Interview with Von and Phyllis Peterson

Recorded in August, 1999 at their home in St. Anthony, Idaho
With Linda Young, Matt Young, and Janet Young


Linda: What do you want to let all of your posterity know about you? I think you should just start telling yarns!
Von: Well, I've written my life history about three times, you know.
L: Yeah and I have them all.
V: But I haven't written the last one, you know, the end of it.
L: You haven't written a lot about the war.
V: What? Haven't you got the thing about the war? I went clear up right about to the end of it.
L: Yeah, but we like to hear it from you.
V: I don't know that much now. I'd have to read what I already wrote.
L: Well, what we should do is ask you guys questions. That's probably easier. Is that easier?
V: That's easier.
L: You both lived in Mud Lake. Tell us about living in Mud Lake.
V: [Laughs]
L: Tell us about skinny dipping.
V: Have you got something on listening to this.
Matt: Yeah, it's recording it.
V: It's recording what I say?
L: Yes!
V: That's terrible.
L: That's OK, you don't need to be shy. You're a lot of a ham.
V: OK, so we're in Mud Lake.
M: Tell us about the band.
V: Oh, tell us about the band.
M: Because I know Bryon's got the accordion.
V: I didn't play the accordion. I played the bass and guitar.  Mainly a guitar when I was out in Mud Lake. It was during war time, so you couldn't get bands anywhere. So many of the young men was gone and everything.
Phyllis: They didn't have DJs to come and fill in for you.
V: No. So a friend of mine played the steel guitar well and I played the...
L: That was Anderson?
V: Benny, yeah. Yup. That was Anderson. I played the Spanish guitar.
L: Oh did you? I didn't know that. I thought you always played bass.
V: No. I didn't have bass at that time. I played rhythm guitar for him and we'd go out to Lidy Hot Spring and play all night long 'till three o'clock in the morning during Saturday nights. People would come and really get drunk and have a lot of fun.
M: What kind of music? What would you play?
V: It was mostly country western, you know.
L: So when did you start the bass fiddle?
V: I didn't start playing the bass until after I came home from the Army. There was me and Tommy Mitchell both playing guitars and they decided they needed a bass. So I bought a bass and played bass after that.
L: Just learned how to play it by yourself?
V: Well, the first four strings are the same four strings as on a guitar. So that wasn't hard once I found out where the notes was at. That's all I had to do. It was very easy to play for me, I had no problem playing it at all.
L: So who were all the members of the band when we were little and you used to take us out there? Who was in that band?
P: Stewart Tyler, Tommy Mitchell, and, oh, what's his brother's name?
L: I thought there was an Anderson. There wasn't an Anderson, huh?
P: Yeah, Louis Anderson.
L: Louis Anderson, Stewart Tyler, Tommy Mitchell, and Tommy Mitchell's brother. Tommy Mitchell's brother Timmy!
V: Yeah.
P: Warren Mitchell.
V: Yeah, Warren Mitchell.
L: Because I remember going out to that pool hall or something out in Mud Lake. It faced east, I remember that.
P: It was the dance hall.
L: A dance hall. And you guys would be up on the stage and we'd finally give out and curl up on the benches, those hard old wooden benches, and sleep while you played. Some of the happiest moments of my childhood. I thought that was the coolest thing.
V: One night, we didn't have Tommy there to play rhythm guitar. We didn't know where he was at, but he had stopped on the road coming up through the desert there and met a guy with a flat tire. So he pulled in front of him and got the tire out of the rear. He happened to have a gun in there and the guy grabbed the gun, held him up, and stole his Cadillac and left. So then he tried to get his Cadillac back. Finally, down in Idaho Falls, the police shot a bunch of holes in his Cadillac. They finally caught the fellow. He came back about the time the dance was almost over. I think he played about half an hour or so.
L: And his car was shot full of holes!
V: When you don't have a rhythm guitar with you, you're in kind of in a bad way.
L: What's the difference between the rhythm guitar? I don't know what that means.
V: Well, that's when you just play rhythm with it.
L: Oh just to keep the beat.
V: Yeah, just play the beat.
L: Instead of drums.
V: Yeah, it takes the place of the drum.
L: How many years did you play?
V: What, all together? I have no idea.
P: You played before we were married.
V: Probably fifteen years, twenty years.
L: You played when we lived here. I know that.
V: Yeah, I went clear out to...
P: Lemhi.
V: Lemhi and played. We played at dances up in Kilgore, up in Leadore and Moore.
P: Arco.
V: Arco. I don't know. And a lot of other places. At churches and whatnot a few times. I thought some of the songs we had weren't really fit for church [laughter] but I hope the Lord will forgive me.
