An American Hero This is the story of my Uncle Rick, a World War 2 American Hero; 1st Lieutenant Richard C. Crabtree, United States Air Force P-47 Pilot for the 523rd Fighter Squadron’s 27th Fighter Group. The real life story began on the morning of November 25th 1944, written in the P.O.W.’s own words of his shoot-down, capture and subsequent imprisonment. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- November 25th 1944 was a particularly nasty morning at the field near Tarquinia, Italy. A heavy, overcast sky threatened rain, it seemed at any time. My spirits had been buoyed shortly before by my appointment as Assistant Operations Officer of the 523rd Squadron. Since two Squadron leaders were on rest leave and another was down with a bad cold, I was to be the leader of the morning’s mission…an 8 plane effort. We took off and formed up over the field without any problems, but were in the soup as soon as we started to gain altitude. We flew through two or three layers of cloud cover before breaking out in the clear at an unusually high altitude for our kind of missions…probably about 15,000 feet as I recall. Our primary target was a railroad line near Ferrara in the Eastern end of the Po River valley, Northeast of Bologna. Cloud cover was 10/10ths under us as we flew North over the Appenine Mountains. Having seen similar conditions before, I thought there might be just one layer of cloud cover with openings, when we got over the valley, and indeed this proved to be the case. When we eventually flew out our time and heading and were over the valley at about 15,000 feet, I estimated that the under- cast was at 8,000. Because of the cloud cover I was not at all certain of our position. We went into line astern and dove for an opening in the clouds, through which I has seen the ground. The bottom of the over-cast was actually about 6,000 feet…rather low , to say the least, for a dive bombing run by eight ships, but a very nice altitude for many different calibers of anti-aircraft fire. Sure enough, the stuff started to come up at us from the ground more or less continually, as I stooged around looking for terrain features to pinpoint our position. The ground fire grew hotter and heavier as we tried to locate ourselves. Eventually I abandoned trying to find the primary target, and sought a target of opportunity in our immediate vicinity. A bridge over the Reno Canal looked good enough, and we went for it. Because of our low altitude we were forced to make a shallow approach, which we did. The bombing effort was probably ineffective, due to the shallow dive and the intense ground fire that we were encountering with disturbing frequency. Prior to the dive, one of the pilots called out some trucks as a straffling target on a road along the canal. I told the mission that we would form up after the dive and go down to hit the trucks. Staying “on the deck” thereafter to pick off any other targets that showed up on our way back to the West coast of Italy. Once over the Tyrrhenian Sea we would turn South and head down the coast to Tarquinia. Visibility was limited to about two miles and the ceiling in the valley appeared to remain about 5 or 6 thousand feet. After the dive I had turned about 900 in our 3600 rendezvous circle when my engine started a violent vibration… to the point where all the instruments were shaking so much they were literally unreadable. At the same time the engine was losing power rapidly and the inevitable loss of altitude started to take place. I radioed that my engine was failing and I might have to bail out. I believe it was my wing man who reported back that there was “a big smear of oil on the bottom of the fuselage.” Just about then the vibration stopped… and so did the propeller… which left me with two options... belly-in, or bail out… neither of which were very enjoyable to contemplate in the precious few seconds left for the decision. One look at the terrain made me opt to bail out. The valley was flat, but broken up into many small fields with large trees around them, and large flood-prevention dikes running this way and that. Either the trees or the dike would have brought about a rather sudden stop to the belly-in option. I had mentally rehearsed the bail-out procedure many times, and a good thing it was that I had. Time was now extremely limited. Complete loss of power in a P-47 resulted in that aircraft assuming the gliding angle of a house brick. In turn this would limit the belly-in option to whatever was dead ahead… trees, a dike, the canal, etc… none of which represented an appealing landing ground… and probably would have represented my grave. Jettisoning the canopy, while I trimmed the plane right wing heavy, I went over the left side and pulled the rip cord as soon as my rear end cleared the cockpit. By that time I was getting very close to the ground, hence my haste to get the chute blossomed. The chute streamed under the rear horizontal tail plane which whisked over my head, as the plane went into a steep, diving turn to the right, and practically split-S’d into the bank of the Reno canal. I breathed a sigh of relief as I swung a few times in the chute with the ground coming up very rapidly… however, when the plane went in, a phenomenal event occurred. A wing broke off, guns pointed up, and a 50 caliber “ran away”, with the tracers arcing up and over me. Not enough that the Germans had shot me down, but now my own aircraft seemed to want my hide also. My landing site was a deeply plowed field. My left ankle took all the shock of the landing, and as a result was badly sprained. I got out of the chute harness as quickly as possible, and tried to run for some kind of a hidy-hole… anywhere. The problem was that I couldn’t run… my left foot wouldn’t obey. I kept tripping myself up and falling. At the same time I saw a soldier running