The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion
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THE THINGS
OUR
FATHERS SAW
Volume III:
The UNTOLD STORIES OF THE
WORLD WAR II GENERATION
FROM HOMETOWN, USA
WAR IN THE AIR:
COMBAT, Captivity, And Reunion
Matthew A. Rozell
Woodchuck Hollow Press
Hartford · New York
Copyright © 2017 by Matthew A. Rozell. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Grateful acknowledgement is made for various short quotations credited to other previously published sources. Please see author notes.
Information at woodchuckhollowpress@gmail.com.
Front Cover: B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 398th Bombardment Group fly a bombing run to Neumunster, Germany, on April 13, 1945. Credit: Public Domain, U.S. Air Force photograph.
Additional photographs and descriptions sourced at Wikimedia Commons within terms of use, unless otherwise noted.
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rozell, Matthew A., 1961-
Title: The things our fathers saw : war in the air, combat, captivity, and reunion : the untold stories of the World War II generation from hometown, USA / Matthew A. Rozell.
Description: Hartford, NY : Woodchuck Hollow Press, 2017. | Series: The things our fathers saw, vol. 3.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-9964800-6-2 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States. Army Air Forces. Air Force, 8th--History--World War, 1939-1945. | United States. Army Air Forces--Airmen--Biography. | World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American. | Bombing, Aerial--History--20th century. | Military history, Modern--20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Veterans. | HISTORY / Military / World War II. | HISTORY / Military / Aviation.
www.matthewrozell.com
www.teachinghistorymatters.com
Created in the United States of America
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW III
WAR IN THE AIR―BOOK TWO
COMBAT, CAPTIVITY, AND REUNION
For the mothers who saw their children off to war,
And for those who keep the memory alive.
How can I be a hero? I was lucky to get out.
― Charlie Corea, PoW, Stalag 17
Dying for freedom isn’t the worst that could happen.
Being forgotten is.
― Susie Stephens-Harvey, reflecting on her brother,
Stephen J. Geist
MIA 9-26-1967
I think we shall never see the likes of it again.
― Andy Doty, B-29 Tail Gunner
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW III
WAR IN THE AIR―BOOK TWO
The Storytellers (in order of appearance):
Clarence Dart
John G. Weeks
Richard J. Faulkner
George T. FitzGibbon
Charles P. Corea
Earl M. Morrow
Sam Lisica
Jerome Silverman
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW III
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
The Tuskegee Airman
‘A Tough Time’
Real Airplanes
Tuskegee
To North Africa and Italy
Combat
Life between Missions
‘You’ll go with the bombers’
Berlin
The Reconnaissance Man
Overseas
Flying High
The Last Mission
War’s End
The Evadee
The Farmer
The French Underground
Leaving Paris
The P-38 Pilot
Combat
Captured
Marched Out
Liberation
The First Engineer
‘Colorblind as a Bat’
Going Overseas
The Fifth Mission
‘They just devastated us’
‘That's not Holland, buddy’
The Operation
Stalag 17
The End of the War
B-17 PoW Reunion
Together Again
Missions
Shot Down
On the Ground
Prisoners of War
The March
Liberation
‘Thank God every day’
About this Book/
Acknowledgements
NOTES
B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 398th Bombardment Group fly a bombing run to Neumunster, Germany, on April 13, 1945.
Credit: Public Domain, U.S. Air Force photograph.
Author’s Note
The rooftop of a hundred-year old valley farmhouse holds special delights as a midsummer’s twilight approaches. I go out to sit back on the porch roof, watching the wind surf through the cornrows, the river flowing quietly in the background, maybe tapping my pack and lighting a cigarette before thinking about the day’s events. Supper has ended, and the sun begins to quicken its march towards the horizon. And then I think I hear it. Far off in the background, a lone drone is steadily growing louder, creeping ever closer, steadier and steadier, like the slow but deliberate advancement of the shadows across the valley panorama. And suddenly she is here, almost treetop level overhead, her four engines roaring as she passes slowly, confidently, right over the top of me with a magnificence so bold I reach up as if to touch her underbelly overhead with my fingertips. An unrehearsed and authentic joy springs up from deep within me, for I have just witnessed something that future generations will never be able to even imagine, this lone sentinel gliding across the sky, the sudden manifestation of American air power and guardian of the memory of a past generation of Americans who once saved the world as the ‘masters of the air’. My eyes locked upon her until she was nothing more than a speck in the sky.
I knew I would never forget that sound. Years later, three hundred miles away from the college town airfield in western New York where my rooftop reverie was broken, I heard it again from inside of my classroom on a spring afternoon. I instantly knew just from that approaching low drone that it was my old Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. I dropped the chalk and hurried away from the lesson, signaling to the kids to ‘Follow me!’ outside the schoolhouse doors. I’m sure they thought I was nuts, but I was just in time to look up and see that old girl once again disappearing over the treetops as she flew in for an exhibition at the local county airport.
