| James W. Taylor's WWII Experiences |
| Donor | Original Source | PIMA ID | Donor ID | Category |
| Richard P. Ellinger | James W. Taylor | NA | RPE-44032 | OCR-DA-P |
| Tempie started to fly a mission. He was talking in his sleep and quite excited. He was reporting flak ahead, fighters here, there, and every
where. He kept asking to get those bombs dropped, so he could get out of there. Not long after that, perhaps in 30 minutes or so, Rob joined the mission and he started to fly. I would have believed that he and Temple were on the same mission as there were lots of fighters and lots of flak. Not to be scrubbed from the mission, Barlow caught up with them and he started to fly. Bill continued to sleep soundly, he never got off the ground nor did he join the trio of flyers. The next morning, Bill and I were out behind the tent at the open air urinal and taking care of business, I casually inquired about what I had heard last evening. Bill said something like---"They are all crazy, they do that every night, but I'm not about to go crazy". And sure enough, that trio flew missions every night, in roughly the same starting order. We were now into mid February, 1945 and a massive all out raid was scheduled for February 22, 1945 as a happy birthday gift for George Washington. Every plane that was flyable was to be on the mission. After dropping the bombs, the crews were authorized to drop down to low level and have a strafing mission. All of the fellows in my tent were on the mission that day. We had not been cleared to fly as a crew but we were getting close. I was promoted to the rank of "Buck. Sergeant. No one was allowed to fly combat until they had the rank of Sergeant or higher. This was something that had come out of the Geneva Convention. In short, if captured by the enemy, those holding the rank of sergeant or above were not supposed to be used as common laborers. Whether the German military would abide by that convention was another question. A greater problem existed with the civilian population and particularly with the Hitler youth in the event of capture by those groups. Some time after the February raid, Bill and I were out one morning at our usual pipe urinal when he looked at me with a rather pained expression and said---"l flew last night". There wasn't much that I could say except repeat what he had said earlier---" but I won't go crazy". Our crew had been flying orientation flights around Pointoise, doing navigation stuff, brushing up on radio procedures and I was even being taught to use a form of radar developed by the British . It was something like an l.F.F. (identification friend or foe) I would look onto a small scope count blips and identify planes. W3032 P .32 |
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