 On January 5th of 1943 , I was on one of what most of us thought was a suicide mission ... The Japanese were getting ready to mount a large expeditionary force to relieve their garrisons on New Guinea , and Brigadier General Walker , who was the commanding general of the V Bomber Command there , was flying in the lead ship , and I was flying on his wing . When it was announced that it was going to be done in broad daylight at noontime , as a matter @-@ of @-@ fact , at low altitude , something like 5000 feet over the most heavily defended target in the Pacific almost ... most of us went away shaking our heads . Many of us believed we wouldn 't come back from it . Anyway , we went over the target and all of us got attacked . I was shot up . Nobody was injured , fortunately , but the airplane was kind of banged up a little bit . We had to break formation over the target to bomb individually and then we were supposed to form up immediately after crossing the target , but no sooner had we dropped our bombs that my tail gunner says , " Hey , there 's somebody in trouble behind us " So we made a turn and looked back and here was an airplane , one of our airplanes , going down , smoking and on fire , not necessarily fire , but smoke anyway , and headed down obviously for a cloud bank with a whole cloud of fighters on top of him . There must have been 15 or 20 fighters . Of course they gang up on a cripple , you know , polish that one off with no trouble , but he disappeared into a cloud bank and we never saw him again . It turns out it was the general ... He actually had a pilot , but he was the overall air commander for the operation . He was conducting it from the <unk> , just behind the pilot 's seat , where he could look out with a microphone and directing what should be done and so on ... The results of the raid , I 'm not sure what it was , whether it was successful or not , but it certainly was a most hair @-@ raising experience you want to go through . I mean , suddenly , you look ahead of you and see about fifteen or twenty airplanes all shooting at you at the same time , you see ... he won the Congressional Medal for that . The rest of us got the Air Medal , and , of course , he did all the planning and whatnot , too , even though many of us thought it was foolhardy , to tell you the truth . 
