The following is wartime and POW account taken from the New Bern Sun Journal. I'm republishing it in its entirity because it is my belief that we need to hold tight to personal accounts like the one of Mr. Leech presented below. The generation who fought the war - be it soldiers of the Allies, the Axis, or the USSR - is getting fewer and fewer in numbers with every passing day. Both my own grandfathers have already perished, the first one five years ago, the second only last month. Soon, there will be no eyewitnesses left. We should preserve their experiences as good as we can. Thank you for your account, Mr. Leech.

WWII: A former POW tells his World War II story

I have a 43-page record of my days in the military, but I’m sure you are not looking for anything like that, so I will try to condense it into a few pages.

During the winter of 1942 I volunteered for the Army Air Corps Aviation Cadet Program. I was called up in March of 1943 and sent to the Nashville Classification Center. I requested Navigation School and was sent to Monroe, La. for pre-flight Navigation School. During the summer of 1943 we were sent to Aerial Gunnery School at Ft. Meyers, Fla. We then returned to Monroe for Advanced Navigation School. I was commissioned a second lieutenant in January 1944. We were sent to Drew Field in Tampa, Fla. for crew training. After the original crew was “broken up,” I was assigned to another crew and very shortly afterwards we left to fly across the North Atlantic Ocean to England. We were assigned to the 100th Bomb Group, known as “The bloody Hundredth” due to the high losses this group had incurred.

On my first mission, I was yanked out of bed around 5 a.m. and told I would have to go on my first mission that day. The other crews were already briefed and on their way to the planes. One crew was missing a navigator, and I was to take his place. I had no briefing and was just taken to the plane without decent maps and told we were going to Leipzig. So, my first mission was in an unprepared state with a strange crew. When we got to Leipzig, the sky was black with “flak” (anti-aircraft fire). I didn’t see how we could possibly get through, but on we flew, and got home again with no damage.

I had several interesting missions including being overhead on D-Day bombing a rail junction or bridge. As we started home, the clouds broke, and we could see the English Channel loaded with ships for the invasion. On another mission we climbed to 26,000 feet before breaking out of the clouds, and just as we broke out, another plane was coming straight at us. Both pilots banked sharply and we avoided a mid-air collision.

Two other missions are memorable for me. One day in June 1944 there was a 1,000-plane mission to Berlin. However, 125 planes did not turn to bomb Berlin, but rather flew on eastward bombing an oil refinery, and flying past Warsaw, and on to Russia. I guess this was “diplomatic” to show the Germans we could fly all the way across Germany. Seventy-five of the planes flew to Poltava, Russia, but the German reconnaissance followed them and bombed most of their planes that night. Our group of 50 flew to Mirgorod and was not followed. The next day flew to an airfield 100 miles away at sunset, where we stayed a few days. Then we flew back at sunset again and then flew to Foggia, Italy, the following day. After a few days in Italy, we flew back to England, bombing some target in southern France.

Perhaps the most memorable mission was my 20th when we flew to Merseburg, Germany, to bomb the oil refinery and chemical plant. We were knocked out of formation on the bombing run by “flak,” and then later picked off by a German fighter plane, as our fighter cover never arrived to escort us home. We bailed out at about 18,000 feet, and suddenly everything seemed to be silent and we seemed to be suspended in mid-air. I would have enjoyed the parachute ride, except that I knew it wouldn’t be fun when I got down. I was captured immediately when I landed, and was told “For you, the war is over.” After about a week in solitary confinement at the interrogation center, we were taken by train to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, Germany. We were sent to the British compound because the American compound was filled up. It was an interesting experience to live with English, Scots, Canadians, South Africans and New Zealanders for about five months. All the captives at this camp were flying officers, and as such were not permitted to work outside the camp. The Luftwaffe (German air force) was the elite group of German armed forces, and being their prisoners, we were not maltreated. We did get Red Cross parcels, which kept us alive, for the Germans did not give us enough food (the German population must have been suffering from too little food by this time). Since we didn’t work, one of our biggest problems was boredom, and the constant conversations were about food, and “The first thing I want to eat when I get home is …” As time went on, we could tell that we were getting weaker, and sports like volleyball and soccer played when we first got there were replaced by just walking around the camp. Winter came early with snow before Thanksgiving, and we used stumps and boards from the wash hut to bum for fuel to keep us “warm” (still cold).

Finally, in late January 1945, the Russians were approaching the area, so they marched us out for two days in a terrible blizzard to another town where we were jammed into boxcars and taken to a camp at Nuremburg. This march in the blizzard was the low point of the whole prisoner-of-war experience. We got a five-minute break each hour and we fell back into a snow bank along the side of the road. We were so weak and tired that it was almost impossible to get up and march again. We were at the camp in Nuremburg from early February until early April. This was crowded, cold, with even less food than before. We called the soup they gave us “Green Death” for it looked like it was made from weeds of the field. Only the march in the blizzard was worse than the period spent at Nuremburg. Finally, as the Americans were approaching the area we were marched out again for about a dozen days to Moosburg (near Munich), where we were liberated by Patton’s troops on April 29, 1945 (nine months as a POW to the day). A few days later we were flown out to Lellarve to camp “Lucky Strike.” We had to land on the way to LeHarve for fuel, and we got white bread sandwiches at the mess hall … it tasted like Angel Food cake to us after the dark, moist, dense German bread. At Camp Lucky Strike we couldn’t finish even small portions at the mess hall initially, but soon ate like pigs to put on weight again. They had GI garbage cans of eggnog spiked with a pint of liquor to encourage us to drink it to help fatten us up. We were at Camp Lucky Strike for about two weeks before getting a ship back to America. We went in convoy because all the U- boats had not yet been accounted for. In about two weeks we entered New York City harbor, and delighted in cruising past the Statue of Liberty. I was back home in another day or two, and was given a 60-day leave. I then went to a re-classification center in Miami Beach, and was sent to Ellington Field in Houston. V-J Day arrived shortly afterward, and former POWs were discharged as soon as possible.

Howard. J. ‘Bill’ Leech lives in New Bern.