In this riveting installment, Fred Wiese takes us back to the early 1940s, as he relives the tense and sometimes perilous moments of his missions during World War II. With tales that span flying through dangerous flak to critical landings, listeners gain insight into the strategic and personal challenges faced by those who flew the iconic B-17 bombers. Join us as Fred reflects on the camaraderie, fears, and the unbreakable spirit that guided him and his team through 35 brave missions.
00:00:02 Introduction to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson
00:00:37 Introducing Fred Wiese, a 99-Year-Old B-17 Bomber Pilot
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 03 :
Welcome to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website, AmericasVeteranStories.com. And the show began because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans, World War II D-Day veterans, back to Normandy, France for the anniversary of the D-Day landings. returned stateside realizing that these stories, each of them, they’re unique, they need to be recorded and broadcast and archived, so hence America’s Veterans Stories. I am thrilled and honored to be here with Fred Wiese. He’s 99 years old. He’ll turn 100 in October. And he was a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II. And we didn’t even really get to when you were flying your combat missions. So where we left off in part one, Fred, was you’d been in formation and your plane was shaking significantly. So you got out of formation and what was it? Somebody came out and met you on the tarmac and take it from there.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, the guy was a… squadron maintenance officer. And he got in the airplane and said, everybody off. My crew was on it. And everybody off except you. That was his point at me. And so we got into the airplane. He said, I’m going to prove to you there’s nothing wrong with this airplane. So we got in and got the engines going. We were taxied out. Just got on the runway and took off just as we broke ground. He could feel it shaking. He started yelling, Mayday, mayday, mayday, mayday. And we went around the circuit to come back into land. And he was shaking severely. But I never heard another word about it after that. Never heard another word so subsequent to that. it was a battery cover that had come loose. And I had no idea about that. No one had any idea what had happened there. And it’s fashioned down on the inboard side of the number two engine and just between it and the fuselage. And so consequently, it must have had a lot of irregular wind resistance and it fluttered a lot and we couldn’t do a thing about it well we went into we took care of that and i had go back into formation through the rest of the day and formation a different airplane so i never did hear a bit about as i said earlier So that happened to another time as I was in another aircraft as we were going down on a cross country. I was near Lincoln at the time and it happened again. Different airplane. So we sat down there and we had to wait for the maintenance to repair that and make a new one. This was a depot, of all things, and they didn’t have that part. So from there we were assigned, I went back to Rapid City. From there we came, we finished the course and we got orders to go to Lincoln And we’d get the new airplane, that one that we would ferry over to England. So we got that started. We got to Lincoln and just got that started and got orders to do a compass swing on it for both day and night and all navigation instruments. And we did that in daytime. And that next night we got up and did the other thing. and everybody seemed to be satisfied that all things were working well. So we signed it off, and on the 15th of September, We had orders to go to Grenier Field, New Hampshire, that day. We would RO in there, and then we would take off for Britain, which we did. We got to Grenier Field about 4.30 in the afternoon, I think. I don’t know for sure what the hours were. But we landed there and we got into a place where we could sleep and rest. And we got an early call to fly up to Nova Scotia, Goose Bay. Newfoundland, I’m sorry. Goose Bay, Newfoundland. So we got there. And my flight engineer noted in his recollection of everything that happened that when I got there, I suddenly turned sick. I had forgotten about it. I was hospitalized for three or four days. Bad cold or something. Well, just before our departure time was listed, I got out of the hospital. And we started out in the middle of the night, I think about midnight. And as we were flying, About two hours out, I asked for a position fix from the navigator. He didn’t answer. He didn’t come back and give me a report. So I called him again, and he said, well, I don’t have a light in my section. Oh, boy. We didn’t like him that much after that. So I had to remember that in our briefing that they had said that there are situations like this where your equipment doesn’t work the second time. And you should line up, if you get over Greenland, line up between BW1 and BW3, I believe it was, and get a compass heading that it will give you, and just go on time, because that’s the