Veterans' sacrifices remembered

After flying on 30 missions in France and Germany as a waist turret gunner, he wonders if it did any good.

"I guess it did," Brenneman said from his home in Chesapeake Point on Naples Bay. "Yeah, we did."

His wife, Doris, was more adamant.

"What do you mean? Of course you did good," she said excitedly. "World War II was a very significant war. It was for freedom for the whole country -- for the whole world. It was a turning point."

Dale Brenneman, 79, said he thinks about the resulting effects of the war every Veterans Day. The longer he lives, he said, the more convinced he is that it had to be fought.

Glancing at the tranquil bay from his living room, Brenneman recalled the time he spent as a young man who went from a life of farming to suddenly fighting a war from the belly of a bomber.

Doris Brenneman, 77, recalled the handsome young gunner and the wedding that began their life together.

Brenneman followed in his father's footsteps as a corn and soybean farmer outside Minier, Ill., population 750. All his friends were already in the military service, and Brenneman wanted to go, too.

"But I was home helping my father on the farm, and the draft board wouldn't change my classification," he said. "So I volunteered. That was the only way they'd take me."

He was 19.

Things moved fast.

His assignments changed quickly after basic and specialized training took him from Fort Sheridan in Chicago to Keesler Field in Biloxi, Miss.

Brenneman had his heart set on being a pilot. But there was a long line of candidates in front of him and it looked as if it would take forever to get into pilot training.

So he volunteered again -- this time to go to gunnery school, which would enable him to get his wings as a crew member more quickly.

Brenneman was off again. The Air Force sent him to Tindle Field in Panama City for three months of gunnery school training.

He soon became an expert in operating 50-caliber machine guns, the type used in defensive flight combat in B-24s against enemy aircraft. He chose to be a waist turret gunner, a position that got its name from the gun's location between the bomb bay and the tail gunner.

"I could be either a left-waist gunner or right-waist," Brenneman said. "It didn't matter which side."

He flew 30 missions over France and Germany from 1943 to '45. Sometimes he flew in an open turret, where he experienced more cold than he ever had in Illinois.

"I've never been colder in my life," he recalled saying at the time. "I was told frostbite was a price for working in fresh air."

It was a far cry from growing corn and soybeans.

Brenneman's career as an Air Force waist turret gunner took him to Pueblo, Colo., where plane crews were formed. Pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio men and gunners were matched up there, and training flights for bombing runs and navigation took place.

It took him to Cologne, Dresden and other industrial sites in Germany for his first real missions.

Brenneman recalled how heavy flak was always present, and the crew members were always ducking and turning their bodies away inside the plane to dodge explosions.

"We dreaded flights to Cologne because flak seemed so heavy you could walk on it," he said. "On one trip we collected 27 holes throughout the plane from flak. Fortunately, none of the hits struck critical control lines. We saw other less fortunate B-24s take disabling hits and fall away from formation."

During the Battle of the Bulge, Brenneman's squadron was directed to fly at a low level on a mission to drop supplies to ground troops. Crew members pushed the supplies out the two bomb bay doors by hand.

"It was harrowing, particularly on the day we encountered another squadron coming in at 50 feet," Brenneman said. "It was a miracle that we avoided them by running under them. All the while, the Germans were firing small arms at us from buildings, ground positions and armored vehicles."

The missions and personal experiences continued, until Brenneman was honorably discharged in October 1945.

He and his high school sweetheart, Doris Snider, who lived in the town of Minier, were married during a leave just before his final assignment to Mission Field, Texas. The newlyweds went to Texas together for the final weeks of his military service.

Had V-J Day, the day of victory for the Allied forces over Japan in World War II, not happened, Brenneman would have been assigned to the Pacific Theater.

The young couple returned to Minier to take over the Brenneman family farm, a huge operation that is now operated by their two sons and their families.

As for the veteran waist turret gunner and his high school sweetheart, they retired from the farm and settled in a condominium on Naples Bay. They've lived there since 1979.

"After spending my life on a farm -- I grew up on one, too -- I wanted to live on the water," Doris Brenneman said. "We never lived close to other people, and now we have neighbors all around."

Douglas Scott, a friend and neighbor for the past 15 years, said he was impressed by Dale Brenneman's story and his service in World War II.

Scott, a veteran who worked with a Naval intelligence group in the Persian Gulf in the 1950s, said Brenneman's military experience was in a different league from his own.

"We're the old guard of the veterans," Scott said. "Veterans of every era have different perspectives. But they have the same basic principles and philosophy of serving country. Dale and Doris are the quintessential Midwesterners. They're quality to the soul."