Interview with Pacific B-24 Pilot Kay Morris

8/7/09-- It’s a long way from Rigby, Idaho to the war-torn skies over Okinawa and Japan, and many years have passed since young Kay Morris flew as a B-24 pilot in World War Two, but thanks to good health, a good memory, and a mother who liked to scrapbook, Morris’s war experiences are as meticulously recorded as if they’d happened yesterday. Every letter Morris wrote to his future wife, from basic training through the end of the war, maps, photographs, chits, dog tags and patches, they’re all there, most bound up in a scrapbook covered with white silk from the parachute Morris brought back from the war.
Kay Morris started life on the Snake River Plain, in Idaho’s premier potato-growing region, and went off to school at nearby Ricks College, a Latter-day Saint-run school now known as BYU-Idaho, before transferring to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Morris joined the Army Air Forces in April, 1943, and was selected for the Aviation Cadet program. He trained at San Antonio, Texas, deciding to go into multi-engine aircraft because “I didn’t like aerobatics particularly”. After earning his silver wings on August 4, 1944 in Altus, Oklahoma, Morris was assigned to the 494th Bomb Group, 865th Squadron, a B-24 Liberator outfit that flew medium altitude bombing missions against the Japanese.
Angaur Island is located South of Peleliu at 6 Degrees 55 Minutes North Latitude 134 Degrees 8 Minutes East Longitude. Angaur Island is about 2 miles long and one and a half mile wide Morris’s photo of Anguar during the war, airstrip at upper right. (Courtesy Kay Morris)

The 494th Bomb Group was nicknamed ‘Kelly’s Kobras’, in honor of General Laurence B. Kelley, who led the group. Created in 1943, the 494th was assigned to the U.S. 7th Air Force, the 494th arrived in the combat zone in August 1944. The group history describes the arrival of the advance echelon in less than idyllic terms. The group was dumped on the island of Angaur, “the meanest of the Palau Group...Though all organized resistance had ceased in the estimation of the communiqué writers, there was still plenty of the unorganized variety, and few if any of that first echelon will forget the first weeks of trying to cope with Jap snipers, land crabs, pup tents, K rations and the jungle growth separately and collectively. Pelelieu Island, on this 30th of September '44 was still in the process of being separated from its Japanese defenders, and the strip at Angaur was far from complete. The Advance Echelon wondered if it would ever see the rest of the Group again.”
(484th Unit History, http://home.att.net/~kelleys_kobras/494history/written.htm)


By October, the group was flying missions, bombing targets in the Phillipines.

A 494th B-24, photo courtesy of Kay Morris.

Initially a copilot, he ended up as the aircraft commander of his own Liberator, flying out of Angaur, Palau. The island had been taken by American forces in fierce fighting in September and October 1944, a battle that cost 264 American lives and over 1,300 Japanese lives. The strategically important island gave the Americans a vital airfield from which it could bomb Japanese targets in the Philippines. Photos show a small island with a runway and not much else. “We were in tents,” he recalls, “four officers to a tent and six enlisted men to a tent. There wasn’t any entertainment or anything to do, really. It was pretty boring. We spent a lot of time resting between missions. Sometimes there were movies and of course there were card games. Morris also did his best to practice his Mormon faith, and wrote letters to his sweetheart and family back home.

Morris remembers that the missions from Anguar to the Phillipines were relatively short ones. However, they were not without their dangers. Morris remembers one plane in his formation going down after its wing was shot off.

Map of 7th Air Force Operations. (Courtesy Kay Morris)
Later, as the war moved closer to Japan, the 494th flew out Okinawa and bombed Japan proper.
In the Pacific, the B-24 was classified as a medium altitude bomber. The B-24 was a four engine bomber that normally carried a crew of ten—four officers and six enlisted men. Officers included the pilot and copilot, bombardier, and navigator. The enlisted personnel was comprised of the flight engineer, radio operator, ball turret gunner, two waist gunners and a tail gunner. High altitude bombing was the job of the advanced, pressurized Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The B-25 Mitchells handled the low-altitude bombing.

According to Morris, the most important man on the crew was the navigator. “Most of our missions were eight hundred miles over water,” he remembers. “You had to rely on the navigators pretty heavily.” Not only that, but unlike their counterparts who flew over Europe, the Pacific bomber boys of the 494th flew in formations of only six airplanes, with limited fighter support.

