I
stood up, gathered the chute in my arms and started down the hill.
It was a struggle through the snow. I could see a small cabin,
apparently unoccupied, that looked like a woodcutter’s mountain
shelter. It was about a half-mile down the slope near the base of
some trees. When I reached it I rolled up my chute and placed it in
the cabin. There were no furnishings or signs of habitation.
Something was choking me. It was my throat mike. I placed it with
the chute and started down the mountain. I didn’t really know
where I was going, but down seemed logical. One snow drift was so
deep I tried to slide down using my body as a sled. That didn’t
work. I tried rolling sideways but that hurt my arm. Nothing to do
but get up and struggle. Eventually the terrain leveled out. I came
upon a long row of cut logs and human foot prints. Enemy foot
prints! I reached the end of the stacked logs and could see a
mountain stream and across the stream was what appeared to be very
large building that looked as if it might be hotel of some kind. I
was very thirsty. I worked my way down to the edge of the stream and
drank from it. A small bridge was nearby. When I crossed it I could
see a small house between me and the hotel. My left arm was numb,
but the bleeding had stopped. I paused to consider what I should
do. I knew I was on the north side of the Alps and escape would
require finding a railroad or road to get south over the Alps into
Yugoslavia. Neither a railroad track nor road were in sight. I
learned later that Joe Metz and Chester Szymanski were out for two
days before they were captured.
I was sure I
had been seen. While my wounds did not seem to be serious, my
instinct for self-preservation said get some medical help. Not
knowing what to do, I approached the small house. There were two
young children playing outside the door. I hoped they would never be
in the situation I was.
I knocked on
the door. A lady opened the door. I must have presented a terribly
disreputable appearance with my flying suit shot full of holes and
dried blood all over it. Surprisingly, she invited me into the
kitchen at the right of the entrance way. The floor was unfinished
wood and scrubbed spotless. The radio was playing some
unrecognizable music and a picture of Adolf Hitler was on the wall.
She said nothing and did not seem to be concerned with my presence.
She went about her housekeeping. I sat in the chair for a few
minutes and shortly I saw a man coming from the hotel with a rifle in
his right hand. He wore a heavy white sweater. I stood up. He went
around to the back of the house and appeared at the door and pointed
the rifle at me. I refused to put up my hands. Instead, I held them
out from my side to show I had no weapons. He searched me and
removed my escape kit and my machine gun head-space gauge. I didn’t
have my .45 pistol. I had quit carrying it some missions before. It
was too heavy.
We walked the
few yards to the hotel. Inside, a lady was on the telephone
preceding every call with “Heil, Hitler” and concluding with the
same “Heil, Hitler”. Except for the greetings, I could not
understand a single word. It must have been about 1:00PM. She
finally made it clear to me that some of my crew would be there about
4:00PM. I sat on the front porch steps in the afternoon sun waiting
for the unknown. The man with the rifle was nearby. About 4:00PM
some of the crew appeared from the south from further up the valley.
Walking were the navigator, Lt. Cooke; the bombardier, Lt. Kauffman;
the co-pilot, Lt. Niemeyer; the radio operator, Joe Hamel; and
Bruce Hall, the ball turret gunner. Lt Braum, the pilot, was on a
straw padded sled covered with some blankets. The right side of his
face had some marks that looked like those caused by parachute shroud
lines. In front of the sled was another with a crude wooden cage
containing a calf. The whole thing was pulled by one horse. There
were two or three civilians with white armbands that said
“Landwacht”. They were obviously trained to round up shot-down
flyers. We started down the mountain trail. We had gone only a
few feet when it was clear that Lt. Braum was in a great deal of
pain. He had been shot through the right leg between the knee and
the ankle. I remembered my parachute harness had a first aid kit
containing a morphine syrette. I was able to make it plain to the
Germans that I needed that kit. They escorted me back to the hotel
for the kit. I had seen the training films and the instructions on
how to administer the morphine between the heart and the wound. The
graphic portrayal of the needle being inserted and the bulge under
the skin as the morphine entered made me wonder at the time how I
could ever do a similar thing. When the time came, it was easy to
do. Alleviating Lt. Braum’s pain was necessary. I gave him the
shot in his right thigh. Afterwards, he seemed to quiet down.