time. And we had the time in our minds, what it should be when we arrived. Well, we did that. We arrived in Iceland at about the right time and slept for the day. It was morning when we got there. The next evening, we got a call. You’re getting off at 3 in the morning, I think, close to that, 5 maybe. But I don’t have those hours. But the situation was that they also briefed us and said, you know, you’ve got to be aware of the northern lights. I never had any idea there were things like that. I had never heard of them before. Well, I was transfixed with that, too, when we got taken off. And they said, be careful, because they’ll fool you. Ride and drive your instruments. And I was looking out at the windows, and Looking out the windscreen and all of a sudden I realized we’re going down. So I pulled that column back right now. And I’m sure we were very close to water. But it was a strange thing. So we went to our assigned altitude. And like kids, young people, we didn’t pay too much attention to our near failure. I got the autopilot set up. And on course, and I said, Kurt, take it over. I want 15 minutes of sleep, of napping. Well, much later, evidently, in daylight, we woke up. And I said, where are we? And everybody came alive. They’d all been asleep. Well, we didn’t know that, but we couldn’t get a radio fixed for a long time. I cranked it into going toward the east so I could get away from that big ocean. And we finally got a fix. The radio operator was a sharp young man named, I’ll give it to you in a minute, He got us a position fix, and they told us what direction to take to land fall, and we were to land at Valley Wales. So we got to Valley Wales, oh, probably an hour later. and, I mean, an hour late than I should have been, and landed. And upon landing, first thing I heard, a man boarded the aircraft and off there, and he says, it’s my airplane now. Get everything that belongs to you off of it, and give me your dog.
SPEAKER 03 :
Give me your what?
SPEAKER 07 :
Give me your dog. We had taken a puppy along with us. Apparently, everybody had tried that. I thought we’d get away with it, but we didn’t. We once had a spy someplace in the States. We don’t know. Okay, we arrived at the Valley Whales, and… After that, he told us, get off and there’ll be a truck waiting for you to take you to your place to go. So I just learned from my flight engineer’s remarks that we went to Stone, England, and And there was obviously a place where they brought in all the pilots and all of the crewmen. And it was a staging area, I suppose. And I’ve often wondered over the years, where did we go to when we got finished with our mission? Well, they take us back to Stone, and then they put us on the vehicle we were going to fly or ride back on to the States.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
What year was this, Fred? This is 42, 3. Oh, 44.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’m sorry.
SPEAKER 1 :
1944.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, September 44. Okay. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Let’s go to break. I’m talking with Fred Weiss, a B-17 World War II pilot. And when we come back, we’ll start to talk about these mini-missions later. Before we go to break, though, I want to just acknowledge a great sponsor of the show, and that is Tricia Hood. And this is in memory of her husband, Donald Hood, who is a Vietnam veteran, as well as her daughter, Chelsea Hood Russell. And we did an interview with Tricia recently regarding Don’s experience and his She so appreciates what we’re doing here that she said that she would like to support our work here. And so just wanted to say thank you to Tricia Hood for doing that. We’re going to go to break. We’ll be right back with Fred Weiss.
SPEAKER 11 :
RE-MAX 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.
SPEAKER 06 :
All of Kim’s sponsors are an 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 03 :
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. Thrilled to be doing part two of the interview with Fred Weiss, 99 years old, B-17 pilot. You’re now in England. You’d ferried this plane over to England and then gave it up. An officer came on and said that plane was his then. So then what happens?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, then after we had gotten to Stone, I suppose we were indoctrinated in various things, various modes of information. about our new location. And then on the 24th, 23rd or 4th of September, we were put on a train to Peterborough, England. And when we got to Peterborough, we were also met by a person on the on the platform, told us to get our equipment and meet it out there at that truck. And that was a Polbrook truck, Polbrook Air Base. So we took that right out to the air base and checked in with the station commander, and he assigned us to 508th Squadron, of the 351st Bomb Group and I think 494th Wing and also the 1st Air Division of the 8th Air Force, England, AP, what is it? ETO, the European Theater of Operations. Okay. Okay. So this is now on the 24th or 25th of September. I had in my mind all along that we had moved directly from Wales, but I couldn’t figure out how we did that.
