It worked. We did come awfully close to them but they only made [only] one pass—the lead man of course was after me because I was the photographic plane, and he went under me. I could see him very plainly in the cockpit as he went under me and he turned and went down, and that was the last we saw them.
We had a range I would say of 1200 or 1300 miles. Fuel was always a problem coming back but there were their emergency fields in England down near the White Cliffs of Dover where we could land at and refuel. Also, late in the war there were airfields in Germany and in France. One of the times that I came back very low on fuel I ran into a thunderstorm over Holland, and I didn't know whether I was going to make it across the Channel or not. I didn't have much choice, so I went on to a field called Manston which was a huge square paved field made especially for emergency landings; it was 10,000 feet square and so you could land in any direction and get a lot of runway; I landed there at the end of that mission. When I went to taxi in, I put the throttles forward a little bit, and both engines quit!
War’s End
When the war ended, I'll tell you it was the greatest relief I've ever had in my life. I can remember that a sergeant came to me—we knew it was coming, probably a week or even more before, we just didn't know exactly when—he wanted to know if it was all right if they went out and bought some beer. I said I thought that was a wonderful idea, and so they went out and they bought six barrels. Now I'm not talking about a little 10-gallon thing, I'm talking about a barrel. Six barrels appeared and they brought them in on a 6x6 truck, and I had them put them in the ammunition dump which was guarded 24 hours a day. The ammunition dump was also the coolest place because it was underground. When Churchill made his announcement that the war was over, we sent the trucks down there and they rolled the beer up onto the trucks and brought it to the squadron, and by the way, other squadrons had done something similar. We rolled the barrels out on top of the bomb shelter which was elevated and could easily be tapped right there, and you never saw so many drunk guys in your life!
I didn't return home until May 26, 1946, which was about a year later. I stayed over there and I flew—I hate to admit this, but I signed up to fly for what at that point was ‘Air Transport Command’—I was a multi-engine pilot so I qualified and frankly the reason I did it was because I didn't want to go to the Pacific. I had had the war up to here [gestures with hands] and I was terrified and I was a nervous wreck. I knew that I could stay in Europe so I signed up for a year. [Of course, when I did get home] there was a family celebration; I was met at the train by my folks, my aunt and uncle, and it was very emotional.
I went back to my college for one day. I hadn't even signed up yet but I could get in, I knew, and I was at the dormitory and my roommate was 16 years old! He was wet behind the ears and I couldn't stand him in the first hour; I spent just one day there. I just knew that I would never be able to concentrate on college so I left there and went up to Lockport and very fortunately I got a very physical job at a cotton bleaching plant. My first job for a long time was to haul bales of cotton like a donkey from the warehouse into the plant, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me because of course I had lots of trouble sleeping at that time. I can tell you that if you haul cotton all day, you will sleep [at night]! I stayed there for about a year and a half, and it was a wonderful transition for me. After that I got married and went to work for a box making factory in Newark, New York, and I was near my hometown and [my life] took off from there.
I think [my experiences in World War II] made me a much better person. One of the experiences that I didn't mention was that at the end of the war, I had a mission and I don't remember where it was to, but I was all alone and on the way back I ran low on fuel. I landed at Munich, Germany— the Munich area had just recently been [taken]; I remember the runway was all bombed out, and I had difficulty landing. They didn't have any aviation fuel so I had to spend the night. When I got out of my plane, the first person I bumped into was Captain Cook, the [former] head of our military police at our base [near Oxford], and he had been transferred to Munich to keep order there.
He took me in his Jeep downtown to where it was going to spend the night, and by the way, my roommate that night was a Russian, so the conversation was very sparse. But Cook then took me to Dachau concentration camp and it had just been liberated. It was the most shaking experience of my life. We went in, and I can remember the first thing that struck me as we went through the gates in his Jeep was the smell; I vomited right as we went into the gate. We drove around the compound and we had to drive very slowly because these people were in such terrible shape that they couldn't get out of the way very well. And they would come up and they would touch us touch me on the shoulder and say ‘Danke’, ‘thank you’. We went to one area where they had dug a trench with a bulldozer; oh it must have been eight feet wide and a hundred feet long and they were pushing bodies into this common grave with a bulldozer, believe it or not. And that was a horrible experience as far as I was concerned, something I will never ever forget, very difficult.
