75. Down on the Farm
December 15, 2010
Lt. Easley Smith
World War II, B-24 Bomber pilot,
Twenty year old Easley Smith
On May 16, 2010, pilot and retired Virginia Tech
professor Easley Smith celebrated his 86th birthday.
Easley was a World War II pilot, whose B-24 plane,
nicknamed “Rocky,” had 99 bomb images painted on its
fuselage. This represented 99 bombing missions, an
exceptional, incredible feat for the European theater where hundreds and hundreds of planes had
been lost. His was one of the older planes that had survived the horrors
encountered on combat missions. When Easley started flying Rocky
Easley Smith looking out of
already had about 50 missions to its credit; when he came back to the US,
the cockpit of “Rocky”
it had 99. There were two crews assigned to this B-24 and they rotated
flying it. Someone noted that the average number of missions for the big
bombers was 17 before they were shot down. Statistics of the losses during the war are nearly
unbelievable. In the European Theater, 30,000 airmen died, 14,000 were wounded, and 33,000
were captured when their planes went down.
Easley noted that he had never been in an airplane until he was in pilot’s training in 1943. He
decided in December 1942 when he enlisted in the armed services that he had rather be in the Air
Force than the Infantry.
This humble, modest, yet proud airman’s home was on a farm in Nottoway County, near Crewe, a
small town in Central Virginia. He was a sophomore student at Virginia Tech in December 1942,
a year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the news from the battlefields in the Pacific
and Europe was grim. Easley could “see the writing on the wall,” that he would be called up, so
he enlisted in the Army Air Corps for aviation training. In February 1943, he was called into
active duty, and later that year began his aviation training. In April 1944, at 19 years of age,
Easley received his coveted pilot’s wings, and a commission as a 2nd Lt. in the Army Air Corps.
Eventually he was sent along with his bomber crew to Manduria, Italy, where, he became a
member of the 723rd Bomber Squadron, 450th Bomber Group in the15th Air Force. From this
base they bombed railroad yards, oil refineries, and shipyards at sites in Germany, Hungary,
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Italy. There was one mission to the Brenner Pass in
Italy and there were several missions to Vienna, Austria.
Reminiscing he said, “There was no such thing as a ‘milk run.’ Every mission was dangerous.
There was no easy mission. It took us about an average of 6-7 hours to make the entire round trip
over the target. We did not have any problem with German fighters; our concern was the antiaircraft batteries, Ack-Ack, or flak. On about half the missions our plane returned with flak
damage but none of the crew received a scratch”.
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“We were escorted to our targets by the Tuskegee airmen, the group
of black airmen flying P-51s. Those airmen were good. We saw
German fighters, but were not attacked by them, and as the war went
on it seemed there was less fighter problems but then there were
more anti-aircraft batteries.”
“I was the pilot and could not see the bombs hitting the target. The
bombardier who was below me was the man to pinpoint the target
and could see it. But really the bombardier on the lead plane in the
squadron had the big responsibility. It was his job to zero in on the
target, and we released our bombs when he did. Our intelligence or
knowledge of the target provided by our forces was very, very good.
Easley Smith
Intelligence would tell us where to expect the heaviest flak, how many guns
were in the battery, and once we released our bombs, they told us the route to take home.”
“Sometimes it appeared that Intelligence might be wrong as we swung away and the flack was
heavy. What really was happening, the Germans were trying to decoy; to divert us into a trap and
make us change our flight pattern so we would have to fly over their highest concentration of
defenses. Their shells were equipped with fuses set to go off at a certain altitude. Sometimes the
antiaircraft crews were following us visually, other times they were using radar.” The Germans
were using their “88” artillery weapon, probably the best and most versatile artillery weapon of
any of the nations in World War II. The shell which it fired weighed 21 pounds. This weapon
was used by Rommel in the North African campaign and at Normandy and was a lethal weapon
against tanks.
“I had a ten man crew. Our squadrons flew in a formation of 7 to 10 airplanes. We flew in an
element of three planes with the lead plane in the center which we called the # 1 plane, and a
wing airplane on each side, #2 on the left, # 3 on the right,. The wing planes flew slightly higher
and a bit behind the lead plane. The next three planes would fly just behind the first three but
slightly lower, the lead, center plane was the #4 in that formation, and the third three would be
behind them but slightly lower, being led by the #7 airplane and there would be a single plane
following the formation. So we flew 3, 3, 3 and 1. All pretty much in a line. The wingtips were
close to each other; maybe only 50-100 feet separating the planes. The trailing planes needed to
avoid the backwash created by the propellers of the lead planes. We flew a tight pattern so the
bombs when released were all closer to the center of the target. We flew at a speed of 160 mph,
we bombed at 160, and we came home at 160. We had to have a uniform speed for everyone to
fly. Once we made our bombing run, it was, “Let’s get home,” and it was a mighty good feeling
to get home. We did not observe strict radio silence, but spoke to each other in code they
assigned each day.”
“I was flying next to one of the airplanes in our formation that got its wing shot off. It probably
was no more than 100 feet away from us. One day the Germans surprised us with some railroad
artillery. Those guns could reach up to 28,000 - 29,000 feet. We had made our bombing run and
I had done most of the piloting since we left that morning so I decided to let the co-pilot take the
controls and I could rest a bit as we headed home. We were going along, and a big shell burst
between us and the adjoining plane. I was resting, kinda taking it easy, and I grabbed the controls
in one big hurry. A little bit later someone said, “Look yonder, someone has shot a flare.” I
looked and told them, “That was no flare, that was a B-17 on fire and going down.” There were
several parachutes visible, then we noticed a single parachute had caught on the plane as it went
spiraling downward, and we could see a man in his parachute harness swinging out, trapped, and
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going down with the plane.
I watched this until the
plane went all of the way to
the ground. It was terrible
to see what was happening.
He had opened his
parachute too quickly and it
got caught somehow on the
plane.”
“They told us when we had
completed ten missions,
you could almost consider
yourself half-done.
Anyway, in the spring of
1945 after completing 25
combat missions, we had an opportunity to return to the
United States and begin training on the new, big B-29
bomber that was being used in the Pacific theater. We
accepted this opportunity. We wanted a change.”
Easley Smith (right), with his close
friend James Stanley, August 2010
By this time, twenty year old Easley Smith was truly a veteran pilot, and had been promoted to 1st
Lt. Easley arrived back in the States on May 15, 1945. The incredible thing was that Easley had
been through all of this piloting, 25 combat missions over hostile territory, and still lacked one
day of being 21 years old.
Soon thereafter the war ended and Easley returned to Virginia Tech in January 1946 to complete
his sophomore studies. He eventually returned to the campus as an Agricultural Engineering
professor. This humble man relates of his war experiences, “We did back then what we had to
do!”
Another 86 year old “wonder,” Jasper Bailey from Tennessee, who also flew from
Italy, noted in his memoirs, “Where did we get such men? Men who flew the big
ones during World War II and helped win the war, getting there “firstest with the
mostest? These were men who rose up early in the morning and ranged far into
enemy territory making the daylight raids on the Nazi. Our British allies thought
we were crazy, flying during the daytime when the Germans could see us. We
thought the British were insane, flying at night when the airmen could not see.
Where did we get such men? From all over the United States men answered the
call. And they would do it again if necessary. We did it before and we can do it
again. It was the most terrifying air war the world has ever known.”
So long for now,
Paul Saunders
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