MY WAR
by

ROGER W. BURWELL

1st Lt. USAF Ret.

Navigator

532nd Sq. 381st Bomb Group (H)

8th Air Force
 

Copyright Roger W. Burwell 1990


 
 
 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jack S. Pry, for his help in clarifying the sequence of events leading to our plane being shot down, and to Kenneth Miller, who was so encouraging and helpful in editing the manuscript.
    It has often been said that ex-prisoners of war are not easy to live with so I must thank my wife, Phyllis, for putting up with me for all these years.
 
 


 
 

PREFACE

    This memoir was written so that my children and grandchildren would have some idea of what war is really like. I became concerned that World War II seems to be fading into history and the Vietnam War now seems to have become the favorite subject of fictionalized and "dramatized" war movie scenarios. Ridiculous "Rambo" type movies and TV programs glorify violence and the use of tremendous firepower. They seem to make it a great sport to kill people. However, most of the TV soldiers must be very poorly trained in the use of weapons as they seem to fire thousands of rounds and hurl many grenades without hitting anyone. When they do hit someone, they usually do it very nicely with little or no blood or guts being splattered. It is as if they are enjoying playing games and, when the game is over, they can all get up and go home just like the game of cowboys and Indians we used to play as kids.
    War is not all fun and games and it has very little glory. It is a dirty, strenuous, dehumanizing experience even for some of those not actually involved in combat. However, only those who have actually experienced combat can truly know what it is like.
    The following memoir was written from some notes that I jotted down shortly after the war and from many indelible memories.
    When I undertook to write these down as they happened, they jogged my memory of many other events and of people and names that I had long ago let slip from my conscious memory. In writing about some of the events, I found that I ended up almost reliving them and it reactivated some of my old nightmares. It thus appears that combat is permanently traumatizing.
    "My War" was painful in many ways. The events that I had to live through and the suffering that I had to experience were probably more difficult than those that many other people lived through. However, on the other hand, I could never really begin to feel sorry for myself as I could always look around and see many others who had a tougher time than I did.

