B0737M5NDQ

by Matthew Rozell

  Flak

  Let me tell you a little about flak. I have carried this with me ever since, because this is what flak looks like [digs into jacket pocket, pulls out a jagged flak fragment about the size of two fingers]. This is a piece of flak from a German 88mm artillery shell, which is fired from the ground and explodes at 25,000 feet, which is where we were flying. It is designed to destroy the plane or the engines or blow up the gas tank. And on my eighth mission, just as we were flying over the target, through these black clouds of exploding shells that you had to fly though, and just as the bombardier released our bombs I hit the salvo handle, a handle right next to the instrument on the navigation table. That would release the bombs in the event that the bombsight did not release the bombs. The second the bombardier says, ‘Bombs are away’, the navigator hits the salvo handle so if any bombs did get hung up, they would automatically go when you hit the salvo handle. So as I hit that handle this piece of flak nearly took my right arm off. And all I felt was no pain, just the feeling that someone had hit me with a sledgehammer. I felt total peace. It was the most unbelievable experience I’d ever had in my life. I didn’t talk to God or see God, but I had absolutely no fear.

  I looked down and there wasn’t much left of my right arm; I saw it hanging there. I called the pilot and asked him to send somebody down to put a tourniquet on. Meanwhile I was checking instruments, because now we were on our way back and navigating was part of what I had to do, and I was still capable of doing it; I had no problem with it. The radio operator came down, took one look at it, and fainted. So I called again and the engineer came down. He revived the radio operator and sent him back with his portable oxygen mask. He then put the tourniquet on and stayed with me for the three or four hours it took to get back to base. An engine was on fire. Joe put the fire out and we lost a second engine. He brought it back, we landed, and I was brought to the hospital. They repaired my arm. I was on the operating table for eight hours. I didn’t wake up for 72 hours due to an overdose of pentothal, which was the drug they used in those days.

  Ken Carlson holds up the flak fragment that nearly took off his right arm.

  While I was in the hospital, our plane had 150 holes in it [to be patched up], and the crew was given a leave to go to London and relax. Joe came in and brought this piece of flak to me. [It had been lodged] in the instrument panel and it had a piece of my wire suit and my blood on it. So it took part of my arm and then went on to demolish part of the instrument panel. Joe said to me, ‘Sorry you are so unlucky, Navigator. We’re going to miss you’, because there was no way I was going to fly again.

  They came back from leave to fly the repaired airplane on the next mission, and they flew and they never came back. The crew next to them saw them explode, just like the Space Shuttle did on my 65th birthday. They were officially declared missing; [only] one parachute was seen coming out. For years I assumed they were missing rather than the fact that they were killed. About two years later, the government declared them killed in action. But up until about four or five years ago, [it was assumed that] there were no bodies ever recovered, because there was no indication otherwise. Then, through a German internet source, I discovered that they had been found by the Germans and were buried in a small German-occupied cemetery just north of Paris, but there were only body parts and one piece of wing that had a star on it. That was their identification. So they [turned out to be] in a cemetery in a little town northwest of Paris.

  That was the end of my combat career. My arm was repaired by a doctor who, by fate, I met thirty years later. When my hand began to contract again I was sent to an orthopedic man. As I was sitting across from him he was questioning me about where this had happened, and he was the doctor who originally had put my hand back together again. He was the only doctor in that hospital which had just opened the week before I was shot.

  The ‘Nine Old Men’

  When I came back from combat I was sent to a rehabilitation center in Pawling, NY. There we had the company of people like Lowell Thomas, the famous commentator, and Tom Dewey, [the former governor] and Norman Vincent Peale, who came over and played softball with us. So here we were with missing legs and arms, and we were called the ‘nine old men’. This was the wonderful part of convalescence, and they were great people.

  From there I was sent back to San Marcos as an instructor. All of us there would devote our time and energy to trying to tell people that what they learned in school would take them only so far. That what they needed to learn in combat was how to operate under conditions that were not classroom. That’s how we made most of our contribution to those people before they were sent to Japan.

  *

  When President Roosevelt died, I was an instructor in Houston on special assignment. Having been a ‘peacenik’ before the war, I would never have gone to war unless we were attacked by Germany. I had studied enough about World War I and understood there was no way in the world that America should get trapped in another European war with France and Britain, who had allowed Hitler to build himself into a dictator over ten years. So I was always an ‘America First’ person; Lindbergh was one of my heroes, saying, ‘Let’s take of America first’, and that is [originally] what my politics were.[14] Pearl Harbor changed all that. When I went to war and served Roosevelt, I was doing that coming from a family where my father thought Roosevelt was the worst thing that had ever happened to America, because [to my father], the free enterprise system was going to go down the pike. I would have tremendous arguments with him. I would say, ‘Look, the banks are closed and the Republicans have not done a thing, and this guy is doing something!’ I had a fondness for FDR, so when he died I was relieved because I was aware of the fact that he was a very ill man. I remember thinking, ‘Thank God that he lived to the point where he knew the war had been won.’ And he did know that, and I knew that. And I learned to have a tremendous respect for Harry Truman, who I didn’t know anything about prior to Roosevelt’s death.

