Fred Wiese Recounts Courageous B-17 Missions Over WWII Europe

Announcer
00:02 – 00:32
World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and our other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. These stories will touch your heart, inspire you, and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Monson.

Kim Monson
00:37 – 01:19
Welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website, americasveteranstories.com. And the show began because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans, World War II D-Day veterans, back to Normandy, France for the anniversary of the D-Day landings. returns to stateside realizing that these stories, each of them are unique, they need to be recorded and broadcast and archived, so hence America’s Veterans Stories. I am thrilled and honored to be here with Fred Wiese. He’s 99 years old. He’ll turn 100 in October. and he was a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II.

Kim Monson
01:20 – 01:42
And we didn’t even really get to when you were flying your combat missions. So where we left off in part one, Fred, was you’d been in formation and your plane was shaking significantly. So you got out of formation and what was it? Somebody came out and met you on the tarmac and take it from there.

Fred Wiese
01:42 – 02:30
Well, the guy was a… squadron maintenance officer. And he got in the airplane and said, everybody off. My crew was on it. And everybody off except you. That was what he was pointing at me. And so we got in the airplane. He said, I’m going to prove to you there’s nothing wrong with this airplane. So we got in and got the engines going. We taxied out. just got on the runway and took off just as we broke ground. He could feel it shaking. He started yelling, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. And we went around the circuit to come back into land.

Fred Wiese
02:32 – 03:36
And he was shaking severely. But I never heard another word about it after that. Never heard another word subsequent to that. It was a battery cover that had come loose. And I had no idea about that. No one had any idea what would happen there. And it’s fastened down on the inboard side of the number two engine, and just between it and the fuselage. And so consequently, they must have had a lot of irregular wind resistance and it fluttered a lot and we couldn’t do a thing about it. Well, we went into, we took care of that and I had to go back into formation for the rest of the day in formation of a different airplane.

Fred Wiese
03:38 – 04:27
So I never did hear a bit about it as I said earlier. So that happened during another time as I was in another aircraft as we were going down on a cross country. I was near Lincoln at the time and it happened again, different airplane. So we sat down there and we had to wait for the maintenance to repair that and make a new one. This was a depot of all things and they didn’t have that part. So from there we were assigned to get, I went back to Rapid City. From there we came, we finished the course and we got orders to go to Lincoln.

Fred Wiese
04:28 – 05:24
And we’d get the new airplane, that one that we would ferry over to England. So we got that started. I got to Lincoln and just got that started in order to do a compass swing on it for both day and night and all navigation instruments. And we did that in daytime and that next night we got up and did the other thing. And everybody seemed to be satisfied that all things were working well. So we signed it off and on the 15th of September, We had orders to go to Grineer Field, New Hampshire, that day.

Fred Wiese
05:25 – 06:35
We would R.O. in there, and then we would take off for Britain, which we did. We got to Grineer Field about 4.30 in the afternoon, I think. I don’t know for sure what the hours were. But we landed there and we got into a place to where we could sleep and rest. And we got an early call to fly up to Nova Scotia, Goose Bay. Newfoundland, I’m sorry. Goose Bay, Newfoundland. So we got there. And my flight engineer noted in his recollection of everything that happened that when I got there I suddenly turned sick. I had forgotten about it.

Fred Wiese
06:35 – 07:43
I was hospitalized for three or four days. Bad cold or something. Well, just before our departure time was listed, I got out of the hospital. And we started out in the middle of the night, I think about midnight, and as we were flying, About two hours out, I asked for a position fix from the navigator. He didn’t answer. He didn’t come back and give me a report. So I called him again, and he said, well, I don’t have a light in my section. Oh boy, we didn’t like him that much after that. So I had remembered in our briefing that they had said that there are situations like this.

Fred Wiese
07:44 – 08:37
where the equipment doesn’t work the second time. And you should line up, if you get over Greenland, line up between BW-1 and BW-3, I believe it was, and take a, get a compass heading that will give you, and just go on time. It was at the time, and we had the time in our minds what it should be when we arrived. Well, we did that and we arrived in Iceland at about the right time and slept for the day. It was morning when we got there. The next evening, we got a call. We were getting off at three in the morning, I think.

