|
Posted on 12/17/2004 10:22:32 PM PST by snippy_about_it
|
|
 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
|
| Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support. The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer. If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions. We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.
|
 Bill Ellett is a small man, white of beard and hair, with a tenor voice turned raspy from endless autumns of barking directions at high school marching bands. After 39 years as a band director, teacher and musician, he enjoys a relaxed retirement, tends to his yard above the Sweetwater Valley in El Cajon, and revels in telling tales of his six grandchildren, and the successes of his three children: the hydrologist son in Tucson; the violinist daughter with the Colorado Symphony in Boulder; the finance grad daughter who works in purchasing for her alma mater, SDSU. Looking at him, you'd never figure Bill Ellett for a war hero - yet his twenty-five missions as a B-17 ball turret gunner, and his two confirmed kills, and one probable, qualify him.  We met while contemplating the ball turret of Sentimental Journey, the B-17G restored by the Confederate Air Force and displayed at Gillespie Field last May. Much later, in the study of his home, I asked him how tight were the confines of a ball turret. "The first time I ever got in one," said Bill, "I didn't know if I could handle it or not. I never did like it, but I handled it. And after you've done it for a while, you get to the point, especially after you've been in combat a few times, where you say, 'Well, I'll never make it anyway, so what the hell's the use of worrying about it.' You live for your next forty-eight hour pass to London. "There were constant thoughts in my mind," he continued, "For two or three hours on my second mission when I was alone there in the waist and tail, where I had accepted the fact that I wasn't gonna make it - I thought, 'There's just no way you can keep going with that many people after you - they're comin' at you all the time and shooting this airplane - you can see holes everywhere you look ... one of those is gonna hit you." His second mission - the first combat mission with the stateside crew Bill had eaten, slept, drank and trained with for six months - taught him intimately about flak and fighters ... and about grief. Among the 10 members of the crew was his best friend, Harold MacGregor, the radio operator. "Mac and I probably were the two closest of the whole crew - we did everything together: going out on dates, together, going to town, together, gettin' loaded ... and whatever you did in those days. We were very, very close, and I wrote home a lot about him - my mother felt like she knew him as well as I did."  Bill's unit, the 390th Bomb Group, contributed 18 of the 264 B-17's that the Eighth Air Force had ordered into the sky to attack Munster, Germany on Sunday, October 10, 1943. Estimates were that the Luftwaffe had over five hundred fighters available to defend the target, and three hundred of them ripped another unit, the 100th Bomb Group, to shreds - in forty-five minutes the 'Bloody Hundredth' lost 12 of its 14 aircraft before ever reaching the target. In twenty- five minutes, the 390th lost 8 of its 18 aircraft. Along with Me-109's, 110's and Fw 190's, there were Ju-88's and Dornier's flying parallel courses, firing air to air rockets at the B-17's. The fighters attacked until the bombers neared the target, then skedaddled when they were within flak range. "They won't come in and fight with you over the target - they'll stay out of the flak, too," Bill said, with a smile. "The fighters are scary, but what's really scary is the flak. You can't do anything about that, when you're on your bomb run and you're flying flat and level as you can, no evasive action possible." And over heavily defended targets like Munster and the Ruhr Valley, the flak was so thick, " ... You'd think you could get out and walk on the smoke from the shells bursting." It was after they had dropped their bombs, with the bomb bay doors still open and the bombardier still flying the airplane, that the worst began. "A direct burst of flak hit behind the number two engine, Bill said, "And left a round hole about three and a half feet in diameter in the wing - it was huge. It winged us over - knocked us right on our back - and the plane started to go down in a spin. Later, Sabel (the pilot) said he rang the bail out bell - he didn't think he could get it under control - but nobody could hear it, the flak had wrecked the communications, too. Of course, it threw an awful lot of shrapnel as it burst up through the fuselage and out." By the time Sabel regained control of the aircraft, they had fallen considerably below and behind their bomb group and the collective, defensive firepower it held. Bill noticed three chutes below him and concluded that they had come from his plane. He struggled out of the turret, but it took a long time.  "I was crawling out of the turret as fast as I could," he said, "And I finally got out of there and noticed that the waist gunners were gone - I could see back through there and the tail gunner was gone, too. So I thought, 'Well, they're all gone, I'm here alone - I'd better get the hell out of here'." He scrambled to the already jettisoned door, strapped on a chute and prepared to jump. "I was leaning in the door, and was kind of dizzy ... in fact, I was very dizzy," he said. He had been without oxygen for some minutes and hypoxia had already kicked in. About then, Bill heard the twin-fifties from the top turret and realized he wasn't alone - only it took a while to comprehend just how much company he really had. "I had sense enough to think, 'Well, the guns are firing up there,'" he said, "They were shaking the ship - I could feel it. So, I rolled back into thewaist and plugged into the waist gunner's oxygen outlet and got to breathing and got straightened up ... and there were fighters all around us, coming at us from all directions." The German fighter pilots were no dummies - they'd look at an airplane to see where the guns were operating and attack where they weren't. Said Bill, "If the ball turret is moving around, they know somebody's in there watching for them, and if the waist guns are moving, they would know. Since those guns were all stationary, they were attacking from the back and the sides and the bottom. So, I started firing the waist guns, and I went from waist gun to waist gun, and even went back to the to the tail gun, and I was firing there, too. I don't know, it was such a confusing time ... I know I hit some, but whether I knocked any down, or not, I'm really not sure. Then, the fighters began concentrating underneath - they could see the ball turret's guns straight down - so I went to see if I could do something there."  There, he found that the inside of the ball turret had been destroyed, when one or more 20 mm shells had stuck it. The gears were shot up and the sight glass, behind which he would have been sitting, was smashed. "One side of it had a big hole in it, and ... ," he said, then paused - and chose not to state the obvious:had he remained in the turret, he would have died. "So, I stayed with the waist guns and my tail gun until we got back over water ... probably a couple of hours of that." Once they reached the English Channel, the fighters departed and, with the his aircraft at an appreciably lower altitude, Bill believed he could relax. "So I took off my mask and started up front," he said. "That's when I discovered Mac in the radio room. He'd been hit in the face with a 20mm shell." He paused at the horror of the image. "If ... if I'd a had any food in me I know I'd have lost it. It was ... the most ... difficult thing I was ever called on to do - to stop ... and do something with him. And I thought, 'Well, I gotta do it,' so I turned his head over and ... he was cold, frozen - so I pulled the rip cord on his parachute, took it out, and wrapped his head up in it as best as I could, propped him up a little bit better and ... went up to the front." Bill struggled with the memory. "We were like brothers," he said. "In fact, after he was killed, my mother and his mother corresponded with each other until they both died. Regularly. And they'd never seen each other ... but we had spoken about each other, so much, to them, that they felt they were almost kin. When I went up into the radio room and I saw him lying there, like he was ... it just made me so sick ... I had to swallow a few times and ... force myself to be able to get him covered up. That bothered me ... I didn't sleep very well for quite a while - then for years afterward it would bother me." Up front, Sabel and the copilot struggled to keep the battered bomber airborne as it crossed the channel but, said Bill, "The plane had just been shot up so badly that they had no intercom, no aileron control, no rudder control. There were one or two cables hanging on ... the columns were just ... (he makes a rough shaking motion with his arms) ... going like that, and the poor co-pilot had wrapped his legs around the column, and his arms around it, trying to hold it, while Sabel did some kind of manipulation with the trim tabs and [tried to] fly it that way. We were losing altitude all the time, so we headed for the 100th Group field, which is right over the southern coast of England, near Hastings." He read to me from Castles in the Air, Martin Bowman's 1984 release from Patrick Stephens Publishing: 'Rusty Lode flown by LT, Robert W Sabel, had over 750 holes in her fuselage, huge