The following is a 2001 interview conducted by Les Baker, where Mr. Williamson recaps his war experiences:
TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW WITH EARL WILLIAMSON, JR. RECORDED ON OCTOBER 6, 2001 (EDITED VERSION)
Baker: This is an interview with Earl Williamson, Jr. taped on October the 6th, 2001. Mr. Williamson would you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what outfit you were in and so forth.
Williamson: My name is Earl Williamson. I’m from Vivian, Louisiana. I was in the 91st Bomb Group in World War II, the 91st Bomb Group, of the 1st Division, of the 323rd Squadron. We were a B-17 outfit. We went overseas in ’42, and I flew from December of ’43, until May of 1944. I finished my missions on the 20th of May and the invasion was June the 6th. So we flew before the invasion, in January of ’44, and didn’t have too much escort at times and had high losses. In October of ’43, on a mission to Schweinfurt for instance, we lost 60 B-17s out of a total of 240 who went out. That’s pretty big losses. In fact, Churchill stopped daylight bombing because he said our losses were too heavy, and General Ira Eaker, one of our commanding officers at the time, was sent to talk to Mr. Churchill and said “Mr. Churchill, we don’t know anything but daylight bombing, that’s all we know how to do” and he said “I tell you what you do, Mr. Churchill, you bomb at night, we’ll bomb in the daytime, we won’t let them sleep” and so he talked Churchill into resuming daylight bombing missions.
I flew my first mission on January the 30th, of 1944. I flew 30 missions over France and Germany. During that time we lost three members of our crew. Three of them went with another crew on one occasion, on one of the first Berlin raids. I had a close call, because I was supposed to go with these three on this other crew. I asked the captain “how about letting me stay with my crew” and he said, “okay, Williamson, if that’s the way you feel about it.” So that was really a lucky deal for me because later I found out, after they were shot down, that two of the members were PWs for 24 months, one of them didn’t bail out in time. Later, toward the end of the war, I saw my bombardier, who was one of the three, and he came, and ran up and grabbed me, and says “Willy”, he says “you lucky outfit, the guy who went in your place, there wasn’t anything left of him!” So I was real fortunate to be in that position, the Lord was looking after me in that case. Anyway, we did 30 missions, it was really tough, and the flak was real heavy, most of the time our losses were from flak instead of German fighter planes.
Although we did have a lot of German fighter planes attack us. In fact, on the first bombing mission I was on, I went with another crew, volunteered for another crew. We were scheduled to make 25 missions at that time, they later raised it to 30, when they got short of crews. Anyway, on that first mission, thirty minutes after I was in France, Herman Goring’s Yellow-nose division, called the “Abbeyville Kids”, started coming in at one o’clock, firing at us, and I started shooting my caliber .50 machine gun. I was a waist gunner, on the side, and I could see the tracers going across, and then about that time, the mount on my caliber .50 machine gun worked loose and it sort of kicked me back into the fuselage. I almost shot the wing off of the plane, because the ground crew left the cap, one of the screws, loose on the mount.
Anyway, we had a real tough situation, we were flying at 21 to 25,000 feet, the conditions were real bad, it was 60 below up there. I got frostbitten on one occasion. In fact I’ve still got a line down my cheek from being frostbitten. On the first old B-17Fs they didn’t even have closed windows, they were open waist windows, and that slipstream would come in there and freeze you. It would freeze our guns, and cause them to not shoot. So we had to have electrically heated suits that plugged into the plane, or we’d freeze to death. Then we had a big old heavy flying suit on top of that, then we had, of course, an oxygen mask, with a helmet, and a steel helmet on top of that, like the infantry had. Then we had a parachute harness that was mounted on our chest, if we had to bail out. We put the pack on beside us; if we had to bail out we just snapped it on, and then bailed out, if we could. Then we had a 42 pound flak suit on top of that, it looked like a man from Mars, and it was hard to get around. We were on oxygen all the time, and we had to break the ice out of our oxygen mask every ten minutes, or so. In fact we’d have an oxygen check by the pilot, or co-pilot, and he’d say “oxygen check” and everybody would check in at the different positions.
There were ten men on a B-17, and it was a real experience to fly over enemy territory and be shot at. And it was real scary I might add, and the next time you would get ready to go up, you’d say “they aren’t going to ever get me up on that plane again”, but you would go out, because everybody else would, and it was a scary deal. We flew, as I said, before the invasion, before we actually invaded, because we had to get control of the air before the infantry and the marines could land. If we didn’t have control of the air, then they could not land. That’s sort of a little preliminary, on what sort of happened to us.
