In 1995, Pappy’s memoirs were accepted for the collection of what was then called the Center for Air Force History in Washington D.C.
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AVAILABLE IN A PDF FORMAT.
SUMMARY: Pappy served in the Fifteenth Air Force from 1943 to 1945. His group was first based in Morocco. His plane was shot down during a raid on Ploesti, and he and his crew were picked up by a group of chetnik guerrillas. Weeks later, he was part of a consolidated group of more than 200 downed airmen who were picked up by the OSS.
SERGEANT VITUS “PAPPY” CRANDALL
TRANSCRIPT OF TAPED RECOLLECTIONS OF MY MILITARY SERVICE IN THE AIR FORCE DURING WORLD WAR TWO
DECEMBER 10, 1985
SERVICE DATES: January 1943 to October 1945
UNIT: Fifteenth Air Force
PLANE: Consolidated B-24 Liberator “Mizpah”
I just don’t know how to start this, where to begin at. Maybe I’d better begin when we left to go overseas.
We took off, all guessing where we were going to go. We had sealed orders that we couldn’t open up until we was two hours out, flying time. All of a sudden, who do we get on our radio but Axis Sally! She invited our whole group, welcomed our whole group, our colonel, half of our officers by name, and told us where we was going. Well, we all laughed about it because we figured, “How does she know when we don’t know ourselves?” Two hours later, when we opened up our sealed orders, we was going right where she told us. I think that’s when we first started to worry…
Going overseas, we were a bunch of crazy people, I guess you’d call us. We had all of our parachutes in the bomb bay, had them covered up with mail that we’d picked up to take over with us. We had liquor and stuff piled on top of them, and the only fellows that knew where the parachutes were was the pilot, and the copilot, bombardier and navigator. And then we had one waist gunner. He wore his parachute (he was afraid to take it off) and he sat in the waist between the two waist guns, and at that time we didn’t know it, but he was scared to death of flying.
So when we finally landed, the first time we’d ever landed on what they called the steel runways, we thought we’d ripped the whole bottom of the plane out! We didn’t know what happened. But after we got out, we saw that they were steel runways.
We were all pretty cocky, as young fellows would be. That night (our first night overseas), we had to sleep under the wings of our plane; we had no place to sleep. And we laid there and of course the BS’ing went on, as most fellows will do, you know, to see who can tell the biggest lie. And I happened to get in an argument with the colonel. They was talking about the horsepower that was in the engines on the plane, and finally I told him, “What do you know about it?” I said, “You never saw that plane,” I said, “till you got in the Air Force.” He wondered what my name was, and I told him.
So the next morning as we stood there and I was talking to my pilot and the rest of the crew, this colonel come up; he wanted to know who Sergeant Crandall was. I said, “That’s me, sir”; and he said, “I just wanted to see who I was arguing with last night!” I laughed at him. I said, “Well,” I said, “I still think I’m right.” And he said, “Well, we won’t go into that.” But, anyhow, that was our first night over there.
Our second night over there was a little more hectic. None of us fellows had ever seen any action, and lo and behold they strafed our airfield, the Germans did; and we scattered out and dug holes to get into. We all had our slit trenches that they had.
But that was quite a place there. We got straightened around. The first leave we got we went into Marrakesh, and I never saw anything like it in my life. They had places that was off limits. Some of the fellas sneaked off and went down in there anyhow. When they come back, why, somebody’d knocked them out, stole all their clothes, stole everything. They’d steal anything there was. And they had a pretty good racket going. You’d see some little guy, oh, probably twelve, thirteen years old; fighting some big kid eighteen, nineteen, twenty. And of course, you know how we are about kids; we jumped in to separate them. They’d climb all over us, then they’d take off. Well, then you’d start to reach for your wallet and stuff and it was gone. They was the slickest pick-pockets in the world.
