I wrote this story in ca. late 2003 and originally published it in Aviation Review, Vol. 6, No, 5. Yarger and I both went to the same doctor, Dr. Debra Celec. She put me in contact with Eugene and his wife Gloria and helped arrange this interview.
Recently the editor and part of the editorial staff had the opportunity to meet and interview Lt. Col. Eugene Yarger (USANG Ret.), who flew B-17s in the 388th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, in World War II.
He grew up in Bellville, OH, where he lives today. His father was an oil distributor covering the Bellville area. Once out of high school Lt. Col. Yarger began training to follow him in the business.
Though Mr. Yarger earned a scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, he elected not to attend, because, he figured, how much college education did he need to distribute gasoline?
Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Because Mr. Yarger’s father was not in the best of health, he stayed home as long as he thought he could before enlisting; he went in in 1942, in Cleveland, Ohio.
He wanted to be a pilot. Here his lack of college education returned to hurt his case with the Army Air Force – but “they needed pilots,” so he was accepted in spite of not having the usual two required years of college. He passed a college equivalency exam.
He went through basic training at Sheppard Field, Wichita Falls, Texas; the field was located only twelve miles from Oklahoma. The temperature would reach 130° Fahrenheit – but passing out was prohibited or else the unfortunate cadet would automatically wash out.
The Army Air Force sent him to a small college in Canyon, Texas. There he took 5 months of intensive math and physics, among other topics, and with the help of “very good professors,” managed to succeed. While in college his fianceé, Gloria, traveled down from Bellville and, with the permission of her family, they married. (Today, over sixty years later, they still are.)
They traveled from town to town together until he went overseas. He would move with his unit and then find proper accomodations for his wife and would send for her from the previous town.
From Canyon, Texas, he was sent to Santa Ana, California, to an Army Air Force classification center. There they decided what he would become; he became a B-17 pilot.
In the Army Air Force they would teach discipline in extreme ways. Cadets would be reviewed in 130° heat; if sweat got onto the brow of their cap they could be accused of having a greasy cap, without recourse to appeal. Though they had shaved at 5 AM, if their facial hair grew too quickly, they could be faulted for not shaving at an inspection later in the day.
However, Mr. Yarger says, this discipline worked. There was a mission on which his B-17 was under attack. He told his radio operator (who had gone through similar training) to stay at his position with the radio, rather than fire the gun situated in that room. The radio operator obediently stayed with the the radio and away from his gun. Not surprisingly, he wondered why. However, he waited 45 years to ask why. At a 1990 crew reunion in Dayton, Ohio, the radio operator asked why. Lt. Col. Yarger said that the only reason he would have told the radio operator to remain at his radio was that they may have needed to remain in radio contact during the air battle.
But since absolute discipline had been taught in training, he stayed at his post – though he wondered why for the next 45 years.
Mr. Yarger had to survive similar discipline in his training; however, he had it easier than some. He made “one of the best decisions of my life” in volunteering to become a mail orderly. After classes he could go and sort mail instead of standing through the same inspections that the others in the class had to pass. (He later carried mail for 32 years in the Bellville area.)
He made it through pilot training. He said, “I had such a strong desire to fly; some of the others could care less.”
He was sent overseas on the same day that his son was born. His wife tried to get word to him of the son’s birth through the Red Cross and he tried to get word through the Red Cross (as he put it, they were trying “on both ends,”) but in spite of that it still took him three months to learn of his son’s safe birth.
He went overseas to England and with his crew joined the 388th Bomb Group in Nettishaull, England, a small town twenty-five miles away from Cambridge. He began flying missions in January 1945.
He flew his first mission as co-pilot for a crew that had suffered casualties and thus had combat experience before flying his crew into battle. (He also got one mission ahead of them.)
He flew five missions with his crew in a wingman position. The first was a bombing mission to the Mannheim, Germany, railroad yards. The second was to Ludwichshaven, Germany, the next day.
After the first five missions with his crew, the group officers wanted to make his crew a lead crew.
He declined the honor for three reasons.
First, the Germans would try to take out the lead crew. By 1945 most B-17s did not use Norden Bombsights or bombardiers. They simply dropped their bombs when the lead plane dropped its bombs. If the Germans took out the lead plane, the deputy lead would fill in. If the deputy lead was shot down, the mission was in trouble.
Second, lead crews only flew once every six or seven missions. He had a wife and son at home; while he wanted to serve his tour of duty and do his part towards winning the war, he wanted to get home as soon as he could.
Third, he did not want his crew to be broken up. In a lead crew, the co-pilot would be moved to the tail gunner position to be a formation control officer while one of the higher officers in the group would fly the command pilot position from the co-pilot’s seat.
He chose not to be a lead crew; he did, however, accept the post of deputy lead, or the backup crew. He accepted on the condition that he would fly every mission.