Baker: In your diary, you talk about where you did your basic training, and so on, and then you mention that you went to armament and gunnery school. Where did you go to the armament and gunnery school at?
Williamson: Okay, I might start by saying that I went to Shreveport when I was inducted, along with about 15 or 20 others from Vivian. Then I went to Keesler Field, Mississippi, for basic training. Then I decided that, hey, it would be glamorous to join an aircrew, so I went to gunnery school at Kingman, Arizona, out in the desert. We trained out there, with the caliber .30 and the caliber .50, shooting at moving targets in the air. And later I went to armament school, how to arm a bomb, I was called an armer/gunner, that was in Denver, Colorado. And then later we joined a crew up in Washington State, close to Moses Lake, Washington and Tacoma, Washington. Then we flew from Kearney, Nebraska, to Prescott, Maine.
We were going overseas. Not too much training, I might add. We flew from Prescott, Maine, to Gander, Newfoundland, and Stevensville, that’s two places in Newfoundland. We got snowed in there for two weeks. I wrote my Christmas cards inside a B-17, on guard duty, in December of ’43. And finally, when we were able to leave Newfoundland, we flew from Gander, Newfoundland, or Stevensville, I’ve forgotten which, and we landed in Scotland. And you could not hardly see anything. Our navigators were terrific, because then we didn’t have radar, but they had a compass and they’d shoot the stars, and navigate with a compass and come down in that terrible English weather without being able to see too far and land on the field. I’d say that was extraordinary for our navigators, and the training they got in World War II.
Baker: When you weren’t flying, weren’t on a mission, what was the day-to-day life like around the base? What did y’all do when you weren’t flying?
Williamson: Well, I wrote a diary in World War II. It was a little different because I’d sit down after each mission, when it was fresh on my mind, instead of waiting 50 years and trying to remember everything, which you can’t do, and I’d sit down and tell all the details that went on, on that mission. We would go to a little town called Royston. We’d go out, and we’d go out dancing, maybe to Cambridge. We’d have dates, go out with some of the English girls. The English people were real friendly, and real nice to us. We would go sometimes on a three-day pass, if the weather was real bad, to London. There were a lot of things to do in London. There were a lot of plays, and we’d go to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey, and English libraries, and a lot of places. In fact, London was still being bombed real heavy while we were there. I saw terrible destruction, while I was there in London.
I have the greatest admiration for the British people because of what they went through in the war. If you could see some of those areas, the areas in London that were bombed… London was on fire, pretty much all across London. In fact, it was so bad that they even put hoses down to the Thames River, to fight the forest fires, because they gave out of water. It was terrible, what the British people went through. But the mighty RAF, this was before we got into the war, helped save England, in the great Battle of Britain. As Churchill said “never in the field of human endeavor have so many owed so much to so few.” This is before we even entered the war.
Baker: How would you say that your experiences in the war changed you? How did it influence your life after the war?
Williamson: After I got out of the service I went right in to LSU and graduated in 1948. We’d wear our A2 jackets, our bomber jackets, there were about 5,000 of us returnees down there in, I guess in ’46 or the last of ’45. For that first 15 or 20 years we didn’t seem to think much about it. Then as you get older, you get to thinking, hey, look what I went through. Then you start saying, well, we’d like to record a little of this for the younger generation, to give them an idea of what it was like in World War II.
I have an 8th Air Force mini-museum up here in Vivian. I have a display at Barksdale, if you go out to Barksdale, they have my A2 jacket on display out there, with some anti-aircraft fire that came out of our gas tank on the second mission, and a pin out of a thousand pound bomb that we dropped on Berlin, on April the 29th, 1944. Just items like that.
We have a picture of a crashed B-17, Blue Dreams, that we were in. It was on one of the first Berlin raids. We crashed with ten 500 pound bombs, gasoline pouring out of the top of the wing, and no wheels. We thought the wheels were down, we were landing, an emergency landing, we landed at a fighter field. The main thing that saved us was we landed in a soft field. If we had landed on a concrete runway we would probably have blown the whole place up. In fact, they evacuated, I found out later, two towns around where we crash landed.
The way I came across that picture of our crashed B-17, was that I went to our reunion in England and I saw some English friends of mine and they said “were you on that crashed B-17?” and I said “yes” and well, one of the guys said “I was 13 years old, I lived down at the end of the runway, I saw y’all crash and I can get you a picture of the airplane.” Well, he told me how to get the picture of the airplane. There was an all-American football player by the name of Marshall, for Vanderbilt University. He was a World War II P-51 fighter ace, who shot down seven German planes. The name of his plane was “Jane.” I’ve got a picture of it. Anyway, he is deceased now, but his son lives in Dallas, Texas.
