Arthur Whalen
[Born 02/20/1924)
Interviewed by Caroline Huang
Recorded on 10/16/2005 by Caroline Huang
Transcribed on 11/19/2005-11/26/2005 by Caroline Huang
[Interview starts at 001 on counter]
Caroline Huang: Today is October 16, 2005, I’m Caroline Huang and I’m interviewing Mr. Arthur J. Whalen at 904 South Lynn Street in Champaign, Illinois. Mr. Arthur is my interviewee and he is 81 years old. He was born on February 20, 1924. Mr. Arthur Whalen served in World War II and was in the 410th Squadron of the 94th Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force and held the rank of sergeant.
[010]
CH: So, where were you drafted- or you enlisted right?
Arthur Whalen: Yeah, but I had to wait because they had to draft and a quota so many people they took every month, I waited I think from January to October something before I really went into service. When I was…
[014]
CH: Okay. So where were you living at this time?
AW: Ivesdale. I-V-E-S-D-A-L-E. I lived out in the country with my folks on a farm and I left Tolono, Illinois- T-O-L-O-N-O – when I was that’s when the draft board was.
[019]
CH: Why did you join?
AW: Why did I join?
CH: Un-huh
AW: Oh- cause it, well it was the right thing to do, everybody, everybody was. There was a war going on and everybody wanted to do what they could, and I did too. I worked in a defense plant for a while before and everybody there was a—bunch of people were all going in service—it was just the thing to do.
CH: Okay-
AW: And I joined the Air Force cause that’s what I wanted to get into, I mean that’s what my favorite at the time was. We called it the U.S. Army Air Corps then, everybody wanted to fly airplanes, but they didn’t get to.
[029]
CH: Do you recall your first days in service?
AW: First days in service?
CH: Yes.
AW: Uh, well it was where we were it was at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. I was only there for two days maybe, one or two days then they put us on a troop train and we went to Miami Beach, Florida
[035]
CH: What did it feel like?
AW: Oh? It was a bunch of guys, it was great. Everybody was about the same. We were all enjoying the different life and [we] went down to Florida. We lived right on the beach, lived in hotels and the army had taken over cafeterias and that’s where we ate, in the cafeterias. We did our basic training on the golf courses and the beach. There would be civilians in the next hotel, living there, but we would be out early. At that time it was six o’clock and then they’d train us. And then we were getting up too early and bothering the civilian people, so we didn’t get up, get going until seven. And every time we went down there, we went in marching formation down the street and there were civilians just like there probably are today. That’s where we did our training. It was in the wintertime too, which was great. You know it was just great down there and we were waiting and we were taking tests all the time for going to cadet school and see what schools we would get into. And finally, there was no—I guess somehow they sent us to gunnery school—they had to send us some place because they had more people coming in there. We went to gunnery school and from then on. And crews for bombers and stuff from different training places [came] and they sent different people and made a crew out of us. And I think they knew what they were doing the whole time. We weren’t supposed to go to cadet school to learn to fly. They already had enough of them and they made a crew out of us and we flew as crew. I think we trained in Louisiana someplace. We’d fly over the Gulf down there and practice flying and shooting as a crew. Then we went to Langley Field, Virginia and then for a couple of days or maybe a week or a couple of weeks. We got to come home for a few days and then we went to, well, they gave us orders and a plane and we took off north. When they opened orders, it said where we were to go. We went to New Hampshire. I believe we stayed a night in New Hampshire. I believe there was a good air field in New Hampshire and the next day we went to Newfoundland and the next day to Iceland, the next day to England. They put us in the air place over there and that’s where we flew our missions from.
[079]
CH: How did you get through all this? Was it easy for you or was it hard?
AW: Was it what?
CH: Was it easy for you to do all these things?
AW: Was it easy? When you were in a group like that and everybody’s got the same thing, you don’t pay much attention to it. When you get into combat and there’s troops shooting at you, you get a little more religious, take things a little more seriously.
CH: Yeah.
