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Okay, we're here with bud haedike
and we're rolling.
This is the song that I wrote for my bomb group
and all the guys that made it or didn't make it.
It's to the melody of "I'll be seeing you."
J I'll be seeing you
on all the missions that we flew j
j and also with your good ole crew j
j the whole day through j
j enemy fighters and flak j
j the sound of loud ack, ack j
j and lucky we got back j
j to our ground crew on that day we flew
j I'll be seeing you
at good old deopham green j
j in your sleek flying machine,
o, the one called mighty queen j
j I'm going to look for you in skies of blue j
j and when your flights are through j
j I'll be seeing you in my dreams
and I'll be missing you j
thank you.
Well, I don't know, the odds were all against ya.
It was more or less like being in death row,
in a penitentiary,
waiting on your turn and you knew it was coming.
You fly a real tough mission,
and you're so glad to get back,
and everybody says, "boy,
we made it through that one, didn't we?"
And, then, next morning they come in,
put their flashlight in your face.
"All right, boys, get up, you're going to be leaving.
We're going to be flying in two hours.”
Now that's... that's tough.
I was 21 years old.
Yeah, and we felt like, uh, we could live forever.
Don't get me wrong,
we still get that tight feeling...
When we would see bursting flak nearby.
When we see fighters, we still get that feeling, but...
You can't make a living that way.
All you could do is make a dying.
Anybody that says they weren't afraid
were full of crap
'cause you were always afraid what was going to happen next,
particularly in flak.
You just... you just waited for something
to go off around you.
And that's when the fighters would come up.
One of the men in our crew kept saying,
"I know I'm not gonna make it," et cetera, et cetera,
and you don't like to hear that.
And he was very concerned
because his wife was expecting within a day or two.
And the next day, they had him flying,
which they shouldn't have had, and they took so many men
from our crew to fly with him,
and they never made it back.
They crashed into the channel.
And, incidentally, and this isn't storytelling, but he...
He, uh...
He was killed the day his son was born.
The war came, and we went and did
what they told us to do.
That's the only thing I know.
The Japanese ruined my youth,
because I was 20 years old or 19 years old.
Everything was wonderful, and the Japanese,
in one fell swoop, ended all of that.
And it lasted four years.
Well, I can see why they get young fellows to fly to war,
or ground, or submarines, and so forth.
When you're younger, you feel you can do anything.
I think when you get older, you get smarter.
There was a 19-year-old navigator,
Jewish kid, sharp as a tack.
And I had some older boys.
My bombardier was 26 years old.
I was 22, 23.
Oldest man we had in the crew was a Pennsylvania dutchman,
thirty-two years old.
We called him "pappy."
Thirty-two years old.
Our navigator was 26,
and everybody else was anywhere from 22, 23.
I see... 1 can look back now and see why young people
were in a war, not older people.
Older people got better sense.
Sometimes they say that the older you get,
the more wiser you get.
There weren't too many, I don't think, younger,
too much younger than me.
I flew every one of my missions at 19.
The old man on our crew was our waist gunner.
He was 25.
I'll tell you, when we got into this thing,
you wanted to fly.
And, you know, you had a great time training,
all that, but when you get over there
and had got shot at the first time,
you knew you were in deep doo-doo.
And... and you really took life seriously after that.
They said we was gonna fly 30 missions.
You know, they started out at 25.
Now they changed it to 30 when we got there.
And then we got 26 missions in,
and they give us a week off.
And we come back and they says, "you're gonna fly 35,"
and that was kind of a shock.
Well, it seemed like I was flying all the time.
There were 40 bomb groups.
Our bomb group had a lot of people.
I don't know the logistics of keeping the fuel
and the ammunition, loading the bombs at night,
getting them ready for the next day.
I don't know how they did it.
When you're in a position like that,
there's no tomorrow.
You do everything that you want to do,
that you can do, when you feel like doing it,
and do it then
because you may not get the chance to do it again.
Wouldn't be unusual, they'd wake you up.
