DeBoard, Jesse
Jesse DeBoard: World War II
Jamie Dwiggins (Student Interview)
Interview Date: October 15, 2001
Abstract
Jesse DeBoard, born in the 1920’s in Missouri, grew up in Oklahoma. He was drafted into the Army during World War II where he went into the newest branch of the Army: the Army Air Corp (also known as the 8th Air Force). In the Army Air Corp, Jesse served his country as a ball turret gunner on a B-17 Bomber. Jesse, along with the other members in his crew, flew 21 dangerous missions over different parts of Germany and Europe. Today, Jesse serves as an elder at the Eastside Church of Christ in Midwest City, Oklahoma with his wife Betty.
Q: What was your life like prior to the beginning of the war?
A: “Well…I was raised on a farm and lived out there in the country, and at that time transportation wasn’t real good. And, I just grew up on a farm.”
Q: Where were you born?
A: “I was born in Mountain View, Missouri. That’s kind of a little east of central Missouri on the Southside of Missouri, about 100 miles east of Springfield. That’s where I was born and I was three years old when we moved to Oklahoma. And of course I don’t remember when we moved but then I grew up in Blackwell. We lived most of my life, we lived three mile east and nine mile north of Blackwell, Oklahoma.
Q: What were your feelings about the war when it started?
A: “Well… I don’t know that I really knew that much about it and followed it that close. Communication wasn’t like it was know. We had radios and newspapers but no television. Radios…well…we didn’t have a lot of radios.”
Q: When you finally did hear about it (war), how did you react to it?
A: “I remember I was in school, and I think that we were in school the day that we heard that the Japanese had dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor. (Speaks off tape to wife.) Let’s see, in ’41 I was a junior. Yeah, I was a junior in high school. So see I was pretty young when it happened, when it started.”
Q: You got drafted into the military?
A: “Yes, when I was 18 then I was drafted. Well, I was drafted into the army and I wanted to be in the Air Corp and to get into the Air Force or Air Corp, the Army Air Corp at that time, the only way I could get in was get in to this and you had to pass a more strenuous physical; you had to have a certain IQ; and you had to have a certain aptitude. Because you had to be either a pilot, or a bombardier, or a navigator, to be in Cadets, and I got into Cadets, so I got into the Air Corp the Army Air Corp.”
Q: How did they decide that you were to be on a B-17?
A: “Well…that’s kind of a long story. When I got into Cadets, I went to Amarillo, Texas and took my basic training and there was 48 of us in a flight, and out of that 48, 6 of us stayed in Cadets. Out of the 6, I got to go straight to a college training detachment that was the University of Montana. I was up there a month and a half, and they decided they had to many in Cadets. They took 35, 000 out of Cadets and sent us either back to military branch we were in or if they went in like I did, they sent us to gunnery school. So I went to gunnery school at Las Vegas, Nevada. When I left there and came to Lincoln, Nebraska I guess that was when they decided what kind of plane we’d be on. I don’t remember when it was decided I’d be a ball turret gunner, but it was sometime while I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, I guess. We went from there to El Paso, Texas and took all of our overseas training. But to know when they decided I’d be on a B-17, I don’t think there was any certain point, but it was after I went to Lincoln, Nebraska. That was when I was assigned to this group.
Q: What was your training like?
A: “Well we just took basic training. I think the basic training was probably to get you accustomed to not questioning authority. When people in authority told you something you never questioned them and you saluted the officers, and really that…as my memory serves me correctly that was the only training that we had, of course, we had to do drills and stuff like that and we learned how to do that but most of the time we spent in class. I mean we went to classes and learned a lot of stuff.”
Q: Where were you stationed?
