This story originally appeared in our 2017 Profile edition. H.H. Bennett, a World War II hero who was knighted by France in 2022 in honor of his service, died last week at the age of 100. This story has been edited for length.
As he flew over the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, Henry Howard Bennett of New Hope noticed one thing: the color of the water.
Bennett, 94 at the time of this interview, was the nose gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber in the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew 30 missions over Europe during World War II. In March, Bennett attended the Wings of Freedom tour and flew on a B-24 for the first time in more than 70 years. He remembers the missions like they happened yesterday.
“When we flew over Omaha Beach on D-Day, the water was red with American blood,” he said. “It was quite an experience. I tried to make the best of every situation, but in reality, it was only the hand of God that got us home.”
Bennett said the memories of his combat missions still haunt him.
“You never forget,” he said. “When you’re in combat, you don’t ever forget it. I had nightmares about it for a long time after it was over. Very seldom, occasionally, they come back again. It’s just like I’ll be on a mission headed over Europe.”
As he walked toward the massive B-24, one of the largest bombers of World War II, with a 110-foot wingspan, the memories flooded back.
“When I look at the front turret, it’s hard to believe I spent 30 missions in there and survived it,” Bennett said. “We took a lot of flak from anti-aircraft guns, fighter pilots and all of those type things. There would be a whole squadron of us flying together – 12 planes – we protected each other. I could see the ones (fighters) that were going to get my neighbor and keep them off of him. They were like buzzards, circling us. Of course, he (the gunner in the other plane) did the same for me.”
The nose gun turret is highly exposed, on the front of the mammoth bomber. It is also a small confined space, according to Bennett.
“Once we got airborne, I was in the turret,” he said. “Anytime we were in a place that we could get shot at, I was in the turret. It got pretty uncomfortable up there. Sometimes, it was boring. We were just sailing above the clouds, looking for buzzards (enemy aircraft). It took more than six hours for that thing (B-24) to circle England and get up to 25,000 feet with a load of bombs. That was the boring part of it. I got tired of looking at England getting littler and littler. When we came back from our missions, we’d come down pretty fast.”
Growing up in Marion County
Bennett was raised in the upper part of Marion County in the Broom settlement.
“I was raised right up there,” he said. “I went to school at Hickory Grove. It’s over in Lamar County. They ran one school bus that made the lap and went over to Hickory Grove. It went through high school, but it consolidated, with Rocky Branch and Victory and moved them all into Sumrall. I went through the eighth-grade at Hickory Grove and then I went to Sumrall. I never finished, I quit and joined the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) when I was 17. I got my dad to sign and I did one hitch in the CCC camp. They called it the Roosevelt Tree Army.”
Bennett was just out of the CCC when World War II broke out.
“I had gone to work in Hattiesburg and worked at the Coney Isle restaurant and that’s when I got called to go in the service,” he said. “I got called to go to Camp Shelby to get checked and I passed. I took an aptitude test and did well enough that they told me I could go into any branch of the service I wanted to. They all put in their plea for me, the Army, Navy and so on. They all wanted somebody that had something between their ears. I didn’t finish high school, but the aptitude test was mainly on common sense. I made better grades than a lot of college boys. It all depended on common sense. I decided that I hadn’t seen very many airplanes and never flew in one, so I thought I might go to the Air Corps. I thought I might get to fly a plane.”
Bennett recalled serving with another Marion County soldier, William C. Berry of Columbia.
“He and I went into the service together,” he said. “He wanted us to stay together. He decided he was going to teach. After we finished gunner school, they kept him down there to teach and he came to see me and said he wanted me to put in for teaching. He said, ‘I reckon you know where you’re headed if you don’t get this job teaching.’ I said, ‘That’s what they got us in here for, to win the war. We ain’t gonna win it down here in Florida.’ I didn’t get the teaching job and he was right, a little while later, they sent me overseas.”
Bennett was in Utah when he got his orders to go to England.
“They sent me to Texas and told me they needed a nose gunner,” he continued. “A B-24 crew was training to go overseas and they had to bail out of the plane and the nose gunner broke his leg really bad. They said he would never be able to get back in an airplane, so they put me in his place. I was in the Eighth Air Force. I was an aerial engineer and they said, ‘You’re a nose gunner now. That’s what we need.’ I didn’t know the crew, but it wasn’t long before I did. They put me in his place and I missed a lot of the training. I went from Texas to Lincoln, Neb. and got the plane armed and all that, ready to go overseas.”
Heading to battle
The squadron then prepared to deploy to Europe.
“We flew down to Texas and then began the journey,” he said. “We flew down through Puerto Rico and Brazil and from Brazil, we flew across the Atlantic Ocean. That was a big deal for a B-24. It held 2,700 gallons of gasoline on its own and they put a 1,000 gallon tank in the bomb bay to get the plane to fly from Brazil to Dakar West Africa (Senegal). It took 3,700 gallons of gasoline to fly a B-24 from Brazil to Dakar. Some of them didn’t make it on that. They fell in the ocean before they got there. But we made it, but we were on fumes when we got there.”
Bennett and his unit then went on to Marrakech in Tunisia (Morocco).
“We stayed there a few days,” Bennett continued. “They didn’t tell us where we were going from there. At any rate, I was in there shaving one day and we’d already been issued a .45 pistol. I had it lying on the bed. There was a guy that came in the tent raising the tent flap and he had all kinds of knives. I didn’t know what he was. I saw him in the mirror, I reached and grabbed my gun and he started hollering to let me know he was friendly. I was fixin’ to shoot him. But he wanted to sell me the knives. He got out pretty quickly because I scared him good when I grabbed that gun. I was young and I was scared. I hadn’t prepared for that.”
Bennett later headed to England to serve with his squadron in the Army Air Corps.