The first thing you'd do would be go to the, uh,
the mess hall to eat.
The mess hall was all lit up and everybody was laughing
and talking, and usually they had
Berlin Lynn or whatever her name was
on the radio broadcasting.
We hadn't been briefed yet.
We didn't know where we was gonna go,
but this lady in Berlin knew where we were gonna go,
and she says, "boys, you've got a tough one today.
You're going to so-and-so and so-and-so
and we'll be waiting on ya,"
and so they knew more than we did.
Now, in the air force, when we went to the kitchen
for breakfast and we were getting, say, eggs,
we'd get powdered eggs.
That's what they had.
Once in a while we would get fresh eggs.
You could get two over easy and this was a treat.
But we knew after a while that when you got fresh eggs,
it meant you were gonna have a real tough mission.
So they gave you fresh eggs.
That's the story.
We don't want fresh eggs, but we want fresh eggs.
When you're going to get ready for a flight,
you go into the locker room.
And you wore long Johns.
And then you'd wear the eod suit, put that on.
And we had gloves that were attached to those.
You had to get your gloves into those,
they came clear around your ankles too.
And then you had your flight suits.
Those were the things that you just wore.
And you'd load back on a truck
and they'd take you to the area
where the debriefing rooms were.
So all the crews and everything would be sitting there,
waiting, and they had a sheet over the wall.
They'd pull the sheet back
and say, "our target today is Germany.
The weather looks pretty good, as near as we can tell.”
One thing always got me about these briefings.
The catholic chaplain,
he was back in the corner hearing confessions.
And giving out communions.
So he... he knew that he was going someplace
he might not come back from.
That was one of the most amazing things in a war,
the choreographing of putting 1,100 airplanes together
in formation to go over.
We'd all line up on the perimeter strip
that comes around to the end of the runway.
And the lead ship would taxi around and line up.
And when he fired a flare to take off,
that lead ship went down the runway.
Next man pulled right up behind him.
Thirty seconds, he moved.
Thirty seconds, the third man moved.
Every 30 seconds a plane was going down that runway.
That lead plane never got off the ground
before that second plane was already running.
Well, we just spin out there on the end of the runway
and give it full throttle,
and you had to have enough speed for it
to lift all that load up.
You had a full gas load,
you had all your ammunition for the guns,
and you had the bomb load.
Of course, while you're up there,
I could see the sun coming up around earth.
And I thought that was the most weird thing,
to see the sun coming up,
and it's dark on earth, you know.
But you realized what was happening to you.
And, then, next thing you know,
the sun come up, and you see all these airplanes circling,
straining, so to speak, to get up to the altitude
with a heavy load of bombs.
You had to form up and you had to circle,
you was supposed to fly till you got formed up
with your group.
And then there'd be another bomb group over here.
And, one day, we come within three or four inches
of whacking up with another bomb group.
Well, on some of them, where the young pilots
had come in as replacements,
if I was first man to take off, we'd be up in the air,
say, 200, 300 feet climbing.
All of a sudden, "boom."
You see a bright flash,
a red flash and stuff coming down.
You knew darn well it was a mid-air collision.
And, uh, those were scary times,
as far as getting up.
Two b-17s, one came down
right on top of the other.
They all went to their death.
That's when I started smoking, by the way.
Well, actually, I believe that our officers
were closer to their crew
than they were with other officers.
As a crew, most crews stuck pretty well together.
We did a lot together.
I don't think we would have appreciated
one new man joining us.
We knew what each man was capable of doing.
Each man did his job good.
And no one complained.
We were family in the air.
You absolutely had to be, we all had our duties.
We just wanted to stay together.
And we flew 25 missions as a crew, all of us together.
You're a family.
Exactly, you have to be.
However, I can remember one mission
when our flight engineer came out smashed.
And I climbed all over him.
I said, "what is wrong with you?
We depend on one another.”
There was a lot of spit and Polish by the officers
and that didn't happen.
