Densho Digital Archive - John Young Interview (denshovh-yjohn-01-0019)

<Begin Segment 19>

JY: Each group, there's two division in England. Each division has twelve group, and each group has four squadron, but they only fly three squadron at a time, they retain one in the base.

RM: Why do you say yours was the most screwed up group?

JY: Because they shoot down their own plane and all that. This was a picture of mine, here's my air medals.

RM: That's an amazing collection. So just so the camera can tell, John is now showing some of --

JY: Yeah, here's my mission I flew.

RM: -- the different missions that he flew, look at that. Oh, my gosh. So we should probably look at this after the interview. Okay, sure. I wanted to ask about the one, you said you were flying back from Berlin.

JY: The second Berlin one. I went to Berlin twice.

RM: It says March 28, 1945.

JY: The only thing I remember about those missions are it's so goddamn cold. It's sixty-five degree minus up there. And we have electric boot, electric suit, electric mask on, and it still gets iced up. Once in a while you had to break up the ice and drop if off. And when you have to go urinate and you think you're your sister, you can't find it, it's so cold. [Laughs]

RM: What about... what's it like to bail out of an airplane? How did you do that?

JY: You hear a bell and you dive out, you don't think. Then you think after you get on the ground, you say, "What the hell happened?" That's when you get... here are some of the, no, leave it there.

RM: Can you hold that up so the camera can see it? What is that? Can you tell us what that is?

JY: It's just something they made up after the war, that I flew so many missions and all that.

RM: Yeah, sixteen combat missions. It says you had a hundred and forty hours of combat time.

JY: Yeah. Most of those missions were eight to ten hours.

RM: Sure. And it looks like they're really close in succession, you have March 12th, 14th, 17th, etcetera, all the way through March and April. Did you have time to rest in between missions?

JY: You don't have time. By the time you even have time to go to the toilet... I think I flew five days in a row, and those missions are, because you have briefings, which takes an hour, hour and a half in the morning, and then you get ready to fly, and then you fly those missions, you come back and you have a debriefing. And that, they give you a couple of shots of liquor when you come back. And then you have to meet with a bunch of officers and explain what you saw and all that. Then you go eat, then you sleep. You never know when you're gonna fly, because about three o'clock in the morning, somebody'll tap you on the shoulder, "You're flying." So you never know. On our wings we wore a blue patch, that means you're on call any minute of the day. So you're not allowed to go to down or anything like that. And imagine, some of those missions are ten hours, that's a long time to be up there in preparation before going, and coming back, debriefing and all that.

RM: Do you know, were you able to communicate with Kay while you were in...

JY: You can't... well, I'll show you something else. I can't tell her where I'm going, but I can send her from Stars and Stripes where I went.

RM: I see. So you sent her the newspaper to tell her about what you had been doing, because that was..

JY: That's the reason I sent these back.

RM: With the date on 'em, I see that, yeah.

JY: With the date on 'em. Here's all my flying time and all that.

RM: Did she ever tell you how she felt receiving those?

JY: She was worrying and keeping her fingers crossed. Of course, I figure it's better than being killed. As an infantryman, you know, plane will blow up and that's the end of it.

RM: Did you lose any of your friends in the war?

JY: Yeah, we lost a navigator, John Lennox. The father was a sheriff in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. [Laughs] Okmulgee, Oklahoma. So if you ever see Twelve O'Clock High, that's our group.

RM: We'll look for it.

JY: Yeah, it's right behind you, I think it's a Gregory Peck picture.

RM: Is there anything else about fighting in World War II that I haven't asked you that you'd really like to tell us about?

JY: Okay. Coming back home, they wanted to fly one of these B-17s home. We said, "Hell, no," so they shipped our crew, we took a vote on it. They shipped our butt over to France, so we had to wait for some infantry guys to come home, and that's when we come home. And we had five hundred infantrymen that came back with us. But they were so seasick, we ate everything. We weren't seasick at all, and I was going to tell you that the Queen Elizabeth, where the hell is that? The Queen Elizabeth took off two weeks after we did, and came in one day ahead of us. The ME-262 was shooting at us, but they only made one strike.

RM: How long was that trip back?

JY: Took us twenty-one days.

RM: And is that because you were in waters that were at war at point?

JY: We hit the Atlantic storm in '46. Yeah, we could have flew home a lot faster but we didn't fly anymore. I'll tell you another thing, too, after about... I didn't fly for thirty years after that. I'd never flown before the war, and all flew with a parachute. Since I bailed out one, I was so scared of flying without a parachute, that was my security blanket. This was our pilot. So I didn't fly for thirty years, until my daughter bought this ticket to go to Hawaii in 1975. From '46 to '75 I didn't fly.