World War II Experiences
"Timeless Voices" Oral History Project

Interview with

Cleo M. Bickford, 398th Bomb Group Radio Operator
600th Squadron, Eighth Air Force

Interviewer: Marilyn Gibb-Rice

Interview conducted at the
398th Bomb Group Annual Reunion
Livonia, Michigan, September 2006

Background:

The 398th has been interviewing its members as part of the Timeless Voices of Aviation project. More information about the project and a current list of video interviews can be found at 398th Timeless Voices Interviews. In addition to the video interviews, some of the interviews have been transcribed to text.

 

Interview with

Cleo M. Bickford, 398th Bomb Group Radio Operator
600th Squadron, Eighth Air Force

MGR: Interviewer, Marilyn Gibb-Rice
CB: 398th Radio Operator, Cleo Bickford

Time of Interview: 0:56:49

CB: Cleo M. Bickford, l was with the 600th squadron, I was the radio operator on the Lee Hicks crew.

MGR: Alright and where were you living and what were you doing, late nineteen thirties and early forties?

CB: Well in the late thirties and early forties I was going to high school.

MGR: Okay, where did you live?

CB: I lived in Houston Texas.

MGR: And were you following the war in Europe?

CB: Well as much as a high school student can be following something like that. Actually, I had graduated from high school and I was trying to find a job. It was very difficult actually to find something because of your draft age.

MGR: Okay and how did you hear about the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

CB: Heard it on the radio, on my seventeenth birthday.

MGR: That’s something you'd really remember then isn’t it?

CB: Yeah boy! (both laugh)

MGR: What were your reactions to it?

CB: Well the first reaction is, where the heck is Pearl Harbor?! (Laughs) There really were, there really were really no sharp reactions other than it was something that happened a long way off and we were suddenly in a war. I realized at my age, being seventeen that day, I was going to be in this thing, but I wasn’t sure when.

MGR: Did you get drafted?

CB: I went in through the draft procedure, actually in the first part of the war immediately after Pearl Harbor you could volunteer and join whatever you wanted to join. They cut that off pretty quick and you had to go in through the Selective Service System. However, if you volunteered for induction you could select your branch of service. I worked at that time, I had a job and I worked for the Corp of Engineers down in the Houston area and I went down to talk to my draft board one day, and a couple of fellas I worked with went down with me and when we walked in the door they announced in a loud voice “he wants to volunteer”. I said what the heck I will.

MGR: Oh really!

CB: So I volunteered.

MGR: And you chose the Air Force?

CB: I chose the Air Force.

MGR: Had you wanted to fly, was that something that you had wanted to do?

CB: I had been into airplanes ever since being a little kid. I use to make little airplanes out of clay. That advanced to model airplanes that you just looked at to the model airplanes that flew. It went from there.

MGR: So that’s the reason you chose the Army Air Corps?

CB: That’s right.

MGR: At that point were you married?

CB: No.

MGR: Did you have a girlfriend or anything?

CB: Not really no.

MGR: So you didn’t put off getting married when you went in?

CB: No let’s face it I was still a kid.

MGR: Right you were quite young. Alright so where did you join and where were you sent?

CB: When I went down and volunteered for the induction, they told me that I would leave on the twenty fifth of May.

MGR: In what year?

CB: In 1943. So I knew exactly when and where. At nine o’clock on the 25th of May I went down to Kitty Station, Kitty Railroad Station in Houston and I got on a railroad car, with a bunch of other guys who were all going to the same place, which was San Antonio, to the reception center. And it’s only two hundred miles to San Antonio, it took us all night to get there! They took this car were on up to a town north of San Antonio and dropped it off on the yards and went off. So, we sat there for two or three hours out there all by ourselves. The engine came along picked us up and took us to San Antonio. That’s where we formally started getting uniforms and doing all the things you do in the military. That wasn’t where I went to Basic. I left there, I was there about four days, then I got on a bus and went to Sheppard Field Texas, Wichita Falls for basic training. That was really the introduction to the military, to the Army.

MGR: Right, and so you did Basic there?

CB: I did Basic there.

MGR: And where did you go to after that?

CB: Well when I left Basic, of course you go through these batteries of tests to determine what you’re going to be. I really wanted to be a pilot but my right eye wasn’t up to the Army’s requirements. So, I wasn’t going to be able to be a pilot so they sent me to Radio School, went to Sioux Falls South Dakota, just in time for the winter, 33 below zero! (laughs)

MGR: And you’re from Texas. (both laugh)

CB: I’m from Texas!

MGR: You weren’t used to that! So how long were you in, was it Radio School, was that what it was called?

CB: Radio School, Radio Operator Command and Mechanics School.

MGR: What do you remember about Basic, any stories at all?

