WWII Interview

By, Samuel C. McFadden

Life before the war
● Before the war my grandfather lived in North
Dakota
● He went to Minot Teachers College on FDR’s
tuition plan. He worked as a construction
worker and in return was given free tuition.
● During that time his brother graduated from the
University of Montana and went to work at
Yellowstone National Park as a park ranger.
● My grandfather left Minot and went to
Yellowstone to work as a park ranger with his
brother.
● While working in Yellowstone he
received a letter from his parents
saying that he had received a letter
from the U. S. Department of
Defence and that is was most likely
a draft notice for the army.
● After reporting to the recruiting office
in his home state of North Dakota,
he was told that he would not have
to report back for a few more days.
Instead of returning to the recruiting
office he went and volunteered for
the army air corps instead of being
sent directly into the role of a soldier.
Army Training
● After volunteering for the Air Corp he was sent to Texas to learn how to fly B-
24’s in 1941.
● One of the many privileges he had while training was that he was able to fly
the B-24’s anywhere he wanted in the United States. The trainees had to get
in a certain number of hours flying so they were allowed to fly anywhere that
they wanted on the weekends to complete those hours.
● After he completed his training he flew to Westover in Massachusetts, then to
the Azores, and then finally to England where he received more training
before he went into service.
Army Life
● While stationed in England, famous musician
Glenn Miller’s plane went down over the English
Channel and my grandfather was part of the
immediate rescue crew.
● Later he was stationed temporarily in Africa and
then was finally stationed in Stornara, Italy
● He was separated from the crew he had been
training with and was placed with a more
experienced bombing crew.
● He was the Pilot for Bombing Crew 456
● On the last flight with the more experienced
bombing crew, the engineer forgot to fuel the
reserve fuel tank.
● While flying to the bombing target in Moose
Biernaun, Germany they realized this and turned
around, unfortunately they got lost.
● They turned around and headed back towards Italy
and hoped to make it to the base. Unfortunately they
ran out of fuel and were losing altitude too fast and
had to bail out of the aircraft before they got back to
Italy.
● They ended up bailing out over Austria. When they
landed they realized that they were in the
mountainous region of the country and it was
forested and covered in snow.
Capture
● After spending the night in a snowbank wrapped in his
parachute he was wakened by an German SS officer
poking him with a luger in his face.
● Grandpa and his crew were taken to a stone farmhouse
where they were interrogated. The only one to suffer
torture was the flight engineer because after they had
beaten him badly they realized the crew new very little.
● My Grandfather said that the engineer’s back looked like
raw ground beef, it had been whipped and beaten so
badly.
● They were transported to Vienna on February 1st, 1945.
The town had just been bombed by allied forces and was
in ruins.
● After arriving in Vienna they were placed in the local jail and held under lock
and key, not because the Germans were afraid they would run away, but
because the local towns folk found out they were Americans and wanted to
kill them.
● After one or two days in Vienna they were placed in box cars and taken to the
beginning of an event known as Hitler’s Hostage March. Thousands of POWs
were marched to Nuremberg where they would be placed in a concentration
camp.
● The guards were only older men, or young children, no young men, they were
all presumably on the front lines fighting.
● My grandfather noticed that they were being fed the same thing that the
guards and SS officers were eating themselves, brown bread and lard. He
knew that the Germans must be in bad shape if the SS was eating the same
things as the prisoners.
● As they marched they saw empty fields with mounds of dirt in them, under
the mounds were potatoes. The only food the townspeople had. They were
told that if anyone tried to take even one potato they would be shot on the
spot and left by the side of the road. My grandfather said he knew one or two
men who were shot for taking food.
● The SS officers would also shoot anyone who collapsed or who could not
keep pace.
● At the beginning of the march my grandfather weighed 180 lbs and by the
end he was 120 lbs.
● One night he was sleeping in a barn when saw a chicken and decided to kill it
and eat it. When he did a SS officer walked in with the owner of the barn and
almost saw him. He pretended he was making a bed by hiding the chicken in
the hay and pretended to be fluffing the hay. If he had been seen with the
chicken he would have been killed.
● When they reached Nuremberg, they were placed in detention camp 13A Luft
on a hill outside the city.
● In the camps next to theirs was the Women's Russian army, and in the camp
on their other side was the entire Lithuanian army.
● The barracks in the camp were entirely of wood and were quite cold and
leaky.
● The RAF would bomb Nuremberg in the night and when the bombs exploded
they could see the bombers fly past the hill the camp was on.
● Anyone who would try to escape would be shot and tied to the fence of the
camps to deter anybody else from trying and leaving.
● Around the end of March, they could see the American army on the outskirts
of Nuremberg and they knew the war would soon be over.
● In April the Guards disappeared from the camp.
● Since the entire German army had left the city and retreated, the American
prisoners went into the SS armory and took weapons and other stuff as
souvenirs. My Grampa Mac took a pearl handled Luger and a linen SS Nazi
armband.
● General Patton rode into camp a day after the Germans had left and told
every U.S. POW that they were still in the line of duty and must be dressed
and well groomed. Every single man in the camp turned and walked away
from Patton.
● After leaving the camp for good the American troops went into the town and
demanded food and keys to the townspeople's cars. They then went to
France where they would be debriefed. On the way there they noticed french
citizens cheering and celebrating in the streets, he asked the convoy driver
why they were celebrating and he said it was because the war had ended.
● On Tuesday May 8, 1945 my Grandfather's 23 birthday, the war in Europe
had ended.
● When they arrived at the army base in
France they realized so many people had to
be debriefed and processed it was going to
take months, so instead of sitting around in
a army base for a month or two they decided
to take off for Paris.
● When my grandfather and his friends arrived
in Paris, the first thing he saw was a
newspaper saying, “50,000 G.I.s Illegally in
Paris.” Before he even got of the landing
platform he ran into a number of other
people who he personally knew.
● After spending almost a month in Paris he
headed back to the states and was finally
debriefed in a Florida air base.
Post War
● He stayed in the Air Corp and the U.S. Air Force for many
years after WWII. My grandfather flew the Berlin airlift in C-
47s, and during the Korean War he flew reconnaissance over
North Korea in T-6s.
● He said that one of his biggest regrets was that he was not
able to keep the B-24 from crashing and felt as if he had
wasted taxpayer money by crashing a million dollar airplane.
● Years later he found out that not only did he survive the war
but the crew he had trained with in Texas had all survived and
everyone who had bailed from the B-24 had also lived through
the war.
● He always said that he never felt as if he was hero of the war.