Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the 2017 Profile edition, written by Mark Rogers, and is reprinted here with minor edits.
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.
“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, 97, 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. Although he and his unit were highly decorated, Bennett said the memories of his combat missions still haunt him. The biggest danger they faced was flak from anti-aircraft guns on the ground.
“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.”
GROWING UP
Bennett was raised in the northern part of Marion County in the Broom settlement.
“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, who turned 97 in December 2019, was just out of the CCC when World War II broke out. He was working at the Coney Isle restaurant in Hattiesburg when he got called to Camp Shelby.
“They gave me 10 days to go home and get ready. 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,” he said. “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 then headed to several locations for training, first mechanic school at Shepherd Field in West Virginia and then to gunner school at Tindall Field in Florida. He was in Utah when he got his orders to go to England as a nose gunner.
“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.’”
HEADING TO BATTLE
The squadron prepared to deploy to Europe and flew down through Puerto Rico and Brazil and from Brazil 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.”
When the crews landed, they were introduced to the African people.
“Some of them had feet so big that they couldn’t find shoes for them,” Bennett recalled. “Many of them had joined the French Foreign Legion. They had leggings on to their knees and their big feet sticking out. They also had those hats on. They had the uniform of the Foreign Legion. They told me they worshipped the sun. It’s hot here, but it is extremely hot there. We didn’t stay there but for a little while.”
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. I got used to the locals. We had fun. We hired a rickshaw, and we got out and put the men in it. We took them for a ride. We were just a bunch of boys.”
Bennett later headed to England to serve with his squadron in the Army Air Corps.
“We thought we might be headed to the Far East,” he said. “But we landed in Lands End, England. 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. The first night we got there, there was an American who had joined the Nazis; we called her Axis Sally. She came 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. They messed up the landing strip, but we fixed it.”
After a short period of training, the crew members joined their pilots and co-pilots.
“There was a crew of 10 on the B-24 at that time,” he said. “After some training, we started going on missions. 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.”
LIFE OF A GUNNER
The nose gun turret is highly exposed, on the front of the mammoth bomber. It is also a small, confined space.
“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.”
The nose gunner was armed with two 50-caliber guns with 1,000 rounds of ammunition in each of them.
“Those guns were my possessions. I had to take them out and put them in there and keep them oiled. If you put too much oil on them, they’d freeze up. You had to oil them and clean them when we got back from a mission. I didn’t trust anybody with those guns; they were mine. That’s what kept us alive,” he said. “I’d get them cleaned and get them set up just like I wanted them. If you put a cam in there wrong, the gun would jam. You had to do it right … it was your life. Your life depended on it.”
Bennett said he was lucky and didn’t have to shoot a lot during his missions because fighter planes mostly kept the German fighters away from the American bombers. However, there were times when he 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. It was pretty well torn up. There was one block with only one building standing. It was a church; it was a mess. They bombed it day after day, night after night. At night, you’d hear the sirens going all night. There would be enemy planes and V-2 rockets. Mostly it was V-2 rockets”
Bennett loves to joke that the B-17 Flying Fortress seemed to get most of the headlines over the B-24s he flew on.
“Maybe it was because they were a better looking plane,” he said. “They got most of the news media, and we did all the hard work. A B-24 could carry more bombs. It was a big old square thing that looked like a boxcar, but we could carry plenty of bombs. We were the workhorse, but we didn’t get much praise. They made all the movies about B-17s. Very little was mentioned about the B-24.”
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 (feet) 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. (The 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.
“Our belly turret gunner didn’t come back,” he said. “He promised the Lord that he’d never get back in an airplane if he would get him down there safe. He wouldn’t finish. He quit right then. They put someone in his place, and we went on the last four missions without having any trouble. I told him he should have gone.”
HEADING HOME
After the crew completed the 30th mission, it was sent home for 30 days.
“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,” he said. “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.
“She wasn’t but 16. I was robbing the cradle, but they grew up faster then. 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.”
Bennett and his wife, Gay, were married 74 years until her death in 2019.
The Air Corps first sent Bennett to Laredo, Texas, and then Chandler Field in Arizona before leaving the service.
He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with several oak leaf clusters, and his unit 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.”
“It was quite an experience, but we made the best of a tough situation,” he concluded. “I’m just glad God got us home.”
