Veterans Day salute for WWII `Burma bridge buster’, Navy radar operator

Bill Carroll and Ted Reinhardt, both residents of Windjammer Village in Little River, served in World War II on two fronts, in Burma flying low-level missions on Billy Mitchell B25 bombers and on a Navy destroyer escort in the Atlantic. They are typical of the young men – “The Greatest Generation” – from farms and cities across America who fought and won wars with Japan in the Pacific and fascist Germany and Italy in the Atlantic and Europe.

Carroll, 92, was a farm boy from Cherryville, N.C. who worked in the Newport News, Va., shipyard for a year when he was drafted and after training was a radio-gunner on B25 “Billy Mitchell” bombers of the 10th Air Force, 490th Squadron, in Burma. The five-man crews were called the “Burma Bridge Busters.” Their missions typically were low-altitude runs on Japanese bridges. They lived in tents in the jungle and carried on their belts a .45-caliber pistol, a canteen of water and a machete.

Carroll was the only survivor of his original crew of pilot, navigator, engineer, radio-gunner and tail gunner. He flew “close to 50 missions – none easy” and only once with his original crew. He was in a nearby village attending to repair of the camp’s movie screen when his name came up to fill in on a mission. Another man took the assignment instead and was lost when the plane went down. “I was five minutes ... [from being on that plane].” He recalls that fear had not been an issue for him until then.

“I prayed a lot,” Carroll says. After “rehab” in California and discharge in 1945, he graduated from Western Carolina University and worked in corporate finance and marketing and retired here with his wife Norma.

Reinhardt, 90, had to have his dad’s OK to join the Navy at 17, in December 1942, “a year after Pearl Harbor.” He was a senior radar operator on the destroyer escort USS Flaherty, DE 135. He was a “plank owner” of the ship, meaning he served from its commissioning to decommissioning. On submarine-hunting patrol in the Atlantic, Flaherty’s sister ship was sunk and the Flaherty was picking up survivors from the fantail or stern.

The ship had drifted from the survivors and the captain started the engines to move in reserve. At the same time, a nearby German submarine fired a torpedo. “I could hear the sub fire the torpedo – WHOOSH – I knew what it was.” He and others in the Combat Information Center and on the bridge watched the wake of the torpedo. It narrowly missed their ship. The Flaherty then dropped hedgehogs, designed to determine the depth of the sub. One hit the sub’s rudder system and it had to surface. A boarding party prevented the sub from sinking and captured U-505 and its Nazi code machine.

A captured German officer told Flaherty officers he did not understand how the torpedo missed. “He said there were no instructions in the German manual of war for determining the lead angle to fire a torpedo at a target moving backwards,” Reinhardt recalls. Reinhardt feels the experience was “devine design” or God’s plan. The Flaherty towed U-505 to Bermuda where a seagoing tug took over towing the submarine to the United States.

The captured submarine has been displayed for years at the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago.

After his discharge in 1945, Reinhardt worked as an electrician for 40 years. He and his late wife retired here in 1988.

On this Veterans Day, 70 years after their WWII experiences, we thank Carroll and Reinhardt – and all military veterans – for their service.

This story was originally published November 12, 2015 at 8:57 AM with the headline "Veterans Day salute for WWII `Burma bridge buster’, Navy radar operator."