1st Lt. Charley Wilcox was a bombardier in the 494th, and describes some of the differences between the Pacific and Atlantic bomber wars. “There are many differences between the European Theatre and the Pacific Theatre. For instance; in the European Theatre the planes were subjected to ‘Flak and Fighters' from the time they crossed the channel until they returned (if they were lucky); whereas in the Pacific; we generally had a peaceful flight over vast stretches of water; generally encountering ‘Flak & Zeros’ only when near the target area. A good indication of how the Brass compared the two theatres is by the number of missions required to rotate home. In the European Theatre, you needed 20 [actually 25] and in the Pacific Theatre, you needed 40. I have pulled some missions with more than 12 hrs of flight time; all over water. I can recall a General who was traveling from a Pacific base to another base - he never made it and to this day no one knows just where he was lost or what happened to him - "Lost in The Pacific" would be a good title for that story.”

Morris agrees. “We didn’t try to think about going down in the ocean,” he says. “The plane had two lifeboats under the wings, and there was an escape sub in the inland sea of Japan if we went down”, but the odds of rescue were very slim in such vast expanses of water. The bomber crews flying over Europe could bail out, for the most part, knowing that they would end up on land and have a decent chance of survival. The Pacific bomber crews knew that death was the most likely result of an ocean ditching, followed by imprisonment by the Japanese, who treated captured prisoners much more harshly than the Germans.

"Blood Chit, requesting protection and safe conduct to downed airmen in multiple languages. Courtesy Kay Morris.
In July, 1945, the 494th moved to the island of Okinawa for attacks on the Japanese heartland. His first really scary experience was over the Japanese island of Kyushu, the first time he encountered flak. The second was a particularly memorable mission on July 28, 1945 to bomb the Japanese battleship ‘Haruna’.

Battleship Haruna (class Kongo) under air attack. Kure, July 28, 1945. (Source: www.ww2incolor.com/japan/haruna.html)

“We used two-thousand-pound bombs on that mission,” he says. “That was the biggest bomb we ever used in the war. We were over the harbor at Kure, and one of our bombs got hung up in the bomb bay. The nose dropped far enough to arm it, and the navigator and flight engineer went back into the bomb bay—without parachutes—and physically kicked the bomb out. It was said that only one-sixty-fourth of an inch of movement could detonate one of those bombs, and it was one of the two times overseas that I was really, really scared.” After jettisoning the bomb, the manual release stuck the bomb bay doors open, and Morris’s plane began to lag behind. Finally, the crew was able to close the bomb bay doors and catch up. In addition to the hung-up bomb, the group history notes that two B-24s were lost and that “Jap gunners threw up the most terrific curtain of flak ever experienced by our crews. Participating personnel declared that was one mission they would not soon forget.” (Unit History)
Fighter escort was ‘iffy’ at best, according to Morris. P-51 Mustang fighters occasionally failed to show up, even when the ‘Kates’—Japanese fighters—did.

“We had to worry about flak from time to time,” Morris remembers. “And the Jap Air Force would come up and visit to see us once in a while.” On one mission, the pilot behind Morris’s plane was killed by a Japanese ‘Tony’ fighter. The co-pilot managed to bring the plane home. “Missions from Okinawa could be eight hundred miles,” says Morris. “The navigator was a very important guy when flying that far over open water. We normally flew at about 11,000 feet all the way to and from the targets—quite a bit lower than the bombers in Europe—and bombed from that altitude as well. We didn’t go on oxygen unless we were at fifteen thousand feet.” He remembers that the temperature in the planes was quite nice, compared to the heat on the ground back at the base.

With all the missions over water, I was curious as to whether Morris was a good swimmer. He shook his head, and told me he preferred to rely on the Mae West life jacket. In fact, he recalled an incident in training where the crew was pushed from a dinghy to simulate a ditching. Another crewman also couldn’t swim, and grabbed at Morris, who promptly pushed him away. Both men passed.

“We were getting ready to invade Japan. And it would have been bloody, for the United States and Japan. We were very grateful when President Truman dropped the bomb in August,” says Morris. Unfortunately, several 494th crews who had been previously shot down, were prisoners of war at the Military Police Barracks at Hiroshima, Japan on August 6th, 1945, when the A-bomb was dropped on the city. Charley Wilcox writes that “the families [of the twelve POW crewmen] from the aircrafts ‘Taloa’ and ‘Lonesome Lady’ were told their loved ones were ‘missing in action’ and some 3 years later were told they were ‘killed in action’ and never told they died from friendly fire—the A-Bomb.”