Fred Wiese
08:38 – 09:33
Close to that, five maybe. But I don’t have his hours. But the situation was that they also briefed us. He said, you know, you’ve got to be aware of the Northern Lights. I’d never had any idea there were things like that. I’d never heard of them before. Well, I was transfixed with that, too, when we got taken off. And they said, be careful, because they’ll fool you. So I’d drive your instruments. And I was looking out at the windows. looking at the windscreen and all of a sudden I realized we’re going down. So I pulled that column back right now.

Fred Wiese
09:34 – 10:30
And I’m sure we were very close to water. But it was a strange thing. So we went to our assigned altitude. And like kids, young people, we didn’t pay too much attention or near failure. I got the autopilot set up. and on course, and I said, Kurt, take it over. I’ve got, I want 15 minutes of sleep, of napping. Well, much later, evidently, in daylight, we woke up. And I said, where are we? And everybody came alive. They’d all been asleep. Well, we didn’t know that, but we couldn’t get a radio fixed for a long time.

Fred Wiese
10:30 – 11:26
I cranked it into going toward the east so I could get away from that big ocean. And we finally got a fix. The radio operator was a sharp-hearing man named… I’ll give it to you in a minute. He got us a position fix and they told us which direction to take the landfall and we were to land at Valley Wales. So we got to Valley Wales probably an hour later. and I mean an hour late than I should have been, and landed. And upon landing, first thing I heard, a man aborted the aircraft and off there.

Fred Wiese
11:27 – 11:34
And he says, it’s my airplane now. Get everything that belongs to you off of it and give me your dog.

Kim Monson
11:37 – 11:37
Give me your what?

Fred Wiese
11:38 – 12:45
Give me your dog. We had taken a puppy along with us. Apparently, everybody had tried that. I thought we’d get away with it, but we didn’t. We must have had a spy someplace in the States. We don’t know. Okay, we arrived at the Valley of Whales and After that, he told us, get off and there’ll be a truck waiting for you to take you to your place to go. So I just learned from my flight engineer’s remarks that we went to Stone, England. stone and obviously it was a place where they brought in all the pilots and all of the crewmen and it was a staging area I suppose.

Fred Wiese
12:47 – 13:04
And I’ve often wondered, over the years, where did we go to when we got finished with our mission? Well, they’d take us back to Stone, and then they’d put us on the vehicles we were going to fly or ride back on to the States.

Kim Monson
13:06 – 13:07
Okay, what year

Fred Wiese
13:07 – 13:13
was this, Fred? This is 42, 3. No, 44, I’m sorry. 1944. Yeah, September 44. Go ahead. Okay, let’s go to break. I’m

Kim Monson
13:13 – 13:15
talking with Fred Wiese, a B-17 World

Fred Wiese
13:15 – 13:17
War II pilot, and when we come back

Kim Monson
13:17 – 13:18
we’ll start to talk

Fred Wiese
13:18 – 13:19
about these

Kim Monson
13:19 – 14:05
mini-missions. that he was on as well. Before we go to break, though, I want to just acknowledge a great sponsor of the show, and that is Tricia Hood. And this is in memory of her husband, Donald Hood, who is a Vietnam veteran, as well as her daughter, Chelsea Hood Russell. And we did an interview with Tricia recently regarding Don’s experience and She so appreciates what we’re doing here that she said that she would like to support our work here. And so just wanted to say thank you to Tricia Hood for doing that. We’re going to go to break.

Kim Monson
14:05 – 14:07
We’ll be right back with Fred Wiese.

Speaker 11
14:08 – 14:40
REMAX Realtor Karen Levine helps bring to life the individual stories of our servicemen and women. With her sponsorship of America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson, Karen honors the sacrifices of our military and is grateful for our freedom. As a member of the National Association of Realtors Board of Directors, Karen works to protect private property rights for all of us. Karen has a heart for our active duty military and veterans and is honored to help you buy or sell your home. Call Karen Levine at 303-877-7516 to help you navigate buying or selling your home. That’s 303-877-7516.

