JOHN W. "BILL" NORRIS
John W. "Bill" Norris now resides in Dalton Gardens, a quiet residential suburb of Coeur d'Alene. As a boy, Bill lived in the section house in Thornton where his dad served as a section boss for the railroad. He graduated from Rosalia High School in June 1943. His dad moved the family to Bonners Ferry in November of that same year. It was there Bill was drafted into the Army. He passed the test admitting him into the Army Air Corps and reported to Buckley Field in Denver for Basic Training.
From Denver he moved on to Radio School in Scottfield, Illinois. When he found he would become a ground radio operator instead of a flight operator, he signed up for gunnery school and was sent to the Aerial Gunnery School in Harlingen, Texas. After graduating from that school, he was sent back to the Pacific Northwest to Walla Walla Air Base where he met the crew he was to fly with in the Pacific Theater of Operations during the closing months of World War II. All ten members of that crew survived the war.
Norris and the crew, upon completion of overseas training, shipped down the coast to Camp Stoneman in California from where they sailed out of San Francisco Bay in late May, 1945. The convoy zig-zagged southwest, finally docking in Pearl Harbor for four days. Norris recalls search lights piercing the Hawaiian skies, a constant reminder of the Japanese attack on American soil on December 7, 1941. Bill then spent twenty-seven days in a naval convoy before landing on Leyte, an island in the Philippines.
Continuing their journey, Bill's crew of ten boarded a C-46 twin engine transport aircraft similar to the earlier Gooney Bird. They began searching for the 5th Bomber Group, 13th Air Force with which they were to join up. While it would seem the Army Air Corps and the 13th Air Force would know exactly where the 5th was, that was not the case. The war was moving so fast over a huge tract of the Southern Pacific Ocean that it proved difficult for headquarters personnel to keep up with troop movement, and impossible to accurately pinpoint island base operations.
The search took Bill's crew first to Morotai where they found a few Japanese and Australians who had declared some kind of tentative truce with each other. Still looking for the 5th, they flew to Biak, where they found nothing but an empty air strip. Then they went on to New Guinea where they found an American air strip, but no bombers. Flying north they finally caught up with the 5th on Samar. Samar was one of many island bases on which the Seabees, who came to be known as the "Jungle Air Force," had carved air strips out of heavy tropical vegetation. Having finally joined the war late in July 1945, Bill's crew also joined the battle, immediately hitting Formosa, Negros, and the China Coast in their B-24.
The B-24 design showed major improvements over the B-17 used out of England at the beginning of World War II. The B-24 could fly farther and carry a bigger load, giving Bill and his fellow crewmen the longer range needed to cover the miles and miles of ocean between their jungle island base and their targets. The earlier B-17 was not equipped with a tail turret, or Plexiglas hemisphere for gun and gunner, as was the later B-24 in which Bill worked. Although Bill was, and is yet, tall and lanky, he found his place in World War II in the tail gunner position on that B-24.
Bill's pilot flew their plane and crew on missions as long as fourteen hours over enemy waters with no fighter escorts. When asked if he remembers what kind of rations they were issued for those grueling flights, Norris replied quickly, with a wry grin, "Always the same: a can of Spam, a loaf of bread, and a can of V-8 juice."
When they finally hooked up with the 5th Bomber unit, they took part in the recapture of Borneo, which had previously served the Japanese war machine as a gas and oil reserve. The 5th had recently taken Rabaul, establishing it as an intelligence and operations site from which American's war effort directed its attention northward after the fleeing Japanese military machine.
Norris spoke of a misconception he has heard frequently since serving in the war. "A lot of people thought of the Japanese as a small nation going up against the huge United States. That just was not true. Right after the turn of the 20th century the Japanese had published the Tanaka Memorial, an agreement of conquest and domination of all the Far East, and ultimately the whole world. They had already taken all of the cities along China's extended sea coast, and all the South Sea islands clear to Hawaii. They had control over China and all its resources, a rich nation much larger than the United States. They had taken Manchuria in 1931 as well as Korea and had never lost a battle until after Pearl Harbor," Bill explained, showing maps and documents he has collected through the years to support his statements.
"So Japan was not a little island empire trying to defend itself against an imperialistic United States that was seeking to dominate the world. Japan itself was the aggressor bound by their own Tanaka Memorial to conquer and rule. It fell to America to stop the tide."
When the A-bombs fell on Japan, that tide was stopped and the war ended. Norris and his crew were split up, eight of them flying home almost immediately. Bill was sent to Leyte in the Philippines as an Automotive Supply Clerk until he was finally sent home.
Bill spent a year at Eastern Washington State College on the G.I. Bill of Rights. After that year he went to flight training school and earned his commercial pilot's license. He and Beverly Peterson were married in Bonners Ferry, Idaho in 1950. They had three girls and one boy. They lived in Rosalia, Lind, and Dayton while he crop-dusted from 1952 to 1960. He then worked as an Operating Engineer from 1960 until he retired in 1987 to the quiet of Dalton Gardens.