Norway didn’t expect to be drawn into World War II. Just as in World War I, the Norwegian government had declared its neutrality and worked hard to maintain this status. But early on during WWII, two major factors made this position untenable.
Iron ore dug at Kiruna and Malmberget was railed to Luleå and Narvik. Courtesy of Wikipedia & Creative Commons
To maintain its war machine, Germany needed uninterrupted access to iron ore from Sweden. The only year-round ice-free port was at Narvik, Norway, to which the iron ore was shipped by train across a short distance. It was vital for German ships to travel safely down the Norwegian coast from this northern port, but England was determined to end German access.
Narvik, Norway. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia
The Germans were concerned that the British would not only interfere with iron ore shipments but that the Allies would also gain access to Norwegian airfields and ports from which they could launch attacks on Germany. The Germans didn’t believe the British would allow Norway to maintain its neutral status, so Hitler ordered his military to draw up plans to invade before the Allies could gain a foothold.
In early April 1940, the British navy laid mines in the waters off the Norwegian coast at Narvik in an effort to force German ships into international waters where the Allies could attack. Unfortunately, the British waited too long. The German invasion was on.
Part 1
Part 1 is based on the firsthand accounts of Mrs. Florence Harriman who was U.S. Minister to Norway (now called Ambassador) before and during the early months of World War II.
On the morning of April 8, the U.S. Legation (Embassy) in Copenhagen, Denmark, phoned Mrs. Harriman in Norway and reported that a large body of German ships was passing through the Great Belt. This is a strait north of Germany, between two large islands in Denmark. Most officials, including the Norwegian government, thought the fleet was heading to the North Sea to engage the British Royal Navy in battle. The British even withdrew all their ships from Norwegian waters.
The Blücher Which Led the German Fleet into Norway Courtesy of Wikipedia
At 11:30 PM, the air raid alarm sounded in Oslo, but the street lights remained on for some time, and most assumed it was just another practice air raid alarm. Mrs. Harriman went to bed. However, at 3:00 AM, she was awakened by a phone call and notified that German warships were coming up the Oslo Fjord (a long narrow waterway connecting the capital with the North Sea). Mrs. Harriman was unable to call or cable the United States – Nazi collaborators had already taken control of communications.
Between 5:00 and 6:00 AM, Mrs. Harriman and others who had joined her at the American Legation made several trips to a newly-built bomb-proof room in the building. German bombers circled the city with Norwegian planes in pursuit. Anti-aircraft fire penetrated the early morning air.
The Norwegian Foreign minister notified Mrs. Harriman that the Court and Government were fleeing Oslo on a special train, and they wanted her to join them. Although she began packing, she was only given a twenty-minute notice of the 7:00 AM departure time, so she left in her Ford automobile at 9:45 AM along with other Americans.
German Troops Marching Through Oslo on April 9, 1940 Courtesy of Wikipedia and Creative Commons
On the route north to Hamar, those fleeing Oslo passed Kjeller Airfield, which the Germans had bombed, and the hangars were still burning. Behind them, the Nazis occupied Oslo, but their arrival was delayed by eight hours. Coastal guns from the Oscarsborg Fortress sank the German flagship Blücher, which slowed down the invasion and allowed the King and Government to escape the Nazis.
After six hours, Mrs. Harriman and her party reached the city of Hamar, but no accommodations were available under any roof. When word came that the Nazis were headed to Hamar, the Norwegian Government, and the U.S., British, and French Legations traveled in a long line of automobiles to Elverum. After the King and Royal Family passed by, soldiers erected a barrier south of town. Later two hundred Germans were killed at this roadblock, including the German air attache.
Dept. of History United States Military Academy. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Upon reaching Elverum, the town was blacked out except for the brightly lit schoolhouse where the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, was meeting. The King and Royal Family continued on to Trysil, seventy miles north, and Mrs. Harriman found lodging with a family outside Elverum. By 5:30 the following morning, German planes were attacking Elverum. The Germans flew at low altitudes and terrified the inhabitants with their deafening roar. When the bombing ended, only a church and Red Cross hospital remained. The Government escaped safely and retreated to Nybergsund.
The Norwegian Foreign Minister urged Mrs. Harriman to follow, but a barrier stood in her way and deep snow made the forests impassible. The Norwegians maneuvered her Ford around a barricade, and only the frozen ice kept her vehicle out of the nearby river. Upon reaching Nybergsund, Mrs. Harriman found the town wiped out and no walls standing. She had no idea where to find the King and Government. She later learned that the King and Crown Prince had run for their lives into the forest when the Nazis attacked.
King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav Hiding in the Woods During Bombing Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Mrs. Harriman crossed the border into Sweden to make contact with the U.S. Legation in Stockholm and report that she and other U.S. officials were still alive. Although she remained close to the border and intended to cross back into Norway after learning the location of the Norwegian Government, she was never able to return. In her memoir, Mission to the North, she shared a portion of King Haakon’s speech to his people, which he broadcast while on the run.
“‘In this hour, the most difficult our country has ever known in a hundred years, I send the most pressing appeal to each of you to do all in your power to save the liberty and independence of Norway. We have been the victims of a lightning attack from a nation with which we have always maintained friendly relations. That nation has not hesitated to bomb the civil population, who are suffering intensely….They have employed against us, and against the civil population high explosives and incendiary bombs and also machine-gunned us in the most savage fashion….I thank all those who are today with me and the Government, and who are fighting at their posts of duty for the independence and preservation of Norway. I pray you all to treasure the memory of those who have already given their lives for this country. God protect Norway.'”
Part 2
Part 2 is based on the firsthand accounts of C.J. Hambro, President of the Norwegian Parliament, as shared in his book I Saw It Happen in Norway.
The Germans attacked Norway on April 9, 1940 and took the country by surprise. Norway had maintained a strict neutral status in World War II and was on excellent terms with both Germany and the Allies.
The German attack on Norway, planned months in advance, was executed with simultaneous invasions by ship and air at every strategically important point in the country. Also, soldiers had been secretly loaded on German commercial ships which were already in Norwegians ports. Unfortunately, the Norwegian army had not been mobilized, and the country was completely unprepared for war.
The first inkling of trouble came when the air raid alarm in Oslo started at 1:00 AM and continued incessantly. At 2:00 AM, Mr. Hambro reached the War Office and the Prime Minister by telephone and then received updates every fifteen minutes. Reports came in from all over the country—the Germans were invading.
Between 4:30 and 5:00 AM, the German Minister met with the Norwegian Minister of Affairs. He presented a list of demands which actually called for the complete surrender of Norway. The Government rejected the proposal and made plans to flee the capital. Mr. Hambro traveled by taxi to Hamar, one hundred miles north of Oslo, to prepare for the arrival of the Royal Family, the Government (Cabinet), the 150 members of the Storting (Parliament), and others supporting them. Most of these traveled on a special train which left Oslo at 7:23 AM that morning.
The sinking of the German flag ship Blucher in the Oslo Fjord postponed the occupation of Oslo, the capital of Norway, by eight hours and prevented the Germans from ever capturing the Royal Family or the Government.
That afternoon while the Storting was in session in Hamar, word arrived that the German motorized troops were advancing toward the city – one group was only ten miles away. A special train left for Elverum with most of the members aboard about ten minutes later. Norwegian soldiers barricaded the roads leading to Elverum and established a line of defense. The Storting met for the last time before the German occupation and unanimously gave the Government the full power to make all necessary decisions under war conditions.
The king sent his daughter-in-law, the Crown-Princess, and her three children to Sweden to stay with her parents, Prince Carl and Princess Ingeborg. The King and Crown Prince traveled with them as far as Nybergsund, which was twenty miles west of the border with Sweden.
The German Minister demanded a meeting with with the King, so he made the 45-mile trip back over frozen roads to Elverum the next day. Dr. Brauer, the German Minister, set forth the ultimatum which was tougher than the one he had presented the day before. The King stated he would abdicate rather than dissolve the Government and appoint a new one headed by Hitler’s man. The Government supported him and refused to accept the German demands.
The Germans replied by bombing Elverum and nearly destroying it. Nybergsund, which was smaller than a village, was also raided by bombers, but the deep snow reduced the impact of the explosions. The King, Crown Prince, and the Government passed through the Gudbrandsdalen Valley to the town of Molde on the west coast. They were constantly on the move, running from German bombers.
King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav hiding in the woods during a German bombing. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
British, French, and Polish troops landed at three points along the west coast to assist the Norwegians in their fight. The first British troops reached Norway on April 19th, but by April 28th, they were forced to evacuate southern Norway. The fight moved to the northern counties. The King and Government sailed above the Arctic Circle to Tromso, which became the provisional capital. The plan was to drive the Germans farther and farther south, and the implementation started to succeed when the Germans slowly lost ground in the north. Nevertheless, the King, Crown Prince, and Government only stayed in Tromso for five weeks.
After the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France, the Allies were forced to evacuate Norway – the troops were needed to defend their homelands. The British offered safe passage to the Royals and the Norwegian Government, and on June 7th, they departed on the British cruiser Devonshire for England.
In August, the Crown Princess, her three children, along with Mrs. Harriman, the U.S. Minister to Norway, and hundreds of others journeyed by train up the length of Sweden to the far north. They crossed into Finland and proceeded to the port of Petsamo on the Arctic coast. There they boarded the American Legion, a troop ship, sent by Roosevelt to take them to America.
The Return of the Royal Family to Norway – June 7, 1945 Courtesy of Oslo Museum via Wikimedia Commons
On June 7, 1940, five years to the day that the King and Crown Prince had fled Norway, the King and Crown Princess and her children returned to Norway by ship to cheering crowds welcoming the Royal Family home. The Crown Prince had returned a few weeks before to prepare the way.
Sources:
Mission to the North by Frances Jaffray Harriman. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1941.
Many books have been written about the atrocities that occurred at the notorious Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the German occupation of Poland in WWII. Survivors of Auschwitz and the death march west in the dead of winter have shared their heartbreaking stories, and each one holds a valuable lesson for readers. But one Auschwitz prisoner who was chosen for execution managed to escape.
Klara Lutkovits was a teenager from Sighet, Hungary (part of Romania before the war). She, her parents, and five of her siblings lived in the Sighet ghetto, which was formed in early 1944. One very hot day in May, Klara and her family were told to pack a few clothes and some food—they would be taken to a work camp and would not return home.
The Hungarian police loaded Klara, her family, and hundreds of others into railroad boxcars, and the Nazis transported them to Auschwitz, just one year before Germany’s surrender. They reached the notorious camp on the third night of travel. Dr. Joseph Mengele, a medical officer at the camp, met them on the selection ramp. He was tall and handsome, only thirty-three-years-old, and resembled the Hollywood actor-type. He had a magnetic personality. Mengele talked and joked with the deportees and then sent them to the gas chambers.
Because Klara’s transport arrived during the night, German soldiers grouped their flashlights around Mengele, and he made his selections. He sent Klara’s sister and brother and her parents to the right and Klara with her two other sisters to the left. He smiled and said they would see their family members the next day. The guards led Klara, Rose, and Hedy to a barracks in B Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The rest of the family went immediately to the gas chambers.
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1944. Selection of Hungarian Jews for work or the gas chamber. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Over the next several months, Klara and her sisters worked eleven-hour shifts in the surrounding fields and factories. They were fed three meager “meals” a day. The girls endured the cold and SS beatings and observed hundreds of new arrivals herded into the gas chambers daily.
Klara’s mind as well as her body began to break down, and she stopped eating. In November, Dr. Mengele announced that he would conduct a selection among the prisoners. After he viewed Klara’s emaciated body, he chose her and others in the same condition to die in the gas chambers.
The Nazis knew they were losing the war and needed to eliminate the evidence of their atrocities, so they pushed their extermination efforts to the maximum. A backlog of prisoners awaited execution, and Mengele could no longer send those housed at Auschwitz directly to the gas chambers whenever he wanted. New arrivals had priority. Klara and the other women selected were taken to the bath house, given black dresses to wear, and told to wait. Klara wanted to die rather than continue suffering in the camp. Her sisters, Rose and Hedy, came to the window of the bath house to comfort her, but they were pulled away and beaten for their efforts.
The guards moved Klara’s group to another holding room, a smaller brick-style building next to the gas chamber. Once the others fell asleep, Klara inspected her surroundings. The walls were made of inferior brick, and she noticed someone had dug around the bottom of one of the bricks. She pushed and pulled until she freed it and then used the brick to chip away at the others. After pulling out more bricks, she slipped through the small passage and into the night. The fresh, cold air and Klara’s newfound freedom awakened her. She decided she wanted to live.
Klara moved through the camp, staying close to the buildings. The wet, snowy rain and very cold weather, kept the guards indoors. She noticed lights on in the bath house. Thick steam covered the windows. Klara found an open window and climbed inside, hidden from detection by the steam. After taking a shower, the girls were given dresses and shoes and were told to line up outside—the Nazis has chosen one hundred young women to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia. The guards counted one hundred and one prisoners and started to drag the last girl in line away. She objected, so one of the other girls volunteered to stay behind with her family and returned to the barracks.
After traveling for three days and three nights, Klara’s train arrived in Weisswasser, Czechoslovakia, the home of a Nazi slave labor camp and the privately owned Telefunken Company. Klara lined up with the other girls but collapsed before making it to the camp gates. She awakened later in a hospital bed in the infirmary, where a female Jewish doctor nursed her back to health.
After six weeks, Klara went to work in the town factory, putting wire transmitters and radio relay systems together. She began to eat again, but the process was painful. Those in charge fed the workers three meals a day, including bread and meat with each meal.
A few months later Klara and her co-workers were ushered to their job site as usual but nobody brought work for them to do. The girls discovered the Germans and their soldiers had left. They were free! The next day Russian soldiers arrived, and their captain arranged transportation for the girls to the nearest operating trains—two days away. The girls were all allowed to board without paying, and Klara traveled home to Sighet.
Several weeks later her sisters, Rose and Hedy, arrived home. They thought Klara had died in the gas chambers. What a reunion of crying, laughing, and screaming took place!
Klara met Ezra Wizel in Sighet, and they married in 1947. Having no desire to live under communism, the Wizel’s escaped and emigrated to America. They eventually settled in Los Angeles, California. Source: Auschwitz Escape – The Klara Wizel Story by Danny Naten and R. Gifford, 2014.
Source:
Auschwitz Escape – The Klara Wizel Story by Danny Naten and R. Gifford, 2014.
Walter Rosenberg, who later changed his name to Rudolf Vrba, and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler escaped from the infamous Auschwitz Death Camp on April 7, 1944. Their method of escape was rather unique, and the comprehensive report they wrote about the mass executions taking place at Auschwitz helped to save the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Walter was fifteen-years-old when he was forced to leave school and study at home due to the anti-Jewish laws passed by the pro-Nazi German protectorate of Slovakia. Three years later, at age seventeen, he’d had enough. He tore the Star of David off his clothes and left home in a taxi, hoping to make it to Great Britain.
At the Hungarian border, frontier guards captured Walter and sent him to a transition camp. Hoping to improve his situation, he volunteered for a “Work Farm” assignment, which was in reality a one-way trip to Auschwitz. He held various jobs at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), where the gas chambers and crematoriums were located.
By April of 1944, about ninety percent of the new arrivals to Auschwitz (6000 people) were sent straight to the gas chambers each day. One day drunken SS guards spilled the news to the prisoners that Hungarian Jews would soon arrive.
Auschwitz II had a very active underground resistance organization made up of prisoners who worked in various departments in the camp. After the group learned that Rosenberg and Wetzler wanted to escape, the members aided their plans. It was past time to expose the Nazi’s secret crimes to the outside world.
Confiscated clothing in the “Kanada” section of Auschwitz Courtesy of Wikipedia. Public Domain.
The underground organization gathered data from the central registry, a list of the SS officers working around the crematoria, drawings of the layout of the gas chambers and crematoria, records of the transports gassed in two of the crematoriums, and a label from a Zyklon B canister. In one department, the prisoners’ job was to sort through the large quantities of items confiscated from the new arrivals and package the goods to send to Germany. From this supply, the underground gathered suits, socks, underpants, shirts, a razor, a torch, glucose, vitamins, margarine, cigarettes and a lighter for Rosenberg and Wetzler.
A barbed wire perimeter surrounded the barracks where the prisoners slept at night. The Nazi guards erected another external perimeter during the day. A stack of wood for constructing new buildings had been placed in a construction area between these two perimeters.
The men created a hollowed-out space in the wood stack, and on Friday, April 7, 1944, Rosenberg and Wetzler, clad in suits, overcoats, and boots, climbed inside their hiding place. A Russian POW had previously told them to soak strong-smelling Russian tobacco in petrol and dry it out to hide the men’s scent from the guard dogs. Their underground helpers piled wood around the escapees and sprinkled the area with the prepared tobacco.
Rosenberg had observed that after someone went missing at Auschwitz, the SS would hunt for them for three days and three nights before calling off their search. The two men stayed in the wood pile undetected for three nights and throughout the fourth day. After nearly 80 hours, they crawled out of their hiding place at 9:00 PM on Monday, April 10th. The external perimeter had been removed for the night, leaving the men free to escape the camp.
Rosenberg and Wetzler headed south to Slovakia, eighty-one miles away. Polish civilians assisted them with food and shelter, and the men crossed the border after eleven days. A peasant family in Slovakia put the men in contact with a nearby Jewish doctor who sent them by train to the Slovak Jewish Council in Žilina.
