Westover Field
We were in training and we’re up at Westover Field [in Massachusetts]. We’re flying very old planes; these were not the ones we flew in combat. Now we had some old planes in combat, but these were bad planes. While I was there, one kid from the Bronx, nice kid, said to me—I was looked upon as a guy who had the training before and I could handle some of the officers by giving them what they wanted—he said, ‘I can’t take it.’ He said every time he got into the plane he thought it was going to blow up, and he couldn’t go near a plane again. I told him it’s not a disgrace because we’re supposed to be in a team and if a unit can’t function together, you’re not helping the guy next to you and you’re going to let him down when it’s important. I told him to go see the commanding officer, which he did, and tell him exactly what he told me. Later, I met him at Fort Dix when I was being discharged. He ended up as a sergeant in the infantry; he saw hand-to-hand combat in the Philippines. The point I always made is that everybody had a point where they’d snap, where they just sat there and couldn’t function.
Now I’ll tell you about this great co-pilot we had. We’re still in the States, and I’m down in the ball turret. In this turret, you lower it down, it comes out the belly of the plane, you have to jump down in it, open it up, get in, and it’s all hydraulic and electric. I’m listening on the interphones and I don’t hear anything except the engines. It’s deafening, by the way, flying in a four-engine bomber. There are some portholes and I had my hands on the handles to make my turret turn and it wouldn’t go. It was dead in the water. I looked up in the portholes and I saw some of the guys running around and I thought I saw one of the guys put on a parachute! Normally we just wore chest chutes and the parachutes were kept separate because it was an additional weight you had to stand up with.
I turned on the radio and tried to speak and I couldn’t hear my own voice—if you can’t hear your own voice, it’s not coming through your headset, ergo, something’s wrong. I realized that now I had to go back to my training, that there’s a way to get out of the turret. You cannot drop out of the ball turret when it’s in the air, but there were some cranks and you could manually crank the turret around and it would come up to where you could get out. Your memory has to be ‘A’ perfect because you had to then lock it. If you didn’t lock it, when you got up to get out, it would spin and you would lose your legs. Thank God the sergeant who trained me told me that. I did exactly what he told me to do and that’s what comes with training. Training is a very important thing, you must do what you’re supposed to do, what you’re trained to do, and improvise when you have to. So I locked it, got out, pulled myself out of the well. Everybody’s got their parachutes on! I put my parachute on. One of the guys said, ‘We have lost electrical power.’ The plane will still go, like an automobile, because the gasoline is flowing into the engines. The pilot’s going crazy; the engineer is running around trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with the damn thing. He had rung the ‘get ready to bail out’ bell and that’s what I saw through the porthole but I didn’t hear it, there’s no bell in the turret. I immediately thought that there should have been a bell in the turret or that somebody should have taken a wrench and whacked on the shaft three times or whatever so I would know to get out!
Now don’t forget, this story is about the co-pilot. The co-pilot’s supposed to be in charge of the gunners, that was his job. He was supposed to coordinate things that we were supposed to do. So they got the problem fixed, the music goes back on, the radio’s on, everybody’s happy. Up comes the turret, I’m not going down there again, not that day. Now I can’t tell other guys what to do, I don’t have the rank, but I was slightly pissed at them. They had to think for themselves because when they say, ‘get ready to bail out’, they’re going to go—they’re not going to come and hold my hand. We landed and the first thing I did was walk up front and I said to the co-pilot, ‘They rang the bell to get ready to bail out but there’s no sound in my turret. I would like you to instruct the gunners back there to give me some kind of a signal when that happens, so I can get out.’ This is what the son-of-a-bitch said. ‘When I bail out, I’ll wave to you as I go by.’ He was a big football player, I’m five foot seven and a half but I’m from Brooklyn and you don’t say things like that. I grabbed him. You’re not supposed to touch an officer, it’s against the rules. I turned him around and said right to his face, ‘As God as my witness, if I get my guns around fast enough, I’ll blow you out of the sky, and if I get down on the ground, I’ll hunt you down and I’ll kill you.’ I let go of him. Now I’ve got a problem because you don’t touch an officer and you don’t threaten him. I went back to the barracks and told one of the guys from another crew what happened. ‘I’m going to be called up, I’m going to go see the commanding officer.’ He said, ‘No you’re not, he’s not going to say a word. Did he say that to you? Will you say that to the commanding officer? He’s not going to say a word.’ So he didn’t say a word, I didn’t say a word, I don’t think I ever spoke to him unless he asked me a question. We put in a system where you bang on the turret.
