WWII history brought to life in Athens

By TOM BONE

ATHENS — A first-person account of World War II bombing runs by a now-deceased McDowell County soldier resurfaced recently at his home in Athens.

Harry Elmer Gates of War was 21 when he flew on at least 21 wartime missions from England to targets in Germany, Holland and France in 1944 as a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the forerunner to the U.S. Air Force.

He wrote reports on each mission on small sheets of notepad paper, which were later laminated. Gates died in October 1988, and the notes, along with wartime photos, were found by his niece Bobbie Klingensmith among mementos preserved by Gates’ wife Anice.

Klingensmith’s husband David, an amateur historian, transcribed Gates’ neat handwriting about all 21 missions.

“I thought it was just such authentic history that it ought to be preserved,” David Klingensmith said.

On Gates’ second mission, on Feb. 10, 1944, the temperature dropped to minus-90 degrees at an altitude of 21,000 feet and the bomb bay doors froze, either open or closed. “Many cases of frost bite occurred,” he wrote.

About a month later, Gates described mission No. 7 as a “milk run” because they encountered no opposition from fighter planes. It wasn’t perfect, though.

Gates wrote, “When we got ready to drop our bombs, the doors didn’t open so we dropped the bombs through the doors.”

Mission No. 12, over Munster, Germany in March, targeted an airfield. He wrote, “We hit it and you can imagine what was left of it. Well it was no more.” On that flight, he noted, “The Pilot let me fly some. I was Co-Pilot on landing.”

A mission on April 9, 1944, took 8 1/2 hours due to being hit by German Messerschmidt 109s that came at them “about thirty at a time,” he wrote. Gunfire damaged the rudder cable, and Gates climbed out of his gun turret to work on it.

“I finally got it fixed and we started for home alone,” he wrote. “It sure was lucky for me that we didn’t have any more attacks from fighters.” He added, “I lost my best buddy on that raid, Carlis C. Gibson. We got home safe but was plenty lucky.”

Two days later, on a flight to bomb a military factory in Germany, the anti-aircraft fire known as “flak” was described as “pretty heavy. A piece came through the top turret and hit me on the head but lucky for me I had a flak helmet on.”

Later in April, the crew counted “about 73 holes in our ship” after returning from a flight over France.

There were brief tales of a co-pilot getting confused about which of his engines was damaged, of missions aborted to due to “undercast” cloudiness, and of a plane behind them turning into “a burning inferno in a matter of seconds.”

He observed the Swiss Alps on a run in mid-March. “They were covered with snow and they sure was pretty,” he reported.

Bobbie Klingensmith said that Gates’ plane was later shot down over Germany and he spent time in a prisoner of war camp in the last year of World War II. Photo images of such a camp, and other wartime snapshots, were found on a CD that Anice Gates had kept.

“It was really something else,” Bobbie Klingensmith said. One image showed movie star Jimmy Stewart, with a caption identifying him as “Lt Col James M. Stewart, 453rd Group Operations Officer,” debriefing a B-24 pilot after a bombing raid over Berlin.

In civilian life, Gates was a coal miner, owned rental property in McDowell County and operated The Owl Drive-In restaurant in War. He also served as a mayor of the town. The couple and their son Johnny later moved to Athens.

After Anice Oxley Gates died, Bobbie Klingensmith and her brother Charles Mann started sorting through the chronicles of the family’s past.

“There’s a tremendous amount of history over there,” Bobbie Klingensmith said.

— Contact Tom Bone at

tbone@bdtonline.com

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