Harley Mullins Lebam Staff Sergeant, B-17 ground crewchief

451st Sub Depot

96th Bomb Group

8th Air ForceHarley James Mullins was born at the old Raymond hospital on June 7, 1918. He went through the Lebam schools, graduating from Lebam High in 1936. A single man at the start of World War II, Harley was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps in March 1942 after working for nearly six years as a logger for the Case and then the Smith Creek logging companies. He was 23 years old at the time of his induction.

The first steps of Harley’s military life included a bus ride from South Bend to Longview, a train ride to Presidio Monterey, Calif., and then after a short time, another train ride to Sheppard Field, Texas. At Sheppard, Harley remembers a busy time, with a doubling up of basic training and airplane mechanics’ school.

We did basic training at Sheppard Field as well as airplane mechanics’ school, both at the same time. Basic training was in the mornings, mechanics’ school at night until 10 pm. Nine hundred went through with me, they were really pushing them through. The base was set up for 25,000 and there were 70,000 of us there at that time. In the mechanical school we learned all the basics, which helped a lot after we started working on the bombers. I was trained on A-20s but I only saw one. After that it was all B-17s. I worked mainly on engine repair, changing engines, changing wings, all that kind of stuff. We did all of this with ordinary tools, nothing sophisticated. We didn’t even get a leave to go home, we were sent straight overseas. The biggest leave I got was in England after the war was over and we were waiting to go home.

We went over on the Queen Elizabeth in 1942, and there were 11,000 of us aboard. There were 13 men in a cabin meant for three, with bunks on the wall with just enough space to crawl in. Took us seven days to do the Atlantic crossing, and we were on our own, no convoy escort, and only the Captain knew the course, which I was told was changed several times an hour. Both Queens (the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary) did this. That way no submarine could line up on them. The weather was good when we went over, and terrible when we went home in late 1945. Went to Scotland, took a train down to England. Went to another base, they put us up in tents, then we went to our base near an old estate called Snetterton Heath, about 18 miles from Norwich. That’s where we stayed the rest of the war, as part of the 96 Heavy Bombardment Group, I was in the 451st Sub Depot unit.

Learning the ropesHarley’s first big job came about when his crew chief asked who had had some rigging experience, since the job was working with the cable controls in the airplane. The ailerons and elevators were controlled by cables. Since rigging was what Harley had done in the woods, working for logging companies, he quickly settled into his new job. He clearly recalls his work on the B-17s.

See, when the pilot hauled back on the wheel he was manually pulling those cables, the elevator. Attaching those cables was a crucial job, nothing to fool with. So much so that we had to go with the pilot on the test flight. They made sure we did our jobs, and we made sure we did it right. If a guy made a mistake he could get into trouble, but usually that didn’t happen. Although on our first two jobs the planes caught fire. That’s when we were told we would be going with a pilot on the test flights. Trouble was, there was a fitting that Boeing hadn’t tightened up enough and that was a problem, and gas would spill out over the wing. But we always checked that problem after that. Both those planes had landed safe.

As time went on some of the men were made engine replacement specialists. And if a plane came in at 5 p.m., the crew would try to have it ready by at least 3 o’clock in the morning. Many times the air crews were up at 3 a.m. and getting their briefings for that day’s mission. Then some of the ground crewmen would have to go up for the power-sop, the necessary ride with a pilot. An engineering officer slept in a shack, across from where the crew worked on the planes. He would get a couple of pilots, sometimes flyers that had completed their combat missions, who were waiting to be sent back to the States.

The 96th Bomb GroupThe ground crew had gotten to Snetterton Heath before the pilots and air crews of the 96th had arrived in May 1943. At first there was nothing ready, and the British were running the base and getting it completed for the Americans. Harley remembers that this was happening all over England in 1942 and early 1943.

When the 96th got there we got into action pretty fast. The planes were all B-17Fs, without chin turrets. The B-17Gs came later. Those early crews had some bad times. Our commanding officer went on one of those early deep penetration raids and he told quite a story when he came back. He had flown as an observer, and he said ‘I would’ve felt a lot better if I had one of those .50 calibers to shoot back at ’em.’ We had sent out 21 aircraft, but the German fighters broke up the formation and we got seven back. And the CO was one of them who came back. He said, ‘I could tell you a story, that’s a bunch of baloney about it being so bad you crap your pants. You couldn’t have shoved a pin up my butt.’ That was Captain Sievers and he was right honest. After the mission he was made major, then he got to lieutenant colonel before it was over. In civilian life he was a used car salesman. He was a good guy. Before it was over we had the second biggest losses in the 8th Air Force. Regensburg and Schweinfurt really tore ’em up.

