By Joseph M. Horodyski
The average American airman in World War II faced some tough challenges. Products of the Great Depression, roughly 50 percent of those who fought the war came from rural America. Their average age was between 18 and 21. Individuals older than this stood a good chance of being labeled “the old man.” With the system then in place in the U.S. Army Air Force, airmen could be rotated back to the States once a full tour of 25 missions was completed. In the early days of the war, however, flight personnel had about a 1-in-30 chance of surviving long enough to complete a tour of duty.
They faced a tough, battle-hardened foe, something for which a young airman’s peacetime background provided little in the way of preparation. Allied airmen stood an excellent chance of serious injury, being shot down, falling into enemy hands, or simply going missing. Those who volunteered for flight duty were by necessity a breed apart, idealistic, and imbued with the optimism of young men. All were heroes in one sense or another, but seldom saw themselves in that light.
One of those men was a member of my own family who, after I lost my dad at a young age, became a substitute father figure that was always present in one way or another in our lives. I heard many whispered stories about some experiences he had endured during the war, but as a child I was too young to ask him about his story, let alone really understand or appreciate the answers. He was one on whom the war had left a deep emotional scar. He seldom talked about his time in the service, answering questions with only one or two words. When I saw him watch an old TV special or look at a book about the war, I came to know this distant look in his eyes that told me he still often visited these far off places in his thoughts, and that they were never far away. Something of a recluse, he never was blessed with a family of his own to share his experiences with and, in a very real sense, ours became a substitute family for him.
Searching for answers about my uncle’s career, I was fortunate enough to discover two genuine heroes, one still living at the time and the other long deceased. Both were connected by their experiences when they were very young.
Frank Chairet was born on June 27, 1923, on the family farm in Banksville, New York. He was one of four children. The youngest and only girl in the family was my mother, Florence. Family stories told of his interest in aviation from an early age. The 1930s were considered the golden age of aviation. I often heard tales of his working in the fields and stopping to stare into the sky, mouth agape, whenever an airplane flew past. To my grandmother, of old stock from an extremely rural part of Poland, airplanes were terrifying things. One local crop duster would often buzz the house while she was out hanging the wash, sending her running screaming inside, much to the amusement of my grandfather.
Frank turned 18 in the summer of 1941. After Pearl Harbor, even though he was of age, he often begged his parents to be allowed to join the service, and though my grandfather agreed, it was my grandmother who opposed the idea. With one brother having already enlisted in the Army, his help was badly needed at home, but it was rumored that it was my grandmother’s sense of foreboding that something was sure to happen to him that was the true reason.
Nearly a year went by before she finally relented. Frank joined the Army Air Force on November 5, 1942, qualifying as an aerial engineer at the camp in Walla Walla, Washington, after doing his basic training at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. He was eventually assigned as a sergeant to the 384th Heavy Bombardment Group and made his way to England as the left waist gunner of a Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress crew, known only by its serial number 42-219987 SQ, in October 1943. He had finally gotten his wish to fly.
In November 1943, he flew five missions over Europe. On the fifth mission, his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe. He was imprisoned and nearly died as a result of a botched operation days before the war’s end.
My quest to learn more about my uncle’s life led me to another extraordinary man.
I knew of the raid on which Frank’s plane was shot down from an official Army Air Forces report. The flight was a mission to bomb the submarine pens at Bremen, Germany, on November 26, 1943. Twenty-two aircraft from the 384th took part, and four were lost that day. It was the 384th’s 37th mission over Europe, and the Eighth Air Force’s 138th mission overall.
Having only the serial number of Frank’s aircraft, I began an online search to locate any images or photographs of that particular aircraft. I failed to find any, but my search brought up a link to a local PBS station in Pullman, Washington. As I wondered about the connection, I was brought to a page featuring video clips from a series of specials done three years before called World War II: Our Neighbor’s Stories, profiling various veterans from the state of Washington and recording their experiences as part of an ongoing project.
