I’m sitting there with Grayboy and I said, ‘I’m not afraid of flying and I don’t think I’m going to get killed. If I thought I was going to get killed, I’d stop flying.’ It was a voluntary thing and if you really wanted to get out of it without going through any nonsense, just walk into headquarters and punch the officer right in the mouth. You want a nice place to eat and sleep where it’s nice and safe? They give you a nice little cage. You just walk in and pop him in the nose. And they say what did you do that for and you say, ‘I don’t know, just don’t like officers’. The MPs will take you away.
I said to him, ‘I don’t think I want to fly your last mission because I really don’t know if I’m going to have to bail out’, which I didn’t look forward to, ever. If I had to bail out and I float down to Germany, they’re not going to look lightly upon me. I’m not a woodsy kind of guy, I’m not going to be able to run through the woods and eat the berries. I would probably end up being in some stalag someplace. ‘So now, Grayboy, think of this—I’m in a stalag somewhere, and you are now me. Being me you have to fly the balance of my missions, you have to answer my mother’s mail that’s coming in, my girlfriend’s mail that’s coming in and when the war is over and they come and get me out of that prison, do you honestly think they’re going to give me a hero’s welcome?’ I will be AWOL, as simple as that. ‘I’ll go from a German prison to an American prison, for a couple of bucks, I won’t do it.’ He got on the plane, I put him on the plane with a bottle of Scotch, he was drunk; he flew his last mission. He was as nutty as a fruitcake.
Patches
Let me tell you about my time on Patches. There was a plane called ‘Patches’ and they should have made a memorial to that plane; they renamed it ‘Patches’ because it had literally over 100 flak holes in it. It flew at a tilt, which was funny. It sounds silly but it seemed like one of the wings went just slightly out of tilt. If you managed to get Patches, if Patches was assigned to you, you knew you were coming home; I flew home in that plane. Nobody’s going to take that plane down, that was a good luck plane.
[When it was about time to come] home, before I got onto Patches, the adjutant officer in the squadron said I would fly with him and I would fly in the nose on the B-24. We didn’t know where we were going to go, we had no idea whether we were going to go to India or we were going to go home, but they said we’re going to have to do some navigational flights. I’m [going to be] flying in the nose and first we’re supposed to go up to the tip of Scotland, turn around, and come back and land. I’m in the nose, there’s no more Germans—by the way, all the Nazis died, they disappeared, there wasn’t a Nazi left in Germany. [Joking] I assure you, the United Nations knows this for a fact, they all went to Sweden. Anyway, something hit my eyes, sunlight, I was resting, I was probably asleep, nothing to do because they’re nothing to see. I see sunlight, a rim of sunlight, and we’re supposed to not be flying at night but up there it’s always very bright. I look forward and I see nothing but water, look to my left, water, look to my right, water. We are no longer over Scotland. This I knew, you don’t have to be a bright boy to know that Scotland is not inundated with water. This is the North Sea or the Atlantic Ocean or God-knows-what. I turn my head around and the navigator, I have no idea who he was—it wasn’t my old navigator—he was sound asleep. True story, not a joke. In the B-24 from that angle you could see up into where the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats were and both of them were out like this [closes eyes, stretches legs]; they were relaxed, they were asleep. Now the rest of the guys in the back, I don’t know what the hell they were doing, they were playing cards or they were asleep, who knows what. I put my hand to my throat mike and I said in a very low quiet controlled voice, ‘Hi, is there anybody in this aircraft that’s awake? I don’t want to upset anybody but is there anybody in this aircraft…’ Then the fun started. The pilot yelled to the co-pilot, ‘You were supposed to be flying, you were supposed to be.’ They had it on ‘George’, George is the automatic pilot and we were flying out to God-knows-where. The navigator woke up and they were yelling at one another and I’m saying to myself, ‘What a bunch of fuck-ups.’ This to me wasn’t practice, practice, practice, this was screw up, screw up, screw up.
