Raymond Cauble was born in Blue Island, Illinois in February 1918. His father was a carpenter and contractor. He was lucky in a sense. He got a job with a steam pump outfit that never laid off anybody [Annotator's Note: during the Great Depression]. In 1928, they moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. Life was rough. Things started picking up in the late 1930s. When the war looked imminent, everybody went to the defense factories and it grew from there. Cauble got married July 1941. The war on 7 December [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] shook everybody up. In February 1942, he decided he wanted to get in the Air Force [Annotator's Note: US Army Air Forces]. He took his exams on 6 February. He passed and was sworn in as a Private. He was assigned in March and went to the California Flight Center [Annotator's Note: West Coast Air Corps Training Center, Santa Ana Army Air Base] for evaluation in Santa Ana, 15 May. Before the war started, Cauble was in high school and on a co-op program. He went to school a week and he worked a week. School was rough his senior year. He had double classes. At graduation, he was told he "does not know anything, but he tries hard." He was learning machinist training in the co-op but he left that for the service.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Raymond Cauble if he recalls where he was when he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941.] Cauble was at a friend's house playing cards. He stayed overnight and was having breakfast when the announcement came over the radio. It was hard to believe. His wife was crying and told him he was going to get himself killed [Annotator's Note: Cauble had already enlisted in the military]. Cauble had gone up before the war to take a test [Annotator's Note: to enter the Army Air Forces' Aviation Cadet training program]. He was told he was not eligible. He told them it said that it required college or an equivalent and he felt he had that. Cauble was already learning to fly, and his instructor was a colonel in the 5th Corps Area National Guard [Annotator's Note: Central Defense Command, Second Army; Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia]. Cauble did not take him up on an offer to help him out. Cauble graduated from flight school on 6 February [Annotator's Note: 6 February 1942]. He went to Tampa, Florida [Annotator's Note: then MacDill Army Airfield; now MacDill Air Force Base] flying B-26s [Annotator's Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber]. The colonel was over in Saint Petersburg [Annotator's Note: Saint Petersburg, Florida] as the CO [Annotator's Note: commanding officer] of a B-29 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber] squadron. Cauble heard he was killed flying into a mountain. He had been an ace in World War 1 and was a great man.

Raymond Cauble won an airplane ride in 1935. Cauble volunteered for the service due to patriotism. He says he would never get into a submarine or a tank. You had to join the Navy to fly in the Navy or Marines, so he went with the Army. He had always wanted to fly. He took primary flight training in Visalia [Annotator's Note: Visalia Army Air Field in Tulare County, California]. He moved to Chico, California for basic, and Stockton [Annotator's Note: Stockton, California] for advanced. The weather got bad in Stockton, so the upper class flew the planes to Yuma, Arizona and finished up there. Cauble says the B-26 [Annotator's Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber] transition was tough. It had a bad reputation. He had a lot of West Pointers [Annotator's Note: graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York] in Tampa [Annotator's Note: then MacDill Army Airfield; now MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida] and they thought they were hot. One that Cauble flew with a lost an engine and would have made them crash. Cauble took over the controls and landed the plane. The West Pointer said he would have Cauble court-martialed. Cauble asked the commander to never have to fly with one of them again. When back from overseas, he ended up in Grenada, Mississippi. The colonel wanted him to be his personnel man and said the pilots needed to learn to fly desks. He sent four of them to take the exam for a regular commission. The pilots were all Reserve [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officers]. Cauble was doing so much administrative work he had fly on Sundays to get his flight time in. He decided he wanted to go home. He got home and got a letter that he had to report to Fort Benjamin Harrison, [Annotator's Note: Lawrence Township, Indiana] which was an artillery school. He did not go, and he requested to not be a candidate for a regular commission. He did not want to work for any West Pointers.

[Annotator's Note: Raymond Cauble flew Martin B-26 Marauder medium bombers out of Tampa, Florida.]. Before you could solo, you had to take a blindfold test. Later on, they were losing airplanes and they did not know why. The slogan was "a ship a day in Tampa Bay." They finally just gave up on the plane. Cauble was shipped out overnight. He went to Smyrna, Tennessee [Annotator's Note: Smyrna Army Airfield] and ended up in B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] for six weeks. They then went to Davis-Monthan [Annotator's Note: then Davis-Monthan Army Air Field; now Davis-Monthan Air Force Base] in Tucson, Arizona and formed the 465th Bombardment Group. Cauble went in the 781st Bombardment Squadron. They trained as a unit and picked up their crews and ground personnel. They went to McCook, Nebraska [Annotator's Note: McCook Army Airfield] for overseas combat training. They shipped from there February 1944 and flew the south route to West Palm Beach, Florida. When leaving Nebraska, the temperature was 26 degrees below zero. They left Florida for Puerto Rico and then to British Guiana. His brakes went out on landing and he had to run into the sand to get stopped. They could not repair it. Whenever you land, you want to go town. He asked for a pass, but they were too far out. The next stop they could not fix the brakes either. He flew to Dakar, Africa, and then to Tunisia in February 1944. Their runway was not done in Italy. It was May 1944 when they got to Pantanella Field [Annotator's Note: Italy].

