[bobbysocks]

TALKING TO BILL POOLE, WORLD WAR II PILOT


Bill Poole could have been the youngest air force pilot flying B25 bombing missions during the waning weeks of World War II. Four years before, when he was 16, he told a recruiter in Montgomery, Alabama that he was 21, to get into U.S. Air Force glider pilot training. The day the war ended, May 8, 1945, he was in Naples, on his way home. Seventy missions and a lifetime of memories were behind him.
Poole, who now lives in the Burro Mountains with his wife, Pat, says he first came to New Mexico during his flight training. Deming, Roswell, Las Cruces and Ft. Sumner all are part of his history. "We flew all through this country. Went up and down every canyon, with B25's, all the fuel we wanted to burn... they figured we might as well learn how to fly close to the ground because we were going to need it."

Remembering how he felt during his first missions, Poole says, "It was terrifying. No question about it. Flying my first and second mission, we were shot at by 92 88mm guns, radar controlled. And I mean, those guns literally lit up the sky, right in front us, popping all around us.

"I've got a piece of flak in my archives. It came through the window right behind my head, and hit that big B25 bulkhead, right behind the pilot's deck. I ducked my head like that..." Two men Poole had known through most of their training together flew their first mission and last mission on the same day. Poole states: "It was pure roulette, as to who caught flak. Planes routinely returned to the airfield with hundreds of holes. We jokingly called it `flak to cumulus'...... as you would get closer to it, you start seeing orange centers, and before long you could smell it, and hear it, and before long part of it would be raining on, or through, your airplane - so if you were prone to lose self control, you had a problem (laughing)."

Self-control was never Poole's problem. Being too young to enlist was. But he got help from a far-off enemy. "When the Germans invaded Crete with a secret weapon called gliders and paratroopers, the Allies immediately said `Hell, we've got to have this type of deal.'" Gliders were capable of silently flying 50 or more miles behind enemy lines, allowing one man into infiltrate deep in enemy territory.

Bill continued "Now mind you, I was a high school drop out. I dropped out in the tenth grade. But I still told my friends, `Hell, I'm going to be a pilot,' but they just laughed at me.When he heard the U.S. Air Force was recruiting men for glider training, he seized the opportunity to make good on his bragging. "To volunteer, you had to have your birth certificate, which shot me down, and you had to have three letters of recommendation from people who knew you back home (the Horatio Alger thing). So here I am 17 years old, going down to see this sergeant, who was playing the regular beauracratic statistical game, `cause he was supposed to have so many people on his list, and he didn't have enough. He said, `How old are you?' and I said, `I'm 21,' figuring that if you're going to lie, you might as well make it a big one.

"Then this Sgt. says, `You got your birth certificate?' and I say, `No, I just decided to enlist yesterday. No way I can get those damn birth certificate and letters of recommendation.' So, he says, `Alright you - be here tomorrow when the trucks leave and you'll be on the orders.'

"So the next day, there I was on those damn orders, riding for a half a day or more in the back of a GI truck going to Randoph Field. We did calesthenics and tumbling because we figured that you'd have to be a virtual commando to be a glider pilot to land behind the lines - you'd have to pick up your own rifle and become an infantryman. So we started all that training. They had people who had experience in calesthenics and tumbling and gymnastics and this type of thing. So we had a nice workout for several weeks.

The tricky thing, according to Poole, "was the ability to control [the glider's] airspeed and stop the bloody thing when you got on the ground. You'd have to put the nose forward(smacking motion with hands), get that skid on the ground, put the brakes on, or go between two trees and wipe the wings off and stop the machine that way [Note: the planes were not expected to ever have to fly again]. We'd get towed for hours, then land at a strange field. We got quite proficient - hell, all we needed were a couple of pot flares [for visibility]. We could land anywhere - that was the idea, to land behind enemy lines, supposedly." In Roswell, in March of 1943, the air force announced they had accumulated too many glider pilots. The glider pilots were offered regular power-flight training, which Bill took.

Poole's most memorable combat mission was number sixty-nine, flown April 9, 1945. "We were on the bomb run with our doors open. There were three hundred aircraft, and everybody was sending out their bombs. The second box (a formation of 24 airplanes at a higher altitude) overtook us and dropped about 625 daisy cutters through us. Eight of them hit my airplane. Only one had fallen far enough to arm, and that one blew the rearmost part of the wing. All the flaps - gone. One of them lodged in the left engine, and the others went right on through. I mean, (they) go right through, but they also make a hole as big as your head!" With some sarcasm, Poole drawls, "That's called friendly fire." "We had no instrumentation as a result of that. I had to come about eighty miles back to the aerodrome. The crew voted to fly it back, rather than jump." His crew included some who had washed out of pilot training. Asked if they might have had more confidence in him, as a result of that, his answer was a strong, "Yes!"

On the trip back, he says, "we were losing altitude all the way, drawing full power. I kept telling the guys, `go back and see what the hell the damage is. There has to be some damage.' They just said `Can't see a thing Lt.' I think they were just scared out of their wits. They didn't want to know..."

