By MARK MILLER
As he approaches his 103rd Veterans Day, Paul Young admits he’s “slowed down a bit these past few years,” he said as he worked to find some of his mementoes in his River Terrace Estates apartment. “And I have trouble remembering some names.”
But there are still a number of details he can share about his 57 missions as a B-25 bomber pilot which earned him a number of citations including the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Assigned to the 445th Bomb Squad, he arrived on the island of Corsica in October 1944. “We often flew two missions a day,” he said.
The most treacherous missions were over the Brenner Pass in the Italian Alps, which served as the main thoroughfare for the Germans to re-supply their forces in Italy. At this point in the war, the German fighter planes were becoming more scarce but they had developed a more sophisticated anti-aircraft defense in targeting the planes from the ground.
“I was really lucky, no doubt,” Young said, “especially considering the number of missions we were on.”
With 57 missions, “you remember bits and pieces of some of them,” he continued. On one flight, he recalls a particularly heavy amount of flak. When they returned to base, they began counting the number of holes in the plane. He does not recall the exact number, “but it was 40 or 50-some,” he shared. “But the amazing thing is that none of my crew was injured.” And even more amazingly, he added, no one was injured on his plane during any of the 57 missions, including one instance in which the tailgunner’s canopy — which they called a “greenhouse” — was completely destroyed by enemy fire but the tailgunner “didn’t get a scratch,” he said and they were able to return safely to base.
“When we got over there and I was assigned a plane, I drew one called ‘Heaven Can Wait,’” which included a drawing of a scantily-clad, attractive woman below the cockpit. “I was told it had been a lucky plane, so I didn’t change a thing,” he said, and laughed.
It was years later that Young discovered his unit, part of the 57th Bomber Wing, was the same as author Joseph Heller, whose fictionalized novel based on his experiences in World War II — “Catch 22” — became a best-seller, was made into a movie and the title became a cultural catch-phrase.
Another writer, Thomas Cleaver, had come across a Veterans Day on-line post in 2013 by Young’s daughter Susan which piqued his interest. She had written that her father had always been reluctant to talk about his war experiences until she accompanied him to a reunion of his old squadron. He was able to track her down and asked for an introduction to her father, which ultimately resulted in “The Bridgebusters — The True Story of the ‘Catch-22’ Bomb Wing.”
“Yes, I had several very long conversations with him,” Young recalled. The book begins with the author’s first discussions with Young and his daughter.
“Talking with Paul about his experiences,” Cleaver wrote in his introduction, “it was easy to see why someone might not wish to relive what amounted to 45 charges of the light brigade ‘into the jaws of hell,’ each as terrifying as the first.” Young’s recollections and comments appear no less than seven times in the book.
A Jay County native, Young’s father was a minister which meant they moved around the state, resulting in him graduating from high school in Evansville. He met his future wife during a return trip to Portland — he remembered her from their time together in first grade. He and Ruby raised two children. His son lives in South Dakota and his daughter in Fort Wayne. Ruby died a couple years ago at the age of 100.
“My family keeps growing though.” They were blessed, he said, with five grandchildren and, so far, seven “greats.”
After a career at McCray Refrigeration in Kendallville and also selling school supplies for a company in Indianapolis, he retired in 1986 and then, at the suggestion of his son’s in-laws, Ed and Imogene Brown, moved to River Terrace in 2016.
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