EAST TEXAS (KYTX) -- "An armament officer was responsible for the ammunition, the gun conditions, and the bombs on the aircraft."
That was Second Lieutenant Warren Warchus' job in the Air Force.
And on his first mission on a B-29 dropping bombs on targets in Japan, there was a big problem he had to fix.
"Something happened in the electrical system of the aircraft, and the bombs didn't go out," he said. "I had to get down there on my hands and knees and get that first bomb out and I was doing that, and we never did find out what happened, all the bombs went out at one time."
With the bomb bay doors open and nothing between him and the Pacific Ocean but a 1 foot-wide catwalk, 40 500 pound bombs began falling all around him. A tail from one of the bombs knocked off his oxygen mask.
"The only reason I didn't fall out, and this is my thinking, was because I had my arm around that bomb rack."
He survived 25 missions.
The Chicago native was drafted into the Army at age 20 in 1942, and was soon off to basic training in Bastrop, Texas. He remembers getting off the train...
"There was a band playing 'Deep In The Heart of Texas,' and this was in July..."
He trained in the sweltering Texas heat. And once he got the chance to switch to the Army Air Corps -- what we now know as the Airforce -- he jumped at it.
"Whenever I was a little tyke, and the airplanes would be flying over the air, I grew up on the south side of Chicago, I'd yell come down and take me for a ride or something like that."
He trained in the Bombardier and Navigation Program in Albuquerque, New Mexico and then went on to Alamogordo, New Mexico.
"That's where our crew was formed," he said. "And we all met each other and we stayed together."
In April 1945, the crew got its orders to head to the Pacific Theater, to fly bomb missions over Japan.
And like on that first mission, the challenges kept on coming -- enemy gunfire damaging engines, intense heat rising from bombed targets launching planes further into the air.
Warchus remembers a firebomb mission over Osaka, Japan.
"We took off with an engine on fire."
And the weather didn't cooperate...
"We came in on a snowstorm, a super blizzard."
Despite that -- mission accomplished.
But Warchus credits some of that success to the U.S. Marines for taking Iwo Jima -- it served as a valuable emergency base for pilots flying long missions across the South Pacific.
"It's so important to me that the Marines took that Iwo because I wouldn't be here."
But he's thankful he was there for his wife, Arlene, and their son and daughter.
Warchus' son, Lee, served in Vietnam. Something Warchus is especially proud of. He says military service teaches something he believes many Americans lack right now.
"I think we lack personal responsibility," he said. "We were responsible for each other. If there was any reason they needed me or I needed them, they would come to me and I to them."
Responsibility, bravery, and integrity -- three things that make Warren Warchus an East Texas Hero.
