Rear Admiral H. Spencer Matthews (1921–2002) was the first U.S. Navy former enlisted pilot to make flag rank—one of only two to have done so. He flew 50 combat missions during World War II. This account of his service as a navigator and pilot on long-range antisubmarine patrols in the North Atlantic is based on a Naval Institute oral history interview of Admiral Matthews conducted by Paul Stillwell on 20 August 1986.
I got to Europe right after D-Day in 1944 and immediately started flying combat missions as a member of Bombing Squadron (VB) 105. The base was the U.S. naval air facility at Dunkeswell, a village in southwest England. We had three squadrons of PB4Y-1 Liberators, which were Navy versions of the Army B-24 bomber. The Liberator was picked for this duty instead of the PBY Catalina because it was faster, carried more bombs, and patrolled larger areas with greater radar capability.
The mission was flying antisubmarine missions in the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel, the Irish Sea, and in the water approaches to the eastern Atlantic from America. We had a lot of duty in which we would go out and join a convoy 200–300 miles from England, then establish an antisubmarine patrol out around and up ahead of it. Other times we were looking for U-boats coming out of the French coast, which was occupied by Germans.
By that time, the Germans were using snorkel submarines, which made detection extremely difficult, because they could recharge batteries without surfacing. In fact, the snorkel submarine was a great step forward. There was one other interesting aspect of our patrols off of the French coast. The German Air Force had established some fighter training commands out of Brest and southern France. The German tactics were later confirmed after the war. The instructor and three of the students, each in an airplane, would have a navigation flight over the area in which we were patrolling.
The only personal encounter that we had was when we spotted four airplanes about ten miles east of us, between us and the land. So we immediately turned west, full power on that lumbering old B-24. The fighters were much faster than we were, and they were gaining on us. They got to about four miles of us and obviously reached their point of no return with whatever fuel they had, and they turned around and went back.
Lieutenant Joe Kennedy Jr. was in our air group over there. He was in a sister squadron, VB-110. We all knew that in August of that year [1944], Kennedy had left on a very secret mission and didn’t come back. We learned later that they took out everything they could from the Liberator and loaded it with torpex. They put in some very elementary radio control gear, but with the equipment the airplane couldn’t take off. So Joe Kennedy flew the plane, and it blew up before he and his copilot could bail out. I remember we had a formation one day at which he was awarded the Navy Cross posthumously.
When I first got over there, after 25 missions you were supposed to rotate back to the United States. Well, along toward the end of 1944, the day before I flew my 25th, they changed it to 50 missions. We thought we were going to be coming home in about week, and now we had to stay over there. We finished our 50th mission two days before the war ended in Europe in May 1945. By then, the squadron had been redesignated Patrol Bombing Squadron (VPB) 105.
On our days off, Bournemouth was a good place to go, because the Germans were not likely to bomb it. The English people were extremely hospitable. While I was there I met a lady, I guess about 50, and her daughter. The two other times I went there, they invited me to stay at their home. I remember particularly one three-day visit, and we had meat every meal. I got back, and I was checking with some of the English people I knew in the Dunkeswell area and found out in those three days the two of them had served me both of their meat rations for about four months, which I felt real bad about.
The weather we flew in was horrible. We lost more crews to weather than we did to combat. A lot of our people were lost coming back in bad weather. There just wouldn’t be a diversion field anywhere, and they’d try to get in. The main weather problems that we encountered were low ceilings, poor visibility, and fog. It rained so often over there. If we had as much as a 300-foot ceiling, we’d take off. I remember losing two crews in our squadron. They were trying to land, the weather was bad, and they just flew into the little hill right next to the base.
While we were there, it started snowing one day, and then it snowed that night. We woke up the next day. My crew had a mission to fly. The big road graders had been running all night long keeping the runway clear of snow. We took off right at sunrise. By then the front had gone through, and there was not a cloud in the sky. Visibility was 100 miles, not a bit of haze, and you’d see these little spirals of smoke coming up out of the chimneys on the English countryside. It just was so beautiful that it seemed incongruous to be fighting a war in the midst of that.