You asked me if I had anything to do with the [Arab and Berber] natives [in Marrakesh]. Well, now, I didn’t know one native from the other, but we had some natives there that were pretty good businessmen, I think. Some of them couldn’t talk too good English, but on their left arm, above the elbow, they’d have four or five leather thongs tied around their arms with little leather bags on them, and whatever was in these bags would rattle. And so, you’d ask them what they was for; and they’d tell you, one was for being a great warrior, you’d be a great warrior if you had it; and another one would be for you’d be chief some day, and all like that. And then they had one there, if you’d ask them [what it was for] they’d clam up, they wouldn’t say nothing, and [they] looked like they was gonna be a little mad at you. They never would tell us what that other one was for. But they did have some that they was selling to all of us fellas, and they’d say, “No boom-boom, no boom-boom.” “What do you mean, no boom-boom?” “No boom-boom.” And then they’d point up at the sky and point down. In other words, if you had that on they couldn’t shoot you down. Well, we didn’t believe in that. We just bought them for souvenirs, anyhow.
But I’ll never forget our first bombing mission. They sent us on our first bombing mission, and we didn’t think much of it, we was flying high. And when we come back, why, our ground crew chief called us and he wanted to know how things went. “Why,” we told him, “nothing to it. Them guys, they can’t shoot, they can’t do nothing.” He said, “No?” He said, “Come out here and take a look.” So we walked around underneath the right wing. There was a hole in that right wing that you could of stuck your head up through. That’s how excited we were; we didn’t even know we’d been hit!
So after that, why, then the fellows they got thinking well, they still can’t get us. And everybody, I think at that time, thought that their time would never come, because we were just too good or too cocky, whichever way you want to put it.
So our next mission that we went on, I’ll never forget that. We were sitting up there and lo and behold, we got hit by anti-aircraft. And boy, something hit me in the stomach, and I swore to God that my stomach was ripped wide open. So the bombardier was right behind me, because I was flying in the nose turret. I told him, I said, “Dick!” I said, “I’m hit!” He said, “Can you hold on?” I said, “I sure can.” I could just feel the blood running. So after we landed, man, I’m gonna tell you they had the ambulance waiting when we piled out. Ha! Boy, did I take a ribbing! I had a big black and blue mark on my stomach. Piece of shrapnel went through between two of the plates in the flak vest. All it did was put a big bruise there. That flak vest really saved me, because I’m afraid that if it hadn’t been for that I’d have had a few innards hanging out, or whatever you want to call them.
So you can see I’m… I don’t know, I guess I’m not much of a talker, I don’t know just how to put things down. But then our next mission, I’ll never forget that. They had us go out after Rommel, I think the greatest general the Germans had, and we was going out and bomb these tank corps of his. Every time we got to where he was supposed to be, he just wasn’t there. He was so good about it, we’d say he buried them in the sand! I don’t know where he’d be, but he really wasn’t where he was supposed to be, according to the intelligence that we got, or the reports that we got from our Intelligence crews.
But all in all, it wasn’t too bad. Today I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the experience that I had; I wouldn’t take two million to go through it again, either! But one thing we did find out. Every time the plane went on a mission we had a briefing, and after a few missions we found out that if they said there was very little fighter action up there and a lot of anti-aircraft, we’d find it was just the opposite: there’d be more fighters and less anti-aircraft. And if they said there was more fighters and less anti-aircraft, then we’d find more anti-aircraft and less fighters! They just got things kind of balled up backwards a little bit.
But I think the roughest mission… there were two roughest missions that we ever had. We flew out of Cherinola and we hit a town, it was called Bad Vaslo, and that was rough. But the worst one, of course, was the Ploesti oil fields. But before we get to the Ploesti oil fields there was some [others]; we hit Regmilla, we hit Cassino in Italy, hit Rome; also we bombed Tunis, and each mission was different. In fact, we finally went in to Tunis, and had an air base there. We had tents to sleep in, and had the sides of the tents rolled up, and we had an area staked out, roped off; and the colonel of that field told us if any of the natives came inside the ropes to shoot at them, to scare them off. Now I don’t know why, unless it was to keep them from stealing or to keep them away from the planes. So it’s a….. Golly, I just don’t know how to say anything. Some things are kind of still muddled up in my mind. I’d thought I’d never forget a lot of things, but I guess as time goes on you get older, you do kind of forget.
Oh, while I’m thinking of it, this young fella I was telling you about sat in our plane with his parachute on all the way overseas, and he was drunk all the time. And we got overseas and I was the oldest guy on the crew. In fact, I was older than the pilot, and all of them they called me Pappy. They said, “Pappy, you go down and see the colonel, tell him we don’t want to fly with this guy.” Well, I’m not going to give you this fella’s name because, of course, probably no one would ever know who he was or anything, but he was a boy from Texas. And he was quite a big boy. And I told them guys, I said, “I’ll go down there. But,” I said, “you guys better back me up,” I said, “when the colonel talks to him.” So I went down and told the colonel.
