Interview with Anthony Adams [8/28/2002]

Tom Swope:

This is the oral history of World War II Veteran Anthony A. Adams. Mr. Adams served in the US Army Air Force with the 20th Air Force, 73rd Wing, 500th Group, and 882nd Bomber Squadron. Tony served in the Pacific Theater, and his highest rank was staff sergeant. I'm Tom Swope, and this recording was made at Mr. Adams' home in Brunswick, Ohio, on August 28, 2002. Tony was 79 at the time of this recording. Where were you living in 1941?

Anthony Adams:

Okay, 1941. It's a pretty hard story to tell, because I was moving so fast back and forth. Anything I say isn't going to bother me, so I'll go ahead and say it. When I was one-and-a-half years old, my mother took off with my dad's best drinking buddy. And he gave me to an aunt in Pittsburg. The other three boys--brothers that I had--he sent to a home in New York, Port Jervis, New York, to be exact. That's where the--New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania join. And there was a glass factory there, which my dad was a glass worker, and he worked at the glass factory and put us in a--then they were called orphanages, but he paid our way, and it was--it was Catholic nuns, Sisters of Charity to be exact.

The brothers were there until I was six years old. When I was six, my dad took me away from my aunt and sent me along with the brothers, because he wanted to keep us all together. So I was there until I was about 16. At 16 I--we went out, and my dad set up housekeeping for us, and that was in '38, and he died in '40. Our mother came back. Then I started my odyssey between Port Jervis, New York, and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, back and forth.

When I went into the service, I actually went in from New York. I was working on the Union Railroad repairing boxcars and coal cars, and at the time Jeeps were being made up in--well, they were being assembled in Buffalo and a couple other places, and we had to make the two-by-four planks that they--that they set the drive trains, transmissions on. So I was doing that when I went in. Before I went in on the Sunday--well, December 7th, I was--I was working in the--supposedly working in the yard, but it was a Sunday, and the yard didn't work on Sunday.

However, I had started out as a night watchman. They started everybody out as a night watchman for their first job. And it was more of a psychological deal. They didn't beat drums, wave flags, or anything like that. They put you on as a night watchman, and you learned that you were there for a reason. So they had called me back on that Sunday at--that Sunday afternoon. They said, well, I had to go back as a night watchman for a day or two, and that's the only reason--the only way I learned--or it sunk in that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

I know before then we--I don't know if you've talked to other people that--we had an inkling that FDR wasn't playing pool the right way. We thought that he knew more than what he was letting the people on, and I had always had the feeling that we were conned into that war. It was going to happen anyhow, but we were kind of conned into it. As I said, we didn't have to be urged on because they did everything psychologically. I can remember even when I went into the service--

Tom Swope:

When did you go into the service?

Anthony Adams:

I went into the service in October--no, it was November of '42. I talked my boss into letting me loose, and I--what I did I got on the--I had a pass on the railroad at the time. I went down to--I had to go to New York City. That was the closest recruiting office. It was in Grand Central Station. If you've ever been there, there's a great big concourse where all the people from the Long Island Railroad come running down the steps. Well, underneath the steps was a recruiting office. I went in, and I told them that I was going to enlist, which meant that I could pick my service. I could pick, supposedly, anything that I wanted. The guy said, "Fine." I started through the line. He said, "Well, what do you want?" I said, "Well, my brother is in the field artillery. I want the field artillery."

I got to the end of the line, and some guy with a big stamp--he had a bunch of rubber stamps in front of him, bang, US Army Air Force, unassigned. I said I didn't want the air force. He said, "Oh, yeah," he said, "today is air force day." He said, "You'll like it. Don't worry about it." Well, as it turned out, yes, the air force then was a very elite part of the army. I mean, it--we didn't pull guard duty; we didn't pull KP. The only time we did pull guard duty was when we were the corporal of the guard or something like that.

I went in--was it--yeah, it was November. I got sent to Camp Upton, which Irving Berlin wrote, Oh, How I Hate to Get Up In the Morning, and they--I mean, this was a world away, but they played that every morning, but I went from there--I was there for about two weeks, and then they decided to send me to Pittsburg, California.

They sent me alone out to Pittsburg, California. I walked into the base out there, threw my papers on the desk, and the guy says, "What are you doing here?" and I says, "They sent me out here for basic training, I guess," and he said, "No; no. You belong back in Atlantic City." I go back to Atlantic City. I got to Atlantic City, and we did our basic training in Atlantic City where were stayed at the--well, they took out all the good furniture at the Claridge Hotel, and they put us in the hotel, because the army air force then had taken over the boardwalk, and we did our marching on the boardwalk. We did our calisthenics at the old double A or whatever it was baseball field, and, of course, as we'd marched, we'd sing, and some of the songs were a little bit risquè.

Tom Swope:

______+

Anthony Adams:

Yeah, and these little old ladies were sitting there on the boardwalk with _____+, but from there they sent me to Chicago, and they put me in the Hotel Sherman, another nice hotel, but they had taken all of the stuff out. I was there for about a week, and they decided that they had too many guys in this radio class that they were starting, so they sent me to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Now, this is getting December. It's cold, and I went through radio school at Sioux Falls, and they took the top 10 percent of the class, and they didn't tell us what it was. They just said the top 10 percent of the class is going to be sent to Madison, Wisconsin. "What is it?" "Oh, it's advanced radio." "Okay." So we went to Madison.

We were there for, oh, a couple weeks, and they said, "Well, the class will start next week in Boca Raton, Florida." So they sent me to Boca Raton. I get to Boca Raton, and they had us housed at the old P.K. Wrigley Club, which is now, I think, the golf club, and they had us housed there, and we did our calisthenics and everything else out in the Everglades, and we had survival courses in the Everglades. You name it. It was weird. And I finished my--I finished a class there, and they said, "Well, we don't have an airplane for you, or we don't have an outfit to put you in." "Why?" Well, they wouldn't tell us. Later we found out that they were installing radar in B-29s, and the set they had was an old AN, which is army, navy, APQ13, which was a 360-degree antenna radar, and for some reason it just wasn't--wasn't working in a 29.

They were trying it over in the China Burma, and it wasn't accurate or--it needed--so they finally figured out that pressurized--everything in that airplane was pressurized except one compartment, which was behind the radar room. It was a sealed door, and the next room--the next opening was where the crew got on board, and there was an APU, which is an Auxiliary Power Unit, which was a long track actually. It was a gasoline driven engine that supplied your power for the aircraft making you independent of ground power. That was unpressurized, but the radar unit being in the radar room was pressurized. The antenna for it was right below my seat, and that was a fiberglass dome which was pressurized, and eventually that turned out that worked pretty good. So we--I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, doing training on B-17s, actually, which didn't have radar.

