In their own words...

[bobbysocks]

Lt. William Laubner

I was shot down near Rhune, Germany, while on the first all fighter sweep scheduled by the 8th Air Force. Our target was an airfield southwest of Berlin. My flight was supposed to provide top cover but Wyche (flight leader), took us down to join in the fun. On the way out on the deck, we passed a flight of FW-190s going in the opposite direction, but they did not bother with us. I strafed a locomotive, power lines and a dry dock facility on the Rhine River which was surrounded by flak towers. My left engine was shot out and my left fuel tank was set on fire. I crash landed near a German anti-aircraft camp and taken prisoner. I hit the gunsight and broke my nose. I cut my knees getting out of the burning ship. My left shoulder felt as if it had been hit with a hammer. After I was put in jail, I took my flight jacket off and noticed a right angle tear on the side of the left shoulder. Evidently a round must have penetrated the armor (the planes armor plate, behind the pilot), and backpack (parachute), and sliced a hole in the jacket. I did not require hospitalization. Lady luck was with me on that mission!

After my capture, I could still understand enough German to make out the rivalry that existed between the two anti-aircraft officers trying to claim credit for my being shot down. One was CO of an 88 mm crew and the other had the flak towers. When a German major walked in everyone snapped to attention. I was sitting with my right leg resting on the top of my left knee. The officer nearest to me kicked my leg off of my knee and made me get up. I left with the two officers still arguing over who was going to claim me. It was hard to keep from smiling. I sat between the major and another officer on the way to the local lockup. We passed an airfield with 109s parked under netting. They remarked to each other that I would have liked to report the location to our air force if I could. That bought another smile to my face. I went through the interrogation center at Frankfurt and from there to Stalag Luft III. My interrogator at Frankfurt spoke perfect English. He told me that he had lived in Hackettstown, N.J. As I was sticking to the name, rank and serial number routine, he told me more about our outfit than I knew myself. He named our CO, Jolly Jack Jenkins, our base name and location, wing number, wing commander, Red Cross girl's names, etc, etc. I finally asked him if he thought he was going to win the war? He said if he didn't think so he would not be sitting across the desk from me. He also told me that they were waiting for Bob Rosenburgh. This told me that he knew I was in A flight, as Bob was also in A flight. I was really too small a fish to waste much time on.

I was at Stalag Luft III until the early part of 1945. I received permission from our barracks commander to converse with the guards. We called them ferrets. Since the barracks were built with a crawl space, the ferrets would crawl under them in order to pick up bits of information. They could speak and understand English. The floors had cracks between the flooring and when we heard them underneath we would get water buckets and brooms to clean the floor. We could hear them scramble out and of course that tickled hell out of us. They could not chastise us because keeping our room clean was S.O.P.

Another humorous diversion was trying to find the camp radio. Time and again a block was singled out and made to wait outside while the guards searched the building for the ever elusive radio. They never did find it. This always brought smiles to our faces. I was not mistreated because I was captured by the military. I did see some POWs that were man-handled by civilians before being turned over to the authorities. I also saw the Gestapo come into camp and take out three POWs. We heard that their gun cameras showed they were shooting civilians and other non-military targets. We never saw them again. We received soup, potatoes, black bread and occasional horse meat. We also received Red Cross parcels periodically. These parcels were used to augment the German rations and were eagerly received. Another bit of humor. We used to comment on our rib showing physiques when we were taken for an occasional shower.

At the end the Germans marched us out, for three days, to Spremburg. Around March of 1945 we were marched to Moosburg. Joe Hummel, who went through flying school with me, was shot down on the same day and we were in prison camp together. Joe and I and another pilot named Sturm, who flew P-47s, plotted our escape on the march to Moosburg. I developed blisters on my feet so gave them half of my rations and they took off during the night. They made it back but I had to wait to be liberated by Patton.

Needless to say we were hungry all the time and the movement from camp to camp in the dead of winter with snow on the ground in just a pair of leather shoes was not too comfortable. We were literally liberated by General Patton on 29 April 1945, pearl handled six gun, polished boots and helmet. His tank rammed through the front gate and he got out and said, "Did any of these bastards mistreat you?" I believe he would have shot them on the spot. We'd heard that he'd given one of his pearl handled six guns to one of his paramours. Don't know how much truth there is in that story, but when he came into camp I had to see for myself. Sure enough he only had one strapped to his waist.

Lt. Robert M. Littlefield "The Bridge at Barentin"

It was a bright, clear, and beautiful Sunday afternoon. Our squadron was top cover for the other units while they worked over a German airfield outside Paris. It was to be a milk run and as we circled above our attacking planes, I unhooked my oxygen mask and had a cigarette. After completion of the attack and on the way out, I spotted a train approaching a large multi-spanned brick bridge at the village of Barentin and called it in to Captain Buck Earls, my flight leader. We were Hellcat White flight, which meant Buck was leading the squadron and I was his element leader. Lt. Francis Matney was my wingman and Lt. Francis Waice was Buck's wingman.

