The Art of Survival – Part III of the Butler’s Bums Story

August 10, 2007 By CJ
Posted in Guest Blogger, Life in the Military

Going through all my grandfather’s paperwork, I came across an interview he did with the Reichelt Oral History Program at Florida State University. Instead of writing the last post on this topic like I mentioned before, I’m going to sort of backtrack and fill in some pretty cool holes that I found. This personal interview helped me get a little more into his head and see some of the peripheral things going on at the time.

My grandfather, James A. Stuthers, Sr., was born on July 20, 1925 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He had great parents – his mother was of German descent. After the war, he would realize that he was actually bombing some of his own forefathers and relatives that were still living in Leipzig, Germany. In April 1943, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. In order to sign up so early, he had to obtain his father’s signature and get their permission. He didn’t actually enter service until after high school in October of the same year. There was a lot of talk about joining the military at the time and the fact that his friends were joining only heightened his desire to join. He initially wanted to become an officer and join the Air Cadets, but washed out of the Nashville tryouts after ending basic training.

He went to basic training in Greensboro, North Carolina where he spent ten or eleven weeks. He wanted to be a pilot. They weren’t supposed to tell him why he failed out of the Air Cadet program, but his math scores were low, which prevented him from becoming a pilot, navigator or bombardier. He ended up going to Lowrey Field armorer school to become an armorer-gunner. At the school, he would learn everything about bombs and how to load the bombs on airplanes and how to wire them. The school was three months long and from there he was sent to gunnery school at Fort Myers, Florida. There are worse places to get trained!!

While he was in school, WWII was being waged across the globe. When asked if he was worried about what was going on in Europe at the time, he responded: “A lot of us were afraid that we weren’t going to get over in time to even fly any missions, you know, towards the end.” After training, they were sent to meet up with their crew at Westover Field, Massachusetts and to obtain their crew training and certifications.

One of the reasons he was worried he wouldn’t make it over to Europe was that they were having “very, very bad experiences.” Before he got to Europe, he was trained to crew a B-24. The B-24s weren’t exactly the darlings of the Air Force at the time. On one particular day, he was coming in from a training flight over Cuba. It was sometime between 1800 and 1900. His crew was following a plane in to land at Chatham Field (now Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport) and the plane he was following exploded right in front of him. He was waved around and had to circle for the better part of an hour while they cleaned up the wreckage. His friend Al Tochman and crew were killed. They shared the same barracks together. Each barracks held four crews – 24 enlisted men. Six of those men died that day. A few weeks later, another crew that was with in the barracks blew up. If that wasn’t enough to spook my grandfather, the following is. The first crew to blow up was crew #297. The second crew was crew #298. My grandfather was in crew #299!! All bad things happens in threes and they all knew this. Was it coincidence that they were blowing up in sequential order? They were all afraid, but got away, finished their training, and later found out that a third crew had blown up on the base shortly after they left. Three crews killed before ever seeing combat within the span of a few months.

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