as told by Arnold Leo Murphy - (Cont'd)
About the time I got out of this hospital, the Chinese had come into the war and had the Marines trapped at the Chosin Reservoir. My crew flew 9 missions to the Chosin Reservoir in three days. I was so wiped out that they put me back in the hospital with total exhaustion.
Twenty six days later I was back in the turret again. After all this, I was the 5th person in the wing to finish 50 missions. That was supposed to be the end and rotation home. It didn't work out that way. My total missions were 68.
Some of those missions went like this: We were sent on a rail splitting mission. We were to drop 500 pound bombs from about 35 feet. The bombs had no fins attached and they were armed with 8-15 second delay fuses. On these I turned my gun sight and remote controlled turrets around so I could watch the bombs bounce higher than we were flying. We dropped them at 35 feet. They would bounce along until the delay ran out, then they made a big hole in the road bed. It slowed down movement of enemy troops and material.
Our crew flew two missions to knock out bridges. On these, we dropped 1,000 pound bombs with parachutes and instant fuses. We carried four of these, to wipe our four bridges. On the first one, my pilot told me to stick my head out into the bomb bay so I could watch and let him know if the parachute opened. Regardless of altitude, if you fly straight a bomb will hit directly below the plane. I told him if the chute didn't open I wasn't going to tell anybody because we were dropping them at 50 feet. Fortunately, the chutes opened.
A lot of our missions were controlled by an observer in a Piper Cub airplane. These brave guys flew that little thing around and around a grid on a map for about 6 hours at a time. If there was enemy activity he could see it. Our flight leader would check with this controller and he would give us the target. On one of these, our flight consisted of six fully armed planes. This controller told us there was an ammo train hiding in a tunnel that he pointed out. We made a few runs trying to skip bombs, bullets and rockets up the tunnel. Finally, my pilot told the leader to give him room enough to try something. This trip we were carrying fourteen 5 inch rockets with a 6.5 inch shaped charged head. We went out about two miles and made a long low approach. He fired two rockets right up the middle of that tunnel. He must have hit the ammo because the mountain blew up. I know they didn't use that tunnel again.
One mission that stands out for more reasons than one was to obliterate a town that was a supply depot for the North Korean Army. The main reason I remember it is because we carried special racks in the bomb bay so we could drop 120, twenty-three pound frag bombs on parachutes. With this rack installed, the gunner had only one way out. That was through a hatch in the top of the compartment. If we had to bail out, I would have hit the vertical stabilizer. Not a very comforting thought.
Anyway, we dropped these little jewels from about 75 to 100 feet. Twelve planes took about an hour to wipe out everything in sight except one big building in the middle of the town. Everyone made a pass at it with rockets. Finally, our pilot put one through the end of the building. When it exploded, it looked like slow motion. The roof raised up, the walls blew out and the roof fell down and then there were several big explosions. Nothing was left standing in that place.
Another mission that got everyone's attention was one on which we carried 500 pound bombs with VT (Variable Time) fuses. These are little radios that send a signal to the ground and back. They were supposed to be set to explode at 200 feet. I don't recall why they wanted an air burst. After a few were dropped, we felt some terrific explosions. The planes were really jumping. Some of us gunners stuck our heads out in the bomb bay and discovered our bombs were exploding prematurely and were getting closer to the formations. The pilots stopped dropping them or they would have wiped out the bunch of us. We never used those things again.
Our crew and two others flew a rather hairy mission to knock out a couple of bridges one mile from Vladivostok, Russia. We flew out of Miho, Japan, at the time. From takeoff to the target and back to two hundred miles south of there, we were not supposed to fly over 500 feet above the terrain. That was the worst part of the mission. We had to fly over a 5,500 foot mountain range. We were the third plane in the trail formation. We were flying so low over one village that our cameras caught pictures of clothes being blown off lines and fences.
We knocked out the bridges and on the way back found a large troop training or assembly area. We dropped our napalm bombs in the buildings in passing. As we were pulling up, we three gunners were spraying .50 calibers all over the area to keep their heads down. One jerk didn't have sense enough to keep his down. He put a rifle bullet into our plane. We felt it hit but didn't know where it hit until we landed back in Japan.
We discovered, much to my dismay, that it hit on an angle toward my rear end (left cheek). Our plane and only about six others in the wing had a rear fuselage gas tank made of rubber. That bullet hit the front corner about an inch from the end. It stopped about six inches from you know where.
One series of mission that I will never forget was to bomb the North Korean capitol of Pyongyang. Our wing bombed that city and its air field ten straight days. Our plane and our crew was the only one to fly all ten of those missions. It may sound silly, but the rest of the planes got the crap shot out of them. A couple were shot down and most of the others had all kinds of holes put in them.
The only damaged we sustained was a shrapnel scratch about three feet long on a bomb bay door. It was reported that Pyongyang was defended by more guns than the Ploesti oil fields in Romania in WWII. I wasn't at Ploesti so I can't compare them. I just know there was one hell of a lot of flack.
I think that there are only two reasons I survived those ten missions. Number one is that the Lord was watching over us. Number two is that I was gunner for the best pilot who ever flew a B-26, Douglas Johnson. While all the other planes were flying straight and level in all that flack, we were out to the side doing acrobatics. That pilot nearly beat me to death back there with all those wild actions.