CB: Nothing more than we had this large open field they called the..., can’t think what they called the thing, anyway it implied it had grass on it, but there was no grass on it. That was where we went out and did calisthenics every afternoon, we’d go out there to do calisthenics, then we’d all run around the field. If happened to be on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday we went in and took off our fatigues and put on ‘Class A’ khakis, without taking a shower, and went out and marched in a Retreat Parade. That was about the most uncomfortable thing, I could do anything else but that just wasn’t clean, it was uncomfortable!

MGR: And I mean how often did you march, I mean, once you were at Nuthampstead, you never went out and did anything like that, so what was the point?

CB: Well the point was to introduce you to the Army and to their standards. And you learned how to do close order drills. I guess it’s worthwhile but at the time you wondered.

MGR: Yeah, I would think so.

CB: You learned a number of bad words there also! (laughs)

MGR: Alright, so after radio school where did you go?

CB: After Radio School went to Yuma Arizona for Gunnery School and down there for six weeks. About the second week I was there, I came down with some sort of a fever. And I’m not sure what it was but I remember I went to mess, to the mess hall, had to walk around a little hill , it was about a mile walk from the tent area where we were living, and when I was eating I started to getting sick and I got progressively sicker to the point where I couldn’t finish what I was eating. And my head developed a tremendous pounding, and I walked back to the tent area and lay down on my bunk and this pounding wouldn’t stop, I mean it was really a headache. So I went over to the orderly and told him I needed to go to the hospital. He said, well sick call is in the morning. So I went back to the tent, laid there a little while longer, then I got back to the orderly, I said “I am not sick in the morning, I am sick NOW”, “I want you to take me over to the hospital NOW!” So they found somebody to take me over there, and I got to the hospital into the admitting office and I sat there at this desk. I had to wait for a doctor who was developing, was ah, delivering several babies, and ah, I had to wait for him to get through the babies. It was somewhat 10 o’clock at night before he ever got around to coming in and admitting me to the hospital. And all the time this guy’s up there with a sledgehammer banging on my skull, that’s what it felt like, boom, boom! They took me in and put me in bed and fed me a bunch of pills about that big around. The next morning, I woke up and my head was clear and I felt fine. They told me don’t get out of bed for anything. That’s dumb, I need to go to the bathroom. So I got up, put my feet on the floor, felt alright, and I stood up and that guy jumped on my head again, so got back in bed... no I take it back, made it on my own [to the bathroom]. I stayed there one week and washed back one class.

MGR: Wow, did they determine what it was?

CB: Some kind of mountain fever, I am sure they gave me a name, but that was a long time ago.

MGR: Wow! So they put you back a week?

CB: Just dropped back one class.

MGR: After that where did you go?

CB: Well I got on a train with a bunch of other fellas and went to, well I got a delayed route, and a short leave, came home, then got back on a bus, went to Tampa Florida, that’s a distribution center down there. All sorts of crews down there. When I first got there we were in, they put us in the baseball stadium in downtown Tampa, Plant Park. Interesting thing is the enlisted men were in the covered area and the officers were in tents out on the infield. But we went down there, we were there, I was there for three months. One month I spent out at MacDill Field actually working on airplanes on the line, working on radios. After three months, then I got assigned to a crew and ah, I met my crew on the train. We got on the train, all together and met all the crew and went to Gulfport Mississippi for combat crew training in B-17’s, which was my first introduction. I take it back, that wasn’t my first introduction to B-17s. Actually, at gunnery school we used B-17’s for gunnery training. We had B-26’s towing targets and we were firing from the waist gun at a sleeve, which is kind of idiotic if you think about it, all it teaches you is to shoot the gun!

MGR: True! So you met your crew. This was the 398th crew, the crew you continued with?

CB: The crew I went into combat with.

MGR: You went from Tampa to where... Mississippi?

CB: From Tampa I went to Mississippi. Gulfport Mississippi.

MGR: And that’s where you did more training.

CB: Yes, that’s where I finished up combat crew training.

MGR: Right, and from there where did you go?

