Capt. Harold Sperber: In the Hours Before D-Day

Ken Harbaugh:

If you like listening to Warriors In Their Own Words, check out our other show, the Medal of Honor Podcast. The link is in the show description.

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Staff Sergeant Alfred Bell. Bell served as a Tank Platoon Sergeant during World War II, and fought in the Invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge as a member of the famous Spearhead division. In this interview, Bell recounts the Battle of the Bulge where he lost his eye, a large portion of his left hand, and most of his fingers in order to successfully evacuate an allied aid station.

Captain Harold Sperber served in World War II as a Pathfinder co-pilot. It was his job to help fly small paratrooper groups called pathfinders to landing zones ahead of major paratrooper missions so that the area could be scouted and marked. In this episode, Sperber describes the mission he had on the night before D-Day.

Capt. Harold Sperber:

As a Pathfinder pilot, I started out as a First Lieutenant in Sicily, and I got promoted to Captain about a year and a half later, and came back to the States and got out of the service, and went to civilian.

When I went into the 50th Squadron, I was a replacement pilot for the 40 air crew that was shot down by our Navy by mistake, by the conditions there, the lack of communications, and what have you. And I walked into the tent in my operations in the 50th squadron and a message came in and said, "Send a pilot to Palermo, Sicily to fly with Lancaster's bombers with the RAF, and learn about radar." And I remember one pilot saying to the other pilot, "What's radar, in that category?" That's how new it was. And it was classified in the early days.

Fortunately, an airplane was delivered in Sicily with the radar system on it. And we took the airplane and flew it to England, and started at Cottesmore, England to start the school and learn how. And mainly, it was for the navigators to interpret the radar, the radar systems, and everything. It was state-of-the-art. In comparison today, if we had GPS like we have today, it would've been a simple operation, but it took a lot of training.

I flew with Clyde Taylor, who was the aircraft commander. I was the right seat man, copilot, and we trained until D-Day, together. And our navigator was Preston Corsa. And the important team member in that Pathfinder crew was the navigator, as far as I was concerned, a Pathfinder navigator, who had to give the pilots the directions and learn about all the LORANs and the radars, and everything else that was involved.

The question about the pilots, they were selected. Colonel Crouch, Lieutenant Crouch in those days, and Clyde Taylor had flown. Most of these Pathfinder people had been through North Africa, through some of the Sicilian operations, and what have you. And they were selected. They were all veterans. They'd been through the malaria days, they'd been through the hepatitis days, the jaundice days, and everything else, like the bad food and everything else, like that, health wise. But they're also veterans who had seen the combat and the problems that could exist.

And I've flown all of those missions. I flew flight tests for 13 years. I flew B26 in Korea, and I had a squadron forward air control airplanes in Vietnam. So, I saw airplanes and pilots from one end to the other. And I would fly with the Pathfinder pilots every day. And we had a card, in Pathfinder airplanes, that we could fly no matter what the weather, if we felt that we could control it. And if we felt that it was necessary. We could fly to any base. And base commander said, "Oh, the weather's below minimum. You can't fly." Well, we'd go fly. So, they were good. They were good. As I say, I would fly with them and just rate them as high as any.

We started from North Witham, England, and got our Pathfinder paratroopers. These were the people had the responsibility of making the jump, securing it. And each one of the Pathfinder paratroopers was weighing, on top of their weight, of 120 to 130 pounds. It just gives you an example of how much weight these gentlemen had to carry.

We loaded up the airplane in North Witham. General Eisenhower came there to say, "Good luck," and cheer up the Pathfinder paratroopers. And then, we took off at 9:00. We were the second flight of three. Colonel Crouch was Lead Three, and we were the second. And the reason for the three was that, if one airplane got shot down, it generally would be the lead airplane, because we were low altitude, they would shoot from underneath us. And in so doing, if we got shot down, Number Two Man could take the lead and do the same job, with the equipment and everything he had on board. If he got shot down or had a problem, then Number Three could do the same job.

Fortunately, in our particular case, I'll go on a little later on this particular point, but we took off, went to Land's End, dropped down to low altitude, and I mean low, around 50 feet and below. We'd actually pick up spray. The seas were high that day, winds, weather. But in developing our flight plan, and also not keeping too much spray coming off our airplanes so that the visibility of our wingmen, the only thing our wingmen could look for was little white lights or blue lights on top of our wing. And it was cupped. If you were in right position, you could see the lights. If you were too high or too low or too right or too left, out of formation, you couldn't see very well. And it was dark. Everything went along fine. We went in between the Guernsey and Jersey Island in the peninsula, and ended up, just as we started into our climb from the water, you might say, our low level water flight, we did this to avoid radar, and as we started up, we got hit. We don't know what, whether it was a night fighter, and a night fighter couldn't have gone under us before we pulled up, but maybe when he come up there, he might have. We didn't see any tracers from this way, but things were coming up from along the shoreline. Somebody had stirred up the guns all around, in that particular case. But it was so hard to tell, actually, what's going on. Our left wingman, Jack Kentner, said he saw something coming up, at that time. The engine did not just sputter, and sometimes with a radial engine you could knock off a cylinder or a valve or anything else like this, and the engine sometimes would just continue to run. Or they would sputter, and you'd see oil pressure drop, or you knew had you had a engine problem. But in this case, it was just, bingo, there was no nothing in that category.

So then, it was a decision time, a very, very short decision time. We had to say, "Can we crash straight ahead?" Can we? Will we? Or, "How can we avoid everybody being killed in the airplane?" We were too low for them to bail out. The paratroopers had to be around 400 foot of altitude, and we were less than around 200, at the time.

Clyde made the decision to make a right hand turn into Colonel Crash's position. And I had just checked him out my window, and he was perfect position. I knew that we had to get underneath him in that category, there. And of course, the last thing that a wingman would think of is somebody turning into, and especially at night and especially in a hard turn, and we had to make a pretty hard turn to get to a safe position that we could recover from.

Now, the engines of a Pratt and Whitney… the engine that is equipped in that airplane is about, I think it's 15 seconds for maximum power before you have to have the engine inspected. And any longer than that, it was a matter of engine change. You're going to ruin the engine. It's just not designed for that long of high power.

We ended up, anyway, making the turn, just going past some houses and buildings. I could see in the lights that before we flew over top, couldn't see, but when we were down so low, you could almost horizontally see a light there. And of course, the action that was going on above them, I'm sure we woke up the whole coastline.

See, we were loaded very, very heavy. Each paratrooper was weighing about, oh, minimum of 250, 300 pounds. The flight crews had flack suits on them. We had a flack helmet. When you add everything up together, we were probably in a category of 5,000 pounds heavy. So, we needed both engines to fly safely, like say, and climb, and what we had to do. The obvious thing was full power on a good engine, make the turn, get down over the water, and hope that we could maintain altitude over the water, and actually getting ground effect or water effect is, that's how low we got.

In fact, as the running engine would hit the top of the waves at times and you hear the prop go, clack, clack, clack, clack, like that, and hitting that low altitude. Meantime, we had to say, "Get everything out of this airplane that's heavy and non-essential." So, they were throwing things out of the airplane like you couldn't believe. And you could hear them almost hit the water and go along like that.

We had to use all that power to maintain the airplane's control. And of course, naturally you're yawing as you're going along on one engine.

One of the things that the paratroopers told us after we got back to mainland was they had landmines on the airplane. And one paratrooper said to the next paratrooper, "Hey, landmine." Go on down to the next person, and throw it out the door. This man says, "Landmine," and he took the landmine and just threw it out to the door that was maybe about a foot clearance and got it out. But then, it was a matter of all the stuff that our crew chief from the airplane threw out, of all the extra equipment that the paratroopers had, and their sidearms, everything that they had, including their parachutes. And last, they were too low to ever jump out. So, they threw even their parachutes out. And that made the airplane a little bit better to control. And then, we had that full power on those engines for about 20, 25 minutes. And we were saying, "What's our next decision? Are we going to try to land at Guernsey Island or Jersey Island," which is, by the way, dairy lands. Even today, England gets their raw milk from those islands, very rich in that category. Named after Jersey and Guernsey milk cows. But they also had fences made out of stone. Landing there would've been disastrous, too. So, the next thing was, we're going to take each decision at a time. And we kept our paratroopers informed what was going on, our crew chief. And then, we decided. "Can we make England?", to get these guys home.

