Local man tells of his days on a B-29 bomber in World War II

On the first day of September 1939, the Nazis were marching through Poland, and 13-year-old Kenneth Bender was chucking papers onto doorsteps earlier than usual.

A call had roused his father — who had in turn roused him — the previous night, summoning Southeast Missourian paperboys to deliver an extra edition with the two-word headline: “WAR BREAKS!”

“And World War II had begun,” he said.

That first newspaper ran wire accounts of bombing runs, strategic speculation and Hitler’s two-inch grimace — starker in newsprint.

Bender shared his memory Wednesday with the Cape Girardeau Noon Lions’ Club, recalling at first, the implications of unrest “over there” were unclear.

To Bender, the news had the dull, distant significance 13-year-olds typically lend foreign affairs, but not much more.

He and the people he knew sympathized with European fears, but that was tempered by a pragmatic, isolationist sentiment.

“We didn’t want to fight Europe’s war,” he explained.

For a time, it remained Europe’s war. U-boats menaced the Atlantic, air raids decimated cities, the drama unfolded at Dunkirk, and life went on more or less as usual, Bender said.

But the cycle of Nazi antagonism and inching American intervention ended when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Bender was a sophomore at Cape Girardeau Central High School at the time. He recalled watching how American society uprooted and reoriented itself to further the war effort.

Auto factories turned to making military vehicles. Sewing machine and refrigerator manufacturers became engines of wartime industry so fruitful as to be dubbed the “Arsenal of Democracy.”

“Women stood in line to get ration coupons to feed their families,” Bender said.

And the men joined up.

“I was a senior and not really eager to be a foot soldier,” he recalled, “dig a foxhole, walk, shoot and what-have-you.”

So he and his friend August Birk — who remains Bender’s friend and attended the Lions’ meeting Wednesday — opted to join the Army Air Corps instead.

Neither was 18, but they were permitted to sign up and were admitted to active duty just months apart. Bender went in March 1944.

Bender pulled up a diagram of a B-29 bomber such as the ones he crewed as a gunner.

Nicknamed the “Superfortress,” B-29s were massive.

“The biggest ones that there was at the time,” Bender said.

He flew 22 missions from April to November 1945 in the Pacific Theater.

He showed a photograph of huts that housed the flight crews.

“Not too pleasant,” Bender said. “Lots of rats in ’em.”

“And this was the crew I was on,” he said, pointing to another black-and-white snapshot.

“I don’t know why the government would turn over a million-dollar aircraft to us, but ...”

The eldest of the officers to whom Bender was accountable was 27. Bender was not yet 20.

But they were capable, he said.

During one mission, the plane was badly hit. It would not make it back to base.

“We radioed it in, and they said to keep coming,” he said. “They’d send a submarine.”

They managed to limp it back as far as the not-entirely-liberated island of Iwo Jima for a rough landing.

Later, he was part of a reconnaissance mission to photograph the aftermath — “inferno down below,” he called it — of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

“We spent several hours going back and forth,” he said, adding he had heard some of the photographs they took had been collected in the National Archives, but he wasn’t sure.

He was in one of the aircraft that flew in single file over the USS Missouri while the Japanese leadership signed the terms of surrender below.

His last mission, he said, was to drop crates to liberated POWs outside Osaka, packed with food and supplies.

“And beer,” he said. “Lots of beer.”

tgraef@semissourian.com

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