Wartime Stories from the Founder's Father
Lieutenant Colonel Gerald E. Douglass was a decorated WWII veteran and a proud member of The Greatest Generation. As these memories reveal, he was somewhat of a free spirit and a patriotic American.
I Took Out an Instructor Before I Took on the Enemy
I had a little difficulty in advanced training because my instructor took me up to 20,000 feet and said, “Put it in a spin and I’ll tell you when to take it out.” At that time, I watched the altimeter, and it was spinning just like a clock—I mean fast. When we got down to about 2,000-3,000 feet I said, “Well, what the hell! I’m going to take this out of a spin, because we’re only supposed to do three turns and we’ve done 33.”
I can always feel tension on the stick and the instructor I had was not a very big fella, so when I pulled it out of the spin, I suddenly discovered that my earphones had become unplugged. So, I said to the instructor, “What do I do now?” He said, “Just take me back to the base.” So, we went back to the base and that’s the last I saw of him.
The next morning, I went into the briefing room and saw my name with a big red tag on it that read “ Captain Zappon”. I said, “That’s an elimination ride!” So, I got all my gear and met Captain Zappon, who was going out to the airplane, and I protested, “I don’t know why I’m doing this; I thought I did everything right.” To which he replied, “You almost spun in.” I explained to Captain Zappon what had happened. We took care of our flight and I passed fine with Captain Zappon.
Afterwards he said, “Y’know, I gotta tell you this. That fella that was your instructor, he’s in the hospital now; he’s all upset because the cadet he had just before you did the same thing as you did, except he had to jump out and parachute to safety. He thought you were going to take him right into the pavement,” he continued with a chuckle. “So, thanks to you, I think we’ve lost an instructor.”
We Landed a Battered B-24 with an Engine Fire and Another Time with 230 Bullet Holes.
They put us up on the first mission to Bingen, Germany. The procedure was all new crews flew with what we called “Tail End Charlie”, which is way back at the end of the line, the last plane out which, of course, was the one the German fighters always got first. But nevertheless, we were Tail End Charlie on the road to Bingen.
We had quite a few new crews on this mission to a place like this, which is called a “no ball”; that meant it would be a very, very easy mission. When we got in the German area, I just could not believe the enemy flak that we were taking. Then the Me-109 German fighters came in and hit us—hard.
Well, before we got through and got back home again, we had lost probably a fourth of the airplanes in our bomb group and it turned out to be the second most-deadly bombing mission for the crews that they had had in the 392nd Bomb Group since Ploesti.
We did get shot up quite a bit. There was one time we had at least 230 holes in the airplane from anti-aircraft shells.
Our most dangerous mission was a truly wild, adrenaline-packed flight. We got hit pretty badly on the course of this flight; we suffered some ruptured fuel lines, and our bomb bay was filled with gasoline. Number 3 engine was on fire. I’m reaching for a lever and Joe Marlowe, our engineer, said “Lieutenant, what are you thinking about doing?”
I said, “I’m going to open the bomb bay doors to get rid of all that gasoline.”
“Lieutenant, don’t you think we oughta wait until the fire is out?”
Of course, he was absolutely right. Had I opened the bomb bay doors, the fire on number 3 engine would have set fire to all the gas in the plane and blown us all to bits. Well, I never forgot that lesson.
On another mission, we got the hell shot out of us, as per most of the missions anyway, and for some reason or other, the anti-aircraft shells had destroyed every instrument we had in the airplane—every instrument except the manual ones. The 8th Air Force had an emergency channel on our frequency. So, I pushed the button called “Darky, Darky”, gave my number, and said “We are in trouble, we have no instruments, and don’t know how to get home.”
They knew exactly where we were by radar and told us to take a certain heading, which we did, and they kept us vectored into our airbase. We were over the airbase, scheduled to land, and they asked, “Are you armed?”
Well, we still had all our bombs in the bomb bay; we didn’t have any instruments, and it would be just about impossible for us to go around. Somebody said, “What are we going to do now?”
I said, “We didn’t hear that transmission; we’re going to land.”. We pulled into our disbursal area, opened the bomb bay doors, and every one of those RDX bombs dropped onto the threshold. I said, “That’s nothing to worry about; we’re all set.”
It wasn’t until a 392nd Bomb Group reunion, when I was talking to some of our enlisted men. I said, “We’re lucky.”
They said, “Lucky, hell! Those bombs were LIVE; nobody had put the pins back in ‘em.”
So, I guess we were REALLY lucky we didn’t blow up the 392nd Bomb Group that day.
Pilots 1, Flight Mechanics 0
We had a tussle with the plane’s guns on one of our first missions. Of course, having initially been trained as a single engine pilot and responsible for my airplane, I was familiar with the guns. So, I’m out on the deck with my crew and we’re working on the guns, and some other officer came up to me and asked me, “What do you think you are doing?” I wasn’t wearing any rank designations; I just had my coveralls on.
I said, “We’re gonna fix these guns so they work right and not have any more trouble. We had trouble the last mission.”
He said, “That’s my responsibility, I’m the armament officer.”
I said, “I don’t care who the hell you are; we’re going to fix these guns.”
Apparently, the army officer and his crew didn’t do a very good job. Well, one thing led to another, and, in my typical fashion, I knocked him right on his can. He got up and said, “I am going to prefer charges on you for hitting an officer!”
Joe Marlowe, the oldest member of the crew, said, “But, Lieutenant, you swung first!” So, that was the end of that.