I said, “Colonel,” I said, “we’re afraid to fly with that gentleman.” I said, “He’s drunk all the time,” I said; “but he’s a good guy,” and like that. The colonel called him down to his headquarters, and took him off and put him on the ground crew. We come back up there and we was all standing there, and he come up and he grabbed my hand and he shook it and he said, “Pappy,” he said, “I’m sure glad you went down to see that colonel.” He said, “The reason I’m drunk all the time,” he said, “is I’m scared to fly.” And he was afraid to let anybody know it. So they put him on our ground crew, and boy, he was just like a mother hen with her chicks! Now, I mean that plane had to be A-number-one as far as it could go, or brother he would really raise hob. And he was one heck of a good ground crew mechanic.
Well, then, we got a new man to take his place, and I can mention his name. His name was Georgie Pless, and he was from a little town down in Georgia. He was our first casualty. He flew in the tail turret; he got hit by a… We always thought it was a 20 mm [machine gun]; now, whether it was a 20 mm or a 50 mm we don’t know. And when we come back to the base and they pulled him out, they had to put a water hose in there and wash the turret out, that’s how bad he was hit. Well, that was our first casualty. In fact, [he was] the only casualty until after we was shot down.
Now, when we went to Ploesti, I’ll never forget the day that we got shot down. Oh, before we get into that, let’s back up a little bit. This one officer we had, like I say I won’t mention his name either. We called him, pardon my language, Chicken-shit Colonel. He would go on a mission, what we used to call milk runs, and he’d find out it was a milk run and boy he’d go and he’d tell you to eat shit. Sometimes, why, we’d get part way to the mission and they’d come out and change orders and we’d go somewhere else. Well, it just seemed like when we got an order to go to Bad Vaslo, [or] we got orders to hit Ploesti, something like that, he’d always find something wrong with his plane; he’d have to turn around and go back, so that’s how he got his name. Like I say, I won’t mention the man’s name because we all have our times of being afraid, as I have, as you’ll find out later on.
But the day that I was really scared, we went to go on a bombing mission, and they said folks, we’re going to hit Ploesti again. Now to me, that was the roughest mission I think they ever had over there. We went down to get in our plane, and they gave us a different plane. And the minute we looked at the name on that plane, we started having our doubts. Now a lot of people say oh, baloney! But the name of the plane was Mizpah, and we looked at that thing and thought it was a jinx. When we was taking training, we’d landed in a place called Mizpah; that’s where we’d lost all of our money, you know.
I don’t think that the plane had ever even been checked out as far as the guns and like that, because the head space under the guns and all that had [not been] checked. The colonel got our plane because, well, we just had a good plane, I mean we had a good crew and a good plane. So we had to fly in that [Mizpah], and our navigator had to fly with the colonel that day, so we got a new navigator, fella name of Tedder, and he was from Oklahoma. So we got in that plane and we started out, and then as you get up [off the ground] you check the guns; mine wouldn’t fire. So I told the pilot. I said, “Dick,” I said, “the head space on my guns just isn’t right.” And he said, “If any planes come in,” he said, “just keep tracking them,” he said. “Don’t let them know it.” I come to find out the tail turret guns were the same way; and the only two guns where the head space and everything was right was the waist guns. And we just thanked the good Lord that there was no firing at any fighter planes that day, because we would have been sitting ducks!
As it turned out, we was anyhow, because we hit the Ploesti oil fields, and as we were coming back we went over a little town called Sofia, and that sky was black with anti-aircraft. I mean they really clobbered us, and they clobbered us good. So we had to bail out; the skipper had them all bail out. I crawled back from the nose turret, snapped on my parachute and as I did, why I lurched in the bomb bay there and [my parachute] caught on the bomb bay latch, and [the parachute] opened up in the plane, full out. So there I was! Well, as luck would have it, we had an extra chute up by the putt-putt (which is the motor that opened the bomb bays). So I got that one on, and then I got scared to jump.
