Zwerin: I understand that your unit received a citation for bravery in the Gotha operation.
Kaplan: Yes, we did but I never got it. That was a presidential citation. I got several other awards that I was entitled to, but I was a POW when that citation was issued, and I didn't get it. When I came home I went to work right away, and I didn't follow it up.
Zwerin: Getting back to the beginning. When did you join the Air Force?
Kaplan: In July of 1942. I was drafted.
Zwerin: How did you feel about it at the time?
Kaplan: You know, I was kind of a Mama's boy. I never spent a lot of time with other boys as a kid. I wasn't mach interested in sports, and I didn't play the street ball games. I never was much good at that kind of thing. I did a lot of reading. The first time I was with other men was when I got into the Army.
Women had a lot to do with my growing up. Now, I was away from Mama. I was with a bunch of men, and they treated me like one of them. That was a nice feeling. And I had my own bed for the first time in my life.
Zwerin: You didn't have your own bed before?
Kaplan: No, I slept with my brother. And my two sisters slept together.
Zwerin: There were four of you?
Kaplan: Yes. As a matter of fact, my nephew, David, once asked his father, my brother Howard, "What was the happiest day of your life?" And Howard said, "The day my brother went into the Army." It was the first time he ever had his own bed.
Zwerin: How far had you gotten in school before you were drafted?
Kaplan: I had a couple of years of college. I went to Townsend Harris High School, and then I went to City College.
Zwerin: Where did you get your basic training?
Kaplan: In Atlantic City. That was strange too. Living in a hotel.
Zwerin: A hotel, for basic training?
Kaplan: They didn't use barracks in Atlantic City. They used all the hotels there. That was the housing that was available. We trained on the beach, and we did our marching drills in Convention Hall. There was a big indoor space, and regardless of the weather, we could do our short order drills and things like that.
Zwerin: And where did you go from there?
Kaplan: I went to aviation mechanics school.
Zwerin: How did you happen to be selected for aviation mechanics?
Kaplan: We took a whole battery of tests. We took the GIC, which was the IQ test the Army gave everybody. You got certain grades, and as a result of getting those grades, you were permitted to take other tests; and I was accepted to go to aviation mechanics school in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Zwerin: How long were you there?
Kaplan: Four months; I finished the school. I was a lousy mechanic, but they didn't know it. I was very good at theory, though, and they offered to train me as an instructor, which I thought was great.
The method of teaching in the Army is, you're really a part of everything that's going on. You audited the courses and watched the more experienced men. Then, again, you had to kill time, so I went out with a couple of other student instructors. We left the school one afternoon, and went down to the soldier's club and had a couple of beers. That was another new thing for me.
And sure enough, the master sergeant in charge of the school came by and saw us. He let us know that our behavior wasn't correct, that we belonged to him, and he was going to be on our tail.
Zwerin: What were you doing wrong?
Kaplan: We were supposed to be in school. We were playing hookey. So, he scared the living daylights out of us, and as we walked back to the school, we passed an aviation cadet application office. We went inside and applied for aviation cadet school. Then, down the road, there was an officers' candidate school, and we signed up for that. We were going to take whatever came first.
They gave us a routine physical, and just at that time, some men who were supposed to have shipped out couldn't make it; and the three of us were offered a chance to ship out right away, in their place. We were still scared of this master sergeant, and we took the offer.
That meant a change from aviation mechanics to going back to school for aviation cadet training -- pre-flight school, and later, navigation.
Zwerin: Was your aviation cadet training at Mather Field?
Kaplan: Yes, but first we went to Santa Ana, which was south of L. A., for ground school, the beginning of our aviation training. There was a lot of technical material. We learned about weather and about principles of flight, and we trained to become officers.
They hadn't determined yet which one was going to become a pilot or a bombardier. That came later. But we started these studies, and also we learned how to drill men. That was one thing I did like. You needed a loud voice, and I had one. Also, there was a rhythm to it that I liked. I had a flair for it, and I fell right into it. I felt I had found something that I was good at.
After we went through ground school, there was a hiatus before aviation cadet school. They had to separate us out. One was going to pilot school, one was going to navigator school, one was going to bombardier school. But there was a blockage in the pipeline, and they had to hold us a little longer.
At this time, they offered a number of us an opportunity to set up a school for glider pilots. It seems that when they first started training glider pilots and paratroopers, they had put too much of an emphasis on glider troops. They were men who had something like flight training, but not quite at the same level.
These men were brought into this program, and we set up a school. There were about twelve of us, and we set up a series of courses to bring them up to speed. This included meteorology, map reading, math, and principles of flight, so that they could become aviation cadets. I enjoyed that.
