DON DORMAN
By Brian Thompson and Don Dorman
Don Dorman was at Washington State College (WSU) on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. It was just a calm, peaceful Sunday. He came home from church, walked into his fraternity house which was usually a hub of noise and commotion, and found it deadly silent. "There was not a sound, except for the radio playing," Dorman said. Then he heard the message: Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
Mr. Dorman enlisted in the Army Air Corps in Spokane at Geiger Field in September of 1942. He had graduated from High School in the summer of 1940 but needed some time to earn money to attend college. At that time you could stay in high school an extra year if you wanted, so he continued to take math, physics, and other science courses while he worked. "That extra year of High School really helped me," he noted. He studied at Washington State College in Pullman for two semesters, then his education was interrupted when he was called to duty in February, 1943.
When the call came he rode the rails to Ayers Junction, then switched to a passenger train going to Salt Lake City. He was ticketed for a sleeper car, but when he got to his space he found it occupied by a woman and baby, so he slept in a seat next to the conductor. "Everything was so crowded," he said shaking his head. "People were being moved all over the country." At Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City he was put on a troop train along with people from all over the country who had assembled there to be assigned to training posts. He was first sent to Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, then went to Kelly/Randolf Field in San Antonio where he had a complete physical exam and some basic military training. For one thing, he learned how to keep the points of his shirt collar sharp by using a "spiffy." The First Lieutenant over him was so adamant about those collar points being kept sharp with a stay that Don and the rest of his unit gifted the man with gold spiffys when they completed their training.
Dorman was then an Army Air Force Cadet and was moved to Fort Hayes Teacher's College in Kansas, a training detachment located on a community college campus. Next move was to Pine Bluff, Arkansas for Primary Training in PT-19s. His flight instructor started giving him a real bad time after about seven and a half hours of instruction. Finally when Don hit eight hours the guy growled at him to land, and he got out of the plane. Don wondered if he was going to be washed out. As the instructor stomped off he shouted, "Go up there and kill yourself."
Don was so excited, he flew up to two thousand feet instead of the required one thousand, but when he came back to earth he executed what he calls "the best landing I've ever done in my life." That training and solo flight got him moved on to Independence, Kansas and into Basic Training where they flew BT-14s and BT-13s to learn instrument flying.
"I didn't like the BT-13," claims Don. "It had a paper tail and shook real bad. The guys called it the 'Vultee Vibrator' for good reason." Also, it was very cold in Kansas that winter. Once he and a couple other Cadets, eager to get in some air time, tried for over an hour in freezing weather to start one of the BT-14s. They had to turn a crank on the wing to get it to turn over, which they did, repeatedly, until they finally coaxed it into a steady roar. Then their instructor came out of the warm shed nearby and took the plane up himself.
Next stop for Dorman was Moore Field in Mission, Texas where he completed Advanced Training in AT-6s, along with seven other men in his flight. They all got their Wings, but only half of them survived the war. Flight training procedure had changed and Don's class, 44-C, was retained for eight hours more of flight training in a P-40, another plane he didn't care much for because of its narrow landing gear. Also, it was torqued so he could only slow roll to the right, which nevertheless he and his buddies enjoyed doing. One day they were flying loose formation and came up on a B-24, a four-engine bomber. They all slow rolled by him, just showing off. Then the bomber pilot slow rolled his plane! He started at twenty thousand feet altitude and came out at ten thousand feet. "We all got out of there in a hurry!" Don laughed. "We didn't want to fly anywhere near that guy… he was crazy!"
Don and a friend bought a Plymouth coupe which they then drove to Richmond, Virginia, then to Blackstone, another training base, where he was introduced to the plane that brings a big smile to his face, the
P-47 Thunderbolt.
"We learned to strafe, bomb, and dog fight. We would go up together, fly by each other, break up, and go into vicious battle maneuvers. We practiced a lot and learned how to fight in the sky. One day when we landed we were all soaking wet from sweat from the intensity of flying combat action. The Thunderbolt handled great. It couldn't turn inside a German 109 or one of our P-51 Mustangs, but you could do a slow roll, chop the engine, hit rudder, pause, then full throttle and be right behind any airplane you were fighting."
Moving on to Dover, Delaware Dorman spent some time flying with loaded bombs out over the ocean looking for German submarines they knew were out there, but never saw one they could attack. He and a friend took off one day with irritant smoke they were to practice discharging. They were flying over Chesapeake Bay about sixty feet off the water when they came upon a Navy Cleveland class cruiser surrounded by small boats. Neither of them said a word to each other, they just opened their smoke valves and flew over the ship. There was no wind so the smoke just settled down until all they could see was the smoke stack of the cruiser sticking up out of the cloud of irritant smoke. Well, apparently the Navy was indeed irritated. The next day there was a terse notice on the Bulletin Board in operations directing all pilots "NOT to fly near Navy ships."