We walked down
the mountain trail. It got dark and Lt. Cooke began to sing a few
bars of a song containing the words: “and we’ll heil, pfft,
heil, pfft, in the fuhrer’s face” giving the appropriate Bronx
“pfft” cheer. I told him he might make these guys mad. Lt.
Niemeyer told me about how he made parachute jumps from a bi-plane
before the war. He said he climbed out on the wing, held on to a
strut and pulled the rip cord. If the chute opened away he went. If
it failed to open, he climbed back into the cockpit.
About
9:00PM we reached level ground a few farm buildings began to appear.
There were no lights visible due to the black out. Suddenly, three
or four black overcoated uniformed figures approached. They were
wearing the red and white arm bands with the hated black swastikas.
These were the first uniformed enemy I had seen. My ridiculous
thought was this is just like in the movies! We were escorted into
the small town of Molln, Austria, about 25 kilometers southwest of
Steyr.
We arrived at
the center of the village and were taken up stairs to a small room.
We were interrogated by a German officer in an army green uniform.
He looked a great deal like my grandfather Pringle. He took down our
names. This may be the penciled list of names contained in the
missing crew report because the names coincide exactly with the names
of those of us who walked down the trail to Molln. The others left
the room and I was escorted into another room and left alone. A lady
bandaged my left wrist and gave me the first food I had since
breakfast. It was three rolled up thin pancakes with jelly inside
and covered with powdered sugar. I was ravenous. The lights were
left on and I was alone. About 2:00AM I was escorted down a long
straight flight of stairs to a car. I believe it was a Volkswagen
because of its size and interior seating arrangement. They had
removed the right front seat and made a stretcher for Lt. Braum who
was moaning again in pain. I sat in the back seat behind the driver.
We set off on the narrow mountain road. After about an hour, we
arrived at a civilian hospital in Steyr. I clearly remember the
octagon shaped lobby.i
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| Steyer Hospital 2012 see octagon entrance [added] |
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| Steyer Hospital 1930 [added] |
Lt. Braum and
I were placed alone in a large room with several beds. A civilian
came in, presumably to act as a guard, and spent the night. He said:
“You know you bombed me out today”. I did not know what to say.
The next day
we moved to a smaller room. Every afternoon, an elderly nurse with a
cap that had DRK (Deutche Rot Kreuz) took our temperatures. I would
snuggle down in the covers to raise my temperature as much as
possible so as to delay what ever was to come. Lt. Braum asked
repeatedly for materials to write a letter. None were provided. One
afternoon some x-rays were brought in. I looked at them and they
clearly showed the break in his right shin bone. It looked as if the
break was caused by a gun shot. He asked me if he should look at
them, and I said I didn’t think he should. I do not know how many
days were in the hospital, probably not more than five when one
afternoon, a Luftwaffe officer entered the room and asked for Sgt.
McClure. He said: “Get dressed, you are coming with me”. I put
on my bloody, beat-up flying suit and my heated boots and said
good-bye to Lt. Braum. I was the last of our crew to see him alive.
My prediction on our first meeting had been fulfilled.
Outside, I was
placed in a small car in the back seat between two Luftwaffe
officers. The other sat in front beside the driver. As we drove
along I tried to remember the names of the towns on the road signs.
They were all so unfamiliar. Shortly we arrived at the Luftwaffe
base Horsching near Linz. I was taken into a large office. In the
corner was a large desk with an equally large German officer, who,
judging by the weight of the silver braid on his shoulder, was at
least a Colonel. Leaning against the window frame was a younger
Luftwaffe officer. He had a metal shield decoration on his upper
sleeve with the inscription “Narvik” on it. It must have been
awarded for his participation in that operation in Norway. The
Colonel became very irate speaking only in German. The only thing I
could understand was that he was cussing out the United States with
vigor. He indicated the young officer was the one who shot us down.
