Then I heard popping and looked on the ground and I could see it looked like a hundred people on the ground shooting at us! I heard the bullets, maybe two or three went through the canopy. I cut that piece out to take it home but somebody on the ship coming home stole it on me. I was not hit.
We were dropping down and I looked down there was a sharp-peaked house coming up right in front of me. I moved over a little bit with the shroud line.[27] Down along side of the house, there’s a little cavity in the ground, like some kind of excavation, I would say maybe three feet deep. I landed right in there and, of course, it cut the wind so my chute collapsed there and didn’t have to be dragged along or anything.
I see the emblem on their hats and uniform that they’re Russians so I started yelling. My mother and father come from Krakow, Poland back in 1911, so as we were growing up we had to learn Polish because that’s the only way we spoke. So, I knew enough of Polish to say, ‘I beg you do not shoot, I am an American.’ I said, ‘I have some papers, easy, easy!’ [Speaks in Polish]
I reached in. We had these papers. They were small—you fold it, you take them out and open it, it’s a big poster. It had a picture of Stalin and a picture of Roosevelt on it and underneath them is says ‘Komrades’ then it had a lot of Russian writing underneath it saying that we’re American and all of that.
A couple of Russians started saying ‘Americans, Americans!’ Then a big black ‘Cadillac’ lookalike limo came along had three officers in it. I could see that they were high-ranking officers and they were told we’re Americans. One reached down, took my hand and pulled me up out of there. That was the first time I had a sigh of relief.
They found Wallace almost immediately. I told the Russians that the guys falling out of the sky, they’re all Americans. So, they sent word around to make sure that they’re alright. They were able to find my navigator. His body was burned up but they found he was all in one piece.
Chapman collapsed his chute then free-fell and then opened it up again. When he hit the ground, they put him in a truck and some Russian on a horse came up to him with a pistol and put it to his head and pulled the trigger three times, but the gun wouldn’t go off. Then the truck pulled away; he could see the guy working on his pistol. He finally fixed it but the truck was too far away so he didn’t chase it.
So, Wallace and I and Twyford, they brought us to this building. They had some interrogators there. They asked me first; I told them I spoke some Polish. They brought a woman over to act as an interpreter but I couldn’t understand her and she couldn’t understand me. They then brought in a fella by the name of Walter. He was a big gangly guy and the type of guy that you see that you like him. We spoke to each other just like talking to my mother or father. He told the Russians that he knows what he is seeing.
They asked through the interpreter what were we bombing. Of course, generally you don’t give information to the enemies except the name and serial number. But in this case, the newspapers would be blasting that, I think it was, 2000 planes would hit Berlin that day in an all-out effort.
I told him we were bombing Berlin. He said, ‘Good, good. How many planes?’ Again, I knew the newspapers would give the amount of planes. I said, ‘2000.’ They were pleased with that. He said, ‘How come didn’t you shoot us down when the Russians were strafing you?’ I didn’t tell him all our guns were all knocked out and that we couldn’t shoot any of the guns. I said, ‘We knew you were Russians so we didn’t want to shoot back.’ I had to lie a little bit.
Then they brought out a bottle of some kind of white liquor. He said, ‘Have a drink.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I need one.’ So, they gave me a little shot. Then some woman there said to put some water in it. The Russian said, ‘No, he can drink it.’ I drank it and boy was it strong. It went down and I felt better after I warmed up. The waist gunner went down to his knees almost.
The put us up, and the next day got the rest of the crew together. There were two more missing but we were going to meet them at the end of the day.
They said we were going to bury the navigator. They found him and they found my log. I was hoping that they’d give it to me. It was partially burnt but you could still read it.
They picked us up in two trucks. One of these flat bottom trucks with green cloth or something over the bottom had a casket on the front. There were two Russians in the front and two in the back with rifles riding with it. The other truck had three seat benches. We sat on that and rode backwards.
