Interview with Elmer Zarney [5/13/2003]

Amanda Cumbee:

May 13, 2003. This is the beginning of the interview with Elmer Zarney at his home at 1063 North Fort Cart in Medina, Ohio. Mr. Zarney was born on February 6, 1922?

Elmer Zarney:

Uh-huh.

Amanda Cumbee:

My name is Amanda Cumbee and I'll be the interviewer. Mr. Zarney, could you state for the recording what war and branch you served in?

Elmer Zarney:

I was in the Army Air Corp in World War II and spent three years, and I flew 73 missions in one airplane and ten missions in another type which we'll get into later.

Amanda Cumbee:

What was your rank?

Elmer Zarney:

When you go in you get -- when you graduate from flying school you get second lieutenant, and then I got my first lieutenancy overseas. And then back here in the States I ended up with captain.

Amanda Cumbee:

Where did you mainly serve at?

Elmer Zarney:

Locally as far as the United States is concerned in Texas and all the southern states and then from Savannah, Georgia --(coughing) excuse me -- I was shipped out to England and stationed there very briefly. Crossed England into France. France and Germany and I'll show you on where on here where I was stationed.

Amanda Cumbee:

Okay.

Elmer Zarney:

Okay.

Amanda Cumbee:

All right. And you enlisted, right?

Elmer Zarney:

Uh-huh.

Amanda Cumbee:

Okay.

Elmer Zarney:

Volunteered. Enlisted.

Amanda Cumbee:

When you enlisted, where were you living during that time?

Elmer Zarney:

In Medina.

Amanda Cumbee:

Why did you enlist? Just because you felt like you should volunteer?

Elmer Zarney:

Oh, absolutely. It was whole different times and they drafted a lot of people, but there were a lot of volunteer young men and young women, too, although they were in lesser number at that time than there is now.

Amanda Cumbee:

Uh-huh.

Elmer Zarney:

And their service was a little more limited. Now you can be pilots and do all that stuff, which at that time you were nurses and that sort of thing. We lived here - Betty was born here. I lived here for 79 years.

Amanda Cumbee:

Do you recall like the first days of your service when you first started? Do you remember the first days?

Elmer Zarney:

Well, it's a little hard to say when it starts because I got on a bus here in Medina and --

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh, yeah.

Elmer Zarney:

-- went down to --

Amanda Cumbee:

Training?

Elmer Zarney:

-- to see Betty before I left. Went to Columbus, Ohio, where all the recruits came in and got assembled to take a big train ride to Texas, which was a long train ride.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh, yeah.

Elmer Zarney:

So that sort of -- the first impression is it's almost like high school and you're having a good time, but then you finally realize that you are in the Service and you are training for something more serious than having a lot of fun, but that doesn't mean you didn't.

Amanda Cumbee:

Did you just feel like excited?

Elmer Zarney:

Sure. It was a chance to do your duty, and that was the general feeling at the time. It wasn't, gee, I got to go. It's, gee, I want to know, you know. How soon can I get in and get overseas and start doing the things that are necessary in the war? I wish now that we had an enemy with a face on it that you could face, but we don't. Different kind of situation, but I would go again if I could.

Amanda Cumbee:

What was it like in boot camp and different --

Elmer Zarney:

Well, I'll say the first thing you go through is classification, which was really rather laid back and kind of fun and you got to do -- you marched everywhere and ran a lot. In fact for the first week you are put in a very demeaning -- they cut your hair off and they -- you wear a set of fatigues which are nothing but coveralls. And they didn't give you any shoes and they didn't tell me to, you know, bring good shoes so I took the worst ones and they wore out in a matter of a couple days and I had to put cardboard. This is all -- because then when you did get your uniform, that was something. New fresh clothes all starched and all -- you're a cadet. And there was many things to do. The camaraderie of meeting all these different people from different parts of the country. We even had Brazilian cadets. Cadets from other countries that -- some of them -- I don't know how they got through because they couldn't talk very good English.

Amanda Cumbee:

Yeah. Wow.

Elmer Zarney:

I mean everything was in English and was fast so they must have had some secret that I didn't know about.

