Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske

Henry Molepske enlisted in the Army Air Force at the age of 24. He was an armament gunner and crew chief on a B24 Bomber. He also loaded the bombs for the missions. "My job was, as we took off on the runways, were the bombs loaded. The bombs are all fused by a ground crew and then they got like a cotter pin, a safety pin. So as we get airborne and on our way in our group, then I go up in through the waist of the plane and I pull these pins out of each one. Now they're all ready to go. Mr. Molepske's plane traveled in a group of four squadrons. Each squadron consisted of ten B-24s, so he was flying in a formation of forty planes.

Even before he started his bombing missions, Mr. Molepske almost lost his life. When he and his crew were traveling from Maine to Newfoundland, the engineer accidentally let the tanks that supplied fuel to the engine, go dry. "In a B-24 they carry some 3000 gallons of fuel or more. And on the very end, on the wings tacks, they had a 250-gallon tank and a 250-gallon tank, one on each end of the wings. As the airplane flies, this puts extra weight on the wings, so you transfer the gasoline from here (points to wings) to the center so they fly better and use less fuel and so on. So we were halfway over Newfoundland and all at once we lost an engine. A B-24's got four engines. And we lost an engine. Then we lost another engine. We were traveling at 18,000 ft. All at once we had two engines going, just that we could maintain our level. And they picked up one of the engines. We called that- when you turn the props over- they call it feathering it. So they got this one engine going- so we had 3 engines- and then we got the other engine." Although they were traveling at a low altitude, Mr. Molepske and the rest of the crew managed to land safely and made it to the place they were headed for when they left.

The crew also had troubles when traveling from Wales to North Africa. "Every time an airplane comes in, there's a crew that checks the airplane, fills it up with gas, and all that. And then on top of the airplane they have what they call a dingy. And that's in case you have to land in the water. What happened that time on take off- the B-24s, they really rare up those engines. They give `er full throttle especially on these short runways. They inspected the dingy and they have little buttons that snap in here, snaps in here, I think there's four of `em. Evidently they didn't push hard enough to snap those in place, you see. Well we're not aware of that, we don't take care of that. So we took off from Whales. And we weren't too far off- maybe about a minute in the air, and `Bang!' something happened. We didn't know what. And here the cover flew off and the dingy flew out. It didn't inflate, but it spread out and wrapped around out vertical stabilizer. A B-24's got two of those in the back, stabilizers.

"Well anyway, that happened and so we didn't know what to do. There were a lot of planes taking off that morning. We took off at 4:30 in the morning. We called back and said something happened, we don't know what it is, but something happened and we have a hard time controlling the plane. So we were just above Portugal heading towards Africa when we turned around. We had to go back to Wales. We were up there at 20,000 ft. and we had to stay there because all the planes were taking off or flying in. We stayed up there until 9:30 in the morning. And finally we did land. We had landed once and the airplane, instead of going this way, it went off to the side. So we revved up and took off again. We didn't land actually, you see. We weren't straight with the runway. We tried it again, and the same thing happened. The third time we made it on the runway, but we went off the end of the runway and on to a field. And here we came to a dead stop. Looking ahead there about 75 feet, there's the English Channel. There you would drop about 200-300 feet down. We were lucky."

Henry Molepske had credit for forty-nine missions. His missions included Vienna, Salzburg-Rozenheim, and Brenner Pass. One of his most dangerous missions was at Lepine. The alternate target was Innsbruck. "They really nailed us. They were waiting for us. They start hitting us 50 miles before we got there. We were to hit a jet field outside of Munich, Germany. Here we are from Italy heading North and from the East here comes B-17s- 5th Army Esses. And we did scamper that time. We lost altitude. Boy, did we do some tricky stuff there. We lost our group and everything like that. See, we were really supposed to go to Lepine or Innsbruck. So we were maybe wrong by taking the third bomb run. So we were on a run for Munich. We dove down, lost control, considerable altitude, lost our formation. The pilot asked everyone to look out for the planes. In a short time we sighted our planes and pulled maximum power to catch up to them. And they were making a run for number two targets as we trailed. See, our group was gonna hit another target. So we trail about 2,000 ft. by ourselves and they had flak all around us. They liked to pick up on one, you know, get after one plane. The pilot saw where the flak was hitting, so he would go right or left. We made a good decoy alone, you know. We then joined another box and made a thirteen-ship box. And it was only three left of our original box of ten. We lost seven. But not necessarily that they all went down, but they maybe landed in some neutral area."

After the war in Germany was over, Mr. Molepske returned home for a short while, but was assigned to go to the Pacific. In the mean time the Japanese surrendered and the war ended, so he ended up not having to go.