Now, I told you everybody has their time of being afraid, and I looked out and I couldn’t see nothing down there but open sky, and I was just scared to jump. And everybody was gone except the pilot, the co-pilot, and the bombardier; pardon me, the navigator. So, anyhow, I stood there; and Newton, the copilot, he said, “Come on, Pappy, jump!” I said, “No!” He said, “I said get the hell out of here!” I said, “I can’t.” Well, he hit me up alongside the head, and out I went. To this day, I don’t know how I pulled my chute cord open. Because when I went out, I was just petrified.
Well, when I pulled the chute cord, she opened up. Funny things went through my head. I looked down and I looked up, and it felt like I was going straight up in the air! And I thought, oh, I don’t have enough weight to pull the chute down; so I started bouncing up and down in the parachute. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then to me. There was a big, white fluffy cloud underneath me. When my feet hit that, I knew I was going down.
Then it just seemed like I was moving so slow. So I tried to light up a cigarette on the way down; I was going to be very nonchalant about everything. I couldn’t get the lighter to work. Then as I got down about thirty foot from the ground it looked like I was going a hundred miles an hour, and when I come down I come right down in a whole flock of sheep! Well, them sheep went one way, the shepherd went the other way, and I just covered up my head with the parachute the best I could and just let them run.
And we had always been taught, and [had] drilled into us, that the minute you hit the ground you get rid of that chute. Hide it. Because then the Germans wouldn’t have a place to start from to look for you. So, I started looking around and I found this old log; and I wadded that chute up and rolled it up as best I could, rolled that log over, and pushed the chute underneath it. And when I did, and I turned around and looked, there was a guy standing there, and he’s got a machine gun (a submachine gun) pointed right at me. And I froze. And I thought I was gonna faint right then. And he looked at me and he kept saying, “Germanski, Germanski, Germanski.” And I said, “No, Americanski, Americanski.” Well, if you’ve never been kissed on the lips by a man don’t go there, because he grabbed me and he kissed me on the lips. Man, I like to have hauled off and hit the man, fella who’d do that to another man! But that was their way of doing it, and it was the underground guerrillas of Yugoslavia; they were really good, they were the chetniks. So, like I say, I could probably go back and think of so many things, but time just kind of fades everything out.
But I spent quite a long time with these chetnik guerrillas back in the hills, and the things that we seen them do and the things they did, I don’t know whether you’d be interested in that or not. Like I say, on the bombing missions you’d hit your targets, you’d go home, get up the next day and hit another target, and you never seen anything that really happened down there. Oh, they would take pictures of it, you know, on the bombing runs; but you never seen the people or anything like that. But anyhow these were these chetnik guerrillas.
Now, I’m going to tell you a few things about what went on with them, and whether you use it or not or whether you’re interested, I don’t know. But when this fella grabbed me and like that, I just didn’t know what to do. I mean, what can you do? So, the navigator, he come running over, and he said, “Come on, Pappy!” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” And he didn’t see this fella, because this fella was standing by a tree. And I pointed and I told him, I said, “We ain’t going nowhere,” I said. “You better sit down, Tedder.”
Tedder took a look at that guy and he froze, too; so anyhow we told him we was thirsty, and he could talk broken English. I mean, some of them talked good English after we got to know them. So I was real thirsty and I kept telling him, “Water, water, water”; and “Oh, vater, vater,” he said. So he went to a little old sheep herder’s place there, pulled out this bottle and give [it to] me and I took a big slug of that; and it was water all right, it was vodka! He thought I kept saying “vodka.” And I’d never drink vodka, of course; but I sure put that one down, and I got pretty drunk on it. And we were hungry. So this sheep herder was frying some mutton in a big old pan, and oh, it was greasy and I don’t know what all. So after he got through eating, the cat jumped up and started getting in the pan; he took the cat up and put it away, and anyhow we tried to get some of that greasy mutton down, and I don’t know… I don’t want to eat no more of it, that’s for sure!
But anyhow, they took us to another place where they said there’s more Americanski’s. So I got my first ride on a horse over there; a big kind. It had a wooden saddle. And if there’s anything sorer than a wooden saddle, riding through the mountains… and that’s where we was. Man, I’m going to tell you, I’d have just as soon walked, but no way, we had to ride. And, as we found out later on, you didn’t do as you wanted to do with them people.