Now we get down on the ground and I don’t know how many days went by but this [new] pilot said to me, ‘Richard,’ by the way he was a decent guy, he called me Richard. He said, ‘Richard, do you have a wife?’ I said, ‘No sir, I do not.’ ‘Do you have a real girlfriend that you want to get home to?’ I’d only been overseas for a couple of months, I said, ‘No, I don’t mind.’ And he said, ‘Look, I’ve got a young pilot that is willing and who wants very much to fly the nose to come home, he’s married, he wants to see his wife. I’ll get you on somebody else’s crew.’ Because he was the adjutant, he could do all this paperwork. I said, ‘Okay, but please, no boats, I’ve had it with the boats, I don’t want to go on another boat.’ He said, ‘No, I’ll get you on another crew.’ And that’s how I got onto Patches again.
Let’s move ahead. I get home, I get fifteen or thirty days [furlough], and I get back to this airfield, the war is still going on in Japan. Some of my buddies came over and they grabbed me and they said, ‘How the hell did you get out?’ I said, ‘Out of what?’ The adjutant went down in the drink [in the other plane]. I said, ‘That’s the way it goes, that’s the way it goes.’ So sometimes you get lucky.
Let me tell you one last thing. When I finally got home—not swimming the Atlantic—I was asked by a nice corporal, ‘Sergeant, I have to ask you, would you like to fly against the Japanese?’ I couldn’t believe anybody would ever ask me that question, ever. He said, ‘Now you have enough combat hours, you don’t have to fly against the Japanese.’ I said, ‘Thank you very much, you’ve made my mother very happy. I would like very much to walk around in my Class A uniform with my ribbons, my wings, chase after all the girls that you’ve been chasing. That’s what I want to do.’ Then I tried to get out of the Army and that was next to impossible.
The war was over, I wanted to go home. I did what I was supposed to do, I volunteered, it’s over. Just send me home.
Martin Bezon, World War II.
chapter Ten
The Radar Man
In researching this book, I came across Martin ‘Hap’ Bezon of Port Henry on Lake Champlain, just to the north of Hometown USA, and about 110 miles north of Albany, New York. Near here is a statue to Samuel De Champlain, who came down the lake from New France (Canada) in 1609. Martin’s grandparents emigrated from Poland; little did he know that he would find himself unexpectedly there during the war, trying to convince advancing Red Army soldiers not to shoot him after bailing out of his B-24 Liberator. This interview was given at his home in 2012 when he was 90 years old.
***
There is one man in particular who is supposed to know all there is to know about this equipment. Sometimes he does, but often he doesn't. And when the radio operator's deficiencies do not become apparent until the crew is in the combat zone, it is then too late. Too often the lives of pilots and crew are lost because the radio operator has accepted his responsibility indifferently.
Radio is a subject that cannot be learned in a day. It cannot be mastered in 6 weeks, but sufficient knowledge can be imparted to the radio man during his period of training in the United States if he is willing to study. It is imperative that you check your radio operator's ability to handle his job before taking him overseas as part of your crew. To do this you may have to check the various departments to find any weakness in the radio operator's training and proficiency and to aid the instructors in overcoming such weaknesses.
Training in the various phases of the heavy bomber program is designed to fit each member of the crew for the handling of his jobs. The radio operator will be required to:
Render position reports every 30 minutes.
Assist the navigator in taking fixes.
Keep the liaison and command sets properly tuned and in good operating order.<
br />
Maintain a log.
In addition to being a radio operator, the radio man is also a gunner. During periods of combat he will be required to leave his watch at the radio and take up his guns. The radio operator who cannot perform his job properly may be the weakest member of your crew -- and the crew is no stronger than its weakest member.
—Duties and Responsibilities of the Airplane Commander and Crewmen, 1943[23]
***
Martin Francis Bezon
‘The Black Cloud Arrived’
I was born on November 8th, 1921, here in Port Henry. As a matter of fact, the house that used to be at the foot of this hill is where I was born. I attended the Champlain Academy Parochial School kindergarten through 8th grade and I went to the Port Henry High School and I graduated from there in June of 1941.