Raymond Cauble just wanted to fly. There was a boy with them on the train to California. When they graduated, he went to P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft]. He made a name for himself. A lot of the boys went to Transport Command and flew The Hump [Annotator's Note: aerial supply route over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China]. Cauble feels lucky to fly the B-26 [Annotator's Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber] to get started. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks what it was like to fly the Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber.] A good B-24 was easy to fly, but he got a lemon and he had to fly it all the time. He always had a cracked nose glass. The put in two replacements and they kept cracking. His CO [Annotator's Note: commanding officer] flew with him one day for about an hour and told him he needed to get it fixed. It flew a lot of missions and eventually went down in the Adriatic [Annotator's Note: Adriatic Sea] when that crew ran out of fuel. Other B-24s flew well. The B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] could fly itself. Cauble had the best crew. He was wounded on 29 May 1944 and they were shot down on 30 June 1944 [Annotator's Note: in another aircraft than Cauble's]. The ball gunner and nose gunner went down with the plane after three fighters hit them. The navigator died about ten days later. Three of the crew died. B-24s were notorious for fires in the bomb bay. The others became prisoners.

The little country towns in Italy were all dirty to Raymond Cauble. The big cities, like Foggia, were good cities. He never understood why it took so long for the little cities to get more civilized. He was stationed at Pantanella [Annotator's Note: Pantanella Airfield, part of Foggia Airfield Complex, Italy]. It was in a valley with two hills. The runway was in the valley. Later on, they built a double runway and the 464th Bombardment Group [Annotator's Note: 55th Bombardment Wing, 15th Air Force] moved in. They never got good training. They had a lot of planes shot down. Cauble's CO [Annotator's Note: commanding officer] went over there and got them into shape, but was eventually shot down. Cauble did not have any interactions with civilians. He lived in a tent. He made a pretty good bed out of an old inner tube. The cots were hard to sleep on. There were four men to a tent. The officers were together. The enlisted men were together, six to a tent. There were no facilities set up when he was there. They had a runway and a control tower. They had gasoline stoves that would, once in a while, burn a tent down. The day his crew was shot down, Cauble had a good pair of officer's shoes. His bombardier wanted to borrow his shoes. Cauble said no way, he was not coming back. He relented and gave him the shoes. The bombardier never came back. He said it was a good thing he took them because he almost wore them out marching so much [Annotator's Note: as a prisoner of war].

Raymond Cauble's first mission was to a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. A general went with Cauble. They dropped their bombs. Cauble turned to look to see them. The general told him he could look at the pictures when he got home, and pointed out an engine cowling flapping. When they landed, the general wanted to know who had worked on the engine. The general flew with him again and on that flight another piece of cowling came loose. Cauble's first mission had no flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] or fighters and he thought this was not going to be bad. On his second mission, they woke him up and said it was not going to be good. It was not. [Annotator's Note: Cauble explains it was a troop concentration camp, not a Holocaust camp.] They hit a marshalling yard that had guns. The railroad yards were pretty well protected. There was a yard in Northern Italy and they came up the Mediterranean side and hit it, then went down the Adriatic side. A black plane went by them in the other direction. It looked like a B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber]. It joined the flight. There was a plane in the flight that had shot a pilot in his parachute [Annotator's Note: German pilot]. The black plane pulled alongside that plane and started firing. Two P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft] shot it down. Later on, in the war, radar got good. The vapor trails gave away their positions too.

The day Raymond Cauble was hit [Annotator's Note: 29 May 1944], they were over Vienna [Annotator's Note: Vienna, Austria]. He saw four puffs come up and he turned. Three puffs came up where he had been, and he turned. He was hit by the fourth one. He flew one mission and got home with all of his engines still running and that was his first one. They were not bothered too much with fighters when he was flying. On the way home, they were letting down over the Balkans [Annotator's Note: Balkan Peninsula] and he saw a trail of dust taking off. The tail gunner called out a fighter at six o'clock. Cauble felt the ship quiver. The airplane was upside down over them and the top gunner shot him down. The flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] rattles like chains. One time they got home and had over 250 flak holes. Cauble had been hit in his calf [Annotator's Note: on this mission]. The flak went through. It drove his foot back under the seat. He had to take his belt off and get down sideways to get it out. The navigator had been hit too. They did not have any sulfa, but his wound never bled as the piece was hot and seared it. Cauble could fly but let the copilot take over. On the final approach, another plane started landing from the other way. Cauble grabbed the controls and got the plane up and over the other plane. That pilot had shot up Cauble's plane back in training [Annotator's Note: in flight school].

