Historic Laredo

then traveled to Wichita Falls. It had been 85° in
Laredo when we left. When we got to Wichita, it
had been sleeting and was 22°,” he continued.
“Though they said they would keep us together,
they split us up pretty quickly. I ended up in
Oklahoma City and entered a one-year flight
cadet program. We took military flight classes in
single engine planes. I soloed in an Aereonca
closed cockpit, single engine prop plane. The
flight cadet program was very aggressive and
strict about comportment and dress. After about
nine months, we were sent to California for
another round of tests to see how well suited we
were to flying. A flaw in my depth perception
kept me from piloting, but it did not keep me
from being a crew member,” Guerra said.
“We went to armor school in Denver to learn
everything about the machine guns on B-24s. We
were then sent to the gunnery school at Laredo
Air Field for four months to fly and fire from AT-
6 trainers at a decoy plane pulling a wind sock
target. We honed our marksmanship skills on the
ground with 12 gauge shotguns and clay targets.
We were also building up our physical stamina
with running and calisthenics. Ismael Montalvo
was our coach,” Guerra recalled.
“We shipped out to California and then to
Tonopah, Nevada, which is where we took our B-
24 training. We had now formed into a 10-man
crew. We agreed that we would rotate the turret
position, which was the hardest of positions
because you had to fit yourself upside down into
a very small hatch that screwed down and was
lowered hydraulically. We flew practice runs to
San Francisco and Los Angeles, and after 30 days
shipped out from Hamilton Field by troop train
to New Jersey. It took us three days. I remember
the coal exhaust and the coal dust from that trip.
We boarded a troop ship to cross the Atlantic.
The ship was filled with bunks, eight bunks high.
It carried thousands of us. It took us five days to
cross the Atlantic in a convoy. We were flanked
by supply ships, destroyers, and submarines. The
convoy tacked across the sea to keep from being
a target for enemy submarines,” he said.
“We docked in southern England, and were
then sent to Tibenham, a very small town that
was the B-24 base for the 8th Air Force. The 8th
Air Force was two-thirds B-17s and one-third B-
24s. We were sent to a small town in Ireland for
10 days to learn from gunners who had combat
experience. They were so elated to be back and
finished. We returned to Tibenham to prepare.
There was not a great deal of information from
the officers about how the war was going. We
read the London newspapers and sometimes listened
to Axis Sally on the German propaganda
radio station. She would tell you how many of
our planes had been shot down and name the
men on those planes. We believed we were winning
the war,” he said.
“There were 32 planes in service at Tibenham.
We lived in Quonset huts filled with folding
metal cots, a door at each end, and a coal heater.
We were awakened each morning at 3 a.m., fed
breakfast, and then briefed. A red string on a
map of Europe told you where you were going
on that mission. We went to the planes and started
them, checked the guns, and prepared to take
off. Our first strike was about 600 miles away in
Dessau, Germany, a refining town. We flew off in
formation, two B-24s on our right, but stepped
down from each other. We were the third plane
in the step. At Dessau, the topmost plane was hit
by flak. It went down and hit the second plane.
A ball of fire of both planes shooting out empty
parachutes was coming to us and would have hit
us except that it exploded in the air. We flew
through the wreckage of that explosion. I was in
the tail and could only hear by radio what had
happened. No one survived. Twenty men who
had been with us in the mess hall that morning
were gone,” Guerra continued.
“There was a crew of Mexican airmen from
New York who didn’t speak Spanish. I used to
❖
B-24 armor gunner Sgt. José María
Guerra of the U.S. Army Air Corps
flew 35 missions over Germany out of
a base at Tibenham, England. He was
a member of a 10-man crew, one of
37 crews that flew from Tibenham to
thwart Nazi aggressions.
COURTESY OF JOSÉ MARÍA GUERRA
Chapter VI ✦ 45