|
Rowland
and Nan Ball
August 2000
|
"I'll
never forget that first day on base. I walked out to
the flight line to look at a B-29. That was the biggest
airplane in our Air Corps and it looked awesome. You
wondered if it would get off the ground.
The
training of our Group, the 39th Bomb Group, and our
Squadron, the 60th did not get off to a "flying start",
mainly because of maintenance of the aircraft. We never
had enough airplanes in flyable condition so that we
could meet all our flight requirements.
I
think that one's survival in wartime depends upon a
lot of luck. I think that I sure had my share of it
starting right here.
I
was behind in my flying time because I had been moving
around the country quite a bit lately and had not been
flying. If we did not get in at least four hours of
flight time in a three-month period we could not get
flight pay for the next month. I did not have four hours
and was running out of time. I went to Group Operations
to see if anyone would be flying that night and I could
go along as observer so I could get my time in. Yes,
Capt. Somebody would be going on a check flight and
I could go along. I checked out my parachute and was
walking to the aircraft when this Sgt came running up
and told me that some Colonel wanted to go along and
that I was bumped. Ok, I would try again the next day.
The
next morning when I went to the field, everyone was
talking about the accident that happened the previous
night. You guessed it, the plane that I was to be on
had caught on fire in the No. 3 engine when they were
coming in to land and they were at only 800 feet. The
Navigator and the Flight Engineer got out the front
end of the aircraft and no one got out of the back end.
Everyone else was killed. Nine men gone and I would
have been one of them if I had not been bumped. That
was the first of my lucky breaks.
The
bailout procedure for a B-29 was for the Navigator to
go first and the Flight Engineer to follow him. The
Navigator, Bill Barthel,
was a friend of mine and he told me about this experience.
He said that when he bailed out he pulled his ripcord
almost immediately because he knew that he was very
close to the ground. His chute opened quickly and almost
at the same time he hit the ground. He landed in a damp
freshly plowed field that probably kept him from breaking
his one or both of his legs. He gathered up his chute,
looked around and saw a farmhouse close by. Bill walked
to the back door of the farmhouse and knocked on the
door. An elderly woman came to the door, opened it and
there stood this man in these weird looking clothes
with a big piece of white silk thrown over his shoulder
and it scared her to death. She started screaming and
her husband came running out with his shotgun. Bill
had to do some fast-talking explaining of who he was
and what he was doing at their back door. They did have
a phone so he was able to call the base and tell them
what happened and to send someone out.
The
Flight Engineer popped his chute early too, but he came
down in a cemetery and hit a tombstone and broke his leg.
The Engineer never did fly again, but Bill was up again
in a couple of days. |