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RM: So I would like to hear more about your wartime experience in the military. Can you tell us about the school that you went to in Oregon, what it was like?

JY: Well, they had lot of physics, main course was physics up there. When I graduated, they cut the program so they had enough pilots, and the war was coming to a standstill, they sent us to Vegas with no prejudice, and graduated as a gunner. In fact, they had a sign up there, "Gunner today, goner tomorrow." [Laughs] Anyway, we had a lot of those kind of joke in the parachute. In case it didn't work, you bring it back, we'll reissue you another one. But that was kind of fun, I kind of laugh at it. Yeah, so I became a gunnery instructor, and like a dumb young fool, like I said before, I volunteered for overseas. And I joined a group in... where the heck was it? In Denver. And I went to Alexandria, Louisiana, gunnery school, and we crew up and flew together as a crew. And came back to Denver and picked up a new airplane and flew into Wales, England, and from there we were transported with a new airplane. Went to New England State, Greenland, Iceland, Atlanta, all those places, and went into Wales. And with the third line, I got the map there, and we started flying with other crew, with experienced creew for about three or four missions, and we started flying as a crew on about fourth or fifth mission. And I completed sixteen combat missions and got shot down once. Not shot down, but bailed out once.

RM: Can you tell us what those missions were like?

JY: Well, it wasn't too bad. The Germans, toward the end of the war, they had the Schitz at that time and they made one dive at us, and they got the hell out of there. So I was hardly able to shoot them, because they're coming down five to six hundred miles an hour. They take one burst and they get the hell out of there, because they were low on plane and low on combat pilot. So it wasn't too bad.

RM: Where did you fly to?

JY: Oh, I go the whole mission, went to Berlin twice, and I was on the mission where we killed fifty thousand civilians. We couldn't find the primary target, the secondary target, so we dropped the whole bomb load, over a thousand planes, over the city of Dresden. And I got the whole article if you want to see it.

RM: You were on the mission that did the Dresden firebombing?

JY: Yeah.

RM: What did that look like from above?

JY: I turned the camera on and I saw the picture, it was just on fire. About twelve five hundred pound bombs we dropped, and two incendiaries, so we set the town on fire. A thousand planes dropping all that, so you can imagine.

RM: What kind of plane were you on?

JY: B-17, Fortress, Flying Fortress.

RM: And how many guys would be on one B-17?

JY: Nine.

RM: What were their different jobs?

JY: Okay, they got the pilot, copilot, bombardier, navigator, flight engineer, a waistgunner, a ballturn, and a tail gunner, which I was in.

RM: Were the nine of you together on most of those missions?

JY: Yeah. About twelve missions. The first three missions we flew with an experienced crew, just to get the experience.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.