Source: Bloody Skies: U.S. Eighth Air Force Battle Damage in World War II, Nicholas A. Veronico, 2014
When I wrote to him he sent me a picture of our crashed B-17, which I received 38 years after the war. It’s now on display, out there at Barksdale. I have this mini-museum up here at Vivian. We have food and clothing for needy people up here. I sort of run that operation, and we have this little mini-museum in there, for the younger generation. We have pictures of the Enola Gay and Boxcar. We’ve got a picture of a fellow by the name of Barber, who shot down Yamamoto, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. Just things like that. I have the King and Queen of England, I have Churchill, I have pictures of Eisenhower, General Spatz, General Doolittle, and just historic pictures of World War II. And anybody can come up and we’d be glad to show you through this museum.
Baker: You mentioned that y’all crash landed in that plane. Could you tell about how that took place, and what led up to that, and what went on?
Williamson: It was the first Berlin raid. I never will forget it. It was on March the 6th, 1944. When they flashed Berlin across the screen, the interrogation officers, I mean the look that came across everybody’s face was horror. Here we are, going to Berlin, the first hard Berlin raid. We take off in our plane, in this plane called “Blue Dreams”, and we get up about 3,000 feet, and I look out, flying right waist gunner that day, and I see aviation gasoline pouring out of the top of the wing. Well, I called it in to the pilot, and that scared the pilot worse than any German pilots, ever. He radios in for an emergency landing at our field, and they say “well, you can’t take off here, all these planes are taking off for Berlin.”
So we’ve got to land at this P-51 fighter base called Steeple-Martin three miles from our base. So, I didn’t think too much about it. I figured we’d probably land, get on another plane, and go back out. I felt the flaps go out, we’re getting ready to land, and the tail gunner comes out of the tail, and he says “hey Willy, the tail wheel is up.” Well if the tail wheel is up, the other wheels are up too. Here we are, about to land with ten 500 pound bombs, gasoline pouring out of the top of the wing, and no wheels. Well, when I saw what was happening, I punched in, in the intercom system, and I told the pilot, I said “pilot from waist gunner, pull this plane up!”
About that time we hit the ground and I went all over the fuselage. At the field they saw what was happening and they had their fire trucks trying to catch our plane, to shoot foam on it, before we even came to a stop. Anyway, it was smoking. I could smell gasoline, and I could see myself floating around in little pieces. So we ran away from the plane. We took out across the field, because we thought it was going to blow up. None of us really got hurt real bad, but we were stunned, and shocked, and they grounded our pilot for about a week. But it wasn’t his fault. It was really the co-pilot and the engineer’s fault. They went back to check, to see if the wheels were down, but the engineer gunner, who goes back and checks that, also calls out ground speed to tell the pilot how fast he’s landing. There’s your second safety valve gone.
Baker: Would you say that was the closest call you had, or the most scared you were?
Williamson: No, it was one of the closest calls, but another time, we were over Berlin, in tight formation, anti-aircraft fire was really coming up, and German planes started coming through at about one or two o’clock, I guess. Another formation in the rear, shooting at the German planes, we didn’t know it at the time, hit our plane. We didn’t know whether flak hit us are what. All of a sudden our plane just goes straight up, like this, and just shakes, we just barely miss another plane in formation, and the co-pilot says “lets get the h-e-l-l out of here!” on the intercom. Well, that’s as scared as I’ve ever been in my life. I yanked that flak suit off, which weighed 42 pounds, took my parachute and hooked it on like this, and about that time the pilot said, “hold on everybody” and he put it on automatic pilot and we leveled off. And he said “Williamson, look back there and see if you can see where we’re hit.”
Well, about eight feet back of my back I saw a hole in the fuselage back there. You have two sets of controls, an automatic pilot set, and the regular set, and those wires, they go right up through the top of the airplane, right above where I’m standing in my position. So I could see the wires dangling on one of the controls. But the other set, the automatic pilot set, had leveled us off. There we are and our flaps were shot out, on the rear. Anyway, we were about three thousand feet higher than the rest of the formation, and we were trying to catch up with the formation. Because the idea is to have the tightest formation so you could have the most guns concentrated, so the Germans can’t come and weave through your formation.
