It Weighs How Much??

My name is Josesph Karpiak and I was an aircraft armorer in the 488th. This means that I was part of the ground crew, and part of my job involved loading or maintaining the bombs and machine guns on the B-25's. I served with the 488th
right from the beginning in 1942 while in South Carolina until the end of the war.

My memory isn't what it used to be, but two incidents stand out rather vividly in my mind. I believe they both happened in Hergla, Corsica. As an armorer, I was responsible for loading the bombs on the planes as well as cleaning and loading the 50 caliber machine guns. One day in Hergla, I was loading a bomb onto a B-25 and found myself in a rather unusual predicament. The bombs for these planes could weigh anywhere from 100 to 500 pounds, and were loaded in teams of three men on stepladders. There were a set of signals relayed to each other in order to successfully load the bomb onto the bomb rack. First, the man at the front/nose of the bomb would attach it to the rack with a shackle while the other two men held it. Then the front/nose man would grab hold the bomb again, and the rear man would then shackle the rear/tail end of the bomb. There were no middle shackles so that meant the middle man was always holding the bomb, but with the help of one of the other two men present. On this one occasion, I was the middle man and the other two men got their signals crossed and both started to attach the shackles at the same time. Suddenly, I realized that I was holding a 250lb. all by myself. I didn't say anything because I didn't want anyone to panic, but I gritted my teeth and somehow held the bomb until they finished shackling it up. Afterwords, I told my two comrads what had happened, and they turned quite pale. I asked them to make sure that they got their signals right from now on, because I didn't think I'd be able to do that with a 500 lb. bomb.

The other Hergla story involves an air raid on the base where I was stationed. The Germans were strafing the base one night with Stuka dive bombers, and the normal procedure when this happened was to jump into a trench or foxhole to wait it out, which is exactly what I did. Sometime during the attack, I felt like a small baseball or stone hit me in the back. When the attack was over, I found an unexploded German anti-personnel grenade lying next to me. Now . . . "if that grenade had been alive, I'd be dead, and wouldn't be here to tell this story. Thank God it was the other way around."

To the left is a photo of me in a leather flight jacket outside a chapel on the Isle of Capri. I'm not quite sure why I'm standing next to a church pillar for a Protestant Church, but notice the leather gloves I'm wearing. It must've been pretty cold in Italy at that time. To the right is a typical advertisement for a "flight jacket" similar to the ones we wore. Notice the price and shipping costs. Wow! How times have changed. After the war I worked in several industrial manufacturing jobs back home in New Jersey. Then, in 1949 I married Helen Klemash. We celebrated our 50th Anniversary in 1999 and are slowly creeping up on our 60th.