We went up to a cemetery in Landsberg and they had a ceremony there. They said something in Russian. They asked me through my interpreter if one of us wanted to say something. I told Chapman they wanted to know if anyone wanted to say last few words. Chapman said, ‘Yeah, I would.’ He gave a nice talk about being Van Tress being a good navigator. He had been just married for one month, he married an English girl. He was a wonderful man, not only a great navigator.
He ended up having a great big tombstone there. They came to see me and asked me what I wanted on it. I put ‘Harold B. Van Tress, born 1923/Killed in action today March 18th, 1945/bombing mission Berlin’—they had that all inscribed overnight, they had it on there. That was a big stone that stood up there at least four or five feet. I asked the girl taking the photograph of everything if she would send me or give me a photograph. She said she’d try, but I never got it.
‘Crazy Amerikanski’
We stayed there in Landsberg for a couple of days. Then we went to [Posen]. From there, we were taken to Lublin, Poland. That was a pretty good size city. The Russians came in and told us at 9:00 there is a curfew—nobody on the streets. They said, ‘If you listen tonight you will hear the Russians holler ‘[speaks Russian]’ which means ‘halt’, and you hear a shot. The next day looking out your window, you can see a funeral going by.’ He says, ‘We’re not fooling’.
We said okay. Chappy and I walked around and found a nice English pub. It was a nice clean place run by a husband and his wife and they had a young daughter about eighteen—a beautiful girl. She’s kind of the receptionist. She met everybody at the door. We went in and had a few vodkas. The next night we went down again but this time, we overstayed. It was 10:00 before we came out. I said, ‘Oh boy, Chappy, this is going to be a lulu.’ We were walking up the street; he was a little bit pie-eyed. We kind of leaned on each other and then heard a son-of-a-gun Russian holler, ‘HALT!’ Chappy hollered, ‘Halt your butt,’ but he didn’t use ‘butt’, he used the other word. I was just waiting to feel the bullet go through my chest. I was just wondering how it was going to feel.
Two Russians come up and said, ‘Crazy Amerikanski’ and they helped us up to the hotel. So, every night they’d meet us down there, they knew we were coming out, and escort us back.
*
I went to church on Palm Sunday. Over in Poland they have what they call a continuous mass. It starts from twelve midnight Sunday morning to twelve midnight Sunday night. There were no Saturday masses then. Anytime you walk into the church, whatever part of the mass going on, when that part came up again, you walk out.
There were people going in and out all the time. It was full. I went in. I don’t remember if any of the other crew were Catholic or not. I took, I think, 20,000 of those zlotys [I got on the black market for my watch] and a bearded priest came in. He had a nice big beard on him. He was slowly passing down and you could see people giving a bill or some coins to him. He comes to me and I chuck 20,000 of them in there. He bowed three times to me and took off. I never saw him again.
I stepped out of the church that day and two guys came up to me. One talked English pretty well—very well. I said, ‘Where did you learn English?’ He said that he was a professor at the Lublin University and he said that I’d like to talk to you sometime. He invited me to come down to his house the next day for dinner. It wasn’t too far from the hotel we were living in.
They sent a guy to take care of us and I asked him for some food because I was having dinner with this Polish family. I sa
id I would sure like to get some food I could give them because food is scarce to them, and I didn’t want to go down there and eat their supplies. He gave me a lot of K-rations and a chicken that was still frozen, cans of different vegetables. So, I went down and gave it all to them. You would think I gave him a million dollars!
We had a nice visit and he asked me if I would take a letter for him and smuggle it back to the country, the Russians wouldn’t let him mail it out. As a matter of fact, while I was walking the streets of Lublin, I must have got about eight letters from people who begged me to send to their relatives in the States. So, I took them all.
A couple of incidents happened while we were there in that hotel. The hotel was just a bombed out half building and we had a nice woman come in everyday to straighten our beds, which were just two planks with hay on them. She would straighten up the hay and fold the parachute on them [that we were still using as a bedroll].