gaps in both wings, rudder and left aileron and both flaps shot away. The bomber had been hit badly before the target, but Sabel forced his way home through incessant fighter attacks. However, not all his crew believed they would make it home. William L Ellett, Sabel's ball gunner, saw three parachutes opening below the aircraft. He knew they must have come from his aircraft, so he climbed out of the turret and saw both waist guns hanging limp with their gunners' gone. The tailgunner had also left the aircraft. ... Ellett scrambled back to the waist door and saw a blood-stained flak suit on the floor, then the top turret guns opened up and he knew he was not alone, after all. Sabel managed to land at Thorpe Abbotts with only two minutes fuel supply remaining. Engineering officers declared that the feat was nothing short of a miracle'.  "We made it," said Bill, "And there were none after that that were as rough, but there were enough losses every time you went out that, when you started figuring the odds, you thought 'God, I've got 23, or 22, or 20, more of these? I'm not gonna make it.' Not very many did at that time in the war." In the four days before and after Munster, the aforementioned 100th Bomb Group lost 19 flight crews, and 20 of its 21 operational aircraft. Of the three crew members who had bailed out, Bill was told that Joe Tolan had died in a German hospital from the wounds he sustained in the attack, but the other two, Leon Tennant and Marvin Cox, survived the rest of the war in a German POW camp - they've since died. Bob Sabel, the pilot, got a job after the war with the CIA, then ran a detective agency in LA. He and Bill and George Woodcock - Woody the top gunner and engineer - all met at a reunion of the 390th Bomb Group, ten years ago at Davis- Mothan Air Force base in Tucson. Sabel died two years ago, but Woody, who has a daughter living in San Diego, gets together with Bill at least once a year. Bill completed all twenty-five missions with nary a scratch, surviving a bail out over the English coast when an engine overran and caught fire, and another mission to Munster (a milk run, compared with the first). For his efforts, he was awarded the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. When he returned stateside, he became a ball turret instructor, then trained in B-29's and was preparing to fight in the Pacific, when they dropped the atomic bombs.  After he mustered out, he vowed he'd never fly again - a vow he kept until 1960, and only a disabled car and a need to be at work the next morning forced him to break it. He got his degree in music from Idaho State, taught school, met and married his wife, taught for nine years in Nevada, then twenty-six more at Granite Hills High. The last couple of years he said, "I didn't feel up to chasing the marching band around all day," so he finished his career teaching history. The images of Mac were never far away, though, occasionally haunting his dreams. " ... And then I began to think, when we talked about WWII, that relating some personal experiences to the kids would be good for them. It'd be interesting, and not only that, but it might improve relations - they might think of me as more of a human being instead of a teacher. So, I began to tell them stories, occasionally, when we got to that unit on WWII. Jeez, it got so that I was famous in the Grossmont District for telling stories about the Eighth Air Force. Other teachers would substitute another class for me, while I came to their history class and spent a day or two with their kids. And so, I did that quite a bit, until I retired. And the kids really enjoyed listening to it." And re-telling those tales from so long ago made it possible for Bill to deal with it, himself, as well.  |
Not as good as having the old St. Paul right off shore, though. Buggers could shoot. Eight inch naval general purpose is very effective. Over a ton to a broadside, and if you asked you got a broadside about every five seconds. Fired one shot at a time, to correct for ship recoil, accuracy was very high if the range was short, like ten miles.
The "who has the biggest guns" brag reminds me of the old mil joke about rifles and guns, snort.
Yeah. Truly Socialism, period. And in the old Second International sense when it is not Marxist-Leninist. Have to swap stories about the old days sometime.
I never thought you were anti-artillery. Just figured it was some good old, healthy inter-branch ribbing. :-)
Sure, got lots of good war stories and tell-all on the libs, and would love to hear yours. Anytime!
I can get by cold, wet, hungry, sleepless, (boy, do I ever complain, though!) and low on ammunition. Lack of artillery support, now that is scary.
"Artillery: The god of war" ;-)
It's even fun to be non-PC when you know you're dealing with a flaming Lib.
