Ashby David Nelson
[b. 1/1/ 1924 ]
[00:05]
I am Kathryn Lerch and I am here interviewing Ashby David Nelson, a veteran of WWII. Here in Indianapolis, it is September 16th, 2007. Mr. Nelson was born on January 1st, 1924 and is from Preston, Idaho and part of the reunion [780th BS]. He was in the 465th BG of the 780th BS serving in Italy.
Mr. Nelson, maybe you could give us some a little information about where you were say starting December 7, 1941 and the impression that made on you.
A D Nelson: Yes, I was in high school at that time and I was within a month of being 18 years old. I knew that my days would come that I would be serving in the armed forces. I enlisted about a year later.
KWL: So you finished high school then before you—
ADN: I finished high school in the second quarter [?]school and joined the Army Air Force at that time.
KWL: What prompted you to join the Army Air Force?
[01:05]
ADN: I got a chance to go to cadet training at that time. I took the cadet test and passed the cadet test and I spent about nine months in cadet training and then I was washed out of cadet training and I was sent to armament school, then to gunnery school. I had a chance to go to B-29s, but I turned it down and went then to combat.
KWL: Why did you not want to get on a B-29?
ADN: I had been in school so long that I decided I wanted to get into flying and I had a chance to go to central fire control school, but I didn’t want it.
KWL: What does it mean by “central fire control school”?
ADN: The central fire control school—the B-29s were several guns were controlled by one gunner on a B-29 and you had to go to central fire control school to get into that field.
[02:00]
KWL: So you ended up then flying B-24s—is that right?
ADN: Yes. [flew as nose gunner]
KWL: Why don’t you tell me a little bit more about where you when (I know you listed here on the form), but where you did some of your initial training and maybe some of the experiences you may have had.
[02:14]
ADN: Well, I was in cadet training for some time. We went to basic training, then went to college, then went to classification and went into primary school and flew the Stearmans for awhile and that’s where they washed me out of cadet training. There was a lot of people washed out at that time, but I washed out at that time and then they sent me to Denver, Colorado for gunnery school where we took gunnery school and learned to take a machine gun apart blindfolded and put together and so forth, and after that they sent me to gunnery school in Florida and finished gunnery school and then I went on to a crew assignment and we flew combat training out of Casper, Wyoming.
[02:57]
KWL: About how long did these various schools last?
ADN: Well, gunnery school was about three months and armament school was about three months, and then we trained about four months in overseas training and I was about eight months in cadet training.
KWL: It probably seemed a long time.
ADN: It did. I was ready to go. I was—
[03:24]
KWL: What was the route your crew took getting to Europe?
AND: We went over by boat. We sailed from Newport News, Virginia and landed in Oran, North Africa. We were there a few days and a French ship picked us up and took us over to Naples, Italy. Then went from Naples—crossed by—in cattle cars to Bari, Italy and then they picked us up a truck and took us into Pantanella where we flew out of.
KWL: Now when you arrived in North Africa, what were some of your very first impressions?
ADN: We were there in the fall and it was very warm on the coast. They took us into some German old barracks in there. At night it would get so cold we couldn’t hardly stand it. We’d get up and chase each other around to get warm, just because it was the desert country, I guess. The Bedouins and the people in there were quite different. The men would ride horses and the women would follow along side.
[04:27]
KWL: What time of year—what year was it? 1944?
ADN: We arrived in Italy the first—no, latter part of November. We crossed Italy on Thanksgiving Day.
KWL: How did you like Italy? How would you compare it with North Africa?
ADN: Italy was tore apart to no end and there wasn’t much in Italy. You would go to town and there wasn’t anything in town except some of the little things that they made and so forth. And the towns were very poor, and the people were very poor. I felt very sorry for them, but it was okay. We got along fine.
[05:09]
KWL: And since you live in Idaho now, were you born there, grow up there?
ADN: I was born in Oregon, but I lived in Idaho a good part of my life and went to school in Idaho.
KWL: So, then Italy is quite a contrast to Idaho for you?
ADN: Quite a contrast, yes.
KWL: What was your responsibility [on the B-24]?
