In a gesture befitting a war hero, Jim Haas of Perry died on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2017. He was 95. His polished manners and gentle, genial humor were a delight to those who knew him, and his death leaves a painful gap in the many Perry social circles in which he turned.
Haas was a lifelong resident of Perry, graduating with the PHS Class of 1940 and then taking one year of study at the University of Iowa before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942.
His military record can be briefly stated: Haas was a bombardier in the 8th Air Force, 398th Bomb group, 603rd Squadron from the fall 1942 until June 1945. He was stationed at Nuthamstead, England, and flew 36 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe.
Haas received the Purple Heart after being critically wounded by anti-aircraft fire. He was also awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Victory Medal, Air Medal with six oak leaf clusters and the European Theatre Award.
But behind these bare facts laid lived experiences — the fight against Nazi fascism — that shaped the character of the Perry man in his early 20s and lasted another 70 years. After graduated from bombardier training Dec. 24, 1943, Haas flew his first mission June 20, 1943, over the northern German city of Hamburg.
“We got off to kind of a rough start,” he said in a 2010 interview with the Experimental Aircraft Association. “The flak was really intense there, and I think we were one of the last groups over the target.”
As his 12-plane squadron turned toward Hamburg from over the North Sea, they “could see two or three B-17s going down. They were in flames,” Haas said. “I was already scared enough. I was really frightened. But we made it. We got through and returned to our base. I was glad that was over with.”
Haas said the second day’s mission was even more challenging. “We went into briefing, and they pulled back the curtain, and the target was Berlin,” he said, and the tone of his voice when he said, “Berlin,” showed how daunting it was to be ordered to fly into the heart of the fascist empire. “What a start!” Haas said with a kind of Why-me? laugh. “We’d suffered quite a few — the group, I mean, didn’t suffer so many losses but the 8th Air Force had quite a heavy loss on Hamburg, and then Berlin wasn’t going to be good. We knew that wasn’t going to be good.”
Haas said there was heavy cloud cover over Berlin when their bomber group reached the target. When one of the bombs in his B-17 failed to release and drop, he made his way to the bomb bay — after first removing his parachute, which the 150 mph winds in the bay could have caught and thrown, along with him, from the plane.
“So there I was at 27,000 feet, standing up over the open bomb bay doors with no parachute, and I took a screwdriver and tripped the manual release, and fortunately it did work, and the bomb released,” Haas said. “I still think about that. On nights when I’m home and I can’t sleep, I keep thinking about that experience. That was a tremendous experience.”
Those were Haas’ first two bombing missions, and there were 33 left to fly. “When we got back and got on the ground again,” he said, “I told the crew, I says, ‘If we fly 35 missions like this,’ I says, ‘there’s no way we’re going to get through this.’ But it worked out all right.”
The B-17 Flying Fortress proved an effective bomber, dropping more bombs than any other U.S. aircraft in World War II. Of the 1.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Nazi Germany and its occupied territories by U.S. aircraft, 640,000 tons were dropped from B-17s.
As the bombardier, Haas sat in the tip of the nose cone at the very front of the aircraft, where through clear plexiglass he had a wide view of the target. His exposed position was also vulnerable to attack, and Haas suffered a serious leg wound from Nazi antiaircraft artillery (flak) on his 24th mission, an early September 1944 bombing of an oil refinery at Ludwigshafen, Germany, an experience he described in his EAA interview.
After recovering from his wounds, Haas learned the rest of his bomber crew was going home, but he was to be assigned to a new crew and would fly 11 more missions, news that greatly saddened him.
“I was pretty low,” Haas said. “Here my crew was going home, and I was staying, and here I was going to have to fly with another crew that I’d never met. I didn’t know any of them, and I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ I was pretty low.”
Two new crews were assigned to his hut, Haas said, and almost immediately “both of them got killed on the same mission. One of them crashed on take off, and one of them got shot down over Germany. So that was probably the lowest spot in my life. I was so low. I was really depressed. I didn’t know what to do.”
