I've been pecking at this blog, adding any information I can find as I get it for some time now. I've never publicized this other than to mention it on other B-24 posts/sites or to pass it along to family, friends or someone else who may be interested in the history. The few who've seen this blog are family, friends and the interested. That's just fine with me. I'm not monetizing this site. Simply, I'm doing this as my
and contributors at the B-24 Liberator and PB4Y fan club have a wealth of information. "A picture is worth a thousand words". How true. I'm doing the best I can with my
toy computer to enlarge and identify planes in photographs; planes that were on Kwajalein and Saipan at the same time as the
. Also, I'm using the pilot roster and mission plans which were sent, to me, via the Pentagon historians. These pages have been typed (in humidity) in carbon triplicates, shipped over oceans, handled, copied, microfilmed and stored. It's amazing they survive at all. These are sometimes smeary, barely legible and require a bit of sleuthing.
As mentioned above, I've been looking at B-24 Best Web and The Liberator/PB4Y sites. Anytime I think I can obtain further information from a surviving crew or family member, I ask. Occasionally I strike gold...
Meet another plane and crew who were flying alongside the Pistol Pakin
Mamma; often on the same missions.
Lt. [Wilson] Christian was the primary pilot for Pacific Avenger 1 & 2. Hopefully I'll be posting more on him later thanks to information from his nephew.
I need to mention that Lt. Victor
Petroff is shown in photograph and mission logs as piloting the
with Robert Dempster, Jr. as
co-pilot. Petroff also pilots the
. He was a busy guy according to the mission logs.
Maybe he was an instructor? Maybe he was in a big hurry to get home? There were plenty others doing the same bomber shuffle.
CHARLES C. J. WYLAND
7th U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE
30th Bombardment Group
1942 – 1945
STAFF SERGEANT
“THE PACT”
Though the odds were as good
as not that it might happen, no one chose to talk about the very real possibility
of having to honor The Pact one day. So, as young men often did in our
circumstance, the ones thrown together by chance just months before, we made a
deal. It was a simple pledge shared
among a few that would bond us as brothers and, one day, determine our fate. More
on this later, as there was work to be done first.
The big story begins much
earlier than my role in the war. At age
19 while working at Standard Steel Works in Burnham, I knew that it was time to
join the thousands of others who had put aside the comforts of home, turning
down a deferment due to the factory’s work in making tank parts, and take up arms in defense of freedom. Indeed, there was a sense of duty; but, the
attraction of adventure beyond the world I had known pulled me in, as well. So,
I enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force.
Basic training took me from
New Cumberland, PA. to Miami, Florida where fancy hotels had been converted to barracks
and the city had become a training ground for young men preparing for
battle. It was an exotic environment for
a country boy from Juniata Valley and made the daily grind worth the effort.
Then it was off to gunnery
training at Nellis AFB in Nevada and bombing training in northern Nevada. At Nellis, we rode in back of pick-up trucks
across the flatlands while firing 12 gauge shot guns at clay pigeons along the
way. Next, I enrolled in aircraft
maintenance school in Amarillo, Texas and became certified as an assistant
flight engineer. While there, we lived
in tar paper shacks for the entire eight months. Later, we moved to the old silver
mining town of Tonopah in northern Nevada for the in-flight combat training
using B-17 heavy bombers.
When we shipped to Hickam AFB
in Oahu, Hawaii, I officially became part of the 7th Army Air Force,
30th Bomber Group, 38th Squadron, as a Staff Sergeant. I was to be the ball turret gunner in the
belly of a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, as I was the only crew member trained
on the Sperry gun sights; and I would be the assistant flight engineer. The
Pacific Avenger, had been in service for a while; and it sported quite a few
battle scars.
Our crew of 10 young recruits
and an ex-fighter pilot, who had washed out of flight school, became part of
the Pacific Theater campaign. Our job
was to open the western Pacific islands in preparation for U.S. invasion. Each island would become a base from which
the next set of missions would be flown, as part of the plan to reach the
Japanese mainland.
Our crew picked up where
others had left off, hitting Kwajalein, the Turks, the Marianas and other
islands before setting up base in Saipan for the big missions to open Iwo Jima
in advance of its invasion. The
mountains in Kwajalein hid scattered Japanese troops who would snipe at us,
even as we tried to root them out. In
Saipan, we lived in tents in sugar cane fields during the monsoon season, a far
cry from the relative luxury of Miami.
Like Yossarian and his flight
crew in Joseph Heller’s classic World War II novel, “Catch 22”, our original
orders called for 25 missions, each one consisting of a five hour flight to the
target and another five hours back to home base. But once we had flown 20, we were told that
the limit had been raised to 30 missions.
Then at 25 we were extended to 35, until we eventually hit 40 missions.
The war was heating up; and it was taking its toll on aircraft and crews. In addition to newly trained crews that
arrived regularly, and in order to accomplish the big push to reach Japan,
combat
experienced crews like mine
were kept in the Pacific Theater to ensure a full battle force.
Iwo Jima was a long way from
Saipan, so far, in fact, that the fighter squadrons that usually accompany
bombing runs as protection against Japanese interceptors could not make the
round trip. We had to fly these
crucial missions alone,
depending upon our own wits and weaponry as defenses against a foe determined
to prevent us from reaching our destination.
