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42 °F Forecast | Road Cams Thursday, February 26, 2004 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People CLASSIFIEDS Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Find a Rental Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Email Story to a Friend January 22, 2004 ‘Burma Bridge Buster’ to be in History Channel documentary Former Rogue Valley resident Doug Knokey served in the Burma campaign during World War II By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Doug Knokey wasn’t sure where it was. "We didn’t have TV then," he says. "I thought maybe it was in the Philippines somewhere." An Oregon boy living in Tacoma, Wash., that December of 1941, Knokey wound up in the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 490th Bomb Squadron. The former Medford resident spent most of the war in India and Burma with the unit that became known as the "Burma Bridge Busters." The History Channel will air a documentary about the unit at 11 a.m. Sunday. Knokey, 82, now of Rainier, is one of the veterans featured in the piece. Another is Arnold Spielberg, father of producer/director Steven Spielberg and also a member of the 490th. The veterans in the program remember the war, sometimes with a laugh, sometimes fighting back tears. Advertisement From 1942 until the end of the war, the 490th specialized in the low-level bombing and strafing of Japanese-held bridges, airfields and troop facilities in occupied Burma. It was dangerous work. Knokey was an armament man, meaning he did a lot of loading of bombs into B-25s but didn’t usually fly combat missions. The bombers would hold up to four 1,000-pound bombs or dozens of smaller ones. "I got awful fast over there," Knokey says. "Every time the cable would break and drop a bomb, you’d run." Knokey and his unit made the two-month journey by ship from the United States to India, then traveled across India to what is now Pakistan and then to the Burma border in what is now Bangladesh. From there they began bombing raids to keep the Japanese from advancing west. Trying to hit 16-foot-wide bridges from 10,000 feet proved almost impossible, and the raiders flew lower and lower until they found a new technique by accident. "This pilot, a colonel, was coming a few hundred feet in the air, and something was in the way," Knokey says. "He had to pull up and then put the nose down. That bomb did the job, and after that everybody did it. That’s how we started taking them out." The men of the unit lived in tents or bamboo huts. They were lucky if they could keep 10 planes in the air. The hardest part was the grinding monotony. "Then there was the famine in 1943 in Bengal," Knokey says. "The natives were starving. They were lying all over. You can’t believe it. You’d walk out of a theater and walk over bodies." Late in the war, the 490th’s commanding officer heard about a shipment of American beer in Calcutta. The men made wooden racks for the B-25, and the plane was flown to India and loaded with cases of beer. "The pilot thought it’d be fun to buzz the outfit," Knokey says. "He went to pull up, and the racks let go, and the cases of beer came sailing through our area. It made a heck of a mess. The captain said not to drink any cans that weren’t open. "So we were sitting around with nails and pocket knives and whatever we could find to make sure they were open. He turned around and walked away." Knokey says after a time the men figured they would never leave the jungle. He got out shortly before the end of the war and moved to Washington, then to Medford to run White City Plywood. He lived in the Rogue Valley in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, working as a production manager for Timber Products. At a reunion of the 490th held in Salt Lake City, a producer asked Knokey to be interviewed for a documentary. "I was tickled," he says. "But I was nervous." But the flood of memories took over, and he told his story. "We got 192 bridges, and we figured it cost us about a man per bridge," he says. "That was the hard part, sweating it out, waiting for them to come back." Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life Opinion - Politics | AP News | Archives | Site Map E Southern Oregon | Classified Copyright © 1997-2004 Mail Tribune. All rights reserved. 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