A Soldier’s Story

By Ed Reynolds

November 04, 2004

Fifty-nine years ago my father, Jim Reynolds, angrily shouted four words that, had he not spoken them, I might never have existed. “Put that gun away!” he barked to the pilot of the B-24 Liberator he co-piloted while fighting in Europe during World War II. The bomber had just been shot down over Wesel, Germany, and Dad remembers the entire day—March 24, 1945—as if it were last week.

To the crew’s surprise, instead of receiving the usual 3 a.m. wake-up call that was standard on mornings when missions were scheduled, they had been allowed to sleep until 5:15 a.m. After breakfast, rather than being briefed on designated bombing targets while staring at the map of Europe referenced before each flight, the crew learned that the mission involved dropping supplies to paratroopers and glider troops who were landing behind enemy lines that morning. That explained why the Liberator’s bombardier would not be on board, and also why they would be flying at an altitude of only 250 feet once they got to the drop zone over Wesel. “At the briefing for the mission, we were told there would be little or no resistance from the Germans, and that our drop area would be secure,” my father recalls. He soon learned otherwise.

The supplies they carried were loaded into “pods” that hung on racks in the bomb bay area in the same manner as the bombs that were normally transported. Each pod was attached to a parachute that was opened by a static line. As the squadron of seven planes approached the drop site, the crew noticed considerable smoke and haze on the ground. “We began getting a little small-arms fire during the supply drop run, and we could hear it hitting the plane,” Dad explains. Suddenly the ground fire grew more intense as 20- and 30-millimeter shells began striking the aircraft. Lieutenant Jack Hummel piloted the plane while my father, also a lieutenant, watched the instrument panels for any sign of engine trouble. Dad soon noticed a fire coming from engine number three, which he immediately shut off as he shouted to the pilot that the plane was on fire. “I feathered the engine, cut off the gasoline supply to the burning engine, closed the cowling flaps, and cut the electrical switches. But the fire continued to burn,” my father says. “Jack hollered back that the number two engine had been hit, and the oil pressure was dropping.”

 

B-24 pilot Lieutenant Jack Hummel (left) and co-pilot Lieutenant Jim Reynolds with the 513th Paratrooper Group the morning of March 25, 1945. The two pilots had spent the previous evening in a farm house near Wesel, Germany, as prisoners of war. (click for larger version)

 

The bomber’s air speed diminished considerably due to the supply drop, and the plane had great difficulty gaining altitude with two engines out. Hummel managed to get the plane back up to 500 feet before pushing the alarm button that signaled all on board to bail out. “Jack and I both knew there was no way we could get out before the plane crashed. I remember saying a short prayer,” my father recalls. Hummel spotted a field scattered with dead gilder troops and attempted to land. “I have no recollection of the crash after the airplane touched down, so I must have been knocked out for a few seconds,” Dad says. “The first thing I remember is Jack asking me if I was hurt. I told him I didn’t get a scratch and he replied, ‘Oh, yes you did.’ I then realized blood was running down my face, and the front of my flight suit was bloody.” My father’s forehead had been severely lacerated, and he learned later that his nose was broken.

Hummel and my father crawled from the plane through a hole that had been torn in the side of the aircraft during the crash. Dad went out first. The pair examined each other’s wounds while standing about 20 feet from the wreckage. “We suddenly noticed the ground kicking up around us and heard gunfire. We were groggy from the licks that caused our head wounds and did not realize that we were being shot at,” he remembers. “There was also a German ‘tiger’ tank about 50 yards from us. The firing stopped after one of our crew opened a parachute and waved it.”

That’s when Dad and Hummel heard voices behind them and discovered that not all of the crew had bailed out. Normally, the flight engineer would have been standing in the nose of the plane with my father and Hummel, but for some reason he was in the rear of the plane. Dad never figured out why the engineer was in the back, but that move saved his life. “It’s doubtful he would have survived the crash, since the top [gun] turret fell just where he would have been standing.” It was then that Hummel pulled his .45 automatic to shoot it out with the Germans, who outnumbered the survivors. Dad shouted at Hummel, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that gun away!”

