On the 70th Anniversary of the Kassel Mission

Paul Swofford being awarded the Silver Star

 

On the 70th Anniversary of the Kassel Mission

Aaron Elson

President, Kassel Mission Historical Society

Hard as it is to believe, today is the 70th anniversary of the Kassel Mission. Paul Swofford, one of a handful of pilots who brought his badly damaged B-24 back to England that day in 1944, left a message on my answering machine the other day. I could tell from the wavering in his voice how shaken he was by the memories, and yet he stressed how thankful he was that he had the opportunity to tell his story so that it would not be forgotten.

Every veteran of the Kassel Mission, every widow or sibling of a flier killed in the battle, has his or her own personal thoughts as the 70th anniversary of the battle approaches. Some family members of Kassel Mission veterans are in Germany where the annual wreath laying ceremony carries extra significance because of the 70th anniversary.

Thanks to the efforts of people like George Collar and Bill Dewey and Frank Bertram and Walter Hassenpflug, and the energy of the members of the Kassel Mission Historical Society, including Kassel survivors John Ray Lemons and Ira Weinstein, the sacrifice of the men lost on the Kassel Mission will be honored not only by the "next generation," but by the generation after that, as exemplified by social media wiz J.P. Bertram, and generations yet to come.

As for me, I don't have a familial connection to the mission. It was while visiting the village of Heimboldshausen where a buddy of my father's was killed in World War II, that I met Walter and became fascinated by the history of the mission, some of which I've helped to preserve through a series of informal oral history interviews.

So today I'm going to watch at least the beginning, and maybe a few scenes, of "12 O'Clock High," which to the survivors of the Kassel Mission is like "Patton" was to the veterans of my father's tank battalion, and I'll get all choked up when Dean Jagger sees that silly figure in the store window, and I'll listen for the drone of the returning B-24s. And I'll read the poem "High Flight," by John Gillespie Magee, a young Spitfire pilot who died in a training crash in 1941 at age 19, and and I'll remember George Collar telling me how disappointed he was as a youth because that was the War to End All Wars, and he feared he would never get the chance to be like his boyhood heroes.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor e'er eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

The Watch That Went to War Part 1

Available soon at Amazon.com and for Kindle

 (My 1999 interview with Kassel Mission veteran Ira Weinstein will be available soon in a Kindle edition, with a print version available from Amazon.)

Navigator/bombardier, 445th Bomb Group

Kassel Mission survivor, ex-POW

April 17, 1999

Palm Beach, Fla.

 

 Aaron Elson: You grew up in Chicago?

Ira Weinstein: Yes.

Aaron Elson: Was there a Jewish community in Chicago?

Ira Weinstein: Oh, a tremendous Jewish community. My grandfather was the first Jewish undertaker in Chicago.

Aaron Elson: And where was your family from originally?

Ira Weinstein: My father and mother were born in America. My grandfather came from Russia.

Aaron Elson: Did you enlist or were you drafted?

Ira Weinstein: I enlisted. Since I was ten years old more or less, I was an aviation buff. I loved airplanes, so here, 70 years later, I’m still building model airplanes.

Aaron Elson: You had started studying the World War I aces?

Ira Weinstein: Yes. And when the war was imminent, and I was working, I enlisted. I filed an application to be an Aviation Cadet. In those days, you had to have either two years’ college education to get an appointment as an Aviation Cadet, or you had to take an exam. I didn’t go to college. My father went broke during the Depression. As soon as I got out of high school I went to work.

I took the exam, and out of 600 guys mine was the fourth highest grade, so I got an appointment. Then the war started, and they were processing so many guys, I quit my job. I thought they were going to take me right away. They didn’t take me for six months, because they were waiting to process people. Then I got my appointment as a cadet, and went through all the usual basic training and the pre-flight.

Aaron Elson: Did you want to be a fighter pilot?

Ira Weinstein: Every guy wanted to be a pilot. I went to primary school and I was doing really good. I was way up in the class in the ground school, but every time I got in an airplane they had to readjust the airplane. First of all, you were supposed to be 5-foot-4 to go to pilot training. I’m only 5 feet tall. So one day I’m standing in a line naked, waiting to get a shot, and a flight surgeon comes by. He says, “Mister, how tall are you?”

I said, “I’m 5-foot-2.” I wasn’t 5-foot-2. I was 5 feet tall. Next day I was in the commandant’s office, and he says, “Look. You’re through in primary training.” But I had a real high number in the draft, so I could have gotten out, because I volunteered to go in. He said, “Do you want out? I can let you out. But if you want to stay in, I’ll see that you go wherever you want to go.”

I didn’t want to get out. He said, “I could send you right away to bombardier school.”

That’s fine. As long as I’m in an airplane, that’s it. So I went to bombardier school. I went to Ellington Field in Texas, and then I went to Childress, Texas, and then they picked a whole bunch of guys and sent us to navigation school. So I had a dual rating. Before I went overseas I was already a first lieutenant; before  I was even assigned to a crew. I know that sounds like nothing, but in the service, that was big-time stuff, to be a first lieutenant instead of a second lieutenant.

I was assigned to a crew, and we went for training as a crew at Peterson Field in Colorado. I got married there, and then we went a bunch of other places to do this and that, and then finally we went overseas.

Aaron Elson: Did you marry somebody you met there or somebody from Chicago?

Ira Weinstein: This was a girlfriend that I had from Chicago. Even though the war was on, they were still treating us like cadets, it was unbelievable. The clothes we had, and the food we were getting, they treated us like kings. The invitations for our graduation, to get our commission, were on leather. Genuine leather invitations. Stamped! I sent one to my girlfriend. Next thing I know, she says, “I’ll come to the graduation.” She came. Next thing, we got married.