Raymond Cauble landed his aircraft after being wounded in flight and was taken to a hospital. That night it hurt, and his foot was turning blue. He asked for the doctor. They rebandaged his leg. The doctor would push him every chance he got. The shrapnel had missed the bone. He never saw the plane after he landed. He was hospitalized for a week and a day. He was scheduled to go to a rest camp. He had thought nothing would happen to him. It is always the other guy. You could not think about it. He went to the Isle of Capri [Annotator's Note: Isle of Capri, Italy] for five days. When his crew was shot down, Cauble took over the crew of the pilot who had been shot down in his plane. The medics did not let him continue to fly. His commander wanted him to fly one day, while he was still on crutches. He left the squadron [Annotator's Note: 781st Bombardment Squadron, 465th Bombardment Group, 55th Bombardment Wing, 15th Air Force] in August [Annotator's Note: August 1944] and went to Service Command [Annotator's Note: Air Service Command] for evaluation. They wanted to know if he could fly B-26s [Annotator's Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber] again. He flew supplies and flew a trip every day to rest camps. He got orders to go to the 96th Service Group in northern Italy. He was assigned after that to the 312th Depot Repair Squadron [Annotator's Note: 312th Depot Repair Squadron, 41st Air Depot Group, 15th Air Force Service Command] as an engineering officer and test pilot. He was a First Lieutenant. He cannot remember getting his Purple Heart [Annotator's Note: the Purple Heart Medal is award bestowed upon a United States service member who has been wounded as a result of combat actions against an armed enemy].

Raymond Cauble liked to the 17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber]. He had so many hours in his old B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber]. The B-17 was a good flying airplane. The B-24, as long as you did not get shot up and catch fire, was better for combat. He went to a rest camp in Southern France one day and the war was over. All the fighters of the 15th Air Force were on the field in Bari [Annotator's Note: Bari Airfield, Foggia Airfield Complex, Italy]. They salvaged the planes. They cut up the P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft] and P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft]. There were 200 B-24s cut up there. He had named his plane "Belle Ringer" [Annotator's Note: B-24 #42-51195]. They had a cartoonist in the squadron [Annotator's Note: 781st Bombardment Squadron, 465th Bombardment Group, 55th Bombardment Wing, 15th Air Force] who painted the plane. Most of the locals anywhere spoke English. When they landed in Cairo [Annotator's Note: Cairo, Egypt], they wanted to go see the town. He had flown in over the pyramids. Their taxi driver was taking them out of town to rob them. Wherever they went, they took a Beretta [Annotator's Note: make of handgun]. He told that driver to turn around, but he would not. Cauble put that Beretta at the back of the guy's head. He turned around and took them back to the hotel. Cauble yelled for an MP [Annotator's Note: Military Police] and the taxi took off. Twice that gun saved his life. Another time, some natives wanted to get rough with him. Cauble pulled his gun out and they scattered.

Raymond Cauble lost his crew after he was wounded and was in recovery. His crew was shot down later. Cauble was wounded on 29 May 1944 and they went down on 30 June. He was at the field and waiting for them to come home. There is always a straggler. They waited and waited and finally started asking questions. Somebody saw two or three parachutes come out. Cauble felt hopeless. Three of them died. They boys in the back raised the lid on the ball turret and there was blood everywhere and they did not have time to get him out [Annotator's Note: the ball turret gunner]. The crew told him if he had been flying it would not have happened. Cauble did keep up with the copilot and the bombardier, who had been prisoners. At the flight section in Bari, [Annotator's Note: Bari Airfield, Foggia Airfield Complex, Italy] some places were getting liberated by the Russians. Cauble was scheduled to go pick up some of them but did not get to.

[Annotator's Note: Raymond Cauble flew as a test pilot for the 312th Depot Repair Squadron, 41st Air Depot Group, 15th Air Force Service Command after being wounded in action in May 1944.] Some of those planes would not even come off the ground. They started down the runway in a B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] and had no idea what was wrong with it. At the end of the runway was an olive grove and a railroad. He could not get very high. He was scared and sweating. He skidded around and landed. He asked them if they were trying to kill him. Later on, he had a five man life raft fly out on take-off and get tangled up on the tail. He was on another check-out flight and on final approach he could see the ground crew readying for a crash. The number three engine had quit. Cauble told the engineer to shut the fuel off, open the bomb bay doors, and run like hell when they landed. A new fuel line had been installed without a clamp. He still does not know how it did not blow. He was on a B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] and on take-off there was big draft. The top turret had come off. There were numerous little things like that that would cause him up to wake up with wet stains.