Although the Slovakian government had turned over thousands of its Jews to the Nazis who deported them, part of the Jewish community was left alone to operate its schools and synagogues as a show piece for German propaganda.
Vrba and Wetzler’s Escape. Courtesy of Wikipedia and Martin Gilbert.
Rosenberg and Wetzler wrote a full report of the atrocities taking place at Auschwitz, including drawings and detailed facts to back up their testimony. Rosenberg signed the report with his new name – Rudolf Vrba. The report was translated from Slovak into German and completed on April 27th. It was copied and taken to Hungary, Switzerland, the UK, Romania, and the United States.
International newspapers eventually picked up the men’s story, and leaders of several countries pressured Hungary to stop the deportations. The United States and Great Britain bombed Budapest on July 2 and dropped leaflets stating those responsible for the deportations would be held accountable.
Although the Nazi’s had invaded Hungary in March 1944 to prevent the country from withdrawing from the war, the Germans had left Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy in power. After the Allies bombed Budapest, Horthy reasserted his authority and ordered an end to the mass deportations. Prior to that, 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz between May 15 and July 7. The order to stop the deportations spared the lives of 200,000 Jews in Budapest.
Vrba and Wetzler survived the war, wrote books about their experiences, and lived to an advanced age. Vrba argued to the day he died that more lives could have been spared if the report had been disseminated immediately. He maintained that politics had played a part in keeping their account quiet for a time. Over the years many theories have been presented for why this may have happened, but that’s a story for another time.
During WWII, thousands of citizens in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Basque region of Spain hid Allied soldiers and delivered them along various escape routes to British consulate officials stationed in Spain. From there, the men flew back to England so they could continue their fight to free Europe from the grip of the Nazis.
The Comet Line was established by Belgians in August of 1941 and continued to operate until the end of 1944. The line ran from Brussels, through France, and across the Pyrenees to northern Spain (red line on map below). How did this line start, and who was behind its formation?
After Belgium surrendered to the Germans in 1940, Mademoiselle Andrée De Jongh, known as Dédée, cared for wounded British soldiers in Brussels. By 1941, she decided to find a way to help the many soldiers and airmen hidden in Brussels to escape back to England. Many were survivors from Dunkirk who hadn’t been caught by the Germans.
Dédée and her father, known as “Paul,” formed an escape line from Brussels to St. Jean de Luz in southwest France. In August of 1941, Dédée escorted a Scottish soldier and two Belgians who wanted to fight for the Allies to the British Consulate in Bilbao, Spain. At first the Consul didn’t believe that the twenty-five-year-old young woman had crossed the Pyrenees on foot, but she convinced him otherwise. She offered to bring more soldiers but asked for financial support to feed and house them on the long trip from Brussels to Bilbao and to pay the Basque guides who would lead them over the mountains. The Consul petitioned the British Foreign Office to support Dédée’s plan, and the Comet Line was born.
Courtesy of Sherri Greene Otis
Meanwhile, back in Brussels, Dédée’s father Paul began plans for collecting the Allied servicemen and young Belgians scattered across the country. He sought aid from likeminded friends – some gave money and others offered to house soldiers.
Early on, one of Dédée’s guides and the servicemen he was escorting were arrested at the train station in Lille, France, and the Germans learned of Dédée’s participation in the escape line. The Gestapo visited the De Jongh home and questioned Dédée’s family at length on her whereabouts. After the Gestapo left without answers, Paul sent word through a trusted messenger that Dédée must not return to Belgium but run the line from France. He took over the Brussels operation.
The De Jongh Home in Schaerbeek, Brussels Courtesy of Lumixbx via Wikipedia
Paul escorted the servicemen to the Brussels train station and handed them off to Charlie and Elvire Morelle, a brother-sister team, who guided them into France. Dédée met up with them just across the border and traveled with the men on a series of trains to Paris and then immediately on the overnight express to Bayonne in the far south of France.
The southern end of the Comet Line was run by the De Greef family. They had fled Belgium when the Germans invaded and then settled in an empty villa in the village of Anglet above the bay of St Jean de Luz, close to the Spanish border. Once recruited, the whole family worked tirelessly for the line. Elvire De Greef, known as “Tante Go,” established a black-market enterprise, which provided good food for the escaping soldiers and their guides before making the arduous crossing of the Pyrenees. Tante Go bribed the Germans with her goods, and her black-market activities provided a good cover for her resistance efforts with the Comet Line.
Tante Go’s husband, L’Oncle, obtained a job as interpreter at the German headquarters in Anglet. This gave him “access to special passes and certificats de domicil required for visitors to the forbidden zone established by the Germans along the Atlantic coast.” L’Oncle was also responsible for billeting German troops in the area, which gave him access to other headquarters of German units. He stole official stamps and blank identity documents and forms in small enough quantities that the theft went unnoticed. These items were then sent to the branches of the escape line in Brussels and Paris.
Tante Go recruited helpers in Bayonne, Anglet, Biarritz, and St Jean de Luz and located those who were willing to provide safe houses for the parties before their crossing into Spain. She and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Janine, regularly bicycled to these locations. Tante Go also hired Basque guides to take the groups over the Pyrenees.
In the fall of 1941, Dédée escorted a group of Allied airmen (two Polish and one Canadian) on the express train from Paris to Bayonne, near the Spanish border. At the train station, they met up with Tant Go’s daughter, Janine, in the refreshment room. When it was time to leave, the airmen went one at a time to the lavatory where there was a door to the outside, allowing them to avoid passing the ticket barrier. Someone in the escape network had made a duplicate key – this door was always locked. Dédée left the station through the main exit.
Janine de Greef
Janine and the airmen bicycled to St. Jean de Luz, left their bicycles at the station, and walked up the stony road to a farm at Urrugne. During their walk, “a young Basque peasant on a bicycle came down the hill towards them. As he passed, he shook his head significantly and pointed up the road.” Janine led the airmen to a hiding place, and then she climbed a wooded slope and observed the road to Urrugne. There she spotted German troops on bicycles at a barricade. Janine led the Allied airmen on a long detour, and they safely arrived at the farm in Urrugne, where their Basque guide, Florentino, awaited them. Florentino and Dédée led the party across the mountains and into the hands of British diplomats in Spain. This was Dédée’s third group of servicemen who made the eight-hour hike to freedom.
Florentino, Basque Guide for Comet
The Basque guide, Florentino, was a tall man, with a broad back and strong muscles. He wore espadrilles, rope-soled shoes necessary for navigating the Pyrenees safely. He provided these shoes for the airmen. Florentino was most at home in the mountains and knew the paths well. Darkness and fog didn’t slow him down. He hated fascism, as did many of the Basques, and he was happy to work for Dédée and Tante Go. He managed to evade the police on both sides of the frontier (France and Spain) who suspected him of smuggling and working for the Allies. In reality, Florentino delivered documents and photos to the British, making constant trips across the mountains from 1941 until France was liberated in the fall of 1944.
Dédée and her father, Paul
Meanwhile, back in Brussels, the Secret Police of the Luftwaffe paid a visit to the De Jongh home, seeking Dédée’s whereabouts. They questioned her mother for an hour. Her father, Paul, was in Valenciennes and escaped the interrogation. Upon learning from a neighbor that she had been questioned about Paul, he moved his headquarters to another location. Six weeks later his wife and daughter, Suzanne, were arrested in their home but were released the same day. With a price on his head of a million Belgian francs, Paul’s friends convinced him to flee to Paris, and he left Belgium forever on April 30. Just six days later, the two men who had taken charge of the Brussels operation were arrested.
In early May of 1942 after Paul De Jongh had fled to France, and the two men who had taken charge of the Brussels end of the Comet Line were arrested and imprisoned, Paul’s daughter and Dédée De Jongh’s sister, Suzanne, worked with Baron Jean Greindl Laan, codenamed “Nemo,” to continue operations. Paul stayed in Paris, and Dédée continued her dangerous trips escorting airmen to the south of France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and into the hands of British consular officials.
Dédée De Jongh, Founder of the Comet Line Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum
A few months earlier, Nemo had become director of a canteen run by the Swedish Red Cross in Brussels. He ran the Comet Line from this location. Madame Scherlinck, a Swedish lady, was the canteen’s patron, and through this agency food and clothes were provided for the poor and ailing children of the city. Nemo supplied bags of rice and flour from the Swedish Red Cross to the families sheltering the airmen.
Peggy van Lier helped with feeding the children at the canteen and became Nemo’s assistant in the Comet Line. The canteen became a cover for several young people who helped in the secret work. They were adventurous and eager to participate in facilitating the escape of Allied airmen.
In an attempt to penetrate the rescue network, the Germans planted young English-speaking men into the countryside who posed as downed Allied airmen. This led to arrests and imprisonment. To counter the problem, eighteen-year-old Elsie Maréchal, who spoke perfect English, started testing the stories of the supposed airmen before taking them to homes in Brussels. The Belgian guides brought the men to St. Joseph’s Church where Elsie asked them about their units, the planes they flew, and where they were stationed. While they waited inside the church, Elsie would report to Nemo at the canteen for further instructions.
St. Joseph’s Church in Brussels Public Domain
One wintry day in November of 1942, two German imposters were brought to St. Joseph’s Church. Normal protocols weren’t followed, and Elsie didn’t know to meet the airmen. The Belgian guide from Namur took them to a house of a friend where he was given the Maréchal’s address by people unaware of their underground activities. The two Germans who claimed to be Americans didn’t act like Americans. Elsie noticed several red flags but thought she was overreacting. After fixing a meal for the men, Elsie went to the canteen. Nemo sent her back home with instructions not to allow the men to leave the house. In the meantime, the young men asked Elsie’s mother if they could go for a walk. They left the house and returned shortly after with guns pointed at Mrs. Maréchal.
One by one the members of the Maréchal family returned home and were arrested along with others who showed up at their house, including Elvire Morelle who arrived from Paris early the next morning. The enemy agents reported on all the guides, shelterers, and helpers they had encountered in the Belgian line “from the Ardennes and Namur to the very center of the organization in Brussels.”
In two days, nearly 100 people were arrested, including innocent relatives thrown into prison as hostages. Many of these never survived to return home. In the previous six months, the Comet Line had rescued sixty airmen, but their operation wasn’t over. New leaders reorganized the line and recruited more Belgians to carry on the work.
After Peggy van Lier successfully convinced the Nazis that she was not a participant in the operation, she was released and fled to England with a group of Allied servicemen on the Comet Line. Mr. Maréchal was executed by the Germans. Mrs. Maréchal, her daughter Elsie, and Elvire Morelle were sent to concentration camps in Germany, but they each survived and returned home after the war ended.
Dédée De Jongh and her father, Paul, continued to work out of their apartment in Paris. She escorted the Allied airmen south across the border to Spain, and Paul stamped forged identity cards. Fearing that her father would be captured by the Nazis, Dédée convinced him to leave France. On January 13, 1943, the two of them along with Franco and three pilots left Paris on the night train and traveled to Bayonne.
Franco returned to Paris to prepare another group to escape. Tante Go, who organized the southern section of the Comet Line, led Dédée and the airmen on bicycles to St. Jean de Luz through the pelting rain. Then they navigated the steep slopes to Urrugne on a road that had become a river of mud. Upon arrival at Francia’s farmhouse, they were treated to hot milk and soup.
Francia’s House in Urrugne
Florentino, the Basque guide who would lead them over the mountains, decided it was too dangerous to make the treck in the tempestuous weather, and the group would have to wait until the next evening to leave. He returned to the town of Ciboure. The storm passed through and was gone by the next morning. The airmen enjoyed Francia’s hospitality and played with her children while they waited.
Soon the sound of an engine stopping in front of the house caught everyone’s attention. The shadow of a gendarme in uniform passed across the window of the farmhouse, and the door burst open. Ten gendarmes invaded the house and searched everywhere, lifting floorboards and casting furniture and pictures aside. After an hour, the gendarmes marched the group to police headquarters in St. Jean de Luz. It is believed that a disgruntled former guide for the Comet Line had betrayed the group.
Dédée was transferred to the Villa Chagrin prison in Bayonne the next day. The Gestapo interrogated her, and later moved her to the Maison Blance prison in Biarritz and then to Paris by train under armed guard. Her father Paul returned to Paris under a fictitious name. The safe houses in Paris were overflowing, and he worked to move some of them out through another organization.
After Dédée De Jongh’s arrest in January of 1943, her assistant, Franco, took over her responsibilities. Dédée’s father, Paul, with a price on his head, refused to leave France as long as Dédée remained imprisoned. He resumed escorting airmen from train station to train station in Paris. In May, Paul hired Jean Masson, a Belgian who worked with the resistance in northern France, to be a guide for the Brussels to Paris route. Masson was described as a short man with untidy blond hair and fierce eyes. He was in his early twenties.
Masson brought his first group of seven airmen down from Brussels to the Gare Montparnesse (train station) in Paris to the delight of Paul and others working with him in Paris. Masson was eager to please, polite, and treated Paul with deference. In early June, Masson warned Paul to be prepared for a large party arriving from Brussels on June 7th. He stated that all Paul’s helpers would be needed.
Gare Montparnesse – Station for Trains to and from Belgium
On June 7th, two women workers were sent north to Lille to meet Masson and the pilots and help escort them to Paris. When they arrived, Masson met them and handed over an airman to each of the women. One couple went to a little café across the street while they waited for the train back to Paris. They were promptly surrounded by the Gestapo and arrested. The other couple was arrested after the train left the station.
Late that same day, Paul and two other team members arrived at the Gare du Nord and were waiting on the platform as Masson had requested. Masson arrived with a number of Allied airmen and greeted Paul’s group, shaking hands and smiling. Soon the group was surrounded by at least twelve gendarmes (police). They were all handcuffed and led to the headquarters of the railway police, including Jean Masson.
Gare du Nord Train Station at the End of the Street
The three people in Paul’s group were taken to the Gestapo office on the Rue des Saussaies. Jean Masson was not with them, but he soon showed up, smiling and free of handcuffs. He spat on the floor in front of them, and called them fools. Paul and his helpers were shocked to discover Masson was a traitor.
Franco returned to Paris from Spain eight days later and went to Paul’s apartment on the Rue Vaneau. He discovered rotting fruit and moldy vegetables. He gathered up all the false papers and money he could find and loaded them into a suitcase and hurried away. Franco and another operative checked the apartments of other helpers and discovered their doors had been sealed by the Gestapo. Realizing Paul and his helpers had been arrested, Franco and his helper grieved the loss of their friends. This didn’t stop Franco, however. He was more determined than ever to keep the Comet Line running.
After Franco returned to Paris and discovered that Paul De Jongh and other Comet agents had been arrested by the Gestapo, Franco worked even harder to facilitate the transfer of airmen out of France. He travelled back and forth from Paris to Bilbao, Spain, with a different group of airmen every two weeks during the summer of 1943. Allied bombings in Europe were increasing and more airmen than ever needed assistance.
It was no longer safe for the airmen to ride the train straight from Paris to Bayonne in the far south of France. Gendarmes and plain-clothes Gestapo agents were watching for escapees taking the routes to the coast from the Gare d’Austerlitz train station in Paris. The airmen now rode a fourteen-hour night train to Bordeaux, then a local train to Dax, near Bayonne.
Franco, Tante Go, and Janine took turns escorting the airmen on bicycles from Dax to Anglet. On one trip, an American airmen didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, so Franco had to teach him before they could make the twenty-six-kilometer trip to Bayonne. After falling on the pavement in town a few times, on the outskirts of town, the poor soldier collided with two German officers riding their bicycles toward him. Franco pretended the American was drunk and hollered at him in front of the Germans, saying he deserved to be shot. This satisfied the officers, and they all went on their way.
Comet Line Route from Southern France to Spain
Franco was so exhausted by the fall of 1943 that the British Consul at Bilbao sent him by car to Gibraltar to meet with British intelligence. There in the shadow of the Rock, Franco found new courage. Observing the great fortress and its orderly calm gave him confidence that for the first time that Hitler’s forces could not win this war. Franco was informed the British were sending someone to replace Paul in Paris. His code name was Jerome.
After three days, Franco left Gibraltar refreshed and within the week had crossed the Pyrenees and returned to Paris. Jerome arrived and set up his headquarters in a flat on the Rue de Longchamps, near the Trocadéro, in Paris.
In December, Franco led a group of American pilots and a Belgian Comet leader to Spain. Their Basque guide, Florentino, was down with the flu and unable to accompany them. Unfortunately, the Bidassoa River on the border between France and Spain was high because of heavy rain the day before. An American pilot and the Belgian leader were carried away in the torrent and drowned.
By January 1944, the Gestapo was closing in on the Comet Line in Brussels and in Paris. The traitor Jean Masson who had led the Gestapo to arrest so many Comet operatives the previous year had resurfaced. Jerome returned to Paris from a visit to Brussels on the evening of January 17th. His intention was to prepare to return to England. The Gestapo was waiting for him at his flat. He was taken to headquarters and tortured. Franco returned to the same apartment the next day and was also arrested. Franco would survive the war.
