Interview with Dr. Ray Matheny Residence: Lindon, Utah Home Town: Bear River City, Box Elder County Service / Duty: US Army Air Corps Flight Engineer/Gunner B-17 Bomber

THIS INTERVIEW IS NOT EDITED FOR CONTENT, LANGUAGE OR HISTORICAL ACCURACY

Rick: We're very happy to have with us today Dr. Ray Matheny who is a WWII veteran and was a Flight Engineer on a B17 flying out of England. Where were you based in England Ray?

Ray: Well there was a little town nearby called 'Kimbolton' and its about 85 miles north of London with Bedford being a larger town nearby.

And you were flying missions over into Germany?

Oh yes, well all of the Occupied Territory by the Germans. That included southern France almost clear down to the border of Spain and so we were deep into Germany several times.

So tell us about what it's like when you were going on those missions, how early you had to get up and what the routine was.

Well the routine was grueling to say the least. A mission call at the time that I was there was about two o'clock in the morning and you had about thirty minutes to wash up and you had to shave everyday because you wore oxygen masks and you couldn't have a bristly face with an oxygen mask, that would drive you crazy. So we had to look neat and appear like real soldiers all of the time, nothing would pass in a relaxed state. We'd have to go down to the flight line and start preparing our aircraft. Ground crews took care of the airplanes very very well but when you're flying the airplane then you have a certain responsibility to make sure that everything is on the up and up because errors can occur. So we were down there taking our guns out of hot oil storage, the removable parts of the guns, like the driving rods, receiver blocks and so forth were all soaked in hot oil and then we'd wipe these down and assemble our guns in positions; in my position for example was the top turret as Flight Engineer. And we'd attend to all of the little details; we had to check the quantity of fuel. Even though the ground crews did all of this we had to go around and secure every fuel cap and make sure the little chain was not hooked underneath the cap and we had to check all of the oxygen systems to make sure every oxygen station was up and the armor - we had to go around and check all the spare ammunition. We carried about 1500 rounds of spare ammunition in wooden boxes stashed strategically throughout the airplane and the pilots and navigator and bombadeer, they had to attend to their duties too and get the right instruments and everything they needed for the flight. Then of course that took quite a bit of time and at about five o'clock in the morning we would go to breakfast and there'd be a long line of ground personnel waiting to eat but they would shuffle us in past the ground personnel.

How many crews, how many planes would be on each mission?

Well our mission was to put up 36 airplanes at a time but rarely were 36 airplanes available because of various repairs that were needed from combat damage and other mechanical failures too which had to be taken care of. So anyway in the chunnel line we'd be shuffled right up there and we'd get fresh eggs for our breakfast, which is really quite wonderful, and the poor ground crews had to have the powdered eggs you know. So anyway that preparation was going on and then after breakfast, getting close to the flight time at six o'clock in the morning or so we would go to briefing and there were several briefings. My briefing was with the pilots and the navigators and bombadeers and they would reveal what the target was for that day. We had no knowledge of any of this before of course and they wanted to keep it secret right to the last moment. And then after that briefing, which is quite extensive at times, we would go out to the airplane and get our parachute harnesses on. Each man had a harness that was tailored to his body. Then we'd have chest-pack parachutes and we would assemble all of our heavy flying gear; our heavy sheep lined coats you know and heavy boots and we wore silk liner gloves and then wool gloves and then a hard leather glove over that and so you were ensconced with all kinds of gear and it was very necessary! The environment up there in the wintertime (especially over Germany) was very very severe, just terribly cold. So we would sit on the flight line in our airplanes waiting for a signal to start engines and usually that was done by a flare that was fired from the control tower. There was no radio communication; there was radio silence all over so the Germans would not know anything about an activity that was taking place. Surprise is the necessary approach to war. So we sat on the flight line and then finally we'd get the signal to start engines and we would start the engines and then another signal would give us the clearance for takeoff.

Did they have electronic starters on those engines?

Oh yes, they had what was called 'initial starters'. There's an electric motor starter that runs a flywheel for kinetic energy and a flywheel builds up high RPM's and then when you want to start the engine you engage that flywheel and it spins that engine over quite rapidly. It's a very large engine, it's a 1,820 cubic engine; it's a pretty good size. A big radial engine, 1200 horsepower and that spins the engine over quite well and it starts right up.

And so those missions started about seven o'clock in the morning?

Well London (around England) is 50 degrees north latitude so at seven o'clock in the morning during winter it would be dark. We would have to take off in the dark. And taking off in the dark is a real difficulty because each group has to assemble all it's own airplanes so they'll have combat formation. So when you take off you take off staggered; you have a series of runways on every airfield (one runway was 6,000 feet and that was the preferred runway because you had a 60-ton bomber you had to get off the ground and it was not very wide but we'd stagger the airplanes). So each bomber would pull into position like this staggered left and right on the runway and then this one would take off and then 20 to 30 seconds later this one would roll down the runway and then another and another and another until we'd get all 30 some odd airplanes up in the air. But then in the dark (and often the weather was pretty severe) the radio operators would tap out the code "K" and that would flash in a white light on the tail so as you took off you'd see flash, flash, flash, K, K, K and that's the airplane you'd try to follow and then form up at a higher altitude. There were great difficulties because there were so many airfields that were close by for example Molesworth 303 Group was just a short distance away from us and it was easy to mix up airplanes which was pretty severe.

Were you on complete radio silence and no radar?

Oh no. No radar to guide us or anything like that, no control towers saying 'maintain at a certain altitude'.

Well how do you get 38 planes in formation in the dark in bad weather?

Well it's really difficult because you have to climb above the weather if you're really going to form and we've had experiences where we would takeoff following the little flashing light and it would just simply disappear and our instructions were to climb out, turn right, maintain 500 feet a minute for so many minutes and climb in a spiral up and out and then poke up above the overcast. And I can remember quite a memorable sight for me is coming out of the overcast up there and then watch B17's just poke up all over right out of the overcast skies.

Were there any midair collisions occurring?

Well unfortunately that is part of the danger too and in fact on the day that we were shot down there was about a 1200 foot ceiling and we took off and were following our lead airplane. Molesworth right nearby was under the same circumstances and under certain wind conditions the patterns of our airfields overlapped one another but for some reason or another I watched one airplane from Kimble and one airplane from Molesworth with their running lights on and I could just see those lights like this and they came together and 'Boom' there was a big ball of fire and then both pieces of wreckage fell down and there were explosions and more fire and everything -there were 20 men gone just like that and it was a bad way to start a mission. And what's more that same day (I didn't realize this until just a couple of years ago) another airplane from our group taking off had some difficulty, we don't know what it was - probably engine problems and he couldn't make it and he crashed on takeoff and killed ten more people. There were 30 men gone before the mission hardly got off the ground.

Well now tell us - how long on average were those missions. If you got up at 2:30 in the morning, by the time you got back how many hours was that?

It was a long time and of course it varied according to the target. Some targets are a long distance away and others are shorter. If you're going to France to bomb a rail station or something then that's not much of a flight, but we were gone six, eight hours, ten hours sometimes and the trip down to the Nicaroon(sp?) River in south France almost to Spain there, that was a long flight. I don't remember exactly how many hours but it was more than eight hours anyway. The real problem with that is you can't eat or drink once you take off and go on your mission and you're careful, a lot of men drank coffee in the morning well I never drank coffee all of my life (I never liked the smell of it for one thing). And men soon learned not to drink in the morning so you went all day without anything because it's very hard to relieve yourself in those airplanes and we've had a couple of bad experiences with men - parts of their anatomy got stuck to the frozen facilities there. And the oxygen that you breath is not the oxygen you have in the hospital which is moisturized because your lungs need that moisture. This is dried oxygen so the moisture wont freeze up in the system. You're breathing that dry cold oxygen all those hours and usually at 10,000 feet the rule is you put on your oxygen mask and you start taking demand oxygen which means that the system automatically regulates the flow of oxygen according to the barometric pressure. As you rise and you get up to around 20,000 feet it's full 100 percent oxygen. You need this to be really alert and functioning as a combat person at higher altitudes, you need to take the oxygen early and then when you're coming back down we usually leave the oxygen on until ten or twelve thousand feet. But sometimes you can't stand it anymore, you know, your face is just burning, your head's under all that tension with the straps and everything and you just rip it off and take a breath of cold dry air anyway. But there's less oxygen and then the systems freeze up sometimes because as you exhale there's moisture coming out of your body and this often freezes up and you have to work your oxygen mask and break up the ice crystals so it doesn't get clogged up.

Well when you got back what would your throat feel like?

We were dehydrated to say the least. For some reason or other the American standard was if you were a man you want a whiskey or scotch or something when you come back and that's supposed to calm you down and feel good about life. Well nuts, I wanted water! I didn't want alcohol for heavens sakes, I wanted water and it's just stupid little things like that worked against you really.

So you had to go the entire mission without food or water?

Well they gave us a candy bar and you had a selection, I would choose the Mars Bars, that was the best but in that cold temperature during the winter of '43 it just turned to a brick and you couldn't eat it. You couldn't bite it at all and you can't eat with the oxygen mask on anyway you see. So I don't know what the candy bar was for, we brought them back and they were just hard rocks and you could carry no drinks. The movies like "The Memphis Belle" they have a thermos there and the guy has tomato soup and all and you just think 'oh come on'.

That's not accurate then?

No you couldn't have a thermos there, I mean if some ordinance hit your thermos bottle it's a vacuum and the darn thing would blow up you know. You don't need that.

Well did you have fighter escort's part of the way over?

Well yes. We did have some Spitfire escorts but Spitfires were designed as defensive airplanes I don't know - an hour and twenty minutes and something was about the limit for a Spitfire. So they would only take us maybe over to France if we went that way. A couple of times we had P47's that went up the coast of Holland and went inland a little bit but they were so short of fuel. You know they had very large engines. They had that R2800 Pratt and Whitney 2000 horsepower engine and that darn thing drinks up fuel and we have to synchronize our flight with their flights and to get all this synchronized is very very tough. I remember in one briefing he says "well now here you're going to meet the P47's and they're going to escort you in and they will be with you anywhere from five to fifteen minutes depending on your coordination". Well that's no help because they just simply had to turn back for the lack of range and of coarse the Germans they knew this too, they'd be just waiting over here someplace you know.

And the fighters left?

Yeah when the P47's go 'Hi' they'd dive right in on you.

And so you had German fighters that were attacking you as well as flack bombs?

