Q: What
was your life like prior to the beginning of the war?
A: “Well…I
was raised on a farm and lived out there in the country, and at that time
transportation wasn’t real good. And, I just grew up on a farm.”
Q: Where
were you born?
A: “I
was born in Mountain View, Missouri. That’s
kind of a little east of central Missouri on the Southside of Missouri, about
100 miles east of Springfield. That’s
where I was born and I was three years old when we moved to Oklahoma. And of course I don’t remember when we moved but then I
grew up in Blackwell. We lived
most of my life, we lived three mile east and nine mile north of Blackwell,
Oklahoma.
Q: What
were your feelings about the war when it started?
A: “Well…
I don’t know that I really knew that much about it and followed it that
close. Communication wasn’t
like it was know. We had radios
and newspapers but no television. Radios…well…we
didn’t have a lot of radios.”
Q: When
you finally did hear about it (war), how did you react to it?
A: “I
remember I was in school, and I think that we were in school the day that we
heard that the Japanese had dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor.
(Speaks off tape to wife.) Let’s see, in ’41 I was a junior.
Yeah, I was a junior in high school.
So see I was pretty young when it happened, when it started.”
Q: You
got drafted into the military?
A: “Yes,
when I was 18 then I was drafted. Well,
I was drafted into the army and I wanted to be in the Air Corp and to get into
the Air Force or Air Corp, the Army Air Corp at that time, the only way I
could get in was get in to this and you had to pass a more strenuous physical;
you had to have a certain IQ; and you had to have a certain aptitude.
Because you had to be either a pilot, or a bombardier, or a navigator,
to be in Cadets, and I got into Cadets, so I got into the Air Corp the Army
Air Corp.”
Q: How
did they decide that you were to be on a B-17?
A: “Well…that’s
kind of a long story. When I got
into Cadets, I went to Amarillo, Texas and took my basic training and there
was 48 of us in a flight, and out of that 48, 6 of us stayed in Cadets.
Out of the 6, I got to go straight to a college training detachment
that was the University of Montana. I
was up there a month and a half, and they decided they had to many in Cadets.
They took 35, 000 out of Cadets and sent us either back to military
branch we were in or if they went in like I did, they sent us to gunnery
school. So I went to gunnery
school at Las Vegas, Nevada. When
I left there and came to Lincoln, Nebraska I guess that was when they decided
what kind of plane we’d be on. I
don’t remember when it was decided I’d be a ball turret gunner, but it was
sometime while I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, I guess.
We went from there to El Paso, Texas and took all of our overseas
training. But to know when they
decided I’d be on a B-17, I don’t think there was any certain point, but
it was after I went to Lincoln, Nebraska. That was when I was assigned to this group.
Q: What
was your training like?
A: “Well
we just took basic training. I
think the basic training was probably to get you accustomed to not questioning
authority. When people in authority told you something you never
questioned them and you saluted the officers, and really that…as my memory
serves me correctly that was the only training that we had, of course, we had
to do drills and stuff like that and we learned how to do that but most of the
time we spent in class. I mean we
went to classes and learned a lot of stuff.”
Q: Where
were you stationed?
A:
(Laughter) “Well, I was stationed in a lot of different places cause
I was never at a base more than three and a half months, and I was in the
service for 2 years and 8 days. I
went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma and that’s where I was inducted, and I got in to
Cadets. Then, I went to Amarillo,
Texas, Amarillo Army Airfield, and to take my basic training, and from there I
went to the College training detachment at the University of Montana at
Missoula, Montana, and then when they decided they had too many, they had 35,
000 to many, they kicked us out, we said.
Then I went to gunnery training at Las Vegas, Nevada and then when I
finished that we came to Lincoln, Nebraska, with a twelve day delay in route.
I got to come home for twelve days.
We went from there, that’s where we were assigned to a crew at
Lincoln, Nebraska, and we went to El Paso, Texas and took our overseas
training. And from El Paso, Texas
we went back to Lincoln, Nebraska and we were there about two or three weeks,
well we were there longer than that we were there about a month. From there we went overseas, well we went to Camp Mile
Standish at Boston, MA and got on
the Il De France. We landed at
Glasgow, Scotland, and went from there to our base there in England at Glatton
we were about 60 miles north of London. I
was there about three and half months, and when we left there, we flew to
Wales and spent the night. Then
flew from Wales to Iceland and spent the night.
It never got dark, when I was coming home. When we landed in Iceland,
the sun went down, it was down for about three hours but it never got dark.
And we flew from Iceland to Goosebay, Labrador and spent the night
there then and then we flew from Goosebay, Labrador to Bradley Field,
Connecticut and spent the night and when we got to Bradley Field, Connecticut,
see my folks and Betty didn’t know that I was coming home.
