The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion

by Matthew Rozell

  Sam, bombardier: I was hurt. When I hit the ground, I bruised my left knee. It was huge and it was all swollen, and I walked with a limp. I don’t know if you were with me [points to Earl].

  Earl, pilot: No, it wasn’t me.

  Sam, bombardier: Who the hell was it? I walked across the field, and they made me pick up my chute and carry it and they took me to the burgermeister’s house.

  Earl, pilot: The first one I saw on the ground was our tail gunner, and he was the happiest guy on earth to see me. He was afraid that he had bailed out, and the rest of us had gone back to England. When he saw me, he knew he had done the right thing.

  Interviewer: He didn’t know that the plane blew up?

  Earl, pilot: Well, no. But he knew to get out, because he saw the other crew up forward and he motioned for them to go. One guy was left standing there, and he just shook his head. He wasn’t going.

  Sam, bombardier: And he died. That was one of the guys that died on the plane.

  Earl, pilot: And I still think, that was strictly a case where—[reaches for photograph] Do you see these two small guys here? This guy was in the ball turret. This other one was standing here on the waist gun, and these guys would switch off in the turret. I think they had a deal between them—‘If I’m in the turret, you don’t leave until I’m out!’ And Joe would always stand there and wait for him to get out. And the escape door was gone, and I think Lindquist must have gotten out and I think he probably was wounded, because when we were on the ground, the Germans came back and told us ‘Komrade bleeding’, but they wouldn’t let us go to him.[45]

  ‘How to bail out of the Flying Fortress.’ B-17 training manual,

  US Government. Source: www.cnks.info/b17-flying-fortress-interior

  Jerry, navigator: I remember that one. When our plane was hit, it goes with what he’s talking about [points to Earl]. Our pilot pushed the ‘bail out’ alarm button and a bell or something rang, and it meant you were supposed to bail out. So I started to bail out and my feet were already hanging out, and I realized that the plane was still flying straight and level. Everybody knew that many a time that half the crew bailed out, and the rest of them somehow got back to England! So I figured, this thing is still straight and level. So I came back into the plane and hooked up to the interphone, I got an oxygen bottle, and I called the pilot and said, ‘What’s wrong with the airplane? We’re still going straight and level.’

  He said, ‘We’re on fire.’

  I said, ‘Where?’

  He said, ‘The waist.’

  I crawled through the bomb bay and back, and I haven’t crawled through a bomb bay since then and I don’t know how the hell I ever did it the first time, because you can’t get through that bomb bay today; maybe I’m a little bigger now, I don’t know. But anyway, I opened the door in the back and I see flames—from the radio room on back, it was just solid flame! I closed the door, came forward, curved straight over, and I bailed out. They tell me that the airplane blew up about a little after the last parachute was seen. The part that I forgot was that we were in this big room, and this was three or four hours after we landed, and then I got the shakes [shakes his hands vigorously], you know, my nerves were such—up until then I was perfectly normal, as normal as I am sitting here now, and about four hours later it was uncontrollable! I guess it must have been a delayed reaction.

  Interviewer: Did all of your crew make it out of the plane?

  Jerry, navigator: Everybody got out of our airplane. But the tail gunner that day—he was a lieutenant in the lead plane—the copilot flies in the back position and he polices the formation, he calls off whatever he sees, telling other planes [over the radio] to tighten up their formation; he was the eyes in the back of the pilot’s head—he became a ‘streamer’, which means he bailed out and popped his parachute, and the parachute came up, but it didn’t blossom. It just streamed, so he went down. His name was Ford. I don’t know his first name, but his name was Ford.

  B-17 Flying Fortresses 486th Bomb Group near Merseberg,

  November, 1944. Credit: USAAF, public domain.

  Earl, pilot, to interviewer [pointing at photo in National Geographic Magazine]: You saw this picture didn’t you?

  Sam, bombardier: That was the same day we got shot down.

  November 2nd, 1944.

  Earl, pilot: That’s it. That’s the day we were shot down. My wife was looking at it and said, ‘That’s you.’ That’s what we were going through.

  Interviewer: You guys had already dropped your bombs, right?

  Earl, pilot: Yes. We had already dropped ours and were five minutes out when we were hit and went down.

  Sam, bombardier: That’s what happens when you become a bomber. [Looks up toward heaven, with hands clasped] If you get out, you say ‘Thank you Lord for letting me go.’

  *

  On the Ground

  Jerry, navigator: When I got on the ground, he [points to Earl] was having his own problems in his plane and they bailed out. When I was on the ground, I got picked up by some civilians, well, not civilians: they were coming towards me but there was one guy who was police and they say get in the hands of the police or the military, don’t let the civilians get a hold of you because they have pitchforks and they were pitching things other than hay. I didn’t see them luckily, but there were American fliers hanging by the necks from telephone poles and trees because of what we were.