Now, I can’t see very good here, and I don’t know if this tape has run its course or not; so I’m going to stop and flip it over, and we’ll see what happens. No, I guess there’s still a little bit of tape on there, I can see it now after I open it up.
But I want to tell you about these chetnik guerrillas. We traveled all day. They finally got us into this one place, and they finally picked up our pilot, our co-pilot, the navigator, and myself, so there were the four of us, out of ten. We didn’t know what happened to the other six fellas at that time, but later on we found out they had been picked up by another band of underground fighters, except our little top turret gunner, Frenchy Sirois from Maine. We never knowed what happened to Frenchy. We heard he was machine-gunned on the way down in his chute; we heard he was taken prisoner of war and killed. After the war I tried to contact everybody at the addresses that the Army give us, and I never got an answer back from Frenchy Sirois. So we don’t know where Frenchy was, so we figured he was our second casualty.
But after traveling all day, we got with these other fellas. And there was Lieutenant Harper, a fella name of Bernie Dimitris, another fella named Patrick Horner, and Zeke Byfield. More about them in a few minutes.
Well, I’m back again. [We spent] our first night with this other bunch of fellas from this other crew, they had been [shot] down four days ahead of us. There’s Bernie Dimitris, he was a Russian boy, but he could talk a little of the Yugoslavian language. As time went on some of us learned a few words, but there was some of the [chetniks] that could talk pretty good English.
Now my biggest ambition is to go back to Yugoslavia, because I have some pictures of what these young fellas in this under¬ground looked like forty-some odd years ago. I’d like to go back, have them printed in the paper, and look some of them up; because if it wasn’t for them, I don’t know what a lot of downed Americans would have done over there, because they were life-savers, believe me. But the odd thing about it is the only movie stars that them people knew about… They always asked us about the movies. They knew Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, and Hoot Gibson. Their submachine gun, they called that the “Al Capone gun,” that was the biggest thing from the gangsters they knew of. And we got quite a kick out of that.
But these fellas here they would go on raids, raiding German trains, blowing up things. They wouldn’t let us go with them, and we’d probably have hindered them if we had, because they were really trained in guerrilla warfare. Very few times would they use a gun. They were the slickest people with a knife that I ever saw. They used to put a target up, and they’d get back and they’d throw knives at the target. And I tell you that nine times out of ten times that knife would stick, and it would be pretty close to the center of that target, and some of them boys were throwing from a pretty good distance. They were really sharp with a knife.
And they had no qualms about killing any¬body. In fact, on the twenty-eighth day of June of 1943, a German pilot was shot down, and they captured him. And they spread-eagled that man on the ground, tied him. They had a young lad there sixteen years old, to kill him. And the way they killed him was with a big rock. This young fella would stand up with that rock, and keep dropping it on his head until it caved his head in. Now, our pilot and this Lieutenant Harper, the pilot of this other crew, they both got sick from watching it. Some of the other fellas got sick. And they made us stand there and watch that. Now I mean, you done as they told you to do, because that was a big thing for them, to show you how they treated their enemies.
Well, today I think it would sicken me, but at that time myself and Zeke from Nebraska, we thought it was a big deal, you know, we’re really seeing something. Well, we did, all right. One of their own men, they caught him selling out to the Germans. Now this is all on the same day, June the twenty-eighth, that this all happened. They tied his hands behind his back, made him kneel down; and this sixteen year-old boy walked up, shoved a gun in his mouth and blowed the back of his head off. Now, that just about got me.
But the thing that really did [get me was when] they had two girls. They tied them back to back to a post, and this young sixteen year-old kid walked up and cut their throats, and then I think that’s when we all really got sick. But later on we was to find out that this sixteen year-old boy… The Germans had kind of set him off his rocker, and this is the story we got from these guerrillas. They tied this young fella up, made him watch as they raped his mother and his sister and then killed them. And the kid, they said, went berserk, and anything to do with a German… well, I guess he was death on all of them.
