gkainz
Final Approach
just got this in an email
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Subject: FW: Gerry Smith WW2 pilot
Gerry Smith wanted to finish his sophomore year at the University of New Hampshire, but the Army Air Force had other plans. Smith, a member of the school's ROTC program, was ordered into pilot's training in the spring of 1943. By the following summer, he was a second lieutenant with the 12th Air Force in Sardinia , Italy . He volunteered for as many missions as he could as copilot in hopes of fulfilling his quota and returning to school. It was only a matter of time before Smith's eagerness led to trouble. He told his story to Monitor reporter Meg Heckman.
We were flying B-26s, the Martin Marauder. Two engines, Pratt and Whitney. The normal crew was six. Range was about 500 miles. When I first got there in August, we were flying all of our missions into southern France , getting prepared for a beach invasion, which happened on Aug. 15, 1944. After the invasion, we did a few support missions and then turned our attention to the mainland in Italy . In late September we moved from Sardinia to Corsica to get closer to our targets.
I was on either my 26th or 27th mission when we were shot down. The night before the mission, the whole crew was on orders to go to rest camp in Rome . The CO came in and said, "I can't ask you to fly, because you're on orders, but we need one more crew for tomorrow and it's supposed to be a milk run."
I said I'd just as soon fly. It would get us one mission closer to home. The pilot agreed. Didn't think anything of it. We'd be home in time to go to rest camp.
On the way to the target, we were picked up by an enemy fighter. We knew we were in trouble because we couldn't see our fighter cover. They were dive-bombing targets of opportunity down by Bologna . By the time they got up to us, we had been jumped by 12 to 15 German fighters. It felt like 30.
There were 18 of us. One plane was shot down on the way in to the target. We knew going in that we were going to be in serious trouble coming out. We dropped our bombs and got hit with a 20mm cannon of a Messerschmidt-109. It shot out the pedestal between the pilot and the copilot.
The copilot always rode with his hand on the pedestal, on the gas control mixtures, so if an engine got hit, you could cut the gas. The shrapnel hit me right in the wrist, just took everything out right down to the bone. The concussion of it knocked me unconscious. The bombardier slapped my face and brought me to. He got me down through the emergency hatch. He had to jump on my chute to get me through.
The pilot, the copilot, the bombardier and the radioman all got out. The tail gunner and the engineer didn't make it. They were sitting in the waist window, so we don't understand why.
On the way down, it's a newsreel of your life. You hear people say it and it's true. I thought that nobody could lose as much blood as I had and still be alive, so I must be dead. When I got a little more rational, I realized my flight suit was coated in hydraulic fluid, which is red. It looked like blood in my semiconscious state, I guess.
I landed almost in the center of a German antiaircraft outfit. They formed a circle around me and protected me from civilians. A lot of people have said the civilians wouldn't have hurt me, but would you want to write an insurance policy for someone who got shot down in Durham after he bombed Portsmouth ? I don't think so.
They put me on a truck. A wood-burning truck, by the way. They took me to a military hospital at the edge of Lake Guarda . They had me on the operating table within a half-hour of the time I landed. They cleaned up my arm and put me in a butterfly cast.
The target that day had been Rovereto a railroad yard. We did a reasonably good job on it. That night the Germans were going to ship us out, but when we got to the railroad yard, the time-delayed bombs were still going off, so they brought us back. The first day we had good cloud cover, they sent us up to Merano. The city had 100 hotels. All but one was a hospital.
Lessons of captivity
I stayed there from roughly Nov. 10 to Feb 15. Except for one pilot from Hartford , Conn. , I was the only American there. I saw him for just a few minutes down in the toilet area. At night we had Catholic sisters taking care of us. They came in one night and told me to be in the toilets at a certain time in the morning and they'd have this other American down there so we could visit.
We probably visited for 10 or 15 minutes before the Germans found us. They weren't happy.
We left Morano for Spittal, Austria , where there was a prison hospital run by the British. I was there maybe three weeks. The doctor was a POW. The dentist was a POW. When I got there I was in a room with British subjects taken at the first battle of El Alamein , in 1942. They were experienced prisoners and they taught me a lot.
They had illegal water heaters. They're simple: two pieces of metal separated by a wooden slat and a metal can with water in it. They'd put the least little bit of salt in the water. Plug that in and it will heat up in no time. Of course, it does quite a job on the current. You get all the British heating water at the same time, the lights would go down. The Germans knew what was going on, but they couldn't find the heaters.
The Brits had a signal. As soon as the guards left the guard house, everybody in camp knew they were coming for an inspection. It gave everybody time to hide stuff. There was a loose board. We took it out, put the things underneath and slid it back. Within 15 minutes after the guards left, we were drinking tea.
