Being the Granddaughter of a Hero

From the time I was about 3 years old, Granddad lived in a small house on my family’s farm.  I spent every day at his place.  My mom would even say that his house was my first home, and my parent’s house was my second home!  I could write all day about how Granddad was the greatest man I’ve known, or about how he and I had a special relationship, but I’ll try to keep my thoughts centered around his service in the Army Air Corps in World War II.

Granddad (along with his two brothers, Jim and John) served in the military during WWII.  Granddad was the Engineer and Top Turret Gunner on a crew that flew a B17 heavy bomber.  In 1944 he married my Gran, who he met in England.  Two weeks after their wedding, in May of 1944, Granddad was shot down over Denmark.  Their plane made a crash landing, and the crew was captured.

Granddad's mother would wait two months to hear on the radio that her son was alive, and four months to be formally informed that he was a Prisoner of War.  I don’t know how long it took for Gran to know of her new husband’s fate.  These are the women from whom I have come.  These are strong and brave women, and I hope and pray that I can be like them.

When the plane came down, Granddad thought quickly and lowered the landing gear half way.  When the plane belly-landed in a field, the landing gear acted as a sort of shockabsorber.  The crew was captured and sent on tightly-packed train cars to prison camps.  Granddad ended up in Stalag Luft IV.  He was 25 years old and made a room leader in the camp where all the younger men looked up to him.  Men and women were definitely made from a seriously sturdy stock in those days.  Granddad was in the camp until February of 1945 when he and 8000 other men were forced to walk 630 miles in 83 days with no food or shelter provided.  This death march is known as the Black March.  He credits his upbringing for helping him survive.  Granddad knew that he shouldn’t take his shoes off—the swelling would have made it nearly impossible for him to get them back on.  Growing up he had watched his father chew on a small piece of a tree twig while he worked in the woods.  While on the march Granddad did this and said that it helped sustain his strength (Saylor, p.156).  He was liberated in April of 1945 and sometime after that met his wife and 8 month old son.

Growing up, Granddad and I would talk about a lot of things.  I learned from him that the Red Cross provided decks of cards to the POWs and to pass the time they would play cribbage.  He told me about the time when everybody in camp was getting dysentery and how his mother had taught him that if you ate charcoal it would cure you.  He burned his bread and ate it and never got dysentery.  He taught other prisoners what he had learned from his mother, and saved a lot of lives.

There are things that my Granddad never told me, though.  Like how he weighed 185 pounds when he was captured by the Germans, weighed 130 pounds when he started the 630 mile death march, and how he weighed 115 pounds when he was liberated.  He didn’t share with me how he was only given dried cabbage to eat for the first six weeks of confinement after he was captured.  He never told me about the people he had seen shot and killed in front of him, or how he had to fight to survive the death march. 

Granddad was a gruff, opinionated, straight-forward, intelligent man.  No doubt these personality characteristics were useful during the 11 months he spent as a Prisoner of War.  As his granddaughter, I was among the privileged to see him share his story with students of all ages in our town and the surrounding areas.  There were occasions when people would visit him and record his experiences for books they would write.  Granddad would often declare “freedom isn’t free.”  Nothing could be truer.  Towards the end of his life he would express how the numbers identifying your birth and death aren’t what are important on your gravestone.  He said it was that little dash between the years that meant something.  He said that he lived a full and meaningful life, and he wanted the same for me.  He wanted that for everybody.  I’ve never met a man quite like him, and I don’t expect I’ll ever meet his equal for as long as I live.

The information used for this post was obtained from sites linked in the body of the post, and also from Thomas Saylor's book Long Hard Road: American POWs During World War II, 2007.