Well yeah, the flack is something else! You can't describe it adequately to someone else. It's an experience and it's very frightening. There's nothing you could do about it, we did some evasive maneuvering at times because we could see the German flack gunners that would send up bursts 'boom, boom, boom' usually three bursts right in a row and that's their ranging bursts you see and we're flying along. Well we'd take a little evasive action and move off but you know they're smart too, they would compensate for that and once they get your range then they start sending up a real barrage of this stuff and those flack guns - there's some places so heavily defended you couldn't hardly imagine like Bremen. I remember reading a British Intelligence Report and it had all these flack towers which are thirty meters high (around 100 feet high), concrete and steel construction and on top they had a series of anti-aircraft guns, a minimum of two of those guns and sometimes more and if they had 88mm guns which were very versatile antiaircraft and antitank guns the Germans had developed, they fire shells up to 34,000 feet and they diminish in accuracy as you go higher and that shell travels about 3,000 feet per second and it has fuses that are set by machine so they have radar that's getting your range and that radar information feeds into a machine. They set their shells down and the machine goes 'click, click' and sets the proximity fuse to that altitude for the timing of how long it takes that shell to get up all calculated in advance. They could fire twenty one rounds per barrel every minute at you and well you can imagine a whole bunch of those flack towers guarding a city when you approach - at least 20 kilometers out you start getting flack and it gets worse and worse and worse and you have to fly through that and your target's down here and you can't evade once you get a bum run, you see, where the bombadeer actually takes over the flight of the airplane through his bombsite its an ordinal bombsite. It's linked up through the Sperry autopilot of the airplane so we get that last minute, minute and a half of the bomb run, the pilot says, "all right" to the bombadeer "it's your airplane." And so he guides the airplane and he's looking right through his telescope and crosshairs and he's guiding that airplane right on the target and the whole formation's going there and that flack is intense, you have no control over anything you just have to go through it. And that flack, you know, they were big shells and sometimes they had 120mm guns and even larger but mostly that 88 and I can remember one day we were flying over Bremen (it was one of our unfavorite targets because of that heavy defense), I was looking out the right wing and 'boom'! Boy there was a big explosion and it lifted our airplane right up in the air and I could see a big piece of metal skin just come up like that. And that day we had 53 major flack holes out there and that right wing had to be changed, it was just not salvageable.

That flack would rip right through the metal of an aircraft?

Well the metal of the aircraft - we have 032 that's 32 thousandths and 64 thousandths skin on that airplane and that's aluminum and that flack are shards of steel - hot ragged steel and it's going some velocity and when it explodes, you know, boy that stuff comes right through. I remember one day we had one of these big flack bursts and it was very close. We have this rating of flack called 'the Pucker Factor' and when you see those black bursts out there, that alerts everybody and their little adrenaline goes up - if you had a gauge it would go up a little bit. But it's not too bothersome because you know everything's expended out there. Then when you get close enough where you can see the red flash the Pucker Factor goes up several notches; maybe up to about an eight. And then when you not only see the flash but you hear it go off, it goes to a nine. Then when it goes off you can see it, you can hear it and it lifts your airplane up in the air and the pieces come shredding through your airplane that's a ten and a ten plus - if there is a ten plus.

And you were nineteen years old about at the time?

No I was eighteen.

And the average age of those flight crews was right around eighteen to twenty?

I was the youngest and not many under eighteen.

After the war what was the percentage that didn't return home from bombing crews?

It really depended on when you were there. When I was there in '43 the attrition rate was quite high, that's why I became a Master Sergeant. When I got there on October 17th, 1943 they had just undergone their second Frankfurt Raid and the mission duty then was 25 missions so we asked "well how many men in our 379th bomb group at Kimbleton had completed 25 missions and were going to go home?"
They said "one man" and they'd been flying since May.
Well those odds were pretty bad were they not? That's because Luftwaffe is up there shooting us down all the time you see and we didn't have adequate fire cover. We couldn't make any really deep penetrations with any assurity of decent success.

I've always wondered, these young men in these ready rooms learning about their missions and realizing the hazards, many of them had to be scared to death and realizing that this may be their last…

Well anybody that wasn't scared is just denying that condition.

So it was a really a hard thing I would guess on these missions that it could have very well been your last?

Well absolutely but you don't allow yourself to think in those terms. Each person has an ego and is determined to beat the odds, you know, and you think 'it's not my time'. Although there were people who had strong premonitions (if that's what you want to call them) or whatever who knew that something very serious was going to happen. And we experienced that with Bob Lamereaux our tail gunner one day who…we went on this flight to bomb a blockade runner, it was the last blockade running the Germans attempted in WWII to Europe and there were three ships that came from Southeast Asia - one of them (at least that I know of) was carrying raw rubber from Southeast Asia, the Germans were desperate for rubber. The British Navy sank two of these blockade runners way up the coast by Brest; they were trying to make the port there. The third one was run south and they tried to make the mouth of the Garonne River and then go up to the main docking facilities up the river and the British Navy ran it aground. So the Navy didn't want to get in any closer to the coast because the coast was defended, so the British Navy backed off and called the Air Force and said "go down there and bomb that ship, we want to prevent the rubber from getting into Germany". So we took off in a flight of thirteen airplanes that day and we were going to fly in trail all the way down there - its a very long flight. As we were flying along Bob Lamereaux our tail gunner called up and said "hey Ray will you change places with me?"
I checked with the aircraft commander pilot Tom Eaton and he said "yeah, that's okay, there's no danger out here we're flying off the bay of Biscay (out there in the distance you could see it) and no German's going to be out there anyway."
So we traded places and you know I enjoy the tail back there, there's a good view and everything and I could see the other airplanes. So Bob didn't like the top turret and I guess maybe didn't quite understand how to work it or whatever, so we traded back and a little bit later he called up the co-pilot and said "Lieutenant Haneline can I trade places with you?"
Well Haneline always wanted to fly in the tail to see what it was like. So he went back there and Bob was very comfortable in the co-pilot's seat, good view and comfortable. But Haneline didn't realize that the tail gun position doesn't have a seat. It has a little bicycle like seat and you have to kneel down and then you have to pick the guns up and they each weigh 64 pounds a piece, you know, and they're somewhat balanced but you have to hold them up and he found that that was very uncomfortable. He didn't like it so he traded back with Bob. So Bob was back in the tail again and then he called up the bombadeer and said "hey would you like to trade places with me?"
"Okay"
So the bombadeer went back there and he was comfortable and Bob really enjoyed being up in the nose section with that clear plastic around and it's just a wonderful view up there and its quiet up there - all the engine noises are behind you. And then we got close to the target and the navigator Robert Dodi called up and said "the ship's in sight you gotta get back here" to the bombadeer.
So they had to trade places and well we were on the bomb run and we lowered down to a very low altitude so we'd make a good hit and just blow that ship to pieces. We could see little lieders that were taking the cargo off the ship onto the shore and we were about maybe a minute or so from the bomb drop and a big fog bank just mysteriously rose right out of the sea and came right over that ship and obscured it and we couldn't see anything. So we had to abort that mission and pick a secondary target, so we flew all the way back to the coast of France and our secondary target was Abbeville. Abbeville happened to be the home base of Herman Göring personal fighter squadron which we called the 'Yellow Jacket Boys' because the cowlings of their airplanes on the engines were all painted yellow and it was a top-notched squadron so that was a good secondary target. So we lined up in formation, thirteen airplanes and we were flying now at 12000 feet above the capability of the airfield defense flack. They had light guns, they didn't have the heavy high altitude guns so that was our ideal altitude. So we were on the bomb run and there were no fighters. We couldn't see any fighters up there at all and I thought 'hey this is great'. So we're on the bomb run and there's no opposition anywhere from the ground, in the air…so I had a German 35mm camera and I stepped in the bomb bay and the doors were open and I'm going to take pictures of bombs dropping on Herman Göring's airfield. Well all of a sudden there's 'boom, pow, voom', all kinds of ordinances hitting the airplane and it's so unmistakable when ordinance hits the airplane. The airplane's lurching up and starting to vibrate and I jump up in my turret and coming directly at us, I mean head-on was a Focke-Wulf 190 with it's wings lit up shooting it's cannons at us and the nose section shooting it's machine guns and I thought we were on a collision course, it was that close. All of our thirteen airplanes were in formation and at the last second this German pilot does a wingover like that and slides right by our right wing, in between the other airplanes, and cut right through our formation. Man! What a nervy thing to do! But that's not all, on his tail were two American P47's diving right after this guy and they did the same thing. They dove down and chased that German into a cloud and I never saw him again…

***Tape Interrupt***

So we're right where a German aircraft went through the formation.

Okay the Focke-Wulf 190 passed through our right wing on a wing up like that and broke through our formation. Now our closing speed (I have no idea exactly what it was but he was probably going 350 miles an hour) and we're going 250 perhaps at that altitude, maybe not that much but we were only going about 200 perhaps. So the closing rate was very great and he was able to maneuver right through the airplane and what's more, those two P47's were right on his tail doing the same thing and they chased that German down through a cloud and we never saw him again. But my comment is - neither pilot the German or the Americans could have been over 19 years of age to pull that off. That's a young man's outrageously daring stunt you know. Nobody in their right mind would do something like that! That's WAR, you know, there's a driveness in war that makes things like that occur. So the airplane shot up all of a sudden here and I have to attend to the engine. That's my responsibility as Flight Engineer is the power and fuel consumption and all that and the right engine's really vibrating out there, you can see it and the manifold pressure on number three engine went down to atmospheric and so I looked everything over and 'okay, we can fly with these engines. Just leave the controls alone'. So I've got to go back and check what's happening because the waste-gunner Arnold Enils called up and said "we're hit" and a few seconds later Bob Lamereaux calls up very weakly on the intercom and says "I'm hit" and so I run back there and we've aborted our bomb run on the airfield and we're headed now towards the shore out to sea because we're low on fuel and we can't make a second run on this airfield. So I get back there and Arnold Enils was just sitting down next to his gun and he's holding his elbow like this and you can't talk in those darn airplanes, you know, you just have to lift your helmet loose and shout at each other and he said that he was looking out the window where his gun station was and had his elbow on the windowsill and a bullet came along and hit him on the elbow and creased his jacket. You know it just hurt like sin and he was still hurting but the other waste-gunner was unconscious on the floor and in a few seconds he came to (later on we learned that another bullet had grazed his head - it hardly left a mark on his leather helmet but it put a little split in his skull and it knocked him out). But they were obviously okay so I went back to Bob Lamereaux in the tail and his gun station's all blow to pieces there, a 20mm cannon shell hit right there in his left hand ammunition can which holds about 600 rounds of 50-calibre machine gun bullets and it just blew that thing up and Bob was lying there. Blood was oozing out of his clothes and so I dragged him back past the tail wheel in the aft section of the fuselage. The odd story here is that morning, just before we took off Bob brought two GI blankets onboard and I was the last one on the airplane and I said, "Bob what are you doing with those blankets. We can't have those…"
If these folded blankets came loose with open waste wind with all that rush of air coming in it would inflate those blankets and it would cause big trouble. We carried emergency gear that was secured but these were just folded up off his bed you know. I said "we can't have those in there" and he got really grumpy and he's not normally a grumpy person and he said "you never can tell when you need these things we gotta have them today". We were about ready to start engines so I just tucked them on the right side of the tail wheel in there (it's a retractable tail wheel) and stowed them away the best I could. So when I rushed up and hauled Bob out I had to open his flight suit and everything and the blood was welling up and I got the first aid kit and I had to take the gauze pads and I had to stuff his wounds because that blood was just flowing out and I tried my best to stop that flow of blood. I got that under control and he had at least two places, one on his backside (his gluteus maximus - he lost a big piece of it really) and he had another hole right here and it turned out later on I just learned a few years ago he had a bullet right through his bladder. Anyway I hauled him out and attended him the best I could and then I took those two blankets and wrapped him up in them. Now you see, he didn't want to be in that tail position all that flight and finally reconciled himself to it and he put those blankets on and those blankets gave him saving comfort.

