From left, Capt. Bill Boutwell, 2nd Lt. Lloyd Herman and Capt. Jack Arvidson during their service years. Herman flew 57 combat missions with the 452nd bombardment group of the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1952.
By LLOYD HERMAN as told to ABBY WEINGARTEN
Published: Friday, February 18, 2011 at 1:00 a.m.
In post-World War II Nebraska, Lloyd Herman was a teenager daydreaming about a career in military aviation. At 19, in 1947, with few job prospects due to the economic climate, he enlisted in the service. When the Korean War erupted, Herman fulfilled his ambitions of becoming a military aviator, flying 57 missions as a navigator-bombardier, with the 452nd bombardment group of the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1952. After a 20-year military career that took him around the world, Herman founded Venice Air Park in Venice, Fl. Now 84, he lives in Sarasota with his wife, Betty, of 61 years.
'We lived on the airbase at Pusan South Korea. We had a long north-south runway, but it wasn't concrete; it was something called perforated steel planking (PSP). We slept with our sidearms and carried them on our missions.
Our job was to fly north of the 38th parallel at night and interdict 13 supply routes that were coming down from Manchuria through the mountains. In addition to that, we would be assigned precision bombing missions from time to time.
We had an electronic bombing navigation system called SHORAN, or short-range navigation, which was very accurate. When we were assigned specific bombing targets like the rail marshalling yards at Pyongyang and Sinanju, we would use this equipment to make precision runs over the targets. You'd set up the system for your target point, and once you hit the point, it would automatically drop the bomb load.
A lot of times, we just went up and roamed among the mountains, covering assigned supply routes looking for truck convoys and railway targets. The thing that made it dicey was those god-awful mountains. It is the most rugged, horrendous terrain. Our planes were painted all black so searchlights couldn't pick us up. In the dead of night, we'd be navigating among those mountains and valleys, because the supply trails were there. Without SHORAN and the precision we had, we'd have been impaled on the mountainside.
We'd be tooling around at night and the Chinese would have their anti-aircraft batteries on the mountainsides. All of a sudden, we'd see them hosing .37-millimeters and .90-millimeters at us. The .37s looked like big red golf balls coming up. If one hit you, it would blow you apart. The 90s were radar guided but we could evade them with abrupt evasive maneuvers. Sometimes, we were so low that they'd be shooting down on us from the mountainside. They finally caught onto the fact that we were flying at such low altitudes, and they started stringing steel cables between the mountains.
People used to say to me, 'Why were you out there at night? Why didn't you go out in the daytime?' Very simple reason: the Russian MiGs would have shot us down like turkeys. I kissed that SHORAN every night; that was a lifesaver.
When B-29s were coming out of Okinawa and flying high-altitude bombing missions, they'd be above us at 25,000 to 30,000 feet. Sometimes, they'd pass over our target first and that would stir up a hornet’s nest of enemy flak. So, once the B-29s had them really mad, here we'd come at a lower altitude, fly through a sea of flak, and do our job.
When you're flying like this, it's a rather exacting job. We were lucky. We never took a hit, although some of our friends did not return from their missions.
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