Jacques Desoubrie Alias Jean Masson. Public Domain
Michou Dumont, codename “Lily,” was away from home in nursing school when her sister Andree was arrested in Brussels for her work in the Comet Line. Like her sister, Lily was also a friend of Dedee, the founder of the escape network. Lily admired Dedee and was determined to carry on the work in Brussels after so many others had been arrested and it was no longer safe for Dedee to remain in Belgium. Lily began working on the Comet Line in 1942.
Micheline Dumont “Lily” Courtesy of Wikipedia. Fair Use.
Lily was only five feet tall and appeared no older than fifteen, although she was in her early twenties. She often dressed as a school girl to hide her activities as she ran around Brussels. She worked with the Comet Line and continued with her nursing duties. One day the Gestapo came to the clinic where she worked, looking for her. The receptionist called her floor and warned her to escape before the agents found her.
Lily fled by way of the outer fire escape and a crossover leading to the building next door. She called to an acquaintance with an office near the outside door to let her in. He complied, and she was able to run down the stairs and out the building without being detected. From then on, Lily stayed on the move. She didn’t remain in one place for long and spent the night in various homes of Belgians she knew.
Lily’s work with the Comet Line kept her very busy. She coordinated transportation for the Allied airmen brought from the country to Brussels and found temporary homes for them. She distributed ration coupons, supplies, and food to the many safe houses in Brussels. She checked on the welfare of the airmen hiding in the city and worked with photographers to produce identity cards. Lily also recruited new individuals and families who were willing to provide safe houses for the airmen, especially after other were arrested for housing the soldiers.
Lily’s shrewdness kept her one step ahead of the Nazis, but in the winter of 1944, one year after Dedee’s arrest, Lily fled Brussels because the Gestapo was getting too close to her. Two of her close associates had been arrested, and instinct told her that the time to leave her native land had arrived. Before she left, Lily recruited trained agents to take her place escorting fliers and securing safe houses.
Lily traveled to Paris and then to Bayonne in the far south of France. She rendezvoused with Jean-Francois (Franco) who’d just crossed back into France after delivering airmen to the British diplomats in Spain. Lily explained the deteriorating situation in Brussels, and Jean-Francois immediately took the express train to Brussels to check out the situation. He planned to return south and coordinate a new operation for Lily. Eight days later, Jean-Francois was arrested and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in France, Belgium, and Germany.
Meanwhile, Lily waited in Anglet at Auntie Go’s house. Auntie Go, who was from Belgium and knew Lily previously, had been running the southern end of the Comet Line from the beginning.
Views along the Comet Escape Line in the Pyrenees. Courtesy of Pyrenean Experience.
After fleeing Belgium when the Gestapo was closing in on her, Lily went to Bayonne in the far south of France and met with Jean-Francois, the leader of the Comet Line. She warned him of serious problems with the network in Brussels. Jean-Francois, codename “Franco,” travelled to Brussels to check out the situation and upon his return to Paris walked into a trap set by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, Lily awaited word from Franco at Auntie Go’s house in Anglet, near Bayonne.
Several weeks later, Michael Creswell, the British attaché in Spain who took charge of the rescued airmen after they crossed the border, called Auntie Go, Lily, and Max, another operative, down to Madrid for a planning session. Lily was assigned to work with Max in Paris and also to work the line from Dax (north of Bayonne) to the Spanish border. Max would continue bringing airmen by train from Paris to Dax.
After crossing the Pyrenees for additional meetings with Creswell in February, Lily returned to Paris. She was to coordinate escapes in Paris along with Martine Noel, a dentist. Lily stored her belongings in Martine’s apartment. Lily wanted to speed up the escape procedures, so Martine set up a strategy session at a local restaurant for the new team of helpers.
The fellow who sat directly in front of Lily seemed vaguely familiar. “He was short and sandy-haired, with close-set eyes, strange and intense. He wore a garish purple coat along with a polka-dot tie. Abbé Beauvais, a priest who gave sanctuary to pilots when they came to Paris,” introduced the young Belgian as Pierre Boulain. Lily didn’t recognize the name, but she didn’t like the man. His polka-dot tie bothered her – it could be a signal.
The next day Lily left Paris with two British agents in danger of capture. They crossed the Pyrenees safely, and Lily returned to Auntie Go’s in Anglet. Because of the increased Allied bombings, main rail lines were damaged, and Lily arrived in Paris many days later than expected. When she called Martine’s apartment, a strange woman answered the phone and called Lily by her real name, Micheline, which Lily had not used in almost a year. No one in Paris knew her real name, or so she thought. The woman encouraged her to come by Martine’s apartment, but Lily knew better.
Lily headed to Martine’s dental office in the suburbs, but the concierge stopped her at the door. After informing her that Martine had been arrested, the concierge sent Lily to one of Martine’s friends. She learned that everyone at the restaurant had been arrested and sent to Fresnes Prison just outside the city of Paris. Fearing her own capture, Lily caught a train for Bayonne. She considered her options and decided to find out who was betraying the Comet Line to the enemy.
Lily returned to Paris and went straight to Fresnes Prison. At the prison gate, she asked to visit Martine and was promptly arrested. Although she was confined to a room by herself, Lily figured out the communication system used by the prisoners. They communicated at the sides of the walls and around corners using taps, echoes, and shouts. The jail was built in a classic hub-and-spoke design,” so the inmates tracked down Martine and brought her close to Lily’s room. Martine revealed that the traitor was Pierre Boulain. Lily finally remembered where she had seen the man before – in Brussels when he went by the name of Jean Masson.
Masson had obtained false identification papers for airmen traveling from Brussels to Paris and specialized in border crossings. He had attended a meeting at a safe house in Brussels two days before the Comet leader Monsieur de Jongh was arrested in Paris. “Up to now, Masson had protected his identity because all those who knew him were always arrested. Lily was the only one capable of breaking his cover.”
After spending two nights at the Fresnes prison, Lily was led to the prison warden. The birthdate on her French identification card indicated she was only seventeen, and he couldn’t accept the imprisonment of someone so young. The warden ordered Lily out of the prison immediately and told her the Gestapo was on the way. Lily left through the front gate. Shortly after, a German staff car passed her on the road, but the Gestapo officers inside didn’t even notice her.
After Lily’s release from her two-day stay in Fresnes Prison, she met with two MI-9 operatives in Paris who had recently returned from England. They had been assigned the task of setting up camps for downed Allied Airmen in Belgium and France. The airmen would gather and wait in these camps until they were liberated.
Lily informed Thomas and Daniel, the MI-9 operatives, that Pierre Boulain was Jean Masson, the traitor causing the arrest of Comet Line agents and helpers. Lily had learned this from Martine, her friend who was imprisoned at Fresnes. Thomas and Daniel were incredulous. Not only had Masson come to them highly recommended, but he had provided expert assistance to the Comet Line, and they’d hired him to help establish the escape camp in Belgium.
Thomas and Daniel wanted more proof of Masson’s treachery than just the word of Martine. Daniel had already arranged to meet with Masson at an outdoor cafe near the Place de la Concorde the next day, so Lily arrived early and sat a ways off, reading a magazine. Daniel reached the cafe, and then Masson showed up with a woman. Lily knew without a doubt that Pierre Boulain was Jean Masson. After he and the woman left, Daniel found Lily, and she confirmed her previous accusation regarding the traitor. Daniel still wasn’t convinced and told Lily to follow Masson and see what happened. She agreed.
Lily crossed the Seine River and walked in the direction she had seen Masson and the woman go. Lily spotted them by the Chamber of Deputies, a place where Masson shouldn’t be. He looked up and their eyes made contact, and it was obvious in his expression that he’d been caught. Lily turned back the way she had come, and Masson followed. They both increased their pace, but when Lily reached an entrance to the Metro station, she raced down the circular stairway. A train came into the station, and she was able to gain entrance without being spotted.
Part of the Comet Line Path across the Pyrenees
The next day Lily returned to Auntie Go in Bayonne and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain on May 11th. Personnel at the British consulate drove her to Madrid to meet with Creswell, and he convinced her to leave for England. “MI9 gave her a commission as an officer in the British Army. They told her she was needed in London to help organize for intelligence operations once the invasion started.” Creswell did not want her to return to France and be arrested by the Nazis.
Lily stayed in England, working for MI9, until after the Germans left France. She met a young Belgian who also worked for British intelligence, and they married while they were both still in uniform. She returned to Paris to help locate MI9 agents and missing airmen in the fall of 1944.
Masson met with Daniel one more time after his confrontation with Lily. Gestapo agents and French Resistance members surrounded them, although they remained in the background. Masson was hoping to get the money promised him to set up the Belgian camp for Allied Airmen, which he would have pocketed and then turned the airmen in. Daniel reported Masson to the French Resistance who sent an agent to kill him. A man was killed, but it wasn’t Masson.
Dedee, Lily, and Auntie Go in England Several Years After the War
Nadine, Lily’s sister who was imprisoned in 1942, survived her time in Ravensbruck and returned home to Belgium after the war.
Jean-Francois was convicted by a German military tribunal and sent to concentration camps in Germany in 1944. He survived the war.
Dedee was held in prisons in France and Belgium and then sent to Ravensbruck. She survived the war and later became a missionary to Africa.
Jean Masson continued to capture Allied Airmen and turn them over to the Gestapo even after D-Day and the Germans were retreating from France. The Germans sent many airmen to POW camps, but some were sent to concentration camps and died there. Masson made a fatal mistake when he resurfaced and volunteered to work as an agent for the Allies. His photo was obtained, and Lily identified him. He was captured, convicted, and sentenced to death. His last words before he was executed were, “Heil Hitler.”
The Comet Line was responsible for leading over one thousand Allied Airmen safely out of Belgium and France and into the hands of the British in Spain. Hundreds of members of the organization were imprisoned and killed by the Nazis, but those who survived the war testified that they had aided the Allies because . . . it was the right thing to do.
Resources:
The Freedom Line by Peter Eisner. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.
Little Cyclone by Airey Neave. Biteback Publishing Ltd, 2013, 2016.
During the early years of WWII, the Soviets invaded and occupied the independent country of Lithuania in the Baltics. In June of 1941, the Germans turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population was Jewish.
Vilnius, Lithuania Old Town Skyline. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia
By late summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s elite killing squads, began escorting Jewish men, women, and children to large pits in the Ponary Forest outside Vilnius to shoot them. The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews as well as Poles and Russians in this forest.
When World War II began, thirty-nine-year-old German shopkeeper Toni Schmid from Vienna, Austria, was drafted into the German army. Schmid did not support the Nazis or Hitler but was a deeply committed Christian. Schmid was a sergeant and ran an army post behind German troops for soldiers who were stragglers or were separated from their units. In 1941 he was sent to Vilnius where he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish children. Horrified, he wanted to help the Jews but didn’t know how.
One night Sergeant Schmid walked down a dark street in Vilnius, and a desperate, young Jewish woman stepped out of the shadows and begged him to protect her from the SS death squads. He took her to his apartment for the night and the following day to a Catholic priest he knew.
The priest issued the woman a certificate of membership from his church. Schmid helped her obtain an official identity card and an apartment to rent. He told the German officials that she was a civilian employee from his military unit and the Soviets had taken her documents when they retreated.
Sergeant Schmid helped a young Jewish man also hiding from the death squads. Schmid gave him a German army uniform and the military identity papers of a German soldier who’d died, but his death hadn’t been reported. Then Schmid installed the young man as a military aide in his office.
One of Schmid’s duties was to oversee workshops manned by convalescing German soldiers, Russian POW’s, and Jews with skills needed for the war effort. Although he was only allowed to employ fifteen Jews, Schmid hired dozens to work in the shops.
Site of the Ponary massacre, where the German Nazis and their collaborators executed up to 100,000 people of various nationalities. About 70,000 of them were Jews. Photo by Avi1111 DR. AVISHAI TEICHER. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Under the cover of darkness, Schmid visited the Vilnius ghetto and supplied the Jews with food, medicine, and baby bottles filled with milk he had kept warm in his pockets. He warned the ghetto residents when Nazi raids were about to take place. Some of Schmid’s Jewish workers were caught in roundups, but he went to the local prison and obtained their release. He hid Jews in the back of covered trucks headed for German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, hoping they would be safer there than in Lithuania.
Sergeant Schmid secretly advised the leaders of a Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto. He helped transport Jewish resistance fighters out of the city, warned them of pending German operations, and even supplied them with stolen German weapons. He also permitted resistance members to meet in his apartment.
Schmid’s good deeds did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and agents began following him. One day they raided his apartment while he was visiting the ghetto. Some of Schmid’s soldiers located him before he arrived home and warned him that Gestapo agents were waiting at his apartment. Schmid fled, but the Nazis caught him after several weeks and sentenced him to death.
Prior to his arrest, Sergeant Schmid had assisted almost 300 Jews to escape the Nazis in Lithuania. On April 13, 1942, he was executed by a Nazi firing squad. The last words out of his mouth were the Lord’s Prayer.
The night before his execution, Sergeant Schmid wrote a letter to his wife and daughter in Austria.
“‘I am informing you, my dearest that I must depart from this world, I am sentenced to death. Please remain strong and trust in our dear God, who decides the destiny of each of us….Now I close my last lines, the last I can write to you, and send my love.’”
Sergeant Schmid took to heart Christ’s teaching that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But Sergeant Schmid went one step further – he gave his life for strangers.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Did anyone help free prisoners on their way to the death camps during WWII? If so, did any of them successfully escape and survive the war? The answer is “Yes!”
In April 1944, Nazi soldiers herded eleven-year-old Simon Gronowski and his mother onto a waiting train, along with more than sixteen hundred other Jewish prisoners living in Belgium. The Gronowskis crowded into a wooden boxcar with one single, small, wired-over window and no food, water, or seats. The train’s destination was the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland, more than seven hundred miles away.
Around 9:30 PM and less than ten minutes after the train left the station, the transport slowed and then stopped. Three members of the Belgian Resistance—Robert Maistriau, Jean Franklemon, and Youra Livchitz—had placed a lantern covered with red paper on the railroad tracks in an effort to stop the train. They wanted to help as many prisoners escape as possible, and their ploy worked. The engineer halted the train for the “danger” signal.
Armed with only a small-caliber handgun, Livchitz attempted to bluff the Nazi guards into thinking a large force was attacking the train. He fired his revolver repeatedly at the rear of the train where the guards were stationed.
Maistriau and Franklemon used wire cutters to open the boxcar doors and yelled at the prisoners to get out. Many jumped off and tried to run away, but the guards on top of the train fired at them. After a few minutes, the train moved forward, but the engineer deliberately accelerated at a slow pace so more prisoners could escape.
After opening as many boxcars as possible, Maistriau, Franklemon, and Livchitz retrieved their bicycles from the bushes and quickly rode away. They had not reached the Gronowskis’s boxcar, but men inside pried open the door. The train had started forward, but some inside jumped out anyway.
Items used during the attack, now in the collection of the Kazerne Dossin Museum in Belgium. Courtesy of Author Jessica Dommicent and Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Simon’s mother gave him money to hide in his sock then led him to the door. She held him by the shoulders outside the car but was reluctant to let go when the train’s speed increased. After the engineer slowed down, the boy’s mother finally released him, and Simon landed on the ground safely. He was the last person to escape his car.
The German guards shot other jumpers, but when Simon spotted the guards heading his way, he rolled down a small slope and ran for the trees. He didn’t stop until he was deep in the woods. Because Simon was a scout and had camped in the Belgian forests, he was quite comfortable in his new surroundings.
The eleven-year-old walked through the night and reached the edge of the woods at daybreak. He stopped at a small house and told the woman who answered that he had lost his way in the woods while playing with friends and needed help getting home to Brussels. The woman took him to the home of a policeman who was also a secret member of the Belgian Resistance.
The policeman was aware of the train ambush and assumed Simon had escaped. The officer’s wife washed and mended Simon’s clothing, fed him breakfast, and gave him a bath. The officer took the boy to a remote train depot and paid for his return to the city. Simon made it safely to Brussels, and, miraculously, no one requested his identification papers along the way.
Simon returned to his former neighborhood where a close family friend, Madame Rouffart, housed and cared for him. She arranged a reunion for Simon with his father, who was in hiding. Fearing they would be captured if they stayed together, Madame Rouffart sent Simon to another safe house where he survived until the Allies liberated Belgium. Sadly, Simon’s mother was sent to the gas chambers as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz, and Simon’s older sister later met the same fate. Simon’s father died of a heart attack shortly after the liberation.
Prisoners Arriving at Auschwitz. Courtesy of Yad Vashem.
Simon’s train achieved notoriety as the “Twentieth Convoy.” It was the only Nazi train carrying deportees to a death camp that was ambushed by a Resistance group during the Holocaust. Two of the three Resistance members who freed the escapees survived the war. More than two hundred and thirty Jewish prisoners escaped, and more than a hundred were not recaptured. Simon grew up in the home of his aunt and uncle and became an accomplished Belgian attorney, father, and grandfather.
Source: My Brother’s Keeper by Rod Gragg. Center Street, 2016.
Poland became a killing ground for both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens during WWII, but the Germans specifically targeted Poland’s three million Jews. Those who weren’t immediately shot during the German invasion in 1939 were relocated from the countryside and placed in dozens of ghettos in cities all over Poland. Gradually the SS death squads emptied the ghettos by deporting the residents to death camps or by shooting them on the spot.
