Flying Flak Alley: Personal Accounts of World War II Bomber Crew Combat by Alan L. Griggs

Author:Alan L. Griggs [Griggs, Alan L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2008-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Al Suedekum (courtesy Al Suedekum)

I don’t consider myself a hero for what I did in combat and I don’t regret anything. I’m satisfied with how I handled what I was assigned to do. I just did my part to help my country win a war.

Windshield Wiper at 350 mph

My introduction to the army air corps was like something out of a dream. I had always loved airplanes as a youngster; their thrilling escapades in the movies helped lead me to build my own model planes out of wood but I never actually flew in an airplane until the service. I still have those little wooden planes today and they bring me as much joy as they did over 70 years ago.

The day I got my wings I was very excited and proud. It was then I found out I was assigned to a B-25 unit. So began another love story involving man and machine. The B-25 Mitchell was something special, easy to fly and exciting beyond anyone’s imagination, especially the way we flew it in the southwest Pacific.

I flew 62 combat missions in that amazing plane, some out of Port Moresby and most of the rest from Nadzab, New Guinea. They were exciting missions, many of them low level bombing and strafing runs against Japanese installations. Many times we dove off the mountains of those islands, then turned and swooped in just as fast as we could. Often that meant going wide open at 275 miles per hour. We came screaming in at tree top level so the Japs wouldn’t see us approaching; our twelve, .50 caliber guns blazing away, hitting anything that moved. All the while I flew the ship up and down, side-to-side so the enemy would have a harder time drawing a bead on us.

We dropped our bombs on targets we saw as we went along: sometimes runways, or, if we were flying to the side, perhaps revetments, planes, machine gun positions, or supply dumps. Mostly we made just one pass so we didn’t have a lot of time to act and react.

We were coming in low one day and I had a copilot on his very first mission. I think he learned one of his most important lessons that day when a ship flying higher in front of us got hit and dropped out of the sky. “You see,” I said, “that’s why we’re so low.”

I had sort of a bad experience shortly after I arrived overseas. At that time, the older crews tried to get their copilots assigned as first pilots. So they stuck me with a guy who was a copilot, someone who didn’t have much experience in a B-25. They basically forced this fellow into the pilot’s seat and I had to fly alongside him. Trouble was, he was afraid of the airplane. There’s just no other way to describe his problem. Someone with experience could tell he was afraid by the way he acted and how nervous he seemed. We flew a

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