In their own words...

[bobbysocks]

Lts. Gevorkian and Kester crash landed their P-51s on the same beach in southern France and evaded through Spain together.

Part of Gevorkian and Kester's story is related by Monsieur A. Auger, a Frenchman, who aided them: "The 26th of August 1944, I was on my way to Cap Ferret to see my parents. Suddenly, at the cemetery, I saw a soldier in uniform in the dis*tance coming this way. Thinking it was a German (even though they had left Cap Ferret at the beginning of August), I jumped into a ditch. The soldier did exactly the same thing. That's when I discovered that he was an American soldier.

"Relieved, and as happy as I, the man tried to explain to me in his language that he was a pilot, and, showing me his scarf which was his navigating map, was going to Cherbourg. (This was actually a silk escape map that was carried by all U.S. aircrew members.) He explained as best he could that he and another pilot, (Kester), were caught in a thunderstorm and that their compass*es went berserk. I then showed him on his scarf where he was and explained to him that, without knowing it, he had crossed a mine field! It is a miracle that the man didn't blow up because, except for a few paths, the beach was covered with mines."

Mademoiselle Marcelle Mora relates her story of the incident: "The 26th of August, (1944), we all rushed to the beach to see the planes, out of gas, one behind the other, 3/4 of a kilometer apart. With all my friends we hugged the pilots, posed for a picture in front of the airplanes. I remember the pilots were taken care of by the FFI, (the French Resistance Group), of Cap Ferret."

Lts. Gevorkian and Kester were turned over to Monsieur Guy Schyler, of Alfred Schyler Fils & Co., Bordeaux, and Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, who in 1939 was President and General Manager of Hispano-Suiza, SA., a French company that built gasoline engines and the famous "Moteur Cannon". He had been jailed by the Germans for refusing to aid the German war effort.

Monsieur Guy Schyler now picks up the story: "On August 26th, 1944, I received a call from Colonel De Luze, commanding officer of the F.F.I. (French Forces of Interior - Maquis), to inform me that the planes that had been cruising around the Arcachon Bay were now flying north, then south, that one of them flew out of sight facing the ocean, and the two others had crash landed on the beach, a few kilometers from the small village of Lege-Cap Ferret adjacent to the Bay of Arca*chon. Colonel De Luze having asked me to investigate, I in turn called Prince Stanislas Poniatowski. We sailed for the spot where both aircraft had pancaked. We were living on the opposite side of the bay.

"Sam and John told us they had lost their formation because of a heavy storm, and were surprised not to find mountains printed on their scarf (escape map), after the estuary of the Loire. They were completely lost, having no idea where they were and practically no more petrol in their tanks. They also were not aware that there were a good many Germans at Royan as well as at Le Verdon, so they did not perform any attack on them, whereas the Germans thought they had better keep quiet unless the American pilots might well bring some trouble should they attempt shooting at the planes!

"An F.F.I. group joined us, wishing to recover the guns as well as munitions, which were useless because they were specially designed for the airplane. I myself took the compass, even though also of no use. Both aircraft were on the ocean side of the beach, so we had to climb a small sand dune to reach the beach on the Arcachon Bay side where our boat was anchored. Sam, John, Ponia*towski and myself, crossed the bay to our homes. The Poniatowski family were direct neighbors to my mother.

"Next morning I contacted Major Xavier de Laborde Noguez, whom I had asked to join us at Bordeaux to organize the return of the Americansto their base through Spain. Xavier was then with the F.F.I. fighting the battle of Medoc under command of General de Larminat. Xavier, as well l as Poniatowski and de Luze are all now dead Xavier had organized, during the German occupa*tion, a Resistance group specializing in getting French or foreigners out of France through Spain and forwarding information to London. As men*tioned above, the German forces, having left Bordeaux and, in general, the Aquitaine region, there was then no need to hide our American friends."

