Colfax resident remaining survivor of World War II B-17 Black Jack

By LeAnn R. Ralph

COLFAX — Think about it — 45 seconds is not very much time.

When the B-17 bomber, Black Jack, went down in the ocean off New Guinea during World War II on July 11, 1943, that’s how much time all ten crew members had to get out of the plane before it sank in 150 feet of water.

And all ten crew members did get out.

James Peterson, 96, a resident at Colfax Health and Rehabilitation Center’s Sandy Ridge Apartments, is now the remaining survivor of the Black Jack.

Peterson, who is originally from Iowa, was a waist gunner.

“It was quite the experience … I was just lucky.” he said.

Peterson, along with his son-in-law, Michael Tandberg, a Vietnam war veteran, and his daughter, Christine, spoke with the Colfax Messenger October 31.

“Being married to his daughter, I knew he was in the Air Corps, which is what they called it back then, but I never knew about the crash until one day when we were visiting them in Fargo, and he was telling about the reporter that knocked on the door, asking if he was one of the crew members of that bomber. That was the first I ever heard of it. He had never said anything to us about it,” Tandberg said.

As it turned out, an Australian named Rod Pearce had discovered the Black Jack in December of 1986 and had made a film about finding the bomber where it had come to rest at the bottom of the ocean.

Pearce was described as an experienced scuba diver in Papua, New Guinea, who was obsessed with finding the wrecks of planes and ships.

More than 40 years after it sank, Pearce and his crew discovered Black Jack, researched the plane’s crew members, and found out what they could about them. The pilot, Captain Ralph DeLoach, was located in California and offered to return to New Guinea to meet the villagers of Boga Boga in December of 1987 when he was 69 years old.

One of the unique aspects of Black Jack’s discovery is that the plane was intact.

DeLoach’s return to New Guinea is part of the film “Black Jack’s Last Mission,” which is now also available on DVD (www.pacificghosts.com).

According to the website, “a little before midnight on July 10, 1943, the crew of ten boarded the B-17 for a night mission against one of the heavily-defended Japanese airstrips at Rabaul on New Britain (Island). Within eight hours Black Jack would be lying on the ocean floor off New Guinea. She would remain there, undisturbed, for more than 43 years.”

Skip bombing

Prior to the crash landing, Black Jack had seen plenty of action with the B-17’s first pilot, Captain Ken McCullar.

Captain McCullar pioneered a technique called “skip bombing” in which he flew in at a low altitude and released the bomb loads about a hundred feet from the bows of target ships.

On one famous mission, McCullar made five skip bomb runs, and by the time he was finished, Black Jack had only two engines still operating and had suffered other damage.

The captain ordered that anything available should be thrown out of the plane to make it lighter so they could obtain enough altitude to fly over the mountains.

Black Jack made it back to land safely at Port Moresby.

McCullar was later killed in a takeoff crash with another plane.

Des Moines

Peterson enlisted in the service at Des Moines, Iowa.

He graduated from Mason City High School in 1938 and enlisted in February of 1942. He joined DeLoach’s crew in May of 1943.

“When I was going to the University of Iowa, they had a course in civilian pilot training,” Peterson said.

“I took that course, and I got a private’s pilot’s license. When I enlisted, there wasn’t any schooling open of any kind. They didn’t know what to do with me. They gave me a gun and a helmet, and I was in the Army just six weeks before I was on my way overseas,” he said.

“I was supposed to go over and be a guard, be on guard duty. It didn’t happen,” Peterson said.

“I got into radio work, and we were going to be in cahoots with the Australian air force and the United States air force. Finally I was assigned to a bomber squadron. I was in radio work there. Somebody was always getting hurt. So I volunteered. It only took me about nine months to complete 43 missions all together,” he said.

Black Jack went down on Peterson’s seventh mission.

“It’s pretty in that area,” Tandberg said.

“When I was in Vietnam, I took R&R to Australia. We flew over New Guinea. The water around the islands was that turquoise color, and the palm trees and the islands, and the beaches around the islands. Remote uninhabited islands. Some places are just dotted with those islands, and other places are empty ocean,” he said.

The night it went down, Black Jack had flown through a storm, and two of the engines became damaged.

