ORVILLE ABBOTT
Age: 87
Born: Sept. 28, 1922
Hometown: Roswell, Idaho
Residence: Palm Desert
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; 20th Air Force; 497th Bomb Group; 869th Squadron
Years served: February 1943 - September 1945
Rank: First lieutenant
Family: Wife Arlene Abbott; first wife, Sally Abbott (deceased); three children, Judy Bilardello of Santa Cruz, Dave Abbott of Carmichael and Terry Abbott of Fair Oaks; six grandchildren; two great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II 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
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army veteran Bill Biehler of Palm Desert.
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
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Orville Abbott, a co-pilot on a B-29 bomber crew, completed 28 successful combat missions over Japan during World War II, but disaster struck on mission 29, when his bomber's two engines died — sending the plane crashing into the ocean.
On June 1, 1945, “We took off from Saipan (at) approximately 3 a.m.,” Abbott, then a first lieutenant with the U.S. Army Air Corp, said. “We were to bomb Osaka. We were scheduled to assemble off the coast of Japan and fly formation over the target.”
About 75 miles from Saipan, one of the bomber's four engines — the number two engine — began overheating. A decision was made to abort the mission, dump the bombs into the ocean and return to base. Soon after, Abbott noticed the same thing was happening to the number one engine — it too, began to overheat.
“It was impossible to fly the B-29 on three engines with a full load of gasoline and maintain elevation,” he said. “It was virtually impossible to do so with two engines. We only had two engines, number three and number four. They were on the same side of the airplane.”
One of the engines caught fire, and, after unsuccessful attempts to extinguish the flames, Abbott made an emergency call.
“The words in the emergency call I remember quite well,” he said. “The emergency base was Condor Base. Our squadron was ‘Happy,' so the message was, ‘Condor Base, this is Happy 11.”
Abbott gave a rundown of the plane's condition and its estimated location. “I still remember the last words to Condor Base,” he said. “They were, ‘Condor Base, this is Happy 11. We are at 400 feet and bailing out. Wish us well.'”
The bombardier, standing over the escape hatch, was reluctant to jump out, Abbott said.
“Straight down, it was coal-black,” Abbott said. “The air was going by at 190 miles an hour. A few feet away, the number one and number two engines were on fire. So, I took my foot and helped him make a decision, and away he went. I followed him by a matter of feet — if not inches.
“As soon as I cleared the airplane I pulled the ripcord. The airplane blew up upon impact when it hit the water. The parachute opened. I felt like someone hit me in the chest with a doubled-up fist. I was in the water and was going down fast,” Abbott said. “I remember the water rushing by (my) head and up my back. I kept wondering when I would start coming up when I did break the surface of the water, the parachute pulled me along like a wind surfer. I released myself from the parachute and inflated the Mae West (life preserver).”
In order to conserve energy to stay alive for the five or so hours he thought it would take before he was rescued, he floated on his back.
“The water was warm, and the night was clear,” he said. “While floating on my back I thought I caught, out of the corner of one eye, the silhouette of a ship. I turned over on my stomach, and sure enough there was a ship with a silhouette as clear as it could be on a moonlit night.”
Abbott took out his one-cell flashlight that he'd pinned to his flight suit and turned it on. “The ship lit up like Coney Island,” Abbott said. “The search lights and all the lights on the ship came on.”
It was a destroyer escort traveling with a small convoy, plowing its way toward Iwo Jima. “The destroyer escort watched our fiery crash and came to the point of impact and explosion,” he said.
Abbott was thrown a life preserver, and after climbing aboard ship, he immediately reported that the pilot had been killed.
“I told them he did not have time to get out,” Abbott said. “They directed me to a room on the ship and there was Bill Campbell, the pilot, smiling from ear to ear. He was the last out, first up; I was the second from last out, second up.”
Two crew members were killed in the crash, Abbott said. The tail gunner and a replacement gunner filling in for a crewman who'd recently rolled his Jeep and was recovering from his injuries.
Abbott flew missions over targets including Iwo Jima, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe.
“From November (1944) through the first of March of 1945, we flew high-altitude daylight bombing raids over target 357, which was the Mitsubishi Aircraft Engine Plant,” he said. “Most of the engines in Japan were made at this plant.”
In early March, General Curtis LeMay was transferred from the China-Burma-India theater of war to the Pacific to assume bomber command of the 20th Air Force. Abbott said LeMay immediately discontinued the raids and ordered the bombers to fly training runs over the island of Truk.
“General LeMay made us fly practice bomb runs at 7,000-feet elevation. We couldn't even conceive why some crazy guy would do that when we'd been bombing at 30,000 feet-plus.”
LeMay's controversial bombing campaigns on the Japanese cities included the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, the most destructive bombing raid of the war, according to historic accounts.
“Somewhere after a two-week interval, we were called in for briefing and were told we would fly ‘single ship' formation (in a) night raid over downtown Tokyo,” Abbott said, recalling the mission.
According to subsequent records, the night raid burned eight square miles, killed 110,000 people and left 1 million homeless, Abbott said.