Zwerin: You set up this school, and you taught there, on the basis of how many months of training that you had received?
Kaplan: Several months. That's the way the Army is. One of the duties of officers in the Army is to pass on the information that you have, to train other people. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things that stood me in good stead eventually when I went into business.
Zwerin: And that's how you changed from aviation mechanics and became aircrew. How was it decided that you would be a navigator?
Kaplan: Another series of tests, including mathematics. Math was my field; I had wanted to teach it, actually. But at that time, there were 10,000 people in teacher training who also wanted to teach math. High schools were loaded with them.
Zwerin: When did you leave for England?
Kaplan: In November of 1943. After you graduated from navigation school, you had what they called staging . You met the crew, you flew together, you became a team. Then, after you finished all of that, you did some specialized training like over-the-water navigation, and you practiced bomb runs, and that kind of thing.
Then we got together in Kansas City. From there we picked up a plane and we went across. We flew up to Presque Isle, Maine, the northernmost part of the United States. This was an exciting part of the trip for me. From there we went to Newfoundland, and from Newfoundland we flew to Scotland. I remember the landfall that we made. This was the first time I knew I was a navigator.
Zwerin: You had done the navigating across the Atlantic?
Kaplan: Yes. Even though we had radio and things like that, I used a couple of tricks and gimmicks that people had taught me in my navigation training, and I wound up crossing the coast within five miles of our planned landfall. It was an unbelievable experience for me.
We landed at Prestwick, near Glasgow.
From there we went to an area where all these crews who were coming in as replacements were brought. We were assigned to the 392nd Bomb Group, based in Wendling. That's between Norwich and an area called The Wash.
Zwerin: When you came there, did you go right into combat?
Kaplan: No, we had a few days of additional training. There's a period where you are first assigned to a squadron, and then you do some training in your own plane. You feel out the little bugs of the plane you're assigned to.
Zwerin: What planes did you fly in?
Kaplan: Our crew flew a B-17 across, and we delivered it. When we got to England, they assigned us to a B-24, and that's the only one I flew in, in combat.
Zwerin: What planes did you train in?
Kaplan: The first was an AT 11, a twin-engine ship where we did our first navigation. They would line us up in the plane, and each crewmember would do his own work. From there they took us into a Lockheed Vega, which was a popular airplane at that time--a very stable plane-and that's the plane we did most of our training in.
At aviation cadet school, at Mather Field, near Sacramento, I did some night work on my own in a B 25. There was a group stationed not far from Mather Field, and occasionally they would let us go up at night to do some celestial navigation.
We never really used a great deal of that in combat. By the time we became operational, they had LORAN, a special guidance system which is used to this day. There was also a radio compass, with which you could tune into a particular radio station. By the strength of the signal or lack of a signal, you could determine your position and direction.
There was another guidance system called by the acronym, GEE, that I had to get used to. It was a very precise and exact way of determining your location, your fix. Again, it was a system that used radio signals from several locations.
Zwerin: So you went into combat in about a week, after going up on various training flights.
Kaplan: Yes. But you didn't fly combat every day. The weather might not be right, or you'd have a flight, and the weather over the target area would be no good; or you'd be looking for a different target. But we were now in combat, depending on the weather and different conditions.
Zwerin: Would you describe your combat experience? What were your briefings like, and your debriefings? What was the typical procedure for a day with a mission?
Kaplan: We would be awakened very early. If I was flying "lead" that day, our crew was called out earlier. "Lead" or "wing." It sounds very exciting.
Zwerin: From Mama's boy to hero. That's fantastic.
Kaplan: I never thought of it that way. I was scared most of the time.
Zwerin: But you weren't so scared that you couldn't do your job, were you?
Kaplan: I'll tell you something. That it is a part of my family. You always do your job. On that video that I told you we made of our family, we found this thing about our parents. They did whatever had to be done to keep the family going. And each one of us is that way in our working habits. We did whatever we had to do.
Zwerin: So you would get up early on a day with a mission?
Kaplan: You got up early, you would go to the mess hall. First I would have to check, is the mission really on? If it was on, then we'd get a fried egg. You always had real eggs on the day you flew a mission. That was how you knew this was for real, and not a training thing. Then you went on to separate briefings. Navigators had their briefing, bombardiers went to another briefing.
Then we met the rest of the crew, and that was very dramatic. Did you ever see the movie, "Twelve O'Clock High"? Everybody sits there, buzzing and buzzing, and then, suddenly everything is quiet.
