- Collection:
- Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
- Title:
- Oral history interview of Allen Shannon Jackson
- Creator:
- Westbrook, Frances H.
Jackson, Allen Shannon, 1922-2008 - Date of Original:
- 2005-06-10
- Subject:
- PT-13 (Training plane)
Thunderbolt (Fighter plane)
B-17 bomber
V-E Day, 1945
Liberty ships
Distinguished Flying Cross (Medal)
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Jackson, Miriam Middleton Hallman, 1926-2009
Elisabeth, Queen, consort of Albert I, King of the Belgians, 1876-1965
Rooney, Mickey
Miller, Glenn, 1904-1944
Sevez, Franc¸ois, 1891-1948
Betts, Thomas J.
Southern Airways, Inc.
United Service Organizations (U.S.)
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
United States. Army Air Forces. Air Transport Wing, 302nd
United States. Army Air Forces. Ferrying Squadron, 311th
Stearman PT-13 (trainer)
Republic P-47 Thunderbolt (fighter) - Location:
- Brazil, Belém, -1.45056, -48.4682453
Brazil, Natal, -5.805398, -35.2080905
France, Le Havre, 49.4938, 0.10767
France, Marseille, 43.2961743, 5.3699525
France, Normandy, 49.0677708, 0.3138532
France, Reims, 49.2577886, 4.031926
Puerto Rico, 18.22141715, -66.4132818505648
Salween River, 25.9136185, 98.8270367
Senegal, Dakar, 14.766667, -17.283333
United Kingdom, England, Liverpool, 53.408371, -2.991573
United Kingdom, England, London, 51.50853, -0.12574
United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Belfast, 54.5964411, -5.9302761
United Kingdom, Scotland, Western Isles, Stornoway, 58.20925, -6.38649
United States, Alabama, Montgomery County, Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, 32.38266, -86.35502
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Fort McPherson, 33.70733, -84.43354
United States, Georgia, Muscogee County, Columbus, 32.46098, -84.98771
United States, New York, Rockland County, Camp Shanks
United States, North Carolina, Cumberland County, Fort Bragg, 35.139, -79.00603 - Medium:
- video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv - Type:
- Moving Image
- Format:
- video/quicktime
- Description:
- In this interview, Allen Jackson describes his career in the Army Air Forces during World War II. At the outbreak of war, he already had civilian flight training and was a flight instructor. He received a direct commission and traveled to England on a converted English luxury liner. He reports that although he had no formal Air Force training, he flew every aircraft the Army Air Forces flew in Europe. He delivered Thunderbolts to Iceland, dropped supplies into Normandy, and brought back wounded soldiers, including Germans, to England. When he returned with wounded, they had flight nurses along on the flights and he praised the hard work of those nurses under such difficult conditions. He recalled that the state of the war for the Germans could be measured by the age of the wounded he brought back; as the war progressed, the soldiers were much older. He also flew American POWs back. When he flew over Europe, he flew low, and describes seeing the World War I trenches still visible. He flew the Belgian queen to visit the wounded, and she wanted to be up in the cockpit. He flew VIPs from SHAEF into Berlin at the end of the war as well as USO entertainers. On one trip, he saw German generals, and heard people yelling and shooting, and learned that the Germans had surrendered. He describes his journey home and his post-war education and career. He remained in the reserves and was recalled as a flight instructor in 1951. He describes the Salween River Campaign.
Allen Shannon Jackson was a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.
