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

by Matthew Rozell

  Sam, bombardier: They sent up a field station, and we hadn’t had nothing good to eat for months and…

  Earl, pilot: Bread would look like angel food cakes it was so white, we were used to that ‘sawdust’ bread.

  Sam, bombardier: But the best thing was the Russians prisoners, they left the camp, they went out and killed some cows [and brought them back] on their shoulders; ‘Gonna roast some beef!’

  Jerry, navigator: That’s right…

  Earl, pilot. They got [food] from the guards, too…

  Sam, bombardier: And they made the guards scared. So they went to the railroad yard and broke into a boxcar, they found condensed milk in gallon cans. And the Russians brought them to us in our tent were I saw staying. They brought us the condensed milk and the army started to deliver the bread and we looked at that bread and we were afraid; it looked so good, it looked like angel food cake. Everyone just looked at it, then we started eating it, we put the condensed milk on it. Then they started making food and we got good food. There must have been 50 guys in our tent

  Jerry, navigator: We had big white tents, far more than 50 guys…

  Sam, bombardier: Great big tents, circus tents …

  Earl, pilot: We had hay to lie on, clean hay, so it wasn’t like back in Nuremberg; boy, Nuremberg was horrible…

  Jerry, navigator: One thing about the Russian cobbling up the livestock was that the farmers got a hold of some American officer, because the Russians were killing off all the sheep. And they’d just cut off a couple steaks they wanted, and discard the rest of it, and then they’d move along. So he said, ‘We’re going need this food, to feed you guys and us, our people’. But by the time he convinced this particular officer [to try to prevent the wanton slaughter of his animals], the farmer came back and said, ‘Forget it!’ [waves his hand]; his herd had been wiped out.

  We spoke with some Russians who had some broken German, and Russians some of our Polish guys, you know, we had sort of communications with them. At this point, we were at this [airfield], a German fighter base, and we were waiting for C-47s to come and get us. We hung around and exchanged some stories; we would tell the Russians how we were getting out of this, and ask, ‘Incidentally, how are you guys getting out of this?’ They said, ‘We were walking home, we walk to Turkistan’, that name sticks in my mind, 1200 or 1400 miles, and me and the other fellows, we asked, ‘Well, aren’t they coming to get you, so you can go home by truck, or fly home?’ Now that the war was over, Moscow didn’t give a damn about them, and if they were going to go home, they were going to have to get out on their own [motions with thumb, as in hitching a ride].They said, ‘They do not recognize that we were prisoners of war—we were written off as dead, we were supposed to die.’ You know, ‘We either go forward or die, we cannot go back’, that’s what they were up against.

  *

  ‘Thank God every day’

  Jerry, navigator: I say that any person today or any kid today who’s growing up, should get on his hands and knees every night and thank God that he was born in the United States of America. Because even today you could be born in Africa, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting to be 12 years old. You have AIDS all over, you’ve got one group murdering the other, you know, within their own country, killing each other and all the while this is going on and on… in Israel, Syria and Lebanon and such. I mean, you can’t even go to school without being afraid your bus is going to be machine gunned or blown up. And people that live in this country have no idea how lucky they are.

  In Mexico they’re having a terrible time. They’re coming by the droves to come over here and work. Same thing with the Canadians, they should be damn glad and thank God every day that they were born in that country. And I don’t think anybody knows it! There’s a quote by George Santayana and it’s posted at the Air Force Museum and I can’t recite it from verbatim but it says, ‘Those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it’, to live it again—and nobody knows!

  We spoke about this the other day [pointing to Earl] you know, they want the Olympics in China and the pros say ‘well, you know, we’ll get in there and we’ll do good and they’ll realize that they have to become more democratic’, and it can’t be that way with their people, we don’t learn from history—in 1936 they held the Olympics in Munich, now didn’t that make Hitler the nice guy? Imagine what he would have been if they didn’t have the Olympics, how bad it could have been?