I went to work for Republic Steel. I had hopes of stepping out in the world and getting a better job, but this job was available. So, we started working at fifty-five cents an hour, but come December the 7th of the same year—‘41—the black cloud [arrived]; the Japs attacked us at Pearl Harbor and it changed my whole life around.
I was walking up to the village and somebody stopped and said the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The full force of that didn’t hit me yet, but I got home and got the news and all that, and I realized that it wouldn’t be long before we’d get in the war too. As a matter of fact, it was the next day that Roosevelt [asked Congress to] declare war.
So I waited a little bit then I went to Albany right away to enlist and I joined the Marine Corps. They said okay, they’ll accept us—there were three of us there—but we have to get home and have my folks sign some papers.
I was still seventeen, too young. I came home and found my father sick. My mother was alone and my brother was in the 3rd year of high school here and the doctor here says, ‘No way are you going to the service yet, because the responsibility of the entire family is on your shoulders.’ I tried to talk to my mother and the doctor, but they said no. So that fell through.
I waited and worked for Republic. Eventually, I just couldn’t take no more and told my mother that I got to go in. In December, I went back to Albany and signed up because they dropped the requirements for the Army Air Force Cadet Program. There was no Air Force at the time. It was part of the US Army Signal Corps. So, it was the US Army Air Force. I signed up with them when the dropped the requirements to high school graduate. This would be in ‘42So, they gave me the physical and the complete tests like they did everybody— physical and what-not. I was told. I went down to join the Air Force and they asked me, ‘Are you anxious to get back in?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come back tomorrow. I just need to go home for a day’. They said, ‘Alright, I’ll give you some advice’—this is a sergeant—he says, ‘We’ll accept you as an Air Force reservist and as soon as the cadet class opens up, they’ll put a call out and they’ll look into the reservists first’. He says ‘If you really want to get in quick, I’d advise you to get in on the next draft that you can and join the Army Service and get in the Army. When the call comes out for cadets, they will first take the ones who are on active duty first.’ So I said, ‘Oh gee, I’ll do that’.
So as we left Albany, we didn’t even come home. We stopped in Ticonderoga because [for us], that’s where the draft board main office was. We stopped up and went into Mr. McLaughlin’s office and he looked up and said, ‘What can I do for you boys?’ I said, ‘We’d like to get into the next draft, sir.’ He said, ‘Great, I need three more men.’ He stamped three forms and said, ‘Be back here tomorrow morning.’ So, the next day, I went back to Albany and he said to tell them that you were a reservist in the Air Force and that you wanted to join the Air Force. So, we got examined. They lined us up on the street and raised our right hand to take the oath of allegiance that we’d be in the Army. Then I didn’t even have a chance to ask to be assigned to the Air Force. They just announced that anybody who wants to join the Air Force, to take one step forward.
So, I stepped forward with a guy who later became my brother-in-law, but eventually he dropped. He got a little leery of being up in the air so far. I went in and went to Camp Upton at Long Island. I was there for about three days and shipped out of there to Camp Croft south of Spartanburg, South Carolina. I kind of joined an empty training. I went through six weeks of basic and seven weeks of advanced. They tried to keep me in as a sharpshooter but I said, ‘No, I’m waiting for the Air Force’. I had to wait a couple of weeks and then the call came out. I was happy that we were picked out of, I think, eight of us. Before we left, three of the boys didn’t pass. So three of us did go from Camp Croft to Nashville, Tennessee. We had one week of written tests and one week of physicals. I was accepted into the cadet program then. There were just two of us left.
‘As Long As I Fly’
Even though I qualified for pilot and navigator, I was asked to be a bombardier; they needed bombardiers badly. They were building a huge armada of bombers and they said they were getting ready to just bomb Germany off the face of the map. So I said, ‘It makes no difference as long as I fly.’ They promised when I put in a tour and came back that they would put me into pilots’ school.