 

B-24 Liberators from the 392nd Bomb Group on a bombing mission. The photo was taken from Lieutenant Jim Reynolds’ aircraft. The Liberator, used primarily in the Mediterranean during the war, was prone to catch fire when hit. (click for larger version)

 

Waist gunner Elmer Milchak had been killed while climbing from the waist window of the plane. My father vividly remembers the details: “Elmer’s body was removed from the plane [after the surrender to the Nazis], because there was still the danger that the fire would catch up and the plane would burn, which it eventually did. The best we could determine, the three missing crewmen—James Deaton, Bernard Knudson, and Ellis Morse—were not in the plane after we removed Elmer. Knudson was shot while parachuting from the plane. Deaton fell through the open bomb bay door after being hit by gunfire. He fell to his death. Before the German soldiers led us away, I said the 23rd Psalm over Elmer’s body.”

The Germans led my father and the other survivors across the field to a pair of farmhouses about 200 yards away. “We went into a room where there were several other soldiers, but they didn’t seem to notice us. After a few minutes, a soldier came over to me and told me to follow him. He led me into a room where there were two other Germans, one a captain and the other a corporal. The corporal did the talking. I told him my name, rank, and serial number. An aunt of mine had given me a small Bible with the metal shield, which I carried in the breast pocket of my flight suit,” my father recounts. “While I was being interrogated by the corporal, the German captain took the Bible out of my pocket and sat reading it. The corporal wanted to know if I spoke French. I said,’No, only English.’ The German smirked, ‘You are an officer in the American army, and you can only speak one language? I am a corporal in the German army and can speak five languages fluently. What do American schools teach?’” My father responded with his name, rank, and serial number, to which the corporal said, “We have ways of making people talk.” The Bible was placed back in Dad’s pocket by the captain, who looked at my father and said, “Lieutenant, he is not going to harm you.” A third soldier then led my dad to a room filled with dozens of wounded Nazis where a German medic treated my father’s wounds. The medic told Dad that if captured by the Allies, he wanted to be sent to the United States.

 

The charred fuselage of Reynolds’ B-24 after it was shot down by Germans on March 24, 1945. (click for larger version)

 

Other Germans were rushing about, operating radio equipment; one soldier was pedaling a stationary bicycle attached to a generator that provided electricity. German soldiers began to burn military papers in a large metal barrel. A Nazi commander who my father thought was addressed by soldiers as “General” told him and Hummel that the Germans were leaving. He asked my father to tell the Americans that the crew had been treated well and requested that they reciprocate by telling their superiors to care for the German wounded that were being left behind in the farmhouse.

Soon American voices were heard, and Dad shouted, “There are G.I.’s in here!” Laughing, he explains, “I had seen too many movies where they threw a hand grenade into the room before checking it out.” The surviving crew members spent that night in a foxhole near the Rhine River. “I was about to freeze,” says my father. “A medic pulled out a quart of whiskey and told me to take a big drink. Since I’m not a drinking man, the drink took my breath away, and I started to cough. He covered my mouth with his hand so any Germans in the area could not hear us. We got no sleep that night.” Dad later discovered that his buddies back at the air base in England had given him up for dead and drank a few rounds in his memory, which they charged to him. He later refused to pay for the drinks.

True to the silent creed that most World War II veterans adopt, Dad rarely speaks of his war experiences. For years, his Purple Heart was kept in his top dresser drawer next to his socks, T-shirts, the family pistol, and his metal military Bible. As a child, I would sneak into my parents’ bedroom when they weren’t around and gaze at his medals. As my father grew older, he began to open up about “the B-24 crash.”

 

To drop supplies to the 513th Paratrooper Division of the Ninth Army, which was pushing east toward Berlin in the spring of 1945, the 392nd Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force flew from headquarters near Kings Lynn north of London, to Wesel, Germany, on the bank of the Rhine. (click for larger version)

 

Several years ago, a Liberator came to the Tuscaloosa airport, and I toured the plane with my father. He told the story of being shot down, pointing out where each of the crew had been stationed and how they had crawled from the wreckage. He showed me where Elmer Milchak had been killed. As he recalled telling pilot Jack Hummel to put away the pistol, he grinned and explained Hummel’s motivation for wanting to engage the Germans in a shoot-out: “Jack was from Texas.” &