Speaker 6
14:50 – 15:08
All of Kim’s sponsors are an inclusive partnership with Kim and are not affiliated with or in partnership with KLZ or Crawford Broadcasting. If you would like to support the work of The Kim Monson Show and grow your business, contact Kim at her website, KimMonson.com. That’s Kim Monson, M-O-N-S-O-N dot com.

Kim Monson
15:20 – 15:44
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. Thrilled to be doing part two of the interview with Fred Wiese, 99 years old, B-17 pilot. You’re now in England. You’d ferried this plane over to England and then gave it up. An officer came on and said that plane was his then. So then what happens?

Fred Wiese
15:45 – 16:59
Well then, after we had gotten to Stone, I suppose we were indoctrinated in various things and various modes of information. about our new location. And then on the 24th, 23rd or 4th of September, we were put on a train to Peterborough, England. And when we got to Peterborough, we were also met by a person on the on the platform, told us to get our equipment and meet it out there at that truck. And that was the Pohlbrook truck, Pohlbrook Air Base. So we took that ride out to the air base and checked in with the station commander and he assigned us to 508 Squadron.

Fred Wiese
17:02 – 18:16
of the 351st Bomb Group and I think 494th Wing and also the First Air Division of the the ATF force in England. ETO, the European Theater of Operations. Okay. So this is now on the 24th or 25th of September. I had in my mind all along that we had moved directly from Wales, but I couldn’t figure out how we did that. Now it showed up in this biography that my flight engineer had written, and he had written down a little comment about every mission we flew.

Announcer
18:16 – 18:16
Wow.

Fred Wiese
18:17 – 18:46
Well, we did a lot of things. We went through lots of ground school again and we did things like fly night missions on just local area. We would slow time engines for them. In other words, an engine had been replaced or something on an aircraft, you have to slow time it in order to break it in.

Kim Monson
18:46 – 18:47
Okay.

Fred Wiese
18:47 – 18:56
And we would fly for an hour or two with it at less RPMs than we had the other three engines going.

Kim Monson
18:56 – 18:56
Okay.

Fred Wiese
18:57 – 20:00
So it wasn’t much of that. We also went to have some crew We had a nice base to go to, APO 110. And where we were located on the base to billet was right next to the officer’s club for the airmen. It was all on the airmen’s side of the base. All the other people that worked on the base all the time, not airmen, had another area adjacent to the place about a half a mile away, and they were out in the forest. Well that was pretty neat for them. I didn’t recognize that for a long time.

Fred Wiese
20:01 – 20:56
But we had a theater over there in that group and we on the main base now primarily we had all the PX and we had a parachute tower repacking area. We had all of the operations was over there, we had a briefing room there, we had one of the very large hangars that would take about three B-17s at a time, and we had another hangar that was identified for certain others that worked, and we had a machine shop. We had the chaplain’s quarters there on that base. We had the headquarters for the wing on that base.

Fred Wiese
21:02 – 21:24
I was assigned to a squadron. The squadron operations officer and commander was a Jamie Stewart. Boy, I thought, boy, we got it all made. But it was another James Stewart.

Kim Monson
21:24 – 21:26
It wasn’t the actor Jamie Stewart.

Fred Wiese
21:26 – 21:35
No, Jamie Stewart was there at the same time. But he was up in the northeast part of the

Kim Monson
21:35 – 21:36
island.

Fred Wiese
21:38 – 22:15
So from there on we had to do a lot of missions of just flying for just doing some orientation things and stuff like that. And we went up probably with a squadron flight officer. I don’t remember all those things, but I do remember that we had a lot of stand-downs at that time, and the weather was just beginning to come in, the winter weather. It was the first of October.

Kim Monson
22:16 – 22:18
And the stand down is because of weather?

Fred Wiese
22:18 – 22:43
Yeah, primarily. Either that or the stand down was primarily weather. But it would be the whole group or sometimes it would be the whole Air Force because of the weather. And finally on the 15th of October we had our first mission and it was to Cologne.

