Capt. Donald Eugene Purcell, Pilot B24-H #418

8th AF, 2nd AD, 96th CBW, 466th BG, 784th BS

RAF Attlebridge, Sta 120.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Don on his experiences as a pilot during WWII (2006):



"After Pearl Harbor, I joined the Air Force on May the 7th, 1942. They had too many applicants for the fields that they had and they didn’t have enough training facilities to accommodate; so I didn’t go to the actual field until September. There were about five months that I was waiting to be called and go after I joined.



Training started out in Maxwell field, Montgomery. It was ground school training. There was a lot of college type stuff because most of us didn’t have college. We worked through pre-flight training and then after about five weeks or so we went to Nashville, Tennessee to be evaluated as to whether we would be pilots, bombardiers, or navigators. I was chosen as a pilot.



From Nashville, we went to Union City, Tennessee for two months flying an open-cockpit airplane. My first flight in that training I got airsick and I was scared to death that they were going to wash me out and send me back to ground troops or something. But, I got through it ok. They had a rule that if the temperature was below 20 degrees, we wouldn’t fly. So, we’d sit on the sunny side of the building and wait until the temperature got to 20 and then we took off. I had goggles, a helmet, beryline jacket and all, but my cheekbones were exposed and both of them froze; they turned chalk white and I stayed in the infirmary for three days doing nothing except just waiting for it to get unfrozen.



After Union City, Tennessee, we went to Newport, Arkansas for two months of what we called basic training; it was closed cockpit. Of course when we got to closed cockpit, I couldn’t get sick inside so I had to do something about it. I almost vomited the first time but I stopped it and swallowed it back down. From then on, I didn’t get sick anymore. After basic training, we went to what we called advanced training. This was in twin-engine airplanes and when we finished that phase of the training, we were commissioned as officers. I became a second lieutenant on the 28th day of July, 1943.



After we finished the training and I got my commission, we went back to Nashville and they had the transition from training to getting a B-24, a four-engine airplane nicknamed the Liberator. When we finished that, I guess we had four weeks of training in Nashville, and then we went to Salt Lake City to be assigned to combat crews. At the end of about two or three weeks they finally came up with the assignments and I was assigned as a co-pilot at Tucson, Arizona. They had three phases of combat training before they sent us overseas. The first phase was Tucson, the second phase was at Alamogordo, and the third phase was back at Tucson.



When we got to Tucson, the pilot that was on my crew was taken off the crew and put into third phase training then sent to combat. So they moved me over to first pilot and I finished my training in that position. After we trained, they sent us to Harrington, Kansas to pick up an airplane to fly overseas. My navigator was from Memphis, Tennessee, I was from Bessemer, Alabama, and the bombardier was from Decatur, Georgia. Well they told us to go to 9000ft after we took off from Harrington and stay there until we got to West-Palm Beach, Florida. It just so happened that we decided that since we were getting ready to go to war, we’d have a little fun so we buzzed the navigator’s house in Memphis and went back to Bessemer and buzzed my house. We went over about six or eight times, I guess, at an altitude of two or three feet. We had to pull up to miss the smokestacks at the Pullman plant. During this time, the RPM’s on the airplane engines were being run up and back by the co-pilot. My dad had a lot of chickens and when we left, he had a lot of broken eggs.



We came on over to Atlanta looking for the bombardier’s home and we weren’t paying too much attention to flying; we were looking too hard and just about the time we found his house we were very close to running out of air speed and altitude so we were lucky not to run into trouble there. Then, we went on down to Jacksonville but the traffic was bad and the weather was bad so they turned us around and took us back to Macon, Georgia. We were on a secret mission; nobody knew where we were. But, I was a second lieutenant and the bombardier was a first lieutenant. So, when we got on the ground in Macon, he took off for Decatur; I couldn’t stop him. The next morning, we were getting ready to leave but he wasn’t back. When we were taxiing down for takeoff, he ran down the runway and jumped in the airplane. Then, we went on down to West Palm Beach and the airplane had a gasoline leak so we stayed there for nine days while they fixed the airplane.



