Texarkana man recalls perils of WWII flying

Even after being told to brace for a rough landing, 23-year-old U.S. Army Air Force Sgt. Homer E. Woosley still didn’t sense the danger. But his senses soon got educated.

“We couldn’t get the landing gear down and we had to do a belly landing,” Woosley, now 87, said, recalling his days as nose gunner aboard a B-24 Liberator bomber.

The dangerous situation came while making a crash landing on an air field runway on Biak Island, in the Pacific, during World War II.

“I remembered having to brace myself against the ball turret (used by the bomber’s belly turret gunner) which we had pulled back up in the fuselage before landing.”

The former Texarkana, Texas, resident, who now lives in Helotes, Texas, managed to exit the warplane just before it became a fiery wreck.

“I got out of the plane just in time and made a run for it shortly after that I saw the tail gunner get out of the camera hatch.”

Born May 15, 1921, Woosley graduated from Texas High School in 1939.

He spent a year at Texarkana Junior College before having to quit to take on various jobs, including pumping gasoline at a filling station to survive the last vestiges of the Great Depression.

The following year, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted Woosley to join the U.S. Army Air Force, with plans to become a pilot.

“I heard about the attack in the radio that Sunday (Dec. 7), but at the time I just didn’t understand the implications of it,” Woosley said. “Up until that time, I hadn’t given much thought to world events.”

Despite the attack, Woosley continued with his plans to marry, which he did 12 days after the attack (Dec. 19). He went to work at the Red River Arsenal in Hooks, Texas (now the Red River Army Depot), for six months before enlisting in the USAAF as an aviation cadet.

Woosley attended preflight school and primary flight school in California, where he trained in a biplane. However, after several unsuccessful and hazardous landings, including a “ground loop” — flipping the plane over as it landed — the AAF disqualified him.

“I had a lot of trouble handling the plane in the air and it broke my heart to wash out,” he said.

Instead, Woosley went into the AAF’s signal corps school to learn cryptography, encoding and decoding, though he ended up as a gunner.

“One day there was a call for volunteers to go to aerial gunnery school, so I went to gunnery school in Harlingen, Texas,” Woosley said.

He qualified as an aerial gunner with the rank of sergeant and became a nose gunner. After gunnery school, the AAF transferred Woosley to March Air Field in Riverside, Calif., where he was assigned to a B-24 flight crew.

“We then went on to fly training missions and navigational missions,” he said.

When his plane was assigned to the 13th Air Force’s 5th Bomber group on Samar Island in the Philippines, Woosley realized it was as far as he had ever been from home.

“The 13th Air Force was called the ’Jungle Air Force’ because of its location. Our 5th Bomber Group was sometimes called the ’Long Rangers’ because of some of our long (reconnaissance) missions to the coast of China,” he said.

Woosley’s combat missions included low-level bombing and .50 caliber machine gun strafing of the oil fields in Balikpapan, on Borneo, for which his group received a Presidential Unit Citation.

“The Balikpapan Oil Refinery and the bombing missions flown against it have been compared in importance to the bombing of the Ploesti Oil Refinery in Europe,” Woosley said.

The island of Borneo had a reputation of offering more danger to B-24 crews, and not just because of its Japanese occupiers.

“I do remember one preflight briefing about a mission we were going to somewhere in Borneo,” Woosley said. “We were told that the Japanese had built a long fence in one area where we were going on a mission. This was to help protect themselves from tigers and the native head hunters.”

Woosley said he remembers being told during the pre-mission briefing that if they had to bail out over that area, the crew would face dangers regardless of what side of the fence they landed on. The enemy was on one side and tigers and natives on the other.

“We were told to just stay off wild pig trails (because these paths were controlled by Japanese patrols) and head for the coast — not very encouraging,” he said.

But Woosley’s crew didn’t have to bail out that day and could look forward to some relaxing beverage back at the base.

“When we returned from a mission, we would go to a doctor’s hospital tent and get two ounces of whiskey,” Woosley said. “I remember saving mine until I had what would equal about a fifth (of a gallon).”

Because flight crews lived in a 10-man tent with a wooden floor and cots to sleep on, but with no mattresses, Woosley eventually found his fifth of whiskey to be a useful trading commodity.

“There were Navy Sea Bees (a term derived from the phrase construction battalion) on Samar and I remember trading my bottle of whiskey to a Navy seaman for a mattress that would fit my cot,” Woosley said.

Besides Balikpapin, Woosley’s group also flew bombing missions over Wewak in New Guinea and the Rabaul sea port on New Britain Island near New Guinea.

“One of our bombing targets was Wewak and the anti-aircraft fire in one area there could always be expected,” Woosley said. “Some of the other flight crews nicknamed that area Pistol Pete.”

For more information see Monday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.