World War II: More Stories from our Veterans

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WORLD WAR ir More Stories From Our Vetera
WALTER JOHN CHIL5EN
Enlisting in 1942, Chilsen was trained as a bombadier. He saved an B-24s in the Pacific and flew misions against Iwo Jima, Saipan, and the home islands of Japan.
What did you experience during WWII?
I use the three names because many people know me by three names because I was on radio and television for about ten years from 1954-1964 as a television anchor man and then I sold television advertising for a couple of years. In 1966 I was elected to the State Senate and I served in the State Senate for 24 years until 1990- as a Republican. I was born in Merrill, Wisconsin and I graduated from Merrill High School in 1941. In September of that year I went down to Lawrence College. It was there, in Appleton where I had the intention of getting my degree in four years, but with the event of Pearl Harbor and the WWII that started in 1941 changed all that. In 1942, the summer after Pearl Harbor, my brother Thad, who is three years older than me, and I both went down to Chicago and enlisted either in the Navy or in the Army Air Corps. I got into the Army Air Corps at the time. He enlisted for immediate active duty and I enlisted to be differed until I graduated from college, unless the President of the United States saw fit to call me up sooner. Thad was called in December of that year to active duty and I was called two months later (in February) to be in the Air Corps. We had both enlisted in the Air Corps. He eventually became a sergeant radioman and started in the Pacific and bailed out over in Japan just at the end of the war. I became bombardier on a B-24. We took our training in south California. We eventually planned the crew in California to train at Nuroc Air Force Base in the ROC and then we went over seas, first to Hawaii and then we flew from Hawaii to Saipan, where we were stationed for a while and then we eventually went to Guam and then Okinawa. While we were in Saipan, one of our principle targets was Iwo Jima. Eventually, the bloodiest battle of WWII, in the Pacific anyway, took place there with some 20,000 Marines losing their lives. Our principle target was Iwo Jima trying to soften in up but the Japanese were really entrenched. They had caves like the Taliban fighters do now in Afghanistan. So the bombing, in truth didn't do a heck of a lot of good in softening them up but it made it impossible for them to use their air craft because they couldn't get them off the ground. We were flying in a tight formation, usually as a bombardier, I operated the bombsight that took over control of the airplane on the flight and then they would be released when the bombsight had indicated if I had operated it properly to hit the target. In this one they wanted to have a solid pattern, so we were just watching the lead plane. The Major bombardier dropped his bombs, then we would just hit a little title switch and our bombs went as well. He dropped his bomb and I hit our title switch. Immediately after that we figured that our (what they called cluster bombs) anti personnel bombs were hit by their anti-aircraft, exploding our own bombs right beneath the airplane and we just went "Woomp!" I could hear the crackling of all kinds of stuff hitting our plane. It appeared as though we were going to crash into the water because we found out later that the
CHILSEN, WALTER JOHN
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