ONLINE EXTRAS
Video: Local World War II veterans tell their stories about the Greatest Generation and WWII 70 years later.
Interactive guide: The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force has a lot of planes from WWII. We'll show you some of the key ones in our guide.
Historic newspapers: See the front pages from the Dayton Daily News during the last week of the war in Europe in May 1945.
Quiz: Can you name notable WWII aircraft from their silhouettes?
MyDaytonDailyNews.com
Army Air Corps B-17 gunner Lewis Waters was wounded but survived Nazi anti-aircraft barrages on American bomber formations over Europe.
Navy sailor Baylor C. Kirk hunted German U-boats in the Atlantic and survived Japanese kamikaze attacks in the Pacific.
Charles P. Feaster was a Tuskegee Airman who kept Army Air Corps fighters planes flying into battle.
They are emblematic of the “Greatest Generation” who lived through the Great Depression, joined more than 16 million other American service members who served in uniform and survived and fought through the perilous state of World War II to attain victory in the largest conflict in human history.
The war that began Sept. 1, 1939, when German troops invaded Poland — and drew the United States in after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941 — claimed the lives of more than 400,000 Americans and killed as many as 60 million people, both civilian and military, worldwide, according to the National Museum of World War II in New Orleans.
Ohioans played a key role in the conflict, from rolling in tanks, flying planes and aboard ships, to manning factory assembly lines on the home front that churned out everything from Jeeps and machine guns to parts to keep planes flying in combat and buying war bonds and rationing consumer goods like meat and gasoline to support the war effort.
Friday, May 8, marks the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe, or V-E Day, the day an armistice went into effect with Germany. That date marks the end of the war in Europe that left a continent devastated and concluded a nightmare of Nazi concentration camps that killed millions of Jews and others.
The war would slog on for months longer in the Pacific until Japan surrendered after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Today, we take a look back on World War II with some local veterans who went “over there” to Europe and North Africa or served on the home front. In August, we will feature veterans who were there for the final victory in the Pacific.
Missing in action
The parents of Lewis H. Waters received a Western Union telegram that he was missing in action.
The Boise, Idaho, native was assigned to the Second Bomb Group in the Army Air Corps in Italy. Now 90 years old, the retired insurance underwriter lives in Springfield with his wife, Ann.
On Jan. 21, 1945, Waters and his crew went missing on a bomber flight over Austria.
“We lost our oxygen on a mission over Vienna and we had to drop down to safe territory,” he said. “The weather was so bad we couldn’t return to Italy. We couldn’t get over the mountains or get over to Switzerland.
“The weather forced us down, down, down until we were flying at about fifteen hundred elevation.”
Looking out the window, he spotted a Nazi airfield.
“You could see the guys getting to their machine guns and their anti-aircraft guns,” he said.
Bullets hit the B-17. An anti-aircraft shell shot through the plane’s floor and exploded outside the cabin.
“The explosion of the shell blew me a couple of feet back to the floor of the plane,” he said. He was bleeding, with shrapnel wounds to a hand, cheek and leg.
Still able to control the plane, the pilot landed the bomber in a frozen potato field near a small Hungarian village. On the ground, Russians hauled Waters and a second wounded gunner on a horse-drawn wagon to a hospital where Waters recuperated for five days.
The crew made rudimentary repairs to fix the damaged B-17, like slapping on a new tail wheel from another bomber.
Twenty-eight days after the crew landed, the B-17 lumbered back into the air. But it was nearly a disaster. The left wing tip was sheared off when it struck a tree.
Back in Italy, the crew wasn’t out of danger. Even so, Waters’ parents got another telegram saying he had returned to base. Yet more missions were on the horizon.
“We lost a few planes over the Adriatic Sea when guys were caught in bad weather and one plane would crash into another,” Waters said. “And then you’re anxious about where you’re going and how bad the flak is going to be and how good the fighter cover is going to be. If you’re not scared, you’re probably a dumb whatever, for sure. Because you have to be.”
Near the end of the war, German fighters targeted B-24 Liberator bombers the most, Waters said.
“They picked on the ones that were the easiest to pick on and that was the B-24s and we could see them in the distance being attacked,” he said. “That’s kind of sad because it’s your own American buddies, yet you have a sigh of relief that it’s not your group and your squadron.”
