John Morrow was very angry about the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor so he joined the Army. It was a done deal, everybody was angry too. He had friends who were in Pearl Harbor who had to jump overboard to survive during the attack. He went to basic training in Texas, where it was very dusty, then went to North Dakota for radio training where the snow would be up to his knees. After that he went to Yuma, Arizona to heat. They practiced flying over the Grand Canyon, Arizona and the planes were so hot they would wear their shorts. His radio operator training was very thorough. The minimum standard for receiving code was 20 words per minute. He achieved 25 to 30 words per minute. He thought flying was interesting and had complete faith in the pilot and crew. He first flew in a B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] in Florida where they would go out with his brand new crew. His pilot was a guy named Junior [Annotator's Note: cannot verify individual]. On their first flight, Junior had run out of power to take off so they started over. He was a good pilot. They traveled from Florida to England via Newfoundland, Canada, and Reykjavik, Iceland. When he was in school in England, German buzz bombs [Annotator's Note: V-1 pulsejet flying bomb] would come across around six o'clock every day. One afternoon, one turned and headed at them. Morrow hit the ground then. The Germans were good technologists and were ahead of almost everybody. Given a little more time, they would have had an atomic bomb. They were working on it.

John Morrow was born in April 1924 in Marksville, Louisiana. It is a small town and he knew almost everyone in town. He graduated in 1941. His father was an attorney and his mother was the best mother. He had three siblings. [Annotator's Note: Morrow says that his memory clogs up.] They lived at his grandfather's. He had many fruit trees. Morrow would go to the courthouse where his father would be. The Great Depression did not hurt them too much but some of his relatives were hit hard and they lived "close to the bone" and could not afford new cars. As a kid, cars were loud and smoky. Morrow was always interested in cars and has three that he restored himself. He would go all around the country to get parts for them. Morrow was walking in the French Quarter in New Orleans and he heard a young paper boy talking about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was angry that our ships were sunk, and people were killed by a sneak attack. He reviewed what he could do to get back at the Japanese. He was so mad. [Annotator's Note: Morrow gets emotional.] He told his friends he was going to join the service and get back at the people who did that. His father approved but his mother did not but they knew this was what he was going to do. He had already learned Morse Code as a hobby. This helped in his later job as a radio operator. He had seen screen versions of the US Marine Corps on the battlefield. He wanted something more elevated than that. Morrow did his basic training in Florida and then picked up a brand new B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] and flew it to Newfoundland, Canada then to Reykjavik, Iceland, and then to Peterborough, England, just northwest of London. That was his home base. If it was too foggy coming back from a mission, they would land in Scotland.

John Morrow was a radio operator on a B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] based in Peterborough, England. He was looking forward to combat. He knew there were dangers like flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire]. One of his basic jobs was to throw out tin foil to mess with the radar of the Germans to make the flak inaccurate. He operated a BC-335 radio and would communicate information he received to the pilot. He was glad to be sent to Europe and not the Pacific. He had heard of the reports of the primitive existence of the service there. He and his crew stayed in houses around the perimeter of the airfield at Peterborough. The landing strip was made of flat metal that would tear up the tires of the planes after about ten landings. It [Annotator's Note: Morrow's air field] was northwest of London. He went to London on leave and on his return his taxi was attacked by a German aircraft. It was a close call. On mission days, the crew would get up around two o'clock in the morning and get a briefing, have breakfast and put on their heated uniforms. Then they took off. The bombs would have been loaded during the night. If they were to fly over the North Sea, they were told they had five minutes to live if they were shot down, the water was that cold. They flew in groups. When the lead aircraft dropped its bombs, the other aircraft dropped theirs. Morrow had not known they had been hit by flak the first time it happened, until they landed, and he saw holes in the tail of plane. None of his crew was ever hurt by flak but it was frightening.