Kim Monson
22:47 – 22:48
And it was a bombing mission, obviously. A

Fred Wiese
22:48 – 23:36
bombing mission, yes. And it was my first introduction to seeing that flight. It was my first introduction to fear of that kind. I tell you, we were cold up there. It was very cold. Most of the winter, it was one of the hardest winters they had in many years in that country. And temperatures were always low, or rainy, or fog, things of that nature. And then later, snow. And so, you have to get used to that kind of thing. Well, my feet were cold. I looked up there and we got on the bombing run. It was called the IP, initial point.

Fred Wiese
23:38 – 24:32
We had to all be very cautious and we followed our leaders and we would be flying in a sort of a three bird position. The lead pilot was in the middle and forward and the two wingmen and there was generally a tail end Charlie. And I flew that several times as a new pilot. They put us down there. And so I’m flying below him and making a diamond out of it. I suppose I saw that flash and my feet just warmed up just almost immediately. And I thought, well, that can’t hurt too much. It just puffs, just

Kim Monson
24:32 – 24:32
puffs.

Fred Wiese
24:33 – 25:16
When we got into it, we found out it does hurt. I didn’t get hit that I know of on that first mission, but we got shaken. because all the time that you’re on that IP, you’re trying to stay in position with a lead to everybody. Well, that’s an impossibility. If that flack goes off under you, you go up. Flack is above you, you go down. Flack is on the one side or the other, you bobble both back and forth. Oh my gosh. And it was terrible to try to stay in this position, but they wanted us to be close.

Fred Wiese
25:18 – 25:34
Well, many times we would almost overrun. the lead aircraft for some reason or another, or by overrunning, I mean wings overlapping, as it were. And that was too close.

Kim Monson
25:35 – 25:35
Yeah,

Fred Wiese
25:36 – 25:37
it was always spread out a little bit, but

Kim Monson
25:38 – 25:38
we

Fred Wiese
25:38 – 25:40
learned. We had to learn the hard way.

Kim Monson
25:42 – 25:43
And you learn fast, don’t you? I

Fred Wiese
25:43 – 25:44
had to learn

Kim Monson
25:44 – 26:18
fast. You have to learn fast to survive. Hey, Fred, we’re going to go to break. I’m talking with Fred Wiese, a B-17 World War II bomber pilot. Before we do that, though, another sponsor of the show is Hooters Restaurants. They have five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. And they become business partners of mine. It’s really a story about free markets, freedom, and capitalism. And so be sure and check that out at my website at KimMonson.com. And we’ll be right back with Fred Wiese. But before we go to break, I want to talk with Karen Levine.

Kim Monson
26:18 – 26:40
She is a great sponsor of both the shows. America’s Veterans Stories, I know, is near and dear to your heart. And our show today is Fred Wiese, 99-year-old, World War II, B-17 bomber pilot. And it’s so great to not just read about history, but to hear history from the people that lived it. And so Karen, I so appreciate your partnership on this show.

Speaker 2
26:40 – 26:59
Well, American Veteran Stories is an amazing show from the standpoint, the stories that you’re bringing to your listeners, and just the history that can be relived and preserved. And I think that’s amazing. And I just have the privilege of working with veterans in the housing market. And that is a joy.

Kim Monson
27:00 – 27:17
Okay. And there are still great opportunities for veterans. There are special financing. We’ll talk to to Lauren Levy about that here soon, but special financing options for them. And I know that it’s it really brings you joy to help help everybody in their buying and selling of homes, but particularly veterans.

Speaker 2
27:17 – 27:53
Yes, and in the pursuit of home ownership, the nice thing that the government has done is provided the VA loan, which allows a veteran to get into a house without a down payment, with no money down. And that is a benefit. They’ve had challenges in the marketplace over these last years with what was known as appraisal gap and having cash for that. But the market is changing and the need for abundance cash for appraisal gapping is becoming less necessary. So that’s creating opportunity for more veterans to be able to get into the housing market and be successful.