The war was over, much to the relief of the men of the 494th. But they were not going home just yet. On September 26, 1945, Okinawa was hit by a serious typhoon that destroyed much of the base and cut off the island from civilization for several days. “The storm was so strong that it bent the flagpole at Headquarters a perfect ninety degrees about six to eight feet up, with no wrinkle in the tube,” says Morris. Miraculously, Morris’s tent did not blow down during the typhoon, though many tents did and the base was wrecked.

Morris’s photos of the typhoon damage at his base(Courtesy Kay Morris)
Finally, in December 1945, Morris was sent home. He went back to BYU, and got married in January of 1946. He’d brought a parachute back with him, and the family used the silk fabric to make a wedding dress for his bride.
A news article from the Rigby, Idaho paper about the parachute-silk wedding dress. (Courtesy Kay Morris)
After finishing school, he worked for a few years before joining the 116th Army National Guard in Idaho as a liaison pilot. He was serving with the Idaho Falls unit when it was called up to go to Korea. However, as a surplus pilot, he ended up in Germany instead. He was there for three years, his main duty was to fly the commander of the 11th Engineer Group around Germany to inspect bridge sites in the early days of the Cold War.
(Source: http://www.aviation.army.mil/aircraft/h-13_oh-13.jpg)

He then went to San Francisco, California, and flew the Bell H-13 helicopter—one of the U.S. military’s first-- in support of the 30th Topo Battalion, which spent the summer making a thorough mapping survey of the territory of Alaska. While there, he was promoted to Captain.
Morris followed that with a stint at the Army Aviation School at Fort Rucker, Alabama as an instrument flying teacher. While he was stationed there, his daughter Marcia remembers going to the parades on base as a favorite activity. Someone came up with the idea of putting square dance costumes on the H-13s—shirt and tie for the ‘boys’, skirts for the ‘girls’—and the chopper pilots would then ‘square-dance’ over the parade ground, to the delight of all in attendance. This activity was cancelled after a few years due to safety concerns.

Morris and family were then off to Iran, where he supported construction efforts for the Shah of Iran’s airfields and other projects.

Morris lives in the same house he bought back in the Sixties, and his memories are safely stowed in the parachute-silk scrapbook and several others. A shadow box on the wall displays his many military decorations. The movie-star-handsome young bomber pilot is older and has less spring in his step, but Kay Morris still lights up when remembering the days, so many years ago, when he flew the unfriendly skies over the Pacific in World War Two.

More on Yesterday's Story

L-R: Eighth Air Force flag;Photo album filled with interesting photos, none of which are captioned; lapel pin;classified pilot information file; Brooks Field, Texas Aircraft Identification book (also restricted); 1 Jan. 1944 Instrument Flying Techniques in Weather manual; Instrument Flying handbook, 339th Fighter Group 1987 San Diego Reunion Banquet Program.

Yesterday I wrote about running across an estate sale in Idaho Falls where the possessions of a former 8th Air Force P-51 Mustang pilot of the 339th Fighter Group were being sold along with everything else in the house that the man and his wife had lived in for over forty years. It was a sad experience, but I did try to find everything related to this man's WWII flight experience and buy it so it can be preserved.

Photos, a single pilot lapel pin, an Eighth Air Force flag, and some old training manuals were all that were left to testify to the distinguished record of this airman.

Research on this individual shows him to have gotten two kills in combat during 1944, and that he reached the rank of captain. I am adding some photos of the priceless pieces of this man's war experiences today.

Photos taken at San Antonio, Texas during pilot training. These are all aerial shots taken from the aircraft.

Another Great WWII Bomber Blog and New Book by South Carolina Writer

A few weeks ago I came in contact with a gentleman by the name of James Hammond, a journalist in South Carolina who recently published a book about his pilot father's time in the 95th Bomb Group in England in 1944. The book is called Tom's War, and I just received my copy yesterday and will dig into it with gusto this evening.

Jim also has a good blog at this address: http://jamesthammond.blogspot.com/

He covers stories about World War Two airmen, same as me, and his stories are interesting and unique. I highly recommend readers check out Jim's new blog and his book, which I will review after finishing it.