They had a black market. You saved your cigarettes from the Red Cross parcels and traded them for black bread or other foodstuffs. They knew how to sabotage if they were out on work details. Sugar was scarce, but urine wasn't. And if you put urine in a gas tank, it serves the same purpose as sugar. Sometime down the road, the engine is going to freeze up.
When my arm had healed enough and there was no danger for an infection, they planned to send me to a camp outside of Frankfurt . They sent three German guards and four of us: two South Africans and two Americans. I was the highest-ranking person, so I was responsible. The German under-officer always communicated with me for any command.
We walked. We went by oxcart. We went by boat. We went by truck. We went by train. We went any way we could to get up there. Things were pretty well shot up.
We eventually got up to Frankfurt , and they put us in the railroad station all day. That didn't make me happy because I knew what the American bombers could do. Around 3 p.m., the under-officer said the Americans were supposedly four days out, so we had to go back to Nuremberg .
Playing the game
We left on an early train the next morning. We'd been out maybe 20 minutes and I looked up and saw some P-47s overhead. I told the under-officer they were going to strafe the train. I'd seen those machine guns pointed the other way, and I didn't want to see them pointed at me. He wasn't going to let us off the train, but finally I told our boys to just leave. The German guards followed us, thank goodness. Fortunately, there was a little ditch that all our fellows got into. You could see the P-47 pilot's face as he was strafing the train.
We got on another train and went probably half, three-quarters of an hour and realized that one was going to be strafed, too. We went out through the window. I still don't know how we got out. They destroyed that train. The under-officer came up to me and said, "Schmitty, we walk from now on. At night."
We were looking for a railroad tunnel to get in for protection and we were strafed by another plane. He was after a riverboat and we were walking along the river. You could see the bullets coming up the black top road. As soon as we found a tunnel, we stayed in it during the day and just moved at night.
We came to a small town. The under-officer found that his family was there and he wanted to know if we'd object to staying two or three days. We said no. Anything was better than prison camp. They put us up with a farm family. He asked if we'd try to escape. I said no, we won't. My reasoning was there was safety in numbers. And we could see from being behind the lines that things were coming to an end sooner or later, hopefully sooner.
As soon as the guards left, the family brought out food. Jellies. Bread. Meat. Potatoes. But when the guards were around, there was no food. They were playing the game.
We went through Wuerzburg, a city that had been firebombed by the British. The ruins were still so hot you couldn't get too close to the foundations. It was absolutely devastated.
We got to Nuremberg . The first day we were there, I was going through the tents looking for someplace to make a bed and I heard my name. It was a fellow who was in training with me. Stood right beside me at Barksdale Field. His name was C.J. Smith. I'm G.L. Smith.
I said, can I join your group?
Everyone had a part
The answer was yes. We were in combines. You always worked through the group. One person from the combine collected rations. He got the provisions and he divided them five, six, seven ways. He always got the last portion so that it was fair. I stayed with him, and he gave me a wool sweater that I wore for years.
Every night they had radios that could listen to the BBC. You had a part, I had a part. He has a part. We meet at a certain time at a certain place and put the radio together. Somebody takes shorthand and takes the news down. The radio comes apart. Everybody disappears, so if they have a shakedown no one has a radio. Then other people would take the shorthand and transcribe it onto paper. Then other people would make copies so each barracks or tent would have a copy, so if the Germans heard you reading the news and took yours, others could fill in.
I was interrogated in Nuremberg in late March. They took my military watch away from me. They gave me a receipt for it so I could turn it in and prove they'd taken it and I hadn't sold it. Even in the chaos of war, they would write you a receipt for a watch.
The interrogator asked me about the flight. I told him I'd been so sick I didn't remember anything. Then he went and got a folder and read me everything about the flight. The headings, the speed, the mission. They just asked what altitudes we flew at, what airspeed, what we were carrying for bombs.
On Easter Sunday, the first of April that year, they said be ready to leave on 15 minutes' notice. We left somewhere around noon and I understand it took them two days to empty the prison camp. We were moving away from the American front and toward the Russian front.
That afternoon we saw a lot of flatbed railroad cars with jet engines on them. It took us a while to figure out what they were, but we had seen the ME-262 a lot. That was the first German jet. So we knew these were jet engines and our boys were dive-bombing them. Some of the boys on the end of the marching line got killed.
The next day out, the big boys bombed Nuremberg . You know the ripple effect you see of a stone in the water? We saw the vapor trails and it looked just like that going out. Like waves in a pond.