M: You know, Mom told me that she knew every hymn in the book because when you were choir director, right?, you made sure you covered all the hymns. I tried her. I tested her one day. I could turn to any page and I would read the title and she'd sing the first line or two for me.
L: I don't even remember this. When did we do this?
M: It must have been when I was in high school.
L: That's probably true.
M: Out of the old hymn book. The new hymn book had come out and you said "I don't know the new hymn book" but I got the old hymn book out.
V: Yeah. The pages are different in the new one.
M: Some of the songs are different too.
L: Oh, that wonderful old blue hymn book. That's right, you led the music for years. We sang in the choir.
V: About fifteen or twenty years or more. I don't know how many I was in. Without ever having a lesson! [laughter]
M: Was that your only church job?
L: You taught Sunday School a lot.
V: Oh yeah.
L: You were in the Scouts too.
V: Yeah, I was in the Scouts. I was a registered Scout in the Scout program for about fifteen years actually but I decided to quit because I had too many girls. [laughter]
L: It had to be kind of shameful, huh?
V: Yeah. When I was in Mud Lake, I also had a motorcycle and had a lot of fun out there with it.
L: And a black leather jacket.
V: Ice skating and doing all kinds of things.
P: A black felt hat.
L: Oh really, a black felt hat?
V: Yup, and I courted her on a motorcycle.
P: Broad rimmed.
L: Oh. Broad rimmed felt hat?
P: Yes, we've got a picture of him somewhere in it.
V: Not on the motorcycle, I didn't. I wore that cap. It come down over your ears and you buttoned it underneath here, like you see in the old war pictures.
L: Yeah, like the pilot helmet.
V: That's what I wore when I was on it. That was to keep the bees from stinging you because they stung you all the time. There was so many honey bees out there that they really raised Cain with you.
L: Get any in the teeth?
V: You didn't ride with your mouth open, let me tell you. If a big old bumblebee hit you, you'd think you'd been hit by a rock!
L: What did you do, wear goggles? Because you didn't have a helmet.
V: I wore goggles and later I just put on a windshield to keep them off of me because I couldn't take it any longer. They'd keep stinging me on the neck.
M: What kind of motorcycle was it?
V: It was a Harley Davidson. The best there was.
M: Her dad [referring to Janet] had an Indian.
V: They're not as good as Harleys.
Janet: I'm sure he would argue that point with you.
V: You think so?
M: Her dad rode one in the military for at least a while. The military version. No, that was a Harley that he rode in the military, wasn't it?
J: No, I think it was an Indian.
L: Man, those Harleys--you should have kept that Harley, Dad.
V: It'd be worth money.
L: I mean, people wait on two year lists for those Harleys and pay seventeen, eighteen thousand dollars for them now.
V: I didn't know that was going to happen! But anyway, I only had one accident. I was going rabbit hunting one day and had the gun right across from my knees. So I was guiding it with one hand and I was going down this road. It was a dirt road and there was a dip in the road. Just a dip. With one hand, I couldn't control it and I went into that dip and went way up in the air and come down out there. Motorcycle tipped over.
L: You were lucky to be alive.
V: Well, fortunately I had brains enough not to be going too fast on a dirt road with a gun in my hand.
P: Was that the day Harvey was with you?
V: Nobody was with me. No, I'd have killed Harvey that day if I'd a went over that. It was terrible. I was going seventy-five miles an hour that day down that gravel road.
M: A young fool, huh?
V: A young fool.
L: Oh, you have to tell about the rabbit kills.
V: I was knocked out when I hit the ground out there and pretty soon a guy come out of his house. I was right by his house. He came out to see if I was still alive, laying on the ground. [laughter]
L: What did you do? Get back up and get on the road?
V: I got up and went out rabbit hunting.
M: So what's this about the rabbit kills?
L: The rabbit hunts. Dad, you have to tell about the rabbit hunts.
V: You mean all the rabbit drives we had out there?
L: Yeah, the rabbit drives. Yeah, you've got to record this for history.
V: They were great fun, to go out there. We loved to kill rabbits, you know. All those little bunnies. Bunnies! [laughter] Anyway, we'd go out and they'd have horses and they'd drive them. They had the pen. For about two miles out here, the horses would drive the rabbits ahead of them, into there. Then when we was about a mile from there, then the people all came across here and got in back of the rabbits. We always had a club in our hand, a good club. If a rabbit came past us, man I could take that club and swing it and hit him on a dead run. Boy they'd just tumble over and over and over out there.
M: I heard that. I've heard people talk about rabbit clubbing.
L: Oh, that was how they got rid of the jackrabbits because the jackrabbits just ate all the crops. Destroyed them.
