Thursday, June 21, 2007

Montgomery remembers bombing raids and motorcycles

by Clarke Davis

Ted Montgomery was a radio operator on a B17 bomber during World War II.

He had to parachute jump over the English channel during a training flight and he dislodged a bomb that had gotten hung up in the shackles before the timing device triggered the explosive.

But the bombing flights over Germany are not the stories that he most enjoys telling. The 86-year-old veteran relishes recalling how he got his motorcycle on a troop train and got the government to haul it to the next training station.

And while the staff sergeant never shirked his duty and was willing to serve his country, it’s obvious he hated military ways and still resents the division between officers and enlisted personnel.

Born at Larkinburg, he moved with his family to Valley Falls in 1933. He would finish high school with the Oskaloosa class of 1938 after his father, Earl “Skeet” Montgomery, stopped selling cars for Murray-Heer Ford and became a deputy sheriff in the county seat. He spent a semester at Kansas State University and held several jobs, working mostly in aircraft plants in Baltimore and Kansas City before signing on as a cadet in the Air Corps in July 1942.

“I did not want to be drafted,” he said.

It was during pilot training in Texas that he got crossfire with a training officer. Montgomery said the guy was hung over from the night before and in a bad mood before they got off the ground.

Montgomery, seated in the cockpit directly behind the leader, did a couple of spins and rollouts in perfect order unlike the officer, who wasn’t doing well at all. Montgomery assumes he could see his smile (or smirk) in the mirror that made him mad. The officer grabbed the controls and did such a poor job of landing the plane it brought emergency services out to the landing strip.

“He was cussing me as we were getting out of the plane and I just hauled off and slugged him as hard as I could,” Montgomery said. “I knew I was in trouble.”

He avoided a court marshal but was “eliminated” from pilot training for conduct unbecoming a soldier. That’s when he headed for engineer’s school and became a radio technician.

When he completed school at Dyersburg, Tenn., he and a crew were sent to Lincoln, Neb., where they were given a brand new B17. They hopped from New Hampshire to Greenland, Iceland, and then to Wales.

It was in this new plane over the channel during a training flight when it caught fire in the nose.

“We had exhausted all the extinguishers and did what we could to put the fire out but it was still burning,” he recalls. “I decided to go back up front to check it out and found no one there.”

The two pilots and three others had bailed out of the plane and left him and three gunners on board without telling them to jump. Jump they did, however. Montgomery’s parachute was a chest-type that had attracted moisture and froze at that altitude, probably 18,000 feet. He recalls manually tearing open the chute after the rip cord failed to deploy the first chute, which in turn deploys the main chute.

“I was the last out and the first to hit the ground,” he said, indicating it took a long time to get the parachute to deploy. He still has the pull cord and the small chute.

His wife, Jessie Mae, has two blouses made by her aunt from the main parachute.

“They were too hot. Air won’t go through that fabric,” she said.

What caused the fire was never determined, but he’s come to believe through published reports that someone may have been smoking in the front of the plane, a dangerous matter with oxygen on.

Ted was with the 487th Bomber Group, U.S. Air Force. Ten men made up a flight crew, he explained. It consisted of two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier, an engineer, radio operator, ball turret gunner, two waist gunners, and a radar officer.

The bombers flew four to a squad, with nine fours in a wing or 36 planes. These would join other wings of 36 adding up to hundreds on some bombing raids.

The bombs consisted of 10-pound sticks of explosive wrapped in 10’s to make a 100-pound bomb. A plane carried 10 bombs unless they were larger than 100 pounds.

“We’d get up at 2 a.m., go to the mess hall, and then get our orders,” he said.

He doesn’t know how many bombing flights he made — maybe 20.

“I was only interested in the last one,” he said. “They were a lot of thrills . . . no one ever made a flight without being scared.”

He knows he was in the lead plane for six raids. That’s the most dangerous location in the flight formation because the enemy knows the lead plane is the best one to take out.

“It’s always the main target,” he said.

Weight was critical in getting the 4-engine planes off the ground. The fuel tanks would be topped off and the bombs loaded and little else would be allowed. The veteran told of one flight where the pilot could not get the tail off the ground and had to decide in a split second to abort the mission. On inspection they found the tail gunner had packed his nest with a whole lot of 35-pound flack jackets to protect him from ground fire. The jackets—weighing nearly 600 pounds—had to be removed so they could get the plane airborne.

It was on one of the first missions when the order “Bombs away” was given and the last bomb failed to leave the plane. It was hung up in the apparatus and the crewman, whose job it was to dislodge it, failed to have his crowbar.

Montgomery found an axe, climbed out over the open bay and dislodged the bomb. The bombs had timing devices to cause them to explode before impact. It was one time when seconds counted.

The period of time in which Montgomery was making these raids was late in 1944 and early 1945. By then, he said, enemy aircraft did not pose much of a threat. The danger to the bombers came from ground fire.

But the story he most enjoys telling did not happen in the war theater. It was back in Texas where he had that prize motorcycle.

He was stationed at Childress and the cadets were being moved to Houston. The motorcycle was outside the post gate because the military would not allow it on the post. One of his buddies posed as a disorderly drunk to keep the guards at the post gate busy while they cut the fence and slipped the cycle onto the post. Then he started begging a warrant officer to let him put the motorcycle on the train car with the baggage.

“I pestered him two or three times until,” Montgomery said. “He wouldn’t give me permission, but he said if it wound up on that train it had better not have any gas in it and the battery cable had better be disconnected.”

It wasn’t long after that and the motorcycle was onboard and covered with baggage and military gear. When it was unpacked in Houston, the commanding officer had to be dealt with.

“I stepped forward and admitted it was my cycle,” Montgomery said.

The commander ordered him to keep the motorcycle at post headquarters and told him it would undergo white glove inspection just like everything else on the post. Montgomery and his buddies used toothbrushes to polish every inch of the cycle. It never failed to pass inspection and they had transportation every weekend.

“I’d head off post with one other fellow on with me and come back with four or five hanging off that thing,” he said.

The saddle bags would hold 18 bottles of beer.

Montgomery was discharged (honorably and with a Good Conduct medal) in November 1945.

He married Jessie Mae Loons, a Valley Falls girl, in 1948. He started farming, then spent 32 years as a rural mail carrier. He has always been the odd jobber around and is still the guy people call to remove a tree, seed a yard, find a tire for a wagon, or whatever.

The veteran has also never quit serving others in some capacity. He joined the volunteer fire department in 1946 and was among the first to become certified as an emergency medical technician in 1978—jobs he’s now retired from.

He’s still an active Lions Club member and among the dwindling few World War II and Korean veterans who keep the the local VFW post operating. He’s a frequent visitor to the VA Center in Topeka.

He and his wife have two children, Roger Montgomery and Proxies Montgomery, both of Topeka, and one adopted grandchild.

Montgomery is a classic storyteller and the writer wants the reader to know that this is not a complete report. I have not told how one gets a yellow beard of icicles attempting to urinate from a plane at 18,000 feet; or how to steal a gallon of orange juice from the mess hall; or how to get a drunk officer home from London to save everyone’s skin from being AWOL; or flying across the Atlantic with the landing light on, a perfect target for an enemy ship; or the bunkmate that shot himself after learning his twin brother had been killed.