Doctoring the airplanesHarley recalls some of the most beat up bombers to make it home, especially one plane that came back with most of its tail shot off.

That was the worst one I saw. The tail controls everything. The aircraft made a good landing, but I don’t know how. We were usually there to see them come in. Belly landings, one gear down landings. They would go down the runway okay until one wing dropped and then it would spin around.

We had another one that came in short of the runway. He’d lost two engines and couldn’t quite make the runway and he drove right into a bordering raised railroad track bed. Everybody got out but when it hit, it just folded up there right behind the radio compartment. The fuselage folded around the radio wall. I talked to one of those guys and he said that after they hit he just got up and walk out of the side of the plane. What a mess. The nose was crushed, the back half just came open. That plane was done.

In thinking about all of the repairs made to the wounded B-17s, Harley recalls that one plane was repaired by replacing the whole back half, from the radio compartment on back.

The whole fuselage, and it was no big deal. That was a pretty simple hookup there. Had to drill all the rivets out, take the back half off and set it up, put the new sheet metal on and rivet it back on. Rigged up the controls, the oxygen lines and so forth.

A lot of those planes were repairable. We’d put a new outer wing on, and two new engines. Fix the landing gear and it would be ready to go again. That would take a day or two. When we needed an engine part or wheel or something else, we’d go over to another depot to get it. We took wings off of the other planes that had something else wrong with them. Our sheet metal shop would repair’em. Bullet holes would be covered, and new bolts put in.

Harley also became the ground crew chief for one particular plane. To support all the repairs, the 451st had a welding shop, radio shop, instrument shop, machine shop, and more. The retired Lebam logger is still proud of the job he and his men did.

Boy, some of those guys were good. When we changed that outer wing panel we had to have some big tapered bolts, there were only about four of them that held that outer wing on. They may have been more than a foot in length, and they turned them out in the machine shop. There were mechanics in that outfit, but also a lot of ex-aircraft factory workers.

A typical day for us was just like any eight hour work day, but if we got a plane in at 5 p.m. we just added that to our eight hour day, we put in the hours. The mess hall would feed us every night at midnight. We’d take a break for the supper and then we’d go back to work. Then we’d take the test hop and when we got back we’d have to refuel it. Then we got to go to bed, somewhere around 5 in the morning. After that we could sleep the next day.

We were 40 of us in a prefab hut. We were kept in the dark at night, because in England there were blackouts every night. The latrines were outside in another building. In these huts we had about two feet between double bunks. The smoke was so thick in there you could hardly see from one end of the barracks to the other. That was because guys were smoking cigarettes. (Note: During WWII, the government regularly gave the GIs cartons of free cigarettes.)

On The TownThe Snetterton Heath village had a pub that was popular with the men, but Harley usually went into London. The most available train was one that made all the stops, a milk train that took four hours to get there. Harley recalls that sometimes a faster limited would pick up the men and then it only took two hours.

My buddy was a coal miner from around St. Louis, Leo Degasperierre. Leo was a husky man, he was my body guard. He was on the flight line with me. There were a lot of Red Cross clubs in London and we’d try to stay there, and they’d give us a blanket. If it was full we could stay at the British YMCA. The bed was metal springs. Hotels were too expensive but we used them sometimes.

I remember Leo and I were in London when a whole bunch of those V-1 rockets came in there. One night we stayed at the British Red Cross place and the next night it got hit by one of those things and it took out the whole city block. It was quite a shock. They sound like an old Model T Ford comin’ with the spark retarded, just like it was ready to die. Well, that was what happened. When it did die, pop, it came down. And they came in low, just over the roof tops. The other ones, the V-2s, there was nothing to scare you. You didn’t know they were coming until they were there. And the German bombers were still coming over. One British officer came out of a room at the hotel we were staying. We had all been awakened to see if we wanted to go to the air raid shelter. He listened to the noise of the bombers for a minute and said, ‘There can’t be more than 50 of them up there, don’t wake me up for something like this.

