“Sgt. A Valcour,” it read. “384th BG.”
Al Valcour had been shot down on the Hamburg mission back in July. Finding his name on the wall was like a letter from home. Old Val was still alive. Maybe Reb would even catch up to him. The discovery gave him a new injection of hope.
After a week of solitary confinement, he was finally released from the holding camp. Another train took him through the bomb-devastated cities of Nuremberg and Regensburg before crossing over the border into Austria.
His new home of Stalag 17 was located in Krems at the confluence of the Danube and Krems rivers. A German army garrison was quartered in the same town. When Reb and about fifty other prisoners arrived at the rain-swept camp, its “Main Street” was lined with hundreds of American airmen, all hoping to recognize a new arrival who might have fresh news of crewmates or friends.
One of them was Eldore Daudelin, the other waist gunner on Yankee Raider, who had left Reb for dead aboard the plane before he bailed out and was taken prisoner by the Germans.
Awestruck, Daudelin gazed at him like he was Lazarus risen from the grave. His pleasure at Reb’s survival was quickly replaced by a sense of guilt at what he had done. Reb told him to forget about it, but the other man continued to blame himself for leaving him behind in the doomed bomber.
In February 1944, Reb’s facial wound became infected yet again. The right side of his face became paralyzed, and he lost his sense of smell. Considering the ever-present stench in the barracks, that wasn’t all bad, but the infection continued to grow worse.
He was sent under guard to a military hospital in Vienna. There, a surgeon told him the infection would continue to fester unless he removed the shrapnel embedded in the bone of his nose and the shattered eye socket. He proposed to remove some of the shrapnel, and then cut away a large section of skin on his forehead and fold it over to cover the eye socket. He would leave a tiny opening in the skin so that Reb could use an eyedropper to suction out the ongoing drainage from the wound.
In the weeks he was there, continuous trainloads of wounded German soldiers arrived from the Russian front. When Reb left, they lined the floors of all the corridors and anterooms.
On April 5, 1944, he turned twenty-one years old.
Six months later, word began to spread through the camp that representatives of an international repatriation commission were coming to Stalag 17 to interview prisoners whose wounds and injuries rendered them incapable of serving as future combatants. Prisoners who met these conditions were to be exchanged for German prisoners currently held by the Allies.
Reb added his name to the list, and after several interviews, the doctors working for the commission approved his participation in the exchange. In late December, he joined the fortunate few who would be leaving for America.
They traveled by train to Leipzig, passing one desolate, bombed-out place after another. At a former officers’ training school, he was issued new clothing by the International Red Cross and permitted to take a bath, the first one he had enjoyed in more than a year. Reb reveled in the hot soapy water for more than an hour, only emerging when the aroma of roasting meat drew him toward the nearby mess hall.
From Leipzig, the prisoners traveled by train to Marseille, where the exchange took place near the port. Reb watched the downcast faces of the German prisoners as they filed past. He didn’t think they were very thrilled to be going home.
Reb and the other American prisoners were ferried out to the Swedish ocean liner Gripsholm, which was waiting for them in the harbor. Soon, they were on their way across the Mediterranean Sea.
On February 20, 1945, the Gripsholm arrived in New York. Many of the returning Americans had predicted that the dock would be thronged with cheering crowds, but the huge pier was almost completely deserted.
At the foot of the gangway, they were greeted by three GI musicians who played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” over and over while an officer checked off their names on his clipboard. They were herded onto several buses and driven to Halloran General Hospital in Queens.
Two days later, Reb received his first pass. Howard Wood, a friend of his from Stalag 17 who had been repatriated to the United States a year earlier, picked him up at the hospital with his new wife and drove him into the city for a night on the town.
They had also arranged a blind date for him.
Her name was Priscilla Hutchinson, and she was a slim, lovely, strawberry blonde. Twenty years old, she worked as a receptionist at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue.
She wasn’t at all put off by his facial disfigurement.
“You have the look of eagles in your face,” she told him later that night.
They had two more dates over the next two nights. Then he received his travel orders. The army was sending him to O’Reilly Army Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, for the first of many operations to rebuild his face.
That night, Reb told Priscilla he was in love with her, and asked her to marry him. Priscilla told Reb that she had also fallen in love with him, and tearfully accepted his proposal.
On Monday, February 26, 1945, six days after his return to the United States, Olen Grant and Priscilla Hutchinson repeated their marriage vows at John Street Methodist Church. Reb’s best man was Sergeant Tom McDonald, who had spent a year with him in Stalag 17.
As soon as he got out of the army hospital in Missouri, he was planning to head west with Priscilla. In his long months of captivity, Reb had often dreamt of roaming the high country in Colorado and California. Wherever they ended up, he planned to savor each and every day for the rest of his life.
EPILOGUE
There are few traces left of the air bases in England that once served as home to the Eighth Air Force bomb groups that took the air war to Germany in 1943. The author had a chance to visit a number of them in the course of researching this book. They would be unrecognizable to the Americans who were stationed there during the war.
Most are quiet, windswept places, stripped clean of the concrete runways, hardstands, repair hangars, and half-cylindrical Quonset huts with their distinctive corrugated metal roofs.