And there’s a lot of funny little things happened, too, and I can’t remember now all of them, but food was the main thing. They didn’t have too much food; but what they had, you got it, along with them. Farmers would come back in the hills with oxen [hitched] to their wagon, loaded down with manure like they was going to put it in their field. They’d come out and they’d have big loads of black bread, sitting beneath that manure, and everybody got a loaf of black bread, and that had to last you for three days. And you brushed that manure off, buddy, and you carried [that bread] with you. And you got a string of garlic to put around your neck, and you’d eat a hunk of bread and a hunk of garlic; and I guess they say [some] garlic a day will kill a cold. Well, I guess there was no colds over in that outfit!
And they had a big kettle [like you would use] to scald hogs in, and they had a bunch of dried peas, you know. And they’d throw that in there, and a bunch of red peppers; and they’d bake some of this bread up and throw it in there, and cook it like mush. And these peas would pop open, they’d be full of bugs, but whether you ate bugs or not it didn’t bother you.
Oh, it was the longest time we hadn’t had any meat. So Zeke and I, we saw a black squirrel, and we stoned it out of a tree. And we cleaned that thing, [we were] gonna cook it, and they said we was “badolla” [sp?]. In other words, we were fools. Well, they walked five kilometers and brought a doctor back with them, and we thought, now here’s a man who’s a doctor, and [he thought] we was gonna die because we ate this black squirrel! And why them people wouldn’t eat them, I don’t know. I guess they thought they was poison or something. And this one place we was at, back in those hills, [there were] rabbits galore, and they wouldn’t even eat a rabbit. We set snares and tried to catch them. And they wouldn’t even eat a rabbit. I mean, they really thought we were just crazy to eat that stuff.
So one day they said, “We’re gonna have pork chops, we’re gonna have pork chops.” And boy, they did. They brought in some pork chops. We set there eating it and Zeke says, “Hey, Pappy,” he said, “pull the meat out of the bone,” he said. He said, “Pull it out.” I pulled it out… [and there were] maggots in there. So I took it and I kind of held on to the side. The dog grabbed it and run, and I made a big show about it. And the others wanted to give me theirs and I said, “No, no,” I said, “that was my fault,” I said. “You go right ahead and eat them.” And that night, maybe it was just him and I, I don’t know. But I sure didn’t want any more pork chops for a while, that was for doggone sure!
And then our… Being a Christian today, I don’t use the stuff anymore, [but] in fact like all the young fellas, you know, we were drinking. They had two kinds of whiskey over there, Rakia and Ludarakia. And the Rakia, [if] a kid had a cold or something, they’d add sweetening and give it to the kid for the cold. And the Ludarakia, now that stuff is something else. And, pardon my language again, but the fellas used to say three drinks of that and you’d try to put a wet noodle up a wildcat’s hind end. That’s how strong it was. In fact, Zeke and I pretty near got shot at one night, because we got drunk on it and we was going around through there and we heard somebody holler, “Stolle!” [sp?] which meant, “Stop!” [in German]. We told him to blow it. We heard the rifle bullets click. When they did, we stopped, and here was this General Draza Mihalovich, he was the general of the chetniks. And we stopped, and that’s where we first met that man. And to this day, this don’t make no difference now; I still think the United States backed the wrong man when they backed Tito instead of that General Draza Mihalovich when the war was over. But that’s neither here nor there.
Now, we got into this one place, and they had a shelter, a bomb shelter I would call it, built in the side of a mountain, for King Peter. And it was really something to see; [they even had] oxygen tanks… It was really quite a fortress, built in the side of the mountain. Well, I have a… I don’t know if it was gold in the pin, or what, and I think I still have it somewhere if my two boys haven’t lost it. They took a lot of things that I brought back from overseas. But [it was] a pin that King Peter gave to each one of us. Showed the crown, King Peter the Second, and like that. And it’s just a little pin, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to keep. But then like I say, my oldest boy, I think he lost most of the stuff when he was a young man and he was running around with girls and giving everybody anything they wanted, I guess. But those old things don’t mean that much to me.
I was talking about this Rakia. Our pilot never drank, but one night we got him stinkered. He said, “Pappy, I really think we’re slipping now.” I said, “You’re all right, Skipper.” But he was sick for three days. I don’t think the man ever touched another drop the rest of his life!
But I don’t really know what to say. I mean, it’s been so many years ago, and besides, [the way] the bombing missions go, I mean one was just the same as the other; except some you had a little rougher than others. I’ve seen some of the planes come back, you don’t know how they could fly. But they would bring them back all right.
