Originally from Binghamton, New York, Jasper resident Bernie Steed became a pilot in south Georgia. "That was in Moultrie, Georgia, by the way," Steed said. "That's where I graduated from flight school and became a 2nd Lieutenant––got my wings." It marked graduation after several months of accelerated training that made Steed a World War II Army pilot.
His first lessons at the controls of an airplane came during what the Army called "primary" training. Steed manned the stick of a PT-17 trainer, an open-cockpit, twin-seat biplane where the instructor rode behind the student cadet. The two sat in separate cockpit wells in the fuselage of the airplane.
"I had a pretty disagreeable civilian instructor," Steed remembers. "I think he tried to wash us out to start with."
Taking Steed up to test his stuff, the instructor tried him flying upside down. Steed said he held to the well of the cockpit to keep from falling out of the plane. "Let go," he remembers his teacher instructed him. "Your seat belt will take care of that."
"After primary, we could do all the aerobatics," Steed said. "Slow rolls; snap rolls; the loops; flying upside down. It was a lot of fun."
After moving up to train in two larger, more powerful single-wing and closed-canopy aircraft, Steed received his pilot's wings and an officer's berth. It must have been heady stuff for a young man drafted not long before at just 19 years old. With no college (at that time), Steed still tested strong enough to qualify for Army pilot’s training. His timing was perfect. History was waiting.
After Moultrie came twin-engine training in a B-25, a medium-sized Mitchell bomber––the same style aircraft that delivered the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo just months after Pearl Harbor. "I had just a few weeks in the plane before going overseas," Steed said. By troop ship he crossed to North Africa. "It was pretty rough. Crowded. People sick," he remembers.
Not long in Africa, Steed soon joined the 488th Bombardment Squadron in Italy. The Allied advance up the boot of Italy had reached to Naples by then, Steed said.
"When we landed in Naples, the first thing we saw was the Tuskegee Airmen," Steed remembers. These black American fighter pilots flew escort duty with sorties of heavy bombers, he said. He remembers watching the Tuskegee pilots fly a touch-and-go drill, buzzing the airfield just low enough to touch down their landing gear and fly off again.
"It was very interesting. They were hot stuff," Steed said.
They weren't all that was hot in Naples. Mt. Vesuvius erupted just days before Steed arrived. Flying ash and flowing lava caught the American air base by surprise. "There were 80-something planes in our squadron," Steed said, "and they were all ruined." The Army moved the base about 40 miles south to a place called Gaudo Paestum, and a fresh batch of B-25's arrived shortly.
"They were new planes," Steed said. "We formerly had B-25-D's, and they were like driving an older car without power steering." Pilot controls on the new B-25-J's handled much easier, he said.
A first bombing mission for Steed (as a co-pilot in March 1944) was against the German line at Cassino. There the enemy had held out for months despite Allied attempts to dislodge them from mountain strongholds.
Earlier Allied bombing led by B-25's had pulverized the abbey on Monte Cassino into a rubble pile. Despite their promises to leave the historic monastery out of the battle, the Germans were believed to have been using the high place as a vantage point for directing artillery fire, so Allied bombers destroyed it.
In April the 488th Bombardment Squadron moved its base to an airfield at Alesani on the French island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. From Corsica, between Italy and the French Mediterranean coast, Steed's squadron flew missions on targets in both the Mediterranean and European theaters of the war.
In mid-August 1944, the Allies opened a second offensive into France, following the Normandy Invasion that June. Landings for this second front occurred between Toulon and Cannes on the French Riviera. As Allied invasion troops pressed north, Steed's unit was one that provided air support.
"We flew in formations of six [planes], and we would have four or five formations of six planes [to a squadron]," he said. "We usually had either four 1,000-pound bombs or six or eight of the 500-pound [per plane]," he said.
B-25's carried a six-man crew, Steed said. The plane serving as squadron leader carried an extra man, a navigator. A standard crew included a pilot, co-pilot, two side gunners, a tail gunner, and a bombardier who also manned the nose machine gun.
"He was out there in the open," Steed said of the bombardier, whose glass encased battle station lay below and forward of the pilots' cockpit and occupied the extreme front end of the airplane. "He had to feel pretty vulnerable, I imagine," Steed said.
While the B-25 was well armed with crew-manned machine guns, his aircraft seldom encountered attack by enemy fighter planes, Steed said. "Anti-aircraft is what we ran into," he said. Anti-aircraft was exploding artillery rounds fired from the ground into the flight path of approaching aircraft. "It was very accurate," Steed said. "The flak became very intense on occasions."
"There were some pretty bad, pretty hard missions," Steed said. "The mission I was shot down on. I ditched in the ocean."
