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Wally King, a veteran fighter pilot from World War II, shares his vivid memories of the war in this compelling episode. From his first flight in a P-47 Thunderbolt to the harrowing moment of being shot down over Germany, Wally’s stories are gripping reminders of courage and resilience. This episode not only honors his service but also gives insight into the human side of war, the bonds formed, the losses endured, and the courage required to face unthinkable situations head-on.
SPEAKER 03 :
World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and our other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s veteran stories with Kim Munson. These stories will touch your heart, inspire you and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Munson.
SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. The show comes to you because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans to Normandy, France, in recognition of the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings by the Allies in World War II. Return stateside realizing that each of these stories are so important to hear, to archive them, to broadcast them, hence America’s veteran stories. I’m thrilled to have on the line with me Wally King, a World War II veteran fighter pilot. Wally, welcome to the show. Thank you.
SPEAKER 07 :
So first question, how old are you, Wally? Thank you. I was 99 last Halloween, so I’m 99 in four months and some days, I guess.
SPEAKER 08 :
Wow. Well, I’m so honored to have you as our guest today. And let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up, Wally?
SPEAKER 11 :
I grew up in a small town in Trumbull County, Ohio, which is northeast Ohio. The town is called Cortland. Very small village, about a mile far. I went to school in the same building, all 12 grades, and graduated from high school in May of 1941 with a class of 32, 16 girls and 16 boys. All 16 boys were in military service in World War II and all 16 survived the war.
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, my gosh. That is quite a record. You grew up then also during the Depression. What could you tell our listeners about what you remember about the Depression?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, it was pretty grim. I was born in 1923, and then the Depression hit in 1929, the same year I started first grade in school. And it was, of course… Normal for me as a six-year-old, five-year-old starting school, but it was grim. It was difficult. My father was fortunate that he had a job driving a truck and delivering coal in the wintertime and delivering builder supplies in the summertime and made $25 a week in a family of seven. Wow. I had one pair of trousers to wear to school, one pair of trousers to wear to play in. That was normal. Everyone was in the same condition. It was pretty grim. In some ways, we didn’t realize how bad we had it until later years where we had more affluence, we didn’t realize how poor we were.
SPEAKER 08 :
I hear that story quite often that the people didn’t know that. So, I mean, what a time where you grew up. Now, what do you remember about when Pearl Harbor was bombed? Because you were a teenager at that time.
SPEAKER 11 :
Correct. I was out of high school. I graduated in May of 1941. And I had a girlfriend in Youngstown, Ohio, and I happened to be visiting at her house that afternoon on Sunday when we heard about Pearl Harbor. And I’ve been asked this question many times about what was my reaction. I don’t think it was a real shock because all the boys my age expected to be involved in World War II if it came. The war had already started in 1939 in Europe. And it was my real surprise that obviously that then cast a die and we knew we were all going to be in service.
SPEAKER 08 :
So you had graduated from high school in May of 1941, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was in December 1941. So when did you join the military?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, I didn’t join the military until 1942. I got a job as a clerk typist for the Erie Railroad because I had taken typing in high school, another classmate, boy classmate. I decided we had an elective. We’d take a typing class because there could not be any homework typing class. I was working for the Erie Railroad and I knew I was going to be in service. I had an older boyfriend that had been my real close companion up until fifth grade when his family moved from Cortland to Youngstown because his father had found a job and they had been living with his wife’s parents in Cortland because things were so grim and this was not uncommon during the Depression that households would be combined if the husband didn’t have a job. So he lived in Youngstown, and he was a year and a half older than I was. And he had signed up to be for pilot training in the summer of 1942 and was placed on inactive reserves. And so in September, October 1942, I decided that I would apply for pilot training. I’d always wanted to fly. I was fascinated with airplanes as a child and made many model airplanes on Saturdays and with other band motors and Christ among Sundays. I’d only been on a light plane once in all that time, and I was out walking to church when I must have been about fifth or sixth grade, and a single-engine airplane landed in a field on the way to church, and my companion, one companion, I rushed over to the field and see what this plane was all about. And the pilot said, oh, I’ll take your boat for a ride. Do you have any money? I had 50 cents for the Sunday school collection. And I think my friend had about the same. So two of us got into this one seat in a two-seated airplane. And he flew us around for about 15 minutes and landed in the field. So that was my first experience in an airplane.
