Two Largo men who served in World War II are part of the Veterans History Project, which attempts to preserve memories of the nation at war.
By STEPHEN NOHLGREN
Published November 11, 2003
In this photo of their B-17 crew, pilot Alvin Brown is the second from the right and top turret gunner Allan Smith is fifth from the left. Their crew flew 26 missions and led the first daylight raid on Berlin.
[Special to the Times]
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[Times photo: Libby Volgyes]
Alvin Brown, left, laughs with his friend Allan Smith in Brown's "war room," a special room filled with World War II pictures and memorabilia from serving together in a bomb crew.
From Nov. 13, 1943, through March 27, 1944, Alvin Brown, Allan Smith and their B-17 bomber crew flew 26 combat missions against German forces. Some targets were hit more than once.
Uncle Sam wants you
If you would like to submit an oral history and documents to the Library of Congress, here's where to get information: Veterans History Project
Library of Congress
American Folklife Center
101 Independence Ave. SE
Washington, D.C. 20540-4615
Phone: 1-888-371-5848 Web site: www.loc.gov/folklife/vets
E-mail: vohp@loc.gov
They live in a Largo mobile home park. One noodles in the garden, the other works part-time as a security guard. By anyone's standard, they are getting on in years.
Yet in their hearts, Alvin H. Brown, 84, and Allan G. Smith, 81, never stray far from the skies of Northern Europe, when the world was at war.
Their B-17 bomber crew led the first daylight raid on Berlin almost 60 years ago. Another mission disabled a chemical plant that could have given Germany the atomic bomb. Other battles helped clear the skies for D-day.
Most importantly, Brown and Smith came home alive.
Shrapnel and enemy fighters on just one bombing run could bring down every 10th plane. Brown and Smith logged 26 missions. They are historical treasures, as welcome as cloud cover when German Messerschmitts are closing in.
They carry the memories.
* * *
Tucked in a musty corner of the Library of Congress, the American Folklife Center collects fragments of our national identity, from the poignant to the arcane.
Woody Guthrie scores intermingle with Songs of the Mormon West. Personal accounts of former slaves gather dust next to hand-carved duck decoys.
Three years ago, the folklife center embarked on a new undertaking.
The Veterans History Project attempts to preserve memories of the nation at war - from Ardennes to Iwo Jima, from Inchon to Da Nang. Anyone from any war can contribute, including civilian support staff and factory workers back at home.
Memoirs, photos, letters, official documents - everything is welcome. About 10,000 veterans, including Smith and Brown, have submitted taped recollections.
"It's a tremendous collection and the potential of it is enormous," says University of California historian Kathleen Frydl, who recently spent two weeks at the folklife center while researching a book on the GI bill.
"A lot of books detail combat and combat experience. But combat is a small minority of the soldiers' encounters. I wanted to get some sense of how soldiers lived and experienced the more prosaic and mundane times of war."
* * *
Allan Smith and Alvin Brown first met in 1943 in Texas, where they learned to fly B-17s. The Flying Fortress was a long-range bomber that was carrying the airwar deep into industrial Germany.
British strategy called for night-time raids, using darkness to hide from enemy fighter planes. The American B-17 was designed for daylight bombing. With its precision sight, a skilled bombardier could plunk his payload within 50 feet of an airplane factory from 4 miles up, higher than most anti-aircraft fire could reach.
The bomber was slow and plodding compared to German fighters. But it was ringed with machine guns in the tail, nose, top, bottom and both sides. By maintaining tight, disciplined formations, the bombers protected each other by saturating their periphery with intense fire.
That's what Smith and Brown practiced in Texas. Smith was the top turret gunner, Brown the pilot. At times, they swooped low over the plains and unleashed their machine guns on stray cows. Though much of the country was skimping through meat shortages, Brown says, "we always ate steak at nearby restaurants" that had acquired fresh meat from recently deceased cattle in the area.
When the crew arrived in England in November 1943, the 8th U.S. Army Air Forces was losing bombers at a prodigious rate. Allied fighters lacked the range to accompany bombers to the continent, so the formations were on their own once they crossed the English Channel or North Sea.
