Ryan O'Brien was born in March 1922 in Los Angeles, California. The Great Depression started when he was seven. His dad was a contractor until then. He grew up about a mile from the University of Southern California. He did a lot with school kids. He thought the Depression was just normal and that life would be like that again after the war. From the fifth grade, he worked for the Kerckhoffs [Annotator's Note: family of William George Kerckhoff]. He worked for them after high school. He had no plans. He knew he would go in the service because he graduated in 1941. Germany had invaded Russia and he thought it was great because they would just fight it out. That was what they talked about. He and his friends discussed what branch they wanted to go into. They would have big parties the night before anyone left. O'Brien ended up with five Model A Fords that way. You could buy a car for 15 dollars. There was gas rationing and you got four gallons a week for each car. He got 20 gallons a week that way.

Ryan O'Brien and a friend went to watch the LA Bulldogs [Annotator's Note: Los Angeles Bulldogs] playing against the Stockton Greenbacks [Annotator's Note: professional football teams]. All during the game, the announcer was giving updates about Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. There were a lot of Japanese in the stands. O'Brien saw a lot of Japanese who were gardeners and ran grocery stores; there were more then, than now. He got along with them. O'Brien saw them being hauled out of his neighborhood and taken to the internment camps. He thought it had to be done. The landscape was all hills where the Japanese vegetable gardens were. They were accused of checking out the Navy ships from there but that was all rumor. O'Brien was a bricklayer and his cousins went into the Navy in the Seabees [Annotator's Note: members of US naval construction battalions]. He applied for the Cadets [Annotator's Note: US Army Air Forces Aviation Cadet Pilot Training Program]. He was told to wait until he was drafted. When drafted, he was sent to Keesler Field [Annotator's Note: now Keesler Air Force Base] in Biloxi, Mississippi. He went through basic training three times while waiting for an opening. He went to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then to San Antonio [Annotator's Note: San Antonio, Texas] for classification. He applied for navigation, but they gave him a choice of bombardier or pilot instead. He had a six-month-old son he had never seen. He chose bombardier training because he could bring his family to the base. Later, they needed 250 men for a navigation class. He applied and got accepted. On the final test, the theory of navigation, he was the only one who got a 100 percent score. He trained at the Pan American [Annotator's Note: Pan American Airways] School at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. All of his flights were over the Bermuda Triangle. [Annotator’s Note: O'Brien laughs.] They were training in flying boats.

Ryan O'Brien was sent to March Field [Annotator's Note: now March Air Reserve Base, Riverside County, California] for four or five months making up his crew. They flew mock bombing raids. It was good training. He was then sent to Hamilton Field [Annotator's Note: Hamilton Army Airfield in Novato, California]. He was issued his .45 [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber M1911 semi-automatic pistol] and they got a brand-new airplane. They went from there to Amarillo [Annotator's Note: Amarillo, Texas], then New Hampshire to Newfoundland. He then flew at night on the Great Circle Route [Annotator's Note: North Atlantic air ferry route] to the Azores [Annotator's Note: Autonomous Region of the Azores]. They had one compass that was way off [Annotator's Note: while training back in California], so they disregarded it. After Newfoundland, they used the one that had gotten them there. When they were about 200 miles out, O'Brien took his first fix, and saw they were headed to Greenland. He used the astral compass then which showed they had the wrong heading. The pilot corrected and they flew until daylight, using the sun to navigate. They had about a half an hour of fuel left when they arrived. Portugal was neutral and owned the Azores so both Americans and Germans used them. A German Air-Sea Rescue unit was there and recording every American plane coming in. O'Brien never went to town but was told that there were Germans and Americans there together. American Air-Sea Rescue was there too. They both would race out to a downed aircraft. Whoever got there first, would give any survivors a choice of what they wanted to do. The same thing happened in the Adriatic Sea. He stayed in the Azores a day or two and then went to Marrakesh [Annotator's Note: Marrakesh, Morocco], then Tunisia, then Italy.

