WWII Heroes: We Were Just Doing Our Jobs

by Minton, Linda E.

  Vernon Bothwell Sr. – US Army Air Corp

  “I have seen fear. I have been scared to death.”

  In June 1941 Vernon enlisted in the US Army Air Corp while still a senior in high school. His only stipulation was that he had to wait, until the Indianapolis 500 was run in May, before he left for duty.

  Who won the race that year?

  He said automatically, “Mauri Rose.”

  One of Vernon’s best quotes was, “I did everything in the war, but I liked flying airplanes best.”

  Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

  Vernon graduated from mechanics school on December 7, 1941. “We were watching Sergeant York at the post theater. It turned off; someone came up on the stage and said the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor—we are now at war. Everything really changed after that. It used to be that people didn’t think much of someone in the military. Well, after war was declared, people respected you. We would get the weekends off, and I would try to thumb a ride and would eventually get a ride. After Pearl Harbor people would give you rides. We all got together behind the people who were in the service. It was one hundred percent backing.”

  To be able to fly, he had to complete many hours of training at various locations in the United States. First was Maxwell Field in Alabama on December 25, 1941. Vernon said they had a big feast that night, since it was Christmas. “There were things there that I didn’t normally eat, like oysters on the half shell. I’m a kid from Indiana, and we were all poor.” There was a fifty-caliber machine gun attached to the hangar in case they were attacked.

  In March of 1942, he got the call to go to San Antonio to become a pilot. He was sent to San Antonio until June of 1942. He took primary training at Stanford, Texas, flying PT-19s; Brady, Texas, flying BT-13s; Lubbock, Texas, twin engine school, flying AT-9s and AT-17s and completing 200 hours of total time. Vernon got his wings on December 13, 1942, with the class of 42K.

  In the meantime, while he was stationed in Texas, Vernon married his first love. He wasn’t supposed to, but he married the very beautiful eighteen-year-old Parma Jane (Coleen). They went out two times, and then he married her. Her family was “dirt poor and as poor as church mice. Thirteen people lived in a three-room shack and a lean-to.” Her family were sharecroppers and a great family.

  North Africa and Sardinia

  Vernon flew forty missions from North Africa and Sardinia. Vernon was usually the copilot of the Martin B-26 planes. The B-26, built by the Glenn L. Martin Company, was not a well-liked airplane. Ominously, it had many nicknames, but one particularly painful one, the “widow maker.” However, it was a hard-working plane, and changes were made to it, so the B-26 continued in service in North Africa.

  Vernon mentioned that “some stupid pilots flew into a thunderstorm.” The planes went down, but all the crew were safe. “We never did find the airplanes!”

  “Twenty-six of us went to the transition place awaiting assignment,” said Vernon. “They didn’t know what to do with us, so they sent us home for two weeks. It was the Christmas of ‘42 when they sent us home. It was going to cost us two hundred forty-five dollars to go home, and I happened to have two hundred forty-five dollars because I played poker. I had a buddy, Perry, who didn’t have the money because I had taken all his money playing poker! So I felt sorry for him and wired my folks that I needed two hundred forty-five dollars to come home. They wired the money back, and I loaned it to Perry so he could go see his folks. Perry was killed on his first mission. At least he got to see his folks.”

  Finally Vernon got his orders to go to Omaha, Nebraska, and then overseas. The crew picked up a new airplane and had a naked woman painted on it. “It was a nice-looking woman anyway. Since the pilot was from Tennessee, they named it the Tennessee Belle. We got to Hunter Field, and they took our airplane away from us.” They stayed there for two weeks and finally got another airplane. “We didn’t put a picture on that one!”

  They went overseas on the southern route, going to Natel, Brazil, Gold Coast, Sahara Desert, Tinduerf Oasis, and a French Foreign Legion post. It rained for three days, and it hadn’t rained for twelve years. So the wine cellar the French had forgotten when they left collapsed. There was wine in that building, so some of the guys dug through it and drank the wine.

