I'm talking about a period of time before and during WWII, up to and through the 50s. Modern educational methods had not yet taken hold, and the public schools still educated young people. I ended up with a ninth grade education, came right off the farm and became a heavy bomber pilot in the US Army Air Corps (how I got in the U S. Army Air Corps is another story to be told later). At Douglas, Az. Army Air Force Base in August of 1943, they put the Second Lieutenant's bars on my shirt collar and shoulders. I was a commissioned officer and a gentleman according to the standards off the US Army. I was also a good candidate for a POW or KIA tag after my name on some unknown list in the future. It was inevitable that I was bound for a foreign shore to fight the enemy, Germany or Japan, and no matter how I schemed, malingered, vacillated, or just plain screwed off, my destiny was assured. I was an Old Plow Boy, and 1 was headed for Combat.

After I got my 2nd Lt.'s bars and wings, they gave me a 10 day leave, and I reported to Roswell Army Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico for transition into the B-I 7, The Flying Fortress. She was loaded with gun turrets, radios, switches and dials, and huge gasoline tanks. I could imagine when you loaded this thing with 2800 gallons of high octane gasoline, thousands of rounds of 50 caliber machine gun bullets, and five thousand pounds of high explosive bombs, and you were setting in the pilot's seat (which is where I'd be setting) your ass was in great danger. It looked to me like a risky, dangerous business, and I asked if I could be transferred to cooking school. However, they said there was more applications from pilots than there were openings.

I finished up at Roswell, learned to fly that big Flying Fortress (I never did learn to start the engines, but that’s another story), and was sent to Salt Lake City to pick up a crew. They were all extremely young men who looked at me with questioning eyes, “Can that stupid looking Plow Boy fly that big Flying Fortress?" I did my best to look professional and to assure them that I was a competent pilot, and no longer a corn picker. To this day I wonder if I succeeded.

We boarded a troop train in Salt Lake City, and meandered down through Colorado to the little town of Dalhart, Texas. Dalhart is in the panhandle of Texas, and is flat prairie grass lands with some big ranches, little towns, and blizzards like I had never seen before. In the cowboy books I had read as a kid, the cowboys had dreaded the blue northers, and I can understand why. There were a thousand pictures with the cowboy in the wind-driven snow with a calf draped over the saddle. I came to dread that winter in Dalhart, the snow blowing and the howling wind. We were housed in primitive Quonset huts with a pot-bellied stove that burned wood or coal. It was tough getting up in the early morning and starting a fire, especially if the flap of your long winter underwear had accidentally unbuttoned in the restless nightmare (usually B-17s crashing in flames with the pilot still strapped in the seat) filled sleep. There was no let up in the training. The air war in Europe was heating up and the 8th Air Force had lost 60 bombers on one day in October. It was hailed as a great victory for the U.S. Army Air Forces, but the requests to transfer to cooking school went up dramatically among the future combat pilots.

We were now a combat crew. We were through with training, ready to go and fight the Hun. I can't say we were rearin' to go, but we were on our way. They issued us a new airplane, jungle packs, and sent us on our way from Kearney, Nebraska. We were to fly from Kearney to Manchester, N.H., to Goose Bay, Labrador, Iceland, Scotland, and then England. It was a sweat flying over the forbidding, wind whipped Atlantic Ocean; looking down from 20,000 feet it looked lik bone chilling cold, and certain death to fall into its clutches

We were assigned to the 384th Bombardment Group, 545th Squadron, at Grafton Underwood, England. We were a new crew, the first one into this squadron in some time and no one went out of their way to welcome us. I flew a couple of missions as a co-pilot, and on our first mission as a crew, all of the old crews in our squadron were shot down. They brought in three crews with experience (10 missions or more) and three new crews to fill out the squadron. Two weeks later our squadron lost the three experienced crews, including the Squadron Commander, Captain Langlois, and I was the most experienced pilot in the Squadron with six missions.

One of the tactics used by the German fighter pilots against heavy bombers was mind-blowing and murderous. Our crews considered it unsportsmanlike and down right dirty. We had seen several B-17s go down from this dastardly maneuver and had been thinking and talking about ways to sting the Hun when he tried it on us. The German fighter would circle the formation paying particular attention to the ball turret gunners. They were hoping to find a plane with the turret inoperative, out of ammunition, or maybe with the gunner wounded and out of the turret. Finding his prey with an inoperative turret, the Hun would snake his way up under the wounded B-17, pull up sharply, hanging the fighter on the prop, and pour deadly 20mm fire into the unprotected belly. When the B-17 blew up, the fighter would fall off and dive straight down. The Germans called it “Der Unterbelly Caper".