I made my way out to the airport on Saturday morning to see my college town B-17. I had not seen her for years since returning back to the hometown that raised me, but I knew I would find a special person out on the tarmac—my old friend Earl. There he was, smiling, his cap embroidered with the emblem ‘B-17 Pilot- WWII’, arms folded for the photographer.
Earl M. Morrow, 2000, Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport.
Credit: Rob Barendse for the Glens Falls Post-Star.
For years I had been collecting World War II narratives with my history students, and it had gotten newspaper attention. So he called me up—‘I just had to call you, and ask—why are you doing this? Why are you interested in our stories?’ Earl Morrow came into my classroom over the years, and I visited with him at his home in upstate New York, close by the communities that were dubbed as ‘Hometown, USA’
during the war. He introduced me to his Army Air Force friends, and I had great conversations with them all.
Earl held court on the tarmac that weekend, even going up again in the B-17 he once commanded over the skies in Europe, the aircraft he brought in ‘on a wing and a prayer’ over the White Cliffs of Dover, the plane that he and the survivors of his crew were forced to bail out of before she exploded in the leaden November skies over Nazi Germany. Little did he know he would soon share quarters with over 100,000 other prisoners of war of the Nazi regime, but also go on to reunite decades later with the men he was imprisoned with right back in this community not far from the waterfalls on the Hudson River in upstate New York.
*
In this and the upcoming books in The Things Our Fathers Saw series, we visit with more of the people who were forged and tempered in the tough times of the Great Depression and went on to ‘do their bit’ when even rougher times came calling. For those of you who may not be familiar with the background, most of these people either hailed from, later settled near, or otherwise have a connection to the ‘Hometown USA’ community where I grew up and taught for over 30 years.
It’s always been my philosophy that history is best understood when it is related by those who were actually there on the front lines. I was lucky enough to recognize this early in my career as a public high school history teacher, which began at a time when America was waking up and beginning to notice the deeds of the men and women who had saved the world only a generation before. Many of these men and women had never spoken of their experiences before, but on some instinctual level I sensed they were ready to talk, and more importantly, ready to share their experiences with our young people who were about to go out into the world themselves. So we began, slowly at first, to seek them out and invite them into the classroom. We taped our conversations and later wrote them out. I began to teach and write more intensely on the subject, and taught my students the value of communication with their elders. As time went on, my kids and I fanned out into our community on a greater scale; just 50 years before (at the height of World War II) it had been the subject of LOOK Magazine’s multi-issue photographic profile of life on the home front appropriately titled, ‘Hometown, USA’.
After nearly three decades of teaching, I finally set out to keep the promise I had made to my students to write about the people that we had met and interviewed. My first book, The Things Our Fathers Saw: The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA-Voices of the Pacific Theater was well received and inspired me to continue with the series. In the second book in the series, we headed to the skies over Europe in The Things Our Fathers Saw: The War in the Air. Several additional volumes are planned, including the war in North Africa and Italy, the D-Day invasion of Fortress Europe, and the piercing of the Third Reich itself to the end of the war in Europe. This book picks up where ‘The War in the Air’ left off, with additional interviews about the air war over Europe that I could not include in Book One. So that it is not necessary to read the books in order, the background chapter on ‘Air Power’ from that book is re-presented in Chapter 1.
*
As I also noted in Book One, as the writer/historian you spend days if not weeks with each individual in your book, researching their stories, getting under their skin. In composing their stories in their own words, you feel like you are giving them new life that places readers at the kitchen table with that person who had something important to say. The reader shares the intimate moments with them as he/she gets absorbed in a real story being told. As an interviewer this happened many times to me directly with our World War II veterans, in living rooms, kitchens and dining rooms all over ‘Hometown USA’, in the classroom, and at reunion ‘hospitality rooms’ and hotel breakfast tables across America. As a history teacher I also turned loose a generation of young people to bond with their grandparents’ generation in the same way. We gave all of our first-person interviews to research institutions so that they might not be lost. The New York State Military Museum was the primary beneficiary, with over a hundred interviews deposited for future generations to learn from. As one of the most active contributors to the program, I also leaned on them for video recordings of some of the interviews I edited for this book. My friends Wayne Clarke and Mike Russert, the workhorses of the NYS Veterans Oral History Program, traversed the state for several years gathering these stories under the leadership of Michael Aikey; they know the feeling of bonding with these extraordinary men and women well. In bringing these stories back to life, I hope I did a service to them as well as to the general public.
