Military history of Frederick W. Ellis

Military history of Frederick W. Ellis

On April 3, I was taken to Fort Devens, and after a week of indoctrination and being issued clothing, physicals and shots, was on my way to Miami Beach for basic training. I was there for eight weeks, and then sent to Denver to Buckley Field for basic armament training. We learned how to take machine guns apart and put them together again, even in the dark, as well as learning about bombs and how they were loaded on planes. After about four weeks of this, we were taken the few miles to Lowery Field to get advanced armament training. We were also given flight physicals, as we were all headed to aerial gunnery school. I was disqualified from flying because of a deviated septum, so was sent to Indianapolis to turret school. We trained on all the turrets that were used in B-17, B-24 and B-25 aircraft. Being one of the top 10 in the class, I went on to learn the G.E. remote turret that was used in the P-61 Black Widow fighter. When I graduated from that course, I went to Fort Ben Harrison, just east of Indianapolis, and had surgery to correct my deviated septum. Because of this, I missed going to Orlando with my class to the P-61 base. About a week before Christmas, I was shipped to Salt Lake City to a replacement depot. While there, the camp got quarantined for scarlet fever, and it was February before I was sent to Pratt, Kan., to a B-29 group, the 40th Bomb Group, 44th Squadron, of the 20th Bomber Command, which also used the G.E. turret, just more of them. I wasn’t there a week when I came down with scarlet fever, and ended up in isolation in the hospital. I was in there for eight weeks, during which time my outfit was shipped overseas, and I lost everything except what I had worn to the hospital. I couldn’t even get anyone to let the family know where I was, and they figured I had been sent overseas without letting them know. I was assigned to a replacement pool at Pratt, and we trained on a mockup of the B-29. On May 30, we were given delay in route orders to go to Miami, and so had some time at home visiting the family before heading overseas.
On July 8, we left Miami by Military Air Transport, and our first stop was at Borenquin Field, Puerto Rico, Then on to Georgetown, British Guiana; then Belem, Brazil; and then to Natal, Brazil, where we spent a couple of days while they checked the plane over for the long over-water flight to Ascension Island in the middle of the South Atlantic. We found that speck in the vast ocean O.K., and then on to Accra, Gold Coast, Africa. The next stop was at Madugeri, Nigeria, and then Khartoum in Sudan, and on to Aden, Arabia. I think that was the hottest place I have ever been. After flying at 12,000 feet where it was nice and cool, when we stepped out of the plane the heat nearly knocked you right back into the plane. They said it was 110 degrees in the shade, if you could find any. There was a problem with a baffle on one of the engines, so we were there for a couple of days, and we sure were glad to get out of there. Our next stop was Karachi, India, and I got sick there and ended up in the hospital with a real bad cold. I was still having trouble with my nose, and the doctor said whoever did the job before didn’t do a good job of it and said he’d do better. I was there about two weeks, and then had to travel on to Calcutta by myself. Nobody knew what to do with me, and didn’t know where I belonged, and I ended up in a replacement camp for Merrill’s Marauders in Burma, so I started yelling that I belonged to the 20th Air Force, so I guess they must have checked it out, as in a few days I was taken to a small airfield nearby called “Dum-Dum” and the 20th Air Force sent a Norseman Plane to pick me up. I was flown to the headquarters at Barackpore, India, and a few days later was taken by truck the 60 miles to my base at Chakulia, which was about 120 miles from Calcutta on the Calcutta-Bombay railroad. Our B-29s would load up with bombs and fuel, and when there was a mission in Japanese-held China, or Manchuria, they would fly “over the hump” which was the Himalayan Mountains, to what we called our forward base in China at Chengtu (we called it A-1). I was scheduled to go there one time, but then got cancelled. There were two planes that were loaded with bombs that were cancelled, so on a Sunday morning they had to get crews together to unload the bombs, and I was supposed to go, but said that I wanted to go to church first, then if they still needed help I’d be there. Just as we were getting out of church, there was a loud explosion, and saw a lot of smoke down on the line. The bombs were cluster anti-personnel bombs, and we found out later that one of the straps broke as one of the bombs was being lowered, and exploded and hit the center gas tank, and that started the fire. The base fire trucks came rolling up, one in front of the wings on each side, and one on each side behind the wings, and just as they got there, the whole thing exploded and killed all the firemen plus all our guys who were inside the bomb bay. Those two planes were totally destroyed, plus all the other planes that were anywhere near them were badly damaged by shrapnel from the bombs and flying bullets. We lost about 12 guys from our outfit, plus the firefighters and all the firefighting equipment. Besides the missions that were flown from China, we flew missions from Chakulia to Rangoon and Singapore, and places down in that area. The British had a floating dry-dock in Singapore that was captured by the Japs, and our planes sunk it. Then the British government sent our government a bill for it, but we got a presidential citation for doing it. We were at Chakulia for nine months, and then got orders to pack up, as we were moving to the South Pacific. We went by train to Calcutta, and boarded two ships, the Morton and the McCray (I was on the Morton), and left there in March 1945. We stopped in Melbourne, Australia, for three days as the McCray had engine trouble, and had to go into dry dock. We were allowed to go ashore for one day, and had a good time.