ADN: I flew nose guns on the B-24. I had trained for upper turret gun, but when we put the crew together, there was two of us had upper turret training, so I volunteered to take nose turret and I loved the nose turret. It was the best seat on the aircraft.
[05:44]
KWL: Tell me a little more about why you liked this.
ADN: Well, it was a place where you could see everything out in front and the upper turret guns it was hard to see—you couldn’t see down from there, so forth. I liked the nose turret best.
KWL: Was it a tight fitting area to get into?
ADN: It was very tight to get into. We were setting in a turret in the nose of the plane on the nose of the plane, had two machine guns, but it was a very good place. I liked it.
KWL: How many missions did you fly?
ADN: We flew twenty-three missions—twenty-three sorties. We flew—the missions were—sometimes we got credit for two missions for every sortie. We had to fly thirty-five sorties before we could come back. So I had more missions than I had sorties; I had twenty-three sorties.
[06:35]
KWL: What were your impressions let’s say of one of your first sorties.
ADN: Oh, the first sortie we flew, we didn’t see any FlaK to speak of, it was a “milk run.” The second one we got lots of FlaK and you come to reality when you see the Flak.
KWL: Can you remember that first run and your impressions at that time, what you thought to yourself?
ADN: All I can remember is our pilot to fly the “Slot,” so to speak, and one of the big boys in the outfit flew with him to check him out and we flew so close to the other plane that I was nervous all the time. But after that, why he loosened it up. But at the time we passed guns about ten feet apart and I was nervous.
KWL: When you say flying the “Slot,” what do you mean by that?
ADN: We flew right behind the lead ship—lead plane.
KWL: Did you have any wash from that plane and the wind, or was there a better place to fly for a variety of reasons?
ADN: Well, no, it was probably the hardest place to fly in the whole group was to fly the Slot. We had two wing men—a man right out in front of us. We had a very good pilot and he wanted to fly that Slot and we flew the Slot.
KWL: So you had confidence in him obviously.
ADN: Very much, very much. There wasn’t a better pilot in the Air Force than him.
KWL: What was his name?
ADN: Baldwin. He was a very good pilot; he’d trained a lot and knew the aircraft—every inch of that aircraft he knew.
[08:05]
KWL: How old were you when you were doing this?
ADN: I was flying combat at twenty years of age.
KWL: Was he a little bit older?
ADN: Yes, he was probably four or five years older than I was.
[08:16]
KWL: So he had maybe a little more experience before he joined your crew.
ADN: Yes. He had trained in the States and had been a training pilot in the States.
KWL: When you think of some of these first missions that were sort of milk runs, when did things change?
ADN: Oh about the third mission and especially when we would go to briefing room and they would tell us what missions we were going to fly. If they told us it was Blechhamer, Germany or Wienerneustadt—the Vienna missions—we all groaned. We knew that we couldn’t get over those targets without getting lots of FlaK and lots of anti-aircraft fire.
KWL: What did your group think of those—did you worry about them all night long before you got the early wake-up call?
AND: We never knew which missions we were going to fly until the morning they told us. Nobody knew on the base where we were flying off from. We went into briefing, they would tell us, let us out of briefing and we’d get on the plane and fly. In the evening the ground crews would not know where we went until we got back. It was a secret at that time and we were not allowed to speak of it.
[09:30]
KWL: Well, that probably helped psychologically didn’t it—you didn’t have to worry about it ahead of time. So, Blechhammer, being over Germany, of course, and then over Vienna—where were some of your other missions?
AND: We flew Munich, and we flew Linz, a lot of—some towns in Yugoslavia. I don’t remember the names of some of those little targets.
KWL: A lot of them. Thirty-two sorties—?
ADN: Yes, we had twenty-three sorties.
KWL: Looking at a long day, what was probably the furthest way—how long a period were you gone from base until you returned?
ADN: We were probably gone 6 ½ hours—that’s probably about as far as we could go with the gasoline that we had. Sometimes we would come back transferring gas from one tank to the other to stay in the air. So, we flew it just as far as they would go.
KWL: Did you have any close calls with running out of fuel on the way home that you remember?
ADN: Yes. We had some close calls. I remember the pilot was telling the engineer to transfer gas to this engine and that engine so that we could get back.