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, my. And how old were you, Wally? Oh, probably 12, perhaps. Oh, my gosh. That’s quite the story. Okay, so you have applied for pilot training. So where did you go for that? You know, what happened then?
SPEAKER 11 :
Yeah, I went to the recruiting office in Warren, Ohio, which is the county seat for Trombone County. And the Army… recruiter there, I told him I wanted to apply for pilot training. He said, well, you want to join the Army? I said, no, I want to apply for pilot training. He said, well, why don’t you just sign up for the Army, and when you’re in the Army, then you can ask for pilot training. I said, no, that’s not good enough. I want to be an aviation cadet. And he said, well, you can’t do that here. You’re going to have to go to Cleveland. So I gave him the address in downtown Cleveland, and I eventually Went up there and applied for pilot training. I was asked to come back for a mental exam, and so I had no room with about 100 other aspiring pilots. After a week or so, I got the notice to come back for a physical since I had an acceptable grade in the mental part of it. And there were probably about 50 in that class. It was nearly an all-day affair. And at the end of the day, there were about 25 that successfully passed the physical. And we were sworn into the Army that afternoon as Army and put on inactive status.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, now the war is going on at this time. Inactive status, what happens after that, Wally King?
SPEAKER 11 :
The Air Corps, in anticipation of the need for many pilots, had been recruiting these future pilots and squaring them into active duty, not inactive duty, And the other branches of the service, I guess, started casting anxious eyes on this pool of healthy young men. So the Air Corps decided they’d better get them on active duty. So in January of 1943, they called virtually 40,000 future possible pilots to active duty, and they set up a temporary… Activists to keep them busy because they didn’t have training schools ready yet at that time. So I was sent to Biloxi, the accuser field, for four weeks of regular Army-based training, marching, drilling, etc., etc. Then at that four weeks, another group was coming in, so we had to vacate the accuser field. So we walked over Gulfport, Mississippi, which is 10 miles away, March, I guess you’d say. And from there, we were transported to various colleges around the country where the Air Corps had set up what they called student pilot training units. I went to Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana for ostensibly a six-month course in history and navigation and Morse code, et cetera. But as the time passed and training schools became available, they started drawing the pilots or potential pilots out of these colleges. I was in the first group to lead Streetport, Louisiana at Centenary College. to go to San Antonio, Texas, to a regular Army base for classification and pre-flight school. So that was probably about May or June of 1942.
SPEAKER 1 :
43?
SPEAKER 11 :
43, 43, yes, 1943. Okay, okay.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, from the way that you’re able to recall, it seems like it’s just yesterday. I’m talking with Wally King, a World War II veteran, and we’re learning about his life and how he ended up being a fighter pilot. And these stories come to you because of great sponsors. One of those great sponsors is Karen Levine. She is a REMAX Alliance award-winning realtor.
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Remax Realtor Karen Levine helps bring to life the individual stories of our servicemen and women. With her sponsorship of America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson, Karen honors the sacrifices of our military and is grateful for our freedom. As a member of the National Association of Realtors Board of Directors, Karen works to protect private property rights for all of us. Karen has a heart for our active duty military and veterans and is honored to help you buy or sell your home. Call Karen Levine at 303-877-7516 to help you navigate buying or selling your home. That’s 303-877-7516.
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All of Kim’s sponsors are in inclusive partnership with Kim and are not affiliated with or in partnership with KLZ or Crawford Broadcasting. If you would like to support the work of The Kim Munson Show and grow your business, contact Kim at her website, kimmunson.com. That’s kimmunson, M-O-N-S-O-N, dot com.
SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And we’re talking with Wally King, World War II fighter pilot. Before we continue the conversation, I did want to mention the USMC Memorial Foundation. It is a nonprofit that I dearly love. Paula Sarles is the president of the USMC Memorial Foundation, and she and her team are raising money for the remodel of the Marine Memorial out at 6th and Colfax in Golden. And you can certainly honor them and help them by going to usmcmemorialfoundation.org to make a contribution. Or you could also buy a brick on one of the walkways of service that they will have to honor your military service or your loved one’s military service. And again, that is at usmcmemorialfoundation.org. I’m talking with World War II veteran Wally King. He is 99 years young. Wally, May 1943, six months at college in Shreveport, Louisiana. What happens next in your life?
SPEAKER 11 :
I went by train to San Antonio, Texas, to what was called the Army Aviation Cadet Center up up above Brooks Field on the bluff. And there we spent a couple months in going through class locations to determine whether we should be trained as pilots, navigators, or bombardiers. And I think the great majority of them are trained as pilots. And then we went, after a few weeks there, we went across Main Street right through the base to pre-flight school. And pre-flight school, we were there nine and a half weeks. That was the very first structured part of pilot training. Each section was nine and a half weeks long. And then from there, we were sent to primary flying schools where we got to see an airplane and ride an airplane for the first time. And I went to… Chickasha, Oklahoma. And this primary school was actually a civilian facility that had army officers for military discipline and training, such as marching and military duty, et cetera, et cetera. But the instructors were all civilians. And there we got approximately 60 hours training in PT-19s, which are open cockpit planes. And I soloed at the end of six hours dual training. And I remember that day so well. We had been practicing landings with the instructor who sat in the front cockpit, and the students were in the back, would be in the back cockpit. And after a couple of circuits around the field, landing, he just pulled over, pulled the plane over and says, hey, Wallach, I think he probably called me, King, take it around. And so I took the taxi back to take off position and took off, and I remember turning on the base leg of the traffic pattern, and I looked up at the empty cockpit in the front and said, what am I doing up here?
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, my gosh.
SPEAKER 11 :
And so I did one landing, and he waved me to take off and keep going until As I was rolling out, and I did two more, and he pulled over and he said, well, I guess I better pull you over here before you kill yourself. Oh, my gosh. That was a big problem. Realize you’re up there and you’re yourself. Critical point, because if you didn’t solo in 10 hours, you’re likely, you’re probably going to be washed out of pilot training. Yeah, that was. As I say, I soloed after six hours of dual thing, and I didn’t feel that much pressure. But we probably lost half of the class at that point in training because we couldn’t learn that fast. And as the instructors told us, we can teach anyone to fly, but you have to learn fast. The primary was really the critical washout point because if we couldn’t learn to fly fast— you’re probably going to get washed out. So after 65 hours of training, both solo and dual, at primary school, survivors transferred to basic flying school, which was a full military operation, a military officer’s total, military discipline, et cetera. And I went to Coffeyville, Kansas, and we sure stepped up to a bigger airplane, the BT-13, which was more enclosed canopy. And we got another 65 and a half hours there, got introduction to some instrument flying, night flying, night landings, and so forth. And from there, went to advanced flying school in Eagle Pass, Texas, which is a single engine advanced training field, had flying AT-6s. And, again, that’s more instrument training and more night flying, et cetera, and successfully completed all of that training in March of 1944 and graduated in class of 44C. In March of 1944, I was commissioned second lieutenant and sent home for a week’s leave with the family.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay. Now, things are going to be ramping up, obviously. That is March 1944. D-Day is going to be June 6, 1944. You go home to see your family. What was that like? Your mother, your father, when you came home, you had a week. What was that like?