I found out way after the mission, we were going up fat and happy by ourselves.
By that time, the Germans got us spotted.
So, every plane in southwest Germany got the word to get up there.
At the height of the Second World War, military service was almost a certainty -
whether by draft or enlistment - for any young American man.
Recent high school graduate Leon Waldman had determined early on that if he was to serve,
it would be with the United States Army Air Forces.
I don't know. I thought it would be nice to fly.
How does an 18 year old kid make decisions?
Everyone was either drafted or joined, so I figured I'd join and get what I want.
I asked for the Air Force and I got what I wanted.
They shipped us to Fort Dix, New Jersey and we got inducted.
So, they cut your hair and taught you how to salute and gave you your uniform.
They put me on a troop train, and of course you don't know where you're going.
And where did I wind up in the middle of November? Miami Beach.
How good can Uncle Sam be to you, right?
We had about six or eight weeks of basic training.
And then I was on a train to Long Beach, California for gunnery school.
So I finished that, then they sent us up to Salt Lake for small arms training.
I don't know what we needed that for, cause I never used the small arms.
And then we went to Las Vegas, and you had to learn airplane recognition.
How to shoot the correct people down and not shoot our own people down, which happened.
And then the last two weeks we went up to Indian Springs.
And the first week we flew in a AT-6. They called it the "Texan Trainer".
But, the first day was the first time I was ever in an airplane,
and the plane was bouncing and I got airsick.
So I stuck my head out, but I faced forward, and I threw up all over me.
That's how smart we were at nineteen.
And then, the last week, we flew in B-17's and you would fly in all the various gun positions
so you could be trained in all of them.
And then they give you your wings, and that's when they form the crews.
I got the waist gun.
Clark Gable was a right waist gunner too, so that was good enough for me.
We lucked out. They gave us seventy-two brand new planes.
These were the B-17G. It was the first one that had a chin turret.
And they were silver. They were the first silver planes that went to Italy.
Oh, and they said, "You better take good care of these planes. They cost $250,00."
And we said, "Wow! That much?"
Equipped with brand new B-17 Flying Fortresses,
Leon and the 483rd Bomb Group were on their way to Italy
to join the rest of the 15th Air Force
as they fought to stop the spread of German forces throughout Europe.
But when the 483rd arrived, they were met with a rude awakening.
So they sent us to double up with another bomb group that had been there a long time -
the 99th.
And those dirty guys took our shiny bombers away. We thought they were ours.
They took seventy-two new planes away from us and gave us this beat up, old
"Bad Penny" up there, with a hundred missions on it when we got it.
A hundred missions.
So, we flew our mission April 12th. But it was a milk run. It was an easy mission.
We were just bombing a cement factory, not a very important target.
I think just a couple puffs of smoke came up. And I was looking out the window,
and it was a beautiful day and I thought, "Boy, this is fun!" You know?
Well the next mission, a guy I knew pretty well, he was on another crew -
Boom! They hit him in the wing.
They hit him with the 88 in the wing, which blows up the gas tanks,
and the plane just disintegrates. Nobody lives through that.
So I thought, "Boy, you could get hurt on this job! That's pretty tough."
So then I flew a lot of missions after that.
Mostly we bombed aircraft factories, we bombed a torpedo factory once in France,
marshalling yards, I went to Vienna two or three times.
They were making fighter planes. We had to bomb those factories.
Ploiești. Of course that's where the Germans were getting most of their fuel.
Munich was a very bad mission.
Flying, at times, more than three missions a week,
Leon was well on his way to completing the required fifty.
But in a moment of frustration and flared tempers, Leon threatened a superior officer,
resulting in being grounded from one of the most significant missions in the war.
I didn't like my co-pilot. I was stupid and I told him,
"Don't go near the bomb bay on the next mission."
So, he reported me, and I guess it went up to the squadron commander.
Instead of court martialling me, he took me off that mission. That was my punishment.
It turned out to be June 2nd to June 11th. Nine days.
Well, what does June 2nd to June 11th tell you?
It was D-Day!
The Allied invasion of the French coast was the first step
in bringing the war to Germany in an unprecedented way.
But for the largest seaborne invasion in history to be a success,
it would require a multitude of diversions
to keep the German full strength from defending the coast.
The bombing missions of the 483rd would do just that.
They flew this mission to Romania, bombed it, then went on to Russia.
Then they sat down for a day or two. Then they flew another mission.
But that took the pressure off of the western front somewhat, you see?
That was my contribution to D-Day.
But, we didn't have newspapers or magazines or radios. D-Day meant nothing to us.
"Oh yeah? Heard about they landed in Normandy? Well, good! When do we go home?"
The D-Day invasion was a success, and the tide began to turn in the Allies’ favor.
But the skies over Europe were no less dangerous for the 15th Air Force.
We lost seventy-nine planes in the time we were over there.
Most of the time, the planes were shot down.
So, everybody was lost except those that could jump out.
The worst mission was a place called Memmingen, Germany.
They thought it was a milk run. You know, "Some airfield in Germany.
What the hell is that all about?"
So I'm flying along and I don't know what was going on.
I thought we were going up to a target with a bunch of other bombers.
The Tuskegee Airmen were supposed to fly escort on that mission.
Well, I found out way after the mission, we were going up fat and happy by ourselves.
Two of the groups didn't like the weather over the Adriatic and turned around and went home.
And two other groups went to an alternate target, and the fighters didn't go with us.
And then, by that time, the Germans got us spotted.
"Hey! A group of twenty-six dumb, happy B-17's all by themselves!"
So, every plane in southwest Germany got the word to get up there.
And I looked out there and I see, "Wow, a flock of birds!"
They came in closer and you could see they're airplanes.
The next thing I hear, everybody's shooting and planes are going down.
The first squadron of seven planes went down in about two or three minutes. All of them.
And then they started on the other two. They got fourteen out of twenty-six of us.
So, fourteen planes went down with one hundred and forty-three guys.
We were fighting the rest of them off. The whole battle was about ten minutes.
When we got over the target, we were able to bomb it successfully.
They say we destroyed a lot of planes on the ground.
But, this was the worst mission for my bomb group,
and probably for most any bomb group, to lose basically sixty percent of their planes
in a few minutes.
We got back and landed, and I could see a twenty millimeter shell
lodged in the back of the wing and it was unexploded.
Of course, if it exploded, it would have blown up the tank near it
and we would have all been dead.
That's why I call July 18th my second birthday. It was July 18th, 1944 - that mission.
Just a few weeks later, Leon would finally complete his quota.
Having survived fifty bombing missions in German-patrolled skies,
he was being sent back to the United States.
I finally got home and got to New Jersey, just behind the Statue of Liberty.
And then they sent me to Kingman, Arizona and they trained me to be an instructor.
So, I was training gunners.
The minute the war ended in Europe, they knew they didn't need a lot of gunners
in the Pacific, cause the B-29's had just a couple gunners with a lot of remote guns.
So, they didn't need a lot of gunners.
And just like that, Leon’s service in the war came to an end.
Seventy-five years later,
Leon’s memories of the Second World War are clear as ever -
the missions he flew and the crew he served with.
But the other guys, they've all disappeared.
I was close with the pilot, the radioman until he died,
the waist gunner until he died, and Shorty when he died.
Most of were only nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, mostly.
That's who fought the war.