Richard LeBoy
RICHARD LEBOY
Age: 90
Residence: Palm Desert
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps. Flew the B-26 Marauder, a twin-engine medium range bomber, in combat. 12th Air Force, 319th Bomber Group, 438th Squadron
Years served: 1941-1946
Rank: Captain
Family: Wife Carol, two children, one grandchild
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II on a regular basis through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
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In the late 1930s, Richard LeBoy signed up for the country's civilian pilot training program. As an incentive, the program offered two years of college paid for by the federal government.
“At that time we flew Piper Cubs,” he said, describing the small, single-engine planes. “You had to start the engine by winding the propeller by hand.”
After ground school and flight training, LeBoy signed up for secondary courses that included aerial acrobatics and instruction in flying biplanes.
As an experienced pilot and with the war raging in Europe, LeBoy decided to join the Army Air Corps in 1941.
His college career would have to wait.
“I enlisted two days before Pearl Harbor,” he said. “I just didn't like what was going on.”
He took his training in Visalia, Bakersfield and Stockton, where he learned to fly single-engine planes, including the PT-22, BT-13 and AT6 fighter plane.
He was sent to airfields in Louisiana for further training, where he was assigned to a B-26 bomber.
“A twin-engine (plane) of which I knew absolutely nothing about,” he said.
His last stop in the U.S. before deployment overseas was Baer Field in Indiana.
After a limited amount of training — 20 hours each of primary, basic and advanced air training — he was assigned a crew that was just as inexperienced as he was when it came to manning the bomber.
Higher-ups arbitrarily selected the crew, he said.
A group of enlisted men were lined up and someone went down the line and said, “You're a navigator. You're a tail gunner. You're a turret gunner.”
With minimal training, the men were sent across the ocean.
“I'm flying over the North Atlantic. It's freezing. They gave us summer uniforms,” said LeBoy. “I had no idea where we were going, other than we were going east.”
The crew flew to Newfoundland, Greenland, and then on to Iceland.
The Greenland-to-Iceland leg of the trip almost proved to be catastrophic.
“With 15 minutes of flight time left in the plane, I have no idea where I am,” he said.
“When I asked the navigator, he said, ‘I don't know,'” because he hadn't been trained, said Leboy.
Then LeBoy asked the engineer to transfer fuel from the extra gas tanks attached to the bomb bays.
“He said, ‘I don't know how,'” LeBoy said.
They finally located their destination — Reykjavík, Iceland.
“We landed and then we ran out of gas on the runway,” he said.
From Iceland, the crew continued on to Africa, where LeBoy engaged in the first of his 40 bombing missions.
His closest call came during a bombing mission in the Mediterranean Sea.
His assignment was to attack the supply ships that were making deliveries to German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel when he was returning from Egypt.
“We did what they call skip bombing,” he said. “We had to fly below the ship's deck when we attacked.”
The bomber carried six 500-pound bombs. The bombs were released close to the water and would skip like rocks across the surface until they hit their targets.
“One time they shot out all of my hydraulic equipment,” he said. “When I got back to base I landed on the bomb bay doors and nose wheel. We had holes in the plane — some of them so big you could walk through.”
