Presentation Date: September 26, 2002
SSGT Al Freitas USAAF, WWII
B-17 Ball-Turret Gunner (Originally trained as Radio Operator), 100th Bombardment Group (The "Bloody 100th") 350th Bomb Squadron, 23 Combat Missions, ETO, Shot-Down on 23rd Mission, POW in German Stalag.
- B-17 Ball-Turret Gunner (Originally trained as Radio Operator)
- 100th Bombardment Group (The "Bloody 100th"); 350th Bomb Squadron
- 23 Combat Missions, ETO
- Shot-Down on 23rd Mission
- POW in German Stalag
- Active Member of Western Aerospace Museum
- Active Member of 8th AirForce Historical Society (Jimmy Doolittle Chapter)
NOTE: One of the most dangerous positions for a WWII airman was the ball-turret gunner. The HISTORY Channel recently telecast an hour-long feature entitled "The Ball Turret Gunner", as part of a series called DANGEROUS MISSIONS.
Hazardous Missions: B-17 Ball Turret GunnerOn my fifteenth mission, a piece of flak hit the cranking mechanism of the turret. The guys couldn't crank me up, and I knew I couldn't bail out. And I thought, if I ever get back down, I'm gonna' have my guns up when we're over a target. - - Al Freitas
Al Freitas' family came from Portugal. Born in Oakland, Al and four of his siblings served in World War II. When Al graduated from high school in 1940, his brothers thought it would be best for him to sign up for military service because jobs were still short in these later days after the Great Depression. Al went to the Army Air Corps, was first stationed at Moffett Field and then Hamilton Air Force Base with the 35th Fighter Group. About six months later, the unit was split and the half Freitas remained with became the 35th Fighter Interception Group, and moved up to Portland, Oregon.
Trained as a radio operator, Freitas says he sought a transfer, against his CO's wishes. "I was bored, and I just wanted to get into combat. A dumb kid, I wanted to have wings. I noticed with the girls, the guy with wings always rated."
He was supposed to wait a month and think about that change of direction. While waiting, Al was sent to Las Vegas for training, then to Boise, Idaho, where he became part of a bomber crew.
Freitas says he became a ball turret gunner by default. His new crew in the 100th Bombardment Group had another radio operator, who happened to be at least 6'2" tall. "Either one of us was going to go in the ball turret. And I'm about five feet six, or something, and I ended up in the ball turret."
As the smaller of the two airmen, Freitas wound up riding into battle in a near fetal position, surrounded by the thin steel and glass of the turret beneath a B-17.
"When you got into a turret, you had to crank it so the guns are down and the door was open. Then you get down in it and you automatically turn on the power, and then it would be power controlled."
Another stop for training in Wendover, Utah, and Freitas and his B-17 crew were headed to England for operations in the European Theater. Al says that thirty-five crews had been trained for the 100th BG, but by the end of the first two month's operations, more than half of the original group had been shot down.
"On my first mission I had my 'chute up above (out of the turret, in the B-17 fuselage). And of course, usually when you get hit, power goes out. Your buddies are supposed to crank you up. On my first mission I see a B-17 going down, and I thought there's no way anyone could get out of that. So I thought I'd try and get a 'chute in my turret. They have a chest 'chute that was sort of a rolled-up pillow... I practiced and I managed to get the 'chute on the side of me and then hook one of the hooks on my harness. And thought 'Great, I had it made.'"
Freitas says on the 100th's bombing missions, he'd look down from the ball turret and watch the bombs drop to the target, and then answer the bombardier's questions about the results of the drop.
"In doing that, part of my escape hatch was in the plane and part was out of it. On my fifteenth mission... a piece of flak hit the cranking mechanism of the turret, and the guys couldn't crank me up. My guns were down about 20 or 30 degrees and I knew I couldn't bail out. And I thought if I ever get back down, I'm gonna' have my guns up when we're over a target."
Freitas says when they came back to their base, one of the controllers said there was a blue streak of sparks where the guns had hit. Al's concern was that the guns would be jammed up against him, which fortunately didn't happen. From then on, Al made sure to keep the ball turret guns up, parallel with the ball of the bomber, a practice that would pay later, when his B-17 was shot down.
"I was there in June, and by October, my crew was shot down. I was frostbitten (on one mission), and was in the hospital at the time. So, I didn't go down with the crew. I became sort of a 'spare'. It took me almost a year - - from June until April - - to get all my 23 missions. It was on my 23 mission that I was shot down."
In July of 1943, the 100th Bomb Group bombed German sub pens in Trondheim, Norway. Freitas remembers a Ju 88 flying below that he opened fire on and watched the German plane smoke. Freitas says that in the heat of an attack by enemy fighters it was not uncommon for a number of gunners to each claim they were responsible for shooting down a German fighter. But in this instance, he thinks he was the gunner who hit the Junkers, since nobody else made a claim.
