March 17, 1999
My view of World War Two
S/Sgt. Lewis T. Haas
452 Bombardment Group (H)
730th Bombardment Squadron
Tail Gunner/Armorer
On a B-17 Heavy Bomber
Served from Dec., 1942 to Dec., 1945
On to England
While we were in Grand Island, Christmas 1943 arrived. The bombardier’s
wife and mother came and rented a suite in the best hotel and took over
the hotel café and threw a party for us. Turkey and all the trimmings.
Pretty neat, we had the place to ourselves with plenty of waitresses to go
around. After the meal we went upstairs to the suite, they had a tub
full of champagne on ice, a decorated Christmas tree and presents for
each of us. We all got pretty well plastered and had a real good time.
The Heims were pretty well off and they were very generous to the crew.
We voted on a name for the plane at that time. We named it Bad Check in
the hopes it would bounce back, it turned out there was no bounce to it.
Heim had a little boy named Peter who was about Ken’s age.
We were only at Grande Island for a few days; they filled the tanks in
the bomb bays with gas and the rest of the plane with K-rations and
personal gear. They only allowed us fifty rounds of ammo per gun since
we were heavily loaded. I can’t believe they expected us to fight off
the Luftwaffe with fifty rounds, that was about enough to shoot ourselves
with. We left Nebraska and hit a few more bases hoping to find a dorsal
fin, but no luck. So we left for overseas, we were flying alone. First
stop was Presque Isle Maine, then Goose Bay, Labrador; Iceland; Prestwick,
Scotland; and finally our base at Deophan Green England.
The base in England was new, in fact they were in the process of building
part of it. We lived in Nissan huts, a smaller version of Quonset, two
enlisted crews to each one, or in other words, twelve men to a hut. We had
the usual metal cot for sleeping; a freestanding locker for clothes and
a footlocker for underwear, socks, and miscellaneous personal things. The
nearest thing to our base I’ve seen in the movies is in Reunion in
Fairborough. It also has some good combat footage in it. A lot of the
combat footage is Luftwaffe film. Anyway it was the way I remember
combat. Chow was not all that great, powdered egg, milk, powdered
everything, half the time we skipped chow and ate K-rations, which were
also lousy. On mission mornings they fed us good, real eggs real
everything. In other words the condemned men ate a hardy meal.
Shortly after we got there the cleaners burned down and both Jeff and Cast lost
their dress uniforms. They gave us a three day pass to go to London, but
I had no big desire to go anyplace, and besides I thought there would be
lots of time to see London, so I loaned Jeff my dress uniform and Cast
borrowed one someplace and off they went. I never saw London except from
the air. We didn’t last long enough to get any more three-day passes. The
only time I got off the base was a three-day skeet shooting practice at
the North Sea. We went in convoy and passed through a few English
villages. About the only thing that impressed me was the windows, they
were so clean they shone. We had a lot of sabotage on the base, control
cables cut half way through. They would check out okay when the pilots
tested them on the ground, but when they tried to take off with a full
fuel and bomb load, the controls would break and the ship would crash
killing all hands.
Our first mission was a milk run into France. We didn’t lose any planes
from our group, but some were shot down by flack in the other groups. We
didn’t know what we were bombing, it turned out to be V-2 launch
platforms. Mission number two was Frankfurt, Germany, a long hard mission,
which I find no record of our being in that raid. We were an unlucky
crew, they couldn’t even get our records straight. We lost our colonel
that day, I was in the same interrogation center at Frankfurt a little
later. I was in the same solitary confinement building as he was. I
never saw him but I heard he was there.
Then came the Brunswick mission, our third and last. I wonder if some
of the men had a premonition that morning, things went a little different than usual.
Of course we weren’t all that experienced in combat, so maybe it was nerves.
The first thing I noticed, or at least paid attention to, was Spieler was a little slow
getting up. No one paid any attention until Shultz said “What’s the
matter? Yellow,” then Spieler jumped up and dressed. The remark was
uncalled for, Spieler was not yellow and it was awful early in the
morning, about three. No one called Shultz on it, we were all scared and
nervous. I don’t know, several things happened I can’t remember now, but
one thing I do remember was we were on the hard stand all set to go, in
fact Tiska had run up the engines and the usual pre flight checks. He
throttled down and the first thing I knew he was standing outside my window.
I opened up and he wished me good luck and shook hands. I suppose he
did it to the whole crew, I couldn’t see what was going on up forward
too much stuff stacked behind me. Any way it was different.
Just every thing went wrong that day ,it was foggy as hell, visibility was
practically nil. I had an Aldous Lamp in the tail with me to signal with.
An Aldous Lamp is a sort of spot light that shoots out a real bright
beam. Since visibility was so poor the next ship in line could not see
when we were air borne, so my job was to signal as soon as I felt the
ship leave the runway. I had to signal our call sign, I think V, but am
not sure, seems like it was dah dah dit, or dit dit dah whatever. Our
takeoff was delayed because before our turn a ship exploded on takeoff.
This made it so the group was divided and we had a hard time finding our
flight. I suppose the crash was caused by sabotage, we had a fair amount
of that. One of the favorite methods was to saw the control cables half
way through. When the pilot would check his controls everything would
seem fine, but the strain on the cables on take off, heavily loaded, would
cause them to break and, bingo, that’s all she wrote. So ten more men
bought the farm. That crash is not mentioned in the records for the
tenth, but neither is a midair collision and I know damn well I didn’t
imagine that one. Our group sent up twenty three ships according to the
group de-briefing. Five of these aborted, Eighteen crossed the Channel.
Of the eighteen, five were lost, four of them close to where we went down.
In fact so close that the Germans had a hard time finding which ship the
bodies belonged to. Of course from twenty six thousand feet bodies and
debris gets scattered over a large area. Still with every ship losing
men it must have been fairly gruesome in that area.
(Continued on the next page.)
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