On Memorial Day, the United States commemorates her war dead. With ceremonies and somber bugles, and the laying of wreaths, Americans stand still and remember. For some in the throng, remembrances are not generic. Their fallen heroes have faces, names and voices. Gray-haired warriors standing by still hear the laughter of boys now long away –– comrades in youth when life's eager beginnings were touched by war.
Old warriors remember on Memorial Day and every other. Eighty-two-year-old Nelson resident, Jim Edmondson remembers.
In the spring of 1944, Twenty-one-year-old 2nd Lieutenant Jim Edmondson arrived at an airfield near Stoney Cross, England.
"Me and about five other guys reported to Stoney Cross as replacements," Edmondson said. The men took the places of downed pilots in the 394th Squadron of the American 367th Fighter Group. The group flew the twin-engine P-38 Lightning fighter.
Just two years out of high school when he received his flyer's commission, Edmondson early on had no love for the P-38. His pilot training was in single-engine aircraft.
"I didn't want to fly the P-38s," Edmondson admitted. "They were difficult to fly.They were new. As a security officer [before he became a pilot] I had traced wrecks [of the P-38] all over the place."
A new design, the P-38 had twin engines and fuselages, connected by a boom tail in back and a long wing in front. The pilot flew the craft from a single-seat control pod, mounted mid-wing.
"Designed in 1937, they got it operational about the time the war got going," Edmondson said. "It was the first new aircraft [of the war] operational on line."
His first time flying the P-38 was also Edmondson's first twin-engine experience. He had just eye-balled a flight, riding behind another pilot to get the feel of the plane. Six feet plus, Edmondson rode wedged in a space where the radio had been removed to accommodate the extra man.
Orientation over, Edmondson lifted another P-38 into the air. He found he liked the counter-rotating propellers. They neutralized the engine torque that pilots always fought in single-engine planes, especially on take-off. All that advantage went away, he found out later, if you ever lost an engine.
"If you lost one, you had your hands full," Edmondson recalled. "I came back three times single-engine while I was in combat."
Edmondson was feeling his way through the initial flight when the tower called to say his wheels were down. "I said, 'I know. How do I get 'em up?'" Edmondson remembers. After he determined what model P-38 he was flying via a tag mounted on the cockpit dash, the tower was able to furnish instructions on how to raise the landing wheels.
After 27 flight hours in the P-38, Edmondson was off to England. He accumulated another ten to twelve hours of flight time at Stoney Cross before a flight in a P-38 when he ran out of fuel and made an emergency landing. The plane stopped short when its wing tip caught a hedge row, and Edmondson broke his nose and forehead against the gun sight in the cockpit. With a concussion, he stayed in the hospital 20 days and missed D-Day June 6th.
Edmondson rejoined his unit June 13. As the Allies moved inland in the Normandy Invasion, Edmondson's unit provided air support. "We were usually a few miles out in front of 'em [Allied infantry] blowing bridges and cutting railroads," Edmondson said. Destroying transportation routes kept German reinforcements from reaching the battle zone.
On armed reconnaissance missions, Edmondson and his wing mates sought targets of opportunity: truck convoys, trains, bridges and railyards.
"That 20 mm [nose gun] would do a lot of damage on a [locomotive] engine," Edmondson said. "Steam would come out everywhere."
The P-38 dropped bombs just as well. "Normally we carried two 1000s [1000 pound bombs] and two 500s, and we'd dive bomb," Edmondson said. "And we'd place 'em pretty damn close to where we wanted 'em."
After the Allies got ashore in France, they needed a permanent harbor. "They needed a deep port, and Cherbourg was the one," Edmondson said.
For 90 minutes on June 22, British and American planes advanced in waves twelve planes abreast to strafe open an Allied invasion path for land forces moving on Cherbourg. Edmondson's fighter group had 48 planes in the air that day. In four lines of twelve each the group strafed low, combing the length of a peninsula with Cherbourg Harbor at the end.
"When our turn came," Edmondson said, "we came on down and came across it. The group that I was in got a little bit off course."
Edmondson's flight of four planes formed the end in a line of twelve aircraft with Edmondson's plane at the far outside.
"We hadn't been down there [low] but about five minutes," Edmondson remembers, "when here popped up the city right in front of the flight of four."
The air over town was alive with exploding anti-aircraft shells. Much of it came from gun emplacements on a fortified breakwater in the harbor. Edmondson turned his plane toward the English Channel. He dashed over the breakwater and dropped down low. Hugging the surface of the channel, he steered erratically to frustrate the anti-aircraft gunners.
"Seemed like I was halfway to England before they stopped firing at me," Edmondson said. "We lost seven planes on that run." Included were the three other planes in Edmondson's flight of four. His position in the flight saved his life.
"I was the last guy on that end, and I take that as a blessing," Edmondson said. "The next day we had thirteen airplanes that were not damaged out of that 48."
Edmondson flew 47 missions in Europe. "They're all as exciting as hell," he said. "A lot is happening. It's easy to remember them when you have a lot of problems or a lot of luck."
Luck is a fickle thing. Edmondson came up short on a day near Duren, Germany.
"That was October 20th, '44," Edmondson remembers. "We flew in at ten to fifteen thousand feet. We went down looking for anything that moved. The first thing we saw was a train. We were not in formation. It was every man for himself, looking for targets."
The American flyers soon discovered they had company: German Focke-Wulf 190s.