So he didn't die?

No, that was a premonition you see. Bob was then taken to the hospital. I fired some flares in the landing pattern and we landed and we had no brakes and we had no tail wheel and you know the airplane was disabled some but we landed on the grass and then hauled Bob out. He was just white and he looked like he was gone. We tried to visit him the next few days but he was unconscious so…

Let me ask you about those flares. You fire those if there's a wounded soldier onboard to alert the hospital?

That's right, you have to make an emergency landing and you have wounded aboard, right. And so anyway that was December 31st 1943 and then on January 5th we were shot down. Bob was unconscious all during this time so when he woke up ten days later (he was unconscious for ten days total) he said "where's my crew?"
"They're gone, they're all dead" Well what a shock that must have been to him! He thought we were all dead now. I gave a talk at the Miami Museum of Science in 1997 and the sister of the navigator on my airplane who got killed learned about me being there and she made contact with Bob Lamereaux. I thought he was dead but we got together.

So all those years…

Fifty-five years later we came back together. It was very emotional. So back to the day we got shot down - this is January 5th 1944. Our mission was Kiel Germany that's up on the Baltic Sea, it's a major submarine base with a shipyard right there. So our flight that day was (I told you about the take off and the three airplanes that crashed to begin with) so we flew several hours gaining altitude very slowly. Those airplane's are so heavily loaded and didn't have the jet power that we have today and so it took about three hours just to get up to altitude. We went out over past Denmark and then over the landmass to the Baltic Sea and we flew over the Baltic Sea and then we made a run back down towards the docks of the submarine facilities. That way we made an approach without flack. Then the flack started as we neared the submarine facilities there, so we made a successful bomb run and our altitude was 25,000 feet that day and it was 56 degrees below zero centigrade which is about 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. It was a very chilly day! It was so cold it was mean, just mean that day. It's a frostbite day for the waste-gunners; we have the open windows and so forth. So we made our run and had a lot of flack and it was very worrisome to say the least. Then all of a sudden a green flack burst comes up "pshhhooo" and that's the signal for the German fighters who are up there circling around waiting for the flack barrage to be over with…

***Tape Interrupt***

Okay we were right by the green burst.

Okay the green burst of flack comes up which is a signal for the German fighters to come down and engage us because the flack barrage is over and they wouldn't want to fly in their own flack barrage. So at that point our airplane's tighten up our formation - we see the green bursts so the airplanes just slide together as close as we can manage and that means (every airplane has thirteen 50-calibre guns on it) so that means there's a bristling mass of guns out there and these fighter planes have to engage the enemy no matter what. That flack burst went off and we were ready and I remember a Messerschmitt 109 often called a 'BF109' came diving in on us and I have a gun sight that's a flat piece of glass that's horizontal and then one bar is up and one bar is down and these bars move back and forth according to little bicycle controls I have on my turret and I can frame a sight but first I have to crank in the dimension of the target. So the fuselage length on that airplane is 29 feet six inches and so I cranked that in and I was tracking this fighter plane now…we're going one way and he's coming the same way so the closure isn't too bad. So I'm tracking and 'brrpppdd, brrpppdd, brrrpppdd' I get about six rounds off of shot as I track and you really can't get anymore than that with any accuracy and then as I swung around all of a sudden I saw the tail guns fly up in the air like that. Now the tail guns (remember I told you they were 64 pounds apiece) and they're balanced but when you let go of the breaches the barrels go up like that. So here we're under fighter attack and the tail gunner let's go of his guns. Well that only means one thing - that he's hit and I then became aware that in the same line of fire the radio operator dropped his gun and his gun went straight up. Well I'm next in that same line of fire so those two boys probably got hit and sure enough there was a Messerschmitt 109 on our tail. Now that day being as cold as it was, our engines produce these huge contrails (not these little streaky things that you see jets producing here) I think it was about 32 airplanes that day and each engine was producing these huge contrails and they were just lining the sky - no wind up there and you could see them for 300 miles. They were just there and all of us were leaving those. So this Messerschmitt 109 pilot was down in our contrail, snuck up behind us and let go a burst and then I could see him dive down in the contrail. I said "hey I'm going to be ready for that guy", so I swung around my turret and then I set my wind dimension of the 109 - thirty two feet nine inches right there. I set that right there and then I tried to judge the distance that he would be because he was very close and sure enough I could see his propeller chopping through the contrails and his nose came up and he was coming up too high. So I bared down and tried to adjust on his wingtips for range and that means my turret guns would be accurate to 25 percent which is very very good for a mechanical analog computer in those days. He leveled off and by the time he started firing, I started firing. So we were both firing at each other in a duel right at the same time but he was still high and I could see his 20mm cannon shells, his wings just lit up with blasts and flashes and I could actually see those 20mm cannon shells stringing over the top of my turret. I just held down the trigger just blasting! My right gun quit firing and I think there's an interrupter cam on the outside of my turret track so you wont blow your own vertical fin off but the left gun just kept firing away and the first thing you know I could see he was getting very, very close. It was frighteningly close and his propeller just ground to a halt and pieces of cowling started to fly off the engine and I yelled into the intercom at that moment to "jump it!" That's an evasive action because we've had experiences before where the fighter pilot has been killed and his airplane is still alive and it comes and crashes into you and I thought maybe it was possible that I could have killed the pilot and here's a live airplane still going much faster than us and it could collide with us so I yelled "jump it!" The pilots have a big yoke there and this is a 60 ton airplane and we burned off a lot of that weight but they have to haul back all their strength because there are no boost controls on B17's, just cables and lever horns that they operate and so that means that we would go up like this and let the airplane pass under us. So at that moment we undergo a terrific G-force because we're inducing that G-force and you're massed down like that but we're…tail end Charlie 'purple heart corner' is the favorite saying there and we're stacked up twelve twelve and whatever - ten there, we didn't have a full compliment. And so we go up but we can only go up for a second and then they have to slam the yoke down and we have to go through weightlessness. So I felt the G-force and we're going up. So I threw both of my arms over the ammunition cans inside of my turret because I knew when we were going through weightlessness anything that's not tied down in an airplane while going back down will just stay there and the airplane will go around it. Now that sounds weird but combat airplanes are build for very high stresses and that maneuver is very necessary and all that ammunition in my ammo cans would just stay there and the airplane would go there and they would…the ammunition would go right through the top of my turret - right through the plexiglass out into space. So I was all braced like this and then there was just a big explosion and it threw me out of the turret right on the bottom of the cockpit and you know if you're going to be a survivor in any flying combat you have to be mentally set to take instant action or else you'll die and we witnessed it many times. You have three maybe five seconds to take positive action and if you don't there's a good chance you'll not make it. So I knew from the impact of the explosion and everything that that airplane was not going to fly anymore. Our airplane went up like this. It turned out that the right outer panel of the wing was blown off. It's about twenty feet long, it was full of 130-octane fuel, it weighed about a ton, so all of a sudden all that was gone from the airplane. The left wing is still flying and so it raised us up in the air like this and eyewitnesses say that here we have these airplanes stacked like this (three stories of airplanes) and our airplane did a roll up as high as the high echelon and came around and then entered into a flat spin. Well I grabbed my parachute which was…I wore the harness but I safety wired my chest pack (because I couldn't wear it in the turret - there's no room) to langerans which is bare metal inside of the airplane, part of the structure with breakaway safety wire - it's 15000 soft copper and that's it's purpose and I ripped off my parachute and by that time I'm being mashed down into the floor of the airplane and I pick up my parachute and I hook on to the right hook, I reached and tried to pick up the parachute and pull it up to the left hook but I can't lift the parachute - it weighs too much. We're in a spin and the centrifugal force has induced these forces and it makes everything weigh so much more than it normally is. I couldn't pick it up to hook it on the left hook and I just kept being mashed and mashed down. The peculiar thing here is that in my turret I have this little small oxygen hose that hooks up to my oxygen mask and supply and as I moved around the cockpit (it was short) I would pull it loose and the first thing you know I would be out of oxygen. So a day or two or before (I don't remember) an airplane crashed on our airfield taking off one of the short runways and it tipped over and burned up and the tail assembly did not burn up with the rest of the airplane. So I went in there and I took the tail gunners oxygen hose which is a great big long thing - I took that off, threw mine away (the little short one) and put the long one on. So now I'm in this spin and I'm exerting myself at 25000 feet and I have a good flow of oxygen and as I'm rolling forward there is a crawlway, there's a pilot and co-pilot here, instrument panel and controls right there and then this crawlway gives you access to the nose section. Also down at the bottom of the crawlway on the left behind number two propeller is an escape hatch about so big. My goal was to get to that escape hatch. I could see the co-pilot and the pilots. They were supposed to have backpack parachutes but they ran out of them so they issued chest pack parachutes. Well these men were big enough where they couldn't wear a chest pack and work the controls so I had safety wired their parachutes on the backs of their seats. I remember the co-pilot, I could see his left hand reaching back trying to get to his parachute but it was just hopeless, he couldn't even raise his arm and the pilot, you know, he's twenty years old now and his duty is a different duty from everybody else's and I could see him working the yoke and the controls trying to right the airplane so everybody can bale out. But there's no chance. It was a totally uncontrollable airplane at this point and the last I saw of them both of them were leaning over like this and being scrunched down into their seats and I know what was happening to them. This spin was very different from a normal spin because when over a ton of your airplane's gone you have a new center of gravity for the airplane. Normally the cockpit is the center of gravity so when you're in a spin the forces are minimal but now the cockpit is no longer the center of gravity and it's swinging around like you're on a skating rink - the whip. So the forces are terrible and the blood is draining out of their brains and they're just going into oblivion unable to help themselves or do anything. I crawled forward head down into this crawlway. What a fortunate thing! I have oxygen; I have blood in my brain. So I crawled down and the control cables are being drawn out of the pulley's and two sets of them are like this and I have to crawl through those or just past them like that and I can remember black smoke just coming in like this and in front of me is the navigator Lieutenant Dodi and he has a steel helmet on, he has his flack suit and he's the only crew member that has a steel helmet and a flack suit and he had this awful premonition and talked about it too much. He knew he was going to die and so he tried to get this protection; but he was on his back like a turtle. He had a backpack parachute and he was on his back and his arm was out trying to get to the escape hatch but there's no way he could do anything. He couldn't even turn over and I could not help him that's for sure and there's no way anybody can help anybody else in those moments so I crawled up to the escape hatch to the forward part. There was a red D-handle and on the D-handle are two little cables that go to the hinge pins. Now this is the leading edge of the escape hatch so I pull that and pull the hinge pins out. The escape hatch is supposed to fly off into space but because the airplane's under this terrible stress from the spin it locks the door in place. So by that time I am flat on the floor. My whole body is just mashed down on the floor. The last memory I have - I propped my arm up like this, my elbow on the floor and I reach up and grab the handle and it's at the aft end of the door (a normal bullet shaped handle) and I pull it down and it stays down and the last thing I remember I was beating my fist on the door trying to force it open. My next consciousness is - I'm free falling feet-first the parachute's on the right hook and it's beating me in the forehead like this and you know who's thinking about anything, who's rational or anything at this moment! I know I've got to get that parachute open! I've gone through this in my mind ten thousand times what I've got to do to get out of that airplane and get that parachute open. And I just reached up and clawed open or clawed at the D-ring (it's another red one right there on my parachute) and ripped it open and out came this beautiful white silk it "sshhooopp" and then it popped open really hard and it pulled up on this right hook and that's all that was needed. But the force was so great it displaced these left ribs and those darn ribs never went back. I still can't lay on my stomach today because they stick out there. Anyway…

