Francis Phelps Life during WWII. Box 3 Folder 17

Eric Walz History 300 Collection Francis Phelps Life during WWII By Francis Phelps October 8, 2003 Box 3 Folder 17 Oral Interview conducted by Beth Orton Transcript copied by Carol May October 2005 Brigham Young University Idaho 1

BO: Why don t we just start out, you tell me your name and where you were born and what year. FP: This is Francis Phelps; I was born in Easton, Maryland, December 18, 1922. BO: How old were you on December the 7, 1941? FP: That was just a few weeks before my 20 th birthday. BO: What was your reaction to what happened at that time? FP: It was disbelief at first, it was a Sunday. Beautiful Sunday sunshiny afternoon, a friend and I were just gassing up at a filling station to go out and drive around the country a little, and we heard the news and we just couldn t believe it. But we canceled out our trip, we went back home forgot all about our Sunday drive, and just listened to the radio. BO: Did you want to do anything about it? FP: Everybody wanted to sign up and go into service. I had a physical problem; I had a little problem getting into the service. I had a pretty serious automobile accident. BO: Did you try to get into the service or did you just? FP: Not immediately but shortly after I did, and I was unsuccessful. I was classified as 4F in the draft. BO: 4F, what does that mean? FP: That means you can t get in! BO: So you were disqualified? FP: Yes, that was a disqualification. And my father was pretty much involved in politics, and so he got both of the senators, the governor of Maryland, working on my behalf writing letters. Due to the fact at the time I was a licensed pilot, and the military was having trouble finding flight instructors. That is the way they finally got me into the service. BO: What part of the service were you in the Air Force then? FP: There was no Air Force at the time; I was in the Army Air Core. BO: What was the general opinion of Mussolini and Hitler and all those men during the war? 2

FP: Everyone thought those men were pretty terrible, just couldn t believe that they would be as bad as all reports said they were, but actually they were. BO: Was your initial prejudice toward the Japanese because they attacked America? FP: Because they attacked America. We weren t worried about them, because of what Hitler and Mussolini were doing in Europe, we didn t expect to be attacked, a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. My opinion never really changed; to this day I still have pretty bitter feelings toward Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito even though they are not with us anymore. BO: Where did you serve and what did you do? FP: When I initially went in the service, I instructed in Median bombers, but I could not fly combat, because of my accident I had been in and I was not to have supposed to have gone overseas, but after they had gotten as many pilots as they needed and started to cut things back on the training program, I could have gotten out of the service, but I didn t want to get out I wanted to stay in. And I kind of faked my way overseas, and I flew white observation planes overseas, because that was not considered combat. BO: What kind of observation planes were those? FP: What they did, they monitored the firing of the artillery and directed the fire. My particular air craft is what they call an L-5, a Liaison 5. They had an L-4 which was smaller, but I had an L-5. We seldom flew much above fifty feet and had to constantly do evasive action, because we had to fly over a lot of potential ground fire. FP: I was in the service a little over three years, when I got out I was twenty-three years old. I did see fighting in Germany, and quite a bit of the effects of war because I of course was observing from the air, I could see a lot more effects than you normally would driving around. Especially Mannheim, Mannheim was as much destroyed city as I have ever seen, it was pretty much all flattened, and one thing about flying when you had bad weather and you couldn t fly you had a lot of time on your hands. So I would get my jeep and my observer and we cruise around and see what kind of trouble we could get into. And we d follow the infantry, and when they d take a town we would drive in and see what we could resurrect from the town, because the first thing you would do was have them turn all their weapons in and then you picked up the (peasants?) and took them. The lines are solid one up against another they are pretty fluid and once in a while toward the end of the war you might enter into a town that hadn t been taken and they d surrender the town to you. Another thing we used to do for amusement, I was with the 7 th Army, and what we used to do is go up to Heidelberg, that was the big depot where they issued the vehicles and things. While we were there one day we saw this general s sedan, we thought that we d enjoy having that so we stole it and took it back with us. They never did catch up with us. Then we left to come home. We didn t know what to do with the 3