Our next problem was our radar operator, Corsa, would look in his radar screen and he'd see something. It might have been seagulls or could have been a submarine or a small boat, or something like this, pop up. The seas were going like this. And ended up, anyway, that we go along, and I saw a ship, a faint deal of a ship out there, and it turned out to be the HF HSM Intrepid, a destroyer.

I was born and raised on Lake Erie, but Clyde Taylor, who was our aircraft commander, Clyde, was in the Navy three years before he went to the Air Force for flight school, Army Air Corps in those days. And he was familiar with bigger boats and that than I was. Anyway, it ended up that we decided that, "Hey, we're going to try that there. If the engines are still going and everything else like that, we'll try to make England." The only problem was, it was using so hard of the engine, everything, the glow of the engine overheating, we hardly needed the light in the cockpit. It was that hot. We finally had enough nerve to say, "Well, let's try it and bring back a little power and see if there's any left." Pull the throttle back up again. And there was no response practically between low and high power setting. So, it was a matter of, "We're going to ditch." We said to our crew chief and told our paratroopers, "Prepare to ditch."

Here's a ship out here, like this. Now, the only thing you didn't want to do is make a turn into the ship. Because this is what happened at Sicily. When they turned this into the ship like this, their guns, "Hey, what are you guys doing out here? You're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be someplace else," like this. "And here you are making a combat threat to us." They had their guns on us. And they said if we'd have turned another 20 degrees, they'd have shot us down, for sure. So, we had our full day on that category.

Anyway, we ditched the airplane. To ditch the airplane, Clyde and I had talked about this, because we were over water quite a bit. We knew we were going to be in combat problems. So, we made procedures on what we were going to do if we had to ditch. We knew the winds, generally, the westerly winds. And we said, "Well, we'll head into the wind so we get the lowest impact, ground speed, water speed." The next thing was, "Are we going to use flaps? How are we going to do it?" We had everything set up exactly where we wanted it. We had to turn the landing light on, by the way. We didn't want to because of obvious reasons. But to see what we were going to do, we had to turn on our landing light.

Turned on the landing light, and the next thing was a wall. Not just a little weight, but a wall of water come over the top of us. And that's the last I remember for a little bit. I lost my eyesight. But I could hear. I could hear the airplane moaning and groaning like it was just tearing apart. "Oh, we've really screwed up this landing." And then, I could feel this sort of thing. And I thought to myself, are we on our way to Heaven or Hell, or we floating?" And I thought to myself, "I hope we're floating." And pretty soon, I could see nothing but green water. "What are we looking at, here?" Well, the landing light still stayed on. And the batteries of the C47 are run underneath you, two big batteries underneath you. And they didn't tear loose. So, quickly we turned off all electrical. We don't want salt water with electrical on, naturally, because had we had gasoline all around the airplane, why, disaster. We checked each other in front. And I thought the front of the airplane windows and everything would come in. It didn't. Clyde and I were okay. Clyde got up from his seat and went back. And being an old Navy man, he wanted to make sure that the life raft, which I think was a five- or seven-man life raft, and he went back to help. I opened the top hatch above there. Of course, we didn't have any power on because of the obvious reasons. I took my flashlight, and stood up on the seat, and was about this high off from the seat. And I could flash to the destroyer.