For Ryan O'Brien, going into combat was like going to play a football game. The flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] vests were heavy. He would wrap his parachute in his flak vest. He never wore either. When his plane got hit, he did not even think about having to bail out. He was looking for Messerschmitts and trying to see dog fights with the P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft]. When he thinks about it now, it does not make sense, but that is the way it was. His plane was shot up on 22 August 1944. They lost an engine, dropped out of the formation, and enemy fighters came in. The pilot called for help from the P-38s. Before they got there, a Messerschmitt Me-109 [Annotator's Note: German Messerschmitt Me-109 or Bf-019 fighter aircraft] hit them. The tail gunner shot the 109 down. One Messerschmitt came broadside over the plane. O'Brien had his head out of the plane watching him. The plane flew close enough to cut the antenna wires with his propellor. He and the pilot were eye-to-eye. O'Brien learned 50 years later, that when the German fighters were out of ammunition, they were instructed to cut the tails on B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] and the centers of the B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] causing them to crash. O'Brien also found out that a navigator in the 8th Air Force wrote a book called "The Fall of Fortresses". In the book, he describes being shot with duds. O'Brien's crew thought they had been hit with duds. In the book, he discovered that the shells had been produced in a factory using Jewish slave labor. The Jews had purposefully left the detonators out of the shells.

The night Ryan O'Brien landed at Spinazzola [Annotator's Note: Spinazzola Airfield, Italy], a movie star was having a program. That was their first night in Italy and they went into town instead of seeing the star. They turned in their brand-new airplane for an old one that they flew back to Toretto Airfield [Annotator's Note: Toretto Airfield, Foggia Airfield Complex, Italy]. They lived in tents. They had four officers to one tent; six enlisted men to one tent. When they did not fly, they played a lot of cards and ate. A mission day started around 5:30 in the morning with breakfast. Then they got briefed. They would get their headings and hear the weather conditions as well as how many fighters were expected in the area. They would go out to the plane. It took about an hour to join the formation. There was a lot of flying before they even started the mission. His first mission was the invasion of Southern France [Annotator's Note: 15 August 1944], when Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] brought in his tanks. They were to start bombing from the coastline forward. O'Brien saw all the landing barges and a bombardier dropped bombs too early. He did not see any get hit. They went inland and he could see the Germans fleeing. For the next three weeks, his group [Annotator's Note: 825th Bombardment Squadron, 484th Bombardment Group, 49th Bombardment Wing, 15th Air Force] only flew gas in for the tanks. The B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] carried 500 gallons of gasoline. They had no flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] on their first mission, so it was a breeze.

Ryan O'Brien would get reports showing on the maps showing how the war was going. The Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] really shook everybody up. He worried about that. He never thought we would lose the war. On his second mission to Ploesti [Annotator's Note: Ploesti or Ploiești, Romania], he first experienced flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire]. It was the heaviest defense in Europe. They had 88mm guns [Annotator's Note: German 88mm multi-purpose artillery] on railroad flatcars. Vienna [Annotator's Note: Vienna, Austria] had 300 guns; Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany] had about 350. They would not be in range all the time there like they were in Ploesti. On his first mission there, he could see just one solid, black cloud of flak. He could see the airplanes going in and count how many came out. Even after 19 raids, Ploesti was at 40 percent capacity. Slave labor was repairing it even as the bombs were coming down. It was an important target. He was just lucky that none of the flak ever hit them. On 22 August [Annotator's Note: 22 August 1944], over Vienna, the flak blew a hole in the side of plane. They were 100 miles from the target and had to decide whether to go back or not. The target was the oil storage on the banks of the Danube River, near Vienna. They were south of the target and O'Brien gave the pilot directions to turn down the Danube. They were at 13,000 feet and were between other groups who were at 23,000 feet. They dropped their bombs and got out. They made it all the way back. The flak guns there were on barges, so they were flying right over them.

Ryan O'Brien crashed on 10 December 1944. O'Brien had been sent to lead navigator school. He flew a lot in the lead ship. The lead and deputy lead aircraft always have three navigators: the dead reckoning, the radar, and the pilotage navigators. The pilotage flies in the nose turret. On this mission, he was the deputy lead, the second aircraft. Their number one engine caught fire and the pilot had to feather it. The number two engine then caught fire. The B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] cannot stay in the air with only two engines. The pilot had to switch back and forth between feathering them. He was not allowed to land and was told to go out over the Adriatic [Annotator's Note: Adriatic Sea] and unload the bombs. They made it a mile or two before going down in a field. The entire crew was standing on the flight deck to keep the weight up front. O'Brien was in the nose turret and there was no room for him on the deck. On the crash, something hit him in the leg. He could not get his right foot loose for some time. He looked down and saw his foot was cut across the metatarsals. They ran behind a hill because the plane was full of bombs and gas and could explode. They had five, 1,000-pound bombs, two of which had delayed actions fuses. That was when it dawned on him that you get hurt in war. He was in the hospital for his foot. Everyday there was ambulance after ambulance coming in with wounded from the airfields. He wrote his wife almost every day. His letter arrived a week or so before the telegram came saying he had been injured. As long as he had a cast, he could move around. He went to Rome [Annotator's Note: Rome, Italy] for a week. He walked all over Rome with his cast on. He wore it out and had to have it taken off. He went back to his same crew.