car because we didn t have it legally so we just parked it in a garage in Germany and left it there. BO: Did you steal an American General s car? FP: Yeah, it was a one star general, brigadier general s car; on the front they have a symbol with stars, now he was a brigadier he had one star; now when he didn t ride in the car, a cover went over that, when he was in the car the cover came off. So the Guards would realize that there was a general so that they would give general s treatment, so whenever we would get to a checkpoint we would take the cover off the car and they would flag us through the checkpoint. Then one time we got into a town into southern Germany, this was just before the war ended, and the Marklin model train factory was in that town. Some of those fellows that got there first got into the factory, and we got our choice of all the trains we wanted, not to steal but to buy. We got (unknown) itself down there, so there were some trains I wanted, that he didn t have and he said he would manufacture them for me, if I could get him some gasoline, which was pretty easy to get in the service. So I gave him some gasoline and he gave me the trains I wanted, and by the time I shipped them all home and gotten home my younger brother and I set them up in the folks attic, and had the whole attic was just covered with railroads. (Not applicable) BO: Did you make any life-long friends in the service? FP: I didn t, I had very close friends in the service, when I came home the war was over, no I have never been back to a reunion, they had one close to where I lived in New York State, but I just didn t feel like I wanted to go BO: Is there any reason for that? FP: No, it was just a different day and a different time, it was all behind me BO: So you just wanted to move on FP: Yeah some people did make life long friends, but I was not one of them. BO: What are some of your experiences? (Most memorable)? FP: Well, probably well there was a couple of things that impressed me. As crazy as this may seem, I liked the German people better than any of the other people over there even though they were the enemy. They treated us better, had more respect for us, and were better to us, they were more like the Americans I thought than anyone over there. The thing used to be, the difference between the Germans and the Americans, is that the Germans worked to live, and we worked to play. Another thing that really impressed me, a couple times we got in a couple towns, that had just been surrendered, and to see the peoples faces, the shock on the faces because they had been told that terrible things were going to happen to them if they 4

surrendered, and they were just waiting for terrible things to happen, you could just see it in their faces BO: And nothing bad happened, not with the United States, anyway. FP: No, no not really. BO: Is there anything else? FP: Not a lot more Yes there is a lot but it is mostly things of the past, (non-applicable) I can tell you a lot more about when the war ended, The division I was with was coming back to the Untied States, to re-equip and go to the Pacific, and at the end of the war your release from service was dependant on, points, you got so many points for the amount of battles you had been in, and so many points for your family and different things like that and I was considered a high point person so I was transferred out of that division to another division that was supposed to come home and be discharged but what happened was my original division got home, and the war in Japan by that time was settled but they all got discharged way before I did and they were all low point people, but when I was making preparations for my first division to come home, we were going up to make arrangements, to get the equipment loaded and shipped home and we had to go through Paris on the way, and as we were approaching Paris, people were dancing in the streets, and all kinds of things and I said, You know I bet the war has ended. And as we drove into Paris they block the street, pulled [us] out of the car gave us wine bottles and all kind of celebration and it was VE-Day, Victory in Europe, and I happened to be in Paris to celebrate it. I had an opportunity to do a little celebrating in Paris, so went out got an airplane and flew upside down the whole (length) of the Aux Champs-Elysees. (Nonapplicable) BO: When did you go home? FP: I came home, December 18, that was my birthday, I got back in Virginia, from there I went up to Fort Mead, Maryland, to be separated from the service, and while I was being separated from the service, I d go into Baltimore, and I was in this USO in Baltimore one night, and I started to go back to my Hotel and as I walked out of the USO, this young marine grabbed me by the arm, and I thought it had been someone drinking so I shook him loose and started away and he grabbed me again and I shook him loose again and he grabbed me again and he said Don t you know who I am? He was my younger brother. We had both been separate from the service and he had come to California, and I came from Europe but when I left home he was quite young and he had changed so much that I didn t recognize him, so what happened was, I said, Stay here with me and so I had another day before I got separated and we ll go home together. And my folks didn t know that anyone of us was anywhere near home, they thought I was still in Europe, and so Christmas Eve we went down and instead of walking in the house we rang the doorbell, and let my mother answer the door and there the two of us stood so we had a pretty happy Christmas. That was Christmas of 1945. 5