Anyhow, let me bring you up to the day of the battle, and then later you can go back if you want.

Okay. The Kassel mission out of Tibenham was on September 27, and you may not know it, but that was Yom Kippur. I was not supposed to fly that day. I don’t know why I went to the briefing, but I was on a lead crew. And I guess, I don’t remember, but I think maybe we had to go to every briefing, even though we weren’t going to fly that day.

I go to the briefing, and I see the mission, and I see we’re going to have fighter cover all the way. It wasn’t that far into Germany. And by that time we had pretty good fighter cover. My wife’s birthday was Christmas, and I had one more mission to fly, so I thought I’d try and go on this mission and I’d be home in time for Christmas.

I went to the colonel and I said, “Let me fly today. See if there’s an opening on a crew.”

And he said, “What are you, stupid? You don’t volunteer. It’s a Jewish holiday. You’ve got a three-day pass. Go to London. Have some fun.”

I said, “No, I want to go.”

And he really didn’t want me to go. He said, “You’re not supposed to do anything today.”

I finally talked him into it, and I was home for my wife’s birthday – a year later.

On the other hand, I’m here and I’m alive, so even though maybe God punished me for flying on Yom Kippur, he also saved me.

On the mission, I was assigned to a crew that I’d never flown with. I flew with the Donald crew. I didn’t know one person on it.

Early on the mission – once we turned off the initial point, I saw fighters. And everybody was on the radio, saying there were fighters and so forth, and in that ship that day we had a nose turret but it was not manned. So I got up in the nose turret, on the guns. I had never gone to gunnery school, but I’d flown enough missions I knew what that was all about.

The battle was quick. I don’t know how many minutes they say the whole thing lasted, but it was minutes, not hours. I’m firing the guns, and the next thing I know, I feel somebody tumble me over backwards out of the turret, and it was the navigator, a guy by the name of Eric Smith. I thought, “What’s going on?” And I turn around and he’s bailing out the nose hatch. He saved my life. That was the first I knew that our ship was in trouble, on fire, and we were going down. I didn’t know it. I was busy firing the guns. So I bailed out.

Now another interesting thing is – God’s will – I always wore a chest chute, and I never wore it on, because when I had to lean over the bomb sight, I couldn’t have that on me, so the chest chute was always by my side. That day, when I finally got permission to fly, I didn’t have a parachute because my parachute was being repacked. I went to the parachute room and they gave me a back pack. I had never worn a back pack except in the cadets. If it would have been a different mission, I wouldn’t be here today because I’d have never found that chest pack.

So I bailed out with a back pack, and when I bailed out, the straps of the parachute caught on the bomb sight. By this time the plane was going down. It was in a flat spin with a lot of centrifugal force. I could hardly get out. I chinned myself back up into the airplane, undid the strap, and bailed out a second time.

By the time I bailed out, I figure I was at the most maybe at 2,500 feet. I popped my chute and I was on the ground. That was it. I never had time enough to enjoy what it was really like being in the parachute.

I landed up in the hills, where a bunch of kids were picnicking. I got rid of my chute and ran, I was up in the hills, and I hid under some trees. My pilot – this guy Donald – must have bailed out the top hatch. When he bailed out, I’m presuming, he must have hit his feet on the rudders. I saw him come down in the valley, and I saw he couldn’t get up. And pretty soon some farmers came along and they pitchforked him to death. When night came, I went down and I got his dogtags, and they had stripped him of everything but his underpants. His shoes, everything but his underpants.

When I came back, I reported that to the War Crimes Commission, and they sent two guys down from Washington, D.C., to Chicago to interview me about it. And then maybe two or three years ago, I got a call – actually, Bill Dewey got the call – a guy was trying to find out if anybody knew anything about his brother-in-law. Dewey said, “Call Ira Weinstein. He knows all about it.” So the guy called me, and told me who he was, but I didn’t know who he was, so I asked him a bunch of questions, and I realized it was legitimate. Then I told him the whole story. I told him, “You may not even want to tell your sister about this,” because why should she know the terrible details?  I don’t know what he did, but we corresponded a couple of times. I sent him copies of all the stuff from the War Crimes Commission. That was a horrible incident.

Aaron Elson: What did you do with his dogtags?

Ira Weinstein: When I finally got to American hands a year later, I still had the dogtags. So I turned them in.

Aaron Elson: Where did you hide them?

Ira Weinstein: In my pocket most of the time. That night I hid under trees up in the forest. It was a pine forest. And the pine needles under the trees were inches thick, so I buried myself under those pine needles, and then during the day I wouldn’t move. I’d only move at night. I thought, ‘I’ll make my way to Switzerland.’ Well, I don’t swim, and every time I came to a body of water I couldn’t get across. I hid out for a couple of days, but by that time I realized that they were shooting and looking for guys. I realized I’m never going to get out of this.

I was scared, but I wasn’t hungry because at night I’d go down in the valley, I’d get some potatoes or whatever they’re growing, and that’s what I’d eat. I came to a little town, and I don’t know, Walter Hassenpflug thinks it was a town called Nesselrode [Nesselroden] or something, and there must have been 20 churches in that town. So I thought, “If I’m ever going to get a fair shake, it’ll be in a place where they had so many churches.”

I walked down into the town, and I looked like Murder Incorporated, because our plane was on fire, I was covered with soot, and I hadn’t shaved for maybe a week. And I’m walking through the center of town and a kid about 17 years old sidles up alongside of me and he said, “You’re one of the American fliers they’re looking for, aren’t you?”

