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392nd Bomb Group

Memories Linger For Pilot

Guy Carnine of Paducah flew a B-24 bomber all over Europe during World War II for the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Guy Carnine can tell visitors what it's like to fly 25 bombing missions over Europe, to smuggle Norwegians to England in a secret mission and even to run out of gas thousands of feet in the air and land without damaging the plane.

Carnine, 87, of Paducah, was a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II. Today, Memorial Day, America honors the lives of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought in that war and others.

Carnine always wanted to be a pilot. He remembers taking his first ride in a plane when was 18 and served six years before going into pilot training in what was then the Army Air Corps.

He and his wife, Jackie, married when he was a cadet. On Saturday, they celebrated their 62nd anniversary. "I thought it was great," she said of his being in the military. "She didn't know how dangerous it was or she would have felt differently," he said.

His first mission as a pilot was a bombing run over Germany. "I was apprehensive because I'd read so much about it when I read the papers here;” he said. He'll never forget the white contrail of the missile he saw on the mission. "Fortunately, it missed me by a couple of feet and didn't hit my wing,” he said.

Carnine's plane, named Hard to Get by the bombardier, was the first in the 392nd Bomb Group, based in Wendling, England, to complete its 25-mission combat tour. Carnine flew those missions, mostly over Germany, but some over France and Belgium, from October 1943 to March 5, 1944. "We lucked out,” he said. "Another crew got shot down (in the same plane) about two weeks later." The bomb group lost 184 planes between 1943 and 1945, according to its memorial association's Web site. "On some missions they all came back,” Carnine said. "Half to two-thirds came back on the really bad ones.”

On one mission, bad weather caused the contrails of the B-24s flying in formation to fuse into something resembling a fog beneath them. Carnine's plane was flying last in the formation, a position known as "Tail End Charlie." From beneath the cover of the contrails, German fighter planes began shooting. Gunners on the B-24s couldn't see well enough to fire back. By the end of the mission, enough planes had been shot down so that Carnine's plane was flying just behind the lead plane. "You learn to fly pretty quickly when they're shooting at you," he said.

On another mission, the turret gunner nearly shot down a B-24 that had dropped out of formation because of mechanical trouble, Carnine said. He had mistaken it for a fighter plane. Carnine couldn't make himself undersood using the radio system, but he knew the gunner was sitting just behind him. Carnine reached back and grabbed him by the foot, getting him to stop shooting.

Once Carnine was forced to make a"dead stick landing; one in which he was out of gas. "We had a long mission and I was running out of gas about 100 miles from our home base, so I was getting there as fast as I could with the least amount of fuel.”

When the engines sputtered as the gas tank emptied, he was ready to give the order to bail out. And then he saw an English airstrip still under construction. "I got it set down on the runway and got it stopped in about 1,000 feet, just before a (construction) barricad,” he said.

For that, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. "The last two missions were kind of bad because you figured you might have a chance;" he said. "Before that, we just figured we didn't.” After the last mission, Carnine sat in the cockpit, filling out paperwork. "All of a sudden, I looked up and there were a whole bunch of people and firetrucks, and my whole crew was out and jumping up and down,” he said.

The day afterward, Carnine, his navigator and his radio operator were called to the office of a Colonel Rendle, the commander of the bomber group. He asked them to volunteer for a secret mission. Because many crews were filling other military jobs in Europe and not being sent back to the United States after finishing their combat tours, they accepted. A day later, they received orders to report to Air Transport Command Headquarters in London.

They were told they were going to impersonate civilian airline crews so that they could go to Sweden, neutral in the war, and bring to England some Norwegians who wanted to help in the war effort.They would also pick up Allied crews that had been stranded there when their planes ran low on fuel.

They were given passports that listed them as airline officials. "We were sent to a clothing store and were fitted with a complete civilian wardrobe, including a top coat and suitcase," Carnine said. Carnine flew a B-24 that had been stripped of its turrets and armament. They were painted a solid color with no markings except a Department of Commerce number on the tail. Benches were installed in each side of the bomb bay to accommodate passengers, but since they were supposed to be a civilian airline, neither the crew nor passengers had parachutes.

For six months, they flew missions from the Royal Air Force Base at Leuchars, Scotland, to Stockholm, Sweden. The route took them over Norway which was occupied by the Germans, so they flew only during bad weather to escape close attention. "Sometimes the weather forecast was wrong, and we would fly across Norway in the clear," Carnine said. "It was always a mystery to us why the Germans didn't send their JU88s after us as they could have easily shot us down.”

Even after his return to the States, Carnine's flying days weren't over. He joined Army Air Rescue near Tacoma,Wash., and was trained as a C-82 cargo pilot. His job was to search for crashed airplanes. After leaving the Army in 1958, he flew for a month with Capital Airways, based near Miami. Although he became a real estate broker and then had a home construction business, he and Jackie have managed to rack up 100,000 frequent flyer miles, including trips back to the base in Wendling. Being a passenger isn't bad, but "I wish I was the pilot," he said, grinning.

Shelly Street. Memories Linger For Pilot. The Paducah Sun. Bomber Legends. Volume 2 No. 3 2005.