*
In the study of World War II, we are tempted to teach and learn the history as if the way things turned out was somehow preordained, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Americans and their allies were destined to win the war from the outset. As historian (and Pacific Marine veteran) William Manchester noted, because we know how events turned out, we tend to read the history with a sense of inevitability. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is easy to forget that during World War II the United States would be essentially engaging in two full-blown wars at the same time, taxing America’s resources and families to the hilt.
Most of these men grew up very fast. Some left school to work in their early teens, some lied about their age to enlist, or got a parent to sign off for them. Others found themselves commanding men at a tender age where today they would not be afforded a legal drink. Listen to them tell you themselves about the world they grew up in, how they surmounted challenges and obstacles placed on life’s course, and how their generation of Americans not only rose to the challenge of defeating the greatest threat the world has ever seen, but built the country and the freedoms that we enjoy today. Be inspired. Share their stories; give them voice. They have some lessons for us all, and we forget their stories at our peril.
Matthew Rozell
October, 2017
Chapter One
Air Power
The transition of the young men in this book from the Great Depression to aerial combat, from boyhood to manhood, paralleled the American development of air power and the emergence of new tactics and philosophies of coordinating and waging ‘air war’ on a scale that had never been done before in history. The concept of waging war from the sky on a large scale after World War I was not a novel idea, but it was met with resistance by the established branches of the U.S. services. During the 1930s, proponents like Billy Mitchell, Jimmy Doolittle and Charles Lindbergh made gains at home, as did the Royal Air Force in Britain. The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe under Air Marshal Herman Goering increased in size and range with the growth of Nazi militarism; these terrible weapons were tested during the Spanish Civil War and then the invasion of Poland to great effect. During the lull in the fighting between the fall of Poland in September 1939 and the German attacks in the west the following spring, Germany and Great Britain geared up for the battles that loomed on the horizon. The British had established the Royal Air Force, or RAF, as an independent wing of their armed forces. Led by independent thinkers who believed that air power and strategic bombing would be the key to winning the next conflict following the its emergence in the First World War, RAF Bomber Command began their first missions with daylight attacks on German warships in the North Sea. In the course of a December 1939 daylight raid, half the bombers sent out as a force of 24 were shot down by the faster German fighter planes. The RAF quickly switched to experimenting with flying at night; survival rates for the planes dropping propaganda leaflets and the occasional bombloads thereafter improved dramatically, although bombing results were far less satisfactory.
After the German invasion of the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a cautionary warning to the Luftwaffe that any attack on civilian populations would lead to an ‘appropriate’ response.[1] On May 14th, the Germans bombed Rotterdam in the Netherlands, killing 800 civilians. Although part of the rationale for the Allied use of
airpower was precisely to avoid the constant slaughter that ground on and on along the stalemated Western Front for four long years in the First World War, no one could predict how much air power, once unleashed, would be difficult to contain. The first strategic targets were aircraft factories, synthetic oil plants, and marshalling yards for rail transport.[2] Wildly inaccurate, bombing by night led to much collateral damage.
After the fall of France in the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone. Hitler’s plan, in simple terms, was to have the German Luftwaffe wreak havoc and terror from the skies, and have the U-boat fleet blockade the island country. Once Operation Sea Lion’s first phase was completed, an invasion by navy barges and infantry troops could occur.
It never got that far. While London was initially avoided by German bombers, on August 24th, 1940, two German pilots veering off course jettisoned their bombloads before heading home, hitting areas of the city. This gave Churchill the opportunity to order up an 81-plane retaliatory nighttime mission on the German capital. Though it did little damage, it was a public relations success, and was also sure to bring German retaliation, which would in turn garner American public opinion towards helping Britain in some way.[3] Outnumbered four to one, the pilots of the RAF, the use of newly invented radar, and effective antiaircraft flak kept the German bombing campaign at bay.[4] In the ensuing Blitz of London, where German bombers appeared over the city in a daily parade of terror bombing, the RAF claimed 56 bombers over the city on a single day in September.[1] Even the royal family’s quarters were not spared, but Londoners did not fold. Hitler called off the invasion indefinitely two days later, though the onslaught would go on at night for the next two months. Forty thousand had been killed in the Battle of Britain, and the notion that ‘civilian populations be spared’ rendered almost quaint. The strategic air offensive against Germany would last for five years, ‘the most continuous and grueling operation of war ever carried out.’[5] Hitler turned his attention to the East, convinced that the conquest of the Soviet Union, with its teeming agricultural lands and resources, were paramount to Germany’s ultimate victory in the war.[6] He could return to finish Britain off later. And now on December 6th, 1941, with Hitler’s legions literally at the gates of Moscow, came Marshal Zhukov’s massive Red Army counterpunch. A world away, Japanese fliers were conducting last minute preparations for launching their strikes against a place most Britishers, or Americans for that matter, had ever heard about—Pearl Harbor. Germany declared war on the United States on December 12th, and the sleeping, lumbering giant stirred. The Americans would finally be on their way.