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Show WILLIAM M. ANDERLIN 27 Jun 2002 the guns and shoot them and what you re shooting at and whatever ther was to b ing a gunner, that's what they taught you. WE: While they were teaching you that did they have you fly or did they have you on the ground? WS: I was flying. In fact, there's one time there that scared the tar out of me. When I first started out, I wasn't in a bomber or nothing, I was just in a little two-seated airplane. And we'd fly over a gunnery range and the pilot would call over the air phone, he'd say "Here comes the target." So it would be up to me to aim the gun and shoot it. In the meantime, you're standing up in that back seat, and you've got a belt right around your harness, anchored to the floor. Well, this one time, all of a sudden he dipped like that with his airplane and I went right out over the top of that. And I'm laying there and I can't move. When he got leveled and squared down and I managed to scoot back inside I says "What was that?" I said, "You almost lost me!" He said, "You didn't see 'em, but I did. There's two horsemen riding right across that target you were getting ready to shoot at." Then from there, they give me a leave of absence, and ... No, from there they sent me to Casper, Wyoming. WE: Casper. WS: And there's where I took my heavy bombing gunnery. I took all my gunnery practice in Wyoming. And a lot of night flying, where you'd fly up over North and South Dakota and then back around to Casper, and land. Back and forth there for, I guess, three or four months, something like that. Then my orders come through, I had to leave of absence to go home and do whatever I wanted to do, but report to Lincoln, Nebraska, in three days. 12 |