FRANCES WESTBROOK: Today is June 30, 2004. We are at the Atlanta History Center for the Veteran's History Project. We are privileged to have today, Allen Shannon Jackson. And this is Frances Westbrook, a staff member at the Atlanta History Center. Mr. Jackson, as you know this is your story, your account. We want to hear about your experiences. So, please feel free to begin when you're ready. ALLEN JACKSON: Thank you Frances. I was born in Atlanta on July 1922. I went through the Atlanta Public Schools, Spring Street, O'Keefe, Boys' High, and then to Georgia Tech. My time at Tech was interrupted by World War II. I took the first year off and became a flight instructor for Southern Airways on the Civilian Pilot Training Program. I then went into the service as a Civilian Instructor in basic flight training in Macon, Georgia, at Cochran Field. After about three or four months at Cochran Field they gave me a direct commission as a second lieutenant. We continued instructing at Cochran Field until the summer of '43. We were then assigned to the ETO, to an air transport group. We went through the normal POE and went to Europe on a converted English luxury liner in a convoy of probably fifty to seventy-five ships. When we got to England we were assigned to a squadron and began normal operation which we did for about two and half years. Most of the group that went with me were ex-civilian instructors; we did not go through Air Force training. The first time they gave me a high performance airplane to fly was a rather odd feeling. I hadn't flown anything bigger than a BT-13. And the first airplane I had to ferry was a P-47 Thunderbolt. It went on like this through all the airplanes until pretty much we got to fly every airplane we had in Europe during the war. We ferried them around to England, waiting for our transports to come to do the original assignment. Towards the end of that time, 30 of us took Thunderbolts to Iceland, which was an interesting trip late in the spring across the North Atlantic. Later on we took, another Atlanta native, Earl Gerard, and I, brought a B-17 back to the United States. The B-17 was to be made into a flying bomb, and I believe it was to be used on the sub pens in Norway. When we got back, D-Day had taken place and we started flying supply and evacuation runs to Europe. We would carry our supplies over to the Normandy Beach head and bring back wounded. We had a flight nurse on board for all of these trips. We followed the front all the way across Europe through Paris, on eastward we got to Germany. We moved our headquarters during that time from Ireland to Oxford, England, to near Marseilles, France. We stayed there for about six months and then moved to Paris. We lived in the suburb of Paris, Veraflay, and stayed there until the war ended. It was during interesting during the cargo and evacuation. We would go to temporarily made airports across Europe generally taking bombs, ammunition, and gasoline, to the front line troops and bringing back any wounded, and we also brought German wounded back. You could pretty well tell how the war was going by the age of the German troops. In Normandy when we were bringing them back, they were young fellows, probably late teens, early twenties, and evidently the cream of the German Army. As we got into Germany, the Germans that we were bringing back were elderly, the home guard type. They would not be the cream of the Army. Toward the end of the war we started bringing back the ex-prisoners from the Concentration Camps. Our planes were equipped to carry, I believe, twenty-eight ambulatory patients, twenty-four stretcher patients. When we carried the Concentration Camp prisoners back, we probably had fifty or sixty of them in the airplane and they probably didn't weigh 100 pounds. They would just put them in there and sit them down if they could find a place to sit. We would take them back to the hospital in England for whatever services they needed. During this time the navigational aids or the flying aids were not very well defined. There were some that we could use. So, it became interesting low flying. You could still see the trenches of World War I, east of Reims. They were still very obvious on the ground. I don't believe General Patton's Army took anything but the Autobahn, because pilots who got off the Autobahn had occasional bullet holes in the wing. So, everybody flew right on the Autobahn and hoped we didn't run together into each other. Towards the end of the war, they changed our squadron to flying VIPs to different points. I had one trip where we took a group of generals to Berlin, right after the end of the war. When we got there the generals were going on a tour of the city. They asked if we wanted to go with them, so two or three limousines drove up and then some GI trucks behind them. And they told us, “You go ahead and ride in the limousines.” It was several weeks later before it dawned on us why we were in the limousines. The generals rode in the trucks. We would use to Tempelhof airdrome when we got to Berlin, and this became rather famous during the Berlin airlift, where you would see all the planes landing over the apartment houses. Tempelhof was the main airport for Berlin. During the later part of the war, we had VIP's that we would carry. We used to carry Queen Elizabeth of Belgium (King Leopold's mother). She would be visiting refugee camps around Germany, and we would frequently pick her up and take her back to Brussels. Very nice lady, she wanted to stay in the cockpit the whole time rather than sit down. And she must have been in her seventies; I don't really know how old she was. During the latter part of the war, we