I was born and raised in a little town called Hallack, Minnesota, way up in the northwest corner of the state and was drafted into the army in early 1943 and went to Ft. Snelling.  

The first thing they make you do is raise your right hand and you agree to defend the Constitution of the United States, just like the president has to do.  Then they gave us IQ tests and from there they selected those of us who would go into the air corps.  At that time the air corps was part of the army and was not a separate unit.  A group of us were sent down to Sugar Field at Wichita, Texas and there we had our basic training.  

In basic training everybody is treated like a dog.  They don’t care who you are, doctor, lawyer, or what, everybody is treated like a dog and they either make men out of you or they break you.  Well, I made it.  

Then they sent us to Harlingen, Texas for aerial gunnery school and I had the first airplane ride in my life.  They took us up in an AT-6 training airplane. This is a single engine low wing airplane with a pilot up front and me in the back seat. Another airplane was flying alongside of us and they would be towing a large canvas target.  We were sitting in the back behind the pilot and we had a .30 cal. machine-gun and it had tracer bullets. They take us up there and fly alongside and we would shoot at the target.  The tracer bullets were different colors.   My gun had one color and another fellow had a different color so they could tell if my bullets hit the target.   

Following that training,  I was shipped along with some other fellows to Boise, Idaho to Gown field and there we met the rest of our crew.  We formed our crew and we started taking instructions and flying B-24 bombers.  I was flying in the nose turret.  We trained there for about seven weeks and then we were sent to Topeka, Kansas where we picked up a brand new B-24 airplane and we flew from there to Bangor, Maine.  

They loaded us up with mail. We went from there to Goose Bay, Labrador.  We got snowed in there for a couple of nights and then we flew the north Atlantic.  That was a sensational flight because we couldn’t see the ocean.  There was nothing but clouds but we finally made it.  I didn’t think our navigator would ever get us across but he did and we landed at Nut’s Corner, North Island.  That is the name of the town.  Then we took a boat over to England to Stonedge and we were dispersed from there to Mendelson, England, which is north of London. 

There must have been 160 bases up in that northeast corner of England where all of our air corps was kept.  We started flying combat out of there and we flew through flak. The Germans had big 88 mm guns and when they knew we were coming, they would shoot shells up and they would explode like a hand grenade only in bigger pieces. I did that 31 times over Germany.  

I got shot at lots of times and saw lots of people go down and get killed.  I also saw lots of airplanes blow up.   We had a very high percentage of killed in our air corps.  I think there were over 20,000 were killed and 20,000 were taken prisoners.  Others escaped and the underground, which was operating in France, was friends and they would find these airmen and get them through France to Spain.  Once they got to Spain, they would be interred for a few days, and then they would be flown back to England. 

A crew consists of ten men.  I was in the nose turret and in the cockpit the pilot and co-pilot sit side by side.  We had a waist gunner on each side of the fuselage, a tail gunner, and then there is a turret that hangs below the airplane and there is a man positioned in there. He would have to sit with his knees up under his chin for the whole mission.  That’s how cramped it was.  Missions would vary from three hours to seven hours depending on where we were going.  If we were going to Berlin or Stuttgart or one of those cities way in Germany it would be a long day and we would be dressed in heavy flying suits.  We had to wear sheepskin lined leather suits, and electrically heated gloves and boots, which plugged into the electrical system of the aircraft.  Crews were trained for skills and through the numbers they would pick you out and put you on a crew it didn’t matter where you were from. 

There were eight enlisted men on each crew and we made up the gunners.  There were four officers who made up the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and bombardier.  They stayed in these Niesen huts, what we call a Quonset hut, and there would be four crews of enlisted men in each hut with a little stove in the middle of this place.  They gave you enough coal from a central coal pile to keep you warm overnight, but we would steal all the coal we could when they weren’t looking.  They had a day room where you could get a beer.  I remember that we are all 18 or 19 years old.  Our pilot was 27; one of the oldest pilots in all of the air corps at that time and the co-pilot was 21.  I was 19 when I got overseas. We hit the sack and the CQ (charge of quarters) would come through at 1 am or at 4 am depending on when they had to get you up for a mission.  They would have you fall out and we rode bikes to the mess hall.  We ate pretty well.  We had eggs and meats and coffee and orange juice.  

From there we would go to the briefing room.  The standard operating procedure in the 8th air force was that you were briefed three hours before takeoff.  So we would all be in there, officers and enlisted men listening to a guy up on the stage telling us where we were going.  Then we would disperse and go down to the armament place and pick up our guns.  The guns were always removed from the aircraft overnight and stripped and oiled.  We would pick them up and take them out to the airplane.  We would place them in the airplane and look the airplane over carefully to be sure of what we were flying and that it was able to fly.  

After that was done,  we would lay down, because of the weight of our parachutes.  You had this parachute harness and the parachute would hook on the hooks.  If you had to bail out then under the parachute was a "mae west", a life preserver with two little aerosol bottles.  You pull a cord and it would inflate.  You could lie by your airplane for hours on the stand because you had on all this equipment and often the weather in England was lousy.  It was lousy most of the year. 

Then we would get the green flare, that meant go.  The crew would pile on board and fire up the engines and head for the end of the runway.  You take off and we would fly the mission.  Some days we would go to Kiel, Germany.   That wasn’t bad.  It was about a five-hour round trip but we got shot at continuously.  German aircraft would come up and shoot at us.  We would have anti-aircraft guns shooting at us, particularly where they were protecting a vital target.  

