THE WORLD WAR II heavy bomber crew has always been a powerful symbol of the American air war against the Axis Powers. Because it invariably contained a cross section of American youth whose teamwork was a natural reflection of the larger national effort, the bomber crew was a wartime propagandist’s dream—the perfect way to depict “America at War” in microcosm. Since the number of men manning a four-engine bomber was usually large—ten is the typical number—the crew has also served as a prime vehicle for postwar novelists to make their own points about the impact of war on the human psyche. John Hersey’s The War Lover and Jim Shepard’s more recent Paper Doll are but two examples of the genre.
What was the truth behind the wartime propaganda? How much of what the novelists write is an accurate reflection of “the way it was” for the men who were actually there doing the flying and the fighting? With the help of real combat men, this book attempts to answer these questions.
The men of “Hullar’s crew” fit the “All-American Bomber Crew” ideal to perfection. They were all “average citizens” who the U.S. Army Air Forces training program, operating at full speed from early 1942 through mid-1943, brought together and began to mold into a first-class fighting team. The first eight members met in April and May of 1943 at Gowen Field, a B-17 crew training center near Boise, Idaho. Before learning how they were trained, a brief introduction to each man is in order.
The pilot and commander was Robert J. Hullar, a native of Syracuse, New York, born March 14, 1917. Known as “the Skipper,” at 26 Bob Hullar was a tall, athletic man whose outgoing, friendly personality combined with strong flying and leadership skills to make an outstanding bomber crew commander. He spent much of his boyhood in Brooklyn, attended Townsend Harris Prep School in the city, and then City College and NYU where, in 1940, he received a Second Lieutenant’s commission in the famous Seventh “Silk Stocking” Regiment of the New York National Guard. In early 1941 Hullar went on active duty with the Regiment (renumbered the 207th Anti-Aircraft Regiment) at Camp Stewart near Savannah, Georgia. In May 1942 he joined the Army Air Force, attended various flight schools, and ultimately won his pilot’s wings. April 1943 found him in Boise forming the heart of a brand new B-17 bomber crew.
Crew portrait. The men of Hullar’s crew are: Bottom row, L-R, Sgt. Merlin D. Miller, tail gunner; Sgt. Norman A. Sampson, ball turret gunner; Sgt. Charles “Pete” Fullem, left waist gunner; Sgt. Dale W. Rice, engineer; Sgt. George F. Hoyt, radioman. Top row, L-R, Sgt. Charles H. “Chuck” Marson, right waist gunner; Lt. Robert J. Hullar, pilot; Lt. Elmer L. Brown, Jr., navigator; Lt. Wilbur “Bud” Klint, copilot; and Lt. James E. “Mac” McCormick, bombardier. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Jean M. Rice.)
If the crew had a “loner,” it was the bombardier, James E. “Mac” McCormick. He was born July 10, 1919, and grew up in Holland, Michigan. McCormick was 20 years old and two years into college when his National Guard unit—the 126th Infantry, 32nd Division—was activated and shipped to Camp Livingston near Alexandria, Louisiana. Here McCormick found himself serving as a company clerk, but he soon tired of it. In 1941 he transferred into the “Ground Air Corps” and went to Keesler Field, the huge AAF training center at Biloxi, Mississippi. At Keesler, McCormick decided to become an aviation cadet. He entered the AAF training pipeline at Montgomery, Alabama, and emerged in early 1943 at Victorville, California, as a rated bombardier. He then joined the Hullar crew in Boise.
The Pilot’s Manual for the Flying Fortress strictly enjoined the novice crew commander to “Size up the man who is to be your engineer. This man is supposed to know more about the airplane you are to fly than any other member of the crew…Make him a man upon whom you can rely.” These lines reflected a strong Army Air Force view that the bomber crew’s engineer should be an enlisted “second in command.” The ideal flight engineer was supposed to know the aircraft’s nuts and bolts and be a leader to the other men. Dale W. Rice, Hullar’s engineer, fit the bill in every way.