AW: And, you think a little differently, you kind of wonder why you were there. But, you can’t do anything about it then but stick with it and that’s what we did. And I think I got in, I believe I got thirty-three missions in and by that time, the pilot either got hurt or was sick or something and then another crew member got hurt and so we missed them, not flying as a crew and I probably flew with somebody else who needed an extra crew member or something a couple of times. That was probably about in March of 45’ that they told me I could come home and our crew wouldn’t be together anymore. A couple of them, two or three of them, were sick and stuff and so they told me I could come home and I didn’t say “no.” I was ready. We came home on a ship it took six days to get back across the Atlantic to New York and when I got back; before I got home on leave, the war in Europe had ended.
[105]
CH: Where exactly did you go during the war?
AW: During the war?
CH: Yeah.
AW: I think I might have had a couple of mission in a part of France and then the rest were all in Germany, you know.
[109]
CH: Do you remember arriving and what it was like?
AW: What it was like when?
CH: Do you remember what it was like when you first arrived in Germany and France?
AW: We were up in the air, up in the air about five miles. You could see the ground just like a picture you’d see in the paper. You couldn’t tell much movement or anything, but they didn’t like us you could tell that, because they were shooting at us, with all that flak and stuff. Then, if we ever got lost from out formations, the fighter pilot would get after us, and that’s when we would really got in trouble if you got off by yourself, they [the Germans] would get you then.
[121]
CH: Where there a lot of casualties in your unit?
AW: Targets?
CH: Where there a lot of deaths in your unit?
AW: Oh yeah. None of my crew died though. There were about nine of us on the crew, none of us died, but there were two crews in the hut where we lived and I’d say half of them died. Half of them got killed. That’s why you come in and put a new crew in when another crew is gone or something. Another crew moved in the hut the same time we did. I think only about one of them survived. We felt pretty fortunate to come out the way we did. There were a lot of them.
[132]
CH: So you saw a lot of combat when you were there?
AW: Oh a lot more than I ever wanted to see, yes. There was nothing to do about it but you made your promise and you had to go. They’d wake you up at about you, oh, three o’clock in the morning. You would get ready, go to breakfast, which you would always have a mile or so to go because we lived in a forest-like place and our huts, there were many huts. You could easily ride your bicycle, everybody would go by bicycle. When you’d go flying there was a truck always there to pick you up and take you because when you get back from flying you were so tired you didn’t even want to walk. It takes a lot of energy out of you and it was cold, it was like fifty below zero, it’s cold and you can’t exercise, I just sit in the bottom of the plane, kind of laying on my back and watching for enemy planes and stuff.
[148]
CH: What were your most memorable experiences?
AW: I don’t know, but there were a lot of them like when you would get over the target when there was all that flack because the fighter won’t come near you then because they would get shot down. They just kept shooting these shells up, which we always called flak. They would get to the right altitude and right and that’s where they would explode because you wouldn’t see them until they exploded. When they exploded all around you, it was really getting dark. You may have heard somebody say it was flak so thick you could walk on it.
CH: Yeah.
AW: And the whole black smoke would stay there and that made you think a little bit when your time was up and almost all the time we would come back and our plane always had holes in it. There would be a crew that would come out and patch those holes where the flak got and that was just a normal thing. Not only that—the engines—they had to change engines, the flak would ruin the engine, you know, poke holes in the fuel tank and the oil tank and for anything like that, they had to [fix]. We’d come home most of the time and the plane had four engines on it. Most of the time when we would come back we would have one that wasn’t working and many times or a couple of times there were two that weren’t working and that’s if we were empty and there were no bombs we could make it. I think there were only two times we didn’t get back to our base. We got back to England and landed in another base. When we went over the Channel to make it lighter, we threw everything we could lose out to the Channel so the plane could still fly. No, we were about pretty fortunate to get back.
[176]
CH: You were never a prisoner-of-war, but were there-
AW: No
CH: Were there other people in your unit that were?
AW: Oh, in the unit, yes, but not in my crew. Oh yes in the unit there was. There was one time I think I remember they were to land in Russia and come back. When they got to Russia, they wouldn’t let them come back—one plane. They wouldn’t let them come back so they kept them over in Russia and kept them under I don’t know how long. They never went back while I was there.
