Oral History Program Robert Van Velkinburgh Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 28 August 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robert Van Velkinburgh Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 28 August 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Van Velkinburgh, Robert, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 28 August 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Robert Van Velkinburgh circa 1940s Robert Van Velkinburgh 28 August 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Robert Van Velkinburgh, conducted on August 28, 2017 in his home, by Alyssa Chaffee. Robert discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Sarah Kamppi, the video technician, is also present during this interview. AC: Today is Monday August 28, 2017. It is about 11:15 a.m. and we are in the home of Robert Van Velkinburgh speaking with him about his experiences during World War II. My name is Alyssa Chaffee, I will be conducting the interview, and I am here with Sara Kamppi. Robert thank you so much for allowing us to come and visit with you today. My first question is, when and where were you born? RVV: Well I was born and raised in Northwest Missouri, December 5, 1924. AC: So you would have been a child during the depression. What are some of your memories of growing up during the depression? RVV: Well, my father worked on the railroad as a delivering agent. He finally lost that job and my mother and I had to move in with my mother’s folks. They lived on a little farm in northwest Missouri, and I kind of grew up there. I was about in first or second grade at that time. That was a wonderful experience for me. They had two cows, chickens and a big garden. We never lacked for food or anything. We ate very good. Finally, my uncle George, who lived in Kansas City called my dad and said he had a job for him. We moved to Kansas City then and my father took that job working for my uncle. Well, the Depression was really hard on a lot of people. I remember I went through grade school there in Kansas City and a lot of people were out of work. 2 The unions were trying to organize the people there at the Ford plant where my dad had a job. He didn’t work for Ford but he worked for the dealer transport company that transported all the Ford cars right at Singley Plant. It was one of the few plants that Ford didn’t close down that was very fortunate. Things gradually got better by 1937 and then by about 1939 when the war started in Europe we started making ammunitions and things like that to supply Great Britain. France had been defeated. Hitler had taken over practically all of Europe and he made a mistake by invading Russia in the summer months. He thought he could quickly subdue the Russians and make peace with them. Then he turned his attention to Great Britain but it didn’t work out for him. The war was starting to turn and we entered the war in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. I remember my dad and I had been out hunting quail with our bird dogs. Coming back in, we turned the radio in the car on and they were talking about this Pearl Harbor thing, and I said, “I don’t know where Pearl Harbor is at Dad, do you?” “No.” He said, “I don’t know. Never heard of it.” When we got home my mother had gone over to my aunt’s house and we went over there and listened to the radio. Sure enough, we found out where Pearl Harbor was at. The next day, President Roosevelt gave his talk about the entering of the war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was in school that day on Monday and we had one radio in the entire school, so there was a batch of kids there. I was a senior at that time in school, and as we listened to his speech I thought to myself, 3 “I’ll bet I’m going to be affected by this. Sooner or later it’s going to hit me.” I was right, it did. I entered the service and I tried to get into the Air Corps. At that time it was called the Air Corps. I couldn’t pass their physical. I had a fast heartbeat—I was just excited. But they tried two or three times to get my heart rate down, but couldn’t do it. So I said, “Well, I’ll just wait for them to draft me.” Sure enough, they did. In the meantime, I had gone through a small teachers college in Northwest Missouri called, Maryville. I got a year of college work in and then I had to go into the service. The service, they took me, and I was headed for the infantry, I would guess. But before they assigned me, we were out listening to a lecture on military courtesy and a Colonel came up and talked to a Sergeant that was giving the interview or the program there. The Sergeant turned and said, “Would the following men please step out and follow this Colonel?” I was one of them. They marched us up to theatre and the Lieutenant Colonel got on the stage and said, “Now, boys we have program called the VFT, Voluntary Flight Training, and we will train you guys to be pilots, navigators, and bombardiers. If you want to volunteer for that.” Which was the Air Corps. So I came into the Air Corps in a roundabout way and I had done what I wanted to do. At that time we went to the University of Oregon, it was the ducks, and we were there for our preliminary training. We were about finished with it, and this is the summer of 1943. One day they called us in and said, “March on down to the theatre.” We all went down 4 there and Lieutenant Colonel got on the stage and he