91-year-old recalls days as B-17 tail gunner in WWII


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SALT LAKE CITY — Seated at his dining room table, 91-year-old Dale Payton travels back in time more than 60 years, to the moment, as a B-17 tail gunner, he shot down a Messerschmitt 110 in the skies above southern Germany.

“As cold as it was, sweat was rolling down my sides,” Payton said as he recalled the day in vivid detail.

He described the moment he hit his target.

“I could see the armor-piercing incendiary shells hitting on the right wing,’ he said, “and it blew up and all I could see was the wing tips. They went out this way. The rest was all a ball of black smoke.”

Payton’s guide back to World War II is retired BYU English professor Don Norton.

“We talked on the phone,” Norton said. “ ‘Well, I don’t know how much I’ll remember.’ Well, that interview lasted two hours.”

Norton was 7 years old when the U.S. declared war on Japan. He recalls how his older brother organized an “army” of children in the neighborhood.

“And, of course, he was the general and I was the buck private,” Norton said.

He developed a deep interest in World War II. Twenty five years ago, one of his students invited him to record oral histories of World War II veterans at a gathering of what’s now the Commemorative Air Force.

He never stopped collecting war stories.

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“It became something of an addictive thing,” Norton says.

He figures he’s recorded and transcribed more than a thousand oral histories with veterans, mostly from World War II. He doesn’t do it for the history books, he says. He does it for the families of the vets — in this case, for Payton’s daughter — and without compensation.

“Any military service is a defining point in your life,” Norton said. “World War II veterans made a tremendous sacrifice in time and their lives, and families need to know their stories.

“All of us are to a much greater extent than we think products of our parents and grandparents,” he said. “In other words, there are emotional genealogies as well as genetic genealogies.”

At the end of every interview, he asks vets how they fit their war experience into their lives.

“Many of them say ‘I came in as a boy I went out as a man,’ ” Norton said.

At the time he served on a B-17 crew, odds were Dale Payton wasn’t going to survive World War II. In the early war, Norton says, the odds of a B-17 crew member surviving 15 missions was one in 10.

Payton flew 33 missions.

“Did the plane get any holes?” Norton asked.

Payton laughed. “Rarely we come back without any,” he said.

For completing his missions, Dale Payton received automatic membership in the aptly named “Lucky Bastards Club,” and the chance, decades later, to tell his story to Norton.

“Sometimes you make your own luck,” he says, “if you shoot the other guy first.”

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