So your left side was completely unhooked and you only had this right hook?

Yeah I only had the right hook. So anyway I have no idea of all the sequence of next events and everything but I know what happened. I remember seeing what was left of my airplane. It was just a big ball of fire, it had no wings, and the tail was gone and it was "rrrhhhrrrhhrrrh" making this awful noise going down and you know my epiphany came right then.

Did that door eventually open or did the escape hatch open?

Well the airplane blew up.

And that's what freed you?

And ejected me right out of that airplane. So you know that was my first serious call to God.

How many got out? Did anybody else get out of that plane?

Yeah. Anyway, let me finish this. As I was coming down on the parachute the debris field of my airplane swept past me and it was shaped like a Christmas tree. It was little pieces (thousands of little pieces of airplane) coming down and it was coming down like that. And these pieces would come and hit the canopy of my parachute. The piece would sink into the canopy and then they would float off on the side like that. And that scared the heck out of me as big pieces were flying through the air now. I could hear big pieces flying through the air and fortunately that debris field passed and that was the most surreal experience I've ever had in my life! To have my own airplane coming down all around me. Anyway that passed and I felt a great sense of relief after that. I came down lower and I could see a parachute down below me (several thousand feet) way down there and he's drifting off in an air current that was different from mine. I looked at my watch which I wore on the inside of my wrist to keep it from banging around on the cockpit and I tried to judge my altitude and the nearest I could calculate that I must have been unconscious and freefalling was for about a mile - about two miles and then got into more dense air and I became revived in the denser air because the oxygen mask, helmet and gloves and all that were gone. Then I remember a piece of burning wing, it was flipping hand over hand going down and as I got closer to the ground a Messerschmidt 110 night fighter came - it had the primitive radar antennae out on the nose and it was painted white on the bottom so search lights wouldn't pick up night fighters and a mottled blue on top and as I was coming down (I have a 24 foot canopy parachute and it drops about 1,000 feet a minute below 10,000 feet) I was drifting down and here's this fighter pilot and he kept circling me and he kept waving at me and oh man! I didn't know what to do. I was scared to death! So I just hung limp on one hook and I didn't respond to him. Finally he left and later on I realized that he was radioing the ground crews that there was another parachute coming down that somebody could pick up. So I got closer and closer to the ground and there was a piece of burning wing with a parachute wrapped in it and a man's body lying in the snow and there's another crew member and then I came very close to these power lines (high tension power lines) and I saw that my parachute was drifting right towards it so I tried to control the parachute. I wasn't very successful because we'd only gotten a few minutes parachute instruction and the favorite saying was "well, when the time comes, you'll know what to do." Well, that didn't help because I had to guide the parachute past these power lines and I was just going to drift right into them so I just climbed up the risers and collapsed the parachute and fell straight down and I let go of the risers and just as the parachute started to inflate…

***Tape Interrupt - interview proceeds in progress***

Why don't we go back to where you hit the ground after you bailed out and start there.

All right as you may recall, my parachute was drifting into these high-tension lines and I climbed up the risers of the parachute and collapsed it and I fell straight down and just as I let go of the risers the parachute reinflated and I hit the ice of a canal, broke through that and went down in the water. But it was January 5th 1944 so the canal had been pretty well drained, there was only about two feet of water left, but I got soaking wet and then I just climbed up on that ice and the most dramatic moment of my life I suppose was my realization that I was still alive. You know, a feeling and circumstance I can't really adequately describe. So I just laid there for a moment or two and I was grateful there was no wind so my parachute didn't billow out and drag me and the first thing I knew a boy came up (he was about 10 years of age I guess) and he kept speaking to me and it sounded familiar and I knew I was in Germany it just didn't sound like German. He kept saying "Venido con mi" and I had been born and raised right at the border of Watts California and all of our business was downtown in Watts so I learned street Spanish and I thought 'gee that sounds like venido con mi' which is Spanish for 'come with me'. This kid was trying to tell me to come with him, so I get him over to me and I'm trying to tell him and trying to show him how to get my harness off because my hands were like clubs (remember it was 56 degrees below zero centigrade when I bailed out).

Did you have gloves on?

When I bailed out but all that was gone - helmet, oxygen mask, goggles, gloves all gone. And my hands were literally clubs and I couldn't articulate my fingers at all and I tried in vein for him to just push the button and give it a half turn and then the harness would come off and I'd be free of the parachute.

How old were you at the time?

I was 18 years old. Anyway an elderly gentleman came over a slight rise of ground and as soon as the boy saw this gentleman he just took off and this fellow came over and he picked me up and I couldn't stand. He fiddled around with the harness and between the two of us we got the harness off and I was free of that parachute and the harness (and the harness straps around your legs too and your shoulders and chest) and he put his arm around me and I put my arm up around his shoulder and he helped me hobble in towards the village. I was really surprised, the ground was littered with pieces of my airplane and on the roofs of the houses there were pieces of metal and there were two girls (I think they were 16 or 17 years old) and they were pointing at the wreckage on top of the roofs and they were yelling "kaput, kaput" and they were pointing at me. I had a gash in my forehead and I was bleeding and I couldn't walk and I guess I looked a mess so as we approached these two girls I made this old gentleman stop and I reached in my flight pocket and I pulled out my comb and I combed my hair. You know, I was 18 and had just gone through such a terrible experience and all of my companions were dead except one and I can't shut off the hormones. They were just there. Anyway I wont live that one down.

We interviewed another pilot that went through a similar experience and he winked at a couple of girls as they were taking him prisoner.

Oh yes, well you know how it is. Anyway I hobbled into the village and met a school teacher who spoke some English but not very well and people were so friendly and just gathered around and I asked him "am I in Denmark?" Denmark's not far away and it was one of our escape routes for the day in case we got shot down and he said "nein nein, Deutschland". And oh boy my heart sunk! I knew I was in for it there and was going to be a prisoner, I really couldn't walk by myself. So he took me over to a house and met an Italian soldier and they took me into the vestibule of the house and it's just a little warm-up room where we would call it a "mud room" in the Midwest. I was a room where you take off your boots and hang up your outdoor clothes and there's a little potbellied stove there and a chair. A lady came in and she saw that I was all wet and I was kind of shivering and kind of in a state of shock as it grew on me more and more. She brought in a blanket and then she stoked up the stove and made me very welcome. So I sat there and I was only there about a few minutes when the soldier went outside and he motioned for me to come over there. I could walk at about that point (with difficulty) and there's my waste gunner "Arnold E. Nevels" - he was the other parachute that I saw floating down and drifting in another air current when I was coming down up higher. His shoulder was displaced and nobody (including me) knew how to take care of that injury and it was very painful for him. We talked a few moments and I asked him "what happened? Did that ME109 that I was shooting at hit us?" and he said "no". He thought it was a direct flack hit and it blew the wing off. Just a couple of years ago I learned that it was a 7.5 rocket fired from another airplane way behind us that had blown our wing off.

How did you find that out?

Well I wrote letters to my reunion group and I got eight responses from people who were eyewitnesses to being shot down. When you see another airplane being shot down with 10 men in it, you know, they're mess hall buddies and everything, you never forget it. But anyway I said "well how did you get out?" because the spin was so terrible and he said "well the ball turret got wrenched right out of the fuselage". Because of the centrifugal force that ball turret weighed 1350 pounds and Ray Ferrell the Ball Turret Operator in it could not wear a parachute so there was a lot of weight there and that centrifugal force was so great it just pulled that turret right out of the fuselage and he went down. We used to call that 'the casket' for good reason. So he went screaming down to earth in that thing and it's a thing to think about every now and then, mostly to avoid thinking about it. But so Arnold said that he crawled out the hole that the turret had left and it's about this big around. So he got taken away and I learned later through letters from my mother and his mother that he had been taken to a German Lazerette somewhere north of town and I never saw him again. So I came back in the house with the soldier and we sat together and I guess I was there for about 15 minutes when another lady came in the house (and there were two children there too about 7 and 8) and the lady in the house came in and invited me to have lunch with the family. It was totally unexpected and I was in such a state I could not eat anything. This whole adventure was just starting to gel within me and I politely declined. The soldier and I sat there and talked (my street Spanish and his Italian) and I learned that he had been wounded in North Africa in the hip and he was no longer fit for active duty in the normal sense. So the Germans had imported Italians to northern Germany to help work the farms while their men were taking off to war. I had an escape kit in my flight pocket and I took that out and it had two silk maps - one was of France and the other was of Germany and they were beautiful things but they were of no use (he couldn't be caught with anything like that) so we just threw them in the fire and thought 'well that's okay'. Then there was a D-Bar which is a concentrated chocolate bar, a 'pep pill' as they call it (I think it was some sort of an amphetamine) and a hacksaw blade. I also think there were a couple of cigarettes in there (cigarettes are money during the war). There was money in there too, there was about 27,000 Francs and 17,000 or 19,000 Reich Marcs and boy this was a lot of money.

