1st Lt. Merwin Adler

He was the radar bombardier of Robert Earl Wildermuth’s ten-man B-24 Liberator crew — the man responsible for the radar-guided bomb-release calculation on night missions over Taiwan and elsewhere across the Pacific tour of November 1944 – November 1945.

From Buffalo, New York. He had been a second-year college student at Buffalo University when he enlisted. Robert Earl’s Big One manuscript gives him the only frankly-negative review of any crew member:

“He was careless in his duties, lax in his personal hygiene and appearance and often had to be counseled by those with whom he lived. He was over confident and was not much of a ‘team player.’”

He is the same Lt. Adler of the 1989 memoir’s homecoming-radar-nap story. After about fifteen missions, on an all-night radar-bombing mission from Tacloban airstrip to a Japanese naval base on the northern tip of Taiwan, Adler was “over-confident in the new equipment” and 120 miles from base he told Robert Earl he had the home airstrip locked on radar — “if I wanted he would direct the plane back to home base and I could take a nap if I liked.” The radar lock was wrong; the story is one Robert Earl never quite let go of.

His postwar trajectory is open. The path forward sits at the University at Buffalo alumni records of the early 1940s and the Buffalo, NY local press.

Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth, The Big One: World War II (typewritten manuscript, c. 1989), Crew Members section; Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir.