When the United States entered the Second World War, everyone lined up to fight in their own way. John Neece was one of the men who lined up outside a recruiting station to join the United States Army Air Forces. He was just 22. John was selected for radio operator training and then was pulled from that for a new program: radar operator. “Going to the radar training school was brand new and extremely top secret,” John recalled. “We were not supposed to talk about it at all.”
Before shipping out for training, John went to see his girlfriend Jane. He told her that he wanted to marry her. She said that they would have to ask her father for permission. “I asked her dad, and her dad knew I was going away to war,” John said. “He told me that he wanted me to wait until I got home from the service.”
As John made his way through training he started to try to guess where he might be assigned and what he might be doing. “I really wanted a shot at those German U-boats. I figured we were going to try to hunt them down with radar.” To John’s surprise, he found out that he was being sent to the Pacific Theater.
John was a crew member on the Consolidated B-24 Liberator in the 7th Air Force, 494th Bomb Group, 864th Bomb Squadron. “I wasn’t sure how I felt at first about the B-24,” he said. “I had heard it called ‘the Box that the B-17 came in’, and worst of all was a flying coffin. I found out that a lot of the problems they had early on were from B-24s exploding due to the fuel vapors inside. Then one flight engineer started having us crack the bomb bay doors and that seemed to fix the problem.”
Once in that 494th Bomb Group, John started flying his missions. And fly he did. Many of the missions would take them eight to ten hours. “We led the formations with our radar unit,” John said. “We had extra tanks in our bomb bay so we could fly long missions. The longest I ever flew was upward of 12 hours. Those seats we were sitting on were not comfortable Constellation seats. They were hard B-24 seats. Luckily I was able to sit on my parachute, and while not perfect, it helped a little.”
In February 1945 John and the other men of the 494th began bombing Iwo Jima. “We knew a landing was coming, and we were sent in to bomb the beaches just ahead of the amphibious landings,” he said. “We led a flight of eight B-24s which had to maintain radio silence for the flight. After a while someone on the crew asked if we should be there already.”
Concerned that they had missed the target, John’s pilot ordered that they deploy the antenna and see where they were. “As I started to look at the scope, I had it backed out to 150 miles,” John said. “That is when we discovered that we had never seen the island and flew right by it for 125 miles!”
Once discovering that they had flown right by, they made a turn and arrived at the target area of Iwo Jima. “The landings had already started, so we could not drop our bombs, but we flew in low and opened up with our .50 calibers,” John said. “I think the gunners all fired until their barrels melted.”
As they flew toward home they now had bombs which had been ready to be dropped that they needed to get rid of. “We decided to drop them in the Marianas Trench as we went by the general area,” John said. “They are still down there.”
One event which stands out all of these years for John was while he was based on Saipan. “We were taking off on a mission to bomb Iwo Jima,” he said. “On departure we hit the top of a hill. We all were pretty sure we had hit it, however the pilots said that they had cleared it and not to worry.”
John and his crew had a long flight ahead of them and soon their attention turned to their tasks on the aircraft. After completing their bombing mission, they returned to their base. “When we got out, the flight engineer and a few of us went back to the tail to see if we had indeed hit the hill.” What John and his crew found was shocking. “The entire tail skid area had a compartment that it retracted into. That area was stuffed full of dirt and sod. Our flight engineer grabbed a bunch of it and took it up to show the pilots!”
John spent a lot of time moving around through the different islands in the Pacific. “We sure seemed to move around a lot,” he said. “I swear I was on about every island big enough for a B-24. By the end of my service I had earned multiple battle stars.” By June 1945, the 494th became the first B-24 unit to bomb the homeland of Japan. The end of the war with Japan was in sight.
“I remember boarding the ship which was going to take us home,” John said. “It had a speaker system and they played the song Sentimental Journey. There wasn’t a dry eye on that ship. The very first thing I did when I got off that boat was to find Jane.”
Jane’s father had wanted to make sure John would return from the war. And now he was back and asking once again for his permission to marry his daughter. “Her father was a great man,” John said. “When I asked his permission he said that he liked me and approved.” John and Jane would be married in a big church wedding in May 1946. “We were married for 70 years.”
A few years ago, John was surprised by a group of friends who took him out to the airport with a plan. “We just went for a ride and as we arrived at the airport, off on the left was a B-24 which had flown into the airport. It was like seeing an old war buddy.” John’s friends had arranged for him to take a flight on the Liberator once more. “I never thought I would see one again let alone fly in one. It brought back a lot of memories to look out of those waist windows one more time.”