A: (Laughter) “Well, I was stationed in a lot of different places cause I was never at a base more than three and a half months, and I was in the service for 2 years and 8 days. I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma and that’s where I was inducted, and I got in to Cadets. Then, I went to Amarillo, Texas, Amarillo Army Airfield, and to take my basic training, and from there I went to the College training detachment at the University of Montana at Missoula, Montana, and then when they decided they had too many, they had 35, 000 to many, they kicked us out, we said. Then I went to gunnery training at Las Vegas, Nevada and then when I finished that we came to Lincoln, Nebraska, with a twelve day delay in route. I got to come home for twelve days. We went from there, that’s where we were assigned to a crew at Lincoln, Nebraska, and we went to El Paso, Texas and took our overseas training. And from El Paso, Texas we went back to Lincoln, Nebraska and we were there about two or three weeks, well we were there longer than that we were there about a month. From there we went overseas, well we went to Camp Mile Standish at Boston, MA and got on the Il De France. We landed at Glasgow, Scotland, and went from there to our base there in England at Glatton we were about 60 miles north of London. I was there about three and half months, and when we left there, we flew to Wales and spent the night. Then flew from Wales to Iceland and spent the night. It never got dark, when I was coming home. When we landed in Iceland, the sun went down, it was down for about three hours but it never got dark. And we flew from Iceland to Goosebay, Labrador and spent the night there then and then we flew from Goosebay, Labrador to Bradley Field, Connecticut and spent the night and when we got to Bradley Field, Connecticut, see my folks and Betty didn’t know that I was coming home. I sent a night letter to Betty and also sent one to my folks and the next morning, we caught a train and went back to Camp Mile Standish up in Boston. And when I got off the train they paged me and I came up and my mother had died. In fact, the day I left England was May the 21st and she died May the 21st and they had her funeral scheduled at two o’clock on the 23rd. The Red Cross had me a Emergency FURLO already worked out with the Air Force. They had me reservations on American Airlines from Boston to Oklahoma City. Then they picked me up at Will Rogers Airport and drove me in a car over to Willey Post Airport and dad had hired a guy from Blackwell that had a plane to fly me from there to Blackwell and I got to Blackwell at four o’clock in the afternoon and they set mom’s funeral back two hours so I could get there for her. But anyway, and that was a seven day Emergency FURLO and then I went to Fort Smith, Arkansas. I went down there and they gave me a thirty day detached service. That’s usually what we got when we got back from overseas we got thirty days off at home, and it didn’t count as FURLO time it was detached service and we were stationed at home. So I came home for thirty days and then I went back to Fort Smith, Camp Chaffy was the name of that base, and I went from there to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and I was at Sioux Falls for about, oh I don’t know, three or four weeks and I went from there to Fort Meyers, Florida. All this traveling was on a troop train, so it was slow. I went to Fort Meyers, Florida and they were going to train us to go back overseas. They were going to send us to Japan. Well, we just raised all kind of ruckus. We had already been over there and fought. We knew that they shouldn’t be doing this to us and we just raised all kind of cain. Finally, the base commander had us all come to the theatre, there on the base, and he told us that they had made a mistake that we all had enough points that we wouldn’t be trained to go back overseas but it was going to take quite awhile for them to distribute us back over the United States to different bases and for us to just be patient. Well, they finally sent me from there, I don’t know a week or so, they sent me to Sebring, Florida, which was about a hundred and ten miles northeast for Fort Meyers, with a twelve day delay in route. And here I lived in Oklahoma. Well I caught a train; no I caught a bus, and rode a bus from Fort Meyers, Florida to Blackwell, Oklahoma. Because I could make it in six hours quicker than I could going by train and those were the only two transportations we had then. So then I went back to Sebring, Florida and I was there about two or three months and I got discharged, and when I got discharged they sent me by train, they always discharged you at the closest base to your home, and so I went from there back to Amarillo and was discharged at Amarillo. And on that train coming from Sebring, Florida to Amarillo I met a girl that had graduated from high school with Betty and her husband was in the navy. He was stationed somewhere, Jacksonville, Florida or somewhere over there and he was coming to Norman to get out and so she was riding a train and I was on a military car hooked to this train and I was walking up this aisle in this car and I looked at her and I thought that’s got to be Irene Crow. So finally I asked her, ‘Are you Irene Crow?’ Cause I hadn’t seen her for two years. And she said, ‘Yes,’ and then course she knew who I was cause we were going to school together and like I said her and Betty were real good friends. But anyway, I was discharged then in Amarillo, Texas and we came back to Oklahoma City the next day and met them, here and we partied.”
Q: When you were stationed overseas, where were your missions?
