Rowland and Nan Ball August 2000

"I'll never forget that first day on base. I walked out to the flight line to look at a B-29. That was the biggest airplane in our Air Corps and it looked awesome. You wondered if it would get off the ground.

The training of our Group, the 39th Bomb Group, and our Squadron, the 60th did not get off to a "flying start", mainly because of maintenance of the aircraft. We never had enough airplanes in flyable condition so that we could meet all our flight requirements.

I think that one's survival in wartime depends upon a lot of luck. I think that I sure had my share of it starting right here.

I was behind in my flying time because I had been moving around the country quite a bit lately and had not been flying. If we did not get in at least four hours of flight time in a three-month period we could not get flight pay for the next month. I did not have four hours and was running out of time. I went to Group Operations to see if anyone would be flying that night and I could go along as observer so I could get my time in. Yes, Capt. Somebody would be going on a check flight and I could go along. I checked out my parachute and was walking to the aircraft when this Sgt came running up and told me that some Colonel wanted to go along and that I was bumped. Ok, I would try again the next day.

The next morning when I went to the field, everyone was talking about the accident that happened the previous night. You guessed it, the plane that I was to be on had caught on fire in the No. 3 engine when they were coming in to land and they were at only 800 feet. The Navigator and the Flight Engineer got out the front end of the aircraft and no one got out of the back end. Everyone else was killed. Nine men gone and I would have been one of them if I had not been bumped. That was the first of my lucky breaks.

The bailout procedure for a B-29 was for the Navigator to go first and the Flight Engineer to follow him. The Navigator, Bill Barthel, was a friend of mine and he told me about this experience. He said that when he bailed out he pulled his ripcord almost immediately because he knew that he was very close to the ground. His chute opened quickly and almost at the same time he hit the ground. He landed in a damp freshly plowed field that probably kept him from breaking his one or both of his legs. He gathered up his chute, looked around and saw a farmhouse close by. Bill walked to the back door of the farmhouse and knocked on the door. An elderly woman came to the door, opened it and there stood this man in these weird looking clothes with a big piece of white silk thrown over his shoulder and it scared her to death. She started screaming and her husband came running out with his shotgun. Bill had to do some fast-talking explaining of who he was and what he was doing at their back door. They did have a phone so he was able to call the base and tell them what happened and to send someone out.