“I was stationed between Ipswich and Norwich. Our base was a brand new base they had made in a wheat field. We began training there for our missions,” he said. “The first night we got there, there was an American who had joined the Nazis, we called her Axis Sally. She came on the on the radio and welcomed the 34th Bomb Group to England and said they would have to give us a visit that night. Sure enough, they did. They came over and bombed our base. We had these Quonset huts, but it didn’t hurt anything.”
After a short period of training, the crew members joined their pilots and co-pilots, according to Bennett.
“There was a crew of 10 on the B-24 at that time,” he said. “We’d take off and wind up in the German occupied territories; mostly in France, Belgium and Poland. The longest run I took was over to Politz, Poland. We went to a refinery and when we dropped bombs on it, fire came up near about as high as we were. This was about 1943.”
Bennett’s plane
takes a hit
The missions were difficult, according to Bennett.
“We were shot at on about every mission, but we made it pretty good until the 26th mission,” he said. “We got a direct hit in the No. 2 engine, right next to it. A terrible explosion happened and the propeller and entire front end of the engine were on fire. We fell just like a rock from 25,000 feet. We fell down to 2,000 in a dead fall. I could see the trees getting bigger and bigger down on the ground. I just figured that was it, I had done made my peace; I knew I was fixin’ to die. He (pilot) kept wrestling with it and then he got it leveled off about 2,000 feet. After he got it back straightened out, we got back a little altitude. The pilot asked me if I could get rid of the bombs because something had happened to the bombardier. He wasn’t able to drop the bombs. I reached down and hit that salvo switch and dumped that load of bombs. I don’t know who got them, it wasn’t where we were supposed to have gone with them, but I got rid of them and we made it back to England. The plane was shot up pretty bad. We kind of crash landed and one tire was flat. We landed safely.”
The crew went on to make its 30 missions, according to Bennett. After the crew completed the 30th mission, it was sent home.
“They sent us home for 30 days,” Bennett recalled. “They figured all of us got married while we were home. After all of us had been home about 20 days or so, they sent a telegram that said if we had gotten married, to report to Miami Beach, Fla., and bring your wife with you. I did, and we got down there and we stayed 18 days down there in the Simone Hotel right there on Miami Beach. I got married when I came back in 1944, on Nov. 5.”
Life after combat
Bennett loved his wife, Gay, who he was married to for 74 years when she passed.
“We’ve had a while together,” he said. “I asked the Lord to give me a wife I could live with … and He did. She’s put up with me for 74 years. ... Her mom had been sick and she’d been taking care of things. She knew all about cooking and all that. We stayed down there 18 days and the Army paid for it. We went deep sea fishing and all that kind of stuff. Then they sent me to Texas and she went home.”
The Air Corps then sent Bennett to Laredo, Texas.
“They wanted to make me a teacher and I flunked out on that,” he said with a chuckle. “They said I told them too much. I said, ‘I wish somebody had told me before I went over there.’ They sent me somewhere else. She joined me.”
Gay Bennett shared a story about the trip out.
“He was supposed to be in Laredo,” she said. “I took the train out and he wasn’t there. I didn’t know anybody. I got back to Mississippi and he had sent me a telegram saying he was at Chandler Field in Arizona.”
Henry Bennett said he was stationed at Chandler Field doing what he called “routine” work.
“I was serving as a crew chief and working on these beat up, shot up old planes returning from the war,” he said. “They were all shot up and wasn’t fit to fly, but we flew some of them.”
Henry Bennett recalled the confined space of the B-24’s nose gun turret as he spoke about the old planes.
“It was pretty tight,” he said. “The B-24 turret was originally made by Consolidated, but the one I had was made by Emerson. It was electric and I could sit in it good.”
The nose gunner was a dangerous position at the front of the aircraft.
“It was out there in the front,” Henry Bennett said. “We had two 50 caliber guns with 1,000 rounds of ammunition in each one of them. Those guns were my possessions. ... I didn’t trust anybody with those guns; they were mine. That’s what kept us alive.”
Henry Bennett said he was lucky and didn’t have to shoot a lot during his missions.
“We had fighter planes that pretty much kept them off of us,” he said. “Our biggest trouble was anti-aircraft fire from down on the ground. That’s what hit us. It wasn’t enemy fighter.”
However, there were times when Henry Bennett did fire at German planes.
“I shot at a few of them and some of them went down,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Somebody asked me if I got any. I’m not sure if I did, but I did shoot down one of those V-2 rockets one time. Germany was launching those V-2s over to England. We called them putt-putts because when they ran out of fuel, they’d putt-putt and they’d fall. They had them set to fall in London. They pretty well leveled London. There would be a whole block without a building standing. We got several three-day passes and went to London.”
Bennett is proud of another accomplishment from his days on the B-24.
“I put in 30 missions and got the Distinguished Flying Cross,” he said. “That was the top medal I got. I got the Air Medal with several oak leaf clusters. We even got a presidential unit citation.”
But it wasn’t all roses and celebrations for the air crews after being shot at and dealing with a high number of missions.
“You just remember hearing the flak; boom, boom, boom,” Bennett said. “It would knock you around. After we survived almost being shot down, they sent us to a shrink. He gave us some brandy. We went to a rest home for about 18 days.”
In his later days, Bennett enjoyed staying at home with his wife as well as participating in veterans activities around the county.
“I’m a member of Post 90,” he said in 2017. “Bill Harris, our commander, also was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He flew helicopters in Vietnam.”
Harris said Bennett is an inspiration to the younger members at the Horatio Rankin post.
“We call Mr. Howard our celebrity member,” he said. “We feel very blessed to have him. He is absolutely an inspiration to us. His generation has such a great attitude. He’s a real leader for us. Nothing rocks him; he’s always ready to go.”
