World War II Experiences
"Timeless Voices" Oral History Project

Interview with

Leo A. Wilcox, 398th Bomb Group Photographer,
398th Photo Section, 601st Squadron, Eighth Air Force

Interviewer: Marilyn Gibb-Rice

Interview conducted at the
398th Bomb Group Annual Reunion
Austin, Texas, September 12, 2009

Background:

The 398th has been interviewing its members as part of the Timeless Voices of Aviation project. More information about the project and a current list of video interviews can be found at 398th Timeless Voices Interviews. In addition to the video interviews, some of the interviews have been transcribed to text.

 

Interview with

Leo A. Wilcox, 398th Bomb Group Photographer,
398th Photo Section, 601st Squadron, Eighth Air Force

MGR: Interviewer, Marilyn Gibb-Rice
LW: 398th Photographer, Leo Wilcox

Time: 01:14:37

MGR: I am Marilyn Gibb-Rice and today is September 12, 2009. We are at the 398th Bomb Group Memorial Association Reunion in Austin, Texas. Would you please introduce yourself?

LW: I certainly will, I’m Leo Wilcox. I was in the six hundred and first Photo Section of the 398th.

MGR: Can you tell me where you were living and what you were doing in the late 1930’s and early [19]40’s?

LW: I had graduated high school when I was 17 and I’m figuring that maybe I should do something different. So I was living at home with my parents in Jamestown, New York when we heard that something had happened at Pearl Harbor.

MGR: How did you hear about it?

LW: On the radio… we just couldn’t believe it. I mean they [the Japanese] had people in Washington negotiating with the President, and then all of a sudden they decided to destroy Pearl Harbor.

MGR: Did you know where Pearl Harbor was?

LW: Yes… I was lucky.

MGR: Did you see the United States becoming involved before Pearl Harbor?

LW: I.. I, honestly, I felt that we probably should have. And watching Britain and what was going on there… and that’s where I thought we would initially go but somebody changed our minds for us.

MGR: So under what circumstances did you join the military?

LW: I was an amateur photographer… and I had read some place in some magazine that the Marine Corp was looking for photographers. So I decided, well, I’ll check that out. So, believe it or not, I wrote to some commanding general whose name was on the letter, or in the article and I got an answer. He said ‘Great, your enlistment papers will be waiting for you in Erie, Pennsylvania’. Which didn’t make my mother too happy, but my dad drove me over and we got there, had nothing. He probably meant Buffalo. So, we went to Buffalo and we got the same story. That was the beginning of, you know, learning about military procedure. And a, so we went back and I decided, ah this was sort of silly. I kept his letter so when I did go in, we went up to Fort Niagara in New York State, and I don’t know what sort of indoctrination or the questions we were asked but I said, ‘here’s a letter from the Marines where they thought I could be a photographer and actually I didn’t know anything else about anything’. [laughs] And you know, it worked? Apparently. So from there on we went to Atlantic City [NJ] for Basic Training, which again was pretty difficult, because we were in the Ambassador Hotel. When we got there it was, ah, dates? Well, you know, this is sort of a recollection, I don’t know if everything really would stack up. But we were told to go to the parking lot but we had to wait while approximately eight to ten stretchers came out of the door and they loaded them into ambulances. It was then that we discovered that there was a infirmary or hospital on the top floor. But anyway, at that time there was an epidemic of meningitis and so, upon getting there we were met with several bodies that had meningitis and that was it. So, there I am, I’m in Basic Training… I still, I don’t really know what happened to that letter, as I said, just by showing it to a couple people, I guess I escaped a lot of initial grief. Because from there, from Atlantic City, I went to Salt Lake City [Utah] and that was a replacement depot for the Air Force. I, a, again the dates sort of, you know it’s ok at my age, you said that [laughs]. But a, I know that the 398th became active in Blyth, California and then they went up to Geiger Field. Well I was assigned somehow to the 398th when it went to Geiger Field. And, a, whatever we did there I can’t remember. From there we went to Rapid City, South Dakota… and I can go on and on [laughs]

MGR: Tell us, keep telling us, that’s what we want.

LW: Well when we got there, initially, for some reason, I was assigned to the 602nd. And, a, it wasn’t too very long before somebody decided that they should split the group of our Photo Section into the actual squadrons so I went into the 601st. So I was fairly acquainted with the 602 officers, I guess. I always remembered Pete Rooney, and a, he cut my tie off. They had some sort of a function and he was going around, I guess making himself known to his people. But a, after we got into our own 601… there were 16 people, four to a squadron in the Photo Section. And we all took pictures, we all participated. Some of them were in the darkroom and others of us fixed cameras, and flew, took pictures... anything that would get us out of really hard work [laughs].

MGR: But you trained just like the rest of them trained?

