Ploesti. Schweinfurt. Regensburg. Lille. The Marianas Turkey Shoot. Unless you were there — or were old enough to read during World War II — you probably won’t recognize these names.

They belong to battles already forgotten by the authors of American history texts. These bloody encounters were not epic, history-altering struggles like Stalingrad, El Alamein, or Midway, but American warriors fought a totalitarian foe nonetheless.

The difference between Ploesti and Lille, Schweinfurt and Blitz Week, and the WWII battles publicized on MPBN’s “Battleground” earlier this summer? The air battles simply did not receive the press.

And there were other air battles, too, that didn’t even rate a place name.

A “Cat Walk” over Germany

Bill Kopp, who after war’s end obtained his education degree from UMaine, went to Europe as a gunner flying on B-26 Marauders assigned to the 344th Bomb Group, 495th Bomb Squadron, Ninth Air Force.

This designation won’t mean much to most people, but the Army Air Force split its Britain-launched war efforts between the Eighth Air Force (strategic bombing a la “Twelve O’Clock High”) and the Ninth Air Force (medium bombers like the B-26, plus ground attack fighters like the P-47 Thunderbolt).

Experienced crews called the B-26 the “Flying Coffin,” since so many had wiped out during crew orientations. Once airborne, the Marauder flew well, but takeoffs and landings required extra attention to the controls.

The 344th Bomb Group earned six battle stars over Europe. Kopp fought as well, remaining with the 495th until V-E Day, but there was a close call…

In late winter or early spring 1945, the 495th had launched aircraft for a raid on Germany. Kopp’s plane approached the target in formation and lowered its bomb-bay doors.

The bombardier went to release the bombs — and nothing happened.

No air crew wanted to fly home with a bomb load. The weight reduced air speed and dragged on the plane, so the pilot asked someone to crawl into the bomb bay and manually jettison the bombs.

Kopp, “a nervous volunteer,” ventured onto the “10-inch-wide bomb-bay catwalk, 9,000 feet over Germany.” He could look down 1.7 miles into Hitler’s territory, but because “the passageway was too narow,” he could not “wear his chest chute or flak suit.” If he slipped and fell, well…

An electrical short had prevented the bombs from releasing automatically. Kopp used a screwdriver to drop the bombs, but his effort failed. The bombs would not drop.

As the Marauder flew home, Kopp crawled from the bomb bay and assumed his position as the power-turret gunner. After the B-26 landed, its ground crew slowly, oh, so slowly removed the bombs to discover the problem. Kopp learned that “a safety switch, which allowed the bombs to drop when the doors were fully open, was defective.”

After the war, Kopp graduated from UMaine and took a position as a sixth-grade teacher at an Orono school. The man who edged into frigid air over Nazi Germany believed “it wasn’t a piece of cake flying in combat, but it didn’t compare to how nervous” he was as a young, inexperienced teacher. “The kids were great, though.”

Today, Kopp and his wife, Frances, live in Glenburn.

Buzzing the Rising Sun

The 90th Bomb Group, nicknamed the Jolly Rogers, transferred to Ie Shima, “a very small island just Okinawa,” in early July 1945, Brewer resident Bill Frederick Sr. recalled.

A navigator and radar bombardier assigned to the B-24 Liberators flown by the 90th, Frederick had left the United States in December 1944. He joined the 90th the next month in New Guinea, from where the group subsequently moved to Biak Island. After flying from Mindoro and Luzon islands in the Philippines, the 90th transferred to Ie Shima, recently captured from the Japanese.

Before reaching Ie Shima, the 90th had flown long missions over the South China Sea and adjacent waters against Japanese ports, railyards, and airfields in Taiwan, China, Indochina (Southeast Asia), and Borneo. “My duties on the missions was to navigate to the target area, and if the weather was clear, set the bombardier on course to the designated, and he’d drop the bombs visually,” Frederick recalled. “If the target was obscured by clouds, I would then drop the bombs by radar.”

The 90th moved to Ie Shima “to enable us to reach Japan to hit military targets on the Japanese mainland,” Frederick said. Missions were still flown overwater, a prospect that worried him: What if the crew had to ditch (land a damaged or malfunctioning aircraft in the ocean)?