Al's fateful 23rd mission was one of those supposed "milk runs", a bombing raid on V-2 rocket sites across the Channel. Freitas says he figured that he'd only have to fly one more mission after this one and he'd be able to go back to the States. "Our co-pilot that day was a brand new Colonel. He'd never gone on a mission before. He was a West Point guy, about 45.
"When we went to these targets we'd all peel off. And there were six planes that would get to one little target. It was just a snap for us. When we got near our target (near Cherbourg), the flak was way over to the right and there was a little cloud right over the target, and we couldn't hit it. But he insisted on going back... so we made a 365 degree turn, and he insisted that we go back on the same heading and at the same altitude, which is stupid.
"We got over the target and all six planes were hit. Two got shot down. Mine was shot down . Seven got killed including him (the co-pilot), and I bailed out... the tail gunner didn't remember how he got out.
"I could feel the thumps of the ack-ack hitting my turret. Then I could feel my turret going around, and realized we must be going down. So I lifted the latches and the door fell back. I pushed myself out. It was burning and I had goggles and the whole works, so I didn't get burned. It was so noisy... and then suddenly it was so quiet and there's no feeling of falling. And there's my chute. Instead of putting it on my other side, I pulled the cord. It was at an angle."
Freitas struggled to properly clip the other 'chute strap to his harness, but thinks the parachute still wasn't cleanly rigged for his descent. He believes if it weren't for the experience of his fifteenth mission, he would have gone down with the bomber. Al doesn't remember being knocked out when he hit the ground, or breaking his leg, but that's what happened. German flak gunners picked him up and took him into a farm house. That was the start of a trip that landed the ball turret gunner in a Paris hospital.
"I was there almost three weeks. >From there I went by train to Frankfurt, on the Main (River) in Germany - - the place where all airmen shot down went to be interrogated. They took our uniforms away, we got new uniforms and then they interrogated us.
"While we were in England, we had been told what to expect, that they (Germans) would try all sorts of things. And, that they had all sorts of information about us, and not to be surprised if they knew something about you.
"I happened to have a write-up in the Oakland Tribune about a mission I'd been on in Norway, so apparently they had that clipping. Because when I got there the guy that interviewed me spoke American english. He sounded just like he was from Brooklyn.
"And then he asked, 'How's your brother Fred? Is he still going to school at Castlemont?' That's the school I went to. And, 'How about Danny? I guess Danny's just about ready to go into combat.'
"Well, in that article they wrote about me, they indicated what I did... and what my brothers were doing. That's where they got all that information. And the idea was that if they presented you with that sort of information, they know so much about you, there'd be no reason for you to hold back on anything. I knew it was sort of a ruse, but it's kind of eerie to have them ask questions about my brother and high school, and so forth."
Name. Rank. Serial number. Al says he stuck to his guns, volunteering no other information. About two days later he was taken by train to a place on the Baltic Sea near the Russian border, a town called Malmo that was the home of Stalag Luft Six. He was there from June of 1944 through that summer.
"It was so well organized that all the terms of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war were taken care of there. The Luftwaffe managed all these camps, and there's a respect between fliers. So long as we were with the Luftwaffe we were treated well. We never had to worry about the SS."
"If it wasn't for the Luftwaffe protecting us in all instances... There were orders that prisoners should have been shot; Hitler's orders. The Luftwaffe managed to not allow that to happen. If it wasn't for the Luftwaffe, I wouldn't be here today..."
When the Russian advance came near, Freitas says he and his fellow prisoners-of-war were put in the hold of a grain ship, and they traveled south to near Stettin, near the Danish border. From there, Al says it was another trip by rail in box cars to Stalag 64, and the first mistreatment by their captors.
"Generally when they take you in the box cars they have you take off your belts and shoes. And when you get out they give you back your belt and shoes, and you had a few minutes or so to get them. But when we landed at this place, they just dumped our shoes and they had all these young marines. They were dressed like sailors, and they had dogs with them.
"There was a young officer, a red-headed guy, in an open car. And he was yelling out, 'Remember your children,' and 'these guys have been bombing you' and so forth. They made us run about three miles through town to the camp.
"When we left the other town, we'd managed to get Red Cross parcels to take with us, and we had our blankets. When we were running so much, we had to discard them. These marines were just young kids and I guess this was the first time they'd really seen enemies. They had the dogs and bayonets and they'd poke at us. And if anybody fell down, the dogs would get them.
"It was July 18th, which was my birthday, so I knew the date." A few months later, with the Russian Army continuing to advance on Germany, Freitas and the other POWs were evacuated by rail box car to Nuremberg. The camp, previously occupied by youth, was two to three miles from town, instead of the conventional fifteen to twenty miles from a potential urban target.