What would that amount to in dollars?

I couldn't tell you, I can't convert that for you. Anyway I offered the money to this Italian soldier because I had no use for it and he couldn't touch that money. He let it be known to me that if he was caught with that money he would really be in deep trouble. So I gave him a pack of bills and I took a pack of bills and we took one at a time and just tossed them in the fire and we burned them up. It was a psychological release or something! It felt good to be burning money! So I could see into the house from the vestibule in the little chair and the stove I was seated at - you could look into the kitchen and the living room and it was just one big room but it was divided by a counter-high structure and there was a kitchen table here and the living room on the left and then there was a mantle with some pots there and there were photographs of their men in German uniforms. Those kids were playing Old Maid and I was really surprised because I was just playing with Old Maid cards not too many years before, you know, and I thought 'gosh this is kind of strange' and you know the people were kind and everything and I thought 'who's the enemy'? Because the propaganda we had been subjected to before the war was really powerful. My childhood boyfriends (most of their fathers had been in World War I), we were all boy scouts together and we wore World War I leggings and the leather leggings were really nice to have but they were rare because they rotted so easily and we used the leg wraps and my fishing creel was a World War I gasmask bag. You know, we had talks with the fathers and they would tell us about the fighting and the trenches and everything and that's what drove me into the airplanes - I was not going to be subjected to what they went through. Little did I know how dangerous it really was no matter where. There were all these movies during the '30's about World War I and the Germans were always the enemy. The Japanese were not the enemy to us at that point, they were just sort of a junk society to us and we had no inclination of thinking that they could ever be an enemy to us. But the German's just kind of came off as a natural enemy. But I remember my uncle was a pilot and I started to fly very early (in 1930 I took my first airplane ride) he used to subscribe to this pulp magazine called 'G8 and His Battle Aces' and World War I was just fighting on and on up until 1941. I still have the big poster of that. So all of that built us up to believe that Germany was our natural enemy but now that I was in the midst of them it didn't seem that way. Anyway, the soldier and I passed the time during the day and about six o'clock in the evening the lady came back in and invited me to have dinner with the family and the soldier excused himself (he was supposed to guard me) but he went to his villa for his dinner so I sat down with the family (no guard) and ate dinner with the children and two women. I really can't remember too much about the meal, it was very simple. I remember hot soup which was very very good, dark bread and some ersatz coffee and strawberry jam. That's all I really remember but I know there was a little bit more but no meat. So that passed and the soldier came back and the radio came on and they listened to the news and I guess it was about eight o'clock in the evening. The news was broadcast in German, French and English and of course I caught the English part and they said that day on our raid over Kiel that 60 bombers had been shot down. Well it turns out there three. But that's the kind of propaganda that people were fed. So at about 10 o'clock a truck was heard outside and a young Wehrmacht Officer is let in the door and he has riding boots and riding breaches (spit polished boots) and he's a tall handsome young man with an immaculate uniform and he just strolled in. He didn't pay any attention at all to me as I was sitting there next to that little potbellied stove. He went right into the living room "Heil Hitler" to the family and the family didn't respond to him at all.

They didn't say a word?

No, no not at all. Finally he came out and "Heil Hitler" again and as he passed me he went "vffvfft" like that - just like I was a little puppy dog on the floor there. I mean when you're a prisoner the other guy is so in charge you just don't know…in the movies with Errol Flynn and his grand escapes and everything, all this heroism and everything - it's really very different when you're on the other end. Here I had flying boots on and my flight suit and nothing else (as though I was going to escape across the country or something). So anyway we got in a truck and there were seven other men in the truck that had been shot down that day plus Wehrmacht Schützen (Wehrmacht means Army - and that's just a GI soldier) with his rifle and he had a little squeeze generator flashlight and he'd go 'zoom zoom zoom' and that would give us a little bit of light. I was the last one in the truck and we were bumbling along and nobody said a word. We're all apprehensions about everything.

It was all US Airmen that were in there?

Well we learned but we didn't know at first because we were given all these precautions earlier in lectures and what have you - 'don't say anything to anybody' and all this. So we're bumping along the road and the guy next to me moans and leans over and falls right over on me so I kind of lifted him up and I said "what's the matter?" and he said "I've been shot in the arm" and he had another minor wound in his body someplace and it was starting to bleed again. He pulled out his handkerchief and I managed to stuff the handkerchief over his wounds, that was all I could do and then I held his hand. We bumped along the road in total darkness and then finally the men started to talk and one big fellow in particular (he was at the fore end of the cab) he was a big fellow and with the flashlight you could clearly see that he had a pockmarked face and he was slamming his fist into his hand like this and he was letting out a scream of World War II swearwords. They were right in with the current vocabulary and he said "that SOB of a B24 tail gunner shot me down!" So we had to hear that story. He said "I was playing cover for this formation of B24's and as I swept by this tail gunner shot at me and his 50 caliber bullets hit my right wing and they walked right through the wing and right through the cockpit…" and not a bullet hit him, it just blew up his instrument panel and went right out the other side of his airplane.
He said "that was the end of that airplane", he just turned it upside down, popped the canopy and fell out. He said "I should be back there getting ready for another sortie!" He was really mad! Anyway we drove on into Hamburg and I can only judge we got there at about four o'clock in the morning or four thirty in the morning and I was taken out first by myself and taken to a brick building. It was black out, it was very very dark but you could tell you were in the city, little outlines of buildings were discernable. Some sleepy-eyed German GI opened the door and they escorted me upstairs and the guard got back in the truck and it went on. This guy took me upstairs to the second floor and we were just looking at each other. Finally he started to talk to me and they were English words but it wasn't very clear what he was trying to say. I had to go to the bathroom so I had to make all the motions. That got over pretty well, he escorted me into the bathroom and golly sakes there's even paper in there! I just came from England and you don't find paper in the bathrooms and I thought 'hey this isn't so bad'. I came back and this fellow was short and stocky and he had the darkest eyes (I called him 'Beedy' just as a nickname because of those dark eyes) and he explained to me that he had lived in New York City for about six months and that they had made him an interrogator. Well that's not much of a qualification I've learned.

This was a German guy that spoke English pretty good?

He was a GI and he had a form and I gave him my name rank and serial number and he started asking me some other questions but I couldn't understand what he was saying. So very shortly a German Major came up the stairs and he was awakened too early in the morning (he had this gray stubble beard) and he was grouchy. He came in there and all these poor guys are all rumpled up from their night duty and they all stood at attention and everything and then he asked some questions. Beedy said "nein nein" and he grabbed the form from Beedy, then he came over to me and I guess what he asked them was "did you search him?" That would be a logical thing to do with a new prisoner, I mean I should have been searched at the house. So the Major came over to me and started patting me down and he found my hacksaw blade. 'Oh man' I thought 'I'm really going to catch it now'! He pulled that blade out and he saw immediately what it was and he went over to each one of those poor GI's and he just waved that in front of their faces. He really read the riot act with them - you know spit was flying out of his mouth he was so mad. Then he turned around and congratulated me. I thought 'wait a minute, I'm not used to this, this is not the normal reaction that I'm accustomed to' - so that's fine, you keep the hacksaw blade.

So he gave it back to you?

No, no he didn't give it back to me. So then he got Beedy engaged with me because Beedy was supposed to be interrogating me. The Major had the form and Beedy would ask me a question and there were a lot of English words in there but there wasn't a constructed sentence and I couldn't understand him. I'd say "What? What are you asking?" and he kept looking at me and then finally he asked me something about school and "oh yeah, yeah I was in school" and the Major asked me where I went to school and Beedy had lived in New York for six months and he knows something about New York so I said "I go to school in New York" and the Major said "New York" and he wrote that down on the sheet. Beedy then looked at me a little stronger and then he started to ask me some more questions and almost anything I would say Beedy would somehow repeat it to the Major but there wasn't a clear communication taking place at all and I thought 'you know something is really going on here and I'm going to test this out'. I'll never forget these words when Beedy asked me a question and I responded "yes and I really like the wallpaper in my Aunts parlor" and Beedy repeated something in German and the Major wrote it down and I thought 'okay the game is on'! So Beedy looks at me and we're really in eye contact now, we're just reading each other back and forth and we're playing the game - he's getting me off the hook, I'm getting him off the hook. Well this didn't last too long because the information really wasn't coming I guess and finally there was another knock on the door downstairs and it was time to get me out of there for whatever reason. They just said "roust". So we walked down under guard to the train station, it wasn't very far away and I went to the jail right next to the train station. The jailor there greeted me in cockney English and he said "Hi ya Yank". I just couldn't believe I was in Germany and I walked in there and he said "don't mind my English brogue, I lived 12 years in London and when the war came I came back to Germany". So he put me in a cell and he said "I'm sorry I don't have better accommodations for you", it was a wooden bed and a piece of wood plank for a pillow at a 30-degree angle and I said "it doesn't matter!" I was so tired, I just laid down and went sound asleep right on those planks. It just didn't matter. The first thing I knew he was waking me up and he says "I'm sorry Yank we've got to get you out of here before daylight. If the civilians find you they'll kill you." So he came back in a few moments with my breakfast, which was ersatz coffee and a piece of black bread with more of this red jam on it. Oh man that tasted good! The liquid and food went down well. He then stepped out of the cell but he didn't lock it, he shut the door but he didn't lock it. There was no concern, he knew I wasn't going anywhere and I knew I wasn't going anywhere.

He knew there were no thoughts of escape?

No sir, I wasn't going to go out to a hostile crowd outside, believe me!

***Tape Interrupt***

So we entered the train station and they marched me outside and we met the other seven prisoners from the truck trip and there were two GI's with their rifles and they marched us a very short distance to the train station. We entered the passenger car and this passenger car already had civilians on the car and the seats were along the length of the car rather than transverse like our trains. The civilians sat on one side of the car and we sat on the other and we just sat there and looked at each other.

Did you have a guard at each end?