CH: Tell me about your medals and citations you were awarded.
AW: The medals? Okay let’s see���European, African, Middle East [service medal with 3 bronze stars, air medal with four oak leaf clusters] that’s the—I guess the battles were over there like the battle of the bulge and different names they had for things I could only remember what then. That was with three bronze stars that’s for three different battles I imagine. And the Air Medal, every time I had an Air Medal, it had four oak leaf clusters. You get the Air Medal once, the next time you earn it, they just give you an oak leaf cluster, a little oak leaf to put on it and I had four of them to put on the Air Medal. That was about it and our unit had another citation, we were with. The squadron won another unit citation, it was kind of a blue, I just forget what it was. It was not noted on my discharge because it was for the unit.
CH: How did you get these?
AW: For flying dangerous missions, things like that, they give you so many missions to go and they give you an Air Medal for it.
[211]
CH: So did you ever plan, or help plan any battles?
AW: No
CH: How did you know what to do in a battle?
AW: Before when we were in training, they showed us and we had to learn all of what planes looked like, enemy planes, they come in so fast and so far away, you had to know by the shape of them, the silhouette. They give us all kinds of tests beforehand and you watch them all the time, you never took your eyes off of the sky and in the plane we had intercoms and we would talk to one another. If you didn’t talk, say anything then the only option was to check every two minutes to make sure everybody was still alive. If they run out of oxygen, then you die pretty quick. They had that and everybody saw enemy planes coming or any planes and they noted where it was you like, twelve o’clock, two o’clock, divided up like we were in the middle and they’d go by the clock system, higher, lower. They’d tell everybody to be on alert for that. To watch them because they come in so fast you only have a second to shoot your guns and fire at them and you would have to watch them to make sure you didn’t shoot somebody else down in your own formations because we flew in formations, I forget just how many it must have been. I suppose twelve planes you know maybe fifteen. You had to watch them too; you didn’t want to shoot somebody else like the friends down. We got as [close] together as we could so fighters couldn’t come in a split you up and start shooting you down because that’s what they wanted. If they get one off by himself and several fighters would come in and they would get him because he couldn’t watch all of them in every direction in one time. You don’t. No, it was exciting. We were always glad to get by, but there was always, about every mission some crew got lost, didn’t make it back. Sometimes they landed in another country or something, but by the time they were shot up and we’d watch and any time a plane went down we would always watch which plane it was and see how many parachutes actually opened, you know, because when we come back from our mission, we went to a briefing and they’d come out and take notes about what we saw and everything. And before the missions we went and they told us what it was going to be and everything and told us what to expect; the temperature, the gas. When we came back we knew what we’d saw and we would tell them, and they’d kind of get an idea that a lot of times when planes went down they exploded in the air and nobody got out.
[262]
CH: So during all this, how did you stay in touch with your family?
AW: Stay in touch with whom?
CH: Your family.
AW: Letters. There was no communication like there is now and we would write a letter. I would write a letter home and they would microfilm it, you know, make it real little and they would censor it. They might mark something if you wrote something in there that they thought was something that had to do with it they would have to be blanked out. It was a little letter I would have to say about two inches high and three inches wide. They called- they had a name for it, some kind of mail [v-mail]. But it was, what we would write, it would just be smaller, our writing and everything but it was a picture copy of it and they just blanked it out. It was just little. But what we got from home was regular-sized mail just like what they sent us.
[281]
CH: What was the food like there?
AW: The what?
CH: Food.
AW: Oh we ate pretty good, well it- I didn’t like the food this one time we were at the British Air Force Station or something like that when we couldn’t make it back to our own place we had to eat their food and they don’t eat like, at that time they didn’t eat like I did. They had stuff too greasy of food, none of us liked it so we didn’t eat much. We just had to stay there a day or maybe two days so they could get our plane going again so we could fly home and that was the only time I didn’t like the food. But otherwise, when you’re flying they give you as good food as they can because you can’t eat any gassy foods or anything like that while you’re flying. See their planes were pressurized like planes today. Like you go in them go get on a plane to get someplace, they’re pressurized, see then they weren’t and there were no insulation in them or anything no heat, no heaters or anything like that, we had lightweight suits when we plugged in but that’s always the kind of thing we had. It would be 45 to 55 below and we had to have oxygen all the time and there’s always icicles too forming in your oxygen mask—had to pick them out, there would be icicles falling down your front and everything for the breathing, you know. It was a long time ago.