“A B-17 had four engines. The props were feathered on two engines, and we only had two good ones on one side,” Peterson said.

The pilot “wanted to get to the coral reef. I forget now if he flew over or was short, but we landed in water that was 150 feet deep,” he said.

“The plane skipped, like you would skip a rock,” Tandberg said.

“Just recently, a fellow aviator landed in New York. Sully. That was an interesting story. They all got out alive,” Peterson said.

Life rafts

Three of the Black Jack’s crew members were injured, and the other crew members, who escaped the plane from the windows nearest to them, pulled the injured out on the wing.

Black Jack was equipped with two life rafts that were supposed to deploy on impact, but neither of them did.

“We only had one life raft. They were in the radio compartment, on the outside. They were supposed to eject, but they didn’t. We had to pull them out. But it worked out all right,” Peterson said.

“I was out on the wing, and I stepped in that raft and was in water (on the wing) over my ankles already. It only took very shortly. The tail went up in the air, and she went straight down,” he said.

The crew of Black Jack had about 45 seconds to get out of the plane and grab the life raft before the B-17 sank into the ocean.

The injured were placed in the life raft, and the remaining crew members hung onto the sides.

As if it were not bad enough that their aircraft had crash landed in the ocean and sank in less than a minute, the raft then became caught in the current and headed out to sea.

“The natives helped us out,” Peterson said.

Realizing that the raft was getting smaller instead of larger, native islanders “jumped in their boats and went out and saved them. Otherwise they would have been lost,” Tandberg said.

“They couldn’t have fought the current. What a shame that would have been, to survive the crash, and then drift out to sea. Luckily they landed on an island with someone on it,” he said.

Church service 

“We crash landed, and it was 7:30 in the morning,” Peterson said.

“I went to their church at 10:30. It was interesting to see. The women were together in one group. The men were together in their group. And the children were in a group. They were all separated. I thought it was quite unique,” Peterson said, adding he believed the church had been built by missionaries and that the church was Lutheran.

“It was a good thing they made it out of that storm before they went down,” Tandberg said.

Although it would be logical to think flying missions in bombers in World War II would be a harrowing experience — consider the poem “The Death of Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell published in 1945 that ends with “When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose” — it was not really the missions themselves Peterson worried about.

It was the weather.

“It always rained at least once a day there, and some of the storms were quite violent. I remember going on one mission, and we were in one of the thermals, and the plane dropped about 3,000 feet in a matter of seconds. So actually, I was more afraid of the weather than I was going over a target. I wasn’t afraid, I guess, but I was uneasy,” Peterson said.

Peterson downplays any hint of a suggestion that he might be a hero.

“I had friends that were killed. They’re the ones who should be recognized. They gave the ultimate. They gave their lives. I really don’t get too excited about any of these fancy deals,” Peterson said.

After Black Jack crash landed, Peterson was awarded an Air Medal and then flew in B-24s.

Landing gear

After the crash landing of Black Jack, Peterson flew on another mission that also could have ended in tragedy had it not been for the expertise of the flight engineer.

The second crash landing Peterson experienced happened on their way back from a mission.

According to an article published in the January 10, 1944, Mason City, Iowa, newspaper, “the hydraulic system operating the ship’s retractable landing gear had been shot out in a brush with a Japanese convoy north of New Britain shortly after midnight Monday.”

The article goes on to say one of the three wheels on the landing gear had dropped down and could not be raised again. The flight engineer had been working for two hours, and the plane was running dangerously low on fuel. Using a screwdriver and a wrench, the flight engineer had disassembled the plane’s heater and used some of the parts to fix the hydraulic controls.

While the plane’s wheels were able to be put into the “down” position, they could not be locked.

The flight engineer told the pilot to lock the wings, and when he did, the wheels snapped tight.

At that moment, one engine quit because it was out of fuel. As the pilot touched down, the second engine also quit.

Peterson said that particular flight was a little tense, too.

“We had a good crew chief. He really worked to get the wheels down. But after we rolled down (the runway) it collapsed. It was sort of exciting,” he said.

“You didn’t think twice about getting into a plane after that?” his daughter, Christine, asked.

“No,” Jim said. “No. I didn’t think twice.”

Tandberg noted it did not sound as if the airplane crews always stayed together.

