- Collection:
- Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
- Title:
- Oral history interview of William Walton Ford, Jr.
- Creator:
- Eberhard, Sarah
Ford, William Walton, Jr., 1924-2011 - Date of Original:
- 2003-12-03
- Subject:
- B-29 (Bomber)
Artillery--United States
50 Caliber gun
Focke-Wulf airplanes
Focke-Wulf Ta 152 (Fighter plane)
Mustang (Fighter plane)
Radar
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Ford, Marilyn Simpson, 1923-2012
Ford, William Walton, Sr., 1887-1952
Ford, Sarah Elizabeth Ewing, 1901-1952
Ford, Enfield Berry, 1928-2003
Ford, Albert Ewing, 1925-2009
Ford, Charles W., Jr., -1944
Ford, Joseph Sylvester, 1920-1982
Chapman, Emily Donelson Walton Ford, 1916-1992
Chapman, Leonard Fielding, 1913-2000
Hamlin, V. T. (Vincent Trout), 1900-1993
Bell Aircraft Corporation
United States. Army Air Forces. Bombardment Group, 92nd
United States. Army Air Forces. Bombardment Squadron, 327th
MacMurray College for Women
University of Nebraska--Lincoln
Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Lockheed Corporation
American Red Cross
National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force
Boeing B-29 Superfortress (bomber) - Location:
- Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, Goose Bay, 53.333333, -60.416667
Germany, Berlin, 52.520007, 13.404954
Germany, Bremen, 53.0758196, 8.8071646
Germany, Fassberg, 52.8989323, 10.1667763
Germany, Ingolstadt, 48.7630165, 11.4250395
Germany, Leipzig, 51.339696, 12.373075
Germany, Lower Saxony, Landkreis Osnabrück, Bramsche, Achmer Airport, 52.37853, 7.91256
Iceland, Southern Peninsula, Reykjanesbær, Keflavík, 64.00492, -22.56242
United Kingdom, England, Staffordshire, Stone, 52.9033037, -2.1477653
United Kingdom, Scotland, South Ayrshire, Prestwick, 55.48333, -4.61667
United States, Alabama, Montgomery County, Montgomery, 32.36681, -86.29997
United States, Arizona, Kingman Army Airfield
United States, California, Contra Costa County, Camp Stoneman, 38.00742, -121.92107
United States, California, Orange County, Santa Ana, 33.74557, -117.86783
United States, Florida, Miami Beach, South Beach, 25.7744291, -80.1332415
United States, Florida, Miami-Dade County, North Miami Beach, 25.93315, -80.16255
United States, Florida, Palm Beach County, Boca Raton, 26.35869, -80.0831
United States, Florida, Tampa, Drew Field, 27.98011845, -82.506755227675
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Chatham County, Hunter Army Airfield, 32.00975, -81.15535
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Fort McPherson, 33.70733, -84.43354
United States, Illinois, Chanute Field
United States, Louisiana, Ouachita Parish, Monroe, 32.50931, -92.1193
United States, Nebraska, Lancaster County, Lincoln, 40.8, -96.66696
United States, North Carolina, Guilford County, Greensboro, 36.07264, -79.79198
United States, Texas, Bexar County, Randolph Air Force Base, 29.52931, -98.278
Wales, Valleys, 52.1427004, -4.4937767 - Medium:
- video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv - Type:
- Moving Image
- Format:
- video/quicktime
- Description:
- In this interview, William Ford describes his service as a navigator in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. He recalls just having come home from church and listening to "One Man's Family" when the broadcast was interrupted to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor and the family spent the rest of the day listening to the radio. Ford had been working at Sears, Roebuck and Company to save money for school and had completed a year's schooling in California, studying aeronautical engineering. He began work at the Bell Bomber plant at the time they brought the templates in for the B-29. He was first sent to basic training, then selected for training as a weather technician. With some friends, he decided he didn't like the different bases where the weather technicians were stationed, so they applied for the Air Force Cadet program while in Rantoul (Ill.). He described South Miami Beach as "the land of prickly heat and ringworm." In North Miami Beach, they were billeted in ol
William Ford was in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe during World War II.