I searched until I came to a section relating to Les Amundson of Sunnyside, Washington. It listed him as a B-17 pilot and POW from the 384th Bomb Group. As I watched the clips I heard him describe getting shot down while on a mission to Bremen on November 26, 1943. It was the same mission, but with four aircraft lost that day, what were the chances it was the same crew? Though he did not mention anyone else by name, the segment included a photograph of his crew under the wing of its aircraft in the fall of 1943—the same photo hanging on my wall. I saw my uncle’s face on the computer screen.
After contacting the PBS show’s producers, I found out that not only was Mr. Amundson still alive, but he was more than happy to speak with me. I soon realized that I could not fully tell my uncle’s story without also telling Amundson’s.
Mr. Amundson, was spry at 92, with sharp and excellent recall when I interviewed him in 2012. He clearly regarded his time of service as one of the most meaningful periods of his life. It was my privilege to speak to him for a full hour.
Horodyski: Was flying something you always wanted to do before the war? How did you become a pilot?
Amundson: I was drafted about five minutes after Pearl Harbor, so I came out of the enlisted ranks, but I had already applied for the Aviation Cadet Training Program probably around October 1941. It was a great opportunity for me, as they would teach anyone who wanted to fly if they volunteered for it. I knew I was listed 1A, but I was drafted as an enlisted man, a buck private. [Shortly afterward] my paperwork finally caught up with me, my application had been approved, so I went into the aviation cadet’s program. I went to flying school in Texas, Randolph Field for basic instruction, and Lubbock, Texas, for advanced training, and then I went into B-17s, which was here in the state of Washington, Walla Walla primarily, and that’s where I picked up my crew.
Did you know Frank before the mission to Bremen? How long before had he become part of your crew?
I think he became part of the crew when we were in Walla Walla. He was rather soft spoken as I remember, performed very well, but didn’t have much to say.
He was like that most of his life. Rather quiet and thoughtful most of the time. What happened next?
They sent me to Grafton-Underwood in England, near Northampton, with my crew. We got there on the last day of the second big mission to Schweinfurt. The first one was in September, I think [actually August 17, 1943], where they lost around 60 B-17s, and the second one, when we got to Grafton, we had to sit outside our barracks while they removed all the personal belongings of those men who had been lost over Schweinfurt. Not many had come back, they lost 60 four-engine bombers on that mission, some 600 men in all. I think just three aircraft out of 21 in my squadron returned, but they were very badly shot up and they junked some of them for parts and scrap. But a month later we got enough new planes from the States to replenish the group, and on November 26 we went up again with around 200 bombers, all told, to bomb the German submarine pens.
In the report your aircraft was referred to by serial number only. Did it have a name?
I did not want to give the plane a flashy name like so many of the crews did. That just wasn’t my style.
Do you remember how many missions you had flown when you were shot down?
We were on our third one. Nobody in our group had gotten to 25 missions yet. The day we went down there were 32 four-engine bombers lost by the Eighth Air Force overall—that’s 320 men. We lost, our bomb group [the 384th], which usually flew 21 planes on a mission, a total of 1,600 men during the war, so we turned over eight times and lost 159 B-17s from just our bomb group. So we had losses.
Frank’s flight record says he was on his fifth mission when he was shot down.
That’s easily possible because sometimes a member of someone else’s crew would get sick or something and some people would be taken out of a crew that was standing down and put in another plane, so he got a couple of missions with somebody else probably.
You said you were on a mission to Bremen. Do you remember what your target was?
Supposedly the sub pens, but you know, you’re at 22,000 feet, that’s five miles up, and Bremen is on the river, these sub pens are all in a row on that river, and we were flying through clouds half the time so we couldn’t always be sure what we were hitting. We were dropping our bombs on the leader. When he dropped his bombs we all dropped ours. It was a visual thing, from seeing his bombs drop, we dropped ours. Sometimes I don’t wonder that we had a hard time hitting Germany (laughs) let alone anything else. We couldn’t see it half the time.”
Can you describe that fateful last mission?