Speaker 2
27:54 – 28:07
And there are some builders in the marketplace that are willing to do some things for veterans as well. An example would be putting in a radon system at the builder’s cost and not charging that to the veteran.

Kim Monson
28:07 – 28:16
Okay. And so you can help people, though, buy, sell new bills as well. Is a new bill different for veterans, or do they also…

Speaker 2
28:17 – 28:32
They can still do the same financing, and like I said, there are some builders that appreciate the service of the veteran, and so they will give additional incentives to the veteran. And I can help navigate both new construction, buying a new home, or a home on the resale market.

Kim Monson
28:33 – 28:44
Right. And just to note on new construction, it’s important to have somebody on your side of the table. And that’s why all you need to do is just have Karen out there with you when you go in and and check out that new build as well.

Speaker 2
28:45 – 28:53
So if you’re contemplating new construction, give me a call and let’s make that visit together. That’s all the builder asks that I accompany you on your first visit.

Kim Monson
28:53 – 28:54
Okay. And what’s your phone number?

Speaker 2
28:54 – 28:58
My number is 303-877-7516. And

Kim Monson
28:59 – 29:07
that’s Karen Levine with RE-MAX Alliance, 303-877-7516. Karen, thank you. We’re going to go to break and we’ll be right back with Fred Wiese.

Speaker 4
29:07 – 29:51
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29:53 – 30:33
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Kim Monson
30:47 – 31:20
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is americasveteranstories.com. And I’m thrilled to be with Fred Wiese. He’s 99 years old, B-17 bomber pilot in World War II. And we’re now talking about you’ve had your first mission. And what is the flak exactly? It detonates around, I know that they would try to, the enemy would try to figure out your altitude and try to hit you, correct? And then what, pieces would break up or what did it look like exactly?

Fred Wiese
31:21 – 32:11
Those shells would come up and they were timed for a certain altitude or something, I think. and they’d just blow up. And what they would do is they spent a whole bunch of shrapnel. And if one of those shells came up and went through a wing or something like that, and it was timed right, it would blow the airplane up. Right. Or if it happened right below you, it could still do it, or above you. So it just was a terrible thing to have to put up with. We fortunately got through it. And I guess we had some holes or something in the aircraft, because it was all just aluminum.

Fred Wiese
32:12 – 32:13
It was easy to puncture.

Speaker 1
32:13 – 32:14
Wow.

Fred Wiese
32:15 – 32:24
At any rate, we got out of that mission, and well, that was a relief to get one out of the way.

Kim Monson
32:25 – 32:27
And the closer you got to your target, the more flak you

Fred Wiese
32:28 – 33:26
got. Oh, yeah, of course. They had concentrated it, and they were using radar. And one of the subsequent missions, we were probably about on the 15th of September, we were on a screening mission above it, above the formation. We were a couple of thousand feet above them, so we could put this aluminum chaff on there to dampen the ability for the radar to be seen properly. And that’s what the ultimate desire was. that we would get up there ahead of the formation slightly. We were going down the same track that they were going in, same identical track, but we were a couple thousand feet above them.

Fred Wiese
33:27 – 34:11
And you know, in the wintertime, you never know where the clouds are. And so consequently, we got up there and dropped our chaff about the time, we have no idea if we were on time or not. Because by that time we had a layer of clouds between us. So while we were in there, something, we lost our number four engine. And so I went out of the formation and headed toward the west. I knew I had to go west. And we got out of formation and came home, and from that mission at a thousand feet.

Fred Wiese
34:13 – 35:11
Well, we dropped down to a thousand feet because it was icing and raining. I didn’t know all about that until I read my engineer’s report, but he mentioned little tidbits in every one of his days. So you know, we were alone at that time. I had led that element and I had to get away from them when that engine went out. So we got home all right. But that was one of those first experiences. We had, from there on we had, and that was probably on the 17th mission, I think. Yeah, to call Germany, K-A-L-L.