But there used to be a big rivalry, a friendly rivalry, [between the] B-17 boys and the B-24’s, which I was flying in. We was telling boys on the B-17’s that you washed out of B-24’s so they sent you to fly in B-17’s, which was like taking a kid off a bicycle and putting him on a tricycle because he didn’t know how to ride that bicycle. But it was all good rivalry.
Anyhow, they would take us from one place to another, these guerrillas, you know. And they took us in this one little town… they’d call them a town but I don’t know what you would call them, [there would be] maybe two or three houses, and a place to drink in. And we was in this one place one time when the guerrillas come in, and said the Germans were coming down the road. So everybody went out the back and through a corn field. And Zeke Byfield, I guess him and I was nuts. We stood there and looked at them out the door until they got close up, and then we went out the back door in the corn field.
Then one other time we had to cross a road, a highway; and there was a German camp right up the road where we had to cross. So one of the guerrillas would go down there and look for them, and then two would go in the corn field, then two more. And finally one time we were on a train on a narrow-gauge track, and I guess we traveled maybe six or seven miles on that. Fella come running up from the opposite way, waved us down to stop; and said a German troop train was coming the other way, so we had to get off and hit the fields again and hide there. And it was taking us to a place where there were several more Americans, so they could take us back into Allied control, back where the U.S. forces were.
This one day they had us in an old German truck; where they got the truck, I don’t know. And this guerrilla come running out from between some houses, and he went to throw a hand grenade in the back of the truck where we was, and there was thirteen of us there then. Thirteen of us in that truck, and just as luck would have it, the guerrillas riding in the back of the truck with us happened to know the guy and hollered, “No, no, no, no, no!” So he had already pulled the pin on that thing, getting ready to throw it; so he threw it over on the other side of the road and when it went off, we were just lucky that it didn’t go in the truck.
I’m getting way ahead of myself, and I’m sorry. We had this one guerrilla, his name was Nick, in fact two of them [were named Nick]. But this one, he was sort of an intern, they called him a student of medicine. And he had my address, [and] I had his. Of course, we had all their addresses. But I’d been back in the States for quite a little while and I got a letter from this young man. And most of it was wrote in Yugoslavian, so a friend of mine was a Yugoslavian fella; I took it to him and he read it for me. And then I wrote back to him a couple of times and now I don’t know, we just don’t hear from each other any more. But then this other Nick, he was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Went to school in Anaconda, Montana. And then his father worked in Pittsburgh, so they moved to Pittsburgh. And when he was sixteen, they moved back to Yugoslavia. So he always considered himself an American. And he was our guide, our main guide, going through the mountains. So every time we’d get ready to go somewhere, he’d say, “Let’s we be go you fourteen Americans”; there was thirteen of us and he’d count himself fourteen!
So anyhow, they got us to this one place where they’d got the planes in to fly us south. But… Gosh, I’m so sorry because there’s so many things and I just can’t think of them all any more. You’d think you’d never forget this stuff, but some things have just kind of slipped by, because I don’t know if I’m getting old and ain’t got a good memory or what, but anyhow I hope that this will help you. I can’t think of anything else right now, but I tell you what I will do. I’ll send you this tape and I will hang on to this other tape that you gave me, and in case I can think of anything else I will put it down and send it. And if I can’t think of anything else, I’ll see that you get your tape back. I guess when you get older, you forget a lot of things; and some things I really want to forget, to be honest with you, because some of these things I’m very ashamed of what I did, and I didn’t want people to know about it. But I hope this does help you, ma’am, I really do.
Oh, I know. When they come to fly us out of there, these guerrillas had made an airfield on top of this mountain, and I mean just about big enough for a plane to land and take off again. Some of the fellas, they’d got a radio and contacted the Allied Forces. So one night, well, they got a radio message back [that] there would be a fella landing, an OSS man. Sure enough, a plane come in there one night. First thing you know, we seen this chute and we got all excited about this guy coming in. And what they did is, they came in to double-check; to make sure, you know, it wasn’t some kind of a ruse or something like that. So he landed and he said, “Well,” he said, “tomorrow let’s call back the Allies.” Tomorrow night, these planes would come in.