Military historians have debated the relative merits of the twin-ruddered B-24 and the graceful B-17 since the mid-1940s. Frederick, though, recognized the major difference in 1945. He did not want to ditch, because it was “almost impossible to survive such a crash.

“I envied the B-17 crews in this same situation, as the B-17 could be easily ditched and would sometimes stay afloat for a lengthy period of time!” he explained.

From its Ie Shima strip, the 90th warmed up for mainland Japan raids by striking enemy targets in Shanghai and Hong Kong. By early August, “we were preparing to fly our first missions against Japan proper, but the monsoon season arrived with a deadly storm, which prevented any missions to be staged for several days,” Frederick recalled.

The Enola Gay dropped an A-bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, and another B-29 flattened Nagasaki with an atomic bomb three days later. “The Japanese then declared they were ready to quit,” Frederick said, “but no one was sure of their sincerity.

“So, (in) what turned out to be my last mission, we were ordered to fly over Japan at very low altitude to see if we would draw any ground fire or interception from Jap fighters,” he said.

Imagine buzzing the Land of the Rising Sun in a B-24: That’s what the crew did, and “fortunately, we did not receive any fire,” Frederick acknowledged. “But when we flew over Nagasaki, you could not believe the total devastation unless you saw it. No wrecked buildings left standing. Just landscape like the moon’s surface!

“A very sobering sight, but we realized that the tragedy of so many civilian casualties was very small (when) compared to the loss of life that would have occurred had we been forced to invade Japan. They would have fought to the bitter end!” he commented.

Bill Frederick later came home to his wife, Ellen, whom he had married in 1944, and a young son whom he had not met. The Fredericks celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary this year.

Like so many WWII vets, Frederick vividly remembers the comrades who did not come home. “We lost a lot of good men from our group to combat and other flying mishaps, and I’m eternally grateful that the `Man Upstairs’ took care of me throughout my tour of duty,” he said.

Buzzing Pappy Boyington

Bangor resident Herman Perkins retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel. In summer 1945, he was flying a B-29 with the 6th Bomb Group, 313th Bomb Wing, stationed on Tinian Island in the Marianas.

That June, the 509th Composite Group and its commander, Col. Paul Tibbetts, arrived on Tinian. Tibbetts flew the “Enola Gay,” which “was parked a few yards from my B-29, the `Spirit of Sammy,”‘ Perkins said. The “Enola Gay” was closely guarded, “with the crew living behind a barbed-wire enclosure. My attempts to see what all the secrecy was about were thwarted. No mention of the word atomic was ever heard at that time.”

Perkins flew bombing missions against Japanese cities and airfields. After the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 6th Bomb Group was briefly ordered to stand down. “No word of surrender was forthcoming, and we resumed flying conventional type missions,” Perkins said. While returning to Tinian on Aug. 14, his crew learned that Japan had agreed to surrender.

The “Spirit of Sammy” was subsequently sent to drop food to prisoner-of-war camps in China. On Sept. 1, Perkins flew to Iwo Jima, where his plane was loaded with “9,000 pounds of food attached to parachutes.

“Flying in over the coast of China, I located the camp to which I had been assigned, and on the roof were the words, `Pappy Boyington is here,”‘ he said. “Of course, he was the commander of the Marines’ Black Sheep Squadron, for which is TV series would be based many years later.”

Perkins landed his B-29 on Iwo Jima to refuel Sept. 2, the day that Japan surrendered.

Captured by the Germans

On June 26, 1944, the 455th Bomb Group launched an air raid from a strip near Cerignola, Italy. Flying aboard a B-24 Liberator that morning was Bangor resident Arthur Tilley Sr., a bombardier assigned to the 742nd Bomb Squadron.

The B-24s formed up over Italy, then droned north across the Adriatic to bomb a German oil refinery near Vienna, Austria. Tilley’s plane was flying in the Tail-End Charlie position in a 12-plane section. Fifteen P-38 Lightnings, twin-engine fighters, joined the B-24s as escorts near the target.

Then several German aircraft, twin-engined Me-110s and Ju-88s, suddenly attacked the formation, shooting down the B-24 next to Tilley’s plane before the P-38s swarmed into them. The American bombers approached their IP, “the point where you turn and start the bomb run, opened the bomb-bay doors, and went into the flak (antiaircraft fire),” Tilley said.