Fred Wiese
35:14 – 36:20
Now I flew a total of thirty-five missions. Thirty-five had been a new edict after we got there. Up to that time it was thirty missions. At the very beginning of our 8th Air Force mission over there. They started out with 25 missions because the kill rate was so bad and they lost so many airplanes early in the days when the Nazis were up there with lots of aircraft and we had the P-38s and P-47s over there as our safety guys. I have recently met a fellow here where I live, Dick Gibbs, who was a P-51 pilot.

Fred Wiese
36:20 – 36:31
He got there in December of 1944. But he says he hated to go on a mission with us. He said we were fine to go.

Kim Monson
36:34 – 36:34
He said we couldn’t

Fred Wiese
36:35 – 36:36
throttle down that

Kim Monson
36:36 – 36:36
far

Fred Wiese
36:37 – 37:51
because we didn’t have good control of our airplane at that time. We were a little bit slow at going, I think maybe 160 miles an hour at all, 150. And we had to keep it that slow because otherwise you couldn’t stay in formation properly. You’re using too much fuel and so forth. whatever they figured out themselves over there, the commanders did. And so we followed their rules. And now we had some close calls, many of them, I’m sure. You know, the good Lord takes care of you sometimes, even though you’re a fool. And I’m sure that that had a lot of validity in our safe flying, and nobody ever got hurt with all my crew.

Fred Wiese
37:52 – 38:04
Wow. Seriously. They’d get bumps and screws and stuff like that from different things, but we were fortunate that no one got hurt physically much.

Kim Monson
38:05 – 38:05
Wow.

Fred Wiese
38:07 – 39:10
So I went back down to the missions. Each of them was different. Each of them went different places. Each of them went different times and total times in here. I think our longest ones were to Berlin, a couple of them. The end of January, we’re getting close to our 30th mission. And that 30th mission, a co-pilot, my co-pilot’s name was Curtis Ashe. He was a good guy, young guy. He never wanted to be in a B-17. He wanted to be a B-51 pilot. But he was chosen to fly as a co-pilot for me. Not by my choice, but it was so he dictated.

Fred Wiese
39:11 – 40:13
So, after 30 missions, the co-pilot has got the authority to choose if he’d like to be a pilot in command of the crew, and he chose to do that. So on his thirty-second, on my thirty-second mission and his second, he got hit over the I thought it was a Friesian island, but it was in Denmark or something in that area. Or Belgium, I’m not sure. But it’s on the west coast of Europe. And he got hit by a flak and his airplane went down. And my engineer notes that he saw one chute come out of it, that’s all.

Fred Wiese
40:14 – 40:44
But the airplane landed on the ground, right side up, that we know. So it probably went through some water and came back on dry land or something of that nature. We don’t know, I know Kurt was put in, later I found out he was in Stalin Luft somewhere. He’d been captured.

Kim Monson
40:44 – 40:45
Oh my gosh.

Fred Wiese
40:46 – 41:36
And I suppose that part of the crew got captured too. I have never heard the full story on that. So I do know that my flight engineer made notes that he said, why is it that good guys like that bunch go down and get hurt? And you know, they’re all good guys. And they all had a mission to do. Now I’m going to go back a step and say that at one time after about four or five missions, My crew came to me one day and said, okay, Lieutenant, we’re not going to fly with you anymore if you don’t get rid of that navigator.

Fred Wiese
41:39 – 42:21
I said, well. I went in to see my commanding officer, the squadron commander, and I think I took my co-pilot and my engineer and radio operator with me. I told him what had happened and the many things that he had done. The crews had made it clear to me that they were not going to fly with me any longer if I didn’t get rid of him. The commander did a little research and took him off my airplane. So now we had nine people.

Kim Monson
42:22 – 42:23
They didn’t replace him?

Fred Wiese
42:23 – 43:20
didn’t replace him. As a matter of fact, my bombardier was probably a better navigator than he was. I don’t know that. His name was John Leipzig. John Leipzig. Well, he had been a real on our side, he loved to just watch and listen to the radio, the radio compass, which you could grab onto any music station that you could find. And you know, we’re over land, and they had radio stations going, and Germans liked to listen to music too. So of course he had no way to transmit to them, so we know he was not doing that.