LW: Ah…. No [laughs]. Well that’s a little bit facetious, we really, we really didn’t. But we did have, as I said you had a great opportunity to almost do what we wanted to. Ah, we were free to move around the base. At that time I was on flying status, so when the 398th became a training group for about a year, ah, we were “training” people, so I had quite a few hours and that’s the way we were compensated, and we got flying pay if we had the time [flying], which was lot different once we got overseas. But it was ah… being a part of the Photo Section, for almost the entire time, we were an entity of our own. And I thought about it since then… it was sort of sad in one way because we sort of selected the people… I don’t want to say it that way… but I mean the people we became involved with were limited, particularly overseas. Our function, basically, was the installation of still cameras to take pictures of bomb strikes. Make sure that we hit what we said we hit.

MGR: Where did you install them?

LW: They were just behind the bomb bay, there was a camera well. And ah, it was stationary, controlled by the bombardier… supposedly. And ah, so we would go out before the missions, sometimes we could get a good breakfast with the crews, and ah install the cameras. I can’t remember whether every plane… I don’t believe every plane had cameras. But then when those guys flew their missions and came back, our job was to take the cameras out and we took the film back to the lab. And there were people in the darkroom, I mean some of our own section and we developed and made prints. And from that point, ah, we flew ‘em, didn’t fly ‘em, well we were in jeeps and sometimes they flew [laughs]. I think Bassingbourn, whoever wanted to look at them, that’s where there was S-2 or G-2 [Intelligence Div]. That was the specific function of the Photo Section, I guess. The other pictures we took we took more or less on our own or at the request of one of the officers.

MGR: Let’s go back to Rapid City. You said you were at Rapid City and then training, did you train other photographers?

LW: No. No, I told you that letter worked, they thought that I knew everything there was about photography. And ah, in Rapid City, if we had a lot of reviews, you know troop reviews and personnel. And, ah, it was not too bad a deal. We could go out… I could go out and take some photographs of the marching formations, as long as I got the officers in. I’d go back to the lab and that was it. Once in awhile I even went back to bed [laughs]. But everyone else was marching. Again, thinking back on it, it was sort of a silly thing to do but like they say, someone’s got to do it I guess [laughs].

MGR: What happened… where did you go from Rapid City?

LW: From Rapid we traveled by train to, ah, Massachusetts… and I think our P.O.E. was Boston. And, ah while we were going there by train, the crews that were still with the Group and were attached when we went overseas, they flew. So, ah, we really didn’t see much of anything until after our boat ride and we got to England.

MGR: Do you have any stories about the boat ride?

LW: Oh yeah, a couple [laughs]. Ah again, a lot of this, as I say these are recollections and the things we heard, we just assumed they were true and I imagined the majority of them were. We went on the U.S.S. Wakefield, which had been a luxury liner ‘The Manhattan” before the war. They had just recommissioned it and changed it to a troop transport. So, I had to see how it would really work. I think it took us, like ten days. But we went over unescorted because it was supposed to be fast enough they could get away from any submarine activity… and they were going to prove it. So ah, there were, I guess there were submarines in the North Atlantic and I know for two days, my recollection is that they had a due north, and this was in the winter and ah, so there was two extra days getting across. That was, got north up there, it was pretty choppy. You really want to know what I saw?

MGR: Yes!!

LW: Our bunks were right above the Mess. And, a, there was a ladder that went down and of course they had all sorts of crockery… was all in big crates settin’ up there. So one night it was really up and down, thankfully it didn’t bother me that much. So the Mess Hall consisted of elevated tables, metal, stationary to the floor, and so, during the night we hear this awful crashing and we’re wondering what in the world is going on. There was two of us that went down for something to eat in the morning. We got to the bottom of that ladder and there was crockery and salt and pepper shakers all over. We got what we thought we were going to eat and my buddy was next to me and he had something a little bit different than I had, I didn’t know… I don’t recall what it was. All I know is when the ship pitched, he didn’t have a tray in front of him but I had his tray slid down in front of me. And it was bad enough so- that there were Marine guards at the bow of the ship and the rest of us weren’t supposed to go any farther than where we could get. So I wanted to see just how high those waves were and I went down and those two Marines, they were sitting on their helmets, they were sick like you wouldn’t believe. And just to show you how bad it really was, when we went back to our bunks, and there was a ladder there and there was some crew came down, medics, and they had a stretcher and they were carrying this poor guy. He was blood… he had started at the top of the ladder and just about that time the ship pitched and he went down and hit his face on that armor plate decking. So it was bad. These.. we don’t realize until afterwards how many people were involved and the stories that they could tell it’s just… it amazes me more afterwards because today we see these young men going to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hey, I had just turned 18 and we were all kids. We didn’t think we were, but if it hadn’t been and today for the youth… it never ceases to amaze me, really, how young everyone was. But I mentioned that Captain, Major Colonel I guess eventually, Rooney of the 602nd, he was from New England. And a, he was a Squadron Commander, ah twenty-three? Twenty-two, twenty-three? So, okay that’s our trip across.

