MY SIX-MONTH FURLOUGH
It was the most miserable night of my life.
Hours earlier I’d bailed out of a burning B-17 somewhere over Germany. One member of Ole Worrybird’s crew was dead, another had jumped out before the rest and vanished, and our copilot had broken his leg upon landing and been hauled off by German soldiers. Now the remaining six of us sat cold and shivering in a horse stall, exchanging frightened glances. Sleep was almost impossible. German guards outside the door made sure we stayed there through the night. We cursed our bad luck, thinking about the rest of the 95th Bomb Group flying home to England and warm barracks.
Ole Worrybird was the bomb group’s only casualty that November 2, 1944, damaged by flak and then downed by a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter after bombing one of Germany’s most dreaded targets: the heavily protected Leuna oil refinery near Merseburg, Germany. The German soldiers who encircled us on the ground had us gather our parachutes and march down a country road to a small garrison. There, our captors first relieved us of anything valuable, including the watch my mom and dad had given me as a high school graduation present. They also took away our fleece-lined flying suits, leaving us with only flight boots and our regular olive-drab wool uniforms. And they removed one of the two dog tags we wore around our necks. Then we had a meal of cabbage soup—cabbage would become a mainstay for the next six months—and spent the night in the horse stall from which the horse (and only some of his droppings) had been recently removed.
The next morning, with two armed guards, we departed on what turned out to be a five-day tour of wartime Germany, traveling by an exhausting mixture of bus, train, streetcar, and on foot, before arriving at our destination: the Luftwaffe interrogation center—or Aus-wertestelle West (Evaluation Center West)—near Frankfurt. Here we were placed in solitary confinement cells to await questioning. Just before a guard pushed me into my cell, I asked him if I could have something to eat, but he acted as if he didn’t understand English.