That mission flew air support for Allied ground troops in southern France. To hear Steed talk of it is to get the idea the danger involved grew to be simply accepted as a part of daily routine.
"I was checking out my co-pilot," a man named Ritter, Steed remembers. "He was flying as first pilot." Any co-pilot had to flight test with a first pilot before graduating to a first pilot slot of his own, Steed explained.
"We had a direct hit on our engine, our left engine," he said. "It hit right in the dome [at the center of the propeller], and the fluid that feathered the propeller was lost."
Normally that hydraulic fluid operated a system that changed the propeller pitch on a dead engine to reduce drag. It turned the sharp trailing edge of propeller blades into the wind.
Now the defeated system allowed the flats of propeller blades to face forward, causing maximum air drag. As Steed's damaged B-25 limped homeward toward Corsica, it continued to lose altitude. When it lowered to just 500 feet above the Mediterranean, Steed knew they would have to ditch in the sea while there was still enough engine power to control the plane's landing.
Despite the difficulties on this flight (including a shot out left engine), Steed continued to allow his co-pilot, Ritter, to act as first pilot in preparation for Ritter's own aircraft command. But when he asked Ritter if he wanted to take the B-25 into the water, he didn’t.
"You take it in," Steed remembers his co-pilot saying. As first pilot, Steed was the man his guys looked to to get them through it.
Steed said landing the B-25 at sea was maybe the most difficult thing he had to do during his time in service. Sometimes such landings were successful, he said. Sometimes they were not.
"When you land in the water, it's really hard to tell how far you are above the water," Steed said. "You feel your way down to the water." Landing on water brings an abrupt stop, he said. "It's like hitting a wall, because the plane stops immediately."
He aimed to slow the plane as much as he could before they got wet. "Without stalling it out, I was trying to get it as close to stalling speed as possible when we hit the water," Steed explained. "We had to throw everything of weight out that we could. We threw the machine guns and anything that would lighten the load."
Steed slackened their speed to about 70 miles per hour and lowered the craft into the ocean. "The nose is up, then it goes down, and you hit the wall," he said. Sea water washed over the cockpit windows, he remembers.
"We scrambled to get out of there and away from it," Steed said. A B-25 had a record of staying afloat a few minutes, but something less than five, he said. Steed and Ritter climbed out through an overhead hatch near the pilots' controls. "We could see the guys in the back coming out the side hatches," Steed said.
From the left side hatch came the rubber raft, deployed by the tail gunner. It was late summer and moderate weather, Steed remembers. The crew swam to the raft and moved quickly away from the plane to avoid the suction when it sank. As they helped each other into the life raft, the worst was over. "We were relieved by that time," Steed said.
They were all OK, he said––six guys in a rubber raft with a Mayday radio. A Mayday radio? "It's a hand-cranked radio," Steed explained. "It's a pretty rustic thing. You just crank it and hope it gets out a signal." After about three hours afloat, Steed and crew were rescued when an American float plane landed and picked them up.
Steed received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance on that mission. "I would say that was one of the worst missions, one of the hardest ones, he said.
"To the flight engineer [the mechanic in charge of repairs to the B-25] that was like his ship," Steed said. "When we got back, he was actually crying. He was crying because he lost his plane."
Bomber duty was tremendously hazardous and stress-filled. His squadron bunked six men to a tent, Steed said. One pilot he roomed with died when his plane was shot down, Steed said. Another tent-mate, a navigator, became a POW when his plane was downed. Another tent-mate became a mental case, Steed said.
"He got to about 40 missions, and he absolutely went out of his mind," Steed said. "We called it flak happy."
"A tour was considered 50 missions," Steed explained. "For several of us, when we got to 50 missions, they didn't have replacements. But you can't just stop the war, so we kept on flying. I got to 66 before we got replacements and I got to come back to the States. I became a 1st Lieutenant halfway through the tour."
Steed spent the last months of the war in Oklahoma and Texas teaching pilot cadets to fly B-25's. He joined the Army Air Corps at 19. He was 22 and just married when the war ended and he left the service.
"You know, there was an awful lot packed into just a few years back then," he said. "Everything was big, big, big; one thing after another."
"During those years it was maybe the most patriotic time ever in this country," Steed said. "Everybody was doing something, whether it was war bonds or something in the war effort, building planes or whatever. We started that war with nothing," he said.
Not many draft dodgers then, he added. "Like I say, I was part of a patriotic time."
Some would say it was the most historically significant time of the 20th century.
"If you served and came home, it was a good experience," Steed said. "Unfortunately, there were so many casualties. Killed and maimed. That's the hard part about war, you know." |
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| World War II Army Pilot Bernie Steed receives the Distinguished Flying Cross for a bomber mission he flew into Southern France during 1944. |
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