On July 26, 1942, an unusual confrontation took place between German Wehrmacht officers and SS troops in the city of Przemysl in southern Poland.
General Curt L. Freiherr von Gienanth, district commander of the Wehrmacht (regular German troops) had just appointed Major Max Liedtke to command the German garrison in Przemysl. Liedtke, a WWI veteran and son of a Lutheran pastor, was opposed to the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews.
In civilian life, Liedtke had lost his post as editor-in-chief of a daily German newspaper and was blacklisted because of his stand against the Nazis. In spite of this, in 1939, Liedtke was recalled to serve as a major in the Wehrmacht. He’d most recently served in Greece.
At Przemysl, Major Liedtke promoted the humane treatment of Jews. General von Gienanth supported Liedtke’s position and put four thousand Jews from Przemysl to work in local armament factories, protecting them and their families from the SS.
Liedtke’s adjutant, Oberleutnant Albert Battel, also despised the Nazi persecution of Jews. Battel was a middle-aged attorney and veteran of WWI who’d been reprimanded by the Nazis for befriending Jews and for treating the Jewish leaders of the Przemysl ghetto with respect. On July 26, 1942, Battel informed Liedtke that a large death squad of SS troops was approaching the bridge over the San River for the purpose of rounding up Jews.
Liedtke and Battel devised a plan to delay the SS long enough to rescue the Jewish workers and their families and to notify General von Gienanth of the situation. Liedtke hoped the general would agree with their plans not to cooperate with the SS death squads. Under Liedtke’s orders, Battel sent Wehrmacht troops to the bridge, erected barricades, mounted heavy machine guns, and put a tough army sergeant major in command.
Truckloads of SS troops arrived at the bridge and halted. Their commanding officer was told that no traffic would be admitted because the city was under a military emergency. The commander protested and ordered that the barricade be removed, but the sergeant major stood firm. He informed the SS officer that he would order his troops to fire on anyone attempting to break through the roadblock, so the SS left.
Major Liedtke ordered Battel to lead Wehrmacht troops into the Jewish ghetto, load the Jewish workers and their families onto trucks, and bring them to the Wehrmacht garrison for protection. Battel succeeded in moving more than one hundred families before new orders arrived from headquarters. General von Gienanth had argued with the high command that the Jews were needed for war labor, but Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler overruled him.
Himmler’s response was ominous. “‘I have ordered that ruthless steps be taken against all those who think that they can use the interest of war industry to cloak their real intentions to protect the Jews.’”
SS troops arrived at the Przemysl Ghetto the next day and deported more than fourteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children to death camps. Eventually the Jews at the Wehrmacht garrison were shipped to death camps as well.
The Nazis forced General von Gienanth to retire. They discharged Oberleutnant Albert Battel from the Wehrmacht and drafted him into the German homeguard, the Volkssturm. They sent Major Liedtke to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. He was captured by the Soviets in 1944, declared a war criminal, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in a Soviet labor camp. The stand taken by these officers is the only known time that German regular army troops stood up to SS troops to protect the Jews.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Early on the morning of April 9, 1940, Germany attacked Denmark. The invasion was executed so swiftly that the Danish military surrendered after only four hours. Many Danish citizens were furious that their government gave up without a fight. Because Hitler wanted to make a good impression on the many foreign correspondents in Denmark at the time, and he wanted the country to be “a model of Nazi occupation rule,” he allowed the people more freedom than in other occupied countries. The elected government continued functioning, but under Nazi supervision, and the Nazis didn’t persecute the Jews.
The boat of Gilbert Lassen, a fisherman from Gilleleje, Denmark, used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. Courtesy of Yadvashem.
The Danish Resistance slowly strengthened over the next three years, and in 1943, after the Allies had put the Germans on the defensive on several fronts, the Danish Resistance stepped up their activities and sabotaged the German war industry in Denmark. The German occupation troops were already concerned about an Allied invasion through Denmark, so Hitler placed the country under a dictatorship. He also ordered occupation commanders to arrest the 7,800 Danish Jews and send them to concentration camps.
Georg F. Duckwitz, a German diplomat serving in Denmark, privately warned the Danish government of Hitler’s orders. Duckwitz went to Germany and tried to get the orders reversed. When he didn’t succeed, he traveled to Sweden and asked the Swedish government if they would grant asylum to the 7,800 Danish Jews. Sweden agreed and Duckwitz returned to Denmark. Hitler was shocked when the Danish government leaders and citizens rose up together and refused to hand over their Jews.
The Danish government encouraged its citizens to hide the Jews from the Nazis. The Danish Resistance led the efforts and recruited captains and crews to take the Jews on boats across the waterways to nearby Sweden. Thousands of refugees made their way to the departure points. They rode on trains, in hospital ambulances, by automobile in a fake funeral procession, and in caravans with Danish police officers “looking the other way.” Even the universities shut down so students would be available to help in the rescue operations.
The leader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark sent a letter to all the Lutheran Churches in the country and urged its church members to fight for the freedom of their Jewish brothers and sisters. The bishop challenged them with the New Testament scripture that states they should “obey God more than man.” On October 3, 1943, in the tiny fishing village of Gilleleje, about thirty-five miles north of Copenhagen (Denmark’s capital), Reverend Kjeldgaard Jensen read the letter to his congregation. He then led them in assisting the Jewish refugees arriving by the hundreds in their seaside village.
Jensen’s church members helped purchase fuel for the local fishermen to carry the refugees ten miles across the Oresund Strait to Sweden. They fed the Jews and hid those awaiting transportation. The fishing boats traveled late at night and at times were hindered by bad weather or German patrol boats. Some ships were swamped and sank, drowning their refugees. The church members worked with the Resistance, some of whom were arrested, imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, and shot to death for assisting the Jews.
Jewish refugees from Denmark upon arrival in Sweden. Courtesy of USHMM
Two days after Pastor Jensen read the aforementioned letter to his congregation, a train arrived from Copenhagen with hundreds of additional Jewish refugees. This brought the total number of Jews awaiting escape in their village to five hundred, and they were in imminent danger if the Gestapo arrived. Because of a storm that same night, a large schooner sheltered in the Gilleleje harbor, and the villagers raised fifty thousand Danish kroner to lease the schooner. Eager to leave, the refugees rushed to the dock, but during the slow boarding process, a fisherman yelled at those out of line, and the people up front thought the Gestapo had arrived. The schooner captain panicked and cast off with only half his passengers aboard.
The villagers immediately loaded all the refugees they could on local fishing boats and took them to Sweden, but they were forced to leave more than one hundred behind. These refugees sheltered in the church, but an informer alerted the Nazis, resulting in a late-night raid. The Gestapo and German soldiers surrounded the church and threatened to burn it down unless the Jews surrendered. The doors were opened, and the Nazis sent all of the men, women, and children to a concentration camp except for one young boy who hid in the belfry.
The Gestapo threatened Jensen and his church members but didn’t arrest them that night. Pastor Jensen collapsed after the raid. However, the villagers leased another large schooner available nearby and safely ferried the remaining Jews sheltering outside Gilleleje to Sweden. Over a three-week period, rescues took place up and down the coast of Denmark, and about 95% of Denmark’s Jews escaped safely. No other Nazi-occupied nation matched this percentage of Jewish survivors.
Danish-Jewish children living in a Swedish children’s home after their escape from Denmark. Courtesy of USHMM.
Resource: Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
At the start of WWII, the Germans began housing prisoners of war at Colditz Castle in the province of Saxony. The castle and town, located between Dresden and Leipzig in the heart of Germany, was about four hundred miles from the closest territory not controlled by the Nazis. The castle had survived for 1000 years and stood as a symbol of German strength. The fortress, with seven-foot thick outer walls, resides on a sheer cliff which drops two hundred and fifty feet to a river below.
Modern-Day Colditz Castle (Deposit Photos)
Allied prisoners-of-war who made multiple escape attempts at other camps were sent to Colditz, because, of course, it was considered escape proof. Putting so many escapees together in one place made for interesting entertainment. The POW’s constantly concocted new escape plans and worked together to ensure their success. It’s believed that thirty-two prisoners escaped and fifteen made it to Allied territory without being captured. Today we’ll look at the first British soldier to escape Colditz and return to Britain successfully (made a homerun).
Airey Neave – between May 1940 and May 1941 (Courtesy of National Archives – Britain)
Airy Neave studied law and completed his education at Oxford University in 1938. He was mobilized when the war broke out and then sent to France in February 1940. He didn’t make it to Dunkirk but was part of the group which kept the Germans occupied in Calais to the south. On May 23rd, Neave was wounded and captured. He landed at the Oflag IX-A/H POW camp near Spangenberg in central Germany and was later sent to Stalag XX-A, near Thorn in western Poland.
Neave and a fellow POW escaped but were caught trying to enter Soviet-controlled eastern Poland. After a brief experience with the Gestapo, they were both sent to Colditz. In August that same year (1941), Neave made his first escape attempt from that POW camp. He dressed up in a German uniform and attempted to leave the castle just as any German officer would. The problem was that the scenery paint used to paint the former Polish army tunic and cap green changed to bright green under the searchlights.
Airey Neave’s German POW Card Obtained by the Allies at the Colditz Surrender (Courtesy of National Archives – Britain)
Here’s a translation of part of Airey Neave’s German record card shown above, describing his escape attempts thus far:
“Stalag XXA: on 16 April 1941, N disappeared on route to the dentist from Fort 15 and on 26 April 1941, he was recaptured by the Gestapo at Plock.”
His punishment – ten days confined arrest
“Oflag IVC on 29 August 1941, N tried to escape from the camp after evening roll call, using a fake German uniform, but was stopped at the gate post and seized.”
His punishment – three weeks close confinement
Colditz. Photo taken in 1945 by U.S. troops (Courtesy of Department of Defense)
Neave was better prepared for his next escape attempt. He and Dutch officer Anthony Luteyn left together, dressed in better German uniforms and with a better plan. A total of four officers, two British and two Dutch, escaping in pairs, dropped through a specially cut hole in the British theater floor into an unoccupied room. They took a corridor “that led over the main gate of the prisoners’ yard and into an attic over the German guardroom.” From there they walked under the archway into the German courtyard and through the main gate. Instead of continuing to the final gate beyond the moat where they could be caught, they turned east and climbed “over the unguarded wall along the park road” under the cover of darkness.
The two pair of escapees parted ways. The other pair was caught eventually. Dressed as civilians and claiming to be Dutchmen working for the Arbeitseinsatz Luteyn and Neave travelled by train and on foot to the Swiss border. They chose to cross at Singen and were successful. Another Dutch POW at Colditz had attempted to cross in the same area in 1940 and had been caught. A Gestapo, who thought Germany had almost won the war, told the Dutch soldier what he’d done wrong and what he should have done instead to make a successful crossing. This information helped many other escapees get across as well.
After arriving in Switzerland, Airey Neave’s ordeal wasn’t over. To get back to England, he had to make it across southern France and cross the Pyrenees into Spain. From there he went to Gibraltar, which was a British colony and arrived home in April of 1942. In May he was awarded the Military Cross. He was recruited to serve as an intelligence officer in MI9, the top secret British agency delegated with the task of supporting the escape networks for Allied military personnel in Europe.
He wrote several books about his experiences:
After the war, Neave served at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and met individually with some of the top German war criminals. He went on to serve in the British House of Commons and later as Margaret Thatcher’s campaign manager. He was instrumental in her rise to lead the Conservative Party in Britain. He was also appointed Shadow Secretary of State for northern Ireland. On March 30, 1979, the Irish National Liberation Army assassinated Neave with a car bomb.
This is Margaret Thatcher’s tribute to Airey Neave when she spoke to the press right after his murder: “He was one of freedom’s warriors. No one knew of the great man he was, except those nearest to him. He was staunch, brave, true, strong; but he was very gentle and kind and loyal. It’s a rare combination of qualities. There’s no one else who can quite fill them. I, and so many other people, owe so much to him and now we must carry on for the things he fought for and not let the people who got him triumph.”
Přemysl Pitter served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI. After returning home to Prague, he became a Christian and helped establish a children’s home in the city’s poorest neighborhood. The local children, many of them Jewish, stopped by Milíč House after school “where they would be fed and could safely play, read, listen to music, learn crafts, or participate in gymnastics.”
After German troops occupied the western half of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, Nazi laws prevented Jewish children from attending public school, and Milič House became a place for them to study. Later it became a place to hide. Parents took their children to Milíč House to protect them from deportation. After other parents were arrested, Pitter rescued their children.
As conditions worsened for the Jews of Czechoslovakia, Pitter took food to Jewish families in Prague, the capital. He sent children to safe houses in the country about fifty miles away. One day Gestapo agents picked up Pitter and took him to their headquarters. The Gestapo chief questioned why he would risk his life to help Jews. Pitter’s response was simple. “‘From a human point of view, I’m sure you can understand why I’m helping these children.’”
The Gestapo released Pitter, and he and the staff who’d prayed together for his safe return, rejoiced at their answer to prayer. He continued to assist Jews by raising money and warning those who were about to be deported to hide.
Pitter hid Jewish children for over six years. The exact number of children he saved from the Holocaust is unknown, but his job didn’t end with the fall of the Third Reich. After the war, the newly formed Czech government requested that Pitter find and take care of Jewish orphans from Czechoslovakia. He located hundreds of orphaned children from several European countries and housed them in sprawling, abandoned chateaus around Prague.
Many of Pitter’s orphans were concentration camp survivors, including hundreds rescued from Theresienstadt in May of 1945. These children were traumatized and physically weak and ill. Under the care of Pitter and his assistants, the orphans healed in spirit, mind, and body and began to trust people again.
Pitter’s goodwill extended to the children of incarcerated Germans living in deplorable conditions in Czechoslovakia after the war. Pitter petitioned the government not to behave as badly as the Nazis had but to treat the Germans better. In the end, Pitter rescued German children too. He brought them to live with the Jewish children who put aside their fear and hatred and showed compassion toward their former tormentors.
Eventually, Pitter placed many of the Jewish children in adoptive and foster homes and organized the departure of others for Israel. Seven hundred children were sent to Great Britain at the request of Jews there.
After the Soviets imposed a communist government on Czechoslovakia, Pitter was forced to flee his native country and continued his refugee work in West Germany. He later settled in Switzerland where he wrote several books and worked for Radio Free Europe.
Pitter expressed great concern over Western culture’s postwar shift from a God-centered worldview to a man-centered worldview. He had witnessed the tragic results when the German people turned from God and relied on the government to save and provide for them. He spread the biblical message that “without Jesus Christ, man’s inherent sinful nature would inevitably draw him toward a darkened heart.” He believed that this darkness had opened the hearts of many to the swastika.
Sources:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Have you heard of film star Wayne Morris? If you answered in the negative, we had the same response. But after reading his story, I had to tell it. He is one of those little-known war heroes who played an important role in the Pacific during World War II.
Bert DeWayne Morris was born and raised in Southern California and played football for Los Angeles Junior College. While acting at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, he was discovered and recruited by Warner Brothers Studios. Beginning in 1936, Morris played supporting roles in films with actors, such as, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan, Eddie Albert, and Jane Wyman. Playing the second lead in Flight Angels, a story about pilots and stewardesses training for commercial airline service, spurred him into earning his pilot’s license.
Morris joined the Naval Reserve before Pearl Harbor and later became a primary flight-training instructor in Hutchinson, Kansas. With his acting career on hold, Morris had no intention of riding out the war in a comfortable position. He wanted to be in the thick of the action, so he asked his wife’s young uncle, David McCampbell to get him into a fighter squadron. McCampbell was the commander of the VF-15 fighter squadron.
McCampbell told Morris to write a letter with his request, but because of his six-foot, two-inch height and muscular build, Morris was transferred to a patrol-bomber unit and assigned to Catalina amphibious aircraft based in Jacksonville, FL. The cockpit of a fighter plane was built for a person of average height and weight. McCampbell and Morris ran into each other in FL, and Morris repeated his request to be a fighter pilot. McCampbell made it happen, and Morris transferred to the “Fighting Fifteen.”
Hellcat F6F which Morris flew from the USS Essex. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In addition to learning to takeoff and land from a carrier deck and shoot down bombers while tangling with enemy fighters, Hellcat pilots were expected to bomb and strafe sea and land targets. All of these lessons were taught in a short time frame and were dangerous. During training, Air Group 15 lost a dozen pilots and crewman. The group deployed to the Essex in 1944.
With three other Navy pilots, Wayne Morris (second from Left) poses for a picture aboard their carrier after a strike against Formosa in 1944. Courtesy of WWII in Color.
Lieutenant Morris shot down his first Zero (Japanese fighter) in the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” off Guam on June 20.
On September 9, Morris and two other pilots took down a Japanese patrol plane over Mindanao.
The next day he led a group of fighters who attacked two airfields and destroyed camouflaged fuel dumps hidden in the woods.
On September 13, Morris shot down another Zero.
A few days later he and another pilot hit a docked Japanese submarine with rockets.
On October 10, Morris led another group of fighters over Okinawa and sank an eight-thousand-ton freighter.
He took out a Tony (Japanese fighter) during the same battle.
On October 24, he shot down two Zeros that were escorting Japanese bombers attacking the American fleet.
Wayne Morris in his Hellcat aboard the Essex. Courtesy of Military Wiki.org.
