Presentation Date: April 22, 2004
Gathering of B-24
LIBERATOR Bomber Crewmembers
Gathering of B-24 "LIBERATOR" Bomber Crewmembers: B-24 Co-Pilot James "Bob" Ware, B-24 Co-Pilot Owen Sullivan, B-24 Tail Gunner Denis Pontefract, B-24 Bombardier Peter Jansen.
1. B-24 Co-Pilot James "Bob" Ware
* 719th BS, 449th BG(H), 15th Air Force; MTO, Grettaglia, Italy
* Shot Down by Enemy Fire On 3rd Combat Mission Over Ploesti, Romania; POW
2. B-24 Co-Pilot Owen Sullivan
* 750th BS, 450th BG(H), 15th Air Force; Forced Bail-Out Over Slovakia
* Joined Partisans & Evaded Germans; Book "Within the Arms of the Village"
3. B-24 Tail Gunner Denis Pontefract
* RAF 356 Squadron, Consisting of Brits, Aussies & Canadians
* Salboni & India
4. B-24 Bombardier Peter Jansen
* 530th BS, 380th BG(H), 5th Air Force; South Pacific PTO
* 30 Combat Missions
"You can always tell a bombardier by the far away look in his eyes.
You can always tell a navigator by the pencils and slide rules in his pocket, and such.
You can always tell a pilot, but you can't tell him much."
- - Owen Sullivan, recalling a ditty about replacement crews posted in the ops shack
The four men who spoke at the March meeting of the Golden Gate Wing served as crewmembers aboard B-24 Liberators during World War II. Among their many, varied experiences, three of them bombed refineries, while the fourth dropped food to prisoner-of-war camps.
Co-Pilot James "Bob" Ware 719 Bomber Sq., 449 BG, 15th Air Force
Bob Ware was seeking work after graduating from high school in 1941. Jobs were beginning to open up as America was striving to be the Arsenal of Democracy, supplying arms to Great Britain and other allied nations. Through the National Youth Administration, Ware got a job repairing electrical aircraft instruments at Sacramento's McClellan Field. He soon found out about openings in the nearby bomb sight building, and was hired to work on the Honeywell automatic pilot, which helped the Norden bomb sight in delivering bombs on target.
Pearl Harbor led Bob to join the Army Air Corps, and he was called up to duty in February, 1943. In training, Ware says he chose bombers because he thought that would be a good fit with his experience working on automatic pilot equipment. Ware graduated in the class of 43K, and became a co-pilot before heading to Colorado Springs for phase training. Overseas, he was assigned to the 719th Bomb Squadron, 449th Bomb Group, based at Grettaglia, Italy. Bob recalls he was very quickly in the thick of the air war:
"They started us flying missions almost before we got our tent in order. We flew on one mission up to northern Italy and then we went to bomb the submarine pens in Toulon, France. The third one happened on the fifth of May, 1944, to Ploesti. When the operations officer announced that Ploesti was the mission, you heard a few moans." That reaction to a bomb raid on Ploesti proved to be well-founded. The 449th Bomb Group and the crew of Ware's B-24 had a painful experienced that day.
"We were attacked by eight fighters that came up right underneath us right after we'd dropped our bombs. The bomb bay doors were still open. They pretty well cut us to pieces. I'm pretty sure they killed our ball turret gunner in his turret. He's the one who made the announcement...'Bandits coming in at six o'clock l--'. He was going to say 'low', but nothing happened after the 'L' part of it. The ones in the rear of the airplane said the turret didn't move after that."
The attack took seconds, but it left the B-24 shattered. Ware says there was a wall of fire in the bomb bay area, the windshield on the flight deck was in splinters and the props on engines three and four were running wild, leaving no option but to feather them. The Liberator was rapidly losing altitude, and Ware says the pilot turned to him and said, "We've got to get out of here, Mac." Ware says he wasted no time putting on his parachute and making his way to the catwalk in the still open bomb bay doors. "Our nose gunner got out, but his chute didn't open. And I don't know what happened to the first pilot or the ball turret gunner. That's one of the sorrows of my life."
On the way down in his parachute, Ware says he was buzzed by a Messerschmitt. "When he dove on me I thought, well, this was probably it. But instead, he took a tight turn to the left - - I think a 360 degree turn - - and then waggled his wings as he flew off." Ware landed about 100 yards from a German flak gun, and was worried he might accidently float in front of the gun as it fired. Instead, the wind blew him backwards, leading to an awkward landing.
"I was going backwards that day and took an awful thud on the back of the head. Two Germans from the shack near that flak gun emplacement ushered me to the shack and offered me some ersatz coffee, which I didn't take because I thought they wanted to poison me. They then brought a straw tick and put it in the corner of the shack and I laid down there. I was in a state of shock, my neck was hurting and I was shivering, I'm sure. A young German spread his great big, steel grey overcoat over me. That was the second kindness that day by the enemy, and it made me think that... wars are between nations, but you still have that human spirit of kindness under certain circumstances... and maybe something will help us in the future."