down the bank from where his truck was stopped… about 100 or 200 yards away. I knew then that the jig was up, this part of the game was over, and a new chapter was about to open. The German soldier made his way to my seated position, and rammed his rifle into my stomach to get me up and walking. When he pulled his rifle back, I saw that he had stuck a greased rope in the barrel, probably to keep it from rusting. In any event, if he’d tried to shoot me he would have succeeded in blowing the bolt backwards through his own head as soon as he pulled the trigger. For a couple of seconds, I contemplated trying to take him down, since he was very slightly built and then I thought (at that time, being 21 years old) an old geezer of 65 or 70 years. I laughed and pointed to his rifle barrel, whereupon he looked rather chagrinned, shouldered his rifle, reached down and helped me to my feet as he said “das Gottverdammit kreig”. He was old enough to have been my grandfather, and just about as cagey. He had spread the drivers of the trucks we were going to straf along the road in the prone position, with rifles at the ready. If I had tried to take him I would have been mince meat. Similarly, if the flight had made a straffling pass at the trucks, I would probably also have been mince meat. He helped me walk across the field, up the bank and into his truck where another soldier kept an eye on me while we drove a short distance to some kind of a German headquarters unit in a house in the small village of Argenta. That night I was placed under guard in a barn, and managed to sleep in the hay. They fed me and the next morning started me on the next part of the journey… to Verona. We crossed the Po River on a flat barge, guided by an underwater cable and powered by a large outboard motor. There were two small trucks and another command car on the barge in addition to the one in which I was a reluctant passenger. The barge would have made a juicy target for someone to shoot up, and we all sweated out the fifteen minutes it took to cross the river. The two German G.I.’s guarding me were both members of a paratroop unit… seasoned veterans who had earned a leave back in Deutschland. We arrived in Verona late that night, and typical of most armies I guess, my guards’ orders were apparently confused. They took me to several different units but each commanding officer sent them to another place. My ankle was up like a balloon and hurting by that time. We stopped in a square, and I sat down on the curb while they had a council of war trying to figure out what to do. Apparently they decided that since my ankle was gimped up, they could dump me at a hospital. I soon found myself in a big German Army hospital, where the only guarded facility was the ward in which their battle fatigue and discipline cases were kept. It was a real snake pit, and I climbed to a top bunk in a corner of the large room, fearful of the reaction of some of the other inmates, if they became aware of their new roommate’s immediately previous activities. After two days in there with apparently being decided about my fate, I banged on the door and yelled until an orderly came, who summoned an officer. After a broken English conflab with him, I was taken to a large private villa, which apparently was a collecting depot for P.O.W.’s. While in the hospital ward a former paratroop top sergeant befriended me. He had jumped in just about every German paratroop drop, beginning in Norway, including the Netherlands, Greece, and Crete… and been wounded numerous times. The number and extent of the battle scars on his body was hard to believe. Totally disenchanted with the war, and fed up with combat, he arrived at his own “peace” and left the front lines near Bologna. Unable to show proper papers while walking through that city, he tried to get away, but had been shot down by the Military Police. In his subsequent court martial he was spared execution for desertion apparently because of his exemplary record, but had been broken to buck Private and sentenced to serve at the front without leave… forever. His latest wounds had just about healed, and he knew he was headed back into the lines. He was 28 years old and his father was a ranger in the Black Forest where he had grown up. He felt he was headed to his death or mutilation since he would never be able to leave the front if he could walk. After several days in the basement cell of the villa, two guards came and we started the journey to Germany. The train was a combination passenger and freight… mostly passenger cars with hundreds of soldiers aboard. The two guards and I shared a compartment with a German Major. One of the guards was named Werner Waernecke. A native of Hamburg, he had been a professional wrestler in civilian life before the war. He had also been a member of the National Socialist Party since 1934 and looked like a pug perfectly capable of terrorizing anybody or thing he came against. The train made its way through the Brenner Pass and Innsbruck to Frankfurt on Main. We arrived in Frankfurt in the middle of the third day and Werner saved my skin from a bunch of civilians who were being evacuated after a bombing raid. They wanted to get their hands on this “Luft Gangster” but Werner’s orders were to get me to Dulag Luft, the interrogation center in Oberursal. His simple solution to the problem involved levering a round into the chamber of his Schmeizer and leveling it at the crowd whilst he yelled at them to back off. We ducked between the cars and hot-footed it to the side of the rail yard, where we boarded a trolley car that went the 25 or 30 kilometers to Oberursal. About three weeks before I was shot down, a “Secret” report came through the Group, which had originated from a German Officer who deserted to our side in Italy. He had been at Dulag Luft as an