flew USO troops around. Mickey Rooney's troop was one of them that we took. Glenn Miller's troop was one. In fact, one of the airplanes of one of our squadrons was the one that lost him in the English Channel. They never did figure out what happened. We had a call early June, I had to take a French general and a couple of aides from Paris to Reims, we had no idea of what we were going for, we flew French generals around frequently. So, anyway we went to Reims, and the general told us to just wait, he'd be going home that afternoon. This was General Francois Sevez. An English C-47 came in with about four or five Germans all in dress uniforms. And again we were wondering what in the world was going on around us. Then they called a little while later and told us to go ahead and get a billet, that we would be spending the night and go back the next day, which was fine. We took our time to wander around Reims and look at a few of the sites. That night in the billet, early in the morning, two or three o'clock, there were people running around in the hall yelling and screaming and shooting pistols off. And I didn't know if we were in an air raid or what, I was ready to get under the bed. But when we peaked out, people were yelling the war was over. And we finally found out that they had signed a peace treaty and General Sevez was the signer for France. We went back to Paris the next morning. We used to fly General Betts, the head of the War Crimes Trial. General Betts was evidently a retired general they had brought back, but a super nice person. Everybody loved to fly him. He had a WAC aide that was always flying with him in Class A uniform. And while in our transport type planes we did not wear parachutes, but the general would always make his aide put on a parachute, which was rather awkward with her dress and her skirt. But he would laugh about it and he would have a ball. FRANCES WESTBROOK: This is a good time to hold up the book that you brought. ALLEN JACKSON: All right, let me get my thoughts together. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Would you mind telling me about the Gooney Birds and the fairytales, which many people may know, but younger people and teenagers might not. ALLEN JACKSON: Gooney Bird was the slang word for a C-47 transport. Same plane airliners had before around 1940, made by Douglas. It had a speed of about 160 of 170 miles per hour and carried about five thousand pounds of load. In Europe we frequently carried more. Our group was a mixture of four or five squadrons, some had the name of Ferry Squadrons, some had the name of Air Transport, but they all did exactly the same thing. At times when we were flying the C-47's while we were still based in England near Oxford, we would occasionally have to take a C-47 up to a depot for maintenance, major maintenance. We still had to get home. During our ferrying time, we knew all the operational officers at all of the big depot bases. We could go ask them if they had any plane that had to be ferried to a base near home. And even though we weren't in the ferrying business, they would give us a plane, a P-38 or something that we would take back to down to our home base. We didn't have parachutes with us, so we would just take our coat off and roll it up under us and sit on the coat, but it was a easy way to get home. When we brought the B-17 back to be made into a bomb, we had a minor problem over the desert in Africa. One of the air filters on the engine did not turn on. We were in the middle of a dust storm. We didn't know anything had happened when we landed at Dakar and nothing seemed out of whack. We left Dakar to go to Natal in South America, a few minutes out of Natal we ran out of oil in one engine. We shut that engine down. It was a long flight, something like ten or eleven hours. Nobody worried about it because the rest of the flights were four or five hours, so it didn't make really any difference. But on our next flight of about four or five hours, we ran out of oil again. The oil was lasting us shorter and shorter periods of time. We got to where we would take off and feather the engine, and we were still trying to get home. We would crank it up to land. The last time we did that, we hadn't run the engine five minutes. Cranked it up to land it, ran out of oil on the final approach. That happened to be at a nice base in Puerto Rico. So, that was not bad to stay there for a week or so and get an engine changed. We had a navigator who was a B-17 navigator during the war, and he was coming home from the end of his tour. We always said he was kind of whacky, but he wasn't, he was a nice fellow. But when we got to Brazil they gave us a couple of carrier pigeons in a box. They said there are head hunting tribes between Natal and Belem, Brazil. When we got that and told the navigator, one of these pigeons goes to Belem and one of these back to Natal. So when we start out, put the Belem pigeon in front, and as long as he is looking forward then we are going to Belem. And if we have to turn around, then you just turn the box around and follow that pigeon back to Natal. But anyway with all of the baloney we still made it alive. People, I guess everybody that has been in the service, knows how much luck is involved. They say, “Oh, there's no such thing as luck.” There are too many cases where you had no choice, it was pure luck and help of your friends. One time in Northern Ireland, several of us had gone to a theatre to watch a movie in Belfast. While we were sitting there, all of the sudden the lights in the theatre came on. There were about four or five men on the stage, all of them with hand machine guns. One fellow proceeds to make