"Sixteen in different groups above us," Edmondson said. "They had all the advantage. I climbed a little bit and dropped my bombs on the train."
There was no time to dive bomb the moving train. And Edmondson could not afford to sacrifice any altitude. He would have a lot of climbing to do in out-maneuvering the Focke-Wulfs above him. The Germans outnumbered the Americans two to one.
Climbing from the train, Edmondson saw four German planes in a formation on his right and turned into them. Avoiding the guns in the nose of the P-38, they dropped down. Edmondson climbed and found four more Focke-Wulfs. These turned to give battle, and the chase was on.
Turning to the left, Edmondson initiated a flying ring into which the Germans followed. He kept turning left, believing his twin-engine plane might gain an advantage that way over the single-engine German planes. The German pilots would be fighting engine torque to control their planes in a tight left turn.
The ring grew tighter. Glancing over his shoulder, Edmondson looked straight into the gun barrels of his foe and figured he was still OK. The guns had to lead his craft to fire rounds that could hit him. Edmondson saw a P-38 climb above him, catch fire and roll belly up. Its pilot dropped from the cockpit, and a parachute blossomed.
Edmondson was still running the ring. Periodically, other Focke-Wulfs dove past the outside and got off a burst of shots. In the ring, Edmondson was catching up to the German in front of him.
"I'm gaining on the fourth guy," Edmondson recalled. "I'm closing on him."
But another diving Focke-Wulf launched a burst of fire that found Edmondson's plane.
"I felt it hitting the fuselage," he recalls. "One came through the plexiglass canopy and rattled around in the cockpit. They hit all this wing and the left engine, and the plane was no longer flyable. That's when I decided to get out."
The plane was spiraling toward the ground. Edmondson had to leave it. But there is a difficulty in exiting a P-38. Striking the boom tail on the way out has decapitated pilots and taken off legs. Edmondson rolled back the canopy and got on top of the seat. He aimed to jump straight up as hard as he could. When he tried to jump, he found he was tethered.
"My shoestring caught on something in the cockpit, and it bent me back over the canopy," Edmondson said. The rush of air outside the plane arched Edmondson's body backward.
"I couldn't get my foot loose," he said. "I didn't go. I tried to get back in." When Edmondson sat up to get back in the plane, the full air pressure of the slip stream caught his body and yanked him free.
"My head hit," he recalled. "I could see the stars and hear the bells. It stunned me. It addled me for just a few seconds."
When he saw the sky and horizon switching places, Edmondson knew he was tumbling.
"My first thought was to open my parachute," Edmondson remembers. "My face was bleeding from a gash above my eye."
He pulled his chute. At first, nothing. He pulled a second cord. Silk blossomed above him.
"One of the guys [the German flyers] came around," Edmondson said. "I thought he might shoot me. I think he was taking a picture. I could see him. I could count the rivets in his plane. He was that close."
Edmondson looked below. "I could see troops in the woods down there," he said.
For the next half year, Edmondson was a prisoner of war. The first few days were the most frightening.
"I was scared until I was registered as a POW," Edmondson said. "From that point on, you were a person, but up until then you were left to the discretion of whoever you were with.
“I saw one guy that was beaten up. He'd been down two or three weeks. He'd almost made it back [to Allied lines].”
But the Hitler Youth found him first. Mercilessly beaten, the pilot's head was severely swollen.
"I saw him in transit," Edmondson remembers. "I don't know where they were taking him at that moment."
Edmondson wound up at Stalag Luft 3 in German-occupied Poland. He stayed there until the approaching Russian army prompted his keepers to put the prisoners on the road. POWs marched most of three days and nights through the snow.
"It was the winter of 1944," Edmondson said, "one of the worst winters they ever had. All my nerves in my legs were damaged. It's from the cold. They said I had nerve damage in both legs and feet."
At the end of the march came a three-day nightmare on rails with prisoners packed shoulder to shoulder inside boxcars.
"I stood for three days against the boxcar walls," Edmondson remembers. "I could slide up and down. That's all that I could do. Vomiting, dysentery, guys crying. It was terrible in those boxcars."
At the end of the journey was another stalag. Liberation finally came Sunday morning, April 29, 1945.
"We were liberated by Patton," Edmondson said. "His 3rd Army."
When he returned home to Canton in 1945 for a 60-day leave, Edmondson weighed 137 pounds. Before his capture, he weighed 170.
Half a century has passed since. A few years ago, the town of Nelson honored Edmondson by naming a ball field in his honor. A sign at the park bears an image of a P-38 fighter. Today, in a room at his Nelson residence, filled with war records and memorabilia, Edmondson remembers his harrowing days in World War II.
"To be 20, 21 and have all that power," Edmondson mused. "I hate to say I enjoyed it. I was scared too," he laughed. "I was scared too."
And with good reason. In Edmondson's flight of ten men, five never came home.
"It's something that I don't ever want to do again," Edmondson said. "But I survived it, and that gives me a lot to remember and to think about. Those five guys that died –– I think about them every day."
In the course of each day, Edmondson said, something will trigger a memory.
"And I think about how lucky I am," Edmondson said, his blue eyes snapping with intensity. "They were like me then. They were young men. I'm 82 years old. I've been lucky as hell. I should be grateful." |
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| From the war room of his Nelson home, 82-year-old World War II veteran Jim Edmondson recalls his days as a P-38 fighter pilot as if they occurred last week. |
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