said, “Well, we’ve started the second part. We don’t have the casualties that we thought we were going to have. We are discontinuing this program. But, you have two options. We can keep you in the Air Corps and make gunners out of you, or you can go to the infantry.” I didn’t have to think about that twice, because I stayed right in the Air Corps and became a gunner. I took my basic training in Las Vegas, Nevada for gunnery. Then it was off to Florida where we got formed in this crew, and did some training as a crew. We picked up a brand new B17-G and started overseas. We were the last flight to ever fly across the Atlantic Ocean on the northern route that year. We flew to Newfoundland and the weather stopped in and we couldn’t get out of there for two or three days. Then from there we went to Iceland, I got to see the Northern Lights then as we flew across the ocean— they were beautiful. We landed in Iceland and the weather again delayed us. Years later when the pilot had his fiftieth wedding anniversary, we were telling stories. He said, “When I got the airplane out on the airstrip, the snow was blowing so badly, that I couldn’t see hardly the runway.” But they signaled for us to take off and he said, “I put all four engines on full throttle and I headed down what I thought was the middle of the runway, but I couldn’t tell. I watched the airspeed, and when we were up to 120 I just pulled back on the stick and we were air born.” I said, “Oh my gosh, flying over that I was scared to death. I’m 5 glad you didn’t tell me that until now.” We flew from Iceland to England. We got stopped in again because of the weather. But, from then on it was clear to fly. We flew from England to Casablanca and I got to see the beautiful Atlas Mountains. From Casablanca to Tunis. From Tunis across Sicily to Italy. Then turned the plane back to Balestrino, Italy, which is on the Adriatic side of the boot. Took a truck up to our quarters which consisted of a tent for six men. None of us had ever put a big tent like that up before. It was getting dark, and they just dumped the tent off and said, “There’s your quarters.” We had to figure out how to put that tent together. It was in the middle of an olive grove but we got it done. By the way, we landed in Italy on my birthday and we took some training there as a crew for war training. I pulled my first mission on December 26. On that mission, we were bombing a target, which was a synthetic oil plant in Southern Germany, it’s called Block Clougher. We lost two of our engines over the target. I was looking out the window and all of the sudden this hundred octane gasoline is pouring out from the trailing edge of the wing. So I called the pilot up on my intercom and told him about it. He and the copilot started a discussion on whether they should feather the engines, shut them down, or whether they should leave them going and hope that the gasoline doesn’t catch fire because they wanted to keep up with the formation. With two engines going we couldn’t keep up with the formation. That conversation didn’t last very long because the flight engineer who stands right back of the pilot and copilot of the 6 airplane, he just reached over and hit the two throttles and feathered them. From then on we were on our own. We are lonesome out there and just before we left the target area someone said on the intercom, “Oh look at the pretty red flag exploding.” Someone else had said, “Yes, that’s the signal for the fighters to come in that the flag isn’t going to start firing.” Well, they stopped firing all right. We looked for the fighters but they never came in. We flew all of the way back, trailing the formation by miles. AC: Wow, that’s crazy. RVV: Isn’t that something? When we landed, I got out of the airplane and I was standing there looking and there was gasoline pouring out from the radio compartment. Because the air pressure up there was holding that gasoline in that compartment, and it was right under the radio room. A ground crew guy came up, a mechanic, and he looked at that and he said, “Wow! You are really lucky you didn’t have to use your radio and just used your intercom. Because that probably would have exploded all of that gasoline underneath that radio compartment.” I said, “Well, the luck was with us.” That’s about it, I did the twenty-three missions and the war was over and we came home and I started civilian life again. AC: Okay, did you have any siblings? RVV: No. I was the only child. AC: Okay, these missions, were they all based out of Italy? RVV: Yes. 7 AC: Would you mind telling me a little bit more about some of those missions? RVV: Well, I told you about the first one. The others were a piece of cake compared to that first mission. We didn’t have any fighter opposition at all, we had Tuskegee Airmen, and they were flying mustangs with red tails on them. They were an all Negro group. They were really good, and they were flying escort for us. They never lost an airplane on the way to a mission or back. They took care of all the fighters that wanted to come down. Vienna, Austria was probably the most heavily armed place. Vienna had the railroad yards and the Germans were transporting troops through Vienna, it was kind of a junction point to Russia and back to the second front. We had opened a second front by the end. We had three hundred and some odd flak guns there. That was pretty hairy. Then there was Innsbruck, the head of the runner pack. The