CB: The we went up to, well we finished combat crew training… Oh this is an interesting one you might want to toss in here. I knew nothing about flying an airplane other than, this is up, and this is this and these are the things that works the rudders. We were near finishing our training there and I was a radio operator of course and had nothing really to do ‘cause we were just flying around burning gas and getting time in. So I went through the bomb bay up to the cockpit and the co-pilot’s flying the airplane, a guy named Allen Talley. The pilot, he’d been out the night before so he had a hangover so he was laying down in the tunnel there between the cockpit and the nose, breathing pure oxygen. So the pilot seat was empty and the co-pilot says “sit down, and take over controls”. So I sat down there, put my hand on the controls, we flew along there for a little bit, was flying down the coast, and he got up and he says “I'm going back in the back of the airplane for a little while, just take the plane down to a, New Orleans”. So, okay, now I don’t know anything other than how to drive it like a car, so I drove it like a car and got down to New Orleans fine. Nothing happens fast in a B17, so I got down to New Orleans, and I got to New Orleans and this was the limit of my instructions was to go to New Orleans, so now what do I do? Okay, I’ll turn around and go back up to Gulfport, made a little shallow turn and went back up to Gulfport. Well I got back to Gulfport, still no Talley. I’m still sitting up there in command of this airplane. Well I'll just put it in a circle and I’ll circle at about 5,000 feet, I'll circle over the base. So I started to circle. Now when you turn the ailerons for a bank, once you establish a bank angle you neutralize the ailerons, because they still will be reacting to the displaced air and they will just continue to roll. And since it is pretty slow acting, I got by with it on the turn right there. Well as I'm circling, as l did about three circles, each one of them got steeper. Pretty soon Talley comes stumbling out of the bomb bay and says ‘What are you trying to do, put us on our back!?’. So I had about twenty minutes, first pilot time in a B-17 (both laugh)

MGR: Oh jeez! And with nobody else around! Oh gosh! Were you supposed to go back up to Gulfport? Was that what he intended for you to do?

CB: Well, he wasn’t going to be back that long, he just lost track of time.

MGR: Did he go back and go to sleep or something?

CB: No I don’t think he did that. (laughs)

MGR: So from there, where?

CB: Well from there we went to Hunter Field in Savannah Georgia. We were there, let’s see I think, I think our bombardier got emergency leave and so since he got emergency leave, they gave everybody a leave so got on a bus and went home. I was home for about a week then I went back to Savannah. Then they gave us, one of the things they did, they issued everybody with a .45 automatic and shoulder holster along with the other stuff you got. They told us don’t leave that gun by itself. Well what are you going to do with a .45 and a shoulder holster? You put it on, everybody around there looked like a con man, because they got this bulge up under their blouse. So we got back, they gave us an airplane and we started out to go to England. We went up to Drew field, no not Drew field, Bangor Maine, I can’t remember the name of the field now. Went to Bangor Maine, run into bad weather and stayed there for six days then the weather cleared. Then we jumped on up to Goose Bay Labrador, yeah Goose Bay. Landed there in the afternoon and stayed there until midnight. Some people had sense to go to sleep. We got out and played football in the snow. We got back in the airplane at midnight and headed off across Greenland over to Iceland. I recall one time I was the only person awake on that airplane, I kept calling people and nobody answered.

MGR: Oh jeez, that would have been scary too, wasn’t it?

CB: Yeah, we headed to Iceland, spent three days in Iceland. And then from Iceland we jumped over to Valley Wales. That’s where they took our airplane away from us. See, we had the impression when we got this airplane, this is the airplane we would take into combat, we figured out names to paint on this thing and all this other stuff. Well we got over there, that’s not gonna work, ‘cause you don’t have the airplane anymore, they put you on the train. Sent us to Stone England which was a supply center for people. I guess you call it something else but that’s what it amounts to. We were there about a week, then we got on a train and went to Royston. I got two wakeup calls during the time I was in the service. One of them, early on when I was in basic training and I was doing something I really didn’t care that much for, I suddenly realized, you know what, I'm going to be in this until this war is over, however long that is. The second one was when we got off the train on the platform there at Royston, and the 91st bomb group which was just on the other side of Royston, were coming back from a mission right overhead and they were doing their break overhead, and I looked at those airplanes and there was pieces missing from some of those airplanes and I said “you know what, you could get seriously hurt!” (Laughs)

MGR: That’s true. Nice wakeup call! So, what was your first impression of the UK when you got there?

CB: Wet (laughs) and cold.

MGR: So yeah, what time of year was it when you finally got there?

CB: November. Cold.

MGR: November of?

CB: Of ‘44.

MGR: What did you think about the food?

CB: About the what?

MGR: The food?

CB: The food, the food on the base? That was GI food. We’re use to eating food… it’s edible but it’s not gourmet food.

MGR: And when you ate off the base?

CB: When you ate off the base sometime you could get good meals. My navigator and I used to, I’ll get to that later. If you had as much as a 24 hour leave you could get a railway pass anyplace in the UK. We'd pick somewhere we wanted to go and we’d get on the train and we’d go there. We’d go to London, went to Plymouth, I don’t remember all the places we went to. We did a lot of travelling over there. And of course, we'd always pick good places to eat. Interesting thing is sometimes you find a good place to eat and the next time you came down there there'd be a big hole in the ground. A V2 got it.

MGR: That’s too bad. Do you remember your first mission?