“My crew was ready to kill me for it,” he said. The crew flew their 30 missions between January and April 1945. (They did not have to fly 35 missions because deputy lead was a position of higher risk than many of the other positions.)
Also, flying deputy lead, his crew did not have to break up; thus he was able to keep his crew.
He had several close calls with anti-aircraft fire, including having several engines shot out.
This was a problem on one of his most difficult missions. The 388th Bomb Group was sent to bomb a target on the Polish border; a Russian airfield was just across the line.
On the mission, his prop feathering cable broke and one of the B-17’s engines ran away and had to be shut off. He then lost another engine and was now flying on two.
When damage like this occurred, he said he would often put it up to a crew vote to decide the course of the mission. They could choose to land in Switzerland or Sweden to be interned, choose to try to make it back home, or, as in this case, choose to fly over to the Russian territory and begin a slow process of returning to combat.
However, he made the decision this time. He had heard some things about conditions in Russia that his crew hadn’t, and didn’t want to go through that (and put them through that.)
He chose to try for home.
They made it to Florens, Belgium, before needing to land.
They landed at a fighter strip that had just been taken by the Americans during the Battle of the Bulge; the field, he later learned, had just been cleared for American planes to land when he landed.
They tried to raise their home base on their radio frequency, without success. So they successfully contacted the Third Division headquarters as their group was part of the Third Division. They gave the Third Division a report of the mission and landing in Belgium, and the Division headquarters promised to pass it on to the 388th Bomb Group.
Lt. Yarger’s crew then turned to the matter at hand: fixing the airplane well enough to return home.
One of the engines was fixed without any difficulty. The other engine shot out, however, proved to be more of a challenge to fix; the parts were not available on site.
Lt. Yarger said that he could fly the airplane home on three engines. Taking off on three engines was not standard operating procedure; still, he knew he could do it.
However, General Hoyt Vandenburg was at the base then, and the General himself said that Lt. Yarger was not permitted to do that. (A Lieutenant cannot disobey a General, especially in this setting!)
However, Lt. Yarger’s crew wanted to return home. So they got the fourth engine of the plane to work – barely. It turned so slowly that you could see the propellers as they slowly revolved.
However, that satisfied the letter of the law, and they prepared to take off.
They encountered another difficulty on the runway. As they were taxiing out, the co-pilot was to lock the tail wheel alignment. As Lt. Yarger tried to pull back on the controls to leave the ground, the controls would not move. He realized that his co-pilot had locked the controls instead of the tail wheel.
He realized it would take too long to tell the co-pilot to unlock the controls and lock the tail wheel. He reached over and did it himself, pulled back on the controls, and took off.
The crew returned to their base without any major incident; the major incidents came when they were back.
They returned to find missing-in-action notices ready to be mailed to their families. They stopped them just in time. Either the Third Division had neglected to inform the 388th Bomb Group or an error occurred in transmission and the 388th never received the message.
However, the story was not over yet. He came across a friend who had trained with him but then went into fighters. The friend had heard that Lt. Yarger had gone down in Belgium. He was surprised to meet him; the friend had written to his wife, Gloria, that he was sorry to hear of Lt. Yarger’s missing-in- action status. Lt. Yarger wrote home as quickly as he could to remedy the error.
His crew’s co-pilot came from Morrison, Illinois. “He was a good co-pilot,” Lt. Col. Yarger said. The co-pilot needed oxygen at 5000 feet or else he would pass out. When he did pass out, the top turret gunner (who was also a flight engineer) had to put him back into his seat and turn on the oxygen, after which point the co-pilot flew fine.
The co-pilot had trained to be a pilot of a Martin B-26 Marauder. He graduated ready to be assigned when his school closed; all the prospective B-26 pilots in that class were then assigned to fly B-17s.
The co-pilot did his duty; however, as he told Lt. Yarger, he wanted nothing to do with the B-17; he wanted to fly the B-26. Since Lt. Yarger loved to fly, he flew nearly all of each mission, except for a few minutes for a break.
When landing, they would fly together. When the whole group would land, the planes would leave a lot of prop wash, which caused turbulence. While Lt. Yarger had several strategies for avoiding this – either coming in high then dropping quickly, or coming in very low, the turbulence forced both pilots to fly at the same time. They flew well together, too; they did not have to worry about one pilot counteracting the other’s manuevers on the instruments.
The plane’s tail gunner had a cramped position; though a bicycle seat was provided on which he could sit, it was so uncomfortable that he usually knelt.
While it was not necessarily standard operating procedure, the tail gunner liked to remain in his place during the landing. Once, when Lt. Yarger was taxiing the plane after landing from a mission, the tail wheel folded and the tail gunner, who had stayed in his flight position, had a very bumpy ride. The airplane’s tail bounced up and down until the plane had stopped. “I don’t think he landed in the tail after that,” Yarger said.
