U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS Peter Friend Peter Friend remembers being cold and scared while serving in WWII as a nose gunner on a B-24. “You were scared the minute you took off ’til you landed,” Friend said. But, “we did our job and came home,” he said. “We flew 50 missions and none of us fellows got a scratch: some lucky.” As a nose gunner, Friend sat in a turret in the nose of the plane with two 50-caliber machine guns and just enough space to turn his head. “Geez, it was cold,” Friend said. The airmen’s suits were heated but that did not help a great deal. Up in the air, the temperature was 40 degrees to 50 degrees below zero and the plane was drafty. “The problem was you weren’t moving around,” Friend said. “The worst part of it was the flak from the anti-aircraft guns,” said Friend. Friend said shells from anti-aircraft guns would explode and little jagged pieces would burst out. “Vienna was the worst place to go,” Friend said. “Heavy, heavy flak.” Friend’s crew started flying combat missions from Manduria, Italy. They served mainly in Western Europe. “We got shot at two or three times pretty bad,” said Friend. “One time we really got shot up bad and lost a couple engines.” One engine was on fire, another was crippled, he said. The plane was near Switzerland. Friend was worried the plane would not land before exploding because the gas tanks were right behind the engines. “I thought: ‘Holy Jesus, this thing is going to blow sky high,’” Friend said, “but it didn’t.” The pilots landed the plane successfully behind the front lines in Italy. Friend belonged to the 450th Bomb Group and earned the rank of staff sergeant. “We lived in tents,” Friend said. “It was miserable.” But, “the infantry had it worse.” Friend enlisted the summer of 1943, after graduating from high school. But because he did not turn 18 until November, he did not join the war effort until Jan. 4, 1944. While he was waiting, Friend worked for his family’s Ford business in Newport, where Friend resides today with his wife, Beverly. Friend did his basic training in Greensboro, N.C., and went to gunnery school in Laredo, Texas. Once his unit was finished overseas, they had a 30-day leave and Friend went home in May 1945 aboard the SS Mariposa. He was assigned to an airfield in Bryan, Texas. It was the summer of 1945 and it was hot. “I hated it,” Friend said. He volunteered to be a firefighter and was sent to fight forest fires in Washington as the war was beginning to wind down in the Pacific. All 200 men in his company of firefighters had been gunners, said Friend. Friend fought fires in California, too, then had accumulated enough points for discharge. That was October 1945. He went to Nichols College in Dudley, Mass., and studied business administration, graduating in 1949. He then returned to his family’s car business. Peter, 79, and Beverly Friend have two grown children, Cooper Friend of Ellsworth, who is married to Meredith Friend, and Anne Pidgeon of Milbridge, who is married to Bill Pidgeon. In 1999, the family traveled with Friend to Italy and visited Manduria. Friend said he could see parts of the foundation from the hangar, in the middle of an olive orchard, but no buildings were left. “You’d never know anyone was there,” he said. — Jennifer Osborn