It wasn’t like that all the time when Small and his wife, Adele, raised their family of five and he worked as a home builder.
“We never discussed the war, but in later years, it became a very prevalent time in my life. Memories go back,” said Small, a retired first lieutenant and bombardier in the Army Air Forces.

He was a member of an 11-man crew in the Army’s 20th Air Force, 314th Wing, 29th Bomb Group, 52nd Squadron, that flew 35 missions over Japan from March 9 to Aug. 15, 1945.
After training in Tennessee and Texas, he became a second lieutenant in a class of 150. But the 19-year-old who left his home in West Haven was one of 12 with no assignment.
“We were told we were going on a secret program,” Small recalled.
That was because at the time, unbeknownst to the enemy, the U.S. military was building the B-29, the first pressurized airplane that was heated, air conditioned and had computer-directed remote control 50-caliber machine guns that were outside the plane, rather than ones that were hand-held.
As a bombardier, Small called the attacks at 12 o’clock or wherever the gun site was.
He was sent to Pratt, Kansas, where the new bomb group was formed. “We got a brand new airplane and went overseas.”
Stationed in Guam — “they cut an air base out of a jungle” — his crew had to endure 14-hour flights to bomb Japan, seven going and seven coming back.
At times, comrades passed away in front of their eyes because there was no medical help when someone, say the gunner, was hit by enemy fire and the aircraft still had hours to go before landing.
Each B-29 carried 40 demolition bombs that weighed 500 pounds each. The first mission was the worst, Small said.
“We burned 15 square miles of Tokyo and killed 80,000 to 100,000 people in one night, as many as the atomic bomb did with one plane, we did with 300 planes,” he said. The mission didn’t bother him initially because bombing in the pitch dark, the crew couldn’t see anything. But the killings did bother him years later, when a foreign correspondent who had been in Tokyo wrote an article for Collier’s magazine that described the raid from the ground.
“Bodies were 50 feet high in the street and the rivers were filled with floating bodies. That bothered me, but I got over it,” Small recalled. “We lost 30 airplanes and 330 men that night. We paid a price.
“It bothers me now. I have dreams of the war now. I guess my mind is blanking,” he said.
Everyone in his unit received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and Small received nine other medals and honors, including the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters and an Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon.
Small went to the final reunion of the 29th Bomb Squad in Washington, D.C., in September. What once was a roster of 2,500 is now down to 40 veterans. The reunion drew about 200 others, but they were widows or family of veterans.
“We had a ball. We visited the Enola Gay at the Air and Space Museum” in Chantilly, Va., he said.
The reunion group has disbanded, but now they’re creating a “Friends of the 29th Bomb Group,” and Small’s son, Stephen Small of West Haven, has volunteered to be with the new group.