V: Oh, they really hurt the farms. Then we'd get closer to the pen and we'd have to grab them. Them rabbits would jump clear over your head sometimes. Trying to keep them in there; trying to use the club too, when you could, they'd just push them into that pen and they'd just pile up. Then they'd kill them and took them to the fox farm. The worst one I was ever in was in the middle of the summer, which we never did but that one time. It was just outside the farms and there was baby rabbits galore, just little teeny ones, you know. Their fur wasn't stuck on. That day, just outside of that farm, we picked up fourteen thousand rabbits. Fourteen thousand of them. Put them into that pen and I'll tell you, that was the furriest mess you ever saw because their fur wasn't stuck on them, you know. Man, fur was flying everywhere. That was the biggest mess I ever saw in my life, out there.
J: What would they do with them at the fox farm?
V: Feed them to foxes! They had several fox farms. Some in Idaho Falls and some in Rexburg. Eventually they turned them all loose, because the price wasn't good, and they killed all our pheasants.
L: Oh, for all the fox collars. I remember you coat that had the fox collar.
V: Pheasants and foxes can live, if they've been in--don't ever tell me things can't get out in the wild and live fine because all them foxes did.
L: They'd been raised in captivity.
V: They knew how to hunt. It didn't take them very long.
P: It was before we had hay balers and so we would stack the hay in huge stacks and the rabbits would eat all the way around that.
V: In the winter.
P: And sometimes tunnel completely through. Before the winter was over, the haystack fell over and then they were on top of it.
L: They were just like rats then.
P: Oh, yeah.
V: Yeah. They'd just eat right under them haystacks. They was all in the winter time unless you put something around them. Sometimes we'd put a wire around them or some netting. The rabbits would still get through it. So then we'd go out there in the middle of the night. I've been many a time out in the middle of the night hunting rabbits. You could see in the dark, with snow on the ground. It was no problem at all. We'd go down there and they'd be in there. They couldn't get out and they'd be hungry so we'd kill them and take them and skin them. They wanted the hides in those days because they was using the hides for packing in shells [ammunition]. Now, they don't use that, but it was a war time and when they changed over, then rabbits were not worth anything.
L: They'd use that instead of cotton wadding.
V: So we'd skin them. I could skin a rabbit in fifteen seconds.
L: Are you kidding?
V: Nope. Fifteen seconds to skin a fresh rabbit. I used to work at skinning poisoned rabbits but they'd bring them in cold and everything and they weren't easy to skin. I spent all day skinning rabbits.
L: What did you get paid for a rabbit pelt then?
V: I have no idea because I was just skinning. That's all I was doing and I don't know what they paid me. The thing I feel bad about, with all that fur on me, I used to go in that guy's store. I can't imagine people in there. [laughter] Bloody hands. There wasn't a place to wash in them days.
L: You didn't have any of that chemical, no-water soap, huh?
P: They used the fur for felt hats too.
M: This was after Pearl Harbor. After we were in the war then?
V: I was still home because I was deferred because I worked for farmers. Then I think her boyfriend that she had was who yiped on me and got me in the Army. I still think he wanted to get rid of me so he'd have a free way.
L: What was his name?
P: Ed Taylor.
L: Ed Taylor. Yeah, I remember that story. Oh come on, Mom. You've got to fess up about the old boyfriend.
P: Well, he's the story teller.
L: This is your story.
P: Well the finale was--he skipped church and came over on the motorcycle, Von did.
V: Oh, I never skipped church to see you!
P: Well, you sure got there early. We were getting dinner and so here comes Ed in a new coupe that he has just bought so he could take me out.
L: And you'd been going with Ed?
P: Yeah. I'd gone with both of them. Mother fixed this big dinner and we were sitting--Ed sat on one corner like this and Von sat over here and they wouldn't either one speak to each other. There was a spot in between and my little brother come and said "Who's gonna sit in a'treen 'em?" [laughter] So I sat in between them. Von wouldn't pass anything that way. It all came this way. Ed passed everything this way and I about starved to death. [laughter] So we went out. I got on the motorcycle and went with Von. Poor Ed.
V: And her mother was mad.
P: She thought that was terrible, for me to go with that...
V: Go with that ignorant kid!
J: On that motorcycle when there was a very nice car.
V: He had a car, had a business and everything.
L: Oh, he did? So he was the rich kid, he was very good.
P: He was thirteen years older than me. A little bit much.
L: So whatever became of him?
P: Oh, he married.
V: He married another woman that died at a young age with heartbreak!
P: No no, he was on a tractor and the tractor tipped over on him and killed him.