SPEAKER 01 :
Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 07 :
Now, it showed up in this biography that my flight engineer had written. And he’d written down a little comment about every mission we flew. well we did a lot of things we went through lots of ground school again and we did things like fly night missions on just local area we would slow time engines for them in other words an engine had been replaced or something on an aircraft, you have to slow time it in order to break it in.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
And we would fly for an hour or two with it at less RPMs than we had the other three engines going.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
So there wasn’t much of that. We also had to have some crew… gunnery practice. And we had a nice base to go to, APO 110. And where we were located on the base to billet was right next to the officer’s club for the airmen. It was all on the airmen’s side of the base. All the other people that worked on the base all the time, not airmen, had another area adjacent to the place about a half a mile away, and they were out in the forest. Well, that was pretty neat for them. I didn’t recognize that for a long time. But we had a theater over there in that group, and on the main base now, primarily we had all the PX, and we had the parachute tower repacking area. We had all of the operations… It was over there. We had a briefing room there. We had one of the very large hangars. It would take about three B-17s at a time. And then we had another hangar that was identified for certain other works. And we had a machine shop. We had chaplains quarters there on that base. We had the headquarters for the wing on that base. I was assigned to a squadron operations officer and commander was a Jamie Stewart. Boy, I thought, boy, we got it all made. But it was another James Stewart.
SPEAKER 03 :
It wasn’t the actor James Stewart.
SPEAKER 07 :
No, Jamie Stewart was there at the same time.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 07 :
Interesting. He was up in the northeast part of the island.
SPEAKER 03 :
Interesting.
SPEAKER 07 :
So there, from there on, we had to do a lot of missions of just flying for just doing some orientation things and such. And we went up probably with a squadron flight officer. I don’t remember all those things, but I do remember that we had a lot of stand downs at that time. The weather was just beginning to come in. It was winter weather. It was the first of October.
SPEAKER 03 :
And the stand-down is because of weather?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, primarily. Either that or a stand-down was primarily weather. But it would be a whole group, or sometimes it would be a whole Air Force because of the weather. And finally, on the 15th of October, we had our first mission, and it was to Cologne.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it was a bombing mission, obviously.
SPEAKER 07 :
A bombing mission, yes. And it was my first introduction to seeing that flag. It was my first introduction to fear. Of that kind. I tell you, we were cold up there. It was very cold. Most of the winter, it was one of the hardest winters they had in many years in that country. And temperatures were always low, rainy or fog, things of that nature. And then later, snow. And so, you know, you have to get used to that kind of thing. Well, my feet were cold, and… I looked up there. We got on the bombing run. It was called the IP, initial point. We had to all be very cautious and we followed our leaders in. We would be flying in a sort of a three bird position. The lead pilot was in the middle and forward and the two wingmen and there was generally a tail end Charlie. And I flew that several times as a new pilot. They all put us down there. And so I’m flying below them and making a diamond out of it. I suppose I saw that flash and my feet just warmed up just almost immediately. And I thought, well, that can’t hurt too much. It just puffs, just puffs. When we got into it, we found out it does hurt. I didn’t get hit that I know of on that first mission, but we got shaken. Because all the time that you’re on that IP, you’re trying to stay in position with a lead data point. Well, that’s an impossibility. If that flak goes off under you, you go up. Flak is above you, you go down. Flak is on the one side or the other, you bobble both back and forth. Oh, my gosh. And it was terrible to try to stay in this position, but they had wanted us to be close. Well, many times we were almost overrun. the lead aircraft for some reason or another. By overrunning, I mean wings overlapping, as it were.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, my gosh.
SPEAKER 07 :
And that was too close.
SPEAKER 03 :
You think?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, it was always spread out a little bit. But we learned. We learned the hard way.