interrogator since the inception of the place as the main interrogation center of the Luftwaffe. It was a soft berth for he and his family, but it all came to a halt when Germany, short of manpower, formed up a number of units and replacement personnel for the Infantry from rear echelon personnel. He found himself in the mud in Italy, and didn’t like it… arriving at his own private peace by coming to our side and spilling everything he knew about the interrogation procedures, techniques and personnel at Dulag Luft. Now I found myself in the same place he described, subject to the same interrogation procedures by the same people described in his report. What a stroke of luck it was for me to be quite certain of the next move that would be made, the next “character actor” that would conduct the next interrogation session… and not least, to remember his statement that physical violence had not been used on captured airmen at Dulag Luft. German intelligence knowledge about the 27th Group was surprisingly good, up to a point. They seemed mystified by our move back to Italy from France, and were curious to know whether we were being equipped with under-wing rockets, among other questions. Clinging to the memory of the “no physical violence” statement, and establishing a daily regimen of activity in the 9’ X 5’ cell, I endured 21 days of solitary confinement interspersed with interrogation sessions, before they gave it up and shipped me to a large P.O.W. collecting camp at Wetzlar. After a few days at Wetzlar the journey to a P.O.W. camp commenced. Transportation was a train of freight cars, each having 25 or 30 P.O.W.’s in one half and 4 guards in the other, with a pot belly stove in the middle. After four cold, miserable days we arrived at the small town of Barth, on the Baltic Sea, 35 kilometers East of Rostock. Stalag Luft I was located four kilometers out of town, on a peninsula of land, and housed 10,000 prisoners in four barracks compounds. As I recall, a captain Williams the only P.O.W. from the 27th in Luft 1. He vouched for me to command inside the camp, after I’d been there for a couple of weeks. Rations were short but adequate during the first two months, January and February, 1945. We subsisted on ½ Red Cross Food parcel per man per week, plus 1/7th of a loaf of “Sawdust” bread and whatever else the Germans threw into the compound, such as potatoes, rutabagas and occasionally some horse meat. The heating stove in each room had to be rebuilt by the inmates to raise the firebox so cooking could be done on the stove top which was fashioned from flattened tin cans. The rooms were 18 X 20 and housed 24 men, on platform bunks tiered three-high. Conditions worsened in March as Germany started to fold up. The Russians advanced on Berlin. The Western front moved up steadily. The German rail network really started to come apart, etc. We were on starvation rations during March & April, and the Russians liberated the area on May 1st. The scenes in the town of Barth as it came under the early Russian occupation were incredible. The unit that came through that area had fought all the way from Stalingrad, and were out for one thing… REVENGE!! They got it too, in the form of rape, pillage and loot. The Allied administration, led by Col. Hubert Zempke, started negotiations with the Russians for evacuation of the camp. A lot of Russian foot-dragging apparently commenced, since there was no assurance that we would be moved West. Rather, the rumor mill had it that we were headed East. Consequently, three of us commandeered a gaff-rigged 32’ sloop at the local yacht club in Barth, and started for Sweden, 60 miles North, across the Baltic Sea. When the Russians fired across the open sea, we hastily aborted that mission. After finally convincing our new captors that we had been American P.O.W.s of the Germans, we escaped from in the middle of the night and made our way 20 or 25 kilometers back to camp. Several days later the Russians, apparently with reluctance, allowed a division of the 8th Air Force to commence evacuating us from the small airfield outside Barth. By that time the camp held almost 12,000 prisoners. In a masterful operation all were flown out, 35 or 40 to a B-17, in 36 hours. The plane I flew in landed at Rheims, France. From there we went by train to Camp Lucky Strike on the channel coast near Le Havre. Two weeks later I boarded a transport and we returned to Boston. My All-Expense-Paid tour of Europe had come to the end. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 41 years later, in 1985, my wife Dorothy and I returned to Oberursal, and toured Dulag Luft, then Camp King, headquarters of a U.S. Army Transportation Battalion. The building my solitary cell was in had been converted to the post bowling alley. The former interrogation building was now post headquarters and the former German headquarters building was the post library and Post Exchange. Personnel in the camp were fascinated to learn that I had come through there as a P.O.W. in 1944, and for me the whole experience was like reliving a dream… no, a nightmare. Epilogue: In 1985, while living in England, Dot and I, accompanied by a roommate/shipmate from the camp, returned to Barth, at the site of Stalag Luft 1, as well as the yacht club from which Beemen, our traveling companion, and I had taken the sailboat. The buildings of the camp were gone; a memorial plaque marked the location. The people in the club building were amused and fascinated to see us and hear our story… except for one heavy-set guy at a table in a corner of the room. One of the men pointed him out, saying “Messerschmidt pilot.” That was before Germany was unified. The little town of Barth was, and remains, living testimonial to the abject failure of the Communist system. The town was exactly as it was in 1945. Little or no construction