Going home
A 10-day march put us down to Moosberg, and we stayed there until we were liberated. Food was always scarce, wood fuel to cook with, always scarce. I was shot down weighing approximately 180 pounds, and when I left the hospital in Merano I weighed 120.
We made fun of the soups we got. Green death. It looked like alfalfa cooked up. We used to have a little game to see who was going to get the most cockroaches. We ate them. If you're hungry enough, you eat most anything.
The people who really didn't make it were the ones who gave up. For one reason or another, they just gave up.
We were liberated by Patton's Third Army on April 29, 1945, but I wasn't back in military control until May 5. Believe it or not, that was the leanest period of time there was. The Germans wouldn't feed us because they weren't there. The American's couldn't feed us because they had extended their line so far. I think the whole prison population in that camp was 40,000.
We had hoarded some food. You heard the nightly news, so you knew what was going on. They wanted you to stay within the compounds after you were liberated. A lot of them didn't. Some of them went out on stealing sprees. I couldn't condemn them for it, but I wouldn't do it myself.
They took us to a field hospital just outside Landshut and put us on strict rations. If you ate too much, you'd be sick. It wasn't until we'd been in the hospital about a week that they'd finally let us eat what we wanted.
They had picked up a lot of the internees at Dachau - political prisoners, mostly French people. They were so far gone nutritionally that they couldn't even tolerate IVs. That first night in the field hospital, out of maybe 16 or 18 in our tent, we must have lost at least six or seven of them.
We flew out to Paris . The most seriously injured went home first. We left Paris on May 30, 1945. We came back into Long Island and landed May 31, 1945. The pilot was good. He said, don't get out of your seats. I will fly twice around the Statue of Liberty so that you all can see it. There wasn't a dry eye on the plane.
I never got into the Red Cross chain, so my family did know I was alive until they got a V-Mail letter from me. In fact, I got a letter to them quicker than the military could. They just had so many people repatriated. When we got into the hospital in Long Island , the first thing they made us do was call home.
Smith remained in the Army until 1947, spending most of his time at Cushing General Hospital in Framingham, Mass. He underwent about a dozen surgeries on his injured arm. While recovering from one operation, Smith met an Army nurse cadet who eventually became his wife. He taught animal science and agriculture at the University of New Hampshire for many years. In 1979, he returned to Europe to retrace his route. Only then did he begin to talk about the 181 days he spent as a POW.
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Subject: FW: Gerry Smith WW2 pilot
Gerry Smith wanted to finish his sophomore year at the University of New Hampshire, but the Army Air Force had other plans. Smith, a member of the school's ROTC program, was ordered into pilot's training in the spring of 1943. By the following summer, he was a second lieutenant with the 12th Air Force in Sardinia , Italy . He volunteered for as many missions as he could as copilot in hopes of fulfilling his quota and returning to school. It was only a matter of time before Smith's eagerness led to trouble. He told his story to Monitor reporter Meg Heckman.
We were flying B-26s, the Martin Marauder. Two engines, Pratt and Whitney. The normal crew was six. Range was about 500 miles. When I first got there in August, we were flying all of our missions into southern France , getting prepared for a beach invasion, which happened on Aug. 15, 1944. After the invasion, we did a few support missions and then turned our attention to the mainland in Italy . In late September we moved from Sardinia to Corsica to get closer to our targets.
I was on either my 26th or 27th mission when we were shot down. The night before the mission, the whole crew was on orders to go to rest camp in Rome . The CO came in and said, "I can't ask you to fly, because you're on orders, but we need one more crew for tomorrow and it's supposed to be a milk run."
I said I'd just as soon fly. It would get us one mission closer to home. The pilot agreed. Didn't think anything of it. We'd be home in time to go to rest camp.
On the way to the target, we were picked up by an enemy fighter. We knew we were in trouble because we couldn't see our fighter cover. They were dive-bombing targets of opportunity down by Bologna . By the time they got up to us, we had been jumped by 12 to 15 German fighters. It felt like 30.
There were 18 of us. One plane was shot down on the way in to the target. We knew going in that we were going to be in serious trouble coming out. We dropped our bombs and got hit with a 20mm cannon of a Messerschmidt-109. It shot out the pedestal between the pilot and the copilot.
The copilot always rode with his hand on the pedestal, on the gas control mixtures, so if an engine got hit, you could cut the gas. The shrapnel hit me right in the wrist, just took everything out right down to the bone. The concussion of it knocked me unconscious. The bombardier slapped my face and brought me to. He got me down through the emergency hatch. He had to jump on my chute to get me through.
The pilot, the copilot, the bombardier and the radioman all got out. The tail gunner and the engineer didn't make it. They were sitting in the waist window, so we don't understand why.