  French Morocco and Marrakech

  Finally they got out of there and went to Marrakech, which was a staging area for going to war. “They weren’t ready for us yet, so they sent us to French Morocco along the coast.”

  In French Morocco they had nice French barracks for about two weeks. There was a train station where the French were building a train track. Vernon turned twenty-one, and his buddies gave him a fifth of Old Grand-Dad whiskey. They bet him he couldn’t drink it all in one sitting. He said, “I bet I can!” He said he was “young, dumb, and lucky.” When he came to, “I had my arm around a nurse, and she was crying. Well, since I was drunk, I didn’t know why. I said I wouldn’t get that drunk again. I felt sorry for the nurse since she was crying.

  “Combat outfits would come in, and we would join in. I suddenly found out that my pilot could not fly formation. So we got turned down on the first two times that we came in. Then 17th Bomb Group, 95 Bomb squadron, came in, and we joined them at that time.” Vernon took over the aircraft, and they passed because in his previous training all they did was fly formation. “My pilot didn’t have this experience, so he didn’t know how to fly formation.”

  They went up to another place in North Africa, eventually moving up to Tunisia. They went into combat, joined an older crew, and were with them for three missions. In the meantime, on June 20, 1943, Vernon flew his first mission. As Vernon went on to explain, “We attacked the airfield on Sardinia. We bombed this airfield. Our unit destroyed six fighters that came in on our formation. We didn’t lose an airplane.”

  Vernon told another story of being “young, dumb, and lucky” when he shot some frogs with a forty-five pistol. He heard these frogs croaking while he was lying in bed beneath some palm trees. “Hey, I’m a kid from Indiana, and I have eaten frog legs all my life!” He had perhaps “a couple dozen frog legs” that he fried and ate. That night, after being asleep for three or four hours, he got cramps. He had dysentery and couldn’t leave his bed.

  He was put in a plane and taken to a doctor. He was put in a med tent, and a nurse gave him some pineapple juice because he was dehydrated. He spent four days in the med tent until he could walk.

  He couldn’t fly, so another copilot was sent to take his place on the next mission. On July 17, 1943, “the mission was near the leg of Italy where they had to fly over the Italian fleet. Italy was still at war with us at that time. My crew was on the right-hand side of the leader. He was the CO of the bomb group. He got shot down, and my crew got shot up, but nobody got hurt.”

  When they got back to Tunis and went to land, the wheels wouldn’t come down. So the pilot had to land wheels up. He did a fine job, and no one was injured. The plane had 113 holes in it. Talk about lucky!

  In two days Vernon was able to fly on a mission to bomb the airfield north of Rome. They had maximum effort on the mission, and “as they were coming in the Italians made a hit on us, but we had five fifty-caliber machine guns and obliterated the fighters that were making an attack. We went on in and bombed the airfields at Rome. About five hundred feet ahead of me, I saw this airplane flying upside down, in an inverted spin. The Italians had captured a P-38 in the desert, and they used it to attack our bombers.”

  How many missions did you fly until you could go home?

  It took Vernon six months to fly thirty missions. On a mission over Lire River Dam, there was lots of flak in the air. He looked over to his right and saw the turret gunner turn “blood and guts” right there in the air. “When I got back that night, lying in my bed, I thought this thing has been going on long enough. So what I am going to do is I’m going to volunteer for every mission by going in for spares.” That meant when someone fell out, another man could volun
teer to go in his place. “In seventeen days, I completed ten more missions, which gave me forty. When we got back off that mission that day, they said that they had upped the missions to sixty before you get to go home. But anyone who had their forty missions on that day would get to go home.” He said that this was another “young, dumb, and lucky” situation that he was involved in during his military career.

  He couldn’t fly home, so he went to Casablanca and went home by ship. It took him ten days to get home by ship. He was seasick all the time, but he got in a poker game and won $6,000, “which was a lot of money in those days!” He had been playing poker while he was in the service, and he would send all but twenty dollars home to his wife. He gambled with the twenty dollars he had left. By the time he got home, his wife had saved $9,000. “She was special,” said Vernon.