a speech for about three or four minutes from the Irish Republic Army government. The lights went out, they left, and the movie came back on just like nothing ever happened. So I guess that's the way they operated. In London, for I guess it was the fall of '43, we would ferry an airplane down to the east coast of England, we would have to go to London to get on a shuttle to come back to Northern Ireland. This was the time of the so called “Baby Blitz.” It was always amazing to be there when the air raids would start, and watch how little the English paid attention to it. They just went on with their business, there were some in the Subway tunnels but they just went on their business and did whatever they were going to do. And it got to be where it was just a normal experience. It wouldn't be like that now. We were in a lot of cities that had been heavenly bombed like the port area of Liverpool. It would give you a chance to see how people could operate under terrible conditions. When the war was over and they decided to send us home, they sent a group of about, my group had maybe fifty people in it. We were based in Paris at that time. They sent us up to a staging area up near Le Havre, up near the English Channel, “Tent City.” We stayed there about a week in November, cold and rainy. And then they put us on several of these little French boxcars, and we rode the boxcars to Marseilles for about three days to get on the boat. I don't know why we couldn't have left from Le Havre, but we went all the way across France to get on the boat. We ended up coming home on the Liberty Ship. It took twenty days to cross the ocean in December. It was very rough crossing. After we landed in New York, they immediately sent us to an area, to a staging area, to be discharged. Mine was lucky, I was Fort McPherson. So when I got to Fort Mac, let us go and sent us home. And that was about the end of my military career, except I stayed in the reserves. When I came back I could not get back in Tech on the first quarter. I got back in Tech the summer quarter and went straight through to finish. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Of course Atlanta had not changed much from the time I was gone. It was still the same city. When I got out of Tech, I went to work for a machinery manufacturer. We made vegetable oil mill type equipment. I worked for them until I think it was 1950 or 1951. I was recalled in the Korean War. And I was in that recall for a year. During that time I was an instrument flight instructor at Columbus, Georgia, for the good bit of the time and then up at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in another type of military unit. I happened to be at the right place at the right time and they let us out at about a year. I went back to the fellow that I worked for with the first company, [he] was starting his own company at that time, because the first company was going into a different line. So, I went to work with him. I worked with him also making fertilizer or mill equipment for about ten years. I ended up being the vice-president of the company. This was a family ownership type company, and when the owner died, his son wanted to change the manufacturer of the type of equipment. Another fellow in the company and I became partners and we started the company that I still work with. We started out making similar type equipment and have since got into making specialized equipment, chemical plant equipment that we sell all over the world. And we have agents in nine different areas of the world. I was still working for them even though I have sold my part of the company back to my partner. While I was at Tech during my junior and senior time, I was a Physics Lab Instructor, so that helped pay for my time back plus the GI bill at that point. During the time I went to Georgia Tech in my junior year, I married Miriam Hallman, another native Atlantan, and we ended up with three children. And now have three grandchildren. They range in age from one year to eleven, and everybody seems to be normal, I guess, as normal as it could be. FRANCES WESTBROOK: May I ask about a memory back, do you remember about when Pearl Harbor occurred and where were you? ALLEN JACKSON: When Pearl Harbor occurred, I was working for Southern Airways during the period of the first year that I had, after my first year at Tech. It was December the 7th, it was a Sunday. It was a normal instruction day at Southern Airways. We worked seven days a week then. And somebody came in and said something was going on, so we all got around the radio and listened. I was at work then when I heard about it. I worked for Southern Airways after that for about eight or nine months and then went to, I don't if you would call it enlisted, but I applied to be an Air Force flight instructor, which I was accepted. I spent about a month at central instructor school at Maxwell Field, mainly to get the procedures they wanted taught. And then was sent to Cochran Field in Macon as a flight instructor and stayed there until July of the following year. That's when I went to Europe and started the time in ETO. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Well, thank you so much for sharing your account. ALLEN JACKSON: Well, I doubt if it will make sense now, but anyway, I was lucky to survive it at all and I'm thankful to have survived it. I'm thankful to have ended up with as nice of a family as we've got. They've made that part real easy. And it has been really a very nice life and traveling around the world both in business since then. There isn't a place I would have to live except Atlanta, by far the nicest place in the world. FRANCES WESTBROOK: That's wonderful. That was such a lovely conclusion. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Did you have a favorite airplane? ALLEN JACKSON: Well, they all flew good as far as I knew. A military airplane, the things that people think about, they were so high power and fast and this, and they were hard to fly—they weren't. The military airplane was easy to fly, because if they weren't easy the pilot couldn't do the job that he was supposed to be doing, if he had to take all this attention to fly the airplane. So, the planes themselves were easy to fly. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Well, I think that is very interesting. ALLEN JACKSON: After I got out, I kept flying. I used a private plane, a Beacherapl that I used to travel in up until four or five years ago. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Apparently the Eiffel Tower was a great attraction according to this. ALLEN JACKSON: Of course somebody was always flying a plane under the Eiffel Tower. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Yeah, that's what it says right here. ALLEN JACKSON: I heard about it, but of course I didn't see it. But during the war some English Spitfire pilots caught a German Storch, which was a slow observation plane in Paris. And they were trying to shoot it down, and it got to going around the Eiffel Tower, of course it could sit there and do that, and the Spitfire couldn't turn that sharp. But anyway it got away because he could fly right around and around the Eiffel Tower. FRANCES WESTBROOK: I think that is very, very interesting. And it even has color pictures. ALLEN JACKSON: We lived in a Duke of Windsor house for about seven or eight months. FRANCES WESTBROOK: That's interesting. ALLEN JACKSON: He owned the house in Veraflay. I went back with my two oldest sons maybe two years ago. We went to London for four or five days and then to Paris for four or five days. Neither of them had been to Europe. And I could navigate it just about as easy as I could, I had been to London several times since the war, but I had never been back to Paris. We went out to Versailles to see that and coming back we stopped at Veraflay to see if I could find where we lived. We went right straight to it, no big deal. Looked just exactly like it did, it was closer to the street than I had imagined it, but it looked exactly just like I thought it was. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Very interesting. Well, I think we should, I honestly think it would be nice if we turned on the tape [the video tape] and you just repeat some of the things you just said, because to me it was interesting about the service planes being easy to fly. You said they had to be easy to fly, that was very interesting. ALLEN JACKSON: Well, you got those little things that happened every day, and the things that was something like that everybody laughed about. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Well, this is great; we'll sit down and work on it. What did you wear? ALLEN JACKSON: Well, once we got to France I wore fatigues most of the time. In England when we were ferrying we had to get home to London, we had to wear Class A when we did the ferry. FRANCES WESTBROOK: This is neat, is there anything here that you would want to show [pictures]. ALLEN JACKSON: I don't know, those are just, we all did the same thing. And whoever got in the picture happened to be whoever was there when somebody had a camera. Our squadron, we still meet, whether we have a group meeting once year, a reunion. And I haven't gone the last two years, but the year before that we had it in Savannah, and I was in charge of that one. But I guess we still have, the group probably had a thousand people in it during the war. And we have, when I first started going maybe twenty years ago, we had maybe hundred or hundred and fifty show up, now we probably have sixty. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Now here is my suggestion, because I think you've said some very interesting things with the camera off. So, maybe however you talk, I think your talk about your veterans' reunion is good. And let's see, what was the other thing? You were flying the military planes from a pilot's point of view. No one else has actually made that comment. I think it is very interesting that they made it easy to fly. And I love the Eiffel Tower story; I just think that is a fun to share. ALLEN JACKSON: Well, there always, in terrible things in the war, there was always funny things that happened. FRANCES WESTBROOK: See that's interesting, that's a human thing that is not going to come through on a list. And the veterans group I think. ALLEN JACKSON: No, we were up at some place up near the Bulge, Luxemburg someplace, and there were a bunch of planes up there. A fellow had gone to the restroom over this slit trench. And about that time here comes a German plane, just roaring along, kind of low over the site with three or four P-38's right behind him, so he was heading for home. But here's this fellow, he saw them coming, he just dropped in the slit trench. And I'm just thankful that he was not in our airplane. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Yeah, that's right. ALLEN JACKSON: But anyway, so I don't forget. FRANCES WESTBROOK: Well, I think we've covered a great deal of ground, and I think it was very, very interesting. And I appreciate it so much, and I hoped you found it interesting. [END OF INTERVIEW] [CJ] - Metadata URL:
- http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/224
- 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:
- 29:05
- 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
- Rights:
-