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, it was a long train trip back, and I’d been married to my girlfriend that I had been visiting on Pearl Harbor Day in November. So she was with me, and we came back to Youngstown, Ohio, and Cortland, Ohio. And it was a pretty fast week. And then back, the train took back to Eagle Pass, Texas. And for an introduction to flying a real World War II fighter, which was the Curtis Wright P-40, an airplane that wasn’t nearly as modern as it could have been, but it was a good old solid airplane where we had probably 10 or 12 hours there. That was quite experience to get into the first fighter plane. And… I remember taking off this big old long-nosed P-40 out in front of me and then wondering, what am I doing up here? But then we went and transferred over to the U.S. Army’s first Air Force base in Florida for a fighter transition. And there we flew P-40s again for about another 60 hours of doing— crashing, dive-bombing, air-to-air combat, et cetera, and getting ready to go overseas. And in July, the first part of July, D-Day had occurred in June. And so in July, the pilots were put on the train in my different group up to Camp Kilmer, New York. And there we were transported to the British… ocean liner, the sister ship of the Lusitania, to go over to England, which we did unescorted. We didn’t have any escort because the ship could not currently outrun any German submarine. And we headed to Glasgow, trained down to Stone in mid-England for a few days of orientation and went up to Docks Hill near the Scottish border on the North Sea and there we were introduced to the P-51s for the first time and so the plane we were training in were some war-weary planes that they had retired from combat duty and the one I remember had one wing that was aluminum and one wing that was painted green and But we survived that and probably got 30, 40 hours in the T-51. And then we had the choice to make whether we would want to fly with the 8th Air Force, which was a strategic air force based in England, heavy bombers, doing daytime bombing, or we would be flying escort duty. or go to the 9th Air Force, which was the invasion air force, which was a strategic, or a tactical air force, doing all close ground support work, supporting the ground troops. And I remember my classmate, Larry Kuhl, said, we don’t want to fly up there at 25,000 feet. Let’s just be a lot more willing to be down doing ground work. So he promised us elected to go to the 9th Air Force, went by train down to somewhere in the south coast of England. And it just so happened that Glenn Miller and his band of the AAF were doing a concert that night with this bass. And we went to hear him and Glenn Miller’s dance appearances several times at home as a civilian. And it very well might have been his last concert because he was lost going over to Paris within the next few weeks. Anyway, they threw us over to the beachhead to A1, the first air script in France, which is behind Utah Beach. We were sitting there in Gleesh. A Mustang, for example, 363rd. fighter group and there we uh four of us together from board class 44c uh living in tents and no one seemed to be in charge and the only instructions we had so we’ll just take these 350 ones and go fly around practice so we did and uh four of us would just go fly around i flew down to on Mount St. Michelle one time just to sort of look at it because I had read a book in the fifth grade about a couple of children that got stranded out there because of high tide, and I wanted to see it there, which I did. And another interesting experience, Larry Poole’s sister was a Third Army nurse in an evacuation hospital. So he said, since we’re doing nothing else, let’s just fly it couple 51s down to Paris, which had just been liberated, and we’ll get transportation and go visit my sister. So we did that. We flew down, landed on the grass in a former flying field in Paris, got some transportation about 40 miles south, and found his sister’s unit. She was on night duty. It was dark by this time, and I jumped in the bed and said, there, you visit with your sister, and I’ll get some sleep. And my only recollection was that sometime during the night, I was shaking on the shoulder, and there was a nurse with a big needle looking at me and was going to give me an injection or something. I had to tell her, no, I’m a visitor. I’m not a patient. But the next day, she got… She got transportation for us back into Paris, and we arrived in there early afternoon, and it was just a madhouse of people still celebrating from de Gaulle’s entry into Paris with his refresh army the afternoon before. And the streets were crowded shoulder to shoulder with civilians celebrating, climbing on the vehicles and throwing flowers and and forcing Bob’s wine onto us, et cetera. It was one of the great experiences of my wartime experience was just being a part of that Zubris and the wild celebration of being liberated. Well, and… Oh, go ahead, Bob. Yes.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, I was just going to say that I don’t think that people understand that the French had been under occupation for, what, four or five years, and many of them were starving. Five years. They were starving. I mean, it was really dire situations, and so this had to be just amazing. So what happened the next day then, Wally?