Amanda Cumbee:

Do you remember what your instructors - what they were like -- if they were --

Elmer Zarney:

Well, we had a lot of -- it was -- there was a real feeling of military courtesy. If you saw a general's car, a general didn't have to be in it. You snapped a salute. And you saluted - you did not salute what we call the enlisted personnel but anybody with rank, second lieutenant on up, and there was quite a bit of after you reached -- got out of classification then the real boot camp which is pre-flight school started. And there they had military hazing just like West Point. Backed your back against the wall and your chin down and you reached for the floor and they called it hell's half hour in which (laughing) you got finished with the day's work and then a half hour before lights out then the upperclassmen could get at the underclassmen. And have marching smiles to the bathroom and flushing them down the toilet and all that sort of great stuff. I thought it was hilarious. That got you. But it was all -- it soon weeded out some people who couldn't take that kind of thing. And if you couldn't take that kind of thing, then you couldn't be a trusted pilot. And they washed out a number of them. Even some cheating going on then, you know, on exams. Dare not. It was gentleman's honor. Just like on the golf course if you move your ball even if no one saw it, you have to say something. Code of honor. You swore to it. There was a lot of that patriotism sort of thing. So (coughing) excuse me. You go ahead and talk. I'll clear my throat.

Amanda Cumbee:

Okay. Where did you go while you were in the service? Like you said you went to Europe and Texas.

Elmer Zarney:

After we got finished with -- got my, you know, wings and then we were transferred to a couple different fields, not very long, but then we ended up in Savannah, Georgia. From Savannah, Georgia, took a train up to New York City and there we were -- went through processing to embark in going across the ocean in a very large convoy. And I happened to -- there would be sometimes a hundred some ships in the convoy. You didn't know that because they were past the curvature of the earth, you know. And there was safety in numbers trying to get through because they still had a number of U-boats, submarines, German submarines.

Amanda Cumbee:

What did you do while you were in Europe? What was your mission there?

Elmer Zarney:

Well, I'll get to that. Are you ready to jump to that now? Okay. The mission is we didn't go overseas as fast as some of the other classmates and so on. We went through a special training called tactical reconnaissance. Tactical -- armed tactical reconnaissance borders on practically like an aerial spy in essence because what your reconnaissance is gathering information and you gathered information and it all fed all your little bits and pieces whether they were relevant -- what you thought might be relevant doesn't matter. You put down, you report it to a debriefing intelligence officer after the meeting. And all that goes to a central point and they put it together like a jigsaw puzzle that makes sense you see. So we would spot, oh, let's say tracks going into a woods. We would try to get down there and find out what it was and lots of times they were using a lot of horses at that time. It was late in the -- they were running out of gas and so forth. And you just gathered all these different things. In fact, I've flown as low -- and most of us in this business -- flew sometimes below the level of a boxcar at fighter speeds in order to see what was in the boxcar. Then the German train would be going along and about every fourth car the sides would come down and there would be a 20 millimeter gloc gun. It was our job just to spot them and then every 15-minute quadrant on the watch you had at your disposal for targets of eminent importance. So at every 15-minute interval, you had at your disposal a 16-ship fighter bombers which I served for 10 missions and 16 airplanes with two 500-pound bombs, rockets, and fragmentation bombs, armor piercing incendiary bullets, which we had two, but -- and you -- the leader could lead this group down onto the train and then you go back up and sit. I must explain before we go too far on that that tactical reconnaissance -- two major airplanes that I flew in. One of them was the P-37 and the other which was the fighter bomber and this was the P-51 Mustang which was the top of the line top fighter of World War II at that time. And to be lucky enough to fly it, no navigator or no crew, you're in it yourself, you do all things yourself. It was highly sought after, coveted. But, anyway, the tactical -- I don't have two. I used to have two of these. Tactical reconnaissance, the reconnaissance man flew and he would do -- look out the side looking for whatever he could find on a certain sector. If I got this sector, that would be my patrol right in there.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh.

Elmer Zarney:

And then there was the weaver and he did this literally in back of his -- in other words, he's keeping his tail clear.

Elmer Zarney:

And then there was the weaver and he did this literally in back of his -- in other words, he's keeping his tail clear.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh. So two at a time?

