Bill Ersthaler

U.S. Army Air Force
Pacific Theater

The only thought in our minds was, “Get out.”

William “Bill” Ersthaler lived in Detroit before the war. He enlisted in 1943, one month before he was scheduled to be drafted. He went through army boot camp and continued on to flight school. He trained at various military bases and schools across the country. In 1944 he joined the 22nd Bomber Group as a navigator, and later was deployed to the Pacific. Ersthaler flew forty missions in the Pacific in areas of Japan, China, and the Philippines. During his time in service he navigated some very dangerous missions, at one point even crash-landing in enemy territory. He received several awards, including the Philippine liberation medal.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, we were brought into an auditorium at our high school. We listened to President Roosevelt make the announcement that we had declared war on the Japanese. We weren’t angry. I’m sure the adults were, but we weren’t. All we wanted to do was get out of high school and get into the service. Some of us were too young then. We were only sixteen, seventeen years old.

1943, Panama City, Florida basic military training.

I enlisted in the army in 1943, a month before I was due to be drafted. I was eighteen—just out of high school—and I thought it would be great fun. I went into the Army infantry. About three months into that there was a notice up saying anyone who wanted to go into the Army Air Corps should sign up, so I did.

I received basic training at Keesler Air Force in Biloxi, Mississippi. That was boot camp—marching, drilling. It was a terrible place at the time, but I was soon transferred to Chicago. We stayed at the Hilton hotel for radio school in downtown Chicago; those were nice accommodations.

At the radio school I learned they were looking for flying officers in the Air Force, so I signed up to go to flight school. That was in 1943. I took a test and they decided I was better suited to be a navigator than a pilot. I was sent to navigation school in San Marcos, Texas. After graduation I was sent to Lincoln Air Force base in Omaha, Nebraska, where I was assigned to a crew. We were told we would be going either to England or the Pacific. We got in line and they handed out orders for transition training before being sent into action. They told us, “You’re going to Europe. You’re going to the Pacific.” Fortunately I was assigned to the Southwest Pacific. I hate the cold. First, we were sent to Tucson, to Davis Monthan Air force base, where we received one month of training.

Bill Erthaler pictured second from the left standing, taken 1944 of the 22nd bomber group.

We left Davis Monthan in October of ‘44 and went across the Pacific to New Guinea, where I joined the 22nd Bomber Group. I became the navigator on a B-24 bomber. We flew missions across the entire Pacific, ranging from Australia and New Guinea right on up into Japan. We had bombing missions into China and we could fly all the way from the Philippines into Win Chou.

Out in the Pacific it rained and stormed everyday. We were always going through something. We went through them or under them—never went over them.

The lead bombardier would fly the plane over the target. When we were ready to go he would drop the bombs and all the other planes would drop at the same time. The bombardier could fly the plane, because the autopilot engaged the bomb site, and the pilot had nothing to do with it.

We always had a rescue submarine off shore, in case a plane went down. They would pick up the crew and put them on the submarine. They would be on the sub for thirty days. The ones who went down always said that was the worst experience; spending thirty days on this submarine was worse that flying missions.

We could fly anywhere that was from six to fourteen hours away. We would then be over any given target for maybe five or ten minutes, getting shot at, and then we would come back. When we returned, we would go to the club and have some drinks and eat and what not. Then the next day we might fly or we might fly two days later. It wasn’t like the infantry. They were on the ground all the time. Our battle was only fifteen twenty minutes over target and that was it. So you knew once you dropped your bombs you were on your way back. Unless you hit some fighters, you were in good shape.

In June of ‘44 we were staging out of Palawan, which is about three hundred miles South of the Philippines. We were flying to Borneo, an island Southeast of Palawan and the Philippines, about the size of Texas. They had oil wells and submarine bases. In Southern Borneo, on our way back to Palawan, we were shot. We lost an engine. Then we lost two engines—we didn’t know why. It’s hard to fly a B24 with four engines, let alone with three. When we lost two we just wouldn’t stay in the air.

1945, Twenty years old Clarkfield Manila, Philippines. Passion pit apartments, that’s what they called their tents; four men shared the tent.

We crash landed in northern Borneo in a swampland. The only thought in our minds was, “Get out.” There were Japanese nearby and U.S. planes were already shooting our crashed plane to destroy it so the Japanese couldn’t get it. We had to go back to the plane twice because the bomb didn’t blow up. I could also see that we were going to be in trouble if we stayed too long.

We had to get the rafts out because we were in the middle of a swampy jungle. It took us about an hour and a half to get to the shore. There was an army PBY (Patrol Bomber) five miles out into the ocean and we paddled out to it. We got there at about midnight. The only thing we had on us was our flight jackets and our revolvers. They picked us up and flew us back to Palawan.

Bill’s plane SHITTININIGITTIN had engine problems and eventually was forced to set down on an open field on the north side of the remote island of Balambaogan.

Once we went on a bombing run to northern Formosa (Taiwan) to a submarine base. The Japanese were doing what they call “boxing in” the aircraft, where they just shoot into the air and hope that they hit you. You have to fly through flak (antiaircraft guns). That day it was extremely heavy flak and we were flying the number two ship below the league. Real tight. The flak hit the number three plane and blew up in mid air. Of course we got flak holes all over. Everybody did, because when it blew, it just blew apart. We were carrying at that time five thousand pounds of fragmentary bombs (frags). So when the frags went off all the other airplanes were hit, too. You could see the plane going down, the engines going down, the engines falling apart. Nobody got out.

How did I feel? You know, you’re sorry to see it, but we lost several dozen planes. It became routine more or less. You couldn’t go in there and cry over it because you had to fly the next day and you knew you were going right back to the same place that the plane got shot down. You just, you thought about it. You lost your friends but you couldn’t sit around and weep about it and moan. You had a job to do and you had to go out and do it again.

When the bomb was dropped I was in Okinawa. Everybody was in Okinawa, preparing to bomb Kyushu. Kyushu, it’s a Japanese island, where the invasion would have possibly taken place. They estimated that there would have been at least a fifty percent loss of planes. We would have had roughly four hundred planes in the air. We probably would have lost two hundred and forty or fifty planes. It was our job to soften them up for the initial invasion by the Army and the Marines.

Then the bomb was dropped and everything was called off.

Page from Bill’s journal where he records the crash landing he survived.

When we heard about it, yes, we were a little relieved because we knew we were going to have some real problems with going into Kyushu. That was the Japanese’s last stance before we were going to invade them. They would have fought like tigers. We lost twenty thousand in Guadalcanal and Tarawa, so we would have lost a lot of people.

After the war we went to Formosa and picked up prisoners of war. We had our B-24s configured so that the back seats and the bomb bay could pick up prisoners of war and bring them back to the Philippines. They had stayed, hundreds of prisoners of war in Formosa. We went up there and landed at the Japanese prison camp and picked up people that had been shot down or were prisoners of war and brought them back. The Japanese were still there, but they let us in because they knew the war was over with.

From my experience in the service, I grew up fast. No disrespect to the eighteen year olds today, but they don’t. I’m not sure that they could, at the present time, could handle what we did. Our Commander was only thirty years old. Our whole crew averaged 19 years old flying B-24s. They were much more mature at that time. Maybe they would be today too. Things are different today; the Air Force is much different than it was back then. There is electronic warfare now, which is a lot different than what we were doing.