A high level officer would get up and pull the shade down. You'd see a long ribbon showing the path to the target, and everybody would groan. Then they would tell you the point of the mission, who would escort you in, and who would fly diversionary maneuvers.
Sometimes that was very discouraging. I never liked the idea of being the diversionary force. If I was going to lay my life on the line, I wanted to be doing the real thing.
They were still having problems with escort planes for us. They couldn't carry enough fuel to follow us all the way into the target, and their ammunition was limited. The fighters would take us out to a certain point, and have to turn back.
Other fighters with a longer range would meet us further in; but eventually they all had to leave us before we reached the target. Then our only protection was to stay in close formation. Every bomber had ten gun positions, and we all covered one another.
But if your plane was not operating properly, if you were hit by flak and couldn't keep up in the formation, you were in serious trouble. You were on your own, away from the protection of the other bombers. Then the German fighters could come in and pick you off, and that is precisely what happened.
Zwerin: How did you get into formation?
Kaplan: We would take off and circle around till we got together, and we would go off. Then you'd get a Vee formation. There were lots of Vees on top, Vees on the bottom and there could be several hundred airplanes there. When you were doing this, forming up was the most dangerous part.
Zwerin: You could bump into each other?
Kaplan: Yes, it happened. There were occasional crashes. When that happened, other planes would move into position to complete the formation, and you would go forward. By the time you crossed the Dutch coast you'd start to see some fighters.
Zwerin: Their fighters?
Kaplan: Our fighters. When their anti-aircraft was coming up, the Gerries weren't around, because the flak could be hitting their planes. Their fighters were waiting, after the flak. Our fighters would be up high, stay as long as they could, and they would return.
Now you would get to what we would call the initial point, and you would turn into the target. But if you're going to bomb a certain area, you wouldn't fly right to it. If they knew exactly where you were going, they would know exactly where to put their defenses up.
You're flying along this way, and you reach the initial point. That's a point that is very easily recognized. There's a railroad, there's a river. Everybody is in position, and then you make your final turn. This is when you are the most vulnerable. From the time you make that turn until the time you're over the target, you've got to stay in tight.
You know, we have this myth of pinpoint bombing. That really did not work the way we advertised it. First of all, there's no sensible way you can have 100 airplanes, bomb correctly, each one jockeying with its automatic bombsight. So if you had the lead crew, you would go in and be working with your bombsight. You would drop the bombs, and the planes following you would be watching, and would drop their bombs too.
At the point where we would make the turn, the bombardier of the lead group would call back to the pilot, "I've got it." In other words, he lines up this bombsight onto the target, and automatically, by the hydraulic or electrical system, this steers the plane. It's an automatic bombsight.
He has it set up so that the bombs are dropped after he passes a certain point in his bombsight. The planes following see the bomb bay doors open, and that is their signal to drop their bombs.
Up to this point, you've been working for Uncle Sam, as we used to say. Then you turn, and start working for yourself. Now you're just trying to get home.
Zwerin: The navigator guides the pilot there, and the bombardier is the one to line up the plane over the target --
Kaplan: -- until the target is hit. From then on the pilot takes evasive action, and the navigator gives him the heading home.
Zwerin: The navigator reads the maps, tells the pilot where to go?
Kaplan: It's a lot of educated guessing. Navigation in a plane is not precise. You use the same systems you use in a boat, but the speeds at which you travel, and the different movements of the plane, are such that you can't be 100% accurate. The plane is vibrating and moving. You look at the compass and it's moving eight degrees that way and six degrees this way, and you say, well, that must be five degrees.
You keep looking at this compass and trying to maintain a certain heading, but it changes because of the speeds at which the plane is going. The pilot also has an automatic pilot to help him.
Zwerin: Did the navigator sit near the pilot?
Kaplan: No, the navigator sat in an office in the nose compartment, behind the bombardier. The pilot and copilot sat in the cockpit. I didn't see the pilot, but we talked to each other constantly through the intercom. We all had some visibility through the plexiglass. Also, the navigator could move around in the plane.
Zwerin: You sat and did calculations, mostly?
Kaplan: Yes, but most of our calculations were done beforehand. If I'm the lead navigator, I've done my work ahead, and then I just make corrections. If you're in the lead plane, you're the "lead navigator"; if not, you're "follow the pilot."
If I'm in a plane behind the lead plane, I don't tell the pilot what to do. I just keep a record of where we've been. But if something happens to the plane, if you get hit, you've got to be able to tell the pilot where we are at any given point, and give him a heading to go home, if we have to go home alone.
Zwerin: What were typical targets? Germany, usually?