SPEAKER 11 :
We got transportation. We stayed at a Red Cross hotel somewhere in Paris that night and went back to our airplanes, gas them up. We didn’t have to gas them up. We didn’t have any gas anyway. When we had landed, the field attendant ran out and said, we don’t have any gasoline. He said, we don’t need gasoline. We need a Jeep. He said, you couldn’t have a Jeep if your name was Patton. But they arranged for us to get down to a location south of Paris where Larry’s sister was working. Anyway, we flew back to A1 on the beach in St. Mary’s. I think it was the next day we were informed that they were going to disband the 363rd Fighter Group. And they said they were disbanding it because they wanted to bring in Planes with cameras in the belly and have more photo reconnaissance capability. We had the option of staying there and flying with photo reconnaissance missions or transferring to other fighter groups. And again, Larry Cole, he’d be the leader of our group, and he said, we came over as fighter pilots. Let’s stay fighter pilots. So thereupon, we got separated. Larry Cole went to the 405th fighter group, and I went to the 406th fighter group, and I didn’t see him for another 30 years. But I went to the 406th group, which was located down in Le Mans, France. I’ve just been recently liberated, flying from the temporary strip, air strip, in the Next afternoon, the operations officer took me out and sent me a Thunderbolt, B-47 Thunderbolt, my first experience. It’s a big airplane. Went through a cockpit check, and he said, now take it around. So I took off and went around. He had told me the only difference is you’ve got to carry power on your approach. This boat’s heavy, and you need to carry some power on your approach to landing. And sure enough, I came around for the first landing, and I’m It’s still a quarter of a mile from the end of the runway, and I’m 50 feet off the ground. So I had to pull up and put on the power and go around again and find a safe landing. And the next day, I flew my first combat mission in a P-47.
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, my gosh. Okay, let’s stop right there, Wally King. This is absolutely fascinating. These stories come to you because of amazing sponsors. Another one of those is mortgage specialist Lauren Levy.
SPEAKER 06 :
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SPEAKER 10 :
and that I love thee.
SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. I also want to say thank you to another sponsor of the show, and that is Hooters Restaurants. They have five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. And they have all kinds of lunch specials and happy hour specials Monday through Friday. They became sponsors of my shows because it’s a great story about freedom and capitalism and free markets. And you can find that at KimMunson.com. I’m talking with Wally King, and he is a World War II fighter pilot. And so, Wally, before we went to break, one day you do a training and some landings in a P-47 Thunderbolt, and the next day you’re in combat. Did I get that correct?
SPEAKER 11 :
That’s correct. Fortunately, the mission was called to head south from Le Mans. because the Germans were evacuating all their troops out of southern France before they got cut off. General Patton had swung around the south of Paris and was heading east, and we flew down there and looked around southern France, and we couldn’t find any military traffic, so we jettisoned our bombs into a lake unarmed and came home. So it was a It was a good thing because I was so consumed on flying this new airplane I hadn’t flown before, and it took a lot of pressure off of the entry into combat in a threatening situation.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, so how was the P-47? It’s a one-pilot fighter, correct? And what armaments did it have on it?