This incensed our crew, and we scratched our heads trying to come up with a method that would protect the underbelly even though the ball turret was inoperative. We had ideas about dropping a large hook attached to a cable, and try to snare the fighter. We thought about dropping chains into the prop, but nobody would volunteer to stand on the bomb bay catwalk and drop the chains at the right time. It was difficult to get anyone to stand in the frigid cold bomb bay with the doors open, the wind and air stream shrieking and howling like a wounded banshee. Especially at 20,000 or 25,000 feet, then it was downright terrorizing with the bomb bay doors open. One crewman suggested we drop used engine oil on the fighter thereby fouling up his windshield, and if he couldn't see he couldn't fire, but how do we get the stuff on the Hun's airplane?

The latter suggestion straightened out our thinking, and we came up with the jellied gasoline idea. It was known at that time that oil-drilling mud (Bentonite) would gel gasoline. Could we rig up a five-gallon can of jellied gasoline, hinged in the bomb bay with a bailing wire running into the cockpit so the pilot could dump the can on command? The ball turret gunner could fire into the gob of jellied gasoline with 50-caliber tracer ammunition, and it would burn the fighter just before he started shooting. It was a bodacious idea; it was doable and we were setting around congratulating ourselves for a great idea.

Our first test came on a mission to Berlin, May 7, 1944. The weather was marginal, but we got through to the target and dropped our bombs. The five-gallon can rested in the bomb bay undisturbed, but not for long. Several Me-109s came sniffing around the formation so we told the ball turret gunner to track the fighters but not to fire. Sure enough one of the fighters started ducking in and out to see if the ball turret gunner was going to shoot at him. We held off until suddenly he was below us pulling up to hang on his prop. When the gunner yelled "Now!”, I pulled the wire and the jellied gasoline went out. In one big gob. The slipstream tore the gob apart, but some of it hit the fighter’s windshield, and he was startled by the mass coming at him. He fell into a dive without firing. We were disappointed by our lack of success, but not discouraged. We increased the Bentonite on the next try, and put in a quart of sorghum that my Grandmother had sent me. The results out of a five-gallon can were again unsuccessful, and we came back from Saarbrucken; Germany on May 11, 1944, a mighty unhappy crew. We had managed to set this gob on fire, but it was so scattered that it did no harm to the fighter. It scared the hell out of the pilot of the fighter; he thought the B-17 had exploded and was coming down on him.

Now then, here's where American ingenuity comes into the picture. This is what I was talking about at the beginning of this article. A young man, hardly 20 years old, and one of the waist gunners, (we'll call him Verlin), came to me, and said he had an idea about dropping the gobs of jellied gasoline. He told me he was hesitant to make the suggestion for fear the rest of the crew would laugh at him.

“I think I've figured out a way to drop that jellied gasoline in one big gob," be said, "but I'm afraid everyone in the crew will laugh."

"Well, what the hell, if it's a good idea we'll try it. We sure need to improve on that five-gallon can," I replied.

"Well, I got the idea setting on the crapper," he hesitated.

"Go on," I urged.

"When I flushed the stool I noticed that the water rushed out of the tank into the bowl, and it swirled and fell out of the bowl in a mass. If we could rig up a toilet stool in the bomb bay, close to the bottom of the plane, it would fall in a gob. In addition, if we could drop it slightly before the fighter pulled up the gob would travel with the speed of our plane, and fall in a curve. Don't you see, Sir, it would be just like a bomb falling out of the bomb bay only our target would be closer." He was animated and his face was flushed with excitement. "If our mixture was just right the gob would spread like a blanket, and engulf the whole fighter plane."

I was excited, as dumb as it sounded, the logic behind the idea had merit. It warranted a trial run. I told him to get the rest of the crew and start hunting up a toilet stool and tank. My actual orders to him were, “Find a stool, and I won't ask any questions."

I went to work with a five-gallon can mixing the gasoline and the Bentonite, until the mixture was right, and then added another quart of my Grandma's sorghum. We put the sorghum in the mixture to make it sticky, and by the time I had stirred all that sorghum in our mixture was fluid but sticky. We thought about mixing in a quart of peanut butter, but that would have made it so thick and sticky it wouldn't flush. We made copious notes of our mixture so we could duplicate it.