Decades later, he still mourns the loss of a friend and fellow gunner killed in a bomber over northern Italy in December 1944.
“He got a piece of flak (that) came through and hit him in his chest and went out his back and he bled to death on the way back to base,” Waters said. “They couldn’t do anything for him.”
Waters and Ann visited the long-lost airman’s grave site a few years ago in Columbus, Ind.
American and British forces had decimated the German Luftwaffe near the end of the war.
Waters was one of the lucky ones in a war where U.S. bomber crews had among the highest casualty rates and dim chances of survival the longer they were in the air. At the end of the war, more than 34,300 Army Air Force airmen were killed and more than 13,700 wounded in Europe. Another 43,000 were missing in action, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
The service branch lost nearly 27,700 aircraft in Europe, including more than 9,900 bombers of all types and nearly 8,500 fighters in combat, Air Force museum figures show.
When victory in Europe arrived, bars were closed near Waters’ base but the airmen didn’t hold back on celebrating, he remembered.
“Everybody went to drink beer and bad Italian wine and celebrate,” he said. “The guys went outside to shoot their .45s (handguns) and that’s when one of the officers said it was a wonder nobody got killed. I don’t even know if anybody got wounded, but it was a celebration and a lot of relief. Guys think, boy, finally I’ll get home.”
‘Everywhere you’d look you’d see ships’
Baylor Kirk was in two wars on both fronts.
It was a long way from home for the Pennington Gap, Va., native who was the son of a coal miner.
On a wall in his Beavercreek home he shares with his wife Clarice, a tattered 48-star flag that once flew aboard his warship, U.S.S. Loy, is a daily reminder of battles seven decades ago.
The Loy, a destroyer escort, was in a fleet of Navy warships that guarded 90 or more cargo vessels in a convoy hauling planes, Jeeps, bombs, ammunition and food across the Atlantic to troops and allies in need in North Africa and islands in the Mediterranean Sea.
“We would try to keep the U-boats from sneaking in and sinking some of our ships,” he said. “Everywhere you’d look you’d see ships.”
Sonar would pick up torpedoes barreling in, but sailors often could do little to stop the spiraling weapons under the waves.
“The sonar would pick it up and the only thing you could do was wait for it to hit,” said Kirk, 91. “If they saw it coming on sonar, they would try to turn to avoid it if they could, but usually that’s pretty hard to do. Usually by the time they pick it up, it’s too late.”
Many cargo ships loaded with war supplies sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.
But even on the roiling ocean, false alarms happened. The warship once popped depth charges into the Atlantic after a sonar ping indicated a U-boat lurked nearby.
It wasn’t there.
“We’d sunk a whale,” Kirk said.
The war for him and more than 200 of his shipmates didn’t end in the Atlantic, where the ship sailed for 13 months on three convoy patrols. The ship was upgraded with additional armaments at an East Coast shipyard and sent through the Panama Canal into the chaos of the Pacific war against the Japanese.
“None of us had any idea what we were facing,” he said.
In the Pacific, sailors contended with Japanese bombers and kamikaze attacks.
“You can be on a ship out there in the middle of the ocean, and you hear it over the speaker system: “‘We got a plane coming in toward us at two mile,’” Kirk said. “We think it might be a bomber. Then they’ll say, ‘now it’s one mile. Now it’s half a mile.’ You’re sitting there (waiting) for the bomb to come down the middle of the stack of the ship. Nowhere to go but just wait on it.”
Kirk said the Loy shot down seven would-be kamikaze attackers, or Japanese pilots on a suicide mission who flew planes loaded with bombs directly into U.S. warships.
In the 1945 invasion of Okinawa, a kamikaze struck a “glancing blow,” punching holes in the side of the ship above the water line, Kirk said.
He remembered one sailor on deck at the time who caught on fire from flying debris but survived.
“When the plane hit, the gasoline just went everywhere on the deck and he was on fire and he was trying to run away from it and it burned his feet and his legs,” he said. “He got hysterical and it took three or four people to hold that guy. He was a small guy, but he just became so strong.”
Kirk, a retired General Motors electrician, said he would tense up in battle, but he didn’t think about fear. “You didn’t have time to think about it much.”
