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If you are a former Prisoner of War or a next of kin of a POW, we invite you to sign and leave your email address so others that come may find you. Please mention camp, compound, barracks and room numbers if possible.
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Following the war, Chuck earned his BSEE at American University in Chicago and spent the next 30 years with several aerospace companies in various defense related engineering positions. Chuck ended his career as Manager of Product Marketing for Northrop/Grumman Aircraft Corp. after 23 years of service. Chuck is an Associate Member of the Colorado Springs Chapter of the Daidalians. He is also a life member of the American Ex-Prisoners of War and the American Disabled Veterans.
Here is Chuck's story:
Our navigator, Lt. Herman Engel, could see the heavy clouds of smoke caused by our heavy bombing in the Hamburg area. He was able to set a coarse towards Wesel on the Rhine where the British Paratroopers had landed just the day before. I guess that we never really expected to make the Rhine but we did not have many options to consider. We were 220 air miles from friendly territory and we had flown about 50 miles in our crippled condition. Then a third engine over heated and had to be feathered. It was now evident that Do Bunny was not going to make it back. On our sixth mission we had experienced an emergency landing with our skipper at the controls. We had been on a typical bombing mission to Worms, Germany when we lost a single engine to flak over the target and a second engine became marginal. Jones maintained formation until we were over friendly territory. Rather than risk the 120 mile run to England over the icy North Sea, he elected to make an emergency landing. We landed on the only runway we could find, which was a PSP mesh fighter strip on the outskirts of Brussels, Belgium. Needless to say, we ran out of this short runway in a hurry and settled in the Belgium countryside. Our B-24, Pregnant Lady, was written off as salvage as two engines were completely burned-out during landing. The successful emergency landing was a great confidence builder for the crew and especially for our pilot. We were indeed grateful for his judgment and piloting skills. The crew had all discussed how difficult our chances of survival might be should we have to bail out over enemy territory. In those days, late in the war when the conflict was going badly for the Germans, the civilians and certain military personnel like the SS and Gestapo were reported to be killing downed Allied airmen. This fact came straight from our Air Force Intelligence at mission briefings. The best chance, if possible, was for the crew to stay together as a group with the hope that the Luftwaffe or the regular German Army would take prisoners of war. This previous emergency landing had a great deal to do with the decision to ride out any subsequent crash landing in enemy territory. Another primary factor in our current situation was the extreme low altitude reached after we lost the third engine. It appeared doubtful that we could survive a bailout under all of these conditions. Lt. Jim Mucha, our copilot, selected a suitable flat area directly along our flight path to set down our crippled B-24. We landed wheels-up in a field only 500 yards from downtown Soltau, Germany. Jones struggled with the controls just to keep the wings level. The crew had assumed its ditching positions. All went well until a wing dipped into the ground as we lost speed and then all hell broke loose. When that happened the plane just broke apart.
The three crew members in the waist, the tail gunner, the waist gunner and the ball turret gunner were able to jump out of the plane onto the ground. The cockpit was split wide open so the pilot and copilot were able to crawl out of the wreckage. All five were immediately confronted by angry town folk with pitchforks. Then two SS Officers appeared on the scene and the five were run into town and up against the wall of the Mehr Hotel. They were eventually taken control of by a German Officer in the Wehrmacht Army who was in charge of the Soltau Riding Academy. He had his soldiers and the manpower to take control over the civilians and the SS. He took the crew to the Riding Academy and locked them in the stables. The remaining four of the crew, the Navigator, Flight Engineer, Nose Gunner and I, the Radio Operator, were trapped on the flight deck and still in the wreckage. We were pinned there when the top turret broke away from the airframe and lodged in the flight deck well. The Navigator and the Flight Engineer were unharmed and finally got out after German soldiers axed their way into the fuselage. The Nose Gunner and myself were not so lucky. The top turret had pinned our legs which were broken. The soldiers, including the town Burgomaster, spent considerable time and effort to hacksaw and pry the top turret enough to set us free. They put us on a horse drawn cart and took us to the town hospital where our legs were set and put in soft casts. We then rejoined the other crew members that were now locked