John Weeks enjoyed a long career in business and later in life settled into the communities surrounding Hometown, USA, volunteering in hospitals and medical centers and as a hospice caregiver in Washington County. He passed away on October 21, 2015, in Glens Falls, at the age of 93.
chapter Four
The Evadee
Richard Faulkner was born on October 8, 1924, a couple hours’ drive west of Hometown USA. He graduated from high school in 1942. He became a ball turret gunner on a B-17 in the 100th Bomb Group, nicknamed ‘The Bloody Hundredth’ for losing many aircraft and crews. In Richard’s case, he was miraculously his crew’s only survivor of a mid-air collision with another B-17 of the 100th Bomb Group, only a few hours into their very first mission. He then spent twenty-nine days evading the Germans in France with the help of the French Underground, eventually being picked up by boat off the coast of France. In crossing the English Channel his rescuers came under fire by German fast attack boats and one of the British gunners was killed. Faulkner manned the fallen gunner’s weapon and they made it back to England.[15] ‘I don't go to the reunions of my bomb group because there's hardly anybody there that I knew. I mean, I was only there nine days. I was in France longer than I was in England.’
*
Richard J. Faulkner
My father died when I was 12. I was one of five children [growing up in the Depression], and we all had to pitch in to help.
[On December 7th, 1941] I was [listening to] a Chicago Bears football game when it broke in with the news about Pearl Harbor. I was surprised and I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was.
I enlisted two days after I turned 18, in October, 1942. And when I went into the service, I immediately signed up for benefits for my mother, to help her out financially. But they didn't take me until December 11th, 1942.
I went into the Air Corps because I wanted to fly. I wanted to get into the pilot program, but I didn't pass it. I went to Miami Beach, spent two weeks at Miami Beach and then to Goldsboro, North Carolina to airplane and engines school and spent two months there. From there I went to gunnery school in Fort Myers, Florida for two months and then to Dalhart Army Air Base in Texas where I was assigned to the group training. We got ready to go overseas, and my pilot didn't pass the proficiency test. So we went to Pyote, Texas for another month.
Then we got ready and went to Grand Island, Nebraska and picked up our airplane, a B-17G. We flew to Grenier Field, New Hampshire, then to Goose Bay, Labrador, to Iceland, and to Stornoway, Scotland. From there we were processed, and we went to further gunnery training at the Wash in England.[32]
I was in the same crew all the way through training and flying over to England, and we were assigned to the 100th Bomb Group. We wanted to name our plane ‘Esquire Lady’, but we didn't last that long. We were shot down on our first mission.
We were going to Augsburg, Germany, and to Munich.We were in the part of the group th
at was assigned to Munich, and we flew the plane that was assigned to us that day, the ‘Berlin Playboy’.
We were delayed an hour for takeoff because of the fog. We got airborne, and soon after crossing the Channel, the plane above us got hit. And it came down and hit us, broke us into two pieces. I was in the ball turret, and I had a parachute in there; being small, I could get one in there.
The airplane broke into two parts right behind the wing. The tail part flipped over. I was with the tail, with the tail gunner and the two waist gunners. And the other part [of the B-17] had the radio man, the bombardier, navigator, pilot, and co-pilot. But they just couldn't get out, evidently, and on the other plane, there were only two people that got out. So, nine plus seven—sixteen people were killed.[33]
[When the tail] turned upside-down, [the ball turret where I was] was now on top. I got the door handles open—it can only open in the stowed position from the outside, and it just happened to be that way—I was just lucky it was in the position where I could open the door. I had the chute hooked on my harness, so when I got out of the turret, I hooked the rest of it on the way down.
I was in a free-fall. When I could make out objects on the ground, I pulled the ripcord. I pulled the D-ring and nothing happened. So, there are three little snaps that cover the pilot chute. I got those unsnapped, and fished the pilot chute out. And luckily it pulled out, and it pulled the rest of the parachute out. I landed in a heap by some woods on a hillside, in a pasture.
The Farmer
I gathered up my chute and carried it over into the woods, and found a bunch of leaves and berry bushes, and I hid everything in there. The goggles and the helmet, the parachute and the harness, the whole works. I saw that there was a farm nearby, so I started for there. But I could see the Germans coming. So I got back and buried myself in the berry brambles, in the leaves. And when they came through, they didn't want to look in the berry bushes, so I didn't get found out.
That was about noon, and then that evening, when it started to get dark, the farmer came, and I told him that I was an American. I couldn't speak French, he couldn't speak English. So he motioned for me to wait until the sun went down. So I waited and he came and got me after dark. My ankles and my knees were banged up, and he put me in the barn to begin with. And when he figured the Germans weren't looking for me, he took me in the house and put me in the bed, giving me some hot towels to soak my knees and ankles to get the swelling down.
But he kept motioning to me that there was something wrong. [I did not know what he meant], so somebody got the idea to get a mirror. And I could see I was all bloody—my face was all covered in dried blood—I had cut myself somehow coming out of the plane. And so they that got cleaned up, and the next day they moved me to another place, because the people got nervous. They thought that the Germans knew I was there, so they hustled me out after dark to another place. I heard later that they executed that family because the Germans were pretty sure I was there, because somehow they knew that there were ten people in the bomber, and only nine bodies [must have been found].