MGR: How long did it take?

LW: I think ten, ten days I believe.

MGR: Where did you land in England?

LW: We landed in Liverpool… along with a few others. Continue? After we got to Liverpool, again recollections we all had our own, ah we went by train – and it must have been as a group – and we went to Nuthampstead. And just, we got there somehow, I don’t recall too much about that.

MGR: Were there others on the ship besides the photographers that were in the 398th?

LW: Oh yeah, yeah. The whole group, the ground personnel, to my understanding, they were all transported… we were all transported at the same time. Again the photo section was just part of the whole thing… there were armorers, and intelligence, and cooks and you name it. So we traveled as the 398th, excepting for the air crews they flew in. And ah, when we got there, once again the photo section required someplace to work where there was a normally warmer atmosphere temperature, dust free and so forth. So there were two attached Nissan Huts that I think that the fighter group [55th FG] that was there before, supposedly used them for aerial gun photography -you know they had the guns on the wings- projection rooms. And it was nice. They were big and they were clean and we suffered with a lot of linoleum flooring (smiles). But ah, that’s the point really where, as I said before, we were sort of apart from the entire Group. Which we thought was okay at the time but afterwards you realize, maybe you did miss something.

MGR: What were your first thoughts of England?

LW: Well, with a name like Wilcox (laughs)… I had an aunt who was up on genealogy and she told us that our ancestors came over on the Mayflower, some of them, which I sort of questioned, but she did prove it. And ah, so I was very interested… I always felt that whenever we got to wherever the Group was going, one of my first things was to get off the base and see where we were. And you can’t say that you really enjoyed it, but I did. It was an opportunity that most of us at that time, I mean the young men, we probably would have stayed wherever we were born forever. So I was, I guess excited about being there and I think one of the reasons was the fact that I was happier that I was there than being a Marine in the South Pacific at that time.

MGR: So what did you first… did you bring the equipment with you, your cameras and everything for the darkroom?

LW: That was all part of… that was all part of what the Group provided, I mean it was there. Other people had rifles, we had what we needed to do what job they said we were supposed to do. So personal? There was nothing… I did have a, I had a 35 millimeter camera with some color film which was almost unavailable for most of us. And I think the 36 exposure lasted me for the whole war. But then I had a lot of black and whites that I could take with Uncle Sam’s stuff.

MGR: So what was a typical day like for you?

LW: Again, our function was to make sure that if there was a mission to be flown, that the cameras were installed in time for the crews to take off. And after that it was just the normal daily activities, I guess.

MGR: Did you have other duties while the crews were on their missions? Did you have certain things you had to do?

LW: No… just to get off the base as quick as we could [laughs]. I shouldn’t be facetious about that but ah, we were lucky again because we had Class A passes and my understanding and recollection was, I know it worked for me, was that if we were not actually doing something relative to the Group’s missions, we could go off the base… which I did.

MGR: Where did you go?

LW: First of all London, and ah, Cambridge. All over you, I didn’t miss too much… went to Scotland. And that’s why I say, think back on it, we had some real privileges that we didn’t know were privileges. And sometimes we thought we were just goofing off, you know?

MGR: Did you ever go on the missions with the guys and take photographs then?

LW: I wasn’t supposed to… that’s another story [laughs]. I mentioned that I was on flying status; we were actually photographers’, camera repair. We did a lot, I flew quite a lot of hours in the States and got paid for it. But when we got to England, ah, a couple times, but didn’t pay any attention to it. I just, we got on the plane, I had a handheld camera and when I really paid attention was on payday because all of a sudden I discovered I wasn’t getting my flight pay. And I was, you know, combat pay. So ah, my recollection is that we were told the reason for it and it was the fact that apparently there was a lot of photographers and tail gunners that got blasted out during the missions, and seeing as how there was only sixteen of us in the Group they decided – someone, when I say they – no, you couldn’t fly anymore. So I says, you mean to tell me that I can’t fly and I am not going to get flight pay? Because that was the main thing, you got more money. And ah, I don’t know how long it was afterwards but there was a time when Captain Opperman came in and said that Colonel Hunter, on a particular mission, wanted some photographs that apparently, he could tell the photographer what he wanted. And ah, the Captain suggested that, you know, maybe I could go and – I got away with things you can’t believe - and I said, well, would I go back on flight status? Oh no, no we can’t do that. And I said, so I wouldn’t get any flight pay. Oh no, because we were told we couldn’t fly. I says, well wouldn’t it be awfully embarrassing to the officers that were in charge if something happened to my plane, the plane I was in, and I didn’t come back? And they’d have to tell someone, how come there was, this guy was flying? Believe it or not, I didn’t have to go. Didn’t get paid either [laughs]. So from that point on, ah, I guess my attitude was, hey I feel sorry for those poor guys that have to fly the missions and after twenty-five they can go home… but no matter how many I flew I didn’t get paid and nothing happens. So I said OK. It was sort of sparse after that, as far as me flying. I did fly a couple times but it was, again my recollection is, if I got on a plane with a camera nobody says anything to me… but thinking back, nobody knew I was there. I mean as far as the crew was concerned.