November 26, 1943, was mission 37, to Bremen. I’ll tell you what happened. We got hit right over Bremen. Just as we approached the bombing point, a Messerschmitt came up from behind, and I saw his tracers going right over my head. He banked slightly and his fire went right through my two right engines. We were on the bomb run at that time at around 22,000 feet, and just as we dropped the bombs we were hit in the right wing root and it blew a hole out of the radio shack, wounding the radio operator very badly, and severed the control cables on the plane. Well, I had the autopilot set in at the time, which controlled the electric motors for the control surfaces such as the elevators, ailerons, and all that. I could control the plane with those buttons, but when I was looking at those buttons at the bottom of the console. I couldn’t see where I was going.
Just as we dropped our bombs a flak gun hit my rudder and right wing and blew a big hole through it. The radio operator was badly wounded with shrapnel and I didn’t think he could swim, and November 26 is no time to be swimming in the North Sea anyway. I didn’t think we would be able to cross the North Sea in our condition. So I said we can’t make it back to England in the shape we’re in, and I gave everybody the right to bail out who wanted to. Nobody wanted to do that. I said we’ll go down and take the wounded man with us because he can’t swim or bail out.
After we got hit over the target we lost our speed and couldn’t keep up with the bomb group and started losing altitude. So I bellied it in Holland near a little town called Donkerbroek. It was up in the north part of Holland, not too far from the German border. I circled a little house; I could only turn one way with two engines out on one side, so I chose to belly land it and almost went through a little brick house in the process. I had just enough flight speed to lift over the house, and I skidded on the pasture behind it, landed, and we all got out. That plane—Boeing made a good one—there wasn’t a wrinkle in it anywhere except the propellers were all bent back. So we sat down on the grass there, got our wind, and Dutchmen starting coming from everywhere. I tried to burn the plane with a thermite flare. I put it on the gas tank, near the gas cap. I finally got it lighted where it fizzed, and I told everybody to scatter.
Did it work? Did it burn the plane?
Well, no. A Dutchman came along and threw the flare off the plane. They wanted all the machine guns out of it. And we also went down with a bomb, which if it had broken out of the shackles, would have killed the lot of us, but I made a pretty good belly landing in that pasture.
Can you tell me about the bomb that wouldn’t release?
After we dropped our bombs and got hit, my engineer, Fred Lord, who was also the top turret gunner, came and told us [in the cockpit] that there was a bomb stuck, still in the bomb bay. I said to go back and see if you can put the pins back in the fuses. There’s one in front and one in back of the bomb that keeps a little propeller from spinning. When you drop the bomb with the pins out, those little propellers on each end will pop off [at a set altitude] and fuse the bomb. As long as the pins are in there to keep the little propellers from spinning, it’s safe.
Well, he couldn’t reach it, and when you’re at 22,000 feet the temperature must have been more than 40 degrees below zero because that’s where our needles stopped. You’re wearing thick, bulky gloves, and if you touched anything metal your skin would freeze off. And you’re wearing an oxygen mask. And he had to do all this without wearing a parachute, hanging over an open bomb bay five miles over the ground with that breeze blowing through there. He was being held onto by the assistant engineer the whole time, so he wouldn’t fall out of the plane.
Frank’s flight record listed him as the assistant engineer for that aircraft, as well as the left waist gunner. Would he have been the one in the bomb bay with Fred Lord?
That sounds about right. He would have been the one to take over if something happened to Lord. Fred Lord was a pretty brave man himself, but he just couldn’t get that pin in there, so we had no choice but to take it down with us, and we bellied it in. The bomb stayed in the shackles, which was lucky for us.
What do you remember about the crash?
Holland is not a very big place, and there aren’t any big places to land, but I remember I stopped just short of a drain ditch and skidded across the pasture. We all got out. I can remember an old lady standing in the doorway of the house we almost hit, holding her apron, and her mouth was bigger than the door because I was heading right for her [laughs]. I couldn’t see where I was going. My copilot said look up, and I looked up and here suddenly was this house, and I had just enough flying speed to drop the plane on the other side of it and just skidded along. That B-17 was well built. If you’ve ever been in one they look like a flying beer can, but there’s nothing frivolous about them.