The B-24 was a four engine
heavy bomber built with two bombays and the capacity for large payloads. The great distance between base and target,
however, required the installation of an auxiliary fuel tank in the front
bay. While it would help get us to
target and back, it was a potentially massive, fixed bomb that, if hit by enemy
fire, would instantly doom the plane and the crew. Nevertheless, we would prepare for each
mission with the determination to complete the job. Each of us was committed to duty, country and
one another. I carried a pocket Bible
with me; and before each mission, I would read the 23rd Psalm.
As I mentioned, each mission
required five hours of flight to and five hours back. It was cold, the altitude was high, and the
plane was not pressurized. On one of the
missions, one of my eardrums blew out during an evasive maneuver that forced us
to dive from the high bombing altitude of 25,000 feet to near sea level in a
matter of seconds to avoid enemy fire. I
did not tell anybody, though, because I would have been grounded; and my crew
would have been without an experienced belly gunner and flight engineer. We had few comforts, one of them being
tropical Hershey’s chocolate, a substance that wouldn’t melt as easily in the
hot Pacific climate, at sea level, that is.
At altitude, we had to melt the stuff over an improvised stove just to
avoid broken teeth. As a side note, my
wife, Mary, a native of Mt. Rock, whom I had married while in training, was
working at the Hershey’s factory during this time. I sensed her presence with every bite.
As we approached our target,
crew members switched from their transit positions to their battle stations in
preparation for ground fire and attack
from the Japanese Zeros we knew
would be coming. The hatch of the belly
turret would be opened; I would climb in and get into a fetal sitting position
with my knees nearly up to my chin, and the turret was lowered from the bottom
of the bomber. I could rotate the
capsule in a wide swing, giving me a good view of the skies and the condition
of the underside of the plane. It was so
tight, though, that I couldn’t move around, nor could I fit in it while wearing
my flak jacket. Instead, I sat on it for
a little peace of mind.
It was only a 45 minute stint
in our battle positions, and just 15 minutes for the actual bombing run. Yet, the 5 hour flight gave us plenty of time
to
privately anticipate the
coming challenge; and those mere minutes of battle and bombing seemed like
eternity.
We were more fortunate than
some other crews, able to get in and out and occasionally taking down a Zero
before it got to us. At least that was
the case until one fateful mission when the odds ran out.
There was nothing unusual
about that day, no new intelligence, no premonitions, and just another 10 hour
bombing run to Iwo. Then it
happened. It wasn’t the typical whiz of anti-aircraft
rounds piercing the fuselage to which we had become accustomed. This was loud, ripping, jarring; and it
rocked the Pacific Avenger from wing to tail.
We had been hit, and hit badly, perhaps mortally, by 20 mm cannon fire
from a Zero. The pilot reported the
number 3 inboard engine had been hit, was smoking and shut down
completely. Our tail had been struck and
the torque bar on the twin rudders was damaged, making it hard to maneuver the
plane. Our tail gunner was wounded and
out of commission. We scrambled to get him
onto the flight deck, checked and treated.
We hurried through the checklist of craft operations. The situation was dire. We were five hours from base and nearly
crippled, losing hydraulic fluid and altitude.
Standard operating procedure
in circumstances such as this suggests lightening the plane’s load by
discarding unnecessary equipment to maintain flight. Out went the guns, the ammunition; anything
that wasn’t necessary for flight was dumped.
And then, it was time to honor
The Pact. First went all the survival
gear. It wouldn’t be needed. Then, without hesitation or ceremony, we sent
out the parachutes, unopened and unoccupied, to their ocean fate.
You see, immortal as we
wished we were and brazened enough in our camaraderie, we knew that going down
with the Pacific Avenger was somehow noble and, in a weird way, darkly
practical. It was
better to die as brothers, at
once, than to give satisfaction to an enemy who
might capture us, or to
experience the agony of witnessing, one by one, our demise in an uncaring ocean
and its formidable inhabitants.
And so, our fate was sealed,
though the outcome was unknown. We descended
to wave level where the air was thicker and warmer; and we waited as the hours
rolled by and doubts were countered by hope and prayer. I pulled that Bible out of my pocket.
It was our pilot who saw the
speck of Saipan first, yelling to the crew to hold fast, even as we all broke
into cheers. It was now just a matter of
bringing the Avenger home.
EPILOGUE
One might be rightfully
satisfied if the story ended here; but there was just a bit more. Upon inspection, we discovered that the
torque bar which connected the twin tail rudders had been almost completely
severed. Had we lost the use of those
rudders, we would have been unable to maneuver the plane and would have crashed
into the Pacific. The Pacific Avenger
was determined to be beyond repair, and it was scrapped.
A short time later, we were
assigned a new B-24, still unpainted and straight from the factory. It was equipped with radar, among other
improvements, which allowed us to conduct night missions. These were flown solo, without either fighter
protection or in formation with other bombers. This was particularly dangerous
because, at night, it was easy for enemy search lights to spot us and gave a
clear shot for anti-aircraft fire to pick us off as though we were sitting
ducks. Toward the end of our tour of
duty, our
bombers were flying missions
every hour, around the clock over Iwo Jima.
Here we go again…
POSTSCRIPT
C.J. Wyland lives in
Belleville, PA., where he and his late wife Mary reared seven children. His courage through the war and his zest for
life inspire us all.