MGR: Where would you ride in the plane?

LW: Wherever I can, was able to take what I thought would be a good picture. Usually the waist windows, sometimes through the Bombardiers glass in the nose, but ah, no I didn’t do anything like those people did. As far as the missions are concerned, ah, these guys all knew, okay if we could get through, initially, twenty-five missions we go home. And I believe there were probably crews that were only in England for maybe two months, because they made them fly that many missions. That was, ah, I know the first mission, I think the first mission the 398th flew was to Berlin and I can remember the activity was so horrendous to begin with that… I saw some of the fifty calibers laying on the tarmac after the planes took off. Now I don’t know, maybe they were supposed to be there but ah… so from that point forward I was very fortunate that nobody said, okay it’s three o’clock in the morning get up, get showered and we’re going to briefing. Those guys did a, really a fantastic job.

MGR: If you had to load the cameras, were you up that early?

LW: Oh yeah. But only to get the special breakfast that the flight crews got [laughs]. I think they had the only cooks who knew how to cook powdered eggs.

MGR: When you went to London what would you do?

LW: Just take pictures of everything that I’d always read about.

MGR: And were you able to keep them or…?

LW: Yeah... excepting when we, ah, I couldn’t send anything home because everything was censored. And ah, even a lot of the photographs that I have, that I did get, had to go through censors. Of course some of us were censors, or I mean, we could send stuff back. But I had all the negatives that I had taken and these were with 4x5 Speed Graphics [Graflex camera] which Uncle Sam had provided. So, the negatives actually belonged to Uncle Sam and I had them in a fifty caliber ammunition case and sent them home. For some strange reason they never got there. So I think that the ah, whoever was censoring decided hey this is a real opportunity. But I did have the prints, so ah, I have quite a few of them.

MGR: I’m sure. How long did you have to stay over there?

LW: I came back with the Group. So we were there what, a couple years? Something like that.

MGR: Did you come back on a ship as well?

LW: No, I flew back.

MGR: In a B-17?

LW: I don’t know why I flew. I mean at that point whoever made the decision to, ah, send some of us back by air… maybe I had something to do with it. But, ah, it was quite a trip. We flew from Nuthampstead into a base in Wales, then flew from Wales to Iceland and then from Iceland to Greenland and Greenland to Nova Scotia and back to Grenier Field in New Hampshire. And they tell us afterwards, I think the name of the base in Greenland was Bluie West One or something like that. And it was tricky because when you landed and took off, well I didn’t land or take off [laughs], when the pilot landed or take off, there was a huge mountain or glacier at the end of the runway. So when you were landing you had to fly around that and then line up and come in for the landing. When you took off you were heading right for that mountain and you had to move pretty accurately. And that’s after we, after we made it somebody told us, you know how many B-17’s are at the bottom of the lake there? So it was, it was tricky for the pilots. But they did it, got me back anyhow.

MGR: When you were in England, did you get what they call Flak Leave.. or just because you went off so often… ?

LW: No, ah we could request, we didn’t get Flak Leave, we got furloughs supposedly. But once again it was… my situation anyway with the availability of time off, ah, I took a couple of furloughs. I went to Scotland the first time and ah, we did a lot. I went to Cambridge a lot. And then there was a town not too far from the base, it was named Luton, ‘L’ ‘U’ ‘T’ ‘O’ ‘N’ and they had a football team there but they also had some dances. And ah, it was there I met this girl who eventually became my wife and a, for sixty-two years so far. So from that point forward, ah, I couldn’t spend an awful lot of time anyplace else [smiles].

MGR:You kept going to Luton. Did you marry over there?

LW: No.

MGR: Brought her back?