A: “Well, now of course the first time I flew was out at Las Vegas, see I was training for army air arterially, aerial gunnery training, and that was the first time I flew. Then of course, when we went to El Paso, we were on a crew and we were assigned to a crew and we did a lot of flying out of El Paso. Then, we didn’t fly anymore until we got on our base in England. And we flew, well they decided they would make a lead crew out of us. And by lead crew, each group had three squadrons, 12 planes in each squadron. You had a high box with 12 planes, a low box, and a lead box. The high box would fly, oh just above the lead crew, and the low box would fly just below the lead box. They were going to make a lead crew and by lead crew you either lead the top box or low box. And so, we didn’t fly, we would have probably flown 25 missions had we not been a lead crew but that slowed us down. We were there for quite awhile before we flew any missions because of that. Did you want to know that places we bombed? Well, I’ve got that stuff at home. I should have brought all that with me because I’ve got a diary with all the missions we flew. But we bombed Dresden a couple of times, and we bombed Zosen, which was a Germany high headquarters, right south of Berlin, we bombed it once and we bombed the airfield down by Munich once, and we bombed the Rurur valley, different places in the Rurur Valley several times, and we bombed Dresden a couple times. But those are the only places I can recall just off the top of my head we bombed. Well those are the places we bombed. Now we flew a lot of training missions down by over the edge of France. (Laughter) I’ll tell you this little story. While we were flying these training missions, the pilot decided that he wanted each man on the crew to fly that plane. To see who could fly it. Well, I was the last one that got in the pilot seat he was in there in the co-pilot seat. Like I said we’d flew a lot of missions and I was a cameraman on our crew so I had to fly every mission, by cameraman if the bombardier practiced bombing, the cameraman took pictures of the bomb strikes. So I had to fly every time. And I stood, I had a lot of time that I didn’t have anything to do and I would stand right behind the pilot and co-pilot and watch them and I knew exactly how to fly that plane. I knew what to do and I raised on a farm and ran all kind of equipment, worked on all kind of equipment and I knew how to fly that plane. So we got overseas and we were doing this, and like I said I was the last one of the crew to get in the pilot seat and I was just a kid. I was 19 years old. He’d sit there and say ‘take a certain heading.’ Well, I would bank the plane over and level out on that heading. I knew that you leveled the plane out just before you got the heading cause it drifted a little bit, see. And I knew that when you banked that plane, you had to pull the nose up or you lost altitude. So, I just pulled it over there and leveled it out and he didn’t say anything and we flew a little bit and he said, ‘take a certain altitude.’ Well, I pulled back on the stick, raised it up, and leveled it off right on that altitude. And he had me take two or three different headings and finally, when he got through with me he said, ‘You flew a plane before haven’t ya?’ And I said, ‘No, I’ve never had a hold of the controls until got this one.’ And he said, ‘Well, you flew a light trainer then?’ And I said, ‘No sir, I’ve never been in a light trainer.’ And he said, ‘Well I have never seen anyone fly a plane like you do and never flown one.’ And I told him, I said, ‘Well, I stood here behind you and Tom,’ that was our co-pilot and I said, ‘I knew exactly what to and how to do it and that’s why I did it like that.’ Now he had been an instructor down in Ardmore and he was a first lieutenant when he joined this crew, so he had to do with a lot of different pilots. So I felt pretty good about that. But I wouldn’t have been afraid to have landed that plane. Like I said, I worked on equipment and I just knew how to do stuff and I watched him and I just knew how he did it.
Q: What was it like being a turret gunner?
A: “Well, I’ve watched these movies and all about that being a dangerous place but I never thought about that being anymore dangerous than any. The tail gunner sat back behind the tail wheel and the tail wheel came up in the plane and so you had to just scoot by the, to get back, I thought he was more isolated than I was. I don’t know why I became a ball turret gunner. I don’t know if I was assigned to that position or what. There was one thing about a ball turret, now that turret turned and sat there like this (demonstrates) and this was your controls. You’d move your turret and the gun controls were just on the end of, knobs on the end of those handles. Well you could see everything from down there. You couldn’t see straight above the plane of course, but you could see out to the side, a long ways up and you could see everything below. I could see the bombs hitting and bursting, and I could see the antiaircraft gun firing. It was quite an experience. But like I said, I was a 19 year old kid, and I never thought about it being anymore dangerous anyplace else in the plane.”
Q: Did you have a specific name for your plane?
A: “No, we were assigned a plane, now some of those planes, the planes we flew when we flew lead we let each squadron, you had three he last four numbers were 0200. We flew that plane three times. We never named it. It was a slow, slow plane. The pilot would get so mad, he’d have to rev those engines up.”
Q: How many planes were up in the air on one mission?”
