Walt
Schroeder grew up
with five siblings in Methuen and Lawrence, Massachusetts, in a
German-ancestry family. His father sold life insurance for John Hancock
and his early memories of the depression were that the family still had
a decent income from the premiums people paid for insurance.
Walt’s early job was working at Pacific Mills in Lawrence as a
“filling” clerk for the weaving looms. He carried wooden
boxes with 35-45 pounds of bobbins and material to the looms and then
hauled away the empties. The mill also turned out the fabric for
airplane trainers’ wings the military used. As he says, it
wasn’t a classy job.
He was drafted for World War II in 1942, a single man of 20, and
arbitrarily assigned to the Air Force, which is where he wanted to be
anyway. His older brother Warren preceded him into the
service, but was taken into the infantry, into field artillery and
eventually wound up in New Guinea and New Hebrides, in General
MacArthur’s command.
Walt’s basic training took place at Atlantic City where recruits
were housed in a hotel. He then undertook radio training in Illinois
for three to four months. Since he had tinkered with radios as a
teenager, even having an illegal radio station the FCC shut down, the
hardest part was memorizing the codes for fast receiving. As it turned
out later, the planes Walt served on as assistant radioman were usually
under radio silence during their bombing runs
and didn’t use radio until they were in sight of their bases.
Proceeding then to gunnery school in Harlingen, Texas, the AT-6
trainers the fledgling gunners flew in, had a .30 caliber flexible
mount in the back and when airborne, the gunners practiced shooting at
a towed target. He also trained by trap-shooting day after day,
sometimes from a moving flat-bed truck, painfully bruising one side of
his body from shoulder to waist repeatedly.
He went from Harlingen to March Field (near today’s Edwards Air
Force Base, then called Muroc) to new concrete barracks in 1943. He saw
his first jet airplane, probably a prototype, a
phenomenon
at the time. He continued flight training there. He shipped out to
Kuaui, Hawaii at Barking Sands, at first doing submarine search
missions in a B-24 Liberator tail turret a few
hundred feet
off the water. In order to get into the turret, he passed through two
tiny metal doors, a tight squeeze for his 5’9” frame, into
the belly turret, but once in, it was fairly comfortable. Once on a
mission all the plate glass on the top and sides of the turret was shot
out and when he tried to fire on approaching Japanese Zeroes, the doors
popped open, jamming the turret. The four inch
Plexiglas directly in front of him was tough,
though, and
withstood about everything. There was no air pressurization, and no
strapping-in harness.
The twin guns themselves had finger-hold handles and were moved by the
handles near the triggers. There were
controls for
the turret on the bottom. The sights on the two 50 caliber guns were
oval/oblong and if you got the target plane on one sight and fired, the
shells from the twin barrels looked like they would meet out in the
distance.
On an early raid over Wotje, a bomb from their own bomb bay exploded
under the plane. Typically, when the bomb bay doors were opened, two or
three men on a dangerous catwalk above
would put their feet on the bombs to unlatch them and kick them out. In
this instance, the Zeroes came up firing from the target field and then
one of the B-24’s bombs exploded right under the plane sending
it
about 500 feet up from the concussion. But the plane, nicknamed
“The Little General,” survived intact and limped back to
Baker Field. After the attack, they counted 156 holes in the plane, the
fuselage was ripped, and there was a lot of flak damage. The damage to
their plane was severe but the hardest things to replace were engines.
With no replacement planes available, the crew went on an early R
&
R during repair.
On another mission, they lost an engine, overheated another
of
the four, and had to jettison all the guns, fuel, and everything else
moveable on the plane. They landed with not enough fuel to turn the
plane off the runway. Replacement tires were hard to get and
regulations said they had to be replaced after 30 landings, but they
were usually over-due for replacements, making the crew sweat out each
landing.
At one point, Walt’s plane bombed Kwajalein and then his unit was
stationed there amid the total ruin. He was
at
Saipan, Apamama, Tarawa, and Canton, often living in tents furnished
with ammunition crates. On long missions in the plane, they were
supplied with bread, spam, pineapple juice, or C rations. The crew
usually brought their own food asthe combination
with
pineapple juice made some of them sick. It was a contrast to the
usually decent food they got wherever they were based. Given an
opportunity, they would raid the Navy’s better stores of food.
In the plane, the crew often played cards up under the top turret near
the pilot, or up above the closed bomb bay, or near the waist guns. The
men would sleep over the bomb bay, too, where they stored oxygen
bottles and other equipment. There was friendship, trust in abilities,
and camaraderie among the crew, including the officers. And when they
went for R & R in Hawaii and other places, they saw the tourist
sights and behaved like college kids on spring
break except that there were no opportunities to meet young
women—they simply weren’t available where he went. He
undertook 33 missions, three more than required, with the same crew
throughout the war. Walt felt fortunate in his crew and he was
satisfied they did their best. He got the Distinguished Flying Cross
with one oak leaf cluster and the air medal with three oak leaf
clusters.
Walt was discharged as Staff Sergeant in San Bernadino, California in
1945 and married Lucille Schaat from St. Anthony, Idaho, that same year
in Oakland. She was a St. Lukes (Boise) trained navy nurse stationed in
the Bay Area, staying with her sister in Huntington Park. He met her at
a friend’s wedding. Dropping early plans to stay in
California,
Walt needed to find a job. Lucille’s brother
in
Idaho owned a hardware store so Walt worked for him and helped out on
the family farm. He bought a grocery store and a frozen meat locker
unit in Parker, near St. Anthony, then, using his veteran’s
preference, became a postmaster in Parker, Idaho. He relocated to the
Las Vegas, Nevada post office and stayed for 29 years.
Walt and
Lucille raised their son and daughter there, and joined the
Presbyterian Church. Lucille went back into nursing for 29 years, first
in a Las Vegas private hospital, and then with an ophthalmologist.
After retirement, they moved to Clarkston in 1984, following their son
to the region, and she joined First Presbyterian Church. She has held
many positions with the church since then.
Editor’s Note: On Veterans Day, 2007, a lengthy typescript
interview done in 1992 by Stan Wolcott, attorney son of Earl Wolcott,
the pilot of the B-24 and commanding officer of Walt Schroeder’s
squadron, came to hand. This is one of several interviews Wolcott
undertook to honor his father and the squadron’s efforts.
The military information is excerpted from that.
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