LW: That’s why I said, I came back by plane, but honestly at that time, ah, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to come back. I remember sitting in the evening before we were supposed to take off I was, went out and sat up in the pilot’s seat in one of the B-17’s and looked around and I sez, “do I really want to go… yeah I guess”. But a, I had known Isabelle for, at that time, for almost a year. And, knew her family… she had a brother that was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – these were Scots - in North Africa, fought against Rommel. And what was to be her sister’s husband was with the Royal Marines and he was part of the Attachment, British Attachment, that landed on Gold [Gold Beach] on D-Day. And my point of saying this, is the fact that I became part of the family before I really WAS part of the family. And ah, I never could understand, there was a lot of Americans, my recollection is, that really deserved the name ‘The Ugly Americans’ because they thought they were better than anyone else. And, let people know it. Some of us were pretty loud. I remember one man that I didn’t know too well but, I asked him if he had gone to London and his response was “hah, what do I want to go off the base for? These people don’t have anything I want to know about.” He actually meant it and as far as I know he never left the base. So that was the difference between some of us, not too many. So for me it was an experience that ah… would you go through it again? If you knew the outcome was to be the same you probably would. I would. But if I didn’t know what was going to happen… once again the guys that really did the work, I don’t know whether I’d take that chance.

MGR: Well tell me about meeting your wife.

LW: Ah, for some reason GI’s were supposed to be very aggressive at dances and things like that, which I really wasn’t. I, actually was sort of a shy, stupid individual. But I looked out and there was this girl and she really was, I mean she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen... and still is. But ah, so not being able to really dance, I went up and asked her if she wanted to go for a cup of tea or something like that, which they served right there. And ah, we decided ok, we had our tea… and back then it was ‘Double British Summertime’ so it would be daylight until eleven o’clock at night. So I asked if I could take her home because she decided that she had better leave and she said, ‘well I don’t know’ and I said ‘well I’ll walk you a little ways’, which I did. And ah, the gist of the story is that I discovered afterwards offering to take her back home… the first time she told me ‘my house is just around the block’, it probably was almost a mile from where she actually lived. So in the successive days, ah, ok I just live up here, so when I finally did take her home, man it was a long walk! [laughs] Fortunately her mother, who was a great lady, just took me like she would any… even if I was a Scotsman or an Englishman, and she was very, very kind. Her father wasn’t quite sure about the angst, and as I said before he probably had good reason to be. So we traveled after that around the country, saw things that maybe she wouldn’t have seen if she hadn’t have had that opportunity. But, greatest thing that ever happened to me!

MGR: So could you explain the “Double British Time”?

LW: Well you know what, we have Daylight Saving Time. Well during the war, Britain, they doubled it so they were two hours ahead of the actual time. So ah, and being at that latitude, why ah, it stayed fairly light normally. I mean in the summertime, like it is now, maybe, I don’t know, I recall it would normally be light until maybe nine, nine thirty. So you tack a couple hours onto that, so they had daylight until once again, eleven, eleven thirty at night.

MGR: And why did they do that, do you know?

LW: Same reason we have, Daylight Saving Time I guess. Supposedly to give people a longer opportunity to work and produce the farms and munition factories. Anyone that worked, allegedly, the extra two hours made your production day that much longer. Somebody decided that, so.

MGR: When you were ever in London did you hear those Buzz Bombs?

LW: Oh yeah.

MGR: What do you remember about those?

LW: Well it was alright as long as you heard them. But when they stopped, then you better wonder, just where are they?

MGR: Do you remember any of the damage in London from the bombs?

LW: Oh Yeah. Yeah, we ah, at that time it was amazing St. Paul’s escaped destruction really, and again my recollection was that Hitler decided if they could destroy St. Paul’s Cathedral it would be really something to tell his people. But ah, the area around St. Paul’s was flattened. Well yesterday was September 11 and you saw some of the things with the World Trade Center. OK. London was, most of London, a LOT of London was the same way after the war.

MGR: So, when you got back how did you, what did you do once you got back to the U.S.?

LW: To the U.S.? Well the Group, as I say a, once at Drew Field… and I think that’s where the Group was, what do you call it? Deactivate? And from there, again I don’t know why some of these things happen but you just found yourself… I was down in Venice, Florida, and a, still as a photographer, ah, we closed up a P-51 base down there. Now I don’t know whether it was the 398th was still functioning that way but that’s where I was until I was discharged.

MGR: You not remember how long that was? Like weeks?

LW: In Florida? Ah, maybe three, four months perhaps. But that’s where you learned how smart the Government was because there was a Speed Graphic Camera which was the ultimate as far as we were concerned back then. And I tried every which way I could to legally get one. And that was one of the first times I just couldn’t understand procedure because I talked to one of the guys and he sez ‘Nah, we smashed up a bunch of ‘em.’ So any camera, anything that was left, apparently this was some sort of arrangement with the manufacturers that you destroy them because they didn’t want them to flood the market. Again, that’s what we were told.

MGR: So did you get one?