Poole approached the field. When the landing gear were extended, they saw long strings of rubber where the left wheel should have been. He ordered his co-pilot, Milfried, to give them about 15-20 degrees of flaps [flaps slow the airspeed and increase the rate of descent)]. The airplane started to turn upside down. Poole yelled repeatedly to put the flaps back up,. There was just enough pressure to retract them. "Otherwise," he says, "we would have been finished right there. We had 1000 miracles that day!"

Knowing the plane was on the verge of a stall (nose dive) the whole time, he made a typical glider approach to the runway. He relates: "The very second I started raising the nose, it quit flying... then we hit the ground. I couldn't hold it straight. I was having to carry full left engine and nothing on the right engine, and after about a quarter of the runway I said, Well, hell you can't do this forever. You gotta do something. So I said `Milfried, get ready to pull the landing gear.... Now, when I say pull' em, YOU PULL em!'" Poole hollered the command, chopped the power, and reached up to shut off the master and two magneto switches. Centrifugal force prevented the action, until the plane stopped a skidding ground loop, a huge, crunching circle, with the landing gear collapsing sideways.

The crew reported their radio man, airman Jollie, was injured. "We thought he was dead. I kept sending people back there. `Hell, he's dead Lt., he's dead!' they were saying.

"We stopped and jumped out of the damn thing. The medics come running out, `Any body hurt?' I says, `I think you got a dead man in the back end.' We went down to see him that night, in intensive care. `You can see him in the morning, probably.' Well, hell, in the morning, he's been flown out. Yeah, we all thought - he's been flown out - six feet under. See - they'd never tell you that kind of thing."

For many years, Poole thought the man had died. About 1983, at a convention (the 57th Bomb Wing) in Massachusetts, the Poole's were told that Jollie was alive, and living in New Jersey. He hadn't lost his life, but he had lost a leg. The Poole's found his address and phone number soon after, and contacted him. In reply to Poole's letter, Jollie wrote, "As my old friend Mark Twain said, The story of my demise is greatly exaggerated."

The two men met at another 379th convention, eight years later. Jollie handcarried a touching letter from their daughter to Poole. She wanted him to know how much she appreciated his saving her father. "I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't even have my father," she had written.

Back at the aerodrome, his superiors tried to give Poole a Silver Star for gallantry. "I said, Keep your Gawddam decoration. There's nothing gallant about it. Those bastards bombed me. There was no bravery involved. We were trying to save our ass."

So then my superior says, `Well how about a Purple Heart? You got a bump up here on your head.' I said, `Hell, I didn't get that in the damn airplane!' The bump on his head, Poole explains, was caused because "we were living in Italian villas, fronted by wrought iron gates with manways through them. Well, the manways were made for midgets... about five feet high. Now, I'm over 6 feet! Being in that deranged attitude when I got off that GI truck coming up from the air field, I didn't duck low enough and I hit that damn gate."

For his final mission, Poole got a new airplane. "We were required to do seventy missions by that time. They considered a misssion less risky at that point. So on April 19th, they walked into the briefing room and heard they were going to Rovereto, in Brenner Pass. "I says, `Oh my God. Of all the damn places to have to go on your last mission.'"

They were part of a flight of 24 aircraft (6 planes in four layers, 300 to 500 feet above one another), following another flight just like it. As Poole tells it, "The planes were more than a mile ahead of us, just getting the hell shot out of them. You didn't hear anything. You could only see the `flakto cumulus.'" His group did not draw a burst. "The only thing I can figure is that they used all of their ammunition on the first group, because this was in the waning days of the war."

Poole added, "Ironically, you have such apprehension, that, some ways it's worse than getting shot at. You cringe and wait it out. You're so built up that all hell's going to tear lose any second.. and it just doesn't happen, and your feet get ice cold. I came off those targets in the Brenner Pass, which were heavily fortified, in the dead of winter, and I'd open the side window because I'd be sweating like hell - but my feet were ice cold. And your hands... most of the time you had to sit on one hand and fly with the other.

Asked whether there was competition between the pilots during training or combat, he answered, "No. During training the biggest threat was if you didn't perform, you'd be washed out. So everybody did the best they could do, continuously, because of that." After being commissioned as pilots, he again said, "The only competition was the typical politics that you have everywhere, in business and industry and anything else... There's always somebody trying to politic."

How did WWII affect his life? "The biggest impression [it left on me was that] freedom doesn't come cheap. I cannot overemphasize that. See, the modern generation thinks freedom is free. And serving in WWII convinced me that man is just guilty of folly, because he assumes all he has to do is be nice and nobody will ever bother him. When, really, I am more convinced than ever, that there is always some Saddam Hussein who wants to take over the world."

Answering the question "Did the war make you live your life differently than you might have?" Poole stated "Well, my flying obviously had something to do with my career, because it... provided an entree into the construction industry. I started flying for construction companies and I had a very, very interesting and fulfilling career in real estate development (Poole was at one point construction manager for the Irvine Company, Newport Beach, CA., and worked on the Big Canyon Golf Course). I was also involved in the construction of hundreds of houses... some of them big things, like 35 acre man-made lakes with complete circulation for them."

Poole says he doesn't think the war affected him psychologically. "I was always a very diligent person before I went into the war." So, after the war, it was just more of the same? "More of the same."

Poole is a veritable library of information, and he has many, many other stories These, however, must be saved for another day. * * * *