Tuskegee Airman goes to war
Charles P. Feaster’s church in Xenia has a “Red Tails” movie poster hanging on a wall. The movie tells the story of the historic Tuskegee Airmen.
For Feaster, it’s no Hollywood movie. The Xenia man served as a technical engineer with the all-black Army Air Corps 99th Pursuit Squadron, one of the Tuskegee Airmen’s units in World War II in an era when the military was segregated.
President Barack Obama handed Feaster a gold presidential coin last year on the tarmac at Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base near Columbus.
“He said, ‘Feaster, you are a path breaker. I said, ‘What do you mean path breaker?’”
The commander-in-chief’s response: “’That means cut a path,’ he said,” Feaster recalled.
The honor was one more commemoration since the Tuskegee Airmen were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007.
“When we got the gold medal, that is something I will never forget my whole life,” said Feaster, a retired Wright-Patterson Air Force Base management and program analyst who lives with his wife, Mae, in Xenia.
Feaster trained at Tuskegee, Ala., and Chanute Army Air Field in Illinois. He spent $13 — or not much more than bus fare — to buy a 1930 Model A Ford to drive to Tuskegee, one place African Americans were allowed to work on and fly planes in the segregated society of the 1940s, he remembered.
“I knew little or nothing about airplanes,” he said.
Tuskegee Airmen scored a distinguished combat record flying P-40 Warhawks, P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs in North Africa, Italy, Sicily, France, Germany and the Balkans. They often flew fighter patrols and shot down enemy fighters to escort white bomber crews on missions over Europe.
“In the beginning, we didn’t get the support we needed in combat,” Feaster said in an interview last year. “Washington decided to give us that chance and we took that chance. We destroyed approximately 400 German airplanes. The Germans called us the black birdman, and the U.S. serviceman called us the red-tailed angels.”
In 1943, Feaster kept P-40 Warhawks flying with the 99th Pursuit Squadron in Cape Bon, Tunisia, so pilots could drop bombs on German and Italian forces on the island of Pantelleria. It was one of several assignments he had during the war.
“I felt very proud,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Dayton Daily News. “We’re flying an iron bird equipped with six 50-caliber guns.”
On the flight line, he he’d wait for a pilot to throw his arms in the air, signally mechanical trouble. Feaster reacted quickly.
“I didn’t have a lot of time,” he added. “The engines are running, gasoline is being consumed. You had to be good. You had to be good.”
In 1948, President Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of blacks and whites in military units.
Of he and his fellow Tuskegee airmen, Feaster said he is proud of “the results of what we all did to get to where we are now.”
WAVES at war
Marguerite McHugh and Dorothy Beach were sisters in war before they were sisters in the Catholic Church.
The two nuns at the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Reading near Cincinnati both served in the Navy WAVES – Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service — in World War II.
Beach, 93, handled confidential communications for the Atlantic and Pacific fleet at Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C., and McHugh, 92, was a gunnery instructor at the Armed Guard School at Shelton, Va.
Today, they both live in a convent in Reading near Cincinnati.
McHugh said her two brothers were in the military during World War II and she didn’t want to be left out of the fight.
“I thought the war would be over soon if the three of us got in there, so that’s why I joined,” she said.
She taught men how to fire weapons, an unusual role at a time when women weren’t allowed in combat units and couldn’t serve on Navy ships. They often took the place of jobs that had gone to men.
That wasn’t one of the considerations Beach thought of while working in Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C. She was one of nearly a dozen women in her Trinity College graduating class who joined the WAVES.
“We were thinking of doing our part in an emergency,” she said, adding she “never really thought of it. They talked a lot about it in the newspapers about accepting women and they hesitated about accepting them. But it was a patriotic thing, I guess, and that was a patriotic time.”
McHugh remembered an isolated base in full training mode to meet wartime needs.
Back in the pre-Pentagon era of Washington, Beach worked in the Chief of Naval Operations code room handling fleet communications.
“It was before computers where you can do things very quickly and it was a situation where they just had to have people there all doing it all the time,” she said.
Hours were long, but she wanted the duty, remembering soldiers and sailors on the war front.
“I did that the whole time I was in and it was hard but you wanted to do it,” she said.
The work of both women went on after V-E Day. The Navy was heavily involved in fighting the war in the Pacific.