[312]
CH: So did you have plenty of supplies?
AW: Supplies? You mean in the plane?
CH: Yes.
AW: They had kind of emergency supplies in there was what they called K-rations or something like that candy bars and when we were at this British base sometime we had we didn’t like their food we had to break into them because we couldn��t stand that greasy food they had to eat and so we went out into your supplies truck and took that stuff that we had, but they replenished it when we got back to our own base. The next time we ever- crashed or something or go down, we would have something to eat.
[325]
CH: Did you feel a lot of pressure or stress?
AW: Pressure how?
CH: During the war did you feel a lot of pressure?
AW: Well, no I just went along like everybody else did. See, we were all like in the same boat and we saw somebody worse off than we were so we never complained. We just, I mean there was always someone worse, I mean, you never heard anybody complain about their situation, you always felt bad about the guy that didn’t come back or sometimes when they did come back and er, kind of got out of hand, got out of control. I guess it kind of went off in their head. We had to hold one guy down so they could come a couple times because he’d just crack. He couldn’t take it. The hospital coming in, it was getting him shaped up and he’d be back in a while. Some could take more than others I think some guy might have taken it too seriously or something. Where I lived half of them got killed.
[348]
CH: Was there anything special that you did for good luck?
AW: No, I don’t think I did anything special for good luck; the only thing was that it made me pretty religious for a while and everybody else too. I didn’t know of anybody that had anything either.
[357]
CH: How did people entertain themselves?
AW: We’d get two days off every so often and we would get on a train, go to London, look around London, and there was a wax museum there that I enjoyed quite a bit, (what was left of it) and just looking around the city and see what people were doing. You see how—we used to see how these bombs hit there and destroyed so much. We went into the city close to where our base was—named Bury St. Edmond’s. Everything was old in the town over there, in the towns over there but the people were so nice and everything. They had—selling produce or something squares or something like that and everybody rode bicycles and about the best thing you could get when you were off like that to eat was fish and chips; I mean like potato chips (French fries) and fish. And that fish and chips was a great thing over there then, maybe yet today, I don’t know but we enjoyed fish with a bunch of people.
[382]
CH: Were there entertainers that came to entertain you?
AW: Yes, there was but we didn’t have time to go to them- you didn’t have time off, you didn’t pay much attention to that, you just couldn’t, you didn’t have time to. Always somebody did, I never did see any of them, I was over there, I think when Glen Miller got lost, I think it was Glen Miller and some man they flew out and we never heard from the both of them.
[394]
CH: What did you do when you were on leave, if you were ever on leave?
AW: Yes, I was, I would go to London or into Bury St. Edmond’s, a closer town, and one time, just when I found out I was going to be coming home soon, I went to visit a friend at another air base that I had known before I went into service. But otherwise, you needed a lot of rest, you appreciated this time off just to lay in the old cot and just rest a while.
[405]
CH: So where did you travel while you were in service?
AW: I just went with…When I went into service, like I told you, I went to Fort Sheridan, Illinois went to Miami Beach for about three months and went on troop train to Kingmar, Arizona and for two, three months, I don’t know just how long and Lincoln, Nebraska for a while and then I got to come home for a few days and then back to Lincoln, Nebraska and to Alexander, Louisiana, I believe it was we were training. Then I went to Langley Field in Virginia. We got a few days off to come home, back to Langley Field, then we as a crew went and flew over to England. I kind of forget where we got the plane. I think we took a train to Granier Field. I think we took a train from Langley Field to Granier Field, New Hampshire. We got a plane there and went to Newfoundland, Iceland, England and then they gave us another plane when they put us in the air base because they change these planes when you take them over and they give you another plane when you get there it would be a different plane and they’d modify it a little bit. When we were in England there were a bunch of places to go, like to London or something, but we did get to fly too, [we] went up to Liverpool for a week. Which was nice, but it was kind of chilly and it wasn’t really nice weather up there and when we wanted to go out and do different things like play golf but the weather wasn’t right while we were there. We enjoyed it enough to be able to visit with other people. That was- our train ride back down near London where we were [unintelligible] and that train, they were different than here- they didn’t go as fast, they had little tunnels, they went through, because they had no power I guess, sometimes it you feel like you could get out and walk faster than they were going. They had different like of whistle they tooted a little funny. At their stations, when you got to their stations, it was so close to the track- they didn’t wait outside much. I guess it was rainy and salty and so foggy over there a lot of times you can hardly see.