I said, “Yeah.” Then I said, “How come you speak such good English?”

“Oh,” he said, “I went to high school in Milwaukee.”

I said to him,  “What’s going to happen to me?”

He said, “I’ll take you to the burgomeister.”

Sure enough, he took me to the burgomeister’s house, and the burgomeister’s wife gave me a bowl of potato soup. And I remember, that was the best thing I ever ate.

There was an SS battalion in that area, and the burgomeister said, “If I turn you over to them, you’re going to be dead. So if you behave yourself, and you don’t try and run away, I’ll call the Luftwaffe and they can come and get you. There you’ll be safe.” And about two hours later, two guys in beautiful Luftwaffe uniforms showed up with a car, and they took me to a little garrison. It was walled in, and they threw me in this room. I think there were maybe 20 other guys in it. George Collar was one of them. There were two badly wounded enlisted men, and I was the ranking officer.

I looked around – these two guys had had no medical attention, they’d been there two or three days already, and don’t ask me why I did this or how I did it, but I was always cocky. I got hold of the guard, and I told him I want to see the commanding officer. So he took me in to see the commanding officer. And it

Erich Von Stroheim

would have been a joke if I wasn’t so scared, but that guy looked just like Erich Von Stroheim, remember him? First I saluted him, and I gave my name, my rank and my serial number, and I said, “Sir, according to the Geneva Convention, we have two very badly wounded men, they’re entitled to some medical care.”

Erich Von Stroheim

He came out from behind his desk with a riding crop, and he hit me across the cheek. He split my cheek open, and he said, “I’ll tell you about the Geneva Convention. You’re bombing our schools and our churches and you’re killing our people and blah blah blah blah.” Then he told the guard to take me away. So I went back to the room, and about two hours later they came and took the two injured men away.

After you flew enough missions you thought you knew all the tricks, and one of them was that the electric shoes in the planes hardly ever worked properly. What I used to do is I’d put on two or three pairs of heavy woolen socks, and then I’d put my flying boots over them. That way my feet were pretty warm. When I bailed out, my flying boots came off,  because they were loose. I was running around in the forest for a couple of days with no shoes. But I cut a piece out of my flying suit and I made a pair of moccasins. I used the electrical wires that were in the flying suit to tie them on. So now I’m in this little room they had us in. Pretty soon the guard comes, he says, “Kommen Sie mit mir,” and he takes me back to the commandant’s office.

My parents never spoke Yiddish, but my grandparents did when they didn’t want us to know what was going on. So I knew a little bit. But a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. This is what I think I hear the commandant say to the guard: “Take him out and schissen him.” That means “Take him out and shoot him.” What he said was “schussen,” or “Give him a pair of shoes.” But I didn’t hear shoes. I heard shoot. So this guy marches me out of the little barracks we were in into the compound, and about 50 yards ahead of me there’s a gate. I thought if this asshole’s gonna shoot me, he’s gonna shoot me in the back, because I’m gonna make a run for it when I get to that gate.

Maybe 25 yards from the gate was another little room. He took me in there and got me a pair of shoes. That’s how close I came to being killed that time, let alone getting out of the airplane or in the battle.

Then they took the guys from that barrack – George and I especially – who were in good shape, around to all the airplanes, getting the guns off of them and burying the bodies. And one of the ships I came across was my own ship. I knew it was mine because I knew the insignia on it, but I didn’t know any of the kids who were in the plane. I knew the pilot got killed. I didn’t know where the navigator was but I knew he had bailed out, and there was another guy – I forget who he was – on the ship. The other five guys were all burned to a crisp in the ship. And I had to take them out and bury them, right there. When I got back to the States I said to my wife, “You know, those parents must wonder what happened. All they get is a KIA notice, nothing else, no explanation from the government. I think I’m going to go visit all those parents.”

I got the addresses and the names, and I went and visited all those parents. I didn’t tell them the gory details, but I told them that their kids were in a battle and it was terrible and they were probably shot during the battle, and that I buried their bodies and this is where it is, and so forth.

Now we go back to this little hut, and they’re going to march us to the railroad station to go to the interrogation center. And these are stories that George told me that I didn’t even remember.

They put two guys on a stretcher, and George and I were going to carry them to the railroad station. I remembered that, but I didn’t remember this part until George told it to me, then it came back to me, like when you see an old movie on television. It was real hot, and these goddamn guys have got their guns in our backs. “Raus! Schnell! Schnell!” They wanted us to walk faster. How can we walk faster? Finally, they let us sit down, and George says we sat down on the curb of the street and a lady came out and gave us a drink. When George told me that, I said, “No German lady ever gave me a drink of water, forget it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” The more I thought about it, all of a sudden it all started to come back to me. Then when we got to the railroad station, I don’t know if George told you this story, they lined everybody up in the railroad station and they made us all stand at attention, and some SS guys took control then, and they were calling out the roll. When they came to my name, Weinstein, they made me step up in front of the group, and George says he was sure they were going to shoot me right then and there. Then they put everybody else at rest, and they left me standing at attention. I think it was about two hours till that train came, I stood at attention, and finally we got on the train.

Aaron Elson: George said that somebody said “Jude.”

Ira Weinstein: Yeah, “Judish.”

Aaron Elson: And he said he thought, “They’re gonna shoot  Weinstein.”

Ira Weinstein: He told me that. And then it came back to me. You know, you’re so young, I think you’re too stupid to know what’s going on. You’re not afraid like you should be. As you look back in retrospect, how did I get the chutzpah to go to the commandant and tell him about those two men who needed medical attention? But I thought I was a hero in those days. Nothing bothered me, I was crazy.

