The Bomber Boys

by Travis L. Ayres

  The German news writers were notorious propagandists, and when Art read that as many as one hundred thirty-five thousand Germans had died in the raid, he had his doubts. Still, he also knew that aside from the expected political slant, the German newspapers were generally accurate when recounting events. There was little doubt that a terrible tragedy had befallen the people of Dresden, Germany.

  Even as the young American aviator sat in an Italian hospital bed reading of Dresden’s fate, the city was still in flames. The fires would rage for four more days until there was nothing left to burn.

  Dresden had very little military or industrial capacity. The historic old city was a cultural center that was world-famous for its Dresden porcelain. Many of the Allied airmen who were ordered to carry out the raid could not understand why Dresden was targeted. The why would be debated for decades or longer, but the who responsible for the controversial bombing was easier to identify.

  British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had long guided his Royal Air Force commanders in the strategy of the general bombing of German cities, as opposed to the American Air Force theory of “precision bombing” targets of military significance. Of course, the American bomber crews tried their best to be precise on their bomb runs, but there was often collateral damage and the unintentional killing of German civilians. Churchill and his RAF bombing chief, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, saw the demoralization of the German population as a way to bring about a speedier Allied victory. Also, the German V-1 and V-2 rocket bombings of London and other English cities very likely ignited in Churchill a basic human emotion—revenge.

  It appeared that Churchill had convinced U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt of the usefulness of firebombing German civilians, or perhaps Roosevelt had his own reasons. Churchill and Roosevelt communicated constantly with each other throughout the war. With the end of the fighting in sight, it was the third Allied leader who worried them as much as the crumbling German army. Joseph Stalin’s massive Russian army was closing in on Germany from the east, and its troops would be the first to reach Berlin. With much of Europe in ruins and chaos, could the ruthless Stalin be counted on to be satisfied with the conquest of eastern Germany?

  Two days before the Dresden raid, the three Allied leaders had concluded their conference at Yalta. The main topic of discussion was how to divide control of the occupied countries in Europe. It was a poker game in which the Russian leader held a strong hand. If the firebombing of Dresden had been planned before Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt saw no reason to cancel it afterward. The almost complete destruction of a major German city would certainly show Stalin the kind of military power the Americans and British possessed. And that they were not reluctant to use it.

  More than seven hundred RAF bombers struck the heart of Dresden on February 13. The majority of the British bombs were incendiaries. Much of Dresden was constructed of old wooden buildings. By the time more than three hundred American bombers reached the city the next day, Dresden was already an inferno.

  Besides Dresden’s population of approximately six hundred thousand, up to four hundred thousand refugees fleeing from the advancing Russian army were also in the city when the bombs began to fall. The resulting fires created hell-like wind-storms that roared through Dresden’s streets. Tens of thousands died. The exact death toll would never be known, since many bodies were incinerated or buried in the ruins. After the war, the figure thirty-five thousand would become the (Allies’) accepted Dresden death count.

  In the days following the Dresden bombing raid, a nurse came into Art’s room on her usual rounds. He could tell she had been crying. In German, he asked her what was wrong and she broke down in tears. She explained between sobs that she had family in Dresden.

  One by one, Art’s roommates and hospital staff members began to speak to him again. He tried to find the friendliness they had once enjoyed. It seemed to him that they were also trying, but the moment was gone. The feeling that, American or German, they were after all just human beings had been lost somewhere in the Pandora’s box of war. Sadly, they were enemies again.

  Art had reached the point in his recovery where two of his casts could be removed. Afterward, only the cast on his left leg remained. This allowed him to move around easier on his crutches, although his pace was still slow. He expected any day to be sent off to a prisoner of war camp. From what he read in the German newspapers, in the days following the Dresden raid, the young aviator had to face the possibility that his fate might turn out to be much worse. The news stories quoted Adolf Hitler, who was enraged at the attack on Dresden. The German dictator was threatening to order the executions of captured Allied airmen.

  A few days later, Art was ordered to dress in his ragged flight clothes; then he was escorted to the street. There was no firing squad awaiting him there. In fact, there was not even an armed guard. He was simply instructed to walk to the corner and “Wait there for the van.”

  Art did as he was told. What else could he do? Any thought of escape was laughable. He could barely walk without his crutches. He waited on the street corner in Merano and soon a Volkswagen van arrived. As he struggled into the vehicle, an American officer greeted him, “Hi, Art, how the hell are you?”

  Art studied the man’s face. He had never seen him before. “How do you know who I am?”

  The man smiled. “Sam Wheeler was in my hospital, and he told me about your fall. And I noticed your uniform is all ripped and shows signs of friction burns. I figured you had to be Art Frechette.”

  The officer was a B-25 Mitchell pilot who had been flying for the Twelfth Air Force when he was shot down. As he and Art chatted, the van stopped at other hotel-hospitals around Merano picking up additional prisoners. One man in particular caught everyone’s attention. He was a black soldier wearing a German military uniform. Art introduced himself and then asked the soldier his name.

  “George Smith. Good to meet you.”

  “George, I’m guessing you’re not really in the German army.”

