Chapter 7
Frank Bertram
Page 3
Now I get to Stalag Luft 1. We were there for eight or nine months and it was hell. You’re feeling just rotten, and when you’re injured you feel worse. And your mental condition isn’t the greatest. The winter was miserable. The food was poor. We lost a lot of weight. I lost 30 or 35 pounds. All of us were pretty skinny. And one thing about it: When you’re hungry you don’t think about anything else. It’s always food, food, food. You dream day and night of food. And escape was not advisable. They said, "You know, it’s not a game anymore, you’re going to get shot if you get caught." And at one point, Hitler issued orders to take the American Jewish boys and separate them, and there actually was an order out to shoot them. Common sense at least prevailed and they realized that if anything like that took place there would be an interaction in the United States and we were holding a lot more of their prisoners than they were of ours. That’s the general thought, anyway.
We had this one Jewish guy, his name was Gerber, and he was very swarthy, almost Arabic looking. He said, "They’re not gonna get me, because I just changed my religion."
And we said, "What did you change to?"
He said, "I’m gonna say Hindu."
Everybody just howled. But they got him; they put him in the other barracks.
Our commanding officer in Barth was a Colonel Von Mueller. He had come from the States, from Long Beach, Long Island. He was what was called a Long Beach Nazi.
Colonel Von Mueller interviewed me when I first went into the camp. When I walked in there he said, "Ahh, Frank Bertram. You’re married. Your wife’s name is Mary. And you went to Commerce High School in San Francisco, graduated in 1938."
He’s telling me this and I’m sitting there thinking, "What is this?" They knew all about me, as they did most everybody else. And he said, "You have no children."
I said, "We didn’t have time."
He said, "Aahh, that’s the trouble. In America, not enough children. In Russia, too many children. But in Germany just right."
Then he said, "You know, I could have you shot as a spy."
I said, "What?"
He said, "You write down your name as Bertram. But the dogtags you gave me said Burtram."
I said, "What?"
He said, "Take a look."
And sure enough, they had misspelled my name on my dogtags and I never knew it.
Then he said, "Of course, we wouldn’t do that. We know who you are."
I knew nothing about the Second Air Division Association until about 20 years after the war, when a friend of mine who lived right around the corner from me in Stockton told me he belonged to it. I thought, "That sounds interesting." So I joined this organization and they’re sending letters and newsletters; you’d come across names you knew, or people looking for information about someone you knew. But every once in a while I’d think, "Gee, what happened to me? I’d like to go back there and find the area where I was shot down." My wife, Mary, and I took several trips to Germany, but I could never find the location – and me, a good navigator, I didn’t know where the hell I was. I knew the approximate area but I couldn’t pin it down. We came within maybe 10 or 15 miles of the town; we probably passed through the edge of Bad Hersfeld, and we were in the town of Schlitz, where the original Schlitz Brewery was.
As I went through life, I kept in contact with a few of the fellows who were on my plane, but never anything personal. Until one time, in February of 1986, I come home from work and my wife doesn’t say hello, she doesn’t give me a kiss, and she says, "What was the number of your plane?"
I looked at her – now this is 40 years later – and I said, "What plane? I drove home."
She said, "No, the plane you flew in the war."
I said, "You want to know the number? All I remember is it was a B-24. I don’t know what the number was."
She said, "Wait till you see this package."
Well, this packet was from Walter Hassenpflug. It had letters from the 8th Air Force Historical Society and from the 19th Armored Division, which was in the town of Bad Hersfeld. And it said that Walter was researching what happened on this particular day over the town of Bad Hersfeld.
Walter’s letter stated that as a boy of 12, he witnessed an airplane explosion in the air, and then he witnessed some parachutes coming down, and he said two days later they were walking through the forest and they came across this man lying by a creek. And I thought, "My God, that’s me!"
His letter stated, "All I remember is that he was a first lieutenant from San Francisco."
Well, when you give your name, rank and serial number, how they ever found out about San Francisco, all I can think of is I had a little prayer book in my pocket that my mother gave me, and it had my address, 118 Delores Street, S.F., California.
I immediately wrote to Walter. Then we got to writing back and forth, and I told him I’d be there in April or May, but due to an injury – I fell through a trap door and pulled some ligaments or tendons in my leg, and had to put a cast on, so that postponed it till August. We met Walter, and much to my surprise he did not speak a word of English, other than "Hello." But he had a fellow named Carl Lepper who interpreted for him.
The Kassel mission has been sort of a mystery. When we came out of prison camp we got interviewed by Colonel Stewart, Jimmy Stewart. Colonel – I guess he was a general by that time, Brigadier General Terrill, who was the commanding officer when I was there, and Colonel Jones. And whatever you told them, they just let it go in one ear, wrote it down, and out the other, and they just passed on through the line. There were something like 22 of us in the line. The doctor would say, "How do you feel?" And you’d say "Fine." He’d say "Okay, pass." And that was it. They were just as anxious to get home as we were.
Something on this mission was screwy. If you talk to 20 guys you’re going to get 20 different stories. The group in back of us, the 453rd, was supposed to follow us. They very wisely went to the target after their commanding officer called our commanding officer to tell him he was going the wrong way. And our man told their man to follow us, that we were on the right course, and I understand really cussed him out when he wouldn’t do it. The 453rd did the right thing by going to the target. You couldn’t see the target on the ground but you could see the group ahead of you going in, and you could see all the flak and the explosions.
