Presentation Date: July 26, 2001
Col. Harry M. Conley USAAF (Ret.)
Original Member of the 95th Bomb Group ( first to bomb Berlin in daylight!). Command Pilot, B-17s and B-24s. Over 75 Missions, including four (4) on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Chief of Staff to GEN John Gerhart, first Commander of the new 93rd Bomb Wing. Flew many Fighters: P-47s, P-51s, P-38s, DeHavilland Mosquitos (as the "Mission Command Center" over the targets). US Navy Fighter Ace
Original Member of the 95th Bomb Group ( first to bomb Berlin in daylight!).
Command Pilot, B-17s and B-24s.
Over 75 Missions, including four (4) on D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Chief of Staff to GEN John Gerhart, first Commander of the new 93rd Bomb Wing.
Flew many Fighters: P-47s, P-51s, P-38s, DeHavilland Mosquitos (as the "Mission Command Center" over the targets).
The Early Days of AirWar Europe
As the winter of 1941 set in, Harry Conley had already graduated from Stanford with his bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering. Due to low demand at that time for aeronautical engineers, he was working on a ranch in Manteca, and had an agricultural deferment from the Army draft.
December 7th, 1941 changed all of that. Harry says he was sorting cattle for the H. Moffett Company of San Francisco that Sunday morning, when a little, heavy-set man came up all out of breath and told him, "The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor."
Conley called Mr. Moffett to tell him he was going to join the Army Air Corps, and headed in his Model A Ford to the recruitment area at Hamilton Field. After a physical, he was given some gas coupons and told to be in Bakersfield by 5 o’clock that evening to begin flight training. With the cadet ranks in alphabetical order, standing next to Conley was Bob Cozzens, a football standout at San Diego State (Conley had played football at Stanford) who was not only to become Conley’s roommate, but would also be with him for virtually the whole war, and remain friends in years since.
And that’s pretty remarkable, given that of the first 100 crew members (10 crews) in that flight training class, only three got through at least 25 missions and survived the war.
Also in San Diego, Conley met another pilot named Al Wilder. "He’d never seen a B-24, an airplane that big. It looked like a house to him. We flew around for about an hour and a half, until it was dark, and then landed." When the two men went in for a drink, Conley says Wilder commented it must take years to learn to fly the bomber, and asked how long Harry had been flying one. Harry had been flying B-24s for about 30 days but told Wilder, "I just checked out to fly this afternoon."
Wilder was in southern California en route to putting together the 95th Bomb Group, and when he offered flight commander positions to Conley and Cozzens, the two of them promptly left the Second Air Force for the lure of the Eight Air Force and the ETO.
Training continued in Spokane, Washington, with wintertime flights, to simulate the conditions expected in England and over the Continent. As training continued in Rapid City, South Dakota and Nebraska, Conley got a feel for the flying characteristics of the B-24, which he says "was like flying an apartment house."
"The Davis wing... when you were flying in close formation... if you dropped off the step, your fuel consumption would rise (dramatically)."
Before long, Conley was converting to the B-17, and then came assignment overseas. That was a hush-hush affair, with the Bomb Group flying from West Palm Beach to South America, crossing the south Atlantic and then north, up across Africa and finally to southern England. Harry says the co-pilot of each B-17 was made a finance officer for the crew, handling 1500 dollars expense money for each crew member.
Natal, Brazil was the launch point for the trans-Atlantic trek to Dakar, West Africa. Harry recalls taking off across the coast as evening fell - - a flash and a puff of smoke from a deck gun he believes was on a submarine - - as a parting shot at Conley’s B-17.
The shot missed, but that was only the first of challenges for the fledgling crew. The B-17s, loaded with spare parts, ran into a tropical storm, one that tossed them around for a few hours. When things settled back down, beyond the "point on no return", Harry says his navigator announced they would be short of making landfall. Conley immediately decided to dump the spare bomber parts overboard.
The B-17 finally landed in French West Africa, at an RAF anti-submarine base. Conley says, "We touched down... and just as I turned around to come back to the tower, all four engines quit." The B-17 was out of gas.
