B-24 Veteran of Fifth Air Force, Australia tells his Story

I don't believe this photo shows the fiery crash described below. Gus's Bus must have had more than its share of mishaps!

Ashland veteran survived fiery B-24 crash in WWII

By Ron Simon T-F staff (Ashland, Ohio)

ASHLAND -- Jerry Eugene Wilson, 83, still has a yellowed copy of that telegram his mother received in October 1944.
"We regret to inform you that your son, Jerry E. Wilson, was slightly injured in action Oct. 11, 1944, in the Southwest Pacific Area."

"It scared the hell out of my mother," Wilson recalled. But if she had seen what was left of Gus' Bus it might have been worse.

Wilson still wonders how he and the other crew members of a B-24 piloted by Major Gus Connery survived after the bomber stalled on takeoff from a field near Darwin, Australia, then crashed and burned.

Wilson, a belly gunner and combat photographer, got out on his hands and knees.
"Then I was up, and that's when I found out that I should have been a sprinter," he said. "It was every man for himself."

One man died. Most crew members were injured. Wilson's ears show damage to this day from the fire that singed them.

"The rest of the crew got to go home, but I had to finish my time. I admit the next time I flew, which was out of the Philippines, I was a bit queasy."

Especially during takeoff.

Wilson flew 38 missions with the 380th Bomb Group of the 530th Bomber Squadron of the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific.

"I wasn't a member of any one crew or plane, but joined crews where needed," he said.
His unit flew out of Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. Bombing targets included the cities of Hanoi and Saigon in what was then called French Indo-China.

Wilson said the targets were enemy shipping, oil refineries, oil fields and mines.

His job was to operate the belly gun, but he was equally proficient with the other gun positions, particularly the waist guns.

"My job as a combat photographer was to snap the lens after the bombs dropped to record whatever damage we did," he said.

Working from bomber to bomber, including the doomed Gus' Bus, Wilson had his share of aerial combat.

"We fired at a lot of fighter planes. They came at you so fast you barely had time to react," he said. He has no idea if he ever shot an enemy fighter down. "I didn't have time to look."

He thinks his unit's most important raids were against the oil refineries and harbors of Borneo.
While many bombs were dropped from great heights, some of these raids were conducted almost at floor level.

"We might come in at just 500 feet," he said.

He recalls one bomber that delivered its load at the end of a near vertical dive. Unfortunately, Wilson said, the bomb skipped off the ground and hit that same bomber, killing that plane and its crew.

On a bombing raid to Hong Kong, Wilson said his pilot lost his way and cruised up and down the China coast before finding Hong Kong to drop his bomb load. "We got home flying on fumes," he said.

He recalled that before raids on Formosa, crews were warned that if they had to bail out, the Japanese on the ground were not taking prisoners.

"Nobody loved us," he said.

Wilson recalls taking homemade green beer on raids just to get it nice and cold for the men when his plane got back. "It's pretty cold at 16,000 feet," he said.

A native of Bryan, Ohio, Wilson's father was an engineer, specializing in railroad bridges. So the family moved around a lot. He graduated from LaPorte High School in Indiana in 1941 and joined the Army Air Force in March 1942 after working a few months in a munitions plant.
During the war, his family lived in Bellville, and that was where he was, on furlough, when the war in the Pacific ended.

After he joined the Army Air Force, Wilson went through a long series of training centers, ending up as a gunner.

"I thought I'd be headed for North Africa," he said. Actually, his destination was Oakland, Calif., where he boarded a troop ship headed for Brisbane, Australia.

"We hit a typhoon along the way. Everybody was sick. I was the only one that showed up on the chow line," he said.

From Brisbane he traveled up the Great Barrier Reef on what he termed "a banana boat" to Port Moresby, New Guinea.

At his first base in New Guinea, he was assigned as a bomb loader. It took a lot of protesting to finally get a crew assignment.

"I came to fight, not load bombs," he said.