  Smith chuckled. “No, I’m from Virginia.” He told Art he was an enlisted man, and he had only been in the Army for six months before being captured in Italy.

  Frechette and the other prisoners were driven to the local train yard, where they were ordered into boxcars already crowded with Allied POWs. There were Americans, British and lots of Russians. The train did not move until darkness began to fall, and then it did not stop until first light the following morning.

  The boxcar doors were opened and the prisoners were allowed to stretch their legs outside, but they were warned to stay close to the train. Art could see why the engineer had picked the place. Their section of track was deep in a heavily wooded valley. It would be difficult for Allied airplanes to spot them. There was a little Austrian village there but nothing worthy of the American Air Force’s attention.

  However, later that morning, Art had a chance to witness the awesome sight of an American bomber armada from the German’s point of view. The sound of Fortress and Liberator engines rumbled through the Alpine valley long before anyone saw the first bomber. By the time the first wave of aircraft was overhead, even the train was rattling from the sound waves. Art began counting the bombers as they stretched from horizon to horizon. There were hundreds of them. He had been part of such a formation before, but seeing it from the ground was a rare experience.

  The massive bomber show was also having an impact on the German guards. Art could see the fear in their eyes and could understand some of their muted comments, not meant for their officers’ ears. The guards assigned positions on top of the boxcars scurried to the ground. Art felt they were ready to run and were only restrained by fear of their own officers.

  One of the guards near him nervously asked Art what kind of airplanes these were. Art knew that unless a sharp-eyed P-51 escort pilot miraculously spotted the train, they were in no real danger of being bombed, but he decided not to share that information with the frightened guard.

  “Those over t
here are B-24s. They’re loaded with bombs. Just one of those B-24s could destroy the train and this town. And you see that group of planes over there?” The guard followed Art’s gesture with wide eyes. “Those are Flying Fortresses. They’re even more deadly than the Liberators!”

  At nightfall, the train headed eastward and it reached its destination before dawn. One of the guards provided the name of the place—Spittal, Austria, somewhere near the Yugoslavian border. The railroad tracks ran right next to the prison camp, no more than a hundred feet from the gate. Art got his first look at Stalag 18 as he jumped down from the boxcar.

  Eight- to ten-feet-high poles strung with barbed wire formed the outer fence of the compound. Another identical fence had been built ten feet inside the first. Wooden guard towers commanded each corner. The guards in the towers nearest the train had their machine guns aimed at the arriving prisoners. Rows of single-story wooden barracks looked cold and bleak on the treeless terrain. In fact, even on the outside of the camp, there were no trees for more than a hundred yards.

  Once inside the camp, the new prisoners were separated by nationality. The Russians were sent to an adjoining compound. The Americans and Brits stayed together. There was also a compound housing only French captives. The interior of the barracks were much as Art expected—rows of upper and lower bunks. Each prisoner had his own mattress, such as it was. The mattress was simply a large bag made from ticking fabric and filled with straw. A metal stove in the center of the barracks provided inadequate heat.

  Art was directed to the end of the barracks, where there was a small room. “You will be living in here with us,” a British officer told him. The “us” included three British officers and two American officers. The little room looked no different from the main barracks, except that Art noticed there was an electrical outlet on one wall. Nothing was plugged into the outlet, and Art could not imagine what electrical appliance the Germans might allow the prisoners to possess. For light, a single bulb dangled at the end of its cord, hanging from the ceiling.

  Later, Art got a sample of the prisoners’ menu. The meal consisted of a bowl of soup, a piece of coarse black bread and a dab of jelly. The general opinion of the prisoners, and also some of the guards, was that the bread was made of sawdust. One of his new American roommates urged Art to eat it all.

  “This is your ration for the day,” he said.

  “It’s not much to get by on,” Art commented.

  “We have found ways to supplement,” the officer assured him. “The Brits sometimes go out to the local farms on work parties. They smuggle in what food they can get their hands on.”

  “What about the Americans?” Art asked. “They don’t go along on the outside work parties?”

  “No. The Germans don’t trust us. The Jerries always demand a promise not to escape. Once the Brits give their word, the Germans know they won’t go back on it.”

  Art smiled.

  “And to get extra food,” the officer added in a whisper, “we also have Wally.”

  “Who’s Wally?” Art asked.

  The officer went on to explain the remarkable abilities of Sergeant Wally Tempest. Before the war, the sergeant had been an electrician in his homeland of South Africa. Now he was assigned as a sort of orderly to the three British officers in Art’s room. Though the American officers refused to treat Wally as a servant, they did enjoy the benefits of his amazing talent for scrounging and trading with the guards.

  Not only could Wally procure food and coffee, he somehow managed to obtain the components needed to make a heating appliance. As a trained electrician, it was easy for him to build the little water heater, which once plugged into the officers’ wall outlet produced hot coffee and soup. The Germans’ official policy was for any such items to be seized by the guards. In fact, searches were occasionally conducted, and one or two of the heating elements would be discovered. Wally made extra ones just for that purpose. The reality of prison life was that the guards desired to own the little soup heaters-coffeemakers themselves. The guards secretly provided Wally with the materials he said he needed, which was always more than he really needed. He made heating elements for them and saved all the extra wiring and parts for his own use.

