Irving Yenoff dreamed of fulfilling a boyhood passion of caring for animals, but at Cornell University he discovered that he lacked the high marks needed to attend veterinarian school.
So he returned to Buffalo and pursued yet another boyhood passion – flying.
“For a few years my family had lived in California near a private airport, and my nose was always pressed up against the cyclone fence at the airport watching the planes,” he recalled.
Yenoff launched his dream to fly by enrolling in a civilian pilot training program at the University of Buffalo, where he received classroom training and flew out of Buffalo Aeronautical, site of the region’s present day Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
This time around he made the grade. Then as World War II reports made their way back to the United States about mistreatment of Jews by Hitler, Yenoff realized he had to do something.
“I heard that horrible things were happening to the Jews in Germany. I knew Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. I was Jewish, and I just couldn’t wait to get in the fight.”
But it would be awhile before Yenoff arrived in the war zone.
He spent more than a year training on different airplanes before graduating up to the medium-range bombers, the B-25 and B-26.
He was also recruited to play in a military band, despite what he says was his “mediocre” musical talent for the clarinet and tenor saxophone.
“We played for the Army Air Forces dances in San Antonio, and a couple times we played coast-to-coast on the radio. There were musicians from all the big dance bands, and I was like a misfit, but they needed a fourth saxophone player,” Yenoff said.
All the while, he itched to get over to Europe and battle the Nazis and their henchmen.
That day finally arrived in May 1944.
Yenoff pilotedaB-26 with a five-man crew, flying 38 missions.
“We were bombing northern Italy. We got shot at with flak, and in one of those missions I had to make an emergency landing because our hydraulic system was shot out. We landed in a place called Siena.”
The crew had managed to manually operate the wing flaps and lower the landing gear, he said. “I used a cylinder of compressed air to actuate the brakes on the plane. We were lucky.”
In the confusion of war, it took him and his crew a week to make their way back to headquarters on the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea.
“When we got back, our foot lockers had been emptied out. They thought we were dead. We managed to get back most of the contents of our foot lockers.”
The closest Yenoff came to death was in a previous mission when flak started piercing the floor of his plane’s fuselage.
“We saw flak all around. We saw bursts of it. You didn’t know what was happening. Then all of a sudden my right hand on the throttle was bleeding, and my co-pilot’s neck was sliced open.”
Yenoff summoned crew members to take the co-pilot from the cockpit and place him on the floor.
“They gave him a shot of morphine and tried to stanch the bleeding. I made an emergency landing right away in Rome, and they took the co-pilot to the hospital. He never flew after that from what I understand.”
Yenoff, who received the Purple Heart for his wound, and the other crew members counted their blessings that they had escaped serious injury.
There would be numerous other missions, but none as dangerous as that one.
As for bombing Italian troops who were on the side of the Nazis, Yenoff said he looked forward to every mission.
“It was exhilarating. I knew I was doing something positive.”
When he returned home in 1945, he became a “rag man,” working in a wholesale business that manufactured wiping cloths and recycled old rags for making paper.
Now just a couple of days away from his 90th birthday Wednesday, Yenoff continues to work as a broker, buying and selling waste paper for recycling.
“I never really had a lot of hobbies other than flying, and when I wake up in the morning I’m ready to go. I love what I’m doing.”
Every so often, he thinks back to the days when his outrage over the mistreatment of fellow Jews took him to Europe. The reflection on answering a call to arms, he says, gives him a sense of satisfaction.
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