L: Oh. Killed Ed.
P: But that was after we got out of the Army.
L: Well, it was a good thing you didn't marry him then. Good heavens, he'd be dead. Well of course, you would have been rich, right? A rich widow?
V: Maybe he had a good insurance policy.
L: Then you could have come in and picked up on the rich widow. You just didn't play this right.
V: Do you want me to tell you about Mary Jane now?
L: Yeah.
P: No. You don't need to talk...no, no.
L: No. Come on, now you have to tell us about...
V: Well, it ain't a dirty story. You know, when I look at it, I feel I was really as good as Joseph because Joseph was being seduced by that woman all the time. He went away. Got away from her. I did too and I wasn't put to jail like he was. This woman, I'd seen her quite a few times before and kind of messed around a little because she'd come up to see Maurine [Maurine was Von's brother Floyd's wife]. So one night, she kind of stayed after church and I wondered why and she says "Well, Von, can I take you home?" I said "Sure." It was only about a quarter mile. I think I was sleeping over at Floyd's. So she takes me about half the way and pulls off into the gutter and starts kissing me. I'll tell you, I've never been kissed like that all my life. Wow, that was fun! [laughter] I got away pure.
L: That's what counts!
P: That was before we were married, not after. [laughter]
L: Thank you for clarifying that.
V: I didn't do anything like that after, of course, but I never got kissing like that either.
P: Too bad, too bad!
M: So you had been deferred, then, and then you got what--a letter in the mail saying...
V: Your friends and neighbors. That's the way they opened it. Your friends and neighbors have selected you to represent them.
M: Really?
V: Yup, that's what it says.
L: So you knew that Ed had selected you.
V: That's what it should have said.
L: Ed Taylor, your friend and neighbor.
M: So how did you end up as a nose gunner? I mean, did it tell you what you would be doing, or just said show up here?
V: No, no. They don't select you. I went to Salt Lake, to Fort Douglas. While I was there, of course they put you through tests and everything like that, and finally they said they wanted people to come in who wanted to be in the Air Force. If you passed the test, why you'd be in the Air Force. Well, I was a high school dropout. You know, I was a high school dropout but I went over there and some way, I passed that stinking test. It had 219 questions. But I've always been good at when they ask those tests, you know, that you have four things you can decide from.
M: That's where I got it from then!
L: Multiple guess.
V: So I passed it. Then they sent us, of course, to Denver for basic training. That wasn't airplanes. Then I went to Laredo, Texas for gunnery training. Then after that, they just trained us all the same way. We had to know how to take a machine gun and with a blindfold, take it apart and put it together.
M: Was this a hand-held one or one of the ones that was actually the fifty caliber one?
V: Fifty caliber. It was in the planes. The reason they did that was for night flying. If you was up on a thing at night, you had to know how to take the gun apart and put it back together and get it firing. That was stupid, but you know, the Army is stupid anyway. Then I went to Casper and I finished training. That was airplanes. I saw more people killed at that base, training, than I ever saw overseas. There was twenty-three men died at that place while I was there.
L: In training?
V: Yes.
P: They were averaging about one a day.
V: They didn't even make it through training.
J: What kinds of things did they get killed doing?
V: Well, they've got them new pilots just training up there. They've been training too, pilot training, and they get their B-24s and they just didn't watch it. One came down one day and I don't know how he did that, but he hit a wire and he killed, I think, the whole crew that was in the plane because the thing exploded. That was pretty bad. But there was accidents all the time. With green pilots, that's a problem.
M: When I flew, the guy sitting next to me, coming down, was a maintenance mechanic or something. He was part of Jimmy Stewart's group in Boise. I guess in Boise, the airbase there was originally B-17s and then they did B-24s. He flew over to England. They were, I guess, in the Eighth Air Force.
V: Yeah, Jimmy Stewart was.
M: He flew over with Jimmy Stewart and was part of his same group. He'd grown up in Boise and everything. I thought that was kind of unusual, that he'd end up there for his training.
L: So what wing were you in?
V: I was in the Fifteenth Air Force, 489th, I think, was the group we was in.
L: Squadron, huh?
V: Squadron, yeah, that we was in.
L: Well, now when did Mom join you? You'd been drafted when you guys got married.
V: You wonder how you came to be, do you?
L: Well, if you read my life story, you'll notice in there it says I couldn't figure it out. You were gone when I was born. [laughter] I could never figure out how you were my dad.
V: Well, that happened in Casper, Wyoming just before we went overseas.
L: Oh. I thought it was in Cheyenne, was where I was conceived. It was Casper, huh? Well that's even worse than Cheyenne!
V: Casper, Wyoming.
