'A little terrifying': Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall recalled World War II service as B-24 waist gunner during 2004 interview

May 27—"And sometimes, sometimes a plane is hit and the fuel tanks are hit and it explodes and everybody's gone. You saw various instances of that. And, of course, that was part of the terror of being up there and seeing other ships hit and go down."

That was Stewart Udall talking during a Dec. 3, 2004, interview at his Santa Fe home.

Udall, who died in March 2010 at the age of 90, was a Democratic politician best remembered as Secretary of the Interior under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the '60s and as a three-term U.S. representative from Arizona before that.

He was an enthusiastic environmentalist and a pretty good basketball player at the University of Arizona.

Udall's son, Tom, served as New Mexico attorney general and as a U.S. representative and U.S. senator from New Mexico and is now U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.

But what many people may not remember, or may not have ever known, is that Stewart Udall was a waist gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber during World War II. Waist gunners attempted to fend off the attacks of enemy fighter aircraft by firing machine guns from windows on the side of the bomber.

"And in a way, the waist gunners were right out in the slipstream," Udall said in that 2004 interview. "I mean, that was the coldest place in the airplane, and you felt it. ... when these 88mm anti-aircraft shots exploded, the pilots and others up where they were didn't hear it. We heard it big time. ... And that was a little terrifying."

Albuquerque resident John Hart was preparing a transcript for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans when he interviewed Udall about his World War II experiences in 2004.

He came across the interview transcript in his computer recently and thought it might make a good story for the Journal, maybe for Memorial Day.

In charge

"In his book 'Citizen Soldiers' (1997), Stephen Ambrose makes a plea for people who know World War II veterans to do an oral history," Hart, 72, said last week in his home near the Rio Grande Nature Center.

Hart was game to give that a go, but could not find a good subject for two or three years. His own father, who served in the Pacific Theater during World War II, had died in 1985.

"One of the things I regret is that we didn't get a more complete history of his experience," Hart said.

But Hart's wife, Deby, a nurse practitioner, worked in a town of Bernalillo clinic with Suzanne Udall, wife of Stewart's son, Jay.

"Our daughter would babysit for Suzanne and Jay's daughter," Hart said.

That connection provided Hart with access to Stewart Udall, which was especially exciting for Hart, who grew up in Indiana and earned a master's in environmental science at Indiana State.

He moved to Albuquerque in 1980 to work for a geotechnical engineering and environmental consulting firm and later had his own environmental consulting business.

Politicians with a passion for protecting the environment, such as Stewart and his Arizona Congressman brother Morris "Mo" Udall, were Hart's heroes when he was in high school.

"When I was in high school, Stewart was Secretary of the Interior," he said. "Because I had followed his career, we had things to talk about."

He said the day he interviewed Udall was a cold, sunny, beautiful New Mexico day.

"He had an office, but I think maybe we did the interview at the dining room table," Hart said. "His house was on the east side of Santa Fe, into the foothills. He had a bunch of glass facing west and an outstanding view of the Jemez Mountains. He was in his early 80s. His eyesight had declined. He had macular degeneration, but he was still sharp.

"I turned on the tape recorder, and he just started talking. He was in charge for the first five or six pages."

Man on a mission

Udall was with the 15th Army Air Force, 454th Bombardment Group. While stationed in southern Italy during the spring and summer of 1944, he flew 39 bombing missions to targets in Italy, Romania, Austria, France, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Germany and Czechoslovakia.

But on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and drew the United States into the war, Udall was on a Mormon mission in New York City.

"I was classified as clergy," Udall told Hart. "And I got interested in pacifism. ... But as soon as Pearl Harbor happened, I became patriotic, and I decided that when my missionary service was finished in May ... I would enlist ... and because it sounded glamorous and so on, wanted to get into flying. ... I enlisted, I think, in the first week in June (1942)."

He was sent to Santa Ana, California, to train as a pilot, but he failed at that.

"I have a nervousness about flying," Udall said in the interview. "I got airsickness. I got sick in cars going around curves."

So then he went to bombardier school in Albuquerque, but he flunked that, too.

"... It was called a washout. And it was humiliating. But that was my life."

At this point, instead of being a flight cadet on the way to becoming an officer, Udall was a private on the way to a military camp at Wichita Falls, Texas. The Army decided to make him a mechanic.

"And I didn't like that because I had gotten myself in a frame of mind that I wanted to be in the war. I wanted to go overseas and I felt — because that was a 12-month course if you went to mechanic school — that ... I'd never get overseas before the war had ended."

He didn't get on the train that was to take him to mechanic's school, which, of course, got him in trouble with the Army. But he was not court-martialed. He was docked a month's pay, which for a private at that time was $29.

And he was sent to armorer school in Kingman, Arizona, where he learned all about machine guns and how to shoot from a bomber.

A close call

Udall was assigned to a B-24 crew and trained at an airbase in Tonopah, Nevada.

"(B-24s) were regarded as an unglamorous, lumbering ship. But I trained on B-24s ... And there were planes that would disappear, some would hit the mountains. ... There were nervous moments when we were flying in overcast days, you know. Flying through clouds for hours. I'd wonder, 'My God, do they know what altitude we're at?' Because we are right near the Sierra Nevada with 14,000 foot peaks. Are we high enough?"

Udall dealt with the alternating boredom and tension at training camps in the United States and between missions in Italy by reading.

"I was an avid book reader and poetry reader and so, intellectually, I didn't waste my time. Other people just sat around and smoked a cigarette and shot the breeze, as they say. I improved my mind. I don't think there is any question about it. I mean, here is this guy, he's an enlisted man and he is in the President's Cabinet a few years later. How the hell did that happen? Well, I was improving my mind, I guess."

The fact that Udall survived the war at all seemed to him to be fated. In July 1944, the 454th Bombardment Group led a raid on the Hermann Goering Steel Works in Linz, Austria. The nose gunner on Udall's B-24, overcome with anxiety, managed to get himself disqualified from flight duty. The pilot asked Udall to fly as nose gunner and put a replacement from another crew, a young Italian American from upstate New York, at Udall's usual waist gunner post.

Aggressive enemy fighter planes attacked the flight of 454th B-24s as they homed in on the steel works.

"They were working in packs. I don't know how many there were. This whole thing is over in a minute and a half. I mean, they closed in. They're trying to hit the lead planes, you know, and knock them out so they can disrupt the whole thing. And (the replacement waist gunner) was hit right in the face. ... By a 20mm. Just blew his face off. ... So, I had to consider that I was lucky that day. I've always felt that way."

Udall said that was the only time a crew member on his B-24 was killed during any of the missions he flew.

His last mission was a raid on a bridge in Yugoslavia on Sept. 8, 1944. He returned to the U.S. in October 1944 and was assigned to serve as an instructor for bomber crews preparing to go overseas. He was an instructor in Albuquerque when the war ended.

Udall's plane, which was nicknamed Flyin' Home, did not survive the war. It was destroyed in a ground explosion while planes were being armed.

The 454th received a unit citation for its role in the raid on the Linz steel works and Udall was awarded the Air Medal with three clusters.

"But the people who deserved the medals, were the ones that didn't come back," he said.