Anyhow, we finally get to the interrogation center, and I have to tell you a great story. I’m writing this story up for the Eighth Air Force Bulletin now.

Before I left, I had a cousin who was older than I was, who was already flying his own plane, and he was my hero. His father and mother invited me to dinner, and he gave me a watch. It was a Longines Weems watch, which was the watch that all the commercial and other aviators wore. And he said, “Here’s a watch. I want you to take this, it’s a great watch for you, and you bring it back safe.” That’s the watch I wore on all my missions. So when we got to the interrogation center – I’m jumping ahead a little bit; well, I’ll tell you the watch story first. No, I can’t. They threw us all in cells, and first they’d run the temperature way up, then they’d turn it off, but I was only there two days as I remember, maybe overnight or two nights. And then they brought me in to a guy to interrogate me. We had seen a movie that showed just what to expect when you were going to be interrogated, and it would be laughable because it was just like that if you weren’t so scared. They told us, you just give your name, rank and serial number. Don’t try and outsmart them or get in a conversation with them.

I stood my ground. Finally, he brings in a guy, and he says to me, “Lieutenant, you don’t have to tell me anything. I know all about you. Your mother is Lillian Seligman. She lives in Rochester, New York, with your sister. She lives at 47 Rutledge Drive. You were born and raised in Chicago. You worked for Goldblatt’s.” They had a dossier on me that was better than the Americans had; they knew everything about me. “You were with the 445th Bomb Group. Your mission was to Kassel. You were in the 702nd Squadron. Your squadron commander was Lieutenant Colonel Jones.” So I didn’t have to answer anything, I just kept giving them my name. “Now, all you have to tell us is, where were you flying that mission and what was your target?”

I’d say, “Name, Ira P. Weinstein, first lieutenant, 0694482.” So finally he got pissed off. Then he says to me, “You are not an American. You’re a German. Your name is Weinstein. You were my neighbor in Frankfurt. You’re a shpy.” If you’re a "shpy," you’re gonna get shot. I didn’t give. Finally, he calls in a guy. A guy comes in, about six feet tall, in a black body suit with a rubber hose. Then the interrogator’s asking me questions and this guy’s slapping that hose. But we saw that in the movie. I was plenty scared, believe me, I wasn’t gonna laugh like I can now. And he finally says to me, “Well, if you don’t want to tell us what we want to know I’m going to have to turn you over to this guy.” I stuck with it, and finally he says to the guy, “Take him out of here,” and I went back to my room.

The next day I was out of there. However, when I went back to my room – oh, and then they sent in a German officer in a flying suit with a lot of ribbons, he came in and he said, “Cigarette, Lieutenant?”

I said, “No, I don’t smoke.”

So he sits down on the couch. He says, “You know, you’re a flying officer. I’m a flying officer. I’d just like to talk to you about what it was like. Can we discuss it?”

I said, “No.”

“You know, we’re compatriots.”

“Sorry.”

So he left. Then they took all our clothes, and they gave us a shower and a delousing. I was marching up the hall to the shower, a group was coming out of the showers, and there was a guy there from New Zealand. He says to me, “Hey, Yank. If you’ve got anything you don’t want them to take, get rid of it now because they’re confiscating everything.”

I still had this watch on. I took the watch off – it was on an expansion band – and I threw it to him. I said, “Here, you keep the watch.”

“Okay.”

Two days later I’m in a boxcar in Frankfurt, in the marshaling yards, and the RAF comes to bomb the marshaling yards. It’s night, and the Germans lock us in the cars and they go to the air raid shelters. On the next track is another set of boxcars with POWs. There’s the New Zealand guy. He sees me. He says, “Hey, Yank, you want your watch back?”

I said, “Yeah.”

So he threw the watch through the slats – and I caught it. And I kept that watch all during the time that I was a POW and I brought it back. That story is in Roger Freeman’s book. But now I’m going to elaborate it on it and write it up for the Eighth Air Force newsletter, “The Watch that Went to War.”

(Part 2 coming soon)

John and DeDe, a Love Story (Part 2)

(See John and DeDe, a Love Story (Part 1)

Aaron Elson: Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?

John Knox: I was sitting at the kitchen table. We were having a late breakfast, I think it was about 11 o’clock Sunday morning, and we had a big kitchen. It was shortly after we moved away from my aunt and my grandma and my two uncles. It was the first place I ever lived since I was four or five years old where our family was alone now in our own house, and my brother and I had our own bedroom, and I still remember the scene sitting at the table and hearing, I guess we were playing music or something, and they cut in, Roosevelt.
 We were dating then. It didn’t affect us. We just kept on dating. I finished school and went to work for Curtiss-Wright for a year until I was going to be drafted. I didn’t want to enlist because I was in love with her, so I just figured, I knew I was A1. And I kind of thought I’d go in the Air Corps because I was so small, and I worked for Curtiss-Wright. I just assumed that. Then I made the mistake, they said, "Don’t ever volunteer in the Army," you’ve heard that expression, and I volunteered to go to gunnery school. That’s where I made my mistake.

     Ray Lemons [a waist gunner on Knox's crew] and I both went to gunnery school, and then we went to Sheppard Field, Texas, to become flight engineers on  B-25 or B-26 medium bombers. We were in the same class but we never knew each other. Then we got through with that and we thought we were gonna be on a B-25 or a B-26, be a flight engineer, and that puts you way up to tech sergeant, pretty good rating. And then they put us on a B-24 and we didn’t know anything about the mechanics, so Ray became a waist gunner and I became a tail gunner. And he helped me out when I was shot. I got a direct hit from a 20-millimeter cannon shell, knocked me for a loop and knocked my turret out of commission. The plane was on fire. He opened the door and got me out.