Elmer Zarney:

That's right. Just two. And it was real good duty. Really (coughing). But the weaver had to be on the ball, also, because the tac recon man could turn without telling anybody so you're immediately -- let's say you're flying along and you're up here and he makes a turn, you've immediately like got to know what to do to get back on his wing. And this airplane had six guns. And these are not bombs. These are disposable gasoline tanks. And if you got into a dog fight or wherever you want to use these tanks first and use them up. They would drop with this total lever (ph) and disappear because they hurt the function of the aircraft. So at any rate to get back to calling in 16 ships, they would just absolutely beat up a train. And sometimes there were troops. Sometimes they were hauling tanks. Sometimes they were hauling, God knows what, explosive, all sorts -- war. Bitter war.

Amanda Cumbee:

Could they shoot you down?

Elmer Zarney:

Oh, yes, they could.

Amanda Cumbee:

Since you were flying so low.

Elmer Zarney:

Well, our missions were from like 10,000 feet on down to -- if that's a boxcar we'd fly alongside of it sometimes to see if we could see what was in there. And there's a whole lot of stories, offshoots of that which I won't go into unless you stop me and want to know that. We did a lot of -- we learned a lot of things. One of them was fly in formation, tight formation, just like the Blue Angels or so forth thing this was not for show but for combat, you know, to cover your tail. So, okay, where was I? what else would you like to -- we skip around a little bit but --

Amanda Cumbee:

Yeah. Let's see. Did you see combat when you were --

Elmer Zarney:

Yes. Not air to air myself. I never fired a gun at another plane dead on like this, however, I will read for you -- I think it's in here. There's a war diary. Every day you would come back and write all this up, the intelligence officer. Now, there's one in here that I would like to see if I can't find it. I'll get back to that. Let's go on to something else.

Amanda Cumbee:

Let's see. Did you get any medals or citations?

Elmer Zarney:

Yes. I got the air medal seven times, I think.

Amanda Cumbee:

How do you get that?

Elmer Zarney:

By flying so many missions that are complete -- completed missions. For every six or eight, maybe ten, you got an air medal. And I've got some pictures of me being presented award. We'll go through these pictures after awhile. Pictures don't mean anything in a tape recorder anyway so I'll show them to you.

Amanda Cumbee:

Did like -- who presented you with -- who presented the medals to you?

Elmer Zarney:

That would be the commanding officer of usually of either your own squadron or the group. When I say group, the group is made up of six squadrons. Squadrons are just off by themselves with the whole group, and then the whole wing is made up of six of the groups. So a wing is like a division in the Army breaks down the same way. And so you would get enough people that won the medal or something or won the flying distinguished service cross, the flying silver star for bravery, you got a purple heart for being wounded. Thank God, I haven't got one of those and I don't need one, but many of them did. There's some awful crashes and bail outs and things that there's only one way to bail out of this airplane, by the way, is this canopy you pull a lever and the canopy would go and then you roll it over to fall out. Because if you bailed at the wing this would get you which happened on one of our people. Things happen very fast.

Amanda Cumbee:

Uh-huh.

Elmer Zarney:

This was an in line engine and it was liquid cooled, glycol. And if that took a hit, you had about a minute, minute and a half to get out. Now if you think a minute, minute and a half is a short time count to 30 seconds sometime. There's so many things you could do with those 30 seconds. Very quick. Otherwise the engine would seize. So there was other ones that had air cooled. They didn't have that problem. They had other problems.

Amanda Cumbee:

So you had to flip upside down, then unlatch your safety belt --

Elmer Zarney:

Well, you got to undo your belts and you'd have your chute on and then roll over and just - the canopy is a huge thing. Weighs many, many pounds. And when that took off it could also go sideways so you had to have your head down below because it could take your head right off. It could. And I guess it has happened. Not to me. I've never had to bail out, thank goodness. I'm here talking to you. So you had to know your aircraft, to digress just a little bit, so well that they would give you a blindfold if they put a blindfold on you and you sat in the cockpit and they'd say, pedo (ph) heat switch and you'd put your finger right on it. You don't go like that.

Amanda Cumbee:

Wow.

Elmer Zarney:

And they would ask you something else. And like that. Because you do not have time or you could get wounded and blood in your eye or whatever and you still had to keep -- maybe you could see a little tiny bit and you couldn't be fiddling around saying, wonder where this is, wonder where that is. So you learn them well. And you learned it real fast.