Both recalled the reaction to the announcement Japan had surrendered.
“On V-J Day, we were watching a moving in the Rec Room and they stopped the movie and they said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we wish to announce the war is over. And … everything went flying,” McHugh said.
Beach anticipated the end.
“We knew it was going to happen because they had been typing out in English and not in code ‘congratulations to the fleet,’” she said.
Whistles blew throughout Washington when the war ended. But her job wasn’t finished. On V-J Day, she got on a trolley car to head to her duty assignment until the car could go no further because of the growing crowds.
“It was just jammed,” she said. “People were out in the street and they didn’t even care about the trolley car.”
She walked the rest of the way to headquarters and noticed one of her fellow officers wasn’t wearing a hat outside, which was forbidden in uniform.
“I said, ‘Where is your hat?’ and she said, ‘Somebody grabbed it off my head in the crowd and so I just don’t have it.’ And so it really was bedlam and everybody was yelling.”
After the war, both chose a religious vocation. Beach became a nun 70 years ago and McHugh has served the church for more than 60 years.
McHugh was inducted into the Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame in 2012 for her work after her time in the Navy.
Cargo pilot under fire
The toll of World War II on American pilots in Europe changed the course of direction for William P. Cullen.
Instead of being a fighter pilot, as he was in training to become, the New York City native who now lives in Beavercreek was sent to Europe to fly Army Air Corps C-47 and C-46 cargo planes.
Even in training, the toll of war was always present.
“There’s a lot of casualties taking place all the time,” he said, who was a pilot with the Ninth Air Force. “Today, if you had figures like they had then, the country would be shocked at how many people were dying, even in training. But it was war.”
Mostly, he remembers Operation Varsity in March 1945, the last major airlift of the war carrying paratroopers into battle into Germany.
Cullen, now 91, took off from northern France in a C-46 to fly across the Rhine River with paratroopers aboard. He was flying in one of 72 C-46s from four squadrons moving in waves over the drop zone.
Over the Rhine in Germany, he said, “Nine of the first 18 planes were shot down almost immediately … in flames, sometimes with everybody aboard being killed, troopers and all, because the plane would suddenly pitch down and nobody could get out the door.”
His twin-engine plane was hit in the second wave.
“My plane took a hit on the left wing tip, another hit in the tail and one right next to me,” he said. “This is when I began to really believe in God.”
A 20 millimeter anti-aircraft shell punctured the skin of the cargo plane near the cockpit but exited without exploding, he said.
During the raid, one of the trooper’s parachutes popped open accidentally in the cabin. He bundled it up and threw out in front of him as he jumped out.
“It blew him right back and his parachute was caught on the tail of the plane and he was dangling there for minutes before he finally broke fee,” Cullen said. “I don’t know whether his chute opened enough to save him or whether he hit the ground too hard. But he certainly landed away from the rest of the guys, so that was bad.”
Another pilot saw a paratrooper killed standing in a plane doorway when he was hit by a flying shell.
“People don’t realize how very vulnerable you are in that situation,” Cullen said.
The World War II aviator witnessed devastation over Germany. Looking down from a formation of planes, he saw a “huge building” in Wesel, Germany, that had been hit with gunfire and bombs “and all you could see was a huge pile of brick dust. It just had been pulverized.”
Dusseldorf, Germany, was another wartime casualty.
“I remember flying over that city and looking down and not seeing a single roof intact,” he said. “When you have a thousand plane raids, you’re pulverizing an awful lot of real estate.”
In Operation Varsity, 21 of the 72 planes he flew with were shot down.
“That’s horrendous casualties,” he said.
Cullen was sent to the far northern reaches of the British Isles just before the war ended.
He and his crew mates heard of Germany’s unconditional surrender on a cockpit radio in May 1945. “We picked up Winston Churchill making a speech in Parliament saying the Germans are surrendering and letting people know that the war in Europe was ending,” he said.
The planes were refueled and landed in Norway at an air base filled with German bombers. The concern was Sweden might invade Norway to regain lost territory with the war’s end, he said.
After the war, he stayed in Europe for a year as a military pilot flying civilians across the continent.
“Immediately after the war, the civilian airlines in Europe were decimated,” he said. “They virtually didn’t exist.”
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