Jay Stout - Air Apaches: The True Story of the 345th Bomb Group and Its Low, Fast, and Deadly Missions in World War II

Air Apaches

The True Story of the 345th Bomb Group and Its Low, Fast, and Deadly Missions in World War II

Jay A. Stout

Guilford, Connecticut

For Frankie, and other dear friends

Published by Stackpole Books

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200

Lanham, MD 20706

www.rowman.com

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

800-462-6420

Copyright 2019 by Jay A. Stout

Maps by Jay A. Stout

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stout, Jay A., 1959 author.

Title: Air Apaches : the true story of the 345th Bomb Group and its low, fast, and deadly missions in World War II / Jay A. Stout.

Description: Lanham, MD : Stackpole Books, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043728 (print) | LCCN 2018044138 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811768092 (e-book) | ISBN 9780811738019 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Army Air Forces. Bombardment Group, 345th. | World War, 19391945Personal narratives, American. | World War, 19391945Aerial operations, American. | World War, 19391945CampaignsPacific Area.

Classification: LCC D790.253 345th (ebook) | LCC D790.253 345th .S76 2019 (print) | DDC 940.54/4973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043728

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

Clark Field on the island of Luzon in the Philippines looked very much different to my father in 1958 than it had in January 1945, when he flew B-25s with the 345th Bomb Groupthe famed Air Apaches. During the war, then lieutenant Ed Bina and his crew had roared low over the runways at Clark and ripped Japanese aircraft and personnel with torrents of deadly machine-gun fire. In their wake, they left a trail of parachute-suspended fragmentation bombs that settled gently to earth before exploding with fatal ferocity.

That same airfield was where he was stationed thirteen years later. And it was where he had brought me and the rest of our family to live. Indeed, it was at Clark that I, as a young boy, barely started to grasp my fathers wartime legacy as a B-25 pilot with the 345th Bomb Groups 501st Bomb Squadron: the Black Panthers. The 501st was one of four squadrons that made up the group.

During that time, the days of the Japanese occupation of Clark, while still visible, were being slowly erased by man and nature. But there was still evidence of the fighting at almost every turn. As kids, we collected spent shell casings and bullets; a long, jagged piece of shrapnel from a five-hundred-pound bomb served as a makeshift machete. Also strong in my memory are hikes to caves where the Japanese had holed up as the Americans and their allies retook Luzon. I vividly recall stepping around and over unexploded bombs, heeding my fathers warnings not to touch them. And an image persists of a war-torn field at the end of the street where we lived.

The war left telltale marks. And although I was young, I knew that those marks and my dad were somehow connected.

As was typical of many of the wars veterans, my father didnt dwell on his wartime experiences. A fellow Air Apache and Dads radio operator, James Baross, declared, It was just something you didnt talk about. By the time my father finally retired after thirty-six years of service, he had described to me only two of his missions. Still, reminders were always there. Among others, his A-2 flight jacket hung untouched in the closet, and his B-25 flight manual was part of my book collection.

The 345th Bomb Group Association got going with purpose during the late 1970s and dedicated the groups memorial in 1985 at the National Museum of the Air Force. Dad and I visited the site shortly after the ceremony. I think it was typical of my fathers humble character that he played an instrumental role in creating the memorial but never memorialized himself. Later that week we met with his lifelong friends from the war, Jay Moore and Julius Fisher. They had all flown together and were part of a much larger group of really amazing guys.

Although I learned more over the years, I still didnt fully understand what my dadand the rest of the Air Apacheshad done. I didnt press him, and he maintained his no talk protocol to the end. Sadly, Colonel Ed Bina went west in 2005 and took most of his wartime memories with him.

Dads passing was the spark that ignited my real passionthe history of the 345th. Although he was gone and I would never again have the opportunity to talk with him, there were other resources that put me on a path of discovery. One of the richest proved to be the 345ths annual reunions, where Air Apache veterans gathered to share their memories and rekindle lost camaraderie. Decades had passed since they had fought the Japanese, and many of them began to open up about their wartime experiences. These storiessome sad, some humorous, and some almost unbelievablefascinated me. What made them more incredible was that these old men who had lived them were barely more than kids during the war.

At my second Air Apaches reunion, I was elected president of the 345th Bomb Group Association. I was the first of the next generation to serve in that position, and it was my ambition to save as much as I could of the history of this proud bomb groupthe hard-fighting, hard-playing, and hard-living young men who had so terrorized the Japanese in the South Pacific and beyond.

Aside from talking with those veterans still surviving, I visited various archives. It was in one of these that my search circled back to my childhood at Clark Field. I found the mission summary report for the 345ths savage attack there on January 7, 1945. And there was my fathers name. He had flown in his squadrons second flight of three B-25s in aircraft number 178. The squadron described the mission as designed to deliver the coup de grce to the Imperial Air Force in Luzon. After tallying the damage wrought against the Japanese, the report described the attack as beautifully executed.

The paper I held in my hand had traveled miles and years from that awful war. And it helped me to further understand who my dad was and what he had really done.

I will never be able to fully recreate my fathers experiences, but I piece together what I collect in order to tell at least a partial story of one of the many young Air Apaches who answered Uncle Sams call. I had often wondered if he knew what he was getting into when he enlisted in the Army in 1942. And I found the answer in a letter he wrote to his own father from Biak in 1944. It was apparent he knew quite well. Dont worry dad, he wrote, everything is fine here and Im doing exactly what Ive always wanted to do. The words seemed quite forthright, coming as they did from a twenty-one-year-old kid who was flying and fighting in a very special hell.

Ed Bina was only one of the more than four thousand men who served with the 345th Air Apaches. And he was but one small part of a team that included not only other flyers but also the cooks and mechanics and clerks and many other men who helped make the group one of the best outfits of the war. And long after the fighting ended, they formed a strong association that helped them not only satisfy their desire to reconnect with old comrades but also preserve their own history. Indeed, without the efforts of the 345th Bomb Group Association the story of the Air Apaches would remain virtually untold.