Then they sent me to Biloxi, Mississippi, which had PBYs, which had a sweep radar, which is forward, and what they used to do was they'd throw sleds in the water, and then they'd aim on them. I got that done there, and then they decided to be on a combat crew I had to be an aerial gunner, so they sent me to Tyndall Field, Florida. So I graduated from there, and the strange thing about that was my brother had gone--John, he had gone to Tyndall Field, and he was in Clark Gable's class before me, and he said Gable--the only story I heard from him about Gable was that Gable sat in the back of the room reading a book, and one of your big exams in aerial gunnery was they blindfold you, had the gun completely laid apart on a table, all parts separated, and then they would take the shear pin and stick it in their pocket, and you had to put the gun back together, and, of course, you couldn't find the shear. Anyhow, Gable sat back there, and he says he finished--he finished his assembly, turned around, and here's Gable reading a book. Clark had to be a gunner because he was an aerial photographer during the war, and I guess anybody that flew in combat had to know how to handle a gun.

Tom Swope:

Tell us a little bit--so we get it on tape--about the secrecy and their radar training.

Anthony Adams:

Oh, yeah, the radar training. Down in Boca Raton we used to go to class every morning, and you went through a barbed gate, and you stayed in class. When the class was over, when you walked out, they searched your pockets. They went through the whole bit. They never told you why. They just searched your pockets. You were not supposed to take anything into town, because they did let us go to Delray Beach, which was the biggest town close to Boca, and we used to go to the bars in Boca Raton at night, and we'd be sitting there, and a civilian would come over and start talking to you, and pretty soon, "Oh, you are from Boca Raton." "Yeah." "Oh, yeah, we know all about that place out there," and then we would egg them on a little, and pretty soon the guy would start telling us stuff about radar that we didn't know.

We were not called radar operators. We were called Mickey. Where Mickey came from, I don't know, but even in combat when the skipper would call back and he would say Mickey, I knew he was asking for me, so I would answer. But these people in Delray Beach and in Miami--we used to go down to Miami a lot to Kitty Kelley's. That used to be a nice bar or nightclub, and we--they would tell us all about how a radar set operates and this and that, and, of course, some of them had come out of MIT. They were college grads there.

I guess they started working on radar probably in '38, '37, '38, back then, and these guys knew--they knew more than our civilian instructors did. Why we had civilian instructors, I don't know. I mean, most of them were civilian. The guys that were on permanent party, which was--permanent party was a guy that was--he usually was from that town, he enlisted, and he was an instructor or teacher, and they kept him there close to home, and he would actually go home at night if he wanted to, and he stayed at that base the whole time he was teaching class after class.

Well, the trouble with the radar was--the radar classes were they didn't really teach enough classes to cover what they were getting into. So what happened with me was that I--I flew extra missions because of the shortage of radar operators, and I finished up before my crew did, and I was home when they were still running missions. My--we got our airplane. It was at Kearney, Nebraska. It was in November, cold. The procedure on the B-29 was before you started it up, you had to pull your prop through, ten--ten blades each engine, and on a cold morning when it's about eight or ten below, that's pretty hard to do, but that's the way we started them up. We--

Tom Swope:

Explain what is "pull your prop through."

Anthony Adams:

You pulled it through--you pull it blade by blade through to get the fuel up into the--

Tom Swope:

All right. Okay.

Anthony Adams:

Yeah, and we went from--Kearney is where we picked up-- where Boeing delivered the airplane. When we got the airplane--this was the Z Square 30, The Constant Nymph. When we got it, it had a 175 play hours on it. Johnny Reeves, the skipper, didn't know what the flight hours were, but he just said the log book showed 175 hours. We flew it to Walker Field, Hays, Kansas. Hays is right-there's Hays, and then the airfield, and then Russell where Dole is from. Well, we always went to Hays. That was the bigger of the two towns, but we sat right between them. We did our training there, and most of the training there was--we didn't know where we were going.

We knew that we had an airplane that was capable of going 3200 miles or a little more, and we didn't know if we were going to Europe, Asia, wherever, but they used to fly missions--simulated missions from Hays, Kansas, Walker Field, to Cuba or to New York City or to Montreal, and these were all roundtrip. I mean, no landing in New York or Cuba. Once in a while we'd--Hays was dry at that time. It wasn't prohibition, but it was dry. So we used to fly booze missions to Chicago, Minneapolis.

There's an old--it's an old military custom. I guess it came from the days of the grog, the navy grog. That the sailors were given a grog a day or whatever it was. This kind of stayed--stayed on as tradition in the air force, and once a month, officers were given a fifth. Each officer got a fifth of whatever you wanted, and Bob Ray, the guy I hung around with mostly, and he's an officer. I wasn't supposed to be hanging around with officers, but this was a crew. We could have cared less what other people thought.

In fact, I have a story on that. We were down at San Antonio, Texas, on what they call a RON, Remain Overnight, and we were horsing around. Of course, I'm wearing the sergeant stripes at the time, and he's wearing--I think he had flight officer bars at the time, and I pushed him or he pushed me. We went up against a building or windows right outside the White Rose Hotel in San Antonio, and this guy from Fort Hood, a colonel, a bird colonel, came over, and he started to read me up and down, and he was going to have me court marshaled and this and that and this and that, and the skipper walks over. We called him J.B. His name is John Reeves.

J.B. walks over and asked what was going on. Of course, he knew because we were all together, and the guy told him--he says, "He's assaulting an officer," and the skipper just told him to go pound salt, go back to Fort Hood, do whatever he wanted to, this was a crew, and this crew was its own army, and from that time on we knew that we were 11 guys that were--it was our own army, but we did operate under the rules and regulations, and you had to be that way in any combat crew or you didn't come back. I mean, if you didn't do your own job and do it right, forget it. I mean, it was either a one-way trip or what else.

