WWII Bombardier Paul “Bud” Haedike Recounts Combat in a B-17 Flying Fortress (Full Interview)

flack destroyed shot down more b-17s than german fighters did and the bad thing was you could not shoot back at flock you had to take it my name is paul c hetiki my dad nicknamed me bud when i was five years old i was born on the northwest side of chicago i'm the only one in my family to actually be in combat and that goes back to great grandfather just one of those things that was when i was born a good buddy of mine and i went to a mall shop and were sitting there listening to music and over the radio franklin delano roosevelt came on and said the japanese just bombed pearl harbor and uh as you know or don't know everybody in the united states wanted to go into the service and i remember saying to my buddy we're too young we're 16. little did i know those two years were gonna go by pretty quick and the war was still on of course everybody wanted to enlist because our country was attacked but my dad would not let me and i can understand that being a father but this is so funny if i would have enlisted i would have gone in to the service two months later by being drafted my birthday is may 30th i was in camp july 15th i went to camp grant illinois the first place rockford illinois and we were sitting in this large room and some soldier came out and said anybody interested in going into the air force and there were a number of us that held our hand up and they took us into a room we had to take some tests they weren't tests from mit or something but we passed them and went into the air force the first place i went to talk about deja vu was jefferson barracks missouri no matter where you went you had some call it boot camp they called it basic training for some reason at jefferson barracks missouri they didn't need fighter pilots believe it or not they used people like quotas they needed more bomber people to be navigators bombardiers waste gunners tail gunners what have you i was very disappointed that i was not going to be a fighter pilot in fact i came so close to going awol that's right but i thought of my mom and dad and i knew they would not really be too proud of that because my heart was set on being a fighter pilot and if i would have become a fighter pilot i'd probably be dead i think god had a lot to do with where i ended up after i got out of basic training i believe and i'm really tested my memory on this one i believe i went to denver colorado for armament school learning about the 50 caliber machine gun and how to fire it from there i went to kingman arizona for air-to-ground gunnery this is where we went up in a b-17 and they had tow targets you know that planes pull and we had to fire at them learn how to lead and so forth and so forth then i went to lincoln nebraska i'm not too sure why from there i went to el paso texas for practice missions and then our crew was formed and there we just flew over mountains and what have you then from there i went back to lincoln nebraska and we got our entire crew and then after that we went overseas when we got to england you don't just like that go bomb berlin you have to learn all about it and we had practice missions over ireland over scotland and it was probably more so for the pilot to learn to go to certain spots and surely the navigator who had to plan the way i dropped the bombs i didn't have to practice bomb dropping on ireland or scotland the b-17 was not a pressurized aeroplane it was 20 to 30 below zero in the plane we had electric flying suits comparable to a heating blanket i did not use mine that much because i flew up in the nose and with the sun coming in it was like sitting in a greenhouse but the tail gunner was freezing as you know wet off and it was cold we had to wear gloves if we dared touch the guns the skin had come right off our hands many men had frostbite and lost fingers it was a very hazardous profession at 18 000 feet there is no more oxygen not one drop and if a man's oxygen position got hit by flock which happened they would just go to sleep and if you didn't get to them in three to five minutes they would die of an axia in the air force like anything in life you have to earn your way we flew low squadron you had a squadron here you had a squad in there you had a squadron there and the last plane to go over the target by that time the germans got pretty accurate they had the german 88 millimeter cannon that could fire five miles up what they did is hit our number one and two engine a b-17 is not made to stay up on two engines they were on fire and the pilot feathered them we were going to bail out that was the order but with our crew on our plane they sent an experienced fella who had flown 30 missions he asked the pilot how much fuel do you have where are the lines meaning the german lines and at that time they were the rhine river and he said i think you can make it across the line and it was the rhine river and we did make it and we went into belgium and ran out of fuel and we didn't go like this we went like that and crashed and saint troid belgium but we crashed in this field and a little antidote to that i remember so well we nosed over and this big six foot one guy at that time was big said what are you doing here with that big ass bird that's exactly what he said and i said what are all the german signs around here he said the crowds left here about a month ago we left them up for sentimental reasons that's the way it was we stayed in saint royden for four or five days in fact the first night or the second the crew wanted to go to brussels to a nightclub believe it or not i did not drink them and we went to the nightclub with our electric heated suits on we looked like guys from mars and uh i remember getting the bill and we had just changed our american money into english pounds and notes shillings well the bill came in whatever brussels have and i knew indirectly i was taken i had ordered some ice cream so what i did is i took the dish and the spoon home with me but i was there four or five days and they sent a c-47 you don't know what that is it's a transport plane over to pick us up they knew we were there they brought us back to england and then we flew 20 more 22 more missions we were attacked by the me262 german jet and this was uh our 14th mission the guy off our right wing which is the right side only back a little i couldn't see it he got hit by the ma262 sometimes it's worth not seeing it you're hearing it and the waste gunner kept saying get out get out but they didn't they blew up and all 10 guys died and that's kind of scary uh coming back from berlin what you do is