Bomb Group historian Joe Chovelak of Naperville, Ill., who is 84-years-old, will present the 450 items in the records to the Bombers on the Prairie Museum during an open house from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 22 at the Pratt Community Center. The public is encouraged to come to the open house and talk with Chovelak about his military career in World War II and his career as an engineer for NBC television from 1949 to 1985.
Chovelak was in the 29th Bomb Group and was stationed in Pratt at the Pratt Army Airfield that is now the Pratt Industrial Airport. He has completed one of the most extensive records of any bomb group ever assembled.
Pratt almost didn’t get the records. A museum in Dayton, Ohio wanted the records but wasn’t going to display them so Chovelak said no. He got the same response from a museum in New Orleans.
He got an e-mail from Milt Martin wanting information about the 29th Bomb Group. After talking with Martin for a month he was impressed and decided to give all his documents to Pratt.
“I felt honored to give them something that was so good,” Chovelak said.
The Bomb Group history will be housed in the Bombers on the Prairie Museum in the original World War II Parachute Building on the airbase. The building is being prepared for the museum and will be ready for occupation in the spring of 2010.
The parachute building is one of just a few original structures left on the airbase. One of the two remaining hangars was recently torn down because of deterioration from 60 years of Kansas’s weather. The only remaining hangar is occupied by R & R Manufacturing and was built to hold two B-29s.
Chovelak volunteered for the Army Air Corps in March 1943 and arrived in Pratt in August of 1944 as a radio engineer after almost being cut for a medical condition. The B-29s were scarce so crews trained on B-17s until more 29s arrived. Crews took long training missions traveling from Pratt to Kansas City to Milwaukee and back with the usual crew of 11 or 12.
Other photo-training missions took them over Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico sometimes traveling 3,000 in a single mission. They dropped white powder bombs on a target baseball field in Cancun.
The crews go to know each other well and anything that happened to a crew affected the others. On a camera bombing run to Dallas/Fort Worth, Chovelak was not on that run, one plane developed an oxygen problem and left the formation. Another plane requested and received permission to move up into that position. The ascending plane flew into the prop wash of another 29, flipped over and pan caked all the way down into a refinery in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The 15-member crew and instructors were all killed, Chovelak said.
In the Middle of January 1945 he left for Guam as radio communications person. His crew carried out 35 missions and two aborts from Guam over Japan between March and August 1945. About half the missions included dropping napalm. His first napalm mission was on the night of March 9/10 with 340 planes. Five planes were lost but the mission killed 123,000 in Tokyo.
Other missions followed including one when a propeller came off; another when and engine caught fire but was put out and they dropped bombs anyway; discovering the reason they could not make head way on one mission was a thing called the jet stream; hitting a thermal the shoved the plane up 8,000 feet then back down and took them over the imperial palace in Tokyo-a target that was off limits and a court marshal offense (the crew was not court marshaled).
His last mission was on Aug. 6, 1945. When his plane was returning at 10,000 feet, a mission from Tinian was going north at 25,000 feet. It was the Enola Gay on its way to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Chovelak considers himself extremely lucky. Out of the 45 planes in the three squadrons, 21 were lost. He only suffered a little frost on his legs. After several missions he had lost his fear of being killed.
“Lord, if you need me take me. I’ m not going to be afraid anymore,” he said.