In February of 1944, American fighter pilot Bob Hoover was shot down over the Mediterranean Sea south of France. A German patrol boat rescued him, and he was sent to Luft Stalag I in northern Germany. Hoover wasn’t happy confined to a prisoner of war camp, awaiting the Soviet Army to liberate him. In the closing days of the war, Eisenhower sent a message for Allied POW’s to stay put, but Hoover’s never-give-up attitude won out over playing the waiting game.
The prison guards at Luft Stalag I had become lax, so when hundreds of prisoners staged a fight, Hoover and another POW escaped the camp. A German farmer’s wife fed the men the first eggs they’d had in over a year. Down the road, another woman gave them a handgun, saying in broken English that they needed it more than she did. The two men confiscated a pair of bicycles and made their way to an airfield, full of damaged aircraft.
Hoover located a Focke-Wulf 190 single-seat fighter with a lot of damage but a full tank of gas. They confronted a German mechanic with their pistol, but he didn’t try to stop them. Hoover’s companion chose to continue his journey by bicycle rather than risking his life in the damaged craft. Hoover didn’t waste time using the runway. He taxied across a grassy field and lifted off. He didn’t have a parachute or a seat cushion and could barely see out the canopy windscreen.
Hoover didn’t know where he was going, but he had a compass, so he headed west, hoping to stay aloft until he reached Allied territory. He was concerned that an American or British pilot would spot the German aircraft and finish him off, so he flew low, below the cloud cover. After Hoover spotted the windmills of Holland, he landed in a plowed field and was immediately surrounded by “an angry group of farmers armed with pitchforks.”
Hoover tried to explain to the Dutchmen “why an American was flying a German warplane.” Fortunately for him, British soldiers pulled up in their truck and translated. Hoover hitched a ride with them and ended the war safely. Incidentally, the other escapee on the bicycle survived the war also and he and Hoover met up many years later.
After the war, Bob Hoover became a civilian test pilot and later an air show display pilot, flying for nearly fifty years before he retired. He died in 2016 at the age of 94. Jimmy Doolittle dubbed Hoover “The greatest stick and rudder man who ever lived!”
Courtesy of Flikr via Wikipedia
Sources:
Strange and Ocscure Stories of World War II by Don Aines. Skyhorse Publishing, 2020.