BY RANDY ROUGHTON
Nearly a decade before he captured motion pictures of bombing missions over Nazi-controlled Europe, a 12-year-old aspiring photographer was in a tree house with his Kodak Brownie.
When retired Chief Master Sgt. Douglas W. Morrell was a boy growing up in Nebraska, he photographed family vacations. One day, a small-town attorney offered to pay him for a picture to help him fight a lawsuit. The lawyer believed the plaintiff wasn’t as hurt from an accident as he’d pretended, so he asked the boy to climb into a neighbor’s tree house until just the right moment.
“I heard the front door slam, and this guy comes out and takes off all of his harnesses, pads and braces,” Morrell said. “Then he gets his shovel and starts digging potatoes in his garden, and I’m catching all of this. That was the start of it all.” Morrell’s love of photography was rivaled only by an obsession to fly, so he joined the Army Air Corps just before World War II. He began a combat photography career that included 32 combat missions and four months as a prisoner-of-war in Romania.
Morrell, who received two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star, bailed out of three airplanes during World War II and in Vietnam after they were hit by enemy fire. The first time he bailed out, he had to evade capture for 25 days.
“That particular mission was practically a milk run for me, compared to the others,” said Morrell, now 92 and living in Highland, Calif.
After high school, Morrell spent two years at Nebraska Wesleyan University before he moved to California. He studied cinematography and photography at the Arts Center in Los Angeles and eventually enlisted in the Army Air Corps on Oct. 3, 1939 at March Air Force Base, Calif.
He spent his first year on special observation status, which rotated him through four major movie studios in Hollywood. Morrell then made training films that specialized in field production and aerial documentation and spent a year in glider pilot training before his transfer to Africa and Italy in 1943. He flew in the B-24 Liberator in combat missions that supported Operation Tidal Wave, which focused on nine oil refineries around Ploesti, Romania to deny petroleum-based fuel to the Axis powers.
“This was very important because Ploesti was where Hitler was getting all of his oil,” Morrell said. “We were bombing that place to keep those oil barges down.”
During Morrell’s third combat mission in March 1944, his B-24 was disabled by anti-aircraft fire over the Iron Gates of Romania, forcing the crew to bail from the airplane.
Morrell and a fellow crewmember evaded capture for 25 days as they walked across Yugoslavia and northern Albania to the Adriatic Sea. They finally bribed a fisherman with a .45-caliber pistol and $100 in gold certificates to take them back to Italy. Morrell was returned to duty, and his green-brown visual color deficiency, which he disguised during his Army Air Corps entrance testing, enabled him to notice a fake Messerschmidt factory in Austria. He shot the area in infra-red stills, and intelligence was able to target the factory. The same result followed his pictures of a pair of camouflaged German submarines he shot near Venice.
But two months after his return to duty, Morrell was filming his fifth raid on the Ploesti oil refineries when anti-aircraft hit the B-24 and forced it to leave formation. An attack by several German ME-109 fighters set the B-24 afire at 18,000 feet. Morrell bailed out moments before the plane exploded and killed five crewmembers still on board.
A German Luftwaffe major on a motorcycle was waiting for Morrell as he descended in his parachute. The major took Morrell to the Balkan headquarters of the Luftwaffe, where he was detained for nearly Morrell was then moved to the main American POW camp in Bucharest, where he stayed for three and a half months.
“We had steel, double-deck beds with straw mattresses and beat-up, old German blankets,” Morrell said. “We had all the good water we wanted, but we had hardly any food. They gave us the equivalent of party rye bread, about a half-inch thick of that a day. They’d sometimes bring some cabbages, six heads that they would use to make soup for 1,400 people. I went in at 165 to 170 pounds and came out at 97 pounds. It’s a very good diet.”
One day, Morrell almost escaped through a trap door in the mess hall ceiling. He sneaked through the trap door after the last person left the mess hall that night and walked out the next morning. He walked halfway through the city before a German army truck picked him up. Morrell told the German soldiers he was an Italian pilot who’d been shot down and was trying to make it back to Bulgaria. The lie worked until the truck reached the post near the Danube River.
“When we got to the post near the Danube, there was a kid there who spoke Italian, and I couldn’t understand him,” Morrell said. “He told the Germans I wasn’t an Italian, and they took me back.”
The POWs were liberated on Aug. 23, 1944, when the Romanians recapitulated. Romanians gave Morrell U.S. money, so he spent several days on the town in Bucharest. When the Soviet Army arrived a couple of days after the POWs were freed, Russian soldiers greeted the American POWs warmly, Morrell said.
“They were on every corner with a sub-machine gun,” he said. “They’d tear the Romanians apart, but they found out I was an ‘Americanski.’ They went in and just broke the hell out of casks of vodka. They got me in there, said, ‘We drink,’ and poured glasses of vodka. They’d toast, ‘Stalin. Roosevelt. Churchill.’
“Finally, I’m getting ready to go out and get something to eat, and here come a couple of more Russians. They’d say, ‘Americanski prisoner.’ Out comes the vodka again. I’ve never been that blasted in my life.”
When Morrell returned to the states, he spent four months in rehabilitation status in hotels in Santa Monica, Calif. He later photographed the atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, guided missile tests in Africa and Alaska, and he left the Army Air Force in February 1947.
Morrell worked as a professional photographer in Montana for the next five years, but returned to the Air Force during the Korean War in March 1952. In 1968, he was an operations noncommissioned officer in charge of a photo flight at Koret, Thailand, when he had to bail out of his third damaged airplane. Morrell was documenting a sensor drop over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos when his O-2 Skymaster was hit by anti-aircraft fire that knocked off half of the left wing and set it on fire. Morrell bailed out with the pilot at 5,000 feet, and they faced anti-aircraft fire as they descended into the jungle. He landed in the middle of a truck servicing and parking complex that was guarded by six anti-aircraft guns. Morrell called in the rescue team with his survival radio and gave the positions of the Viet Cong guns. He was rescued by a Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopter nearly nine hours after he parachuted into the jungle, but his pilot was captured and held as a POW in Hanoi for four years.
After Morrell recovered in the hospital at Clark Air Base, Philippines, he was reassigned to Headquarters, Aerospace Audiovisual Service at Norton Air Force Base, Calif., where he was the aircrew standardization chief until he retired on June 30, 1974. Morrell spent the next 15 years conducting combat camera documentation seminars at AAVS units and wrote almost all combat camera operational regulations, including a comprehensive documentation techniques manual, the combat camera basic unit supplement and supplements to Department of Defense and Air Force regulations. He also managed the DOD’s Military Cinematographer of the Year competition and led the creation of Syracuse University’s Military Motion Media Studies Program in 1993. Morrell retired from his federal civilian career on Sept. 3, 1994.
He hasn’t lost his love of motion picture photography in his retirement years. He still enjoys creating multi-media presentations at his computer in his California home and talking about his combat photography career that began with a $10 photo from a tree house.
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