I sent a night letter to Betty and also sent one to my folks and the
next morning, we caught a train and went back to Camp Mile Standish up in
Boston. And when I got off the
train they paged me and I came up and my mother had died. In
fact, the day I left England was May the 21st and she died May the
21st and they had her funeral scheduled at two o’clock on the 23rd.
The Red Cross had me a Emergency FURLO already worked out with the Air
Force. They had me reservations
on American Airlines from Boston to Oklahoma City.
Then they picked me up at Will Rogers Airport and drove me in a car
over to Willey Post Airport and dad had hired a guy from Blackwell that had a
plane to fly me from there to Blackwell and I got to Blackwell at four
o’clock in the afternoon and they set mom’s funeral back two hours so I
could get there for her. But anyway, and that was a seven day Emergency FURLO and then
I went to Fort Smith, Arkansas. I
went down there and they gave me a thirty day detached service. That’s usually what we got when we got back from overseas
we got thirty days off at home, and it didn’t count as FURLO time it was
detached service and we were stationed at home.
So I came home for thirty days and then I went back to Fort Smith, Camp
Chaffy was the name of that base, and I went from there to Sioux Falls, South
Dakota and I was at Sioux Falls for about, oh I don’t know, three or four
weeks and I went from there to Fort Meyers, Florida.
All this traveling was on a troop train, so it was slow. I went to Fort Meyers, Florida and they were going to train
us to go back overseas. They were
going to send us to Japan. Well,
we just raised all kind of ruckus. We
had already been over there and fought. We
knew that they shouldn’t be doing this to us and we just raised all kind of
cain. Finally, the base commander
had us all come to the theatre, there on the base, and he told us that they
had made a mistake that we all had enough points that we wouldn’t be trained
to go back overseas but it was going to take quite awhile for them to
distribute us back over the United States to different bases and for us to
just be patient. Well, they
finally sent me from there, I don’t know a week or so, they sent me to
Sebring, Florida, which was about a hundred and ten miles northeast for Fort
Meyers, with a twelve day delay in route.
And here I lived in Oklahoma. Well
I caught a train; no I caught a bus, and rode a bus from Fort Meyers, Florida
to Blackwell, Oklahoma. Because I
could make it in six hours quicker than I could going by train and those were
the only two transportations we had then.
So then I went back to Sebring, Florida and I was there about two or
three months and I got discharged, and when I got discharged they sent me by
train, they always discharged you at the closest base to your home, and so I
went from there back to Amarillo and was discharged at Amarillo.
And on that train coming from Sebring, Florida to Amarillo I met a girl
that had graduated from high school with Betty and her husband was in the
navy. He was stationed somewhere, Jacksonville, Florida or
somewhere over there and he was coming to Norman to get out and so she was
riding a train and I was on a military car hooked to this train and I was
walking up this aisle in this car and I looked at her and I thought that’s
got to be Irene Crow. So finally
I asked her, ‘Are you Irene Crow?’ Cause
I hadn’t seen her for two years. And
she said, ‘Yes,’ and then course she knew who I was cause we were going to
school together and like I said her and Betty were real good friends.
But anyway, I was discharged then in Amarillo, Texas and we came back
to Oklahoma City the next day and met them, here and we partied.”
Q: When
you were stationed overseas, where were your missions?
A: “Well,
now of course the first time I flew was out at Las Vegas, see I was training
for army air arterially, aerial gunnery training, and that was the first time
I flew. Then of course, when we went to El Paso, we were on a crew
and we were assigned to a crew and we did a lot of flying out of El Paso.
Then, we didn’t fly anymore until we got on our base in England.
And we flew, well they decided they would make a lead crew out of us. And by lead crew, each group had three squadrons, 12 planes
in each squadron. You had a high
box with 12 planes, a low box, and a lead box.
The high box would fly, oh just above the lead crew, and the low box
would fly just below the lead box. They
were going to make a lead crew and by lead crew you either lead the top box or
low box. And so, we didn’t fly,
we would have probably flown 25 missions had we not been a lead crew but that
slowed us down. We were there for
quite awhile before we flew any missions because of that. Did you want to know that places we bombed?
Well, I’ve got that stuff at home.
I should have brought all that with me because I’ve got a diary with
all the missions we flew. But we
bombed Dresden a couple of times, and we bombed Zosen, which was a Germany
high headquarters, right south of Berlin, we bombed it once and we bombed the
airfield down by Munich once, and we bombed the Rurur valley, different places
in the Rurur Valley several times, and we bombed Dresden a couple times.
