as told by Arnold Leo Murphy - (Cont'd)
We went to Japan with 27 full crews. We lost our first crew about a month after we started flying missions to Korea. An amazing thing happened within a week after that. All but 9 of us gunners came down with every imaginable malady that took them off flying status. I guess that's why I finished my 50 so fast, I only had pneumonia and exhaustion, and none of those strange diseases.
Another interesting flight came in late one December afternoon with ice all over the runway. As mentioned before, this was a very short runway for a B-26. Ice really shortened it because brakes didn't help much. Also mentioned before was the train station at one end of the runway. This particular plane came in over the bay and landed toward the station. This day a train was stopped at the station when the plane landed. This was commuter time and the train had about 10,000 people on it. About half way down the runway the pilot realized he could not stop. He retracted the landing gear and plopped down on the belly of the plane. Can you imagine 10,000 people frozen on one side of that train watching a plane sliding into them? It finally stopped with the nose gun barrels sticking through the windows of the station. I believe it took them awhile to clean up the train after that.
We started getting replacement flying personnel in January 1951. Lt. Johnson, my pilot, was the final check pilot for all new pilots. We got one in our squadron who had graduated from West Point, went through flight school, then 60 days at Langly Field, Virginia, training in B-26's. From there he came straight to Miho. I made three flights while he was training and getting checked out by Johnson. Johnson just about went out of his gourd but he finally signed him off. Ours was the duty crew the morning this pilot flew his first mission. This meant that we had to awaken all the crews, get them to chow and then to briefing. We hauled them to the planes and signaled each one when to take off. This was in January and we had about a foot of snow all over the place. At the end of the runway by the bay, there was about 20 feet of dirt before it dropped off into the bay.
This new 2nd Lt. was the last to take off. When he left the runway, all we could see was white spray. We thought he had gone into the bay so we jumped in our Jeeps and took off. About half way down the runway we saw his plane rise up over the horizon. We went on down to the end and this jerko had put tire tracks across that pile of snow. How he kept from plopping in the bay we never knew, but this is not the end of his story.
There was bad weather over the target and the flight got separated. All but one plane made it back to base. No one had heard from the new man or his crew. A search was started over the Sea of Japan and com checks were in process all over South Korea, to no avail. Two and a half hours after the flight arrived, this crew came flying in. A couple of hundred people were out to meet them and find out what happened because their fuel should have run out at least an hour before. The pilot needed to go pottie. He found an emergency strip and landed to take care of his problem. Then they had a little trouble getting enough fuel to get home. This was his one and only mission with our squadron.
This pilot was grounded for a week, then he was assigned to a Turkish Regiment as a forward controller for air strikes. This was a 90 day assignment. When his 90 days were up, he volunteered for another 90 days. The story was that he made more money per month than the entire Turkish Regiment and they treated him like a king.
Christmas Eve at Miho we had a hot time in the old town. Our mess hall burned down with about 3,500 pounds of Turkey in it. I wouldn't have had any of the Turkey anyway. At lunch time, I was somewhere over North Korea. We had a frozen flight lunch.
Back to the fire. We were living in two-story barracks left from WWII. This had been a Kamakazi training base. The ceilings were about 20 feet high and the place was impossible to heat. The building was constructed of wood and the inside walls were about an eighth of an inch thick. Ten of us gunners lived in one room and a bunch of drunken crew chiefs lived next door. They would throw a whiskey bottle through the wall about once a week.
Back to the fire again. When the fire started about two in the morning, some nut ran up and down the hall screaming, FIRE! He damn near gave us all a heart attack. Just before this we had been talking about how fast this building would burn if it caught fire. We were about 30 feet above the ground, so we rounded up a big rope and put a bunch of knots in it so we could climb down if necessary. There were about 750 people on our floor and our room was about center between the stairs. The mess hall was across the street from our barracks. When the fire started everyone ran over to that side to watch.
The wind was blowing from the fire toward our side of the street. After a few minutes, someone noticed the sparks were quite heavy and they were blowing onto our roof. All of a sudden there was a stampede to get out. We ran back to our room and threw all of our gear out the window and climbed down our rope. I think they had green weenies for Christmas dinner. I'm glad I was flying.
The weather was so bad the middle of January that we flew no missions for three days. This was great for us because we could catch up on some sleep. One of those mornings, our 1st Sergeant and Adjutant decided to inspect the barracks. They opened our door and hollered, "Attention!" Someone picked up a flying boot and threw it at them. It went through the thin wall. They made a hasty retreat and didn't come back. No one had moved except to throw that boot. We had long since decided they couldn't give more punishment than we were taking most every day anyway.
Those three day we would get up about 10 o=clock and all ten of us would go to the NCO Club for breakfast. One morning we were sitting there shooting the bull when this little Japanese waitress came toward us on her wooden cloggers with about six plates in her arms. Just before she got to the table, someone cut a big silent wind that really had a potent smell. As if in one motion, ten chairs moved away from the table and that waitress clogged right in the middle of it. She went aaugh and almost dropped the plates. To this day, only one man knows who did that. It has since been referred to as "The Great Fart." I am not guilty.
Our squadron bombed the main bridge over the Yalu River between North Korea and Manchuria. This bridge had five large spans. At briefings we were instructed to hit the two spans on the Korean side only. We could get dust on the middle span, but we were definitely not to hit the two spans on the Manchurian side. The first time we hit the bridge, I was gunner for the leader of the formation. When we got there, he told everyone to fall in line behind him and do what he did. He fired four rockets into the bridge, dropped five bombs on it and as we pulled out on the Manchurian side he fired the other ten rockets into an airfield with a bunch of MIG planes parked on it. I flew three missions to hit this bridge and we did the same thing every time. The Chinese screamed and hollered each time this was done, but Washington denied the charges each time. We thought this was rather amusing.