SPEAKER 03 :
And you learn fast, don’t you? I had to learn fast. You have to learn fast to survive. Hey, Fred, we’re going to go to break. I’m talking with Fred Weiss, a B-17 World War II bomber pilot. Before we do that, though, another sponsor of the show is Hooters Restaurants. They have five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. And they’ve become business partners of mine. It’s really a story about free markets, freedom, and capitalism. And so be sure and check that out at my website at KimMunson.com. And we’ll be right back with Fred Weiss. But before we go to break, I want to talk with Karen Levine. She is a great sponsor of both the shows. America’s Veterans Stories, I know, is near and dear to your heart. And our show today is Fred Weiss, 99-year-old, World War II, B-17 bomber pilot. And it’s so great. to not just read about history, but to hear history from the people that lived it. And so Karen, I so appreciate your partnership on this show.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, American Veterans Stories is an amazing show from the standpoint, the stories that you’re bringing to your listeners and just the history that can be relived and preserved. And I think that’s amazing. And I just have the privilege of working with veterans in the housing market. And that is a joy.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. And there are still great opportunities for veterans. There are special financing. We’ll talk to Lauren Levy about that here soon, but special financing options for them. And I know that it really brings you joy to help everybody in their buying and selling of homes, but particularly veterans.
SPEAKER 02 :
yes and in the pursuit of home ownership the nice thing that the government has done is provided the va loan which allows a veteran to get into a house without a down payment with no money down and that is a benefit they’ve had challenges in the marketplace over these last years with what was known as appraisal gap and having cash for that but the market is changing and the need for abundance cash for appraisal gapping is becoming less necessary. So that’s creating opportunity for more veterans to be able to get into the housing market and be successful. And there are some builders in the marketplace that are willing to do some things for veterans as well. An example would be putting in a radon system at the builder’s cost and not charging that to the veteran.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. And so you can help people, though, buy, sell new bills as well. Is a new bill different for veterans, or do they also?
SPEAKER 02 :
They can still do the same financing. And like I said, there are some builders that appreciate the service of the veteran, and so they will give additional incentives to the veteran. And I can help navigate both new construction, buying a new home, or a home on the resale market.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Right. And just a note on new construction, it’s important to have somebody on your side of the table. And that’s why all you need to do is just have Karen out there with you when you go in and check out that new build as well.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Well, if you’re contemplating new construction, give me a call and let’s make that visit together. That’s all the builder asks is that I accompany you on your first visit.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. And what’s your phone number?
SPEAKER 02 :
My number is 303-877-7516.
SPEAKER 03 :
And that’s Karen Levine with Remax Alliance, 303-877-7516. Karen, thank you. We’re going to go to break and we’ll be right back with Fred Weiss.
SPEAKER 04 :
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SPEAKER 08 :
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SPEAKER 05 :
God bless.
SPEAKER 1 :
And that I love to die.
SPEAKER 03 :
And what is the flak exactly? It detonates around, I know that they would try to, the enemy would try to figure out your altitude and try to hit you, correct? And then what, pieces would break up, or what did it look like exactly?
SPEAKER 07 :
Those shells would come up, and they were timed for a certain altitude or something, I think. And they’d just blow up, and what they would do is they’d spend a whole bunch of shrapnel. And if one of those shells came up and went through a wing or something like that, and it was timed right, they’d blow the airplane up. Right. Or if it happened right below you, you could still do it, or above you. So it just was a terrible thing to have to put up with. We fortunately got through it. And I guess we had some holes or something in the aircraft. Because it was all just aluminum. It was easy to puncture. At any rate, we got out of that mission. And, well, that was a relief to get one out of the way.
SPEAKER 03 :
And the closer you got to your target, the more flak you got.
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, yeah, of course. They had concentrated it, and they were using radar. And one of the subsequent missions, we were probably about a 15th, something like that. We were on a mission, a screening mission, above it, above the formation. We were a couple of thousand feet above them. So we could put this… aluminum chaff on there to dampen the ability for the radar to be seen properly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
And that’s what the ultimate desire was. that we would get up there ahead of the formation slightly. We were going down the same track that they were going in, same identical track, but we were a couple of thousand feet above them. Okay. And, you know, in the wintertime, you never know where the clouds are.