CB: Yes I do.

MGR: Can you talk about it?

CB: Went to Frankfurt Germany. It was very, very, I guess you’d call it a milk run. I mean there was flak, no fighters and that’s all there was to it. You still got the apprehension that you’re going to have someone shooting at you, shoot you down and there was flak. But it wasn’t that bad, as a matter of fact it wasn’t until the third mission that it got a really… . I use to lay down on the bomb run, one of my duties of course was at the end of the bomb run, after dropping the bombs, was to tell the bombardier that the bomb bay was clear, otherwise he had to come back there and do it manually [release the bombs]. So I opened the door to the bomb bay and the radio room, the rear spar was right in front of the radio room, so I laid down on the floor and had my hands on the spar and I looked down at the ground. That was a nice snow-covered landscape down there. It all looked great. On the third mission, l’m looking out and there’s a flak burst right underneath the airplane. I got up and slammed the door. I wouldn’t do it anymore.

MGR: Oh so you didn’t do it anymore?

CB: I didn’t do that, I still opened the door and did the check.

MGR: You use to lay and watch. That would have been fun.

CB: It was very interesting up to that point. After that I really don’t want to look at it!

MGR: How many missions did you fly?

CB: 35

MGR: 35 wow, and what was it like on an average mission?

CB: Average mission, of course the worst thing about it was getting you up in the middle of the night. We were on double daylight-saving time over there and they’d usually get us around three-thirty in the morning which is actually one-thirty and you’ve got to go out and dress and get ready to go and go down the mess hall. I’ve heard all these stories about combat crews having fresh eggs and all these things, I never saw a fresh egg when I was over there! We had powdered milk and powdered eggs and this big jar can on the floor full of hot coffee. You'd take your canteen cup and dip it down there to get this hot coffee. You’d take your mess kit with you and you'd get your food, it was edible food. It put you in a real good mood to do battle with the Hun, you’re mad at everybody!

MGR: Right, well talking about food did they give you anything to take on a mission, food or water?

CB: They'd give you a little packet, about that big a square [small square], as I recall it had candy in it and they usually had an orange in there and a pack of gum. That’s about all there was in there. Occasionally there was a chocolate bar but that was our combat rations.

MGR: And what about something to drink?

CB: I don’t recall anything to drink.

MGR: Sometimes your missions were eight or nine hours long.

CB: Yeah I remember one that was eleven hours, but I can’t recall… because it couldn’t have been water because water freezes. Temperatures we were exposed to up there, external temperatures were low as 62 below zero. However, being the radio operator, I had my own little room and I had the heat controls for the whole airplane. There was heat from the front to the back of the radio room. Also, from the exhaust from the in-board engines, from there back there was no heat. We had heated suits and heated gloves and heated boots and stuff like that… but ah, I don’t recall water, I just don’t.

MGR: That’s probably why you had gum….

CB: Could be, to keep the mouth wet.

MGR: Can you describe your feelings during a mission, I mean what were you thinking and how did it feel?

CB: Scared out of your wits. Anybody who says he isn’t (laughs) he’s either real dumb or he’s lying!

MGR: Right, right. Were you ever shot down or did you ever have to bail out?

CB: No.

MGR: You weren’t wounded?

CB: Never wounded, nobody on the crew got wounded. We got the airplane got shot up a few times. One mission, I don’t remember the target exactly now, we were at 28,000 feet and ah, we took, it was very accurate flak, we took one burst between number three and four engines, right outside the waist. It took out those engines over there and it took out the oxygen to the right side of the radio room and the ball turret and a good bunch of control cables. Course they had the autopilot system could fly on autopilot, but I remember the waist gunner called me and said would you come back here and help me get the Polack, that’s the ball turret gunner, and help me get the Polack out of the ball turret, he's passed out. So I was going to be very efficient and I unplugged my headset and my oxygen. The oxygen, of course, you’ve got this long hose that goes to the register on the wall and I unplugged the oxygen, got out of my chair and went to the right side of the radio room and pulled the walk around bottle off the wall. Pulled and it didn’t want to come, it wouldn’t release. I realized then if I keep doing this I’m going to pass out. So I reached down on the floor and picked up a hose and plugged it back into my mask and I took a few good whiffs of the thing. The next thing I remember is the engineer bending over me and I was looking straight up and I had collapsed on the floor. What had happened is when I plugged back in, I had plugged into one of the units on the right side of the airplane, one of the hoses over there, which was on the same system as the ball turret gunner so there was no oxygen in it. So I promptly passed out! So he plugged me back in and I came back to. That was kind of scary. We came home with a little more than one engine, one and a half engines, I guess. It was quite a long while getting back. We came down to seventy-five hundred feet I think before we could keep the airplane flyable on that one and a half engines. That was, that was probably the worst thing that happened to me, still nobody got hurt.

