Densho Digital Archive - John Young Interview (denshovh-yjohn-01-0020)

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RM: Could you tell me, among the guys that you trained with, it sounds like you guys were a pretty tight-knit group.

JY: Yeah, we were a tight group, yeah.

RM: Did you ever face any discrimination in the military?

JY: No. I never really did. It's amazing, a lot of people have, and they asked me, "Did you face any discrimination?" I said, "No, never did." Even when I was becoming an officer, I had no problem. All the crew member, there's a guy associated with Ball Jar, Ernie Ball, and Hugo was a millionaire because his parents owned a restaurant and taught math. And he ran it, he and his brother retired from it, gave it to their grandkids, they ran it into the ground, they finally sold it for a million dollars. I took him to Low Jo's just to show him another Italian restaurant, he said, "John I'm not bragging, but our restaurant was larger." I said, "Wow." He said, "We have three stories and have over fifty people working for us."

RM: Did you all stay in touch?

JY: Yeah, we kept in touch. Except, well, Hugo, I, and Fred Wages became the closest. The only one I lost contact with, good-looking Henry Brown. He's the one we lost track of, the real tall guy. And I don't know about him. The rest are dead, but I think Henry is the only one younger than I was, the rest is older. Yeah, then the hotel, Hugo and I, we became very close, and Fred Wages. I got a pilot license for anything under a hundred horsepower.

RM: Did you ever talk to these guys about the fact that you spent a year living in Manzanar?

JY: No, I never said that. But said, "We would have had an ideal crew if you were Japanese." I said, "Why?" He said, "Joe Hann was a German," our flight engineer is Italian, he said, "If you were a Jap, we've got it made." [Laughs] That's the only thing we used to laugh about.

RM: Did you guys hear about the 442nd when you were in the military?

JY: Oh, yeah, I heard about that, too, my wife. Here's a newspaper I kept.

RM: Oh, look at that. Can you hold that up so the camera can see it? That's an important one, huh?

JY: Yeah. This is August the 15th, 1945.

RM: Kristen, did you have questions about his World War II experience?

KL: Yeah, a couple. You talked about that run on Dresden. And did you say there were two military targets you guys were looking for, but you couldn't find either of them, so you went to Dresden instead? Did I understand that right?

JY: What was that again?

KL: The bombing raid over Dresden, the firebombing?

JY: Oh, yeah, we couldn't find the primary, we couldn't find the secondary, so we dropped the bomb right over Dresden.

KL: And how did that feel while you were watching the bombs and the fires start?

JY: We don't care. When we heard about the Jewish camps, what they did, we were happy. We had no feeling for it at all. Here's a milkman that turned out not to be. That's the Dresden run, I got the whole shebang on it.

KL: Can you say anything more about learning about the camps in Germany, the Nazi camps? How did you find out about them and what did you think?

JY: We heard from other people, infantry people, that been through it, and they told us about how they killed the Jewish people and all that, so we didn't feel bad about it at all. We thought it was poetic justice. Yeah, we dropped the bomb right over the city, lot of people got killed.

KL: Speaking of bombs, do you remember hearing the news that the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

JY: Oh, yes, we heard about that.

KL: How did you hear about that, and what did you think about that?

JY: Well, I knew it was coming, I heard something about the atomic bomb even before it was dropped. We thought they might use it in Japan. That's about it.

KL: What was your understanding of what an atomic bomb was in 1945?

JY: We knew it was really something, because we were told it was a thousand times worse than the bombs we were dropping, one bomb. Imagine a thousand planes, each carrying six tons of bombs, that's a lot of bombs. I told you as soon as they hit the bomb, then I turned the camera on and photographed everything. Just a few planes will have cameras.

RM: What happened to those photographs?

JY: Pardon?

RM: What happened to those photographs?

JY: I guess the army still has them. I set these because our club is still, 306 bomb group, is still active. But now the grandchildren are running it, not even the children. They show us how we fly, where we were placed in the formation and all that. Shows the position where we flew, this is all my flight time. This was my mission, of course. Yeah, that's why I came back on the furlough, right before I went overseas.

KL: That's in Los Angeles?

JY: Pardon?

KL: Is that in Los Angeles?

JY: Yeah, it's in Solono, on Solano.