BO: Can I ask you more about your army experience? You didn t have to go to boot camp or anything like that? FP: Oh, yeah, yeah I had to do the work. BO: You had to do the work even though you were technically 4F? FP: Yeah, but I didn t have to carry a rifle, because I had had a crushed right shoulder, and that is where you normally carried the sling and I couldn t carry it because it bothered my shoulder. So I had a sidearm instead. But of course I did something a little unusual. I went in on a Thursday and then I went on leave that weekend, because my father-in-law was the post chaplain (gave him leave). BO: So you were just like See you later! FP: Oh, yeah Now when I was down in Florida in flight training, my wife and I had our first child, so I got home each time she had a child, so if I wasn t there long enough to take her home from the hospital my father-in-law would send a telegram down and sign it Chaplain so and so, cause chaplains carried a lot of weight and asked for extensions, so I always got my extensions. They didn t realize that he was my father-in-law. BO: Where did you train at in the United States? FP: Well, while I was waiting to get clearance to go into the air core, I was with what they called the amphibious engineers and we operated on the landing barges, now the reason I was with them was because I had grown up on the water, and skippered a lot of boats, and so that was the natural place to put me, until they could find out whether I could get a spot in the air core. And we trained in New England out on Cape Cod. And in the summertime out in Martha s Vineyard, did a lot of training along the coast of Martha s Vineyard, out to Nantucket Island, and then when winter came we went down to Florida and use the barges on the Gulf Coast. BO: What exactly was your father in the government? (How did he help you join up in the Army Air Core)? FP: He was not in the government, but he had a lot of connections. He got our senator down in Maryland, he got him elected to office for the first time he did a lot of campaigning for him. He was in the background. The town I lived in, in Cambridge, Maryland, was very political, as a matter of fact we had furnished four governors for the state of Maryland in that little town. As a matter of fact my dad s best friend was son of one of the governors, and that is how my dad got involved in politics, he and Emerson Harrington worked together on all the campaigns. The strange thing about Maryland, it s heavily democratic, but there is two factions down there the Harrington faction and this other faction both Democrats, but they would get fighting one of them would push the Republicans and that was the only way a Republican would get elected down there is 6

when these two factions were fighting. Yeah, the only reason we would have Republican governors is because the Harrington s weren t getting along with the other factions. BO: Where exactly is Cambridge, Maryland? Is that by the water then? FP: The State of Maryland is separated by the Chesapeake Bay, the eastern shore and the western shore, I was born and I grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland, and that is between the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean. And we lived on, a Cambridge was on a river that emptied into the bay, the Choptank River, it was two miles wide at Cambridge, it was pretty good sized river. My dad always had a boat so we were on the water most of our spare time. BO: So you knew the water and the air. How did you learn how to fly? FP: Well, I used to wash and polish airplanes weekends to buy flying time, worked my way through it. BO: What kind of plane did you learn how to fly in? FP: Well, back then there was mostly Eurakna s. Actually when I first learned to fly, when I flew Cubs, J-2 Cubs, and the early J-3 s they didn t even have brakes on them, you had to open the side door, which was half the side of the airplane, and put your foot on the wheel to try to slow down. So I ve seen how far aircraft s have come from when I first started flying in 1938 until today. Now I have not been active flying since the late seventies because I developed an eye problem and I had to quit flying. But my sons all fly. BO: Did you teach them? FP: No, you don t teach your kids to fly...but I had a good friend, he was a fighter pilot in the Second World War, I knew he was competent so I had him teach Bill (Phelps son). But funny thing, he had a little problem with Bill with making his lands, so he called me up one day and said Come on down and ride with Bill and I today, he s doing something I can t catch him, what he is doing but he is not making good landings. So I jumped in the back seat, of course I had a lot more instruction time than his instructor because his instructor only instructed civilians, I instructed military men and civilian both, so I jump in back seat and the first time he landed, I saw his problem, of course I could see it better from the back seat than Steve could from the front seat and he was just wasn t looking far enough ahead from the aircraft, when you look to close to the runway when you do that you bounce. He has to get the right perspective. So I just told Bill to look farther ahead. And he just (reached?) on the next landing and he was set from then on. (Not applicable) BO: How old were you when you got your license (to fly)? 7