Born in Brooklyn on December 3, 1920, Rice was a child of the Great Depression who never stopped looking on the bright side of life. As the son of a union lather (the forgotten trade of installing wooden, wire, or rock foundations for interior plaster walls and window “fancy work”), Rice’s early years were spent in Islip, Long Island, and the Queens communities of Saint Albans and Queens Village. They were hard times, but, as his elder brother Charles recalls, “We still had a great life during the Depression. In spite of our problems, we never missed a meal. There was a great amount of love in our family, and it had its effect on my brother, his outlook on life, and his feelings towards people.”
“The Skipper.” Bob Hullar as a 25-year-old 2nd Lt. with the 207th (7th N.Y.) Anti-Aircraft Regt. at Camp Stewart, Georgia, in 1941 before he transferred to the Army Air Force. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Jean J. Hullar.)
Real adversity came to Rice in 1937, when he had to leave high school at the end of his junior year to help his father and brother make ends meet. Three years later, Rice was a service station mechanic, and with the war going full blast in the summer of 1942, he opted for the Army Air Force because he wanted to become an airplane mechanic. It seemed a great way to make up for his lost education, and for a while, it looked like a good move. Rice went to Airplane Mechanics School at Keesler, but then he wound up headed for the wild blue yonder via gunnery school at Las Vegas. After further flight engineer training at the Seattle Boeing plant, he joined Hullar’s crew at Boise.
Loved for his wonderful sense of humor, easy camaraderie, and deadly ability with the top turret’s twin fifties, Dale Rice was, according to the crew’s ball turret gunner, “the one who always took responsibility for the enlisted men. He was the one who made the crew what it was.”
The ball turret gunner was Norman A. “Sammy” Sampson, a shy young man born February 5, 1921, and raised in the farming community of Mason City, Iowa. Sampson was drafted into the Army in August 1942 after three years of high school and a job in an Armour meat packing plant, and at first he didn’t realize that he would end up in the Army Air Force. Sampson was sent to Sheppard Field, Texas, where “after a lot of different tests one morning, I was called out and shipped to Radio School. It was all ‘Hurry up Air Force!’ after that.” There were 18 weeks of Radio School at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then Sampson went to Las Vegas for gunnery training. He arrived in Boise with the other men and was given the ball turret and the second radio operator’s job.
The crew’s most “gung ho” member was George F. Hoyt, the radioman. A Southerner from Brunswick, Georgia, he was born July 6, 1924, into a prosperous family that set great store in traditional values. He grew up with a fervent belief in God and country, a strong streak of romanticism, and a deeply ingrained sense of duty. After graduating in June 1942 from a private school called Glynn Academy, Hoyt had a strong desire to join the war effort; the conflict was already outside his doorstep, for this was the “happy time” of the German U-Boat force prowling close inshore along America’s virtually undefended coasts. As Hoyt recalls now, “More than once I heard the dishes in my mother’s china cabinet rattle as oil tankers exploded right off the beaches of St. Simons Island near my home.”
Hoyt had earned a Private Pilot Certificate while in high school, and he felt that the Army Air Force was the best way of striking back. He enlisted in Waycross, Georgia, on August 3, 1942. After basic training in Atlantic City, he went to Radio School in Sioux Falls, gunnery school at Las Vegas, and then on to Boise and Hullar’s crew.
Charles H. “Chuck” Marson was the crew’s practical joker and arch “character.” Born on November 11, 1920, in Mystic, Connecticut, he grew up on a family farm at Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He spent more time hunting in the woods with his rifle than he did in the classroom, and finally ran off to join the Army during his senior year of high school. He was sent to Panama, where he hacked out jungle trails. After a year, Marson “purchased his discharge” for $100 and came home to finish school. But he remained a restless sort, and after Pearl Harbor was one of countless young Americans crowding U.S. Army recruiting offices. He opted for the Army Air Force, and after basic training his shooting skills won him a place in gunnery school at Las Vegas, followed by armorer’s school in Denver. He wound up as the crew’s right waist gunner, where his thick Maine accent and rough-hewn ways made a lasting impression on everyone.