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MY WAR
PART 1
FLYING HIGH

    As Captain Joe Alexander, a pilot in the 532nd Squadron of the 381st Bomb Group, once said when getting back to the base one morning after a long night in Ridgewell, "War would be a hell of a great time, if no one got hurt."
    He chuckled as he made that statement, so I asked him what he was chuckling about. He proceeded to tell me the following story. It seems that he had met an English girl in the King's Head Pub in Ridgewell, the first time that he went to town. After drinking with her for several hours, she invited him to go home with her. When they arrived at her house, he found that she was living with her parents, so he was hesitant when she invited him to spend the night in her bedroom. However, she assured him that her father would not have any objection. The next morning, when he got up, he found that the girl's mother had breakfast ready and he was invited to eat with the family. The parents were very pleasant and told him that he would always be welcome in their home.
    For several weekends, he went through the same routine with the English girl until the night before he told me the story. He said that on that night, when they got to her house, they found a bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table so they killed the bottle before going to bed.
    The next morning when they came down to breakfast, he noticed that the girl's father seemed to be quite unhappy and did not want to talk. Hesitantly, Joe asked him if something was wrong. He finally replied, "You know captain, I don't mind ye screwing me daughter but don't drink all me whiskey up!"
    Every individual has his or her own view of war depending on where they were and how they were personally affected. To me, combat was a long, rapidly moving nightmare you conditioned yourself to endure. It was like being on a grotesque merry-go-round over which you had no control and no way of getting off safely. The last time that I saw Joe Alexander, his plane was going down in flames above Hamburg, Germany.
    My World War II experience really started when I became a "replacement" in a "replacement crew." I had started my B-17 training in a crew piloted by Lieutenant Malcolm Westbrook, with a group of crews organized into the Saunders Provisional Group. We were training to replace some of the first crews in the 8th Air Force which were shot down.
    We had finished our training at Walla Walla, Washington and were about to go to Grand Island, Nebraska to pick up new planes to fly to England when Lieutenant Westbrook was hospitalized with circulation problems in his leg. We were then told that the crew would be broken up to provide replacements to crews that had personnel problems.
    I was assigned as the replacement navigator on Flight Officer Jack Pry's crew. When I first met Pry, he told me that he got rid of his former navigator because he wasn't good enough. He then asked me if I was any good - I could see right then that I'd be on trial. I told him that I had graduated in the top of my navigation school class, had been offered a choice of being an instructor at a new navigation school in Austin, Texas or go into combat and that I was sure that I could do the job for him. I later found out that he had started in the Army Air Corps as a flying Sergeant and was then given a warrant as a flight officer. As most of the other pilots were Lieutenants, he made every effort to show that he and his crew were better than the others. Two days after we met, we left for Grand Island by train. Our first flight together was to Salina, Kansas to pick up some parts in our new B-17 that we would be flying overseas.
    The flight to Salina was uneventful and we hit the airport right on schedule, even though most of the flight was in cloudy weather. I later discovered that Jack was an excellent pilotage navigator and had tracked me all the way. I guessed that he was satisfied with my navigation as he said nothing to me. We spent the next several weeks equipping our new plane for combat, loading supplies to take to England and making some short check flights.
    We finally took off for Presque Isle, Maine, and wouldn't you know it, we were socked in solid with a thick cloud layer and had to fly through a front. The cloud cover broke just as we were approaching the airport. Again, my dead reckoning navigation got us there right on course but we were two minutes early after crossing the front and picking up a tail wind. Again Jack had nothing to say.
    After a few days, we were told we were to leave for England via Gander, Newfoundland. We took off in clear weather but by the time we hit Prince Edward Island, we encountered a solid cloud layer at low level below us and could no longer see the ground. When we reached my estimated time of arrival for Gander, I called Jack and told him he could circle and start his let down. His only comment was, "Are you sure?" I gave him an equally short answer, "Affirmative." We finally broke through the clouds with a very low ceiling and could see the airport through the rain, about a mile off our port wing. Again, Jack made no comment so I figured that I was meeting his anticipated navigational requirements.
    We waited for a number of days at Gander for the weather to break but it rained every day. Finally, the meteorologist said the weather was as good as it would get and we'd have to fly through a big front with high winds. We were supposed to hit good weather off Iceland and then have clear weather for the rest of the trip to Prestwick, Scotland.
We took off in a rain squall and were soon into the storm front. It was very bumpy with strong winds and I knew we could easily be blown off course. I hoped to get a good course correction with a celestial fix after we cleared the front. We did pass the major storm front at about mid ocean. However, we were still in heavy cloud cover with only an occasional star shining through. We then hit another storm front with turbulence and I started to worry whether I would be able to do any celestial navigation before dawn. I knew by now that we were probably quite a bit off course due to the high winds that were shifting directions.
    As the sky was starting to lighten up, there were occasional breaks in the overcast and I could finally see some stars. I found three stars that I could take a fix on and felt I could make the difficult determination as to their identity. Just as I finished shooting the stars with my octant, the cloud cover closed in and I never saw another star.
    When I computed the fix. I found that the shifting winds had blown us more than 100 miles south of our course and we were headed for the Cherbourg Peninsula in occupied France. As the Germans were jamming radio beacons and sending out false signals, I couldn't do a Radio Beam fix as a check. I thought to myself, "Now is the time I'll really find out if Jack Pry trusts my navigation." I hit the intercom button and said, “We are now 100 miles south of course and will have to make a course change 30 degrees left if we are to hit our checkpoint at Ballymorn, Ireland." Then there was a long silence, and finally a question, "Are you sure?"
    I told him that we had passed through two storm fronts with switching wind directions and that I felt that I had a good three star fix. Again, there was a silence on the intercom. Finally, I heard "O.K., we are changing heading." I knew then that I had passed Jack Pry's final test. I replied, “I'm glad we are turning, as I really didn't want to be a guest of the Germans in France.” Then I gave him an ETA for Ballymorn.
    The weather cleared above us as dawn approached, but there was a solid cloud layer below us. As we neared the west coast of Ireland, there were a few breaks in the clouds and for one short instance the rocky shoreline was visible. The crew got on the intercom and commented on how glad they were to see land.
    Ted Snyder, the bombardier, had slept most of the way across the Atlantic after we hit the storm. Cece Quinley, our copilot, thought he'd pull a joke on Snyder so he hollered over the intercom for Snyder to wake up. Ted about went berserk, when Cece told him that we had just crossed the coast of North Africa after being blown off course. We later found out that Ted's parents had some friends in England and that Ted was already lined up with a date with their daughter. The thought of being stuck in North Africa just about killed him.
    As we hit my ETA for Ballymorn, we could see houses and the greenest grass I ever saw through the break in the clouds. I was surprised to find that I was only one minute late for my ETA, so it must have been one hell of a good three star fix. I then gave Jack a change in heading and an ETA for Prestwick as the cloud layer again closed back in.
    Jack started his letdown, so we could clear the cloud layer below us before we crossed the Irish Sea. As we broke through the cloud layer, I could see that we were only about 1,000 feet above the water. Directly ahead of us was a cruiser or destroyer coming right at us and blinking rapid code signals. I hurriedly grabbed our Aldis lamp and blinked back the code of the day. I must have gotten the signal right and it must have been a British ship, as they didn't shoot at us.
    The ceiling was very low and kept dropping as we neared the coast of Scotland. Since we were low on fuel, Jack landed at the first airport we saw. It turned out to be an RAF fighter field, with a shorter runway than the main airport a few miles away. We used up all of the runway and it would be an understatement to say that the RAF personnel were amazed to see a B-17 land on a short air strip built for Beau-fighters. Two RAF vehicles met us and directed us to a hardstand and Jack then directed our tail gunner, Ted Brandt, to stay and guard the plane.
    The RAF people took us to Base Operations and while they talked with Jack about fueling and clearances to take off for Bovington, England near London, the rest of us were offered coffee by some ladies from the Society of St. John. The coffee proved to be the most awful I had ever tasted but I managed to gulp it down. When they wanted to refill my cup, I asked if I could have tea instead. They said "Oh yes, but we thought you Yanks like coffee." The tea looked like it had boiled until it was real black and actually proved to taste more like coffee than their coffee did. It was strong enough to float a spoon in.
    Jack sent me and the rest of the crew back to the plane to get ready for takeoff and to check on Tex. When we got to the plane, Tex was nowhere in sight. I asked an RAF airman on an adjacent hardstand if he had seen Tex and he told me that he had seen him walking down a trail behind the hardstand that went to a local village.
    I left the crew at the plane and started down the trail. I had only gone about 100 yards when I came to a curve in the trail. I stopped when I heard a low moan coming from around the curve. As I peered through the trees and brush, I saw a bunch of red fur and thought that perhaps a local villager had trapped a fox. However, as I walked around the curve, I discovered that the fur turned out to be a redheaded Scottish girl laying on the side of the trail with Tex on top of her. Tex heard my footsteps and looked up with a smile on his face and said, "I'll be with you in a minute, sir." I turned and started back up the trail thinking to myself, "Tex must have set an all time record in what he had managed to accomplish in less than an hour after setting foot in a foreign country.
    Our flight to Bovington was uneventful and we delivered the plane to the authorities, but on our way South, I noticed that the whole countryside seemed to be dotted with air bases. I thought then that it sure must be tough to find your own air base when the weather was bad. We waited for several days for an assignment to a group. While waiting there, we asked some base personnel how heavy the losses were on missions. We were told that there were about 25 percent losses in aircraft on the last two missions. Right then and there, I computed that with 25 missions to fly to complete a tour of duty, and 25 percent losses per mission, it would just about be impossible to avoid being shot down. From then on, I became pretty fatalistic that it was only a question of time before -we would be shot down. I later found out that most of the rest of the 8th Air Force flying personnel felt the same way. We finally got word that we were being assigned to the 532nd Squadron of the 381st Bomb Group at Ridgewell in East Anglia. It was about 20 miles southeast of Cambridge and 50 miles from London. We were told that we had lucked-out as it was the closest combat base to London.
    When we arrived at the base, we found that the group had only been flying missions since June 22nd, and that the 532nd Squadron had lost their first plane on that mission. We were the first replacement crew for the squadron. The four officers in our crew were assigned to a "Nissen Hut" - the earlier British version of a Quonset hut - that was also occupied by Lt. Baltrusaitus' crew. The enlisted men were housed in another housing area. "Baldy" was a real nice guy and proved to be a good roommate. However, the crew navigator, Martin Honke, was a real loner, and didn't even associate with his own crew. The copilot, Art Sample, was a real southerner from Hattiesburg, Mississippi and I really hit it off with him and we became the best of friends. My combat career was now really about to begin.
    We had arrived on base about the first week of July and spent some time checking out our newly assigned plane and equipment. We flew some test flights and some practice formation flights during which time I became familiar with the location of the base and the countryside. I also managed to sit in on navigation briefings for several missions to get an idea of what I'd be facing. I was up at base operations when a plane named "Old Coffin" came back with a dead navigator, who had bled to death from a flak wound in the groin. I later found out that since the Germans had changed their strategy to making frontal fighter attacks, that the navigators experienced the highest casualty rate.
    During this time, I also managed to find time to get to know the officers on my crew better. Cecil Quinley, the copilot, was older than the rest of us. He was very pleasant, but rather quiet, and didn't socialize at the Officers Club very often. Ted Snyder, our bombardier, on the other hand, was a real "Hollywood type," which is understandable as he was raised in North Hollywood. His father was a big wheel in the film industry and was also well known as the songwriter who wrote such songs as "The Sheik of Araby" and "Who's Sorry Now."
    I found out later that Ted was a good Catholic and hung his rosary beads over his bombsight. On almost every mission, he would grab his rosary beads and start saying Hail Marys when the first enemy fighters made a pass at us. Then I'd kick him in the butt and he'd drop his beads and start shooting. It was sort of a ritual. He was a damned good bombardier and we had a good working relationship. We became pretty good friends as time went by.
    Jack Pry was probably the best pilot in the squadron, if not in the entire group, because he was a perfectionist. He loved to fly and practiced whenever he could. He had a concern for his crew because he wanted them to be the best. He was pretty much a loner and was usually all business. On occasion, we could get him to loosen up and socialize at the club and he would occasionally get in the poker games.
All in all, for four people with very diverse backgrounds and very different personalities, we managed to develop a good working relationship and got along surprisingly well under very trying circumstances.
Our first mission was Hanover, Germany. Even though we had a few flak holes and the group was under fighter attack most of the time over the continent we didn't lose any planes. However, I did find out that between trying to navigate on a miniscule desk to keep track of our location and at the same time man a machine gun on each side of the nose of the plane, was like a one-armed paperhanger trying to eat his sandwich while at the same time trying to paper a wall. I was so damned busy that I didn't have time to think about anything else. I didn't even have time to get scared. It wasn't until after we got back out over the Channel and met the Spitfires that I had time to feel totally exhausted, shaking and scared. I later found that this was to be the pattern for all missions for me as well as for other navigators that I talked with. Actually this may have been the best way to fly combat. I always wondered how Cecil and the other copilots could stand sitting there doing very little except watching the German fighters attacking us. It's a wonder that they all didn't go "flak happy."
    I don't actually remember much about our next missions, except for the mission to Kiel, Germany, as they seemed to be scheduled so frequently. The raid to Kiel was an unscheduled one. I understand that the RAF recon planes had spotted the battleship Tirpitz steaming toward the Kiel Navy Yard in the Baltic Sea, so a mission was hurriedly planned to catch the ship while it was tied up at the dock.
The group had been beaten up for several missions and we had few planes or crews in flying condition. Even though we had flown a mission the day before (my birthday), they grabbed me to fill in as navigator on a crew from the 535th Squadron that had a flyable plane but had the navigator in the hospital. I think we got only six planes off from our group and we joined a squadron from the 91st Group to make up a shorthanded group. I later heard that the whole 8th Air Force could only put up 90 B-17s.
    After we left the RAF Spitfires a short distance out of the "Wash," we were on our own flying over the North Sea. As we neared Helgoland, an island base off the coast of Germany, German fighters jumped us and we were under a fighter attack all the way across Denmark and then to the shipyard target. We dropped our bombs in the navy yard and I could see them hitting the docks and ships; but I doubt if our bombs had any more effect on the battleship than number eight dove shot would have if it was used in a shotgun to shoot a goose. We had been hit by flak before we dropped our bombs and lost number two engine. However, the pilot managed to feather the engine so we could stay in formation as the fighters hit us on the way out from the target area.