Well, one thing I always remember, di, di, di, da, da, da. That's SOS. But a di, di, di also indicates a flash, like you're shooting. Man. But I remembered, I did a lot of dashes rather than the dits, I think. But it ended up anyway, that this big destroyer comes sailing up there within, oh, 10 yards of where we were, stopped right side of us, and really blanked the winds and the sea from where we were, a fabulous bit of seamanship, and threw a landing net over. And a man up on the top threw me a line. And I was able to hold the airplane against the destroyer and the guys got out of the back of the airplane. They would get in the life vest. And of course, it was only set for the crew of five. So, one guy go in and one guy has to go over the side. Of course, the water was so cold. I think, June up in Lake Erie, we'd go out and swim in the June time. The water was fairly warm. But it was cold, cold, cold. And it ended up that the guys got over on the side of the landing net and out, and I'm holding this line yet. And the last thing that a destroyer wants to do in a combat zone is sit there. They rely on speed and they want to be up to 20, 30 knots to avoid everything. And the next thing was, they started the screws up, the airplane started sinking underneath me and I decided, "I have not got time to go back through the back way." I went over the top. I swung from the top of the destroyer, over there. One minute you might be sitting right next to them, and next minute you might be looking up, it seemed like 50 feet on the seas, in that category. I had leather gloves, fortunately, on. Otherwise, I'd have torn my skin right off my hands, I'm sure, because of the rope, and everything else like this. But as he turned the screws of the big destroyer on, it just sucked the airplane underneath, and it was gone. I swung over. I caught the last leg of the landing net, and they pulled me along for a little while, and he was pulling up the landing at the same time. And one of the seamen looked down. He probably thought it was pretty heavy landing net, pulling up. And he says, "Blimey. There's a Yank down there, yet." And I still remember him saying that.

We got on board, checked everybody over. I had a little, I don't know where they hit my side of my head slamming against the hard shell of the destroyer. Or I did it with the helmet on. I don't know. But anyway, I had a little scratch, I call it. But with seawater it looked like blood coming down my face, like I was really hurt. And the seamen in charge of medic surgery, remember the old days and the medical man on the old ships, if you had the problem, they'd saw your legs off, your arm, with a carpenter [inaudible] And I said, "No thanks. I'm fine." He said to me, "Well, if you don't want me to do anything there," he says, "drink this." And he brought a nice big white mug, Navy mug, of hot buttered rum. And it was so cold and everything else like it, I don't drink. And I took one sip just to help him, and boy, it was good. But I gave it to my navigator who was sitting there shaking as cold as could be. And he still remembers that part. And the poor navigator cannot see what's going on outside. And so it was hard for them.

Anyway, they put us in a room, about a 12 by 12, because one, they didn't want to lose us after they got us. Normally, the biggest crews they probably would pick up might be 8, 9, 10, or something like that on a B24, or something like this. And they're not used to, we had 18 plus 5, 23 people on board. And none of us were hurt. Anyway, they put us in. And all night long, this is from about midnight, quarter after 12, all night long, go sailing through the seas. And destroyer, as you know, doesn't go over the waves, it goes through them. They kept us in there at night. And when the morning light came in, we could see the whole invasion system, and everything else like this. And it was a fantastic deal. About noon, 1:00, a PT boat, a rescue boat, pulled up to the ship. We saluted and says, "Goodbye, Intrepid. Thank you for hauling us in," and headed off with this little PT boat.

Now, they got two 50 calibers on the top. That's the only thing they have for defense. And they have two engines, big Rolls-Royce Berlin engines, and two screws. And he had shut one engine down, because it could only go on idle, and up and down. And the poor paratroopers were so sick, they took a hell of a ride going all the way through all the problems that we had. And then, with the destroyer all night, and then with this PT boat.

We finally got into South Hampton Harbor, the slip, there. And then, they'd start the other engine up. And then, he showed us, "Hey, that destroyer isn't so fast." You know, about 50 miles an hour, I think, for short distance. Got in there. They gave us British battle jackets and British clothing. We were sopping wet, naturally, with salt water and what have you. Put us in a place where we'd get a shower and cleaned up, and treated us wonderfully. But I was hungry. We were all hungry. And I looked outside. And a lady was in a canteen, a Red Cross deal, selling tea and crumpets. And I said, "Could I have some tea and crumpets, please?" And she says, "Yankee, what are you doing in that British uniform?" I only said two words to her. Amazing how they could interpret us.

We slept there the night. The next morning, we put in Lower East, and we got back to our base. Paratroopers, bless their hearts, I don't know whatever happened to them, whether next day they went on, and everything else. But I went from there. The next day I was back in the air again. And we went over and picked up wounded from the Peninsula, Cherbourg, and back over. And we went on to Bass Stone, and through all of the other. Two years I spent over there.