KWL: Any other particular missions that you can remember or particularly resonate with you today?
ADN: Yes, I— because I had some ear trouble coming down altitude, they grounded me for two missions that my crew flew. I wanted to come back with my crew if we finished our missions, so I volunteered and flew with another pilot one time, had no problems at all. The second time, we were flying a very long mission; we were just south of Berlin, got shot up over the target and had to leave formation and come back all by ourselves. About 90% of those planes were being shot down that were crippled. We happened to have cloud cover that day; we dropped down onto the clouds and flew back all by ourselves. We were about an hour late getting in to—but we made it back without any problems. [chuckles]
KWL: I’ll bet you celebrated that night or you were too exhausted to [do so.]
ADN: I was too exhausted to [celebrate].
KWL: To come back an hour late, I imagine crews back at your base were waiting for you [at Bari, right]? [note: not at Bari, but Panatella]
ADN: Yes, they were waiting for us.
[11:42]
KWL: This is a target south of Berlin, would that have been Dresden?
ADN: I don’t know which target it was, but we could see Berlin ahead of us and there was a lot of smoke coming up from there, I know that. Berlin and them targets were usually hit from England.
[12:06]
KWL: Can you remember what the scene looked like since you were obviously had the best seat in the house?
ADN: I flew with the field glasses on all the time—big field glasses and I called off check points to the navigator. The B-24 is not a good plane for navigators...the sides slope out. So I used to get some—go to navigation briefings and call off checkpoints and as I come off the targets, I'd watch the bombs hit and so forth, and I could tell if we hit target or missed target, or whatever.
KWL: Any close calls over this long run coming back?
ADN: That was the closest call in combat. We had an experience when training when we just almost got killed.
[12:51]
KWL: Can you tell me more about that?
ADN: Well, we took off and we had trouble with one engine and the pilot tried to feather that engine and another engine caught on fire, and we tried to land, and got off the runway—and thank goodness there was a gully down at the end of the runway, and we flew down that gully just at tree top levels and got down there and we had some dummy bombs on board out on the bombing range. Finally we got high enough that we got rid of those bombs and got back on the field. But we were so low and when we dropped these bombs—they were smoke bombs—they made so much smoke that the airbase at Casper, Wyoming sent the ambulances and emergency vehicles out to this site, and when we landed there was none [fire engines]on the base [chuckles]. We finally got back on base and landed. We got out of that plane and it was still on fire, and we ran about a quarter of a mile, and sat down and waited about thirty minutes before they picked us up at the end of the runway.
[13:56]
KWL: That was scary; you couldn’t have reconsidered at that moment could you?
ADN: [chuckling] No, we couldn’t.
KWL: While you were overseas, you had to have had family back home in Idaho. How did you keep in touch with them?
ADN: We had the mails—I can’t think of the name of it now [KWL: V-Mail?] V-Mails, v-mails. But sometimes we didn’t get mail for two of three weeks, but we got mail.
KWL: What were your family members that were back home?
ADN: Just my mother and father. I had a girlfriend that I dropped when I went into combat, but she is now my wife—sixty-two years later! I have only been married to her about three years now.
[14:46]
KWL: So then you wrote home then to your family. Did you ever keep a diary, or anything else?
ADN: Yes, I kept a book of all our missions, and whether the Flak was dense, heavy and accurate, or a milk run and so forth. I have a book of every one of our missions.
KWL: That is amazing. It is good that you did do that.
ADN: We weren’t supposed to keep them, but we kept them.
KWL: Have you ever kept track of some of the other members of your crew?
ADN: Yes, I started going to reunions in 1981. And I looked up my crew members and I had been in correspondence with two or three of them at that time. Then I got on the mailing list and I contacted about four others and we have consistently had the highest group of crew members to these reunions since that time. We have here today two of our crew members, we have the daughter of our co-pilot, and the wife of our bombardier.
[15:53]
KWL: I hope they have all told their stories.
ADN: I hope they have, too.
KWL: Back to Europe again, you mentioned it was very poor. Did you ever have any chances to have any R & R while you were over there and see some of the sights?
