JOHN ELLIS

John L. Ellis was born in Burns, Wyoming and unlike most people who migrated west to Whitman County, he moved east, first to Iowa, then to Chicago, Illinois where he lived in 1940.  His father, who had an idea that war was pending, hoped to prepare him for what appeared to be his future by sending him to Kemper Military School in Boonesville, Missouri.  There he became interested in flying and got a private pilot's license.  He married Lorna Hinz from Anamosa, Iowa in December, 1942, but they didn't move to Colfax until 1953.

Meanwhile, he signed up with the Air Force in the spring of 1942, when indeed America was at war.  After Basic Training, he spent nine months in Cadet School in such exotic places as San Antonio, Brady, and Dalhart, graduating in December 1943.  He found he had at least a little advantage in being able to survive Cadet School.  Since he had flown before, he was able to manage PT-19s, BT-13s and twin engine planes easier than some of his fellow Cadets.  When he got into a B-17 he even felt free to buzz the prison in Anamosa, Iowa as a form of greeting to his wife who was living with her parents near that institution while he was in the service. 

After his training was completed he flew to England.  The flight took twenty-one days, due to bad weather in Iceland and Greenland, plus mechanical problems.  His reply to the question, "What happened when you got to Europe?" was, "They kept shooting at me!"

That was certainly the story of bombers flying out of England during the war, in his case in the early spring of 1944.  He flew two missions on D-Day and says he was really glad to be up in the sky looking down on all the chaos going on below him on Omaha Beach.

He flew over Berlin twice, both of those experiences, Ellis says, were, "Real scary.  There was real heavy flak, that is pieces of metal shot from ground anti-aircraft guns, and lots of fighters coming at us." 

The first time he flew over Berlin, a piece of flak the size of his thumb put a hole in the floor of the cockpit of his plane and was spent in his combat boot, but didn't injure his foot.  His second Berlin mission saw a larger piece of flak come through the windshield.  His co-pilot had his hand on the throttle and the flak skimmed his knuckles, flew past John, and hit the flares on the cockpit wall behind him, igniting them and causing sparks to fly all over the place.  The flak then bounced back and hit him in the back of the neck.  Fortunately he was wearing his flight jacket, a leather jacket commonly worn by pilots, and a flak suit, designed of kapok to protect from just such flying objects.

"Kapok flew!" John exclaimed.  "And I felt that thing lodge on my neck."  He retrieved the piece of flak and still has it, mounted on a piece of wood by his grandfather.  It is about the size of an index finger, with really rough edges.  That flak came a flight-jacket-and-flak-suit's thickness from doing him great harm.  Their bombardier got hit on that mission too, but he was not seriously injured either.

"Other than that, I had a really odd tour of duty," John said.  When he said earlier in the interview, "They kept shooting at me," he didn't just mean the Germans. "We had more problems with our own side than with the Germans," he said.  "We did take a lot of German flak and a lot of fire from German fighters.  But we lost a tail-gunner, not to the enemy."

They had been briefed to make a bomb drop on target, then make a sharp right hand turn to clear the area.  When they got to the target they were told to vacate.  He had to slide under another plane to follow that order and when he did a B-17 started dropping its bombs. 

"He dropped bombs from our radio to the tail, hitting and killing our tail gunner.  That was the really sad part of our tour of duty," Ellis said. 

His rudder was bent over and both elevators were full of holes from that accident.  "We still made it back to base," he said. "The B-17 was a good plane."

Another mission he flew when he was at the mercy of American fire, found him coming around some mountains and flying right into a dog fight between some P-51s and some German ME-109s.  One of the German 109 pilots was trying to out-run a P-51 who was hard after him.  The German flew by so close John could see his face clearly.  The American shot at the 109 and hit John's plane, putting out two engines and setting the wing on fire.  Again, the B-17's two remaining engines got him safely back to base.

There was yet another time they were deep into Germany and the last bomber out of the target area that night.  His co-Pilot saw another B-17 come up under him.  He put his plane into a whip stall to avoid hitting the other plane which resulted in either torn gas lines or gas tank damage, he was not sure which.  This time they didn't make it back to England but had to put down in the North Sea after they lost two engines, then a third went out for lack of gasoline.  The B-17 had life rafts on each side of the plane above the pilot and the crew was able to deploy them when they hit the water since the plane didn't sink for about twenty minutes. 

He had been on the radio with the British Air-Sea Rescue who had stayed on with them for the whole time as they were running out of gas, getting them positioned for rescue.  The rescue people steered him across the North Sea from boat to boat keeping him as close to rescue vessels as possible until he finally went down.  It was the 31^st of July and yet the water they went into was so cold they knew they could last only a few minutes if they actually stayed in the water.  The rafts they inflated saved them from hypothermia and kept them alive until help arrived.

"The Brits had a terrific air sea rescue team, " John said, shaking his head as he recalled their well executed response to his critical situation.  They found him and his crew with a one-engine-on-top Walrus sea plane built to hold two people.  When his crew had been pulled on board, there were twelve people in the plane and it was too heavy to take off.  They taxied on the water for three hours until they got connected with a rescue boat.

The bombardier on the plane was a historian who later wrote to the Royal Air Sea Rescue and got a copy of the orders written to go pick them up.  John has copies of that correspondence to remind him of the job well done by the British on his crew's behalf.

In addition to dodging American fire, John Ellis flew missions twice to deliver supplies to the French Freedom Fighters in the French Alps.  They set out to drop parachutes attached to canisters holding guns, ammo, toilet paper, food - whatever the French needed to survive against German attack and occupation. 

The first mission required them to drop their canisters in a narrow valley where the Freedom Fighters were pinned down by Germans entrenched on the mountain tops lining the valley.  The planes had to fly wing tip to wing tip down into the valley with Germans shooting at them as they went in.  They were in such close quarters that some parachutes caught on the wings and tails of other planes coming in behind them.  The second mission was to a more open space where they had to fly over at five hundred feet, taking ground fire from German troops.  "There were heavy reprisals from those missions," John said.  "The Germans went in and shot up some little towns, killing civilians who received some of the things we dropped."

Ellis spoke of R & R after his North Sea experience at an English estate where he was awakened at 6 a.m. and asked if he wished to have tea.  That was a later call than what he usually expected.  He and his crew were awakened at their quarters at Bury St. Edmonds between one and three in the morning for general briefing followed by pilot briefing prior to six to ten hour missions.

Although it took him twenty-one days to fly over, after he completed his thirty-five missions he returned on a ship in just eleven days.  He and his wife moved to Colfax where they raised one girl and two boys and he owned and operated a concrete plant for twenty years, then sold out and retired, or at least retired in his own way.  He has worked at different jobs that interested him such as the Town and Country men's clothing store that was on Main Street for so many years and is now part of The Clothes Horse.

John is proud to say his North Sea story has found its way into the Air Force National Archives.  One John Winslet kept a war-time diary in which he included the story, and that diary now resides in the archives.