SPEAKER 01 :
Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 07 :
And so consequently, we got up there and dropped our chaff about the time. We have no idea if we were on time or not. Because by that time we had a layer of clouds between us. So while we were in there, something, we lost our number four engine. And so I went out of the formation and headed toward the west. I knew I had to go west. And we got out of formation and came home, and from that mission, at 1,000 feet.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, my gosh.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, we dropped down to 1,000 feet because of the icing and raining. And fog and all that stuff. I didn’t know all about that until I read my engineer’s report. But he mentioned little tidbits in every one of his days.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 07 :
So, you know, we were flying. We were alone at that time. Uh-huh. I had led that element, and I had to get away from them when that engine went out. So we got home all right, but that was one of those first experiences. Yeah. From there on we had, and that was probably on the 17th mission, I think, to call Germany, K-A-L-L. Now, I flew a total of 35 missions. 35 had been a new edict after we got there. Up to that time, it was 30 missions. At the very beginning of our… Eight Air Force mission over there. They started out with 25 missions because the kill rate was so bad and they lost so many airplanes early in the days when the Nazis were up there with lots of aircraft and we had the P-38s and P-47s over there as our safety guys. Mm-hmm. I have recently met a fellow here where I live, Dick Gibbs, who was a P-51 pilot. He got there in December of 44. But he says that he hated to go on a mission with us. He said we were flying too slow.
SPEAKER 03 :
He said you were what?
SPEAKER 07 :
Flying too slowly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh.
SPEAKER 07 :
He said we couldn’t throttle down that far because we didn’t have good control of our airplane at that time. We were a little bit slow at going, I think maybe 160 miles an hour at all, 150. And we had to keep it that slow because otherwise you couldn’t stay in formation properly. You’re using too much fuel and so forth. Whatever they figured out themselves over there, the commanders did. And so we followed their rules. And now we had some close calls. Many of them, I’m sure. You know, the good Lord takes care of you sometimes, even though you’re a fool. And I’m sure that that had a lot of validity in our safe flying, and nobody ever got hurt on my crew. Wow. Seriously, that is. They’d get bumps and bruises and stuff like that from different things, but we were fortunate that no one got hurt physically much.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 07 :
So I get back down to the missions. Each of them was different. Each of them went different places. Each of them were different times. And total times in here, I think our longest ones were to Berlin, a couple of them. And we got… At the end of January, we were getting close to our 30th mission. And at 30 missions, a co-pilot, my co-pilot’s name was Curtis Ashe. He was a good guy, young guy. He never wanted to be in a B-17. He wanted to be a B-51 pilot. But he was chosen to fly as a co-pilot for me. Not by my choice, but it was so he dictated. So after 30 missions, the co-pilot has got the authority to choose if he’d like to be a pilot in command of the crew. And he chose to do that. So on his 32nd, on my 32nd mission, in his second, he got hit over the… I thought earlier it was a Friesian island, but it was in Denmark or something in that area. Or Belgium, I’m not sure. But it was on the west coast of Europe. And he got hit by a flak, and his airplane went down. And my engineer notes that he saw one chute come out of it, that’s all. But the airplane landed on the ground, right side up. That we know. So it probably went through some water and came back onto dry land or something of that nature. We don’t know. I know Kurt was put in. Later I found he was in Stalin Luft somewhere. He had been captured.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, my gosh.
SPEAKER 07 :
And I suppose that part of the crew got captured, too. I have never heard the full story on that. So I do know that my flight engineer made notes that he said, why is it that good guys like that bunch go down, get hurt? And, you know, they’re all good guys. And they all had a mission to do. Now I’m going to go back a step and say that at one time, after about four or five missions, My crew came to me one day and said, okay, Lieutenant, we’re not going to fly with you anymore if you don’t get rid of that navigator. I said, well. I went in to see my commanding officer, the squadron commander, and I told him, I think I took my co-pilot and my engineer and radio operator with me. And I told him what had happened and the many things that he had done. And he just, the crews had made it to me that they were not going to fly with me any longer if I didn’t get rid of him. The commander did a little research and took him off my airplane. So now we had nine people.
SPEAKER 03 :
They didn’t replace him?