On the way down, it's a newsreel of your life. You hear people say it and it's true. I thought that nobody could lose as much blood as I had and still be alive, so I must be dead. When I got a little more rational, I realized my flight suit was coated in hydraulic fluid, which is red. It looked like blood in my semiconscious state, I guess.
I landed almost in the center of a German antiaircraft outfit. They formed a circle around me and protected me from civilians. A lot of people have said the civilians wouldn't have hurt me, but would you want to write an insurance policy for someone who got shot down in Durham after he bombed Portsmouth ? I don't think so.
They put me on a truck. A wood-burning truck, by the way. They took me to a military hospital at the edge of Lake Guarda . They had me on the operating table within a half-hour of the time I landed. They cleaned up my arm and put me in a butterfly cast.
The target that day had been Rovereto a railroad yard. We did a reasonably good job on it. That night the Germans were going to ship us out, but when we got to the railroad yard, the time-delayed bombs were still going off, so they brought us back. The first day we had good cloud cover, they sent us up to Merano. The city had 100 hotels. All but one was a hospital.
Lessons of captivity
I stayed there from roughly Nov. 10 to Feb 15. Except for one pilot from Hartford , Conn. , I was the only American there. I saw him for just a few minutes down in the toilet area. At night we had Catholic sisters taking care of us. They came in one night and told me to be in the toilets at a certain time in the morning and they'd have this other American down there so we could visit.
We probably visited for 10 or 15 minutes before the Germans found us. They weren't happy.
We left Morano for Spittal, Austria , where there was a prison hospital run by the British. I was there maybe three weeks. The doctor was a POW. The dentist was a POW. When I got there I was in a room with British subjects taken at the first battle of El Alamein , in 1942. They were experienced prisoners and they taught me a lot.
They had illegal water heaters. They're simple: two pieces of metal separated by a wooden slat and a metal can with water in it. They'd put the least little bit of salt in the water. Plug that in and it will heat up in no time. Of course, it does quite a job on the current. You get all the British heating water at the same time, the lights would go down. The Germans knew what was going on, but they couldn't find the heaters.
The Brits had a signal. As soon as the guards left the guard house, everybody in camp knew they were coming for an inspection. It gave everybody time to hide stuff. There was a loose board. We took it out, put the things underneath and slid it back. Within 15 minutes after the guards left, we were drinking tea.
They had a black market. You saved your cigarettes from the Red Cross parcels and traded them for black bread or other foodstuffs. They knew how to sabotage if they were out on work details. Sugar was scarce, but urine wasn't. And if you put urine in a gas tank, it serves the same purpose as sugar. Sometime down the road, the engine is going to freeze up.
When my arm had healed enough and there was no danger for an infection, they planned to send me to a camp outside of Frankfurt . They sent three German guards and four of us: two South Africans and two Americans. I was the highest-ranking person, so I was responsible. The German under-officer always communicated with me for any command.
We walked. We went by oxcart. We went by boat. We went by truck. We went by train. We went any way we could to get up there. Things were pretty well shot up.
We eventually got up to Frankfurt , and they put us in the railroad station all day. That didn't make me happy because I knew what the American bombers could do. Around 3 p.m., the under-officer said the Americans were supposedly four days out, so we had to go back to Nuremberg .
Playing the game
We left on an early train the next morning. We'd been out maybe 20 minutes and I looked up and saw some P-47s overhead. I told the under-officer they were going to strafe the train. I'd seen those machine guns pointed the other way, and I didn't want to see them pointed at me. He wasn't going to let us off the train, but finally I told our boys to just leave. The German guards followed us, thank goodness. Fortunately, there was a little ditch that all our fellows got into. You could see the P-47 pilot's face as he was strafing the train.
We got on another train and went probably half, three-quarters of an hour and realized that one was going to be strafed, too. We went out through the window. I still don't know how we got out. They destroyed that train. The under-officer came up to me and said, "Schmitty, we walk from now on. At night."
We were looking for a railroad tunnel to get in for protection and we were strafed by another plane. He was after a riverboat and we were walking along the river. You could see the bullets coming up the black top road. As soon as we found a tunnel, we stayed in it during the day and just moved at night.
We came to a small town. The under-officer found that his family was there and he wanted to know if we'd object to staying two or three days. We said no. Anything was better than prison camp. They put us up with a farm family. He asked if we'd try to escape. I said no, we won't. My reasoning was there was safety in numbers. And we could see from being behind the lines that things were coming to an end sooner or later, hopefully sooner.
As soon as the guards left, the family brought out food. Jellies. Bread. Meat. Potatoes. But when the guards were around, there was no food. They were playing the game.