  Everybody is worried about himself and nobody is worried about the United States. Nobody is worried about his or her country. They want their vans, their boats; they want their summer cottage, you know? They want their retirement plan, you know; they want ‘theirs’.

  Sam, bombardier: It makes you laugh.

  Jerry, navigator: In the meantime this stuff is using up gas and oil. You know, there’s only so much juice in an orange, and there’s only so much oil. Now, where is the oil right now that’s being used up? Arabia? They want to take off a few yards of oil up here and some in the U.S. When this is done who’s going to have the oil? Russia, China and India![To Earl and Sam] So boys, plan ahead! [Chuckles]

  Sam, bombardier: We don’t have anything to worry about. We’re not going to be here.

  Earl, pilot: Yes, well you worry a little bit about your kids and grandkids.

  Jerry, navigator: What you get out of the prisoner of war experience, it’s amazing—I haven’t seen this guy for 50 years [points to Sam] and politically, economically and everything else, we’re like twins. And you see any [former PoW]—that’s why it broke my heart when John McCain dropped out [of the 2000 presidential race], because the guy is a former PoW. And I know—when you’re a PoW, you suddenly realize what’s important and what’s not important. That’s one thing you find out. The next important thing is that we’ve got to take care of this country first and nobody seems to be giving a damn.

  Interviewer: Have any of you been back to Germany since the war?

  Sam, bombardier: Not me.

  Jerry, navigator: They have tours—‘do you want to go to the old prison camps’, you know, that’s hot stuff. [Sarcastically] I get out of Sing-Sing[52]—after 15 years, do you think I’m going to go back and take a tour of the place? [Laughter]

  Interviewer: So you have no desire to retrace those steps?

  Sam, bombardier: I wanted to go to just let my wife see England and France, but she’d get sick. You know? So, I can’t do nothing, I was lucky to get here.

  Interviewer: So what about German people today? Do you know any? Do you have any desire to know any?

  Sam, bombardier: The men that I knew were the civilians, the ones who were left behind. We got to talk to them and I thought most of them I met were pretty nice people.

  Jerry, navigator: I can tell you a story about that. If you’re old enough, you have a story for everything.

  I used to be in the driving school business. When I first got in, I worked for the summer and took it as a temporary job, and I was teaching a woman by the name of Katie G. She was a German woman, and also a nice woman, I just didn’t get around to telling her that I had bombed Germany, you know, my job was to teach her how to drive. And she was married to Max. And Max is a salesman for a German company that makes hardware for operating such as scissors, scalpels, etc. And in the course of discussion with him, it turned out that he was a German fighter pilot. We started to compare notes and probably, we were mixed up, and we were flying every day, so he must have been flying when I was there because he was flying in that period of time, and he was in a Me109. Now this is the nicest guy in world, I mean, we got along very well. They invited my wife and me, we went over, had dinner there, they wanted something done to their building and our scout master was a contractor so I fixed it up with the scout master and he got the job. She was a chief housekeeper in a hospital in Hempstead [Long Island] nearby and whenever anyone was in the hospital that I knew, I’d go in and see them, and then go down and see Katie. Katie saw to it that they got a little
extra of this and that, that kind of thing. They were the nicest people in the world. Here’s a guy doing his job for his country, I'm a guy doing my job, we were trying to kill each other, and 30, 40 years later, I don’t see anything wrong with this guy.

  But I’m not judging the German people or the German frame of mind; I’m judging Max G., individual. Now, I’m Jewish, and this guy’s Luftwaffe and he was fighting for the Nazis. He should have said to his wife, ‘What? You let him teach you to drive?’ Never happened. I taught Arabs, by the way, and if they pass, they think you’re the greatest instructor in the world. If they fail, you’re a bum. [Laughter] So anyway, they’re passing and I’m getting a lot of these Arab people, and I’m getting them from Lebanon, I’m getting them from Syria, and I’m getting them from Israel itself, they’re Palestinian Arabs. So one day I asked one guy, his name was Habeeb, I said, ‘You guys know I’m Jewish. With all of this that’s going on in Palestine, how come you’re using me?’