    The fighters stayed with us out over the North Sea and finally hit our number four engine. The pilot feathered it but we could no longer stay in formation. He dived for the sea with the fighters trying to get on our tail. He "redlined" the airspeed indicator and pulled out of the dive just a few hundred feet above the water. Just as it looked like the fighters would get us, they turned back toward land. They must have reached their fuel limit on getting back to Helgoland Island.
    We hopped waves and made it back to an RAF base near the "Wash." After making emergency repairs to the engine oil lines, we took off and landed back at Ridgewell. The crew chief told me the plane had 27 flak holes and seven 20 mm holes. It was the only time that I ever flew with another crew. I don't even remember the name of the pilot but he did a hell of a job.
    I did get a chance to rest for a while and I finally got to know some of the enlisted men better. One day I walked up behind Russell Frautschi, our radioman, and I heard him muttering dit dot, dit dot dit, etc. as he walked along. I thought to myself, "My God, I know that some people talk to themselves, but I just can't believe that someone would talk to himself in Morse code.” He turned out to be a real good guy. I probably got to know Ed LaPointe, the flight engineer, the best as he was up front in the top turret and spent more time with the officers. I found out that Tex Brandt, our tail gunner, who was much bigger than Ed, enjoyed picking on Lapointe. One day I had to step in and stop a fight between them by offering to go behind the hangar and have him try to take me on. After that, Ed and I were good friends but Tex avoided me from that time on.
    Like most everyone on base, I bought a bicycle so that I could pedal down to the club, which was too far to walk to from our "Nissen Hut" site. On occasion, I would bike into the pub in Ashen, or to the King's Head pub in Ridgewell. I remember that after one mission, I was cleaning my machine guns - which we officers had to do for ourselves - and Al Johnson and Carl Baird asked me if I wanted to go to the pub in Ashen for a beer. I told them I'd meet them later on after I cleaned up.
    I was late getting away and by the time I got to the pub, I found that an MP was hitting some of the enlisted personnel with his billy club. Just then, he hit Al Johnson on the head and I stepped up behind the MP and told him to stop. He turned around and swung at me and I ducked. He then saw that I was an officer and he told me to stay out of it as he was trying to control a drunken disturbance and went back to swinging his club. I went to a phone and called the O.D. on base. He and the captain of the MP's arrived and I preferred charges against the MP for trying to hit an officer.
    After they took the MP away, Al and the other flight personnel told me that the MP sergeant had a habit of antagonizing them and using his club on them when they were only getting a bit noisy while drinking to relieve their tension after a mission. The MP was transferred from the base and after that I was sort of a hero to some of our enlisted flying personnel. It was the only time in my military career     that I ever "pulled rank." I never really got to know Smith, the turret gunner. He was very quiet and truly shy.
    It was very hard to develop any real friendships as we had such a turnover in personnel. You would see a replacement crew come on base and they might get shot down on their first or second mission. It was easier not to make many friends and then you wouldn't have to feel bad when they got shot down. We had such great losses in flight crews, that toward the end of my time on base, there were only a few old time crews left. As I mentioned earlier, Art Sample became my only real close friend. We drank together at the Officers' Club and went on passes to London or Cambridge together whenever we could and played a lot of poker with the other officers in the club or in the "Nissen Huts." I got quite good at poker and as my winnings added up, I managed to keep a nest egg of 200 pounds (that's $805 in American money, which was a lot of money in those days), and at the same time had plenty of money to spend on my recreational endeavors in town with Art.
    Art was a tall good-looking guy with a real southern accent. Many of the nurses took after him when they came to our club from a nearby hospital. But the night that I remember best was the night a bunch of WAFs and some of their senior officers came over for a night of entertainment at our Officers' Club. One of the WAF Lieutenants kept trying to monopolize Art and kept cutting in on him when he was trying to dance with other WAFs. Finally, just as the music stopped and there was a lull in the conversation before the next piece started, Art's voice was clearly heard all over the club, as he shouted, "Damn it woman, leave me alone, or I'll turn you over my knee and paddle your fanny."
    The music didn't start up again and all of the RAF people stood paralyzed and red-faced in embarrassment. Joe Nazarro, our colonel, went over to the RAF group captain and asked him what was wrong. The group captain stammered, "My God, what that officer said!" Joe replied, "Well, it wasn't too polite, but it wasn't really too bad!" Finally the group captain asked, "What is a fanny over in the states?" Joe replied, "Well it's your backside!" The group captain then smiled and said, "Oh, but over here, it's the other side, you know!" The whole room roared and the embarrassment was forgotten. However, Art's reputation was established.
    After the Kiel mission, I couldn't keep track of the missions as they seemed to come up so fast. The next mission that I really remember well was the infamous Schweinfurt mission - the one dramatized in the movie, "Twelve O'clock High." Actually, the mission was originally planned for Aug. 10. We got up at 4 a.m. for the briefing but the flight kept being delayed because of the lousy weather. After waiting many hours, the mission was finally scrubbed.
    We flew a mission to Paris on the 16th and as good weather was reported over southern Germany for the next day, we were awakened at about 4 a.m. on the 17th. The Schweinfurt mission was on again. Supposedly, it was planned to be the mission that would be "the start of the end of the war." We were to knock out most of the German ball bearing factories, which all happened to be in Schweinfurt and thereby cripple aircraft and vehicle production. Unfortunately, with their excellent espionage system, the Germans knew we were coming by then and pulled most of their fighter aircraft over to airfields along our route into the target area. Also, unfortunately, it was a hell of along way into southern Germany - further than we had ever flown before and we had no fighter escort.
    We did have Spitfire escort to about mid-channel, but when they turned back, we were on our own. The German fighters hit us before we got to the Belgian shore. We were under constant fighter attack all the way to the target. No one had ever seen so many fighters. They came in at us in waves of 10-20 planes, slowing rolling and spraying 20 mm shells as they flew right through our formation. Both B-17's and fighters were going down all over the sky. Our only relief was when we got to the target area.
    It was a real relief to enter the heavy flak area over Schweinfurt, as the fighters all left us to go down and gas up and fly to an airfield along our route out so that they could hit us again. We hit the target and destroyed part of the industrial complex. Our intelligence officer later told us that the Germans had all the women and kids in the city picking up ball bearings the day after the mission.
    We got a bunch of small flak holes over the target and as we headed west, we were again hit by a massive fighter attack. As we were bucking a strong headwind, we crawled back at about one half the ground speed that we made on the way in. After almost four hours of constant fighter attack, except for the time over the target, we finally made it to the channel. Our group had taken a beating. We lost 10 crews and one plane that ditched before we got back to Ridgewell. The brass from the First Air Division and 8th Air Force Headquarters were at the base operations when we got back and they sat in on our debriefing. I remember that when we told them that the other groups' losses were about as bad as ours, they told us that the mission had been designed to give Germany a fatal blow and if necessary they were prepared to sacrifice any number of planes. In fact they said that they didn't think we'd bring back as many planes as we did. The whole 8th Air Force had taken the greatest loss of planes on a mission that they would for some time to come.
    Later that night, when we were all drinking at the club and feeling pretty bad about all of the old crews that went down that day. Joe Nazzaro came in and sat down at the bar next to Art Sample. With tears in his eyes. Joe said, "My God, we lost just about the whole group!" Art leaned over and put his hand on Joe's shoulder and said, "That's O.K., we know how you feel!" Joe then sighed and said, "It's terrible, now I am going to have to rebuild the group!" Art got so mad, I had to drag him away from the bar before he hit Joe.
    After I got Art away from the bar, he said, "I ought to kill the son of a bitch!" "He doesn't give a damn about the guys we lost, thinking about the work it will take him to rebuild the group!” Art, like most of the officers on the flight crews, never did like Col. Joe Nazarro. He called him a genuine "Chicken Colonel." Joe flew five "milk runs" so he could get an air medal for flying five missions. After that, he had Lt. Col. Conway Hall and the squadron C.O.’s lead all of the missions. As a result, we lost all of the original squadron C.O.'s except Major Kunkel and also lost the replacement C.O.'s.
Needless to say, almost all of our flight crew personnel got “bombed out” that night. Come to think of it, most of us did a hell drinking almost every night. It was about the only way to relax your nervous system and be able to maintain your sanity. If you drank enough, you didn't have to think about the possibility that mission might be your last. If the American public ever knew that were flying hung-over or still slightly drunk, they would flipped. Luckily, we found out that if you breathed pure oxygen for a while after you got on board the plane, it would cure your hangover in a hurry. If you weren't quite sobered up when the enemy fighters showed up, you would sober up immediately after they made their first pass at you. (Note: the title, Flying High, not only relates fact that we usually flew at 24,000-27,000 thousand feet, fact that we may not have taken off entirely sober).
    A couple of days after the Schweinfurt mission, I was called into group operations. I was told that as part of the group rebuilding process, they were picking the best remaining pilots and the best navigators to fly lead planes. As they felt that Jack Pry was a top pilot, they were giving him his commission as a first lieutenant making his crew the "A" Flight lead plane. They then told me that I was to be a lead navigator and that they were sending me to an RAF school for special training and that after I returned to our base, I’d be expected to train some other lead navigators and break in replacement navigators.
    I was sent to an installation on the edge of Bovington Air Base near London. When I arrived along with six navigators from other groups we were welcomed to the RAF Radar School. We were told that "radar" was highly classified and that we were to never to use the word, but were to refer to the equipment by code names such as "Mickey" or "Gee." The RAF was giving the 8th Air Force equipment for a number of lead planes in each group and we were the nucleus of navigators who would train others.
    After long hours of schoolroom time and some practicing in the air, we finally approached graduation time. We found that our RAF instructors loved to play poker, even though they were lousy players, and since we couldn't leave the base at night, we had a game going every night. I soon had winnings of over 100 pounds, as various RAF officers sat in and lost their money. A navigator from the 91st Group and I ended up with pretty big bankrolls.
    One day, our head instructor said, "You are lucky, you are going to meet Sir Watson Watt on Thursday." Our immediate question was, "Who in hell is Sir Watson Watt?" We were then told that because of tight security, it was not known but he was in fact the inventor of radar. We were told the secret of the famous commando raid at Dieppe, France. It seems that the French underground reported that the Germans were building a secret facility at Dieppe and low level RAF aerial photos indicated that it could be some type of radar station.
    It was decided that a commando raid would be made to capture the facility and remove any radar type equipment and bring it back to England. Unfortunately, no one knew what to look for in the building complex as it might look like other radio gear. Sir Watson Watt volunteered to go and supervise the dismantling of the equipment. The RAF brass flipped their lids at the thought that Watt could be captured in the raid. A compromise plan was then agreed upon. Sir Watson Watt was to be guarded by two very big Canadian commandos, who had strict orders to shoot him if there was the slightest chance he would be captured.
    Watt returned from Dieppe with the Germans' equipment. However they lost many commandos there. We all thought that Watt must be some real "macho" type and looked forward to meeting him. He arrived in the classroom and proved to be a man of slight build, wearing a black suit and tie and a "bowler" hat. He was a very mild-mannered person and would have passed as an English clerk or bank employee. We were amazed at the guts that the little old guy must have had.
    We were told that we were learning so fast we'd graduate a day early. As we all had a two-day pass before going back to our bases, it meant that we'd be able to spend three days in London. The navigator from the 91st Group and I decided that we would bankroll a party in London with our poker winnings and invited the three RAF instructors to join all seven of us if they would show us the town.
    When we got to London they took us to the Russell Square Hotel and we got a suite of rooms for the ten of us. As whiskey was rationed, we had to buy "black market," but one of the RAF officers had a connection and we soon had quite a few cases of Scotch whiskey, gin, Irish whiskey, and beer. We all went out to eat in Oddinio's, a top London restaurant, and then came back to start the party. The RAF types made a few phone calls and people started showing up. What a party! It went on 24 hours a day for the three days, with WAFs and other RAF types wandering in and out and with everyone periodically catnapping or passing out.
    The morning that we had to leave, the three RAF officers were really hung over and we had to haul them to Euston Station and put them on the train for Watford. One of them asked, "How often do you bloody Yanks do this?" We told him we did it every time we got to town and he said, "My God" and passed out. We called their base and told the administrative officers to meet them at the station in Watford. I ended up at my base with the biggest headache I have ever had.
    Chaplain Brown, the group chaplain for the entire war, wrote a book about the group after the war was over. How he managed to compile so much information and make so few mistakes in the book, I'll never know. However, a few errors did creep in.
    He wrote a section of the book about me and Jack Pry. He mistakenly referred to us as being original crew members of the group, rather than as the first replacement crew. In the article, he stated that I was a great talker and I guess that I can't argue with that too much. He also told how I gave him hell about not being on the flight line when the crews were coming back from a mission that day. He didn't tell the whole story.
    As he said, we frequently used to sit at the bar and talk a lot. That night he kept complaining that there just were not many flight personnel attending chapel and he wondered what good he was doing on the base. He was filling in his time on Sundays by preaching at the local church in Ashen.
    I told him that as far as the flight personnel were concerned most of us were pretty fatalistic and didn't care if he shut down the chapel. We felt that he had a more important job to do. With Col. Joe Nazarro not seeming to care about his crews, what they really appreciated was seeing the chaplain on the flight line "sweating out" the crews’ coming back. I mentioned that just that day, some of the guys asked "where's Brownie," when they didn't see him on the flight line. He apologized for not being on the flight line, and said, "I really didn’t know they cared that much and I'll promise never to miss another mission." As far as I know he never did miss another mission for the duration of the war.
    Getting back to the war, I soon began the damnedest month possible. Between flying practice missions, I was training navigators or flying with Jack and the rest of my own crew as he trained replacement pilots in formation flying. In all, I logged over 90 hours of flying time. including missions. I can't remember any of the missions except the Stuttgart mission, as they all seemed to run together. It like I was on an endless belt, flying missions, and flying training flights - and I just couldn't get off and I was about to go “flak happy."