Anyhow to get back to where I was, I went to Walker Field after we had our training, simulated missions, et cetera. We went--flew from Walker to Mather Field, California, which is up around Sacramento, and that was our point of debarkation. The first day we were supposed to leave we took off, had a runaway prop. The prop spun completely off the engine. It missed us probably by about that much. It was close. We had to go back because we were fully loaded. We knew we were going to the Pacific, but the bomb bays were loaded with all kinds of artic gear. Don't ask me why, but that was typical army. We got back okay. We were supposed to leave the next morning. After they changed the engine and did everything to it, we were supposed to leave--no, it was two days later. The weather got so bad we couldn't take off. Then the next--it was almost a week we started to take off again, and we had two generators--each engine had its own generator, and we had two generators, one and two, go off the bus and run wild. Had to shut down number one. Got back on the ground. I think it was about a week and a half later we finally had some good weather, and we took off from Mather to Hawaii. We landed at Hickam, and that was our real first scare--or not scare, but idea that we were going into a combat area.

Because when we came up to Hickam, everybody had their binoculars out, we were looking down, and these antiaircraft were just tracking us all the way in. Of course, this is what? '42, which still wasn't only--wasn't quite a year after Pearl Harbor, and we were at Hickham for a couple days, and then we took off--and no problems except some real lousy weather--to Kwajalein. We spent a night in Kwajalein, and then from there to Saipan. We got into Saipan--I believe it was on November the 25th--no, it was December. I'm sorry; December--December 23.

Tom Swope:

Of 1944?

Anthony Adams:

'44, yeah, and the first raid from--of B-29s from Saipan, Guam, and Tinian to the Japanese islands--Honshu, Hokkaido, and Kyushu were the main Japanese islands, and they had a series of small shimas. They called them Minami Shima and such. But the first raid was the 24th of November. Saipan was not secured when we got there. It was--it was what they called secured, but it really wasn't secured. If we were at the movies--we had these theaters--outdoor theaters. Ours was called Surf Side, and it dipped across toward Tinian, and when you--if you were sitting there at the movie, you could be sitting next to you and some guy--some guy say, "Hey, Yank," you turn, and it was a Jap. from up in the hills. They had so many caves up there. We never did get into all the caves. The marines went up there when we were taking Saipan, and they had to fire, and they blasted out as many caves as they could, but I understood that 25 years after the war some Jap. up on Saipan came out and wanted to surrender.

Tom Swope:

Did the guy come down to watch the movie and then go back?

Anthony Adams:

Yeah; uh-huh, he would, or you would be--or we had guys sit on top of the mess hall on the company street, and these guys would sit up there--they had their regular four-hour watches. They would sit up there with their carbine-carbines, and every once in a while you'd hear a gun fire. You'd come out of the tent, "What's going on?" Well, a Jap. came down the street trying to get food or something. They just come out of the hills. In fact, they were along the runway.

The airport--or the airfield up there was called Eisley Field. Who Eisley was, I don't know, but they called it Eisley Field, and it was the old Japanese fighter base, and our boys came in when they took the island, and they poured blacktop on top of the corral to make it 7,000-foot runways, and the Japs would be in bunkers down under--of course, if you went off the runway on any of those islands, it was volcanic ash. It was like quicksand, so you stayed off the side of the runways.

These guys would hole in under that stuff, and that's where they lived, and they'd come out when they got starved or something, and they'd come out, and once in a while, we'd catch them, and they were there--we knew they were there. The marines would go up in the hills every once in a while to--it was--Mount Suribachi was the only high spot we had on the island. All of those islands seemed to have one high spot like Iwo Jima and Suribachi, and the marines would go up there, and they'd clean out an area, and that was an occasion where marines came back, and they knew we had--they knew we had booze because of our officers getting it and giving us--they'd give us-if they didn't drink it, they'd give us some.

So they would trade booze for souvenirs. So a marine came down one day, a nice kid. He was from Kansas, I believe, and he said, "I've got a Japanese flag. What's it worth?" I said, "Well, it's worth a bottle of Cutty Sark." I gave him a bottle of Cutty Sark. He gave me a Japanese flag. He took off back to the hills and to his base, and we were inspecting the Japanese flag, and right down in one corner it says, "Property of the US Army Air Force." It was part of a parachute. They used to pull that all the time.

Tom Swope:

___________+

Anthony Adams:

Yeah, they pulled that on me. We used to make-- everybody had their own darkroom, and I don't know where these pictures come from, but somebody would get a picture. It was pretty raunchy and--or a negative, and it would go around the base. See, I was in the 500th bomb group, 882nd bomb squadron. So we had three squadrons in this one area. It was the 881st, 882nd, 883rd, and each guy, as I said, had his own darkroom. We would go over to Tanapag Harbor, which was a navy base on Saipan, and we'd--we'd bargain for hypopaper. They had everything. I mean, you wanted it, the navy had it. So we'd trade the paper and bring it back, and we made our own pictures.

Well, some pretty good pictures went around. The strange part about that was I had a bunch of those pictures in my barracks bag, and when I came back, I wanted to--I didn't want to fly back on a 29. They says, "We can fly you back on a 29," and I said, "No. These things are war weary." I was afraid of them, because they had so many missions on them and they were--the next one might have been the last one. That was the way I felt.

So I worked my way back in the navy on what they called an APA, Army Personnel Attached. It was a Kisser ship that they had the concrete in the bow, and I worked my way back guarding Japanese prisoners that they had picked up--or that they had captured on Saipan and were taking them to the US out in California for--to these internment camps. Why I don't know, but we would--I would--that's the way that I got back. I worked my way back to Hawaii on the Franklin, which was the name of the boat, and from there I came back--they insisted that I had to take a one-month R and R because the head shrink said, "No, you've got to have a month's rest."

So I stayed there for a month, which wasn't bad to take. The Seventh Air Force had a base over on Lanai. This thing was complete. I mean, it was a rest camp to beat all rest camps. Well, I was there for a month, and then from there I took the--it was the Sevier, which was another APA, Army Personnel Attached, to Frisco and went up to Angel Island where I was shipped from there to the east coast to Fort Dix. I got out at Fort Dix on October 2nd--I think it was--of '45.

Saipan was--it was a semitropical island. It wasn't very big. I think it was three by six or something like that, six miles long and three wide. It had the one airfield, and, of course, it had navy, marine, and army air force base, and we had the--three squadrons were on Saipan. The 500th Bomb Group was on Saipan. Tinian, which we could see, as I said, across the bay, had the 499th, and Guam had the 498th, and, of course, Guam was the headquarters.