  And he said, ‘That’s Palestine, this is here. You’re a good teacher, we want you.’

  So if you go on a person-to-person level—and I've taught people in that area from all over, everybody wants the same thing. They want a good job, they want a clean house, they want a roof that doesn’t leak, they want their bellies full, they want their kids clean, behaved, kept out of trouble, they want their kids educated, they want to enjoy Jones Beach just like everyone else, on a person-to-person basis. But when you get a rabble rouser that whips up the crowd [waves hand in the air] you know, I could mention a few of ours right now, whenever they set up a camera, bingo!—they are there, I’m not going to mention any names, you know who I’m talking about…

  Some of the things that shake you—my younger son, I use to look down on him, now he is looking over me—I’ve found the packet with my old record and ID and so on from about 1943. I was 5’ 10 ½’’. I think I’m about five feet even right now!

  Sam, bombardier: They say you shrink, gravity’s pushing us down. My kids all called me ‘Shorty’, their mother’s short. They’re all over six feet.

  Jerry, navigator: I use to have three sons and a daughter, now I’ve got three fathers and a mother.

  [Interviewer laughs]

  Jerry, navigator: Your day will come, don’t snicker, your day will come…

  Sam Lisica passed away at age 85, five years after this roundtable interview. Jerry Silverman died at age 89 in 2008, two years after Sam. I invited Earl to my high school again in 2011, where I had the honor of introducing him to the granddaughter of his liberator, General George S. Patton.

  Epilogue

  Trails in the Sky

  I waited on the tarmac as the crew prepared the airplane for takeoff. A high school friend had let me know that the B-17 was coming to town, and I was going up in it for a thirty minute ride over ‘The Queen of Americans Lakes’ Lake George, New York. I hurried to the airport and filled out the pre-flight paperwork, and was briefed along with seven others on the ‘dos and don’ts’ of a once in a lifetime ride aboard an authentic World War II Flying Fortress.

  Once inside, we were strapped along the metal benches for take-off. Passengers were advised to insert the orange earplugs provided, but as the engines spat and coughed to life, I left mine out. I wanted all of my senses intact for my time in the belly of the bird.

  We were off, lumbering down the runway and into the air. Our cruising altitude was probably less than a thousand feet as we headed north, the shadow of the bird plain as day over the golf course greens. From the top turret position I looked back on French Mountain and the city of Glens Falls; from the waist gun windows I could see the waves and pleasure craft on Lake George below. We banked over the Sagamore Hotel and Resort in Bolton landing, completing the 180 degree turn to return via the lake southward over Lake George Village. People on summer holiday looked up and waved; a friend on the ground texted to ask if I was aboard, but at the time I was too absorbed in my thoughts and my surroundings to look at the message, only seeing it upon landing.

  I looked at my fellow passengers—a red headed teenager, riding solo with his father’s blessing, another man about my age, seemingly as absorbed as I had been, a younger touristy woman, jaws working furiously to process a wad of chewing gum as she snapped miles of cell phone video and photographs. Certainly it was an experience that was photo-worthy. I took a few shots myself, and somehow captured the essence of serenity upon an older woman’s face as she gazed out of the left waist gun window, not looking down at the lake, but drifting through the sky. Was she trying to live the moment of a special somebody, a brother, a father, or perhaps even a late husband? I didn’t speak to her, but her serene look spoke volumes to me. Here I was, nearing the end of my own career as a teacher, knowing full well that my old friends who had once braved the skies over Europe we leaving me. In the one of the most destructive machines of war, this lady just radiated peace, a level of contentedness and gratitude and everything else that I noted in the faces of some of these grizzled veterans sitting down for the first time in front of the camera. And I think they knew it too, opening up as they did for their interviewers, both young and old, students and professionals. They had a story to tell, before it was too late.