had taken place, and the buildings had in fact deteriorated a great deal. The streets were empty of traffic, and the shops had next to nothing for sale. The people were shabby, and for the most part looked very glum. I also returned to Barth in November, 1991, after the unification of Germany, while on business there. The shops had started to fill up with goods, the people looked and dressed better, and conditions in general had improved. However, a number of the small houses in town had been abandoned. The former occupants had gone to the West seeking work. Since they didn’t own the places in which they lived, it didn’t matter a bit to them to simply abandon their houses in an effort to find a better life. 1st Lieutenant Richard C. Crabtree was awarded the (2) “Distinguished Flying Cross” and the “Oak Leaf Cluster” for his valor and dedication he showed for his country. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LETTERS FROM CAMRADES The following information are transcripts of various letters written and addressed to Rick’s parents, Herbert and Florence Crabtree mailed to their residence in Chicago, Illinois during Ricks tenure as a P.O.W. At the time they had no idea if they would ever be reunited with their son. Written December 18th, 1944 (APO 650 Postmasters NYC), by Major A.C. Commanding Robert C. Brown, 525 Fighter Squadron, 27 Fighter Group: Dear Mr. Crabtree, This letter is written by me both as Rick’s Commanding Officer and as Rick’s friend. I was fortunate in getting to know him soon after I transferred to this Group in July, and was even more fortunate in having him as one of my officers when I took over the Squadron in September. Parenthetically, the first combat mission I flew with this Group was under Rick’s leadership the first time he led the Squadron into combat. It was, as anyone who knows Rick would expect, a spectacularly successful mission made under adverse weather conditions. It was also the mission which earned him his first Distinguished Flying Cross. (Perhaps you may not have heard he has been awarded an Oak Leaf Cluster to his DEO for a mission led on November 18th.) During our stay together in Paris I came to appreciate his fine qualities even more, and you can think of no one who would have made a more delightful companion. Some time ago Rick reached the point where he could have returned at least temporarily to the zone of the Interior. Rick to our great pleasure, elected to remain where he could be most useful to the Armed Forces and his country and took over the position of Assistant Operations Officer. It was my intention to groom him for positions of increasing responsibilities, positions for which his flying ability and mental alertness fully qualified him. As to Rick’s present whereabouts and physical well-being, I am personally quite optimistic – despite War Department cautions not to be too optimistic in letters such as these. Rick successfully bailed out of his plane behind enemy lines in Italy when his aircraft engine was damaged by flak. He was uninjured when he left his aircraft. His parachute opened safely, and when last seen his fall gave every indication of being successful as those made by many of us, including myself, in the past. (To avoid giving away the position where a pilot lands, the remaining aircraft do not remain in the vicinity, so no further details are available.) We have packed Rick’s personal effects for shipment according to existing law and regulations. Any inquires in regard to these effects can be obtained from the Quartermaster General, Washington, D.C. Doubtless the War Department will communicate with you regarding his personal affairs. Based on experiences of other pilots who have bailed out in enemy territory, the worst that would be likely to happen to anyone as resourceful as Rick would be to become a Prisoner of War. And fighter pilots falling into enemy hands in this theatre are being well-treated under the Geneva Convention. Many of us expect to see Rick show up here as fit as ever whenever our troops occupy the area in which he landed. We have ample reason to hope that he, like so many others, will be successful in hiding out with friendly natives until our troops arrive. Yours sincerely, Robert C. Brown Robert C. Brown Major, A.C. Commanding. Written January 16th 1945, Headquarters Twelfth Air Force Office of the Commanding General (APO 650, U.S. Army) by John K. Cannon, Major General, U.S. Army Commanding. (Addressed to Rick’s Mother) Dear Mrs. Crabtree, On November 25th, 1944, your son, 1st Lieutenant Richard C. Crabtree, was leading a flight of eight P-47’s on a fighter-bomber mission against a target near Argento, Italy. After completing the attack, he reported over the radio “My engine is running rough. I’m getting out.” He then pulled up to about two thousand feet and was seen to leave the aircraft. His chute opened and he descended in the vicinity of Argento. His aircraft crashed and exploded on the bank of a canal near the same place. The failure of the engine in Lt. Crabtree’s airplane was probably due to enemy anti-aircraft fire which was encountered prior to the attack. Your son is now probably a Prisoner of War. If you have not already heard from him, you should so hear in the near future. Occasionally it requires considerable time for information to trickle through from enemy Prisoner of War camps. Lt. Crabtree was on his 112th mission when forced to bail out. He has had 207 operational combat hours, and has been decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross and one cluster and the Air Medal with five clusters. He is a grand young man of whom you may well be proud. Sincerely, JOHN K. CANNON, Major General, U. S. Army Commanding
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 11:46:04 +0000
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