“No, the crews did not always stay together,” Peterson said, adding that crews members on the bombers would be injured, and then they would need someone else to fill in.

“They always said you were never supposed to volunteer for anything in the army, but I did,” Peterson said.

Brothers

Peterson was not the only member of his immediate family to serve in World War II.

His twin brother, Dean, who currently lives in Florida, was part of the D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and his older brother, Bill, served in Iceland.

“D-Day had to be quite an operation,” Christine said, “but Dean says his claim to fame is that he met Jack Dempsey.”

Peterson keeps one of his favorite pictures on his dresser.

The photograph is Jim and his brothers together flanked with a photograph of their father on the left side and their mother on the right side.

“What I always think about the war, too, are things Nana had saved and their involvement on the home front. Grandpa headed up a coat drive to send to refugees. And Nana was involved in teas and meeting the soldiers on the trains to give them sandwiches,” Christine said.

“My grandma wrote her own memoir. She had a section called ‘the war years,’ and she talked about how she always prayed the guys would have a full moon to fly under. And them saying, ‘no, that’s not what they wanted,’” Christine said.

“No, they wanted to be invisible,” Tandberg said.

“Yes, we wanted to be invisible,” Peterson said.

“With three kids in the service, it’s amazing they all got out okay. I had an uncle that served in the Pacific Theater too. He was telling us that if he was just a little bit taller, he would have been dead. A bullet went right through his helmet and grazed his head. He had a bullet burn. It took the hair right off. I was quite little when he was telling that,” Tandberg recalled.

Peterson was in the service in World War II for three years, six months and one day.

Civilian life

Peterson did not know his wife, Gwen, before he went into the service.

“I went back to Mason City and worked there, and actually, I was a salesman, and I was on the road quite a bit. I had territories in Kansas, Arkansas. I lived in Kansas City too. I’ve been around. I’ve lived in six or seven states. I was with a cement company for 30 years (in Fargo). I enjoyed that work,” Peterson said.

“I met my wife in Mason City. There were four of us guys, bachelors, who lived in one apartment, and in the other apartment, there were four girls. And that’s how I met her,” Peterson said.

“She was my better half. She was really a wonderful lady. I was a little bit on the Good Time Charlie side,” he said.

When asked if his wife had “knocked off some of the rough edges,” Peterson laughed. “She sure did.”

Gwen passed away in 2009.

Christine is Peterson’s oldest daughter. Another daughter lives in Kansas City, and a son lives in North Dakota.

After Peterson retired from his job at Fargo, North Dakota, he and his wife moved to their cabin in Minnesota and would spend their winters in Arizona.

Peterson moved to this area to be closer to his daughter and lived in Eau Claire for a number of years before moving to Sandy Ridge Apartments.

Crew members

The Pacific Ghosts website lists all of the crew members of the Black Jack and includes biographies for each of them.

In addition to Captain Ralph DeLoach and Waist Gunner James Peterson, Black Jack’s crew included Co-pilot Joseph H. Moore; Navigator Charles Shaver; Bombardier Herman J. Dias; Engineer Delbert C. Smith; Radio Operator George Prezioso; Ball Turret Gunner Joseph F. Wilson; Waist Gunner Daniel T. Clinton; and Tail Gunner Paul J. Blasewitz.

Nine of Black Jack’s crew members returned to civilian life after World War II.

Bombardier Dias was killed on January 19, 1944, when their bomber “Paper Doll” was shot down by fighters, hit the water and exploded. He is listed as Missing in Action and is memorialized at Manila American Cemetery.

Captain DeLoach, who later started another career as the “Marlboro Man,” died in September of 2007 in California.

Co-pilot Moore died in September of 1994 in Pennsylvania.

Navigator Shaver died in March of 1997 in Virginia.

Flight Engineer Smith was the most seriously wounded during the ditching of the Black Jack and suffered a broken back. He never returned to flight duty and died in Arkansas in August of 1992.

Ball Turret Gunner Wilson died in New Jersey in September of 1986 just a few month’s before Pearce’s discovery of Black Jack.

Waist Gunner Clinton died in Massachusetts in February of 1977.

The second-longest surviving member of Black Jack’s crew was Radio Operator Prezioso.

Prezioso died in New Jersey in January of 2015.