Regensburg, we bombed that place, they had a ball bearing plant there and we wanted to destroy it. Then toward the end of the war we ran out of good targets so we were bombing bridges in Northern Italy. The Germans were trying to get out of Italy and go through the Brunner pass, join their comrades up in Germany. We were trying to impede that evacuation. We bombed the bridge and the Germans would put a pontoon bridge up the next day. We’d go bomb it again. This was up near Florence Italy in a place called Padua. I can’t remember the whole rest of the mission but they were important to destroy. We did our best and I think we were pretty successful with our operations. That’s about it. 8 AC: Were your parents still living in Kansas at this time? RVV: No, they weren’t, we had moved even before. We made that move probably in about 1934 or 1935. We moved to a small town and my dad took that job as a standard oil bulk agent. It was called Trenton, Missouri. I entered high school, I was a senior in high school when the war started in 1941. AC: Okay. Once the war ended, did you go back to Missouri? RVV: Yes, I went back to my parents’ house. Then my dad had a grocery store there in Albany and there was an appliance store. I worked in both places there for about six months. Then I applied to the University of Missouri at Columbia. I went down there in spring 1946 and started my college education. AC: When did you meet your wife? RVV: I met her down at Columbia, Missouri where the university is and she was going to a girls’ finishing school called Stephen's college. It was a junior college and we met there. AC: Was that after the war that you met her? RVV: Yes, this was after war. AC: How long was your courtship? RVV: Well, we met in 1946 and we married in 1947, so it was about six months or so. She lived in Chicago and that summer I remember three of us boys sitting in a tavern drinking beer. I wanted to go see her and I said, “How would you guys like to go to Chicago?” They said, “Boy, that’s great. We’d like that. When?” I said, “Right now,” and we drove all night and we got to Chicago the next morning. 9 Called up her phone and she said, “Come on out, my dad will give you the directions.” We went out there and had a wonderful time. The two boys, my friends, she told me over the phone, “My cousins are here, Melba and….” Oh, I can’t think of that other cousins name now. “She’s blonde and the other one is a redhead,” so all the way driving there to her house, these two guys were arguing who is going to get the blonde and who’s going to get the red head. But they figured out that. We had a lovely meal and we went down to the beach and walked in Lake Michigan and then we had to say goodbye because we had to be back at work on Monday and this was a Sunday. I thought that was quite a drive there and back just to spend a few hours. AC: That sounds like fun. RVV: It was. AC: So, you guys got married in 1947? RVV: Yes, June 5, 1947. AC: After you got married where did you settle? RVV: Well, like I say, we went back to Columbia and I kept trying to finish my college education. She had graduated from the junior college. She took a job to support us so that I could finish school. She is a really talented woman. Later on, when we moved here to Utah she was asked to be the assistant to the President of Clover Club foods and she moved from there into the personnel department. She was the head of the personnel and then she ended up on the board of directors for Clover Club foods. She had a nice career. 10 AC: That’s great. What did she major in? RVV: I really don’t know. The junior college is as far as she got in her college training. But, I don’t know what her major was. AC: Okay, that makes sense. So it was like an associate’s degree then? RVV: Yes. AC: So what brought you out to Utah? RVV: Well, we had moved to Phoenix Arizona after I finished school, and we were there for about ten years. I had taken up a teaching position. We were in a flower shop for about nine years there in Missouri. That would have been in the 1950’s. We took a trip out west to visit some of her relatives and folks in Utah. We liked it so well that we came back to Missouri and sold our house, sold our business and all of our furniture and took off in a station wagon with the kids in the back for Phoenix Arizona. First we lived in some motels and then we rented a house. I took a teaching position there with the Merryville School District. The principal called me up, I had applied in several different districts and said he was looking for somebody to replace a teacher that had resigned. I said, “Ya, I’ll come in for an interview.” He told me, “I want you to have your eyes wide open here. This is a problem class and that’s why this teacher resigned, he couldn’t handle these kids. They are wild.” I thought about it and I said, “Well, see this is a grade school.” He said, “The position is in sixth grade.” I thought, “Well, I don’t’ think there’s a sixth grader that I can’t handle.” So I said, “I’ll take it.” I did have trouble 11 with some of the children in that class. But we worked our differences out and by the end of the school year we had a great class. I had this one kid who was a ringleader—his name was David Wells. One day he did something, he was sitting back in the back of the room. I didn’t like what he did and I saw him walk back there and I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him out of his