A: “There was over 1000 in the 8th Air Force. We bombed Dresden twice and over 1200 planes bombed it. We bombed Berlin the same way too.”
Q: What missions stood out to you?”
A: “There were two missions that stood out to me that I flew. The one we flew over Berlin—we though we were going to get shot down. When antiaircraft fire, the shells busted and explode. The flak would usually burst in fours. Well, when we had our Bombay doors over, three shells busted under us that the plane bounced. It looked like someone had jabbed holes in the bottom of the plane. It had broken the sending unit line. The first mission we bombed Dresden, we carried six, five-hundred pound general purpose bombs, and four, five-hundred pound incendiary bombs. The incendiary bombs were a cluster of a hundred five-hundred pound incendiary bombs. When they got within a certain distance to the ground, they would spread out. Well… we were supposed to be bombing the train yard, and the whole 8th Air Force was bombing Dresden that day. I could see the whole town just afire. But those two missions stood out to me.”
Q: How regular was it for the planes to get shot down?
A: “It wasn’t real regular. But one mission we flew, four out of the six out of our group. That day, we were flying deputy lead of the low box, and one of the planes got a direct hit and just split in two.”
Q: Did you meet Betty, your wife, before the war?
A: “Yes, Betty and I got married in El Paso, Texas while I was down there taking overseas training. We’d met in high school, and well….she quit going with me once, but (laugh) she couldn’t find anyone better.”
Q: How old were you when you got married?
A: “I was 19 and she was 18.”
Q: How did you keep correspondence during the war?
A: “Letters, but we didn’t call each other very often because we didn’t have communication like we did now. We telegrammed a lot though.”
Q: What were your feelings when you heard that WWII was over?
A: “Well, I was glad. I was really happy. At that point, I was in Sebring, Florida when the dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. I was in England when Germany gave up…we were really happy that that war was over.”
Q: When did you get processed out?
A: “I got out on November 6.”
Q: Was it difficult to readjust to your life after the war?
A: “Well….it was altogether different. Like I said, I was raised on a farm, and then when I got out, Betty and I were married. In fact, our daughter was five months old when I got home. But we couldn’t find a place to live because everybody was getting out of the service, and there hadn’t been any new houses built. We lived with her folks for…well, we looked at a chicken house that this guy was renting for an apartment, but we decided that that wasn’t any place to live. We finally found a house from this girl we knew from high school. She had a place there in Blackwell—a duplex—and she let us have her furniture.”
Q: What did you do profession-wise after the war?
A: “The first job I had been in a flour mill. Part of the time was trucked sacks of flour out and put them in a boxed car, and part of the time I ran a sewing machine. Then I went to work for a fellow in a furniture store. He fell down on raising my wages, so I finally quit working for him then went to working for a guy in a Buick garage. I worked as a mechanic for a while, then as a service manager, then a part’s manager, then both departments. Then one of our customers had some trucks and talked me into buying a truck. I owned a truck and did that for about 20 years. Then, finally, after our kids went to college, I sold the truck and went to work for a company as a dispatcher. Then, I became an elder of the church here.”
Q: What were your feeling towards Hitler and the Nazi party?
A: “I didn’t have much feeling about them at time. They were kind of like everybody else. The Air Force men who were shot down, if the civilians got to them, they really mistreated them. A lot of them they killed. That day we bombed Dresden, two days later, we got word that we had killed 200,000 civilians. They died from suffocation. Well, you can imagine how that would make you feel. It didn’t matter that the men who were in charge sent you; you were the one that did it. They were just ordinary people that resented that, and we were just whipping up on them, so you couldn’t blame ‘em.”
Q: How has your experience in the war affected your life?
A: “For the first year of two it probably affected it pretty bad. I learned what it was to be scared. I flew 21 missions over Germany. Flying those missions, they got you up at 2 or 2:30 in the morning, and you went to get briefed. They told you where you were going, how many guns you were going to be in range of, how many fighters that was possible to hit the group, what times you were going to drop the bombs, and all that stuff. Some of those missions were just terrible, like that one with the plane that just burst apart. Even now, and just talking about it, it bothers me a little bit. It took me a couple of years to get over it.”
Q: If you had any advice about going into war, what would you advise?
A: “Well…if you have to go, and if your country has to be defended, go do it. But, I’ll tell ya’, war--I think Churchill was the one that said it—“war it hell”. So, I would say, stay out of it if at all possible.”