We looked back there and five Messerschmitts were coming in from the rear, so we were getting ready to shoot it out with them.There was a straggling B-24 Liberator over to the right, and I saw them go over there and knock that B-24 down. I saw it go down in flames. But one of the B-24 gunners knocked one of the Messerschmitts down, and that left four of them, and they were going to come up and try and pick us off. We were by ourselves. I don’t know where they came from, but five P-47 Thunderbolts came up and I saw the darndest air battles you ever saw, right around our plane. Those five P-47s ran those Messerschmitts off. That was as scared as I’ve ever been, I guess.
Baker: Probably your closest call?
Williamson: Yeah, and then that crashed B-17 was too, one of the closest calls we had.
Baker: Right.
Williamson: You might wonder why it seemed like the Germans would rather hit a B-24 instead of a B-17, and you asked me that question, why do you think that is. I think the main reason is a B-24 did not have a ball turret underneath the fuselage where a B-17 did. See, they couldn’t come up underneath as well, because there wasn’t a turret under there. That’s my thinking, I don’t know whether that’s right or not, but I’ve heard some other people think that’s why.
Baker: Well, that would make sense. What was your life like on the base. What did y’all have to eat? What were your quarters like?
Williamson: Well, I tell you what, we had good food. You have to, flying, because you get what you call the bends. You get so much gas that you can’t hardly stand it, so you have to eat pretty good food. We had the advantage over the infantry, and a lot of other people I’m sure, because we almost had to have, with good breakfasts. The British liked to come visit with us, because I think we ate a whole lot better than they did. They were rationed a whole lot, you know, during World War II.
As far as activities, we had a tennis court. I played tennis one time with a lady from the Red Cross. I only played one time. I had lettered at Louisiana Normal (College) before the war, and lettered at LSU after the war in Tennis.
Source: 1943 LSN Potpourri (yearbook), Page 90
Anyway, this lady was a pretty good tennis player, and so I found out, so we hit a lot of balls and had some fun there. And we would go to these English pubs, afterward, and I didn’t care much for their beer. They had what they called light or bitter, horrible beer, so we’d drink soft drinks, cokes, stuff like that. Then we’d pay visits to English homes, sometimes we’d go and visit them. I had an English lady friend who dated a friend of mine. He lived in New York, and she was in love with him. But anyway, she was real nice, she’d invite a bunch of us there, to come to her home, and her mother and her father would entertain us, and feed us, and they were real great to us. We’d take them cigarettes, which they could not get during the war. We had good American cigarettes, which I didn’t smoke, so I’d take mine in to them, my cigarettes. I’d trade them my cigarettes for candy. We’d go on some kind of picnic.
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| A member of LSN's 1942 Louisiana Intercollegiate Conference champions |
Anyway, this lady was a pretty good tennis player, and so I found out, so we hit a lot of balls and had some fun there. And we would go to these English pubs, afterward, and I didn’t care much for their beer. They had what they called light or bitter, horrible beer, so we’d drink soft drinks, cokes, stuff like that. Then we’d pay visits to English homes, sometimes we’d go and visit them. I had an English lady friend who dated a friend of mine. He lived in New York, and she was in love with him. But anyway, she was real nice, she’d invite a bunch of us there, to come to her home, and her mother and her father would entertain us, and feed us, and they were real great to us. We’d take them cigarettes, which they could not get during the war. We had good American cigarettes, which I didn’t smoke, so I’d take mine in to them, my cigarettes. I’d trade them my cigarettes for candy. We’d go on some kind of picnic.
Had a beautiful river, called the Camb, the Camb River, running through Cambridge, where Cambridge University is. Cambridge University is made up of about 15 or 20 colleges. They have St. John’s College. They have Churchill College. They have Queen’s College. You could just name all kinds of colleges. They make up Cambridge University. That might be interesting to university students. But they had this little river called the Camb, that ran right through Cambridge. And they had these little boats you could get into. They call it punting on the Camb. And you could ride down this little Camb River, and maneuver around with a long pole. And then, there was a beautiful place there, Cambridge University was real historic, real old, you got Darwin’s house, maybe down the road,
I remember walking by it. They’d have picnics, and they’d have dances for the Americans. We’d run a truck from our base into the dances, and have a lot of fun with the English people, they were real nice to us. That was sort of the way we entertained ourselves. I think they had horseshoes, maybe, on the base. They had three chaplains, no two chaplains, I remember a Catholic, and then a Protestant, that’s the two I remember anyway.
Baker: Was there any other of the fellows that you flew with, that you really kept in touch with, or established long friendships with?