Ware was interrogated the next day by an Oxford-educated German officer who was very knowledgeable. But when the interrogator was unable to get the downed flier to talk, two soldiers drove Ware to some Rumanian interrogators who also failed to elicit any response. By day's end, Ware had been trucked to Bucharest, with stops along the way to pick up other American crewmen from downed B-24s.
Ware spent the next four months as a POW. He was liberated August 23, 1944, and witnessed part of a colorful story. A Rumanian pilot named Captain Koziny flew the top ranking American officer, Col. James A. Gunn, to Italy, so Gunn could arrange for transportation for the POWs.
"They put Col. Gunn in the fuselage of a Messerschmitt. They painted it with stars and stripes on each side and Captain Koziny flew Col. Gunn to Foggia. A week later they brought B-17s over to pick us up. It was done that way because the Germans still controlled the communications and airfields at the time we were liberated."
In groups of 20, the POWs climbed aboard the bombers. Ware says they'd put plywood in the bomb bays, and they didn't waste any time before the planes were loaded and they took off for Italy, where General Nathan Twining of the 15th Air Force met them.
Tail Gunner Denis Pontefract RAF 356 Squadron
Englishman Denis Pontefract flew Tiger Moths and the Airspeed Oxford in training before he volunteered to be an Air Gunner, which sent him packing to Scotland for training in Avro Ansons with Polish pilots, who spoke little if any English. "If you're Air Gunnery, you know, four gunners go up. You paint all your bullets different colors and shoot at a drogue," Denis explained. Then he told about the risks he experienced in gunnery training using only a camera gun. "It wasn't my plane - - but one of these Polish pilots was a little too enthusiastic. He flew in and hit the Anson. It was the only time I know where a Polish pilot got shot down with a camera gun. There weren't any bullets."
Denis remembers only one mid-air collision but many close calls on the simulated attacks. He got his gunner's wings and was sent to Scotland to sail on the HMS Queen Elizabeth to North America. He traveled by train to New Brunswick where some of his crew were sent to the Bahamas to fly on Sunderland Flying Boats.
The rest of the crew had a week's journey by rail to Vancouver, British Columbia. That's where Denis converted his gunnery skills from .303 caliber to .50 caliber machine guns. Shortly thereafter, came a move to Abbotsford and his introduction to the B-24. "We were training at 25,000 feet. I was the tail gunner, and we had a ball gunner. To be a ball gunner you had to be about five-feet-six. We had a little Welsh guy who could squeeze in there, because to get in a ball turret you've got to put you knees behind your ears."
"The B-24 had three sections - - the pilots, bomb aimer, radio operator and navigator were all up front. We (the gunners) were the 'back room boys' . When we took off we all had our backs to the bulkhead. There is a catwalk, but nobody ever came from the front through the bomb bay and we didn't go the other way. We stayed in our separate rooms." At 25,000 feet altitude over Canada, where winters are already deeply frozen, there was extreme weather for Pontefract and his fellow back room boys. "It's very drafty at the back. You can actually pee ice. "
Denis was soon to experience an extraordinary contrast in weather, as he was sent to the Far East for a posting to Salboni, Bengal. The 356 Squadron had been given the task of dropping supplies to friendly troops rather than bombs on the enemy. "I never flew over 10,000 feet in India. Never used oxygen or anything. You trained at 25,000 feet and minus-70 degrees so you could get in these damn planes, and it was so hot that if you touched anything, you had to wear gloves so you wouldn't burn your hands. The other place, everything was too cold."
By this point in the war, Rangoon had fallen. Pontefract and his crew were sent to the Cocos Islands, 1700 miles south of Ceylon and 1300 miles west of Australia. In 1944, flying boats used the island's lagoon as a refueling stop, until the Allies decided a series of airstrips should be built there.
Just as the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pontefract's squadron was deployed to the Cocos Islands. While the rest of his crew went to the Cocos, Denis was told to stay behind in India and strip machine guns and ammunition out of some planes. All of Denis' crewmembers were killed returning from a mission dropping supplies at camps in Sumatra.
Bombardier Peter Jansen 530 Bomb Sq., 380 BG, 5th Air Force
Peter Jansen had graduated high school, and was attending college at Cal Berkeley when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. He signed up for the Air Corps enlisted reserve and was called up in March, 1943. Jansen says his bombardier school took longer than Ware's pilot training, which delayed him in getting out to the Pacific.