Shells exploded close to his plane. A German fighter, possibly an Fw-190, apparently attacked the B-24: “Suddenly there was a popping sound of bullets going through the plane,” Tilley recalled. One bullet zipped between two of his outstretched fingers.

“Our plane seemed to stop in mid-air and then just drift forward. I could tell by the feel we would never reach the target,” he recalled. Salvoing the bombs, Tilley worked his way to the open bomb bay, where he saw another Fw-190 climbing to strafe the plane’s belly. The bullets cut the hydraulic lines in the bomb bay, starting a fire that quickly engulfed the aircraft’s midsection.

Tilley soon realized that the B-24 was “on fire from wing tip to wing tip. Three engines were burning. We were going down.” The pilot was dead, but the co-pilot told Tilley to jump.

Strapping on a chest chute, he returned to the bomb bay and leaped out as he pulled his rip cord. The chute blossomed, slowing Tilley’s ascent.

He was not alone. “At one time I counted 30 parachutes in the air, some landing, and even more coming out,” he explained. “One fellow landed at the same time and place as bombs salvoed” from a damaged B-24; the American “just disappeared” in the resulting explosions.

Tilley drifted toward a field, across which came three German soldiers. He landed in a potato field, released his chute, and crawled away, masked by some growing grain.

He had gone 100-200 feet when “there was a noise behind me, and there they were, about 50 feet away, with two of the biggest dogs you would ever see, pulling on their leashes, eager to get some meat,” Tilley recalled the moment he was captured. The Germans stripped off his outer clothing to search him and immediately confiscated his escape kit.

Tilley would later learn that the co-pilot and tail gunner had bailed out of his plane, only to be captured by the Germans. “The co-pilot said that just as I was jumping, the plane exploded and broke apart,” he said. Other gunners had been struggling toward a hatch when the tail gunner jumped; those men did not survive the crash. In fact, nine of the 12 B-24s flying in his section were shot down.

The captured Americans were driven into captivity aboard a charcoal-burning pickup, initially stopping at a military hospital, then moving into a makeshift prison. Tilley underwent interrogation by a “big German officer” who could be “Hermann Goering or his double.”

The prisoners later entrained to Stalag Luft III near Sagan. Tilley, living in Barracks No. 56, recalled that “confinement and lack of food were the two main problems in the camp.” The Germans fed their prisoners “some black bread equivalent to three thin slices a day, a cup of barley once a week” and the occasional vegetable scrounged from a local garden. Red Cross parcels delivered to the camp made life somewhat bearable for the prisoners, who included British aviators in separate barracks.

Late one frigid night in January 1945, with the Red Army closing on central Germany from the Eastern Front, the German guards rousted out their prisoners and marched them west. “It was snowing, and the wind (was) blowing with the temperature around zero,” Tilley said.

For the next several days, the Allied prisoners shuffled westward, sleeping wherever they could at night (Tilley spent the first night packed with other men into a parsonage, then slept the next night in a hay mow). March and sleep, march and sleep: The prisoners merely survived from one moment to the next. As Tilley remembered, “The only way to exist was to put everything out of your mind and keep plodding.”

Then the prisoners reached a railyard, where they were herded into box cars and shipped to Stalag VIIA near Moosburg. This camp was packed with prisoners — an estimated 70,000 men, Tilley said — who survived the cold winter on reduced rations.

The war was ending in Europe, however. Even as the Soviets and Germans tore Berlin apart in an epic battle, American troops reached Moosburg. On April 20, 1945, “the (camp) gates opened, and two tanks from Gen. Patton’s Third Army slowly came into the camp,” Tilley said. “They were mobbed. We were finally free! I don’t think anyone who was there will ever forget the emotion of that moment.”

The German guards had absconded during the night to avoid retribution from their captives. Told to stay in the camp, many Americans refused. Tilley walked into Moosburg because “just to get out in the open fields was a pleasure.”

A few days later, Patton visited the camp, arriving “in his jeep, pearl-handle pistols and all, with another jeep following as guards,” Tilley said. Patton “made a brief speech and left.”

Within the week, the American prisoners were flown to a repatriation camp in France. They enjoyed “the first hot shower of a year, new clothes, and plenty of good food,” Tilley recalled.