  I think all of us who had been in combat felt that Harry Truman did the right thing, [when he decided to use the atomic bomb]. I was aware of the fact that Einstein, one of my heroes growing up, said that you have no idea what you are doing when you set off this weapon, that it is beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. I still think that politically at that point in time [to invade Japan] it would have been unconscionable as to the number of Americans that would have been killed, knowing that [the Japanese] would have fought, as they did in the islands, to the last man. And I had to put it all into perspective—and this is the thing people, including my own children who are in their fifties, don’t understand—is that when we dropped bombs on Berlin and other cities I understood that not only did we hit our target, we also killed hundreds of thousands of women and children. But at the same time there were nights when I sat in a bomb shelter in England with a woman and her child right next to me while Germans were dropping bombs on England. So I saw it both ways. I was in a bomb shelter seeing the horror those women were going through and remembered that Hitler had been doing this to England for a year without any real target—he had just leveled London and Coventry. So in doing what I did, it seemed that what I was trapped into had nothing to do with soldiers. It had to with civilizations and cultures, so whatever it takes is what a president has to do. So I thought that Harry Truman made the right decision, one that I would have made. And I would have taken the bomb [to the target] had I been the navigator. I would have had no problem delivering the bomb.

  *

  I had enough points to get out so in September of 1945, I was sent to Fort Dix, NJ and that was the end of my Air Force career. I resigned my commission at the beginning of the Korean War; I felt that I was no longer young enough or capable enough to keep up with the modern technology to be of use to the government in Korea.

  [After the war, I did not go to reunions.] I had lost my crew and it was something I didn’t talk about for many years. I had no desire to go back and share memories with crews that had su
rvived. It wasn’t until much later that I decided to do this book for reasons that it would be helpful to young people in understanding what World War II was like. Not so much understanding it in its entirety, but how it affected individual people’s lives. It wasn’t until then that I had any real reason to try and recapture people who had been there. Then I joined what is called the 8th Air Force Historical Society. And through that I have maintained contacts at both the national level and at the local level in New York City. I found that very rewarding.

  [I think my time in the military affected me] in a very dominant way. People talk about religion and believing in something; the moment of truth comes to you. I was raised and schooled in the Christian church. I don’t go to church anymore, but I do have the faith that came to me when this piece of flak hit me. There was just no question in my mind that I was coming home, and that I was going to be safe and go to work and just do the job that I had to do. It is a feeling that has stayed with me all my life. So, from that standpoint, there is no fear. So many people today seem to be afraid of so many things. The fear of doing things or fear of failing has never been with me since I left the service. I have continued to look at my own life as one of missions, a series of missions and not just adventures, and it has worked for me.

  Meeting the Enemy

  After the war I was lucky enough to be able to open my own business on Madison Ave. doing advertising, marketing and public relations. I started with Milton Bradley, the game company, and helped make them very successful. And for my second client I had the opportunity to make a presentation to BMW motorcycles and cars. Here was a German company and 33 other organizations were making [potential sales] presentations. I flew to Munich to meet the director of BMW. In talking with him after making my pitch presentation, he asked me where I was during the war. I said I was in the 8th Air Force bombing Germany. He said he wanted to show me what we did to Munich. He drove me out to a park and he said they had to bulldoze all of Munich out here and raze everything. So I pulled out my piece of flak and asked him if he knew what that was. He said, ‘Jah, German 88.’ I said, ‘This went into my right arm and almost took it off, and another one on its next mission went into my airplane, and my whole crew blew up.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You see this missing ear lobe? American .50 caliber machine gun bullet.’ From that moment on, we would drink together and he would say, ‘We should have been on the same side. The Russians were the enemy.’ But I reminded him that they had a little guy with a mustache named Hitler. Then he said, ‘What could we do? We had Hitler and you had Roosevelt.’ See, in his mind it made no difference; to him, in either case we had to do what our leaders said. Anyway, he became a good friend and I did get the account. I became very successful. I drove the first BMW that came in from Munich for $2,300, drove it to Maine, wrote the marketing plan, and you know the rest.

  Later, in working on a consulting job with the game company Milton Bradley in the 1970s, I had to go to Tokyo. In another marketing company I met a man who told me he was the last kamikaze pilot. I said, ‘What do you mean, you were the last kamikaze pilot?’ It was the last day of the war, and he was on a suicide mission to crash his plane into an American ship. Halfway there he decided he didn’t have enough fuel and turned back. He said he got back, and the war was over. He was seventeen! So I had met the head of BMW who had been an SS trooper, and had met the last kamikaze pilot during my business career.