Williamson: Yes, there was one of my best friends, lives in Boston, he flew as the tail gunner on “909” and I keep in contact with him. My pilot is still living. He lives in Washington State. I talk to him a couple of times a year, probably. My navigator lives in Rochester, New York, and I talk to him every once in a while. And the one I guess I’m closest to is my engineer gunner, who is from Kentucky. I still see him. He comes to every reunion. We have a reunion every two years, of the 91st Bomb Group, and I see him.
Most of my crew are deceased. I’ve lost contact with my tail gunner. I had contact with him, up through the 60s, I guess, and then I lost contact. He moved to San Diego, I think. I had his San Diego address and then he moved somewhere else and I lost it and haven’t been able to contact him. My co-pilot, Magee was his name, I heard he had passed away, but I’m not sure. Then my radio operator, his name was Schleyer, was from Cincinnati. He was my first radio operator. He got shot down. He was one of the three from my crew who went with another other crew and got shot down over Berlin. He got hit in the leg and was in the Berlin hospital and was a PW for 24 months. I’ve had contact with him once since the war but he since has died. Now I have my pilot, his name is Wilkinson, in Washington State. I have my navigator who lives in Rochester, New York, and my engineer-gunner who lives in Leesville, Kentucky.
My other waist gunner died about three or four years ago. I visited one time with him since the war. I went to visit him, and I was sitting in his living room, and on one of the missions that we were on, a piece of round flak came right up, right between his legs, just missed his nose, and hit the armor plate right at the top. He punches me right in the middle of a battle, just like that, and holds that round piece of flak up, and he got my attention. But, anyway, when I was visiting with him years later, we were sitting in his living room, and he said “wait a minute, I’ll be right back” and he comes back out of the other room and he says “remember this” and he still has this piece of flak. He died about four years ago, it must have been.
I had a Jewish fellow that was my second bombardier, he was a real nice fellow, and I talked to him since the war, and he died about two years ago. In fact, I saw him one time, shortly before he died. We had gone to the Holy Land in 1985, and we were coming back through New York. He lived in Brooklyn, and so I called him, and he and his wife came over. We didn’t hardly recognize each other after forty-something years, as you could imagine.
Baker: In your diary, you mention having a pair of pliers with you a couple of times. What were the pliers for?
Williamson: Well, you could always use pliers, to tighten up a screw or something, like on the gun mount. Like I had trouble with the gun mount on that first mission, with it coming loose. Also, sometimes you’d pull the pins out of the bombs with a pair of pliers, or you could pull them out with your hands, and then if you have to crank the bomb bays open or something. Sometimes you have to have a little pair of pliers to do odds and ends.
Baker: I have the impression that when you would talk on the interphone during the flights, you were all very calm and businesslike. Is that true?
Williamson: I’m afraid not. In fact our pilot on one or two occasions got after us for hollering on planes coming in and so forth. He said to calm down and just tell it like it is and be calm. But that wasn’t necessarily so all the time. I tell you, you can really get scared up there, when you’re making 200 miles an hour and the German plane is coming in at 400 miles an hour, that’s scary.
Baker: Was it considered safer to try and land a plane that was damaged? I read in the diary accounts of some of the fortresses that were damaged that would crash land there in France or Germany. Was it considered safer to try and do that than to bail out?
Williamson: No, it was usually safer to bail out. Because if the plane’s on fire, with that aviation gasoline, you saw what happened to our country with that aviation gasoline when it hit the towers in New York, it’s safer to bail out. Usually you come out okay bailing out. But it’s sort of left up to the pilot because he’s up there where the engines are. He’s the commanding officer and he has a bail out alarm he rings if he wants us to bail out. And then sometimes they come on the intercom, like my co-pilot. He said “let’s get the h-e-l-l out of here!” That will get your attention right fast.
If you can imagine being over Berlin, with anti-aircraft fire coming up, and get hit and go straight up, and the co-pilot says “let’s get the h-e-l-l out of here!” and you’ve got to bail out over Berlin, with a walk-around bottle, because you’re on oxygen, but you’ve got to walk to the door, and you have to be on oxygen or you’ll pass out.
Oxygen, that’s another one of the dangers of flying. And then they had mid-air collisions, I read where there were 300 mid-air collisions in England, the weather was so bad. All these planes getting ready to take off for wherever they were going. I was on 2,000 plane raids, if you can imagine 2,000 planes bombing a city. That’s a lot of airplanes, and it’s no wonder you have mid-air collisions, with 2,000 planes trying to assemble together. Some of them had wounded on board, when they’re trying to land.