you let down to have less turbulence and when we're going back off across the north sea or english channel we're safe because now we're probably 400 miles from berlin but just like not putting on your safety belt in the car you get careless and you throw your parachute over in a corner what happened here is one b17 came down right on top of this one this guy chewed the nose off right here the bombardier and the navigator drowned and the other guy his props cut this plane right right in half this is just aluminum but they made it back the one on the bottom the guys on top all perished and again when we got back we were kind of shaken and they put us on rest leave for about three or four days flac was german 88 millimeter cannons they fired five miles up and uh you would see the flock you might be here and you'd see the bursts of flack so it's a canton mouse game maybe you'd go down sometimes they were right on so it all depended on there was an expression used the flock was so thick you could get and walk out on it there were times not much flack it depended on berlin was well fortified they had i don't know how many guns they had but they had tons of them see an 88 millimeter cannon shell is huge and it explodes into 100 pieces 160 there's no rhyme or reason it just explodes maybe something a analogy when you drive your car over a gravel road you hear the gravel hitting when flock bursts were close you could hear him hitting the aluminum side of the plane very few people know this uh a b-17 was equipped with a norton bomb site why for precision bombing the only way i can tell you this is like the arch in st louis that would be the specific target well eisenhower and churchill and so forth decided to go away from precision bombing and go to pattern bombing what's pattern bombing what it is is the lead ship in a squadron has the norton bomb site when he opens his bombay doors i open mine as well as all the others when you see the first bomb come out you release yours and what we did was dropped on the center of berlin munich dresden and unfortunately it killed many thousands of civilians but it is known that because of this the world war ii ended about a year earlier germany was leveled just like the trade tower in new york can you imagine the entire city of chicago or st louis looking like that when we came back from a mission if a plane had a wounded man on board they would fire a red flare and they would get priority and land first so the we called it meat wagon which was the ambulance could pick them up and take them to the hospital but other than that we landed and if we weren't hurt we went to briefing again they asked us questions how did it look did you hit the target how many fighters did you see etc etc a lot of people have the misconception that you flied flied flew the same plane all the time you were there not at all i flew in the eradicator probably six times different planes every mission just about because if you got flack holes they had to be fixed and the ground crew worked overnight they worked day and night repairing them repairing and repairing them all we wanted to do was go to the target and come back and make it home and not only that better them than us our job was to do that yes i uh if you ever meet somebody that tells you they weren't scared one bit you can tell them they're a liar i was scared every time i went up and how you can't be when somebody's shooting at you come on on a runway planes lined up and when the red flare was shot off from the main shot up from the main building we would take off but we'd take off every 30 to 45 seconds one was not even airborne hardly and the next one followed the toughest part was the forming because you've got to remember one plane's up now there's two now there's three and we had to get in formation and the weather in england is terrible especially in the winter time and that's when i flew and there were many midair collisions we missed a plane by about a hundred feet one day you're not you're in the clouds you don't see it and then your group forms and meets another group and there were times you're ready for this one when 800 to a thousand planes went over berlin dropping their bombs why was germany leveled that's why but that was the toughest part the forming once you drop the bombs let's get out of here and get home but you never went straight to the target you went this way you went that way why to hopefully follow up the germans maybe 50 60 of our bombs hit where they were supposed to you know all this talk about you could drop a bomb in a pickle barrel i doubt it but my point is a lot of bombs didn't hit anything and it never bothered me one bit because you really think of yourself you better and the people back home and it bothered me a lot when i got home because the people back home all they were complaining about is the rationing and all that and they had no idea what the people in england went through most of our targets we call them marshalling yards those are railroad yards why if you tied up their transportation think about it they couldn't take supplies here and there oil refineries one of the biggest most famous missions i wasn't on it was the pulaski oil fields they they had all most of the oil for germany we would hit factories a lot that produce fighter planes and stuff but then at the end as i told you we dropped on the middle of the city just to take out electricity water anything and yes you can say that was terrible it was very terrible but it was to get the war over with i towns bombed frankfurt remember or recognize munich berlin dresden hamburg these are big metropolitan cities why would we bomb smaller cities because they either had a factory there or something i even wondered many times they knew more about they would say at our briefing you're going to have considerable flack or you're going to have no flack and they were usually right a b-17 flying drops its bombs the bombs go straight down right the b-17 keeps going you never see the bombs that you drop the bombs you see are ahead of you from planes that drop them and then you see the earth go like this and that's not funny that is very explosion and you know especially if it's a city it is so hard for guys like me to communicate what we saw of course another reason so long ago but it is it's a terrible thing it's a terrible thing but very honestly you think of yourself why not you want to make it but you thought many our flight engineer came out one day to a mission we were getting on the plane and he was drunk why was he drunk because he had given up and i chewed his you know what out i said hey we're a family up in the