Eventually, I cut off a little piece of the shroud lines and I pulled all these threads out of it—very fine threads just like you sew clothes with, and I said, ‘You can’t break it. It would be good for sewing. You take this parachute too’. She brought me something to cover myself that night and she took and hid everything I gave her so the Russians didn’t see her taking it from there. I hope she finally got it out of there.
Another time we were in the room and in comes three Russians. You could see they were a little bit looped; I guess they wanted to fight. One came up to me and said, ‘Me boxer’. I said, ‘Me, football player.’ He went to the next guy. Then he went over to Chapman. I looked at Chapman. He was a little Southern boy and I could see he’s not going to take it. So, I told Yarcusko [the bombardier] to get ready. This Russian hits Chapman on the chest and Chapman hauled off and belted him one. I belted one and somebody else grabbed the other one. So, there we were fighting, and somebody fired a pistol. Some big shots came in—big officers, high ranking. We all stopped when the shot went off. My interpreter came in and asked me what happened. I told him that we were resting and relaxing here and these guys busted in and they wanted to fight.
Well, they threw them out of the place. I don’t mean pushed them. They threw them out! One gave me a Russian pistol and he said, ‘The next time somebody comes in to bother you, don’t talk to them, don’t answer them, don’t ask them questions— just shoot them. Don’t drag them out in the hallway, throw them out the window and we’ll pick them up. So they left and I took the bullets out of the gun and said, ‘Don’t fool around, boys.’ The next day they came and took the pistol away from me.
*
We weren’t prisoners. Though we were kept in confinement by the Russians, we had quite a bit of liberty. Whenever we pick up a Russian girl to take her to her house to talk with her, they would pick up the girl the next day. The KGB, they would question her and tell her we were spies. But, none of them believed it.
One time, they came in and said, ‘We can’t ask you officers to do manual labor’—I guess the rules of the Geneva Convention the enlisted men were going to work today. I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘Shovel some fill onto the truck.’ I said, ‘I’ll go with them’. [The Russian] said, ‘No, you’re an officer.’ I said, ‘I want to go with my men.’ He said, ‘OK.’
So I went with them and I took a shovel and helped them fill up a big truck; there were two trucks to load up. So, they’re going down to [deliver] the first load and I said, ‘Can I go with you?’ He said, ‘Sure’; it was into a prison. They dumped the load there. I went in where all the prisoners were; I had never seen anything so sad in my life. I see one guy there with nothing but bones sticking out of his face. You could count his ribs so easy and his face was nothing but bones sticking out. His eyes looked at me and here I am fat as a hog, and smoking a cigarette.
I see he is looking at me. I took a cigarette and walked over to him. The guards said, ‘No, no’, but I said, ‘The hell with you, you’re not going to shoot me.’ I see some of the others looking around. I had about twelve cigarettes left. I broke them in two into twenty-four and gave everybody a half cigarette. There was no filter so they could smoke either end.
‘We’re Going To Crash!’
It was a lot of fun. I wanted to go to Krakow but they had no way of transporting me there. I knew that I had relatives all over the area.
They finally flew us from there to Poltava up in the Ukraine over Russia. We were trying to take off. I was on a grass field—just a meadow. They had a jeep loaded on there already and all of us went on. I sat in the seat just behind the steering wheel. They started going on the grass and all of a sudden hit a hole. They pulled it out and tried again; it hit [another crater]. I said, ‘Holy cow!’ Finally, they took us off and sent us down a few miles away where they had a cement runway—a hard top runway. They had heavy screens over the thing. When we got there, they loaded us on the plane and flew us to Poltava.
