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Edward: Yes. That was lousy experience from that point on because we boarded a train at Miami Beach, a troop train, to go to Lerado, Texas. I took three or four days to get there. At one point during the trip, they ran out of food. We were somewhere in Texas and all of the Officers got off and went into a pretty big town, I can't recall the name, anyway they went into all the grocery stores and bought all the food that they could carry. They brought it back and the train took off again to get us to Laredo. John: How many people were on the train? Edward: There must have been three or found hundred people. All of them were headed for the gunnery school. The old wooden benches in the cars were pretty uncomfortable. I went to civilian coaches and I saw this young lady sitting there with a baby with a nice comfortable seat next to her. I asked her if I could sit next to her and help her with the baby. I sit with them until we reached Corpus Christi. When I got to gunnery school, they told us that we were lucky as we were training for B-24 rather than B-17s. John: What kind of guys were they? Edward: They were 50 Caliber machine guns. John: Tell me about a typical day. What did you do? Edward: We would go to the gun range where they had the 50 Caliber mounted in little turret like boxes and you would fire at targets straight in. You weren't flying then. You were just learning to use the turret and the mechanisms used to turn and move the guns. We
were also getting some training in communications using call signals for when fighters were coming in. We also had some skeet shooting from a jeep. The instructor would take a couple of guys out in a jeep and you would shoot the clay pigeons. They were trying to get you to think in terms of moving objects, the target moving and you moving. My hit ratio was not all that great, but we were learning to develop the feeling for moving with the target and determining which way it was going to go.
The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Edward Campbell. Campbell joined the Army Air Forces in late 1943. He completed gunnery school. He served as a B-24 turret gunner with the 394th Bomb Squadron. He completed 50 combat missions, over Tarawa, Borneo, bombing oil fields, refineries and ports. He returned to the US and received his discharge in 1945.
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