LW: No. I came home and bought one. But ah, and that’s not the only… I have a cousin who was in the South Pacific and he was with the, oh what was the group, they were there before the military was there… they were Seabees and he told me afterwards that they had, I don’t know, a couple of huge cranes on ships that came into his base just before the end of the war and they took them out in the harbor and sunk ‘em. They couldn’t take them back to the States. So that’s, that’s another reason I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get that camera, they’d rather smash it. But that’s life.

MGR: You stayed in touch with your girlfriend at the time? How did you do that?

LW: Oh absolutely.

MGR: Was it letters?

LW: Letters, yeah. And ah, she had, we had decided that we would get her over here as fast as we could. And ah, she made, she contacted, I don’t know, Pan Am I think it was but transportation for civilians was pretty difficult at that time. This was about a year after the war. But finally she did. She had a call one day and they said we have a seat for you on the Pan Am flight, whatever it was, for tomorrow morning. Well everything had been, I mean we had decided that we would like to do things a certain way, so they were prepared for it in one sense. But a, she and her parents and brother and sister went with her to London and ah, it had to be pretty emotional. I told my girls, we had four daughters, and I told them if any of you ever think you are going to do what your mother did to get married, I said NO WAY. I was, today I can’t believe that her parents let her go. But they all wished us well, they really knew in their hearts what she was going for and what she was getting into. So I guess they trusted me. And she came over on the ‘Mayflower’. Really! It was a Pan Am… I could ask my grandson here... what was that? Tri… Tri… Constellation. She came over on the Constellation [Lockheed L-049] and the Constellation was named the ‘Mayflower’. So if I tell you she came over on the ‘Mayflower’ you never would have believed she was that old. So, I met her in New York and that’s when, one of the first times she actually discovered how big this country is. Because we live in Jamestown which is as far from the City as you can possibly get, we’re only about ten miles from the Pennsylvania border. So we took a train and we went on and on and on, as far as she was concerned, and finally made it to Jamestown. Came out of a little track, oh, I don’t know what they called the train, but anyway it ran from the New York Central terminal in Westfield New York to Jamestown - and it was little, called the ‘Doodlebug’, it’s gone now. But my parents, my mother and father were there to meet us. And again, Isabelle is very attractive. I remember my father looking at me after we got off that little train… and he looked at Isabelle, he looked back at me and went ‘WOW’. [laughs] That’s my father! So everything really worked out very well. And again, with the four daughters. Uncle Sam gave us the privilege of going to a high university and graduating there. And so, hey, I can’t complain about anything.

MGR: So you were able to use the G.I. Bill?

LW: Oh yes.

MGR: For the college?

LW: [nods yes].

MGR: And anything else? Could you use college and buy a house with it?

LW: We ah, at that time at Wyler University and Athens was one of the few schools that would give you a degree in Fine Arts with a Photography major. So that was the principle reason that we went there. And ah, being married we stayed in the G.I. apartments along with a bunch of other people. Big people. And ah, graduated… we had the opportunity of staying there and taking summer school, post grad and all that. So I graduated in three years, as a lot of people did. And ah, after that, came back to Jamestown and worked for a photographer for maybe a year or so. I wasn’t making much money. I thought initially ‘man, wouldn’t it be great to be a National Geographic photographer’. And then I guess I, oh, why would I want to be away from my wife and my baby, no. So I did work for him for a while and then I went to buy some automobile insurance and the agent who was also a manager said, ‘would you like to make some extra money? He said, get your licensing and you could be an insurance salesman or broker.’ Ah, I don’t know… but I did. And that’s the way we spent the rest of our life, as a Nationwide Insurance agent broker.

MGR: Did you continue your photography though?

LW: Pardon?

MGR: Did you continue your photography though?

LW: Oh yeah, but not for profit. Well, I did for awhile because I knew a couple of attorneys that would need pictures of accident scenes and so forth. So I was able to, initially, supplement income a little bit that way. And I still stayed in the business a little bit. But today with digital, it’s totally different from what I went to school for three years for. You know, with film and developing and making prints, and now all we do is like some people they just set the camera on a tripod and they turn it on and there we are. Don’t have to do anything but put the CD or tape in a computer or… so anyone actually ought to be able to take pictures today. The only thing that makes them good or bad is the composition that they use and I suppose the subject that they choose to photograph.

MGR: Did you think that the Country had changed, our Country had changed when you came back?