We finally found a plane there over in Poltava that was in good shape except the landing gear was pretty badly mangled. We found another landing gear on one of the other planes there that was in pretty good shape and, with Russian help, we jacked the plane up got the thing off and put the other one on. We worked on the engines—whatever we knew about it. We never had any experience with them. What had happened a year or so before was that there were these ‘shuttle missions’—they take off in England and bomb Germany, then Poland and over to Russia. The next day they take off loaded with bombs again, hit the southern part of Germany, and land in Italy. The third day, they fly from Italy, bomb Germany again and then land back at the base. They called it a shuttle run—three runs. You’d get three missions in three days.[28]
They had seventy-five of these planes come in. They lined them up in two rows. The Germans came in and demolished all of the planes. Never took off again; that’s where we got our landing gear and stuff. Each plane had a small generator on it because you don’t have any electricity in the plane until at least one engine is going. So, we start them up to give us power while checking the position that we were flying. When we got that all done, the Russians took all seventy five auxiliary engines—they called it—and put them all in the bomb bay—all seventy five of them! Then they said, ‘We’ve got sixteen more men we want you to haul out of here.’ There’s eight of us left, so there would be twenty-four men.
We went up to test op [our rebuilt plane]—Chapman, Wallace—the two pilots and myself acting as the engineer. I knelt between the pilot and co-pilot. It was one of these steel mat runways—you could hear that rippling noise as you go over them. Usually, you should get over 100 miles, 115 miles, 110 miles an hour before you like to take the plane off. I watched the speedometer. I leaned. Both of their heads are close by me. I hollered, ‘You’re doing 60, 65’ but when I got around 80, it didn’t climb very high. ‘Eighty-four, eighty-five!’ Oh boy, I looked up and we were at the point of no return, and gone too far. When I got up around 88, 89, Chappy pulled back on the plane and said, ‘We’re going to crash!’ The plane took off and he quickly folded his landing gear. That worked, thank God. We started going down again and just before we hit the ground she picked up enough speed and kept going—success!
We landed right away. They gave us heck. They thought we just taxied down the runway to turn off, but here we are going full speed. So, we told them, ‘We’ve got to do some more work on those engines.’ We have to take all those auxiliary engines out of the bomb bay and the other men—we can’t take off with 16 more of them—they’ve got to wait for somebody else to come in. So, they fixed the plane up and they said, ‘Okay take off this time, and don’t come back.’
All the guys assembled there. Something told me this time when we got on that plane, we’re going to be searched. As soon as I got to my navigation position up there on the flight deck, I opened a big huge fuse box about that wide and about that high [makes gesture with hands] with all the fuses in there. I opened it up. It had two screws on top and one on the bottom. I took the bottom one off and lo
osened up the others and removed it and put the letters in it and put the screw back in quickly.
I went to my position and then they came on and said, ‘Everyone out.’ We had to go all out of the plane. They took about four men and they went in and searched that plane from one end to the other. So, I kind of held my breath. Then they said, ‘Alright, get on, close that door and don’t come back.’ They said, ‘You’re going to Bari, Italy.’ He gave us the elevation of the flight at ten thousand feet and gave us the wind. I forgot how many knots it was and the direction the wind was coming in. Like anybody flying an airplane, you’ve got a heading and if the wind is coming [a certain direction] and you want to go there, you better go this way so the wind would blow you on the right track.
So, I told them, ‘One minute, when I go up in the air at ten thousand feet, I am going to take three different headings. I’ll only be a minute—a minute or so on each one’. He said, ‘What are you want to do that for?’ I said, ‘I want to get my own wind and the knots.’ He said, ‘We gave you winds.’ I said, ‘That’s alright, I want to get my own.’ He said, ‘Alright.’ So, I took a heading so and so and I told Chapman to take another thirty, forty feet the other way and then the third way. Each time, I marked our heading and how much drift we were making. I put all this on the E6B computer. We carried a small computer. I set them all on there. I could turn the dials and show you exactly what degree the wind was coming from, the exact knots up to half a knot. I think it was five knots an hour. Anyway, I put the wind on the E6B after I erased it and put my heading on there and applied the wind. I put the course on there. The exact course I wanted to make. I put the heading on and it showed me how much correction to make into the wind. I put that all down and we took off. They told us if we get one mile off course, we’ve got to shoot you down.
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