Amanda Cumbee:

Inside and out.

Elmer Zarney:

Okay?

Amanda Cumbee:

How did you stay in touch with your family? Just by --

Elmer Zarney:

Letters. They had -- well, they looked like tissue paper in some instances, but you could write back and forth although they didn't censor so much the officers or they might have but we didn't know it, but we had to act as censors very often for the enlisted men when they wrote home.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh.

Elmer Zarney:

It was a terrible job. They would put a big bag of mail in front of you. You would open it and look at somebody else's mail, but you learned to skim it to see if they have said anything to give comfort to the enemy. You follow me?

Amanda Cumbee:

Yeah.

Elmer Zarney:

So if you did get shot down and you did get into a prisoner of war camp, there was only three things. Your name, your serial number, and your rank. No matter what they asked you. My name is Elmer Zarney, 706604. And then I'm a lieutenant. And they do all kinds of tricks. Dress up as priests, all sort of things, I'm your friend. And they were graduated from Harvard or Yale or wherever, talked just like you do.

Amanda Cumbee:

That's weird.

Elmer Zarney:

A lot of stories like that are made up.

Amanda Cumbee:

What was the food like when you were there?

Elmer Zarney:

Food was sometimes very good. Sometimes it was downright nasty. Squadron like this was always near the front so we lived in tents sometimes and the mud you wouldn't believe and they built wooden steps and you ate outside out of big pots boiling, you know, soup and God knows what. And you had a mess kit, and they slapped the food onto the mess kit as you went along, no complaints, just take it, and you got dessert. Ice cream right on top of your mashed potatoes like that so you ate your ice cream first real fast. It wasn't always like that. We did eat if you were in a solid like a house or post of some sort, each pilot had to have an egg a day. So they got -- one fresh egg was mandatory. However, if one turned out rotten, you just moved down the line. They didn't give you another one, you know. In some places the food was so superb. They all got the same food. It was how it was prepared because you got it in cans and all that sort of thing, G.I., government issue. Some squadrons had French chefs prepare it, you know. You'd think you were in Paris somewhere. Chez vous. Other than that, it was, you know, you got hungry and there wasn't any -- my wife sent me some popcorn once and I was -- I think I got four kernels and popped it in our steel helmet that they gave us on a little corner stove and a Coke. And one man had a white shirt and he passed that around for you. White shirt on just to feel what a civilian feels like. Those are the little side funs of what happened. Other than that, you know, it was passable.

Amanda Cumbee:

Did you have a lot of pressure or stress while you were there?

Elmer Zarney:

Yeah.

Amanda Cumbee:

Did you feel it a lot like you're --

Elmer Zarney:

Well, little things happened to add to stress outside of combat. You know you had to go, you know. You're supposed to get four days on and two days off. But lots of times the two days off would come and you think you're going to get to sleep in and all of a sudden they shake you and say, 4:00 a.m., and say, Zarney, you're on a mission, so and so is sick or in the hospital, you're on mission. And then we also had a cute thing called snow patrol in which they had two airplanes that weren't qualified to fly. They had to do some -- but the engines would run. So if it snowed during the night we had no snow plows so the two airplanes would go along with their landing lights on and rev them up, keep the brakes on somewhat, and blow the snow away for the squadron. Isn't that nice? No heat in the airplane.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh.

Elmer Zarney:

It has to fly before you get heat. So then all of a sudden they wake you up and say, okay, you're on snow patrol. Anyway, but you're young and you take those things. 21 years old. No problem.

Amanda Cumbee:

Did you guys have plenty of supplies while you were --

Elmer Zarney:

Generally. Not always. The enlisted personnel had to put up with some -- and this was very rankling in the engine would be running rough and they would do everything they could with it but they didn't have any new spark plugs come in. There was 12 on each side. And so they take them out and clean them. And this was a job and brutal wind and the snow blowing and then the airplane's nose was in the tent with no heat. Unbelieveable. In the summertime it wasn't bad, but in the wintertime it was tough stuff. And so supplies like that would sometimes not get through. And we get a field just about ready and real nice and then all of a sudden they would order you to another one as the lines moved on you would have to go to. I've landed on things as crude as tarpaper stretched over just a raw field. And that had big bubbles of rain or water in it would spray up as you hit it. And land on icy runway. You couldn't use salt next to the airplanes. Didn't have any anyways so. What else there? I'm not hurrying. I've got all night.