MGR: And the ball turret was okay?

CB: He was alright, was alright.

MGR: So tell me more about your crew members, you started to say something about your navigator.

CB: Well yes, the original navigator who’s here today, who’s with us today… right now I can’t think of the name, you know getting old is terrible (both laugh) anyway one of the guys I went over with, he flew about 12 missions with us, and then he started flying lead missions. Our tail gunner came on the crew as buck private; he had gone through pilot training for 35 hours in the basic, washed out. Then he went to navigation school and completed navigation school, and he did something bad before he got his commission and so they didn’t commission him, so when he came on the crew he was a buck private and he was assigned as tail gunner. Well when our original navigator went to leave they called him up from Operations and they wanted to know if he wanted to be a navigator, they looked at his records and saw he completed navigator school. And he said well if you promote me to lieutenant, I’ll be a navigator. They said well no, we can’t do that. Apparently whatever he did precluded him from being commissioned.

MGR: And you don’t know what he did?

CB: No, I don’t know what he did, he never talked about it. But he said “Well make me a Master Sergeant “, can you do that? - that’s when he was Tech [Technical Sergeant] – okay, and he moved up to the nose and became a navigator and ah, I’m still trying to remember the guy who was there with me today. Anyway, the crew, of course we lost the bombardier, he went to the lead also, so we had a togglier in the nose, so we had sort of a fragmented crew there for a while. And then when the ball turret gunner had a disagreement with the new navigator, he left the crew. He went down to operations and told them he wanted another crew. By the time we got through it we had new people filling in about three different positions on the crew. So a, I finished the tour one mission ahead of my crew. I flew on lead when they didn’t fly, so I got one mission ahead of them. I finished my 35, they had one to go and they asked me if I was going to fly that last mission with them. I said fellas I will go out and see you off and I’ll be out there to meet you but I’m not gonna go with you! (laughs).

MGR: No point in taking a chance was there?! (laughs)

CB: Herb Meeker!

MGR: So what did you do on your time off?

CB: Well like I was saying, you sleep if you got time off. We were actually on a lot of maximum efforts over there, unless it was just raining or the weather was so bad you couldn’t fly, you were flying. Whenever we came back from our flak leave, which was to Spetchley Park, we came back and went down to Operations and said any time this Group leaves the ground we want to go with it and so every time they went up, we went with them. So we finished our tour pretty fast, that’s why we did it, 35 missions and we finished April 1st. I finished April the first.

MGR: And you got there in November?

CB: Yep, we did it fast.

MGR: So you weren’t there for D-Day were you?

CB: No I wasn’t there for D-Day. VE Day. VE Day I was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

MGR: On your way back?

CB: On our way back.

MGR: So did you go to the Woodman Pub?

CB: Never went to the Woodman.

MGR: No?

CB: Never did. Back in those days I didn’t have many vices. I didn’t smoke and I didn’t drink.

MGR: So that’s good, that’s the reason your still here today. So what were the living conditions like?

CB: Well you lived in a hut with three other crews, two other crews, three crews in a hut. And ah, if you’ve had this thing described to you it’s a Quonset hut, we called it a Nissan hut, this little round thing and there’s a concrete tunnel that goes in from the front door it was the length of one bunk, and it was a concrete tunnel, and what that is of course is an air trap and a heat trap. There’s a door here and there’s a door down here. We could go in there we’ve got this, in the middle of the thing there’s a stove, which isn’t a stove it’s a piece of sheet metal wrapped in a cone and it’s got a door in one side of it and it’s fastened to a pipe that goes out the top of the hut and it’s setting on a grate that’s on bricks in this concrete device. We got one bucket of coal per day, for heating the thing. That’s not an awful lot of coal. Well we discovered that there’s ways of doing things, and outside the mess hall there’s was a big coal pile. So when we went down to the mess hall we’d take our bags with us and toss a few pieces of coal in it and come back there. One time we had 12 full bags stashed under these (laughs) bunks! Now I lived in a… stayed in a upper bunk, and when you came in the door, opened the door, my bunk was right there and the light switch was right here. There’s a bunk over here and a bunk over here, two bunks down here. But that’s where I was… my waist gunner slept underneath me. There was a sidewalk from our hut back to the orderly room. The C.Q. would come down to wake you up for a mission, and he'd come in and call out the names of the pilots, Hicks and the other two, there were three crews in there. When he’d do this, he would turn on the light switch, turn around and scream at the top of his lungs “Hicks, Bailey, Riley” my ear was about that far [shows with hands about 10 inches] from his mouth when he did this. One morning I was awake and I heard him clip, clippity clop, clippity clop comin’ down that walkway. I reached down and got my G.I. shield and when he turned around to yell, he opened his mouth and I had that thing, I said “you open your mouth and say one word and I am going to brain you”, he looked at me and walked over into the middle of the thing and then called out the names. Never again did he come up there and yell in my ear!