    Stuttgart - I remember, because it was the mission damned fool colonel from the Pentagon came over to ride a copilot seat on a mission and get a silver star for "gallant leadership” and a Distinguished Flying Cross. It seem that colonels stuck at a desk job in the Pentagon were jealous of the medals that were being accumulated by 8th Air Force colonels who were junior in grade. They would manage to get a short detail in England to pick up some medals, and then get back to their safe desk job. Once in a while one of them would have their luck run out and they would be in a plane that got shot down.
    We took off for Stuttgart with an overload of incendiary magnesium bombs. When we got to Stuttgart, it was socked in solid with a low cloud layer. Instead of going immediately to a secondary target, the colonel wanted to be a hero, so he had us circle Stuttgart several times looking for a hole in the clouds. Finally, he ordered that we drop the bombs at random on any target.
    The bombardiers toggled out bombs over a wide area of southern Germany and France. We never knew where the bombs landed, the French underground later reported that there were fires burning in a 100 square mile area. The wide circling of Stuttgart used up a lot of fuel, and as we approached Paris from the south on our way back, Jack called on the intercom and told me that the red lights on the gauges were on and he wanted an ETA for our base at Ridgewell. I asked him how many minutes of fuel he had left and made some calculations. I informed him that we could not get back to our base and worse yet, we might not make it back to England. Our only possibility was an emergency metal-mat landing strip on the sand at the tip of Dungeness Point on the channel.
    As soon as we hit the channel, Jack leaned the engines down as much as possible, and put the plane in a long glide as I gave a heading for Dungeness Point. The crew prepared to ditch, and threw what they could, to lighten the plane. I looked out of the plane, and as far as I could see, there were a great number of planes ahead of us and behind us, all making a straight line for Dungeness.
We came in very low, just over the water of the channel, and made one straight shot at the temporary strip on the beach. We used up all of the strip, and our engines started to "konk out" as we pulled off in into the sand so that the plane behind us could land. Quite a few planes landed behind us and we could see planes ditching just off shore, out in the channel.
    The only fuel available at the strip was a big pile of five-gallon cans (the British called them "four gallon tins" as they used imperial gallons). We had to form human chains passing cans of gasoline up to the wings, so we could take on enough gasoline to get to the nearest RAF base and yet be able to take off from the short strip. We lost a bunch of planes that day but the crews were all rescued by the air-sea rescue boats and we didn't lose any planes due to enemy action. They were all lost due to the action of some dumb colonel who ran us out of fuel.
    I don't remember the next missions we flew in September as they all fit the pattern of trying to navigate and run two machine guns at the same time for hours on end. I do know that I can't remember a single one of those missions when we didn't come back with holes in the plane. Sometimes, it would take several days to patch all of the holes. It finally got to be a real problem, when they had to place patches on top of patches. We had so many patches, it was causing enough drag to reduce our air speed.
    The October Fourth mission was to Frankfurt, Germany. Our squadron was to lead the group and the group was to lead the 1st Air Division, so our squadron was to lead the whole 8th Air Force that day. Because we were flying Deputy Group Lead, we had an officer from division flying the copilot's seat and we left Quinley home.
    We were on the route in and had just passed Aachen, Germany when we lost oil pressure on one engine. I guess the air division officer panicked as he ordered Jack to pull out of formation and head back toward England. The first thing that I knew, Jack had put the plane into an almost vertical dive after feathering the engine. He was headed down for a low cloud layer with some fighters trying to get on our tail. He called on the intercom for a heading back to our base but I was pinned against the bulkhead and couldn't move. My immediate thought was, "I guess we are going to buy the farm this time." After all, it was the 16th mission for me and Jack and we had survived much longer than most of the rest of the group. The airspeed indicator was "redlined." and the whole plane was shaking and vibrating so much that the insulation patches that were glued to the interior skin of the nose fuselage started shaking loose and fine insulation particles were floating in the air.
    As soon as we leveled out, I took a quick "GEE" radar fix and gave Jack a heading. As we were a little over a thousand feet off the deck, I knew that we would be vulnerable to light flak guns in every town in Belgium even though we were in a solid cloud cover. I told Jack to go ahead and fly evasive action as he saw fit and that I would keep track of his position to make sure we didn't get too much off course. I had a map showing all major flak installations and the cities and towns with possible flak guns, and I'd keep giving Jack changes in headings to avoid them.
    Unfortunately there were unrecorded flak guns along some of the railroad tracks. Periodically there would be a few flak bursts in the clouds near us, and Jack would have to take quick evasive action. We skirted every town in Belgium and finally cleared the coast. I gave Jack a heading for Oxford Ness on the English coast east of Ipswich. We broke out of the clouds just before we hit the coast and I gave Jack a heading for home. Luckily, we made it back without a single hole in the plane. Jack and I thought that the air division officer was crazy for ordering us out of formation, as it was usually suicide.
The only things that we had going for us were the solid cloud layer and the fact that I had the "GEE" radar which I could use to take very quick fixes and make necessary heading changes. Even at that it was very difficult to read the radar at that low level and extended range away from England, and probably would have been impossible for a newly trained operator to do.
    Having survived so many missions with near misses, I then decided that we had just about run out our string of luck.
After a two-day pass, I got back to the base - well hung over, just in time for our next mission on October 8th. It was Bremen, not as far into Germany as Schweinfurt or Frankfurt, but very heavily defended by 90 mm and 120 mm flak batteries. It was to be an all-out effort with coordinated night bombing by the RAF.
    We got rolled out of bed at 4 a.m. as usual for most missions. We were told that we were lucky, we would have P-47 fighter cover all the way to the border between Holland and Germany. This would be much further over the continent than the fighters had gone before. That did make us feel good, until we heard that Bremen had just about the greatest single flak installation in Germany.
Art Sample had been offered the choice of becoming a pilot of a new crew, or staying on as copilot with Lt. Baltrusaitis. Baldy tried to talk him out of leaving his crew, but Art decided he would take a chance, and finally get to do some flying instead of mostly sitting. This was to be his first mission with his own crew and he was to fly on our right wing.
    We made a typical rendezvous with the 91st and 351st groups over Braintree, and after joining the other wing of the 1st Air Division, we headed out over the channel at 27,000 feet with our Spitfire escort. The Spits dropped off and we picked up the P-47 escort. They flew above us as we crossed the Dutch coast and crossed over the middle of the Zuider Zee. They mixed it up with a bunch of FW 190's, and kept them away from us for a while. Finally, the P-47's left us at the German border near Papenberg, and we were once again on our own, headed toward our turning point near Rastede.
    There were German planes coming at us from all directions. There were the usual FW-190's and Me 109's but, unbelievably, there were twin engine JU-88 dive-bombers and twin engine Me 210's equipped with wing racks hanging off just out of our machine gun range. We were getting heavy fighter attacks, and to my surprise, I saw a JU-88 shoot a rocket toward us and watched it sail high over the plane. It was the first time we had ever encountered dive-bombers and the first time that we ever saw air to air rockets. We turned on the I.P. near Vegesack, and headed south toward Bremen. As we turned, the JU-88's fell behind us.
    The FW 190's and Me-109's kept up the attack, until we hit the flak zone, and they peeled off to wait for us to clear the target area. Just before Ted dropped his bombs, and while I was looking out of the starboard window, we took a direct flak hit on the number two engine behind me. Several pieces of flak came through the nose and one piece lodged in my right wrist. I pulled it out and grabbed the first aid kit and bandaged the wrist before we left the target area. I noticed that one piece of flak had taken out our intercom and being up in the nose, we could no longer hear what was going on in the rest of the plane. Ted dropped the bombs and the formation turned to head back for England.
    The number two engine started windmilling because Jack evidently couldn't feather it. Then we got hit with another burst of flak above my port window and next to the cockpit. I later learned that this was the flak that probably hit Cecil and cut the hose on his oxygen mask. Since Jack couldn't keep up with the formation with number two engine windmilling, he pulled out of formation. Art Sample's plane had also taken some bad flak hits and he pulled out with us.
    I later found out that Jack had ordered the crew to bail out and that Cecil had bailed out of the bomb bay but we could not hear the bailout order with the intercom shot out. Then, the number two engine really wound up and parts were flying through the nacelle. The windmilling prop made such a loud noise, it really hurt my ears as the tip of the prop is only about three feet away from the navigator's ear when the port machine gun is being manned. The prop finally froze up and the whole engine tore off and flew up over the plane.
    About that time, I turned to glance out of the starboard window, just in time to see a rocket hit Art Sample's plane. It blew up with a big flash and I couldn't see any parachutes open. All that I could momentarily think was "Goodbye old buddy!" Then I checked my charts and saw that we were only about 30 miles from the point where we were supposed to rendezvous with the P-47 fighter escort planes.
I thought, maybe we can hang on long enough and make it there, as Boeing sure as hell makes tough airplanes. Just then, when I was looking out the port window, I saw a rocket take off about 15 feet of our left wing. I then figured that our chances of making it back were nil. I am not sure how Jack managed to keep the plane level but I thought that I'd stay with the plane and continue to keep shooting at the fighters who started coming in close for the "Kill." Ted must have thought the same way as he was still up front burning up ammunition.
    I didn't know it at the time, but a rocket had sheared off most of our vertical stabilizer and rudder and part of the right horizontal stabilizer was gone. The ball turret had also been hit and Smith had been killed. At about the same time (as I later heard), Baird had a 20 mm explode between his legs and it made hamburger out of his lower body. Johnson's chute spilled in the plane and he didn’t make it out. I understand that LaPointe and Frautschi helped Baird to bail out and then jumped themselves. I don't know when Brandt jumped, but I understand that he stayed after the other gunners had jumped.
    An FW 190 came at us from about 11 o'clock level a with a burst of 20 mm shells. It blew out a very large part side of the nose between me and Ted, taking the bomb toggle switch panel out with it. I was manning the starboard machine gun at the time, and one of the 20 mm shells blew up right behind my back, throwing me against the bulkhead. My flak suit was smoking and looked like a badly torn sack of tin plates. My left arm and the back of my neck were filled with very tiny splinters of metal.
    The wind blew through the big hole in the left side of the nose and the gale scattered my maps and charts all over the plane. Everything that was loose was flying around in the nose of the plane. I didn't know how Ted was doing as I couldn't talk to him with the intercom out, but he was still shooting away at the fighters that kept coming in at us.
    Soon after that, another rocket hit the number one engine knockIng it clear out of the nacelle. We now had no engines left on the left wing and lacked the outer 15 feet of the wing. Then an Me 109 came at us from two o'clock high and I saw him spurt a big cloud from his engine and the canopy flew off as I continued to shoot at him. He did manage to hit our number four engine before he dived down under the wing but I was sure I got him. The number four engine lost power and we now had only the number three engine running at full power. We were now in a long glide with Jack managing to hold the plane fairly level.
    An FW 190 circled in from about 11 o'clock level shooting at us and just as I was about to get my machine gun sights on him I was amazed to see that Jack was turning our plane right at him and we barely missed colliding. Later, Jack told me that he had become so frustrated that he had deliberately tried to ram the fighter,
    The plane then started to wobble and I thought that I had better go back and see what was going on in the rest of the plane. I grabbed an oxygen bailout bottle and crawled back to the front escape compartment and looked up to see Jack's legs as he was standing up with a parachute in his hand. Then I knew that it was time to bail out so I crawled back to the nose after pulling the release on the hatch and kicked Ted in the butt for the last time and pointed to the open hatch. He put his parachute on and headed for the hatch, and I turned around to put my "GEE" radar charts in the brief case, and pull the incendiary flare to burn them up. Then I put my chute on.
    As I turned to head for the hatch, I saw Ted kneeling there so I tapped him on the back and he went on out. Then I remembered that I had not pushed the button to blow up the radar set, so I turned back to the navigator's desk and punched the detonator. I happened to glance out the port window and was surprised to see an FW 190 coming up slowly from behind us with his flaps down, looking at our plane. He was so very close to our wing that I could see his face as he looked out of the plane. It made me so mad that I figured that he must be the son of a bitch that had hit me with the explosive 20 mm and I grabbed my machine gun and emptied the last rounds in the belt. The fighter was so close that I couldn't miss. I saw him crumple over in the cockpit and the engine blew up in fire as he fell off on a wing. I thought, "At least I got that bastard for me and Art Sample!"
    The plane was jerking badly and started to wobble so I had to lay down and crawl to the escape hatch. I had to push myself out against the force of the wobbling of the plane.
    I still had the bailout bottle of oxygen so I counted to ten and pulled the "D" ring on my chute. I had no feeling of falling and, as I looked toward our plane, I saw it go down past me about a mile away. The whole plane, from the cockpit back to the tail, was in flames. I never did know who was the last one in the plane, as Jack Pry said that he had gone back to hold the plane steady for Ted to jump, and when he looked down and saw that Ted was gone, he bailed out. It could have been between the time Ted and I jumped, or after I jumped. However, I never did see any other parachutes after I jumped.
    It felt great floating in space with absolutely no feeling of falling. I was just hanging there looking far down below at a low cloud layer. I don't know how much altitude we lost before I bailed out, but because we were at 26,000 feet when we flew over the target, I thought I must be at about 18,000 feet. I had heard that you could expect a big jerk when your chute opened but I had felt no jerk at all. I then looked up, and to my horror, saw that my chute had not opened. It was just waving back and forth like a streamer.
    I dropped the "D" ring that I was still holding and grabbed for the shroud lines. As I pulled on the lines, I could see that they were tangled up in the metal snap ribs of the pilot chute. After violently shaking the lines, I finally got all except two of the parachute panels full of air. I was exhausted and settled back to await my landing.
    I was sure glad that I had not delayed pulling my chute as I needed most of the elevation I had to have time to pull the shroud lines. I heard a plane coming toward me from the side and he circled around me and came in close. But, as he never pointed his nose at me I knew he wasn't going to shoot. He then waved and peeled off to go home to his base.
    Almost imperceptibly, the cloud layer started to come up toward me. And then it came up at me faster and faster. When I hit the cloud layer, it was like jumping into a giant head of beer; sort of frothy and wet. When I broke through the clouds, I could see a large complex of buildings directly below me. As I was already short of air in my chute due to the two unopened panels and because a 24 foot chest pack was none too big for someone my size and weight, I didn't dare spill any air to steer away from the buildings. The last thing that I remember is my feet hitting the edge of the roof of a one-story building.
    As I started to come to, I seemed to hear a voice far away. Then it became louder and I then heard, "Wo ist sie Kapoten?" When I opened my eyes, I saw what looked like a cannon about six inches in front of my nose. As my vision cleared, I could make out two German soldiers, with one holding his rifle in my face. I thought, "Oh, no, this is my welcome to captivity but I've actually survived unless I’m dreaming."
 