Well, anyhow, when they finally got us to the first drop there was 220 of us; that’s how many they had brought to this one place, 220 people. And when [the OSS agent had] come down, he had several cartons of cigarettes with him. Now, we’d been smoking these… we called them Green Death cigarettes. They were about as big around as an old penny pencil; and doggone, they about took your breath away until you got used to them. So he come in, and he had some Camel cigarettes, and we’d got so used to them small ones, that [the Camels] looked to be as big around as our little finger, and we thought they’d been making them bigger for the boys in the service. That’s how small them other ones were, and we were so used to them.
So the next night, they had us line up in [groups of] twenty, and the minute that plane hit that runway and stopped, twenty guys run out, piled into the C-47, it turned and it kept right on a-going, took off. So there was an airfield right at the bottom of the mountain. Well, I say at the bottom; I would say it was a mile, maybe a little farther. And hell, believe it or not, there was fighter planes and bombers strafing and bombing that airfield to keep them planes on the ground so they couldn’t get to us.
All the chetniks said that they wanted different things [of ours] now. I told Nick, I said, “Yeah,” I said, “when I get on that plane,” I said, “I’ll throw you my clothes.” And so I did. When I went and jumped in the plane, I shed my jacket and stuff that he wanted, and I don’t know whether he got it or one of the other fellas got it, but I imagine he did because he was the fella that was really their leader, you know, of the guerrillas to get us out to this place.
But anyhow, they got us out, and we come back to Allied [territory]. We had to be deloused, because we had lice on us, oh man, that you wouldn’t believe! They looked as big as cockroaches, some of them. But we got deloused, and fed, some new clothes [were] given to us; some of them didn’t fit. So we finally got to go back to our airbase. We was there standing around and this young fella (I felt so sorry for him), he come up and he said, “You fellas just come in?” To which one fella name of Jones, he was quite a comedian; he said, “Yeah, we just got in today.” So this young kid, he said, “Well, you hear a lot of stories. But,” he said, “it ain’t so bad.” Jones said, “I hear it’s pretty rough over here.” “Ah,” he said, “it ain’t so bad,” he said. “You have any trouble,” he said, “just come and ask some of us old-timers.” So Jonesy said, perfect timing: “Oh,” he said, “you’re one?” “Oh, yeah,” the kid says, “I got three missions in already.” “Oh,” Jonesy said, “I don’t know,” he said, “whether I want to stick around or not!” It was so funny.
This major come up, I’ll never forget it. He said, “Well, fellas,” he said, “you about ready to go home?” Jonesy said, “Yeah,” he said. “This young fella here was just telling me things get pretty rough over here.” This fella, I guess he could have slunk into a hole, but Jonesy was really playing him like a fish. And I looked over at him (Jonesy)… “Aw,” he said. “Heck,” he said, “I’m just having some fun with the kid,” he said. Maybe some day he’ll have some fun with somebody else that way. And the other fellas was all lined up for chow, so we got to eat in the officer’s mess tent with them, you know.
But anyhow, the best part of it is, we come back. The United States won the war. This is the greatest country that God ever put on Earth. And with all the fault that we find with it, and I know everybody does; we find fault with the government, we find fault with this [and that]… But what other great country can you ever live in that you have the freedom that we have?
I’m hoping that you can make sense out of this, lady, because I sure can’t, because I just don’t know how to talk, I don’t know how to write, what I’m telling you. If I can think of anything else, I’ll put it on that other tape; and if not, I’m positive and I’m sure that I’ll send it to you. So this is old Pappy saying so long, goodbye, and God bless you.
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INDEX
Axis Sally: 1
Cassino, bombing mission: 3
Chetniks: 6-12
Douglas C 47 Skytrain: 12
German pilot, treatment by chetniks: 8
King Peter of Yugoslavia: 9
Mihalovich, General Draza: 9
Marrakesh: 2
Marrakesh, Arab and Berber natives: 2
OSS agent: 11
OSS and chetniks: 11
Ploesti, bombing mission: 4-5
Rome, bombing mission: 3
Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin: 3
Sofia, Bulgaria: 5
Tito, Marshal: 9
Tunis, bombing mission: 3
[END]
Pappy Crandall, plane and crew. Pappy is on the right end of the front row.
World War Two Remembered 