The attack on the train was made by White flight only. Buck gave us the signal to spread out and go into trail in preparation for the attack. He and Waice went in first and I could see their strikes all over the locomotive. Great billowing clouds of steam shot skyward from the locomotive as they pulled off. I made a right diving turn and put my pipper (gunsight) on the car behind the locomotive. Matney was on the outside of the turn and behind me.

I squeezed the trigger and saw strikes from my six fifty caliber machine guns as I raked the box cars. By this time the locomotive and box cars had stopped on the bridge. I gave it another burst, saw more strikes on the cars but as I pulled up I heard a loud explosion and my P-51 lurched. My stomach tensed with a burning sensation because I had previously experienced that same sound over Germany, which resulted in my shot-up P-38 being totaled in a crash landing at Old Buckenham, England. I realized that I had taken an explosive shell hit on the leading edge of my right wing at the inboard 50 caliber machine gun. The wing was burning fiercely and close to a gas tank. I decided to bail.

I made a quick call to my flight, informing them of my situation. I was doing about 350 miles an hour so I pulled up and delayed a bit before I pulled the emergency canopy release handle. After leaving the plan, falling head first, I pulled my rip cord, the chute opened and at about the count of three I gently hit the ground. As I was examining light wounds on my neck and chin I heard gunfire and immediately hit the dirt and started looking about to establish the direction of fire. It was the ammo in my crashed plane cooking off about 150 yards away!

I gathered my chute, hid it in some bushes, and walked to a farmhouse nearby. A lad of about 16 was watching as I approached and I identified myself as an American pilot and asked where "le Boche" were. He motioned that they were all around. He obviously was of no help. An older man walked up and asked, "le parachute?", and I pointed to where I'd hidden it. When he returned he signaled for me to get the hell out.

I had walked only a few dozen yards when a man, walking a bicycle, with a big smile on his face, motioned to follow him. We soon passed a lady who gave me the V for victory sign. We stopped for a moment to talk to another lady who told me to take off my flight suit, which I did. A moment later she began shoving me down the road and talking excitedly. As I followed Rene, riding his bike, I glanced back and saw two German soldiers walking up to my crashed plane with rifles at the ready.

We were at a sharp bend on a direct road so were out of sight of the Germans within a few steps but I ran like hell for as long as I could until I was running so slowly that Rene became alarmed and got off the bike and ran while I rode. He took me to his parent's farm and hid me in a hayloft. I was beginning to think I was living a class B movie. Shortly, Rene brought me into the house. Years later he told me his father was furious with him for bringing me home; the Germans would have shot them all if we were caught. At the farm there were five members of the family all trying to ask questions by sign language.

A short time later three men, one with an arm in a sling, called me out of the hay and told me were taking me to an English speaking lady. Two bicycles were provided for Marcel and myself and we set off down a dirt road until we arrived at a main cement highway. In about 20 minutes we arrived at Chateau le Matra, a large 150 year old, three story building. I was taken into a darkened room where a lady about five feet two inches tall, buxom and plump, proffered her hand and said in a very heavy French accent, "I am Madame Angele Greux." She was the wife of Armand. She motioned me to a chair along side hers and opened a map of northern France. "You are here", she said, pointing to the small town of Barentin in Normandy. she then began speaking rapidly and I could not understand her. I became alarmed because I feared that if everyone thought she spoke perfect English and I did not understand her they would be suspicious of me. I knew the French Underground had executed German agents attempting to penetrate their organisation. She must have sensed my dismay for she said very slowly, "Pardon my English, I have not spoken it since 1936 when I worked in England for two years. You will be living here."

Henri and Armand arrived and I was introduced to the eleven who lived here. The chateau was owned by a wealthy French farmer, Monsieur Douillet, who, with his wife and family, lived in a small home nearby. The chateau had been requisitioned by the Germans for people who had been bombed out of their homes in Rouen. The others who lived there were: a very old lady whose name I never knew, a young boy of 7, named Pierre, not related to any of the household; Henri's sons, Daniel Couture, age 22, and Andre Couture, age 18, Micheline Guilloux, age 12 on that very day, niece of Angele; Madame Glasson, age 47, and her daughter Janine, age 22 (Janine was engaged to Daniel). And Huguette Greux, age 19, sister of Armand. No one worked except to help local farmers in exchange for food and they were living on their savings. In addition to the food received from local farmers, there were rabbits and chickens in hutches in the back yard. We never had wine but drank cider, a very weak hard cider made from local Normandy apples. The children drank it too. Henri and I drank it with baking soda because it gave us heartburn.