While he was in the South Pacific, Wilson obtained a saxophone and played in a Glenn Miller-style band between missions.

He still plays the saxophone and enjoys swing, jazz and the more reserved music he plays at his church, St. Timothy Lutheran Church on U.S. 42 in Madison Township.

My thanks to friend Maurice Rockett of Massachusetts for sending me this story.

Gus's Bus Crew.

How a London Lad Ended up in the Royal Australian Air Force

Douglas Frederick Wooldridge, Halifax Flight Engineer, Royal Australian Air Force, 1944

Two of my friends from across the pond, John and Richard Havers, share my enthusiasm for aviation and World War Two history. John has written several books on the history of civil aviation in Britain and Richard has written on a variety of subjects.

Bettina Wooldridge (now Havers), Douglas Wooldridge, and their parents, early 1944

John's wife (Richard's mother) Bettina, has a brother by the name of Douglas Frederick Wooldridge. During World War Two, Douglas was the only Englishman on an Australian crew. John writes, "Until the advent of the Short Stirling, Handley Page Halifax and Avro Lancaster four-engine bombers there had not been a need for Flight Engineers and training for these was given in the UK. Many Australians received their training at home or in other Commonwealth counties such as Canada or in Africa but this did not include Flight Engineers and so it meant that the FE would mostly be an Englishman."

Richard picks up the story here, writing: "My Uncle was a Flight Engineer, a Sergeant, with 466 Squadron, a Royal Australian Air Force unit that flew Halifaxes; this despite the fact that he had been born in South London and was English through and through. Between 15 February 1944 and 18 March 1944 he and his fellow crewmembers, who were all Australian, flew four missions against targets in France and Germany. The other six members of the crew were Flight Sergeants with the exception of the Wireless Operator/Gunner who was a Warrant Officer. On their first mission they bombed Augsburg, in Germany, they took off at 2103 and landed again at 0514 hours – meaning that they were airborne for over eight hours.

Their fourth mission on the night of 18/19 March was as part of a raid against Frankfurt – Twelve Halifaxes from 466 Squadron got airborne that night although two returned early due to hydraulic trouble. Seven of the remaining ten aircraft bombed the primary target and returned safely, three failed to return including my Uncle’s aircraft.

A German fighter attacked HX231 killing the mid‑upper gunner Noel Lees and probably the other gunners, Jack Dansie and George De Fraine. With the fuselage a mass of flames the Captain told the crew to bail out, which Bill Bray. Ken Wilson and Doug Wooldridge all did. The Captain, Johnny Richards, pushed Doug Wooldridge out of the aircraft causing him to strike the tall, which knocked him out and broke his teeth. He came to in a snowdrift covered by his parachute, which in view of the very cold conditions undoubtedly saved his life. He was eventually discovered by German troops and admitted to a hospital run by Sister's of Mercy; Johnny Richards went down with the aircraft. Ironically the news bulletins the following day said that the bombers “met fewer fighters than usual”. All three men who bailed out became POWs and separately passed through the Luftwaffe interrogation centre at Oberursel, near Frankfurt‑on‑Main before moving on to Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan in south east Germany where they were reunited. They were later moved to Stalag Luft 6 at Heydekrug, East Prussia before being marched back west in the wake of the advancing Red Army; they were found by Allied troops. The four men that died, including the pilot, were all twenty-one years old with the exception of Jack Dansie who was just twenty; they are buried at Rheinberg War Cemetery in the Ruhr. My uncle, Doug Wooldridge, was a month shy of his twenty third birthday - today at eighty-four he still enjoys playing golf and travels the world. He is just one example that illustrates the random nature of survival in Bomber Command; the same can be said in every aspect of war."

Douglas Frederick Wooldridge, Halifax airman and former Prisoner of War, in 2004

In this painting by aviation artist Nicholas Trudgian, a squadron of Royal Australian Air Force Halifaxes heads over the Lincolnshire Coast bound for Germany in 1942.