The Webmaster

1. Tell me about your life before the war:
1. "Well, before the war I had gone to a two year college here in Americus, (Georgia) and I got a job with the Buick dealer as a bookkeeper and accountant, so that's what I was doing right up to the time of the war. Now of course, some things got pretty rough in 1939, and they had a draft over here, so I had to volunteer for the draft, but I got a deferment because my dad wasn't in good health, and I was contributing money for the family. My sister and I were both working, and we were contributing money for my dad and my mother. So, what happened when Japan got into it and attacked us, then, I realized I was going to have to lose my draft status because they were calling for men, so I decided to join the air force, and I volunteered for the air force.  I volunteered as a cadet. I just barely got in. I was almost overage."
2. How old were you when you went into the military and why?
1. "I enlisted on April 2, 1942, but I did have a deferment. My deferment lasted for several months and so eventually I had to go in. I had never flown, but I volunteered for cadets, and I passed the test. Then I went out and got a friend of mine to take me up in an airplane. I had never been up in one, and one of the reasons was I was just a little uneasy about getting in one, but I realized that in the war things were going to be different. I didn't want to be on the ground. I'd rather be in the air. Everything happened in a hurry there; if you got killed you got killed right away. You weren't hanging around along time, and there was something kind of spectacular and exciting about it too."
3. What type of training did you have to prepare you for the war?
1. "So I went to primary. I got through primary alright, and I got in basic training, and my dad died, and I came home, and I really got messed up when I came home. I didn't get home in time for my dad's funeral, and when I came back I was a bunch of nerves. I was washed out, but then I got into what I really was tailored to be and that was a gunner on a B24, and I went to gunnery school. They sent me to gunnery school down at Florida at Tyndall Field, and I was in class 4340 there, and there were 525 men in there, and I was the top student. I was the top gunner, and I got to shoot on the Tyndall Field Gunnery Team against the competition between the other five gunnery schools in the United States, and we met down at Fort Myers Florida then. Fort Myers had a gunnery school down there, and that's where they had the shoot down there, so I shot on the Tyndall Field Gunnery Team down there. We placed third out of the six. That was what we did, and then I was sent to bomber school where I studied about bombs and how they rigged bombs on the planes and everything; the things that held them. I had to study how all those things worked so in case a jam up or anything we could go in there and cut them loose…and that was at Denver Colorado…Like I said, studied about bombs, and how they were on a plane and there were different types and all the things like that. In gunnery school they taught me how to shoot machine guns and aim and everything, and I was already pretty good with a gun, so I got along good there…Then we were made up as a crew. I was sent to Salt Lake City, and they made up the crews there, so I got with my other 9 men who were on my crew with our bomber and we started flying together on training missions, and one unusual thing; the pilot looked at me when we all came together and he looked at me and he said, "You're my tail gunner." So, I was a tail gunner on there and we trained there. We went to Pocatello Idaho, and the weather got real bad there, and then they sent us out to Muroc California, to Lake Muroc, and we wound up training out there. Then we went to Hamilton field and picked up a new bomber, and we named it "Destiny Deb," and everybody chipped in, and they painted a picture on it there, the little girl riding the bomb. We flew that one over seas. We flew over seas to Manduria Italy and that was in March. We got over seas in March of 1944. It was down in the heel of Italy and that was a heavy bomber crew and they were also called "The Cotton Tails." They had quit a reputation, but the Germans had gotten real upset with our bombing crew because they had tore them up one time on a real important mission, and they attacked our bomber crew. They said, "the white tails," so our CO said, "It isn't but just a little bit of white on there, so get some white paint and paint the whole thing white back there on the tail where they'll be able to see it real good, so you can see what it was then, and from then on it was a war of the Cotton Tails." 
4. How would you describe your first mission in the war?
1. "I flew my first mission April the twelfth… but what you would do is go out and look at the bulletin board to see if you were flying yet. I went out this day and I looked at it and my name wasn't on it, but that night, at two-o-clock in the morning a guy was shaking me and had a flashlight in my face, and he said, "Hey Buddy. Your name Dudley?" and I said, "Yes." And I just hardly knew where he was. He said, "You're flying replacement gunner on a crew whose tail gunner is sick, Lieutenant Becktail…You got five minutes to get your flying gear together, get over to briefing, and get something to eat." It was pitch black dark. He had a light in my face. I didn't know where the light switch was in the thing and he was gone and I said, "Wait up, I done forgot who you told me to go to." and he was gone! I couldn't get him! My heart was beating a million miles a minute. I ain't kidding you. I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't even know where the light switch was! I was in pitch black dark. It was between two and three-o-clock in the morning. That's how early you had to get up for a mission. And so, one of the old guys that had been there a long time got up, and got the lights on, and helped me, and got me out there, and I got out to the plane. The props were turning, and we took off in about five minutes, but before that, when I got out there, sitting on the ground was the guy that I was supposed to replace, and here's what he told me. He said, "I wouldn't ask anybody to fly this as their first mission, and if you don't want to fly it, I'll fly it." And boy, I'm telling you, he did more then I would've done. I would've never done that. He had a lot of internal, what you call g-u-t-s. You know what I'm talking about. But I told him I'd come to fly it, and I was going to fly it. So I got in and we took off and we flew up the Adriatic about an hour and a half and those bombers fly close to 200 miles an hour, loaded and everything. And so, we were up the Adriatic probably over two hundred miles and the pilot came on the intercom and he said, "Crew, the mission has been recalled… The target is blocked over by bad weather. Disarm the bombs." We had already armed them to fly in and that was part of our job on there about studying bombs when you take off you didn't want them armed because is anything crashed in it that thing would blow up. So we disarmed the bombs, dropped them in the Adriatic, and they just went down there, they didn't bust or anything, they were disarmed. And then we came back, and I tell you what, I was so happy to come back from that mission. I had the worst strain trying to get out there…and I said, "Never again will I get caught like this." And I had all my gear laid out before. Every time I had a mission again, all I had to do was jump in it and go, and I could do it in the dark! You know what I mean? It was so important to me…"