We sailed alone the next day, and met up with a baby flattop, but we were too fast for it so went on alone. We stopped at all the Navy bases, the Solomon Islands, Ulithi’s, The Gilbert Islands, and finally pulled into Guam Harbor one afternoon, and made a 180-degree turn out into the open ocean again. The next morning we pulled into Tinian Harbor, and they made us go over the side of the ship and climb down the ropes and into landing craft to take us to shore. When we got to our area, it was a sugarcane field, and there were no tents or any place to call home. They brought “K” rations for us to eat, and we had to sleep out in the open for a couple of nights. We ate sugarcane also, and it was good. We found hand grenades and empty ammunition, and a few live rounds, and had fun throwing them into the ocean. We were on a plateau right on the ocean, and eventually made stairs down the rocky cliff so we could swim in the ocean. There was a fighter strip up on the hill back toward the harbor, that we could watch the P-51s coming in for a landing.
When we first got to Tinian, our planes hadn’t arrived, so once we got our tents set up and got settled in, the Navy asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to go to their base on the island and stack wood for them. They said one of the benefits was that we could get any of the damaged boards we wanted. I went, and another benefit was that we got good food at lunch time. The wood came from the ships that brought the bombs, called “dunnage.” We had a wooden floor and side walls in our tent, and had a nice table too. In fact, guys from other tents would come over and shoot craps on our table. One of our guys had a little garden out in front and grew melons, and we all enjoyed them. One time a typhoon hit the island, and most tents were blown down, but we just dropped ours onto the platform, and although some things got wet we didn’t have any damage. The guys in one tent got a 6x6 truck, and lassoed a rope to the pins sticking out of the top of the tent, and tied them to the truck, but it backfired on them as the tent came away from the floor and was flapping out in the breeze like a flag. They really got soaked.
Later, when Gen. Curtis LeMay took command of the 20th Air Force, he had a house built up on that hill, and we could see it from our area. There were two airfields on Tinian besides the fighter strip, North Field and West Field. Our planes were at West Field. North Field was near Saipan, and one day we saw this B-29 flying around from North Field, and it didn’t have any gun turrets on it. We wondered what was going on, and then found out that there was an atomic bomb on the island, and that was the plane that was going to drop it. We were about ready to start swimming from the island!During this time, when our planes left on a bombing raid to Japan, old LeMay was sitting up in his house, broadcasting to the Japanese telling where the bombs were going to drop that night. Everyone was ready to go up there and shoot him. Then we found out what he was doing. He would plan the raids in the south one night, and then in the north the next night, so he had the Japs running all over the place with their anti-aircraft guns. They didn’t have many fighters left, so they didn’t bother our bombers too much. After the 2nd atomic bomb dropped, the Japs gave up and the war was over. I made one flight over Japan after the war to drop supplies to our prisoners, and saw Mount Fuji and also saw the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor.
The flight that I made over Japan, as I said, was to drop supplies to our men held prisoner there. I don’t remember the name of the town where we went, but it was on the China Sea side of the main island. We were flying around in the valleys looking for signs of the camp and couldn’t locate it, so the pilot climbed up to altitude, and then we saw big arrows on hilltops, pointing to the camp. We had four wooden platforms, two in each bomb bay, that were loaded with food, clothing, personal grooming supplies and medical supplies, all strapped down tight, and with a parachute at each corner. Two of them dropped right into the camp, and the other two landed outside, but not too far away. We could see the Japs streaming out of the village to see what they could get also. On the last platform one parachute didn’t open, and all the stuff came loose and just spread all over the countryside.
The Japanese surrendered in August, and we were wondering when we would leave for home and get back to our normal lives. The government set up a system of points, so that the guys who had been in the military the longest and had seen the most action were the first to go home.
I left Tinian around the first of November by Liberty Ship, and arrived in Los Angeles (San Pedro) the day after Thanksgiving 1945. The next day we were transferred to Camp Hahn, across the highway from March Field in Riverside. We had a three-day pass in Riverside, and then boarded a plane and flew to Newark, N.J., and then by streetcar, taxi and train, made it to Fort Devens, and was discharged on Dec. 4, 1945. I had been in the Army Air Corps for 32 months, and overseas for 18 months, been on all the continents except Antarctica, had been all the way around the world, and crossed the Equator four times.
Frederick W. Ellis
40th Bomb Group - 44th Squadron of 20th Bomber Command, U.S. Army Air Corps
Daphne, Ala.
Honor Flight trip taken in 2011
Jan. 5, 2015 – update:
I was recently reading a book about the “Hump” over the Himalayan Mountains, and there was one place where it told about a cargo plane landing at Dum Dum Airport in Calcutta and his brakes failed, and to keep from going into the river he raised his landing gear to stop the plane. That was the day I was at the airport waiting for the plane that was to pick me up. I didn’t see the cargo plane land, but did see it at the end of the runway. That was in July 1944.
Another update is that I was told to read the book “Unbroken” about Louie Zamperini, the famous runner, which was written by Laura Hillenbrand, about Louie, who was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. At the end of the war he was held at a camp on the China Sea coast on a high hill called Naoetsu, and I have a feeling that was the camp where we dropped the supplies when I went on the flight over Japan in 1945. I have nothing to corroborate this; it’s just a gut feeling I have.