Fighting Memories Tail Gunner Paul Thornton Recalls Exhilaration But Battles Despair After Wwii Service

When the flak hit, Paul Thornton was huddled in his regular spot - the tail gunner’s bubble on a B-26 bomber - and was flying high over the fields of France.

Shrapnel struck his left thigh. Then again, same leg. Another piece bloodied the back of his hand.

“We took quite a shellacking,” the Spokane native recalled last week. “They shot us to ribbons. We came out of it with 263 holes in our plane.”

That was 1943, the year of Thornton’s star-crossed World War II bombing run his 13th mission, dubbed “Mission 12b” by a superstitious Army Air Corps.

Thornton was the lucky one.

On that same raid, a dozen feet away and with Thornton’s crew looking on, a companion plane went down. On it was an eager-beaver gunner, a fellow soldier who had volunteered for that flight to get more air time.

“He didn’t have as many missions in as his friends, so he wanted to catch up so they could go home together,” Thornton said. “They shot the plane in two.”

Thornton was discharged a year later after completing an astounding 71 bombing missions - his 50th on D-Day. He left with two Purple Hearts, two distinguished flying crosses and a host of other medals.

He is 75 now, shaky from encephalitis - an inflammation of the brain - and sometimes forgets old friends’ names. He suffered a heart attack in October.

Yet, the war’s agonizing seesaw of chaos and boredom and the troubling role of chance in determining who lived and who died haunt him still. Today, Thornton is among thousands of World War II veterans still battling memories of combat. Thornton, however, also struggles with the fame he experienced when returning home.

When he came back to Eastern Washington 52 years ago, Thornton was named “GI Spokane,” part of a campaign to promote the war effort. He was held up as the Inland Empire’s exemplary soldier, photographed for newspaper ads and asked to address crowds at dinner parties.

Through it all, he was gracious and accommodating, proud and embarrassed by the honor.

But there were darker feelings as well a disconnection he wouldn’t identify for years, a sleepless isolation that later would lead him to work three jobs at once, more to keep busy than to make ends meet.

“A person doesn’t know what combat can do to you,” he said from his North Idaho home. “People are getting killed and you’re killing people, and they’re all telling you how great you are. You’d get so sick about it all, but you didn’t know what was wrong.”

In Europe, Thornton served with a six-man flight crew, including a bombardier - remembered only as “Hatch” - who suffered from ulcers.

On bombing missions, it was Hatch’s job to watch the lead plane drop its bombs so he could follow suit. But he couldn’t bear it, electing instead to hide beneath a stack of flak jackets.

“He would keep his face covered the whole time,” Thornton said. “He was so scared, he didn’t want to see anything.”

Thornton picked up the slack, often shouting to Hatch when the time came.

Once, Hatch dropped the shells early, infuriating his crew. Later, they learned he’d hit a crucial enemy target by mistake.

“They were suddenly ready to give him the Medal of Honor,” Thornton said.

Thornton’s war experiences were filled with such fortunate accidents.

On one mission, Thornton’s crew flew alongside a rookie flying team. In dense fog, that plane got out of formation, flying directly above Thornton’s bomber.

“I called the pilot and said, ‘The 391st is on top of us and they’ve got their bomb doors open,”’ Thornton said. “I can count their bombs.”

The pilot urged him to relax; the bomber wouldn’t release its shells, he insisted.

But fall they did.

“Those bombs were missing our plane by inches,” Thornton said. “We all scattered like a bunch of ducks.”

Not a plane was hit.

On yet another mission, Thornton’s aircraft stalled and flipped over, heading for the ground.

Crew members began diving off the plane. One man got tangled in his parachute lines inside the plane. Thornton leaned over to help him escape.

Just as the crewman flipped out, Thornton’s own window sealed shut. He was trapped in the nose-diving bomber, alone with the pilot.

“Somehow, the pilot righted the plane and landed it,” he said. “Later, they all asked why I didn’t jump out. I kept telling them ‘because I couldn’t!”’

The Army gave the crew a seven-day leave.

“That was one of the poorest things they could have done,” Thornton said. “After that, every time that plane hit an air pocket, I was ready to leave it.”

Thornton also survived D-Day - June 6, 1944.

He and his crew took off at 1 a.m., and the black night sky was thick with dozens of squadrons of planes. Some flew a mere 10 feet apart.

“Planes would blow up and you’d see an engine floating by,” Thornton said. “You’d see some of them get shot in half and come by with people still inside.”

Like many in his generation, Thornton’s life was shaped by strife.

The son of an alcoholic railroad agent and a teacher, he came of age in the Great Depression. Before he was 10 years old, he had been hospitalized twice - first for 44 days with appendicitis and later for five weeks with scarlet fever. It was only after a cousin held a watch to his ear at age 7 that family members learned he had hearing trouble.

Thornton remained good-natured.

“He never swore - not even ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ - and rarely got angry,” said his son, George Thornton, a retired cop who now is a fraud investigator for Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare.

Paul Thornton enlisted after Pearl Harbor and tried to join an artillery unit but landed in the Air Corps, training in Wichita Falls, Texas.

“There was a lieutenant there. … He used to walk among us and say, ‘Are you prepared to lay down your life for your country? Some of you will be dead in six months,”’ Thornton recalled.

Military life sometimes resembled the Depression at home.

Food rations were tight. Once, Thornton and his crew gave away some of their food, not realizing they’d run out themselves soon.

Seeing them hungry, a handful of British officers took the group to an officers club to eat - but made the U.S. enlisted men sneak in the back door. Thornton later got dysentery.

Clothing was rarely adequate.

“When we got to Europe, the Army shipped our clothes over, but the engineer’s shoes never arrived,” Thornton said.

He gave engineer Glendon Smith a pair of loafers. He still was wearing them a year later.

On winter bombing missions, temperatures sometimes bottomed out at minus 56, and “you had to open your windows to put the gun out.” Thornton once found himself dressed in three shirts, three pairs of pants and cowboy boots to keep warm.

His off-hours later would amuse and unnerve him.

He was threatened with jail time for buying beer at an English pub with U.S. currency. He watched one crew member gamble away a suitcase full of cash with European soldiers. Walking down a street during a midnight air-raid blackout, Thornton once heard - but could not see - a train heading toward him.

“It turned out I was on the bridge above it,” he said. “Scared the heck out of me.”

After the war, Thornton moved to Clark Fork, Idaho, east of Sandpoint. He married, had children, hunted in the hills.

And he worked. He worked on the railroad. He was a miner. He was a logger. He built houses, sheds and barns.

He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it would be the Vietnam era before health officials discovered it.

Post-traumatic stress disorder “can cause sleeplessness, night sweats, inability to adjust to community life,” said Ron Porzio, associate director of Spokane’s Veterans Affairs office. But after World War II, it often was treated as depression, “and there’s a significant difference.”

As in childhood, Thornton was in and out of hospitals - this time, over decades.

“It’s not something that you say, ‘Come in and we’ll do counseling and it will go away,”’ said Linda Parkes, team leader for Spokane’s veterans outreach program. Post-traumatic stress disorder “is a part of them now.”

Today, Thornton reminisces about a productive life - he’s still married to his wife, Violet, and is close to his grandchildren.

But only recently has he come to grips with the emotional trauma that has served as his co-pilot for a half-century.

“You can’t ever understand what it’s like unless you’ve been there.”

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