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Bernard Smith was born in July 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He did not grow up there. They moved to Syracuse, New York when he was about four. He had a normal childhood. His parents had little grocery stores and then his father went into the insurance business. His mother took care of the store. The Great Depression was not as traumatic as one might think. Everyone around was in the same condition. His father had customers on the Onondaga Indian Reservation [Annotator's Note: Onondaga Nation Reservation, Onondaga County, New York]. He would bring home fried crickets. His family is Jewish and lived in a Jewish neighborhood. The 15th Ward was called Jew Town. His mother was born in London, England and his father was born near Vilnia [Annotator's Note: Vilnia, Lithuania]. It was Russian then. He left when he had to join the army. His father had a sister who survived [Annotator's Note: the Holocaust] and bought her way out of a camp with her two daughters and son-in-law who was a dentist. Those are the only two that survived. Smith graduated from Syracuse University [Annotator's Note: Syracuse, New York] in 1949. He felt like everyone else about the attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He was amazed, astonished, and angry. They had only followed Europe. They did not know anything about the Jews. There were hints coming through and it was a question of whether you believed them or not.
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The attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] did not make Bernard Smith want to join the military. He was fearful that he would not be drafted because he was so small. He was drafted and he felt wonderful. The Bell Aircraft Corporation was nearby [Annotator's Note: Buffalo, New York]. They made the Air Cobra [Annotator's Note: Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter aircraft]. He saw the airplane and thought that was where he belonged. He applied to the Army Air Corps and was accepted. He was in the last group of Aviation Cadets authorized by Congress. He was sent to Nashville [Annotator's Note: Nashville, Tennessee] for testing and did well on all but depth perception, so he washed out. He feels that was probably fortunate. He was offered to volunteer for aerial gunnery. He did so. He was sent to radio school. He had difficulty with Morse Code and got washed out again. He was then sent to armorer school in Dallas, Texas where he became a gunner. He went to Plant Park, Florida and became part of a crew. The crew went to Biloxi, Mississippi. Smith took care of the guns and taught the other members of the crew. He was very proficient. He could field strip a .50 caliber machine gun [Annotator's Note: Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun] blindfolded with gloves on. He had had firearms since he was 11. He is a card-carrying member of the NRA [Annotator's Note: National Rifle Association]. He does not understand Jewish politicians who are against guns. Guns being thrown over the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto [Annotator's Note: Warsaw, Poland] made the Jews there into the warriors they were 2,000 years ago. It took the Germans three weeks to take Poland, but it took them a month to clean out that Jewish ghetto [Annotator's Note: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 19 April to 16 May 1943]. From that point on, they became warriors like they used to be.
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Bernard Smith was very comfortable as an armorer gunner. He and his crew got along very well. They were ecumenical. There were two Jews, a Mormon, a couple of Catholics, and the rest were varying degrees of Protestantism. Religion was not a problem. Twenty years after the war, Smith read a letter in the local newspaper titled, "Looking for Smitty". From that point on, his crew had annual reunions, eventually joining the Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 463rd Bombardment Group]. The wives of the men took in his wife as a sister. He trained in Biloxi [Annotator's Note: Biloxi, Mississippi] for several months and then flew overseas to Marrakesh, Morocco. The plane lost an engine on the way over but continued. A B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] could fly on two engines. He thought going overseas was wonderful. He had been asked to stay in the United States and teach but he told them no, he had to go over and fight for his people. On the fifth raid, the crew chief was underneath the wing and he told them another inch and they would have lost a wing. Then the war got real serious.