The French Underground
I went to another place, and I stayed there for about a week. Then they shipped me to another place, took me for another week or so, and then I was transported on the back of a motorcycle to another location, and we got a flat tire, right under a German machine gun outpost! And the Germans were up there laughing at us for having a flat tire, and I thought, ‘If you only knew, fella, that this is an American down here.’
They had me in civilian clothes. And from there I went to Paris, where the [French Underground] was going to get a new picture and make up a false ID. They made it up, and it said I was a 15-year-old deaf mute. We always laughed about it—the Germans were kind of slow, because there were so many deaf mutes running around with IDs. [Laughs]
So I got the pictures taken, and they took me around sightseeing, Champs-Élysées and all that. And I was so scared, I thought all the Germans were all watching me; all of them were walking around there, but it was probably the best thing [to be ‘hiding’] right out in the open.
Leaving Paris
So when we got ready to leave, we were going to go on the subway. And there were two other fellas in the apartment with me. One was a big redhead, and the other was a southerner from Houston, Texas.
The fellow in the Underground went down the stairs. When he got to the bottom, I started down, and the others followed suit, in the same way, in single file. I waited until [the leader] got to the corner of the street, then I came out of the building, and then I got to the corner, and then he was at another corner. But I didn't see any of the other fellows coming behind me, so I threw my hands up like, ‘What do I do now?’ And he motioned for me to come forward.
I ran into those two fellas much later, back home, after the Germans surrendered. The Gestapo picked them up as they came out the door, and they were held prisoner until the end of the war! But [I guess I blended in better]; I was short and dark like a Frenchman.
We got on the subway. The man in the Underground got in one door, and I got in another. When he gets off, I would get off. But I was standing right next to a colonel in the SS—he had a satchel handcuffed to his arm with a guard with a Sten gun. The train started up, and the SS colonel bumped into me. And he turned around to me and said, 'Pardonne-moi'. I thought, ‘Oh, my God’; I thought I was done right then and there! [Laughs]
[They put me] on the train going from Paris to Morlaix [on the coastline in Brittany], where I eventually exited France. I had a magazine—if you're holding that up in front of your face like you're reading, and most people don't bother you. When I got to Morlaix, they brought me to a deserted French farmhouse. There were other people from the Underground there, and also a P-47 pilot who had been shot down. His name was Ken Williams and he had flown 63 missions. I asked him how he got shot down.
P-47N flying over the Pacific during World War II.
Credit: USAF. Public domain.
He said, ‘I shot myself down. I was strafing a German bomber, and it blew up under me and blew both wings off my P-47. I ditched it, and I started running across the field. And I'm trying to hide, and I look down, and I’ve got the bright Mae West [life jacket] vest still on!’ [Laughs]
Pretty soon, into the farmhouse came two ladies, and two other men. One was a captain in the British intelligence, and the other fella was losing his mind, and so they tried to get him out of there before he got caught. The two ladies had just been broken out of jail. They were Underground workers, a mother and daughter. So we waited, and pretty soon they distributed some handguns to two of the Underground guys and they went out; I found out later they were to go out and watch the German machine gun [outpost]. If the Germans spotted us, they were to shoot the Germans, but if not, they were to just leave them alone, because the Underground would use the route again.
We went out and they told us to watch for the phosphorus dots in the trail and follow them—‘Don't get out of the track, because it's a minefield.’ So we went across the minefield, and went down the bank, down to the shore. We waited down there, and at about 4:00 in the morning they flashed a flashlight from the shore to out at sea, and the British rode in with two rubber dinghies to pick us up. They brought the pilot and I out to something like a PT boat, a British gunboat. The others were put on another one.
We were put on in the hold, in the crews' quarters. We started up and got moving, and we could hear gunfire, we could hear rounds hitting the boat. The captain opened the hatch up, and he said, ‘One of you guys a gunner?’
I said, ‘Yes, I am.’
He says, ‘Well, I just had a gunner get killed, and I need a gunner!’
I went up on top, and they put me on one of those .303 machine guns.[34] We pulled the guy's body away and kept on in the gunfight for a little while, and then two British Spitfires showed up and chased off the German E-boats. So we had quite a time out there.
Well, we got into England, and they had us put on
British uniforms. When we got to London, we were issued American uniforms. I think they were trying to hide the fact [that we had been rescued] from the German [spies], but I don't think it worked.
I was shot down on the 18th day of March, 1944, and I was picked up April 16th, 1944. [They had notified my mother]; I still have the telegram that my mother received. ‘Regret to inform you that your son, Richard J. Faulkner, is missing on a mission over Germany.’ And no other details. My mother wrote to the adjutant general and everybody she could write to. My chaplain on the base wrote his condolences to her.
The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion Page 7