Lieutenant Commander Morris participated in fifty-seven missions during his six-month combat tour on board the Essex. In total he was credited with downing seven enemy aircraft (five downs were needed to become an ace) and for sinking an escort vessel and a flak gunboat and helping to damage a heavy cruiser and a mine layer as well as the wins listed above. Morris was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals.
What was Wayne Morris most afraid of? “Every time they showed a picture aboard the Essex, I was scared to death it would be one of mine.”
The actor turned soldier was one of twenty-six aces in VF-15. Together these aces shot down 310 enemy planes in combat and sunk or damaged half a million tons of Japanese shipping. Can you pick Morris out in this photo?
The Aces of VF-15 with their victorious scorecard at the end of their six-month tour of duty. Photo dated 12/1/1944. Courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command.
Morris played in over two dozen films before the war and another three dozen after, including a supporting role in Gary Cooper’s 1949 aircraft-carrier film, Task Force. He went on to star in westerns, a 1957 WWI film, Paths of Glory, and played for television series.
In 1959, Morris visited his former commander and uncle-in-law Captain David McCampbell aboard the USS Bon Homme off the coast of Monterey, California. While watching air operations from the bridge of the carrier, Morris collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was forty-five years old. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Sources: Strange and Ocscure Stories of World War II by Don Aines. Skyhorse Publishing, 2020. The Pasadena Independent newspaper, September 15, 1959.
The V-2 rocket was a much more sophisticated bomb than the V-1 and was enormously expensive to build. The Germans launched the first V-2 to hit London on September 8, 1944, three months after D-Day, in a last-ditch effort to turn the war around in their favor. They fired more than thirteen hundred V-2’s at England and hundreds more at Belgium and France as the allies advanced toward Germany.
The V-2 was forty-six feet high, as tall as a 4-story building. Launched from a mobile unit and propelled by a powerful rocket engine which burned a mix of alcohol-water and liquid oxygen, the bomb blasted more than fifty miles above the earth— to the edge of space—and returned to earth at supersonic speed, hitting its target five minutes later. Each one carried a ton of explosives and was equipped with an automatic guidance system—an on-board analogue computer with a pre-programmed destination.
Unlike the buzzing noise of the V-1 engine which alerted those on the ground to its impending arrival, the V-2 crashed and exploded without warning. No one heard it coming—only the bang after it had landed and exploded. The V-weapons caused immense suffering in Britain—30,000 casualties and hundreds of thousands homeless. Despite these statistics, the V-weapons caused less destruction than the bombing during the Blitz (1940-1941).
The V-2’s were manufactured at Mittelwerk, a huge underground factory. Slave laborers who possessed the needed skills were brought from concentration camps to perform the work. Conditions were so bad that an estimated 20,000 died from starvation, a lack of sleep and proper sanitation, and torture as well as frequent executions.
Wernher von Braun Public Domain
The V-2 bombings came to an end when Allied troops overran the last launch sites in March of 1945. According to the BBC, the V-2 was “the world’s first space rocket” and was responsible for launching the space age. Wernher von Braun, the engineer who helped design and develop the V-2, surrendered to the Americans and later “developed the rockets that launched the United States’ first space satellite Explorer 1” and became “the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon” (Wikipedia).
In an effort to terrorize and demoralize British civilians, the Germans unleashed a new weapon on England just one week after Allied troops landed in France on D-Day in 1944. The V-1 flying bombs were launched from ramps on the northern coast of France until the Allies overran the launching sites. The last one left France on September 7, 1944. Later the Germans launched the V-1’s from other locations, including from special mounts attached to bombers, although this proved dangerous to the German airmen.
A German Crew Rolls out a V-1 Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1973-029A-24A / Lysiak / CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Each V-1 was twenty-five feet long with a wingspan of about twenty feet. The bombs, resembling small airplanes, traveled at a speed of 400 miles per hour and crossed the English Channel in five minutes. They had a range of 150+ miles and were capable of reaching London from northern France. The Germans launched 25,000 V-1’s at targets in England and later Belgium, but only about 2,400 hit the capital city and its environs. Because the bombs flew straight and level, gun batteries posted along the southern and eastern coasts of Britain, Allied fighter planes, and barrage balloons successfully stopped thousands of V-1’s from reaching their targets.
Barrage balloons on the south-eastern approaches to London to combat V-1 flying bombs, 1944. Courtesy of Bellamy W (Flying Officer) Royal Air Force Official Photographer via IWM
A Bofors gun battery fully manned, situated on the South Coast of England. Courtesy of O’Brien (Lt.) War Office Official Photographer via IWM
Powered by a jet engine, the V-1 could be heard ten miles away, and it was nicknamed “doodlebug” and “buzz bomb” because of its noise. An air-driven gyroscope and a magnetic compass controlled the bomb’s course, and a barometric altimeter controlled its altitude. Once the V-1 reached its programmed target, a device mounted in the rear caused it to pitch nose-down and the engine quit. Once the buzzing engine died, those on the ground knew they had twelve seconds to seek shelter. The warhead exploded on impact.
Back in Germany, the Nazis called the V-1 a wonder weapon (Wunderwaffe) and tried to convince the German people that it along with other weapons could turn the war in their favor. Although Hitler was advised to launch the V-1 at southern England where the Allies were gathering ships and equipment to invade France, he was intent on targeting London.
In an effort to fool the Germans, the British publicized inaccurate information and recruited double agents to send back false reports on where the V-1’s had landed. The Germans believed the reports and adjusted the flight patterns, causing the bombs to fall short of their targets.
Searching for belongings in the rubble of a home Ministry of Information Photo Division via IWMCivil defense rescue workers dig survivors out of collapsed buildings. Ministry of Information Photo Division via IWM
In all, fifty-five hundred people were killed, sixteen thousand were injured, and more than a million were forced to evacuate due to the V-1 flying bombs.
Have you known anyone who was personally impacted by the V-1 bomb?
There are many WWII museums and memorials to be found throughout the USA. I’ve included many of the major ones in this blog post. Be sure to check out the links to obtain detailed information.
“Ranked by TripAdvisor as the #1 Attraction in New Orleans, named by USA Today as a top-ranking Best Place to Learn US Military History, and designated by Congress as America’s official museum about World War II, The National WWII Museum features a rich collection of artifacts that bring history to life” (The National WWII Museum Website).
“Discover the human story of World War II in the Pacific in more than 55,000 square feet of exhibit space spread over three galleries located on six acres in the heart of Fredericksburg, Texas. The National Museum of the Pacific War is the only museum in the continental U.S. solely dedicated to telling the story of WWII in the Pacific” (National Museum of the Pacific War Website).
The museum documents the Holocaust, “the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators” (USHMM website). Photos, artifacts, and testimonials give evidence to Holocaust events.
WWII artifacts, including over 15 tanks, are displayed as a part of the museum’s exhibitions. “At the American Heritage Museum you explore America’s conflicts, beginning with the Revolutionary War to today. You’ll discover, and interact with, our heritage through the History, the national effort developing new technologies of warfare, and the Human Impact of America’s fight to preserve the freedom we all hold dear” (American Heritage Museum Website).
Exhibits display aircraft flown by the Eighth Air Force, including a B-17 in the process of being restored. The mission of this museum is “to preserve for all Americans the stories of courage, character and patriotism displayed by the men and women of the Eighth Air Force from World War II to the present” (National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Sir Force Website).
“The Florida World War II Heritage Trail, a 72-page guidebook, includes color and archival photographs of Florida sites related to World War II, and biographical sketches of many men and women who played a significant role during the war. Produced by the Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources in association with the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs World War II Memorial Project, Florida World War II Heritage Trail features more than 150 Florida World War II-related sites and military assets in 74 Florida cities from Pensacola to Key West” (Florida Division of Historical Resources Website).
Have you visited any of these museums shared today? Have you enjoyed visiting other WWII museums which are not included in today’s blog?
World War II is full of many miraculous acts of bravery and survival, but the encounter of Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown over the skies of Germany in 1943 is one of the most profound. This is their story.
Restored B-17 Bomber – Creative Commons via Wikipedia – Author Airwolfhound
The German Pilot:
Franz Stigler was born and raised in Bavaria, southern Germany. His father, a former WWI pilot, instilled a love of flying in his sons. At the age of twelve, Franz soloed in a home-built glider. Because he didn’t weigh enough, the plane crashed, and Franz sustained minor injuries. Several months later, with a sandbag tied around his waist, he successfully launched and landed the rebuilt glider. By the time Franz was seventeen, he knew he wanted to fly every day for the rest of his life. The German government provided his training, and Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline, hired him when he was only eighteen years old.
In 1937, two years before WWII started, Franz received orders from the new German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, to train pilots how to fly long distances using instruments. One day Franz’s older brother surprised him by showing up for flight training. Franz did everything in his power to prepare his new student for war because it was obvious that Germany was preparing for one. Franz’s family was anti-Nazi, but German young men weren’t given the option to avoid the military, not unless they wanted to end up in a concentration camp.
Franz Stigler – Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot
In 1940, after Germany had occupied most of Europe, and the Luftwaffe was bombing English cities at night, Franz’s brother’s plane crashed at takeoff in France. Upon learning of his brother’s death, “Franz’s grief chilled into hate.” He had believed Hitler’s lies that Germany had invaded Poland in self-defense, and now Franz blamed the British for enlarging the conflict into a world war. Franz resigned as an instructor and volunteered to be a fighter pilot.
In 1942, Franz was sent to North Africa to backup General Erwin Rommel and the German Wehrmacht as they fought to capture the Suez Canal from the British. Franz flew a Messerschmitt Bf109 against the P-40s of the British Desert Air Force. The British pilots outnumbered the German’s five to one. Franz’s commanding officers taught him to fight with honor – not to shoot a defenseless enemy in his parachute, not to count “kills” but count victories, to shoot at a machine and not a man. A highly decorated young ace fighter pilot told Franz that once a person enjoyed killing, he would be a lost man.
Franz Stigler in North Africa
Franz’s squadron followed Rommel east into Egypt “far from their ports and supply lines while pushing the British closer to theirs.” The German pilots and their fighters were worn to the bone. The pilots slept in 6-foot holes they’d dug in the desert for protection from British air attacks. After being hit by ground fire while escorting German bombers, Franz was forced to belly land in the desert. A Bedouin rescued and escorted him back to base on a camel. In September of 1942 Franz was ordered home on leave. While in Germany, several ace pilots of his acquaintance were killed in Africa. The British launched a counter attack at El Alamein, Egypt, that Rommel couldn’t stop, and the Americans landed to the west in Casablanca. The Germans were trapped between them.
Messerschmitt Bf 109G-10 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Franz’s unit withdrew from Africa, and in March 1943, they deployed to Trapani Airfield, Sicily, where he encountered the Four Motors, which the Americans called the “B-17 Flying Fortress.” The German mission – defend the island and the supply convoys to Africa; the Allies’ mission – cut off the supply line. In May of 1943, 275,000 troops of the Afrika Korp surrendered to the Allies. Only an Italian garrison stood in the way of an Allied invasion of Sicily. After the Italians sent a distress message for fighter support to pick up their downed pilots, Franz volunteered to go, even though he’d already flown a combat mission that day.
Forty-five minutes later Franz coaxed his severely damaged ME 109 toward the coast of Sicily. Three miles from shore, the fighter’s engine gave out, and Franz decided to ditch rather than bail out. He steered the 109 as if it were a glider landing on the ocean surface. The plane bounced on the waves and then dove under the sea. Franz forgot to jettison the canopy before hitting the water, and as the fighter sank into the sea, the water pressure kept the canopy from releasing. Franz opened a side window pane, allowing water to pour in and equalize the pressure so he was able to flip the canopy open. His life preserver pulled him to the surface where he inflated his life raft. He drifted to shore and convinced an old fisherman to take him back to his base. Two weeks later Franz was shot down by Spitfires, and he bailed out behind friendly lines. This was the fourth fighter he lost in the war.
After the Allied invasion of Sicily, Franz’s squadron was sent home to defend Germany. By mid-August 1943, they had settled into a routine. Every other day they battled the Four Motors (B-17’s) from England “to stop the bombs from dropping and killing the German people.”
The American Pilot:
During the summer of 1943, twenty-year-old pilot Charlie Brown and his co-pilot Spencer “Pinky” Luke flew their final mission of B-17 training school. They were required to stay in the air for seven hours but were allowed to plan their own route. Charlie aimed for his hometown of Weston, West Virginia. After circling the area, Charlie and Pinky buzzed the town, sending fishermen running from a bridge, the river water over its banks, and forcing dust to billow in the streets. His father, knowing only one young man from Weston piloted B-17’s, watched the disturbance from the sidewalk.
Later, Charlie and Pinky headed for Texas where they picked up the other eight members of their crew and trained together. They dropped practice bombs and shot at wooden targets on the base’s thirteen-thousand acre range. In late October, the crew left for England where they joined the 379th Bomb Group of the United States 8th Air Force. Charlie flew his first mission over Germany as co-pilot to a veteran pilot so he could acclimate to combat before heading out with his own crew. German fighters beat up the bombers behind Charlie’s formation, but after bombing the submarine pens in the German port city of Bremen, Charlie’s plane made it back to England without a scratch.
One week later, on December 20, 1943, Charlie piloted his own crew on a return bombing run to Bremen, but this mission would end differently. Return on October 1st to learn about the extraordinary outcome of that fateful day over the skies of Germany.
Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 91st Bomb Group, 8th AF, enroute to Bremen, Germany, fly high above heavy cloud banks at 27,000 feet altitude. 20 Dec. 1943. Courtesy of American Air Museum in Britain.
On the morning of December 20, 1943, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Charlie Brown piloted his B-17 crew into combat for the first time. “Ye Olde Pub” flew in a twenty-one-plane battle formation and led most of the 8th Air Force’s bomb groups to Germany (475 B-17s and B24s). They were told to expect five hundred or more bandits (German fighters) to intercept them.
The Crew of “Ye Olde Pub.” Kneeling, L to R: Charlie, Pinky, Doc, and Andy. Standing, L to R: Frenchy, Russian, Pechout, Jennings, Ecky, and Blackie. Courtesy of the American Air Museum in Britain.
The bomber group flew twenty-seven thousand feet above the icy sea. Three and a half hours into their flight, the bandits attacked and flak from the ground soon followed. After four separate explosions just ahead of The Pub, Andy, the navigator, and Doc, the bombardier, reported a big hole in the Plexiglas nose of their plane. One of the engines on the left began to smoke and pinky, the co-pilot, shut it down. A shell passed through one of the wings, leaving a large hole. The Pub reached the target area and released twelve five-hundred-pound bombs on the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant five miles below and turned north to escape Germany as quickly as possible.
The bomber group didn’t know it yet, but their fighter cover had already departed for England because they feared running out of fuel. One of The Pub’s right engines began to run wild, and Pinky cut power and restarted the engine. The bomber fell back as the rest of the 8th Air Force passed overhead and left The Pub behind.
Five German 109s leaped from below, and eight German 190s trailed ahead, blocking the path to the North Sea. Two enemy fighters dove straight for the cockpit of The Pub, so Charlie, the pilot, climbed directly up and into their path. Frenchy opened up and hammered one of the 190s before it could break away, putting it out of the fight. The other fighter scored hits on The Pub, but Doc fired at its belly and scored another win.
The controls for The Pub’s third engine was shot out, and the engine froze at half power. Five 109s headed for the tail of The Pub, but Ecky’s guns in the tail jammed. Then Blackie’s guns in the ball turret froze. “Charlie threw the bomber into a bank,” and bullets from the 109s “ricocheted off the bomber’s frozen belly and clanged against Blackie’s turret, cracking its glass but not penetrating.” More guns froze, welded shut by ice. Only three of the bomber’s eleven guns were now operational. Charlie twisted and weaved while the 109s continued to attack, but the pilot’s maneuvers threw them off.
A 20mm cannon shell tore into The Pub and “blasted the bomber’s skin outward,” almost severing the right waist gunner’s leg. Other shells struck the tail, destroying the tail gun position and killing Ecky. Pechout, the radio operator, frantically calld for help, but several 20mm shells blew the radio into pieces but spared the operator. Meanwhile, Charlie banked the bomber into a near vertical turn of eighty degrees and aimed at any fighters he saw coming in. He flew in circles. Bullets tore through the cockpit’s ceiling, and one embedded itself against Charlie’s left shoulder blade. Bullets punctured the oxygen tanks behind the pilots’ seats, slowing the flow of oxygen into their masks.
The enemy shot off The Pub’s horizontal stabilizer and shortened the sixteen-foot rear wing to three feet. Charlie, needing a new evasion tactic, tilted the bomber until its left wing pointed to the sky, but without the stabilizer, the plane “flipped and entered a slow, upside-down, flat spin.” Oxygen stopped flowing to the pilots, and the last thing Charlie remembered was viewing the German farm fields five miles below as he and the co-pilot hung upside down in the cockpit. Then he passed out.
B-17 Bomber
When The Pub reached 10,000 feet, “its spiral broke into a nose dive.” The oxygen-rich air at this low altitude brought Charlie back to consciousness. He gripped the controls and hauled back. He toggled the bomber’s flaps, but
The Pub continued her dive. At 3000 feet, “her wings began to flutter,” something a B-17 in this kind of condition shouldn’t have been able to do. “Charlie dug his heels into the rudder pedals and pulled back on the yoke with his whole body.” “The wings began flying again,” but the bomber was now below two thousand feet and still dropping. Just in time, “her nose lifted to the horizon and she leveled out” over the suburbs of Oldenburg. Pinky, the co-pilot, regained consciousness, spotted the treetops below them, and asked if they were in England.