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Bernard Smith was fortunate because when he got overseas, the Luftwaffe [Annotator's Note: German Air Force] had been pretty much grounded. Their biggest nemesis was flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft fire]. He has a piece that he took off his airplane. The armorer's official position was the ball turret, but another guy wanted it. After a couple of raids, it frightened him so he would sit in the fuselage until they got to the target. [Annotator's Note: Smith explains how the flight path works on a bomb run.] Smith convinced him it was probably safer in the turret because it was curved, so he stayed in it. On one mission, they were hit where he used to sit, and he would have been killed. Smith does not remember his first mission. One that stands out was to bomb Yugoslavia. The navigator was up front. They put their flak suits on. They were hit and one engine went out completely. Another only worked partially. They did not know until they landed that they had no brakes and a tire was shot out. The plane stopped rolling about a yard from a row of planes. They had not gone to their base in Foggia, but to Bari [Annotator's Note: both in Italy] where there was a hospital. The right waist gunner, the pilot, and copilot were wounded but they all survived. They had tried to get rid of all the weight they could, and tried to unhook the ball turret, but it got hung up. They were escorted by a couple of P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft].
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On one raid, Bernard Smith remembers a plane behind them burst into flames. His first reaction was that it was pretty. It reminded him of the Roman Candles he would set off as a kid on the Fourth of July [Annotator's Note: American Independence Day]. Then he thought about the ten men on that plane. He did not see any get out. No matter how benign your experience, war is hell. World War 2 was the last war for survival that we fought. There were 135 million people in the United States and there were 135 million people in the war. Women were in the factories, kids were scrapping for metal, there was rationing. He did not know any of that in the war. Downtime was boring. The Army Air Corps was like the infantry; long periods of boredom and then hell. They were bombing Salzburg [Annotator's Note: Salzburg, Austria] and flying through the Brenner Pass. He thinks the German 88 [Annotator's Note: German 88mm multi-purpose artillery] was the most efficient, fearful gun in the war. It was anti-everything and they had them up on the mountain. It was an ordeal. The crew did not talk about it much when they were on the ground. Ordinarily, the Red Cross was handing out coffee and donuts. One asked him how it was after Salzburg and he said it was terrible. He watched the bombs go all up and down the mountains. She told him good, they were going to kill those bastards. He said he was not into killing women and children. When infantrymen were walking on the base, he would cross the street away from them. This was when Bradley [Annotator's Note: US Army General Omar Nelson Bradley] was in Cassino [Annotator's Note: Cassino, Italy] and they were called in to bomb. Some Americans were killed, and the infantry was mad about it. The bombing turned the place to rubble, giving the Germans more places to hide. One of the quirks of war.
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Most of Bernard Smith's missions were to railroad marshalling yards. [Annotator's Note: SMith walks off camera for a minute to let someone in.] They were all military targets. British Vice Admiral Harris' [Annotator's Note: Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet] philosophy was to break the will of the people to win the war. The British bombed the cities at night, the Americans bombed the military during the day. He did not like bombing civilians. He is a non-confrontational person, but he is also a realist and understands it is part of war. In Plant Park [Annotator's Note: Plant Park, Florida], there was an air station nearby that trained pilots. The expression was, "one a day in Tampa Bay". During war you lose more people due to accidents and sickness than from combat. He understood collateral damage, people get hurt, he does not have to like it. He never lost any crew during combat. The pilot and copilot were injured by shrapnel. The right waist gunner got shrapnel in his temple. Smith treated him with sulfa powder. When they landed in Bari [Annotator's Note: Bari, Italy], they asked who took care of him because it took so long to get the sulfa out. They had no medical training. They carried morphine ampules. [Annotator's Note: There is a lot of background noise regarding a nurse helping his wife, so they pause to let it end. Smith notes how sad it is and that they have been married 60 years.]