SPEAKER 11 :
It had eight. 50-caliber machine guns firing at a very fast rate. We carried usually a 500-pound bomb on each wing rack. We carried a 150-gallon belly tank that was disposable just to give us extra range. And later in the war, we were equipped with high-velocity aircraft rockets, which were naval shells on a four-and-a-half, five-inch naval shells on a four-and-a-half-foot rocket shaft. And those were brought over from the pooling ground in the States because the American Army really didn’t have any answer to the heavy German tanks. It had the German tank, 88 cannons. We could outgun the Shermans when there were 75-millimeter cannons. And so… They developed these high-blast aircraft rockets that had armor-piercing shells with delayed fuses to allow the shell to penetrate the 5-inch armor on a tank before it exploded. And it proved to be very successful, and I think eventually many other squadrons in the 9th Air Force were equipped with these rockets.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and I think, explain, I’m just trying to think of this. First of all, you’re just young. You’re like, what, 21, 22 probably at this age, and you’re a second lieutenant, and you train in a P-47 one day. You had your combat mission, which there was not any air-to-air training. combat on that but explain to our listeners that this isn’t with all of the the electronics that that we have in our military now i mean you’re flying the plane if you’re in combat you’re shooting shooting the guns you’re uh deciding when to let the bombs go i mean this is a pretty and navigating as well i mean you did it all correct wally correct good but the uh
SPEAKER 11 :
The B-47 Thunderbolt was a very easy airplane to fly. That makes the difference. It had been in development for many years prior to the war, and when the war broke out, it really was the only current model that could compete with the Japanese Zeros on the German 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, which was classic. Whereas the P-51 was designed late and rushed into production to be a long-distance, high-altitude escort fighter, and it suffered a lot of developmental problems any new aircraft has. And so the P-47 was much more durable. It was much larger than the P-51. It actually probably weighed twice as much. It was a huge airplane, a single-engine airplane. And our missions were dive bomb missions. And so when you dive bomb, it was a vertical pass of about 10,000 feet. You would identify the target, and then with full power, You’d go vertically as fast as you could go toward that target, release the bombs about 1,000 feet or so from the ground to give you room to recover and get up out of the light flak range at 5,000 feet with the power you’ve accumulated. And it was very effective because you could actually take out a bomb car or truck on the road or artillery position, whatever. So it was a pretty silly thing to do, you know, 10,000 feet all over on your back and come straight down as fast as you can and then go back up as fast as you can. And then when you do, you would scrape any other targets that you might find.
SPEAKER 08 :
My gosh, that seems like that’s very dangerous work to be a dive bomber. You lost some friends doing this, correct?
SPEAKER 11 :
Yes, and I think there’s something to be emphasized. I’ve heard people comment that once the D-Day invasion was successful, the war was over. And I can counter that by saying there’s a fighter squadron has about 30 pilots. And we had 29 pilots killed from D-Day until Smith Creek. So it was a hazardous duty. First of all, you had ground flak to contend with. Plus the dangers of just doing low-level strafing, hitting trees, hitting telephone poles, whatever, which could be fatal.
SPEAKER 08 :
So out of your group, there were 30 pilots and only one survived. Did I hear that correctly?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, it doesn’t mean it was the same 30 because of replacements that would come in as pilots would complete a number of missions. We probably had 75 pilots come into the 513th Squadron in that period of time. But we had essentially 100% If you want to consider the normal fighter squadron is possibly 30 pilots. We lost 29, and our squadron is no different than the other two squadrons in the 406 fighter group. We each lost right around 30 pilots in the time between D-Day and victory.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and I think an important thing for people to understand, Wally, is each of those pilots was the son or father or husband or brother of somebody. And war is really a terrible thing, isn’t it, Wally?
SPEAKER 11 :
Oh, it’s brutal. It’s evil. It’s nasty. There’s nothing romantic about it. And one thing that a fighter pilot doing ground support work had to do, it had to overcome fear. And I learned that on my third mission, which was the first mission where I saw, I actually saw a lot of flak come up. And we rolled over, and I’m flying a flight leader’s wing, which is where you broke into combat by being the wingman of the fire meter. So I was the second person down. And as we started down, it was a dark day near the Rhine River. And it just seemed like a Fourth of July fireworks display at 5,000 feet below us. And I thought to myself, nobody can fly in there and not get hit. And there was just panic. You had to do it. And you learned that you just had to put fear aside. You had to overcome fear, otherwise you just couldn’t be an effective combat pilot.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, that was your third mission. And how many missions, combat missions, did you fly, Wally King?
SPEAKER 11 :
I had to do a total of 75. Of course, I was shot down on my 75th mission south of Berlin.