Lt. Gevorkian told the interrogator in London: "My fighter plane, and that of 2nd Lt. John E. Kester, landed on Cap Ferret, W. of Bordeaux, on 26 Aug 44. We were both put up at the house of Prince Stanley Poniatowski, Villa Hyowawa, Boul de L'Ocean, Arcachon, for 12 days, a very well known man to the Resistance and acting mayor of Arcachon. Then we were taken by Guy Schuyler, who lived next door, to Bordeaux, where we stayed 2 days at the home of M. DuBreille, FFI Member, known to Mlle. F. Rauly, 23 Rue des Villas, Cauderan (Gironde). M. Xavier Testas arranged for us to be sent to Hendaye, and we were taken there by M. et Mme. Gabriel Testas. From here we went to Gastes to pick up a number of other Americans and British (Volz, Walsh and Christ), all now returned to duty, and then joined A!lied control on about 10 September."

The procedure if near the Spanish Costa Brava was to take the evader through the French/Spanish border to Barcelona, where he was hidden in a safe house, of which there were a good many in the city. There Tom Forsythe, of the American Consulate, took over to get the airman back to England, usually through Gibraltar.

John Potter, counterintelligence for the O.S.S. in Spain and Portugal, remembers "double cross*ing" things he dealt with in Andorra, the tiny (191 sq. m.) republic in the eastern Pyrenees, such as receiving word that, "I've got four aviators hid*den in the mountains. Twenty thousand pesatas each ($2,190.) is wanted or they go back to the Germans." Mr. Potter said that in counterintelli*gence work, one does not deal with choir boys!

Lt. Kester was killed, 14 Jan. 1945, strafing a German airdrome. Major Gevorkian was killed in a P-51 accident, 7 Aug. 1945, in southern Germany. In 1982, Ailes Anciennes, a French non-profit organization that works to save historic aircraft, recovered Gevorkian's and Kester's P-51s from under tons of beach sand for restoration.

George Korinek

Our fighter group had been assigned escort duty to protect a B-17 bombing mission in Germany. This part of the mission was uneventful and we didn't experience much enemy action other than flak. At this time I had 60 plus missions and 285 combat flying hours. After our rendezvous with the bombers, we were relieved by another fighter group and began our return to our base at Wormingford, England. Since we had not been bounced by enemy fighters and had not dropped our belly tanks, we had plenty of fuel left and so requested permission to hit targets of opportunity. The request was granted. From our altitude I had previously noticed a freight train heading for Paris. I took my flight down and made a strafing run on the train. About four cars behind the locomotive my machine guns hit an ammunition car which exploded. I pulled up to avoid the explosion and in doing so saw several German Me-109's parked in a pasture at the edge of a wooded area. I went down to tree-top level to strafe them and caught ground fire. It hit my left engine which caught fire. I managed to strafe the gun crew firing at me before I bailed out at low altitude.'

"bailed out at a low altitude," is a very modest understatement. Korinek almost lost his life! The official encounter report submitted by a member of his flight, Lt. Wayne Lanham, states: "Lt. Korinek had been strafing a locomotive and was hit by flak while strafing a plane on an airdrome. Lt. Korinek bailed at 300 feet and his chute opened at about 100 feet." (or lower!)

I was downed near Evereux, France, west of Paris. I'd landed in a grain field and hid there for several hours while German soldiers searched for me. On their second combing of the field, about ten young Wehrmacht soldiers saw me and fired several shots at the ground along side me and, needless to say, I surrendered! They put me aboard a 6 x 6 truck and took me to their operations headquarters several miles away. In route the truck passed through a dense forest. Several of the soldiers who had been talking among themselves didn't notice some low, overhanging branches and were swept off the truck. In spite of my predicament, I found this so funny that I broke out in laughter. The soldiers were so young and inexperienced that they seemed more embarrassed by this than disturbed. After picking up the soldiers who had been brushed off we continued on our way.

After we reached their headquarters I was interrogated by German flying officers, who could not speak English. They had an enlisted man who knew enough English to translate for them. I feigned ignorance, but since I had studied German in college, I knew enough to better prepare my answers as they asked for information concerning my unit and mission. After this attempted interrogation, I was sent to a jail house in Evereux. I was placed in a cell with some crew members from a shot down B-17. Several of these men had been badly injured with compound fractures but we were prevented from helping them by an armed guard.