During the crew's initiation into the 95th Bomb Group, the brass was "telling us we had to complete 25 missions" before going home, Brown says. "Somebody from the back of the room yelled, "You'll be lucky to finish seven.' "
By their eighth mission, Brown had more seniority that any pilot in the squadron and usually led formations.
"We didn't want to make friends with anybody, just our crew," Brown said. "We would go to the clubhouse and do anything to keep from really getting close to anyone. You'd gamble and drink, but not make friends. They might not be here tomorrow."
What made such losses acceptable were the stakes. The Allies had scheduled a massive invasion of France for mid-1944. Unless they could control the air, Allied troops would be slaughtered on the beaches. The strategic bombing campaigns of 1943 and early 1944 were designed to cripple the Luftwaffe's manufacturing capability.
"If we cannot stop the (English and American bombing) we cannot win," Field Marshal Erwin Rommel wrote to the German High Command in June 1944. "Either make peace or drop the atomic bomb, if you've got it."
The Germans didn't have the atomic bomb, but they were trying. They were slowly making "heavy water" at a hydroelectric plant in the Rjuken Valley of occupied Norway. Heavy water, rare and difficult to produce, could be used to make weapons-grade plutonium. Norwegian saboteurs had blown up the plant once but the Germans had repaired it. So the Allies brought in bombers.
Years later, Smith met a waitress in Minneapolis who said she grew up in a little Norwegian town nobody ever heard of - Rjuken.
"I said, "That's about 60 miles west of Oslo and you have a hydroelectric plant there. I was there.' She said, "I was 9 years old when you were there. Your people dropped leaflets saying don't be there at 1 o'clock Sunday. When you left, (the plant) was not there anymore.' "
On March 4, 1944, a huge American bombing force left England for the first daylight raid on Berlin. At 29,000 feet, about 51/2 miles high, the thermometer read minus 65 degrees. Dense cloud banks prevented many groups from forming up. Radio waves crackled with recall orders and almost everyone headed back.
Al Brown, piloting I'll Be Around, kept going, with 28 other planes in tow. His radio operator had reported that the recall orders were improperly coded and might be German impostors. Aboard was a superior officer, Lt. Col. Grig Mumford, who agreed.
"I was momentarily stunned," Glenn Infield, pilot of another plane, wrote later. "Twenty-nine B-17s against the entire Luftwaffe? . . . It was suicide . . . Col. Mumford and Al Brown . . . had made an on-the-spot decision that was a courageous and wise as any made during the aerial war over Europe. Knowing that the wing was already deep in enemy territory . . . Mumford decided to take advantage of the extremely bad weather" and gut it out.
With clouds cover for almost the entire mission, 23 bombers managed to hit Berlin and return safely, earning Brown the Distinguished Flying Cross. Two days later, I'll Be Around led the second daylight raid on Berlin, this time at the head of 800 bombers.
A few weeks later, the crew's war was over. They had counted as many as 300 bullet holes in their plane after raids, Brown says. Another time, flak tore a hole in the wing "I could jump through." Except for one gunner wounded in the buttocks by spent shrapnel, no one else was wounded.
After jobs and marriages, the crew started holding reunions. Now only Brown, Smith and three others remain, their health too fragile for further reunions. Brown and Smith moved to Pinellas County because they had family here. Six years ago, the pull of comradeship led the Browns to sell their St. Petersburg home and move into Islands of the Sun mobile home park, to live near the Smiths.
They visit nearly every day and insult each other about how ugly they are. American flags hang outside their homes. They are proud of their deeds 60 years ago but don't brag about it.
"I wouldn't do again for $1-million," Smith says. "But I wouldn't take $1-million for what I did."
- Historical sources from this story were taken from Big Week, by Glenn Infield (Pinnacle books, 1974), *Courage *Honor *Victory, by Ian Hawkins (The 95th Bomb Group Association, 1987), and The Mighty Eighth, by Roger Freeman (Doubleday, 1970).