DeDe Knox: He was operated on his knee without anesthetic.

John Knox: That’s all on the tape [a video interview that was done with the Knoxes].

Aaron Elson: Let’s go back to Pearl Harbor.

John Knox: We’re going too fast.

Aaron Elson: DeDe, where were you when you heard about it?

John Knox: She probably doesn’t remember.

DeDe Knox: I don’t remember.

John Knox: Her memory’s slipping a little.

Aaron Elson: Did you know immediately that John was going to be drafted?

John Knox: Oh, sure, as soon as I was called in for a physical and rated A-1, we talked about it. We were dating pretty hot and heavy. We were engaged when I went over.

DeDe Knox: Before he went overseas, he was out in Colorado, and the pilot said that’s it, they were ready to go overseas but they had a delay, and he wanted me to come out, because some of them were getting married. My mother said you can’t let them get married, because she wanted a church wedding, and she said, “You can go,” but his mother chaperoned me. At that age, you never heard of that now. So I did go to Colorado and spend that week with him before he went overseas. And we were married after he got back. The Air Force flew him home every weekend so he could see me, and finally the doctor said “Jack, you go back home and get that girl and marry her and bring her back so you can stay put long enough for us to operate on your eye.”

John Knox: I lost an eye. Shrapnel penetrated the optic nerve, and shrapnel put my knee out of commission. I’ve had a stiff knee all my life. This has been a terrible thing. You can’t sit right. You can’t do anything right. That’s why I can’t fly anymore, because I think when we went to Kansas City, the last 8th Air Force reunion we went to, my god, I got on the plane, I couldn’t get my leg under the seat in front of me. And I’m standing there, everybody’s getting on the plane. I told the stewardess, “I just simply can not sit down, what am I gonna do, get off?” I said “I can sit in a bulkhead seat,” so she arranged a bulkhead seat. And then when I got to Atlanta I had to arrange a bulkhead seat, and then coming back. And I said never again.

DeDe Knox: They don’t let you do it ahead of time.

John Knox: The time I flew before that the plane I was in must have been bigger, probably Delta, but I could squeeze my leg under the seat in front of me. But this, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get all the way down and get my leg. I almost hit the panic button, what am I gonna stand up the whole way or what?

DeDe Knox: Because he was supposed to light one candle, he was supposed to be on the stage and honored in Kansas City and I said “What are we gonna do?” And he said, “I’ll figure out something.” That was four planes during that trip, and he said this is going to be our last trip by plane.

John Knox: That was five years ago.

Aaron Elson: Tell me about your crew.

John Knox: We all met in Salt Lake City, that’s where they assembled the crew. That’s where we met Jim Baynham and the co-pilot Charlie, and the flight engineer was Howard Boldt who just died recently from Houston. We didn’t have a navigator and a bombardier. We picked them up later. But that’s when Ray and I found out we weren’t going to be flight engineers on a medium bomber and we’d probably go to the South Pacific. And we weren’t too happy about it. After Salt Lake City we went to Colorado Springs to do our training on B-24s.

 

Aaron Elson: Who was in the crew? Who else joined later on.

John Knox: Jim Baynham. Charlie Bosquet was the co-pilot. When we finally got the navigator it was John, he’s from Kentucky, it’s on the tape. Hector Scala was the bombardier, and Boldt was the flight engineer. He was shot up worse than I was. He was just getting in the bomb bay waiting to bail out, and he got shot in the legs. And of course Bosquet and John, the navigator, they were two that weren’t shot, and the radio operator was Jim Fields from California, and he was wounded. And then the other waist gunner, opposite from Ray Lemons, was Olen Byrd. He was kind of a Texas farmboy, not very well polished, and the last Ray and I saw of him he was sitting down on the floor of the airplane under the waist gun kind of looking at us. And the plane was on fire. We don’t know whether he was afraid, and we had the door open to bail out, that was right there too. And I remember looking at him and I remember Ray saying “Come on, Bird, come on,” and he said “no, no, no.” And we don’t know whether he had a bullet in him, or whether he froze, scared, all we know is we think he went down with the plane. And to this day, Ray and I were the only ones who saw him, and we don’t know why. He had a funny look on his face. But he wasn’t dead. But with all that stuff on him he could have been bleeding interior, and the plane was raked with cannon shells and shrapnel. The plane was in bad shape, and on fire. So we don’t know about Bird. He was just a real quiet guy and all he did, he’d just gone to gunnery school, he hadn’t gone to any mechanic school or anything like that, he was strictly a gunner. And then we used to have a ball turret when we went over, and we had a ball turret gunner, his name was Jed Lord. I don’t think we flew maybe one mission and then they took out the ball turrets because we had better escorts and the missions were getting easier, and that thing created a drag, so we could go a little faster. So we rotated. And Lord happened to be the one that day that didn’t fly. When I didn’t fly he flew the tail turret and when Ray didn’t fly he flew the waist gun. So he was the one, and he went ahead and finished all his missions, stayed over there a couple of years I think, in ordnance.

Aaron Elson: Which mission was that for you?

John Knox: My eighth. It was different for some of us. It was my eighth, and I think it was Jim’s tenth. We rotated, like I say, so I lost one there. And then one time the pilot and co-pilot, the flight engineer, and I think they took Ray along on that one, a bunch of them flew gasoline over to France. They got credit for a mission I think for that. So even on the same crew we had different, but I think eight was the minimum. People ask me how many missions I went on and I always said “Seven and a half.”

Aaron Elson: Was that mission in September when they flew the gas over to France.

John Knox: Our first mission was in August, so it had to be in late August or September. They made one mission doing that and they might have got two missions in, I’m not sure. But there was no reason for a tail gunner to go because they were not going over enemy territory, they were just going across the Channel. And I remember Charlie, the co-pilot, got some cognac while he was over there. And I think he got drunk on it, too, because I think they stayed overnight, by the time they unloaded the plane, and he had a ball. He was a character. Somehow he died, he wrote me a letter about 20 years after the war. We didn’t know each other too well because I was an enlisted man and he was the co-pilot. But it was a weird letter, like he was having mental trouble, all mixed up or something. And I wrote back and told him if there was anything I can do, let me know. But we weren’t that close. He was closer to Jim. And about six months later he was dead. And I think he committed suicide. His family wrote us.

      When I was a prisoner of war my mother got some information from the Army Air Force, of the addresses of all my crew members, and she wrote to all the wives, or mothers, to find out how many of them are alive and how many are dead, because I was the only one that was missing in action. All the others were accounted for. Either they were dead or they were POWs, but I wasn’t accounted for until one of my older letters from Germany which I still have, all those letters, arrived at her house, the following March, after the mail carriers kept telling her “You might as well quit writing, all of the letters are coming back.”

DeDe Knox: He was probably dead.

John Knox: And then when they got that letter that morning he got in the car and took it right to the house. And she called up my mother, and that’s the only way she knew that I wasn’t dead. But I’ve got all the letters my mother wrote to Jim Baynham’s wife and Hector Scala’s mother. They wrote back. Who was missing, who was a prisoner of war, and who was KIA.

Aaron Elson: Tell me about the battle itself, what you remember, from the first inkling that something was wrong.

John Knox: Well, that was all weird. Our radios, we didn’t back there know we pulled away from the group. We didn’t know that. And then all of a sudden I saw a plane on my tail. I assumed it was an American plane, and then I got looking close and I said “No, that’s not a P-47, that’s an FW-190.” And boy, he was coming in on me. And I’m shooting at him. There’s nothing over the intercom about planes or bandits or enemy planes or anything. Nothing. And he’s shooting at me and I’m shooting at him, of course he’s got 20-millimeter cannons and maybe even a 30, and I’ve got a couple of little .50-caliber machine guns. And he just, one of them hit my turret. I never saw all those 130 planes at all. And to this day I can’t figure that out. It’s weird. We were fairly in the back, and I think the attack started in the front. But I didn’t see a lot of planes being shot down or a lot of German planes or engines. I didn’t see anything. But the plane was already on fire when I got hit, so you know they made some passes at us. There was a fire in the bomb bay. So I don’t know, it was just dead. I heard nothing. I heard nothing about a fire. I heard nothing about bailing out. I heard nothing about bandits in the area. Nothing. I’ll never figure that one out.

Aaron Elson: Which position were you in?

John Knox: Tail gunner.

Aaron Elson: No, I mean the plane. Was it the tail end?

John Knox: I think we were pretty much. I’ve got a diagram of that. We all got diagrams in our Kassel, the black book, this Kassel book [The Kassel Mission Chronicles].

Aaron Elson: Once you were hit, did the turret shatter?

John Knox: Apparently it shattered because I had shrapnel all over.

DeDe Knox: He’s still got 13 pieces in him.

John Knox: But I knew my eye was hit, and I knew my leg was hit, and I could see the tear in my pants and the blood coming out. And I just got out of the turret and clipped on my parachute. I was kind of half in and half out and I bailed out and I counted to ten, I wanted to clear the rudders, then I pulled the cord right away. Because I was kind of woozy. And that’s what I shouldn’t have done probably because I passed out, see, we were at 23, 24,000 feet.

Aaron Elson: When this was happening, did your life flash before your eyes?

John Knox: No.

Aaron Elson: Did the concept of death occur to you?

John Knox: The concept, no, what occurred to me was, if I wanted to live, I had to get out of that burning plane. My desire to live overcame any fear of bailing out. So I took the only escape that I could see. I had enough sensibility to do that.

Aaron Elson: At what point did you see Bird?

John Knox: I saw him while I was putting my chute on, and Ray had the door open, just that second or two before I went through the hole there. He was sitting to my left, right under the waist gun.

Aaron Elson: And who was the other gunner who you said was hurt worse than you?

John Knox: Oh, that was the flight engineer [Howard Boldt]. The flight engineer flew the top turret, and he got out of the turret, got his parachute on, tried to put out the fire I guess and couldn’t. And the bomb bay doors were open. I don’t know whether he opened them or whether they never closed or what, and he was on the catwalk, and that’s where he and the radio operator were supposed to bail out, just right where the bombs went through, the doors. And he was standing on that. I’ve got a whole lot of stuff about him, a whole book about him, because he remembered every detail. And he was just ready to step off of the catwalk and fall through the bomb bay doors, and I guess he got raked by, both legs ...

Aaron Elson: Machine gun?

John Knox: I don’t even know whether those FW-190s had machine guns by that time in the war. They had, according to my book "The Log of the Liberator," they had 20-millimeter cannons, of course we knew that, and they might have even had a 30-millimeter cannon, which would be a pretty big one. But whether he got hit by machine guns or not, or whether those 20-millimeter things explode, kind of like a cannon shell, and spray shrapnel.