Small granite commemorative monuments, similar to the ones erected by postwar generations at Gettysburg and Antietam, mark the empty airfields that once launched intrepid flight crews on their missions to Germany.
Grafton Underwood, from which the 384th’s Jimmy Armstrong and Reb Grant took off on their last combat mission, is now a landscape of woods and pasture, with a few concrete perimeter tracks being the last hints of the airfield that once was.
The 388th’s base at Knettishall, where Ted Wilken, Warren Laws, and the Greek were stationed, was newly constructed when they got there, with fifty-yard-wide runways and enough concrete hardstands for two groups. Some decaying buildings are all that is left.
Thurleigh, the home of Andy Andrews’s famed 306th group, is now a business park, although it also hosts a small museum dedicated to the men who served in the bomb group.
Molesworth, where the 303rd Bomb Group was based, remains a U.S. Air Force facility, although there are few reminders of the base from which Bob Travis and Bud Klint completed their combat tours.
The Eighth Air Force in Europe is a distant memory, but an indelible one.
Its battle losses were astonishing. According to Donald Miller in Masters of the Air, the casualty rate among the American bomber crews in 1942 and 1943 was in excess of 50 percent. Only one man out of five was able to complete the original combat tour of twenty-five missions.
The author agrees with Donald Miller that the deep-penetration raids into Germany in the fall of 1943 should not have been launched until the bomber forces were large enough to accomplish the task and could be protected by long-range fighters.
Combat losses in the bomber crews dropped dramatically after these goals were achieved. It is a tribute to the courage of the Fortress crews in the first year of the air war that they kept on going in the face of tremendou
s odds, and with little hope of ultimate survival.
For those readers interested in what happened to the group of individuals whose stories were chronicled in this book, a brief account of their subsequent lives after the Stuttgart mission follows.
Martin “Andy” Andrews
After delivering his trove of top secret military intelligence to the admiral at OSS headquarters in Virginia, Andy enjoyed a brief family leave before being assigned to the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Transport Command. He spent the rest of the war piloting new military aircraft from the factories where they were manufactured to the active war fronts across the globe.
In the course of his travels, Andy spent his free time writing a stage play that he was sure would find glory on Broadway. Discharged from the army at the end of the war, he headed straight for New York and the Great White Way. Although his play failed, it led to a job as a writer for Paramount News, which then made the newsreels that ran at all the movie houses in the years before television. Aside from the radio networks, the newsreels were the only electronic medium for millions of Americans to learn the news.
In 1948, the Republican Party produced an expensive ten-minute propaganda film in support of its candidate for president, Governor Thomas Dewey, who was running against President Harry Truman. In every national poll, it appeared that Dewey was going to whip the unpopular Truman in a landslide, and Paramount News, among other companies, ran the film as if it was their own independent newsreel in movie houses all over the country.
The outraged White House press staff demanded “equal time” for Truman, and Andy was assigned to write and narrate a newsreel about him. It had a production budget of $1,200. Most of the footage came from Paramount’s film library, but Andy was granted an opportunity to interview Truman at a campaign event at Madison Square Garden.
Knowing that the president was ill at ease in front of a movie camera, Andy urged him to speak off the cuff on anything he wanted. Truman then gave his famous denunciation of the “do-nothing Congress” in Washington. In the week that the newsreel was shown in theaters across the country, 60 million theatergoers saw the newsreel. Truman narrowly won reelection a few weeks later in the greatest political comeback in history. Andy likes to think his newsreel might have helped.
A few years later, he was selected to become head of the documentary division of Hearst Metrotone News, eventually writing, producing, and directing nearly two hundred films. In 1956, shortly after Dwight Eisenhower was elected president of the United States, Andy was at home one evening mucking out his barn when he received a telephone call from his boss, who told him that five thousand feet of film had just arrived in New York. It was raw footage of the first bloody days of the Hungarian Revolution. He needed Andy to come into the city to cut it down to nine hundred feet and write an accompanying script for a newsreel that was to be shown to President Eisenhower the next morning. Two film editors were waiting for him at the Hearst studio in New York City, and a courier was on hand to take the finished film to Washington that night.
Andy had less than three hours to do the job.
Reaching the studio an hour later in his overalls, Andy had time to screen the raw footage once, and then told the editors what to open with, what to keep in the body of the ten-minute film, and what footage to close with at the end. There was no chance to write a script. After ad-libbing a ten-minute narrative to go with the footage, he gave it the title “A Nation in Torment.” The courier put it in his pouch and was on his way.
Convinced it was a disaster, he went to a local bar with the two editors and they proceeded to finish a bottle of whiskey together. The following morning, President Eisenhower invited the leaders of the House and Senate to watch it with him. After the screening, Senator James Mead of New York was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “This film should be shown around the world.”
It was. “A Nation in Torment” was screened in eighty-two languages and dialects, becoming the most successful propaganda film ever released by the United States Information Agency.
After winning numerous awards for his work, Andy established his own film company, going on to produce and direct numerous documentaries on the New York State park system and many environmental subjects.
