When one listens to Fred Piper talk about his service in World War II, the memories are almost as clear as if they happened last week instead of more than 70 years ago.
Piper, who has spoken at numerous events over the years, was the invited guest of the Sedona Heritage Museum on Thursday, Feb. 20 in which nearly 100 people attended.
When introduced, the Sedona native received a warm applause to which he smiled and said, “I guess I can leave now.”
Piper was the oldest of five boys raised on a homestead in what’s now known as the Chapel area.
Days after his 18th birthday in the summer of 1943 he traveled to Flagstaff to sign on the dotted line for the military draft as a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps, which would later become the U.S. Air Force after the war. After a 30-day deferment he was told to report to a base in California, which was the first time he had left Arizona. He said basic training was a bit of an eye opener.
“You have to understand, there are three ways of doing something — the right way, the wrong way and the Army way,” he said. “That’s what they were trying to pound into my head.”
From there he reported to gunnery school in Las Vegas where he and the others were told, “Don’t get homesick because you’re probably not going back to it anyway.”
His next stop was Tampa, Fla., to finish his gunnery training. While there he would eventually become a ball turret gunner. His pilot felt it was important that the crew knew how to fly the plane in case of an emergency. Unbeknownst to them, they flew directly over a firing range at night where they began taking fire with Piper at the helm.
“I got shot at before I even got to the war,” he said.
It wasn’t long after that scare that Piper and his fellow B-17 “Flying Fortress” crewmen experienced the real thing. After receiving additional training in North Carolina and Maine, they eventually reported to a base in England. It was October 1944 when he had his first mission.
“It was a dreaded mission,” he said. “We had these little puffs of black smoke coming up all around us. It sounded like hail on a tin roof. I didn’t pay much attention to it.”
They soon found themselves flying to Colon, Germany, and were then assigned to a plane nicknamed Flak Eater. Flak is antiaircraft fire, which that plane had encountered on previous missions and survived. On their fifth mission they lost one of Piper’s crew members who he had become close to.
“That was a complete turnaround for me,” said Piper, who turns 95 this summer. “That’s when reality really set in for me. From that day on, it seemed like every day I crawled into the turret.It was like closing the lid on my own coffin.”
On a subsequent mission, 36 U.S. planes left the base but just six returned, Piper’s being in one of them.
“All you could see were parts and pieces of planes — and parachutes,” he said.
What may have been the most frightening of Piper’s 35 bombing missions was almost his last. During a mission near Berlin his plane took heavy fire, so the pilot decided to try and make it out of German airspace.
“We were falling like a rock but we had 30,000 feet of airspace under us,” he said.
They found an airstrip in France but little did they know it had fallen into German hands just a day earlier. When attempting to lower the landing gear, the mechanism failed so the crew had to use a hand crank — 140 turns in all — to lower it. They landed, but technically, he said, they were classified as having been shot down.
While Piper survived that mission, during another their plane again took heavy fire and he was shot in the upper leg. As a result, he would later be awarded a Purple Heart and Silver Star.
The battle in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, and would become known as VE Day — a day Piper will never forget.
“We were so excited,” he said. “I had a red-headed Irish girl under one arm and a bottle of whiskey in the other. The whiskey ran out, the Irish girl ran off and I returned to America.”