Charles “Pete” Fullem was the crew’s left waist gunner. He was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on May 31, 1921, into a large Catholic family of three boys and three girls whose parents ran a small candy store. Pete grew up in the city, where he went to St. Mary’s Parochial School and attended St. Michael’s High School, completing tenth grade. He got work in 1938 with a wallpaper company and was a factory foreman when he enlisted in August 1942. His first duty was Airplane Mechanics School at Keesler, where he completed the 20-week course in December 1942. He then was transferred to a Douglas Aircraft factory school in California, where he trained in both B-24s and A-20s. Afterwards, he was sent to the Flexible Gunnery School at Buckingham Field, Fort Myers, Florida, for a six-week aerial gunnery course. In May 1943, he joined the crew at Boise as left waist gunner and assistant engineer. Fullem is remembered as a very sociable, friendly soul who was “the most happy-go-lucky member of the crew, the one who always had a big smile and a wisecrack.”
Merlin D. Miller, the tail gunner, was classic soldier material out of the southern Indiana farm belt where the small town of Sullivan is located. Miller was born there on July 1, 1923, into a family whose breadwinner was an ex-coal miner; his father switched to farming after his grandfather was killed in the mines. As a farm boy, Miller developed an early, intimate familiarity with all kinds of firearms that served him well in hostile German skies. As he describes it, “I had a shotgun, rifle, pistol, or something like that in my hands ever since I was big enough to hold one, so shooting a gun was second nature to me, and I was a fairly decent shot.” His teenage years were a combination of farm chores and high school, enlivened by attendance at local airshows to watch airplanes he couldn’t afford a ride in. Following graduation in June 1941, Miller went to Chicago Heights, Illinois, where he worked for a roofing company. Enlistment in September 1942 came naturally: “It was almost a family tradition. My father had enlisted in the Canadian Army in World War I and several of my uncles were also in that war.” After gunnery school in Las Vegas and armament school in Denver, Merlin Miller joined Hullar’s crew in Boise and wound up as tail gunner and first armorer.
Charles “Pete” Fullem with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph and Georgianna Fullem, outside the family candy store at 4 Coles Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, during the spring of 1943. The store was the scene of much neighborhood excitement when an AP photo appeared in the press amid news of the crew’s ditching and rescue from the English Channel on September 6, 1943. This photo was taken while Pete was on leave before traveling to Boise, Idaho, to join Hullar’s crew in May 1943. Mr. Fullem died suddenly that July and Pete’s emergency leave with the family almost caused him to miss the crew’s deployment overseas. While he and his two brothers were in the military, his mother and three sisters literally “minded the store.” Note the sign in the center of the shop window, which proudly proclaims: “Answered the Call.” (Photo courtesy Mrs. Rita Dispoto, Executrix of the Estate of Joseph J. Fullem.)
George Hoyt best recalls how the crew first came together: “We met and assembled as a flight crew at Gowen Field, a first phase training base for B-17 crews, during the first week of April 1943. McCormick came to see the enlisted men first, introducing himself and informing us that we would be under Bob Hullar. At this time our copilot was a fellow named Milton Turner, who later checked out as a first pilot and got his own crew, with ‘Willie’ Klint joining us in the copilot’s seat at Walla Walla, which is where we went through second and third phase crew training.”
In the early part of first phase training there were other personnel changes as well. As Miller recalls, “Chuck Marson was originally assigned as the tail gunner, but the extreme buffeting in the tail was too much for his stomach. I had no susceptibility to motion sickness and switched places so that Marson became the right waist gunner. Our first left waist gunner also suffered from airsickness—or at least he claimed he did. After a few training flights he was grounded, and we got Pete Fullem in his place.”