P: I was quite pregnant when I left there to come home.
L: You went to Denver, though, didn't you? Didn't you join Dad in Denver?
V: Yeah, that was the first place I went.
L: Then you went to Laredo and she came home.
V: Yeah.
P: Then when he came home from there, I went back with him to Lincoln, Nebraska which was a--what did they call that?
V: That was just a base to send everybody to where they needed to be.
P: Sort them out. Anyway, they sent us to Casper from there.
J: So now, you were married right after he was drafted?
P: Yes. He was drafted one day and I met him in Pocatello and we were married the next day. We had twenty days before he had to ship out and I was going to school.
L: So then you went down and were married in Logan and which of your parents are in the next room on your honeymoon?
P: My mother and his mother. [laughter]
V: With the door open between them!
P: It wasn't opened, but it could be opened.
L: Great honeymoon!
V: Yeah, what a honeymoon!
L: And Mom, you did candy.
P: Yeah. That was at Casper.
L: That was at Casper? You were pregnant with me and you were working in the candy place?
P: Mmm hmm.
J: Is that why you have a sweet tooth?
L: Probably is.
P: [I would wait for] him to come and oftentimes went in to this little store. One day, she hired me and she let me pick the hours that fit his schedule.
L: My gosh, you were just so much in love you two. This is so sweet.
V: I should tell them something about what happened while we was there, but I don't think I should.
L: Now you've brought it up, you have to tell us. We can always leave it out.
V: Well, I got some kind of a disease down in my crotch. So I went to the Army man and he said, well this will cure you and he gave me this stuff. So I went to the apartment that night and the only way to the bathroom--you know, people don't understand, you didn't have bathrooms in your rooms them days. They had one bathroom and everybody went to it. It was in a rooming house, it was different. So I was in a room and I had her stick this stuff on me and everything around there. I'll tell you: Sting! Hurt! You can't believe what that done to me! I didn't know what to do and I had to get some water or something to sit in. I went down that stinking place naked, right through that hall and in the bathroom. I was in a hurry, I'll tell you.
P: He didn't grab a towel or anything. I didn't know what was going on.
J: He just took off?
L: So that was a case where the cure was worse than the disease.
P: It cured, though, I'll tell you.
L: Just one dose of this?
V: Boy, it cured me, I'll tell you.
M: So you were in Casper then, when you got shipped overseas?
V: Yeah.
M: Did you go straight to Italy or where did they send you?
V: No, then I went to--you have to get there. They sent me to Toledo, Kansas. Is that right?
P: Topeka.
V: Topeka, Kansas is where they sent me to. I had to stay there a while. Then they put us on a train, a troop train, and took us back to...
P: Newport News, wasn't it?
V: Newport News. That's where I left, from Newport News. Of course, in those days, people didn't have gas and the thing on the radio, you know, says "Is this trip really necessary?" So I got on that boat and said "Is this trip really necessary?"
M: You went over on a transport boat?
V: It wasn't much of a transport. I think it was a banana boat, I really do. That was a made-over boat. It really wasn't a big boat and it was made over. What I hated about it, you know, they just put bunks in it and they were about eight high. Six or eight, I don't know how high they were. You only had this much room between them, you know, just roll into bed. I grabbed a bottom bunk. Thankfully, I didn't have to sleep up there in that rolling ship. But the bad thing was going to dinner, because you know, on a rolling ship--I was in the Air Force and I wasn't supposed to get sick. That was one of the things they asked us about and I knew I got carsick and I lied to them. So I got in. A lot of them was Air Force, but a lot weren't. Anyway, we would go down in there and people would throw up while they was eating, I tell you.
L: No! Gross!
V: Oh, yes. It was terrible. That ship was rocking all the time, you know, and I tell you, that's what's awful.
L: So how long did it take you? Where did you go? Did you go straight to Italy or did you go to the Azores?
V: Yeah. Our first stop was in Naples. We went over to Naples on that boat and then they changed ships. I think it took me two or three weeks to get over there.
L: Oh, really?
V: I can't remember. Because we was going in a formation, you know, U-boats and everything. All the [dye?] and all the things they have to watch. We wasn't going very fast. It might not have taken that long, but it was quite a while. Then they put us on an English ship and it smelled like mutton. [laughter] Called them limeys in those days. I don't know why.
J: It's because they ate limes to ward off scurvey.
M: Yeah, that's an old term from pirate days.
V: But anyway, that took us down around to the end of Italy and we landed at Bari. What is that? I used to know the name of that, anyway it was something like that. Then they took us by truck up to where we was at. Well, how did we get back into...? They must have taken us up to Naples and then taken us inland because I remember seeing Naples and then going through Naples and all that. Then we went overland to Cerignola, where I was staying.