They always had to test your ability to function as a gunner and they would put film next to your machine gun and it would film through your gun sight. We had very special gun sights, a Sperry invention. It had a line [draws imaginary horizontal line with index finger] and you had to do all kinds of crazy things. It was very unique. You had to recognize the aircraft you were firing at, it had to be a certain length, et cetera, and you’d set it in quickly into your gun sight, which is actually a computer. Then you had to cross it. You did everything—you did it with your feet, with your hands, it was quite a complicated thing but allegedly it was very accurate. The first time [all the gunners had to use it], I’m down in the ball turret. One of the gentlemen, I’m sure it was an officer, used the relief tube. A relief tube is a funnel and you would urinate into this funnel and the urine would go out the plane and it would come back and splash over the turret. Now a little urine is not going to hurt you, but it colored the entire area of the turret where my gunsight would function. I had a problem because they brought this plane up and they wanted me to shoot at it the target and I couldn’t very well shoot at it, so I used my finger and I went like this [waves index finger in air] and I made some film [for them]. When we went to the briefing everybody had good grades and they said, ‘The ball turret gunner is very creative, but we figured out it had to be his finger because we played it over and over again.’ Up we go again and I told them in the front of the plane, ‘Don’t use the funnel until I’m out of there.’ Well, they did it again. This is no joke because we had to go up pretty high and we had to be on oxygen. You piss on me once, you piss on me twice, the third time you don’t get a shot at it. The third time I heard the co-pilot say, ‘I wet my leg, my leg is wet!’ The pilot said, ‘What do you mean you wet your leg?’ ‘I had to use the relief tube and it’s been cut.’ The pilot said to me, ‘Did you cut the relief tube?’ I said, ‘Me, sir? Not I, sir.’ I cut it. [Laughs] When we got the film back for that run, I got a commendation which made me very happy because they used my film for a training film.
The tail gunner was a character, he had a knife, he was Jewish and he always carried a knife. My father was Roman Catholic and my mother was Greek Orthodox. I joined the Protestant Church because I was fed up with all the fighting in the family about which church I should belong to. In the barracks one time, a drunk came in and he called me a dirty Jew. I got up and one of my crew members grabbed me and said, ‘You’re not Jewish.’ And I said, ‘Fuck him.’ The point of the story is that anti-Semitism permeated the Army and all of our lives back then, and it just wasn’t very nice.
*
We hadn’t gotten overseas yet. At that particular time I bought as fountain pen, a Waterman, guaranteed for life, and it broke. [Laughs] I was very superstitious, most guys were superstitious. And then there was the fire [on the plane].
Everybody on an aircraft had to be trained
to do somebody else’s job in case they got sick. My nickname was ‘Malfunction,’ so they made me the assistant engineer—perfect, right? For example, they taught me how to transfer fuel which is very important on a plane, even though I had absolutely no concept of where the fuel went [after it was transferred]; it just made the engines go around. I also learned to stand behind the pilot when we would land, and I would call off the air speed because you had to land at a certain air speed or you were in deep trouble. Back then there was always someone standing when you landed a plane, I don’t think they do that anymore. But then my job, what the engineer did, I would then leave, go past the turret gunner, radio operator, drop down into a well with a catwalk where the bomb bays would go to the back, and I would go forward. At that point, everybody in the nose of the plane is out. That would be the nose gunner, navigator, bombardier, three people would be out. There was a machine there like a lawn mower which had a pull and it was called the ‘putt-putt,’ for want of another name. It provided the auxiliary power to run the generator on the aircraft so that you’d have electricity. When the plane lands, the nose wheel opens up, this was a B-24, and the wheel goes down and all the papers in the front of the plane would be blown all around the place. It was not my job, not that I’m saying ‘not my job, I don’t do windows’, but I had no knowledge that this was an important factor. It was up to those people that had their loose papers, whether they were maps or anything like that, to have them secure. So you pull the string and the machine starts, I pull it and it belched fire! On an airplane, like on a boat, fire is not a nice thing. By the way, I heard a story that one guy got a Congressional Medal of Honor, at least the story went, because he pissed on a fire, which I thought was a very cute story; I don’t believe it. Anyway, I put the fire out with my hands and when I got it out, naturally I wouldn’t turn the machine back on because I still didn’t know what the hell was going on. I went up and I screamed that there was a fire and the radio operator, Jimmy Broderick, jumped down, took a fire extinguisher and completely encased the machine in [fire retardant]. We were now travelling on the runway. The pilot rang a bell when he heard ‘fire’ and the nose gunner went out the bomb bays and luckily he didn’t get killed, he went into a rolling position—we had on leather suits and stuff like that. Well, it turned out that what had burned was a comic book—I have no idea whose comic book it was, but it had blown and caught in that machine! I think I told you that my pilot wasn’t a very forgiving person—he accused me of having the comic book. I didn’t read comic books, I was into reading whatever books I could carry, but I didn’t read comic books. I was slightly incensed that I was accused of starting a fire on a plane. This man would accuse me if it were raining outside, that I had ruined the day.