Like you say, we're a family of brothers.
And we didn't have time for all that stuff.
But there's no saluting and...
And "yes, sir," "no, sir," all that.
Each guy was his own guy.
Well, of course, each man would do his job,
and we all knew exactly who was going to do what,
so to speak.
So I knew I had a good crew.
And, uh, we just got along beautifully.
We had a crew chief that took care of that plane
after we got it back off a mission.
So the three of us walked that plane,
looked at everything on the ground,
asked him all the questions we could think of.
If there was any little thing
that we thought we should pay particular attention to,
for him to tell us.
You never flew the same plane all the time.
It's just like your car having an ouchy
and you take it in to firestone
or somewhere to get fixed.
They'd work overnight, all night long,
trying to patch planes.
As soon as you gotin,
they would take care of any damage.
They would get in the plane and check the engines out,
start "em up and check 'em out.
And they would clean up everything.
Tremendous workers.
They were... they were so good.
We came back in b-17s with two engines,
with the tail fin shot up and busted away...
With all kinds of holes in the plane.
And in two days, that plane was flying missions again.
We had an armorer on our crew,
and he'd be there when they were,
most cases, not all cases,
sometimes the plane would be loaded
before we ever got there.
The armor gunners took care of all of that.
They bring 'em out on big carriers
and, uh, it was a dangerous job.
We did not load the bombs.
No, but we did come out and check.
They were all fused.
And they had fusing wires stuck to the propeller.
These fusing wires were hooked on the shackles
that the bombs are hung on.
And when they left the plane, it would pull the wire out.
Now the bomb is alive.
If you've seen movies and you hear bombs,
"shhh," going down, that's this fuse spinning out.
Now the bomb is live and once it hit,
of course, it detonates.
We had two missions where I had to go back
in the bomb bay and put the cotter pins back in
and that is a little hairy.
Why? Cause when you landed,
if you didn't, the bombs were armed.
And if you had trouble, of course, you'd detonate.
Well, we talked about just about everything.
Our families, et cetera...
It didn't matter what it was.
We kept pretty much a running conversation
between everybody.
It made the mission go a little easier.
First thing you did, as soon as we cleared
the coast of england,
everybody would test their guns.
Well, of course, I can only speak for myself,
but when you're in hostile territory,
and I was in a top turret,
so all of my vision was 360,
ninety degrees this way, you know.
Contrails formed at the tail of the ship.
The moisture in the air and the ship flying through it
made the contrails,
and a lot of times you wouldn't have them
because it depends on the amount
of moisture in the air.
Couldn't see a prettier sight than that.
Kind of spellbound, you know, spellbound.
A beautiful sight.
If you was watching on the ground over in Germany,
they tell me it took about 30 minutes
for "em all to come over.
They said on a clear day
that the Germans could see us coming 50 miles out,
from the contrails.
And, unfortunately, when that happened,
that wasn't too good
because they were ready for us.
In 1938, I was down in Chile,
and they flew a goodwill tour down there.
I remember going out with my father
and seeing these big planes.
And I said to my father someday I'm gonna fly in one of those.
Little did I know.
The b-17 was not only a beautiful ship,
but it flew like a dream.
It flew like a overgrown Piper cub.
It flew nice and smooth.
Beautiful.
Took a lot of punishment.
The greatest airplane ever built
as far as I'm concerned.
They brought us back 35 times.
Sometimes in condition
that you would never even think of trying
to fly an airplane...
Any other airplane.
That plane came back,
and that plane brought us back.
It was a marriage, I'll tell ya.
A lot of guys had named their own planes,
and they had all kinds of kooky names.
The original crews had a lot of good painters.
And they had a lot of planes that were decorated
and had logos on them and so on.
Vargas girls like petty girl...
Petty girls, vargas girls, sexy girls,
there weren't too many serious things.
I think to keep guys loose.
Well, on a warm day it would be 20 below.
It... sometimes it got 60 below.