I had two emotions. One emotion was, we didn't complete our primary mission. But our second side of the story was, we were so happy that no one was hurt or killed in that situation. Normally at night, in those conditions, I'm not sure of these facts, but I know others went down that night or during that D-Day period, and many of them lost everybody on board. So, in all, my emotions was twofold. One, "Hey. Why did we get hit, right there? Why couldn't we go on another 5, 10 miles into Sainte-Mere-Eglise, which was our target, and drop our troops? And with all the weight on, even with one engine, we might have been able to make it back with no problem at all." But on the other side of the coin, it was to be a million to one, maybe, but we made it and got everybody back, and they're going to fly both of us again, and made to drop again.

We had to remember that there are 820 airplanes, approximately, coming this way, bringing 15,000 paratroopers, ballpark figure. And so, here we are coming against the grain, you might say. And so, we had to think of control and everything. And they were coming low altitude, too. And certainly, we didn't want to take another Pathfinder airplane down that our Number Two man was on, because we had turned into him like that. I helped as much as I could to help Clyde to avoid that particular part of it.

I think the way I felt about the whole thing was that every target assigned to the Pathfinders for their drop zone target, and everything else, was made and met and completed 100%. The rest, as far as what we did that night, I just wish we could've got another 10, 15 miles from that airplane at that time. But it wasn't to be. We were lucky that it didn't blow up.

We had one other case in my original squadron of four airplanes, this airplane here, hit a wire, blew up. These two airplanes, here, rolled over like this and crashed and killed all three airplanes here. This airplane in a diamond went into a loop and blew up on the top like this. The only survivor was a crew chief who got blown out, and his shoot open by the impact of the explosion. So, it's one of those things that had we had a couple of seconds or more, one way or the other, could we have done anything differently? And I would say, no.

The thing about Clyde Taylor and I, one, we knew each other very well. We'd flown with each other for about four months solidly. Our navigator, Preston Corsa, was one of the best. And we're selected to lead the element. I would go anytime, even today, with all the, I had about, oh, I don't know, 10,000 hours of flying time when I retired from the Air Force, and I flew everything from my small helicopters to even, I've been in B52s, flew the flight test of 104s, from one end to the other, you might say. And even today, I could, in my sleep, reach up and grab the straddles of a C47 and the props and the mixtures and everything else about it. It's something that stayed in my mind such a long, long time, to feel the respect for that airplane. It built right here in Long Beach. And of course later on, they produced some other. They built 10,000 C47s. And Eisenhower claimed it to be one of the best work horses of the war.

And the other thing I want to mention, I'm glad you meant asked me the question, question there again is, how about the paratroopers? If you had paratroopers that dropped around you in any place in this country, any place that you were, nobody slept. Nobody slept until they found out all those paratroopers were gone or secured, or what have you. Because a paratroop, he's not carrying a 100-pound bomb or a 1000-pound bomb. I felt they were more like bombs. They could do more, they could move, they could go a thousand feet, three miles or anything else like this. If they missed the target, they could move. They had intelligence, they could hide. You never knew where they were. And they carried hand grenades, and they had landmines, and everything of this nature, not to really kill tanks and things like this, but they were there. So very, very powerful, secure fighting men.

I think we were very, very, very lucky that we all got out of it. Yes. And Clyde Taylor, by the way, that was his last flight. I never saw Clyde Taylor again, sorry to say, because he went back to the States and I stayed over there and I was aircraft commander the rest of the time. But the thing about it was that, after you go through what Clyde went through, and everything else like that, and another problem this particular cases is that people don't realize the number of people you have wounded, number of people you have fatalities. And the next thing was there's never, never, I've never seen any figures, on deep depression, battle fatigue, that sort of thing. It's a number that people don't realize, and it can go on for years and years. And Clyde spent approximately 20 years in a depression problem. I don't know, cumulative or just what, but it is another part of the system.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Captain Harold Sperber. To hear more about the Pathfinders, listen to last week’s interview with pathfinder pilot Maj. Richard Jacobson.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.