Along the way, Andy’s first marriage ended in divorce, but he and his second wife, Jean, have been together since 1977. They share five children, along with five grandchildren.
After his friend Preston Bassett, the former president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company, reached the age of ninety, he told Andy, “You know, when you get to be ninety years old, you slow down. There are some things you can’t do anymore.”
Still high on life, the ninety-two-year-old Andy Andrews is now wheelchair bound, and lives in a veterans’ nursing home. The move there was a jarring experience for him. He felt a great sense of isolation living apart from his wife and family. To cope with his loneliness, he has embarked on a rigorous program of physical exercise, and dedicated himself to rereading the classic books of Western civilization.
James E. “Jimmy” Armstrong
After completing an account of his five months behind enemy lines to intelligence officers in England, Jimmy was granted home leave, and arrived to a joyful celebration with his parents and grandparents in Bradenton, Florida. It seemed like the whole town turned out to greet him when he got there.
“Jimmy, you are so pale after living underground for so long,” his grandmother told the twenty-one-year-old.
He quickly regained both his tan and his strength after three weeks of sun and swimming at the public beach. When his leave ended, Jimmy was assigned to the gunnery school at Buckingham Army Base in Florida. There, he was awarded his Purple Heart by the base commander.
Upon receiving his discharge from the army in 1945, he entered the University of Florida under the GI Bill and studied agriculture. In his sophomore year, he attended a dance, where he met a lovely young woman named Nita DesChamps. For Jimmy, it was love at first sight, and they were married two years later after his graduation.
In 1945, Annie Price, the Englishwoman who had sheltered him in Triel, France, and put him on his way to eventual freedom, wrote to him in Florida. He had sent her a letter saying he hoped to return to France to thank her in person.
“Dear Jim,” she wrote. “Are you serious about coming back? Are you thinking of trying to make Paris gay once more? You’ll have a job, for Paris is like myself—we have had all the stuffing knocked out and the beauty knocked off. . . . We’re a couple of ruins the Germans left behind.... Annie Price.”
As the years passed, the happy-go-lucky Jimmy slowly transformed himself into a more serious Jim. After an unfulfilling business career, he decided to enroll as a student at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, where he earned a master of divinity degree. In the years after his ordination, he served as the pastor of three churches, drawing the admiration and respect of all the congregants he served. His last church family before his retirement was in Thomasville, Georgia, where he still lives.
In 1981, Jim made the first of four trips back to France to thank the people who had sheltered and protected him for the five months he evaded capture by the Germans. He met with Madame Laurent, who was still living in the same house where she had served him breakfast before turning him over to Annie Price. Annie had died in 1951. The medical intern with whom he had stayed initially in Paris was now Dr. Alec Prochiantz, and was serving on the medical staff at the American Hospital in Paris.
He had no luck finding the underground reprobates Maurice and George, with whom he had stayed above their Paris café, or Theodorine “Madame Q” Quenot, who had sheltered Jim and three other Allied escapees, or the brave Gilbert Virmoux, who had tried to help him escape over the Pyrenees.
In Quimper, he learned that his hosts Jacques and Madeleine Mourlet had continued to help Allied escapees to leave France until Jacques was arrested and imprisoned in 1944. They had both died after the war.
“Fanfan,”
the French underground agent who had arranged Jim’s escape aboard the Breiz-Izel, and was a leader of the “Dahlia” resistance network, had been arrested by the Gestapo a few months after Jim’s escape. After weeks of torture, he died in a railroad car on his way to Dachau. The Catholic priest who had housed the escapees in his upstairs bedroom disappeared in a German concentration camp.
After his first visit, Jim continued to make trips to France to pay homage to the members of the underground networks who had assisted Allied airmen, and to provide support to those who were in need.
In 2008, Jim and Nita Armstrong celebrated their seventieth wedding anniversary. They have three children, Alice, Jim, and Jean, seven grandchildren, and a vast circle of friends.
Jim still plays golf and loves spending hours each week in his garden. He has made one concession to his age as he closes in on ninety. Jim no longer climbs an extension ladder to pick the oranges at the top of the fruit-laden trees in his backyard. A recent fall reminded him all too painfully of his parachute landing in France in 1943.
Henry H. “Hap” Arnold
In August 1945, his B-29 bombers delivered the nuclear payloads to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. Six months after the Japanese surrender, Hap Arnold resigned as the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He had survived four heart attacks during the war while overseeing the disposition of two and a half million airmen and seventy-two thousand military aircraft.
One of his first priorities after leaving the army was to rebuild his shattered marriage. During the war, Bee Arnold had developed an acute nervous condition and had lost a good deal of weight. At one point, she accused Hap of being unfaithful. He had become increasingly bewildered by her shifting moods.
In February 1946, the Arnolds moved out of Quarters Number 8 on General’s Row at Fort Myer and headed for California. A few years earlier, while Arnold was at a military conference in Cairo, Egypt, Bee had found a small, unimproved ranch property in the Valley of the Moon near Sonoma, California, and decided to buy it for their future home. Although the price was only $7,500, Hap did not have enough money to pay for it. After overseeing billions of dollars in procurement contracts, he had to borrow most of the down payment. It would be the only land he would ever own.
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