"Not everybody can meet the qualifications to be a bombardier. You have to be too much of a klutz to be a pilot, too dumb to be a navigator, not have enough mechanical aptitude to be an engineer, and not be quick-witted enough to be a radio operator. I never could tell 'dit' from 'dah'. And, I was too frightened of firearms to be a gunner. "So what the hell else are they going to do with you? I became a bombardier, becoming an aerial gunner first, despite my fear of firearms."
Jansen flew 29 missions with the 380th Bomb Group(H) in the South Pacific. "I was just lucky nothing happened. On about half our missions we got shot up by ack-ack. We got a few small holes in our plane a number of times."
Jansen recalls missions lasting from fourteen to sixteen hours, when the 380 Bomb Group flew from Mindoro Island in the Philippines to Balikpapan in Borneo to bomb huge oil refineries. He remembers the effect the long flights had on crews, and the danger he narrowly avoided after one flight.
"You're in this plane so long, and there's a lot of noise. I was just sort of rum-dum. I got out of the plane, out through the bomb bay walking forward, and I looked in front of me and there was a member of the ground crew sitting on the other side, gaping at me. I didn't realize it but the props were still idling over. One more step and I'd have been in the propeller. I owe that ground man my life."
Today, Jansen is firmly convinced the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many millions of lives that otherwise might have been lost, given the way the war was going.
"Doing that saved lives. It saved American lives, it saved Japanese lives," Jansen says, citing the fire bombing missions against Japanese cities. "B-29s of the 20th Air Force had already killed more Japanese than were killed in the atomic bombings. "If Japan hadn't surrendered when it did, that bombing would have continued. In addition to that, Okinawa was becoming a vast airfield and staging area. The 5th Air Force was moving up there, the 13th Air Force was moving up there. I don't know how many others were moving up there... I saw elements of the 8th Air Force up there. The amount of aerial bombardment alone would have been much more tragic for Japan."
Jansen also points to preparations for an invasion of the Japanese mainland, where invasion forecasts predicted millions of casualties - - both Allied soldiers and Japanese civilians - - women and children defending the islands of Nippon.
Co-Pilot Owen Sullivan 750th Bomb Sq., 450th BG, 15th Air Force
"My experience in the B-24 was very limited," says Owen Sullivan. "I wasn't shot down by the enemy. I was shot down by a dishonest crew chief, who did something to our number two engine so that it caught fire. "I carried guilt for fifty years after that mission, and I thought maybe I was running the fuel mixture too lean, or not enough carburetor heat, or maybe too much carburetor heat..."
Sixty years ago, Owen Sullivan was the co-pilot of a B-24 that exploded on a mission to bomb German oil refineries. On November 20th, 1944, the B-24 had flown out of Cerignola, Italy, along with the rest of the 750th Bomb Squadron, heading heading north to Blechhammer, Silesia.
Flight Officer Sullivan and his pilot, Lt. Ernest Appleby, generally switched seats on missions - - Owen was in the left-side pilot seat, Appleby in the right seat. About a half hour from the target, at 23,000 feet, one of the waist gunners noticed a stream of fire from the number 2 engine. Owen tried to feather the prop, but couldn't, and the crippled bomber began falling from formation. "We dove form 23,000 down to 15,000 feet. We leveled off and I hit the bail-out button and the fellows all started going out. I went to the end of the cockpit and I couldn't see anyone."
Shortly thereafter, with Sullivan and Appleby still on the flight deck, the bomber blew up. Owen remembers Appleby's failure to get out from the armor shroud around his seat to put on his chest pack parachute. Then there were flames, everywhere. "Something hit my right forearm, and Iooked down and there was a bone looking back at me. I got down on my knees and I crawled toward a patch of blue I could see through the bomb bay. I just tumbled out."
The story of Sullivan's rescue by Slovakian partisans, who hid him, nursed him back to health and allowed him to join their raids against occupying German forces, is told in detail in Owen's book, Within the Arms of the Village. Sullivan's repatriation through Allied forces came the hard way. He recalls the briefing before his one and only mission. The intelligence officer told him not to worry about getting back if he went down in Slovakia.
"He said the partisans had taken over an airfield up there called Banska Bystrica. They'll bring you to the airfield and you'll have a big party that night. They'll exchange clothes and uniforms and there'll be a few gals there to dance with you and drink with you. Then the B-17s or C-47s will come in and pick you up the next day. You'll be back here in 48 hours. "Six months later... ha-ha... The Germans moved in with tanks and took over the airfield, and there was no opportunity for us to get a return trip or anything. So that intelligence officer was a little bit behind times."
The spring of 1945 brought the thaw of ice and snow, and a notion to escape east, towards the rapidly-advancing Soviet armies. Sullivan and Eugene Hodge got only as far as the nearby town of Brezova before they were captured by German troops. It was March 24th, and after interrogation at Gestapo headquarters in Senica, they were taken to a civilian prison in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.