Ryan O'Brien returned to his same crew after being hospitalized for an injury in a crash. His 35th mission was his last one and they were the lead ship. This was late in the war, March [Annotator's Note: March 1945]. They were told there was to be no radar bombing. They did not want any civilians hit. If it was overcast at the target, they were to go to the next one. Their first target was solid clouds but with a lot of flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire]. The second was the same. On the third target, it was clear, and they dropped their bombs. Their hydraulics were out, and they had no brakes due to the flak over the other targets. The pilot wanted everyone forward on the flight deck to keep the weight there. He then wanted them to all move to the back to shift the weight. When they landed, both tires were flat, and they ran off the runway into a ditch. They had their picture taken since it was their last mission. They could get a promotion if they volunteered for another tour. He did not volunteer though. A one percent loss was acceptable to the Air Forces. If you fly 35 missions, that is a 35 percent chance of being shot down. There were more men lost in the Air Force than any other branch. O'Brien then returned home on a Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] from Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy] in a convoy. They never had a submarine attack until they were 100 miles off of Richmond, Virginia. It was easier for the subs to find ships near the coast than on the open sea. That was a big surprise. They went into New Jersey then he took a train back to California.

Ryan O'Brien had a great homecoming. He had ten days at the Delmar Beach Club in Santa Monica [Annotator's Note: Santa Monica, California]. That was where the decision was made whether to send them to the Pacific or not. He was relieved not to go. He was going to stay in and had applied for pilot training. He decided he would be better off going back to work. He went back to bricklaying in 1945. In 1947, he got his State Contractor's License. In 1960, he proposed the contractor's association join together at one central location. He was elected Vice-President of the Bricklayers Union. He then proposed a statewide association and he volunteered to establish it. He had become a pilot and had a Cessna 195 of his own. He would fly all over the state organizing the association. He started in 1962 and they started the association in 1963. He became Executive Vice-President for the next 47 years. At a meeting in Palm Springs [Annotator's Note: Palm Springs, California] in April 2000, his daughter helped set up a retirement roast for him. He had not intended to retire and went another nine years.

Ryan O’Brien's most memorable experience was when the Messerschmitts [Annotator's Note: German Messerschmitt Me-109 or Bf-109 fighter aircraft] hit his airplane. [Annotator's Note: this event is described in the clip titled Hit by German Fighters]. He ended up being on Schindler's List [Annotator’s Note: Oskar Schindler] because he saved their lives. O'Brien first though the P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft] had saved their lives, then he thought it was the German pilot who had, and now he knows that Schindler saved their lives. Anyone of the shells would have blown the wing off [Annotator's Note: the antiaircraft shells that hit O’Brien's aircraft were duds due to not having charges installed by the slave laborers of Schindler’s ammunition factory]. O'Brien's parachute was wrapped in his flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] suit under the navigation table so he would not have gotten out. He had no choice but to serve in World War 2. It was 100 percent everyone and that is why we won. The war was just one of the things that happened to him. He does not think it changed his life much. His service is now what everybody talks about, the Greatest Generation. He did not think about that then. It was the last war the United States won. Korea [Annotator's Note: Korean War, 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953] was a stalemate. The others, the politicians would not let them win. In Vietnam [Annotator's Note: Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War, 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975], they would say where they would bomb and that is why we lost so many planes. McNamara [Annotator's Note: Robert Strange McNamara] thought he was saving civilians, but he was killing pilots. The same kind of thing happened with ISIS [Annotator's Note: Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also called Daesh]. If you want to win a war, you cannot compromise. The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] is important. Future generations should know what went on. In 1932, he was ten years old and the American Legion had a big convention of World War I veterans there. They had a big parade that had Civil War [Annotator's Note: American Civil War, 1861 to 1865] veterans too. O'Brien thought it was such a long time ago then. He was on a big parade on a trailer with World War 2 veterans and he saw ten year old kids and thought it was the same for them. It is the same thing. O'Brien joined the local Veterans of Foreign Wars. They have 400 members and only two are World War 2 vets. He was always trying to find out who the P-38 pilots were who saved his life on 22 August 1944. During that week, the entirety of Northern Europe was overcast. The Germans had sent all of their fighters south to fight the 15th Air Force which O'Brien was in.