But those are the only places I can recall just off the top of my head
we bombed. Well those are the
places we bombed. Now we flew a
lot of training missions down by over the edge of France.
(Laughter) I’ll tell you this little story. While we were flying these training missions, the pilot
decided that he wanted each man on the crew to fly that plane.
To see who could fly it. Well,
I was the last one that got in the pilot seat he was in there in the co-pilot
seat. Like I said we’d flew a lot of missions and I was a
cameraman on our crew so I had to fly every mission, by cameraman if the
bombardier practiced bombing, the cameraman took pictures of the bomb strikes.
So I had to fly every time. And
I stood, I had a lot of time that I didn’t have anything to do and I would
stand right behind the pilot and co-pilot and watch them and I knew exactly
how to fly that plane. I knew
what to do and I raised on a farm and ran all kind of equipment, worked on all
kind of equipment and I knew how to fly that plane.
So we got overseas and we were doing this, and like I said I was the
last one of the crew to get in the pilot seat and I was just a kid.
I was 19 years old. He’d
sit there and say ‘take a certain heading.’
Well, I would bank the plane over and level out on that heading.
I knew that you leveled the plane out just before you got the heading
cause it drifted a little bit, see. And
I knew that when you banked that plane, you had to pull the nose up or you
lost altitude. So, I just pulled it over there and leveled it out and he
didn’t say anything and we flew a little bit and he said, ‘take a certain
altitude.’ Well, I pulled back
on the stick, raised it up, and leveled it off right on that altitude. And he had me take two or three different headings and
finally, when he got through with me he said, ‘You flew a plane before
haven’t ya?’ And I said, ‘No, I’ve never had a hold of the controls
until got this one.’ And he said, ‘Well, you flew a light trainer then?’
And I said, ‘No sir, I’ve never been in a light trainer.’
And he said, ‘Well I have never seen anyone fly a plane like you do
and never flown one.’ And I
told him, I said, ‘Well, I stood here behind you and Tom,’ that was our
co-pilot and I said, ‘I knew exactly what to and how to do it and that’s
why I did it like that.’ Now he
had been an instructor down in Ardmore and he was a first lieutenant when he
joined this crew, so he had to do with a lot of different pilots.
So I felt pretty good about that.
But I wouldn’t have been afraid to have landed that plane.
Like I said, I worked on equipment and I just knew how to do stuff and
I watched him and I just knew how he did it.
Q: What
was it like being a turret gunner?
A: “Well,
I’ve watched these movies and all about that being a dangerous place but I
never thought about that being anymore dangerous than any.
The tail gunner sat back behind the tail wheel and the tail wheel came
up in the plane and so you had to just scoot by the, to get back, I thought he
was more isolated than I was. I
don’t know why I became a ball turret gunner.
I don’t know if I was assigned to that position or what.
There was one thing about a ball turret, now that turret turned and sat
there like this (demonstrates) and this was your controls.
You’d move your turret and the gun controls were just on the end of,
knobs on the end of those handles. Well
you could see everything from down there.
You couldn’t see straight above the plane of course, but you could
see out to the side, a long ways up and you could see everything below. I could see the bombs hitting and bursting, and I could see
the antiaircraft gun firing. It
was quite an experience. But like
I said, I was a 19 year old kid, and I never thought about it being anymore
dangerous anyplace else in the plane.”
Q: Did
you have a specific name for your plane?
A: “No,
we were assigned a plane, now some of those planes, the planes we flew when we
flew lead we let each squadron, you had three he last four numbers were 0200.
We flew that plane three times. We
never named it. It was a slow,
slow plane. The pilot would get
so mad, he’d have to rev those engines up.”
Q: How
many planes were up in the air on one mission?”
A: “There
was over 1000 in the 8th Air Force.
We bombed Dresden twice and over 1200 planes bombed it.
We bombed Berlin the same way too.”
Q: What missions stood out to you?”
A: “There
were two missions that stood out to me that I flew.
The one we flew over Berlin—we though we were going to get shot down. When antiaircraft fire, the shells busted and explode.
The flak would usually burst in fours.
Well, when we had our Bombay doors over, three shells busted under us
that the plane bounced. It looked like someone had jabbed holes in the bottom of the
plane. It had broken the sending
unit line. The first mission we
bombed Dresden, we carried six, five-hundred pound general purpose bombs, and
four, five-hundred pound incendiary bombs.
The incendiary bombs were a cluster of a hundred five-hundred pound
incendiary bombs. When they got
within a certain distance to the ground, they would spread out.
Well… we were supposed to be bombing the train yard, and the whole 8th
Air Force was bombing Dresden that day. I
could see the whole town just afire. But
those two missions stood out to me.”