Check the book out on Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/Toms-War-Flying-Eighth-Europe/dp/0595415393/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7258335-3060614?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187400755&sr=8-1

World War Two Glider Pilots--A Rare Breed

American and Allied glider pilots did much to help win the war in Europe. Their fragile planes, towed behind C-47s or other powered aircraft, were responsible for putting large numbers of infantry troops on the ground during major assaults. Pulled behind their tow-planes, these pilots often found themselves released early or off-course, often under fire, and had to put down wherever they could find an open space. Landings were dangerous and frequently fatal.

This Horsa glider crashed in France on D-Day, killing its pilot and passengers.

The following is quoted from the website of the World War Two Glider Pilots' Assocation (website at http://www.ww2gp.org/index.htm)

This is an excellent website and you could easily spend a few hours here learning about the bravery of the glider crews.

"American glider pilots, along with airborne forces, spearheaded all the major invasions, landing behind enemy lines in their unarmed gliders in Sicily, Normandy, Southern France, Holland, Bastogne, Rhine Crossing, Luzon in the Philippines, and Burma.

Gee....sounds like fun to me! Where do I sign up?

One veteran American glider pilot painted a vivid picture of the stark terror they experienced. "Imagine", he said, "flying a motorless, fabric-covered CG-4A glider, violently bouncing and jerking on a 11/16 inch thick nylon rope 350 feet back of the C-47 tow plane. You see the nervous glider infantrymen behind you, some vomiting, many in prayer, as you hedge-hop along at tree-top level instinctively jumping up in your seat every time you hear bullets and flak tearing through the glider. You try not to think about the explosives aboard. It's like flying a stick of dynamite through the gates of Hell."

A Waco glider underway, its tow-line visible to the left.

After D-Day, Allied forces attempted to recover as many of the gliders as they could. Here, a C-47 snatches the first glider to be picked up in France and returned for future use.

A museum mock-up of the interior of a Waco glider.

There were only about 6,000 American military glider pilots, all volunteers. They proudly wore the silver wings with the letter "G" superimposed on them. The brash, high-spirited pilots were not a bit bashful about letting everyone know that the "G" stood for "Guts".

American glider pilots were scheduled for "Operation Eclipse", the Allied airborne offensive planned to capture Berlin. But, the glory went, through political default, to Russian ground forces. They were spared an invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima.
They suffered heavy casualties and their ranks have thinned through the years until now only about 1,400 are banded together in The National World War II Gliders Pilots Association with its headquarters at 21 Phyllis Road, Freehold NJ 07728. They are a vanishing breed. There will be no future generations of American military glider pilots. The Defense Department ended the military glider pilot program in 1952.

World War II Glider Pilots; none had ever been before and probably none will ever be again; a hybrid breed like jackasses with no need to reproduce themselves; definitely one of a kind understood only by themselves and some completely beyond understanding. A few more years and military glider pilots will be an extinct species remembered by few. But they did exist and were involved in some mighty important and exciting military actions in WWII. "

A salute to the brave glider crews of World War Two, and thank you for doing the tough job.

"Ordinary Hero" Eddie Martens Makes a Crucial Decision Over London, 1943

In the summer of 1943, Lt. Edwin W. 'Eddie' Martens, had just taken off as the pilot of a B-17 bomber from his base at Podington, England. The 92nd Bomb Group's Podington base was northwest of London, and as Martens' plane, 'Berlin Special' began to climb to altitude, the bomb-laden plane suddenly caught fire.

Martens ordered the crew to bail out and prepared to do the same, envisioning the violent explosion that was imminent aboard the plane. However, as he prepared to jump, he noticed that the plane was flying directly over London. Recalling stories of burning planes crashing in London and killing innocent people on the ground, Martens' fought his way through blinding smoke and heat to reach the fire and beat out the flames. He then managed to land the plane safely at a nearby airfield, sparing the people of London.

Martens flew thirty missions over Germany, and after the war returned to his Nebraska farm, where he built an airstrip, restored planes, and taught flying.

Martens died June 10, 2007 at the age of 86.

The only photo I could find of Eddie Martens on the web shows him with one of his restored aircraft. Martens became a civilian instructor after the war and opened Martens Air Service in Grant, Nebraska. He restored and rebuilt old airplanes, and built new ones. He helped found the Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 562, serving several years as president and vice-president. As a regular at local fly-ins, he won several awards for his work on a Waco UPF-7 that he rebuilt from a wreck.