MGR: Very good! My gosh! Geez… well were the floors concrete in the Quonset hut?

CB: Yeah.

MGR: And the Quonset Huts were metal right, were they insulated at all?

CB: No! (laughs)

MGR: No (laughs), that’s the reason it was cold. So when it rained could you hear the rain on roof?

CB: Oh, yeah, yeah. One of the engineers on one of the other crews.., the coal is wet it’s hard to start a fire with wet coal. He got the bright idea to go over and get a little bit of 100 octane gasoline, to sprinkle on this coal to get it going. Well he did this and doused it liberally and then went looking for a match. He came back and tossed the match in there and that stove jumped about that high [motions with hand about 4-foot-high] in the air! Soot all over the building! (Laughs)

MGR: In the evenings or when you weren’t flying did you ever play cards or games or anything like that?

CB: Usually slept, this was a... now I’m telling you, this was a marathon event. I mean you’re over there and you’re getting up, you’re getting up in the morning at three o’clock, and you get back from the mission, by the time you get back, go to interrogation , get your guns cleaned, get something to eat, it’s time to get in bed so you can have a little bit of sleep before you get up the next morning. Only if you happen to have bad, bad weather and you don’t have a mission can you sleep in. Of course we had those and that’s the time, ‘cause there’s nothing to do outside, you’d play cards, and do things like that. And occasionally there’s a little friction between one person to another but not too much, we got along pretty good.

MGR: Did you have any interactions with the people locally? You probably didn’t.

CB: No I never did, I didn’t personally have any interaction with them. Never got too far away, other than leaving the base completely. I really didn’t get too far into the village Nuthampstead.

MGR: Did you carry any good luck items?

CB: No.

MGR: Did you have any special medals?

CB: No, I mean what kind of medals?

MGR: Any of the special ones other than the...

CB: You mean a Saint Christopher?

MGR: Well, just the medals you received, the Distinguished Flying Cross...

CB: Just got the usual, five Air Medals, stuff like that.

MGR: Okay.

CB: That’s like box tops.

MGR: Like what?

CB: Like box tops. (laughs)

MGR: Box tops?

CB: Cutting the tops off boxes and saving them.

MGR: So what was your happiest, funniest or saddest memory of the war?

CB: Happiest was when I had finished my thirty-five missions.

MGR: True, true.

CB: Of course when you lose somebody out of your hut, out of another crew, that’s pretty sad, ‘cause you look at the empty bed.

MGR: That’s true. What do you think was your biggest accomplishment?

CB: Finishing the war.

MGR: Flying all those missions.

CB: Yes.

MGR: Alright, how did you feel about the surrender of Japan?

CB: Well I was happy it was over, yes.

MGR: Okay, tell us about returning home.

CB: Well when I came back, they gave me thirty days leave. Then I went out to Santa Anna, California to a re-distribution center and I was there for about a week, I guess. There were a lot of people out there, incidentally everybody did K.P. out there. I remember doing pots and pans with a Master Sergeant. Everybody did his share out there. Then they asked me what my preferences were, preferences for reassignment were. And I said, first thing I put down was air transport command to B-29s, third choice was air training command, so I got air training command. And wondered where I’d like to be sent, I said Ellington field which is right in Houston. Would you believe I got Ellington Field?

MGR: Oh wow.

CB: So I got on a train with some other guys and we came from all the way out from California to Ellington field. And when I got up to Ellington, I was able to live off base and with my parents then. That was a great duty out there, I was..., having a fair amount of rank, I was the Production Line Maintenance Chief for Communications. So I had a pretty cushy job. Let me say this, I spent 24 years in the military and aside from the time that the people were shooting at me I enjoyed it, or I wouldn’t have stayed there.

MGR: So you stayed in...

CB: I stayed in, I stayed in the Reserve. I got recalled for active duty for the Korean war.

MGR: Did you use the G.I. Bill at all?

CB: Yes I did. I went to college. Got an engineering degree.

MGR: And where did you go, to college?

CB: The University of Houston.

MGR: You stayed in Houston? Are you still in Houston?

CB: I’m just outside Houston. However, I was re-called into active duty in the Korean war. Strange thing, I didn’t go to Korea I went to Idaho!

MGR: What did you do in Idaho!?

CB: Well they had a new type of unit up there called the Air Response Communications Wing... I didn’t know what it was at the time. It wasn’t until a lot of years later I finally figured out it was a C.I.A. operation.

