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Larry Wolfe

In 1940 my name came up for the military draft. Because I was just starting my Junior year in college, they let me finish the year and deferred my draft until July of '41. Because so many of my friends were going into the military, I would have felt bad if I couldn't have gone.

Because of my mathematical skills, my local draft board encouraged me to enroll in the coast artillery. But as a 1AO, conscientious objector I felt more comfortable serving my time as a medic. My training lasted the better part of a year at Camp Lee, Petersburg, Virginia. Because the war was just starting, and the military lacked training personnel, I was asked to help train. I became a permanent cadre and trained three different groups of medics. That was a rewarding experience.

One day I noticed an Air Force flyer on the PX bulletin board advertising a need for navigators. Navigation was kind of a new word to me. I knew a little about it but not too much. After consulting with a friend I put my name on the list and was immediately put on a troop train that took me to Santa Ana, California. There I spent three days, eight hours a day, taking qualifying examinations, medical exams and so forth. Every time I was given an opportunity to identify what I wanted to be, a pilot or whatever, I stipulated navigation. When I finished with my physical, the flight surgeon said, "You're about four pounds under weight." I didn't know what that meant. He said, "I'll tell you what to do. Go home and eat four pounds of bananas, drink a gallon of water and hurry back." I think he was pulling my leg.

I entered the preflight training course in Santa Ana. After preflight, I went to Mather Field in Sacramento for flight training, which I completed in October, 1942. My first assignment was to heavy bombardment in Pocatello, Idaho. I'll never forget it, when we pulled into the Pocatello station I wondered where in the world I was. A number of Indians were standing around in full dress uniform.

In Pocatello I was finally assigned to my 10-man crew. We spent the first month training in B-17's. From there we were sent to Casper, Wyoming for a month and then on to Salina, Kansas for a month. After a short stay in West Palm Beach, Florida, we were on our way to England and the European theater.

Onward to England

To reach our destination we had to fly the South American coast to Ascension Island and then up the African coast. We didn't have enough fuel to go straight across the ocean. On our way, between Natal and Ascension Island, someone sabotaged our aircraft and we had to crash land in Portuguese Guinea. We were leading a group of thirty-six B-17's, but we were not in a tight formation. The Colonel, who was on board our aircraft, was our provisional group commander. Amazingly, we crashed landed in a rice patty, which was unheard of in those parts. We lost our plane, all of our clothing and what little belongings we had with us. We were interned twenty-nine days by the Portuguese. It cost our government about a quarter of a million dollars and a B-17 to get eleven men out of Portuguese Guinea.

Finally we were able to fly out of there on a Pan American Clipper to Liberia. There we were put on a military aircraft and flown up to Marakesh, which is up close to Dakar. And from there we made it to England.

In England we were given another plane and were assigned to a 306 bomb group, the 367th squadron (there are four squadrons to a group). The 367th was known as a clay pigeon squadron because their mortality rate was pretty high.

Bombs away

Our first mission was down to St. Nazaire, France to the submarine pens. I was so excited about being up there I didn't do much navigation because I was looking for flake and 190's. I knew pretty much where I was but I didn't do the type of navigation that we normally did when we were in training. We dropped our bombs somewhere around 22 - 25,000 feet and quickly dropped to within 800 feet off the water to keep under German radar.

After flying for quite awhile, the pilot wanted an ETA (estimated time of arrival) for England and I gave him one. Just about that time I looked up and saw land right in front of us which always makes a navigator over water feel good. It makes a pilot feel even better because they get nervous over water (at least back then). Since we knew the coastal defense wouldn't know who we were, we shot up the customary flare and got back the proper response. So, there we were, fifteen B-17's flying in at low level, and all of a sudden everything broke loose. We thought, "What is wrong with these people? Why are they shooting at us?" It didn't take us long to realize they were Germans. We had unknowingly flown in over Brest Harbor at 800 feet. Later we learned we had been blown off course by a 60 mile-an-hour cross wind we knew nothing about.