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On one mission, Bernard Smith's aircraft was taking off and the left wing began to dip. He got frightened and they hit the ground, stopped rolling, and they all got out and ran. They had 6,000 pounds of bombs aboard. They would not have gone off because they were not armed. Part of his job was to arm them when they neared the target. They did not stop to think about that. They were running through mud up to their ankles. He said, "Jesus Christ was not the only Jew who walked on water." [Annotator's Note: Smith laughs.] They were very fortunate that they got there in the fall of 1944 when the Luftwaffe [Annotator's Note: German Air Force] was basically grounded. They would fly over their airfields and watch the aircraft take-off, fly away, and then land again after they passed. They did not want the aircraft destroyed on the ground. Smith was in a replacement depot in Naples, Italy on VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945]. He had completed 25 missions, a complete tour. Somehow he had fallen behind about five missions. The rest of his crew went for rest and recreation and Smith flew with "bastard" crews made up of other guys. One aircraft kept sliding and he could see the planes coming close together. It was the worst raid he ever went on. He was so frightened he hung his parachute pack so if the wing came crashing through, he could jump. The next day he saw a black smear where that same plane had crashed, killing that pilot and five of his men. There were more people killed in accidents than actual combat.
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[Annotator's Note: Bernard Smith flew his final five missions with "bastard" crews or crews made of men who did not regularly fly together.] He was too scared to remember much about them. A crew was like being married. You get used to a bunch of guys who you depend on. When you move into different territory, you do not have the same level of comfort. That feeling remained after the war; they had the same camaraderie. They would tell each other they loved each other. Smith was in Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy] for about a week and does not recall celebrating VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945]. He returned home by boat. It was wonderful. The Navy knows how to live. They had freshly baked bread and real eggs. In the camp, they lived in pyramidal tents, six of them. They had a stove made out of a gasoline can. They had aviation gas that flowed through a pipe under the tent to the stove. This was all made of salvaged scraps. If you did not light it properly, you would get burned. Every couple of weeks they would turn their sleeping bags inside out and dust them with DDT [Annotator's Note: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane; developed as an insecticide] for lice. He returned home without his crew who had left before him. He came into New York City. The Red Cross was handing out milk. He went down to Queens where his father's sister and her family lived. He slept there overnight. He has no idea how he got back to Syracuse [Annotator's Note: Syracuse, New York].
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When Bernard Smith got back to the United States, he was interviewed and told he had a choice of schools where he could teach, and they would like him to stay in the Air Corps. Smith told him [Annotator's Note: the interviewer] he could "take those big birds and stick them." He was scared to fly anymore. He made it back. He went to Dallas, Texas and discharged in October 1945. He used the G.I. Bill. He would not have been able to attend college without it. He majored in Business Administration at Syracuse University [Annotator's Note: in Syracuse, New York]. He has no idea why he picked that major and he did not go into the profession. He sold insurance for 35 years. He had no trouble adjusting to civilian life. He only encountered verbal difficulty. Before the military, he had read a great deal and had an extensive vocabulary. He lost about a third of it in the military because they only use three and four letter words [Annotator's Note: he means curse words]. Now his kids use them and it still bothers him. He is not a prude but it bothers him when his family uses them. He never drank alcohol until he got into the military. Then he reached a point where he was drinking 20 shots before feeling it. That continued until he ran out of money. Now he does not drink at all.
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The war changed Bernard Smith's life like it changed everybody's. It is a different world. Up until 1945, and the atomic bomb blew [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] life existed along a certain path. He remembers sitting on the stoop with a 16 year old kid. He was arguing with him and saying that there were 92 elements [Annotator's Note: chemistry] and the kid was saying there were 115 elements. The minute they blew that bomb, the whole world changed. The kid was right. It is a completely different world today. Shaking a hand was a golden bond; you did not lock your front door. So, his life changed. He joined the service for love of country. He is a patriot and a realist. He is logical. His service means a great deal to him. He is not unhappy that he went through it, but would not want to do it again because war is such a terrible, terrible waste. A lot of his family were doctors and scientists and they were gone, all gone. World War 2 does not mean much to Americans today. He worries that when he and the rest go, it will just be a hiccup of history. The last war of survival. The wars since are political wars; survival is not a factor. Win or lose, we will still be here. It is absolutely important for The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] to exist and to teach future generations about the war. There is another way of living; we do not have to live the way we do today. People today know nothing about American History, Medieval history, or ancient history. If you do not know where you came from, it is difficult to understand where you are, and where you are going. He sees bright spots here and there.
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