Q: How
regular was it for the planes to get shot down?
A: “It
wasn’t real regular. But one
mission we flew, four out of the six out of our group.
That day, we were flying deputy lead of the low box, and one of the
planes got a direct hit and just split in two.”
Q: Did
you meet Betty, your wife, before the war?
A: “Yes,
Betty and I got married in El Paso, Texas while I was down there taking
overseas training. We’d met in
high school, and well….she quit going with me once, but (laugh) she
couldn’t find anyone better.”
Q: How
old were you when you got married?
A: “I
was 19 and she was 18.”
Q: How
did you keep correspondence during the war?
A: “Letters,
but we didn’t call each other very often because we didn’t have
communication like we did now. We
telegrammed a lot though.”
Q: What
were your feelings when you heard that WWII was over?
A: “Well,
I was glad. I was really happy. At
that point, I was in Sebring, Florida when the dropped the atomic bombs on
Japan. I was in England when
Germany gave up…we were really happy that that war was over.”
Q: When
did you get processed out?
A: “I got out on
November 6.”
Q: Was it
difficult to readjust to your life after the war?
A: “Well….it
was altogether different. Like I
said, I was raised on a farm, and then when I got out, Betty and I were
married. In fact, our daughter
was five months old when I got home. But
we couldn’t find a place to live because everybody was getting out of the
service, and there hadn’t been any new houses built.
We lived with her folks for…well, we looked at a chicken house that
this guy was renting for an apartment, but we decided that that wasn’t any
place to live. We finally found a
house from this girl we knew from high school.
She had a place there in Blackwell—a duplex—and she let us have her
furniture.”
Q: What
did you do profession-wise after the war?
A: “The
first job I had been in a flour mill. Part
of the time was trucked sacks of flour out and put them in a boxed car, and
part of the time I ran a sewing machine.
Then I went to work for a fellow in a furniture store.
He fell down on raising my wages, so I finally quit working for him
then went to working for a guy in a Buick garage.
I worked as a mechanic for a while, then as a service manager, then a
part’s manager, then both departments.
Then one of our customers had some trucks and talked me into buying a
truck. I owned a truck and did
that for about 20 years. Then, finally, after our kids went to college, I sold
the truck and went to work for a company as a dispatcher.
Then, I became an elder of the church here.”
Q: What
were your feeling towards Hitler and the Nazi party?
A: “I
didn’t have much feeling about them at time. They were kind of like
everybody else. The Air Force men
who were shot down, if the civilians got to them, they really mistreated them.
A lot of them they killed. That
day we bombed Dresden, two days later, we got word that we had killed 200,000
civilians. They died from
suffocation. Well, you can
imagine how that would make you feel. It
didn’t matter that the men who were in charge sent you; you were the one
that did it. They were just
ordinary people that resented that, and we were just whipping up on them, so
you couldn’t blame ‘em.”
Q:
How has your experience in the war affected your life?
A: “For
the first year of two it probably affected it pretty bad.
I learned what it was to be scared.
I flew 21 missions over Germany. Flying
those missions, they got you up at 2 or 2:30 in the morning, and you went to
get briefed. They told you where
you were going, how many guns you were going to be in range of, how many
fighters that was possible to hit the group, what times you were going to drop
the bombs, and all that stuff. Some
of those missions were just terrible, like that one with the plane that just
burst apart. Even now, and just
talking about it, it bothers me a little bit.
It took me a couple of years to get over it.”
Q: If you
had any advice about going into war, what would you advise?
A: “Well…if
you have to go, and if your country has to be defended, go do it.
But, I’ll tell ya’, war--I think Churchill was the one that said
it—“war it hell”. So, I
would say, stay out of it if at all possible.”
Photographic Archives
Jesse DeBoard (back row, left) and crew
members.
Crew - John Cantillion (Pilot; First
Lt.) Buffalo, New York
Thomas Hyde (Co-pilot; Second Lt.) New Mexico
Arthur Robiolio (Navigator; Second Lt.) North Burgen, New Jersey
Robert Ryan (Bomadeer; Second Lt.) Chicago, Illinois
Don Priestley (Engineer; Master Sgt.) California
Charles Decoret (Radio operater; Tech. Sgt.) Pennsylvania
William Badoyle (Waster Gunner; Staff Sgt.) Bayonne, New Jersey
Lloyd (Billie) R. Burke (Tail Gunner) Ellsbury, Mississippi
Jesse DeBoard (right) with crew member.
B-17 ball turret.
B-17 ball turret.
B-17
Diary Entries by Mr. DeBoard
Jesse
DeBoard: World War II