Being a navigator, I probably should have known about the cross wind, but when you are in a formation you follow the pilot. I was not number one so I had to follow the lead plane. The lead plane had a colonel and a lead navigator on board and they were not aware of it either. We lost three aircraft right there, shot right down in the water. All six of our enlisted crewmen were hit, plus myself. I had Plexiglas all through my face, but it finally stopped bleeding. When we landed in England our plane was so damaged, it coasted to the end of the runway and collapsed. All the lights were on, the horns were blowing, we were out of oil, out of water, everything was gone! We couldn't have ditched in the water because we had six wounded men, and we would have lost every one of them.

Two hours after landing we lost our engineer. He had been hit with a 20mm cannon (both front and back). With my medical training I was considered the medical officer on board the aircraft. It was worse than any butcher shop I had ever seen. It was terrible. We buried Clifford the day after we landed. Clifford was 36 years old, too old to be in the Air Force. He was a good engineer so we fought hard to keep him.

Our next assignment

After landing on the English coast we were transported to our air base to get another plane. This was our third B-17. The six enlisted men were not able to fly for some time because of their injuries. Some came back and were assigned to other crews. One man on our crew turned out to be one of the heaviest decorated flyers in the 8th Air Force because of his bravery. We were out of commission for two weeks because of the loss we took there at St. Nazaire.

Once we got our new plane I had to calibrate all the compasses so they would be in sync. None of them matched so there were deviations. When you gave the pilot a heading he would look at his chart and see what the deviation was and that's what he would fly. We spent a lot of time group flying formations. We went on a few diversionary raids that helped us learn how to fly in formation flying over enemy territory. This occasionally brought up German fighters that we got into dogfights with (which doesn't make sense to me to this day). Why would we send a four-engine bomber to fight with a one engine fighter? We suffered a few losses there, but nothing too bad because we weren't weighted down with bombs.

A few weeks later our next raid took us over France. Later on we went to the Kiel submarine pens. Submarines were really wreaking havoc with our shipping in the Atlantic so we did a lot of submarine pen bombing toward the first part of the war. At Kiel our ball-turret was shot out--the electronics were shot out. When we returned we red-lined the plane, which meant we wouldn't fly again until it was repaired. We went to bed that night thinking we would be going to London the next day on a 48-hour pass.

But the next morning at 2 a.m. the alarm sounded. By 4:30 a.m. we were eating breakfast. We were assigned to the same airplane we had the day before and we were told it had been repaired. We took off for Dillenhaufen, another submarine pen which almost retraced the steps of the day before. At about 22,000 feet, I don't know exactly what happened but I did notice that we had a change of course. Of course, I was following the pilot. We noticed a radical change and later on found out that Dillenhaufen was closed in, so we couldn't bomb it. They redirected us to Helgaland, which was an island airbase, way off the coast.

About that time we noticed a German fighter off to the side, out of firing range, and then we noticed more fighters converging on our formation. Our plane was located in what they called "purple heart corner" which meant we were the lowest and last aircraft over the target with our group. The next thing we knew the German fighters started ganging up on us. I just happened to look out the front window in time to see an airplane climbing underneath the nose. The bombardier was firing off to the right and I just tapped him on the shoulder and motioned and he raised his gun. In our aircraft, every fifth shell in our guns was a tracer. You could see pretty much where it was going. You could see the tracers clearing the aircraft coming up underneath us. He noticed our ball-turret was not working so he came up underneath us.

The next thing we knew our plane was wobbling around and going out of control. The pilot was fighting to keep the plane steady. The alarm went off to head for the hatches. We were forty miles off the coast of Germany at 22,000 feet. But when it's time to bail you don't think about where you are. You just react. If we had stopped to realize we were bailing into the North Sea, we might have hesitated. But there was no time for that because when I jumped I was on fire. Our whole aircraft was ablaze. When my feet hit the air the wind just sucked me right out of the plane. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind not to pull the rip cord right until I was away from the bottom of the plane. 

I remember pulling off my head set . . . We were 40 miles off the coast when I landed in the North Sea.  That’s not a heated swimming pool, believe me. It’s cold. I was in there an hour and 20 minutes. As I was coming down, I could see some little ships but I didn’t know what they were. They turned out to be fishing vessels.