That's where Curt was. I was talking about Curt before. Curt LeMay was a--he was a maverick. He came in, and as he said, "We're going to bomb at seven or eight thousand. If you agree with me, stay seated. If you don't agree with me, go over to that side of the room." What happens on that side of the room, possibly court marshal, demotion. He wouldn't say. He didn't have too many guys that would go over to the other side. Some of them did, and we never did know what happened to them. They shipped out right away.

Tom Swope:

What all had you been bombing at previous to that?

Anthony Adams:

18 to 20 thousand that is, and as I said, we weren't hitting anything. If we were, it was--you couldn't lie. Because the minute you opened your bomb-bay doors, you had a camera, and it automatically started when the bombs dropped. As soon as the bomb is released, the camera would start. It wouldn't stop until the door switch was activated to close the bomb-bay door. So if you tried to lie, you were caught

Because they tried to get us--they tried to get our crew once a statement of--what they called a statement of charges. If you lost something, you had to pay for it, like a .45, and we would give our .45s to the marines or somebody and say we lost it, and then, of course, we had to pay for it. They accused us of dropping a bomb inside the Emperor's Palace. It had a moat affair around it with a wall.

They--at the time Hirohito supposedly wanted to stop--or didn't want the war. Tojo, Yamamoto, a couple other guys, supposedly, talked him out of it; that he was doing the right thing. So our intelligence theory was stay away from the palace. Well, what happened was we--we got--on a fire raid, we got a guy over head of us, and we pulled evasion tactics to get away from him, and in the process, we went directly over the palace, and the camera was operating, and they didn't know if it was our bombs or not, but somebody's--somebody's bombs hit the ball field inside the palace, and we never did pay the statement of charges for it, but it was an incident that happened.

I had another incident. We were bombing at 7,000 feet. I was not with my crew that night. I was with another crew, because their radar operator was sick, and I was with them. We were going in at 7,000, and it was about midnight. We were right over Kure Naval Base, which was Tokyo's--it was Yokosuka, Yokohama, Kure. They were all the bases that were right on that Bay of Tokyo, and we were going right over there, and I released the bombs by radar, and that was up to the navigator and me.

He had a sleeve set, and I had the actual set. I would do the calibration, and he would make sure that I was--the wind, the drift, and the air speed and all of that was correct. Dropped the bombs. It was anything over six-tenth coverage of clouds you went radar, and, of course, at night when you get a six-tenth coverage, it was--you're going to drop by radar. I dropped them by radar. I had the cameras clicking away, went to close the bomb-bay doors, and there's a horrible smell. So the flight engineer goes down into the bomb bay. He found half a cow and enough lumber to build a small house. It went up into the bomber. Because what you had is you had these fires on the ground. It was pretty bad, and you had thermal updraft, and, of course, as you got into the thermal updraft, right away you got into the downdraft. After the updraft came the downdraft, and it probably drug us down to maybe 4,000 feet or less. I think it was the captain flying that airplane. He said he thought he was at 3,000, but he couldn't swear. He just had a chance to look at the gauge at one time and then pull back on the stick to get it up, and when the doors closed, it closed in on this cow that had been blown up.

So the procedure was you went in on a fire--usually on a fire raid you went in with 500,000 pounders that were detonators. They would blast, and then your fire bombs, which was napalm and--oh, I can't think of the name of it. It was more like sparkers. That stuff. That would burn, hit, stick. The napalm would stick and burn out whatever you had previously blasted, and that was the idea of the fire raids. That was another good reason why I had to take a one-month R and R. Because after you sit up there and you look down on 65 square miles of city burning, you kind of get guilty. You know that it's the enemy, but still they're civilians, but the only reason we bombed Tokyo so much was because the Japanese system was every family had to do something for the war effort. Every family had their own little factory. They would make parts for gun sights, for bomb sights, for airplane parts in each house, and then that stuff was all collected and sent to the factory, and their factory--their biggest factory was the Mitsubishi Aircraft Factory, which was in--was Hamamatsu.

Originally back, oh, 1,000 years ago they made fiddles, these lutes and stuff like the old Japanese used to play, the kabuki dancers and that. Well, the fiddle factory was turned into the Mitsubishi Aircraft Factory, which we always called it the fiddle factory when were going on that raid, and most of the material there came from individual houses in Tokyo, and you still felt guilty. I mean, because, you know, it got so hot--from what we were told, it got so hot that it drove the people into Tokyo Bay, and even the water close to shore would boil, because you had 300 B-29s, say, on one raid, and they're all dropping fire bombs plus demolition bombs. It could make a pretty good sized fire. In fact, in his diary, he describes one where he could see the fire from 65 to miles away before we got--see, what we used to do was--if they wanted us, they had us. We used to fly north--naturally north from Saipan. We would go up over the South China Sea, which was this side of Tokyo. We would make a turn, and our IPR, Initial Point, would be Mount Fuji, because it always--always seemed to be sticking--just the snowcap was always above the cloud layer. On clear days, you could see the whole mountain, but mostly it was--it was in clouds, but Fuji was always above the cloud layer. So we could see Fuji, and that was our--that was our initial point. Then we come down, and our aiming point was where--where they had the Olympics three or four years ago. I can't think of the name of the town. Sariavo?

Tom Swope:

Yeah, no. I can't think of what you're talking about, but I know what you're talking about, yes.

Anthony Adams:

That would be our aiming point, because it was on a direct line with downtown Tokyo. The Ginza, which was their Broadway, ran straight down, and that was the street that Jimmy Doolittle and his first raiders--they strafed--they strafed the Ginza, and that was more of a psychological raid than anything else, because they knew they were going to get back to the base. Well, their base was a carrier. So they wound up in China, everywhere.

Our deal was to go down--the radar sets then, the APQ13, was a round scope, and it had a 360 sweep, and up and down. As you look straight at it, you had what they called a bombing pip or target pip, and you would set that pip to the air speed, ground speed, wind drift, which the navigator all figured out. You would set it on that, and when your target hit that pip--and it stays lit. Because certainly when the target hit that pip, then you dropped. The quality--the antenna, which was--as I said, was in a fiberglass dome, would go up and down, and you could lower it as far as you wanted and raise it as far as you wanted.

In that respect, on February 25, 1945, we were on a Tokyo raid, and we got up over the South China Sea, and the weather was really bad. It was like Cedar Point demon drop. We came back, went to circle the field, dropped a gear, and nothing happened. Didn't have enough fuel to go around a second time. So the skipper says, "Well, okay, let's crank them down by hand." This took 15 minutes, and it was a--it was a hard crank. It was like an old Model--Model T Ford. We didn't have that time.