On about Harley’s third trip into London he met his future wife, Mary Spraggs. He remembers that the pub owner where she worked gave the customers a good Scotch drink at first and then would switch the GIs to cheaper stuff. Harley chuckled as recalled those days.

At least he was truthful, he said that after a couple of drinks no one could tell the difference. Mary and I didn’t get married until 1949. She was divorced and then I went back over there. Afterwards we went to England five times. The last time was in 1988. Then we came back in 1989. Then after we found out she had Alzheimer’s her sister came over. She still has two brothers over there. I remember that during the war I got Mary’s mother some hamburger rations, but she didn’t know what to do with all that food. They weren’t used to it. She didn’t know how to cook it. Our bacon was strange to them, too.

MemoriesUnlike most of the air crews who were there and gone according to the completion of their missions, the ground crewmen stayed overseas for the duration. Harley was still in England on V-E Day (May 1945), and he didn’t return to the U.S. until Dec. 14, 1945.

He recalls that the men serviced planes all during that time. Since the ground crews were non-combat personnel, they were the last to come home at the Snetterton Heath base. Fortunately, the remaining time was a lot less stressful, with more time to relax. At the end of his tour of duty Harley was getting $114 a month, but the dollar-British pound exchange did not favor the Americans. Regardless, he recalls the lighthearted times.

In town a meal wasn’t too bad, but we didn’t have much of a choice. We could either have rabbit and fries or Spam and fries. One day I got so tired of rabbit that I ordered Spam and fries. The waitress looked at me and said, ‘You don’t really mean that, do you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do, I’m tired of rabbit and fries.’ So she hollered into the kitchen, ‘One slum and fries.’

For breakfast you could get a hard bun, coffee with cream or not, and dried eggs. They had some kind of sausage that seemed like it had sawdust in it, with grease poured on it. It was horrible. On the base we didn’t get to know many of the flight crews. They had their own separate mess. They couldn’t eat our food because they could get airsick. And that’s the truth. In our mess the grub wasn’t very good, I’ll tell you. The only eggs we got were the powdered variety. And they cooked them in big steam vats. If you got there late they were green in the middle. There were probably two or three thousand eating in that mess. It was crowded. No sooner than they finished breakfast and they were ready for lunchtime.

In the middle of the war Harley was sent to an RAF base to take a refresher course on engine repair. It was here that he ran into Ernie Wirkkala of Rosburg, who was one of the local fellows with whom he had been inducted into the service.

Ernie and I went out onto the town one night, to Manchester and tried to find what we could have to drink. Later that night we went back to the barracks and got sick and then couldn’t find our beds in that strange place. It was really dark because of the blackout. We couldn’t find the doors until a British guard came around to help us.

At that RAF mess hall their breakfast was what we called shit on a shingle, one piece of toast, two tablespoons of cooked beans, and a cup of tea. I gobbled it up and went up to get more and the Brit woman working there said, ‘You’ve been through here, that’s it …’ And when those women said that was it, there was no more. There were no fat servicemen over there. Those British boys were skin and bones.

Writer’s Notes

1. Interview with Harley at his home in Lebam on December 18, 2003.

2. Harley’s parents: Charles G. Mullins and Ella M. Mullins, Charles was from Virginia, mom from Wisconsin, but they met in Pacific County. They had three children: Harley, Arlene (who now lives in Walla Walla), and Myra Patricia, who has passed away.

3. Harley and Mary Mullins children: 5 girls , 1 boy. 1 girl (Sandra) is adopted (Mary’s by first husband), Margaret (lives in Lebam), Susan (lives in Olympia), Penny (Menlo), Gerry, and Michael (Lebam). Sandra and Gerry both live in Elgin, Oregon. There are 11 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

4. Pacific County boys who went into the service with Harley in 1942: Charley Owens, Ernie Wirkkala, Walt Leikas, and Elmer Tienhaara. (See Wirkkala and Tienhaara stories in this series.)

Buy the book

Contact Doug Allen at P.O. Box 1278, South Bend, WA 98586 for information on ordering a special limited-edition book collecting these stories of heroic Pacific County airmen.