They got to me after about an hour and 20 minutes. The seas were so rough—they would lose track of me and I would lose track of them. The next thing I knew when I came to, I was face down in their net of fish. They had pulled their fish net up.

I bailed out at 11:30 a.m. and at 7:30 p.m. they had taken me to a German hospital close to the Danish boarder. I was there for six weeks. Then they put us on a train and took us to the Gestapo headquarters in Frankfurt where we went through interrogation. 

While I was in the hospital I recognized some of the crew who had been picked up. My bombardier, my pilot, who died about two weeks later from his burns, and an enlisted man, Richard Harris. He replaced the man who had been killed the day before.

While we were lying there in bed the bombardier said, “Larry, How did you get out of that air plane?” So I told him how.  “No, you didn’t,” he said. “I tried to get out that way and I couldn’t get the door open.” Evidently, the shells tearing into the plane had jammed the door. The bombardier crawled clear to the back through the bomb bay. The radio room and the back door had not been opened. We talked back and forth a little bit and he said, “There is only one way you got out of that airplane and thats if you went out through one of the holes the 20 mm cannon tore through the airecraft.”

I know this was possible because on occasion we had returned from combat with our plane so shot up you could have driven the better part of a jeep through one of the shell holes. So I know there was a pretty good size hole there. The thing that amazed me was how I could go out without my parachute and uniform being shredded by all the jagged edges.

I know how I got out. I’ve had guys say how lucky I was. Luck had nothing to do with it. It was providential that I got out of there.

Question:  Burns…what about the burns?

Well, I was on fire when I went out. When the shells exploded they hit the oxygen system behind the co-pilot and the plane ignited. I was sitting in flames trying to get that door open. The bombardier went clear to the back of the plane and he had just a few little burns and a couple of broken ribs when he snapped his parachute. I had second and third degree burns. They used paper bandages in the hospital. They would change those bandages six and seven times a day because of sloughing from your burns.  That was bad enough. But the big fear was ahead of me—the Gestapo.

The Gestapo

I was in solitary confinement seven days and each day they would come in and ask a lot of questions and throw tantrums. They were armed and you never knew what they were going to pull on you. This was psychological warfare.

After seven days I asked to go to the restroom (for six days they had ignored me for two or more days at a time). Immediately the door opened and they said, “Come with me.” I followed them and was taken to a room and where there was a German sergeant who spoke fluent English. He was the kind of man I think Hitler was trying to develop in his nation—huge, Arian, blonde.

When I walked in the first thing he did was to try to make me comfortable. They typically did this by offering a cigarette and so forth. He said, “We don’t know why you don’t want to cooperate with us. We know everything about you. We just want you to confirm it.”  He opened a book he had and leafed through a few pages and permitted me to look and there were “T’s” which represented an airplane which showed the formation we were to fly in.  He said, “I see you have flown in many different aircraft.” Let me tell you, when this happens you don’t say anything. You just sit there.

My dog tag gave my name, rank and serial number, my address, blood type and religion.

He said, “Let me tell you what we know about you. You graduated from Shenandoah Valley Academy. You went to Washington Missionary College. You lived in Hagerstown, Maryland.” He knew everything about me except the 29 days I spent in Portuguese Guinea. I’m sure that shortly after that they knew that also.

After telling me my pedigree, he said, “We know everything.” I was taken from there out into a compound where many, many men were. I recognized some who had been flying but had been shot down and they said, “Don’t talk. There are microphones on all these trees all around.” So we just didn’t talk.

A few days later they sent a train load of us to Poland. We were placed in the camp where the great escape took place—Stalag Luft 3. We were in with the British at first because there weren’t many Americans. We were told how to dig tunnels and shore them up. I was involved in that. It was good therapy. We took bed boards that were the same size and made a box out of them by cutting male and female joints in them with a little kitchen knife that we made into a saw. We put those bed boards down underground and that is what we used to shore up the sand. Those tunnels were at least 300 feet long. One time I figured out how many tons we hauled out of there. Every hundred feet underground we would create a room which was tall enough for a man to stand up and exercise in because it was very cold down there.