Did you see Frank after the crash?
Yes, we were in a group. We all got out of the plane.
When you scattered, did he go off in his own direction, or was he in your group?
We all went in different directions. I told them not to go in a big bunch because we had been warned in England at the briefings, don’t go as a group if you’re trying to escape, go as ones or twos, no more than twos, because [the civilians] can’t hide that many people. So we scattered, all except the wounded radio man and one gunner. He walked straight down the road like he was going into town to get a beer, and he got picked up right away. He must have been in some kind of shock.
What happened once you made contact with the Dutch Resistance?
Well, the Dutch people hid me, and they treated me very well, but I was eventually captured. The navigator, Frank Faragasse, and I stayed with a Dutch family, and you have to admire those people. They could not speak English. The husband, I think, worked for the railroad, and the woman was a housewife, and we stayed up in the garret of their barn, in the town of Leeuwarden [about 15 miles from the crash site]. This is in northern Friesland, right up in the north part of Holland. The gentleman who hid me was 20 years old at the time. I was 23, and he hid the four officers of my crew because that’s the way the military wanted it. They wanted to get the officers out first because they were the ones who had the most training. But we all got captured eventually. Anyway, he visited me several times after the war. He became a doctor of economics and the head of a department at the University of Leiden. He later took me and my nephew to visit the place where I went down, and we saw many of the same places and that little house I almost went through.
Anyway, we weren’t in a group at this time. They put the four officers together out in a pasture under some plywood for about four or five days. The hole in the ground was made for two people, but there were four of us hiding there. The Dutchmen did that by orders from London. They were apparently in touch with London by shortwave. We just had to stay under that plywood.
I don’t know how long we were there in that field, but they finally came and got us in the middle of the night. We had to ride bicycles down a little trail by a ditch bank. They had a little generator on the wheel, which ran a little red tail light on the lead bicycle. There was no headlight on it. We were following this Dutchman, and that was an experience when you’re going down a dark path at night where there’s water on both sides. You have to keep from falling down, and I hadn’t ridden a bicycle since I was a kid. But we got up on the main road, and they hid the bicycles for the moment and we lay down in the grass in an open field near a canal.
Our contact saw a dim light coming toward us—the curfew was at 9 p.m. No one except military or the German police were allowed to be crossing the roads, and very little of that. In fact, I don’t recall any car even passing us when we were lying down on that grass. The Dutch were all very brave and self-sacrificing because they could have been shot for helping us. We were then taken to a few safe houses. I don’t remember how many, but we were trying to make our way to Belgium. We were moving back and forth across parts of northern Holland by train because they just couldn’t make the connections.
The way the underground worked, we were to get on a train, the four of us, sit in different parts of the car, and then pretend to go to sleep. The military police were patrolling the cars, and they looked for identity cards. Well, we had Dutch identity cards provided by the resistance, but none of us could speak Dutch, so we were at a disadvantage. So, when we got off the train, the Dutch underground man went ahead of us and bought the tickets, and we then got on a different train and had to sit in different parts of the car but always within eyesight of this agent. He would get out and say that we would meet another man and he would point out the person we were to follow after that. He then disappeared.
Well, we got to Amsterdam and got off the train. We went through security checks. The military police constantly patrolled the trains. We always had Dutch identity cards, and we wore civilian clothes.
Could you describe how you were captured?
Well, when we got to Amsterdam the agent met us there and said there would be a car to pick us up, which was unusual because there weren’t any cars running to speak of. They sent a 1928 Studebaker, and the car stopped and the guy inside said get in. The four officers got in and they drove us around the city a bit then took us to a nice building. We were told it was an undertaker’s parlor. We went into an upstairs room with nice Davenports and chairs where we were told to wait. We hadn’t been there very long when all the doors suddenly opened and an agent from the Gestapo came in along with some police guards with drawn pistols. They shouted, “Police militaire!” We were placed under arrest, handcuffed with our hands behind our backs, and taken across the street to a Gestapo prison. And this was probably the day before Christmas 1943.
Do you think you were turned in by someone?