I’ll tell you more about the navigator. We’re in Westover Field and we are told that we’re going to go on a night mission to Ohio, with no radio and only wing lights on. We had to navigate our way out to someplace in Ohio and practice bombing something out there, without actually dropping bombs. I [tried to convince] the pilot that it wasn’t necessary for me to go on the trip, it’s a night mission; there’s nothing a gunner can do in the back. He said, ‘You’re flying!’ So on the way back we get to the area of Westover Field and we drop down. He dropped his wheels down and we gunners were supposed to use flashlights and look at the wheels to see if the pins came out, because if the pin didn’t come out, it meant that the landing gear was not locked and it would collapse on landing. It’s dark and I’m looking out and I’ve got the headset on, the wheels are down and locked, and the pilot said to the navigator, ‘Are you absolutely certain that’s Westover Field?’ The reason he asked is that there was an airfield at Hartford; I believe there was a Navy field there. He said, ‘I’m reasonably certain.’ The pilot then pulled the plane up, and everybody went on their ass, and then the fight started. He said, ‘What do you mean? If I land the plane on a commercial airfield or a Navy field, I will be the laughing stock of the Air Corps!’ I look out the window and I said to the pilot, ‘I know where the airfield is.’ That’s when the second fight started. The navigator said, ‘He’s only a kid.’ He was right, I was nineteen; he must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two, so really we’re all in that category of being infants. ‘You are going to listen to him?’ The pilot said, ‘He said he knows where the field is.’ We’re practically at treetop level now and I told him what direction to go, straight ahead, to the left, to the right, and I said, ‘The airfield is directly ahead.’ He made the signal, the lights went on, and we landed on our field. The pilot came over and he said, ‘How did you know where the field was?’ I said, ‘I followed the bus route.’ Any flyer will know that old time flyers used to do sight navigation and you would go down and read railroad crossings, and that’s just what I did. I knew where the movie house was and in Springfield, I’m positive that it’s still there, is a good restaurant, the Student Prince, good sauerbraten. The navigator wouldn’t speak to me; I guess he didn’t want to be put down.
Then there was the time we went on another night mission in Springfield and as I told you my job was to look out the window and see if the wheels were up or down or if anything was wrong on the plane. We had windows in those old planes that lifted up. I had my Class A uniform on, it was the only way you could get off the post. I looked out this window and I was blinded, couldn’t see, and I had a mouthful of gasoline! I fell to the floor, I was really in pain. I don’t remember if I threw up or not. The other gunner said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I can’t see, I’m blind, there’s a gasoline leak!’ Gasoline was just gulping out of the wings! He passed the word on; down we went, we landed. I was sitting there, there was a canteen of water, somebody either put water on my face or I had washed my face, so now I could see. It turned out that when they fueled the plane up it wasn’t level, it was at a tilt, and they put too much gasoline in. The mission was off, I unzipped my flight suit, put on my hat, and my pilot said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going to town.’ He did not appreciate that, he thought I set that whole thing up because I had a pass to go to town.
Passes—it always annoyed me that the officers could go wherever they wanted but the enlisted men could not, so we created our own passes. We got a book of passes and we were under the impression—which was wrong I found out later in law school—I thought that if you signed a phony name, it meant nothing. I remember once I was stopped by an MP [checking passes] in Times Square and he said, ‘Captain Midnight?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my name’ and got away with it. We would do things like that.
It’s been often asked of me if flying was voluntary. Nobody would believe me when I said it was, you did not have to fly. At any time you could have just gone in and said, ‘I’m out.’ That wouldn’t mean you’d be out of the Army, you just didn’t fly, where they would send you, God only knows. They’d send you some place; the Army wasn’t going to let you go.
Ken Carlson, first row second from right,
and the crew of ‘Myrtle the Flying Turtle’. Credit: Ken Carlson.
chapter Seven
The Navigator
Kenneth R. Carlson was born in 1921 in New York City. As a boy in the Great Depression, he spent his summers at Glenburnie at the Lake George Camp, the northern fringe of the communities surrounding ‘Hometown USA’. He called me at home one evening, shortly after I had returned from swimming near there.
‘Tell me about yourself, your family. I myself was from a middle-class family, but we were lucky in that I was able to attend what was probably the best private school in New York City. Incidentally, my tuition in grade school in the ‘20s was $250 a year; today a kindergarten slot is $45,000. I had a terrific education, even though I had to fight my way through the Irish gangs on 69th Street when I came back home from school.’
He tells me that the man who cuts his hair was an 8-year old boy in occupied France. He would look up, see the twin tails of the B-24s coming or going to attack Germany, and wish them a silent prayer, hope
ful that one day he would indeed be free.
‘I think what you are doing is very important. I still go to speak to the students here a few times a year; when we got out of the service, I joined the 8th Air Force Historical Society here in New York and vowed to speak to kids. At 96, I’m still keeping that commitment. Years ago the Smithsonian put out a book, High Honor, of inspirational stories with World War II veterans, myself and twenty-nine other fellows. Get the book, but I wouldn’t try to contact any of the other fellows. I’m the last one left.’
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