SPEAKER 07 :
didn’t replace him. Matter of fact, my bombardier was probably a better navigator than he was. I don’t know that. His name was John Leipzig. John Leipzig. Well, he had been a real Thorn on our side, he loved to just watch and listen to the radio, the radio compass, which you could grab onto any music station that you could find. And, you know, we’re over land, and they had radio stations going, and Germans liked to listen to music, too. So, of course, he had no way to transmit to them, so we know he was not doing that.
SPEAKER 03 :
But he just wasn’t really getting the job done.
SPEAKER 07 :
He was not doing the job. And we finished our mission now. The last mission was done on February 23rd to Plan Germany, B-L-A-U-E-N. This is by the registry that came from my squadron. So I have to assume that this is right. I don’t know. Upon getting back from every mission, we had a chance to debrief amongst the intelligence people, and they would ask us certain questions. What did you see that was important today? All I could say was a lot of airplanes.
SPEAKER 03 :
A lot of airplanes. Okay, let’s go to break. I’m talking with Fred Weiss, World War II B-17 pilot. Before we do that, though, the nonprofit that I am supporting is the USMC Memorial Foundation, and they’re raising money to remodel the… marine memorial out at 6th and sim excuse me 6th and colfax and if you want to help them you can donate at usmcmemorialfoundation.org that’s usmcmemorialfoundation.org or you can buy a brick to honor your loved one or yourself and it’ll be on one of the walkways that they will have there as they do this remodel so again that’s usmcmemorialfoundation.org we’ll be right back with fred weiss
SPEAKER 09 :
We’ll be right back. If you’d like to explore what a reverse mortgage can do for you, call Lauren Levy at 303-880-8881. That’s 303-880-8881.
SPEAKER 10 :
Call now. You’d like to get in touch with one of the sponsors of The Kim Monson Show, but you can’t remember their phone contact or website information. Find a full list of advertising partners on Kim’s website, kimmonson.com. That’s Kim, M-O-N-S-O-N dot com.
SPEAKER 05 :
From the mountains to the prairies,
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. And I’m thrilled to be here with Fred Weiss, 99 years old, B-17 bomber pilot in World War II, 35 missions. Just fascinating, Fred. What do you want to make sure that our listeners know? We’re down to our final segment. Got a story for us?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, I’d like to go back to a mission we did to, obviously, to cancel Germany on the 16th of December. We evidently got through that mission all right, but we had to… divert when we got back to Britain. On landing we found that it was all fogged in. So we were diverted to a place called Bath, England. or Bath was in that town, yeah, Bath, England. And we were housing relatively new quarters up there. One quarter of the city was brand new, sitting on a hillside, I remember that. And they had apartments that were all the same, and they were stacked up the hill in circular form around the hill. Okay. And we were building it in one of those. Whether it had any heat or not, I don’t know. I don’t remember that it did, but I don’t remember that it didn’t. No one had ever occupied the building. So we were there for several days because the weather kept us down. And then on the 24th, in the early morning, they awakened us and said, every airplane that’s flyable and every crew that’s here will be on this mission. This is an ME. Major effort. Okay. Maximum effort. Something of that nature. Anyhow, then we went that mission. We were attached to a different group. And we were told what that would be at a briefing. We went to Biblis, B-I-B-L-I-S. I don’t know what that was, what it was. But it was a terrible, rough one. And when we got through it, we got to the British coast again. I just took off and went flying over to our air base. But all along, we could see the fog getting deeper. It was deepening. That meant it was going up higher. As we got closer, that meant there was much more depth of fog When we got to our home base.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, off in the distance, I had noticed before, to the northeast of our airfield, about 40, 50 miles, we could see smoke coming up there. And one time I’d flown over it, and I saw what it was. It was a British station where they had Lancasters. a big four-engine aircraft, bigger than the one that was made for Lane. And they had troughs built alongside each side of the main runway, east-west runway. And then the troughs, obviously, they put fuel, probably some cheap fuel, and it would burn They light it, and it would burn and cause heat to come up and bring the fog away, burn the fog away. Fascinating. For their landing. Now, this was after they had been on a mission at night. So they have to have a place to bring that airplane back into it. It’s called FIDO, Fog Intensive Dispersal Operation.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hmm.
