Warbird Information Exchange

Note this is a series of articles posted in the Toronto Star. Each with a different look from veterans of what they saw and where they were serving. I hope all enjoy these articles.

Remembrance Day: Mac Joyner flew headfirst into war

A veteran describes the experience of being in the bubble nose of Lancaster bombers flying into enemy fire over Germany in World War II. “Could you describe the fear you’d feel if somebody suddenly came up and stuck a gun in your mouth?”

Mac Joyner, 90, was a navigator/bombardier flying Lancaster bombers in early 1944. The flight lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Air Force did 33 trips, including raids on Nuremberg, Berlin and Gelsenkirchen. Story at told to The Star's Paul Hunter

I was up in the nose of the plane in a plastic bubble. You can’t be more exposed. You can see everything that’s going on. I was beneath the pilot.

I was 20 — 18 when I enlisted. Most of our crew was English — five English, three Canadians. We couldn’t believe how young we were.

On a mission, sometimes there would be hours of silence interspersed with microseconds of abject fear. You’d be going along in the pitch black — all our raids were at night — and you’re just humming along in the dark and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. Searchlights come on, anti-aircraft fire starts coming up. You’d go from languor to high alert.

Could you describe the fear you’d feel if somebody suddenly came up and stuck a gun in your mouth? That would be the way you’d feel.

We came under fire all the time. Sometimes we got hit. On a Gelsenkirchen raid, we were going past search lights, being hit by anti-aircraft fire and attacked by a fighter — at the same time. My pilot got the Distinguished Flying Cross for getting us home. That night it felt like we might go down. We had an engine on fire and a fighter whacking away at us from underneath.

All I could feel was panic. You can’t do very much. You’re not strapped in and the pilot is taking such extreme evasive action that half the time you’re plastered up against the ceiling and the other half you’re nailed against the floor. You’d just be bouncing around in the cone of the plane. It hurt.

You can’t help but come under fire. You go over Berlin, there’s probably 5,000 anti-aircraft guns firing at you. Once the anti-aircraft guns have picked out the bombers’ height, every gun fires at that height, say 17,000 feet. It’s just a solid mass of anti-aircraft fire. Every time a shell would hit you, it went through the aircraft.

You see thousands of black puffs and showers of sparks and, of course, you can hear them, and the aircraft is shaking and rattling. You can hear them exploding and by that time, you can hear your own bombs, too. We carried big bombs. The Americans carried piddly 250-pound bombs; we carried 4,000-pound bombs.

I did see some of those bombs go off inside planes. Suddenly those planes would just be gone. I also saw two planes coming in over a marker a couple of thousand feet below us, and they just flew right into one another. There’s 6,000 gallons of gasoline. There’s 28,000 pounds of bombs. They just disappeared in a huge orange flash, except for one wing, and it was just like slow motion, the two engine props were still turning over and the wing just slowly turned end over end over end.

It didn’t fall. It just went straight out and then began to fall. I watched the whole thing.

It seemed surreal in a way. Especially that wing in slow motion going end over end. There were all kinds of collisions. You can’t put 700 or 800 aircraft over a single stop without that. You’d be at varying heights, too. You might have aircraft bombing from anywhere from 14,000 to 22,000 feet, so they invariably dropped bombs on one another.

It was not a good time, I’ll tell you.

I wasn’t a brave person. You just reach a level where you didn’t think about anything. You didn’t think about tomorrow, that’s for darn sure. You thought about today and what you were going to do today ... In my case and in the case of most other guys that I knew, you were in a situation it never occurred to you that you would ever be in.

If you didn’t shut it down emotionally, you were in real trouble.

Christ, you’re 20 years old. If you thought about it, what you’d think about is the fact that you are 20 and in a month you were going to be dead. That is not healthy thinking. Guys that thought that way committed suicide or refused to fly.

Our tail gunner, he did three trips and he wouldn’t fly any more. He out-and-out refused. It was out of fear. You sit in that tail turret and see aircraft going down all around you, then look and see how many aircraft are lost each time you go out. You have to have a lot of guts.

He wrote us a letter after he was dishonourably discharged, the gist being, “I may be a coward, but at the end of the war I’ll be alive and you’ll all be dead.” He was right. Most of us were dead; 100,000 guys went through Bomber Command and 54,000 were killed.

No one on our plane got killed. We were lucky, lucky, lucky. We were on a special-duty squad with an eight-man crew. The normal, main-force bombing crew was a seven-man crew. Our eighth man was a German-speaking wireless operator. He would pick up the voice commands from the ground controllers directing the enemy fighters and jam them with his radio equipment. We were the only squadron in the royal air force doing that. But the German fighters had radar equipment to pick up our equipment. So we suffered really severe losses compared to the main-force bombers.

We had 30 Lancasters on our squadron. And while I was on the squadron, doing my tour, we had 45 shot down. That’s 150 per cent of the strength in six months. They’d bring in new ones every day. And new crews, too. They didn’t want you demoralized by coming into the mess and suddenly seeing 100 guys missing.

We wouldn’t feel anything when the bombs hit. Nothing. It was just a target. There was no celebrating. We were as quiet as mice. It was just, let’s get the hell out of there and try to get home.

You didn’t feel great about it. You didn’t think of it at all. It’s just a job you were trained to do. There was a marker down there and you dropped a bomb on it. Or a lot of bombs.

And you were extremely lucky to get back. You’d put one more trip in your logbook.

Before signing up, if we’d had even an inkling of what we were going to go though, I’m darn sure a lot of us would have found 9,000 reasons for not going. You weren’t told what it would be like. What you were told was all the girls just love an airman in his officer’s uniform. They didn’t say you’re going to go overseas and have an 80-per-cent chance of being killed, do 30 trips and then do 20 more.

We all thought it was a glamorous thing while we were in Canada. But there weren’t any of us who thought that way when we got home.

Story as told to Paul Hunter

Tomorrow: Dr. Dylan Pannell, who served seven months with the Canadian Forces’ Royal Canadian Medical Service in Kandahar

Excerpted from the ebook Never Forget: More Stories from the Conflict Zones , by Paul Hunter and Jim Rankin. To read more, subscribe to Star Dispatches, the Toronto Star’s weekly ebook program, at stardispatches.com . Single copies of Never Forget are available for $2.99 at stardispatches.com/starstore /starstore and stardispatches.com/itunes /itunes.

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http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/201 ... o_war.html