  When we got picked up, they put us on a train and took us to [where] there was a railroad station. That’s where we got on a train to go back west of Frankfurt, which was the interrogation center. So they had a number of us, I’d say maybe 15, 20, 30, something like that, and we were guarded by the Luftwaffe. We came in to this railroad station and all these Germans were there, and the next thing you know, there was a mob of people screaming and shouting, and the Luftwaffe had their guns and they protected us. That’s when we first found out…

  Earl, pilot: They finally had to lock us in the building in a room in the basement to keep us away from the civilians.

  Jerry, navigator: Had it not been for that, we would have been lynched right there. We would have been lynched right there! Now these are the same people, that come April [1945], when they could smell borsht on the Russians’ breaths on one side, and onion on the Americans’ breaths on the other, you know, then all of a sudden [imitates German civilian, shrugging shoulders, palms up] ‘What could we do?’, you know,[as if to say] ‘what would you do if you were in the same position, you’d do the same thing…’

  Earl, pilot: They said, ‘If you get shot down, you get under military control as soon as you possibly can.’

  When we were shot down, the only reason I had a .45 strapped to me was that they made sure you had it when you left. And they put some rifles in the back of the airplane in case you crash-landed so you could protect yourself with it. And at the end of all the discussion, when they were telling us how to use this stuff, they said, ‘Save a bullet for yourself.’ And I would never do that, but I mean, that’s the way it was. The civilians were really going after the air force.

  Sam, bombardier: They did all the killing of the American airmen when they were captured. Not the soldiers, the civilians did that. Strung them up on telephone poles…

  Jerry, navigator: It seems to be worldwide. Nobody seems to like the American airmen. The worst thing about being airmen is being caught by the Viet Cong, caught by the Koreans; they’d torture the airmen.

  Earl, pilot: I went to an air force gathering recently, that’s where I met Clarence Dart [local Tuskegee Airman]. But beforehand I saw in the paper that there was going to be a German Luftwaffe pilot who was going to be a speaker, and I didn’t want to go. So I called and talked to the director of the program, and his wife said, ‘Well, forget your problems and come on out and have a good time.’ So I went and I stood there when [the former Luftwaffe pilot] made the speech. Now his speech kind of turned me off, because he spent a lot of time explaining that he was not a combat p
ilot, and at the end of the war he was flying scientists out of the eastern zone back to the western zone so [the Americans] could get them, and so on and so forth. And he was backing himself up that he was a ‘good guy’. So then I flat out asked him, ‘Well tell me this, when our planes were shot down and our guys were in parachutes, why was the German Luftwaffe shooting at our guys with the parachutes?’

  ‘It couldn’t have happened,’ he said.

  ‘Well it did happen,’ I said, ‘I was there and saw it!’ And that kind of turned me off… and since I got on him pretty heavy about those German fighters shooting our guys in the parachutes, he kind of avoids me now.

  Jerry, navigator: Well, I can prove to you that what he [points to Earl] is saying is correct because when I bailed out, I could see two or three other parachutes and about three or four of us were in a group. I heard the chatter of machine guns and I got terrified and said, ‘Oh my God, they’re shooting us, they’re going to come around and shoot us in our parachutes.’ Now, if the story wasn’t around, I wouldn’t have thought of that, but it just so happened that all this [machine gun] chatter I heard was not them shooting parachutes; it was what they called a ‘Lufbery circle’, which was developed in the first World War after a pilot by the name of Lufbery. [Motions with hands] Here’s an Me109, he’s on the tail of a P-51, who was on the tail of a 109, who was on the tail of a P-51, and if you break out, you’ve got to try and turn inside [motions again with hands] so they can’t get at you. All the while they’re trying to get inside and shoot you. So the circle gets tighter and tighter and they’re all firing at each other, so I couldn’t wait to get down from that cloud level and disappear into the clouds below. But up above I could hear the shooting. And when I came through and I saw the planes, the first thing I thought was that they were shooting at the parachutes. And if I didn’t think that, then where did I get the thought? From the stories that go around that they did do these things.

  Earl, pilot: Well, they found a guy who was shot through the leg down there and he was still in his parachute. I didn’t see any American fighters down there, either. Things were rather hectic.

  Jerry, navigator: One thing that came back to me yesterday that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. By the time I got on the ground and we were picked up and put in a building, which Sam remembers and reminded me about—he’s the first guy I’ve seen in years that was in that same building; I’ve met a lot of PoWs and I never found a guy that was in that building—and he remembers that I was one of the two guys who wasn’t wounded. Everyone was wounded, one way or another, and some guys were all burned and blackened like chicken.

  Interviewer: It must have been terrible.

  Jerry, navigator: Well, it wasn’t good. Now this is what I’m talking about; I went off on a tangent and I forgot the damn point.

  Earl, pilot: Were you going to talk about the first aid kits? They snatched them so quick, we had nothing to take care of our wounded with.

  Sam, bombardier, [referring to the kit]: The German soldiers would come with a knife and cut the whole thing off. It had iodine and bandages, and they took it for their troops. We had nothing for ours.

  Interviewer: You said you were one of the two guys who weren’t wounded?

  Jerry, navigator: Yes.