A Special Day for Bob Cozens and Wife Pat

I heard from 95th BG pilot Robert 'Bob' Cozens today that this is the 65th anniversary of receiving his pilot's wings, and also the 65th anniversary of the day he married his lovely wife Pat, for whom his aircraft, Patsy Ann III, was named.

Bob has an incredible story, having been one of the original airmen of the 95th Bomb Group. Many of the early flyers in this group perished in the spring, summer, and fall of 1943.

To read his story, click this link http://www.goldengatewing.org/proptalk/speaker.cfm?ID=115

Leave Bob and Pat a message here and I'll make sure they get it.

High Flight--A Great Air War Poem

High Flight


Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .


Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew
—And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.


— John Gillespie Magee, Jr


John Gillespie Magee, Jr., was born in Shanghai, China, in 1922 to an English mother and a Scotch-Irish-American father, He was 18 years old when he entered flight training. Within the year, he was sent to England and posted to the newly formed No 412 Fighter Squadron, RCAF, which was activated at Digby, England, on 30 June 1941. He was qualified on and flew the Supermarine Spitfire.

Flying fighter sweeps over France and air defense over England against the German Luftwaffe, he rose to the rank of Pilot Officer.

On 3 September 1941, Magee flew a high altitude (30,000 feet) test flight in a newer model of the Spitfire V. As he orbited and climbed upward, he was struck with the inspiration of a poem — "To touch the face of God."


Once back on the ground, he wrote a letter to his parents. In it he commented, "I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed." On the back of the letter, he jotted down his poem, 'High Flight'.


Just three months later, on 11 December 1941 (and only three days after the US entered the war), Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., was killed. The Spitfire V he was flying, VZ-H, collided with an Oxford Trainer from Cranwell Airfield flown by one Ernest Aubrey. The mid-air happened over the village of Roxholm which lies between RAF Cranwell and RAF Digby, in the county of Lincolnshire at about 400 feet AGL at 11:30. John was descending in the clouds. At the enquiry a farmer testified that he saw the Spitfire pilot struggle to push back the canopy. The pilot, he said, finally stood up to jump from the plane. John, however, was too close to the ground for his parachute to open. He died instantly. He was 19 years old.

Read more about Magee and his poem at http://www.skygod.com/quotes/highflight.html

The poem was made famous by President Ronald Reagan. Speaking at the memorial service for the Challenger Space Shuttle astronauts, Reagan said:

"We shall never forget them nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their mission and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God."

Herb Alf and Petals of Fire

Geri Morris, Herb Alf, and Rob Morris in Roseburg, Oregon, c. 2003. Geri and Herb are holding some of Herb's original notes he took as a POW in a German prison camp. These notes formed the nucleus of his World War Two novel Petals of Fire. He wrote on both sides of sheets of toilet paper, and hid the work in a secret compartment in his wallet. Herb was one of the only survivors on his B-17 Flying Fortress after it took a direct hit and exploded. He then survived prison camp hardships and a forced march across Germany in 1945.

Today's recommended book is 100th Bomb Group pilot and POW Herbert Alf's Petals of Fire. Herb conceived and wrote this book over a fifty-year span. He began it as a prisoner of war in Germany, writing on BOTH sides of sheets of toilet paper, which he stored in a 'secret compartment' in a dime store wallet. The Germans never found it. In 1999, Petals of Fire was published in a limited quantity of 2,000 books. It is almost impossible to find a copy anymore, but anyone wishing to read it, get in touch with me about possibly borrowing mine. It is a historical novel in which Herb tried to cover all aspects of strategic aerial bombing.

I had the good fortune to get to know Herb quite well while writing my own book. We had several very enjoyable days together at his home in Roseberg, Oregon with Herb and his wife Sylvia.

Herb passed away a few years ago and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was an artist, a sculptor, an educator and one of the finest men I've ever met. His book is must reading for any air war historian or 100th Bomb Group member, especially anyone interested in the POW experience.

One of the only known photos of Herb as a pilot, taken when he was in flight training Stateside. Enlarged and edited for clarity and color by R. Morris

Friday's Mystery Flier

Congratulations to Richard and Les for identifying Clark Gable as the first mystery flier.

After I dropped the hint that yesterday's mystery flier (seated in the cockpit of his aircraft in a previous post) became famous 'in another FIELD' (That field being Boston's Green Monster), Les figured out it was Red Sox great Ted Williams.

So today's question---Who is the man pictured in this post at center with his crew? He went on to become very famous in another field, and is still alive.