Raymond Cauble stayed in Italy until after Japan surrendered [Annotator's Note: Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945]. He was there when he heard about President Roosevelt's [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] death. They did not know who the new President Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] was. He was in Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy] one day in a C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft] and was holding in position for take-off. He had to shut off his engines and he sat and sat there. Pretty soon, a big squadron of Spitfires [Annotator's Note: British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft] came over and circled. A black B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer heavy bomber] came in with a single tail and a door in the back. Churchill [Annotator's Note: Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill; Prime Minister, United Kingdom, 1940 to 1945] got out of it with his cigar. After two hours of sitting there, they let him leave. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Cauble where he was when the Germans surrendered.] They had a formation called and were told they could have the rest of the day off. He and some others went down to Taranto [Annotator's Note: Taranto, Italy] and saw the Italian Navy sailing out to war. [Annotator's Note: Cauble laughs.] The Japanese surrender did not mean much. They were slated to go to the Far East, and they were salvaging airplanes and engines. They were removing the engines and making boxes to put them in. They had to dismantle the airplanes.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Raymond Cauble to talk about a jeep he and some men built.] In North Africa, there were motorcycles and everything just laying around. A lot of the boys were taking the motorcycles. When the Germans left, they had put sugar in the gas. Cauble and the boys took the pieces of them [Annotator's Note: to build it]. They had to dismantle it and put it in the bomb bay [Annotator's Note: of their Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] when they moved up to Italy. Some way or another, they got it out and had an extra engine too. They did not have any exhaust pipes. They named it "Rippering Ribbon." Cauble returned to the United States in October [Annotator's Note: October 1945] by ship through the Mediterranean. The ship had a swimming pool and dance lounge, but it was overloaded, and people were sleeping on the stair landings. He had all of the men's records under his bunk. He felt down and it was wet. Some WAC [Annotator's Note: Women's Army Corps; women's branch of the United States Army, 1942 to 1978] had let a bathtub run over and it ran into their compartment. Water was rationed then. He could not find six men on the ship. They landed in New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] at night. They saw the Statue of Liberty all lit up. It was a good sight. They unloaded and then he had all of his men.

Raymond Cauble got a long leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] when he returned to the United States. On 2 January [Annotator's Note: 2 January 1946] he had to report for reassignment. He was sent to Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama. He went early to find a place to live. When he was in Tampa [Annotator's Note: then MacDill Army Airfield; now MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida], his son was born on 1 September 1943. He was told he was not staying in Mobile. He was given a choice of Greenville [Annotator's Note: Greenville Army Airfield, Mississippi] and B-25s [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber] or Grenada [Annotator's Note: Grenada Army Airfield, Mississippi] and A-26s [Annotator's Note: Douglas A-26 Invader light bomber and ground attack aircraft]. He chose Greenville but was told the CO [Annotator's Note: commanding officer] was no good. He was sent to Grenada to a pencil and a desk. The A-26 was a lot better than a B-26 [Annotator's Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber]. It was a glorified A-20 [Annotator's Note: Douglas A-20 Havoc medium bomber and ground attack aircraft]. They were flown out to the desert. Cauble flew out to Burbank [Annotator's Note: Burbank, California] in 1945 to pick up some parts in a C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft]. His instrument rating had expired. Overseas it had not mattered. A Second Lieutenant signed their release for instruments. On the way out, they saw a lake where there should not be one. It was acres and acres of airplanes.

Raymond Cauble had to leave his wife in Tampa [Annotator's Note: Tampa, Florida] when he went up to Smyrna [Annotator's Note: Smyrna, Tennessee] and she was due with their child. He had to leave again and in Tucson [Annotator's Note: Tucson, Arizona] he kept checking on her. He went to the theater. The telegram came and they called all of the airplanes but could not find him. He came back to the base and the telegram was on his bunk. He was six months old when Cauble went overseas and was two when he got home in October 1945. His son would not have anything to do with him. The picture was his dad, not him. After a few weeks he came around. Cauble left the service in December 1946 in Alabama as a captain. He used the G.I. Bill to go to school. He had no troubles with PTSD [Annotator's Note: post-traumatic stress disorder] when he got back. Cauble fought in the war because of patriotism. He cannot say that the war changed his life. He could not get out quick enough. The war did not have any effect on his values. The war was just something he did. He does not believe the younger generation knows what the war was all about. He feels that The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, should continue to teach about the war, and any other war, to future generations. Living good and coming home is his most memorable experience of the war. When it is all said and done, it is done.