Nothing productive that I could see came from this meeting. In
retrospect, he may have been berating me for our shooting up his air
force when our wheels were down.
I was taken to
a solitary cell. I asked the guard how long I would be here. He
indicated about midnight by pointing at my watch. I was skeptical
but at midnight I was taken out and joined with some other Americans.
We were transported to a nearby railroad station. On the wall were
posters showing German soldiers in aggressive poses. The civilians
ignored us. Finally, we boarded a train to an unknown destination
for a scary ride.
It was scary
because I had read in Reader’s Digest magazine before I entered the
service about a train in Germany. It had to do with a locomotive
making sparks in the night and it was about taking Jews to a
concentration camp. I was startled to see this train making the same
sparks in the night. The glowing coals lit on the ground and glowed
momentarily. This is what I had read about! Where were we going?
What was going to happen to us! It puzzles me to this day how anyone
can deny the existence of the concentration camps when I had read
about them in the Reader’s Digest in 1942.
During the
night we got off the train and were confined to a small waiting room
on a platform between tracks. There was about a dozen of us. I
don’t recall if any of my crew were in the group. Because of the
blackout the platform lights and the waiting room lights were dim and
shielded from view above. We boarded another train in the same kind
of third class four wheel passenger car we had been in. They had
hard wooden seats and gave us a very bumpy ride. During a cloudy and
gloomy day we stopped at a fairly large station. Factories were
visible. None seemed damaged by our bombing. The platforms were
busy with people and soldiers in constant movement. The German Army
Military Police were identified by a large silver plate suspended
over their chests by a heavy silver chain. No one seemed to pay any
attention to us.
The only food
provided was some German dark brown bread which at first we used to
wipe the condensation off the windows. This wasn’t too smart
because we soon found out that was all we had to eat during the trip.
Later that day the sun came out and our spirits lifted. We got off
the train at Bad Homburg near Frankfurt-Am-Main with our Luftwaffe
guards. We were fortunate they were with us. Several hostile
civilians began to gather around us. One German with a briefcase
walked around us several times muttering in English: “You blood
thirsty bastards”.ii
i
In 1956 I made a personal visit to the hospital at Steyr to
determine what happened to Lt. Braum. When I entered the lobby the
octagon shape of the room was shockingly familiar. I explained the
purpose of my visit in broken German to the young lady attendant.
After 20 minutes she returned with our hospital records.
Unbelievable! There were our names, ranks and serial numbers. I
found that Lt. Braum had been transferred to a Luftwaffe hospital at
nearby Wels, Austria a few days after I was taken away. Still no
answer as to why he had not survived the war.
[ Christian Arzberger provided the pictures of the base at Wells, I remember my Dad saying that Lt. Braum was killed in an American bombing raid. The Missing Aircrew Report MACR 3538 explains that Lt. Braum was killed in a raid at Wells. The first picture shows the airfield at wells in 2012. The bomb damage picture shows the airfield at the top and the rail yard at the bottom. The picture clearly show strings of bombs going long from the rail yard on to the base. The airfield and the rail yards exist today.]
[ Christian Arzberger provided the pictures of the base at Wells, I remember my Dad saying that Lt. Braum was killed in an American bombing raid. The Missing Aircrew Report MACR 3538 explains that Lt. Braum was killed in a raid at Wells. The first picture shows the airfield at wells in 2012. The bomb damage picture shows the airfield at the top and the rail yard at the bottom. The picture clearly show strings of bombs going long from the rail yard on to the base. The airfield and the rail yards exist today.]
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| Air Field at Wells - rail yards below |
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| Wells after bombing raid on rail yard. |
ii
In 1965, while stationed at Lindsey Air Station in Wiesbaden,
Germany with the Headquarters of the United States Air Forces in
Europe, (USAFE) the family took a Sunday ride to nearby Bad Homburg.
I could not identify a single building by the railroad tracks.
Either my memory was wrong, or Bad Homburg had been totally
destroyed later in the war. I believe the latter more likely.