WILLIAM FORD WWII Oral Histories December 3, 2003 Atlanta History Center With Sarah Everhart [Tape 1, Side A] Interviewer: Today is December third, two thousand three. My name is Sarah Everhart, interviewing William Ford regarding his experiences in World War Two and Korea. Okay. Ford: All right. Interviewer: What I'd to start off with is get a little background about just prior to you going into the service. Were you in school? Were you working? Were you drafted? What was the circumstances [inaudible]? Ford: All of the above. All of the above. When the was came along, I was in my senior year in high school. And when…I remember the Sunday, December the seventh. I had come back from…we'd come home from church. And I lived in the little garage apartment behind the house that had been servants quarters at one time. And I'd been listening to the radio. I remember I was listening to “One Man's Family”. And they interrupted the show and declared that somebody had dropped a bomb on Pearl Harbor. I went in and told my mother and father because they were busy in home duties. And so we all listened to the radio for the rest of the afternoon to find out what was going on. That was…I had…actually I had graduated the year before that. I graduated in nineteen forty-one in the spring and I had worked at Sears-Roebuck to earn enough money so I could go to school out in California. Well, I went on out in January, forty-two. Went out to California and finished up a year's course in aeronautical engineering. Came back to Atlanta in time to go to work for Bell Aircraft, who was moving in to activate the Bummer plant. Cause everybody in Marietta pronounces it the Bummer plant. But we…I worked with Bill down on Marietta Street before they…I came here and as they were unloading and we were doing templates to build the B-29. And as I…three months later I got the call from Uncle Sam and my draft board had been in California and my draft board was not interested in Bell Aircraft's manpower needs, so they had not given me any kind of deferment. So I went out to Fort Mack. Was sworn in. Came back to Bell and worked that last week before I went off to Miami Beach, Florida. This was known to the recruits as the land of prickly heat and ringworm because the beaches down there, I don't know where they came from, but particularly the south beaches of Miami were just full of ringworm and prickly heat, of course. But spent two, three months in basic training down there. Went…was classified as a weather technician and was sent to Rantool [phonetic], Illinois, to Chinook Field. Well, I underwent a three-month training period as a weather observer. While I was there, a couple of us got to talking about being…what our options were and what our likelihood was of service and most of the weather assignments were in places like…wonderful places like Greenland, the islands off of Alaska and things like that. And we decided that…the Air Force cadet program had opened an office on Chinook for a drive of getting new members or new cadets. And a couple of us decided we'd go down and try our luck. We had no problems passing the exam. Had a little problem with blood pressure because we were excited. Had a little problem with blood pressure getting in as far as passing the physical. And we were then assigned, after being accepted as cadets, we were then assigned to go back to Miami Beach. This time…the first time we'd been on the South Beach. When we went back as cadets, we were on the North Beach, which was about twenty-five, thirty miles north of where we started off. And our billeting was in old motel accommodations around the golf courses around the northern part of Miami Beach. We spent another couple of months there and came November…it seemed to always happen in the service, at least for me. Around November, October, when things started cooling down up north and when being in Florida would not have been so bad, they decided I needed to go to…above the St. Paul, Minneapolis area to a little town called Collegeville. This was a college…CTD, College Training Detachment for cadets. They liked to have some college education with a cadet. And we went to CTD up there. This was a combination Catholic university. It had a monastery and a convent in conjunction there. The brothers did the teaching. The brothers did the farming. They tended…I mean, they had a total farm there, growing wheat and vegetables, the whole smear. And also a good dairy herd. The sisters did all of the cooking and, as the time was then, the division of labor there. They did the feminine part, the brothers did the masculine part and we always at that school, we waited for mealtime cause the sisters baked the most wonderful cracked wheat bread and it came right out of the oven before it was put on the table and sliced with butter churned from the dairy herd. We had no problems with ration stamps. Just a wonderful place up there. But we had three months up there. We got a little bit of flight training and I decided at that time, after a couple of scares or miscues in flying, I decided that I didn't need to be a pilot, that I could be a navigator. And that's what I pursued. We were sent from there to Santa Ana for—what do they call it—classification and pre-flight training. And we spent I think it was about three months down at Santa Ana. We had a delay. They did not have enough training capacity to train all of us. And we had a delay and did a little extra drilling down at Santa Ana before we went to gunnery school in Kingman, Arizona. And the fifty caliber…learning to fire the fifty caliber and how to handle it. And actually went up and doing flight training with…in gunnery positions. And seeing that I was, at the time, about six foot four, maximum that you could be and get in the Air Force, the position on the B-17 that they trained me in or put me in for training was the ball turret gun on the B-17. I don't know whether you've ever seen that, but that is a…it's about a three-foot diameter ball with two machines guns running out and you had to get in, put your knees up around your ears and your tush down on the seat and tuck in and then latch yourself into this ball. And when you were there you were not uncomfortable, but you were tight. And you had two little controls up about your head. They were kind of like bicycle handles and you controlled by twisting, you controlled the movement of the ball turret. Being six foot