FP: I can explain what I was doing when I was training the pilots in the median bombers. It s a particular bomber that I was training the men it was a B-26 built by Martin was pretty tricky, and it had been rounded several times and then they decide that the pilots that flew these needed special instructions and they called it transitional training and that s what I did. Special instructions to be able to fly a B-26 Martin. There were actually two B-26 s in the Second World War, they replaced the B-26 Martin with the B- 26 Douglas which was a better flying airplane. Actually the Martin was more rugged, it took more to shoot it down, but it was a lot trickier to fly, it was not a problem graduating the kids, they felt safer in combat than they did in training. It was a nice aircraft I thought, it was a little tricky but it was fast, it was almost as fast as our fighters of the day, they called it the Marauder yeah the Martin Marauder. Now the reason I chose that air craft to fly, you always wanted to fly the most difficult if you were really wrapped up in flying, you always wanted the most difficult one to fly, but when my younger brother was building engine mounts for the Martin before he went into the service, and my older brother was chief of ground test with Martins, so I wanted a Martin Bomber. You know though I couldn t fly it in combat. BO: Where did you serve in Germany? FP: We went from France into Germany, yes. Now actually my division that I was serving with then was the 63 rd infantry division and they were the first division to completely break the Siegfried Line and stay through. Other divisions had broken it but they had been pushed back, and we broke it and stayed through and kept going all the way across Germany, and then head south in Germany, so this whole time I was flying cover for the Artillery. BO: Flying cover, what exactly does that mean? FP: Well, observation, I flew the aircraft and my observer gave me the directions, where to fire. I was so busy taking the evasive action, because as I say we were only about fifty feet of the ground, so we were exposed to a lot of small arms fire. BO: Did you ever get shot at? FP: Oh, you couldn t count the holes (in my aircraft)! BO: You never got shot down, though? FP: Oh, no, it was pretty hard to shoot them down, the little Liaison planes I was flying. They were built out of fabric instead of metal so all you had to do was paste a patch over the hole when you got back or (undistinguishable) crew did. BO: Describe those airplanes to me. 8

FP: Well, they are Tandem seats, the L-5 did have a compartment in the back that you could open up and put a stretcher in. Now they had the L-3, L-4, and the L-5. The L-3 was a Euranka, the L-4 was a Cub, and the L-5 was a Stinson. The Cub and the Eurankas had 60 high horse power engines; my L-5 had a 185 so I had a large engine in mine. Did a lot more performance, that s how I could carry a stretcher in the back. BO: So did you ever have to put anyone in the stretcher? FP: No, never had anyone in the stretcher, no. Now some of the fellows, I did it too, we d strap Bazookas on our struts and go tank hunting, but I was never good enough to hit one. BO: Tank hunting? How did you do that? FP: We d try to fly in behind a tank and blow its tack off of it with our Bazookas. I fired a lot of them, but I never hit one we didn t have sites, just dead reckoning really. We just had them fixed on to the struts with wiring tape and stuff. They fired electronically from inside the cockpit, so you just aimed them the best you could and took a chance at hitting. You only got one shot so you have to come back and reload. Now there s one liaison plane not in my outfit but there s one liaison plane, that was credited with destroying a German Fighter Plane, and the way we did it, we flew so low and we flew slow and we could [do] tight maneuvers so what the fellow did, his was a quick thinker, so he flew in really close to these trees and wiped him out, it was kind of an honor to be able to do that. (He says something, but I don t understand). He didn t use his bazooka, he just pulled up into the trees and crashed into the fighter pilot. Yeah, the pilot could [not] pull up and he wiped his plane out. BO: How was he (the pilot) was he ok? FP: Oh, we don t know because he was behind German lines. We know his plane was destroyed but we don t know anything about him. BO: What did you think as you flew over the area? FP: What did I think, I thought boy I sure hope I get home safe tonight. See now a lot of people didn t realize we did with these airplanes and they thought that the infantry was the combat, which it was, we got to go home to a decent home and decent bed at night while the infantry fellow s had to sleep in their fox holes. But up in the air where we had people shooting at us, we didn t have a fox hole to get into, we just had to sit there and let them shoot at us. Now you hear so much about the unaccounted for in Vietnam, well in the Second World War there was almost twice as many air core people lost and never found than there was the whole Vietnam War. That is a statistic that you don t hear too often. Fighter Pilots and Bomber Pilots went down and they never found them. Now the German people generally were pretty good, they d bury them, and we were in a couple towns where we found pilots buried in the local cemeteries. There were thousands of them that were unaccounted for. 9