up at the Riding Academy. The next morning troops from the German Luftwaffe arrived from a nearby ME--262 air base took over. Lt. Grauenhorst, the Riding Academy Officer, was relieved because he had been worried about the SS Officers and his confrontation with them the day before. We stayed at the air base one night and were then transported to Penneberg, an interrogation center for captured airmen. After four days in single solitary cells (the kind of stuff you see in movies) we were taken to Hamburg and shipped in railway boxcars, with other recently captured airmen, to Stalag Luft I Prison Camp in Barth, Germany. To this day, my copilot, Jim Mucha complains about having to carry me on his back through Hamburg but I counter by reminding him that I took all of the rocks thrown as we were paraded through the streets. In late May 1945, the Russians liberated our prison camp. Just before the Russians overran the area the Prison Commandant ordered an evacuation and forced march of all prisoners. Colonel Zemke, our senior camp officer, refused to give the order to march. The next day revealed that the German guards had fled during the night and left us to our own device. Colonel Zemke, along with Lt/Col. Gabreski, went out to meet the Russians to make sure that they didn't mistake our camp for a German area and shoot up everything in sight. These Russian troops were the advanced units with a search and destroy mission. Our senior officers made arrangements with the Russians to contact the Eight Air Force and advise them of our situation. It was then just a matter of time before the 8th Air Force flew into the airfield in Barth to get us the hell out of there. All 7,717 American Airmen from Stalag Luft I were flown to tent cities in France to join 90,000 other liberated Americans to await transport back home. Some prisoners had been incarcerated for nearly four years during the US Army Air Corps 1,000 day War over Germany.
A young 12 year old German boy, who was a member of the Hitler Youth Corps, watched our crash landing. Gerhard Bracke was that boy's name. Today Mr. Bracke is a University Professor and a part time WW II aircraft historian. It was during this past year that he made it his goal to find out what happened to the crew in the bomber that he watched as it crash landed. Many of the details, that we never knew from the German viewpoint, were revealed by Brache's research. He was instrumental in locating the survivors of that crash still living today, and brought us together for a 50th anniversary reunion in Dayton, Ohio during the fall of 1995. Gerhard Bracke flew in from Germany to join us for the celebration. The German Officer in charge of the Soltau Riding Academy was a Lt. Joachim Grauenhorst. He watched our B-24 pass directly over the academy and thought it would explode any minute. But there was no explosion nor any sound of any crash so he assembled several soldiers and took off to find where the bomber had gone down. In locating the wreckage, he directed all his attention to freeing the trapped crewmen inside. He then went into the town square where the others were herded. An SS Officer was inciting the angry German civilians and Lt. Grauenhorst initiated an argument with the SS Officers as to who had the authority to take the prisoners. It was probably only because Grauenhorst had several soldiers with him under his command that he was able to take those crew members back to the Soltau Riding Academy stables. He probably saved all of our lives. The reunion in Dayton was a huge success. Gerhard Bracke arrival from Germany was a complete surprise. Of the nine original crewmen, five are still alive. Four of us made it to the reunion; Paul Jones, the pilot; Jim Mucha, the copilot; Herman Engel, the navigator; and me-- the radio operator. Mr. Bracke brought additional information he had gathered on our crew such as the official missing crew reports from other bombers that had seen the four bombers of the 448th Bomb Group go down that day. Bracke also had the biography of the German pilot, a Lt. Rudolf Rademacher, who shot us down. Rademacher had 118 victories in the ME-109 and 8 more in Luftwaffe's hottest jet, the ME-262 ( At least we were not shot down by an amateur). Lt. Rademacher survived the war only to die in a glider crash in 1953 about 10 miles from where we crash landed. Poetic justice. Bracke also brought a personal letter from Lt. Grauenhorst who still lives in Soltau and a letter from the Mayor of Soltau inviting our crew to a City Of Soltau reunion in 1996. A highlight of Bracke's research was his uncovering of five photos of our crashed bomber that laid in the archives of the Soltau newspaper since 1945. What a treasure to acquire after all these years. So, that is my story. Four planes shot out of the sky in minutes and only our crew survived intact. With hundreds of holes in our B-24, no one was seriously wounded or killed. Why didn't the plane burn or explode in flight or upon crash landing. Was it just luck or was God the "tenth man" man in our crew that day. --- I would like to think that he was.
The Crew
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