Tail gunner to smokejumper, retired teacher saw it all

John K. “Jack” Dunne has led an interesting life, just ask him.

The 92-year-old resident of the Montana Veterans’ Home in Columbia Falls loves to tell stories of his days as a tail gunner on a B29 bomber in World War II, his days as a smokejumper in Missoula and his 33 years as a sixth grade teacher in Hot Springs and Whitefish. By his own admission, some of the stories may even be true.

Born on Christmas day in 1925, Dunne grew up on what he referred to as the “mean streets” of Butte, where gangs of unruly teenagers were not uncommon and fights were a near daily occurrence.

During the height of World War II in 1943, when his buddy brought up the idea of joining the military and getting out of town, Dunne jumped at the chance.

“It was a tough town and I got out of there as quick as I could,” he recalled. “After I got out of the military, I never went back other than to visit.”

The first stop for this adventure-seeking duo was the recruiting office of the U.S. Army Air Force. There was just one problem, there was a minimum weight limit of 132 pounds and Dunne came in at a slim 127.

Not one to be easily deterred, Dunne went through the line three times before the recruiting officer finally relented and let him sign up.

“The last time through, the sergeant just asked me how much I weighed, and I said 134. He didn’t even look up, he just wrote it down and that’s how I got in the Air Force,” Dunne said.

An 18-year-old kid who had never seen the ocean, Dunne received a severe sunburn during his first week of aerial gunnery training in Florida as he continued to dodge questions about his weight.

“I had to lie and cheat the whole way through training because they kept wanting to throw me out because of my weight,” he said.

After training to become a tail gunner, Dunne was transferred to an air base in Kansas, where he was trained to operate in a Boeing B29 Superfortress, one of the largest aircraft used in World War II. After even more training in Puerto Rico, Dunne and the 11-man crew of his B29, “The City of Cincinnati,” were sent to Guam to carry out bombing raids over Japan during the final months of the war.

Upon arriving on the island, Dunne quickly fell in love with the tropical locale and its people.

“The island was beautiful, but the people were kind of strange. I tried to explain to one man there about snow, about how white frozen stuff falls from the sky and lands on your hand and melts,” he said. “He just looked at me and laughed, because he just knew I was lying.”

While spending his days on the tropical island were like paradise, the night raids he and his crew flew over Japan were not.

It’s was during his seventh mission aboard the “City of Cincinnati” that Dunne looked out of his machine gun turret and noticed a black dot following on the horizon.

“I called the captain and I told him, there’s a little black plane following us. He kept asking if I could shoot it, but it was too far behind us. I called him in three times, but there was nothing that I or the captain could do.”

Undeterred, the plane continued its mission, dropping its payload of bombs over its target in Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo. If was after they had dropped their bombs that all hell broke loose.

“After we dropped the bombs, the radio operator went down to check if all the bombs had been dropped, the next thing I heard was a whole lot of screaming,” Dunne said.

Looking out of the open bomb bay doors, radio operator Raymond Rector had caught sight of a twin-engine Japanese fighter that had taken up position directly below the much larger Superfortress, no doubt directed into place by the “black dot” that had been following the “City of Cincinnati.”

Just as Rector screamed out his warning to the rest of the crew, the twin machine guns on the top of the fighter opened fire on the bottom of the B29, doing extensive damage to a fuel tank, the exhaust system and one of the tires on the landing gear.

“The captain told us to hang on to something and he flew us into the fire and smoke to lose the fighter and we just went up and down like we were a toy,” Dunne said. “We came out of the cloud and we had lost the fighter. I think we were all shocked that we were still flying – we were all shot to hell.”

Losing gallons of fuel by the minute, the “City of Cincinnati” tried to limp its way back to Guam, but the distance was too far for the plane to make with so little fuel. Running out of options, pilot and mission commander Robert Morris made the decision to attempt to reach the unfinished airstrip on the recently-captured island of Iwo Jima.

“The captain asked us if we wanted to ditch in the bay, parachute out or if we wanted to try to land our severely damaged plane on the uncompleted runway,” Dunne remembered. “Somehow, the pilot was able to get us on the ground, but we didn’t get our plane back for months while they repaired it. It was never quite the same again.”

A few weeks later, while their plane was still being repaired, the crew was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for their part in determining why the Army Air Force was losing so many planes during night raids over Japan.

“I was shocked to get it,” Dunne admitted. “Here I was, a kid who had cheated to get into the Air Force and they were giving me a medal. It was a nice feeling.”

After the war, the Army Air Force tried to talk Dunne into reenlisting to help form the Strategic Air Command, but Dunne said no. When asked by a captain about his decision, Dunne replied, “I haven’t been fishing in a long time and until I take care of that I’m not going to do another damn thing.” Laughing, the captain admitted that he was from near Browning and knew exactly what Dunne was talking about.

Upon returning home, Dunne spent a short time as a logger near Libby before he and a friend decided to try their hand at smokejumping in Missoula.

“We showed up to talk to them and Earl Cooley asked if we knew anything about filing saws. My buddy said ‘I sure don’t, but Jack does,’ and that’s how I wound up filing saws and taking care of equipment,” Dunne said.

Dunne spent the next four years working as a smokejumper while getting his education degree at Western Montana College in Dillon.

A hard-working, fun loving crew, Jack smiled as he told of the hijinks of his smokejumping buddies, including the times they “borrowed” a baby elephant from the circus for the night and how they turned a ground hog into a paratrooper.

“The smokejumpers were a unique outfit in that they were very confident, very clever and were hard workers, but when they had fun, they had a lot of fun,” Dunne said. “I knew I belonged with that group. They were a bunch of idiots, but I was one of them.”

Dunne said he especially enjoyed the day a flight group showed up in a B29 to try to drop water on one fire. Knowing the plane’s capabilities and limitation, Dunne said he tried to explain to the crew that they would have a hard time getting the water on target, but the crew did not listen.

“When they got back from that fire, I called up to them to ask how their B29 had done and one guy yelled back ‘I think we missed Montana,’ Dunne said with a chuckle. “They should have listened to me.”

Smokejumping was not all fun and games, though. Dunne told of one jump made to help with a man who had injured his back. At the end of the day, Dunne volunteered to retrieve the team’s parachutes and was forced to stay at a ranger cabin overnight while many of the others made their way back to base in Missoula. The crew members that went back were put on the Mann Gulch Fire near Helena, where they were among the 13 firefighters killed while fighting the blaze. Had Dunne returned that night, he would have been on that crew.

“I’ve had some very close calls over the years, that’s for sure, but that was one of the closest,” he said.

After graduating from college, Dunne took a teaching job in Hot Springs for two years before moving to Whitefish, where he taught sixth grade for 31 years.

“I never had a bad day as a teacher. I came close to it a few times, but never had a day I would have considered bad,” he said.

All things considered, Dunne says he has had more than his fair share of adventures, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Great adventures make for even better stories.