 


 

PART II, CAPTIVITY, OR LIFE AS A KRIEGSGEFANGENEN
(PRISONER OF WAR)

    As my head started to clear, I again heard "Wo ist sie Kapoten?" being shouted at me. Not knowing much German at that time, even though I am of mostly German ancestry, I had no idea of what the soldiers wanted. I learned later they were saying "Where is your I pistol?" As I moved my head slightly, I could see the eaves of a building above me. I must have bounced off the roof when I passed out and then fallen about eight feet to the ground. The two soldiers must have gotten tired of hollering at me as one of them then proceeded to search me thoroughly. He then said "Kein Kapoten." which means, no pistol.
T    hey finally each grabbed one of my arms and tried to stand me up. At that point, I finally became aware of the fact that I seemed to be numb from the waist down. Every time they tried to stand me up, I collapsed. Finally, in frustration they each put one of my arms over their shoulder, and half carried and dragged me into a building. Then they propped me up in a chair in an office and left.
    A man in a Luftwaffe uniform, sitting at the desk, looked up and said in fairly good English, "Welcome to Germany!" He then told me that I had parachuted right into a German Women's Labor Camp. He explained that it was operated by a semi-military organization called the "Reich Arbeit Dienst," which was formed to have young people provide labor for the government before they were old enough to go into the military. Most of the girls were German, but he said that there were also "volunteers" from Holland, Belgium, and France.
    The girls worked in a clothing factory making military uniforms, in a large farming operation, or in a nearby radio facility. I was the very first "enemy" they had seen, and the two windows of the office were completely filled with the faces of the girls who were trying to get a look at me. The officer then told me that he had been an Oberst, or Colonel in the Luftwaffe, and had made "Ace" as a night fighter. When he was shot down by a British bomber, he was wounded, and it left him with impaired eyesight, so he was given a medal and assigned as the Kommandant of the RAD camp as a reward for being a "Hero of the Third Reich." He then told me that he had just called a German air base on the other side of the town of Diepholz, to get them to send a vehicle for me.
To pass the time away, he would point to some of the girls in the windows and tell me which ones were the best to sleep with. He had an exceptionally good looking blond secretary who was working at her desk and periodically going in and out of the office. As she went by his desk, he patted her on the butt and told me that she was the best of all the girls. As I was feeling no pain, and as he was being so friendly, I asked him if he had any girls available for guests. He laughed heartily and said that was the best joke he had heard in a long time.
    The colonel then asked how I got shot down and I told him how we had been jumped by a large number of fighters after being hit by flak. He asked how many fighters we had shot down and I told him that I could not be sure as our intercom had been shot out. However, I was fairly sure that our top turret got several and that I was very sure that I had gotten an Me 109 and a FW 190 just before I bailed out. He then said something to the blond secretary and she left the room. She returned shortly with a bottle of Schnapps and some glasses and poured us each a drink. Then, she and the colonel drank a toast to me as a "gallant flier." I then learned that she actually spoke better English than the colonel.
    I began to get some feeling back in my lower back and legs. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by increasing feelings of pain. About that time, some guards brought Jack Pry into the office and he told me that he had been captured not too far from the labor camp. By the time a truck arrived from the Diepholz air base, I had regained enough feeling in my legs that I could walk with some assistance.
    The ride of about 15 miles to the air base was very rough in the back of the truck and every bump caused excruciating pain in my hack and down my left leg. At the air base, we were placed in the guard house and met the rest of our crew, who had been picked up at various other spots. It was then that I learned that Johnson and Smith had been killed in the plane. A German fighter pilot came into the guard house and told us that he wanted to shake our hands for putting up such a good fight. He said that he had received the credit for finally shooting our plane down.
    The next morning, we were hauled by truck back to Bremen. They drove us right through the center of the city and the bombed area on the way to the railroad station. As we rounded a corner in the bombed area. I could see smoke and fire down the street and the body of an American flier hanging from a lamp post. I was then glad that I was in the hands of the military rather than a mob of civilians.
I really do not remember much about the railroad trip to Frankfurt-Am-Main, as I was In severe pain, and the whole situation of being a captive still seemed to be just a horrible dream. I am sure that I was also in severe shock from being shot down as well as from my injuries. On arriving in Frankfurt, we were taken to Du Lag Luft Transient Camp, which was built right next to the main railroad yard and the headquarters building of the I.G. Farben Chemical plant. I think the Germans built it there to keep the Allies from bombing that part of the city. In the morning, I was taken to the Du Lag Luft Interrogation Center at Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt. I was stripped of my watch, silver I.D. bracelet and my pencils, and placed in a room about seven feet by five feet in size, with a thick almost soundproof door with a peephole. The room had one barred window with frosted glass and it contained nothing but a bunk with a burlap mattress filled with a small amount of straw and one blanket. There was one overhead light bulb and an electric wall heater built into the wall with no controls in the room.
    I was still suffering great pain and had difficulty walking without help. A guard finally came back to my room and helped me down the hall to an office, where I was put in a chair opposite a desk. The officer at the desk asked me a lot of questions but I would only give my name, rank and serial number. He said that I was only making it difficult for myself, and that he could see that I was injured and needed treatment and that my being stubborn would only delay my being sent to a hospital. He also told me that he would probably find all the information on me in their files once they had time to search the records. I was then sent back to my cell.
    At dinner time in the late afternoon, a guard brought me a small boiled potato and a bowl of soup and spoon. It was strange soup. It didn't taste too badly but seemed to have a lot of tiny twigs in it along with a little barley. In the morning, I was given a cup of ersatz coffee, which was pretty bad, and a piece of hard, black bread. This routine, along with escorted trips to the latrine and the interrogator's office became my routine for days.
    I soon discovered that I had somehow gotten "crab" body lice from the very unsanitary toilet (I was later told by some other prisoners that they had gotten them also while here). They caused much itching to go along with the pain in my back and leg, and the infected flak wound in my wrist. Trying to pick off the crabs did help to provide a diversion to pass the time away but I doubt that it reduced the crab population much.
    Finally, one day I noticed that a previous occupant of the cell had worked on the latch of the window and had almost loosened it enough to open the casement window. By using the spoon 1 got with my soup for a short time, I worked on the latch when I thought the guard wasn't looking through the peephole. I kept trying to pry the fastener loose from the screws and finally, on the second day, I managed to get the final screw out before the guard returned to my cell. I waited until after my morning coffee and bread and cautiously opened the window. To my surprise, I saw a large vegetable garden and, just in front of my window, an old man facing me and weeding in the garden. He looked up and smiled before I could shut the window. As he had made no move to yell or go to report me, I pointed to the cabbages and said "kraut," which was about the only German word I knew. I then kept pointing to my mouth. He smiled and leaned down and pulled up a small cabbage. He then cut it in two and squeezed it through the bars for me. It was to be the best food that I a would get for a very long time.
    The next day, one of the guards who periodically checked me and the room, found the broken fastener on the window and started screaming at me as he stormed out the door. He returned a short time later and took me to another cell which had no blanket,. They turned up the heat during the day so that I had to take off my clothes to stand it. In the evening, they shut off the electric heater and, with a no blanket, I suffered from the cold. This "hot and cold" treatment continued for days and combined with the pain in my back and legs and the discomforts of the "crabs," I was in total misery.
    One morning, when they brought me into the interrogator's office, he was ranting and raving about the fact that the Koln (Cologne) Cathedral was in the target area of an air raid the previous day, as shown on photos recovered from the downed lead plane. He screamed that the Americans had become barbarians by targeting a cathedral.
    I finally said, "What are you complaining about, you Nazis are a bunch of barbarians. Why should you be concerned about a cathedral?"
    He then became totally irate and grabbed for his pistol, saying "I am going to kill you."
    As I had been suffering pain for so many days, I told him, "Go ahead and shoot me and put me out of my misery."
    He immediately stopped waving his gun, hollered for the guard and I was escorted back to my cell. I later learned that my reaction was probably the best thing I could have said, as the Germans respected courage. If I had cowered, I would have likely been shot.
    I have no idea of how many days I was in the interrogation center, or the sequence of events as the days all seemed to run together and I had no way of marking them down. However, one day, when they took me into the interrogator's room, they sat me down in a chair that was to the side of his desk, where I could see a large portrait photo of a woman. As I looked at it closely, I could see "Liebe Dorthea" written on it and recognized who the woman in the photo was. I asked him if he knew the woman in the photo. He said, yes, and then asked me if I knew who she was.
    I told him that I did because my mother had pictures of her and she was my mother's cousin, Dorthea Wieck. She was the number one movie star in Germany after Marlene Dietrich left for Hollywood. I asked him how well he knew her and he replied, "Quite well. I live with her whenever I can get up to Berlin on a weekend or when she can get down to Frankfurt."
    He said that he would tell her that he had one of her second cousins prisoner. That evening, they stopped the "hot and cold" treatment and turned on the electric heater so that I got my best sleep in days.
Several days later, they took me to the interrogator's room and he met me with a file. He said, "Lt. Burwell. we now know all about you. I told you that you were just being stubborn and that we already had the information in our files." He then showed me a copy of my special orders that I received when I graduated from navigation school, the ones I received for every transfer to training bases, and the ones I received sending our replacement group to England. Then he told me that I was in the 532nd Squadron of the 381st Group stationed in Ridgewell, England. He even knew the names of all the top brass on base, including our intelligence officer. The Germans must have had a spy in every mimeograph room at every U.S. air base in order to have exact copies of all the special orders. They must have also had a spy on every air base in England, as he told me that the clock in our Officers' Club had malfunctioned, and he was right.
    He said, "We know everything about you, there are just a few incidental things we'd like to clear up. What altitude were you flying at over the target and how far into Germany could you use your radar?" I played dumb and said, "What's radar?" He kept grilling me in various ways trying to get me to talk about radar. He kept saying, "You were a lead navigator, you must know about radar." It seemed to be the only thing that their spies hadn't been able to get much information on. He finally gave up on me and said that he was sending me to a hospital.
    That afternoon, I was taken back to Frankfurt with some other prisoners. Instead of being returned to the Transient Camp, we were put in a large, windowless room on the second floor of the railroad station. I noticed that the main portion of the railroad station had been a very large, glass dome but the bombing must have been close enough to shatter all of the glass as it now looked like one gigantic spider web.
    The room had no bunks or blankets so we had to sleep in our clothes on the floor. The air in the room was pretty foul by morning or whenever it was that they came to get us. We had some new guards and they seemed to be younger and nastier. As I couldn't walk very well, I had a difficult time going down the stairs and was holding up the prisoners behind me. A guard got mad and hit me in the kidney with the butt of his rifle. I passed out and evidently fell the rest of the way down the stairway. When I regained consciousness, several of the other prisoners were carrying me down a railroad track.
    We got to some old railroad box cars on a siding and the Germans loaded as many of us as they could squeeze into one of the boxcars and shut the door. There was no window but there was some light coming in through several large cracks between the boards. The car was so full that no more than 10 or 12 of us could lie down at any one time. The other prisoners let me and two other injured prisoners lay on the floor most of the time while they stood. This was a typical boxcar - referred to as a 40 and 8 - because the capacity was supposed to be 40 men or eight horses. I am sure that we had many more than 40 men in the boxcar.