And oftentimes, I had to take my oxygen mask
and crack the ice out of it,
and check if it would freeze into the tube.
That was one of the worst parts of the mission,
was the, uh, was the cold air.
The only time you didn't feel it is when you were
fighting fighters or going over the target.
Oh, at 30,000 feet,
I think the temperature drops
2 degrees every 1,000.
It'd be about 40 below at that altitude.
In the cockpit, a little bit of heat came off
a number three engine.
It came into the cockpit there where the pilot and I sat,
and it was enough to kind of keep your feet warm
and your hands.
Our ball turret gunner had a gun problem.
His guns jammed and he took his gloves off to work on it.
And both his hands got frostbitten
and he didn't fly with us for a month
till his hands healed up.
Well, it was so cold on one mission
our co-pilot suffered an anoxia situation
where he passed out
and his hand froze to the plexiglas window.
And he had to amputate the fingers of his hand
because it was so cold that his hand, when he tried
to help himself, froze to the plexiglas window.
Well, the British treated us very nice.
In some cases, royally.
They call it the friendly invasion,
'cause we flat invaded that country.
England's a small country, and we had it
absolutely covered up with American soldiers.
And they tolerated us.
I was single then.
I could run around, do whatever I wanted.
But I didn't feel uncomfortable
with the British people at all.
Once I got to be able to understand the language,
because that english language
was a little different than ours.
Very good people.
As you know, at the beginning of the war,
they weren't too enamored by the yanks coming over.
They said we were overpaid,
oversexed and over here.
I remember that.
Flak is German 88-millimeter Cannon shells.
Flak was responsible for more planes being shot down
than enemy fighters.
And when you see flak, black puffs of smoke...
That's after the shell, of course, has exploded.
And it explodes, hypothetically,
into 200 pieces.
And it's powerful.
You don't know where the flak is coming from.
You don't know if the next burst is gonna hit you or not.
You never know where the next one is gonna be
in a case like that, and that's what scares you.
Well, it just looked like a big thunderstorm, so to speak.
That's what it amounted to.
But you had to keep on flying.
God was on your side when you didn't get hit.
The flak would vary so much.
The Germans had pretty good radar.
They could judge your altitude, your speed,
and your direction.
I think the worst that I ever had over a castle, Germany,
I'll never forget that one.
It blew my windshield out,
and come into my face at 160 miles an hour.
You look at that flak out there
and you swear you're not gonna get through it.
The sky's almost black with these things
busting all over the place.
It's amazing we did make it through as much as we did.
Well, we had a dog and it looked
more like a pig than a dog,
but it was our mascot.
We had a stove in the middle of the barracks
and we used to make sandwiches on it and so forth.
If the dog was around we'd feed him whatever we had left over.
He hung around the barracks until we got back.
I don't know if he had a name or not.
It was a faithful little dog.
But had a real wide nose.
Oh, you get superstitious.
I remember I had to put on a clean pair of socks
the day I was shot down.
I'd been wearing the same pair of socks.
Evidently, I think the pup got one of my socks
and was chewing on it and then hid it
and I couldn't find it that morning.
I had to put on a clean pair of socks.
That might have been the reason I was shot down.
You either believe this or not,
but somewhere's around the 10th or 12th mission,
I got to a point and I know some of the other fellas
reached the same thing,
that they were feeling blasé.
They didn't get us up to here.
They ain't gonna get us here on.
I was somewhat superstitious.
I always felt god would bring me home,
and I mean that sincerely.
However, I wasn't sure if it would be in one piece.
I flew five days in a row, five missions.
And I remember by the fourth or fifth one
you really didn't care.
You were worn out.
You wanted to get away from it.
I saw a lot of them break under pressure.
Come back and told the flight surgeon,
"ll can't fly anymore,” and they didn't.
Nobody pointed their finger at them and ridiculed them.
Nobody.
Yes, the bomb run.
That was the worst,
'cause you had to keep everything steady.
If you weren't on a bomb run you could slide over
once in a while and they'd think it'd miss ya.