Kim Monson
43:21 – 43:22
But he just wasn’t really getting the job done.

Fred Wiese
43:22 – 44:22
He was not doing the job. And we finished our mission now. The last mission was done on February 23rd to Plohn, Germany. P-L-O-N. This is by the registry that came from my squadron. So I have to assume that this is right. I don’t know. Upon getting back from every mission, we had a chance to debrief amongst the intelligence people, and they would ask us certain questions. What did you see that was important today? All I could say was a lot of airplanes.

Kim Monson
44:22 – 45:04
A lot of airplanes. Okay, let’s go to break. I’m talking with Fred Weese, World War II B-17 pilot. Before we do that, though, the nonprofit that I am supporting is the USMC Memorial Foundation, and they’re raising money to remodel the Marine Memorial out at 6th and Colfax. And if you want to help them, you can donate at usmcmemorialfoundation.org. That’s usmcmemorialfoundation.org. Or you can buy a brick to honor your loved one or yourself. And it’ll be on one of the walkways that they will have there as they do this remodel. So again, that’s usmcmemorialfoundation.org. We’ll be right back with Fred Wiese.

Speaker 9
45:05 – 45:32
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Speaker 10
45:34 – 45:50
Call now. You’d like to get in touch with one of the sponsors of The Kim Monson Show, but you can’t remember their phone contact or website information. Find a full list of advertising partners on Kim’s website, KimMonson.com. That’s Kim, M-O-N-S-O-N dot com.

Announcer
45:51 – 45:56
from the mountains to the prairie.

Kim Monson
45:58 – 46:21
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is americasveteranstories.com. And I’m thrilled to be here with Fred Wiese, 99 years old, B-17 bomber pilot in World War II, 35 missions. Just fascinating, Fred. What do you want to make sure that our listeners know? We’re down to our final segment. You got a story for us?

Fred Wiese
46:23 – 47:33
Yeah, I’d like to go back to a mission we did to, obviously, to castle Germany on the 16th of December. We evidently got through that mission all right, but we had to When we got back to Britain on landing, we found that it was all fogged in. So we were diverted to a place called Bath, England. or Bath was in that town, Bath, England. And we were housing relatively new quarters up there. One quarter of the city was brand new, sitting on a hillside, I remember that. And they had apartments that were all the same, and they were stacked up the hill in circular form around the hill.

Fred Wiese
47:34 – 48:35
And we were building it in one of those. Whether it had any heat or not, I don’t know. I don’t remember that it did, but I don’t remember that it didn’t. No one had ever occupied those buildings. So we were there for several days because the weather kept us down. And then on the 24th, in the early morning, they awakened us and said, every airplane that’s flyable and every crew that’s here will be on this mission. This is an M.E. that means Major Effort, Maximum Effort, something of that nature. Anyhow, then we went to that mission.

Fred Wiese
48:36 – 49:32
We were attached to a different group. And we were told that it would be at a briefing. We went to Biblis. B-I-B-L-I-S. I don’t know what that was, what it was. But it was a terrible, rough one. And when we got through it, we got to the British coast again. I just took off and went flying over to our air base. But all along, we could see the fog getting deeper. It was deepening. That means it was going up higher. As we got closer, that meant there was much more depth of fog. when we got to our home base.

Fred Wiese
49:33 – 50:32
Well, off in that distance, I had noticed before, to the northeast of our airfield, about 40, 50 miles, we could see smoke coming up there. And one time I’d flown over it and I saw what it was. It was a British station where they had Lancasters. a big four-engine aircraft, bigger than the one that was made for land. And they had troughs built alongside each side of the main runway, east-west runway. And then the troughs, obviously they put fuel, probably some cheap fuel, and it would burn and light it and it would burn and cause heat to come up and bring the fog away, burn the fog away.