L: So how long were you over there, total? I mean, not very long because you [Phyllis] were pregnant.
P: You were eight or nine months.
L: You flew all your missions then. Thirty-three? Thirty?
V: No, we was supposed to do thirty-five but there was no way, after a pilot left. The pilot had to fly five missions before he took his crew up. He had to have experience. So at the time, he flew five then he left and went home at thirty. So if you was going to get any more missions, you had to fill in if somebody got sick and that's the only way you could get them. It would take you forever to get out of there. I didn't ever go up again because it was right after that, that the war ended.
P: You were on the boat for Thanksgiving.
V: I know it.
P: And you came home in August, after Linda was born.
V: Hey, I wasn't on the boat when I came home. I came home in an airplane.
P: No, when you went over.
V: Yeah, OK.
L: So you were on the boat for Thanksgiving.
P: And you came home in August.
V: Yeah.
L: How come they didn't fly you out?
V: You mean over? I flew back.
L: Oh, because now the war is over and you're bringing everything home.
V: We're bringing our planes home. I was on the last plane to leave that place.
L: Is that right?
V: Yes sir. I helped with all the lousy cleanup of the camp and taking down all the tents. They built brick things around the tents, you know, and take all them down. Rats would run everywhere and we'd all take after the rats. [laughter]
L: With a club!
M: Rabbit-clubbing.
V: Club a rat. I was there right till the end. They finally had one plane to go home. I caught that one and went right down to Bari and left there.
L: How come you stayed? Just a good guy?
V: My name never came up. It wasn't "C". "P"!
L: Your name never came up. They were going by "Von," waiting till the end.
M: You know, the thing I noticed when I climbed up front, past the nose wheel--they told us to be really careful because those doors will open [the front landing gear doors]. They said that was the emergency exit for the people up front. They said to make sure you don't hit that door because it will open and you don't want that to happen. I remember climbing up in the front there and looking at the bombardier's section and looking at the doors to open up into the front turret. It was so noisy! There was just wind blowing.
V: While you was flying?
M: While we were flying, yeah.
L: On that B-24.
M: Yeah. We were yelling in each other's ear and couldn't hardly hear each other. I was amazed. The tail wasn't very noisy. There was wind, yeah, but you've got the engine noise, plus the wind blowing through it. I never would have guessed there is so much air moving through those things.
V: Well, you get going a couple hundred miles an hour, it will make it.
M: Yeah. We weren't flying that fast either.
V: It depends on how high you was too.
M: Right we weren't very high. I don't know how high above the town. We circled around Boise and landed. It was about thirty minutes. But the other thing I noticed, looking in there, was there was just not much room in those things [referring to the nose turret].
V: No, but I was thin then.
M: I would think your legs would get cramped. It doesn't seem like a real natural position either.
V: It never bothered me.
L: Really?
V: No. We also had on quite a bit of clothes because we had to have on clothes with electricity coming through them to keep us warm. And we had to have air because once we got up to about 10,000 feet, why, we had to put on oxygen masks and keep them on. Then you had to wear a helmet. If a plane got hit and started moving at all, you'd never get out of those turrets. You couldn't make it. Because once the plane starts whirling, you're done. That's all there is to it. If a wing's shot down, one wing, then you're going to start whirling.
M: You wouldn't be able to get out and parachute out?
V: No, you wouldn't be able to jump out of there.
L: Did you have a parachute on?
V: Oh, yeah.
L: Even in the gun?
V: We always had a parachute on. Either one in front of us--sometimes we had two of them, I think. I can't remember. If you wore the back chutes, they had the back chutes too, you know, in those days. Then sometimes, as I remember, you had two of them on. If the first one didn't work, you pulled the second one. [laughter] You hoped! We had to have them anyway because if a plane went back and it had been shot up and couldn't land, why then you have to jump out. All the crew has to go except the pilot and he's got to take the chance of going down and skidding on the runway and see if he can save anything. There was only one day I almost had to do that and they decided that we had to bail out because they couldn't get the landing gear down at all. The engineer finally worked at it and worked at it and got the wheel down. I think it was one wheel that went down and the other one didn't. He finally got it down, so we landed.
L: Otherwise you'd have bailed out, trying to save lives?
V: Yeah, they'd have to take us up a little higher and let us all bail out. I wasn't really for that. They didn't try us on that. They used to. At the gunnery school, they'd make you bail out. But we was taking flight training there too and whatnot. Well, it was a gunnery training, of course. They quit doing it because so many men broke their legs. [laughter] They was breaking things all the time. Oh, it ain't like these now, they have, that you just pull and slide in there, nice and smooth.