They had a propaganda woman, "Axis Sally" they called her, broadcasting on a German radio telling us everyday where we were going.  We didn’t know who told her but she knew where we were going and sometimes that is how we learned where we were going.  We either had that on or the BBC, which was the British government radio.  

When we got back from a mission, we would unload the aircraft and then go in and be debriefed.   If I claimed I shot down an enemy fighter there might be three other airplanes claiming that same kill.   We were flying in squadrons of twelve airplanes.  Sometimes you would have four to five hundred bombers in a big stream heading for a target.  When a fighter comes in, everybody’s 50-caliber machine gun might be firing at that poor devil from many directions.  If I thought I hit him, there might be five or six other guys that thought they had hit him.  You would have to find out who actually got credit for it because they would decipher all of our information.  

We also saw the first jets.  The Germans, about the time I was finishing up my tour in September of 1944, had developed the Me 262, a two-engine jet.  I had never seen anything that fast.  Propeller airplanes go 350 mph or something like that.  We would be cruising at about 170 mph.  It was frightening as hell!  The German jet fighters couldn’t stay up very long once they reached the altitude where we were.  They could stay with us for about eight minutes and then they had to go back and refuel. If a bunch of your airplanes from your squadron were shot up or went down for some reason or another, or if the crews bailed out, they would put us back in the air.  They didn’t want us sitting around.  The only time we flew two missions in a single day was on D-Day.  That was just a short hop over the channel.  We bombed their installations and then went back and bombed their troops.  We tried to bomb their transports, roadways, and bridges to stop them from bringing troops to fight against our boys who were hitting the beach.  

When you were flying we had to wear the heavy leather suit because it was cold.  So that is why we wore silk gloves under our mitts.  If a gun jammed and you had to do something to un jam it, you wouldn’t dare touch that metal because you would be stuck there for the rest of the mission.  The other thing that they warned us about was bailing out over the water.  If you had to bail out over the North Sea, your life expectancy was 20 minutes.  The water is that cold. 

One of our most memorable missions was in the middle of 1944.  General Montgomery, was the commander for all the English troops and he had to answer to Eisenhower, who was our commander.  He convinced Eisenhower that he was going to be the first one to cross the Rhine into Germany.  He wasn’t going to let Patton or Bradley become the first.  So they put together a big attack that called for us to bomb the devil out of Arnhem, Holland.  Behind us would come about 4,000 gliders being pulled by DC-3s, with our troops in them and they were going to land there in their gliders. There was going to be a big effort to save one bridge over the Rhine River.  We went in and bombed ahead of that attack.  When we came off the target, the whole squadron would turn left and drop about 1000 feet to throw the German anti-aircraft shells off.  We were over Holland and after we turned we got out over the North Sea. We had lost both outboard engines.  We only had the inboard engines.  We got out over the North Sea and there were no fighters around so we took and stripped everything out of that airplane that was heavy.  We threw away the ammunition and guns.  We always took and strapped our GI boots to our parachute harness somewhere because these were soft-shoes and if we had to bail out we wanted our boots with us so we could put those on and walk.  It would be painful to walk very far in the heavy flying boots.  We threw everything out and we made it back to England.  Thank god we even found our airfield.  But, it turned out that the whole mission called "Market Garden" was a disaster and we lost thousands of men.  Montgomery was not the first one into Germany, Patton was.  I was grateful that I survived.  Not one man in our crew was wounded even though we had shells that came through our airplane.  

There are only three of us left alive now.   Our pilot passed away about three years ago.  I was a staff sergeant.  This is the air medal that I was awarded.  After every five missions you got an air medal but you only got one medal and you got a star for the other set of missions. I was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross at the end of my tour. The big thing was VE day when Hitler surrendered and there was a big blast in Times Square. When the war ended I was already back in the states.  I got home Christmas day, 1944.  I got back from England on the "Ille De France" which was one of the luxury ocean liners like the Queen Elizabeth.  They had stripped it down to be a troop carrier and we landed in Boston. I took a train across the country and got home on Christmas day.  It was sensational.  

Then I was sent to California and they kept trying to get us to sign up because at that time they had developed the B-29 bomber, which was flying all those long missions in the South Pacific.  We said "no way".  We were not going to sign up for more combat.  We had all we wanted.  They didn’t know what to do with us. General Arnold put the excess airmen in the army engineers.  So we signed up for the army engineers and we went to Boise, Idaho in 1945.  We were there when fires were breaking out. We started fighting fires in late May, 1945 and we did not quit fighting fires until October, 1945.

What was the hardest part of being in the war?

Hardest part was being away from home.  That was tough.  I had never been anyplace in my life and here I was over in England and away from home. I was not able to correspond with my family.

I know we came back one time from a mission and England was so fogged in that you couldn’t see the ends of our wings.  We let down from 22,000 feet until we dropped low enough to see and there were thousands of planes coming back and you see them.  They had radio beacons and that was hairy.  Most of the missions always had something that caused you a lot of heartache, but especially German fighter airplanes.  They would come nose to nose and I had a little piece of plastic for protection.  They would roll through your formation and many times we knocked them down.  It was a harried life.  We got two days off every two weeks and most of the time we would jump on a train, and we would go to London.  We saw the Tower of London, St. Paul’s, and all those things.   I was in London one time and Hitler had developed a buzz bomb and he would send those things over England and when they ran out of fuel they would come down and explode.  The A-2, a rocket, would come down so fast the wardens didn’t even know.  One time I was there in the middle of London, and a rocket blew the top two floors off a hotel.