SPEAKER 08 :
And what happened then?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, the war was virtually winding down. The Russians were closing in on Berlin. The American armies had stopped at the Elbe River, didn’t go east of the Elbe River due to their agreement with Stalin to allow the Russians to take their vengeance against Berlin that they’d experienced in the war. their cities, Leningrad and Stalingrad particularly. So we weren’t flying many missions, hardly any, because the armies had stopped moving, so they didn’t need ground support. So they called a fleet plane mission, and we had lost our squadron commander. Our squadron had the… Assignment of silencing the flak positions on the east bank of the Rhine when we airdropped three airborne divisions on the east bank of the Rhine, Basel. And our mission was to wind bomb the flak positions and then scrape them. And we used white phosphorus bombs for the first and only time, which when they hit, they put out tentacles like a huge octopus and spread over a wide area. The goal was to get the flak gunners to crawl in their holes and not shoot at the cargo planes, which were very vulnerable. And on that mission, we lost our squadron commander, was killed, and my wingman didn’t come back from that mission. So that mission was like Dante’s Inferno. We hit the targets early in the morning, As soon as we saw the C-47 transport planes and gliders coming in a huge convoy, and it was terrible. I had pulled up, did the dive bombing in the second strafing pass, so a paratrooper went right over my wing. I never saw it. He was coming down this parachute and almost killed him. And I said, this is madness. So I got up out of that lower level, 5,000 feet out of the white flak range and just watched. And the C-47s were burning and crashing, and the gliders were crashing, and they dropped those troops right across the line, right into the German positions. That was by design. To me, it looked like a total fiasco, but history records it was a very successful mission. Army got pontoon bridges over the line that day and got tanks across the river. So it was a huge tactical success. But at that early moment of that first wave, it just looked like disaster.
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, my gosh, first wave of that. This is really important to learn about this. Wally King, we’re going to go to break. I’m talking with World War II veteran Wally King, 75 combat missions, shot down on his 75th mission. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
From the mountains to the prairies,
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Welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. I’m thrilled and honored to have on the line with me Wally King, World War II fighter pilot, veteran, and talking about his story. Wally, you said on your 75th mission, first of all, why did you do 75 missions? Because normally you could come home after, I think it used to be 30, then it was 50. Why did you stay and do 75 missions?
SPEAKER 11 :
The 9th Air Force, unlike the 8th Air Force, never had a set number of missions. It was always flight surgeons’ decision if a fellow was getting too flack-happy, as we called it, to send him on home. And I had the opportunity around somewhere around 40, 50 missions of doing it, going home for 75 days and returning to the squadron in which I refused. I couldn’t imagine, couldn’t even believe that I could go home to a normal civilian environment and come back into that hazardous duty and have to relearn to overcome fear again. So I declined. I said, no, the war’s on. I’m going to stay here until the end of the war. So I flew 45 missions in the month of March. We flew two missions one day, one mission the next day. And so it’s a constant presence in the battlefield. But anyway, the last mission I was up, we had this eighth plane mission just to go out, I guess, to prove to the Russians we were doing something other than just sitting on the west bank of the Elbe River. And we couldn’t find, I don’t think we found anything to shoot at. We didn’t want to get too close to the Russian lines. So on the way back from that mission, my flight, my layman called out and said, did you see that big cannon down there on that railroad track? And I said, no, I didn’t. He said, how did you not look at it? And I said, we don’t have anything that could do any harm to a big cannon. We don’t have any rockets. We don’t have any bombs, OEMs, 50 caliber machine guns, etc. And he said, oh, well, we should go see it because maybe the next mission out could do something with it. So we went down, just did a little pass, didn’t fire a gun, just went through the flyby about 50 feet off the ground looking at this huge cannon, which wasn’t a surprise. We knew that the Russians and the Germans had long-range cannons. And just as I was over that cannon, I got hit with white flak in the engine. And I knew I’d been hit. It was kind of a big thump and an explosion. So I had enough speed to zoom up about 5,000 feet and head back west. And, of course, the plane was burning on fire. I dipped us in the canopy and nursed it. If I kept the throttle back, I could control the flames coming over the canopy. And I could see the Elbe River in the west. So if I can nurse this thing along, I might be able to get across the Elbe and sail out. Well, it wasn’t very long until I realized that was not going to happen. I looked down to clean my rudder puddles, and the armor plate in front of the pilot’s cockpit was melting. It’s like a flaming torch was… And I knew it was time to get out. We had been told that, don’t worry, you’ll know when it’s