Then it was Don's turn to board a ship. He and about seventeen thousand others sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, built for one thousand passengers. They headed for Glasgow, England. The trip was profitable for Dorman who was able to send home about thirty-five hundred dollars from poker winnings. The first two months while he was at Atcham Field near Shrewsbury, England, he learned to fly with British pilots. One important thing he learned was not to come up directly behind a Lancaster Bomber in his P-47 or they would start firing.
Paris had been liberated just two weeks before Dorman arrived in France in October of 1944. He was billeted in the former German Officer's Center at Chateaux Rothschild outside Paris where the grounds were liberally sprinkled with signs that said "Minen" or mine. The Germans had planted land mines all over the place as they evacuated. Dorman and a friend of his were celebrating a mission well done one evening and somehow forgot about the mine field and walked all the way across it in the dark, not giving any consideration to where they were walking. "That could have been it," Dorman said sheepishly.
He was next attached to the 406th Fighter Group, 514th Fighter Squadron, at Mourmelon La Grand, near Reims, France on the front lines. First Lieutenant Donald O. Dorman, Jr., had flown just six missions when on December 16, 1944 German General von Rundstedt launched a major attack that came to be known as The Battle of The Bulge. The next day Don flew a morning mission, then returned to base and volunteered to replace an ill pilot on an afternoon flight. Near Gilszem, Germany his formation came upon a German tank unit that had stopped in a woods to camouflage their tanks.
"We dropped our napalm bombs on them," Don said. "One of my bombs hit a tank, but I saw the igniter fall off and bounce away, so it didn't explode. We had to break away when an ack-ack position opened up on us. We came back around, three or four of us. I was flying 'tail-end Charlie.' We went down to strafe the gun position that was firing at us. I located the emplacement and dove down to hit it. I didn't see another gun off to my side. He made several hits. I could hear metal grinding, my engine quit, and I had fire coming up in the cockpit. I threw the canopy off, unfastened my seat belt, jumped up on the seat, dove for the trailing edge of the wing, and pulled the rip cord. My leg hit the tail of the plane as my chute opened. I swung once and hit the ground at the bottom of the swing, then rolled into the ack-ack hole I had been strafing seconds before. The German gunner very carefully removed my 45 automatic and with his knife cut the chute cords from around me. He said, 'For you the Var isst over!!'"
Dorman was temporarily placed in a civilian prison in the town of Trier, about two miles from where his plane had gone down, almost on the front line. He was locked in a cell on the top floor. A few days later American B-26s came over, dropping bombs, one of which hit the church across the street, and another hit the prison kitchen. Locked in his cell, huddled against the wall, windows blown in, bombs screaming, Don remembers, "I never felt so helpless and scared in my life."
Then a very odd thing happened. A German guard, risking his own life, made his way through the prison, unlocking all the cell doors. The prisoners rushed out and followed the guard to an air raid shelter under the prison. After the all-clear sounded that same guard put Don in a ground-level cell which contained a printing press and some parts. He and his cellmate, Rusty Price, a member of his squadron, were able to pass their time taking apart the press. They used long pieces of that metal to try to pry apart the prison bars. Don covered the noise by singing his high school and WSC fight songs. Their efforts were to no avail since the Germans had built the prison too well.
Dorman and Price later walked to Bitburg, then Don was shipped to Barth, Germany where he spent the balance of the war at Stalag Luft I. He was liberated in the second week of May 1945 by Russian troops. While in prison camp the twenty-three men with him in Room 10, Block 9, North Compound 3 agreed to pool and share all food that came to them including Red Cross parcels.
Their main staple was what he calls World War II Black Bread, made from the following recipe which came from the official record of the "Food Providing Ministry published (top secret) Berlin 24. XI 1941 by the Director of Ministry Herr Mansfeld and Herr Moritiz."
The recipe read, "It was agreed that the best mixture to bake black bread was: 50% bruised rye grain, 20% sliced sugar beets, 20% tree flour (saw dust), and 10% minced leaves and straw."
After the war Don returned to his studies at WSC, graduated in 1948, and returned to LaCrosse to farm his family land. He married Ruth Ellingwood in 1946. He is currently the mayor of LaCrosse.