air and many of them said we're not going to make it back home at the beginning of the war they said if a guy flew six or eight missions he was on borrowed time i had a good friend that flew a half a mission what do you mean a half he got shot down over the target and was a prisoner of war for two years you didn't know if it had your name on it it's that simple as a little kid my grandma my dad's mother held me on her lap your your daughters would uh kind of agree with this and she tell me about her dresden which i understand was a very historical town how beautiful well my dear grandma didn't even know a war was on she was pretty old grandma and grandpas today are young and my dad told me when i got home don't you say a word to motor about your bombing germany especially dresden that's the story and i had the weirdest feeling when i let those bombs go i probably had third fourth cousins down there and the greatest thing about the air force is you didn't know how many people you killed or who you killed a mission would vary of course why here's germany now maybe your target is right here but maybe the next time it's way over here munich was down by the swiss alps that's the first time in my life i looked out i had the breast best view of anybody and when i saw the swiss alps i mean that's where they were by munich and you don't gosh you don't think think about anything all you do is want to get to the target and get it over with and hopefully go home but that's when we were jumped by german fighters usually coming into the target and after you released your bombs and if a plane was hit and he was in bad shape he couldn't keep up with the rest of the planes he'd in other words he had to drop out of formation that's when the germans had the best of fun they would jump on them and shoot them down sometimes we would get escort all the way to the target and back but sometimes we didn't at the beginning of the war fighters couldn't even make it they i mean they couldn't carry enough fuel they had wing tanks and after about i don't know how many hours they would drop the wing tanks they used the fuel in them and now went on their own but there was a lot of dog fights that's what they called them our fighters fighting german fighters uh flack destroyed shot down more b-17s than german fighters did and the bad thing was you could not shoot back at flock you had to take it the germans occupied the netherlands right to the end of the war they were there in amsterdam the hague and what have you now not all of the netherlands but the big cities this would be like you and i fighting and you win and i pick up a rock and throw it at you when you walk away this is exactly what these germans were they knew the war was over it ended may 8. what did they do they blew out the dykes and inundated holland with water the people were starving to death at 5 000 a week eisenhower and churchill said we have to do something the war is not over b-17s and english lancaster bombers put in plywood floors in the bombay we loaded them with k rations food there were five mercy missions the english called it manna manna from heaven biblical i flew three of them instead of flying at 20 to 25 000 feet we came in at 200 feet can you imagine how loud the germans agreed not to fire on us when i hit the coast of the netherlands i waved and the german wave back to me this is gospel yet in books i read they said some of the germans had just pistols and they were firing them i don't know but when we came in there and dropped the food on the rooftops they had god bless you boys thank you and i told my dad when i got home i was doing just what we're doing now talking about it and i said it was a beautiful way to end the war doing something good instead of killing people it was probably the greatest party i ever was at guys they they did anything and everything were on base they had bonfires they were excited i went i didn't go home until august of 45. they kept me there somebody had a stay until the planes all went home i wasn't the only one but there were many of us and when i got home i was on 30-day leave you know just to relax in that and that beautiful lady behind you i met her she was 17. she was a junior in high school my sister's best friend and the japs surrendered not the germans now the japs in august and i was slated to go to the pacific i needed 12 more missions so can you imagine how i felt but when the total war ended every city in america went nuts i mean i can't compare it to anything it was it was great so many mothers so many wives lost their sons their husbands and those that made it home can you imagine the parties that they had in fact my dad threw a big party on vga day when the japs surrendered and that's the first time in my life i got smashed i really got smashed because i did not have to go nobody can understand that unless they were there to the pacific but i had different jobs i worked for telephone company i worked for nesco roasters and then finally a little company in the merchandise mark in chicago johnson's wax who makes pledge glade they own windex now i went and interviewed and i interviewed every not interviewed i went there to see if there were any chance every week for three months and finally had an opening and then i was with them just short of 35 years i i'd be wrong to say i'm not proud of what i did during world war ii i also am so thankful that i wasn't in the infantry that it wasn't in the navy not that we had it easy in fact the eighth air force of which i was in uh was responsible for ending world war ii probably a year early and i was proud of that i was part of it but i was also very very thankful to god that i didn't die because every time you went up you were scared i prayed every time i flew and i'm so proud to say that but then one day i said to myself you're a christian guy bud what about the guy off your right wing if there is such a thing as a better christian and he got hit and he went down and died and that makes you scratch your head i guess it just wasn't my time there were many guys that didn't get to be husbands didn't get to be dads and none of them got to be grandpa's and you can only relate to that when you're there yourself but it's being proud just being happy that i made it being happy like the cold blue that i told you about many many hundreds of people i understand have found out about the war and what went on up in the air with guys 19 20 maybe 25 the old man on our crew was 25. you

Channel: American Veterans Center

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Id: YENfcv6shdg

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021