The following day I was transported to Chartres, France, where I saw more American prisoners from downed B-17s. We were paraded through the streets to the derision of the French people. We were then transported to Paris by motor lorry and put on a train there to Frankfurt am Main for further interrogation. I was impressed by their intelligence organization, for they knew more about me and my family than I could have ever imagined. (Hanns Scharff interrogated Lt. Korinek on July 11, 1944.)

I spent eleven days in solitary confinement and was constantly interrogated. I was then sent by train to Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Germany, for permanent incarceration. I spent a little over seven months there. On January 20, 1945, we were forced to evacuate our camp and march through the countryside, deep in snow, for several days. About three or four days after the march we were loaded in 40 x 8 box cars enroute to Stammlager VII A, at Moosburg, near Munich.

We were liberated on April 27, 1945 by General Patton's 14th Armored Division. Our treatment by the Germans was satisfactory considering that we were prisoners. Regimentation and the lack of food and boredom were our biggest problems. We were always hungry and I went from 166 pounds to 115 at the time of my release.


Victor LaBella

We were on a bomber escort mission to Berlin. About twenty minutes into Germany my right engine began to lose power. I turned towards home and my good engine began to lose power too and I started a descent. I descended to the tops of the cloud-cover at about fifteen hundred feet and decided to leave the airplane. I turned her over (upside down) and bailed out. I landed in a large cultivated field and immediately got picked up by the Home Guard. They had rifles and held me until some regular military took me to a local town and threw me in the hoosegow. The next day a Luftwaffe enlisted man accompanied me on a train ride to the interrogation center near Frankfurt am Main at Oberursel. The scariest part of this trip was that our 8th Air Force had bombed the train station that very day, so they stopped the train a few miles out of Frankfurt and all the passengers were put on busses. Here I was amongst all these people who were going in to check on their loved ones. My guard was very indifferent to my concern and I frankly stayed as close to him as possible. These people knew who I was and looks of hate and loud talking with threatening gestures alarmed me. I'd heard stories of how German civilians had killed downed airmen. I knew that my lone guard could never protect me even if he wanted to. After a slow agonizing ride we arrived in Frankfurt where I was taken to the interrogation center and thrown into solitary for two days. They fed me soup and black bread. I was brought before an interrogator who spoke perfect English and told me how he'd attended some college in California. I guess I was brought before him two or three times in which he asked me a few questions. After a few more days I was put in a box car with a lot of others and sent to Stalag Luft I.

I think I was in the south compound, block 14. There I ran into Joe Marsiglia, White, Ernest George and a couple of fellows with whom I'd gone to flight training school. After the long miseries of prison life we knew that the war was coming to an end and one day all the guards were gone. Some of our fellows took off and others remained. We had a lot of German women that were frantically trying to get into the compound with us. They were terrified of the advancing Russian army. When the Russians started arriving, they were not the regulars but a group of undisciplined, badly dressed, raggedy-assed of hoodlums. They went into town and were breaking into the homes and taking whatever they wanted, including cash and valuables, raped women and generally terrorizing the local populace. I believe this was actually planned by the Russians so that when the main body of the army came in, about three days later, and established discipline, the local people having undergone such horrible experiences that they were psychologically beaten into submission and would accept the new troops as their protectors.

When the Russians came into the camp we were treated very well. They rounded up some live stock from the local area and brought them into the camp, slaughtered them, and we had our first fresh meat since taken prisoner. I had been there fourteen months and some of the RAF pilots had been there for four or five years.

Our commanders, theirs and ours, asked that we stay in the camp, because we were going to be picked up. I don't know this to be a fact, but I heard that some of the Americans that didn't stay, that took off walking or by bicycle, you know how Americans are, especially after being imprisoned, were never heard of again. Well, shortly, B-17s came and flew us down to Camp Lucky Strike. We were there a week or ten days. Some of us took off for Paris. After being in prison we wanted to eat, drink and be merry ---- and be bred, (laughter). I think I fooled around in Paris for ten or fifteen days. Ernest George was with me and we then returned to Lucky Strike. Things were rather loose, the fellas were going into French towns or catching plane rides back to England. I eventually returned to the States by ship.

I stayed in the service and retired in 1963.