Veteran Bill Marshall has so many stories to tell

Bill Marshall will talk your ear off. You won’t mind.

The 97-year-old U.S. Army Air Forces captain was a P-47 fighter pilot in World War II, when he flew 97 missions out of Pisa, Italy. Later the local Ford dealer, 1966’s First Citizen of Clark County and a major philanthropist, Marshall has so many fascinating tales in his repertoire that he’ll mention a harrowing brush with death casually — almost like an afterthought.

Take the time his plane was shot down by a 20-mm gun near enemy territory. It was his 94th mission, just 10 days before Allies announced the formal surrender of Nazi troops in Italy.

“When I went down, the way the aircraft was acting, I knew I couldn’t gain altitude, so I just really crashed in no-man’s land between our troops and their troops. You just go through the mechanics — the first thing I did was reach up and pull the lever and the canopy flew off the airplane,” Marshall said, speaking at his home at the Van Mall Retirement Community last month.

“I knew not to put my wheels down, because that makes you trip and will put you on your back,” he continued. Luckily, he said, he was able to find an open field and skittered to a stop just short of an irrigation ditch.

“So I just came in very nicely, and got a little scrape on my arm. I’ve got hurt worse on roller skates than I did that day.” He laughed. “I was picked up by a tank outfit. I stayed with them for two days, and a mail plane came in and flew me back to my base.”

After that, he flew three more missions.

Sitting in the common room of the retirement community, he reads aloud from one of many certificates detailing his venerable service — he’s been awarded five Air Medals and one Distinguished Flying Cross.

“Best fiction writer I’ve ever seen,” he chuckles at the certificate’s flowery language. “He sure makes you look good.”

If you’ve got the time, Marshall has the story to fill it. He recounted the most memorable flight of his career, in which he led 24 pilots on a bombing mission to northern Italy through a layer of fog nearly 16,000 feet thick.

“When we got up over our target area, which was northern Italy, called the Po Valley, it was still foggy. We didn’t know what was underneath us. So we jettisoned all those bombs. I don’t know what they hit. Then I had to take those 24 guys back through this 16,000 feet of fog,” Marshall said.

Years before, his roommate had run his plane into the side of a mountain under similar weather conditions, so Marshall was locked into his instruments and determined to get the pilots safely back to base. Blinded by fog, they continued to fly at top altitude until he could be sure they’d passed the coast.

“I kept them up there until I was out over the Tyrrhenian Sea, then we let down and I called the aircraft at the extreme ends of our formation. I said, ‘The first one of us that sees water, tell me. Radio me,’ ” Marshall said. “Then I turned them around. Gosh, we were halfway to France.”

“I don’t think anybody in the squadron was as good at instruments as I was, and I don’t know why I was good. But I became good that day,” he said. “You have 24 guys depending on you. In the fog, it’s very easy to get what is known as vertigo. … you have to believe your instruments.”

He loved flying but disliked certain parts. He hated flying at night. He also hated carrying out orders to shoot at horse-drawn carts.

“It might be a vegetable cart for all I know, but a lot of times they were smuggling bombs, armament, gasoline. If they had (materiel) in an army vehicle we could spot it and shoot it, so they started carrying it in HDVs — horse-drawn vehicles. I just didn’t like shooting those guys. They were usually farmers, and I didn’t like killing the horses. I always told the guys that I’d aim not to hit the horse, just to hit the cart.”

In an era of drone strikes and cutting-edge military weaponry, “try not to hit the horse” feels like a mantra from another planet, let alone another time.

But the humanity of stories from World War II veterans — and all of the tragedy, loss, connection and luck that humanity encompasses — remains valuable. Today, it’s a shrinking resource. As years pass, fewer and fewer World War II veterans are around to retell their memories.

Keeping stories alive

Roughly 16 million Americans, or 11 percent of the entire population of the United States, served in World War II.

But it’s been 73 years since the conflict ended. Assuming enlisted soldiers were at least 18 (although a small fraction of signees lied about their age), that officially puts the youngest veterans of the war at 91 years old. Their numbers are dwindling.

According to a population model from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, an estimated 496,777 World War II veterans, or just more than 3 percent of the original number, remained alive in the United States as of Sept. 30.

That figure is estimated to shrink to five digits by 2024, four digits by 2030 and three digits by 2035.

The model predicts that there will be no U.S. World War II veterans alive by the year 2045.

Washington is home to an estimated 36,427 veterans of the war, according to the same VA model. By 2024, the state will be home to fewer than 10,000. By 2040, the model predicts that just one surviving World War II veteran will remain.

Judy Russel, president of the Clark County Veterans Assistance Center since 2011, has seen the number of local World War II veterans shrink in just the last few years.

The center primarily works with veterans from wars in Korea, Vietnam or the Middle East. The occasional World War II veteran tends to draw a crowd, Russel said, especially these days.

“We see fewer WWII veterans than we did seven years ago because of their age. It’s such an honor when we do get to see one,” Russel said. “When we get one that comes into the lounge and he’s waiting on a service officer, we all go up to them, and talk to them and pick their brain.”

One year ago today, The Columbian printed a profile of fellow local WWII veteran Phil Azure, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 tail-gunner and also served in the Korean War. Last Friday, Azure was buried at Northwood Park Cemetery in Ridgefield.

Marshall’s experienced a dwindling of peers to swap WWII stories with firsthand. Since returning stateside, the veterans of the Pisa airbase have shrunk down to a tiny fraction of their full numbers, he said.

“We’ve had 17 reunions. That included pilots and enlisted personnel that kept us flying, like the mechanics and cooks,” Marshall said.

“We have three pilots left and two enlisted men left. At full force, we were 240 people — there’s five of us left now.”