RSSGrim and grimy
After 27 bombing runs over Europe, what he really wanted was a showerYakima Herald-Republic
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The War Years – Special SectionWar Years Photo Gallery
More 'Special Project'
- War Stories: Norma Baird
- War Stories: Reva Blomé-Bunnell
- Letting it out
- Aboard the Superfortress
- 'They needed nurses'
- Grim and grimy
- Before Pearl Harbor
It wasn't the 27 terrifying combat bombing missions over Europe.
Nor the sight of Allied planes being shot down all around him.
Nor the strafing of his B-24 by German anti-aircraft missiles.
No, what made the biggest impression on Merlin Martin were the unsanitary conditions he and his fellow airmen endured during World War II.
"I look back on it now and think, 'My word, that was a rough deal,'" said Martin, who lives in Ellensburg.
Martin's story begins the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, Dec. 7, 1941, as he was driving to see his fiancee, Audrey, in Utica, N.Y.
He heard President Franklin Roosevelt's voice over the car radio declaring it a "date which will live in infamy" and knew his life had inexorably changed. As had everyone's.
A little more than a year later, after marrying Audrey, the 22-year-old enlisted in the Army Air Forces.
He'd wanted to be a pilot but there was a surplus, so he was shifted into gunnery instruction instead.
After training in New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida, Kansas and Arizona, he and 499 other men were loaded onto a Liberty, or cargo, ship and began the long journey across the Atlantic to Europe.
Martin discovered on shipboard that water was a luxury, a fact that would remain true for the duration of the war.
"We had only enough water for brushing our teeth and making coffee. But no showers," he noted.
After 28 days, they landed in North Africa.
"We hadn't had a bath in a month and our clothes were filthy," recalled Martin. "The officer told us to strip, throw our clothes in a pile. Then he threw kerosene on it and burned them all."
Although they were issued new uniforms, they were caked with grime again by the time the men arrived in Italy and climbed onto soot-laden coal trains.
"You think of the Air Force as glamour boys. Well, forget that," Martin laughed.
Next came open-air trucks, as the airmen were transported to Spinazzola Airfield in Italy. Unfortunately, it rained the entire trip.
"We got there at midnight, soaking, and had to pitch a tent in the rain," Martin recalled.
There was no running water or electricity in the camp, just plenty of powdered eggs and powdered milk.
Trouble came early on, but not from the enemy. It was a matter of cleanliness: the airmen were instructed to wash their mess kits after every meal, but they had to do it in the same barrel of water, which was always clogged with grease.
After Martin and the nine other men in his crew all became violently ill, "I wrote home and said 'Please send a box of Brillo pads.'"
Once everyone was healthy, the squadron flew its first bombing mission over a railroad yard near Vienna.
"It was a baptism of fire with anti-aircraft shooting all over at us," remembered Martin. "We came back with dozens of holes in the plane."
But they came back, and he knows how lucky that was. Especially since they returned from 26 more missions during the next six months, over most of Europe.
And every one of them was frightening.
"After a couple bombing missions, you begin to get the fear of God in you," he said. "You're not naive any longer."
Martin enjoyed one idyllic interlude, 10 days of R & R on the Isle of Capri, off the coast of Italy. The airmen enjoyed the warm weather and blue seas and stayed in a hotel with white tablecloths in the dining room.
"What a treat that was," Martin recalled.
As harrowing as the bombing missions were, Martin's B-24 was never hit hard enough to crash, nor was anyone in his plane killed.
"Every mission there were losses; you never knew when your number would come up," he said.
He was still in Italy in 1945 when the war in Europe was declared over and rejoiced at the prospect of going home -- and finally getting clean.
"In retrospect, one of the hardest things for an American boy to get used to was the lack of sanitation, the lack of personal hygiene," he said. "You became a little less civil in language, dress and habits."
Traveling home wasn't without adventures, either. Martin's oddest experience came when he was sitting at an air base in Brazil, cutting up a pineapple, the first fresh fruit he'd seen in months, when an anteater nudged him on the back of the neck.
After the war ended and he returned home, it took about a year before he felt normal again and could shake off the way he'd had to live during those grim months.
"It wasn't the danger that was so bad," Martin said. "It was the terrible living conditions."
Now 86, Martin moved from New York to Seattle in 1948 and worked for the General Electric Co., overseeing contract administration, until 1981 when he retired and moved to Ellensburg.
As odious as his experiences in Italy were, it was a difficult adjustment leaving his 10-man crew at the end of the war. They'd become a particularly close-knit unit, Martin said. And the six remaining men still are, corresponding with one another every year.
"We were like a family," he said.
