Young Pilot

Like many who have been in combat, MacDonell “Mac” Moore has rarely spoken of his wartime experiences.

Even family members are just learning the details.

Those who do hear the stories say they’d make a spine-tingling movie — if only the details were less hard to believe.

He was born to a well-to-do family in Danbury, Conn., on March 12, 1925. He recalls enduring no special hardships during the Great Depression.

He was gifted in school and played hockey, football and golf.

He met the girl he would marry when he was 12.

“I wouldn’t change a thing on that front,” he says, and smiles in the direction of the former Betty Ann Fennell, sharp and bright-eyed at 92.

When a team of Army Air Forces recruiters came to Danbury looking for potential pilots in 1943, they told young Mac he was qualified for a special training program even though he hadn’t been to college. Eager to join the war effort, he signed on. “Much to his surprise, and my grandmother’s dismay, he was called to duty two months before high school graduation and left for basic training in Biloxi, Miss.,” says the couple’s son, MacDonell “Don” Moore III.

Within 18 months, Mac Moore had learned to fly the heavy B-24 Liberator bomber, become commissioned as an officer, bonded with the men who would become his crew, and married Betty Ann at an Army airfield near his final training stop in Savannah, Ga.

By Dec. 16, 1944, the 10 airmen — part of the 484th Bombardment Squadron of the 15th U.S. Army Air Force — had relocated to an Allied airbase in Cerignola, Italy, staging ground for an intensive campaign of bombing missions aimed at military, industrial and transportation targets in the southern part of the Third Reich.

Lead pilot James Crockett, 24, also a second lieutenant, thought so much of Moore’s skills that he had the 19-year-old serve as pilot for half his crew’s first dozen runs.

All were dangerous forays toward such heavily guarded Austrian centers of industry as Vienna and Linz.

Moore’s tone in recalling them is as calm as he must have been in the cockpit.

They returned from one run with 189 bullet holes in the aircraft — a number he says was not out of the ordinary.

“You just hoped the bullets didn’t hit you where it counted,” Moore recalls.

For their “lucky 13th” mission, the target was a rail yard in Graz, the second-largest city in Austria.