Amanda Cumbee:

Okay. How did you and everyone else entertain yourselves while you were --

Elmer Zarney:

Well, we would -- they had movies. Old movies that a section would show. Sometimes we wouldn't get any new ones so we would see the same thing over again. And, of course, books, and then you could get to go into a town. I got some wonderful French bread that way. I felt very guilty about, you know, depriving somebody. They said, hey, we've got to make money, take the bread. Just give us the francs. And so we would do, you know, things like that. And sometimes the USO would come through. That's like the Red Cross, United Service Organization, and the ladies would have donuts on the flight line or that sort of thing. And so our squadron never got into much of that, but the ones that were really lived like kings were the ones that were stationed in England and they escorted the bombers across. They're the ones that got all the kills and the aces and so forth, got famous, and they had dances with the English girls and all that stuff. We never really got into that sort of thing because we're always on the go.

Amanda Cumbee:

Yeah. What did you do when you were on leave? You came back here to Medina, right?

Elmer Zarney:

You don't get any leave.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh, you didn't?

Elmer Zarney:

If you got leave and I had a couple of dandies. In fact, I'll skip ahead here a little just a second. I was in the French Alps in a super nice little hotel in the mountains, just gorgeous lake. Lake Beodysy (ph) and I took a rowboat out and was laying there in the sun and somebody hollered, hey, Zarney. What. He says, the war is over. I said, oh, if I don't drown going back I've got it made. And then we spent time going down to the Riviera where they have the famous pool carved out of the rock there at Eden Rock they call it near Monte Carlo and all that area. Beautiful. Sand beaches and so forth. You got -- sometimes you got -- after you put in so much time and you got a stress level when you get out. Some went to England. Some went to -- you went where they told you to. You didn't have a choice. Wherever those people that arranged that sort of thing sent you, which was always pretty nice.

Amanda Cumbee:

And then you went -- so you went to some place and they would like for your hotel stay and -- went to some place and they would like for your hotel stay and --

Elmer Zarney:

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, we did. You asked about food before. Down in the French Riviera they had waiters in tuxedos, stayed in the hotels right on the -- and they would bring these silver platter with the big -- you think you're getting a turkey and it was the same food you had in camp but prepared to the nines. They used onions and different things. And, of course, French wines and cognac. We had a bar. And this a holdover from the World War I fighter pilots and it was so stressful because things that they flew back then that each officer had a batman, not your batman, but they called him the batman and you would land the airplane and stop the propeller and he would be there with three fingers or two ounces of whiskey. Right there. Yes. That held over. Now we didn't have somebody jump on a wing and give us whiskey when we got off but you saved up. And then at the end of a month whatever you had a bottle or two and so forth and the pilot - I didn't drink much so I had a lot of trading. I could get cigarettes. For cigarettes you could -- I'd smoke but I didn't smoke all those and you could trade for different things, but you had to go do your own laundry and your own dry cleaning and things like that. I would walk around on my half day off or whatever. I would spot some French lady doing laundry flapping in the breeze like Holmes County and I would go over and talk to her. Being an artist, I didn't know really -- I knew a little French, but I would just take my pad out and I would draw. Everybody can understand drawing.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh, yeah.

Elmer Zarney:

So I hold up the -- ahh. So I just -- what I said on there was that I will trade a can of coffee, American coffee, for doing my laundry. And you guarded that very secretly because other guys would say, where'd you get your laundry done. Faintest idea. Because all of a sudden you're not going to get yours done and they're going to get it. So you kind of -- that ying yang went on all the time and that sort of thing.

Amanda Cumbee:

Do you recall any humorous or unusual events that happened when you were --

Elmer Zarney:

Well, they're not humorous per se, but when the Frenchmen when we were in the -- when I told you they would try and do tarpaper over the ground and then they would have a crew - as soon as the airplanes landed and they tore up some of this then they would take big brushes of hot tar and put them back down. And they had these hot tar drums alongside the runway not too far from the runways that weren't that wide. And one of my friends came in and he was almost just making it in. He had his gear and his gear comes down on this. And he put one gear right in the bucket, right in that. It went up over. It already got tar and crap all over everything and of course it wiped out one good airplane.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh, wow.