    We waited the rest of the day for an engine to pull us out of the railroad yard. The German guards wouldn't let us out of the car to go to the bathroom, so we had to urinate through the cracks in the boards. Sometime after dark, we heard the wail of the air raid sirens and then the sound of the RAF bombers. Suddenly, there was a series of gigantic explosions. It must have ben some of the 8,000 lb. bombs the RAF could carry and one landed close enough to knock our boxcar off the track. However the car did not tip over. The air raid finally stopped and all I could think of was that it was surely different being on the receiving end of a bombing raid rather than being on the receiving end.
    Some time the next morning, the guards took us to another siding, where after giving us some bread, they loaded us into another boxcar that was in a string of cars which were already loaded. After dark, we were finally on our way out of the rail yard. It took us three days, with many stops and delays and with little to eat or drink, to finally arrive at the city of Sagan in eastern Germany. I guess our train load of prisoners did not have a very high rail priority cargo. Most of the prisoners were taken off the train and sent to Stalag Luft III Prison Camp, but the other two guys and I were taken to a hospital on the other side of the city. Sagan is a small city on the Bober River, which is a tributary of the Oder River. At that time it was in Silesia, but it is now close to the border between East Germany and Poland. It was south of Frankfurt-Am-Oder, about 108 kilometers southeast of Berlin.
    The German doctor at the hospital could speak a little English so I was able to tell him where I was hurt. They X-rayed me, ran a bunch of other tests on me, and shaved my crotch and painted me purple with Gentian Violet. The next day, he told me that I had a compressed vertebra with a hairline crack, two broken ribs, a bruised kidney, a lot of splinters of metal in the back of my neck and left hand that they couldn't remove, and an infected wound on my wrist. He said that all they could do for my back was to immobilize it by heavily taping me up to prevent movement while the crack healed. They said that they couldn't do much for my kidney; that I could expect to pass blood for a few more days. They bandaged my wrist with a wet compress soaked with an antiseptic called "Flavin," which was like iodine but had no sting. He said that if it didn't help to stop the infection, they would then give me some sulfa powder, which was in very short supply. The Germans had no antibiotics like penicillin and infections were more of a problem to their doctors than broken bones.
    They sent me back across town to the prison hospital in the "Vorlager" or Front Compound, of Stalag Luft III, Kriegsgefangenen Kampf. I was put into a ward with seven other prisoners. One was an American and the rest were RAF personnel. I was still in a great deal of pain and the doctor gave me some opiate pills. I soon felt like I was floating on the clouds again. I almost began to feel sorry for myself until I saw the condition of the other patients in the ward.
    The RAF lieutenant in the bed next to me was the lone survivor of a plane that was shot down on the famous low level raid, where the RAF dropped naval torpedoes from Lancaster bombers into the water of the lake just upstream of the large dam on a river in the Ruhr valley. They blew a large hole in the dam and partially flooded the Ruhr valley and cut off the electric power. They came in very low, just skimming treetops and buildings in order to drop the torpedoes accurately. They were hit by light flak and couldn't gain altitude after making the drop and bounced off the top of a ridge. The German orthopedists were much more advanced than our doctors, and even though he had 17 breaks in the bones in his body, they put him back together with a lot of pins and external steel adjustable rods. They would get him up out of bed every morning and make him walk up and down the hall on crutches. The German doctors were very concerned about muscle atrophy and made us all get out of bed and walk.
The guy in the bed across from me had a leg broken just below his hip joint. The orthopedist drilled a hole in the top of his pelvis and drove a steel pin into the broken off ball and into the femur. They had him walking two days after the operation. After the war, I described the operation to some American doctors and they didn't believe me. It wasn't until about a year later that one doctor told me the hip operation was described in the medical journal as the greatest new advance in orthopedic surgery.
    I remained in the hospital for about three weeks and found that the biggest entertainment for the patients was playing poker for cigarettes that came in the Red Cross food parcels. I found that the RAF patients were no better poker players than the RAF instructors at radar school and I soon amassed a fortune in "Players" and "Craven A" cigarettes. The doctors gave me opium pills whenever I felt that I needed one and kept me doped up. I found that I was taking more and more and that it was raising hell with my poker playing. I decided to quit the pills "cold turkey" and tough it out. It was pretty painful for a number of days and I had a terrible urge to go back on the pills. However, playing poker helped to keep my mind off my problems.
    Just before I left the hospital, they brought in a RAF pilot from the East Compound of the main camp, who had a bad cold or pneumonia. I found out that he was the very first prisoner of war. He told me that on the day Britain declared war on Germany, he was out on patrol flying over the North Sea, when a German fighter came up from Helgoland Island and shot him down. He was picked up by a German boat and they didn't know what to do with him as it was 1939 and the Germans had no prison camps. Herman Goering personally took an interest in him and had him sent to his mansion, Where he stayed for several months as a house guest, while waiting for a prison camp to be built.
    One day, the doctor came in and told me that he thought I'd be able to be sent into the regular prison camp and I was escorted to the gate by a guard. I was met there by an American prisoner, who took me to the senior American officer, Colonel Delmar T. Spivey. He was very friendly and asked me about my experiences. He explained how the camp operated and told me that the total Stalag Luft Prisoner of War Camp consisted of the East Compound of RAF prisoners; the North Compound; the Center Compound that was half RAF and half American, of which he was the senior officer; South Compound that was American, and a West Compound which was being built and was near completion. He also told me that prisoners called themselves "Kriegies."
    I was told that I would be assigned to a "combine," or group of Krlegies who lived together as a group sharing their meager food rations and doing necessary chores. I learned that the Germans provided us a minimal quantity of boiled potatoes which were semi-rotten, boiled barley grain, or a soup similar to that I got at Oberursel with little twigs in it. They also fed us hard, black bread, really bad margarine, occasional sugar beets or rutabagas, sometimes some German "hand cheese," and, on rare occasions, some semi-spoiled horse meat if a horse got killed in a bombing raid nearby. The whole boiled barley grain contained weevil grubs which were white in color and slightly larger than the barley grains.
    I later found that you could tell an old-timer in camp by the fact that he didn't bother to pick out the maggots when eating his barley. It was a slow starvation diet and it would have been difficult to survive without the British and American Red Cross parcels. I later learned that the parcels were actually provided by the governments: that the Red Cross only paid the cost of transporting the parcels through Spain and Switzerland. Parents of Kriegies were also allowed to occasionally send food and clothing packages as well as cigarette packages.
    I was taken to a barracks building which had a communal kitchen with heating stoves in each end of the building. The rest of the building was one large, open room. "Combines" were formed by arranging triple-decker bunks into squares to provide semi-privacy when cardboard was tacked on the outside of some of the bunks. There were six or seven of these combines in each barracks and there were about 2,000 prisoners in the Center Compound. Three of the combines in my barracks were RAF and RCAF Kriegies and the rest were American. There, I met C.W. "Red" Cramer, Leo Correia and Ed Fazenbaker, with whom I spent most of my time. There were three other Kriegies in the combine but Red, Leo and Ed became my closest friends. Later on, we had more new prisoners move in with us.
    I received a warm welcome especially when they found that I was arriving with a large sack of cigarettes, which I had won in the hospital. Cigarettes were the currency of the camp. You could buy almost anything from other Kriegies, from the "FOODACO" or food exchange, or from the German guards. It was the first week in December when I finally arrived in the Center Compound. I checked the camp records and found that Jack Pry and Ted Snyder were also in the Center Compound but were in two other barracks. They seemed to be settled into prison life in their own combines but Jack seemed to be somewhat depressed. I was told that Cecil Quinley had been sent to the West Compound after he got out of a hospital so I never saw him again until 1989. Jack, Ted and I visited each other occasionally but it was difficult to maintain friendships with people in other barracks, as it took most of your time and energy to maintain a survival routine.
    After several weeks of indoctrination into combine life, I could see that quite a few prisoners were depressed or emotionally disturbed. I learned that they were the people who withdrew into themselves. They spent most of their time bemoaning their fate and dwelling on the miseries of being incarcerated. The Kriegies who seemed to survive with apparently more healthy mental attitudes, on the other hand, accepted the fact that they were in prison. They developed routines to keep their minds occupied and they tried to maintain the best possible physical fitness.
    After the war, I read a book by Viktor Frankel, a psychologist who had been sent to a concentration camp but had survived without being sent to the gas chambers. He made the strong point in his book that survival depended on keeping in the best possible physical condition, having hope, and keeping occupied in some constructive way. He wrote and rewrote his book while he was in prison. Even after the Germans destroyed his book, he rewrote it from memory. He came to the same conclusion that many of us did that survival was almost a full time occupation, which required hope and dedication that could carry you through the war.
    I should note that it was the introspective people who bemoaned their fate and dwelled on their confinement who were the first to develop severe mental problems. The first person in our compound to go completely "off his rocker" was a pilot who had a master's degree in psychology from Stanford University. He got to the point where he would talk with no one and spent his time meditating. One day, he went berserk and tried to climb over the main gate, right in front of the guards. They hauled him off to the "cooler" (solitary confinement cell), and we later found out that he had been judged insane by the German psychiatrist and was expatriated to Switzerland. At least, he got out of prison camp before the rest of us.
    The RAF Kriegies had continuing soccer and rugby games and the Americans played softball. These activities continued into the freezing winter weather and started again as soon as the snow melted in the spring. Those who couldn't play physically strenuous games, walked circuits of the compound for exercise. Some Kriegies practiced on musical instruments provided by the YMCA and we had a Center Compound Symphony Orchestra and a Big Band. There were drama groups that put on plays and some of the RAF guys formed a Shakespeare Company. I will never forget "As You Like It" as performed by English Kriegies using an unexpurgated original script, which was pretty "bawdy." Two of them made unbelievably good "village sluts." Perhaps I appreciated their actions of reaching up under their dresses to scratch their "crabs" more than some of the other Kriegies.
    We had people in camp who were experts in almost any field since, as officers, most of the people in camp were college students or graduates. We had pilots who were professional tailors and could hand tailor costumes for the plays as well as civilian clothes and German uniforms for people trying to escape. We also had a radio genius who could build radios, making condensers from tinfoil on cigarette packages and buying the parts and wire he couldn't make from the German guards for cigarettes. We had one radio in camp that was hidden in the base section of a piano accordion and another in a model airplane hanging over a table in a combine. The Germans had searched the accordion before the radio was installed. When a guard came into the barracks someone was usually playing the accordion and it was never again searched. The Germans watched the model airplane being built and inspected it after it was completed but not after the radio was hidden in it.
    Other people became involved in escape activities, making escape maps, forged identification papers, digging tunnels, etc. Others were involved in learning and we had a "Kriegie Kollege." Would-be students could take courses in a great number of subjects from people with degrees in such subjects as mining engineering, biology, languages or calculus. After I settled into a survival routine, I helped Bruno Berselli, another forester from Oregon State University, write up lesson plans and teach courses in forest management. Students could get a certificate stating that they had completed so many hours of study which we hoped would be accepted by some colleges after the war.
    Bridge playing and poker were other great time fillers. The British, particularly, were excellent bridge players and taught me to play using a British bidding system. There was a chapel in camp and Padre McDonnald, a British chaplain, held services. However, only a small number of Kriegies attended regularly.
Other activities included much handwork, making things, or patching and mending clothes. The only cooking utensils provided by the Germans were a few table knives, forks and spoons and a big, zinc pitcher with a label on it saying "Kein Trinkwasser," which translated meant "not to be used for drinking water." However, we cooked soup in them and we must have absorbed a great quantity of zinc in our systems.
    One of the great items in a Red Cross parcel was the "Klim" powdered milk. We needed the milk for our health and the tin cans provided the raw material for making innumerable items essential to Kriegie life. Everything from pipes and air pumps for escape tunnels, cooking ladles and pots and pans were made from the tins.