ADN: Yes, we had chances to go on rest-leave twice. The first time we had a chance to go on a rest-leave, one of our crew members was in the hospital, and we turned it down to go with him. Then, our next turn for rest-leave came up and our pilot was in the hospital, so we turned it down for them. So we never did take rest-leave. We flew right on through it. [KWL: you sacrificed all that for your crew?]
[16:35]
ADN: Yes. And I wish we could have gone over to the Holy Land, and that we could have gone to the Isle of Capri, and we never got there and I regret that to this day.
KWL: Can you think of any other—of all those missions that you had, I’ll bet they all blur together except for the fact that you wrote them down in your log book—are there any others that even strike you as being some humor along the side to break the tension?
ADN: We had a good crew and we would listen to “Berlin Sally” as we took off and she would often tell us that we were going to hit such and such a target. A lot of the time she was wrong. Once in a while she would be right on, okay. We got a laugh out of that and we did have a lot of fun when we on the ground. We played ball and we did everything and it broke the tensions and we were a very good, close crew, a very close crew.
[17:34]
KWL: What else did you do besides play ball for entertainment?
ADN: Oh, we, of course, played cards all the time. There wasn’t much else to do.
KWL: Did you have any USO groups come though?
ADN: Yes, once in a while there would be a USO group. Quite a few Italian people would come there. And on the base, we had lots of Italians work on the base. And about every afternoon about 1:00 or 2:00 or after dinner they would get out and sing. They were very good singers—really, really good singers.
[18:08]
KWL: [Can you] Think about things that you might have had in training when you were Stateside, say versus when you were in Italy on those missions.
ADN: For some reason they always fed the crew a very good meal the morning we left. I guess maybe they thought it was our last meal or something, but they fed us better than the other people. But other times we had Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. It got so bad that we would take our mess kits—the Spam that we had left over—throw it over on the ground and the dogs would go over and smell it and wouldn’t eat it. I got so I cannot stand Spam.
KWL: Did—what else did you have in the way of food besides Spam—if they served you a great breakfast—what made it so outstanding?
ADN: Well, they gave us real butter at that time, so we usually go and take two slices of bread and take a big chunk of butter, then when we come back from our missions we would cook something up in our own tent with the butter that we had. The meals were fairly good except the Spam.
KWL: You just mentioned tents, so you weren’t in wooden barracks.
ADN: We were not in barracks. Every crew over there usually built their own. The enlisted men lived in a hut and the officers lived in a hut. We had a hut built out of tuffa rock—what we call tuffa rock. It was a sandstone. It was about six feet tall and we had a tent top on it. And had a stove in it. We fixed it up so we had running water, fixed a coil in our stove so we even had hot water. We did fine that way.
KWL: It looks like all the comforts of home. How did you furnish something like that?
ADN: Well, almost. I had a table built by the Italians—a little one so I could write on it and a foot locker they built for us, and then we had cots—these canvas cots.
KWL: Was it warm enough in the winter time?
ADN: Yes, it was. We had good, warm sleeping bags.
[20:16]
KWL: Now, did you have a chance to go into a town nearby or do anything interesting there?
ADN: It was quite interesting, those little towns did not have much. One time we went down [to town]. We ordered spaghetti. We went in and it just tasted like soap, we pushed it back, paid for it and walked out.
I remember one time we went down and there was a very beautiful Italian girl came out walking down the street. We didn’t do anything, just turned around and looked at her and she screamed and I tell you every window on that street had a head sticking out. We didn’t even—all we did was look at her, okay. She was in a velvet dress—must be going to a wedding or something. Was very embarrassing, but—
KWL: Any other funny moments that you can remember?
ADN: Well, our greatest punishment in our hut was if somebody [was] out of line or did something wrong, we’d throw our shoes at him. And I mean, and he’d have to get out as fast as he could get out, because everybody threw their GI shoes at him, just as hard as we could throw them. That was the punishment for anybody that did something in our tent that wasn’t right.
[21:19]
KWL: Did it ever happen to you?
ADN: Yes, it happened to me. [KWL: what did you do that was so annoying? ]I don’t recall, but I remember getting hit with shoes a few times.
KWL: Any other remarkable things or did you ever go back to Europe?