By this time the crew had returned with a toilet stool complete with a tank. They had thoughtfully covered it with a canvas tarp. I really wasn't anxious to have the crew chiefs know what we were doing to their airplane. I certainly didn't want the other crews knowing and damn sure didn't want the commanding officer to know. He probably would have taken a dim view of our idea. While we were mounting the toilet in the bomb bay my crew started calling me Captain Sticky; that name stuck to me for some time.

After we had the toilet mounted, and the bailing wire was threaded to the cockpit, we notified the crew chief what we had done, and asked him to keep quiet about it. Because I was the senior pilot in the squadron, he said it was OK, and was anxious to know how it worked. After a while he started calling me Captain Sticky.

The big day for the test came on May 13, 1944; on a mission to Stettin, Germany. Stettin was north of Berlin, and was a long drawn out mission with hours spent over enemy territory. We were not going over the North Sea, across Denmark then down to Stettin. The line on the map showed us going straight across Germany, right through the fighters and the flak. With that much time, probably about 8 hours, spent over enemy territory we were bound to run into fighters, and we were ready. There was five gallons of jellied gasoline, buttressed with a quart of my Grandma's sorghum, in the toilet tank, with the lid tied down so it wouldn't flop off in evasive action. The bailing wire was rigged from the flush valve to the cockpit on the pilot's side. We even tied a red rag to the wire loop in the cockpit so the pilot could find it in a hurry. We were ready. It was a go.

Our Group put up 18 airplanes, and the take off and forming into Group formation was uneventful. We got into Wing formation and struck out across France in pretty tight formation. As the mission progressed and the pilots got tired the formation tended to scatter or open up, and our position, number 5 in the low squadron of the low group, put us the lowest B-17 on the left side of the 56-ship Combat Wing. We were in an ideal position to test our theory, and the ammunition was ready and waiting.

Over Denmark we saw the first unfriendly fighters. They flew past us, circled ahead and made a half-hearted pass from head on. They disappeared behind us, probably to attack another wing, but five fighters continued to trail us looking for an opening to shoot somebody down. We had pulled our formation together, and they finally left us.

After dropping the bombs and turning north for our return we again became complacent. It was a beautiful sunny day, there was a lower overcast, and we were flying above the clouds; no fighters; and no flak. Everyone tended to relax, if relaxing is possible in a combat situation 500 miles into enemy territory.

The unexpected happened when two Me-109s came up through the clouds, and in a climbing position shot down two B-17s in our group. Lt. Thomas R Frances in plane 42-97404 SU-L (544th Squadron) with one crewman ki1led in action, and nine prisoners of-war. Lt. Charles W. Baker was the pilot in the second B-17, 43-102548 with 3 killed in action and 7 prisoners.

B-17 43-97414 Crew:
Pilot: 2nd Lt.Thomas R Francis – KIA
Co-Pilot: 2nd Lt. Maurice S. Mahoney – POW
Navigator: First Officer Herbert (NMI) Polansky – POW
Bombardier: 2nd Lt. Raymond E. Bowkley – POW
Top Turrett: S/Sgt. A. F. Brannigan – POW
Radio Operator: S/Sgt. C W Barnum – POW
Ball Turrett: Sgt. William J.J. Fiory – POW
Left Waist: Sgt. Joseph H. Palladino – POW
Right Waist: Sgt. Joseph (NMI) Petrillo – POW
Tail Gunner: Sgt. W. G. Zordel – POW

The pilot, 2nd Lt. Thomas R. Francis, probably went to his death, holding the airplane in a steady position so his crew could jump, and he stayed a few seconds longer than he should have. He probably wanted to make sure they were all out. I mention his name here because the name should be remembered.

B-17 SO-M (547th Squadron) Crew:
Pilot: 2nd Lt. Charles W. Baker – POW
Co-Pilot: First Officer Leonard F. Koos – POW
Navigator: 2nd Lt. Phillip L. Carlin – POW
Bombardier: 2nd Lt. William M. Shaner – POW
Top Turret: Sgt. Harry L. Gutierrez – KIA
Radio Operator: S/Sgt. William A. Sneed – POW
Ball Turret: Sgt. Carroll D. Swartzendruber – KIA
Left Waist: S/Sgt. Harry T. Hamilton – POW
Right Waist: Sgt. George (NMI) Sabo – POW
Tail Gunner: Sgt. Salvatore (NMI) Soto – KIA

In a few seconds, 4 men are dead, some of the other crewmen wounded, and the prisoners were in for almost a year of suffering in prison camps. The Generals say that it’s a small price to pay for putting the bombs on the target, but the names of Harry I. Gutierrez, Carroll D. Swartzendruber and Salvatore Soto should be enshrined in stone and remembered forever. They were brave young men and they made the ultimate sacrifice.