The purpose of first phase training was threefold. First, the new crew had to become familiar with the Flying Fortress. Then, individual crewmember skills had to be developed. Finally, by working together, the crew began to become a team. The pace was grueling, as Hoyt recalls: “First phase training was a rough crash course. Much of the time we were flying eight hours on and eight off around the clock in old worn out B-17Es, though there were a few newer F models around. We also flew a lot of 11-hour training missions with a 400-gallon ‘self-sealing’ auxiliary gas tank in the right bomb bay. The fumes back in the radio room were strong, and several aircraft with this arrangement blew up in midair. I can remember 12 planes going down during one especially rough 14-day period.
Polishing basic flying skills was the first priority, as both pilots were still transiting from twin-engine trainers. Initially, an instructor pilot flew with the crew while, the pilots practiced “touch and go” landings. As Merlin Miller recalls, “At first, Hullar had a hard time with landings and he let the plane get away from him at times. In the back, we enlisted men placed bets about how many times the tailwheel was likely to bounce with Bob at the controls. But he soon ironed out the problem.”
George Hoyt remembers that “in this phase of training, the pilot and copilot were taught another interesting landing procedure, which was done without the rudder steering the plane. During the landing approach, they would take their feet off the rudder pedals, and using only the control column, would turn and steer by ‘goosing’ the two outboard engines. To turn left, they would advance the right outboard engine and vice versa. A complete landing with the feet off the rudder pedals was required. During landings, the tailwheel also had to be down and its swivel locked. On one occasion we landed with it unlocked, and the swivel’s mad, wild gyrations nearly vibrated our teeth out.”
Once the pilots reached a certain level of proficiency, the crew concentrated on other skills. McCormick utilized a bombing range for practice runs at 20,000 feet. George Hoyt sent out the required radio reports every half-hour in the air and practiced radio navigation with the Bendix radio compass in the nose. And the gunners shot countless .50-caliber rounds at towed target sleeves and at ground targets on a gunnery range near the Snake River. There were ground school classes too, with much emphasis on aircraft and ship identification, opportunities for the pilots to practice instrument flying in Link trainers, and training sessions for the gunners in turrets that were set up in buildings.
First phase training at Boise eventually ended and Hullar’s crew became part of a “replacement group” ordered to Walla Walla, Washington, for second and third phase training. It was here that the crew got their last two members: the navigator, Elmer Brown, and the copilot, Wilbur Klint.
Elmer L. Brown, Jr. was born on Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918, at Golconda, Illinois, but he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. In high school, Elmer excelled in science and sports, and after graduation pursued technical training. He attended engineering classes at Washington University and at Rankin Trade School in St. Louis, where he learned to design and install air conditioning and heating systems. He worked first as an air conditioning engineer and then as a draftsman with a St. Louis machinery company.
In 1941, Brown sought greater opportunities in Kansas City, Missouri, where he got a civil service job as a topographic draftsman. It was, he recalls, a happy time. “K.C. was a fun city. The popular dance was swing. On a salary of $120 a month, I had a 1940 four-door Packard and three girlfriends that I liked very much. I frequently went dancing, usually at nightclubs. I also played golf and tennis. It was a good year.” Kansas City was also the origin of Brown’s interest in aviation. He took Civil Aviation Administration courses in night school and would have enlisted in the Aviation Cadets but didn’t have the two years of college required. After Pearl Harbor, it magically became possible to qualify if one passed an exam in lieu of college. Elmer took the exam, passed, and enlisted as a cadet on January 24, 1942.
On February 23, 1942, Brown reported to Air Corps Basic Flying School at Higley Field, Arizona, where he received orders almost immediately to join Class 42-1 at Santa Ana Army Air Base, California. Looking back on his military training there, Brown recalls very well the feelings of the men who volunteered for military service just after America’s entry into the war:
“On Sunday afternoons after weekend leave, we marched around the parade grounds to the beat of a military band playing very patriotic music. This involved thousands of cadets all in step, marching in a wide formation, 16 abreast, each line maintaining as straight an alignment as humanly possible through one complicated turn after another. Awards were given to the marching division that performed best. Each cadet knew that his unit performed only as well as each and every cadet in that division. Consequently, each cadet tried very hard to be perfect. A team spirit developed. And the team was not limited to the marching division. At the sight of the American flag and the sound of that inspiring band music, it was obvious that the spirit in the air was for America.”