I was also provided with an identification card with my picture, the photo provided by me courtesy of the US Army, a food ration card and a paper that stated I was deaf and dumb so that hopefully, I wouldn't be sent to Germany for forced labor.

Local people who had seen me were told that I was Angele's deaf and dumb cousin from Dieppe. My French identification card stated that I was Robert Joseph, address in Dieppe. All records in Dieppe had been destroyed in a bombing raid so this could not be disproved.

One day as Armand and I sat quietly watching Angele knit, we were startled by the roar of an airplane, firing its guns, right over our roof top. We all dropped to the floor. I peeked out the window to see two British Typhoon fighters who had caught five German soldiers in a small civilian panel truck in front of the chateau. "Feld-grau", (field gray), which was what the German soldier was called, after the color of his uniform, were running in every direction. When the planes left, the soldiers got back in and drove the truck into an apple orchard next to the chateau. The Typhoons had riddled the truck but hadn't hit one vital part and the Germans had escaped without a scratch! Needless to say, I was very disgusted with their marksmanship and told the French my fighter unit would have destroyed the truck.

It was rumored that the Americans were nearby. Paris had already been liberated. So Henri, Angele, Daniel, Andre, Janine and myself started walking toward the seine. Armand still hadn't returned. We had gone only a short distance when we encountered two young Frenchmen, one with a 25 caliber automatic pistol and the other with a single hand grenade. There was automatic gunfire coming from a short distance north and they were going to help the French Resistance who had a small group of Germans "cornered".

About an hour later we ran into Scottish commandos advancing with guns at the ready. The officer in charge apologized for not having transportation to take me to Duclair, on the Seine River, so we continued until we arrived at an almost totally destroyed Duclair. I gave Angele my GI watch and my escape kit, which was always issued prior to each combat flight, and which contained 2,000 francs ($40.), silk maps and language phrase sheets of which I had made good use. After long teary goodbyes and many hugs and kisses, I left my dear friends who had made me one of the family for three weeks. The British interrogated me and flew me back to London on September 3, 1944. There I was interrogated at 63 Brook St., by the American military. My interrogator said there were 40 men a day, like myself, coming through enemy lines.

Lt. Howard W. Rhodes

On July 28, 1944 I was on an escort mission in a P-51, shortly after the group switched from P-38s. The target was Merseburg, Germany. We observed two B-17s falling in flames. We assumed that they were under fighter attack as no flak bursts could be seen. The squadron leader radioed, "Drop tanks and let's go" and turned towards the bombers.

I dropped the exterior tanks after switching to the interior 90 gallon fuselage tank. Unfortunately my engine quit. I was unable to get the engine going. The only action I was able to get out of the engine was occasional burps from using the primer. I had agreed with some buddies, that if we ever did go down we would try to do it in style. So I told the guys not to take the new Wellington boots I had just gotten from Peal's, but my voice was sufficiently projecting my anxiety that it wasn't funny.

At about 3,000 feet indicated, (being blissfully unaware that the ground was not at sea level), I determined to bail out. I found myself facing upwards, being caressed by a gentle breeze. It was a delightful sensation; there was nothing to do but open the parachute, no more struggling to get power. After enjoying for a second or so, I pulled the rip cord rather halfheartedly and nothing happened so I pulled it hard. No sooner had the parachute opened than I hit the ground. I was sure I was dead because everything was black and there was a kind of warm, flooding, pleasant sensation, Nirvana. I actually thought at the moment that the Hindus were right, it seemed to me precisely as I had understood the Hindu notion of the afterlife to be.

Very shortly thereafter consciousness began to return, and I could begin to see that I was on a hard packed dirt farm road. I unbuckled the parachute harness and, taking stock, observed that my wallet was still in my back pocket. I should have left it in the ready room, since it contained, of course, my identification and sources of information to the enemy.

There was a ditch about twenty yards away. I tried to walk there but I couldn't walk because of an injury to my back and foot so I crawled over to a big bush on the top of this ditch bank. I left the parachute there with my wallet which I tried to hide under the litter. Then I crawled out into the corn field because there was a hill beyond it. About fifty yards into the corn field, still crawling, I looked up and about a foot away were two shoe topes and above them this red haired and mustached farm worker with a tiny pistol pointed at me. He first words were, "Me Polska." I understood him to mean that he was a Polish farm worker, not a German, and that he was sympathetic with my situation. In any event he assisted me up and helped me stagger over to the edge of the field where there was a fat old German farmer with a hunting rifle.

We went down the road to his home and into his little study, a tiny room with a desk in it. He let me sit in the corner. After fifteen or twenty minutes, a car came and a blond man about forty years of age dressed in a grey suit with a Nazi arm band on his left sleeve got out. He greeted the farmer with a Hitler salute, then shook his hand, then repeated the same greeting to the farmer's wife and their several children in descending order of age. He then drew himself up, turned to me and with a torrent of abuse, in German, which I could not understand except the part about being a North American Air Gangster, then he slapped me on both cheeks, grabbed me by the shoulders and made me face the corner of the room. Then he tried to interrogate me in English, asking me where I had come from. I was so unaware of the Big Picture that I didn't even know that I could have come from Italy, instead of England, so I said America.