SPEAKER 07 :
So I said to the guys, I’m going to land there. I don’t want to try to get down and go down through fog and then miss. And so I did it. I got it lined up. I tried very often to get some radio contact with those people on different circuits from us, different, well, whatever circuits. I could not make contact. I finally did, just decided to go in and land. Now I couldn’t get the airplane to go down. It had so much heat, so much buoyancy there. So I stuck the column forward and forced it down. And we finally got to just about on the ground. And we were closing in on that wall of fog up ahead of us. So I pushed it a little harder and got it down on the ground. And we both got on the brakes and I dumped the sticks all the way forward. And we came to a screeching halt just as we went into the into that bank of cloud. And at the same time, there’s no light behind me anymore. What happened? Well, it had just burned off. It had burned out. It shut it down. So we got in just at the tail end of it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 07 :
And we sat there for a long time with the engine shut down. And finally, a vehicle came by. And the guy got out of that vehicle and he had a pistol in his hand and he got back in his vehicle and went in and a whole bunch of cars came out. Apparently they all circled around the airplane and said, who are you? How did you get in here? How long have you been here? All those questions. And so we identified ourselves and told them what group we belonged to and where we were from. And then they took us into operations and identified us. And this was on Christmas Eve, the 24th of December. So that night, it evidently had been very cold. And the fog had been very thick, and it evidently iced the airplane very thoroughly to at least a quarter or maybe greater ice level on it. And we were told never to fly with an airplane with icing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 07 :
So these people had taken us in. I had never been to a British breakfast of any sort. And they had, on that evening, some special… Yes, to make some announcements and to tell stories and all that stuff. It was a very formal thing in the officers club. And the three of us sat down and pretty soon a ruckus of noise came. And our guys came in, all my crew, they just literally broke into that group of people and made a mess for me. And they kept yelling, well, we’d like to get some food, too. We’re hungry. So they took them all in and shut them up that way. And they fed us and them, and we got out of there. And they put us up for the night somewhere. The next morning, it’s Christmas Day now, I called the station and I told them I’d like to come back home if I could. They said, no, you stay where you are. We’re fogged in. I said, okay. And then I called back about another hour. They said, stay where you are and we’ll call you when we want you. And about that time, one of my guys came in and said, Phil’s got the guys out there pulling props through. I said, what’s that for? He said, well, we’re going to start the engine if we can. It’s cold as dickens out here, and we’ve got a lot of ice on the airplane. So… After another time, I called and they said it was starting to break a little bit. I said, good. So we talked about it for a while. We ran the engines up and found out they were okay. The engineer had done that. We got in the airplane and took off. Now, we couldn’t see out the windscreen because it was full of ice. So we opened the side windows, and we did our lookout there. And I went up to the end of the runway that we came in on and got squared in the middle of the runway. And we both looked out our windows. Oh, my gosh. And I put the power to it, and we took off.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, my gosh. Fred, we are just about out of time, so 30 seconds. What’s the final thought you’d like to leave with our listeners?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, it was an experience that, you know, after looking at it, I enjoyed it because I learned a whole lot. I had completed my mission. I had not heard anybody hurt, and I went away happy. I never had a bad night because of that. No PTSD or whatever, D, and nothing of that nature. I feel God bless me and our crew. And no questions about it. We probably have done more bad things than good things, but he’s still loving us.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, my gosh. Fred Weiss, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. I so appreciate it. Thank you. And my friends, indeed, we do stand on the shoulders of giants. God bless you and God bless America.
SPEAKER 05 :
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.
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
In this riveting installment, Fred Wiese takes us back to the early 1940s, as he relives the tense and sometimes perilous moments of his missions during World War II. With tales that span flying through dangerous flak to critical landings, listeners gain insight into the strategic and personal challenges faced by those who flew the iconic B-17 bombers. Join us as Fred reflects on the camaraderie, fears, and the unbreakable spirit that guided him and his team through 35 brave missions.