Brown received his primary pilot training at Rankin Aeronautical Academy in Tulare, California. It was a beautifully landscaped “country club” with bright white buildings whose interiors were always spotlessly clean and perfectly arranged, for white glove inspections could come at any time. Brown thrived in this environment and found the PT-17 Stearman primary trainer a delight to fly, but then he went on with the rest of Class 42-1 to Basic Flight Training at Lemoore Army Flying School in Lemoore, California. Here he was confronted with “the noisy, clumsy BT-13” and the check pilot who ended his pilot aspirations.
As he recalls: “There was an instructor pilot who each morning would select a cadet to check on his flying. The cadets named him ‘Capt. Maytag’ because any cadet that he selected for a check ride usually was washed out. And that happened to me.”
Brown was bitterly disappointed by this setback, and was ordered to return to Santa Ana Army Air Base. En route on July 11, 1942, he went with two other “washed out” cadets to a social at the Beverly Hills Hotel USO, and it was here that he encountered a silver lining to the black cloud on his career. By sheer coincidence her last name was Brown, and her first was Peggyann. After seeing a lot of each other, the two began to seriously consider marriage.
Elmer and Peggyann soon discovered that their personal plans took a back seat to the war effort. Elmer received orders to join Bombardier Class WC 43-1 at Roswell Army Flying School, Roswell, New Mexico. He reported there in September 1942 and the couple spent October apart considering their situation. Peggyann joined Elmer in early November, and on the 14th of the month they got married in the base chapel. The sabres of eight cadets formed an arch under which the two walked.
Elmer Brown finished bombardier school and “hit the jackpot” on January 2, 1943. “On that day I was appointed and commissioned in the Army of the United States as a Second Lieutenant in the Air Reserve, was rated as an ‘Aircraft Observer (Bombardier),’ and was ordered to active duty.” Four days later, he and 23 other new bombardiers got orders to Army Air Force Navigation School at Hondo, Texas. Elmer and Peggyann boarded a troop train with the other new officers and their wives and arrived two days later.
Wartime wedding. Elmer and Peggyann Brown wed at the base chapel of Roswell Army Flying School, Roswell, New Mexico, on November 14, 1942. (Photo courtesy Elmer L. Brown, Jr.)
At Hondo, they had to rent a room and share a bathroom with another young officer couple, like thousands of other war newlyweds. Elmer Brown completed the navigation school course on May 13, 1943, and after two weeks leave, went to Walla Walla, Washington, where Peggyann joined him for the last six weeks before his bomber crew deployed overseas.
When the pair would see each other again was anyone’s guess.
The last man to join the crew was Wilbur Klint, known variously as “Willie,” “Bud,” or “Bill.” Born on July 18, 1919, and raised in a strict Presbyterian family, Bud Klint’s childhood included six years in the farming community of Plymouth, Indiana. Klint’s home was Chicago, however, where he finished high school and graduated from Morgan Park Junior College in 1939. He then took an accounting clerk’s position in a candy factory and enlisted April 21, 1942, as a Private in the Army Air Force to avoid the draft and to pursue an early love of the air. Klint had caught the flying bug as a child much as Merlin Miller had—by watching the barnstormers who toured rural Indiana in the 1920s.
Klint’s military service began on August 19, 1942, when he boarded a troop train to an Army Air Force classification center in Nashville, Tennessee. The next two weeks were filled with physical checks, shots, and psychology tests, and on Friday, September 4th, “about one-third of the outfit was notified that they had been classified as pilots and would be shipping out the following day.” Klint was one of the lucky ones, and “if I hadn’t been in that group, I think I would have been ready to ‘go over the hill.’ Never had I been so certain, as I was then, that I wanted to be a pilot.”