So he decided, okay, he was just going to take it in and crash land it. So, of course, we didn't have seat belts then except--well, the gunners did, but I didn't have a seat belt. I was on a swivel chair, which I could abut myself up against the radar table, my map table, and I have my chest chute, and that would hold me steady, so I was braced up against that, and I sat sideways facing the star.

So what happened was he said, "Well, lower the antenna as far as it will go." So I lowered the radar antenna just as far as it would go, and he said when you hear it scrape--of course, he couldn't up front. He said, "When you hear that thing scrape, you holler out." So when I heard it scrape, I hollered out. He eased it, and then when he got us going slow enough--down to about 70 or 60 miles an hour--it settled down.

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE; BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE.

There wasn't anything we could do then but just slide, and it bent the props. It curled them up real good. We all got out okay. I ran my nose against the--I guess it must have been the scope. I ran it against the radar scope, and actually what I wound up with is what's called a deviated septum, and I didn't say anything. Because my brother, who was in the infantry, field artillery, whatever it was, he had a lot of trouble getting out of the service.

He finally wound up--see he had--over at Bougainville he got jungle rot in his big toe. He would have been okay, but then diabetes set in, and he finally wound up losing both legs, and they played with him for a long time, and I figured, no, if I ever get in an army hospital, they will play games with me, and so I didn't say anything. So as far as the skipper knows in his journal, he says everybody got out okay, nobody was hurt.

Well, all right, it wasn't bad, but we all got out of the airplane. Everybody lit up a cigarette like idiots. We were, what, 100 feet away from it. It never caught fire. It probably had 30 to 50 gallons of--slop gas is what it was. It was in the bottom of the tanks, subfuel, and that was no good fuel anyhow. It wouldn't feed. So what they did they just took the airplane. They jacked it up the next morning. They jacked it up. The inspector went up on board from Boeing, and he hit the switch, and the gears popped out.

The only thing they could figure was that it was moss, jungle moss or some kind of moss, had gotten in, because it was two or three days between flights with that airplane, and moss had gotten in there and jammed a switch. It operated okay until it was ready to land, and then the gears wouldn't drop. So they took the airplane, and they put gear pins in it to keep the gears down, and flew it to Guam, and then disassembled it, put it on a boat, and shipped it over to the United States, and took it around the country to sell war bonds with, the fuselage. So the airplane did serve some good. We had three--two--two or three airplanes after that. We had Devil's Delight, Sting Shift, and they had another airplane, and I don't know--

Tom Swope:

How did they come up with the names?

Anthony Adams:

The Constant Nymph, nobody really wants to admit where they got it from, but I knew it came from Noel Coward, the play or book, The Constant Nymph, and I think that's where they got it from, and, of course, the skipper knew that the nymph was supposed to be a good omen back in the centuries, and he agreed to it. Later on after I left, these airplanes--you'll see in this book there's all kinds of so-called filthy pictures.

Curt LeMay's wife came over to Guam, and there was an airplane up on the ramp, a 29, and it was American Beauty, which, I think, there's a picture of it in there. She thought that was disgusting. So she chewed him out, and I guess he was the only one that she ever listened to, because the next thing we know they started using--a strategic air command insignia was on all of the noses.

That was the end of all of the fun, because we were given free hand to put anything we wanted on any airplane. In some of my pictures of our airplane, the copilot--it used to be way back in the early movies they had--they used to run these trailers, "Stinky Davis, go home. Your mother wants you." So his name was Davis, and everybody called him Stinky. So he had his name Stinky on the right outside his window, and most of the guys had their names. I didn't. All I had was a star, and the star I didn't like because the star was a good aiming point for Japanese fighters. They would aim at it, and they would always come from above, too, out of the sun. They'd like to come up--down out of the sun and get you because your top gunner wasn't looking up. We had sunglasses, flight glasses, but they didn't really work in that bright sun.

Tom Swope:

Did you encounter a lot of fighter opposition?

Anthony Adams:

Okay, now, when I went over--when we went over there in December of '44, the nearest fighter escort we had was on Saipan itself. Okinawa had not been taken. None of the--Iwo Jima, that definitely had not been taken. So therefore, the fighters would escort us from takeoff to maybe 100 miles north. Now, this was a 1600-mile-one-way trip. So they would escort us, and then we would--we would pick up Japanese fighters from Iwo, and we would try to go over there--over to Iwo at 18 to 20 thousand. Then we would lower--drop down after we got out of there.

Then there was a small chain of islands, Pagan, Rota, where small Japanese fields were that they could come up at us, but they couldn't do too much. But then once we got along side Okinawa, then Japanese fighters would come out to intercept us.

Over Japan, it was pure Japanese fighters. I mean, we had no escort whatsoever. I don't think we had escort--fighter escort until Iwo was taken, and even then, we didn't have fighter escort up in Tokyo from Iwo because that was too far. That was about half way. Okinawa would send over some escort P-338s, maybe some Thunderbirds, but that was about all. There weren't too many of them.

Our bombing missions were all strictly against Zeros, Bettys, Nancys. Why we named them that, I don't know, but we gave Japanese aircraft all kinds of girls' names, except for the Zero. I don't know if you know it or not, but the Zero was actually the brainchild of Howard Hughes. Back in 1936 or '37--it was the middle '30s--Howard had the drawings of an airplane, a fighter, that he offered to the army. The army refused it. Somehow the Japanese got ahold of some of the specs, and with it actually turned out to be the Zero. That's a true story. The reason I know is because I worked for Howard Hughes when he owned Trans World Airlines. I worked for them for 33 years.

The Zero was a--it was a good aircraft. The only trouble with the Zero was it had no--it had armament as far as guns, but it had no armament as far as saving the pilot. I mean, it was just a shell with a--a shell of a--a metal shell with guns on it. It was a gun platform is all that it was, but it could turn on a dime. I mean, it was a good aircraft. But if you hit it--and in his journal here, he mentions several hits that we got on them. If you hit them--all you have to do is hit them one burst.