M: The other thing that surprised me about it was--there's the two guns and there's the thing that moves them around, like a little yoke in there.
V: Yeah. The trigger is on the yoke.
M: Yeah. And then there is some sort of a little sight.
V: Yeah.
M: And there was equipment, so that you could see up and you could see directly forward in the sight, but you couldn't really see much else, it seemed like. There's stuff to the side of the sight.
V: I saw enough. There's enough flak to see. I had to see it, me and the pilot, and the rest of the people couldn't see the flak in front of them till they got to it. Yeah, the gun was a little different. We had to learn to shoot with rads--radius--instead of with sights.
M: What is that?
V:  Well, we had to use radius. You've got to remember, when two planes is flying, side by side, you can't shoot this plane.
M: Right, you've got to shoot ahead of him.
V: Oh no. Well, that's the thing; that's the reason it don't work. It don't work, it just don't work. You can't do it, so you just don't shoot at him. He's not hurting you anyway, but if he's in a pursuit curve--they called it a pursuit curve--they always came around and they would come in on this curve. OK. Now which way are you going to shoot at him?
M: Ahead of him?
V: You got to shoot in back of him.
M: In back of him?
V: You bet. Because the bullet is traveling with you, going the same speed. He has to be coming at you to be able to hit him, because you don't know where to shoot otherwise. They used them stupid bullets that was flares--what do you call them?
M: Oh, yeah, the tracers.
V: Tracers. They weren't true because they burned out. People that used them, they burned out so they got light and went a different direction. It was a stupid thing to do but that's what they were doing with those things. So we had to know if you was in a certain spot back here, you had to have one rad, or two rads, or three rads. So you aimed the gun with the rads. They had to know how to shoot this so if he was in a curve. You see, it's harder to hit a plane up there than they think it is. As if you just shoot at it. But you can't just shoot right at it; you wouldn't hit nothing! 
L: They do on the television and the movies and they always hit them.
M: The bullets come right in and boom!
L: The bullets hit right down the side in two neat lines, you know? Ain't true, huh?
V: Yeah. They trained us with shotguns, part of the time.
L: Really?
V: Yeah, we got in the plane and we got about a hundred and some bullets and they had these houses, you know, where the clay pigeons came out. Each one of them had a different rad and our shotguns had rads on them. So each one of them had a different rad and to hit the thing, you had to use that rad system to hit the clay pigeon. And we was moving because we was in the back of a truck.
L: They were training you out of the back of a truck with clay pigeons, huh?
V: Then they put us in a thing. It was a--I don't know, some kind of a house. But anyway, then they had these Piper Cubs, whatever they call them. They got down there and they'd come at us in different ways and we had to pass that with the rad system to shoot the plane down. It was fun.
M: How would they know whether you hit the plane? I assume you weren't using real...
V: I don't remember all the way, but there was somebody there taking the test on it, always with us.
J: That's where they developed the paint balls.
L: So did they fail very many people? I mean, did you have to pass the test?
V: Not that I knew. They just wanted bodies anyway.
L: You were just kind of like flying corpses for them. It was like, oh well, huh?
V: Yeah.
M: So did you end up shooting down very many planes?
V: There wasn't any planes came up. I'm sorry.
M: Towards the end, there was not enough left or they didn't have enough gas?
V: Yeah. Just before I got there, you know, Ploesti was--you've probably seen the shows about Ploesti and the terrible things they done. All the mistakes. They shot down half the 15th Air Force over that thing. Killed I don't know how many people and the Germans was only a little ways out of that town, I mean the Russians, at that time. They took it over anyway, a little while after. In fact, from what I hear, we did very little damage to it. It was hard to damage them places anyway. I flew over Moosbierbaum [Austria] several times and it was a gas factory or oil refinery. We had to go and knock that thing out every couple of weeks! We had to go over that stupid thing and hit it. It was bad, it had a lot of guns around it. They protect those places badly. But not as badly as up in England because them ball bearing plants and things up there, they would have a thousand guns around there. Down there, I think Munich was the only thing I hit that had three hundred guns around it. That's quite a few guns shooting at you though.
J: How many missions did you fly on?
V: Thirty.
M: So the one thing I was wondering about flak--they must try to guess the altitude and set their guns up to try to put the flak right in front of the plane, right? Does it spread quite a bit vertically?
V: Well, vertically, it does. You could hit somebody in the back. But they was using radar.
M: So they knew what height you were at and they'd set all of the guns.