BO: You were in southern Germany then? FP: Yes, we went in from (non-distinguishable) Lorraine, and went across, but another little thing that is kind of amusing: I couldn t cross the Rhine with my aircraft until after the other side of the Rhine had been secured. So we were sitting back waiting for darkness to get a (beachhead?) established on the other side of the Rhine and this deer ran from this open field, and it was pretty amusing because everyone opened up with their machine guns and you could see tracers flying and the whole air was just full of slugs and that deer ran all the way across the field and nobody touched it. I says This is the kind of people I m fighting with? They couldn t shoot a deer!? Oh that brings another point, talking about deer hunting. One evening I was driving around and I saw these deer in the field and I shot one and I took it down to DP Camp, Displaced Person camp, enforced labor that Germany brought in. And I knew that they didn t have much food so I gave them this deer for dinner. So in exchange for being kind to them they told me where General Von (Root?). So I went over with my observer and we picked up General Von Root. I got his sword and my observer got his dagger. My son has that sword now and it has Hermann Goring signature inscribed in the blade. Goring had given it to Von Root because they were good friends and my son was in Ohio a year ago doing some work for his company and he went in this restaurant, and in the restaurant was a gathering of collectors of WWII memorabilia, and they happened to be talking about this sword and Bill was listening and he says That s my sword. So he went over and said, I hear you fellows describing a sword and says I ve got that sword. They said, We ve been wondering who had it, we knew it existed but we didn t know where it was. They said, You know that sword is worth big bucks. He said, I know it is my Father had it appraised for $80,000. There was no way he was cashing it in; he s still got the sword. BO: Did you actually capture Von Root? FP: I say captured, he was at home hiding, we turned him in, and we took him with us and turned him in. There wasn t much of an effort. He wanted to send to a higher ranking officer but I didn t give him much of a choice. BO: What type of officer were you? FP: Well, I was a captain; I got promoted to major just before I came home. I was unit commander of my little air group. That s why I had an L-5; the other people had L-4 s. BO: What was General Von Root s house like? FP: Okay, you probably never say this, there was a movie on The Winds of War, Robert Mitchum was the star in it, and they went to Von root s house in one of the sequences, the same house that I picked him up in. BO: Was it pretty nice? 10

FP: Yeah, it had trick steps that went down to the playrooms downstairs and it showed that in the movie. If you pushed a lever the steps would collapse and you would go down like a sliding board. We actually went in and saw it. It was a very impressive place, a big villa. BO: Where exactly was that at? FP: You know my memory is not that good anymore; I can t remember the exact town. I remember buildings there; there was a walled city there. But he was not inside the walled city. I was living in a railroad station at that time for a couple days until we moved on. I left the railway station to drive around and I can t even think of the next town we went to. BO: Do you have anything else you want to tell me? FP: Not right now, these things are difficult for me because there are some things you didn t bring up. (War) is an experience that you have gone through but that you don t really want to experience again. BO: Is that your general theory on war then? FP: Yeah, I think so, everyone felt that they needed to serve; you know you looked down on them if they didn t get in the service. It was a different time and a different day. Everyone felt that they just had to go defend their country. It is so much different than these later wars. Now something that kind of bothers me is how the wives complain when they are out of the country for six months or a year or whatever. We served without our wives for as long as necessary and didn t think a thing about it. People are better educated today they probably understand things better than we did. BO: Did you think that war was this big heroic thing? PF: We had a pretty good idea of what it (war) was, because we kept hearing the news of what Hitler was doing, and we just figured he had to be stopped. We didn t want him over here. 11