No the Schützen sat together, they didn't care about anything; you know they were just chatting with each other all the time. So we rode out of Hamburg before daylight (and this is January 6th of 1944 so it was seven o'clock in the morning) we rode all day on the train, passed through Mayrberg (about the geographic center of Germany) and saw all the bomb damage in the town and the rail yards in particular and we ended up at Frankfurt.

Did they feed you on the train?

No but the civilians each had a little black briefcase and I thought they were all business men (and I guess they were) but about lunchtime they opened them up and they had sausage and bread.

So they were eating and didn't offer you any?

They didn't offer us any. If there were ladies there they might have. But anyway we came to the train station in Frankfurt and Frankfurt has this big dome canopy of glass and there were only a few panes blown out and it was virtually undamaged. We got off the train and we were walking on the ramp to go into the building that exits and as we passed a false niche in the wall there was a man that wore a fedora. He had an overcoat and he kind of backed into this niche in the wall and as we walked by he raised the overcoat and he gave us the 'victory signal' and then he quickly put the overcoat back over his had. Boy, gee wiz that just sent a chill!

He was a German?

I don't know who he was. He was dressed in civilian clothes. And we walked maybe 50 feet or whatever down the aisle and there was another old lady there and she was kind of bent over. She had a shawl and as we passed she did the same thing. Two people in a row in the train station…and these Schützen (one guy was in front and one guy was in back now) as we were marching they didn't see anything and if they did they couldn't have cared less.

What city were you in at this time?

Frankfurt. So we went through the train station and out the other side and I was totally surprised at seeing downtown Frankfurt because the first thing that greeted me was a great big billboard that said "Coca Cola" on it! It was just like home and there was a Shell Service Station across the street and there was a 1937 Chevrolet four door sedan driving and then a Ford driving down the street, then all these gasbag cars, you know, that had to produce their gasbags on top of the cars and gas generators on the back and man, this looked more civilized than London.

So was this in 1943?

It was January 6th 1944. So we got on the streetcar and rode up to the edge of town to a place called 'Dulog Luft', it's the allied interrogation center. There was a great big sign out front that said 'welcome, we have been expecting you' (all in English) and this is the place where all the bomber crews and fighter pilots and everybody got shuffled through. None of the ground pounders got through this interrogation center; this was special for airmen.

You were all officers I guess?

We were Non-Commissioned Officers. You see, I was a technical sergeant (non-com) and then the officers were with us too. We got sent into a line, there was a line of men, freshly arrived prisoners. It was a big business and we had to take off all of our clothes and then they took away our electric heated underwear which is a purplish blue color. They gave us back our flight suit and then I had a mechanic's sweater (a woolen sweater) they made me throw that in the bin and there was a young German guard there and I looked at him and I looked at that sweater and I looked at him and I looked at that sweater and he just discretely looked away. So I took it and I put it back on and put my flight suit over it and tucked the collar down and I was so grateful!

So this seems to me like there were a lot of civilians that were against the war and against Hitler.

A lot of soldiers were against the war too. I mean these guys were GI's, they were in uniform and they weren't gung-ho Nazi's as far as I could see. So then we got led to a cell, it was solitary confinement (a little cell about 10 feet long maybe six feet wide and it had a wooden bunk and a palliasse which is a stuffed straw mattress) and that gad dern palliasse was full of bugs.

What's a palliasse?

A palliasse is a straw mattress and there were body lice in there and fleas and bedbugs. What an irritation! You'd come out with little sores all over you and at the end of the cell were two very large electric heaters and then above that was a boarded up window so no light got in. It was a processing cell so they turned on the heat until it got just boiling hot and you had to just take off your clothes. And then they'd leave it off long enough where you just froze and then they'd turn it back on and you'd boil and freeze, boil and freeze. It was working you. You couldn't see anything, there was no light.

That was part of their interrogation process?

It's a processing cell, right. Then outside was a clock that chimed every 15 minutes so you knew exactly how long an hour was - 24 hours a day, every 15 minutes "bong, bong, bong" and all that works on you. Then at the end of the cell next to the door there was a flag and you pulled that flag down (the flag's outside in the hallway) and it tells the guard you need to go to the bathroom and you know you wait until you really need to go to the bathroom and you pull the flag down but the guard doesn't come. You pound on the door and its two hours or so before he finally opens the door. He has a bayonet on his rifle and he starts poking you with this bayonet down the hall on the way to the latrine and you just get down to the latrine and you sit down and you're just trying to do your thing and he's "Raz raz". He's got that bayonet poking at you "get out of there, get out of there" and I'm dry, I'm just out of water from perspiring in that cell and there's a basin there in the latrine and I turned on the faucet and just grabbed a handful of water trying to get some water in me. He just shoves me right out and down the hall and back in the cell. At about six o'clock in the morning (there's a little door down at the bottom of the entry door) they raise that and shove in a bowl of hot water (I don't know if there was anything else in it) and at six o'clock at night there was a little bowl of soup and a piece of bread and some Ersatz coffee too.

Did you have any light in there?

No it was completely dark and the only time you had light was when the guard would open the door and I noticed on the wall when that light came that the prisoners before me had marked the days down on the wall. They had scratched them in the wall and over the days why I counted them up and they only averaged seven. I thought 'well this is a seven day stay in here'. But the next day I was there a Red Cross representative came in, he had a Red Cross armband (International Red Cross representative) and he had this big form and he came in and said, "Fill out this form".

Was he German?

This was a German, that's right. It just became so obvious in five minutes that he was not a Red Cross representative and I filled out the form with my name rank and serial number and I looked at the rest of the form and they wanted my home address and everything and my parent's names and it had all this military information there 'what base did you come from' and all that. I said "I can't fill this out" and he says "oh yes, you will stay here until you do fill this out".

So he spoke pretty good English?

Oh yes, very good English. He kept coming back and in about three days he came back again and I saw that form and I thought (I don't know why -it was against the rules) but I put down my parent's name and address - 320 East 92nd Street Los Angeles, California. I shouldn't have done that according to the rules but I did it anyway and it turned out that that was one of the best things that I'd ever done (and I'll tell you about that later). On the sixth day the guard opens the door and there was no bayonet on his rifle this time and he just escorts me very casually down to the latrine. He said, "You need to clean up". So I take the water and I'm washing myself up and he says "you need to shave" and I said "I don't have a razor" and there was a double-edged razor blade sitting on the counter and there was a glass mirror there above the basin. So he took that double-edged razor blade and then he spit on the mirror. Then he stropped the blade back and forth and sharpened that blade up then he handed it to me and said, "shave". So I took that blade and shaved.

So you had a seven-day growth by then?

Yeah I had a seven-day grown by then you see and I was only 18 so it wasn't too bad. Then he took me down to the Hauptman (that was the interrogator) and the Hauptman greeted me. I'm under military control and under military control you're obligated to give obeisance to the one in authority. So I saluted him and he saluted me and he offered me schnapps and cigarettes and I had to decline all that stuff. So he started giving me a history lesson about Germany and what have you and then finally he started asking me military questions and I said, "You know I can't answer those questions."
He says "but you must identify yourself because we know that you are a spy."
Well that was a shock to me, you know, I wasn't prepared for being accused of being a spy. He'd already told me that they had found the remains of my airplane and the airplane broke up and the tail had come off from the rest of the fuselage (it had all blown up) but the tail came off and it had my tail identification and the serial number of my airplane (093 was the last three numbers of that airplane). He'd already told me that so anyway he was accusing me of being a spy and I said, "Well I have dog tags!"
And he said, "Anybody can have dog tags."
Then finally it dawned on me 'this guy really goofed' because I said "if I'm a spy would a spy arrive in Germany in a shot down B17 in the middle of a daylight raid over Kiel Germany?"
I told him that and he blew it. He realized that his ploy was over with, so he said "I don't have time for this" and he reached down in the lower right drawer. He pulled it open and said "I have your file here"
I said "what? My file?"
And he says "oh yes" and he pulled it out and he opened it up "Ah, yes. Ah, so I see you graduated from Gulfport Mississippi A&E School in April 1943. You went to the gunnery school at Cayman Arizona" and so and so. Everyplace that I had been he repeated. There was also a news item that had been sent back from my hometown that was published in the paper. And I said, "How did you get this information?"
And he said, "Ah, we have friends in America."
He said, "We have a clipping service. Every time there is a notice about a soldier or an airman who graduates from a school and it's in the newspaper, our friends clip it out and they mail it to us."
I was totally shocked and he had a file on me no less and a lot more information which I don't know how he got. I finally figured it out, it all went to Berlin and it took them six or seven days to assemble the file and then they send it to Dulog Luft. So that's why we had to stay in there. So anyway we went downtown and got issued new uniforms. Now these were second's, rejects from the Quartermaster, they were United States Army uniforms but they weren't complete. I was issued a pair of Czechoslovakian shoes with iron hobb nails and a Serbian hat. But I had a GI field jacket and shirt and two pairs of underwear and the most wonderful piece of equipment that the government ever issued to a GI was woolen pants! I hate wool because it scratches but this is ironclad wool, which you can run a tank over and it won't damage it. I mean, it lasted the whole imprisonment you see and most clothes won't. Then we were shuffled on 40 and 8 boxcars (you know the 40 and 8 stories from World War I - eight mules and 40 men) anyway these old boxcars were all taken out of storage during the war and put back into service and a bunch of us men (and I don't know how many were in there, maybe 20 or more). There was a potbellied stove and a sandbox in the middle of the cab and I sat next to a wall. I thought 'I want to have a backrest' and there wasn't enough room for everybody to have a backrest. So the train started to roll out of the station and I could feel the wheels 'calunk calunk calunk', they had encountered emergency stops so many times that they had ground flat spots on the wheels and the car started to vibrate and shake so I traded places with the guy next to the sandbox and the stove. I said "here, do you want a backrest?" But that train got up to speed and it was just vibrating like this and splinters were just raining down from the roof or the ceiling of this boxcar. We went clear across the country and we were out there about seven days (I'm going to pass up some very neat stories before we got there) but we ended up at Krems Austria right on the Danube River about 34 kilometers outside of Vienna.

Did you have enough room on that boxcar to move around? I mean was it packed?

Yes. That's right, there were only about 20 men or so.

So you could move around in there and the sandbox was for latrine purposes?

No it was for the stove. And they issued us a food parcel (a Red Cross food parcel) so we had a little food.

How about latrine stuff?

Okay well that's the story I omitted but if you want me to tell it it's kind of funny.

Well let's hear it.

