Ch. 6, D-Day and Me

On the D-Day Invasion of June, 6th 1945 King flew in the lead plane and remembers spotting new bodies of water on the countryside, which turned out to be the flooded farm fields that the Germans were hoping would stop the paratroopers of the invasion force. King and the rest of the flight bombed the dikes in an attempt to drain the fields before the paratroopers arrived in their gliders. King also relates the story on that same day (D-Day) about one of the pilots that returned to base with his full complement of bombs. There was an accident, and the bombs exploded on the flight line during the unloading process. Upon arriving at the scene, King recognized Sergeant Bradshaw, who was in charge of armaments, beckoning for help. The sergeant’s legs had been blown off in the accident. Sergeant Bradshaw died before King could even get to him. The group lost three aircraft and three flight crews that day.

It was now late December, and King & Elsie’s second son (me) was born on December 24th, 1944.

                                 L to R: Kenneth and Robert

King flew steadily as a replacement. Being part of the Combat Crew Replacement Center, King flew with many different crews and groups. Of these crews he remembers Captain Hardesty (first name forgotten) who grounded him after he passed out when his oxygen mask came loose over Austria. King was flying the tail gunner/Observer that day and says he must have been focused on a plane that had one engine shot out over Holland, and then another over the target. The plane was trying to keep up, but was steadily losing altitude. The pilot's name was Captain Lipka, and he eventually made it all the way to the target and back to home base.

Captain Lipka's crew shared the same barracks with King and his brother Ralph. On one mission to Bordeaux, France, Lipka’s plane's tail was shot off with his tail gunner in it, but he managed to turn it around and fly over Spain's Pyrenees Mountains so all the rest of the crew could bail out. Later, he and his crew came back and finished their required missions so they could qualify to return to the states. King’s brother Ralph was flying that day in another plane alongside Lipka's and had witnessed the tail being blown off of Lipka's plane, and upon returning from the mission he requested and was granted an assignment to ground crew. He never flew again. King says “Lipka's last mission was the plane that had two engines shot off and was also the plane I was watching out for when I passed out, so I can say that I started my first mission with the 401st Bomb Group the same time as Lipka, and ended the same time, but in different planes.”

The right waist gunner that revived King after being out for 27 and ½ minutes was named Luenberger. King said he never wanted to forget him, so he wrote him several times after he got out of the Air Corps, but never got any answers to those letters. King remembers a scruffy chap named Paul F. (Puff) Kaiser who tried to teach him how to use the G-box loaned to them by the British, and who often gave him the “dead reckoning” maps from their missions. Major William T. Garland was King’s squadron commander, and in later years achieved the rank of a four star general. Another pilot King and Ralph had flown with was Captain Rozell, whose ship was named "Rosie's Sweat Box." Colonel Bowman was that Group Commander.

On one mission, a bombing raid to Spain over the Pyrenees Mountains King remembers being escorted by a fighter squadron composed entirely of African American pilots. Obviously, this is the group that became known as the Tuskegee Airmen. As chance would have it, 50 years later, King became good friends with a gentleman by the name of Fred Samuels, who happened to be one of those pilots. Fred died in an automobile accident in 2002, in Moreno Valley, California.

Just before King left the base at Deenthorpe, he remembers an enlisted man who had shot and killed 2 officers who had been giving him a bad time. King says “The last I remember seeing him, a young Pollock nicknamed ‘Whitey,’ the guard was exercising him around the perimeter track prior to his court martial. I never did learn the results of that incident.”

Next: The War Is Over