four, I could not get into the ball turret except by having all of the glass panels taken out of the ball turret so that I could stick my feet through, get in and sit down and then pull my knees up around my ears and my feet in the stirrups, which was…but I couldn't fly because they couldn't do that. But I did on the simulator. I did that training. We finished up gunnery in about two and a half months. And then we were sent to various navigation schools around the area. This was a group of navigators and bombardiers. And we were sent to the different schools. I went to Selman Field in Monroe, Louisiana. And I've gotten…now I've gotten tropical in Miami, I've gotten artic in Minnesota, I've got desert in California and Arizona and now they put me in the bayou country down in Louisiana [laughs]. And it did give us a variety of the country available. I think it was sixteen weeks, we graduated from navigation school and were given two weeks off and sent to Lincoln, Nebraska. And I really didn't know at the time that it was gonna be that much influence on me, but later when I had come out of service and had come back to the real world after the war, I met a young lady from Atlantic, Iowa, who had been in school at Lincoln, Nebraska University…University of Nebraska at the time I had gone through the training. But we had…we did get assigned at that point, we got assigned our crews and we went to our various ways and we kind of broke up. So beginning friendships, some of them…some of which lasted quite a while. But went to…I went to Big Seal, El Paso, Texas. Back in the desert again. And this was in November and December, right after… we graduated navigation in November of forty-four. We went through all of the combat crew training and I got my navigation missions in. We flew all over west Texas and then New Mexico and the borders of California. And we had training squadrons of fighters that would pull attacks on our formations as we went about our training in the bomber, in the B-17s. And these 17s were all so-called war weary. They had been in use and principally coming apart. There was a legend about B-17s, particularly the older ones, that it was a cotter [phonetic] key and a beam, and a wing beam, in the bomb bay that you didn't want to touch. Because if you pulled that cotter key out the wings would fall off. So I mean, [laughing] just…and always the new crew in the combat unit always got the old aircraft and they were always aware of that problem. But we finished up our training in Big Seal and our crew came through very nicely. My name, William W., one of my school mates was from Puerto Rico. Very Spanish in his speaking and he used to refer to me as Woggly Woggly [phonetic]. But in the…in our training at Bigs, the graduation flight was flown with an air inspector, usually a captain or a major. We had an air inspector that was a general and then our instructor pilots included the flight deck crew. When we took our training…when we took our graduation flight, we went through all the motions. The crew had a…the enlisted men of the crew were loose. They were not real…they were civilian soldiers. And they referred to their officers in more familiar terms than the average academy graduate would. And we came back for debriefing and the captain that had flown with us as an air inspector debriefed us and said that we were doing fine. Our crew was among the best that he had seen. But the crew should defer from calling the officers by familiar names, nicknames. And the crew…excuse me. The crew had taken a nickname for me, the WW, as [coughs]…excuse me...Ooee [phonetic]. And the captain told us that we should not do that. That they should have a little bit more…excuse me. I've got a… Interviewer: [inaudible] a break. [inaudible] Ford: Yes, please. [coughs] Interviewer: How about you just keep [inaudible] Ford: As I said, the captain said that the crew should refrain from being familiar with the…particularly with the officers of the crew and they said, “Show a little more respect and address them by their rank”. Well, the crew decided that my rank or my name was Lieutenant Ooee. [laughs] We had a good group. We had a fella from…Balter [phonetic] was from Brooklyn. The tail gunner, whom I'm trying to find now, was from Long Island and his father was a mortician. And he went back, when he came back he took over the business. Our engineer was the old man of the crew. He was twenty-six. And he was an auto mechanic from Texarkana, Arkansas. And our co-pilot…our pilot was from Columbus, Ohio. Our co-pilot was the second oldest of the crew. He was from near Galesburg, Illinois. Of course, I was from Georgia. I was the…number four. Of ten people I was number four in age. Our pilot was the second youngest member of the crew. The boss. Our armor gunner was the third oldest of the crew and he was a Mormon from Cedar City, Utah, and a real nice guy. A real nice guy. And we had two waist [phonetic] gunners. One from Indiana and one from Ohio. And the radioman…I never did…I don't remember where he was from. There was a fella named Jones, of course Jonesy. And he stayed in the service. The only crew member that I know of that stayed in the service after the unpleasantness was over. So when we were assigned, went back to Lincoln, we were assigned an aircraft. We took two or three days to check the thing out, take it up for a check flight and check out all of the systems, make sure that we had everything working right. And then about three days after we'd been assigned the airplane and gotten the testing done, we [inaudible, audio noise] and we took off around eleven o'clock at night, headed for Goose Bay, Labrador. And we flew up there, got in, landed, taxied over to the parking area and when we got out of the airplane, we looked up at the top of the snow banks around the taxi…the parking area. There was ten, twelve feet of snow. They had just dug out two days before apparently. And we were sent into the mess hall and the barracks and we got in, we had our supper. We went to the barracks and stretched out and we were gone. None of us took off our uniforms or anything. We just sacked out. We hadn't been asleep more than about an hour and a half and they came and they said, “There's a frontal system coming in. We've got to get you out of here.” So we took off and about halfway between Goose Bay and the tip of Greenland the sun came up and I watched the tip of Greenland go