The Me-109s had darted up through the overcast and fired into the bellies of the B-17s sending them spiraling down trailing smoke and fire. The German fighters had ducked right back into the undercast and disappeared. I told the crew to be alert; our plane being so low in the formation was a natural prey for the fighters. They would be anxious to add to their score, and we looked like easy pickings.

We opened our bomb bay doors, alerted the ball turret gunner to point his guns down and keep his eyes open. I let the copilot fly the airplane, and reached down and grabbed hold of the bailing wire that was threaded back to the toilet stool flush valve. The whole crew was tense, and apprehensive. In about a minute, the ball turret gunner reported on the intercom, “Get ready, here comes one.”

My hand tightened on the bailing wire trigger, and regardless of the cold (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit) I was sweating. The fighter didn t have to be teased into position. He was climing, coming at our belly, when the ball turret gunner yelled “Now!”

I immediately jerked the bailing wire, and the ball turret gunner started firing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a tremendous orange flash and knew the jellied gasoline had been ignited. Looking down, I saw the German fighter with all the fabric burned off the control surfaces and the pilot wiggling the stick wondering what had happened to his control. The bombardier had a beautiful view of the pilot, and he reported there was a puzzled look on his face. As the German fighter fell off on its wing, the pilot bailed out.

The crew was excited and happy, and they all started talking on the intercom at once. I warned them to be quiet and not let down their guard; there were still German fighters in the area. We closed the bomb bay doors and moved back into formation. Being low man in the formation, it was obvious that no one else had seen our downing of the German fighter and I didn t figure we could get a confirmation. As it turned out, two different planes claimed they had shot down a German fighter, and one of them got credit for it.

The ball turret gunner told us that the jellied gasoline had come out perfectly, and he had been quick to ignite it with his tracer fire. The explosion had caused him to lose sight of the German fighter temporarily, but he also had seen the plane with its scorched skin and the fabric burned off the control surfaces. He said the control surfaces were being rapidly moved in every direction as the pilot wiggled the stick, wondering what had happened.

Back at the base, we didn't talk much about it. The crew chief of the airplane was aware of what we were doing, and a few other enlisted men were privy to our secret. After we had gotten our third enemy fighter, our crew chief painted three small toilets up under the pilot’s window. They were not prominent, but they could be seen from the ground. We were elated at our success, and were very proud of the fact that we burned off the control surfaces of the German fighters, and down they went with a puzzled pilot wiggling the stick around, wondering why he didn’t have control of the airplane. The West Pointers on the base were not aware of our success, and we thought they would probably frown at our method of delivering the lethal dose of jelliued gasoline. However the secret was getting harder and harder to contain. Most of the enlisted men on the base knew about our toilet, and thought it a pretty good joke.

In a couple of weeks we had our fifth enemy fighter down. We had five, which entitled us to call ourselves the Ace Crew, but the bloom was off the rose, and I was called to Headquarters to see the Commanding Officer. I expected a warm welcome, and congratulations, but instead I got my ass chewed out. He ordered me to take the toilet stool out of the bomb bay, and in no uncertain terms told me that I was a disgrace to the Army Air Corps Officers Corp. I was a disgrace to all the officers, who faithfully served, followed orders, used Government equipment that was issued to fight the Hun and did not embarrass the Commanding Officer. “That was my toilet your crew took. I’ve had to use the regular officers’ latrine." His face was red and his eyes were bulging. “What if the General heard about this, fighting the enemy with a toilet stool,” he shouted. “He probably would have my gawd damn eagles."

l was crestfallen, but the crew and I quickly took out the bailing wire trigger, and put the plane back in shape to fight the Hun in a more conventional manner. The tall old Colonel got his revenge. He must have been amused while he signed the order to give me the DEATH SENTENCE. He had given me an extra combat mission, (not the crew), and I few 31 instead 30 missions.

The Toilet Stool Ace, 1999

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