  Sam, bombardier: He and I were trying to figure out how we were going to take care of the rest. We would look for the packs, and there weren’t any there. So I would take off my shirt and my undershirt, because I always wear an undershirt, and we cut that up and used it for bandages. Finally we got the Germans to bring us some stuff for wounds. Like the paper you dry your hands with—that’s what they were using for bandages! They brought us some grease, and we put as much on our guys as we could. One guy landed on a roof and it collapsed, so he fell 35 feet to the ground and hurt his back and couldn’t move. Every time we tried to move him, he was in pain.

  Earl, pilot: He was the one I carried across Frankfurt, on my back, and I don’t know if he got used to the pain or what, because he never uttered a cry or anything.

  *

  Prisoners of War

  Interviewer: So it was the same exact day, the same mission you were on?

  Jerry, navigator: Yes—then we were collected and put with other guys, and then put on a train, and each section was a whole story in itself, what happened here, what happened there. When I got picked up, two German soldiers came around in a Volkswagen, which like a jeep, and he [points to Earl] is sitting in the back of the thing, and that’s where I met him.

  Interviewer: What happened when you were on the Jeep?

  Jerry, navigator: Well on the jeep, this one German, the guy riding shotgun, had a patch on his eye. He was a big guy, and he took his [points to Earl] watch, he took my high school ring, he said he would keep it so some other guy wouldn’t just come and steal it from me, and I would get it back after the war.

  I’m not going to argue with the guy. He goes over to him [points to Earl] to get his pilot wings and this big dumb jerk [referring to Earl], he’s pushing the German away and I’m saying ‘These guys have guns for God’s sake, give him the damn wings before they kill us’. And he said, ‘They’re not getting my wings,’ so I repeated ‘Don’t be so damn stubborn, give him the damn wings!’ And he wouldn’t give him the wings and the guy backed off. But if this guy was in another frame of mind you [points to Earl] wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t be here, and Sam wouldn’t be here. He could have just shot us and nobody ask questions, then. So that’s where I met him.

  Then they would collect us and we would go to central point, and they would ship you across the country to a place called Dusseldorf, which is an interrogation center. And they keep you there a few days while you get interrogated. And depending on what happened, they would send you to another place, until they got enough people together so they could try the freight train, or passenger train or something, and then they send you off to your destination. That’s how we all ended up in the same camp.

  The camps were set up this way. If you were in the army or an infantryman, you were prisoner of the German army. If you were in the navy and got picked up by the army some way or another, you are a prisoner of the navy. We were Air Corps people, so we were prisoners of the Luftwaffe and I think we were treated better than anyone else. Because the British had so many Luftwaffe pilots in their camp and Herman Goering would make sure the British would take care of his boys. We didn’t have a picnic, it wasn’t exactly the Hilton and it wasn’t Hogan’s Heroes, but we were much better off than anyone else in Germany. We got the same rations that [the guards] got, but they didn’t really have all that much either, to tell you the truth, the German population, if you were a farmer you ate; if you lived in the city, you didn’t get much either.

  We didn’t get much. We had Red Cross parcels come to us, but they kept saying ‘no parcels this week, your bombers hit three things—schools, hospitals and supply trains with Red Cross parcels’, that’s all our bombers ever hit. [Laughter]

  The Red Cross parcels you are supposed to use to supplement rations they gave us, which was potatoes and soup and our lard or something. Everybody lost weight—I went from about 160 down to 129, they [points to Earl and Sam] would have to tell you what they lost, but most lost from 30 to 40 pounds. But we were still much better than those poor guys who ended up in Japan; there is no question about it. When they say ‘Geez, you were a prisoner of war, you had it tough’, I have a kind of a guilty conscience because I knew guys that were in Japan.

  Interviewer: Did you know any of the British troops or flyers in the PoW camps?

  Sam, bombardier: We weren’t up to their status; they didn’t have anything to do with us.

  Interviewer: They looked down on you?

  Sam, bombardier: Oh yes, they looked down their noses on us.

  Jerry, navigator: Can you say that again?

  Interviewer: The British flyers, any contact with them or any conversations during the war?

  Jerry,
navigator: Well I got a chance to fly, not a mission but a practice. And I can’t remember how it came about; we were talking about the other day. Some flew with us, it was sort of an exchange thing—they flew in and we talked to them

  I had great admiration for the Royal Air Force, they don’t take the backseat to anybody. They had more guts when they were prisoners of war; if they could have had an [opportunity to] escape, they did. The British were taking the crème of the kids from the college, and putting them in the RAF. They were the crème de la crème. So when they got there, they had guys that could print, could forge and could do this. They had engineers. You know, they could build tunnels, but they knew how to get air through it. When we got down to Moosburg, I see them with this little thing [motions hands in a circular motion] they got a little blower with a duct going down there and you turn a few things on, and they had a red hot flame going! The British had the ingenuity. I was watching this little thing and I asked ‘What’s that?’ They devised all kinds of things—these guys were all experts in their own fields, and they knew how to forge documents, they knew how to do things with their time. They took uniforms and re-cut them and re-sewed them and made them into civilian clothes. And they got a hold of the train schedule and arrived at daylight out of the forest!