  While he was in Florida, he found out his dad, Alfred, age forty-two, had been drafted into the military as an MP while Vernon was gone overseas. Vernon served in Bartow, Florida for the duration of the war training pilots on P-51s. He and his wife rented a beautiful house for seventy-five dollars a month. By November 1945 the war was over, and he had enough points to muster out of the service. He bought a farm in Indiana and got a job making sixty-five cents an hour.

  Should the United States have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan?

  “Greatest thing that ever happened. If not, then another four hundred thousand of our generation and Japanese lives would have been lost.”

  Vernon said, “The only thing I didn’t like when I was in the service was when they were shooting at me. Nobody enjoyed that! I have seen fear. I have been scared to death.” Again, young, dumb, and lucky.

  Max A. Bates – US Navy

  “What those guys had to go through was terrible!”

  In 1943 Max, age seventeen, enlisted in the US Navy after he graduated from Ben Davis High School. On July 18, 1944, he left for the navy at age eighteen. He went to boot camp at Camp Peary, Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay. It is now a CIA base, as Max found out when he and his wife, Mary Ellen, tried to visit it after the war. He was told, “No deal. Turn around and leave!”

  Camp Peary was well known for the German POWs that were housed there during the war. “Some of the German prisoners were from captured German U-boats and ships,” said Max. “The Allies didn’t want the Axis powers to know that these prisoners were captured, so secret code books wouldn’t be compromised.”

  He went to radio man school in Bainbridge, Maryland, where he learned the universal code and to type, and graduated in five months. He took some advanced radio training in Newport, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts. He was based out of Boston while waiting for his ship, the USS Helena CA 75, a heavy cruiser, to be christened. All new ships are sent on “shakedown cruises” before they are accepted by the navy. A shakedown cruise is when a new ship sails for its first time. On this first sailing, the crew looks for potential problems involving the ship. On this cruise Max went to New York City, where there were festivities honoring military personnel; Philadelphia, where they fixed some problems on the ship; and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the soldiers practiced shooting at some drones.

  Battling a hurricane

  In September 1945 they were in a hurricane for four days while heading back to Boston. “This ship was rolling and pitching, so meals couldn’t be prepared,” said Max. “Some of the kids were sick, but I never was sick on the ship. Our meals, which were served two times a day, consisted of a tin of beef stew. It was the same for breakfast and dinner—beef stew!”

  Do you like beef stew today?

  “No. I could tolerate it, but I would prefer something else.

  “Next we headed to Europe. This was after the war, when we went on our goodwill cruise. We were making visits to different ports. We went to England, Scotland, around the Mediterranean Sea, and Gibraltar.

  “My points were up in March 1946. (Points were given for time spent in the military or flying a set number of missions. When soldiers reached the number necessary for them to be discharged, they could go home.) I left this ship at Exeter, England, where I stayed for three weeks.” He headed back to the United States on the SS Colby Victory. The SS Colby Victory, a Victory ship that was a cargo ship. The SS Colby Victory was named after Colby College in Waterville, Maine. We stopped in Bremerhaven, Germany, which is on the coast of Germany. We picked up some Army soldiers there who had been in the fighting in Europe. It took us nine days to get home.”

  There were poker games that went on aboard the ship. “Some guys had saved their money, since there wasn’t anything to spend their money on,” Max said. “There was this big poker game that went on in the mess hall. When the two meals a day were served, the men went up on deck and played craps.”

  Did you play in the poker game?

  “I didn’t play, just one of the many spectators.” The pay was twenty dollars every two weeks, and he spent most of his money on shore leave. So he didn’t have any money to play poker.

  Did anyone ever win a lot of money?

  “This one guy had a big pile of bills. As guys would lose their money and go broke, they would drop out and become spectators. Then other guys would take their place.”

  Was it good luck?

  In Newport, Rhode Island, Max was selected to be a radio man on the USS Indianapolis. He was to report to the West Coast, where the ship was docked following the run delivering the atomic weapons parts. He thought, This is great. I am from Indianapolis, and I am going to serve on the Indianapolis.

  However, he contracted what the navy called “cat fever.” Max said, “It was really just the flu.” In any case, the navy assigned another sailor to the Indianapolis, and Max didn’t serve on that ship. Knowing what happened to the USS Indianapolis, it was good luck for Max. He said, “What those guys had to go through was terrible!”

  Marriage and Children

  Max and Mary Ellen met at a friend’s wedding in Washington, Indiana. Six months later, in 1948, they were married. They were married for sixty-four years before Mary Ellen’s death. They had three children—two girls and one boy. Unfortunately, one of his daughters died from pneumonia following a bout of leukemia, and his son was killed in motorcycle accident. Max worked for Eli Lilly for twenty-five years, working with computers. He retired from Lilly in 1989.

  Ninetieth Birthday Present

  Max made the local news in July 2016 by announcing he wanted to jump out of an airplane for his ninetieth birthday. He skydived from the Frankfort Airport on his birthday, July 18. He said, “I have thought about it for several years.” When his honor flight guardian, Jill Fewell, asked him what he wanted to do for his ninetieth birthday, he said, “Let’s do it.” She set it up for him.

  Indy Honor Flight

  Max went on the Indy Honor Flight to Washington, DC. The local Indiana military and supporters put together special flights for vets to visit memorials in the Washington DC. He said he enjoyed it very much. It makes the vets feel special, and it is a way to repay them for the sacrifices they made for our country. He has a very nice keepsake book showing what went on while he was on the flight and during the events in Washington, DC.

  Tom Boyd—US Army Infantry

  “You always wanted to be behind the tanks.”

  In 1942 Tom, twenty-four years old, lived in Evansville, Indiana, when he was drafted into the service. Tom’s son, Jerry, was just walking when Tom left for the service. He spent two years, seven months, and eight days as a serviceman. He was assigned to the 14th Armored Division, 19th Infantry. He went in at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. An officer came around after a week and pinned a corporal band on Tom. In another two or three weeks, he was given his corporal stripes. He had been in the CCC, Maritime Service, and ROTC before going into the service, and these previous experiences helped him to be promoted quickly. “Three of the guys from Evansville all went in together” he said. “Two of them went into the infantry, and one guy was sent to Florida to take care of soldiers returning
with injuries and never left the States.”

  During cold Tennessee maneuvers, he found out some things about keeping his boots warm. “The winter in Tennessee, we found out, when you go to sleep, you want to keep them warm, or you aren’t going to get them on in the morning. You have to either sleep with them on or sleep with them beside you.” Tom said, “We stayed out in the weather. We were an angry and mean bunch of guys. We were ready. Actually, the army couldn’t have had better training for us. We were scheduled to go to desert training when they were fighting in North Africa; however, the tide turned, and they run the Germans out of there. Rommel was the German general there.”

  Marseille, France

  When Tom found out he was going to be in the infantry, he and another guy went in to see if they could transfer to another outfit. The only thing open was to be a paratrooper. “Well, I [was] not going to jump out of a plane,” he said. So he stayed in the infantry. However, his buddy joined the paratroopers. “When I got over to Marseille, France, I started to get off, and who do I see? This guy that transferred to the paratroopers. He said, ‘I knew you were coming.’ Now, how the heck did he know I was coming? He was right there to greet me when I got off the ship.”

  Tom told a story of a tank man from St. Louis. “There were a lot of sinkholes where we were staying. He got in one of the sinkholes to stay out of the weather. Well, that night it poured down rain. The next morning the sinkhole was just filling up with water. He and his assistant, Corporal Davis, both got out all right.”

  Tom didn’t know where he was going to be. In fact, “I was sick all the way over. We landed in Marseille, France, which is in southern France. Which is very fortunate, because we didn’t have to land on the beaches.

  “When we landed, one group of men went one way and another group of men went the other. We went up to the Maritime Alps and the Mediterranean. They had pretty women. We stayed up for a while. We had a lot of canon fire and heavy fire. It kept us busy up in the mountains, which I didn’t like at all.