I am no veteran, but I imagine the daily reality and close presence of violent death must leave a deep impression on a Perry boy, giving the experience of 18 months in one’s early 20s a weight and gravity that lasts a lifetime. The American poet and World War II veteran of the Army Air Corps Randall Jarrell maybe catches something of this mental state in his poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
But it is what it is, as Iowa’s philosophers often tell us. Orders are orders. Haas was assigned to a new bomber crew under Command Pilot Ernie Spitzer, and his last 11 flights were “pretty rough missions,” he said, including the Nov. 21, 1944, mission to Merseburg, the center of Nazi oil refining. Of the 36 B-17s that bombed Merseburg that day, only three made it home.
In Haas’ account, his crew was “flying the high squadron that day, and we bombed Merseburg. When we turned off the target, the weather was closing in on us, and we got separated from the other two squadrons. Well, the German fighters were sitting up there above us, watching, and they saw that we were separated from the rest of the group. They immediately attacked us, and they just slaughtered us. They’d taken out their 50 caliber machine guns and put in four 20 millimeter cannons in their planes. They came in a head-on attack, and they just went through our group, our squadron.”
According to 398th Bomb Group historian Allen Ostrom, “This was the day the German radio would beam the news toward England that Goering’s elite FW-190 fighter group, known to American airmen as the ‘Abbeville Gang,’ had destroyed an entire squadron of B-17s from the 398th Bomb Group!” Goering only slightly overstated the case.
“But just three of us made it back,” Haas said, “three planes. I was one of the lucky ones.” In Haas’ inimitable way, he was putting it mildly.
Sixty years after the war, Haas’ daughter-in-law, Ronda Roberts, described her father-in-law’s wartime heroism during a 2015 Perry Historic Preservation Commission ceremony honoring several Perry residents.
“We were once looking through some old photos,” Roberts said, “and I asked, ‘Weren’t you ever scared?’ and he answered, ‘Every minute of every day. I used to wake up in the morning and wonder whether I would be alive to go to bed that night.'”
Haas admitted he had a lot to live for.
“I was 22, and I didn’t want to die,” he told the audience at the ceremony. “There were all those pretty girls out there I still wanted to meet.” The crowd laughed heartily.
In spite of his great attraction to “all those pretty girls” — even late in life Haas could charm lovely lady after lovely lady as they passed through the Perry Perk coffeehouse, much to the envy of his fellow senior citizens — he was married to Diana Foster of Perry March 6, 1945, while home on leave. The couple made their home in Santa Monica, Calif., until the war was over. They returned to Perry, and Haas took up work at the Perry State Bank, retiring 40 years later as senior vice-president and trust officer. Haas’ unfailing devotion to his wife in her final illness testified to the strength of their bond.
The hero lives on in his children, Nancy Haas Gilman of Las Vegas, Nev., and Marty Haas of Johnston, and in many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In the days following his father’s death, Marty Haas said his relations with his dad became closer and warmer in recent years, that they had become real friends, that his father would even hug him and tell him he loved him.
“And that wasn’t something they did much back in his day,” Marty Haas said. He said it was hard to see his father grow frail near the end but that their last years together are ones he would not exchange for anything. All who knew Jim Haas’ soft-spoken and modest heroism — in every way the opposite of the braggart soldier — share the family’s loss.
The Sixth Mission
By Jim Haas, Bombardier, 603rd Squadron
We flew our 6th mission on the sixth day of July 1944. We were scheduled to fly two missions that day, as they were to be short missions. The first target was to bomb a “No-Ball” Buzz-Bomb site at Saint Omer, just inside France. The second mission was supposed to be to Villaroche near Paris, to bomb railroad yards. However, that wasn’t to be for our crew.