John Morrow does not really remember his first mission as a radio operator on a B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] based in Peterborough, England [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Glatton]. He had to have confidence in his crew as he had no control over the plane at all. The Germans had developed a fast, jet plane [Annotator's Note: German Messerschmitt Me 262 "Schwalbe"or "Swallow" jet fighter aircraft]. Every time they made a pass at group of planes, a B-17 went down. One time, one hit their outboard engine and the pilot said for everyone to be ready to parachute out. Morrow put on his parachute, but the engine recovered, and they stayed in. Morrow said his blood froze. He had never even practiced parachute jumping. They had been given silk maps of Germany in case they had to bail out. They had no guns because if the Germans caught them with a gun, they would be shot. He wishes he had kept some of the maps. They would normally take about eight to ten hours for each mission, dependent upon the fuel supply. Sometimes as they would cross the white cliffs of Dover, England and sometimes it would be so foggy that they would have to land in Scotland. Morrow liked the beer, so he drank quite a bit of it. He had only one close call in England, when he was strafed while he was riding in a taxi. He knew the other crews well and they would go into town on leave often. Once, one of his friend's planes blew up ahead of them in formation. [Annotator's Note: Morrow gets very quiet for some time.] Before they left on a mission, they would leave their effects on their beds. He does not recall exactly what was done with them if the person was lost on a mission. Other than feeling sad, there was no memorial for them.

When John Morrow was not flying missions, he looked forward to getting 48 hour passes. He would go into London, England. London was under blackout conditions. He could not even light a cigarette in the open. Wardens would watch for any light at all. He thought the British were educated and very enjoyable. His first time in line at a mess hall, he saw something he had never had seen and he ate it. He had never had anything like it. Only one place in London served any kind of meat and he is pretty sure it was horsemeat. He and his friend Joe would go there, and he liked it. Sometimes the British thought they were arrogant because they did not follow their rules of society. He was glad he was in a civilized country and not in the Pacific. He knew of the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] because they had helped some trapped Americans there. Otherwise he did not really know what else was going on with the war. While on missions, they were asked to look for indications that the German military was improving. He recalls seeing V-2 missiles [Annotator's Note: V-2 Aggregat 4; the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile] rising. When they landed, they had a debriefing and they would say what they had seen during the mission. The Germans were very good war mechanics, the Allies just overwhelmed them. Sometimes they would bomb rail junction yards, but the Germans would recover very fast.

John Morrow recalls MEs, Maximum Effort missions [Annotator's Note: for a maximum effort mission, every bombardment group involved would send up every available aircraft], for the bomber squadrons. He does not recall any particular one, but he remembers the contrails. Sometimes there were thousands of planes flying at one time. They would circle for quite a while waiting for the entire group to leave at once. He only knew of where they were dropping their bombs from the briefing. The pilot, copilot, and bombardier would get a separate briefing. The bombardier's information was in a box that he could not see. He never gave a thought to bombing civilians. They were bad people and he was part of the good people. When they went on missions to Cologne, Germany, they had instructions to be careful and not hit the cathedral. He thought that was very nice, that we could do this to an enemy. They [Annotator's Note: the Germans] did not reciprocate when they bombed London. Morrow was present on leave when that happened. It was frightening and the damage was awful with crumpled buildings, streets and buses disrupted. It made what Morrow was doing not enjoyable, but necessary. When the war ended, he received a 48-hour pass to London. People were running up and down in the street and kissing each other. He enjoyed it a lot. He flew back to the United States and was assigned to B-52s [Annotator's Note: he means Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber] that dropped the big bomb [Annotator's Note: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on 6 and 9 August 1945]. He was on the train for that, when the war with Japan ended too. He was then sent to Mississippi where he was discharged. He then returned home.

John Morrow volunteered to stay in the service after the war ended in Europe. The atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, Japan [Annotator's Note: on 9 August 1945] made that unnecessary. He felt that the bomb was a very necessary thing at the time to bring the war to an end. The loss of manpower in a Japanese invasion would be massive. He returned home and went to work at Western Electric installing telephone systems. He used the G.I. Bill to take flying lessons in Alexandria, Louisiana and got his pilot's license. He bought a house. Civilian life did not have the regimentation of military life. It was a freedom. He kept his uniform for a while but otherwise he had no remnants of his service time. What he remembers most is the day they were loaded with bombs and it snowed. He had been hoping it would snow and it did. He was happy. He had decided to serve because he was mad our ships had been sunk on a Sunday morning [Annotator's Note: Morrow is referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, 7 December 1941] and our troops were killed. He cannot really say that the war changed his life except that he has the freedom to do what he wants. It did not change him that much. He is glad it is over. He is happy at the satisfactory results of the war. He thinks Americans feel the same way. Morrow also feels The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] is important. He enjoys it and thinks that it is very important to teach the future generations about the war.