There was solitary confinement in a cold cell, beatings, and a nightly bombing from a single Soviet Stormavik. After about five days, Sullivan and Hodge were taken by train to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, where interrogations continued. Sullivan says his rank as Flight Officer drew the attention of one German, who thought Owen must be a spy - - a member of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps - - and should be shot. Taken to the Austrian Army building (now the West Bahnhoff War Museum), Sullivan and Hodge were thrown in with Wehrmacht deserters and political prisoners. With Russians at the city gates, the German guards apparently decided there were too few of their number to take the prisoners out of Vienna, and decided to execute them all. Owen says he was stood at a wall as a German gunner locked and loaded a heavy machine gun on a tripod. But as he waited, through what he believes was divine intervention, the officer-in-charge instead ordered the prisoners to begin marching out of the prison. It would become a four-week, 400 kilometer march, southwest towards Branau on the Danube.
Virtually without food, they walked by day and slept in fields or barns at night. "I was losing weight like crazy and Eugene was kind of spare. I said,'Geez Eugene, if we don't get some food pretty soon, we're not going to make it.
"He asked,'Have you ever had dandilion soup?' "I said, hell no, what is dandilion soup? So we started picking up bones along the road wherever we could find them, and dandilions, and he threw those all together and made this soup. And it was awful, but it was food. And that was good enough." The prisoners were marched by their German captors toward American troops advancing on Berlin, when they came across a group of about 100 British Commonwealth POWs, also being herded west. The Brits had Red Cross parcels with food, and that enticed Sullivan and Hodge to slip into line with them.
"They weren't just Brits either. There were several Aussies and Kiwis and they were giving the Brits a bad time, all the time (Pontefract chimned in,"Cheating them at cards,too!"). By May 1st, 1945, Owen says the German guards of the POW group had become pretty lax. Russian troops were approaching from the east and American units were believed to be nearby to the west. "Poor Eugene got pneumonia. There was one American that was with the Brits. They'd come out of Stalag 17 of all places. Dave and I put Eugene between us in the loft of this barn and kept him warm. But he was very, very sick and was taken to a German hospital. When I finally saw him after we were back in the arms of the United States military, he told me the Germans had treated him pretty well in that hospital."
"My escape was very dramatic. I just said to the guard I have to go into the forest to to get some wood for tonight's fire, and he just (waved). I took off and just kept going. There was no heroism there. I just didn't figure he was going to shoot me. I sure was listening to hear if that bolt was making any noise in his rifle. And it wasn't." Owen ran through the woods until he saw an American jeep on a road below the hill he was on. An officer sat in the front passenger seat and two GIs in the back, one of them manning a .50 caliber machine gun. Unshaven and dressed in Slovak farmer's clothes, Owen was racing down the hillside until he heard a call to stop, and responded," Don't shoot, godammit."
The officer in the jeep was a Captain Murphy of the 80th Division of the Third Army. The Captain finally believed the disheveled Irishman enough to take him to the company command post for interrogation. There, Sullivan got a uniform to wear, and ate two dinners. However, without a real meal in so long, he quickly lost them.
The next morning Sullivan hitched a ride to the regional Recovered Allied Military Personnel Station outside Regensburg. While waiting to fly back to France, Owen talked with two MPs on the flight line. He asked them if he could borrow a jeep for a ride into Regensburg. They told him he could, as long as he behaved in it and brought the jeep back in perfect shape. "So I drove that thing into town, and here's all these GIs on either side of the street, standing at attention, saluting me. I looked on the front, and there were three stars. It was General Patton's jeep."
In March, 1998, Owen Sullivan went with several of his former crewmembers (Chekirda, Hodge and Zebrowski) who were with the partisans, back to Slovakia.
Sullivan says that in talking with Chick Chekirda about the B-24 engine's flaming failure on that fateful November 20th, 1944, the flight engineer told him his fear about being the perpetrator of the fire had been unfounded. "He said,' I was watching you the whole way up and you were right within the tech manual all the way. You guys went to your briefing and we got to the tarmac before you did. As we got there, they were just putting the cowling on the number two engine. The crew chief gave me his maintenance report and I took a look at it. There was no notice of any maintenance on the number two engine.' " Owen says Chekirda further told him,"I asked the guy what he was doing putting on the number two cowling, and he said, 'Aww, that was nothing. The crew that used this plane yesterday said there was something wrong with number two. But we couldn't find anything wrong with it."
"So Chick asked him why he didn't write it up properly and the guy said there was no problem. Well, there was a problem..." For enduring those months in rural Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, evading capture and aiding in sabotage against occupying German troops, Owen Sullivan and his B-24 crew received Slovakia's Medal of Freedom. The award from the Minister of Defense commemorates acts of heroism in the 1944 Slovakian uprising against German occupation troops.
Special thanks to Gil Ferrey for arranging and leading the panel discussion.