  ***

  I last saw my friend Earl a few weeks ago. His daughter got in touch to say she would be in town, so I drove over to the old farmhouse where he grew up, bringing him a copy of my recently released first ‘War in the Air’ book, where he is also prominently featured. His wife passed away a few years back, his PoW friends are gone now as well, but after turning 96 he is still plugging along, one day at a time. He might not get around like he used to, but he was excited to hold the book in his hands, and as he thumbed through it, he pointing excitedly to the B-17s he once commanded in a world that seems so long ago.

  *

  How soon we forget.

  Our World War II veterans gave us a nation that for all of its imperfections survives a model for others, a lesson in what it means to stand together during the tough times often against seemingly insurmountable odds, in spite of our differences or innate biases. It may help us to recall that democracy is not only very fragile, it is hardly even out of the cradle in the backdrop of world history. But as a wise philosopher-historian once told me, what sets democracy apart from every other experiment in history—in its pure form and in theory—is its defense of minorities. That doesn’t exist yet, but maybe this form of government needs to be protected, and nourished. And maybe this is what the airmen, Marines, sailors, soldiers, and merchant marines who participated in the greatest cataclysm in the history of the world were fighting for.

  The world does not have to be united, and in fact it never has been and never will be. We argue and we disagree all of the time. That is as it is, and as it should be; it’s even part of what the Allies were fighting against, a ‘New World Order’. But when the chips are down, the actions of this generation remind us of who we are as a nation, what we aspired to and achieved not so long ago, together. And that should be celebrated, fêted, and honored, while our veterans are still with us, and long after the last one departs.

  The Airmen featured in this book

  Clarence W. Dart: After the war, Clarence Dart married and he and his wife raised a large family in Saratoga Springs, NY. He worked nearly four decades for the General Electric Company and was a reservist in the New York Air National Guard, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Mr. Dart was inducted into the New York State Veterans' Hall of Fame in 2011. He passed away on February 17, 2012, at the age of 91.[21]

  John G. Weeks: Following his military service, John briefly flew for commercial airlines. He then started a long career in business, concluding as a consultant to businesses trying to avoid bankruptcy. He and his wife had four children and in retirement, he founded a mushroom farm in Washington County, New York. He was involved in his church and many civic organizations. He passed away on October 21, 2015, at the age of 93.[22]

  Richard Faulkne
r: Richard Faulkner married and raised three children, working as a mechanic and then 35 years for New York State Electric and Gas Company as a lineman. He was a member of American Legion, 100th Bomb Group Association, and the Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society. He passed at age 89 on August 29, 2014.[23]

  George FitzGibbon: As a reserve officer, George FitzGibbon was recalled during the Korean War when they needed pilots. He and his wife raised three children. He retired from the Air Force in 1969 as a lieutenant colonel, the operations officer of the 41st Air Refueling Squadron at Griffiss Air Force base in New York. Later he settled in Binghamton, NY, serving as the chief pilot for New York State Electric & Gas He passed away at the age of 93 on May 5, 2015.[24]

  Charles Corea: Charlie settled back in his hometown and married, raising four children with his wife of 68 years before his death. He was active in many civic organizations, and retired in 1984 as owner and publisher of the East Rochester Shopping Guide. He passed away at the age of 92 on August 26, 2014.[25]

  Earl M. Morrow: Earl Morrow was a career airline pilot for American Airlines. He and his wife retired to the family farm in Hartford, New York after his career, and he was a sought after speaker in local schools and community events.

  Sam Lisica: Sam Lisica married and returned to Pennsylvania, retiring after 40 years with the Pittsburgh Forgings Steel Company. He and his wife raised four children; Mr. Lisica passed away on October 11, 2006 at the age of 85.

  Jerry Silverman: After the war, Jerry married and raised four children on Long Island, New York, and founded his own driving school, where he worked for 25 years. He was active in civic organizations and the Northport VA, where he served as a driver for disabled veterans. He was also an active member of the Nassau/Suffolk Chapter of the American Ex-Prisoners of War. He passed away on October 4, 2008 at the age of 89.[26]