[470]
CH: Were there any particularly things that happened?
AW: Funny things?
CH: Yeah.
AW: No, I don’t remember a funny thing, no, nope I never think I saw anything I thought was funny all that time. No, it was pretty serious business.
[476]
CH: So were there ever any unusual events that happened?
AW: No, there was nothing unusual then. You could expect anything you heard about. We heard about things happening and it was no surprise when we saw it happen or heard it again. You don’t believe it. You just see so many things, planes going down, blowing up, people flying out when you get back, you didn’t know who else was getting back, and I would see planes come into land and crash and another plane propeller cut the tail off and crash and burn. Since they were coming in and they were so tired some of the pilots couldn’t even tell where another plane was. They wouldn’t even know where another plane was because it would be foggy and all.
[498]
CH: Were there any pranks that you pulled on each other?
AW: Nope. No, we didn’t do any pranks or stuff. We were pretty serious.
[503]
CH: What did you think of the officers or other soldiers that you worked with?
AW: Oh, the officers? They were just like us enlisted men; see we didn’t salute officers all the time, they didn’t want us too, there were too many of them, I got reprimanded after I- before I got discharged, when I was in service, they were, when we got back here, they asked us to- they sent us to Santa Anna, California for recuperation or something and they asked us what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go and I told them, I liked to go Chanute Airbase and work in the motor pool, Chanute here, close to Champaign, so that’s where they sent me. But before that, I and another guy and were sitting out close to the artillery base and an officer walked by a few times and you’re supposed to salute them all the time, well had been in the Air Corps so long and they didn’t want us to salute the officers and we didn’t salute them and they reprimanded my man and him so head to get on us for not saluting him. So that was to only time I-that was only time I thought was strange. Even the new guy, we were had been in the war and he was just starting, commission and he was supposed to respect- he wasn’t getting much out of us because we weren’t paying much attention to him. And that was just before, after I got back from service and they asked me what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go and they did, they sent me to work in the motor pool and after about a month there, there was a fire that broke out west in Washington, Idaho and California the forest fires, and so they had to get people to fight their forest fires and so they sent us out there. We went with the engineers and we worked with civilians in the forest service and lived at CCC camp, Civilian Conservation Corps or something out in Fort Lewis or Washington and we went to a place in Idaho close to Boise and we put out fires, grass fires, all kinds of fires, putting out fires. They sent us down to California, southern California; around San Diego they had fires. That’s where I worked when I got discharged, we were working on fires. We were in the service, but working for the civilians and those fires just got burning discharged, a got my discharge. October 27, 1945 a long time ago.
[677]
CH: Did you keep a diary?
AW: No I didn’t. I had one member on the crew did and he was- I talk to him every couple times a year, maybe, he lives in Tuskilwa, Illinois he could probably tell you a lot more stories than I could.
[687]
CH: Do you recall the day your service ended?
AW: Yes, I do. I sure do. I got on a train to come home. It took a week to come home probably, a least a week on a train, it took a long time then, not long now. The day I got home, I think I probably, you could hitch-hike you know, people would pick you up and give you a ride but I got in to Champaign at night on a bus and I had—I lived—my folks lived about twenty miles [away]. And I probably out of those twenty miles I walked ten miles. Somebody would come by and give you a ride, only going so far. People didn’t go too far then, you didn’t go out of your way driving, you didn’t have any gas and I probably walked ten of the twenty miles that night, you know, I got home about one o’clock in the morning probably.