The Gestapo had worked their way into the underground, and we were turned over to a person who was supposed to be with the underground but wasn’t. They had agents everywhere.
Can you describe what your interrogation was like?
Yes. I have the room imprinted in my mind. The Gestapo agent in charge would sit at the desk across from you asking questions, and there was a fat gal there taking dictation. Across the room stood an SS trooper with a death’s head skull on his cap, with a drawn pistol in his hand. Here was this young SS officer, a typical example of a young Aryan man, probably about 21 or 22, beautiful uniform, shiny jackboots. The SS guy came over and twisted my arm behind me. I’m sure this happened to all four of us. We were wearing civilian coats, and you know certain coat sleeves have a place on the cuff where the buttons are. The SS officer would put his finger through the hole in the sleeve, in the cuff, and twist your arm up in back of you. He would then hammer your head with his pistol butt to get you to answer the questions being asked by the Gestapo interrogator. The only answer I was supposed to give was name, rank, and serial number. That went on for quite a while, and I was getting several lumps on my head.
When they got through with me they took me back to my cell in this big old warehouse, I guess it was. They took Bill Marcollo, my copilot, down there and did the same thing to him. I later got to ask him what happened, and Bill said that this weaselly SS guy let go of his arm when they were about done with the questioning and said we were all going to be shot because we were spies, and we couldn’t prove that we weren’t. Well, there was a little truth to that because we had Dutch identity cards and none of us could speak Dutch.
So, when the interrogator rose from his seat Bill Marcollo lunged and grabbed the pistol that was lying on the desk, but it wasn’t loaded. And a good thing it wasn’t, because he would have shot everybody in there. Either the pistol was empty or he didn’t understand how to work the safety on it. That SS trooper lunged over and picked up a wooden office chair and smashed it over Bill’s head and knocked him stone cold out. Then he went over and pushed Bill’s face in with the heel of his jackboot. Broke his nose, broke all the front teeth out of him, and came close to breaking his jaw. His face had been pulverized. His nose was totally broken, it was off to the side, his eyes were black, and the whole face had turned purple from the bleeding under his skin.
Then very late, around two in the morning I would guess, they took the four of us out and lined us up in the hall. I looked at my copilot, who wore a white shirt, with dried blood covering him from his head to his feet. They said we were going to be shot as spies. Well, they had us convinced of that, and I’m telling you we believed them. They took us outside, then two riflemen put down their rifles and got on each side of us. They’d get you by the scruff of your neck, by your collar, and by your crotch and throw you in the back of a truck. They’d throw you up onto that steel plate deck of the truck with your hands tied behind you and they’d bang your head down pretty good. There was nothing gentle about it. So we rode around Amsterdam in the back of that lorry with those riflemen for a while. We soon pulled up in a big warehouse area and stopped near a door. The driver honked the horn, and a Luftwaffe guard opened that door and came out to take charge of us. I felt like kissing that guy because I felt that once we got out of Gestapo hands and into the Luftwaffe’s there might be some sanity somewhere after all.
Did you see Frank after you were captured or was he sent somewhere else?
No, I never saw him again. You see, the enlisted people were sent to different camps. I was sent to Stalag Luft 1, which is up on the Baltic, near a little town called Barth, and when I got there, there were 600 British fliers. Some had been shot down as much as three years before that. When I left, there were just short of 10,000 American flying officers there.
Can you describe your trip to the POW camp?
We made it as far Cologne, and we almost got lynched by a mob in the railroad station there. The guards had to keep pushing the crowd back, but they were losing ground, and the crowd was all set to lynch us. So the railroad people opened the door and let us down into the basement on a landing, which was sometimes used by railroad employees as a bomb shelter during raids. Then some German Red Cross ladies came and gave us each a bowl of soup. That was the first meal we had eaten for three or four days. After we got to Frankfurt and the Luftwaffe’s interrogation, we were placed in solitary cells. I was there for three days, which was a small amount of time, but you soon count up all the nail heads in the place. They would come and give you a little bowl of barley through the door once a day or so.