Okay. I'm going to take up your afternoon, you haven't heard anything yet. We're booking along on the rails there and we came to…I'm 80 years old and this old brain doesn't work like it used to…okay we're bumping along on the rails and we come to Nuremberg and we stop and they open the doors so we could relieve ourselves. Well we had a comic with us, he was a little short fellow, a bald Turret Gunner from Chicago and he was imitating Hitler and he put his two fingers underneath his nose which was a very common thing to do to imitate Hitler and he was doing this and everything and the doors are open. The guards are outside and they're looking at us and they're kind of laughing, you know. But there's the great stadium of Nuremberg and the great swastika with the wreath around it that was blown up by the allies. So we're out there and we're all unbuttoned and we're streaming out into the rail yard and this guy is doing this and the guard looks up there and sees an officer and he gets all excited "stop, stop, stop, stop!" Then finally the officer must have turned away and then he started to laugh but we were doing our darndest to spoil the image of that swastika. It was funny to us.

You hadn't really been treated with much brutality at all?

No, no, not really. We rode on, I think it was about a week and we ran out of food and we just had the normal stops for relief.

You traveled day and night for a week?

Yes.

All night long?

Yes, well a lot of sightings for more important trains and this dragged on. We didn't make much progress any day at all. We finally ended up at Krems Austria which is 34 clicks out of Vienna and it's right on the Danube River and they let us out (they call it Bahnhof which is the train station). We were marched through town and then out a little bit through the country and then up a hill. We get up the hill and there's the camp - Stalag 17B. There's a great big sign up there that said "Stalag 17B" and they opened the gates and American prisoners greeted us. Then they shuffled us right in to a processing area and they shave our heads and they issue us a ceramic bowl or cup and a pewter spoon and that's all the German's are going to give us in the way of eating utensils. Then they gave us a blanket. My blanket was made up of three old worn-out blankets that were sewn together. But that was better than nothing! Then we went in and were given our barracks assignment, mine was 19A. These barracks hold 150 men and there's a separation from one end to the other with a washroom and it has a number of washbasins and running water and a stove. 75 men for each end was the normal accompaniment when I was there. We were greeted by the prisoners that were already there and they called themselves 'Kriegies' which was an acronym for 'Kriegsgefangener, which means 'prisoner of war' in German. They gave us some food parcels to start with and we were assigned to bunks. We had three tier bunks and there were two men to each level and from time to time it got to three men and even up to 13 men in three tiered bunks.

You mean three men would take one bunk?

Three men on one level and that would be nine men to a triple deck bunk but mostly it was only two but from time to time (depending on the flow of prisoners and their ability to take care of them) we ended up with a lot of men at times. These bunks had wooden slats and there was a thin piece of plywood (about ¼ inch plywood) that you laid on and then you had a palliasse.

Was it like sleeping right with somebody? Was there any separation?

Oh yes. Oh no there was no separation.

So you had three men sleeping together on one bunk and sometimes nine men?

Yes, nine men on three levels but mostly it was two men. We joined into what we called 'combined partners' and that meant that two or three men and maybe four (usually two men) would pool all of their resources. So when you got a food parcel then you would have two food parcels and then the duplicate items you could trade with somebody else for something else. So there was very vigorous trade going on when you got food parcels. Other rations that came we would share those so this was a good thing to share like this. I remember we had trouble with the German ration. It was not really good, it would not sustain us so the food parcel was designed to supplement the German ration and because of the transportation difficulties during the war we didn't always get a food parcel. We were supposed to get one every Friday but I can only remember a few weeks in succession that we actually got food parcels. These food parcels were very very good because they had a can of Spam in it, a can of bullied beef, orange paste, sometimes a little strawberry jam or something, liver paste (concentrated), a pack of cigarettes (I think about five cigarettes in each one), a little TP, some soap - minor items like that but they were lifesaving items and they would supplement the German food.

What's bullied beef?

That's corned beef.

And you called it bullied beef?

Well that was the common term used at that time. Then when we got the parcels issued, the Germans would puncture each can with a bayonet and the purpose there was to make sure that you consume the can of goods and not save them for an escape. This was a distinct disadvantage but we sealed the can back up by taking the German margarine which was issued to us (it was a white stringy margarine) and we'd seal over the bayonet punch.

And it would harden up and seal it?

No, it never hardened up, it was just a white goo that just kept the air out. You know, you spoil the preservation of it. You couldn't keep it very long but I can remember once I ate a small can of salmon that was in one of the parcels (sometimes salmon or tuna came) and it had been punched for seven days and I ate it and I know that today I don't have the same bacteria in my gut that I had then and I would probably have to have my stomach pumped eating canned salmon that had been punched for a week. But we got a bread ration and the bread ration turned out to be a top-secret document of the Germans. This was the standing, I didn't know this. We always knew it had sawdust in it because we could tell and sometimes you could actually see the ground up pieces of wood, but it turns out (I don't remember exactly the recipe for it) it was about 20 percent bruised rye. It had no wheat in it at all and it had a little bit of barley and 13 percent or something like that of what they call 'tree flower'. Well tree flower is nothing more than sawdust. Sometimes you would find a rusty nail in your bread and other people would find pieces of glass in the bread. But it kept everybody's bowls moving so there were no cases of constipation in the camp. Anyway, there were arguments about the ration of bread and the German's forbade us to have knives, they were considered a weapon. So they issued the Kielo Loaf, which is a round loaf that looks like that. Well how are you going to divide that up? Normally it was 13 men to a loaf of bread and this bread issue was about twice a week - well we made a knife. The German's were very elaborate in the construction of the barracks. Our barracks had a date on it and it was built in 1919, others were built later in the '40's. But they had a steel latch on the windows, a very elaborate latch about 15 inches long or so, so we took that off and ground down the edge with a stone until we made a nice cutting blade out of it and then another fellow fashioned a wooden handle and attached it to this. So we had a bread knife and one day there was an argument, you know bread was short and food parcels weren't coming on time and people started to fight over this bread that came to our little section. There would be two or three bunks that had 13 men to that loaf and they were fighting over it so I just waited right in and I said "here, I know how to divide that up" So I very carefully measured out the cuts. The first cut I cut thick, the next one thinner, the next one thinner, the next one thinner, thinner, thinner, thicker, thicker, thicker, thicker until I got clear over the whole loaf. Then I said "all right you take the first cut - you're number one, you're number two, you're number three. The next time we get a loaf of bread number one moves up to position two and so forth so that over time everybody gets the good cuts of bread." So I charged a fee to cut this bread and they were very satisfied by my divisions. I had a milk can and I would take the knife and scrape each side…

*** Tape Interrupt ***

Interview in progress…

So my fee for cutting the bread was to slice off each of those sides of a slice with a knife and collect the crumbs in this clay milk can which is quite a large can and I got to do such a good job I built a reputation in cutting. So I'd cut other people's rations of bread too and I'd collect more and more of these crumbs and this gave me extra food. In fact February 15th 1944 was my 19th birthday in camp so I took the breadcrumbs and mixed some whole powdered milk and some jam or something (I don't remember exactly) but I made myself a birthday cake and then the next year on my 20th birthday I was still there and I made another cake and I also made ice cream on that second birthday.

So you were there on your 20th birthday and that was in 1945?

That's right. So life in camp was not fun. It was full of anxiety all the time, there were guards out there with machine guns and search lights and sometimes guards were shooting and bringing their mean dogs in after curfew and just lots of anxiety and one man got shot as he lay in his bunk. A guard shot at something or another and a bullet came through the barracks and so there were incidents like this all the time. There were a few events that were really memorable, one was that a Red Cross representative came (International Red Cross from Geneva Switzerland) to inspect the camp and we had gotten word that this man really was not what he claimed to be, he was really a German spy. He came to gather information about escape parties or something, I don't know what. So he rode his bicycle in and he stopped at our barracks and our barracks was right next to the wire and that would be the logical one to try to tunnel out you see. He got in the barracks and men started to talk with him and they engaged him very well because he lost track of time and he didn't think about his bicycle. Outside other men took his bicycle and passed it from barracks to barracks and got it across the company street and there's a gate there and they got it across there, clear across the camp to a large cesspool and they threw it in the cesspool and it's still there. By hand signals they got the word back to the men who were engaging in conversation with this phony Red Cross representative and as soon as the guys got the signals they all got up and walked away and he's sitting there in the middle of a conversation and everybody's gone. Uh-oh, he knows he's been had so he walks outside and his bicycle isn't there and oh he's infuriated - "Wo mein fahrrad ist?" "Wo mein fahrrad ist?" he kept shouting you know and he went up to the camp commander which was Colonel Khun, a German Wehrmacht officer and he was the head of the camp and Mayer Igul was the Luftwaffe Camp Commander and Khun really had it over by rank and he complained and complained. Our camp commander who was a Staff Sergeant named Kirk Kirtenbach and it turns out he was an OS Agent. We had no idea of this until just two years ago and he somehow got smuggled into Germany and into the camp system and became our camp commander. He was a Staff Sergeant and the complaint went to Kirtenbach and everybody said, "we never saw a bicycle…there's no bicycle…he didn't come on a bicycle" you know. And the Colonel really got mad and then finally others (I don't know who it was) revealed that this man was a German spy and not a Red Cross representative and it all blew up and finally the Colonel went off.

How did they know he was a German spy?

I don't know. The word got out. Kirtenbach, this OS Officer who was a Staff Sergeant, he had communications. He had marvelous communications. There was one time that the Gestapo came to our camp looking for an escaped airman who had been brought in by accident by the local police and this man had escaped two other times from German jail and from a work gang he had been put with earlier and the Gestapo was infuriated that here was a war prisoner who had escaped twice already from the German authorities and the police had accidentally put him in our camp. So the Gestapo came up to our camp looking for him. Well Kirtenbach got him hid and the rumor was that he was hidden in a latrine so that one of these big latrines (they were 77 hole latrines) and there's a shelf underneath. That was the rumor flying around and the Gestapo for three days searched the camp and kept us out without shelter in April when it was cold and rainy and everything and they finally had to give up. They wrecked our camp, they stole all of our cigarettes and everything else and they stomped off the camp and boy we let out a yell you could hear clear to Krems "the Gestapo was gone!" Anyway we had smuggled in radios too and we got the news - President Roosevelt made a public announcement that he had sent a communiqué to the high German command on the mistreatment of prisoners at Stalag 17B. So how did he know that so fast? Kirtenbach really had connections, it was very fascinating. Also British agents were involved, there was this M9 or M1 or something like British Intelligence and they smuggled radio parts into our camp no less. So there were a lot of things going on.

Were there escape attempts being done?

Oh there were escape attempts. The only one that worked was for this airman that I talked about, he disappeared and then there was a Sergeant Gray who escaped but he was picked up again and brought back to camp so other than that there were no…

Were there tunnels being dug?