  It has been a fun trip. In 1972 when I retired from business, the war then had become the war on drugs. By 1972 it was a problem in all of the high schools in New York or Maine, or wherever. President Nixon had declared war on cancer and then a war on drugs, so most of my effort has been talking to people in the school systems and helping young people in finding some kind of career guidance. That is my current war. When I work with young people in the school systems, both public and private, I try to use the book ‘High Honor’. I talk further about the drug problem and why the war on drugs is so vital to the future of this country; that word ‘honor’ is difficult to define, not just in reference to World War II but easy to understand when read in relation to what the Founding Fathers said when they signed the Declaration of Independence. The final sentence said, ‘And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’ My chapter is entitled ‘Borrowed Time’, and in that chapter there is a photo of me and my crew taken in 1943. [Pointing out crew]—Frank Caldwell was the bombardier, from Anderson, IN; ‘Johnny’ Johnson, the co-pilot, from Houston, TX; Joe Roznos, the pilot, my greatest friend, from Hollywood, CA; ‘Wally’ Waldmann, waist gunner, from Houston, TX; Hal McNew, waist gunner, from Montana; Ed Miller, tail gunner, from Wyoming; Frank Dinkins, the engineer; John Rose, ‘Rosie’, our ball turret gunner—he could shoot a squirrel, or a German fighter pilot, from his shoulder or his waist, it didn’t make any difference; and Cleo Pursifull, our radioman. He is the one that came to help me and fainted. And he failed to go on that last mission. He had just had enough.

  The thing that haunts me is that I can’t put a face to the guy who replaced him. He was an 18-year old Jewish kid named Henry Vogelstein from Brooklyn. It was his first and last mission. And when you think about it, an 18-year old boy was put as a replacement in a crew that he did not know; we were an all Christian crew. We all had our little New Testament that the Air Force gave us and he would have been given an Old Testament. He made his only mission with a crew of strangers. Now that’s bravery!

  We all want to be free, but very few of us want to be brave. For all of us to be free, a few of us must be brave, and that is the history of America.

  Earl Morrow, first row, far left and his B-17 bomber crew. 1944.

  Source: Earl Morrow

  chapter Eight

  The Pilot

  Earl Montgomery Morrow was born on June 27th, 1921 in West Pawlet, Vermont. His father, a school teacher, decided to take up farming across the border in Washington County, New York.

  Earl first came on my radar when he called me up twenty years ago, having heard of my interest in World War II veterans and their stories. ‘I just had to call you, and ask—why are you doing this?’ Why are you interested in our stories?’ Later, he would be a frequent victory to my classroom, and I even got to introduce him to the granddaughter of the man who liberated him, General George Patton. I would also be invited to sit with him and two other B-17 veterans at his dining room table as they reunited after many years to swap stories of the day they were shot down and their prisoner of war experience, to be detailed in the sequel to this book.

  This interview was recorded in 2009 when Earl was 88 years old in the rural farmhouse he grew up in, B-17 memorabilia and photographs adorning the walls.

  ***

  Duties of the Pilot

  Your assignment to the B-17 airplane means that you are no longer just a pilot. You are now an airplane commander, charged with all the duties and responsibilities of a command post.

  You are now flying a 10-man weapon. It is your airplane, and your crew. You are responsible for the safety and efficiency of the crew at all times--not just when you are flying and fighting, but for the full 24 hours of every day while you are in command.

  Your crew is made up of specialists. Each man -- whether he is the navigator, bombardier, engineer, radio operator, or one of the gunners -- is an expert in his line. But how well he does his job, and how efficiently he plays his part as a member of your combat team, will depend to a great extent on how well you play your own part as the airplane commander.

  Get to know each member of your crew as an individual. Know his personal idiosyncrasies, his capabilities, his shortcomings. Take a personal interest in his problems, his ambitions, his need for specific training.

  See that your men are properly quartered, clothed, and fed. There will be many times, when your airplane and crew are away from the home base, when you may even have to carry y
our interest to the extent of financing them yourself. Remember always that you are the commanding officer of a miniature army -- a specialized army; and that morale is one of the biggest problems for the commander of any army, large or small.

  Crew Discipline

  Your success as the airplane commander will depend in a large measure on the respect, confidence, and trust which the crew feels for you. It will depend also on how well you maintain crew discipline.

  Your position commands obedience and respect. This does not mean that you have to be stiff-necked, overbearing, or aloof. Such characteristics most certainly will defeat your purpose. Be friendly, understanding, but firm. Know your job; and, by the way you perform your duties daily, impress upon the crew that you do know your job. Keep close to your men, and let them realize that their interests are uppermost in your mind. Make fair decisions, after due consideration of all the facts involved; but make them in such a way as to impress upon your crew that your decisions are to stick. Crew discipline is vitally important, but it need not be as difficult a problem as it sounds. Good discipline in an air crew breeds comradeship and high morale, and the combination is unbeatable.