We were wound up training and went to Santa Ana, California for preflight. They had our curtains closed [on the train] because they said we were too valuable; we were the cream of the crop that they could pick. We weren’t allowed to raise the curtains on the train until we got way out around Arizona out in the desert. Then we headed north. Everybody was guessing where we were going. We were headed northeast rather west; we were going to Chicago or something. Nope. Then we headed south and then headed back east. We crisscrossed the country that way until we got out to Arizona. Then the officer in charge comes through and raised curtains now and said, ‘You guys are going to Santa Ana, California for preflight.’ I remember that there was quite a ‘whoop’. They all liked that idea. So we went to training up there.
I think it was about six weeks. I remember a sergeant coming in the barracks one time and he said, ‘How many people have never flown in a plane?’ I thought I was going to be embarrassed that I would be the only one standing, but there was quite a few of them stood up. So, we all got a ride in a plane to get the feel of it.
On weekends, we went to Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Long Beach. It used to be that every Friday night there used to be about fifty buses outside the gate to take the cadets wherever they wanted to go.
When we finished preflight, we were sent to Kingman, Arizona for air to air gunnery. That was a seven week course out in the desert. You had to shoot the .50 caliber machine guns way up in the air. You can imagine how far those projectiles would go.
We had different types of training. We had a huge screen coming over for a machine gun that fired only BBs. There was thousands of BBs fall back and they would just put them back in. Then you would have planes going across and you would try to hit them. Then we were on the shotgun range every day. We had to fire fifty rounds of 12-gauge shotgun at clay pigeons going through the air—some going one way and some the other. That, I loved too.
The final week, we had to fire from the back side of a pickup truck. The guy shooting was tied down so he wouldn’t fall and you had two men with you. So, as you went around the track at, I believe, 30 miles per hour, they had underground cement places that they made with the front secure so you couldn’t get hurt or anything. It had a small slit in it and you looked through the slit. When you see a truck coming and hit a certain spot, you just lean back and pull the thing there which throws it out. You had to work that for the other crews that came on. It was hard to hit with you moving with the target coming at you and going away from you—going to the right and going to the left, going straight up. If you got six or seven hits you were lucky.
But the last day, I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t miss—just couldn’t miss. I know a lot of the boys from the city, they didn’t know how to fire a weapon so they used to keep it loose. When that r
ecoiled, it would hit them. The rest of us, it would just push us. So they were black and blue all over the arm and the chest. This one guy he couldn’t fire anymore, his shoulder hurt so bad. You’re not supposed to do that. So, I fired mine. I couldn’t believe it. I think I got 21 out of 25. We got through with gunnery, passed and got the certificate as ‘Air to Air’ gunners and then we were given a seven-day furlough.
We headed down to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We got our advanced bombardier course. There we learned all about the Norden bombsight.[24] We learned everything about the ins and outs, and made our practice runs. We flew AT-8’s on a bombing run. I had a close call there. After we got through and everything was good, we had time on our hands. The pilots liked to fly up through the canyons. One time we saw one plane coming out while we’re going in. We had enough room but in the planes you don’t know. So, as they were ready to pass they both flipped over and flew by. It turned out good—no problem.
We did have one man killed. One of our cadets was killed on training. A couple had to bail out.
We enjoyed our weekends in Albuquerque. Sunday we had to come back because every Sunday they had a huge parade and everybody on that base had to be in that parade even the KPs, no matter who it was. If you were on toward the tail end of the parade, you had to stand out there for a few hours, just standing [at attention] for your turn to go. It took that long—at least two hours before the last few would get to march. Whoever was picked the best would get an afternoon off to go to town at twelve noon the next Friday instead of five o’clock. Finally, we got close one day, we felt we were going to make it. We came out there and everything was good. Then they gave ‘eyes right’ and we did, but there was a little Italian guy who had a little bit too much to drink the night before. He snapped his head right and his hat flew off and he stooped to picked it up. They gave us a good mark, but it kicked us out of first place! But, we graduated—graduated as 2nd lieutenants. This was January of ’44.
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