"For one week they (the USAAF) bombed Nuremberg. And that was really scary. And that was the time... there was hardly any food. It was amazing the Germans could give us anything, considering the logistics, and the bombing. But we managed to get food, enough to keep us going. People started having dysentery and everything, and people were dying. I wasn't scared of not eating, but I was scared of dying. Gosh, If I didn't eat, I was going to die, and I never felt that way before."
Freitas admits to feeling the end might be drawing near, when instead, American troops drew close, bringing on another evacuation. This time, though, it was what Al calls the best part of his confinement.
"We all got to march. It was April and we marched right down from Nuremberg to Moosburg in Bavaria. We'd sleep at night in the barns and there were potatoes there. At one of the little towns, I think it was Neumark, they had a church, a Catholic church. They let us go to mass.
"When we'd had our first guards (Stalag Luft Six) they were young fliers who'd been shot down. They'd been wounded and they were prison guards. By the time we'd gotten to Nuremberg the guards were grandfathers, and they were so old we would help them carry their guns. And they hated Hitler. They had grown through a different life, and so we felt sorry for them."
Al particularly remembers a Bavarian woman who befriended him after mass, and prepared him a meal of bacon and eggs. She cried as she told Freitas she'd lost four of her children in the war, and she was concerned the Russians would arrive before any other Allied troops.
Freitas says arriving at the Moosburg camp brought him in contact with POWs from many nationalities - - South America, the Sudan, the Soviet Union. He says everything was open, and "we just had to watch (out for) ourselves."
The second half of the month of April passed in the camp before an American flag was raised on a church steeple in the nearby town. Freitas says liberation came quietly. First a GI came by and wanted to know if the POWs wanted something to eat. Rations were supplied by a unit of Patton's Third Army, which then continued on its way. When the liberators were gone, so were the German soldiers who had supplied the camp and kept it running. The POWs were on their own for about a week before the Red Cross came in to take care of them.
"The nice thing was we could go into town. There were hordes of a variety of people in town. If you were an American, the German people wanted us to stay with them, as they didn't want a Russian to come in there. There was raping going on..."
By May 8th, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, Al says he knew he'd eventually be flying to one of a number of camps in France. Set up to take care of POWs, the camps carried names of cigarettes, and Freitas soon found himself in a B-17 converted to carry passengers on his way to Camp Lucky Strike.
"When we got there they got rid of our clothes, and de-loused us. We showered and the whole thing and got new clothes. Everybody was so nice, and that was a hard thing to get over. Everybody wanted to do things for you, and it was an eerie feeling to have people so kind.
"We were told not to eat much food, because we weren't used to a lot of rich food... That was fine and I was going to practice that, but the cooks were just dumping us with all sorts of food and people were getting sick from having too much food." Al's next stay was aboard a Liberty ship, in a convoy headed across the Atlantic to New Jersey. But what should have been a week's journey turned into two weeks. The convoy received orders to creep back to the States after some ships hit icebergs in the North Sea.
There was a harrowing moment Freitas recalls, when he came topside during the cruise for one of the air raid drills.
"When I got up onto the deck, right next to me was a ship. And it happened to have an Oriental crew. I thought, 'the Japs', and I don't know why it came to my mind, and I thought 'that's stupid.' But what had happened is that the two (ships) were just trying to avoid one another, and were just scraping one another. And nothing happened, but our ship started to leak, and I thought we were never going to get home."
But he did disembark safely and then travel by train back to Oakland. Al's home was a block off 98th Avenue, the thoroughfare which ran between the Oakland Airport and Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. One day he was drawn outside by the sound of ambulance sirens.
"They were taking people who were wounded from Okinawa. Here the war was over for me, and I'm looking at all these wounded coming by. It was kind of a strange feeling."
Home for a month, Freitas was sent to Santa Monica. He says he lived on the beach with other servicemen and they had people waiting on them for about two weeks. After that, based on points earned on his B-17 missions, Freitas was discharged.
Looking back to his days riding B-17s into battle over Europe, Al says today he mostly remembers the good times. A 1980s trip to Thorpe Abbots, where the 100th BG control tower has been preserved as a museum, didn't conjure up familiar feelings for Al. But when he drove a rental car into a nearby town, memories welled up inside of him.
"The moment we drove into town, I was back. That place hadn't changed. That was where we used to go dancing, that's where we used to drink, everything hadn't changed. It's funny, England is like that."
Al still remembers good times with his bomber crew, parties and dances, riding bicycles, hearing the stories of an old English veteran of the Boer War, for whom Freitas baked bread.
Those are the experiences of the war Al Freitas remembers most.