The ball turret gunner was taller than the normal height for the position, yet fit anyway.
He, too, liked to land in his position. Lt. Yarger permitted it, though the guns had to be pulled up or else they would hit the ground and break as the plane landed.
Lt. Yarger described the plane’s navigator as a “Jewish boy from New York.”
While the navigator was capable, he had a severe sinus problem. To help him, Lt. Yarger would flip the B-17 upside down and drop it; this would clear the navigator’s problem for the rest of the flight. (The B-17s were not designed to roll, so inverted was the farthest Lt. Yarger got.)
Once, when Lt. Yarger’s crew was about 25 missions through the tour, an anti-aircraft explosive came up through the airplane. It went through the navigator’s table and through his map. It went through the top of the B-17 and exploded, taking out an engine and blowing out Lt. Yarger’s window. Lt. Yarger did not blame him too much when the navigator decided that that was the last mission he’d fly.
Lt. Yarger’s plane was attacked by German fighters several times; they encountered “mostly Me-109s.” However, as he learned about a decade ago, on April 7, 1945, the Germans were ordered to down as many B-17s as they could with the ammunition they had and then to ram one of the Allied bombers.
On that day’s mission they encountered an Me-262. This jet had already downed a B-17, coming from above. After the attack it flew beneath the B-17 formation and started climbing back up. The pilot made the mistake of climbing directly in front of Lt. Yarger’s B-17; the top turret gunner shot it down. On the same day the top turret gunner shot down a Fw-190 that was flying under the same orders.
The crew has met again in three reunions, one of which was in Dayton, Ohio, and another of which was in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
After the war, Yarger bought his father’s business from him and because of business constraints was unable to participate in the Berlin Airlift.
After the war, Lt. Yarger joined the 164th National Guard in Mansfield, Ohio and was an original member. (This was the precursor of the 179th Air National Guard, now flying C-130s.)
This was a fighter unit; however, he never checked out in fighters. He wanted to fly multi-engined aircraft; the base had a C-47. He had never checked out in a C-47, but that quickly changed.
He flew the C-47s from the Mansfield, Springfield, and Lockbourne Air National Guard bases.
He flew five governors of Ohio. “Governor Lausche was my favorite,” he said. “He was the nicest guy and appreciated everything.”
Yarger became the chief C-47 pilot on the base. He became so proficient at flying the plane that he was sent to a school at Langley Field, Virginia, to learn to be a standardization pilot. He trained with future astronaut Fred Hayes (though Hayes was training on a fighter aircraft.) As a Standardization Evaluation Pilot, he gave instrument checks and Standardization checks. Pilots had to have the Standardization checks yearly.
He also flew air transport planes at Rickenbacker Field in Columbus, Ohio. He flew the KC-97 air tanker. This propeller-driven aircraft had 3500 horsepower propellor engines, the most powerful engines built. They later added on jet engines to the planes.
The KC-97 was built as a transport plane and served as one until tanks were put into the fuselage, at which point it was modified to become an aerial refueling tanker.
He flew tankers for some time in Germany; he found it strange after bombing the nation’s military facilities a few years before. There, his base officer was a German who had flown Ju-88s in World War II. They joked about it; Yarger allowed that it was a strange thing to joke about, but they did.
The unit Yarger flew with at Rickenbacker field now flies KC-135s.
Yarger retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.
Some years ago, Ed Huntzinger (we’re not sure of the spelling of his last name) published a history of the 388th Bomb Group called The 388th at War. Only the lead crews and the deputy leads were mentioned; thus Yarger is in the book.
We discussed other aviation topics on which Lt. Col. Yarger offered his opinions.
On the Norden Bombsight: They had received specific orders to destroy the bombsight if the plane was downed, but that was partly a joke since the Germans “had more of them than we did.”
On the B-24: During his missions (while flying a B-17), he had several engines shot out yet made it home safely. While a B-24’s wing design was very good, he said, “it wasn’t designed to fly with holes in it.” The B-24s could theoretically fly a “trifle faster” and carry a “little bigger bomb load,” yet they were more vulnerable to enemy attack. He said of the B-24 pilots, “I felt sorry for them.”
On the 100th Bomb Group: “They flew poor formation. The Germans had very good intelligence – whenever they saw the Sqare D [the 100th’s tail marking] they’d go for them.” (Harry Crosby, a 100th lead navigator, quoted another non-100th B-17 veteran expressing the same opinion, without denying it.)
On the B-17: The B-17 has always been his favorite airplane. “It was always so stable and did so well under adverse conditions.” He bombed from 32,000 feet in the airplane once, and took it up to 38,000 feet in a test flight. (He was later told that he should not have done that without wearing a pressure suit, but he did not know that at the time.)
As the interview ended, he said, “I know a lot of friends that will not talk. I decided a long time ago that I would talk because a lot of people needed to know.”