Opinion

Willis Jones, hero

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Gone but never to be forgotten. Saturday at a large funeral we paid tribute to a life well- lived. Then at an impressive service at the cemetery the American Flag draping his coffin was removed, folded, reverently with great dignity and precision as only a military honor guard can do, and presented to family. The sad lingering notes of Taps sang out, a "21 gun salute" echoed and Willis Jones was sent off on his journey to eternity. God Bless you and thank you for your service.

Willis, age 98, was one of the last of our rapidly decreasing pool of veterans to have served in World War II. Serve he did as a pilot on a B-17 bomber flying out of England to bomb Nazi Germany. Fly 25 missions and you've earned your ticket home and Willis flew 251⁄2 missions that counted as combat. They'd delivered their bombs on target deep in Germany and made the turn to go back to England and then on home. Happiness!

In horseshoes close counts but not so in combat. Willis's big bomber was hit with flak (aviator's lingo for exploding anti-aircraft shells fired from the ground) evidently in the belly under the navigator's position. The shell also knocked out #3 (right inboard) in such a way that the propeller would not feather. The extra drag from the windmilling engine/propeller caused so much resistance that Jones's crew could not keep up with the formation. Friday the 13th of April 1944.

There is strength in numbers. B-17s of the day bristled with 50 caliber machine guns. Picture 12 bombers flying in close formation just feet apart each carrying nine trigger happy gunners. Well it was a good place for a German fighter plane to avoid.

Then, when one ship drops below and behind the formation it is open season for the German fighter pilot who by the way was defending his homeland. The inevitable happened and the FW-190 knocked out the B-17 flight controls. Time to bail out!

In the spirit of the medieval knights, plane commander pilots are the last to bail out of a crew served airplane. Willis was the copilot so was to go next to last. Further complications. The cockpit of a B-17 is, in actuality, a rather small space. The escape hatch is down below and behind the pilots. The bombardier has to crawl out of the nose below and past the pilots. The engineer and navigator's stations are behind the pilots and out they went except the navigator, a large man, sticks in the escape hatch and his buddies stomp on his shoulders to "help" him on out. Lt Jones grabs his detachable chest pack parachute which is stowed under his seat, he already is wearing the parachute harness, Oops he grabs it by the handle -- the D-ring and the pack bursts open. White silky parachute everywhere. Willis grabs it up by the armful hooks it on and bails out holding the lifesaving silk waded in his arms.

Later, Willis told of waving the pilot chute, the small one that is supposed to pop out first and pull the rest of the main chute out to inflate. Whoosh his parachute inflates and suddenly all is well, or at least much better. On the way down to the ground, he contemplates landing, hiding out and walking to Switzerland. He hits hard and hurts his leg which already contains a wound from a fragment of the exploding flak. Willis unhooks his chute and makes his way to help his already landed navigator who had both feet injured from the exploding flak just under the floor of the aircraft. On arrival he finds his nav surrounded by a party of waiting Germans who are only too happy to turn their enemy aviators over to military authorities.

Willis always remembered that life in the prisoner of war camp was in a word uncomfortable. The food was poor to non-existent. Sanitation just the minimum and heat--well the war torn Germans were short of coal as well as food. POW's weren't very high on the priority list. Thirteen long months later his camp was liberated by the Russian Army on Friday the 13th of May.

You will note that in the title to this column this old combat veteran, that's me, referred to Willis Jones as one of my heroes. My combat tour consisted of missions flown over the relative safety of Laos, Thailand and South Vietnam in a four engine jet powered aerial refueling tanker. We flew at 25,000+ feet beyond the reach of any anti-aircraft artillery in relatively air-conditioned pressurized comfort. The World War II crews flew unpressurized aircraft at roughly the same altitudes which forced the crews to endure temperatures well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Electrically heated sheepskin lined flying suits mostly worked pretty much of the time but an oxygen mask worn in those temperatures is maximum uncomfortable.

At altitude, we tanker crews lazed along at 450 miles per hour in contrast to the B-17's flat out 250 miles per hour. The German gunners has plenty of time to shoot as the early bombers floated overhead.

I still shake my head and wonder at the absolute courage it took for WWII bomber crews to go out day after day and fly another mission over Germany. Their losses were extremely high sometimes so that it was statistically impossible to survive the required 25 missions. It is little remembered that more aircrew men were killed in training missions and in battle than suffered by any other branch of the service, Army, Marines, or Navy. Willis along with thousands of his contemporaries, ordinary young American men, richly deserved the appellation of warrior and hero. And now they are very few.

In the early 1960s this old guy also flew out of a small base Fairford, U.K. originally a World War II bomber base. We too bunked in the same "Nissan" huts used by Willis and his crew members. Think small corrugated steel Quonset huts. Uninsulated in the damp cold winter climate of England. Heated by small pot-bellied coal burning stoves and coal was extremely short rationed at that time in England. There was a war on don't ya know? In my day the same stoves had been upgraded to burn kerosene or coal oil and also heated water for a tepid shower. Some fifteen years after Willis and crew departed we had the luxury of concrete floors in the same old huts a far cry from the dirt/mud floors endured by those who went before.

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  • Thanks for this splendid article, Dick. I hope Willy's family gets a copy of your article, so they, too, will know that there are still a few left, that remember the heros of WW-2. You and I had it a whole lot better, and safer, than the Military of the 1940's. May their service, to God, and Country, be long remembered. AMEN

    -- Posted by Navyblue on Wed, Oct 14, 2015, at 3:45 PM
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