This B-24 was redesigned by the Jack Clarke crew.

Crunch Landing At Seething

The date was January 10, 1945, a bad day for the Jack Clarke crew of the 392nd Bomb Group of the Second Air Division of the Eighth Air Force. I, Oak Mackey, was the copilot; Brad Eaton, navigator; Bob Lowe, bombardier; E.C. Brunnette, engineer; J.T Brown, radio operator; Ralph Heilman, nose gunner; George Peer and John Heckman, waist gunners; and Kevin Killea, tail gunner; perhaps the best crew in the 8th AF.

We were awakened at 02:00 a.m. for briefing at 04:30 a.m. The target was Dasburg in the Bastogne area to support our ground troops there. The weather was absolutely atrocious - through the night there had been a combination of freezing rain, sleet, snow showers and fog. The runways and taxiways were covered with a sheet of slippery ice.

At briefing we learned that our usual B-24 was not available and we were assigned the squadron spare. We were a deputy lead crew and would be flying off the right wing of the lead plane of the leading squadron. Upon reaching our assigned airplane we found it had not been warmed up, the engines were cold and very difficult to start. Only after much cranking, priming and cussing were we able to get them running. We were supposed to be two for takeoff just after the Group lead airplane. By now most, of the entire Group had departed.

We made our takeoff, climbed through the overcast to on top of the clouds and had the rest of the Group formation in sight. At this time the #3 engine propeller severely over-speeded, probably because of congealed oil trying to pass through the propeller governor. This is a serious problem - because of the engine over-speed the engine might turn to junk, or the propeller might come off the engine and pass through the fuselage or hit the other engine on that side. Jack told me to shut down the engine and feather the propeller. I reduced power to the engine and pushed the feathering button. It immediately popped out again, for it is its own circuit breaker. Brunette was sitting between Jack and me on the cockpit jump seat, as all good engineers should. He pushed the feathering button in and held it there which caused the secondary circuit breaker to pop open, which he immediately held down with his other hand, a risky procedure as it could cause the feathering oil pump motor or associated wiring to catch fire. Oh-so-slowly the prop blades turned to the feathered position and engine rotation stopped.

With one engine out and a loaded airplane there was no way we could stay with the Group. We were now in the vicinity of Great Yarrnouth, so we flew out over the North Sea and dumped our bombs. We left the arming safety wires in place so the bombs could not. explode.

As we turned to go back to our base, the #2 propeller ran away, compounding our numerous problems. We got the engine shut down and propeller feathered with less trouble than we had with #3. A B-24 cannot maintain airspeed and altitude with two engines out and full fuel tanks, and we gave careful consideration to bailing out but decided to stay with the aiiplane for a while and conserve altitude as best we could. The weather at our airfield near Wendling had not improved, but we had little choice but to try to return there.

We were about due south of Norwich ten miles or so when we spotted an airport, through a hole in the clouds, our first good luck of the day. We descended through the hole in the clouds and had gone through the before-landing checklists, lowered wing flaps to the landing position, extended the landing gear, and were turning to line up with a runway from west of the airport when the thick bullet-resistant windshield and side windows iced up, a common occurrence when descending through a temperature inversion. We could not pull up and go around with the landing gear and flaps down with only two engines operating - we were committed to landing,

Jack and I could not see through the iced-up windshields and windows. We had to continue our descent to keep airspeed above stalling. Through a small clear place on my side window I saw men running at full speed, and I also saw that we were about to touch down. I assumed those men were running from a building of some sort and we were lined up to hit it. Without any thought and perhaps with instinct, I pushed full left rudder that caused the airplane to slew around to the left, and we touched clown in a sideways attitude. The landing gear snapped off, the two outside engine propellers broke off and went cartwheeling across the airfield. We slid sideways on the fuselage for a long way on the ice and snow; it seemed like forever. The fuselage was broken behind the cockpit area and the nose tilted up, which enlarged the window to my right a bit so that I was able to go through it with my backpack parachute on. Likewise Jack went out the left cockpit window. I ran along the right side of the airplane, stopped at the waist window to look in to see if everyone was out, continued around the tail and there they were, all nine of them and no one had a scratch. We had landed al Seething Airfield, home of the 448th Bomb Group, and we had missed the control lower by only 100 feet or so.

An ambulance pulled up in a few minutes and took us to the base hospital where the doctor looked us over to be certain there were no injuries. For medicinal purposes, some one brought out a bottle of 100-proof rye whisky. We took our medicine like real men. Someone called our base at Wendling and a truck came for us in an hour or so. So ended a had day for the Clarke crew. It could have been much worse.

Oak Mackey (392nd). Crunch Landing at Seething. The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 45 Number 1, Winter 2006.

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Fairchild C-82 Packet and C-119 Flying Boxcar Lloyd. First flown in 1944, the C-82 was the first transport to really take advantage of the uninterrupted cargo hold and ground-level loading advantages conferred by a twin-boom layout. The C-119 - an improved version with over 1,000 built - saw lengthy service with the USAF, the Military Air Transport Service, and the Air Force Reserve during the Korean War and for many years thereafter. There were also overseas customers, experimental versions, and even civilian operations, all of which are covered here thoroughly.

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