LW: In a degree. When I came back there was still rationing. And after being in Britain for that long a time… these people, they were really something different, I mean the women… my mother-in-law would take a little handbag and basket and go down and stand in a cue for hours, literally, to get things that she wanted to buy. And when I said a ‘cue’, a line, and nobody broke it. I mean if you were there, when your turn came, you got what was available. When I came back home, meat was still rationed and ah, I remember going down to one of the markets that had meat and there was a bunch of women there, I say a BUNCH. No line. And so, I don’t know whether I got what I was going for or not but when he opened the door everyone would just sort of elbow their way in. And of course, this is something maybe I shouldn’t say but, even at that point in my life, I thought that I was you know, quite old and knew everything. But the people that I met, the girls, women that you met in Britain, they seemed to be much more mature. I came back home and girls of the same age were still high school kids. I mean, they were still kids. Again, that’s my recollection. But as far as the Country itself, I don’t know, I think most of us were just basically interested in what we were going to do and what we wanted to do. But was the Country different than it is today? You bet. You bet. We didn’t all think, we were amazed we would be on the G.I. Bill and get the benefits that we got. I don’t think we were necessarily entitled. One of the benefits as far as the town was concerned of political sub-divisions was that if you took some of your mustering out pay and applied it against the cost of your housing, you would get a tax exemption. I personally thought that was, that was ridiculous. Why? I mean, that’s what we were supposed to do. So although we were, I was entitled to it, I never took a tax exemption. And that was part of, I think part of the difference back then. I don’t think we all felt, that hey, this is available, I’m going to get that. Entitlement has screwed up this Country but I won’t go into that. [laughs]

MGR: Have you been back to Nuthampstead since you were there during the war?

LW: Yes, many times.

MGR: Have you gone on the tours?

LW: No. I told Brian the other day, one of the reasons that we didn’t go on the tours was the fact that we go back and we’d go to Nuthampstead whenever we wanted to and spend time with the family. So that was one of the reasons. But ah, we used to go back every other year and my sister-in-law and her husband would visit us on the alternate years. So, been to Nuthampstead, been to Cambridge, and Duxford and Anstey, and any place that really would have been an interest. But being a photographer, I have some tapes of all of these places. Madingley, you’ve been there. Ah, when people say that we didn’t participate in the European war out of England, haven’t been to Madingley, they haven’t been to the memorial in the back of St. Paul’s, haven’t been to Churchill’s War Room. That to me was quite something. They have a wall down there similar to the Viet Nam Wall but you walk in and there’s over ten thousand names of Londoners that died. So ah, I just enjoyed going over there. Still would if I was able to walk around like I did. [laughs]

MGR: Have you been back into a B-17?

LW: Yeah, we ah, we’ve been fortunate to be in three or four times when they’ve flown into Jamestown, our hometown. As a matter of fact, there was one, the Fuddy Duddy was there a couple weeks ago. But for my fiftieth, no, I’m getting my anniversaries and my birthdays mixed up. For my eightieth birthday, there was a B-17 came in and all my grandkids and daughters decided that I should fly in it. So, they collected up the money and we went up in a B-17 for about an hour. And everything was almost the same… but it was a lot smaller than I remember. [laughs] And the hatch into the nose of the plane… for some reason I used to be able to grab it and pull myself up and get in. I don’t think I got my feet over 3 feet off the ground, but I wasn’t the only one. But, ah, that gives you an opportunity to recognize just, again, what the flight crews went through. Can you imagine now, looking in the tail section of one of those, how somebody could sit back there for the entire mission? Or the ball turret? I knew when we were in the States, I figured that would be a great place to take pictures. So ah, again we weren’t supposed to, but I got into the turret with the hatch off and went back and got some pretty good pictures that way. But I just, again at the time you don’t think that much about it, but afterwards, somebody in a ball turret? And these other people weren’t kidding, they were shooting at you for real. So, ah, we did enjoy that. That was sort of nostalgic you might say.

MGR: That was nice of your family. Would you say that anything happened during the war, besides meeting your wife? …

LW: [laughs] I’m glad you mentioned that.

MGR: …that affected you for the rest of your life?

LW: I, I never had anything… nothing really happened to me that I would consider traumatic. Hey, any airplane that I was ever a passenger in always came back, never got hit that I know of. So, ah, perhaps at that time you just think, maybe this is just what I’m supposed to be doing every day. It’s just sort of a, sort of a job... and a, again, nothing traumatic happened. Nothing that I would call important excepting the fact as a young man I never would have had the opportunity to do the things, see the places and have the experiences that I did at that time. But then, obviously meeting my wife, that was overwhelming, there wasn’t anything else that could possibly compare with how important that was.

MGR: Did a lot of the other G.I.’s date English women?

LW: That, again we were a, Isabelle was fortunate. Because a, I guess that the G.I. brides had a sort of a difficult thing because we had people, Army people, that I guess their recollection of what their home life was, wasn’t what the girls that they married discovered after they got here. So there were a, in our town maybe five or six war brides, if you want to call them that, that Isabelle became friendly with. Fortunately most of them met men that provided for them and were good husbands. But she had several friends that, ah, it wasn’t what they had told, what the people had told her it was going to be like. I can’t say where it was, because it’s a great state, if you go to the right places, but a, one of her friends wound up way back in the hills in West Virginia… and she didn’t stay there. But that’s not what she anticipated.