Anyway, we eventually got to a Dulag, which was a German transit camp. By this time they were getting so many shot-down American planes they were running out of room. They put us on a train, and after that we went to Stalag Luft 1 at Barth. I was there for 17 months which, together with my time with the underground, made it a year and a half I was a prisoner.
When we got liberated out of the Stalag, the Eighth Air Force came in and flew us out of this airdrome right near the prison. They gave us POWs a cook’s tour and flew us all over the area. By this time Germany was pulverized. You can’t imagine the devastation, and I mean everywhere.”
Did you keep in touch with any of the other crew members after the war? Did you hear from any of them again?
I kept track of my copilot, Bill Marcollo, because he lived in California, and I visited him a couple of times, but I became a very good friend of that underground man who hid me in Holland.
Are there any other members of the crew still alive?
One of them, the engineer, Frederick Lord, stayed in the service after the war and was sent to South America to train Chileans how to fly airplanes and, since he was an engineer, how to take care of them. He retired, as I did, but I retired out of the reserves, and he stayed in and retired out of active duty. But I lost track of the others. Bob Coughlin, who was the bombardier, is dead. I used to talk to him. He lived at Beacon, New York. But most of them are dead. My copilot is dead, I know that. So we’re all pretty old—I’m 95 myself.
Did everyone in your crew survive the war?
Yes. We all came back home. We met at Camp Lucky Strike in France after we were liberated, which was a transit camp for returning POW airmen after the war.
Did you do any flying after the war?
Not professionally. I had a private license, but I didn’t fly but very little because it cost too much. At that time, during my training, I enjoyed flying and I had no problem with it, but when I got out of the service, after I got liberated from the prison camp and came home, I had to go to work. We had a family hardware store there. It was kind of a one-horse town.
But anyway, I retired out of the reserves. I would take my two-week duty every year in January because I ran the hardware store and it was least busy then, and it worked out very well for me. I had a very good military pension. I got 27 very good years of active reserve time, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
So you stayed in Sunnyside for most of your life?
Yeah, I never got far. I was born in Sunnyside, and after the war I came back here to work in the family store, and I retired out of that business. I got a little one-horse farm out here just south of Sunnyside, and I married, had four children, had a good life, and I have no complaints about anything.
You went back to visit Holland after the war?
Oh yeah, I’ve been back there two or three, maybe four times.
Does it feel strange being back in that same place after so many years?
Well, I enjoyed it because the Dutch kid that originally hid us showed up in Sunnyside after the war. Well, it turned out he was an expert in finances, his field of work, and he was teaching college on the East Coast. He came to see me, and I didn’t know him from Adam. He just showed up one day, and I had no idea who he was because he had changed a lot in that period of time. He identified himself, and then I recalled him. He stayed for a couple of weeks. Anyway, he went to college and became the head of the Dutch savings bank after the war and taught at Harvard for a couple of years before he came out to see me. After the war the Dutch underground had so much money they sent many of their former agents to universities and colleges all over Holland, and he became a financier after the war. Anyway, I met some interesting people.
When you went back to Holland did any of the other civilians come to meet you? Did anyone else remember your crash?
Yeah. The Dutch underground in that area had a well-organized thing after the war, and they made a big hullabaloo out of it. They had a lot of American military equipment like Jeeps and Army trucks that must have been left there in Europe after the war, and they fixed them all up fancy and they had an underground organization that treated us just like we were royalty. They are very appreciative of what we Americans did. They took us back to places where I had been, and every little town in the Netherlands has a resistance museum of some kind where it shows the number of young people who were shot by the Germans during the war. They have their photos there. They just about decimated all the young people that were left around there, the Germans did. They were shooting people right and left.
Do you often hear from other veterans or their families?
I have had several calls from crew members and relatives who want some information because, well, what we did was a big deal at the time, and I guess it still is to many. I don’t hold anything against any people. I think that the way I was treated by the Germans was just war. That’s the way war is. I have no ill feelings toward the German people at all. I’m not the kind to hold grudges. That’s just the way I am, I guess.