V: Yeah. But the thing we did, we would go up and we'd fly right even with the target, several miles from the target as if  we was going on up. Well, that didn't fool anybody. So we would go up and then we'd make a turn to the target. Now, you could fly any way you wanted to as long as you was here. But once you started over the top of the target, you had to stay exactly in formation. You couldn't move. So we were dead ducks. We was dead ducks going over the top of the target because we just couldn't move. Boy, after we got past the target, we'd just go everywhere. [laughter] Let's get out of here! Man, we don't want to be into here. That's what we did. Then at the start of this thing, we would start throwing out tin foil.
M: Oh, and fool the radar.
V: Yeah and foul up the radar. We would drop all that tin foil on them and that fouled them up, I'm sure. But gosh, I had a lot of blasts around me and you wondered how you got through them. If it had been fifteen feet closer, it would have killed me. But it never did. You know, it's funny how you get through it. You look at it and it's just solid black up there when somebody else has been across it. Anyway, it was all fun. [laughter]
M: So you were really up there just kind of waiting to get home.
V: I was a spectator. Planes couldn't come up, because like you say, they were out of gas. At the time I was over there, they had them jet planes. Golden saw one or two of them and he said up there, they had a few of them come through them, in England. He said them things just scared them kids, the heck out of them, using them planes. He said they was so fast, he said they'd come right up square through the middle of you. He said they'd get behind you; they'd shoot you down. I think guys was so scared, they didn't shoot right. I don't know. But they're hard to hit. You've got to know that rad system if you're going to hit one of them planes that's coming at you. It's not easy.
L: So how long did a mission take? How long would you be out?
V: Oh, I think the longest mission we was on, we went to Germany one time, out of Italy, and I think that was about eight hours.
L: Round trip, huh?
V: Yeah, round trip. I didn't go on that one completely because we got up there and we didn't have a fast enough plane, something wrong with the engines or something, and we kept losing ground behind them. We was left up there all alone. Well, you better be a good gunner. Fortunately, there wasn't any planes come up after us. So we decided to get rid of our bombs. We saw a town down there and we decided, well, let's drop the bombs, there's a railroad down there. We don't have a bomb sight because the only bomb sight there was, was in the lead plane. Now, you dropped on him. When he said bombs away to you, the whole bunch, why, all the people. We didn't have anybody to do that.
M: So who released the bombs, then, if you didn't have a bombardier?
V: I don't think we had a bombardier. What I can't figure out is, you know, with only one, what if he was shot down? What would you do? Anyway, we'd go in and we'd drop our bombs on this poor little town in the middle of Austria. Then we'd turn around and head home. Going along--and the pilot really got after me for this, because I was the nose gunner and I could see the ground. He couldn't. I could see all the ground around me. You have a flak map. It shows how many guns every place has and where they have the guns. But every once in a while, they'd stick those guns on a railroad and they was just all over the country sometimes, this gun. So, I didn't see the town. It didn't show flak or anything there. We started over that and with nothing out to foul up the radar, or anything else, let me tell you, they get accurate! [laughter] They get accurate. Anyway, he saw the guns going off and the flak ahead of him and he went every way. They'd hit over this way and bullets was coming. There was about 21 holes, I think, in the ship when we got done. And he'd go this way, then he turned and flap this way and just  trying to stay out of the way of it because they'd have shot us down. There's no doubt about it.
L: You'd already dropped the bombs?
V: I dropped the bombs and was headed back, was going home.
M: That's when you gun the engines and start moving fast.
V: Boy, I tell you, that was the closest call I had, of going down. They could have hit us so easy, it was pitiful. Them 88s. But we made it, then the pilot lined me up and cussed me out for not telling him this town was there. Would he have turned? I don't know because I never did it. I should have called him on the radio and said there was a town in front of us. I think it was a railroad car, was what is was. It was out there by the town. I don't think it was a battery down there, but I don't know.
L: So did you wipe anything out with your bombs?
V: As I remember, we turned around and looked at it and we pretty well hit our target, guessing.
L: How many bombs did you drop?
V: It depends on what you have on. They might be hundred pound bombs. They might be two thousand pound bombs. The two thousands, we didn't carry very often. That was a blockbuster. That was meant to go deep in the ground, I'll tell you, and blow things up, them big old bombs. Sometimes we carried little bombs, about that long, and we could carry whole bunches of those things. They was personnel bombs, though. They wasn't made to try to blow anything up, they was personnel bombs. They exploded above the ground and just wipe out everybody in a foxhole. Dangerous little buggers. You didn't want to be under them. Well, is that what you wanted to know? Do you think that ought to be interesting to listen to?

Transcribed from the audio by Matt Young in 2011. This transcription is slightly edited to remove phrases that were corrected by the speaker and some unimportant reactions from the listeners.