We took off from there and one hour out from sea, we opened our orders to see where we were going. We were going England by way of South America then Africa. Before we left Tucson, after we finished training, one of the gunners picked up a little dog that was supposed to have been a hairless Chihuahua. We took it with us and we weren’t supposed to; we broke another little rule. We took it with us overseas and we turned it into a tramp. We had three groups in our division in GI trucks that went from base to base and this little old dog they let ride the bus from one base to another. Finally got to England after quite a lengthy trip through South America and Africa and we found our way into our home base in Attlebridge.



After leaving Dakar, we went to Marrakesh and then we took off from there to Scotland and we didn’t have much visibility and very poor navigational aid. I saw what I thought was the airport we were looking for, so we landed. It turned out to be one country shy of where we were supposed to land; it was Wales instead of Scotland. But we took off again and headed back to Scotland.



At the base in Scotland, I was given a crew of ten. I was the first pilot; we had a co-pilot named Meredith Carb. He was from Fort Worth, Texas. Matthew was our navigator. He was about 18 years old; the youngest one in our crew from Rochester, New York. Our bombardier was Joe Adams and he was from Savannah, Georgia. Harold Knudsen was the radio operator. He was a professional piano player before the war and he was from Portland, Oregon. The flight engineer had a handlebar mustache and looked just like Jerry Colonna and he was the oldest man in the outfit; he was 32 years old. I was 23 and I was the next oldest. We also had 4 gun-men that shot 50.cals from the airplane. I think all I can say is that I was pumped up rather than scared for war. We were Gung Ho; we were out to get Hitler in any way that we could. Therefore, we didn’t worry much about anything.



A good part of our missions were short but I’d say that maybe half of them were about ten hour flights. We’d take off and then we’d circle above the clouds until we got our formation intact and then we’d take off for the target which was about eight to ten hours away. I was doing my flights as a leader in formation. I was on his [formation plane] right wing and you had to stay in close formation or else you got lost because at that altitude, if you got lost, you couldn’t get back into formation. Our plane went all the way from carrying small fragmentation bombs to 2000lbs bombs. Our maximum load was four 2000lbs bombs.



On my first mission, we heard all kinds of talk about flak 88s and enemy fighters and that kind of stuff. I guess we were over France and about fifty miles ahead I could see little flak bursts and smoke and my feet started chattering on the rudders; I couldn’t stop them. I was nowhere near any danger but for some reason, my feet started chattering.



On the third mission, which was on Easter Sunday, we were going to bomb Berlin and we had fighter escort the whole way. They were P-40s and P-47s and they escorted us to Denmark. Then the P-51s picked us up for the rest of the flight. The 47s had to turn back because they was running out of fuel but the 51s hadn’t gotten there yet when the Luftwaffe became our host. I remember one of them came down right in front of our airplane and we saw what we thought was orange lights blinking but it was really the machine gun firing at us. He shot an airplane from our group down; the one under us that has stuck with me pretty good. As soon as we got back to England on the ground, I went to church.



While I was flying, my two brothers, Roy and Percy, were fighting in the navy. I saw both of them once or twice before D-Day. Percy came to my base with a friend of his to check the engines of the airplanes. I got the chance to take Percy up on a flight. Of course he got airsick and he talked about that continually. The last time I heard from Roy, he was in Utah. It turned out that he was in the MP. Percy was in Louisiana. Roy and Percy ran into each other on the streets of New York on their way out. They were just getting ready to board ship and they found each other. They stayed together for a while then went their separate ways.



I flew 30 or so successful bombing runs when I was honorably discharged from active duty as a Captain. We got air medals for each five completed missions we flew. I have a distinguished flying cross with two clusters, which I got for being a good boy. When I came back to the states, they tried to make an instructor out of me. I was sent to Alabama to instruct B-24 pilots and that’s where I made the mistake of running into my wife. When I came home from the big war, she was at my house. I was discharged at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia."

_____________________________________________________________________________

After the war, Donald became a pilot for Eastern Airlines where he flew for 35 years before retiring. His EA plane is on display in the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in Washington DC. Donald passed away in 2010 at the age of 89 and is survived by his two sons, two daughters, eight grandchildren, five great grandchildren.