 |
Interviewed by: Patrick Lynch |
| Leaving the University of
Missouri, I began my military service on December 8, 1942. (I went back to MU and
finished my degree after the war was over) I decided I wanted to be in the Air Force and,
if possible, a pilot. When I was going into the service it was a time that everyone was
going in that could, and I was very anxious about it. My ground work was in
Superior, Wisconsin. It was a preliminary evaluation to determine who was afraid of
flying and who was capable of making good decisions. I went to pilot’s school in Visalia, California. We had basic training, went through physical education, learned Morse code, and then went through cadet training, and then flight training. A little over a year later after I had trained in places like Santa Ana and Merced, California, we learned how to "stall", or pull up until your power fails and you "fall out" or spin downwards. We learned how to get out of that situation. Also, we were trained in night flying and instrument flying. Pilots who were just beginning and had not flown solo were known as "dodos". We flew with an instructor until he felt we could fly alone. When someone first soloed we had a big barrel of water, and we dunked him headfirst into it. During this time I went to multi-engine bomber school in Stockton, California and learned how to operate the B-17 bomber. After training, I graduated and received my commission. Then I went on to Ardmore, Oklahoma to gather my crew. There we were flying over a gunnery range to fire on targets. The pilot was in charge of telling the gunners when it was safe to fire. One of the ‘gung ho’ boys, the tail gunner, decided to shoot one more burst at the target and instead hit a corral. He happened to kill a horse that lived on Gene Autry’s Ranch. The officer in charge told us that if it were peacetime we’d all be in big trouble, but instead we each had to donate money to pay for the horse he’d killed. We were then shipped to Omaha, Nebraska to check out our planes. Then we went to Bangor, Maine. In 1944, after stopping in Iceland, we went on to England to be part of the 457th Bomber Group, 8th Army. German submarines were sending up false signals to try to confuse our pilots, so we had to rely upon our training to get us there. I lived in a Quonset hut near where our planes were serviced on base. Some of the places in England still had houses with thatched roofs. The Army never served fresh eggs, so we always tried to trade oranges or things for them with the people that lived near our base. I brought some pictures today of the crews and planes that we flew with.
They called the B-17 the "Fortress" because we could fire
to the front, side, down or back. We had cameras on our plane so we could take
pictures of the damage we had done. Each of our planes flew in formation at
different altitudes on reconnaissance (photographic) missions, because the Germans were
firing from the ground with If you think that war was fun, well, war was not fun. The first planes would go out carrying 1000 or 2000-pound bombs with delayed-action fuses. The fall buried them in the earth and they would not explode. The next wave would drop 500-pound bombs to wreck the buildings, and then the third wave would drop incendiaries (fire bombs) to set what remained on fire. People who were fighting the fires would then be exposed to the explosions of the first bombs. The bombers were designed to wipe out the major economy of a nation. We went in to demolish factories, trains, airfields and bridges and any road or rail junctions for surface travel. You asked if I had a special story to tell. Well, our longest
trip was from our base in England to Dresden, and it was an 11-hour trip. We bombed
the city. Our plane lost an engine, and we had to find a safe landing place. After
we got rid of the rest of our bombs we landed near an airfield. We didn’t know
where we were. People came out of the woods with their hands outstretched in
friendship and motioned for us to follow them, and they led us to a safe barn. After a few
days they got us to another group and they flew us back to England. After servicemen had completed 35 missions they could go home. I had flown 37, so in 1945 I served as an officer on board a hospital ship carrying wounded and former American prisoners of war back home. This was the one of the first ships going home after V-E Day in May 1945. I was asked if I wanted to learn how to fly the B-29 for service in the Pacific, but I figured that I had pressed my luck enough and turned them down. What part of our country changed from the war? Our country changed a lot. One example is how General Eisenhower realized the value of the German autobahn (highway) in moving troops and equipment. When he became president after the war he started a national highway system in the United States. It means that you can travel to Denver or even California from Kansas City. I went to Russia after the war, and they couldn’t move anything because they didn’t have highways. What change do I think was the most important? Perhaps it was the way in which the pictures of and words written in the papers about the war changed the way in which the American people saw the war. Before that, people who did not fight saw little of what was going on in a war. I went to the Boeing museum in Seattle, and I thought that it would be fun to see the old planes. One small plane that had a wooden propeller of the type that as a salesman I once sold. I guess time flies! I was in Berlin on the 50th anniversary of V-E Day. Even in West Berlin there was not a word of recognition that it had happened, even though there was still damage, even fifty years later. You asked if war is ever justified? It is justified when it stops the killing of innocent people. Permission Granted For Use By Don Miller © 2001 |
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Don Miller
We had missions to Germany
flying in groups of three or more planes. Our ships had a nine man crew each: a pilot and
co-pilot, bombardier, radioman, engineer, waist gunner, navigator, tail gunner and
ball-turret gunner. Since the airplanes weren’t pressurized we were tied down
to our supplies of oxygen. Each man was given a flak jacket that was supposed to
keep out the flak. While most of the gunners wore their jackets, the other pilots
and I sat on them because the flak came at us from below. 
88-millimeter guns with altitude-based fuses. They never would have the opportunity
of hitting all of us at different altitudes. The time we got hit it came up between
the two of us pilots in the front, and went through the floor, and out the top.
Another one burst outside our plane and damaged the power line to #2 engine, so we
didn’t have any control over it. We dove and that tended to pull the engine
right out of the airplane.