But on a bomb run you just had to sit there and take it.
Try to shrivel up, I guess.
Well, the lead ship does it all.
You just follow what he does.
The lead ship and then the two on each side
and one down here and one up here and around here.
I was flying up right above the leader.
And when you're watching him,
and you see the bomb doors open,
then you open too,
and then you wait for him to drop bombs,
and when he drops bombs, then you drop.
We can't change our altitude,
and we can't change our direction,
and we're what you call sitting ducks at that moment.
It was rough, because any minute
you were going to get hit.
The bombs are dropped.
Bombs away and the first thing you hear is,
"let's get the hell out of here."
Well, we'd make a sharp turn
and the group follows the lead.
After a while, fighters tanks started coming in,
and they didn't miss very often.
They'd be out 20, 30 miles,
and they'd come rush straight at your level.
You couldn't hit anything with those guns I had back there.
By the time you saw a guy he was gone.
I mean, you see one coming, he's gone.
You don't have much time to shoot at 'em.
If you get off a burst or two, you're lucky.
They go zoop.
He'll drop off, he'll fly down,
and then he'll line up on you.
Dut-dut-dut-dut-dut, and then he'll peel off.
The co-pilot was hit pretty hard when we were shot down,
a 20 millimeter shell popped
right above his head and it knocked an eye out.
So it was high noon.
Me109 was back there blasting at us.
And I heard the co-pilot, he said,
"Jesus Christ, number 4's on fire.
Get out.”
When that thing is spinning and heading down,
you are glued to your seat.
You couldn't move if you wanted to.
And you're lucky if you see two or three guys bail out.
We would count the chutes and usually, if we start to look
too long after a ship that was going down,
the pilot would say, "okay, guys, off.”
We didn't want to spend too much time looking
at a plane going down when we had,
you know, fighters in the area and so forth.
The gunners and the others that were watching all the time
would tell you, "boy, I don't think
anybody got out of that one, nobody got out,”
and then sometimes you'd see chutes
coming out of them before they blew up or anything.
And if you didn't have your chute on,
and get out of there in less than 30 seconds,
you gone.
You're gone.
And seven out of eleven out of my crew
got out alive.
And one of them, when he got on the ground,
they pitchforked him to death.
How can you kill a human like that?
As we approach the field, we set off flares.
Red flares means you have wounded aboard.
Everybody else gets out of the way
and the wounded comes in first.
To this day, I still see it when I think of it.
I choke up.
I can't help it, they were friends of mine.
They were good friends and it hurt so bad.
Especially, we all felt like what a waste.
With the job we had, the chance of dying
was at least 50 percent.
Fifty percent chance of living,
fifty percent chance of dying.
You know a guy said, "your name's on it."
Well, maybe it was.
But it was scary,
and I get very irritated
when I hear some of these guys say,
"I wasn't scared one bit."
They're full of prunes.
I was scared every time.
I went out to a ship one time
when they were taking a young fellow off,
and I thought I could help them.
The guy they were pulling out of the ship...
He was calling for his mother.
In about late 1944,
the allies decided
to do away with precision bombing.
We went to pattern bombing.
Unfortunately, killed a lot of people
but brought the war to a close about a year sooner.
The United States military did not go out
to carpet bomb civilians or anything.
They went out to bomb factories,
rail yards, refineries,
and places that had something to do with the war.
I don't think that I feel bad about that at all.
That's what we were supposed to do.
But toward the end of the war,
the Germans would not give up.
Never thought a thing about it.
We didn't think about people being down there.
That never crossed my mind
about a human being being down there.
I never gave it a thought.
They're just Germans.
You know, and I never gave it a thought.
For some reason, I didn't hate them.
If I had a fighter plane come within shooting distance,
my thought was, this kid probably wanted
to live as bad as you did.
I really didn't have any hate for them.
I'm just scared of them.
Never gave it a thought.
I honestly never gave it a thought.
I just felt this way.
