tracking the crew members for Norbert Vollmann. I was the last one, for some reason, I was the last one that they were able to trace and at that time there were one-two-three-four of us living. Today there are—there were five—today there are three of us. She said, “Would it be alright if she gave my name to Norbert Vollmann?” and I said, “Sure.”  And he wrote me, introduced himself—wrote me a letter with a long list of questions; he wanted to know something about this airplane called the “Iron Maiden”. I sat down and answered his questions as best I could and we got into emailing thing, and we talked with one another. His English is pretty good, my German is non-existent, but he brought us all together. Ultimately, I ended up flying back to Buffalo to meet with Ellen and Dan Sirianni, and Norbert and his wife, Marianne [sp?] (and they have two sons), and one of their sons. They had made a trip from Germany to visit some friends in the United States and they had [----?] made a side trip to visit with the Siriannis and I went back and we had a wonderful time. Meeting Dan was like yesterday—one of those things. Well, that sort of broke the dam and we started talking about all this and I wrote this “Two Weeks On the Run” thing that you have here, in order to tell my navigator, Daniel—Danny Maher, who is living in New York—taking care of a wife with Alzheimer’s, and so we talked. I also contacted and talked to my tail gunner in Chicago and Vollmann has pulled all of this out with questioning and answering over a period of time. You know, it’s sixty-four years of silence and then all of the sudden, the dam broke. It still hits me as you can tell every now and then. Well, it’s—I have a long list of things that I answered to him.

[28:19]

KWL: To tell those stories, to get them out and share them with those members of the crew, is so meaningful.

RHM: Yes, in particular, Dan had a cancer and I have forgotten whether it was stomach, maybe liver—and I can’t remember. He thought he had it beat and he was feeling pretty good about it. And by the way, he turned out—he was a school teacher. He came back and taught school and then became a headmaster and ultimately the school superintendent for a county area—a wonderful fellow and tremendous number of friends. A salesman—much of my job was spent traveling around the country and to some extent to around the world. You develop a lot of contacts but not a lot of close friends. He lived with kids who grew up and got married and had children and they all knew one another. It was a really tight sense of community. Anyway, we really enjoyed it. Since then, unfortunately, he has had a relapse. He may not make it this time. He wanted to know, for example, about that sexy woman on the nose of the airplane—with brunette hair, long legs and everyman’s dream, well that’s a barber girl we had painted on the nose of the airplane. The crew as I see here, we paid fifty £ for a British painter to have that put on.

[30:20 Iron Maiden]

KWL: What was the name of your plane again?

RHM: The “Iron Maiden”.

KWL: If you think you have anything else to share?

RHM: Well, I think I pretty well [covered it.]

KWL: Does anything come to mind—any food you will never eat again, like pumpkin for example?

RHM: The food I will never eat again is rutabagas. . . .[Betty: but I never cook them anyhow.]

[31:15]

KWL: How did you name your plane?

Upon being assigned to a group, the new crews came in and were given pretty much the runts of the litter—the beat up airplanes because if you got through ten missions supposedly, you were considered to have a better chance of finishing your twenty-five [missions]. When I arrived at this base and they had been flying since May, I think—May-June-July-August-September—thereabouts, only one crew could finish twenty-five missions. They just kept replacing them. We were, you know, five—and by the time I was shot down that five had gone and they were new one—but we were given—we were assigned an airplane which was very helpful, because that one you can preflight, you know your ground crew, you get to know your crew chief and you get to know, you know, the strengths and frailties of that particular airplane. So when we got the airplane, everyone wanted to name their airplane and I said, “Okay” and we—I sat the crew down and “Let’s name this airplane.” Well, we came up with all kinds of stuff and I said, “Okay, fine. You know, there’s only one way to make this thing work and I’m going to name the airplane and we’re going to call it the “Iron Maiden”—and it’s the “Iron Maiden” because it’s our first airplane and it’s the “Iron Maiden”, as I tried to explain to Vollmann. (The Germans don’t have the same sense of humor that Americans do.) I said, “Norbert, I had to call it “Iron Maiden” because I couldn’t call it the “Aluminum Maiden.” He says, “Okay.” Anyway, the “Iron Maiden”—there was a certain steel to it—I mean we—this was our sword, our scimitar, if you will, and it was our maiden flight—our maiden airplane and we were going to live with it. I probably—I almost wrote at one time to Margaret Thatcher because she was the “Iron Lady” and I said, “Well, I got there before you did!” But anyway, that obviously—that’s how we named it.

[34:04]

End of interview (half way through side A, Tape 2).
[Interview was followed by very brief general discussion of photos, print-out about MacArthur.]