William Craig

In 1942 I was twenty-five years old and I was running a grocery store in Nebraska, where I was born. I was drafted on March 12, 1942 and by September of that year I was on my way to England to prepare for the Torch landings (the invasion of Africa). At that time the Air Force was desperate for anyone who had any knowledge of radio communications. On my induction papers I had indicated that through my Boy Scout work I had knowledge of Morse Code and that was my ticket into the air corps.

My wife and I had been going together for close to a year and wanted to get married but it was obvious that I was going to be gone for a long while. I felt that it wouldn’t be fair to marry her at that time. I wanted to leave her options open to her but by golly she waited for me. She never did know where I was while I was gone. No one knew where I was.

On my trip to Northern Africa we sailed on the Queen Mary. Before the war, she was a luxury liner for tourists crossing the Atlantic. It took five days to make the crossing. I was in a cabin that had two bunks and a shower room. There were six of us in this room, but it wasn't too bad. As we approached north of Ireland a plane came out to meet us and we wondered if it was friend or foe. A friend told me this was known as torpedo alley. Four ships came out to meet us. We were watching the ship running along out there. Then it made a hard left turn. We were certain that he couldn’t get past our ship. We ran to the other side and he made it. About an hour later he did it again. The next time he did we could tell he wouldn’t make the turn and we ended up cutting the cruiser right in half. There were over 400 men on board. They were able to rescue about half of them. The cruiser put a big hole in the Queen Mary; the hole was about two or three stories high. I asked for four years what was the point of these maneuvers. All the British sailors denied that it happened. In late 1945 there was an investigation launched about this incident. The Queen Mary was the faster of the two ships and was doing zigzags across the ocean. The two captains of the two ships had a clash of wills as to who had the right of way. The captain of the cruiser was in his quarters. The quartermaster who was in charge and told the captain that the Queen Mary was going to hit them and the captain said to hold the course because we have the right of way. That decision cost 250 men their lives. It was a battle of wills and egos between the captains of the ships .

curacoa2.gif (23618 bytes) Because our group went overseas very early some of the radio towers and communications equipment was not in place. We scavenged equipment from downed planes to build control towers. When we got to North Africa the Germans weren’t there but the French troops were opposing us. The climate in North Africa was much like that of Northern California. They raise olives there.

Rommel was a very capable general. They called him the Desert Fox. As Rommel was retreating from the eastern edge of North Africa he made a dash west at the Kasserine Pass. He got clear to the top but the first army met him at the top and there was quite a battle. There were a lot of airfields and Rommel thought it would be easy pickings if he could get past the first division. Well, we all got busy and started digging foxholes and got ready for him. The word came out that they thought they could hold him off but to dig in and get ready, and that’s what we did.

I was put into a bomber group that was flying the B-26. It was nicked named the "Flying Bumblebees". I couldn't fly because of my sinus problems, I worked on the radio equipment on the planes. They had an extremely large engines and there were many ships lost on take off because they just dropped out of the sky at low speeds. The wings were modified later for stability. It was a low-level high-speed attack bomber that carried bombs and machine guns. It redlined at 430 miles an hour. We weren’t involved in any city bombing; our bombing was mostly tactical to destroy bridges and tanks.

We lived in tents and the Arabs were quite friendly. I spent a lot of time learning the French language. When I moved up to Tunis we were bombing targets in Italy, like bridges. From Tunis I would take the train to the beach for my time off. It was funny for me to see the new young troops make fools of themselves getting drunk (I was 25-28 at the time). At that point we had taken equipment from planes. I was one of the people training new American troops coming in as repair crews. Then the French took over the training and I helped I enjoyed teaching the new guys.

I returned to the US when I had fulfilled my quota of time overseas. I was in the US stationed in California. My funniest story is about sending an SOS signal by mistake--I had the whole west coast looking for a "downed plane"! I heard about the surrender of Japan on the radio but I thought that it was just propaganda about the A-bomb, Interview Craig.jpg (7531 bytes) because I thought it was simply carpet bombing.

Was war worth it? There's no simple answer. There is a long history of the Germans' conflict with other countries and cultural clashes, that leads to escalation. It's an action/reaction effect.