MGR: Do you have any other stories you’d like to tell us?

LW: Oh I did mention the fact that being in the Photo Section, once again, it did require and environment that was relatively clean and dust-free and that. And ah, I think what he might be alluding to is the fact that most of the people, my recollection and what I understand, we didn’t do the barracks as a crew- and they had the option of heating with these little potbellied stoves and burned or coal or whatever they could. And a, so our sergeant who was in charge of the Photo Section decided we had taken over one of the huts as, I can’t say - a dormitory you might say, and it wasn’t really too warm. But we had a, of course we dried the prints, and we dried the prints at that time with electric dryers, which contained really big heating elements. So, John decided; hey, we can put those to good use. I don’t know where he got the stuff but he got this huge brass reflector. When I say huge it was probably about four feet by three feet, and he mounted three or four of those, they must have been thousand-watt heating elements. And as a reflector that’s what we heated our bunks with. So again, it was pretty tough. But they did find out because apparently when we turned it on all the lights in the Base dimmed [laughs]. But if that’s what you mean, ah yeah we had it pretty lucky, pretty easy. Never giving it a thought at the time… excepting maybe, hey those poor guys are burning coal and we’re… [laughs]

MGR: You had nice heaters. Can you tell me about the D-Day?

LW: Well D-Day was pretty active. I think our Group flew, I don’t know four, five missions… and, you just can’t believe what the Channel looked like. I mean with the boats, ships… looked as though you could actually walk across. And, it depends on who you’re talking to but most of what I recollect at that time was they were called “Milk-Runs” but obviously for a lot of people it wasn’t. And it’s sort of a situation where you possibly believe that this is happening today? And besides a little additional activity, as far as our section was concerned, we just had more pictures that had to be developed. And the most important thing that I would say, I’m glad I wasn’t there. That was horrible. I mentioned earlier that I did have a brother-in-law that was with the Royal Marines and landed on Gold. And after that he had said even they could not understand why the U.S. tried to go up a beach at Omaha. He says it was just a situation you knew that they were going to be slaughtered. You just can’t get off a landing craft, run across the beach and climb up cliffs… and the only other thing, eventually it worked.

MGR: So when the planes would come back, like the Delancey plane with the nose all shot up, were you guys there and ready with your cameras and would take the photographs of that flight?

LW: Usually, yeah. Because that was the other thing that you would do. And I have some pictures that I took of that too. But the thing that I looked at was VE Day and Bill and I had been in Scotland and we happened to come back and be in London. So there was another advantage of having a type of pass, I was supposed to be – I was on furlough at that time – I was supposed to be back at the base but, ah, couldn’t get back anyway. There was so many people, we happened to be in front of the Buckingham Palace and the King and Queen came out and you know how they wave… literally you could not move. I mean there were people shoulder to shoulder and for some reason they were extremely happy [grins]. But that was just one part of VE Day that I remember. There must have been others but I can’t remember all those.

MGR: Well we are about out of time…

LW: [laughs] Good, thank heavens. I want to thank you for taking the time to go around and set-up these interviews because if it wasn’t for people like you, ah, a couple years from now, who would know what the 398th Bomb Group Memorial was all about. And, actually, my Grandson Brian is probably one of the principle reasons for my being here this year. Because, ah, again my wife wasn’t able to come with me and I don’t go anywhere without her, if I can help it. But it’s a great, great thing that young people are taking over and hopefully are interested in history enough to perpetuate the thing. So I just wanted to thank all you people too.

MGR: Well thank you, and as part of the second generation and part of this Bomb Group, I want to thank you because your photographs and your time that you spent was very important. Because if we didn’t have all these photographs to go back to and to gather and build our website from, we wouldn’t have had anything because that’s what’s bringing a lot of people in, is the website and those photographs. So thank you for your time.

LW: Well we’re very glad we were around to be able to do it.

 

See also:

1. Leo A. Wilcox, Photographer - 601st Squadron - 1944/1945 (Photo 1)
2. Leo A. Wilcox, Photographer - 601st Squadron - 1944/1945 (Photo 2)
3. Return to 398th Timeless Voices Interviews to view and listen to the interview.

 

Notes:

1. Lt. Leo A. Wilcox was a Photographer with 398th Photo Section, 601st SQ.
2. The above transcription was provided by Lee Bradley, daughter of Frederick C. Bradley, Jr., 601st Squadron, in October 2019.
3. The transcription was obtained from a video file.
4. Punctuation, grammar and minor word changes may have been made to improve readability.
5. Additional information may be shown in brackets [ ].