I flew 18 missions before D-Day from our base in Matching Green, England. I was the tail gunner on a B-26 Martin Marauder twin engine bomber. The B-26s were pretty, cigar-shaped planes. We could carry as many bombs as the B-17s and B-24s, but we couldn’t carry as much fuel. As a result we flew shorter, but more frequent missions. Guess it all evened out in the end. After D-Day, I was stationed in Roye-Ame, France, just outside Paris.

Our plane was shot down on December 23, 1944, during the Ahrweiler Mission. We were sent out to bomb a bridge that was on the main supply route for the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. We were attacked by 70 German fighter planes, including the newest Focke-Wulf 190s in a "company front" attack. They would get on the tail of our formation, four planes deep behind us, and be nearly impossible to shoot down. We lost 18 out of 36 planes that day, six guys in each plane, including me. Most people don’t realize that the Army Air Force suffered more casualties in Europe than the Marines encountered in the South Pacific.

When we flew a mission we took only our escape kits and our parachutes. The escape kit had caffeine tablets to help keep us awake, German money and a fake passport with our picture. When they took those pictures they told us to "look like you’re mentally disabled." I also had some cigarettes and a lighter.

When our plane got hit, I knew I had to bail. I went searching for my chute, and found it near the camera hatch. It had gotten wet and then frozen. When I jumped, the leg strap got caught on the gun sight and I was banging against the fuselage, on the same side as the burning engine. It singed off my eyebrows and lashes. I bent the gun sight, about a big around as your finger, with my hands to disentangle the strap. I sure couldn’t do that today, but I was only 19 then, young and strong. I pulled my ripcord, but nothing happened because the chute was frozen. I ripped it open with my bare hands.

I landed in a tree amidst the dense Ardennes forest. It was so dense; I could only make out more trees and three round-shaped lakes from my perch. This forest is so dense that historians and forest rangers are still finding wreckage of World War II aircraft in it. My own plane was found in 1998 and I have a piece of it, along with an armor piercing 50-caliber bullet from the wreckage. I also discovered just recently that I landed near a small village called Eisenschmidt, and the locals call those small lakes I remember so well, crater lakes. In the ‘70s a plane was found in the forest with the remains of the pilot, still in the cockpit. When I cut myself down, I fell and broke my ankle. I spent a couple of days in the forest, in deep snow. It was really cold. I had to ford streams covered in ice, and I fell through one of them. Water got inside the linings of my boots and my feet froze. I didn’t make it to safety and was captured on Christmas Day. I was luckier though than both our pilot and bombardier who perished when we were shot down. The top turret gunner, a young skinny, little guy, died from a heart attack, exactly one year after the crash.

When I was captured I was put into an ambulance and driven to a prison. American fighter planes came along and strafed the ambulance and killed the driver. This really made the guard mad and so he beat me up on the way to the POW camp. They interrogated me, and like all good soldiers, I gave them my name, rank and serial number and nothing else. I told the guy interrogating me that he knew more about the plans of the American Army Air Force than I did. He agreed.

After a while I was loaded into a boxcar along with other prisoners and made a four day and four night trip to Stalag IIIA at Lukenwald. During this train journey we never stopped, we had nothing to eat and we had to endure being strafed and bombed by the Americans during the day and by the English at night. We’d fall asleep on the top of a pile of men’s bodies, and wake up on the bottom of the heap!

At one point during my incarceration they wanted to amputate my feet, but I wouldn’t let them because they had no anesthetics. They told me I’d pass out right away and then not feel it, but I declined their offer. Though my feet still bother me, they’re better than no feet at all.

The Russians finally liberated us, but they sure didn’t want to feed us.

Of course we hadn’t had much to eat the whole time we were captive. We got a piece of bread known as "sawdust bread" because it really did have sawdust in it. Occasionally we’d get a small potato or two, and maybe some very thin cabbage or green pea soup. The pea soup always had larvae in it and to this day I still hate pea soup. The Russians did want to give us guns and have us go out to fight the Germans, but we weren’t interested.

Each liberated American earned a Russian soldier $50, so they started marching us east toward Russia. We decided we didn’t want to go to Russia…we wanted to go home! So five of us took off, trying to get back to the advancing Americans.

We marched back to our former camp and hid in a German house when German SS Troopers stormed the camp. We thought for sure the SS would kills us, but they didn’t. They were only interested in escaping the Russians, so we convinced them they should surrender to the Americans and not let the Russians get them. They scrounged up some civilian clothes and we told them to follow us, but not too closely, and we would lead them where they could surrender. A Russian patrol found us before we found our troops. They shook us down, but since we’d been prisoners, we didn’t have anything for them to take. We finally convinced them we were Americans, and they let us go. The SS Troopers were not so fortunate. The Russians shot them all, instantly recognizing the German boots they wore with their civilian clothes.

By this time, it was a state of mass confusion. We’d pass German soldiers, Russian soldiers, and finally one day we came upon a 6 by 6 truck outside Magdeburg. The driver thought we were Germans! We asked him for food and all he had were some D bars. We took them even though they were the least preferred ration of all.

We finally made it to Camp Lucky Strike in Le Havre. All I wanted was a shower. I’d only had a single shower during my entire incarceration and I was covered with lice. They’re not just bothersome...they bite! To this day I hate crawling things. We all got deloused and went on to Rheims.

I went home on the Liberty ship as a POW. It took eight days to get to New York. I’ll always remember the sight of the Statue of Liberty when we got home. I was home on recuperation leave when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. If the bomb had not been dropped, a minimum of a million soldiers would have died in an invasion of Japan. It was the right thing to do.

I was at a dance with my girl, now my wife of 54 years, when the war ended. The streets of Des Moines were filled with celebration. It was a great, great feeling.