We were assigned to a new shiny silver B-17 which had just arrived in England and did not have the usual 398th identifications painted on it. The name of the plane was “the Prowler” with a picture of a black tomcat. However, we had selected the name “Hissanmoan” which was to be painted on the nose of the plane after we returned from the first mission of the day. The crew chief was very proud of this new plane and reminded us to bring this plane home safely. It was a beautiful day and we took off at zero-four-fifty-seven. Our bombing altitude was to be seventeen thousand feet. We were near the Initial Point which was Etapes and climbing when we ran into some flak. We received a hit on our #2 and #3 engines. Everybody yelled, “We’re hit and on fire.” The engineer jumped down from his position and helped the pilot feather the #3 engine and pulled that engine’s fire extinguisher handle. We all felt a great relief when the smoking stopped on #3 and #4 engine looked okay. Then they turned their attention to the #2 engine. It was in bad shape and the propeller continued to windmill. From their positions they could see that the engine cowling had been ripped away to reveal exploded cylinders which were dripping oil and fuel. They cut off all fuel and oil to that engine. #1 engine was also having difficulties and its cockpit instruments indicated trouble. We turned to go back to our base.
Everybody checked out okay except the ball turret gunner because for awhile he was unable to get out of his turret. A part of the shell that hit the #2 engine along with other debris had hit that turret. But he was okay, just shaken a bit from the experience. After a thorough inspection of the plane, it seemed we were in pretty good shape, except for the left wing area and the bomb bay doors. The engineer told us that shrapnel had cut the shackles holding two of our five hundred pound bombs, dropping them through the closed bomb bay doors. One bomb bay door was ripped completely from the aircraft. Before crossing the French coast we salvoed the other bombs on what we hoped was the U-boat pens at Calais.
The plane continued to drift to the left and kept losing altitude. The #2 propeller was turning at a high rate of speed and creating an enormous amount of drag. The pilot and the engineer tried several maneuvers to get rid of that runaway prop. In the back of the plane the crew was throwing everything they could out of the plane. We were losing altitude quite fast. The navigator called the pilot and said that we were heading toward the south of London. London was protected by a ring of barrage balloons. Our radio had also been knocked out when we got hit. As we approached the English coast, two Seafires of the RAF’s coastal command came to look us over and we identified ourselves. They waved goodbye and left us. When we passed Hastings, off to our left, the altimeter read under 3,500 feet and there were no fields in sight. Finally with only one engine working, we were down to 1,900 feet and the pilot gave the order to bail out.
Six of us bailed out, while the pilot, copilot and engineer remained with the plane. The co-pilot counted six chutes, so he knew we were safe. Only 900 feet remained when the co-pilot spotted a field about two miles ahead. The field looked very small and there was a tall wire fence at the end, but it was too late to turn back. When the ball turret made contact with the ground the engineer cut all switches. They kept the plane on line for a while, but the left wing made contact with the ground and brought the plane around in a wide arc. Finally the plane came to a stop. They had used up a thousand feet of a sixteen hundred foot length field.
Fortunately everyone was safely on the ground. The only casualty was the tail gunner who had broken his ankle when he hit the ground. I just missed a large tree but my chute became entangled on the lower branches. I looked up and there was a farmer with his pitch fork sitting on a fence post. I asked him to come over and help me get untangled, but he wasn’t sure if I was a Nazi or not. Finally I convinced him I was an American, so he came over and helped me get out of my chute. He told me to go up to his house on the side of a hill where his wife had already made some tea. He located the other five and brought them all to his home. There was a small recon outfit nearby that flew small planes over to the coast and back. They called our squadron headquarters at Nuthampstead and eventually some 398th personnel came down and trucked us back to our base. I went on and flew my 35 missions.
My crew was: Harry Sleaman, pilot; Leonard Waring, co-pilot; John Allare, navigator; James Haas, bombardier; Elwood Davis, engineer; Lorjo Gennaro, radio operator; Vern Kling, ball turret; Leon Weber and Harley Roark, waist gunners and Robert Adkins, tail gunner.
What a great tribute to a great man. May he rest in peace.
A wonderful interview and story.