Les Amundson, who passed away in 2017 at age 97, was an honorable man whose thoughts were often with those he served with nearly 70 years ago. In a sense, he straddled both worlds, the modern and the past. As for Frank Chairet, he returned home to a quiet life and to work the land. However, his sense of duty remained strong. He joined the Banksville, New York, volunteer fire department, rising to the rank of assistant fire chief before he retired in the 1980s. He finally married late in life but became a widower in three short years. He died on January 11, 1997, at the age of 74. His funeral reflected his sense of duty. While a military honor guard performed taps at the gravesite and gave the traditional 21-gun salute, his casket was borne to his final resting place on the back of a firetruck while members of the department marched alongside in their dress uniforms. For his service in World War II, he had earned a purple heart and two bronze stars.
While going through his papers after his death, I came across a letter of commendation for Frank signed by the commanding officer of the 384th, Colonel Dale Smith. It reads in part, “Although you failed to return from our mission over Germany on 26 November, 1943, I take great pleasure in being able to commend you for your meritorious achievement on that date. Your performance of duty on that important mission was superior. In spite of heavy fighter and flak opposition you coolly accomplished your duties as Waist Gunner. By your skillful airmanship and courage you enabled our Group to deal a vital blow to the enemy. It is through such acts that we are able to continually press home our blows to the enemy and assure us of ultimate victory. The courage, coolness and skill displayed by you reflect great credit upon yourself, the 384th Bombardment Group, the Army Air Forces and the Armed Forces of the United States. As commanding officer of the 384th Bombardment Group, I speak for its entirety in saying we are proud of you for your gallant action; we sincerely hope that you are safe and we shall again be able to fly with you wing to wing.”
Chairet’s luck had run out about the same time as Amundson’s. He wandered from farm to farm for the next three weeks, often sleeping in open fields, barns, or haylofts. The ground was by now frozen hard, and he occasionally found a potato or some other food that he had to eat raw, sometimes supplemented by what a Dutch farmer’s family could spare. He was passed from house to house, never staying for more than a night or two.
The Germans often posted bounties for Allied airmen turned in to them. Some families sympathized with the Nazis, while others just needed money to survive. While this was the exception to the rule, it did account for the capture of a significant number of Allied airmen. In Frank’s case, he was turned in by the family that owned the barn he slept in. The Germans came one morning a few days before Christmas, surrounded the barn, and captured him at gunpoint. None of the crew managed to make it back to England.
At the notorious Stalag 17B near Vienna, Frank almost did not make it home alive. A week before the guards fled the camp as the Allies closed in, Frank’s appendix ruptured. Whether the camp doctor botched the operation or not, a serious blood infection set in. The Germans barely had medication for their own men, much less their Allied prisoners. The infection was left untreated.
On April 8, 1945, the Germans forced 4,000 POWs at Stalag 17B to begin an extremely difficult 18-day march of some 280 miles to Braunau, Austria. The remaining 900 men were too ill to make the march and were left behind in the hospitals. Chairet was one of these. Allied medics arrived on May 3. He was probably within a day or two of dying if help had not arrived when it did. He convalesced for six long months back in the States before he could finally return home.
The mission to Bremen occurred on the day after Thanksgiving, 1943. It was said in my family that my grandmother received the telegram that Frank was missing two days afterward. It was at least mid-January before word of the crew’s capture was passed through the Red Cross, so the families endured an agonizing two-month holiday season without knowing if their loved one was dead, a prisoner, or missing. My grandmother scanned the local papers, which published casualty lists every day, looking for word of Frank or the chance of perhaps seeing him in some picture. Even after it was known he was in German hands, it was nearly May before the first letter from Frank arrived via Victory Mail. Over 50 letters from Frank arrived over the next year and a half, and my grandmother was said to have read them until they were committed to memory.
Chairet and Amundson crossed paths in 1943 and spent a few short months of their lives together. It was purely by chance I crossed paths with Amundson some 68 years later. A total of 54,700 fellow airmen failed to return home.
Author and researcher Joseph M. Horodyski resides in Brook Park, Ohio.
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