Oh there were tunnels being dug all over the place. In the spring of '45 the ground was sagging down where tunnels were. We don't have time to really talk about prison life very much here but let me get right to the end. It was April 8th that we were moved out of camp because the Russians had surrounded Vienna and their tanks had preceded the ground troops and they stopped out on the plain out there below the hill at Krems. We were being assembled to go out and one of the guards came in and he was crying. That is weird, a German guard was crying. But we knew this German guard and he had been conscripted and thrown into the German army and we said, "what's wrong?" and he said "well the SS troops just slaughtered civilians down in Krems that night" because they refused to stay there and fight the Russians. There were women and children and elderly men there and we were just stunned, we didn't know whether to believe this or not so we got marched out through town and we didn't see anything and we marched out up some hills and one of the guards died of a heart attack while we marched up the hill. It was hard on us and we had a lot of men start to fall out because we had been rather inactive and poorly fed and had no medical attention whatsoever.

And this is in April of '45?

Yes, April 8th. We marched on that first day about 10 kilometers and the next day more men dropped out and about 150 men dropped out and walked back to the camp.

These were prisoners of war?

Yeah, they just couldn't make it.

Did they tell you that you were heading for the western lines?

We knew the direction was west and that was good enough for us and we were on the eastern front because the Russians were coming so we were going west.

How did they feed you?

Well that was one of the problems. They gave us a food parcel which helped the first few days and then the Germans fed us every other day and we didn't always meet the rendezvous on time and I remember once we came to a little town and we could smell this awful smell, you know it was just terrible and "yeah that's our food". We didn't make it the day before so we were a whole night late you know, 12 hours late getting there so the towns folks had poured white wine into this big kebal of soup. They had barley soup prepared for us and it had some horsemeat in it and it all spoiled. It didn't make any difference we ate it anyway and then I remember one night there was no food at all and we were supposed to be fed every other day but then we missed it and you know we were just really starving and I had kept a handful of raisins in my pocket. That was the last of my food and almost anybody else's so that evening I went around and I cut the new shoots of dandelions coming up and I put them in a can of water and I boiled them on the fire and you know dandelions are toxic - it's a milkweed so I had to pour off that first boiling and on the second boiling I put my raisins in there and I had boiled raisins and dandelions and I had something to eat and almost no one else had food to eat. But my metabolism is such that I need to eat. So anyway we marched on and then we came to Mauthausen and this is a 'killing camp' and it's not just a concentration camp, as I understand it. It's a place of torture and killing and some of our men got thrown in the camp accidentally and fortunately they got out. It's a fortress of a camp, it's made out of cut stone and barbed wire and supposedly 60,000 volts of electricity on all of the wires around the camp and just next to the camp is a rock quarry and we walked right by that rock quarry and I still have that scene in my mind. The rock quarry is down below the bluff and to get up and down the Germans had cut 163 steps into the stone but these steps are not regular risers like you would have everyone the same, they were different heights so it was very difficult to climb up and down. They made the prisoners down there quarry the stone and then they had to carry the stones on their backs and then have to hike up those 163 irregular steps up to the top. Well you can make one trip and you're done and maybe some exceptional people could make a few trips. Then the stories are (and I didn't see them doing this) but after a trip or two people would join hands up at the top and jump off and kill themselves. Well I saw the quarry and I saw the people climbing up the steps with the rocks on their back and then about three kilometers beyond (it was very early in the morning) and we ran across a group of about 3500 Hungarian Jews. They all had their long coats on and they were carrying suitcases, we had Hungarian speakers with us. A good American group has all kinds of speakers in it and there were dead people - dead men and boys lying along the road and the suitcases were open of those that had died and others had riffled their suitcases from whatever they could get and inside were photographs of their families and articles of clothing. Out in the field (it was early in the morning) and people had just died in the night out there in the field and there's that awful scene that never leaves my memory - there were men and boys on their hands and knees with their faces down to the ground eating the new shoots of grass that were coming up and one man looked up to me as though he was an animal, a sheep or something and he had green grass hanging from his lips and you know that really touched me. We learned from them that they had been on the road for two weeks, they had come from Hungary and the Germans had not fed them anything. They were in very very bad shape and we told them where they were going and trying to hurry this story along I didn't tell you that as we were passing through the little settlement of Mauthausen (people ran out of their houses and told us about Mauthausen) they told us about the camp. They told us that it was a killing camp and that they gassed and killed people there and burned them there and you know we just didn't know what to think about this. It was a shock and we thought 'what is it'? But when we met these Jews outside of the camp we knew. So we told them they were being taken to Mauthausen - a killing camp and they passed the word real fast and they started going crazy and the Germans started to shoot them. They started to shoot them with small arms and as we were marching on they engaged a heavy machine gun, we could hear it rattling away.

They just massacred them all?

I don't know, we were marching on and we could hear that machine gun for a long time as we marched away from that scene. It's one of those nightmares.

Whatever happened to those guys that dropped out? Did they survive?

They went back. Kirtenbach stayed in camp and he rescued all of them. They were okay and the American army (Patton's Third Army) sent a contingent over to the camp to rescue those men and they did because the Russians were there and they were occupying the camp and you couldn't trust what the Russians were going to do to you. Anyway we marched past Mauthausen and came to Linz, we passed the bridge there over the Danube and went through Linz and then we marched down to Braunau Bavaria and that's the birthplace of Hitler. They had no camp for us so three kilometers outside of Braunau is a wooded area so the Germans cut a perimeter of trees all around (quite a large piece there), it's right along the Inn River and the perimeter was cut from river bank to river bank around like that and they put us in the woods. So right in here we had no food, they had no food, they had nothing to give us and we just had to stay in the woods there while the German's guarded us. It was raining and it was April, there was sleet and you know it was cold and miserable and I had a knife that I had traded some cigarettes to a Russian prisoner with and it was a homemade knife (I still have that knife, I should have brought it to you). But I used that knife to build a little shelter out there in the woods and we had our blankets and all the things that we owned (which were almost nothing) and one day - April 26th or 28th a jeep comes into camp driven by an American captain. He drove right up close to where my friends and I were and he got out and jumped on top of the hood and he says, "Come around here". He says, "Alright you guys you're free". That was the liberation, it was such a letdown! One guy.

Were the German guards gone?

No the German guards had all come too and they had grabbed their rifles by the barrels and were dragging their butts in the ground and they all came over and the captain said "alright tell those guards to come over here" and you know we could all speak German (not all of us, I took German lessons while I was in camp) and he got them out and he said "all right you tell those guards to go back and stand guard duty over you one more night and I'll be back tomorrow to pick them up". So here we were liberated but this captain tells the German guards that they've got to go back on duty to guard us. It was very logical, now they're prisoners, now they have to have obedience to the authorities you see. So "yes sir" and they went right back on duty and the next day this guy comes back with three or four 6x trucks and American GI's and they rounded up all the guards and hauled them away.

Did they bring any food to you?

No, no.

You were still existing on nothing?

On nothing, yeah. But what I did and two other friends of mine - man we bolted out of camp and ran across the farm and there was one rooster. That was the only animal left on that farm and we were throwing everything at it and I had a German bayonet at that point and I finally threw that bayonet and I hit that rooster broadside like that and it just knocked the wind right out of it and I ran right over there and I wrung it's neck and we went down to the Inn River and we started to pluck it but it wouldn't pluck so we skinned that thing up and we built a little fire and we ate that thing when it got warm. We were hungry! Then we went to town, we went into Braunau and I found a Model C Ford, you know, they had Model A, B and C and the Model C was '32 and it was the old four cylinder. It was quite a deluxe automobile and I hotwired it and fired it up and we started to drive it but it just ran out of gas.

Were there a lot of American troops in town?

Well when we got to town there was a field kitchen. Man we bummed some food real fast and before that though this captain came to us and he said that he just had orders that he had to take his men and go after the Germans in Czechoslovakia because that's where the last of the battles occurred and he said "alright you men are in charge", he said "you go out and round up all the German stragglers you can find (men in uniform) and also stack arms". So we found a farm wagon, quite a large one and it had a single horse on it and we started picking up arms and the German army had just evacuated one of their armies and they just threw away everything. I mean there was just all kinds of personal stuff and arms and lots of munitions and guns and everything. We had this whole wagon loaded with guns where the horse couldn't pull it anymore and I had a German Mauser by then and I saw a white flag shaking behind a barn so I shouted over to him "Kommen sei ere" and out came this guy holding a flag on a stick. And out came another and another and another and about 30 men came out and I was really surprised. So we made them all prisoners and had them put their hands up and we got them all lined up there and they had no guns, they had thrown away everything. Some of the guys there made them take off their boots and the reason was that the Russians in our camp had been marched out ahead of us and they had been put in another section of the woods right nearby but they had no boots. They had worn their boots out long before and they never ratified the Geneva Convention so the Germans didn't give them anything, they didn't have to. So we took their boots and gave them to the Russians.

*** Tape Interrupt ***

Well when I was in camp, it was February 14th of '43 and letters and telegrams came to my mother and father in Los Angeles with notification that people in the east coast had received radio broadcast from Germany giving my name and my serial number and giving their names (my parents names) and address that I was safe and a prisoner of war.

So your parents would never have known had that information not been given?

Not until the following September. That meant a lot to my parents.

So how long did you remain there before you were on board back to the states?

Well they put us in an aluminum factory as a billet with a roof on it and everything but we went crazy and wrecked the factory and there was a pile of smoke coming out of it. It was a brand new factory, never turned a billet and a major came this time and he was just fuming and he says "we were saving that factory for the German reconstruction program".

And you guys ripped it up?

We ripped it up. But it turns out (I didn't learn this until 1995) that it was Alcoa - American Aluminum Factory, so that's why we didn't bomb it. But anyway then they took us to Pocking Field where there was a Hungarian Air Force Field flying German fighters against our bombers and then we really went crazy. I got into a Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane and it's tied town and I got a hand crank and turned up the initial starter and I read all the British Intelligence reports and I knew how to operate that airplane but I had no intentions of trying to fly it of course but I fired up that engine and I was having fun running that. Here I was in the cockpit of a 109 "Rrrrrhhh". It ran out of fuel. So we did a number of things and then there was real effort to get us out of there as we were wrecking things and just the most interesting thing happened here right at the end. We found the control tower with flare guns and flare ammunition, you know, pistols and we started firing this late in the afternoon into the evening and finally a C47 turned on its landing lights and landed at Pocking Field. And what on earth is anybody doing with landing lights on while the war was on but they taxied up and out came a colonel and an entourage of other officers and they came over to us and they started shaking our hands and they started talking to us but we couldn't hear anything because we had fired these guns right