by. And being the navigator, I was very happy that it was there at the time that I said it was gonna be there. And we went on passed that and on towards Iceland. Well, the weather closed in and about the time we got to Iceland, it was dusk. And we were, I think, about fifteen miles south when we came in, which is not bad navigating with nothing to use. And we came in and put her down on the ground. Went in and had supper and they tied everything down on the thing because they front caught up with us there. Three days later the snow quit. And they started thawing our aircraft out. They'd bring them into the hangar and melt all the snow out. And twelve days after we'd put down on Keflavik, Iceland, we took off and flew to Valley Wheels [phonetic]. Valley Wheels was one of the main…Preswick [phonetic] and Valley and there was one other one. Oh, the other one was in Northern Ireland. They were the main touch-down places for the crews coming over. And we touched down at Valley Wheels. As I said, the personal note that I said something about before in my conversation, my cousin, one of my cousins that we grew up with, was a member of the twentieth fighter group in England. And on the nineteenth of February when we landed, he had been on a mission and was shot down and spent…was captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. I didn't find that out until after…actually after the war had terminated over there. And I had time to go up to his fighter base. Interviewer: Yeah. And where was he shot down? Ford: He was shot down near Munich. Yeah, near Munich. It was in a…he landed in a field that the farmers had prepared for planting. So when he went down, he bogged up to his ankles in that. He had a…his wingman, contrary to orders, his wingman decided he could save Joe. And he landed on the field. When he got to the end of the field, he applied brakes and tipped up a little bit and the propeller dug into the ground. But the thing rocked back and the propeller had one bent blade. But when it rocked back, it settled really bad in there. And Joe had come up and had gotten into the cockpit with…and they tried to take off and the airplane wouldn't budge. So they both got out and ran. But that…we got out the nineteen. We went to a replacement depot, Stone. And here's where I was introduced to English beers and ales. And there are many Americans who thought they could drink beer that got over there and found out that the English had something that they had never heard of before. Particularly in the Stone ale, out of the Stone area, there was an ale, Jewels Stone Ale. And you could have one pint and if you were a neophyte at drinking beer, that pint would knock you to your knees and keep you down. If you were a seasoned veteran, you could take care of two. And we had a…we went in on liberty into a dance area in the area of Newcastle, near there. And we were getting on the bus and this…one of the three guys that had gone in with…two with me and myself. And we were standing there talking, waiting for the bus to come. And this fella said, “That's what did it”. And we turned to him and said, “What did what?” And he had passed out. He was on the ground. We had to pick him up and get him on the bus and get him back to the base. But he had had one too many of those Jewel Stone Ale and it knocked him down. We were there at Stone probably a week and a half and then we got our assignment to the ninety second. We came in and we were assigned to three twenty-seventh bomb squadron. The ninety-second was known as…it's nickname was Fame's Favored Few. And I'm not so sure we were favored at all, but that was the slogan. And we went through a week or so of orientation and classes and practice missions around, learning to navigate in England. And it is…as an aerial navigator doing what we called pilotage, which was flying with reference to the ground features. Every English town, village, whatever, has a church. They all have spires. They're all built out of stone. And you just can't determine where you are by towns. This is what they taught us as navigators. They said you take the British maps, and the British maps have all of the woodlands plotted because there are laws about cutting down trees. You can't cut down trees with permits. And of a consequence, your wooded area stayed the same and you picked out a few that you recognized, that you could recognize around your airbase and you navigated by wood patches. And it…we had one, we were up in Alkenbury [phonetic] for a radar. The primary runway was an east-west runway. And ten miles west of the end of the east-west runway there was a patch of woods that looked like a one-headed arrow that was lined up right with the runway. So when you were coming in, you were flying pilotage, you looked for that and you… [Tape 1, Side B] Ford: …looked for that and you were home. So that…lots of little interesting things like that. After we finished our training in Pottington [phonetic], in the ninety-second coming in, we came up on my twenty-first birthday. And we were scheduled for our first combat mission as a crew on my twenty-first birthday. And we took off. And as I said, we…when that happens to you, you're not sure that the good Lord has intended for you to get much further. And so, it was with some concern that I took off. We went over the Rua [phonetic] Valley. And as any eighth Air Force veteran knows, the Rua Valley was a very unfriendly place. The Germans had about as much anti-aircraft fire in there as you could run into. But we went into Rua Valley and our target was a marshalling yards [sic] in the valley at a little town called Rayklinghausen [phonetic]. That will always be with me. We got back and we were debriefed and the intelligence officer was asking and the pilot said that we had hit heavy flak. The debriefing officer put down moderate. It looked bad, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been as we later found out. We went into Berlin. Out of nine missions that I flew, Rayklinghausen was the first and then we flew to bomb a jet plane base, Okmer [phonetic] in the area between Holland and Germany. We went up and bombed the river at Bremen. A good prime target in Germany. And they always had a warm greeting for you. Then we went to a place, Fosberg [phonetic] which was an experimental base where they tested rockets, jet planes and anything new they had. So we went after that. Went to Berlin. Bombed