Smug, sanctimonious, self important, and arrogant. That is the good stuff I can say about that crowd.
In a way it is too bad they didn't get their wish, the "socialism", the "revolution" they ardently desire. Inevitably then the tough guys will take over from the Kerensky types (Hillary sees herself as one of the "tough guys", but she would not last a second in with that bunch) and the whole "liberal" crowd would go the way of the Social Democrats.
I can do the Marxist-Leninist cant, Moscow style, a little bit yet after all these years. Figured if you can't lick them, join them. Finally decided it was more than I could stomach.
It's a freedom I have not known in years. Drives them nuts, Libs are not used to flagrant non-pc language and are non-plussed when they encounter, especially if they knew me as a lefty. I've even gotten in a little hot water being non-pc right here in FR. But I've learned to more careful since then, as a newbie I defer to my elders! (when that respect is deserved, of course!)
I was looking for something good in Barnes and Noble, finally tried a bio of Quantrill. Really a horrible pile of PC manure. Terrible job, without merit.
My kids came back from shopping and we talked while waiting for their mother, my wife. I started explaining the deficiencies of the work in detail, and noticed out of the very corner of the eye that a middle aged woman within earshot was starting to swell up like a toad. So, since she really couldn't get too nutso because, after all, she was eavesdropping shamelessly and "I did not see her", I raised the volume, and let her have it, both barrels and three reloads. Tapered off nicely, if I do say so myself, maybe even got a thought moving in that wasteland. Not bloody likely, though.
As we were leaving, my middle young lady, Margaret (named after the Baroness Thatcher, the Iron Lady), commented on this near case of assault with purse, or at least violent vituperation. I could she was wondering whether I had been inattentive. I told her I had been watching, and that it had been fun.
Kids think the old man is still formidable. Just massively good kids. Intend to stick around and watch out for them.
I have called Troll on guys here over 18 months. Just do a "report abuse" on the posting that is suspicious, with "Troll??" as the text. Check the box to let the Admin see your ID. The Admins are pretty good bunch of cops.
Sound advice and thank you! This one guy I wasn't sure was a troll because his profile said he was here since 1998, but you never know. and thanks for the support, if I can't handle the troll with my own artillery, I'll call you for air support.
Semper fi.
It was conscious immersion past the brr-the-water's-cold to the fish's what-is-this-wet-of-which-you-speak?
Epic valor.
His struggle with friendship and friend's death is an instant bookmark to a Pattonism.
When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do.
Here from Zeno's Warbird Videos is a three-part B-17 Ball Turret Manual:
B-17 Ball Turret, Part 1
B-17 Ball Turret, Part 2
B-17 Ball Turret, Part 3
Speaking of Betty Grable:
That's what I always disliked about Sundays.
Thanks for the link Phil. Epic valor indeed.
And if the airsupport does't work, I will teach you how to make a special little package for your liberal friends.
this is a great gang over here in the foxhole.
HEY folks, say "HI" to ariamne. she's NEW.
free dixie,sw
This is a combo response . . . I just finished reading the "John Kline & The Bulge" post from yesterday. Back to back reads on the greatest generation. Next to 'Nam Vets (heck, all Vets) these guys are amazing. My God, the loneliness and cold of sitting in a log bunker and being so drained emotionally that the kid could not even remember the night of Dec 18th.
And then to follow with Bill Ellett and 390th Bomber Group. Flying missions wherein German Fighters are slaughtering these big birds right up until they came into "flak range". All along this fellow's ass is hanging out of the belly of his bomber. These men are the best.
Your aerial pics and art work completment the writer's experience.
Excellent work as always folks.
OH! And by the way . . .
Hi sw, yes, I tried to follow you all morning! Now its night and I'm still all over the place on FR;having WAY too much fun! My husband and daughter keep peering in to see what I'm doing, he he, my daughter just said "daddy, mommy's freeping again". Uh-oh!
I don't think they call me friend anymore, but the package would be very much deserved!
Thanks!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