Baker: How important was it to have the fighters escorting the bombers?
Williamson: Well, the reason our losses were so great in the early days of the air war, was we didn’t have too much escort. At first we had British Spitfires, with elliptical wings, and they were our escort. Also P-47 Thunderbolts, and P-38 twin boom fighter planes, those were our three at first. We had P-51s coming on the scene a little later. And they could just go a certain distance. See, we’d go and be out on eight or nine hour bombing missions.
Like if we’d go to Munich, Germany, for instance, that would be a nine hour round trip, that’s a long way, that’s a long time, to be on oxygen and everything. The fighter planes could only go part of the way, the escorts, and when they left us the German planes had a field day. That’s when they would shoot us down. They could make 400 miles an hour and we could make 200 miles an hour. And the whole idea was to try and fly in a tight formation, real close, so the German planes couldn’t wind through our formation That was our whole idea, a tight formation. The German planes wanted you to be knocked out of the formation so they could attack from several different angles.
When I first started making missions you had to do 25, then the losses were so heavy. I’d see them come in and get the flyer’s clothes in our big bay that we were all in. There would be maybe 15 or 20 crews in a big long room. I’d see these guys come in and get these people’s clothes that didn’t come back. That sort of took a toll on you too, when you had to go out the next day too, you know, or whenever the next mission was. Then the losses were so heavy, and they were short of crews, so they raised it to 30.
Baker: The number of missions?
Williamson: That’s the reason I made 31 missions, but I didn’t get credit for one of them. I made 30 that I got credit for and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals. And our outfit got the Distinguished Unit Citation, which is called the Presidential Citation, for shooting down so many German fighter planes on certain raids and so forth. So I was real fortunate to survive that deal, I was really fortunate.
Baker: What did you and your buddies think when they raised the number of missions from 25 to 30? Did y’all have a reaction to that?
Williamson: Yeah, it was sort of demoralizing but it had to be done. Three members of my crew had gone down and I tried to write their families and tell them. I couldn’t say much because of censorship, but I’d tell them what little I could, as far as what the censors would pass.
Baker: As you were getting close to having your 30 missions done, did you get more anxious, more nervous about going up then, as it got close to the end?
Williamson: Yeah, you tried not to dwell on it too much. If you dwelled on it, we had a lot of people back out, and decide not to fly anymore, which they could do. Of course I never did know what happened to them. I don’t think they were court-martialed. They just didn’t have the nerve to go back up.
In fact my, my engineer-gunner was drunk on every mission that we went on. I think that was the way he could get up enough nerve to go. But anyway, when he’d get on the oxygen it would sober him up, he’d be just clear as a bell when he got on that oxygen. See as soon as we got to around 10,000 we’d go on oxygen, and we’d stay on it till we came back low. And it was very tiring, you go on eight and nine hour missions, and be on oxygen all that time, and under all that anxiety and confusion, and all the combat and all, and it was very, very tiring.
We’d get back to the base and then they’d interrogate us on everything that happened. The Red Cross would be there with doughnuts and coffee. And for anybody that wanted it, they’d give them a shot of bourbon to relax them when they came in, if they wanted to. And then they’d interrogate us on everything that happened on the mission, to try to get all the information they can, to put it together.
Baker: Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t discussed, or haven’t talked about?
Williamson: I guess you’d say the reason I decided to write that diary was the fact that when I got over there and I saw how many crews were not coming back, I said, I’ve got hopes of being able to maybe bail out, if nothing else, maybe, and survive. But I think I will record what happened up to that point. That was one reason I decided to write a diary.
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| Graduating from LSU in 1948 |
Baker: Okay, well, I appreciate it, and thank you for doing the interview and talking to me.
Williamson: Thank you for being interested. I think it’s good that we can give the younger generation, especially those who are interested, just a little idea of what we went through in World War II. I know that I flew before the invasion, when the greatest air battles of all time took place. Our losses were real heavy. At one time we had anywhere from 30 to 50,000 PWs, 8th Air Force, 9th Air Force, and RAF, flyers, in PW camps.
I’ve got a VCR tape on “Behind the Wire” if you want to see what happened to some of our PWs, you can buy this film, it’s called “Behind the Wire.” It includes “The Great Escape”, the movie you probably saw, “The Great Escape.” You can get an idea of what some of our fellows went through. That was quite an experience, and that’s sort of my story of World War II.
Baker: Thanks.
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