![]() Leroy remembers his father talking about how cold it was during the bombing flights that winter. ![]() That was one mission I’ll never forget, so help me.” You can just imagine the nervous tension I went through. “Thereafter I kept my hands on my chute and I never forgot it again. I prayed more during that trip than I have ever prayed in my life. “We finally landed, and I got out and kissed good old Mother Earth. The good Lord kept us up and it seemed like the angels were pouring gas into the tanks. Someone had taken it out of my bag and, like a fool, I had not checked it. “We were afraid we may have to bail out and me without a parachute. After we let go our bombs and left the coast of France, it looked like we wouldn’t get halfway home because we didn’t have enough gas. ![]() We flew for over four hours before we reached the target, then circled for a half hour. McCloud - “This mission was perhaps the most nerve-wracking. That is the closest I have come to being killed, and that was close enough for me.” Our friends, the P-47 fighter pilots, came to our rescue otherwise I would not be here today to write this account of my first mission. “We were falling behind the group when four enemy fighters came up on us. We were in what we call Purple Heart territory, coming out of the target, when two of our four supercharge engines went out and we were losing speed and altitude. “Thanks to great evasive action by the pilot, none of it came close enough to do us any harm. We were told it was the worst-ever amount of flak put up against any group of bombers. The bursts of flak were so numerous we couldn’t count them. When we were over Bremen, all hell broke loose. McCloud - “After taking off, we circled the field for about two hours while our squadron formed into its formation and then joined the bomber group in our position in the wing. He also mentioned that his father told him that when they where over enemy fire, the flak would be so thick you could walk on it. What follows are excerpts from the diary with comments from his son, Leroy.īecause there were hundreds of bombers going out on each mission, it took two hours for all the planes to get off the ground and group up into formation, Leroy noted. “Pee Wee” McCloud kept a diary detailing the missions that the crew of B-24 bomber “Happy Go Lucky” completed during WWII. Perhaps God’s hand was on this plane as they completed all of their assigned missions and lived to tell about it. On many, many occasions, crews faced fatal problems or the aircraft was shot down on their very last mission, Lewis had told Leroy. 18, 1943, the 705th Squadron of the 446th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force departed for Bungay, England.Įach squadron was assigned 25 missions in their tour of duty. 8, 1942, and trained as a waist gunner on a B-24 bomber at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver. Lewis was inducted into the Army Air Corps on his 22nd birthday, Oct. They began to pray for God to protect him, said Leroy Getchell, Lewis’ son. “Where was he at that time?” they wondered. On March 6, 1944, at 3 a.m., something awakened Lewis Getchell’s family.
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