    As our combine only had a "Kein Trinkwasser" and a poorly made tin pan to cook in, I decided to become a tinsmith. The best tinsmith in our barracks was an Australian in an RAF combine so I became his apprentice for a while. Then I traded some cigarettes to a German guard for a small shoemaker's hammer and a square bar of steel to bend tin on and I was in business. I learned to make all kinds of utensils and other items out of "Klim" cans. I even helped the Australian make a still, which could be dissembled when not in use so the Germans didn't know what it was. The RAF combine had a barrel next to their garden, which they told the Germans was used for making compost for the garden. They threw in all of the sugar beet roots and peelings, a few prunes and raisins and fermented a sort of wine. We made the still to distill the fermented mash into a sort of pink vodka. The only bottles in camp were medicine bottles so we had everybody save the bottles, which we filled and buried in the gardens.
    Even though my back pain had become tolerable, I couldn't get involved in the soccer or other strenuous sports but I occasionally played softball. My main physical activity was walking "rounds." There was a guard rail about 20 feet from the double-barbed wire fence that encircled the compound. There was a very well-worn path along the guard rail and, at any time after morning "Appel" (roll call) until we were locked in the barracks after dark, there would be a steady stream of prisoners walking whether in rain, snow or freezing weather. I started a routine of walking a minimum of 10 rounds daily unless I was too sick to walk. My days became filled with doing my assigned chores, walking rounds, tinwork, melting the solder off corned beef can lids, teaching forestry, playing bridge or poker, learning a little German, reading, or talking with other people in the barracks. One of my other activities was as part of the security organization. I would do scheduled shifts to keep track of who the Germans were that were going in and out of camp, so the other Kriegies working on escape activities could be warned of their presence. No one was allowed out of the barracks after evening Appel and no one was safe outdoors as the Germans turned loose their Doberman and German Shepherd guard dogs that had been known to take a big chunk out of a Kriegie's leg if they attacked. All-in-all I managed to work out a routine that provided me a full day with no time to dwell on my injuries or my fate of being a prisoner of war.
    I got to know a number of the RAF and RCAF people quite well. There was a South African from Pietermaritzberg, Natal, who was the son of a plantation owner who grew mine props for the gold mines. He had pictures of his father standing next to some Pinus Patula pine trees grown from seed gathered in Mexico. They were only seven years old yet big enough to make a mine prop. We had many enjoyable discussions on forestry in our countries. He was raised by a Zulu nanny and spoke Zulu fluently before he learned to speak English. He used to pass messages over the fence between our compound and the East Compound by speaking in Zulu to another South African over there. It frustrated the Germans as there was no way to understand the Zulu language or to learn it, as it was primarily a lot of clicking noises.
    Peter Whidby, son of the chairman of the Board of Royal Dutch Shell Oil Co., was also in our barracks. His stepmother was a young German woman only about six years older than Peter. She had been stranded in Germany when the war started. She had a lot of pull with Nazi bigwigs in Berlin and used to come to our camp to take Peter out on a pass. He and his stepmother and a German officer would go to a restaurant for dinner. He usually managed to bring back a big basket of food when he was returned to camp.
    Then we had an RAF fighter pilot who had been shooting up trains in northern France. He was hit by flak guns on the train while he was flying only about 50 feet off the ground. His plane caught fire and he couldn't gain enough altitude to bail out so he decided to jump out anyway, rather than to burn to death in the plane. He pulled the canopy and ejected. He had been flying directly over and parallel to one of the famous French hedgerows, which are quite wide, and he landed right on top of it. He bounced and rolled down the hedgerow with the branches and spines tearing off his leather flying suit. He broke both legs and probably didn't have a spot two square inches on his body that wasn't scratched and scarred by the hedgerow. However, he survived bailing out at about 160 mph without a parachute.
    One of the RAF pilots was actually a Pole. He had been at Cambridge studying when Germany invaded Poland so he volunteered for the RAF. He was shot down over Germany but, because he could speak fluent German and managed to steal some civilian clothes, he managed to make it to Poland. There, he stayed with friends until someone turned him in to the Gestapo. They executed his friends for hiding him and sent him to Belsen-Bergen Concentration Camp. He finally convinced the Germans that he was an RAF pilot so they transferred him to Stalag Luft III.
    It was a sad day in our barracks when all of the RAF people were told that they were being transferred to the North Compound and to a camp at Baleria across town. The Center Compound was to become an all-American Compound. It was a very much sadder day when we heard about the escape from the tunnel in the North Compound. This escape was later dramatized and fictionalized as the movie, "The Great Escape," with Steve McQueen playing an American prisoner. Actually, there were no Americans involved in the escape, although a number of Americans helped to dig the tunnel before they were transferred to the South Compound. Fifty of the escapees were rounded up and taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Goerlitz and shot in execution style to convince the rest of the prisoners that it was not safe to try to escape. A number of our old RAF friends were among those shot, including the Pole. Three prisoners did make it to England. One was a Dutchman, who was studying in England when the war started and joined the RAF. I believe the other two were Norwegians who had also volunteered for the RAF. They made it to Danzig on the Baltic Sea and hid aboard a Swedish ship, in a bin of coal being shipped to neutral Sweden. I later met the Dutchman at a Stalag Luft III reunion in 1987. He had come to the states and finished medical school and is now a doctor in Hawaii.
    Speaking of TV and movies, "Hogan's Heroes," although totally wacky, did show, in an exaggerated way, some things we actually did in camp to annoy the guards. One favorite trick was to sneak up behind a guard, while another person talked with him or got his attention, and then pour sand down the barrel of his rifle. When he had to stand inspection after getting off guard duty and had to pull open the bolt, sand would pour out - earning him extra duty. Sometimes, instead of sand, we would drop a lighted cigarette which nicely fit into the gun barrel. After we left the guard, we would see him periodically turn around quickly to see who was smoking a cigarette behind him. It drove him nuts.
    The head guard in our compound was Ober Feldwebel, or Chief Master Sergeant Stranghoner, whom we had nicknamed Popeye. He was an old-time regular military man who was in the Luftwaffe before Hitler came to power. He didn't like the younger Nazis and was always strictly military in how he treated us. He was called "Popeye," because he had been wounded on the Russian front and laid in the snow until some German soldiers rescued him. His eye had frozen and they had to remove it. He was than sent to our camp to be a guard. All of the regular uniformed guards, other than Popeye, were called "Goons" after the sub-human characters in the Popeye comic strip.
    We had other guards who were referred to as "ferrets," who wore coveralls. They crawled under the barracks with pointed steel rods and probed and looked for tunnels. They also listened through knotholes in the floor. They claimed they couldn't speak English but we knew better. When we thought they were listening below a knothole, we would pour hot water down the hole and occasionally scald one.
    There was only one successful escape from the Center Compound and it occurred before I came into camp. Some RAF guys had made a horse to do gymnastics on and had the bottom made out of solid boards with a hollow interior which would hold two people and some excavated dirt. Every day a bunch of Kriegies would haul it out to a spot near the guard or warning rail, where they only had to dig a tunnel about 30 feet to get outside of the barbed wire. They made a board trapdoor that could be covered with sand when they were through digging for the day. When they were digging, some of the prisoners exercised on the horse and, when the tunnelers were through for the day, they would haul it back to be stored next to the "abort" or latrine. When the guards were not looking, the sand was dumped down the abort or scattered along the guard rail, while walking rounds so that the new dirt would be stirred up in the path.
    Three men who spoke German, escaped through the tunnel and made it to Sweden.
    There were a number of other escape attempts made in the Center Compound. We tried tunneling until the Germans installed seismograph machines at the corners of the camp. They would let us continue to dig while they kept track of how the digging progressed. When the tunnel got close to the barbed wire area, they would come into camp and scold us for digging. We'd pretend innocence until they would show us the exact route of the tunnel. They would then poke iron rods down into the ground to make holes so that they could then flood the tunnel with fire hoses and collapse it.
    Some Kriegies tried cutting the barbed wire fences at night between passes of the searchlights. Other Kriegies tried to hide in, or under, supply wagons going out of the main gate. I understand that before I arrived in camp, one Kriegie even tried to hide in a "Honey Wagon" which had just pumped the sewage out of an abort. All of these attempts failed quickly.
    A Kriegie named Shaw, who lived in the combine next to ours, got the idea of jumping from the barracks roof to catch one of the two main power lines coming into camp. So, one stormy night, he made his try. He managed to catch the wire without grounding it and getting electrocuted and then proceeded to go hand over hand towards freedom. Just as he was over the double barbed wire fence, the electric wire broke. He hit the ground and the broken wire grounded out on the barbed wire fence making a great flash and shorting out all of the lights in camp. He was immediately caught and thrown into the “cooler” for 30 days.
    In January, 1944, I came down with a very bad cold as the barracks were very poorly heated by only two small coal stoves. We also had a minimum of winter clothes and blankets. When I began to get chest pains and coughed up blood, they sent me to the hospital in Vorlager. I was then walked across the city of Sagan by two Goons to the main hospital, where I was X-rayed. As we walked back through the city, I noticed a number of workers with French patches on their work clothes. I asked one of the Goons who they were and I was told that a great many Frenchmen volunteered to work in German factories after Germany captured France. They had limited run of the city and, according to the Goons, were good workers who did not try to leave or sabotage the machinery.
    The X-rays showed that I had a bad case of pleurisy and that my lungs were about half filled with fluid. To ease the pain, they taped my chest up so that I could hardly breathe and gave me some of their scarce sulfa pills. It took about two weeks to get over the worst part of the pleurisy, when I had recovered enough that they could return me to the Center Compound with some aspirin and a couple of sulfa pills. While I was back in the hospital, I found out that all of the orderlies were Russian officers. Since Russia had never signed the Geneva Convention, the Germans forced Russian officers to work at manual labor.
    The Russian major on our ward could speak a bit of German and one of our RAF patients could speak fluent German, so we had a three language conversation. We found that he was a major in charge of a tank column, when the Russians made a midwinter push across the frozen Witebsk Marshes in eastern Poland. His only orders were to keep going west and kill as many Germans as possible. His tank column went as far as they could and ran out of fuel. Then they fought until they ran out of ammunition. He was wounded and unconscious when captured and his biggest worry was that when the war was over, the Russians would execute him as a traitor for not fighting until he was killed.
    One of the German officers in charge of our camp was Hauptmann (Captain) Schultz. I learned, while talking with him in the Vorlager hospital, that before the war, his family owned the largest chocolate company in Germany. They even had a branch in New York and Schultz used to go there on business frequently. He spoke perfect English. Because his family didn't protest the Nazis taking over the business, the Nazis gave him a direct commission as a Hauptmann in the Luftwaffe. He had many friends who were high-ranking in Berlin headquarters. He still had quite a bit of money and a hand tailored uniform and a beautiful, split leather, horsehide trench coat. He was a real "dandy," and took frequent trips to Berlin for the weekend.
    The British had started heavy night bombing in the Berlin area and when I was in the hospital with pleurisy, Schultz came back from a weekend in Berlin, a bundle of nerves and a total wreck. At first, all that he would say was "It was awful, it was awful." The doctors gave him a sedative and he stayed in the hospital for two days. He then told us about his trip to Berlin. He had been in bed with a girl friend in his Berlin apartment when the air raid sirens had started wailing. As he had just started some sexual activity, he didn't want to get up and dress and go to an air raid shelter. He said that as he was about to have an orgasm. a large bomb landed just outside of his window and blew him and his girlfriend clear out of bed and they bounced off the wall. They managed to crawl their way out of the building and onto the street. There by the light of the fires that had started, they suddenly realized that in their hurry to escape the falling debris, they had reached the street in a totally naked condition. They finally made it to an air raid shelter, where the embarrassed pair were given some blankets. In the morning, he managed to salvage his uniform from the apartment and he headed back to camp.