     After Christmas, I came back from another place where they looked at my eye, as a prisoner of war, and that’s a funny story. I was put in the bed right next to him. That’s the first time I saw him. We were side by side. And we both had a cast over our legs and all the way up our body. And we’d sit there and play cribbage, they had a little cribbage board. He was in a lower bunk there and I was in a lower bunk here. We couldn’t get in a higher bunk because we were just practically on our backs. We couldn’t even sit up because of those casts. But he was in one of those electric scooters for the last 30 years, I think.

Aaron Elson: Was that Boldt?

John Knox: Howard Boldt. He had a terrible time. And he was a big man. And having a stiff leg, the worst thing you can do, being big, is fall on your own legs. I think he had a terrible life. But he was very, very cheerful. He was the most upbeat guy. The last 25 years he called me every five, six weeks. The last time he called me was just about a month or two before he died. And he would just talk about how they’re taking care of him, and real upbeat, laughed, and he had nothing to be happy about because he had everything in the world wrong with him. His arms, finally he couldn’t use his arms because he’d used them so much to pull himself up, they went bad.

DeDe Knox: We tried to talk him into coming to a reunion one time.

John Knox: He would have loved to have gone to the reunions, but he said he just couldn’t get around.

Aaron Elson: Did he have a family? Was he married?

John Knox: Of all things, his wife died young, probably when she was fifty. Where he needed her so badly. She died early. He had a son and a daughter, but the only one that ever seemed to help him much, later on, was a grandson, would come around and see him. He had a terrible life. But he was so upbeat. He never complained. Always laughing and joking.

DeDe Knox: He used to cook very well, too. And I admired him.

Aaron Elson: Now, when you pulled the ripcord, you passed out. When did you come to?

John Knox: Hanging in a tree. A tall tree. My parachute caught in a tree and I’m dangling. And about that time three or four German soldiers drove up in a vehicle similar to our jeep, and cut me down and took me somewhere. I was conscious then. And I came to just about the time they came, so I don’t know how long I was hanging in the tree. Boldt was hanging a tree for several hours. And he couldn’t cut himself down because his leg, well, he did finally cut himself down. He had a pocket knife. And there’s a long story about that [in Boldt’s account]

Aaron Elson: Where did the German soldiers take you?
 

John Knox: I don’t know whether they took me right to the hospital where I was at, or whether they took me to a field hospital. They took me somewhere, and the doctor said he was going to operate on this knee, but he didn’t have any anesthetic. But he said there’s a, it was either a Catholic nurse or some of those nurses over there in Europe wear kind of habits, they’re like a nun, so I don’t know really which it was. He said, “She’ll hold your hand.” He said, “I’ve got to operate on your knee.” He spoke pretty fair English. And I passed out. And the next thing I knew I was in this boys’ school which they’d turned into a POW hospital.

Aaron Elson: So you passed out and didn’t feel the operation?

John Knox: See, I was pretty woozy from the time I was hit. I don’t know how much blood I lost. I think they said they gave me some transfusions. So I might have a little more German blood in me now.

DeDe Knox: When they brought him home on the hospital ship he was about 65 pounds.

Aaron Elson: Now Baynham, did he land the plane or did he bail out?

John Knox: No, he took it down to about 12,000 feet as I remember, and then they bailed out and it blew up then. I don’t know why he took it down so low. I guess he was trying to get back to Allied territory. But I guess the fire wasn’t all the way out. Why did it blow up? I never did get that story. Of course he’s the only one that can tell that. One time we were at Lemons’ house, after the first Kansas City reunion, that was about ten, twelve years ago. We went down and spent some time at Ray’s house, and he surprised us and had Baynham there. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen Baynham since the war.

DeDe Knox: And we went out of the way to see the fellow that didn’t fly that day.

John Knox: Oh, yeah, Lord. We stopped in Tampa to see Lord.

DeDe Knox: You’d seen all the rest of the crew and Jack said, I’d like to go there. And his wife says he felt so guilty.

John Knox: Oh, we did that on the way home. We’ve been to Ray’s house twice. The first time he had Jim over for dinner. He was married to his second wife. Then the next time we went there, we drove down to Houston and saw Howard Boldt. That’s the only time I’ve seen him since the war. But Ray Lemons and I went to a lot of the reunions, and his wife and my wife get along real well. We had a good time at the reunions. The first reunion we went to was, one day Ray called me up, I lived in Deerfield Beach up here, DeDe and I did, we had a nice condo. And he said “Hey, Jack, there’s going to be an Air Force reunion at Hollywood, Florida. Would you be interested in going?”
And I said “Yeah. Where’s it going to be?”
And he said, “At the Diplomat.”
I said, “That’s kind of expensive, why don’t we just stay here? We had a three-bedroom condo close to the water right on the Intercoastal. And so he came down, and his wife Jean, and we went down there, and this was an 8th Air Force reunion. We’d never heard of the 2nd Air Division. And that was 1989. 1988, something like that. And so we went down there, and came back at night, for two or three days. And that’s where we heard about the 2nd Air Division, and the following year they were gonna go to England. Jimmy Stewart was gonna be there. So we signed up for that. And that’s the year we went over to the Kassel Mission Memorial.

Aaron Elson: That was in 1990?

 

John Knox: We had a week in Norwich for the reunion, and then we went over for three or four days, for the opening ceremonies.

Aaron Elson: That must have been a very moving experience for you.

John Knox: Olen Byrd’s name was on there, and Hector Scala. And John, I can’t think of John’s last name, he was going to the University of Kentucky.

