French war honor can’t ease soul of WWII pilot

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. John C. Taylor can’t recall a single bombing mission he flew over Europe during World War II, not even the one he was honored for this weekend, but those fuzzy memories likely have nothing to do with his age — 97.

He’s never forgotten how hard it was to sleep the night before.

“When you were laying in the sack at night and you got up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the briefing, your stomach would be upside down,” Taylor said. “If you thought about the possibility of dying and all of your friends dying, the ones who went a few days before, if you did that, it would bother you.”

All nine members of his Flying Fortress crew, and almost certainly every other aviator in the 8th Air Force, wrestled with the same demons. The Mighty 8th, as it was called, lost 26,000 men over the skies of Europe with another 28,000 becoming prisoners of war.

On Saturday, the people of France saluted Taylor. French Consul General Alexis Andres presented him with the Legion of Honor in a ceremony before more than 75 people in Garden Ridge, a small city in Comal County not far from his home.

Those in the crowd raised their glasses and toasted Taylor at the end of the event.

The award made him a chevalier, or knight. More than 300 veterans in Texas have received the award since France marked the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004, Andres said. “We’re still finding new ones,” he added.

“Your life and your military career prove that knight is your rank to which you are entitled,” Andres told Taylor as he presented the medal.

In reciting the history of the medal, which was first established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, Andres talked of the role Texans played in World War II. He told the audience that more than 1.5 million troops were trained in the Lone Star State, with 750,000 Texans serving in various war zones and 20,000 losing their lives.

Taylor can’t recall the April 14,

1945, mission that saw more than 1,280 heavy bombers strike artillery, anti-aircraft, tank trenches, bunkers and U-boat pens in Royan, France. When the French inquired if he served on that mission, he had to look it up in an old log book. He was a co-pilot that day.

“I don’t remember a damned thing about it. I wish I could. It’s just one of them things, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m am old geezer or whether it’s because the Lord’s blessed me with a short memory about killing people.”

Then a second lieutenant, it was Taylor’s 16th bombing mission as a B-17 pilot. He would fly 18 missions in all before the war ended and remembers nothing of them, either

One of the last pockets of Nazi resistance as the conflict closed, Royan was destroyed in an attack that one account said left 1,700 civilian casualties. Andres, the consul general, said he didn’t know the number.

It was the first and last time napalm was employed on a target by the 8th Air Force, Air Education and Training Command historian Gary Boyd said, citing a record that called it “ineffective” and recommended against using it again.

The destruction wasn’t unusual given the breadth of bomber missions across the continent, but the carnage weighs on Taylor even now.

“I struggle a little bit with some of the things that occurred in the war, really, to this event, because you don’t like to do bad things,” he told the crowd.

When the war ended, Taylor flew his England-based ground crew, medics and others who hadn’t seen Europe’s destruction on tours to give them an up-close idea of it.

“It was a lot of fun. I say a lot of fun, I mean if you can imagine that the folks that were on the ground that got a chance to fly on those flights

were absolutely thrilled,” Taylor said. “We’d go from Paris up toward Germany and we’d fly at low level over places like Frankfurt or Schweinfurt, and they would see the absolute, total destruction … It would almost make you feel bad, make you sick.”

Like so many Americans, John Carl Taylor entered the military from hard times. He wasn’t just a Depression kid, but one who had been essentially orphaned along with a sister after his parents split up. He spent most of his childhood in a boarding school run by the De La Salle Christian Brothers, strict disciplinarians. After graduating from St. Paul’s School in Covington, La., he joined the Army Air Corps, scored well on an exam and found himself learning to fly heavy bombers.

The combat missions quickly blurred together at his U.S. Army Air Forces base in Kimbolton, England. Fear that kept him from a restful sleep dissipated like a postdawn mist after he jumped out of the rack and focused on the task at hand.

“Once you got involved in the briefing, once you got down in the airplane and once you started checking it out — and it was all radio silence — at nighttime you would be taxiing out at 4:30, 5 in the morning, totally black. All these airplanes managed to fall in line behind one another and get out to the end of the runway and get the green light to go,” Taylor said.

“But by the time you got involved in the process, all the jitters or the fear or the whatever it was, that was gone. And when you got up to altitude and you were in formation and you were going in to hit the target and flak was bad or the enemy 109s, which were the German fighters, were coming in on you, I never felt afraid. I don’t know what the hell it is, you do your job.”

Royan had been bypassed by Allied troops on the drive into Germany yet remained a critical U-boat base. Taylor’s crew, part of the 379th Bomb Group, carried 2,000-pound delayed fuse bombs and targeted concrete-reinforced sub pens and gun emplacements. The bombs penetrated defenses before exploding.

The crew — ranging from 17 to 22 years old — didn’t talk about their fears.

“That was all inside,” Taylor said. “As a matter of fact, we would do the opposite. We would flaunt a devil-may-care sort of an approach.”

A native of Clarksdale, Miss., Taylor came home at war’s end and quickly married. The couple stayed together 22 years and got their two kids in college before divorcing. He went to college himself after getting discharged, earning a degree from Boston University, but was recalled to active duty after the Korean War broke out.

Taylor stayed in the Air Force for nearly 32 years, serving in Honduras, El Salvador, Indonesia and Laos, and flying planes that ranged from the B-29 Superfortress and C-47 Dakota to the T-37 Tweet. He earned an MBA from George Washington University along the way, and married a second time and is still with his wife, Margo.

They had two more children; he embarked on a second career, teaching at Samuel Clemens and Judson high schools before retiring in 1986 and then began building and remodeling homes and commercial buildings.

While he notes, these many decades later, that the Americans fought a defensive war against an enemy bent on conquering others, Taylor continues to wrestle with the moral implications of it. Those not killed by Allied bombing had to live in basements under rubble, he said. Royan and all those other missions are things he prays about.

“We hit them in the daytime with these demolition bombs and then the Brits would come and hit them at night and firebomb them,” he said. “This war business, I don’t know how you feel about war, but it’s a horrible, horrible thing.”