a fire arms manufacturer. That particular one we had…we had bombed Berlin and we had come out of Berlin going a little east, then south and then came back to the west. And we had not experienced anything particularly bad except over the target. And we were tooling along and we'd been over a bank of clouds since we left Berlin. And my armor gunner was up front and he says, “Ford, come up here. I said, “Look, I'm finding where I am”. He said, “Come up here”. I said, “I've got to get my position”. We just…I've just come out…He says, “Well, there's a canal up here. I want you to look at it.” I said, “Oh heck. Okay. Go ahead. I'll be there.” So I went up and about the time I got up and got my head in the transparency of the nose, we had three rounds of anti-aircraft fire that went off to the left of our plane and we had…we were to the left of the lead crew. And then there was a crew…there was an airplane just off of our left. And when those first three rounds exploded, the plane on our left pulled out of formation and started down, trailing smoke. We watched all nine of the crew bail out. But we [inaudible] content, not bothering anybody at that time and boom. We lost a plane. And that was the closest that I came to anything like that. And we went down to the Munich area. We went into Leipzig. Leipzig was a big transportation and manufacturing center. And we went to a place call Englestadt [phonetic]. And I never did figure out what is was we were going after in Englestadt. We didn't…finally dropped our bombs on the marshalling yards. But I don't really know what it was that was there that was particularly interesting. And we didn't see…we saw maybe…our crew saw two fighter aircraft at that time. We were in nineteen forty-five. We were in March and April. The war was almost over. And my crew, after I left, I flew nine missions with our crew. When they pulled me out and put me into radar school, my crew flew an additional four missions before there were no more combat missions flown. So we were at the tail end of the whole fracas. But we saw a fighter over Holland in the air. It turned and made a pass. We had had to abort or run…a bomb run and come back around. Did a three sixty. Came all the way back around and made a second bomb run. We were the last squadron on the continent and there was one fighter in the air. And he started after us and we saw him. And the airplanes were pulled up so close together that you could have walked from one side of the other without falling. But he decided that there were just too many guns looking at him and he peeled off and left us. Then the other fighter that I saw was down…we'd been down to Englestadt and there was one of the Faulkwolf [phonetic] airplanes that were developed during the latter part of the war that was really a good airplane. And we were up flying back in. Our escort had been cleared to leave and take targets of opportunity and strafe. And well, there were two B-51s down below us and this one German airplane. And the two B-51s kind of lined up on him and started pulling up. And that German pilot saw them and he just put that throttle forward and that airplane walked off and left our 51s just like they were standing still. But it was…that was a Faulkwolf TA-154. No, 152. TA-152, which was a derivative of the Faulkwolf FW-190. But it just walked off and left them. The Germans at the later part of the war had some airplanes, had they had a different leader than they did, would have given us a lot of trouble. And they gave us enough trouble [laughing] as it was. But at the end of my radar, the Germans had surrendered. And we came back and were disbanded and I was sent back as a radar operator. I was sent back to the States to go on to Japan, possibly. I had a thirty-day leave. I spent that at home and had…got all rested up and went up to Greensboro, North Carolina, at the replacement depot up there. While I was up there, the Japs surrendered. I stayed around another week and they sent me down to Boca Raton. They'd just finished some new buildings on the air base down there. So I went down there and I spent a month and a half sitting in the barracks, going to the O club and waiting for them to decide what they were gonna do with us. And then I ended up going…from that point, I ended up in November of forty-five going up to Drew Field just north of Tampa and they discharged me there or put me on reserve status and I came home. And that was in forty-five. And in forty-seven, I met the young lady that had been…that had gone to the University of Nebraska. Interviewer: And she had come to Atlanta? Ford: She'd come down here. She finished up…she was a very intelligent young lady. I don't know why she married me, but she was a very intelligent young lady. She had been…I say she was thrown out of three of the best schools in the country. She'd gone to…for her freshman year had gone to a school called MacMurray in Illinois, which was a girls' school and one of the best girls' schools in the country. Then she went to the University of Nebraska for two years, sophomore and junior year. And she decided she wanted to be in radio. And Nebraska did not have a good radio department, but Northwestern did. So she went up to Northwestern and she got up there and she only had one year to do, two semesters to finish her requirements. She got up there and she finished up those two semesters and found out that Northwestern wouldn't graduate you unless you had three semesters at Northwestern. So, she had to go to Northwestern for an extra thing. She was…for that last semester she was put into a program. Had four students, three graduate students and an undergraduate. She was the undergraduate. She had…she was to produce a series of children's shows for Saturday in Chicago. She produced and directed. Among the people that she worked with that were going to Northwestern at the same time was Paul Lynde, Cloris Leachman, Charlotte Ray and a couple of others. Bob Banner. Bob Banner was the producer of the Dina Shore program. [laughs] And so, she's had a right nice life, too. But after we got married in forty-eight, I got…I was working downtown, going to Tech. My mother, they diagnosed her with a [inaudible] brain tumor. And about that time, we found out that we were expecting. We were gonna be parents. And in fifty-one, my mother died in February of fifty-one on a Sunday before our first son was born on Saturday. So that, we [inaudible] that. And January of fifty-one, I approached Lockheed. Lockheed was opening up and they hired me. Interviewer: Were you going to school at the same time? Ford: I was going to school at the same time and I'd kind of…I dropped out for a quarter, I thought it was gonna be a quarter. I dropped out and went to work for Lockheed. I worked for Lockheed for three months. And since I was a reserve second lieutenant, they came and got me. And I went down to Montgomery and was put in B-29s as a radar operator. And we went from there to…seventeen, eighteen months of service in the Korean affair. My crew in B-29s, we came out to be…we were trained down in Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas. We were sent to Stoneman [phonetic], I think, in California, which was the port of departure for Korea. And when I hit there, there was Red Cross waiting for me. My father had gone into the hospital and was having a kidney operation and they wanted me home. So I came back and he went under the knife. And he had had kidney stones all of his life. Probably been operated on about half a dozen times and this time it didn't work. And I ended up staying in the service, but [inaudible, audio noise] down to Savannah, Hunter Field. And I rode out the rest of my service at Hunter Field. And I got out and went back to work for Lockheed. And I told my wife at the time this is the second time I've been in and out of the Air Force or aircraft industry. If they came and got me again, I wasn't gonna get anywhere near an airplane again. Well, we had a pretty good run; thirty-one years with Lockheed. And I've been retired from Lockheed, come April, twenty-one years. So, that's fifty-two years of life. Interviewer: Now, were any of your other family members…you mentioned your cousin…were they in at the same time, any of your brothers or… Ford: My two cousins…I had a girl cousin. My girl cousin was…she was the oldest one of the group. She married a lieutenant in the Marine Corps and he was Fielding Chapman, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps, as I said, during the Nixon and…I know the Nixon administration, but I'm not sure which others. But she went everywhere he did that she could go in the Pacific. Her younger brother, Charles, was a fighter pilot in the 207th fighter group, I think. I think it was 207th. But he was in a P-38 outfit in the Ninth Air Force. And he was killed Christmas Eve, nineteen forty-four, on a mission over Belgium. They got a lucky hit right smack in his gas tanks and there wasn't anything left. But his brother Joe was in the 20th fighter group and he, as I said, was shot down on the same day that I arrived in England. My brother just younger, Ewing, two years younger than I am, he was in the Marine Corps and was involved in the Ewol [phonetic] landing. He now lives in Hawaii. Then my next brother, Flicky, who died this past summer, he went in in fifty-one. He went in to the Korean affair, was stationed in Japan during the Korean police action. And he was a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes over there. And he spent the rest…after he got out of the service, he got a job with Smith Publishing down here and then got itchy feet, got married, got itchy feet and decided to see what he could do in New York and ended up with Time-Life Corporation as development director for the Time-Life Corporation. And he passed away this summer. My baby brother, who died two weeks after 9/11, was also in the Korean affair. He was in the Marine Corps. We have two Marines. My brother [inaudible] was the one who worked for Time-Life. He was in the infantry and I was in the Air Force. And then I have cousins, numerous cousins who were in the Navy and Air Force and everything else. Interviewer: Yeah. What…back home, with so many, like you said, cousins and everything, what was the communication like. Did you have much communication at all when you were overseas? Ford: Overseas? Overseas, almost strictly between my mother and my grandfather, her father, and…those were my connections. I found out where my cousin was at a base called King's Cliff, that was about forty, fifty miles north of the base that I was assigned to. And I went up there. I had not…did not have any knowledge of his being shot down. But I went up there on one weekend and was greeted by the squadron commander and adjutant and the whole thing like a long-lost cousin because they liked Joe. Joe was given or earned a Distinguished Flying Cross on his first combat mission. And this was…he always downplayed it a little bit like this was a publicity stunt that the Air Force had engineered so that they could get some good publicity. But he was a…he was quite a guy. We, all of us, we were up around Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee. We were somewhat country boys, but we kind of lived in town, too. So we got a well-rounded education. I can build a slingshot. [laughs] I can't hit much with it, but I can build a slingshot. We did all the things. We used to go snake hunting. And we had several things…my mother…four boys and a husband. So she was the only female on campus and she was very active with her friends and they had bridge clubs every weekend. And as boys, we would go out and hunt animals and snakes and things. One summer we caught a mole in the front yard. We found a little hump running along the lawn. So I went and got a spading fork and two of us got out there and took the spading fork and figured out where that mole was going to be, then pushed the fork in the ground and when he hit there, we flipped him out. We caught him. And my father had an aquarium that was not used. So we put dirt in the aquarium. [coughs] Excuse me. We put the mole in the aquarium filled with dirt. And he stayed there for a while. We would put worms in there for him to eat and so forth. Like other kids got wild pets, you know, [inaudible] we left him. Didn't pay much attention to him. Well, we had a hot-air furnace system. And with four boys in the family, these registers that went down to the floor always had a rib or two missing. And my mother had a bridge party started. And this was before the days of air conditioning. And it was a hot Saturday afternoon. She decided just a half an hour before the party started that she was gonna turn on the basement fan to pull the cool air out of the basement and cool off the front. Well, you have never smelled anything