WW II aviator tells of surviving air war over Europe

Retired Air Force Col. John B. Parker spent World War II in a B-17 Flying Fortress over Europe.
Parker, 87, of Hickory, was a navigator and, although his crew was never shot down, its planes did take lots of damage. They rarely had the same plane for more than two or three missions before it would be sent away for repairs and a new plane would be assigned.
More than once, mechanics had to patch more than 300 holes in the plane when it came back from a mission. German gunfire destroyed two of the plane’s four engines — on the same side of the plane. Parker said that happened twice.
“It helps to have a good pilot,” Parker said. “We always experienced anti-aircraft fire — especially over target areas. We always attacked at daylight, and we always had an assigned tactical target.”
The anti-aircraft fire was bad, but what really worried the crew were the enemy fighter planes. “They were tenacious and certainly more accurate,” Parker said.
“Sometimes we were attacked by fighters, Messerschmitts,” Parker said. “They were the best fighters in the world. They’d been at war for five years and we’d just started.”
“I shot at lots of them, but I bet I never got one,” Parker said. “Our ball turret gunner did shoot down a few.”
Parker’s crew flew support missions during the Battle of the Bulge, a strategic battle against German troops in the mountains of Belgium near the end of the war.
“On the first mission, 2,000 B-17s and B-24s took off on 24 December 1944,” he said. “That was the first time I saw a German jet. It attacked our formation.”
Parker said he’d never seen any plane flying without a propeller and wasn’t sure what it was. Given its speed, he thought it might have been some kind of manned rocket. It was one of two jets he spotted during the war.
“I had no idea there was such a thing as a jet,” he said. “Our intel never told us.”
Parker flew 30 missions during World War II and stayed in the Air Force for 32 years. His military career began when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
“I was a freshman at Kansas State University on Pearl Harbor Day,” he said. His father, an army chaplain, was stationed about 15 miles away at Fort Reilly.
Parker had gone home to travel with his family to take his older brother to Fort Leavenworth for basic training.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor while the family was on the road. There was no radio in the car, and they didn’t know the country had been attacked.
His father stopped the car to get some fuel and the attendant spotted his uniform and asked, “What did you think about Pearl Harbor?”
The senior Parker hadn’t heard about the attack and answered, “Who’s she?”
The attendant explained. “He said, ‘The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, and they’re going to attack California any minute,” Parker said.
His father dropped Parker’s older brother off at the gate of Fort Leveanworth, drove to Kansas State University, dropped Parker off and returned to Fort Reilly.
“The next day I went down to enlist in the infantry,” Parker said.
When he went to enlist, he had to wait in line behind about 100 people eager to volunteer for the army.
After about an hour, he got to the front of the line and was told that, because he was younger than 21, he needed parental consent and his birth certificate to join.
He hitchhiked back to his parents’ house, got the necessary paperwork together and joined the army on Feb. 6, 1942. Like the other recruits, he’d signed up to serve for the duration of the war plus six months.
He went to Camp Wolters, outside of Fort Worth, Texas, for basic training. After 11 weeks, he and 99 others were sent to a brand new camp in Texas where they lived in tents as Fort Hood was being built. He stayed there for about a year-and-a-half and was promoted to sergeant.
“They wouldn’t let me go overseas, so I signed up for Aviation Cadets. I wanted to be a pilot, but they were short of navigators at the time,” Parker said. “It was OK with me. Being a navigator is a challenging job.”
It was Parker’s job to direct the airplane, to maintain his headings with radar and celestial navigation. He kept the ship’s log and was in constant communication with the pilot, keeping him informed about the plane’s fuel supplies and range.
He trained as a navigator and received his commission as a second lieutenant on April 22, 1944. Three months later, he arrived at a B-17 base in Maine.
“The B-17 had the greatest reputation — I thought it was beautiful,” Parker said. “It was about that time that the Memphis Belle made their 25 missions and toured the United States.”
B-17 school was supposed to last six months, but the army was desperate for bomb crews, so Parker’s class was rushed through in two-and-a-half months. The crew knew it would be stationed in Italy or England.
Parker’s crew was assigned a new B-17G Liberator — one of the first to be outfitted with a chin turret, which were machine guns under the nose of the plane — and flew in it for an hour-and-a-half to check its instruments.
The next day his crew flew to Gander, Newfoundland, where they spent three days before being told they were flying on to the 8th Air Force in England. They made their way at night to avoid being seen by German submarines.
When they arrived, the new plane was taken from them to be outfitted for combat with radios and to have guns installed. “They got a big kick out of that. They said, ‘You’re not getting a new plane like that. You’re a new crew. You’ll go down in about four missions,’” Parker said.
The crew was assigned to the 457th bomb group, 10 miles north of Cambridge, England, on July 22, 1944.
Parker’s pilot, Ray Hedrick, had been a pilot trainer and was far more experienced than the majority of the newly-graduated pilots on the other crews. That experience led to the designation of Parker’s group as a lead crew. They flew at the point of the 12-plane V formation squadron.
The crew was known as “Little David” after Hedrick’s son.
Parker was in the war from August 1944 through February 1945 and flew 240 combat hours.
On a typical mission day, a sergeant would walk through the round-roofed Quonset hut and wake each crewmen  scheduled to fly that day by touching him on the toe with his flashlight and saying, “Wake up, lieutenant. Go make like a hero,” Parker said.
The crew would meet for breakfast at about 4:30 a.m. and eat a meal of cold pancakes or powdered eggs. Then they’d go to the operations hangar for a mission briefing.
The colonel would walk in the room and say, “Sit down, ladies,” as he began the briefing, Parker said. “He was something like 22 to 28 years old, but he seemed old to us.”
The colonel would show the men a map of Europe with arrows on it to show the intended direction of approach to the target.
“You’re trying to confuse them (the Germans) about where you’re going,” Parker said. “You’re trying to surprise them, which didn’t usually work.”
The crewmen would synchronize their watches and put on their electrically heated suits that would plug into the plane’s electrical system. The men also had flak suits designed to help ward off the anti-aircraft fire directed at them from the ground five miles below their planes.
“I usually stood on mine,” Parker said, of his flak suit.
When the bombers were 15 minutes from their target, the bombardier would take control of the lead plane through the bomb site. When he had the plane over the target, he’d drop his 6,000 pounds of bombs and the remaining planes would follow suit.
“We bombed the Tiger tank works, synthetic fuel plants, several railroad yards and an aircraft factory assembly building,” he said. “Then we turned and returned home. We usually lost one or two planes to flak or maintenance trouble.”
Parker said his crew lost one member during the war. His bombardier, Lee Mohn, died when he flew as a replacement member of another crew that was shot down Sept. 30, 1944.
Parker credits his crew’s survival in large part to the skills of his pilot, Hedrick.
As the war drew to a close, Parker decided to make a career of the military.
“Ninety-nine percent of my compatriots got out immediately after the war, but I didn’t. I liked being in the army,” Parker said.