    After I got back to my combine in the Center Compound, I settled back into my survival routine and don't remember much worth writing about except for unusual incidents or happenings.
When spring came, the YMCA gave us some vegetable seeds to plant a garden so Red, Leo and I spent time digging up some stumps and preparing a garden plot under our window. It was terrible soil -almost pure sand and it was difficult to raise much except carrots, beets and rutabagas. To water the garden, we had to haul buckets of water from the compound fire pit or sump in the middle of the compound. However, it was worth it for the few fresh vegetables we did produce.
    Leo's hair started falling out and it worried him greatly. I offered to shave his head - I forgot to mention that I also became the combine barber - having heard that baldness was caused by poor circulation. We decided that if I could massage his scalp, it would improve circulation. Every few days I would massage his head and, since the only oil we had was the lousy German margarine, we used his margarine ration for his massage. One of the Kriegies in our barracks nicknamed him "Skull" and it stuck while we were at Stalag Luft III. His hair actually stopped falling out and when I last saw him in 1989, he still seemed to have about the same amount of hair, so I guess the treatment worked.
    The Germans delivered our Red Cross parcels somewhat sporadically. But when they were delivered regularly, we had enough food to stabilize our weight after losing considerable poundage. When the Germans had been particularly slow about giving us our Red Cross parcels, we got hungry enough to go on strike and refused to come out of the barracks for Appel. The Germans wouldn't budge on our demand and called in some troops with two machine guns which they set up in the center of the compound. They demanded that we come out of the barracks immediately or they would shoot. We again refused to come out and a machine gun proceeded to shoot a long row of holes through the side of the barracks. Luckily no one was hit, but they got results as we came boiling out of the barracks. They kept us lined up for hours as punishment but a few days later we again started to get our Red Cross parcels on a regular basis.
    In his book, "POW ODYSSEY," Col. Spivey said that he felt that we had received "adequate" food at Stalag Luft III. Perhaps he felt that way because he bunked in a separate barracks with the rest of the colonels and with General Vandaman when he showed up in camp. The personnel in the cookhouse made sure that they got a good supply of our ration of German soup and vegetables and they also got more Red Cross parcels. Col. Spivey was undoubtedly unaware that he was given a little preferential treatment. No one complained, as we thought he deserved it.
    Our "Combine" system of living, which was communistic in that everyone shared equally, probably worked successfully because it was the only way that we could survive on such short food rations. I should mention that there were almost no cases of stealing in camp. The only case that I can remember is that of a bombardier who had gone a bit weird or mentally unstable.
    I did notice that the few times that we had an adequate supply of Red Cross parcels, people tended to become more possessive about personal belongings and food. I guess that communism only works well when people are uniformly living in poverty.
    Another situation occurred which I remember well. We had received a set of dueling sabers along with fencing masks from the YMCA in a shipment of athletic equipment. Red Cramer and I took up dueling for exercise and had fun, even though we weren't too proficient at it. One day a Luftwaffe headquarters inspection team came into our compound for a surprise inspection and, when they saw Red and I dueling, they came over closer to watch and asked us to continue dueling. Finally, one colonel with a long scar on his cheek asked Red to give him his saber so that he could demonstrate some moves on me. I had visions of being cut to pieces as I figured that he must have gotten the scar from dueling at the famous dueling school at Heidelberg, so I politely declined. He ended up demonstrating some moves without having a target.
    One day, a number of women were seen starting to dig a ditch outside of our barbed wire fence. One of our Kriegies, who spoke Polish, found out that they were Polish women from a concentration camp, who were put into a labor battalion. We noticed that when they had to go to the bathroom, the guards made them squat on the edge of the trench and that they seemed to have difficulty urinating. They told our Polish speaking Kriegie that before they were sent out from the concentration camp, they had been sterilized with a red hot steel poker. The resulting scar tissue not only prohibited sexual activity, but also caused difficulty in urinating.
    According to the Geneva Convention, the Germans were supposed to give us the pay of German officers of equivalent rank in the Luftwaffe. However, they never paid us any money. They kept it in a fund that was supposed to be used to buy things for the camp. However, they used the fund to pay for the repair of any damage caused by Kriegies. It took a great portion of the fund to pay for the cost of repairing the damage caused by our tunneling activities. However, at times Col. Spivey could get them to buy extra food and supplies such as toilet paper.
    Sometimes, he was able to buy some cigarettes from the Germans. They were a brand named "Elegans," made in France. They were anything but elegant as they seemed to be made from the floor sweepings of the cigarette factory. They contained pieces of the leaf veins, splinters of tobacco stalks and dust. They tasted so bad that the German guards refused to take them when we tried to barter them away.
    As Christmas 1944 approached, Col. Spivey convinced the German Kommandant to sell us some nonalcoholic beer so that we could have some Christmas cheer. Unbeknownst to the Germans, we had been distilling alcohol for some time and storing it in many small medicine bottles, which were hidden and buried in our gardens.
    After the Germans delivered the kegs of "Ersatz" beer to our compound, they were tapped and we filled our "Kein Trinkwassers." Then the medicine bottles of alcohol were poured into the beer. Many of the Kriegies got a bit drunk and staggered around camp even after they were supposed to be lining up for evening Appel. The Goons and Kommandant about went out of their minds and, at first, thought that the wrong kind of beer had been delivered to us. They ended up being pretty tolerant of the drunks but never did find out how we managed to get the alcohol.
    The weather turned cold and we had the typical wet snowstorms which turned to slush about two to three inches deep. It would freeze at night and get up to about 34-38 degrees during the day, so that the slush stayed on the ground almost all winter. We also had a cold, damp wind coming down across the Baltic Sea from the north.
    We finally got a shipment of winter clothes and I managed to get an English army "great coat." or overcoat, which was pretty warm. However, I still had the problem of army boots with holes in them which I patched with cardboard innersoles. It was impossible to keep my feet dry for long when I was walking in the slush. A number of other Kriegies and I were on the list for new boots when a new shipment arrived.
    In January of 1945, the Russians started a big advance through Poland. We kept track of their progress by getting the BBC news on our clandestine radio sets and marking the progress of the Russians on a map that we had obtained earlier from the Germans. They had no problem with our tacking our map on the cookhouse wall and even the Goons used to stop and look at the movement of the advancing Russians.
    By mid-January, we could hear faint cannon fire off to the East and we knew that the Russians were getting closer. The sound would seem to get a little closer every day or so and we began to feel that we could soon be liberated by the Russians. Such was not to be.
    The sounds of battle came closer and closer until they could be heard quite plainly. If we were to be liberated, I wanted to have something to carry my personal belongings in so I started sewing up a shirt to make a pack sack by sewing the sleeves to the back of the shirt. I then sewed up the front of the shirt a ways and folded the bottom of the shirt and sewed it up to finish the pack sack.
On January 27, 1945, it snowed hard most of the day and by evening, we had about eight inches of new snow on top of the three inches of slush. At about 9:15 that evening, a Goon opened the barracks door and asked our barracks commander to go with him to Col. Spivey's barracks. About 15 minutes later, he returned and told us to start packing as we were going to be marched out of the camp, then move south and west so that the Russians couldn't liberate us.
    Red Cramer and I decided that we would stick together, so while he started to pack our gear, I tore apart our bunk bed, and using the bed boards, nails and the rope from British Red Cross parcels, I built a sled. Red made bedrolls of our blankets and had packed our share of the combine food, utensils, knives, forks and spoons. He even scrounged some toilet paper. I put my hammer and steel bar, along with my other clothes and the sack of about 100 packs of cigarettes, in the pack sack. We were ready to go. However, I was concerned that I hadn't been able to get my new boots so I made some extra cardboard innersoles while we waited.
    No one could sleep, waiting for word to leave. At that time, there of were over 11,000 prisoners in Stalag Luft III so it would take quite a while to empty the camp. Finally, we were told that the North and West Compounds had left and that the South and East Compounds would be leaving next. At about 3 a.m., we were called to leave the barracks and line up for the march. It was bitterly cold with a strong wind and light snow still falling.
    Popeye had opened up the Red Cross parcel warehouse and we were told that we could take anything we wanted. I had taken the burlap mattress off my bunk and emptied the straw so we had a big sack for the sled. Red and I loaded up with what we could carry by taking only the best stuff out of the parcels. We took mostly "D" bar chocolate, raisins, prunes, spam, cheese, cigarettes and crackers. We took all that we thought we could pull on the sled. General Vandaman and Popeye, our Ober Feldwebel, led us out of the gate on a venture into the unknown. Our barracks was one of the first out of the gate so we were close to the head of the column. Everyone seemed happy about leaving the relative security of our Stalag home butwe all wondered where we were going and how it would all end up.
    Note: Col. Spivey wrote a very good description of the first days of our march in his book, "P.O.W. Odyssey," so I will only describe how Red and I managed.
    Although there was about a foot of snow on the road, the men in the compounds who marched ahead of us had stamped a trail so it was probably easier for us than it had been for them. We marched all day with short breaks to eat some chocolate or smoke a cigarette. My feet had become wet after a short distance and finally they became numb.
    After dark, at about 6 p.m., we finally reached the town of Halbau and Popeye went to look for a place for us to spend the night. We had been standing in the snow for an hour waiting, when he finally returned and said that we were going to stay in a church. It was heated and felt great. All 2,000 of us packed into the church and Red and I carried our sled in and found a small spot on the floor of a raised lectern or pulpit. It had just enough room for us and the sled if we slept sitting up. I took my shoes off to dry and saw that my feet were a very pale, white color and they were still numb.
    In the morning, my feet ached fiercely and woke me early so I knew for sure that they had been frozen. After eating some chocolate and raisins, we left the church and formed our column. We marched all day with an hour break for lunch and then finally stopped at a farm with two tremendous barns. They had lots of hay to burrow into and keep warm. During the day my feet had again become numb, so I knew that they were again frozen.
    The farm was owned by a German Count and he had a lot of Polish women working there. He had them hauling hot water for us to make coffee and we settled in for the night. In the morning, we were told that we would be able to stay another day to rest up and I spent most of the day sleeping and bathing my feet. I finally got our first aid man to treat and bandage them. Some of the Kriegies had our Polish speaking Kriegie proposition one of the Polish girls, offering one square of a "D" bar of chocolate. Soon, she and quite a number of other girls were running a business and had long lines of customers waiting their turn. Unfortunately, my feet hurt so badly that I didn't feel much like participating.
    On January 31, we got up early and headed down the road. By dark, we arrived at the city of Muskau, about 50 kilometers from the barn that we had left that morning. We were put up in a pottery factory and we slept between rows of big pots and urns. The building was nice and warm because the kilns were still operating and we found that by putting a small pot of water on the chimney of a kiln, we could heat water for coffee. We remained at the pottery factory for three days while the Germans were trying to find a place for us to go.
    Unfortunately, my feet started to turn somewhat black and the skin started to peel off in chunks. When we left on the morning of February 4, my feet were quite raw. However, with my feet bandaged, we marched all day. The weather turned warmer and the snow melted and became about six inches of slush. Finally we got to where the pavement was getting pretty bare and it became difficult to pull the sled. We crossed the river Neisse, at the town of Neissebrucke, and, at about dark, stopped at a farm to spend the night near the town of Graustein.
    In the morning, we were told that we were to march to Spremberg and be put on a train. Red and I could see that the sled would be useless on the pavement, so we packed as much food as possible into our pack sacks and in the pockets of our greatcoats. We arrived at the city of Spremberg at about noon and the Germans had a big pot of soup waiting for us. In our march from Sagan to Spremberg, we had covered a total of 87 kilometers, about 55 miles. We were finally loaded into the infamous "40 and 8" boxcars, and again we were a sure that Germans couldn't count because we ended up packed in like sardines in a can. We didn't know where we were going but one guard said that we were going to Nuremburg, whil