quite so bad. She called my father. He came in from the garden. [laughs] He went down in the basement and there in the plenum of the furnace, where the furnace pulled all of the nice cool air out of the basement, was the mole. Obviously dead and very ripe. And that air had been circulating [laughing] through the whole house. We had to go around our neighbors and our neighbors weren't very close at that time and borrow electric fans. Turn off the furnace, borrow electric fans and have them blowing through the [inaudible] to get rid of that dead skunk smell. Interviewer: Now, you had mentioned an earlier conversation about that you went back to England once. Ford: Yeah. Interviewer: And I liked to get…to touch upon the people you stayed in touched with. Like you mentioned you were looking for somebody. Have you had reunions, stayed in touch with people [inaudible] going back? Ford: We do have…I've been to two Eighth Air Force Reunions and I've been to half a dozen bomb group reunions. The people in England that I was looking up and looking for were actually couldn't [sic]. I never did find anybody that I really had been familiar with. But I did make some good friends on the…what do they call that organization? FOTE. F-O-T-E. Friends of the Eighth. And that's those who are English citizens that supported information centers on various bomb groups. Every one of those bomb stations over there has a little group of locals that support the history of that group. And I've got a couple, John and Elizabeth Hadfield. John is…he was a member of the ninety-second support group. And then he got pulled off because he lived near, and I don't remember what the station name was, but it was the facility where the British decoding people worked. When was that connection? Had some friends, the Hewlings, that used to live here in Atlanta. Tom Hewling was a member of the ninety-second bomb group when the bomb group first formed. I found out that…I needed to find some information on the ninety-second…and I found out Tom's name and I got in touch with him and found out that he was a member of that. And I was a member of the ninety-second as it was leaving England. So we have both ends back…Tom's wife, Kitty, and they both died in the last couple of years, Tom's wife, Kitty, was the commandant of the WAC squadron in the Eighth Air Force Headquarters and worked with Jimmy Doolittle. And Tom worked…Tom was in…did his tour with the ninety-second, went from there--he didn't want to come home—he went from there to Eighth Air Force Headquarters and then, at the latter part of the war, he went into the three oh six bomb group as a squadron commander. And he finished out the war there. But they had…I'm trying to pull up…John Hadfield's sister was a friend of Kitty Hewlings. And John Hadfield's sister was in, not the land army, but the British equivalent of the WAF. And they…she knew Kitty during the war. And John and Elizabeth, his wife Elizabeth, came over and one of the reunions that we had…Well, it was the reunion when the Mighty Eighth Heritage Museum was opened in Savannah. And we did…a modeling club that I belong to, did a diorama down there, a fairly large one. It's fourteen feet wide and twenty-two feet long and it shows an operating air base. [end of Tape 1] [Tape 2, Side B] Ford: Which is very interesting. If you haven't seen it you got to go. But they also had a…we also did a diorama for the B-24s and the Eighth Air Force that actually took part in the [inaudible] raid. We did a diorama down there of that too. So, that's another thing to go see. Interviewer: And our you still in touch with some of the people that aren't around here. You say… Ford: Oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: …through e-mail or [inaudible, talking at same time]. Ford: Yeah. I have Hadfield's e-mail address and I correspond with him every now and then. The gal that we met on our first trip back, the one that took us down the runway, I have her e-mail address and I correspond with her. The head of the Friends group, for our group…our bomb group, John Mills and his wife Di. John passed away about two years ago, but we enjoyed their company very much so, we've had quite…we've been back…oh, I went back to a reunion that occurred in England. Then Marilyn and I have been back to three group reunions here and two Eighth Air Force reunions in this country. So we…and we've got active friends and all that. We're getting fewer and fewer of them because we lost…we lost a lady whose husband was a weather observer up in Greenland a long time during the war. He passed away three years ago and she passed away about two weeks ago. The Hewlings, both of them are gone now. And every now and then one of our friends turns up missing. Interviewer: Now, when you went…cause we…we weren't taping at the tape you were telling me about when you went to England. I guess it was the first time you went back. Was that part of a reunion or just [inaudible]? Ford: No, that was just Marilyn and I went back to England. Our first trip back we didn't get up to the bomb area. We didn't get out to the RAF museum. But we went back just to kind of establish a foothold and see if we wanted to come back later. Well, we wanted to spend a week. We went over…we left the day after Christmas. Worst time in the world to go to England. But we had six days over there that we were there. The first three days were misty. Not enough to throw your umbrella up, but misty and cloudy. The last three days were like it was in the middle of June, fifty…between fifty-five and sixty-five degrees, puffy white clouds, blue sky. Beautiful. And you walk through London and look down in the window wells and there were flowers growing down in the window wells. And it made me so dad gum mad because I had been trying to grow geraniums and I can't grow geraniums. I kill them. And my best thing to geranium hood is to leave them in nursery and don't take them home and kill them. But these people in the middle of winter got geraniums growing in the window wells. And it's…that's when we made friends with the young lady that took us out. That was in nineteen eighty. Nineteen eighty Christmas we left and went over and spent New Years and came back right after New Years. We liked it so much that we signed up for a tour of England in eighty-one, in the latter part of the summer. And we went back over there. And that's when I went up to the runway. And it