Pilots give veteran a flight filled with memories

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

“Not many people have heard of it,” said Jim Parlier Monday as he sat at a table in the maintenance hangar at Mountain Empire Airport and showed a photo of himself in the Virginia Protective Force uniform in his last year of high school.
“We called it the home guard.”
The force was established the prior year – 1941, in response to coming federalization of the Virginia National Guard. “Provided surplus M-1917 Enfield rifles and blue-grey wool uniforms made in the state’s penitentiaries, the Virginia Protective Force assumed the in-state missions of the Virginia National Guard when it was called to federal service,” literature online said.
Service in the force for Parlier was a precursor to service in the U.S. Army, and he and several dozen local boys went to Abingdon for the Army physicals in 1943. Parlier’s VPF discharge paper shows his was discharged honorably “[t]o enter the Army of the United States,” and was signed by a Major M.J Anderson, captain of the VPF.
Another photo shows a line of B-24 Liberators in a line stretching as far as the camera could see on an English airfield. As one took off, the next rounded a turn to face the wind for its own takeoff about ten seconds later.
Flying so tightly in the fogs of England led the planes’ crews to wonder “will we chew off his tail or got our tail chewed off,” a reference to the action of the plane’s propellers if the distance between planes was too short.
Another photo showed a utilitarian looking German flak tower, elevated to give Nazis on the ground best advantage to fire upon incoming allied aircraft.
German flak ripping through the bomber on which Parlier was a gunner cut the tendons in his right hand.
“I got a little wound,” Parlier said in the understated way soldiers talk about incidents that didn’t kill them. “I never knew how it got the inside of my hand, but it certainly did.”
He was manning twin 50-caliber guns as the plane flew over Bremen, Germany, on a run to bomb a marshaling yard where the Germans loaded box cars for their war effort.
He did not get a Purple Heart at the time.
“Dr. Richardson’s father [of the Marion family of physicians] was in charge of field hospitals in England, but I didn’t know it at the time,” Parlier said. “If I had I would have stood a better chance of getting it.”
An attempt to get the Purple Heart six years ago was unsuccessful. The reason is shown in a Feb. 25, 2005 letter from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Mo.: “If the record were here on July 12, 1973, it would have been in that area that suffered the most damage in the fire on that date.”
Parlier was assigned to the 489th Bomb Group, 845th Squadron. Briefing the crews each morning on the day’s missions was a commanding officer who would go on to become “the best actor in the movies, Jimmy Stewart,” Parlier said. “They would tell us how much flak they would be getting and what kind, how long it should take, and what fighters would be protecting us.”
When the bombers returned, crews were debriefed. “They gave us a water glass half full of whiskey,” Parlier said. “The object was to get us to talk without being bashful. It seemed to work.”
Crews, he said, might still be nervous and not want to talk about the harrowing experience of bombing and being targeted by guns on the ground and in the air. German fighters would fly in the cloudy contrails behind the B24s “and we couldn’t see them until they got right up on us.”
Parlier flew 19 missions as an extra, meaning he was assigned to crews as needed. That meant he did not reach the required 25 for fulfillment of his duties.
“When we got back to the States, people with less than 25 trained for the South Pacific,” Parlier said. He trained to be a flight engineer on a B-29 in Pueblo, Colo. “Thank goodness the war with Japan was over before our classes ended. They put us on a train to Wilmington, North Carolina, and I was discharged at Seymour Johnson Field in South Carolina.”
Last week, Parlier was at a meeting of the Mountain Empire Pilots Association when Travis Hill stood up and walked to him, handing him an envelope.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Parlier said, “and started to stick it under my notebook. Someone said, ‘Count it.’”
The envelope held $425 collected from the association’s members, the cost of a flight on a B-24 appearing at an air show at Tri-Cities Regional Airport in Blountville, Tenn., two days later.
Parlier flew on the Liberator for about 50 minutes, longer than the usual 30 minutes. He thinks the crew took longer in training a new member.
For Parlier, the flight brought back memories he’d not recalled in years, like watching “one of the boys in our crew. When the bomb bay doors opened, he would lie down so he could see the bombs dropping.” He was checking their accuracy as the explosions followed the path of the plane overhead, what Parlier said they called “walking across since there was a little delay between each bomb.”
Pilots’ association member and aircraft mechanic Curtis Pennington working nearby heard Parlier talking about “how good the association was to me.”
“People don’t remember what happened,” Pennington said. “They don’t teach it in school any more. They don’t respect the people who fought. That’s why we did what we did for you.”
Curtis said an untold story of the war is that air crews “were lucky to just get back” and not just because of “being shot at.” The planes, he said, were unproven, developed just before the war. “You took a chance just flying in it.”
For Pennington, the best part of Parlier’s flight last week was “you weren’t getting shot at.”