ADN: I have been back to Europe many times, but I haven’t been to Italy. I married a girl from Denmark—my first wife was from Denmark and we’ve been back there twice. In fact, we just come back from Europe—a trip through Europe with my new wife—have been back to Europe. My first wife died and I remarried.
[22:04]
KWL: Was there a mascot at all for your unit?
ADN: I don’t know as we had a mascot for our unit, but when we were flying up in Casper, Wyoming, we had a little pup dog and we even made an oxygen mask with him and he flew along with us all the time. But I don’t know what happened to him when we left Casper.
KWL: Any mascots over in Italy?
ADN: Not that I know of [KWL: It kind of breaks the ice and things.] We had a lot of fun, though, when we were on the ground—had a great trip, a great crew and I’ll say this much, I enjoyed my time in the service, I was glad the war was over and I was out of the service, but I had a good time while I was in the service.
[22:57]
KWL: When V-E Day occurred in Europe, where were you and at what point in your missions?
AND: We had our twenty-third mission at that time and we stayed in Europe for about three weeks after that, then we come back to the States.
KWL: Can you describe what it was like coming back to the States and your future activity?
ADN: We came back to the States by way of Africa and South America, then to the States and I had had some ear problems coming down from altitude, so I took a grounding and they put me as the head armorer [?] on a line on a P-51 outfit, so I was at Tucker [sp?], Arkansas. I was there two or three months, then I came up for discharge. I went for discharge and then I went and finished my college and so forth.
KWL: So the GI Bill was very important to you.
ADN: Very helpful, very helpful.
[23:49]
KWL: What type of degree did you work on?
ADN: I had a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and I worked for the Department of Agriculture for thirty-two years after that, and then I worked for the State for five—Department of Agriculture—for five years, then I have been a crossing guard for the schools for fourteen years.
KWL: This is all in Preston, Idaho? What’s Preston, Idaho like?
ADN: It’s a town of about 5,000 people and one good grocery story and that’s about it.
KWL: But do you all know each other pretty well, giving the size of the town?
ADN: I used to know everybody, but I don’t anymore because I have been out of circulation.
We’re about thirty miles north of Logan, Utah, part of the Utah State University. University State University is a good town.
KWL: So, do you have any regrets from your service, or special things that you are particularly proud of and willing to share them.
ADN: I am proud of the fact that I served. I am no hero by any means. I served because the war was on; I wouldn’t have served otherwise. But I am glad I served and the results from that have been very good for me. I got the GI Bill and a GI loan on my house, and very well paid for the time I spent in the service.
KWL: Any other thoughts that you can think of? What has it meant to you to go to the various reunions.
ADN: I started coming to reunions in 1981 and I have only missed two since that time. The comradeship and the good fellowship is great and we have a great reunion and a great bunch of people. I am now treasurer of the outfit and I spend too much time dealing with money, but that’s alright and somebody has to do it, and I don’t mind it.
[25:57]
KWL: You covered—you flew all over in Europe, obviously, and headed up towards Berlin.
ADN: Yes, we did. We flew all of southern Europe—yes we did. Even our outfit flew to the Battle of the Bulge. [KWL: Oh, really?] I didn’t fly that mission, but we didn’t have to fly it because the boys [did not need?] needed our help, but very few planes got back on the field that night. They landed on airstrips north of us and so of course was out of gas.
KWL: Did you have to land (forgive me, this is getting repetitious) on any airfields that were not your own?
ADN: We did not, we always made it back. [KWL: Very fortunate.]
ADN: Very fortunate, we had a few holes shot in the aircraft and so forth. We went over one target where there was forty-nine holes in the aircraft ahead of us and we didn’t have one.
KWL: Now, what was your usual order? Was this the one when you flew the Slot?
ADN: We always flew the [Slot]—no particular location [?], [KWL: with that good pilot.] You bet!
KWL: Well, if you can think of anything else that you would like to share, I encourage you to. We did pretty well and I certainly appreciate all the time you’ve taken and the patience of waiting to do the story today. If I have any other questions I will give you a call and send you an email to fill in the gaps. We appreciate all your time and thank you so much.
ADN: Thank you.
[27:27] end of interview