MGR: Wow.

CB: ‘ Course the word C.I.A. nobody knew. We dropped leaflets, we had speakers on airplanes, we picked up spies, we dropped spies. C.I.A.!

MGR: Wow.

CB: But the unit I was in was scheduled to go to Tripoli. The second unit went to Korea. And the third one never, the war was over before... As a matter of fact the C.O. of the second… it was 580, 581st and 582nd were the numbers of the thing. The 581st his crew, they were shot down over there in a B-29 and there was a lot of negative publicity about them signing confessions and stuff like that. Since then I think they have sort of said sign anything they want you to sign, it doesn’t mean anything ‘cause otherwise you'd bang around there, it’s not going to mean anything anyway. But I didn’t ah..., they tried to ship us over to Tripoli, they weren’t ready so they cancelled the shipment. They got as far as Camp Kilmer New Jersey. And then I went back to Idaho and I started running out of my 21 days, 21 months I mean, of recall so I wasn’t eligible for shipment then, so they transferred me to a base unit and met a girl up there.

MGR: Wow.

CB: Well, you can imagine when I first went up there, we had nothing to do. Now I was Tech Sergeant they are not going to mess around with you, but the lower airmen they started sending them back to basic training. They set up a basic training up there called it Project Uplift. They had a radio school, up at Gowan Field in Boise, which is forty miles from my home, my mountain home, and I went up there to teach in radio school for a while. Then there was an opening for a head of a radio station up there in McCall, in the mountains in a resort area, so I went up there. In the fall they had a base football team, so I played football for the base football team. I played two seasons of football up there!

MGR: Is that how you met her?

CB: Well I met her, I was on a double date, she was the other guy’s date. Anyway, we got married. When I got out I went to Seattle to work for Boeing.

MGR: So how did you find out about the 398th reunions?

CB: You know what, I am trying to remember how I found out about that. Well the first one I went to was the one in San Antonio. I was only there for one day. I was at another function in San Diego. I belong to a flying organization; I have an airplane. We were out there for this convention. I remember getting on an airplane at midnight, redeye, going up to Las Vegas and sitting there for several hours and then going on to San Antonio. Got into San Antonio at 6 o’clock in the morning, and I went to the hotel, checked in. The first guy I met there was Wally Blackwell. I sat down and talked to Wally for a while, had a look at his scrap books and stuff like that. We went to a picnic that day in Aggie Park there. We had dinner that night. Got back on an airplane the next morning, went back to San Diego. That was my first, I had missed two or three since then, but I try to make them all.

MGR: Were there a lot of your crew members from back then?

CB: The only crew members that I’ve ever had, that come to the reunion is a Meeker and Gregory Landolfi who was the engineer. When we had the convention in southern Arizona in... Tucson. The bombardier lives just out of Tucson, and I called him up and wanted to know and ah… he wasn’t interested, he was a farmer and he wasn’t interested. The tail gunner come navigator lives in Toledo, not actually Toledo, he lives on the lake area, I’m trying to remember the name of the town but it’s out of Toledo. We went up and visited him one time, the same old guy he always was but he didn’t want to come to the reunion, I don’t understand that. Now our pilot… the co-pilot nobody can find, he used to always talk about Walters Oklahoma, that was his home. One time I was up in that area so I drove through Walters Oklahoma and I inquired about him, nobody had heard of him, and nobody had even heard of the family by that name, so I don’t know.

MGR: Wow.

CB: That was forty years ago maybe, something like that, maybe a little longer that. Four of us, let me see, there was Baker, Landolfi and Meeker I guess, we went out to visit with our pilot, Lee Hicks, he lives not too far from Sacramento. We were with him for about three days, went down to a museum somewhere, just hung out together for a while.

MGR: Wow. So have you been back to Nuthampstead since the war?

CB: This year.

MGR: This year was your first time?

CB: First time.

MGR: Oh, that was good.

CB: And I have to say it was worth every penny. I really enjoyed it.

MGR: Did you like the memorial?

CB: Yes I thought it was good.

MGR: That’s good.

CB: When we went over this time, we have a friend who ah… we live next to a private airport, a regional airport. There was a fella over there that had a Tiger Moth, a British Trainer. He was an Englishman, he was the head of maintenance for British Caledonian Airlines and BCal was bought out by British Airways, and he lost his job here, he had to go back to England. That’s been 15 years ago, anyway we kept in touch all this time. So we called him up, told him we were coming over and he said fine come and stay with me for a while. So we arranged to come down and spend two days with him before the tour and come back and spent two more days with him after the tour. So we had a real tour over there, we got to go to a lot of places that he took us that wasn’t on the tour, for example the R.A.F. museum which wasn’t on the tour, that’s in London, and a number of other places like that. We really had a real enjoyable tour over there.