DeDe Knox: When we left to go on this trip, we had a neighbor at the condo in Deerfield Beach, she worked for the Sun Sentinel. She heard about us going over to this reunion, and she came over and said, “I’d love to interview you.” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know...” And she said, “This is something good. People like to hear about this.” So she came and talked to us and got all interested. So we went to Germany, then she called him over there, at the hotel, and did an interview. It was all over the newspaper. And then she called him two or three days later again.

John Knox: She brought a photographer and they came out to the condo before we left, and it was on the front page of the second section of the Sun Sentinel. And a whole article about us going to Germany and meeting the pilots.

DeDe Knox: And then she did a followup on it and phoned him again to see what his reaction was, and then they had another article two or three days later. She said people like to read about good things. And this was a gesture between the two countries, and it was very nice. And the bands were there. It was special.

Aaron Elson: When did you learn the fate of the three crew members who were murdered?

 

John Knox: I don’t think until about 1986. I got a letter from Walter [Hassenpflug]. Walter wrote me a letter. I think he wrote everybody a letter. He wanted to know more about, and asked me a lot of questions. That guy got all the serial numbers of every plane that was shot down, every crew member, everything.

     After the war I had a lot of trouble, mentally and physically. I was in bad shape. And I went to psychiatrists, I went through shock treatment. And the psychiatrist wanted to find out what happened, so he asked me to write a letter to Jim Baynham, and I think that’s when I first knew that we’d even gone off course. That this whole mission was a disaster. And that’s all I knew about that, I didn’t know anything about anybody being hit. I think it was 1986 when I found out about the three fellows being murdered. They started to put this stuff together, writing back and forth, and we got some information, all through Walter.

Aaron Elson: Now, tell me about your treatment in the hospital.

John Knox: It was better than you would think. It was good. No abuse of any kind. And the whole hospital was run by Dunkirk and Dieppe English prisoners of war. You know how they were trapped when France collapsed. They couldn’t get back across the Channel. So there happened to be among them a medical group. Doctors and enlisted medics and all. They were all taken prisoners, and Germany utilized them by putting them in this hospital. The doctor I had was a captain, a young captain, I don’t think he was 25 years old. He would come around and review the cases with the English doctors. And the medics, they had to do everything, wipe our butt and everything else for a while. Howard Boldt and I were in terrible shape.

Aaron Elson: Why is it that you lost so much weight?

John Knox: There wasn’t much to eat and what there was was so bad I couldn’t eat it. The bread had green mold around it and was real heavy and black and tasted like it was made out of sawdust. And the coffee was the same, ersatz coffee, I don’t know what it was made out of. It was horrible. Once in a while they’d get cheese, and I should have eaten more of that than I did, I just can’t stand cheese. So part of it was my own fault. But most of it was just there just wasn’t much to eat. Everybody lost a lot of weight. But see, I was small, I only weighed about 128.

Aaron Elson: Did you smoke at the time?

John Knox: I might have got a few cigarettes and given them to Boldt. Boldt smoked, in the next bed. If I got any cigarettes, I would have given them to him. I’m not sure. We got a couple Red Cross parcels. There weren’t many.

Aaron Elson: Did they notify the government, or the Red Cross, that you were POWs?

John Knox: Somehow they did Boldt. His wife was notified that he was a POW. But my mother, see, she [DeDe] wouldn’t have got the letter because I was not married. She never got a thing. All she got was letters missing in action. And we never, ever figured that out.

DeDe Knox: Well, the Red Cross said that the Germans didn’t notify people until they got well and went to regular prison camp or till they died, then they notified, but in that interim period they didn’t notify them while he was in the hospital.

John Knox: Three things could have happened to you in that hospital. You could have got better, and put into a stalag. Or you could have died. Or there was a repatriation list, and one boy went home a couple months after I got there. I gave him my address, and he actually wrote a couple of letters. I’ve got the letters even. I think I was on a repatriation list, but that didn’t come up very often.

DeDe Knox: Would you like a cup of coffee?

Aaron Elson: No, thank you. DeDe, how about you during this time?

DeDe Knox: I was in school. I was in college, and then I worked part time. I sold World Book encyclopedias.

John Knox: She wrote a letter to my address in England every day. From September the 27th she kept them going until ...

DeDe Knox: May.

John Knox: Every day. And eventually they all came back. But she kept writing.

DeDe Knox: I kept writing. The mailman told my mother, why don’t you tell that poor girl to quit writing, he’s probably dead. And I said, well, I’m a very religious person, and I said well, I think he’s alive somewhere, maybe with a nice family. He said, “You’re a dreamer.” I just knew he was alive.

Aaron Elson: You never doubted?

DeDe Knox: No.

John Knox: I’ve got whole albums of this, all the letters. And no one ever sees it anymore.

Aaron Elson: When you learned Jack was alive, what went through your mind?

DeDe Knox: Grateful. Happy and grateful. His mother and I were very close. She would pick me up and take me shopping and she took me to church and we were very close. We got to know each other.

John Knox: I didn’t say much in the letters because we weren’t allowed to complain or anything, so I just said that I’m doing okay, I’ve got some injuries, or something like that, and I’ll never be quite the same as before, but I miss you and hope to get home soon. I just couldn’t say much.

DeDe Knox: When he got back he was really cruel. He wanted to leave me off the hook. And I said to him, “I have been writing to you every day all the time you’ve been gone, and you are not gonna dump me!” The doctors, psychiatrists, I went to too with him. And he said that it’s better that you weren’t married because now this way Jack knows that you love him. But he was always of small stature and he was very self-conscious. But he realized that there’s more important things in life.

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