Vet recalls crossing Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth
Former U.S. Army Air Force Tech Sgt. Richard Perkins initially sought military service on the water, but wound up spending most of his time on dry land—but that didn’t discourage him.
Perkins, now 94, quit high school at 17 to join the U.S. Navy in 1940. But the Navy rejected him.
“The Navy told me that I was too small and too light,” the Texarkana, Texas, resident recently said.
However, the U.S. Army accepted Perkins the following year, just as the U.S. entered World War II.
Born in Sabine, Texas, in 1923, Perkins’ family eventually moved to Houston, where his dad, who survived military service in World War I, operated three service stations. Perkins himself managed one of the stations just before enlisting.
“I took my basic training at Fort Sam Houston, after which the Army gave me an aptitude test and found out that I liked mechanics, so they sent me into the U.S. Army Air Force as a flight mechanic.”
From “Fort Sam,” the AAF sent Perkins first to Santa Anna Army Air Force Base in California, then to Florida, then back to California for some advanced flight mechanical training.
“I leaned to work on piston engines and later I took charge of airplane parts and supplies, like spark plugs,” Perkins said.
While in training, Perkins witnessed his first war-related fatality.
“One day, I was picking up some parts and I saw a P-39 Air Cobra coming in sideways,” he said. “It crashed into one of the hangars. Me and another guy climbed up on one of the P-39’s wings and tried to open the canopy and get the pilot out. Then a colonel came running up and told us the plane was leaking fuel and to get away from it before it exploded. The pilot was slumped over, dead and his neck was apparently broken.”
Undaunted by the accident, Perkins stayed in training and eventually wound up being deployed to Europe on the converted passenger liner, the Queen Elizabeth.
Perkins remembers being impressed by the ship’s size.
“It was a four-stacker, complete with a state room,” he said.
However, since the Queen Elizabeth happened to be a large vessel, it also made for being a large potential target for enemy submarines.
On the way across the Atlantic, this former passenger liner had to slightly change directions as it zigged and zagged every six minutes in order to throw off any potential fixed torpedo aim that a German U-Boat might have on it.
“At the time, we heard that it took an average of six minutes for an enemy submarine to get a fixed torpedo aim at the ship’s hull,” Perkins said. “We just slid from one side to the other the whole time.”
Once the ship docked in Scotland, Perkins received his assignment to the Huntington fighter base, after being assigned to the U.S. Eighth Strategic Air Force in England by mid-1943.
Eventually Perkins received assignment to the Eighth’s 385th Fighter Squadron. There he worked on the P-38 Lighting, a twin-engine fighter plane. Later, the squadron would receive P-51 Mustang fighter planes.
“We had some P-38s come back in from flying escort missions,” Perkins said. “They came in with mostly anti-air
craft shell, or flak damage. They also had some bullet holes in them from enemy fighters.”
By June 6, 1944, Perkins’ unit was flying the relatively new P-51 Mustang fighters as close ground support for Allied foot soldiers going in on the Normandy Beach landings. But about a week later, the Germans started hitting England with V-1 rockets.
These missiles became the world’s first short-range intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were often referred to as “Buzz” bombs because they were shaped like a bomb and would make a buzzing sound as they glided though the air. However, once they ran out of fuel, they would be completely silent until they crashed and exploded. No one could see or know for sure where they would hit and explode—especially at night.
“When I heard some of these V-1s coming over, I knew how to pray,” Perkins said. “One of those hit a nearby town and killed almost all the people living there.”
By the time Allied ground forces were able to secure most of France throughout August and into early September of 1944, Perkins’ air unit left England for assignment to the U.S. Ninth Tactical Air Force in the French Riviera, near Marseilles.
“I got to ride in a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber to France,” Perkins said. “When we flew across the English Channel, I could see Allied shipping damaged by German sea mines planted in the LeHavre seaport just west of Normandy.”
As the war progressed closer and closer to Germany, the Allies started using the Riviera area for German Army prisoners of war encampments.
“We would toss some cigarettes to the German POWs since our barracks were pretty close to their camp just outside our base,” Perkins said. “Some could speak English and one of them even gave me one of their Luger pistols for a souvenir, but for the most part, we were told not to associate much with them.”
Finally, some good news came on May 8, 1945, when Germany surrendered and the war, at least in Europe, was over.
“I was in the chow line when I got the news and after that there was plenty of hollering, people blowing jeep horns and celebrating,” Perkins said. “I was also glad to hear that the war was over and the French had all kinds of wine to drink.”
For a few weeks after the war, Perkins said his unit busied itself with using B-17s as transport planes to fly both displaced military and French civilian personnel where they needed to be. But as for Perkins, he had accumulated enough discharge points that the Army was able to send him back home just before the end of the year.
“There was a train that took a group of about 50 of us north to Paris and from there, we went on to LeHavre,” he said. “From there, we boarded a ship and headed straight back home.”
Following a stop at Camp Shanks, a New Jersey-based separation center, Perkins caught a troop train to Tyler, Texas, before finally getting back to Houston.
“At this time of the year, it was freezing cold in New Jersey, but I made it back home just before Thanksgiving,” he said.
Perkins married in September 1946 and worked for a Houstonbased synthetic rubber chemical plant for 33 years before retiring as a foreman and getting into real estate for a while.
“I could have gotten killed, but God was watching over me,” he said.
“One day, I was picking up some parts and I saw a P-39 Air Cobra coming in sideways. It crashed into one of the hangars. Me and another guy climbed up on one of the P-39’s wings and tried to open the canopy and get the pilot out. Then a colonel came running up and told us the plane was leaking fuel and to get away from it before it exploded. The pilot was slumped over, dead and his neck was apparently broken.” —Richard Perkins