time to bail out. And I knew it was time to bail out. So out I went, and the suit opened when I was upside down. I didn’t even pull the ripcord out of the suit open. I looked in my right arm, and here was a ripcord wrapped around my wrist. So I must have just pulled it subconsciously. I knew I was low, and I probably realized I had to get that chute open early. And so the civilians on the ground were firing at me with rifles. Hitler had armed all the men that late in the war with rifles, and fortunately their aim wasn’t too good. I’d look up and see I could see holes in the parachute. But I just cleared the house that I was heading for and then the orchard behind the house. Stunned, I got up and started to run away from the house. The whole property was enclosed with a high board fence. Running along the fence, I didn’t hear any shots. I didn’t hear anyone hollering. There was a board out of the fence. I squeezed through and got into the woods on the other side of the fence. There was a path leading right down to the Elb River. And I thought, oh, boy, I’m going to run down there and jump in the river downstream to the American bridgehead. And next thing I knew, I was on the ground, stunned, and I couldn’t figure out what happened. I mean, it was this little boy about 10 years old screaming his lungs out. And he had apparently been laying in the woods or something and tripped me. And by the time I recovered, My senses got up off the ground. I could see civilians running down through the woods with rifles. I just held up my hands and surrendered. I still had my .45. I wasn’t about to shoot that little kid. So they took me into the house and put some sulfur powder on my face where I’d been burned. And about that time, shortly thereafter, the Door banged open and two young German soldiers came in and hit me across the head with a burp gun and knocked me off the stool and dragged me outside to the civilians who had gathered by this time and were not very friendly. And they forced their way through this group of civilians who were spitting on me and welcoming me to Germany unkindly. And so I went walking up the road and by this time panic was setting in And all of a sudden, I thought to myself, you know, here I am in the toughest spot of my life. I’ve never thought of God. And at that moment, a peace came over me, and I can’t explain. It didn’t make any difference. It wasn’t as if I’d been rescued at all. I thought maybe God had come to take me home. And so we wandered up that road, and I had to push the motorbike that these two young Germans had arrived on. And so I went up the road about a mile and hobbling along. I thought I had a broken ankle, and I was burned. And from there, I got to a flak position that was manned by the Luftwaffe. I didn’t realize that the Luftwaffe manned the aircraft positions in the German Army. Then I finally got to a medical facility and… taken into the care of what would be a frontline evacuation hospital group. It was on the Russian front. So I spent two weeks in that hospital. I was in the ambulatory. And we had this medical group that accumulated about 10 GIs on the ground who had been badly injured. But the German doctor was a real humanitarian. I mean, he saved my neck as well as all those seriously wounded GIs by violating his orders to go into Berlin and fight the very last man to defend Berlin. First thing he did was send the female nurses all to the American bridgehead so the Russians couldn’t capture them. And then a week later, he got two ambulances and fuel someplace and put these eight severely wounded GIs that were going to die because he had no medicine to take care of him, sent them to the American bridgehead. And we came back from that trip into the American lines because of me and another GI that he still had responsibility for. And at that point, we went into hiding. We still openly… I was hiding from the SS. I was rumored to be shooting anyone trying to escape into the American mines. And we were three days. We did that. Ended up at the castle the last day. Finally, we commandeered some transportation again, and we went without lights on back roads. After midnight, we found American lines and surrounded the American army. And that is really what the American medical care. And that was the last I saw of this by a savior German doctor.
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh my gosh. Wally King, this is absolutely fascinating. We have one minute left. What’s the final thought that you’d like to leave with our listeners today?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, the, uh, I guess the main thought is that we hear a lot of hero stories at wartime, and we don’t really want any heroes. It was just a bloody, messy business. You’re killing other human beings, and certainly not the way to resolve an argument. But I guess the only justification is it takes one evil to correct a greater evil.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, Wally King, I so appreciate you sharing your story with us. This is Wally King, 99 years young, World War II fighter pilot. God bless you, Wally King. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
SPEAKER 11 :
I’m happy to. Thank you.
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And my friends, indeed, we do live, we stand on the shoulders of giants. And God bless you, and God bless America.
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Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m. here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.
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The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