[722]
CH: Where were you when your service ended?
AW: San Diego. Fort Rosecrans, San Diego, California.
[728]
CH: So what did you do in the days and weeks afterwards?
AW: After the war? I didn’t do much for a couple of months, then I went to work in a garage, Chevrolet garage and learned the mechanic trade. I did garages for about ten years and then I sold auto parts and garage equipments for about ten years, eight or nine years maybe and I went to work at the University of Illinois for twenty some years and then I retired I’m working at hardware supply place now, you know, put up new supplies, fill orders, and deliver.
[749] END OF SIDE ONE,
SIDE TWO
[750]
CH: Did you go back to school?
AW: No, I didn’t go back to school. So I went to- when the G.I. Bill- I learned to be an auto mechanic, that’s what I did for about ten years.
[754]
CH: The G.I. Bill supported your education?
AW: Yeah, that’s what covered your education. To go to college- the colleges were- I didn’t really know what I wanted and they were, you know, everybody wanted to go to college or go onto law school and do more of what they wanted and I didn’t. I didn’t know anything but than working with my hands. But that’s all I’d ever seen so I went to be an auto mechanic.
[761]
CH: Did you make any close friendships while you were in service?
AW: Well, we were close for a long time, but there was only one person on the crew that I hear from and he lives here in Illinois, you know in the northwest parts and I hear from him about twice a year and there was one that used to come to see, but he only came once because I loaned him twenty dollars and he came over to pay me back the twenty dollars and he’s from Toledo, Ohio and I never heard from him again. When he came, he’d just got married and stuff and then I wrote to him a few times but I kind of lost contact with him because we got so we didn’t have much in common I guess or a reason and at that time I wasn’t traveling around too much and working and he was too and raising a family, so I suppose…But the one that did go on, I talk to him about twice a year at least. He just calls every so often or I call him. I’ve been to his place about four or five times and he’s like me, getting older and but he’s more remembering military stuff, he kept a diary you know, that kind of stuff and stuff about every mission we went on. But if you wanted to call him, I could give you his number.
[782]
CH: Did you ever join a veteran’s organization?
AW: Ah, yeah. I’ve joined a VFW but I’m not an active member, I just get their magazine and I, my nine-fourth bomb group as a little newsletter that they send out about four times a year, I get that and the Air Force Museum, down in Savannah, Georgia, I their magazine.
[788]
CH: What did you do as a career after the war?
AW: After the war? Auto mechanic for about ten years. I sold garage equipment and other supplies for about ten years, and then I went to work at the University of Illinois for about twenty some years and when I retired from there, I went to work at a Black and Company Hardware Supply and that’s where I’m still working. I’ve been there for twenty, going on twenty-one years.
[796]
CH: Did your military experience influence how you, or what you thought about the was?
AW: No, it didn’t. I think about that war just like everybody did, all the things I hear about like what Hitler was doing and everything, I’m still the same.
[801]
CH: What kinds of activities does your veteran’s organization do?
AW: I couldn’t tell you because- I’m not- I’m just a member I’m not ____ you know what veterans and veterans’ organizations do; collect money for different organizations and stuff, mostly just help disabled.
[806]
CH: Do you attend reunions?
AW: No I don’t. I’ve never attended a reunion. They’re always far enough away and when people get that much older… I read about them, they all enjoy them and everything but I don’t think I could.
[810]
CH: So how did your service and experience of the war affect your life?
AW: Affect my life? I don’t know what I’d did if I—I imagine, if there wasn’t been a war, if I didn’t go to service, I probably maybe ended up being a farmer or something, but that was my ambition in high school. Everybody went to a school like that. We didn’t have great ambitions of going anyplace else, because we enjoyed that life as kids.
[818]
CH: Is there anything else that you would like to add that we haven’t covered in the interview?
AW: No, I don’t think so, only I do remember when I was in high school I remember the day that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, that was on a Sunday and I remember that day- all of us my age knew we would be going into service from then on. We were planning on what we were going to do, you know what branch we wanted to be in and all that kind of stuff and that’s about the only thing I remember of it.
[830] End of Interview