Elmer Zarney:

He was all right. Some things like that, you know, happened. I can recall a whole bunch if I sat here all day.

Amanda Cumbee:

Did you or anybody else pull pranks on any of the officers or --

Elmer Zarney:

Oh, sure. Not only just overseas but I was in the National Guard here. This is after the war now and the National Guard in Massfield and we would go on two-week maneuvers. And I took my saxophone and all because I was into sax. And after a few songs, I guess my buddies got a little tired of hearing that so I came back to the barracks and sat down on the bunk and somebody says, you're sitting on my bunk. I said, what do you mean I'm sitting -- oh, I said, sorry, I'll move to the next one. The next guy said, you're sitting on my bunk. All of a sudden I don't have any place. No clothes, no nothing, no saxophone, everything. And, of course, everybody says, I've got to go do something. There was nobody in the barracks that was even to ask. And I said, what did they do. Finally I looked up and it was open rafters, my bunk was up there, everything was up there. Nobody to help. I had to get it all down myself. So those, you know, it's like college. Same age guys. They do things like that.

Amanda Cumbee:

What did you do in the days and weeks after your service ended?

Elmer Zarney:

I'm sorry. Say that again.

Amanda Cumbee:

What did you do -- after your service ended, what did you do those days and weeks after that?

Elmer Zarney:

You mean when I came back from overseas?

Amanda Cumbee:

Yeah.

Elmer Zarney:

Well, I was an artist for Firestone Company in Akron in a division of theirs and then I applied for the G.I. bill of rights which paid for school, supplies, everything. And they had to give you back your job. So I went to the Cleveland Institute of Art then and came back and went to Firestone and decided I'm going to open up my own studio which is another whole story. So I was a professional commercial artist as you probably knew. And kept on flying. Had several different -- went to the National Guard, had a couple different private airplanes so we flew for quite awhile afterwards. Could have gone to the airlines or at least taken a test and decided I'd rather do draw or do things like that rather than fly that way.

Amanda Cumbee:

And did you make any close friendships during the war?

Elmer Zarney:

Yes, very much. This was -- well, overseas, too, but here in the States especially during training and Betty could come down in some places we stayed she'd stay we'd have a little room after we were married and she -- we made friends with a couple that his wife's passed on now but we still write and we've gone to see them from Dallas, Texas. He served in the Pacific and I served in Europe. We stayed friends for a long time.

Amanda Cumbee:

Wow. That's good.

Elmer Zarney:

Good people. So, yes, you do make friends. And you make some that are very quick and then they're there in the morning and you eat breakfast with them and they're not there that night. They pack their stuff and send them home. Not easy. But that's the way it happened.

Amanda Cumbee:

Is there anything else you want to like add about the war?

Elmer Zarney:

Well, I wanted to show you some photographs if you're interested in seeing that. I was flying a mission, a flak, heavy, heavy flak. Flak is a missile fired up that you -- they could get your altitude and direction inside of a matter of seconds and this flak bursts. You see them in the bomber pictures mainly when you see it on TV. The flak bursts. That's heavy flak when it's black and light when it isn't. And I caught a heavy flak burst underneath my airplane and it flipped it over so fast that it cut the engine out and I went through a start procedure going down and there was snow all over and everything. And I said, well, Stalag muft (ph), which means in German air prison, here I come, and started. Thank goodness. And another one that didn't turn out so well. It wasn't me. A young man was on his first mission. He was flying the leader's wing (ph). This was in the dive bombers. They went down to hit a marshaling yard which is trains. They marshal them when they send them out. And they dropped their bombs and strafing and took off and he flew right up into the middle of what they call a light flak burst which is white. It's big, but it looks like a dandelion going to seed where there's thousands of pieces of metal going inward.

Amanda Cumbee:

Oh.

Elmer Zarney:

It looks like fireworks, boom. You know, beautiful. And I know he was dead because his airplane just sort of stopped. I saw him at the ground. First mission. I didn't know the boy.

Amanda Cumbee:

Wow.

Elmer Zarney:

But just to show you a little bit about how Betty --