Klint moved on to nine weeks of preflight training in San Antonio, Texas, followed by nine weeks of primary flight training at Fred Harmon Primary Flight Training School at Bruce Field, near Ballinger, Texas. He soloed in the PT-19 on December 1, 1942, and underwent nine weeks of basic training at Goodfellow Field, San Angelo, Texas where he mastered the more demanding BT-13, night flying, cross-country navigation, and instrument training. Multiengine training in AT-9s, 10s, and 17s followed at Blackland Army Flying School, Waco, Texas, where Klint won his wings on May 24, 1943.
Klint next drew exactly what he wanted—heavy bomber training at Ephrata, Washington. But he soon found things “severely tied up there” and after two weeks of sightseeing “the Army put an end to our ease by shipping us out—to Walla Walla, Washington. We arrived there June 22, 1943, and learned we were being assigned as copilots to crews that were entering their third and last phase. The accelerated schedule we were entering called for just 17 more days of training at Walla Walla, 10 days of staging, and arrival in England on or about July 20th. In just three weeks time, we copilots were supposed to step from a twin-engine ship of 900 horsepower, to a four-engine B-17 of 5,000 horsepower. Even today, looking back at it, I am sometimes frightened when I think how little I knew about the airplane and about emergency procedures when I went into combat.”
In second phase training the emphasis was on formation flying, and the crew flew in progressively larger formations composed of three-plane elements, six-plane squadrons, and 18-plane groups. In the third phase, mock missions and war games were the principal staple.
The chief pilot instructor at Walla Walla during both phases was Colonel Hewitt T. Wheless, one of the few B-17 pilots to escape the Japanese offensive in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor. The climax to training was a mission in which Colonel Wheless led the replacement group on a mock raid against the Boeing factory in Seattle.
As George Hoyt recalls the mission, “The group took off on a flight plan to proceed out over the Pacific climbing in a tight formation to 25,000 feet. We were then to do a 180-degree turn to head due East on an approach that would take us over one of the nation’s prime defense plants. The plan was for Lockheed P-38s and Bell P-39s to intercept us in its defense.
“Things did not go according to plan. When we got ‘X’ miles out into the Pacific, Colonel Wheless ordered the group to descend rapidly down to the deck, and our heading was changed to an East by Northeast one. We were all perplexed as we skimmed along just above the whitecaps of a choppy sea at 175 mph. When we crossed the West Coast at Vancouver, Canada, we made a 90-degree turn towards the South, followed the coast into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and flew over the water straight into Seattle. We then sliced over the roofs of the Boeing factory at smokestack level, and ‘bombed it off the map.’
“The P-38 and P-39 squadrons were completely duped! They were back on the ground, having exhausted their fuel looking for us at 25,000 feet. But some miles beyond the factory, some of them made mock passes at us, and the next morning they tried to get back at us by making mock strafing runs on the flight line while our crew was standing on the apron. They came in at over 300 mph and went below the tops of the B-17 rudders, down the line between the first and second rows of parked planes. At the end of their runs, they pulled up into chandelles and made off.”
With the “bombing” of the Boeing plant, the replacement group and the Hullar crew were almost set for their overseas deployment. Bud Klint remembers that “our new B-17 arrived in Walla Walla about July 4th. We were assigned to it and had the pleasant task of selecting a name for it. The name that we picked was Winnie the Pooh.”
On July 14, 1943, the crew began an 11-day journey overseas, proceeding by way of Kearney, Nebraska; Syracuse, New York; Bangor, Maine; and Gander Lake, Newfoundland, en route to Prestwick, Scotland.
They were headed for the European Theatre of Operations, universally known as “The ETO” and regarded by all as the toughest theatre of the war for American airmen. Hullar’s crew was about to learn what it was all about.