DAN FANELLI
Age: 86
Born: Dec. 2, 1923
Hometown: New Haven, Conn.
Residence: Palm Desert
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; 7th Air Force; 41st Bomb Group, 47th Bomb Squadron
Years served: January 1943- February 1946
Rank: Staff sergeant
Family: Wife Phyllis; two children, Denise Fanelli of Playa del Rey and Donna Fanelli of Carlsbad.
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. Navy veteran Ray Edwards of Rancho Mirage.
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
More
Dan Fanelli, a radioman-gunner, flew 43 combat missions over Japan and China as a member of a B-25 bomber crew.
Stationed on Okinawa, the 41st Bomb Group bombarded airfields, railways and harbor facilities in Kyushu, Japan, in the months leading up to the end of the war.
“This was the first time the B-25s bombed Japan since (Lt. Col. James) Doolittle,” Fanelli said.
Doolittle led an attack of 16 B-25 medium bombers, launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, hitting targets in Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Osaka and Nagoya on April 18, 1942 — the first retaliatory attack on the Japanese homeland since the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
When the war broke out, Fanelli's family was dead-set against him enlisting in the military. They wanted him to wait until the government came calling.
“I was drafted,” Fanelli said. “My father wouldn't sign anything. I was the only child.”
After basic training, Fanelli attended radio school at Army Air Force Technical School in Sioux Falls, S.D.
The tediousness of learning Morse Code grated on the men's nerves.
“‘Dee dee da dee, dee dee da dee,' that's all you heard all day,” he said.
After a while the men got fed up listening to all that clickety-clacking through their headphones.
“They'd throw 'em on the ground and head out the door,” he said, laughing.
The next stop for Fanelli was Kingman, Ariz., where he attended gunnery school.
“It was a little, dinky town when I was there,” he said. “There was nobody there — I mean nobody.”
The men practiced skeet shooting and shooting at a “sleeve target” pulled by an airplane.
When the target was examined after practice, “Nine out of 10 times, there wasn't a shot in it,” Fanelli said, laughing. “It wasn't as easy as you think.”
After gunnery training, Fanelli was sent to Savannah, Ga., and assigned to a B-25 bomber squadron.
“That's where we crewed-up,” he said. “That's when I met my pilot, co-pilot, navigator, gunners. I had a pilot who was 40 years old.”
Before heading overseas, Fanelli and his crew trained at Eglin Field, an Army Air Force Proving Ground in Valparaiso, Fla., where they practiced dropping 500-pound flying torpedos.
The flying torpedos — they had wings attached — were dropped in the ocean with the purpose of blowing up enemy submarines or ships.
“Once it was dropped in the water, it was geared to go left, right, in circles or straight ahead,” Fanelli explained.
With multiple torpedos dropped during a mission and each plane's torpedo geared to run in a different direction, chances were good “we would hit something,” he said.
“We dropped the bombs 10 miles from the target,” and from an altitude of 10,000 feet, he said. “It used to fly down.”
During training, the men practiced in crew positions other than their own — in case someone was wounded, they could take over that man's job if necessary.
“The worst scare of my life was getting into the bottom (ball) turret,” he said. “You get in and your friend locks the door.”
The ball turret gunner's back is flush against the door and if it's not closed properly, “You can fall right out,” he said.
Once overseas, the crew had an incident in Hawaii while practicing torpedo drops.
“One day we went up and it wouldn't drop — it wouldn't release,” he said. “We had to land with it. It was scary, but we landed,” safely.
In June 1945, the squadron — stationed on Okinawa — began launching a flurry of attacks on the Japanese mainland.
“The first raid on Japan we expected a lot of fighter planes coming up on us,” Fanelli said.
There were no enemy fighters haranguing the bombers during this surprise attack, “but the next day, we caught hell,” Fanelli said. “We got planes shooting at us, we got ack ack (anti-aircraft fire).”
“You see that black burst coming at you,” he said. “We always said, ‘Hurry up! Drop the bomb! Let's get out of here!'
“The only time it was bad was when we were flying low missions,” he said.
“Strafing and fragmentation bombing causes fires,” he said. “Once in a while we'd go after a bridge. That's when we used the 500-pounders.”
The gunners strafed close to the ground with the goal of shooting up key military targets. But Japanese civilians sometimes got caught in the middle of the action.
On one such mission, “There's a guy pushing a cart and he's looking up at me,” Fanelli said.
Looking down at the man's face from an altitude of about 300 feet, Fanelli, gripping his .50-caliber machine gun, made a split-second decision.
“I couldn't shoot him,” Fanelli said. I just couldn't pull the trigger.”