5. Where were you stationed over seas and what were the living conditions like?
1. "The conditions were primitive. The German's had owned that base… and the German's had just taken everything that was worth anything out and just left it stripped and when we landed there I thought, man that is the worst looking place that I ever saw. It had dirt runways and over in England, you know, they had paved runways and everything: Broke down houses, hangers and stuff over there. So it was real discouraging when we first got over there to see it, you know, like that. But everything turned out alright. What we had to do, we had to fly practice missions before we actually got on a regular mission, and then what they would do they would take one green man off of my crew and put him on a replacement on a nine man crew that already had missions and had experience., you see? So, that way we were getting our break in. So, on the mission that I actually flew in…I forgot who the pilot was that I flew with, but it was a real good crew and we came back and I got out and there were nine holes back in the tail section back there where the torrent was from flack where they had shot at us, you know? But we had flack holes all over the plane. Flack was almost accurate almost all of the time. And it hit us one time, and there was a hole about that far from a parachute pack. I always kept my parachute pack outside… so in case we had to get out in a hurry, we could grab our parachute, you could slap it on, and you were ready to jump out. I would have never thought about jumping out of a plane, but in war you do it automatically… You did what you had to do then because people were dying around you all the time, so you were just trying to stay alive almost by the minute…"
6. What is your most vivid memory from the war?
1. "We were on a raid and another crew had got our plane…and we had to fly in some planes that weren't very well kept up, and we were flying in one this first time…it was around our sixth mission I think it was, and when we get up to altitude we fired our guns to be sure that they were working alright. So we got up to altitude and I fired the guns and it fired alright. And then, we were coming off the target and we got attacked by two fighters and they had been painted the same thing as the terrain, it's just like a blackboard when you look down at the terrain, and so I didn't see them first. The first thing I saw when they came up to attack us was a cannon flasher…so I knew I was going to shoot one of them down, so I squeezed the trigger on my two guns and it went, "POP, POP, POP," and quite, and I had to cross charge them in such a crowded space…and I couldn't charge them. Somebody had jimmied up the gun and I was scared literally to death that I was going to get hit then, but some of the other crews drove them off and we got by alright but that scared me the worst that I had ever been scared. I knew I was dead then, you know, because they were firing at us and my guns didn't work…and there wasn't no missing, you know what I mean, it was that kind of shot. But anyway, the Lord took care of them and me both, so I got out alright."
7. After completing your fifty missions and returning to the United States, describe how your life changed?
1. "I never will forget when I came back. When I came back I had been discharged from Fort McPherson in Atlanta and I came home on a train and then I walked from the station to my home, which was probably about a mile and a half, and I thought then it was just like I was in a different world, you know. I just had a strange feeling that I had lived through the war, you know, and it was just like things were going to be different, and they were different. I had my old job back, my boss, the job that I left, they had to save your jobs for you when were taken into the service, so he wanted me to come back in a hurry, but I took about two or three weeks to take a little time off and get some relaxation, and for a while, it looked like I couldn't eat anything. My momma would cook me everything that I used to love. She would ask me, "What would you like me to cook?" and I'd tell her, and I'd sit down, and I couldn't eat it.  It was just something inside of me. I had gone through a shock or something. But other then that, then I gradually began to get alright. Of course back then too, we'd pour up a few drinks, you know what I mean…"
8. In your opinion, how did the roles of women change after the war?
1. "Well, women were a lot more into things after the war. So many of them went to work in factories, and they were working on ships, so they'd be working late at night or some of them would be working all night long on an all night ship. And they (women) did a tremendous war effort, and in doing it, it took them to where they were more aggressive in life, you see what I'm talking about? But that's the way it was."
9. Did your mother have to go to work?
1. "No, my mother couldn't work. She was already pretty well up in age. I was the last of six children. Of course, she lived until she was 82, which was good. My sister stayed with her. And I had two other brothers, one that was too old to be in the service and one that was a banker, and he was in the money end of it and he went right up, he got to be a major, but he didn't get in combat…"
10. If you could tell people one thing about the war, what would it be and why?
1. "One thing I'd tell them about the war: that if I had died it would have been worth my life and that I was glad I went to it. Hitler was one of the cruelest people to the Jewish people that ever lived that I knew anything about and I would of gladly died if I had to to get rid of him. And I was so thankful that I was sent to the European theatre, yeah, and I really meant that. I mean I meant that."