WWII Vet Recalls ‘Jeeter Bugging’ in the Pacific
Much has changed for the members of the Jeeter Bug crew since March 12, 1945, when the B-24 bomber made an emergency landing on Iwo Jima in the midst of battle.
Just four of the 11 crew members are still living, among them 91-year-old Willow Glen resident John Weller, who served as navigator. As their numbers have dwindled, so has the tenor of their annual reunions.
“The first time we got together in Denver [in 1979], our hotel room looked like a bar,” Weller recalls. “At our last meeting there was no booze. We had sundaes at an ice cream parlor.”
What hasn’t changed is the bond that formed between crew members during their service in World War II, when they completed 37 bombing missions in the South Pacific.
We’d formed more than just a crew,” Weller says. “We were all brothers.”
The story of this band of brothers has been told more than once. In 2005 PBS aired “Jeeter Bug: Mission Over Iwo Jima,” a documentary produced in San Jose and featuring Super 8 film footage the crew members had shot during their service and smuggled past military censors once the war was over.
When it came to assuring that the footage survived,”sometimes a bottle of beer could buy an awful lot,” Weller says.
After watching the documentary, Oakland author Virginia McPartland contacted Weller, initially just to talk to him about his experiences. Her father, who had recently died, had also been a B-24 crew member in WWII.
“I never had the opportunity to find out what it was like and what he did” in the war, says McPartland. “I thought that if I met John, I could get a better feel for what it was like.”
Their conversations eventually led McPartland to write “Brothers at Daybreak,” in which she tells the stories of all 11 crew members via either firsthand recollections or accounts from surviving family. The book was published last year.
While Weller and his brothers in arms are willing to talk publicly about their WWII service, he says they never discussed it among themselves at their reunions. “We didn’t talk about the horrors of war. We talked about the crazy things we did.”
The Jeeter Bug’s Iwo Jima landing was, by turn, horrifying and crazy. After a bombing run on the nearby island of Chichi Jima, the B-24 had lost an engine, and the crew had to make the choice between a water landing and setting down on Iwo Jima, where the fighting was intense and American forces were firing on anything they couldn’t quickly identify.
The Jeeter Bug finally made contact when a P-61 nightfighter came up behind them, trying to ascertain their intentions. The next problem was the war going on below. The Jeeter Bug would have to fly over Mt. Suribachi, where the Japanese were being inundated by ground artillery and Naval shore bombardment.
The only solution was to shut down the war to let the Jeeter Bug fly through.
While that landing was particularly harrowing, Weller says these situations weren’t all that unusual in the Pacific Theater, given the U.S. military’s scant mapping of the area and the B-24’s scant instrumentation.
“The military had to take a land sextant and convert it to use in the air, which is completely different,” he recalls. “If we got within 50 miles of where we should be, that was a good shot.”
When he wanted to navigate by the stars, he had to climb out the open cockpit while the radio operator held onto his legs.
“We didn’t have GPS,” Weller jokes, adding more seriously, “There was never a time I didn’t see a member of my crew not handle a situation, and we had plenty of them.”
Tags: Veterans News
