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Show Harold W. Poole April 3, 2001 until we were hit first, even though they had already declared war. WIN: Really? HAR: And this is what hurt us. Because you can't hit an air force--you can't hit them and expect them to turn around and--if you hit them they're done. And that's what they did with us. They just annihilated most of those B-17's. They didn't get them all, but they got a lot of them. And, of course, when they were fully loaded with bombs, and high test aviation gas, and everything, once they get on fire they just--in fact, there was places where there was just the outline of one of them. The wing, and the fuselage, and then the four big lumps sitting there that were the motors. It had burnt clear down--and the wheels, you know--everything else had burnt right flat to the ground. You could hardly believe that they would do that. But then, of course, like I say, with that high test gas in there, and everything else, they just really--once they got them on fire they're gone, you know. But, anyway, after these two flights, these two big V-formations came over us--you know, it was one flight, but two big V -'s--and then, after they'd gone, here comes twenty-seven dive bombers off from carriers in the China Seas. And they were strafing everything else that was left, you know, and trying to get everything that these big bombers had missed, and they were doing a pretty good job. And about this time, when these bombers first came over, I jumped into a foxhole that was near an operations shack, and it had a .30 caliber Lewis air-cooled machine gun in it. This was an old time World War I machine gun. And it was on a steel post. But a bomb had hit from me, oh, thirty to forty feet away, and threw dirt on me and the gun, and clogged it up, and it 17 |
