Robert E. Irion, Sandy, Utah: an interview by Benjamin Bahlmann, September 20, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 537, 538, and 539

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Robert . Irion ept mb r 20'h 2 2 g t activ at the end of the war. They got a new C.O. They only lost tw nty-tw m n though. o it paid off. I think the 503rd had lost twenty-eight. So we had about fifty percent in ours. We had fifty compared to the next one was twenty-eight. I made a little list yesterday. I went back over a listing of the guys we lost during the time I was there. I was there for the last - well, let's go back and start at the beginning. Before I arrived, the group had flown one hundred and twenty-six missions. Our squadron had lost eleven pilots killed in action; five were P.O.W.'s and three had gone down in territory in France where they were able to evade capture by staying with the French Underground. So that was nineteen they'd lost in the first one hundred and twenty-six missions. I was there for the last one hundred and thirty-eight missions that we flew during the war. During that time, we had fifteen killed and thirteen P.O.W.'s- and this was in our squadron now, not the group. BEN: Okay. ROB: Just our squadron. Of those, out of the five guys that I went overseas with, two of them were killed. The other two friends of mine, they finished their tour and came home. I stayed for an extra seventy-five hours of flying time after I finished my tour. I took an extension on the tour. I had - three hundred hours was your required time. I got my three hundred hours in, and while this Bill Jones, who was one of the ones that was killed that went in with me, he and I had gone to a flak home, a rest home, in February, and while we were there we were saying, "What are we going to do when we finish up our three hundred hours?" 53