Havoc veteran recalls D-Day

Antipodean Andy · Jun 10, 2008

Jacksonville.com

Frank Young tried to buy his way into D-Day, but no one would give up a seat.

Not even the most nervous guys, the guys who got so terrified they vomited during each flight.

As June 5, 1944, turned to June 6, Young, a 23-year-old with a syrupy North Carolina accent, wandered the airfield in Gosfield, England, looking for a way into the fight. It was a surreal scene - bustling, brightly lit up, as work crews rushed to paint big black and white stripes on the American planes before dawn, so they'd be easily distinguishable in the battle to come.

Finally. The invasion of Europe was on.

Young was an Army staff sergeant, a turret gunner in the Douglas A-20 Havoc, a swift twin-engine attack bomber. He had an eye for the women, and he had opened and finished more than a few bottles of booze. He was a hell-raiser, that's for sure. "Most of us were," he said.

As dawn on D-Day approached, he told his buddies he'd fly for them, man their guns. He'd give them $10 even, a good-sized chunk of change in those days. But everyone wanted in on this day.

"Oh, I wanted to see that big invasion," Young said. "That was something you didn't want to miss."

Young, sitting outside his Atlantic Beach home, tells how he knew what was coming: On a June 2 mission to soften up German defenses in Normandy, he'd seen the ships massing on England's southern coast.

On June 6, though, he had to sit at the base and watch as the waves of planes took off. A speaker mounted on a pole played music throughout the day, and gave occasional bits of news. No one told him much. "Not at my rank," he said. "They didn't ask my opinion."

On June 7 - D-Day Plus One - Young got his chance at action, in a plane that flew low to avoid radar, aiming for rail and road supply lines near the stretch of Normandy coast the Allies called Utah Beach.

With his A-20 moving at 300 mph, he glimpsed destroyed landing craft at the beach, parachutes in trees, crashed gliders and smoking rubble in the neatly patterned fields below.

And as the Allies took back Europe, mile by mile, Young had an overhead view of the action. Lots of it.

From May 4 to Nov. 9, 1944, he flew on 65 missions. He pushed his luck: His superiors wanted him to stop flying after 50 missions, but he volunteered for 15 more. In honor of his friend, Jimmy DiRago.

Sixty-three years later, Young still thinks of him. "It's been hard since World War II to have a friend as close as that. We screwed up together all the time."

They talked about going to Duke University together after all the fighting was over. DiRago would play football, and Young would run track. That was the plan, until DiRago was killed in the skies over Cologne, Germany.

"That day, I got myself a bottle," Young said, "I sat down next to a pot-bellied stove in operations, got bombed, wouldn't give anyone a drink of whiskey, and cried my eyes out."

It was nasty and dangerous in the skies over Europe. After missions, Young and his friends made a game of counting the holes in their planes. A few times they stopped counting at 100.

About one in three of the men he flew with didn't make it, he said. Young, though, had this way of getting through the fear: You couldn't think much about being scared, because then you would be scared. Circular logic, yes, but it worked for him.

His mother, back in Charlotte, wanted to know what it was like in the air, so he sat down and wrote her a letter with the horrible truth. He chuckles about it now: It probably would have been an "award-winning letter," he said, with all its gut-wrenching details about being buffeted by flak so heavy it blotted out the sun.

But when he finished the letter, he crumpled it up - she didn't need to read about that - and tossed it in that same pot-bellied stove. "It ate a lot of stories," he said.

Young- born Linville Franklin Young Jr. on March 12, 1921 - wrote many more stories in his life. He's 87 now, retired since 1985 after 27 years as a journalist at the Times-Union. He married his wife, Marian, in 1948, and they have two grown children.

He did end up going to Duke after the war, but he didn't run track. He'd packed on a few pounds, he says, from boozing between bombing missions. While he wasn't fat, he'd lost his skinny runner's body.

Young figures he had it relatively good in the air. After all, the guys on the ground were cold, hungry, filthy and wet, and he at least got to sleep in a bed at night.

By late 1944, he was back at an England air base, his tour in Europe over, ready to board a hospital ship to America. It was strange; he should have felt relieved but he was vaguely deflated. He was leaving friends, and had lost friends. The war would carry on without him.

He stood in formation with other departing bombardiers, all in their greasy, worn jackets. They were drawn-looking, tired, haunted. Nearby were new American pilots, headed for fresh battles. The kids were high-spirited - punching each other, laughing, horse-playing.

"They were just behind us, a year or so younger than we were, but we looked like old men already," Young said. "You change a lot in one year. You get wrinkles and crinkles, and not just from age."
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Pathfinder · Jun 10, 2008

Thanks for this really interesting article Andy

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