Kaplan: Yes, but when we couldn't go to a big target, we'd go to what we called "no-balls." It was usually the submarine works at St. Nazaire, France. This was an easy mission, a milk-run. We didn't have to worry about going in deep.
You crossed the Channel, and there was a lot of flak, usually. There were concrete submarine pens at St. Nazaire. When we went there, lobbing the bombs from above didn't do much good because the bombs would just bounce off the concrete. So the trick was to approach the submarine pens from the sea, and drop your bombs so that they would go under the concrete ceiling.
Zwerin: Could you actually direct the bombs?
Kaplan: Today you can, but you couldn't then. What we used to do, we'd come in from a certain altitude and drop the bomb. It moved forward at the same speed as the plane; and if you had figured out the trajectory correctly, by the time you'd get over the target, the bomb was coming down under the ceiling of the submarine pen.
Zwerin: So that was an easy mission.
Kaplan: Yes. Now, if you were deep into Germany and you couldn't complete your mission, and you had bombs, the rule was that you dropped them anywhere. They were called targets of opportunity. If you were in France, you were only supposed to drop them on military targets like bridges and railroad yards.
Zwerin: And if you couldn't find any?
Kaplan: You couldn't bring live bombs back to the air base; so if you had to get rid of them, you dropped them over the Channel.
Zwerin: You just described some easy ones. Now would you describe some difficult ones?
Kaplan: Well, there were human beings who made these plans, and human beings flying the planes, and things go wrong sometimes. At the beginning of that week when I was shot down, there was a maximum effort every day we flew.
We didn't normally fly every day, but this whole week, everybody was flying. When we got near the initial point, it didn't look right. We couldn't pick out our initial point. Finally, the one flying lead that day -- I wasn't, but it could have happened to me -- he thought he saw the confluence of river and railroad. It looked right to him, and we made the turn, but we did not find our target.
There were over 150 planes making a complete 360 degree circle, looking for the target. Talk about guys being scared! Finally, we dropped our bombs at the signal of the lead crew, but those of us in the rear knew that we had not hit the target.
When we got back from the mission and had a debriefing, our reconnaissance pictures showed that we had hit a cheese factory and a school.
Zwerin: Do you remember a successful one, where the opposite happened?
Kaplan: I can remember a couple of times when we hit industrial plants in the Ruhr. And the day that we were shot down, we had a tremendous success. That was Gotha, the Messerschmidt airplane works at Gotha.
Zwerin: That must have been the action for which your unit received the citation -- the one you should have gotten, and didn't.
Kaplan: Yes.
Zwerin: What other targets did you hit?
Kaplan: We hit the naval base at Kiel. As a matter of fact, that was the first time we used B-17s and B-24s together. It was a catastrophe. They flew higher than we did, and we flew a little faster than they did. The planes were hard to keep together in formation. We had flak, we didn't have any fighters up there.
But most of the injuries at that time were from frostbite, because the men touched their guns and instruments with their bare hands, and it was about 50 degrees below zero. The men had electric gloves, and silk gloves inside the electric gloves. They weren't supposed to touch the guns without their silk gloves. But a lot of men did, and had very had frostbite injuries.
What happened was, they got very frustrated and wanted to fire their weapons at the enemy planes. But the guns froze up because the lubricating oil in the guns had frozen, and the men couldn't free them. It was terrible. A lot of people were hurt.
Zwerin: Did you have many planes penetrated by flak, and men being hit?
Kaplan: Yes, we had substantial flak damage, but most of our injuries that day were caused by frostbite.
Zwerin: The B-24s were called Liberators?
Kaplan: Yes. They were also called flying boxcars because of their squared-off shape. And the B-17s were called Flying Fortresses. They're about the same size. We carried more bombs and we had a little better speed, but the B-17s could fly higher, they could fly tighter formations, and take more punishment. They were safer airplanes.
Zwerin: You mentioned hundreds of planes going out. How many went out at a time on a mission of that size?
Kaplan: About 100, 120.
Zwerin: How many planes were in a squadron?
Kaplan: Seven in a squadron. Four times seven is 28, and possibly 32, would be on a normal mission. But they had what they called "maximum effort." When you had a maximum effort, every plane that could possibly fly went up, and joined the other squadrons. So we had as many as 1,000 planes in the air.
Zwerin: Was that very often? I think of that as D-Day.
Kaplan: Toward the end, in February, 1944, it was not unusual to have 1,000-plane raids.
Zwerin: Let's get into the story of when you were shot down. How long had you been flying missions before that happened?
Kaplan: I became operational early December, 1943, and I was shot down on February 24, 1944.
Zwerin: How many missions did you fly before you were shot down?
Kaplan: Seventeen--and a half.