MGR: That’s good. Did you go on the base on ‘Wally’s Tour’? Could you remember places where you had been?

CB: Yeah, yeah I could remember some things over there. Have you been back? You know what it’s like, no buildings there. When we came this time we came from Anstey, we had dinner up there at somebody’s barn, and then from there we went back to the base on the back road. Ozzie had put signs out everywhere, where everything was, you got the back gate there. They said anyone who wants to walk back to the Woodman from the back gate we'll let you off, so a bunch of us got off and hiked from the back gate to the Woodman inn. On your left walking back it’s all rapeseed, on your right it’s all… wheat, wheat field. Now of course somebody after we left, took some photographs from the air, and they sent us that CD and those pictures showed everything we did. Now on ‘Wally’s Tour’, actually wound up being ‘Ozzie’s Tour’ on the bus there, took us through all these places where everything was. Everything comes to mind, plus I've got a book, called ‘Airfields of the 398th [8th] Then and Now’ published back in the seventies, there were several pages about the 398th and all that was done by Ozzie.

MGR: Oh wow.

CB: That was credited as Malcolm [Ozzie] Osborn. One of them was a view of the airport, an angled view, where you could just about see everything. When we got off that thing I said “Ozzie, take your pencil and show me exactly where we went on this thing “. He marked it out. (laughs)

MGR: That was good. So what would you want people to know about this time in history about World War Two?

CB: What I would like people mainly to know is the values, the values of people had back then, compared to what they are now. I think our values have eroded tremendously. Patriotism, patriotism was a word and a word can mean nothing or it can mean something. This is one thing I would like people to know. You’re talking about the greatest generation, they ain’t the greatest generation, they were just people who went over to do a job and did the job without asking any questions. Now everything has to be justified to very little degree. Nothing is done on face value.

MGR: Did anything happen during the war that you would say affected you for the rest of your life?

CB: No I don’t think I can’t say there was anything particular that happened to us, something that I don’t want to have to go through again. I would do it again ‘cause I feel like it was worth it. Don’t want to go through it again. But I would hate to have my children to do it.

MGR: Right. Is there anything else you want to tell us?

CB: After this interview is over there’s a lot of things I'd like to say but right now you draw a blank. Actually when you come in to do one of these things you should come in with an outline of things that you’ve thought about for a while, and when I leave here, I can stop out in the hall and tell you of lots of things but as of right now there isn’t. (laughs)

MGR: So as part of the second generation, I want to thank you for your service and for what you did for our country in World War Two.

CB: One thing I did, I stayed in the military like I say for 24 years. When I left, well I worked for Boeing, I got married and moved up there. My wife developed a skin problem up there, so after I had been up there for a year or two, I sent her back to Houston to see if the climate was better down there. You know what the Seattle climate is like, clammy cold climate, and Houston is moist but it’s warm. Well she started getting better on it, so I gave my notice, fair notice up there and I left Boeing and went back to Texas without a job. After two weeks’ vacation, I went out there to see if I could find me a job. Somebody told me about this company that built airplanes called Anderson Greenwood Company, and l walked out there, walked in the door and went to work. Worked there for 33 years, 9 months and 25 days. I had some friends in the International Guard down there and they wanted me to join the Reserve in the Air National Guard. At that time I was Tech Sergeant, that was the rank I had during the war. So I was in there about a year before I was able to get a commission. I stayed in there for the rest of the time in the Guard as a Major. The military was good to me. I do have all the medical benefits of being a retiree. I get a small pension.

MGR: Every little bit helps.

CB: Every little bit helps, it sure does.

MGR: Alright, well thank you very much.

CB: Did I do good?

MGR: You did very well.

CB: Okay. (both laugh)

[TIME OF INTERVIEW 0:56:49]

 

See also:

1. Hicks' Crew - 600th Squadron - 22 March 1945
2. Return to 398th Timeless Voices Interviews to view and listen to the interview, Cleo M. Bickford 398th Radio Operator - 600th Squadron (56m 49s).

 

Notes:

1. T/Sgt. Cleo M. Bickford was a Radio Operator in the 600th Squadron and flew with the Hicks Crew.
2. The above transcription was provided by volunteer transcriber, Amanda Cockcroft. Amanda would like to dedicate her Cleo Bickford transcription to T/Sgt. Howard F Ayers, Radio Operator of the 603rd SQ DeCleene Crew and all the radio operators for the 398th. Amanda is a big 398th BGMA supporter and also maintains the DeCleene Crew's crash site at Birchenough Hill in England.
3. The transcription was obtained from a video file.
4. Punctuation, grammar and minor word changes may have been made to improve readability.
5. Additional information may be shown in brackets [ ].