See, on our guns, every tenth or twentieth shell was a tracer. Of course, the tracer was--you know, it was harmless. If it hit something, it was--it was like a Roman candle. But you could judge your windage by watching the tracers, because the tracers would--they would make a streak along with the other bullets. They were-- .50 caliber they all were. See, the 29 had four guns in the top turret--top forward turret, two in the back top turret, two--these were all .50s--two .50s and a--some had one .20 millimeter and some had two cannons in the tail. So that when the .50s start--took off, the .20 millimeters took off too. They would give you--they would give you enough of a jolt that they would give you about five more miles an hour air speed when they went off. Then the under turret--the underside turrets had two forward--two in the forward and two in the rear, and these were all controlled by the central fire control gunner and the two side gunners. The side gunners usually took care of the bottom turrets. The central fire took care of the top. And it was an electrical nightmare. It had a cable, a big ball of wires, that went from the front of the airplane to the rear of the airplane. Some of them had servo motors to operate the rudders, ailerons, you name it.

There was nothing direct in that airplane that you could actually say, well, okay, if I push the brake pedal, this is going to stop. There was nothing like that. Everything went through a servo motor, and this thing could be a nightmare, and when anything went wrong electrically, they would have to get somebody from Boeing Wichita or Boeing Seattle to come over and look at it, correct it, and that's why we had that airplane--not just ours, but everybody's airplane was being remodified at least once a week, because the airplane was built in a big hurry.

It proved itself in China, CBI, but it still had a lot of things go wrong with it once it got into combat, and you didn't know until it happened, and then you would report it on--just like you may write up your log on the way back and tell them what happened, and then they'd remodify the whole fleet, and this meant that--you didn't always fly your own airplane on a mission, because they tried to run missions every day, but it was almost impossible because you've got 33, 34 hundred miles of flight on each airplane, and engine changes were normal. I mean, they got so they could change an engine on a 29 in, oh, eight, ten hours easy complete, which in those days was really something, because you've got a 2800-horse-power engine that had all kinds of problems. We had--you were observing all the time in flight.

That's why I had to ride gunner's position a lot to relieve the gunners, because you had to watch your wings, and if you didn't see oil coming up--a little streak of oil coming up off the leading edge of the wing, you had troubles. They had rocker box troubles where the oil would get down in the rocker boxes, and it would clog up, and they had generator troubles. Of course, they had runaway props. The prop was a Hamilton standard, which was supposedly at the time was the best prop in the business, best prop system. They didn't have too many real sparkplug or coil or lead problems. I don't know why. Because when I went to work for the airlines, we still didn't have jets. We were always changing plugs, leads, coils. I mean, that was common, especially on Martin 202s, 404s, Boeing stratoliners, which the stratoliner was an airplane that the army had--in fact, MacArthur had one of them, but speaking of Curt again, the maverick, Curt went over there, and when he started his missions at eight, ten--anywhere below 10,000, he insisted on being the number one leader.

He would go over target, and if he didn't like the run--now, he's got maybe 60 guys behind him that are in his group. If he didn't like the run, he went around again, and they would say, well, the fighters are bad, the antiaircraft is bad. He didn't care. He wanted a perfect run. So he would go around again. Well, about the third time he would go to go around, his engineer would say, "Hey, you're not going to get back to base. You're not going to have the fuel." So he'd relent and let them drop.

I understand that Harry Truman had to stop him. Because when he got up in that airplane--I never saw the man--I saw him several times, but I never saw him light a cigar. He had an old butt end of cigar that he chewed on, always chewed on a cigar. He'd get on the airplane, stick that cigar in his mouth, and he was the aircraft commander, and that was it, and he would lead. Truman finally told him. He says, "Hey, I'm not going to lose my generals that way." They were still worried about McKellough over in Belgium. We did--we had lost a couple, Colonel King. There were a few others that we had lost in our group, and Truman stopped him. But he would go on selected runs.

But he had a penchant for knowing everybody in his group by first name. He didn't know your last name, but he knew your first name. Now, he was on Guam, and we were on Saipan. We didn't get any chance to see him, but he would come up. Every once in a while he had to stick his nose in to see how the squadron was doing. He went over their books, looked, and he would meet everybody.

I got out in '45, and '48 he was running with--was it '48? He was running as vice-president with Wallace, whenever Wallace was running for president. I was working in Pittsburg with TWA, and he came off the airplane, and I was a ramp agent at the time. He came off the airplane, and then we had steps. It was the Constellation, and we had the steps. We had Jetways. He came down the steps, and I was at the bottom, and the old PR stuff, how was your flight, so and so, so and so, and I looked at him, and I said, "General, how was your flight?" He said, "Oh, it was fine, Tony."

Just like that, just bing, and they had said that he was like Vincent ____, whoever that guy was, and he knew everybody by their first name in his outfit, and he retained that, I guess, until the day he died.

I don't know. But Curt was a--the only time I officially--really officially met him was when I had--they said 25 missions, and that was it. So I got the 25, and they called me into Guam. They flew me down to Guam, and I went in the office, and--the commander's office, and he was sitting there, and he said, well, sergeant, you've got 30 missions, right? I said--no, 25 it was. 25, right? He said, "I said 25 was tops, right?" I said, "Yep." He said, well, we increased it to 30, but if you're really burned out, blah, blah, blah, blah. "No. Okay, I'll go to 30."

So at 30 I was called down again, and I was told, "Well, you could stay on, and we'll think about sending you to OCS," Officers Candidate School. I thought about it, and I says, "Okay, I'll stay on," but I says, "I will not go over 35." I got to 33, and they called me in, and he said, "Well, we've got enough people now that if you want to, you can go," and I said, "Yes, I'll go." "However, you go back on a B-29, or you find your own way back." That's how I wound up on a boat.

Tom Swope:

Do you remember that last mission?

Anthony Adams:

The last mission was--I think it was to--I don't know if it was Kyoto or Yokohama, but it was almost my last mission. We ran into real heavy flak. Luckily I was sitting on my swivel chair, and I had three or four flight curtains, and they were pieces of fabric that had steel woven into them, steel strips woven into them, and they would--they had some give. What we used to do was sit them up around our back behind us. Because of the star back there, the guy was aiming at the star, and whether it worked or not, it was all psychological anyhow, but it helped us, but I was sitting on two of them, and the--we had a close hit.

It was actually a near miss, but the fragments came up and went--came through the floor, and it got the radar antenna and came up and got through the seat and into the flak curtain.

We came back, and I went into the dispensary, and I had a few scratches, and "What was your problem?" "I got hit in the butt by a battle ship." It was a battle ship at the naval base that was firing at us, and when we came back--got back from that mission, that was a--there were quite a few holes in that airplane, I mean. It's amazing how they could patch them up overnight, because they kept those things just constantly flying. It was a good airplane. It was the first real pressurized aircraft. It was the first aircraft other than the PBY that carried radar of any kind.