They're gonna do it to us.
We better do it to them before they do it to us.
And that's the way I felt and I couldn't help it.
Bring any thoughts seeing that?
Oh I, I drifted off into several thoughts.
Most of them you know, uh,
were bad thoughts when you look at a mission,
and see what took place on that mission.
And your mind drifts back to those times, you know.
We had a lot of mid-air collisions.
Some guys would get mixed up, pilots, and they'd start flying
the wrong direction, so on.
But uh, the scary part of our mission
is just getting through all of that.
Did it get easier or harder as you flew more missions?
I just, like I said, I was scared to death.
But uh, those were not good days.
There was no radio communication at all.
We had the intercom going all the time though,
checking the men with the oxygen masks on,
make sure their oxygen was flowing right.
Especially the tail gunner,
he was laying back there by himself so much.
You get very close to the men and everything,
and they're all young kids.
They're all dead now, I'm sure.
When you're that high up,
everything on the ground looks like a little toy.
If you see a truck or something
it really looks small.
It was hard but you had to do it.
We had to get rid of Hitler and so we did it.
You guys know that some bombs
went through the wings of b-17s?
I always wondered, "how in the world?"
They were out of position in the formation.
God's been good to me.
First of all, he's given me 70 years
with that lady over there,
and we have a wonderful family.
We had six kids,
and we have 20 grandkids,
22 great grandkids.
So, we've been a very blessed family.
I didn't say I want 'em all at the house at once.
What do you think about the good war
and you're the greatest generation?
Well, um, I'm beginning to believe it.
Does that make sense to ya?
I don't know, you kinda grew up 10 years
when you went into that thing.
And uh, when I came back home
I didn't feel like the same man anymore.
What do you say to people who say,
"John, you're a hero, you're a hero.”
I say, "okay you're probably right."
I don't know what else to say.
I wasn't one of them hero heroes,
the guys that finished their tour
and signed up for another one.
I wasn't them kinda heroes.
I want it clearly known,
I do not profess myself to be a hero.
I was the pilot.
The heroes are buried in england, Germany, and France.
The boys that didn't make it.
They're the heroes.
I was just a normal pilot.
This is called "pattern bombing."
Well, no offense but you guys aren't getting any younger.
Why do you think it's important
that people know what you guys did?
Well, for one thing,
we don't want it to happen again.
In fact or in fancy,
we just don't want it to happen again,
for my grandson, my granddaughters
and their husbands.
I don't wanna see them have to face what we did.
I cannot say it much more eloquently.
It was a hazardous profession.
Okay, up at altitude, and of course,
bombs away and all, and you got this on.
I think fear more than anything,
you'd perspire and sweat.
And you got this on.
Ice would form and you'd take a deep breath,
and break the ice out of the oxygen mask,
and then put it back on.
This is bud trying to get down on the floor.
This is the Mae west.
Remember I told you about the oxygen?
I mean the co2 cylinder?
This is it.
There it is, co2 cylinder.
This was before underarm deodorant, hair spray.
I think this was the birth of aerosol containers.
And if guys bailed out,
they didn't want it totally inflated
couple of hundred feet up because if they hit the water
they could break their backs.
So it wasn't that easy, I never did it.
This is a throat mic.
This is how I talk to Erik.
And this plugged in.
And as I showed you on the helmet,
this is how I heard,
so we had our communication system.
But, bud, to be clear, this should've been returned
to the government in 1945.
Come and get 'em, baby!
Well, this... What we just did with you
might be the credit roll to our movie.
So, you have any messages for people
that have just watched this movie?
Well, I'm just so glad that people in America
or anywhere can get an idea
of what 19 and 20 and 21-year-old kids went through.
And as I tell kids when I get done with my talk,
"I'm going to ask you guys a favor now."
"What's that, bud?"
When you go home tonight,
you say a prayer of thanks to god
for those 28,000 guys that gave their lives
so that you got the life you got today.
Thank you for your service, bud.
Not at all, not at all.