chair and tore the shirt, just a tiny bit. Then recess came and when he came back in from recess that shirt was in tatters. I knew what he was up to. He was going to go home and say, “Look what Mr. Van did to me. He tore my shirt almost off of my back.” I said, “Okay, just wait a minute, I want to write a letter to your father and I want you to go home and take it to him.” The next day, he came back and he had a letter from his father—I offered to pay for the shirt. He said, “Don’t you worry about the shirt, anytime he needs discipline, you give it to him. I don’t care what you do.” So I said, “Have you read this letter David?” he said, “No, I haven’t.” I said, “Well, you read it.” He read it and he kind of sobered down and things were running kind of smooth there for a while. David was a Beekeeper. He had some Beehives and he was fascinated with Bee’s. He said to me one day, “Mr. Van, I’d like to bring a beehive in class and tell the kids about my beehive and the bees.” I was just visualizing a big swarm of bees around this hive and the kids getting stung and everything. I said, “Let’s just hold up on that for a while. Maybe we’ll study bees here pretty soon and you’ll get to talk to them about that.” The last day of school, David held back. After the kids had left, he came up to my desk. He had something behind him 12 and I didn’t know what it was. He said, “Mr. Van, I have something for you.” I said, “Okay.” He brought his arm up with a jar of honey he wanted to give me. I knew in an instant that we were friends again. Every time I tell that story I tear up because it was an emotional moment for me and for him. AC: What subject did you teach while you were in Utah? RVV: Well, I started out teaching science in Phoenix. I taught Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Geology. Those four subjects which I was pretty well-versed in. AC: Did you and your wife have any children? RVV: Yes, we had three children. One boy, who was the oldest and two girls. AC: Okay. I think that’s about all of my questions, unless you have any stories you want to share about World War II? RVV: Well, all of these guys are dead except two more—besides me. gun turret guy is still alive—and his wife is still living with him. Not the Navigator but the Bombardier is still alive. I haven’t called and talked to those two guys for about six months. They may have died. I was trying to get a hold of them over the weekend but I couldn’t get through. I hope they are still alive I’ll continue to check on them. That’s about it. They’re getting pretty old and just like me and they are still married to their wives. One of them is in Ohio and the other one is in Colorado. They’re with their children. Their children are taking care of them— both of them. The gun turret guy, he had a stroke and he’s kind of disabled and disoriented. The other one, is hard of hearing and has dementia and he can’t remember what’s going on. But, they are in good hands. We never did locate this 13 Navigator right up here. I don’t know whatever happened to him. He was a very nice guy and a very handsome man. He got married just before we left for Europe. He did get back safely, but I don’t know what happened to him. I could get a copy of this if you wanted. AC: Oh we would love that. That would be fantastic. I did think of another question. You mentioned that you were the gunner, what was your training like? RVV: Well, I took my gunnery training in Las Vegas. We had to learn to assemble and disassemble the fifty caliber machine gun. Then we had some training on how to aim the gun and how to fire the gun, and what to do in case the gun jammed and so on. We took some flights out and they would tow a target passed us and then we’d fire at it with bullets that were colored with some kind of paint that you could tell whether you were hitting the target when it landed. That was about it. Las Vegas was a small town at that time. We were just out there at Las Vegas Army Air Base. Just a few miles out of town. We’d go into town and I think they only had at that time maybe two or three casinos that were open. We met an old man sitting on an old park bench one day. Several of us had gone in town and we engaged in a conversation and I had the feeling he was an old prospector. He looked like it to me. He said to us before we left, “Boys, you want to come back to Las Vegas after the war is over. Because this town is about to go wild.” Well, he was right. I never went back to Las Vegas though. I had other plans. I don’t think anybody did. 14 AC: That’s really fascinating. So for my last question before we let you go, I wanted to know: How do you feel that your experiences during World War II affected you for the rest of your life? RVV: Well, at first, not very much because I was engaged in trying to carve out a career. It wasn’t until I retired in 1991 that I was sitting at my computer one day and I thought, “I wonder whatever happened to those crew members of mine.” So I started to search for them. I found them all except the Navigator up there. We did get together several times. We met down at Tucson Arizona for a convention. It was a 300 person convention that was the group that we were in. We corresponded with each other and it was a delightful experience then. AC: Alright, we’ll go ahead and end the interview then. Thank you so much again for your time and allowing us to come and interview you today. It was great. RVV: Oh you’re welcome.