My navigator stayed on. After the war ended, he stayed on. He went into B-52s, and he said that everything he did on the B-52s he learned from me, because he operated radar on a 52, and he says everything he learned about that 52 he learned from me between the two of us working together. Because out of the 33 missions, I think I bombed my radar, oh, maybe ten times. He's got in the journal there one mission where, I suppose, that he did a hell of a good job. I don't know, because I couldn't see where I was, and my room was dark. The only way I could get to see anything was to go up and sit in the gunner position, and if the gunner was there, usually what the gunner would do--the radar room had two bunks, an upper and a lower. Underneath the lower bunk was a footlocker full of C rations and K rations, if you know what they are.

They were Spam, little sausages, canned sausages, Ziebach or rye--rye crisp, and butter that wouldn't melt. We had butter up on Iwo Jima when we landed on Iwo Jima one night because of fuel, and that's where this letter came for the--down at Arlington, Texas, at the school down there, that's--a picture of our crew then and now is hanging--it was the first picture in their museum, according to them. They--they wrote that letter to thank me for sending it down to them. I haven't written--I should have written to them to tell them four of the guys are gone. We are down to seven now, but--

Tom Swope:

Do you remember your very first mission?

Anthony Adams:

The first mission was to Iwo Jima. It was on December the 24th. In fact, on Christmas Day we were over Iwo, and what we were doing was we were--we were bombing the airfield, which we were going to build up two or three months later. We were bombing it to stop the Japanese from coming up--intercepting our Tokyo missions, our Osaka, Kobe, you-name-it mission. It wasn't a real bad mission, except we had bad weather. Most of our missions were in bad weather. The South China Sea generated some of the nastiest weather in the world. It all came out of Siberia, and that's where we first learned about the jet stream.

Nobody knew what the jet stream was. All they said was upper winds, upper winds. We would be flying north up to our initial point, and we would be indicating--indicated air speed was 250. The navigator would pull out the ground speed, and it would be 25. Antiaircraft guns at that speed were pretty accurate. So we definitely had to stay away from the Japanese islands, especially on a weather mission. We used to take weather missions which lasted--the average mission that we ran was 141/2 hours. I mean, that was the average mission. That's why--I think that's why we got five air medals because of the time we were putting in and the--and no fighter escort.

I mean, it was--we were brave. Baloney. It was a job. But when you were indicating miles an hour, that meant when you made your turn and started downwind, that you were going over downtown Tokyo-- hey, we're up to 400, 500 miles an hour, you're indicating. Well, the average bomb run was 200. It was indicated XP bomb runs were 200 miles an hour. Ninety percent of the bomb runs were downwind because of the upper winds. So you had to really be sharp on figuring your drift and your air speed, and I had a real good navigator, and we had an excellent engineer.

The engineer figured the fuel, and he--only once when we had to land at Iwo because of a fuel shortage, and that was because of real bad weather over--I think it was Osaka, Japan. That night we--we just--we were fighting weather all the way back. We had just taken Iwo Jima. In fact, it wasn't secure. Just the strip was secured, and the marines were lined up along side of the strip, and there was something like 200--200 B-29s landed there that night. How they got them out of there, I don't know, because we flew back on a B-17. They brought our airplane back empty, because all it had was fuel because of the--because of the length of the runway at Iwo.

Iwo had short runways. Some of these missions we took I didn't know until after they were over that we had gunners on board but no bullets. They would fly night missions, fire raid missions, empty canisters. The gunners knew it, but they wouldn't tell us. And the reason for that is--they flew along as observers, and the reason for that was that we had just enough fuel--our fuel had to be managed on those trips because you went in, you climbed to, say, 15,000, then you dropped down, and then you climbed again, and then you dropped down, and each time you climbed, you were eating up fuel. So they would take as much weight off the airplanes as they possibly could, and nighttime, they figured Japanese fighters weren't that prevalent.

What the Japs at nighttime used to use was what they called the Baka Bomb. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or not. It was a B-2 rocket with a kamikaze pilot in it, and he would ram--he would try to ram the lead aircraft in formation. If he came upon a formation, he would--he would ram the lead plane, and you flew in formation, as he shows in his diary there. You flew wingtip to wingtip, and there wasn't much room for error. If you had any kind of turbulence, all you did was just widen it out, but you stayed in formation, if possible. And we had some real good pilots. Our commanding officer of the 500th Bomb Group was a colonel, bird colonel, 26 years old. He was in command of--I think it was 300 airplanes. His officers were mostly colonels and captains. The generals were all down on Guam with Curt.

Tom Swope:

Did anyone get hit by any of these kamikazes?

Anthony Adams:

Kamikazes, yes. We were missed--on one mission, we were missed by about--according to Johnny Reeves, it might have been two- or three-hundred feet by a kamikaze pilot. The tail gunner got him. He got him before he got--he missed us, and he was heading for an airplane just below us, and the tail gunner happened to spot him, and he got him with the .20 millimeter cannons. Luckily, he had shells in the .20 millimeters. Whether that night they had shells in the .50 calibers in the canisters, I never knew from mission to mission what it was. We were never told until after it was over. They'd say, "Well, yeah, your gunner was along as an observer." Here we are up there without any fighter escort.

Tom Swope:

Do you remember any other particularly rough missions over Tokyo?

Anthony Adams:

Most of our missions were really rough as far as weather related. We had one where--where the antiaircraft hit just off of our starboard side--no, it was portside, and it got the captain, and the bombardier got cut up. Busted out the glass in the cockpit. The navigator had a thing--a thing that he shot the stars with. It was a little Plexiglas dome, and he was--what he was doing up in it, I don't know, but it got the dome, and it blew it out, and it got him in the hand.

There was several missions where we--where two or three feet more and antiaircraft would have hit the gas tanks, because we came back a couple times with peppered--peppered wings. That airplane could take a beating. It couldn't take the beating as the B-17 did. The 17s would fly on anything. The 17 was like a Model T.

I mean, if you went out and started down the runway, fired up--well, you run your test firing to see if you're okay on your engines, and if the magnetos weren't working, so what. You went ahead and flew. Well, the 29 didn't have that magneto problem. Our problem was that if we--if we didn't get it up 150 miles an hour, we didn't take off. That was it. A typical was at--Tinian was across from us. Tinian had a strip--I'm pretty sure it was 8,000 foot long, but it was right on the shore. We had--our strip at Eisley was 200 foot above the water. They were on the water. The great thinking of the US Army Air Corps was they would use Tinian for sowing mines in Tokyo Bay, saltwater mines. These mines were saltwater active. That as soon as they were dropped in Tokyo Bay, they became active with the saltwater.