Charlie had Doc, the navigator, “figure out where they were and establish a course for home.” He sent others to assess the damage to the bomber and check on the status of the crew. Doc mapped out a plan to head thirty-five miles north to the sea, but his map showed flak batteries all along the coastline, known as “the Atlantic Wall.”
The German Pilot:
Meanwhile, German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, had landed at an airfield to refuel and continue the fight. If he could nail a bomber, he would have enough points to receive the Knight’s Cross, a badge of honor, indicating “that he had done something good for his people.” While waiting at the airfield, the low drone of an approaching bomber caught his attention. A B-17 skirted the airfield, flying low and slow before disappearing behind the trees. Franz took off without waiting for clearance from the tower. He had a bomber to catch and a Knight’s Cross to earn.
Stigler approached the wounded B-17 but noted the missing stabilizer and the dead tail gunner leaning over his machine gun. Through the torn fuselage, he saw the airmen tending their wounded crew members. He thought of his commander’s words that if Stigler ever shot an airman floating down in his parachute, the commander would shoot Stigler himself. He remembered his dead brother and the grief these enemies’ families would face.
Kimbolton at Sunset – Airfield Where Charlie Brown & His B-17 Crew Were Stationed in England Courtesy of American Air Museum in Britain.
Franz’s superiors had taught him “to fight with fearlessness and restraint, to celebrate victories not death, and to know when it was time to answer a higher call.” Realizing the bomber held no threat to him, Stigler pulled up close to the co-pilot’s window and stared at Brown.
Charles “Charlie” Brown had sent his co-pilot, Pinky, to give the crewmen permission to bail out. They would be taken as POW’s, but they would live. He planned to attempt a return flight back to England with Russian who was unconscious. Charlie viewed the approaching coastline where Germany met the North Sea and knew the soldiers manning the coastal defenses would shoot them down. He looked out the co-pilot’s window to check on engine four and spied Stigler’s 109, flying three feet from The Pub‘s right wingtip, as if it owned the B-17. Charlie’s heart stopped for a moment. Franz nodded at Charlie, but Charlie thought he’d imagined it.
Pinky returned to the cockpit, announcing that none of the men wanted to jump. They planned to stay together and help fly The Pub home. Pinky turned to see what Charlie was staring at and claimed they were living in a nightmare. Charlie and Pinky expected Franz to destroy them. Franz noted the shock and fear on the pilots’ faces and pointed to the ground. Charlie and Pinky shook their heads. This angered Franz, but he felt that leaving the B-17 to face the coming flak alone would be the same as shooting it down. He moved his 109 a few feet away so the guys at the coastal defenses would recognize his silhouette and hold their fire.
John D. Shaw’s painting of Ye Olde Pub Being Escorted Out to Sea by Franz Stigler’s ME-109. Valor Studios. Used by Permission.
As Stigler and Brown approached, the battery commander recognized the Messerschmitt 109 and shouted for his men to hold their fire. The Germans used captured B-17’s for training, so it wasn’t out of the question for the two planes to be flying together. “Side by side the 109 and the B-17 soared over the soldiers defending the Atlantic Wall then over the beach obstacles and the crashing surf. The sight was a beautiful one, the little fighter protecting the big bomber.”
Charlie still thought the German pilot was a threat and that he’d escorted them out to sea to finish them off. Franz, however, waved at the pilots and pointed to the east, mouthing, “Sweden,” which was only thirty minutes away. Neither American pilot could figure out what Franz was trying to tell them. Given the damage to the B-17, Franz was certain they would not make it home alive. Charlie sent the turret gunner to swing his gun toward the 109, hoping to chase the German away. When Franz spotted the movement in the turret, he wasn’t surprised. He saluted Charlie, who responded with surprise, and then Franz flew over the B-17 and dove away.
With a hole in her nose, her skin frayed, and only two and a half engines operating, The Pub headed toward Kimbolton Airfield, three hundred miles away. She was steadily losing altitude when engine four began acting up again. Pinky initiated shut-down procedures and successfully restarted the engine, but the bomber’s altitude dropped further during the process. Charlie ordered his men to dump everything that wasn’t nailed down. The Pub dropped below 1000 feet of altitude and was only halfway home. Charlie told his men that all they could do was pray.
Three-fourths of the way home, The Pub dropped below five hundred feet. Charlie prayed and touched the Bible in his pocket. Shortly after, two fighters zoomed past his window, and the crewmen were afraid the enemy had come to finish them off. The fighters turned and passed in front of the bomber, revealing the emblem of the U.S. Army Air Corp. Then they returned to the B-17, and one parked beside the pilot’s window, just as Franz Stigler had done. The fighter pilot pointed to his headset, but Charlie shook his head. Then the fellow pointed down, and Charlie spotted a bit of land between the clouds. Soon the clouds parted, revealing an ever widening band of land. The Pub had reached England.
Charlie searched for a suitable field to land his bird, but they were dotted with stone fences. The Pub dropped below two hundred feet, and Charlie told his men to prepare for a crash landing. Up ahead, the two fighters were circling at one thousand feet, so Charlie turned the bomber in their direction. A military airfield appeared below them. He made the approach to land and attempted to lower the landing gear. Unfortunately, the hydraulics weren’t functioning. Frenchy, the flight engineer, went down and lowered the wheels by hand, but the flaps were frozen. Alerted by the fighter pilots above, emergency vehicles pulled up along the runway. Soldiers crowded around the tower and watched the wounded bomber come in.
Frenchy fired red flares from a ceiling window of the bomber, notifying the base that wounded airmen were aboard. Charlie kept The Pub’s nose up and brought her front wheels down. Once the tail wheels settled on the runway, Charlie and Pinky jammed on the brakes, and the undefeated bomber slowed and came to a stop. The pilots shut the plane down. “The crew and The Pub had completed their first mission together.”
Charlie and most of his original crew completed their twenty-eighth and final mission on April 11, 1944. Charlie returned stateside and became an instructor. He wondered for over forty years if the German pilot who’d spared them had survived the war. At the same time, Franz Stigler wondered for over forty years if the men of the B-17 he’d risked a court-martial for had ever made it home.
After returning to England, Charlie and most of his original crew continued bombing Germany. They completed their twenty-eighth and final mission on April 11, 1944. Charlie returned stateside and became an instructor for the remainder of the war. Later he graduated from college and joined the U.S. Air Force as an intelligence officer. He retired early in order to work for the State Department during the Vietnam War. After retiring again, Charlie and his family moved to Florida.
Franz Stigler continued to shoot down Allied planes on bombing runs over Germany. In late October 1944, a one-inch copper bullet from a B-17 pierced the windshield of Franz’s 109, hit him in the forehead and bounced off. Franz managed to make it back to base, sporting a black hole of dried blood and a nasty dent in his head. The copper bullet was secure in the palm of his hand.
Franz was sent away to recuperate but later convinced his commander to send him to jet school. Franz learned how to fly the jet-powered Me 262 and, in March of 1945, joined General Adolf Galland’s newly formed fighter unit, JV-44, dubbed “the Flying Sanatorium” or “the Squadron of Experts.” Franz and other ace pilots made their last stand from a base just outside of Munich. He surrendered to the Americans shortly before the war ended, having achieved 487 combat flights. In 1953, Franz immigrated to Vancouver, Canada.
Franz had a good life in Canada. After retiring, he flew a Me 108 in air shows, with Allied planes chasing him, which delighted the crowds. He came to the notice of the Boeing Company, and in 1985 they invited him to their 50th Anniversary party for the B-17 Flying Fortress. This led him to tell his German wife about “the one he had let get away.” Still curious whether the B-17 he’d risked a court-martial for had ever made it home, he attended the party and much to his amazement was embraced by the former American B-17 pilots and crewman he met. He asked if any of them knew of a bomber that had been escorted to safety by a German fighter, but no one did.
After debriefing on that fateful day in 1943, Charlie and his crew were ordered not to tell anyone about their escort out of Germany, and the records were classified. Charlie wondered for over forty years if the German fighter pilot who’d spared him and his crew had survived the war. Most of them had been wiped out. Now, many years later Charlie began to think about his war experiences and had nightmares that “always ended with The Pub spinning to earth in a death dive from which he could not recover.” He always woke up before he crashed.
Charlie decided he needed closure, so he joined the 379th Bomb Association and attended a reunion for pilots. He shared the story “of the German pilot who had spared him and his crew.” Nobody had heard the story until now, and Charlie’s fellow pilots encouraged him to look for the German. He searched the archives in the U.S. and England and located his crew’s after-action report but after four years was no closer to locating the pilot he sought.
Several years after WWII, the Allies allowed West Germany to re-establish its air force as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. Several of the ace fighters Franz Stigler had served with became leaders in the new organization. These were the pilots who’d served their country with dignity and hadn’t joined the Nazi Party. The Association of German Fighter Pilots published a newsletter called Jagerblatt. Charlie wrote the editor, asking that a short letter be published in the newsletter about the December 20 incident, but the editor was not interested in helping a former bomber pilot. Charlie wrote to Adolf Galland, Germany’s most famous pilot and former president of the Association. Galland ordered the editor to publish Charlie’s letter. Galland was Franz’s former commander in JV-44.
General Galland – Public Domain
A few months later, the Jagerblatt arrived in Franz Stiger’s mailbox. He was so excited when he read Charlie’s letter that he immediately wrote to him. Charlie was equally astounded when he received Franz’s letter. He obtained Franz’s phone number from directory assistance and called him. In the Jagerblatt letter, Charlie had left out information about The Pub’s exact damage and the fact that they had flown out of Germany over the North Sea. Charlie began asking Franz a series of questions. Franz shared details about The Pub’s damage that Charlie had not included in his Jaggerblatt letter, and when Franz said he thought they’d never make it across the sea after he let them go, Charlie couldn’t hold back the tears.
Charlie wrote a thank you letter to Franz, but he still didn’t know that the German was an ace or why Franz had allowed the B-17 to escape. The two met for the first time in Seattle in June of 1990. When they saw each other in the hotel lobby, they hugged and cried. The fact that they’d found each other was miraculous enough, but the fact that they were both living after forty-six years was incredible. The two spent a couple days together, sharing about their lives. Contrary to what Charlie had thought, Franz’s guns had been full of ammunition when he’d encountered Charlie’s plane. He learned that Franz had served in the “Squadron of Experts” and was one of Germany’s great aces. After that meeting, Charlie never suffered another nightmare.
Ten years prior, Franz’s former commander General Galland had visited Franz in Canada, and Franz took him hunting. They’d kept up with each other by phone ever since. After meeting with Charlie, he confessed to Galland about sparing the B-17. Galland’s response was “‘It would be you.'” The reunion soon made the headlines and hit the TV news stories. Later that year, Franz met Charlie at the 379th Bomb Group reunion in Massachusetts. Charlie introduced his old ball turret gunner, “Blackie” and his former radio operator Pechout to Franz, and they hugged and cried together. Blackie sobbed and thanked Franz for sparing his life because it had allowed “his children and grandchildren to experience life.”
Watch a short documentary about this story on You Tube here.
Source: A Higher Call by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander – Berkley Caliber, New York, 2012.
Eighty Army Airmen formed the sixteen crews known as the Doolittle Raiders who bombed the Japanese homeland in April of 1942. Many consider this operation to be a turning point in WWII because it boosted the morale of the allies and humbled the Japanese at a time when they had seemed invincible.
After bombing Japan, three of the Raiders died during crash landings and bailouts in China, eight were captured by the Japanese (three were put to death and one died of starvation), five landed in the Soviet Union and were interned until they escaped through the Middle East one year later, and the rest were assisted inland by the Chinese.
So what happened to these airmen after their infamous raid and escape from China?
Pilot Ted Lawson who was severally injured during the crash landing of the Ruptured Duck survived after Doc White of Plane 15 amputated his leg at a remote missionary hospital in China. The Chinese escorted White and Lawson and his other injured crew members to safety, often just ahead of the Japanese pursuing them. Lawson was flown to the United States where surgeons at Walter Reed rebuilt his jaw and performed additional surgery on his leg.
One year later Lawson published Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a book about the Doolittle Raid and his experiences in China. A Hollywood movie by the same name was produced and released by MGM in 1944. The black-and-white movie was a hit and won an Oscar and is still available for purchase today. Lawson died at the age of 75.
The Ruptured Duck Logo
When MGM needed a stunt pilot for the movie A Guy Named Joe, the army sent former co-pilot Col. Dean Davenport. Davenport also served as technical adviser during the filming of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. He completed his WWII service in Alaska and lived to the age of 81.
Lt.Charles McClure convalesced with Ted Lawson at Walter Reed Hospital and was hospitalized until June of 1943. He became a navigator instructor but retired with a physical disability in June of 1945. He lived to be 82.
Lt. Bob Clever recovered from his head and face injuries from the Ruptured Duck’s crash landing, but was killed on November 20, 1942, the day his flight group departed from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His “airplane spun out climbing up through the clouds.” He was 28.
Sgt. David Thatcher, only 20-years old when he served as gunner on the Ruptured Duck, was the only crew member able to walk after the crash landing. He kept his fellow crewmates alive by tending to their injuries and collecting and giving them rainwater. He was the only Doolittle enlisted man to receive the Silver Star for his gallantry and courage. Thatcher was sent to North Africa and Europe and survived 26 bombing mission. He contracted hepatitis and malaria with ended his military career. He died in 2016 at the age of 94.
Sgt. David Thatcher
Crew Members of the Hari Kari-er
The crew members of the Hari Kari-er bailed out in Japanese controlled territory eighty miles from the coast. Thanks to the help of the Chinese, they each made it safely out of China.
In early June of 1942, Pilot Ross Greening flew back to the states on the same plane with the
Ruptured Duck wounded airmen. Along with many other Raiders he was sent to North Africa later that year, and he was based in Marrakech, Morocco. By July of 1943 he had completed 125 hours of combat, and on July 17th, he took part in a five-hundred-craft run on the Naples, Italy, shipyards.
Greening’s plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, the cockpit crashed open, and pieces of the plane fell off. The fuselage ripped apart, the plane burst into flames and the men ran to the bomb bay to bail out. The plane was thrown sideways by another burst, and the men were tossed out. Greening floated into the line of fire and “yanked his cords in every direction to” get away. He landed in the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius and was knocked unconscious. He woke up with his hip out of joint, and the Nazis popped it back in place before carrying him out of the volcano piggyback. Despite his many injuries, he was forced to crawl from a truck to the inside of a jail while an Italian mob spat and threw stones at him.
After Italy surrendered on September 8, 1943, the Wehrmacht loaded the POWs from Greening’s prison on a northbound train. The Allies attacked the train and Greening “was blown out of the carriage by a direct hit, and in the chaos he took off.” He wandered in the mountains for a few days and then hid on a train until he reached Verona. An Italian family who had lived in the U.S. for many years aided him until it became too dangerous.
Greening hid in a cave near Venice with two escaped POWs from New Zealand until a German patrol searching for partisans found them by accident. He spent the rest of the war at Stalag Luft I, 125 miles north of Berlin where 9000 POW aviators were held. Greening “gave the prisoners art lessons and taught them to make their own supplies.” He became commanding officer, and “when the Red Army finally liberated the camp in 1945, the Nazi prison chief surrendered to Greening to spare himself the Soviets’ known brutality.”
Greening’s former co-pilotKen Reddy died in an airplane accident near Little Rock, Arkansas on September 3, 1942, at the age of 22. The three other Hari Kari-er crew members were assigned to the China-India-Burma Theater.
Lt. Kappeler and Sergeant Gardner were sent on a mission from India to bomb Burma and then land in Kunming, China. After they dropped their bombs, “they were immediately attacked by Japanese planes and ducked into the clouds to evade but weren’t familiar with the area’s mountainous terrain.” They tried to cross the hump (the Himalayas) at too low an altitude, and only Lt. Kappeler’s plane, out of the six, made it to China. Sgt. Gardner was killed in action on June 3, 1942 at the age of 22.
Lt. Kappeler survived to fly fifty-three combat missions out of England, France, and Belgium and died in 2010 at the age of 96. After the Doolittle Raid, Bombardier
Second Lt. Bill Birch was sent state-side and participated in War-Bond-selling drives and completed flight training in Texas. As a result of an airplane accident, he spent almost two years in a hospital and didn’t have an opportunity to fly again before the war ended.
After dropping their bombs, all the crews made it safely out of Japan but encountered numerous difficulties later.
3 Raiders died in crash landings and bailouts over China
8 Raiders were captured by the Japanese – 3 went before a firing squad and 1 starved to death
5 Raiders landed in the Soviet Union and were interned – they escaped through the Middle East one year later
64 Raiders were assisted to safety in Free China by Chinese soldiers and civilians
So what happened to the Raiders after they escaped from China?
Plane #1 – Piloted by Jimmy Doolittle
Doolittle Before WWII Public Domain
After spending the summer of 1942 traveling the U.S. on war bond drives, Jimmy Doolittle was appointed commanding general over the 12th Air Force in North Africa under General Eisenhower. In March 1943, Doolittle became commanding general of the North African Strategic Air Forces. On the one-year anniversary of the Tokyo Raid, Doolittle and the other Raiders also serving in North Africa held the first Doolittle Raider reunion.