Fred Wiese
50:32 – 51:30
Fascinating. For their landing. Now this was after they had been on a mission at night. So they have to have a place to bring that airplane back into it. It’s called FIDO, Fog Intensive Dispersal Operation. So I said to the guys, I’m going to land there. I don’t want to try to get down, go down through fog and then miss. And so I did it. I got lined up. I tried very often to get some radio contact with those people who were on different circuits from us, different, well, whatever. I could not make contact. I finally did, just decided to go in and land.

Fred Wiese
51:30 – 52:13
Now I couldn’t get the airplane to go down. It had so much heat, so much buoyancy there. So I stuck the column forward and forced it down. And we finally got it just about on the ground. And we were closing in on that wall of fog up ahead of us. So I pushed it a little harder and got it down on the ground. And we both got on the brakes and I dumped the sticks all the way forward. And we came to a screeching halt just as we went into the into that bank of cloud, and at the same time, there’s no lighting behind me anymore.

Fred Wiese
52:15 – 52:26
What happened? Well, it had just burned off. It had burned out. It shut it down. So we got in just at the tail end of it.

Speaker 1
52:27 – 52:27
Wow.

Fred Wiese
52:27 – 53:12
And we sat there for a long time with the engine shut down, and finally a vehicle came by. and the guy got out of that vehicle and he had a pistol in his hand and he got back in his vehicle and went in and a whole bunch of cars came out. Apparently they all circled around the airplane and said, who are you? How’d you get in here? How long have you been here? All those questions. And so we identified ourselves and told them what group we belonged to and where we were from. And then they took us into operations and identified us.

Fred Wiese
53:13 – 54:16
And this was on Christmas Eve, the 24th of December. So that night, it evidently had been very cold. And the fog had been very thick and it evidently iced the airplane very thoroughly to at least a quarter or maybe greater ice level on it. And we were told never to fly the airplane with the icing. So these people had taken us in. I had never been to a British breakfast of any sort, and they had on that evening some special guests to make some announcements and to tell stories and all that stuff. It was a very formal thing in the Officers Club.

Fred Wiese
54:17 – 55:12
And the three of us sat down and pretty soon a ruckus of noise came. And our guys came in, all my crew, they just literally broke into that group of people and made a mess for me. And they kept yelling, well, we’d like to get some food, too. We’re hungry. So they took them all in and shut them up that way. And they fed us and then we got out of there. And they put us up for the night somewhere. The next morning, it’s Christmas Day now, I called the station and told them I’d like to come back home if I could.

Fred Wiese
55:12 – 56:01
They said, no, you stay where you are. We’re fogged in. I said, okay. And then I called back about another hour. They said, stay where you are and we’ll call you when we want you. And about that time, one of my guys came in and said, Phil’s got the guys out there pulling props through. I said, what’s that for? He said, well, we’re going to start the engine if we can. It’s cold as Dickens out here, and we’ve got a lot of ice on the airplane. After another time, I called and they said it was starting to break a little bit.

Fred Wiese
56:02 – 56:48
I said, good. So we talked about it for a while. We ran the engines up and found out they were okay. The engineer had done that. We got in the airplane and took off. Now we couldn’t see out the windscreen, because it was full of ice. So we opened the side windows, and we did our look out there, and I went up to the end of the runway that we came in on, and got squared in the middle of the runway, and we both looked out our windows, and I put the power to it, and we took off.

Kim Monson
56:49 – 56:59
Oh my gosh. Fred, we are just about out of time, so 30 seconds. What’s the final thought you’d like to leave with our listeners?

Fred Wiese
56:59 – 57:43
Well, it was an experience that after looking at it, I enjoyed it because I learned a whole lot. I had completed my mission. I had not heard anybody hurt and I went away happy. I never had a bad night because of that. No PTSD or whatever D and nothing of that nature. I feel God bless me and our crew. and no questions about it. We probably have done more bad things and good things, but he’s still loving us.

Kim Monson
57:43 – 57:56
Oh my gosh. Fred Wiese, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. I so appreciate it. Thank you. And my friends, indeed, we do stand on the shoulders of giants. God bless you and God bless America.

Announcer
57:58 – 58:08
Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m. here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.

Speaker 1
58:14 – 58:28
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ Management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.