A policeman arrived in a three wheeled car, one wheel in the front and two in the back. He put me in the back seat. Around the same time my parachute appeared along with the wallet which I had attempted to bury. The policeman took me and my effects to his home in the town, apparently so that he could show me off. He left me in the car and went inside.

We then drove down to the city jail which consisted of one cell. He gave me some bread, but I wasn't really interested in that. I really hurt. I had strained my back. I think I had a compression fracture but I never had any medical treatment so I don't really know. My left foot was so far extended over my low quarter shoe on impact that it was bleeding around the upper line of the shoe.

After joining up with some B-17 crews, we were taken through Frankfurt to Oberursel, a Luftwaffe interrogation station. On arrival, I was called into a tiny office in which there was a private, a little guy, but obviously a sophisticated and intelligent person. He asked me to fill out a form. The form had "Red Cross Information" at the top, and then it asked for name, rank, serial number, home address, with spaces for all kinds of military information. If I had filled out the whole form it would have given the store away. I filled out my home address and parent's name, as well as my name, rank and serial number. I declined to go further. He said he didn't give a damn anyway, as he was doing Red Cross duty and that the interrogation would come later. He said that we had to spend some time anyway, so we might just as well talk.

(Howard Rhodes was interrogated by Hanns Scharff, August 3rd, 1944.) The interrogation started with the usual cigarette or cookie, and then he said, in substance, I had to identify myself as an officer of the United States Army, that if I failed to do so I would be treated as a spy. That they weren't trying to get information; that a second lieutenant couldn't tell them anything anyway that they did not already know; that I could come in saying I was Colonel Bullshit with my dog tags; but that I had to prove it. Note that I was twenty-one, not a colonel, did not have proper insignia, and that I didn't have any dog tags. He said that the Geneva Convention had been mistranslated by the Allied governments, and that I was obliged to tell them what unit I was from; I gave him name, rank and serial number. He replied, "Oh dear, Lt. Rhodes, don't be such a bore!" Then he got from behind his desk a volume and started flipping through it. He first asked if I was from the 4th Fighter Group, P-51s, and of course, I just stared at him. He finally got down to the 55th Fighter Group, P-38s. "Oh no", he said, "just changed to P-51s." (The one big secret I thought I knew). Well, I made a little involuntary reaction, and he said, "Oh my goodness, Lt. Rhodes, you don't think we don't know that yet?" He said his name was Hanns Scharff.

Nothing further of substance transpired. He told me a lot more about the 55th. Then he stood up, told me the interrogation was finished, that I would be on my way in a couple of days, and wished me good luck. He stuck out his hand, I took it, and bang, the door opened with another prisoner outside looking at me as though I had just divulged the secret of the atomic bomb.

Later, we were taken to Dulag Luft in Wetzlar and given showers, our Red Cross parcels, clothing, cigarettes and food. We were put on a train to our permanent camps. No fun spending all night in the Berlin marshalling yards, hoping it was not the night's target for the RAF.

They hauled us into the prison camp, Stalag Luft I, and since other contributors will have told you a great deal about prison camp life, I will not. But one thing about any detention facility is that detainees, ie, the prisoners, have a lot of hostility about their detention. Rightly or wrongly, they take it out on the guards who represent the detaining power.

Early in 1945, the camp commandant issued an order requiring the transfer of all identified Jewish prisoners to a single compound within the camp. We all inferred our Jewish buddies were to be mistreated, so we ranted and raved and yelled and screamed, actually considering trying to attack the guard towers and revolt, but cooler heads prevailed and the transfer occurred the next day, although we stayed up until midnight, probably. Since our compound was next to the Jewish compound, we spent a lot of time talking to our buddies across the intervening fence for a period of days, and finally it just seemed a normal thing, and no one was mad any longer.

The Oberst in charge of the camp, who also commanded a nearby Luftwaffe air base, where jets were based, the nearby sugar factory where slave laborers worked, and a nearby death camp, came to our compound to visit us. I remember that I kind of wondered how, in his mind, he justified the different sort of treatment for the people in the various camps he commanded. One morning we woke up after hearing the sounds of artillery for a couple of days, and all the Germans were gone.

When we got back to London, we waited to go home for weeks. When I saw on the bulletin board orders for transport for an officer, Albert LaChasse, who I knew had already hit Los Angeles, I adopted his name and identity and got on board the ship. When we got to Camp Miles Standish I was put under house arrest for ten days, but I was home, and they had a hole in the fence. That's my story.