First Doolittle Raider Reunion – North Africa – 1943
The Japanese notified the U.S. that the eight captured Raiders had been sentenced to death, but some lives had been spared. They refused give names. When the American military released this information, Jimmy Doolittle replied from North Africa that he and his Raiders were ready to go back to Japan and finish the job they had started. The Japanese responded in a radio address from Tokyo. They stated that “Doolittle, commander of the raid on Japan one year ago, failed to do anything, so we have the pleasure of offering him the title of “Did-little'” (The First Heroes).
After pushing the Germans out of Africa, Doolittle went on to command the 15th Air Force in the Mediterranean Theater and the 8th Air Force in Europe and the Pacific. He ended the war as a lieutenant general and reverted to inactive reserve status in May of 1946. He returned to Shell Oil and served as vice president and later director. In 1985, the U.S. Congress promoted Doolittle to full general on the Air Force retired list, and he became the first four-star general in Air Force Reserve history.
Doolittle was married to Josephine, “Joe,” for seventy years, and he lived to the age of 96.
Plane #1 on a Mountain in China – Courtesy of the Smithsonian
After Doolittle’s crew members bailed out over China and located each other on the ground, Doolittle and his gunner, Paul Leonard, visited their destroyed plane at its crash site on a mountainside. Doolittle sat beside his plane and wondered about the fate of the other 75 men and their aircraft. He “felt lower than a frog’s posterior.” This was his first combat mission, and he was sure it would be his last. He told Leonard he expected to be court-martialed and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth. At the very least, he “would sit out the war flying a desk.” Leonard disagreed and predicted that Doolittle would be promoted to general, be given a new plane, and receive the Medal of Honor. Leonard was correct on all three counts (The First Heroes).
Leonard was so impressed with Doolittle that he asked to fly as Doolittle’s crew chief on his next mission. Doolittle agreed, and Leonard went with him to North Africa. When Doolittle was called away from the airfield for a meeting with the ground commanders at Youks-les-Bains, Algeria, he left Leonard to look after their airplane. The Germans bombed the airfield that night, and Leonard manned the top turret machine gun until the batteries ran out. He then took refuge in a nearby bomb crater, but a bomb meant for the plane landed in the bomb crater. When Doolittle returned to the field, he only found Leonard’s left hand with his wristwatch still in place. Doolittle stated that losing Leonard was his greatest personal tragedy of the war.
Dick Cole, Doolittle’s co-pilot, served in the China-Burma-India Theater and then became a test pilot with the Douglas Aircraft Plant for the remainder of the war. He served in the military for twenty-six years, rated as a command pilot, and retired as a colonel. Cole was the last living Doolittle Raider. He died on April 9, 2019, at 103 years of age.
Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator, served stateside after the Tokyo Raid and later in Germany in the 1950’s. He earned the rank of colonel and lived to be 83.
Fred Braemer, Doolittle’s bombardier, served in the China-Burma-India Theater and then attended bombardier, radar, and observer training schools and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant. He served in Korea, retired in 1969 and died at the age of 71.
Former Plane #5 pilot Davey Jones participated in the invasion of North Africa.Leading a dozen P-38 fighters in a B-26, he landed at the airfield in Oran, Algeria, during fighting. They had to land from every direction, straddling bomb craters and avoiding wrecked airplanes. Two or three hundred planes parked there, and the men lived by their airplanes and built fires for cooking. After a few days they all moved to Algiers. From there they ran bombing raids without ground crews. They refueled with five-gallon tins and loaded their 250-pound bombs by sheer muscle.
In November of 1942, Eisenhower started the offensive against Tunis, which was defended by thirty thousand German troops. Davey Jones led a raid on the port of Bizerte, twenty miles north of Tunis. They were forced to bomb at twelve hundred feet because they didn’t have any bomb sights. Jones’ plane was hit and the left engine knocked out. He also lost the trim and engine instruments and was forced to land along the coast between two little sand mounds which took their wings off.
North Africa Campaign – Courtesy of Naval-History.net and the Late Gordon Smith
The crew set off walking and ran into a line of German skirmishers. Jones pointed at his pistol and one of the Germans pulled it out. He said, “‘For you, the war is over.'” He and another guy were taken to the command post where the blond, Aryan-type commander who spoke reasonable English gave him a deck chair, cheese, and wine and asked him not to run away that night.
Jones was sent to Sicily and on to Rome for interrogation where he was in solitary for two weeks. From there he traveled by train in a group to Stalag Luft III, 125 miles southeast of Berlin. He arrived on his birthday. The camp was run by the Luftwaffe instead of the Gestapo or SS and grew to hold around 10,000 captive Allied aviators. In camp, Davey Jones was given the moniker “Tokyo” Jones because of his Raider experience.
The POWs put each other to work “‘building things, hiding things or ‘working to escape’-type things.'” In the spring of 1943, Davey and others moved to the north camp where they built the big tunnel featured in the book and movie, The Great Escape. The dug the tunnel thirty feet down through sand, using their hands or a small trowel and shored up the tunnel with bed boards. They used a little tin with margarine for a lamp but had to keep sending it up to be relit before they realized there wasn’t enough oxygen to support it. They had “a guy word a pump to bring air into the tunnel with beg bellows, and eventually they ran electric lights.”
The Nazi’s built more prisons to accommodate the rising number of captured Allied airmen. The Americans were moved out of Stalag Luft III, so they didn’t participate in the actual escape. Being moved likely saved Jones’s life because many of those who escaped were recaptured and executed. Jones stayed in the service after the war ended and later had the opportunity to test fly the Mach-2 supersonic bomber in 1955. He lived to be 95.
After the capture of Davey Jones and Ross Greening, U.S. Army officials worried that the Germans would hand over any captured Raiders to the Japanese, so they stopped most of the Raiders from flying and sent them home. Plane #14 navigator/bombardier Herb Macia from Tombstone, Arizona, missed the recall and crewed more than seventy sorties all the way to April 1945. He amassed more WWII combat missions than any other Raider. He lived to 93.
Former Plane 2 pilot Lt.Travis Hoover was assigned to train crews for a new squadron of B-25s. Before they were combat ready, they were sent to North Africa to bomb the tank forces under Rommel. Hoover flew missions over Sicily and Italy and then volunteered to fly B-24’s, “doing runs on Romania’s Ploesti oil fields, which were the major source of fuel for the Nazis.” Instead of being sent home after flying about fifty missions, Hoover received permission from Doolittle to stay on as a fighter pilot. He survived the war and lived to the age of 86.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the American people longed to strike Japan where it would hurt – in their homeland. But four months after the United States entered World War II, the Japanese continued to conquer territory in Asia and defeat the allies at every turn.
The Japanese Empire in 1942 – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In January 1942, top commanders in the American military began planning a sneak air attack on Japan, targeting military sites and industrial facilities supporting the war effort. Dubbed “Special Aviation Project #1,” the planned bombing was kept so secret that the volunteer army pilots selected to participate didn’t know their target until after they’d sailed out of San Francisco aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier.
One hundred forty Army Air Corps volunteers from the Seventeenth Bombardment Group trained for this mission at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida. Everything about the mission was peculiar from the start. Their B-25’s had been altered en route to Florida, and the men had to quickly adjust to the changes. A navy pilot arrived to train the soldiers and select who would go on the mission. The pilots trained to taxi for no more than five hundred feet and lift off at fifty miles per hour. This had never been done in a B-25. Then the crews practiced flying at extremely low levels and pulling up to accurately drop practice bombs.
Jimmy Doolittle – Pre-WWII. Courtesy of U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia
Shortly after their training began, the airmen met their mission commander—Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Doolittle was a legend and many considered him to be America’s greatest aviator. Doolittle warned his men of the project’s danger and gave them the opportunity to drop out without repercussions. He said that “some of them would come home as heroes, and others, as angels,” but none of the men took Doolittle up on his offer to quit.
Three weeks later the airmen who’d been selected were roused from sleep, ordered to load up their gear, and immediately fly to McClellan Field near Sacramento. Those not chosen for the mission were heartbroken. Ordered to practice their “hedgehopping” on the way to California, the airmen enjoyed flying under power lines, racing dust clouds in the desert, banking through an open drawbridge, and frightening cattle in the fields. One twenty-two-year-old pilot landed on a Texas highway and went to say goodbye to his mom and dad.
At McClellan, the B-25’s were tuned-up and further modified. Unfortunately, the civilian mechanics who couldn’t be told of the operation, made unauthorized adjustments, undoing previous changes unique to the mission. There wasn’t time to undo the damage.
On April 1st, the army airmen flew their planes to Alameda Naval Air Station, outside San Francisco. The first sixteen B-25’s to arrive and not have anything wrong with them were loaded on the aircraft carrier, Hornet. This was the first joint mission coordinated by the army and navy since the Civil War, and the navy men and marines did their best to put the army men in their place.
B-25’s Aboard the USS Hornet En Route to Japan Courtesy National Museum of the U.S. Air Force via English Wikipedia
But all the rudeness and snubs evaporated two days out to sea. The Hornet’s captain announced over the loudspeakers that the mission’s target was Tokyo, the army was going to bomb Japan, and the navy would get them as close to the enemy as possible. Cheers and screams broke out, and the navy men couldn’t do enough to accommodate the army airmen for the rest of their journey aboard the Hornet. They realized the danger of the mission and wanted to honor the volunteer airmen for their bravery.
Doolittle had already briefed his men about their mission and informed them that their chances of making it back were slim. The goal was to sail within 450 miles of Japan, bomb the islands at night, and fly to unoccupied landing fields in eastern China. The airmen knew that if their B-25 bombers successfully lifted off the aircraft carrier, they could not return to the ship because the landing strip would be too short. They also knew the likely probability of running out of gas before reaching safe landing strips in China. Again, Doolittle gave his men the opportunity to stay behind, but none did.
Doolittle Raiders Aboard the USS Hornet. Courtesy of the U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
On April 10th, the Hornet’s fleet rendezvoused with the fleet of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, and they proceeded west under radio silence. The Japanese had intercepted an earlier transmission between the two fleets and knew where they were headed. The Japanese made plans to hit the American ships when they were six hundred miles from Tokyo. The weather grew bad, but the terrible squalls rendered the fleets invisible to the enemy.
On April 18th, the American ships encountered and sank a seventy-ton Japanese fishing boat, picketed about six hundred miles from Japan. The Enterprise picked up radio traffic indicating that the Japanese fleet had changed course, and the Americans knew they’d been discovered.
Sinking of the Japanese Fishing Boat Nitto Maru. Courtesy of U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
The American commanders realized the B-25’s wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach Japan and the Allied airfields in China, but the fleets couldn’t sail closer and put themselves in range of bombers flying out of Japan. And so, Admiral Halsey, the task force leader, sent a message: “LAUNCH PLANES. TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND: GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU.” The army airmen were either waiting for breakfast or just getting up when the order came over the ship’s loudspeakers for them to man their planes.
Jimmy Doolittle and the Crew of Plane #1 – Courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia
Doolittle was the first pilot to ever fly a B-25 loaded with bombs, extra fuel, and a crew of five from an aircraft carrier. The skies poured rain, and the sea churned in thirty-foot swells, but the ship’s turbulence contributed to the successful launch of all sixteen bombers. The navy flagman timed each take-off so that the planes started down the runway when the ship’s bow started down and then the planes launched as the ship’s deck came up. After the last plane was in the air, the carrier fleets immediately reversed course and safely reached Hawaii.
The Doolittle Raiders bombed Japan in the middle of the day, and despite heavy anti-aircraft fire and attacks from Japanese fighter planes, each B-25 dropped its payload on various targets and left Japanese airspace safely. Radio Japan announced the attack on Tokyo, and the American papers picked up the news.
On April 21st, President Roosevelt held a press conference and confirmed “that the United States Army Air Corps planes had very successfully attacked ‘from our new base in Shangri-La'” (a fictitious place because Roosevelt didn’t want to give away the mission’s launch site.)
The mission accomplished its purpose—it was the first victory for the Allies in World War II and greatly boosted the morale of Allied civilians and soldiers.
B-25 Taking Off from the USS Hornet during the Doolittle Raid Courtesy of U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Stories of the Individual Doolittle Crews
Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Raiders, piloted the first B-25 to take off from the deck of the USS Hornet. A terrible storm bucked the ship with tremendous waves, but all eyes focused on the lead plane. If the “Old Man” didn’t succeed, none of them would.
Doolittle’s Plane Launching from the USS Hornet Courtesy of the U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
Plane #1 lifted off with yards to spare, and the sailors across the whole convoy cheered. Each of the sixteen planes lifted off four minutes apart and spread out over a field fifty miles wide and one hundred fifty miles long.
The pilots flew low over the water, and their crews watched for surface ships and other aircraft. The B-25’s cleared the storm front two hundred miles before reaching Japan and encountered clear skies all the way to their targets. After reaching land, Doolittle flew close to treetop level. He spotted a squadron of Japanese fighters ahead, so he dropped lower and the aircraft’s olive drab paint caused the plane to “disappear” over a rice paddy and lose the pursing fighters.
Doolittle flew over Tokyo at thirty feet, but nearing the target, ascended to 1,200 feet, and bombardier Fred Braemer dropped all four bombs consecutively. After diving to a low altitude for their getaway, Doolittle and his crew encountered antiaircraft fire. Although copilot Dick Cole counted eighty enemy planes during the course of their #1’s flight over Japan, the only sustained minor damage—some holes in the tail from flak.
Doolittle headed to the East China Sea. His navigator, Hank Potter, estimated they would run out of gas one hundred and thirty-five miles short of the Chinese coast. This was a frightening prospect since the crew spotted sharks basking in the sea below. Fifteen of the sixteen planes followed this same route, and after leaving Japanese territory, a miracle developed.
The prevailing winds which usually blew from west to east reversed direction, and the fifteen planes rode on a thirty-mile-an-hour tailwind. This gifted them with an extra two hundred and fity miles of flying time before running out of gas. The tailwind lasted for five to six hours, allowing all fifteen planes to reach mainland China.
As the planes neared land, the tailwind gave out, night descended, and the Raiders hit a coastal storm. Doolittle headed for a landing field at Chuchow, then in the hands of Free China, but couldn’t locate it in the storm and darkness. Through a serious of missteps the authorities in Chuchow didn’t receive word about the imminent arrival of the allied planes or of the signal the Doolittle crews would use to contact them.
Instead, upon hearing the noise of approaching aircraft and assuming the Japanese were conducting a night raid, the officials in Chuchow ordered a complete blackout. At the last possible moment, Doolittle instructed his crew members to bail out. He was the only member of the Raiders who had previously jumped from a plane, and he was afraid he’d repeat an earlier experience and break both ankles.
Gunner Paul Leonard landed in the rain and dark on the side of a very steep embankment. After crawling twenty feet up and down and getting nowhere, he rolled up in his shoot, wrapped his arm around a bamboo tree, and went to sleep.
Copilot, Dick Cole, landed in a thirty-foot pine tree. He climbed to the top, untangled his chute, then climbed down and inspected his surroundings. He was on the top of a very steep mountain, so he made a hammock and stayed in the tree for the night.
Colonel Doolittle landed in a recently fertilized rice paddy. After extricating himself from the mess, he spent the night inside a water mill doing light calisthenics to fend off the cold.
Doolittle, Flight Crew, & Chinese Officials in China after Raid on Japan Courtesy of U.S. Army Air Forces via Wikimedia Commons
In the morning, a Chinese peasant took Doolittle to the local headquarters of the Chinese army, and Dick Cole arrived shortly after. A band of renegade guerrilla fighters brought Leonard, Potter, and Braemer in later.
Leonard and Doolittle climbed to the site where their plane had crashed. The debris was spread over several acres. Doolittle said he “‘felt lower than a frog’s posterior.’” This was his first combat mission, and he considered it a failure. He expected to be court-martialed or relegated to sitting out the war behind a desk.
Japanese soldiers in the area could have captured Doolittle and his crew, but the Free Chinese found the airmen first and smuggled them many miles to safety. At the time, American missionary John Birch was travelling by river and arrived at the same location where the crew was hiding in the cabin of a boat. A Chinaman led Birch to the door of the crews’ hiding place, but when they heard his voice they were afraid Birch was a Japanese impersonator. His Southern drawl convinced Leonard to open the door. Birch joined the airmen, translating for them, and facilitating their trip to Chuchow.
The Japanese conducted regular air raids on Chuchow, forcing the American airmen to retreat to a handmade cave in the hills outside the city. They remained at an army post near the cave until a United States C-47 landed on April 29th and flew them to Chungking, the capital of Free China. At the American Embassy in Chungking, Doolittle learned that seventy-five of his eighty Raiders had landed in enemy-controlled territory. Twenty were rescued and brought to Chungking at the same time.
President Roosevelt, General Marshall, and General Arnold sent personal congratulations to the Raiders, and Doolittle was promoted to brigadier general. He left Chungking on May 9thon a two-week puddle-jumping trip west to Washington D.C. where he was immediately ushered to the White House and met with President Roosevelt.