really does get you and it still gets me a little bit talking about. Because it…you remember and if you…did you ever see “Twelve O'Clock High”? Look at it. Dean Jaeger plays the returning executive officer and he comes up to the fence outlining the airfield on a bicycle and he leans his bicycle up against the fence and he looks out over where the field was. And it fades to when you can hear the engines turning. And you do. I mean, you really do hear it. Interviewer: And in your case, so much of it was still intact. Ford: Yeah. Interviewer: Runways were still there and… Ford: Runways were still there and the taxi strips were still there. Most…not most of the buildings, but most of the key buildings that we used were still there. One of the first things we went when we stopped at the control tower and the young told us that we could go. I asked him about a couple of the buildings that we used. And we went down to our building where our flight line offices were. And this is where we went to pick up our equipment before we went to the airplane. And it's…it was still there. There was a mural that had been in one of those flight rooms that has been taken apart. It was a brick wall. And it had been taken apart and been reconstructed. And I'm not quite sure where. It's been reconstructed. I think over at Ducksford, where a lot of the stuff is. And it's an experience and it's something that…there's not many of us left that's been experiencing this. Interviewer: How did you feel or did you read when Tom Brokaw came out with The Greatest Generation. Did you read it? Ford: Yes. Interviewer: And did that have an effect on you? I've heard from several people that it made them more comfortable talking about it, I guess, again. Ford: That, yes. Yes. It does. And Brokaw sometimes to people of my age group, Brokaw sometimes comes out to be a flaming liberal. And [laughs] not too popular. But Brokaw probably is one of the most evenhanded newscasters we have and I did appreciate…and one of those guys, a doctor that's up here in North Georgia or was up here in North Georgia, that he writes about in that book. And somehow, I don't remember his name now, but somehow we had some connection there. But yeah, his book did kind of release the hesitancy that some of us had. Some people had too much of an involvement and they don't…they still don't like to talk about it. This fella, I will see if he has talked to you all or not. If not I will have him call you. Interviewer: Okay. Ford: His name's Albert McMahan . Interviewer: And what's the last name again? Ford: McMahan. M-C-M-A-H-A-N. Interviewer: Okay. Ford: McMahan. Albert is a [laughing]…it's funny how you run into people. Albert was in the three oh six bomb group, when the three oh six bomb group went over. Tom Hewlings was in the ninety-second when the ninety-second went over and they went over fairly close together. Albert finished his missions and went home in nineteen forty…either late forty-two or early forty-three, about the same time that the Memphis Belle crew came home. So he did not know Tom Hewlings at all. Tom…because Tom was over in the ninety-second and Albert was in three oh six. When Tom came back, he came back into active service after his hiatus. He came back in the three oh six, which was the same place that Albert started. But he came back in the three oh six about the time I was in the ninety-second. Well, when they got down here to Atlanta, Albert came down here because his sister teaches school here. And Albert's wife died. Albert was teaching school up in Alaska. When he retired from Alaska, he came down here to live with his sister, because his sister had been widowed. And he started getting together with [inaudible] wings and the Eighth Air Force Association. He met Tom and they found out that they had been in the same group. And then I, much later came along and joined and here I find…and Albert's an old Alabama boy. I started my life in Nashville, but I was raised the first five years in Birmingham. And then I've been here since I was five years old. Interviewer: And still [inaudible]? Ford: Yeah. Stovall Boulevard in Buckhead. But we stayed for six months in Decatur. And then our house was…our house on Stovall Boulevard's still there. It was the first house that was ever white-washed in the city of Atlanta. My mother just drove the contractor crazy because they couldn't find anybody that knew anything about white-washing [laughs]. So it's… Interviewer: Well, I'm gonna…we've got just a couple minutes left on the tape and before I forget I want to get you to show us the jacket here that you've got and some of the…explain the…patches and… Ford: Okay. Yeah, you can see here. This is the three twenty-seventh squadron. Now V.T. Hamlin, who wrote “Alley Oop”, the comic strip, did this for us because our group formed down in Sarasota. Now this was the three twenty-seventh, ninety-second bomb group. These are navigator's wings. And that…you don't find those anymore. This Eighth Air Force patch. This is a radar patch. This is actually a British insignia that the Air Force, the Eighth Air Force adopted for its Mickey operators. We had the APS fifteen, which was a…the bombing radar that we had and we had to work with the bombardier and the radar operator. The radar operator could see through the clouds and he told the bombardier when to set…how to set his bomb site as we went through. Now on this…this is the ninety-second shoulder patch and this one, I'm most proud of, is my daughter…our daughter did the cross-stitching to do that B-17 tail. That is the tail of the airplane that I flew my last combat mission in and it was a natural metal. The first one that I flew was a olive drab and gray and this was in the Fortieth Combat Wing, the First Air Division. And the little thing at the bottom, “Fane's Favored Few.” We had a naughty…we had a naughty bunch of words to go with that, but I won't say those. Interviewer: Okay. Well, I think that's gonna just about wrap it up here [inaudible]. Go ahead and conclude. [end of tape] - Metadata URL:
- http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/163
- Additional Rights Information:
- This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required.
- Extent:
- 1:16:18
- Original Collection:
- Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center - Holding Institution:
- Atlanta History Center
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