The only catch was when they would barrel down the runway at Tinian as they take off, the 29 had a habit of dropping at least 50 to 60 foot after takeoff. It would just mush, and then it would climb.

They would drop, and if the bomb-bay doors were not that well designed of which--Bell Aircraft was a subsidiary--was a--subcontractor is what it was of Boeing during World War II. Bell used to make an airplane in a big hurry. They wanted the airplane in a hurry, so Bell would overlap their riveting. What happens--what would happen at 20,000 foot with overlapping riveting would be what happened to Hawaiian Airlines several years ago when--the skin just peals right off. Our riveting from Boeing was all flush riveting. There was no resistance--wind resistance.

So what would happen also was that the Bell Aircraft bomb-bay doors were not really tight as they should be, and the saltwater props would pick up the spray, throw it up into the bomb bay against these mines. The mines would be doing this, moving back and forth, and if they touched, boom. We used to watch a couple airplanes.

Now and then we'd see an airplane explode on takeoff, and we knew exactly what it was. Why they didn't use Saipan, I don't know. But then they used Tinian the same way with the atomic bomb. You see Tibbets was over on Tinian, and I knew one of his crew members. I palled around with him for awhile. We used to have a kayak that we used to go between the island on, and I knew one of them.

I think today--he is still around, but I think he's a little off upstairs. The way they explained, when they dropped bomb, they made a sharp--they were told right away to make a real sharp turn and get the hell of there, which they did. On the turn, they looked back, and when he saw that mushroom--I think it affected everybody on that crew. After I retired in 1980 from TWA, I was--I had a chapter of our local Retirees, senior club. We called it Retirees. I tried to get Tibbets.

He lives in Gross City, Ohio, by Columbus. I tried to get him to come up and talk to our retirees, but he never would. Now I notice--oh, a couple months ago I saw in the paper where actually where he is starting to talk about it now. That's 60 years, and he's actually talking about it now. Because he kept--he would say, "Sorry, I can't. He said, "I can't come up. If I did, he said, "somebody would have to ask me," and he says, "I would have to give them an answer," and he says, "I don't want to talk about it." That was his answer every year. We'd meet twice a year, and I'd ask him twice a year.

Tom Swope:

When you think about what you experienced, does one particularly vivid memory come to mind?

Anthony Adams:

Well, I mean, everything happened so fast. You realize I was only over there from December the 24th until--I think it was April--sometime in April, and I pushed--as I said, I pushed 33 missions in there, plus missions that didn't count like training missions and bomb runs and getting flight time and stuff like that that everything was pushed together in such a fast occurrence that we really--we really didn't even get to know our own crew members that well because we were so busy.

That--you know, that was good. I mean, it kept a lot of the stress out of it. Most of my fears and apprehensions were actually the actual length of the flying hours, the missions, the roughness of the weather, the sites that I saw on the ground after a raid or during a raid, if I could get away from the set to go out and sit in the gunner's position or look over his shoulders, as I said, that left an impression on me.

The one night that I really got to see the fires, it left me with a lot of guilt. I know I lost my fear on about the third or fourth mission. When we went into it at the very beginning, we're all pretty well scared out of our wits, because we didn't know what was going to happen. You couldn't--in a way you couldn't trust the engines themselves to take you 3200 miles. This was not jet travel, and you soon either--you went up there the first time, and you were scared. There was no doubt it.

The second time you were a little bit less than scared. The third time you got to thinking about the booze and stuff that you left behind in your locker. We had a theory. I don't know what good it was, but if a guy was going on a mission and another crew had flown the day before--they weren't going--you left all your personal belongings with your buddy on the other crew. If you had booze and you didn't come back, they were to have a wake, and it was common procedure. The first part of December--or of January of '45 and February of '45, none of us expected to come back from any mission that we went on. Because we finally realized--we finally realized that, hey, we don't have fighter escort, we're on our own, and it's up to our gunners, but the gunners couldn't do anything about antiaircraft.

The Japanese were real good on any aircraft up to about 15,000. Anything above 15,000 they could hit or miss. It all depended how good their operators were. They had a habit of mounting all of their aircraft throughout the island of Kyushu and Honshu on the railroad tracks. So that when you went up on a--you went up on a bomb--or observer mission, weather observe mission, you always went over, and you took pictures of the antiaircraft positions as you saw them that day, but the next day they weren't there, because they would move them on the tracks a quarter of a mile away or something like that.

They were good at that. But the trouble with that was--being on tracks like they were, they couldn't get the accuracy of a permanent setup. We lost a good bit--we didn't lose as many aircraft as Curt did in Ploiesti. There is no doubt about that.

I mean, I understand from my brother--incidentally, all of my brothers are dead now. I understand that he had lost out of 100 B-24s on a raid on the Ploiesti oilfields that they lost 90 of them one day. I mean, it didn't--it may have bothered Curt, but it was expected because he was getting results, and he finally got results in the Pacific. The results in the Pacific mostly were done due to the fire bombs. I don't care what anybody says about the atomic bomb. We had them beat. There was no doubt about it. Our fire raids--they were ready to scream uncle. The atomic bomb was just an exclamation point. That was all.

Tom Swope:

Do you think they would have given up without-

Anthony Adams:

They would have given up, yeah. We wouldn't have had to land any troops. Everybody was worried about we had to land troops. I've talked to more guys that were shot down in Tokyo Bay, and actually our subs would go in, get through the nets, get them out of there. How they did it, I don't know, because we were--as I said, we were going up there from Tinian and dropping salt mines constantly up there in the bay.

The Japanese were--they were bottled up in their own bay. Of course, they were bottled up on their own island, because the island wasn't that--the three islands weren't that big, the three islands that they lived on. The other islands were just resorts more or less. Now, they would have quit. They would have quit probably, oh, before--before the bomb was dropped.

Tom Swope:

Did you have any trouble adjusting to civilian life when you got back?

Anthony Adams:

Yes. At first I did, yes. Well, it was nightmares. My aunt tells me, so I don't know anything about it. But She--I was up--I had an attic room, and she'd hear me, and she would come up, and I'd be hanging on the bedpost going through--going through missions is what I was doing. That was for four, five months.

[End of Tape]