  Once the Germans learned that Wally was a trained electrician, he was called on often to do repair jobs on the camp’s shaky wiring system. The weakest storm could plunge the camp into darkness, and Wally was always ready to help restore the lights. He asked nothing in return, but because of his usefulness, he was able to roam around the camp unsupervised. Wally made the most of it. He “liberated” food from the camp kitchen, coal for the barracks stove, blankets and anything else he thought might be useful to his mates.

  Wally once confessed to Art that the Germans were really getting a one-sided deal. “Every time the power goes out and they ask me to fix it, I’m sabotaging the electrical system. I get the lights back on, but I’m overloading the circuits. One of these days,” the South African smiled, “this whole place is going to burn to the ground.”

  Art nodded as if he approved, but he really was not sure what such a plan would accomplish for the prisoners. The secret seemed to make Wally happy, so Art kept his doubts to himself. The sergeant was too productive to be discouraged from his activities. One of his proudest accomplishments was accumulating enough parts to build a radio receiver. With their own radio, the Americans and British were able to maintain an up-to-date awareness of what was going on with the war and just how close they were to liberation.

  The Germans knew the Yanks and Brits had a radio and staged many surprise raids attempting to seize it, but the device was never discovered. It was hidden well—inside the German commandant’s own office. The office doubled as the camp’s infirmary, although the Germans had no doctor on staff. There were at least two prisoners in the American and British compound who were doctors. These men treated their fellow prisoners and occasionally even the guards. Because of this, these doctors were allowed access to the commandant’s office-infirmary.

  Every night at least one of the prisoners would complain of stomach cramps or some other real or imaginary ailment. One of the doctors would request the key to the office to get medicine. Once inside, the doctor would pry loose a floorboard, then retrieve and plug in the prisoners’ radio. He would listen to the BBC broadcasts right in the commandant’s office. In this manner, the American and British prisoners kept themselves as well informed as their German captors.

  Art and his friends did not need the radio to know that the Allies were tightening the noose on Germany. Sometimes they witnessed visible proof. On the morning of his first full day at the stalag, he was awakened by the sound of machine guns firing. From his barracks’ window he saw a train with antiaircraft weapons mounted on it; the train sat on the tracks just yards outside the prison’s outer fence. Under the international rules of war, the Germans were not supposed to have an armed train so close to a prison camp, but there it was, its guns blazing away at three American P-38 fighters.

  The Lightnings made several passes at the train, splintering some boxcars but doing little real damage. Art hoped they realized the compound was a prison camp and not a German army base. Apparently the P-38 pilots were aware their own men were down there, for they soon abandoned the attacks on the train and streaked away. Had they aborted the attacks only because they feared hitting the POW camp, or had the fighter pilots been looking for another target entirely? Art wondered about it and a few days later he got his answer.

  The P-38s came back. Again there were three of them, though Art had no way of knowing if these were the same pilots. Once again the heavily armed German train sat on the tracks next to the camp. The antiaircraft gunners fired almost continuously, but the Lightnings were too fast for them. The American pilots, in fact, seemed to pay no attention to the train during this raid. It became obvious to Art and the other prisoners, who all ran into the prison yard to watch the battle, that the P-38s were after something else.

  Art
looked over at the French compound and noticed the prisoners there had also come out of their barracks to see the show. However, the men were hunkered down on the ground. Beyond them, in the Russian compound, he could see the prisoners there were also curious about the air raid, but they were taking whatever cover they could find. Only the American and British prisoners were standing around watching the battle as if they were spectators at a baseball game.

  When the P-38s found their target, Art and his friends were not prepared for the concussion that followed. First there was a soundless fireball explosion less than a mile away. A second or two later came the deafening sound of a large ammunition dump being blown apart. Just as Art and all the Americans and British began to cheer, a strong wind roared across the camp and knocked most of them on their backsides. The prisoners quickly scrambled to their feet and cheered the Lightning pilots’ success even louder.

  Most days in the stalag were not nearly as exciting. The prisoners’ time was mostly occupied by three activities: talking, reading and playing cards. Art was surprised at the number of books in camp. It had been his experience that the German interrogators took most personal items away soon after capture. Perhaps, though they were happy to discover American cigarettes, chocolate bars and watches, the Germans found no use for the English-language paperbacks.

  Conversation was by far the most popular pastime. Topics ranged from home life and personal experiences to intellectual and philosophical discussions. Many of the men in the American and British compound were well educated. Two British officers had been Oxford professors before the war. Art not only enjoyed the discussions but realized they were important in keeping his mind sharp and clear.

  Appearance was also important. As an officer, Art tried to set an example. Most of the prisoners wore ragged uniforms and there was not much that could be done about that, but a man could wash when there was water, keep his hair trimmed and even shave. For some reason, the Germans allowed the British officers to keep their personal straight razors. These officers were more than happy to share the blades with their American friends.