Exactly 70 years ago today, on his 19th birthday, tail-gunner Thomas Boyd lept from his doomed B-24 into the freezing skies over Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.
He remembers the time: noon. And he remembers the harrowing descent — he had taken a bullet to the knee and managed to deploy his parachute in those final airborne moments.
Boyd landed hard in the field of a friendly farmer. By sundown, all the crew members except for the pilot, who had been taken prisoner, had reunited. Aided by the underground, the Americans began a four-day trek through snow and darkness and German lines. Once, they were fired upon by enemy soldiers who were so close the crew could hear their conversations. They reached the safety of a secret British mission on Christmas Eve.
All of which made the prospect of a well-planned parachute jump near Boyd's present-day home in Sunnyvale, California, sound like child's play.
"I did it one time with nobody telling me what to do other than pull the ripcord," he said.
The tail-gunner's ill-fated mission on Dec. 20, 1944, was only his second mission of the war. Boyd would go on to fly two dozen others, bombing rail yards in Austria's capital city and taking out 22 enemy planes on an airstrip in Regensburg, Germany. There were close calls — anti-aircraft fire and engine losses. But never again did Boyd jump out of an airplane.
Not that he didn't think about it, even long after the war was over.
"Over the years, I thought, well, one of these days I'm going to do it again," Boyd said.
The years turned to decades — seven of them.
Now, on his 89th birthday and the 70th anniversary of the first and only jump of his life, the day has finally come.
In love with military life
Boyd was nearly 16 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He tried to enlist in the military a year later but was turned away.
Boyd left his family farm soon after, making the 25-mile journey to Baltimore where he got a job as a janitor in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
"At the time, I was glad to get anything," said Boyd, who'd left school after the eighth grade.
The war dominated Boyd's conversations with the three doctors he worked for.
"You know, Tom," he recalled one of them saying at the time, "when you're 18 you're going to get drafted." The doctor asked him what service he wanted to belong to.
"The Army Air Corps," Boyd responded.
He was a boy of no more than 12 the first time he'd seen an airplane winging over the vast fields surrounding his home. "I thought to myself, one of these years I'm going to fly one of those things."
When Boyd was called into service less than two months after his 18th birthday, all three doctors wrote letters to the draft board detailing his desire to join the air corps.
"In the end, I got in there," he said.
Boyd reported to Fort Meade, Maryland, on Feb. 21, 1944, then headed to Miami for basic training. He trained to be a B-24 tail-gunner at Tyndall Field, Florida, that April. Combat crew training followed across the country, at March Field in California. On Oct. 1, 1944, he began overseas processing; three weeks later, he boarded the Liberty Ship S.S. James Barbara in Virginia, which carried him across the Atlantic.
By then, Boyd said, he'd fallen in love with military life. "In six months, I knew this is the career for me for the rest of my life. And it was."
Boyd arrived in Bari, Italy, via horse-drawn boxcar in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Two days later, he was assigned to the 741st Bomb Squadron, 455th Bomb Group (Heavy).
Boyd flew his first mission over Brux, Austria, on Dec. 9, 1944. The crew was tasked with a similar mission 11 days later when the bomb bay and engine took on fire. It was noon — broad daylight — when the pilot ordered the crew to bail out over Yugoslavia.
Boyd's parachute didn't deploy the first time he yanked on the ripcord. He was shot in the left knee and landed hard enough to sprain his right ankle. Four painful, perilous days and nights followed, until they reached the British mission where they would remain until just after Christmas.
Boyd still remembers his Christmas dinner: A fish he shot himself.
He celebrated a year in service with a party at the Enlisted Man's Club following another bombing mission in Vienna. After his return to the U.S. in June 1945, Boyd went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, for rehabilitation. His first assignment to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, followed.
He stayed for five years, working first as an aircraft mechanic and then in reconnaissance. In 1949, he married his bride, Anna, with whom he had two daughters and a son. They were married for 63 years, until her death in April 2013.
Boyd would remain in the Air Force for 22 years in all, with assignments to Germany, Wyoming, Florida and, finally, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. He earned his GED and took college courses.
By July 1966, he said, "I'd had enough of the Air Force, and especially the weather in Montana."
Boyd went to work for what was then Lockeed Missiles and Space Company, eventually settling in Sunnyvale.
By then, he'd long made good on what he'd once told himself as a farm boy looking at a magnificent flying machine overhead. He earned his pilot's license.
Telling his story
He never talked much about his wartime experiences, said his daughter, Cynthia Kepple, until a couple of decades ago when Boyd had the opportunity to go on a B-24 flight with the Collings Foundation, a nonprofit educational foundation in Stow, Massachusetts, that supports living history events.
A few years later, Kepple urged her father to volunteer.
"You need to go tell people what it was like to fly on this plane. You are a wealth of information. You lived it. You know what it was like," she told him.
Father and daughter have volunteered together for the last 15 years. "He's opened up a lot about it," Kepple said. "I've learned more and more."
Making the leap
It was Kepple whom Boyd first approached last spring about making a parachute jump.
He wanted to make the jump alone — no instructor — and he wanted to do it on his 89th birthday, he told her.
Kepple convinced him to make a tandem jump, explaining that his training 70 years ago probably no longer counted. The instructor would do all of the work and take the brunt of the impact, she told him. "You can enjoy the scenery."
She asked him if he'd rather make the leap in summer, when the weather is warmer.
"I want to jump on the anniversary," Boyd told her. Besides, he pointed out, it was snowing and cold the first time.
There would be no changing his mind.
Boyd planned to rise this morning just as he always does, at 6:30 a.m., followed by breakfast, the first of three regular meals he eats every day like clockwork.
At 89, he is in near perfect physical health, although his eyesight has begun to go and problems with his vocal cords have left his voice sounding strained.
"I keep busy," he said, bowling twice a week and keeping up with the housework.
After breakfast, Boyd and Kepple, who plans to make the jump with her father, will drive from Boyd's home in Sunnyvale to Bay Area Skydiving in Byron some 60 miles north.
If the elements cooperate, the World War II veteran will leap from the plane at exactly noon, tumbling through the sunlight to the field below.
Thomas Boyd aboard a B-24.
Photo Credit: Courtesy photo