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The Crew of Plane #7, the Ruptured Duck: McClure, Lawson, Clever, Davenport, Thatcher. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Shortly before the Ruptured Duck launched from the Enterprise, Pilot Ted Lawson levered the plane’s flaps down, the correct position for lift-off. But fearing the strong gale would tear the flaps off and disable the plane, he pulled the flaps back up. The navy flagman signaled Lawson to rev his engines and, after thirty seconds, gave the okay to release the brakes and head down the short flight deck.
The wind grabbed at the Ruptured Duck’s wings and sent it close to the edge of the ship, but Ted braked and steered the B-25 back to the white navigation line he needed to follow for take-off. The deck disappeared beneath the plane, and it skimmed the top of the waves before climbing away from the ship. Ted reached down to pull up the flaps and realized that he’d taken off without using them. Those on deck had noticed, and it had given them quite a scare.
To save fuel on the trip to Japan, Lawson maintained an altitude of twenty feet above the ocean. Gunner Dave Thatcher tested the turret, but it failed to engage. If the plane was attacked, Thatcher wouldn’t be able to move the .50 caliber rear guns which were currently pointing straight back. Switching on the emergency juice didn’t help.
In the meantime, an empty five-gallon gas can thrown out by one of the crews ahead flew past the Ruptured Duck’s left wing. If it had hit a prop, the plane would have crashed. Ted called bombardier Robert Clever in the plane’s snout and asked him to engage the automatic pilot. The plane moved dangerously to the left, forcing Lawson to quickly grab the controls. The automatic pilot didn’t work either.
The Ruptured Duck arrived at Tokyo Bay, and gunner Dave Thatcher, watching from his immovable turret, observed six Japanese fighter planes flying above. One dove but then flew away. Lawson hedgehopped fast and low to avoid the “ack-ack” attacks (anti-aircraft fire).
Yokosuka Japanese Naval Base Taken from a B-25 Bomber during the Doolittle Raid Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
The crew located its targets, and Lawson safely guided the Ruptured Duck up to 1500 feet, allowing Bombardier Robert Clever to drop the payload. Clouds of flak appeared in front of them and flew past at the right altitude but at the wrong time to damage their aircraft. Lawson put the plane into a screaming dive and outran the flak at three hundred and fifty miles per hour, then headed for China.
After crossing the China Sea, Lawson piloted the Ruptured Duck over numerous islands near the Chinese coast and located a beach that appeared adequate for landing, which he preferred to bailing out. The plane’s fuel level was dangerously low, and, before reaching the beach, both engines coughed and lost power. The bomber lost altitude, and a quarter of a mile from shore the back landing wheels hit a wave, slamming the Duck to a complete stop.
The pilot, co-pilot and navigator flew through the bomber’s windshield, and the bombardier pitched through the nose. Thatcher, the gunner, regained consciousness inside the rapidly sinking plane. When he tried to escape, he realized the Ruptured Duck was upside down, so he reversed course and crawled through the hatch above him.
Four of the five crew members on the Ruptured Duck were seriously injured. Pilot Ted Lawson landed underwater, but upright in the sand, still buckled into his pilot’s seat. He didn’t feel trapped and didn’t fight for air but thought about his wife and mother and wished he’d left them money. He was able to unbuckle his seat belt and float to the surface but was temporarily paralyzed and couldn’t swim.
The waves carried Lawson one hundred feet to the shore where he discovered the extent of his injuries. His teeth were bent in, and when he tried to straighten them, they broke off. His lower lip was torn down to the cleft of his chin, and his left arm was destroyed. His whole left leg was sliced wide open, exposing the bone.
The impact had pulled both of Navigator Mac McClure’s arms out of their sockets and left them swollen from his shoulders to his wrists. He was unable to use his arms to swim but kicked and hurled his body to shore and crawled onto the beach.
Blood poured from bombardier Bob Clever’s head and face from a serious gash and deep cuts. Half of his hair had been stripped away, and he could only crawl on his hands and knees because of back and hip sprains. Co-pilot Dean Davenport had deep cuts on his lower right leg and was unable to walk.
Gunner Dave Thatcher spotted two Chinese fishermen on a ridge above the beach but thought they were Japanese soldiers. Mac McClure stopped Thatcher from shooting the men, and once he put his gun away, eight of the fisherman came down to the beach and led the fliers to a shack about a half mile away.
Clever crawled the whole distance. The men shivered in their wet clothes, so the Chinese peasants gave them quilts to wrap up in and mud-encrusted bamboo mats to rest on. The airmen tried to communicate with their benefactors, but the language barrier proved difficult.
A Chinaman who appeared to hold power over the others arrived at the shack and studied the airmen’s insignia. He turned to Captain Lawson and introduced himself as “Charlie.” His English was extremely limited, but he pointed at them and said “Melican.” He promised to come back for them and repeatedly said, “Boat.”
Dave Thacker returned to the beach the next morning and dove around the plane, seeking more of their medical kits but couldn’t locate them. He heard a motor and spotted a Japanese patrol boat in the distance. The enemy had discovered the presence of the Doolittle Raiders.
Chinese Junks by Lai Afong. Courtesy Wikipedia. Public Domain
Charlie returned to the shack the next morning with a dozen helpers who constructed litters and carried the wounded airmen to a Chinese guerrilla camp. Armed guerrillas carried the men through villages, across fields, onto a flat-bottomed boat, and down a muddy canal. Another group of peasants met the boat and carried the wounded men straight up a winding hillside trail and down toward the shore where a Chinese junk waited to take them to the mainland.
However, before reaching the junk, the litter bearers heard a Japanese gunboat approaching and dumped the Raiders in a ditch. The boat appeared, and the Japanese soldiers questioned the men on the junk. The Americans were very impressed that the Chinese never gave them up to the enemy.
Chinese Carry Doolittle’s Raiders to Safety Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
After arriving on the mainland, the Raiders were taken to a China Relief station where Young Doctor Chen and his helpers awaited the airmen. They’d spent the night running twenty-six miles from their hospital in Linhai and brought sedan chairs to immediately carry the Americans back to the safety of Linhai. The local Chinese soldiers, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts stood at attention and saluted the wounded Raiders as they were carried out of town.
Doctor Chen’s father, as well as an English missionary couple, a young Australian nurse, and other volunteer nurses manned the hospital at Linhai. The facility only had a little chloroform, antiseptic fluid, and bandages left. The airmen were badly injured, their wounds had become infected, and Lawson could only eat and drink through a slit in his mouth. His leg had turned a horrible color and was swollen from the ankles to the groin.
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Plane #15 – No Nickname
When the time came for Plane #15 to take off from the Enterprise, she refused to budge. Pilot Don Smith feared he and his crew would be scrubbed from the mission. A deckhand realized they’d failed to remove the chocks in front of the B-25’s wheels and remedied the problem.
The Crew of Plane #15: Sessler, Smith, White, Williams, Saylor Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Smith maneuvered #15 down the flight deck, but a rogue wave caused the Hornet’s bow to dip just as the plane reached the end of the deck. Pointing down toward the water, #15 faced an imminent catastrophe, but the plane’s speed, and the strong winds enabled her to lift off safely.
Plane #15 and her crew headed for targets in the city of Kobe, but a 2,500-foot mountain stood in the middle of their flight path. The mountain was not on their charts. While adjusting their route, they listened to a Tokyo radio station until a shrieking alarm, a voice shouting in Japanese, and complete silence interrupted the broadcast.
Due to the radio warning, the crew expected trouble in Kobe, but none materialized. They successfully dropped their bombs on an aircraft factory, dockyards, a steel works, and the machinery works. They only observed a little flak that didn’t come close to them.
Plane #15 reached the coast of China, and Smith and co-pilot “Griff” Williams decided to land in the ocean rather than travel inland and risk running out of gas. They located a soft spot on the water a half mile from shore and landed the craft so smoothly that no one was injured.
The crew had to evacuate quickly before the heavy bomber sank, so the men grabbed their supplies and prepared their raft. Gunner Thomas White, a medical doctor, salvaged his surgical instruments and medical kit and climbed from the plane seconds before it sank under the waves.
The life raft was too small to accommodate all the crew and their supplies. When one person moved too quickly, another crewman was knocked into the water. Waves pulled men overboard, and they made no progress with their rowing. A rogue wave forced the raft against a sharp edge of the sunken plane, and the raft began to collapse. Another wave flipped the whole raft over, and the crew lost everything, including Doc White’s bandages and medicines.
The airmen of Plane #15 abandoned their useless raft and swam through the crashing waves to the shore. They climbed cliffs surrounding the beach, spotted a light in the distance, and came upon a small house and a covered goat pen. The light was extinguished, and no one answered the door. The Raiders attempted to settle in the goat pen for the night, but the owner finally emerged from the house, brought the men inside, and fed them. The airmen were two feet taller than their host.
Local Chinese peasants came to the house, but no one was able to communicate until some children brought a book with pictures and English translations. The men learned they were on the only island in the vicinity that didn’t have its own Japanese patrol. Friends of the Chinese family sailed the crew to a nearby island and handed them over to the guerrilla band led by Charlie.
On April 25th, seven days after “The Ruptured Duck’s” crash landing, the crew members of Plane #15 arrived at the hospital in Linhai. The plane’s gunner, Doc White, was the only medical doctor among the eighty Doolittle Raiders, and he carried two tubes of morphine with him. White was also a surgeon and amputated Lawson’s infected leg, saving the captain’s life. All of the crew members on both bombers eventually made it to Chungking and out of China safely.
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Due to a faulty setting on its stabilizer, Plane #2 launched too sharply from the Enterprise “lost its air and seemed to collapse in flight.” A strong gust of wind came to the rescue and the plane avoided a collision with the ship’s hull which would have sliced it in two.
Travis Hoover, pilot of Plane #2, followed Doolittle’s plane until they reached Japan, but the army intelligence photos they’d brought with them didn’t match what the airmen now viewed. His navigator eventually gave Hoover a new course, but they didn’t spot their primary target, a powder works. They picked a new target but were unable to rise above 900 feet. When their bombs struck, the concussion jolted the plane and smoke rose all around them. If they’d struck the powder works, they wouldn’t have survived.
Trav Hoover followed General Doolittle to the coast of China, where they ran into a storm. The navigator checked his charts and determined they were in Japanese territory. They headed southwest and discovered mountains which were missing from their maps. They attempted to climb to a higher elevation, but each time they did, the left engine died. Now “they were too low on gas to climb, and too low in altitude to jump.”
Trav had no choice but to find a place to land. He brought the plane down in a rice paddy, and the airmen set it on fire so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. The airmen knew the Japanese forces were very close, so they headed west through the mountains, guided by their dime store compasses.
Not knowing whom they could trust, the Raiders avoided contact with the locals, and all five men managed to survive on “one canteen of water, one ration, and a few candy bars” for three days. They made their way through the mountains but ran out of food and turned to the Chinese for help. They discovered that the Japanese had just moved out of their area the week before.
Chinese guerrilla soldiers took the airmen in, but they were unable to communicate with each other until a young man who spoke a little English asked them how he could help. Tung-Sheng Liu, a former university student from Beijing, was just traveling through the area, using the back roads to avoid the Japanese and had stopped overnight at a small hotel. He stayed with the airman and directed them away from areas where they would have been captured by the enemy.
The Crew of Plane #2 with Tung-Sheng Liu (in white coat) Courtesy of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons
Tung-Sheng Liu and the Chinese guerillas led the five Raiders to Chuhsien, one hundred miles away. They traveled over trails through the mountains at night, covering ten to fifteen miles a day. Housing was arranged by the local guerrillas, and Chinese bearers carried the men in sedan chairs. After a week in Chuhsien, two buses arrived and took the airmen to Hengyang where they stayed for another week until an American C-47 landed and took them to Chungking and the American consulate. Tung-Sheng Liu immigrated to the U.S. and was named an honorary Doolittle Raider.
Davey Jones, pilot of Plane #5, discovered that one of his tanks was short by thirty gallons, but the hose had been turned off “and he could either have his plane pushed overboard or get in line and join the mission.” He joined the mission. Plane #5 crossed Tokyo Bay “and headed for their assignment on the far side of the city.” They encountered machine-gun fire and ack-ack. Hundreds of tracers followed their plane, so Davey Jones pulled up to 1200 feet, and they chose a new target—an oil storage facility and a power plant—and they were successful. Antiaircraft fire was intense, but they made it out of the city.
Using dead reckoning, Plane #5 arrived at the coast of China. Davey Jones determined they were close “to land because the color of the water changed.” He pulled the plane up to 5000 feet. They dropped a parachute flare and spotted a river and discovered they were over mountains. They had no choice but to bail out, which none of them had done before. Because of the bad weather and zero visibility, Gunner Joe Manske didn’t think he was falling. He thought he was just suspended. Davey was the last airman out the hatch and was blown against the fuselage. He hung on with his arms stretched out and then pulled the ripcord.
Davey Jones and his co-pilot, Hoss Wilder, ran into each other at a railroad station house, and the Chinese took them up to the town of Yushan in a railroad boxcar. Jones and Wilder were greeted by the mayor, thousands of people and huge banners that said, “Welcome brave heroes! You’ve struck a blow for us.” All five crewman made it out of China safely.
Plane 3, the Whiskey Pete, successfully launched from the deck of the USS Hornet during a squall but arrived over Tokyo on a clear, sunny day. The Whiskey Pete encountered strong anti-aircraft fire, forcing pilot Bob Gray and co-pilot Shorty Manch to pull up to 1450 feet. They passed over the Temple of Heaven, the residence of the Japanese emperor, but Commander Jimmy Doolittle had expressly forbidden the Raiders from attacking the emperor’s palace. Instead, bombardier Aden Jones dropped Pete’s bombs on the assigned steel, gas, and chemical plants nearby. Dozens of fighters and enemy warships fired at Pete, but she and her crew made a successfully getaway and headed to China.
The Whiskey Pete reached the coast of China as night was approaching and continued inland for one hour. Expecting their fuel to run out at any moment, the airmen dropped chute flares for illumination but didn’t detect any flat land. With no other choice available, the crew bailed out into the unknown. The navigator and bombardier left through the forward hatch.
Co-pilot Shorty Manch used his flashlight to check if gunner Leland Faktor had departed through the rear hatch. When he was satisfied, Shorty jumped. Unfortunately, his 24-foot parachute was too small for his weight, so when he pulled the D-ring, the impact of the chute’s opening jerked his bowie knife, ax, canteen, and all of his private arsenal away, except for a gun in his holster. The Baby Ruth bars he’d stuffed in his jacket flew off, leaving behind their empty wrappers.
Navigator Chuck Ozuk’s parachute tangled with a pine tree, causing Ozuk to be thrown against a ledge of rock, which cut his left leg wide open. He was unable to cut himself out of the lines or harness in the darkness. When daylight came, Ozuk gazed upon his surroundings in awe. All alone, high up in the mountains, with a beautiful sun above him, he almost thought he’d arrived in heaven. He freed himself, made a crutch from a tree limb, and headed west for two days without help.
Shorty Manch
Manch’s Chinese rescuer communicated with him by drawing with a stick in the dirt. First the Chinaman drew a Japanese flag, and Manch responded by holding his nose and waving the picture away. Then the man pulled out a clipping of an old British Blenheim plane and pointed at the insignia. Shorty shook his head again. Next, the Chinaman pulled out a four-year-old copy of the Saturday Evening Post with a picture of President Roosevelt on the cover.
Shorty grinned and pointed to Roosevelt and then to himself. Everybody present laughed and shook hands with the American. Manch slept in the man’s home that night and was escorted to another village the next morning. He spotted pieces of wreckage from Whiskey Pete along the way. “In the village, they showed him the American clothes they had found, some pieces of equipment from the navigator’s deck, and the body of twenty-one-year-old Leland Faktor.”
Faktor was the first Raider to die, but the cause of death was unclear because of conflicting reports from the eyewitnesses. Doolittle concluded that Faktor “landed on extremely rough terrain and was killed in the secondary fall.”
The Chinese whisked the remaining four members of the Whiskey Pete crew to safety, and the crewmen were reunited. A short time later, Pilot Bob Gray was assigned to fly transports over the Himalayas between India and China. Two days after he was promoted to the rank of captain, Gray’s plane crashed, and he and two other former Raiders were killed.
Co-pilot Shorty Manch was also assigned to the China-India-Burma Theater but was transferred Stateside in 1943. He served in the Korean War and later trained young officers to fly jets at Nellis AFB in Nevada. On one of his training missions, his T-33 burst into flames over Las Vegas. Manch ordered his students to bailout, while he guided the plane away from a residential neighborhood and an elementary school. By the time Manch ejected, his parachute couldn’t fully open, and he died when he hit the ground. He was 39.
Bombardier Aden Jones also served in the China-India-Burma Theater until 1943 and then was transferred Stateside. After the war, he served briefly in Japan and was discharged in 1948. He died at the age of 62. Navigator Chuck Ozuk was sent to North Africa in 1942 and was relieved from active duty in 1945. He died in 2010 at the age of 94.
Sources:
The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory by Craig Nelson (Viking, 2002)
With three other Navy pilots, Wayne Morris (second from Left) poses for a picture aboard their carrier after a strike against Formosa in 1944. Courtesy of WWII in Color.
The Aces of VF-15 with their victorious scorecard at the end of their six-month tour of duty. Photo dated 12/1/1944. Courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command.