After refueling, the next stop was Dakar, a few palm trees on the edge of the barren desert, where Conley was visually impressed with all the French Legionnaires sky blue uniform tunics and red hats. The Free French had just taken over from the Vichy regime, and there was quite a celebratory mood. Harry says his crew gravitated to the lights and music from "Madame Lillie’s". Before the night had ended, the crew had managed to start a brawl in the establishment, thanks to the pranks of Conley’s bombardier, Fitz, a 6’6" college all-American basketball player from Michigan.
Conley’s crew was greeted in Penzance, at the southern tip of England by a "bunch of farmers with pitchforks. They thought we were Germans. They’d never seen a B-17 before."
The 95th Bomb Group’s missions were among the most harrowing of any faced by Eighth Air Force crews - - six months of raids against the U-boat pens in Kiel and other coastal sites, strikes further into Germany without benefit of fighter escort, and notably, the first daylight raid on Berlin. These were among the ‘teething’ missions for the Eighth Bomber Command, missions often filled with terrible losses.
13 June, 1943, the target for the 94th, 95th and 96th Bomb Groups were the submarine yards at Kiel. Conley was commanding the "tail-end Charlie" group, a composite group of bombers which bore the brunt of attacks by the Luftwaffe. Attacks came from the rear of the sixty bomber formation, with German fighters flying through the formation to break it up, cripple bombers and pick off stragglers.
It was a tough day, starting at 26,000 feet with 120 knot tailwinds. At the German-held island of Helgoland, Conley’s group watched as the fighters rose to shoot at the "box" of bombers. In the first attack, a cylinder was blown off the number one engine. Conley shut it down and feathered its prop after. After the bomb run over Kiel, the 120 knot wind became a headwind, leaving the B-17s hanging in the sky like kites for their trip home. Conley says a cannon shell then blew the nose off the B-17. The bombardier and navigator had been knocked back and down to the floor of the bomber’s nose. Neither was seriously hurt, and they jury-rigged the .50 cal nose gun to fire from the floor through the hole where the Plexiglas had been.
Conley had to feather a second engine, and fought to maintain at least 3000 feet altitude as he nursed the B-17. But before long, a dozen Me 109s attacked. Conley says his gunners shot down four of them, before they flew off and left the Flying Fortress to make its way to the English coast.
"There was so much damage, I was afraid to bank the airplane, to put it on the beach. So I figured I’d have to go right into a barley field... I was about 50 feet and sinking... so I pulled it up and over the trees, and we hit the trees and landed in the barley field. And nobody got hurt. We had maybe 300 to 400 holes in the plane."
Conley found out later the beach was mined. He was glad he hadn’t landed there.
A little blonde girl and her brother had seen the crippled bomber and heard the crash. They came over to see the crumpled B-17. In 1999 Conley says he got a phone call from a woman who asked if he was "Capt. Conley", the pilot of the bomber with the serial number of Harry’s plane. More than five decades after she had seen and heard the B-17 come down, ‘little blonde girl’ began corresponding with the pilot of that Flying Fortress.
Among the many memories Conley has of interesting experiences in the Eighth Air Force, are his lunch at Claridge’s Hotel with Lord Beaverbrook (the RAF’s Minister of Aircraft Production) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the dogfight he had with General Curtis Lemay.
Harry was Chief of Staff of the 93rd Bomb Wing in 1944, just before the D-Day invasion. The Wing had a P-47 as a ‘hack’, for officers to fly from base to base instead of flying a bomber or cargo plane. Harry says he had just taken off in the Thunderbolt when he spotted another P-47 below. As was the custom, he "bounced" the other fighter, but almost as quickly he found that plane sliding behind his tail.
The dogfight between the two P-47 pilots was on.
"I shook him around, " says Conley. " I took him up as high as I could, then down through the trees." But Conley found himself unable to shake the other pilot off his tail. Noticing he was low on fuel, he returned to base, only to find the other P-47 already sitting at the hardstand where Conley would refuel. Climbing down and heading over to the other Thunderbolt, Harry was surprised to see General Curtis Lemay step out and tell him, "Conley, next time - - stay with bombers," before ‘blowing him off the wing’ as LeMay taxied to takeoff.
Postscript - Maj. Al Wilder was KIA on the June 13, 1943 mission to Kiel, as was Brig. Gen. Nathan Forrest. The 95th Bomb Group was the first USAAF unit to bomb Berlin (March 4, 1944) and was the only Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force to receive three Distinguished Unit Citations.