We went through Wuerzburg, a city that had been firebombed by the British. The ruins were still so hot you couldn't get too close to the foundations. It was absolutely devastated.
We got to Nuremberg . The first day we were there, I was going through the tents looking for someplace to make a bed and I heard my name. It was a fellow who was in training with me. Stood right beside me at Barksdale Field. His name was C.J. Smith. I'm G.L. Smith.
I said, can I join your group?
Everyone had a part
The answer was yes. We were in combines. You always worked through the group. One person from the combine collected rations. He got the provisions and he divided them five, six, seven ways. He always got the last portion so that it was fair. I stayed with him, and he gave me a wool sweater that I wore for years.
Every night they had radios that could listen to the BBC. You had a part, I had a part. He has a part. We meet at a certain time at a certain place and put the radio together. Somebody takes shorthand and takes the news down. The radio comes apart. Everybody disappears, so if they have a shakedown no one has a radio. Then other people would take the shorthand and transcribe it onto paper. Then other people would make copies so each barracks or tent would have a copy, so if the Germans heard you reading the news and took yours, others could fill in.
I was interrogated in Nuremberg in late March. They took my military watch away from me. They gave me a receipt for it so I could turn it in and prove they'd taken it and I hadn't sold it. Even in the chaos of war, they would write you a receipt for a watch.
The interrogator asked me about the flight. I told him I'd been so sick I didn't remember anything. Then he went and got a folder and read me everything about the flight. The headings, the speed, the mission. They just asked what altitudes we flew at, what airspeed, what we were carrying for bombs.
On Easter Sunday, the first of April that year, they said be ready to leave on 15 minutes' notice. We left somewhere around noon and I understand it took them two days to empty the prison camp. We were moving away from the American front and toward the Russian front.
That afternoon we saw a lot of flatbed railroad cars with jet engines on them. It took us a while to figure out what they were, but we had seen the ME-262 a lot. That was the first German jet. So we knew these were jet engines and our boys were dive-bombing them. Some of the boys on the end of the marching line got killed.
The next day out, the big boys bombed Nuremberg . You know the ripple effect you see of a stone in the water? We saw the vapor trails and it looked just like that going out. Like waves in a pond.
Going home
A 10-day march put us down to Moosberg, and we stayed there until we were liberated. Food was always scarce, wood fuel to cook with, always scarce. I was shot down weighing approximately 180 pounds, and when I left the hospital in Merano I weighed 120.
We made fun of the soups we got. Green death. It looked like alfalfa cooked up. We used to have a little game to see who was going to get the most cockroaches. We ate them. If you're hungry enough, you eat most anything.
The people who really didn't make it were the ones who gave up. For one reason or another, they just gave up.
We were liberated by Patton's Third Army on April 29, 1945, but I wasn't back in military control until May 5. Believe it or not, that was the leanest period of time there was. The Germans wouldn't feed us because they weren't there. The American's couldn't feed us because they had extended their line so far. I think the whole prison population in that camp was 40,000.
We had hoarded some food. You heard the nightly news, so you knew what was going on. They wanted you to stay within the compounds after you were liberated. A lot of them didn't. Some of them went out on stealing sprees. I couldn't condemn them for it, but I wouldn't do it myself.
They took us to a field hospital just outside Landshut and put us on strict rations. If you ate too much, you'd be sick. It wasn't until we'd been in the hospital about a week that they'd finally let us eat what we wanted.
They had picked up a lot of the internees at Dachau - political prisoners, mostly French people. They were so far gone nutritionally that they couldn't even tolerate IVs. That first night in the field hospital, out of maybe 16 or 18 in our tent, we must have lost at least six or seven of them.
We flew out to Paris . The most seriously injured went home first. We left Paris on May 30, 1945. We came back into Long Island and landed May 31, 1945. The pilot was good. He said, don't get out of your seats. I will fly twice around the Statue of Liberty so that you all can see it. There wasn't a dry eye on the plane.
I never got into the Red Cross chain, so my family did know I was alive until they got a V-Mail letter from me. In fact, I got a letter to them quicker than the military could. They just had so many people repatriated. When we got into the hospital in Long Island , the first thing they made us do was call home.
Smith remained in the Army until 1947, spending most of his time at Cushing General Hospital in Framingham, Mass. He underwent about a dozen surgeries on his injured arm. While recovering from one operation, Smith met an Army nurse cadet who eventually became his wife. He taught animal science and agriculture at the University of New Hampshire for many years. In 1979, he returned to Europe to retrace his route. Only then did he begin to talk about the 181 days he spent as a POW.
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