Before we got too involved in the tunnel work, they built another compound and moved the Americans. The British kept up with their tunnels. They had three of them going—Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Our family went back in 1994, because our daughter wanted to see where I was. We went into the museum that the Germans had constructed and they called them Tom, Dick and George. I don’t know where they got “George” from. They had a museum built with a 3-D layout of our camp. I could show our daughter where I lived. Everything was right there.

We were there until January of 1945. We knew that the Russian army was getting close. The Germans came in Saturday night and said they were moving out that night. There were 10,000 of us there—five compounds—we moved out in compound groups of 2,000 men in the worst blizzard Germany had in 20 years—very little clothing, no food. You would wrap something around your head and because of the ice and the sleet it would form a helmet around our head. The Germans took us out on the road that night. We found out the Russians were within about 30 kilometers of us.

In retrospect, that was kind of foolish because we were walking and the Russians had equipment. Once again I think Someone was looking out for us. I know Eisenhower kept tabs on where we were because he even sent messages to the Germans: “Keep these prisoners in camps where they belong. We’re going to hold you responsible if anything happens.”

We marched—walked and dragged ourselves—for seven days with only two stops; a hay barn and a glass factory. The Germans didn’t do like the Americans. We would march our men 45-50 minutes and give them a 10 minutes rest. The Germans would march us a couple of hours and let us stand for an hour and 45 minutes in a blizzard. Men were dropping like flies. You had to get them on their feet because if you didn’t they would just shoot them and keep on going.

Some of us made it to Nuremberg. There we were loaded into boxcars and sent across the Danube and on to Munich.  At Munich we were put in a camp with about 180,000 prisoners—just a mass of people. It was miserable. To have faith in something that was going to protect you and maintain a sense of humor, got us through a lot.

We had a lot of religious services there. We had prayer meeting on Wednesday night and services every Sunday. You would be surprised how many times soldiers would go. It embarrasses me sometimes to think how many times I went there and how few times I go here.

One day we were on our way out to services. Because we had a contraband radio, we knew that General Patton was not too far away. As we were going to this outdoor church, we saw puffs of smoke coming up over the hills. We knew something was happening. It wasn’t long before a P-51 came barrlin’ across the sky aiming for the guard towers. The Germans guards bailed out on the concrete. Some guys crawled up on the roof. They wanted to see what was going to happen. One guy ended up with a spent bullet in his ribs. Some others went under the building to get protection.

The next thing we knew a tank rolled in. The posts to this camp were huge. The tank just leaned up against the post, it didn’t come in through the gate, it just leaned up against the post and knocked the post over, and by the time that tank got inside the only thing you could recognize about it was the opening in the gun barrel. It was covered with POWs. They just flocked over that tank. This was the American compound. It was rougher in some of the others. Some of the men had been prisoners since 1939.

Two days later General Patton came into the camp and said, “Men, I’m still fighting a war. As soon as I can get fuel in here for my tanks, I’ll take you out on the airplanes that bring in the fuel.” By this time we were so emaciated that we could not even get out of bed to salute the man. He stood there with tears in his eyes to see how bad off we were. I weigh about the same now as when I went into Germany at 137 pounds. I weighed 97 when I got out. I lost that weight from January to April of 1945.

God is My Refuge

One text that has really been a Godsend to me is found in Psalm 46:1 and 2. God is my refuge. During that time He was certainly my refuge. He certainly protected me through many, many things. I can recall many other instances when I knew that my angel was right there between the German soldier and me. I knew that and I’m sure there were other instances that I didn’t know that my angel was there.

I was permitted to come home to Kelly Field and was separated from the Air Force to active reserve for eight years.

I received a call after I finished another year of college to work at Mount Vernon Academy. I taught there eight years. Then went to Lodi Academy until I saw the promised land of Newbury Park and this is where I settled. I have been here since 1959.

I feel so fortunate that I have been able to lead a productive life for the last 40 years or more. I was able to teach almost 40 years.
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