I have maintained all through the years, mouthed off about it a few times – other people have said no, but I have people other than me that agree with me – that there was a deliberate turnoff to avoid going through that heavy flak. This is my personal opinion and that of several others that I know of. Too many things just don’t add up on that mission. The one lead plane, of course, blew up, and the pilot was killed. The command pilot, Major McKoy, was killed. The lead navigator on that plane did get out before the explosion. He ended up in Stalag Luft 1 months after we did; whether he was injured or held prisoner somewhere I don’t know. But I went up to talk to him about it and he insisted that they went in to the target. And I just don’t understand it, because it was so obvious. But he insisted we hit the target. So I just gave up. The navigator was killed in an automobile crash shortly after he arrived home. So the one guy that really knew is dead.
The Luftwaffe were not aiming for us as a target. They were headed for the main body, the other three hundred and some planes that were going into Kassel, and they were a little late, as far as hitting them before the bombs dropped. These particular FW-190s were not made to do battle with the American fighters. They were heavily armored, and the pilots were heavily protected but did not have the maneuverability or speed of the regular FW-190. They were there for one purpose and that was to shoot down bombers. And they were ordered that when they came under attack by American fighters to get the hell out of there, no combat, just go. Which discouraged Ernst Schroeder, who I befriended and I still consider a good friend, if he’s still alive. He said when he shot his second plane down, "In all honesty, Frank, I’ll get the credit, but the damage had already been done" on the wave of planes that went in ahead of him and set these planes on fire. He said, "I put the finishing touches on them."
And he said, "I followed these planes down, and watched to see where they crashed, for confirmation." He said he was flying over some railroad tracks when he heard thump-thump-thump and he looked behind and there’s a P-51 Mustang right on his tail. He said, "I turned around and came around at him, but I had no ammunition left and I just got the hell out of there."
Some of these German boys that were in those planes that day that were killed were on their first or second mission. Others were oldtimers. And I personally met them: Schroeder, Ossi Rahm, Werner Vorburg, who actually flew in World War I. Werner Vorburg is gone. Ossie Rahm is gone. And the last I heard of Ernst two years ago he was quite ill.
At its best, flying combat was nerve-racking. Even in training it was nerve-racking. We’d sweat out every takeoff and every landing and in between we’d pray. Without the fighter escort, we didn’t have a chance. When I think of those poor boys on that Ploesti mission, because 160-some planes went in there and they lost 60 or 62. One of the boys in my room in the first place I stayed at Stalag Luft 1 was on the Ploesti mission. He was a bombardier in Killer Kane’s crew. Which group was that? I think the 93rd. He crash-landed in Turkey and they escaped from Turkey, and then he got shot down a second time and captured.
Now that must have been scary, flying 50 feet above the ground going into a monumental flak area. Ploesti probably was one of the most heavily defended targets in all of Europe, because of the value of the oil fields there and the refineries. If you got hit there, you’re dead, there’s nothing you could do. At least when we’re up there at 25,000 feet you could jump out or get blown out, but I’ve seen pictures of these guys at Ploesti, they didn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell once they got hit.
You know, that generation – of course I was involved – really did save the world, because Hitler, that German army was something else. They came so close, so very close. If we hadn’t gone in there with all this bombing, we’d all be speaking German. They actually had rockets that could hit the United States, but they never used them because of lack of petrol. They almost took the British to their knees with those V-2s, after what those poor people in Britain went through in the blitz and then the V-1, which was going on when I was there. They were terrifying enough but these V-2s, there was no answer to them. You didn’t know you were dead until 30 seconds after you died.
We wouldn’t have that memorial if Walter Hassenpflug hadn’t found me. I tried to tell him in English – and he didn’t understand me – that he owes me a lot of money because since he found me, it’s cost me all this money going back and forth to Germany. And Walter being real German doesn’t have a great sense of humor; it takes him a little while to catch on. The second year we went there, I had brought my pilot, Reg Miner, and his wife, and with Walter we were going to go around to all the sites where these planes crashed and Walter couldn’t show us because he had his hand all wrapped up in a cast.
I said, "What happened?"
He said he was out hunting and shot himself in the hand and severed some nerves.
I said, "You know, Walter" – he had an interpreter – "that’s why you guys lost the war. You couldn’t shoot straight." And for about 30 seconds he just looked at me and then he burst out laughing.
I talked myself into attending a Luftwaffe reunion with Ernst Schroeder. I got invited to this reunion of the Wild Boar Squadron, which was one of the ones that attacked us that day. I was the only one there that wasn’t a fighter pilot. My wife and I went there. We had a great time. The only thing bad there was every one of them smoked up a storm up and almost choked us to death. But they were nice people. The wives were so nice and so pleasant, and very few of them could speak English, so the communication problem was there, too. There was no chance of getting too friendly because of the lack of communication.
When they started their meeting, they had as a gavel at the podium the joystick of an FW-190. They had it all fancied up there with the trigger guard like they used in combat. Of course I didn’t know what they were talking about, and Ernst would tell me once in a while what they said. He was in charge. And I asked, "Could I see that FW-190 joystick?"
"Sure." He gave it to me, and all these guys were looking at me. And I turned it over, and I said, "Oh, made in Japan!"
You could have heard a pin drop. It took another thirty seconds before they realized it was a joke. "Nein! Nein! Deutschland! Deutschland!" We had a big laugh on that.
I’ve always been a joker. It’s kept me alive, even through prison camp. I won’t tell you what they called me in camp but it was like megaphone mouth or something. But you had to do that or you’d go crazy.
Throughout the years I’ve kept in close contact with my pilot, Reg Miner. He’s probably one of the best pilots the Air Force ever had. Man, he could handle that bomber like it was a kite. And he was over there for one reason: that was to win the damn war and get home.
On a previous mission to the Kassel mission – six missions before – we had flown one that was scarier than the Kassel mission, but with not quite the same results. We were shot up very badly over the city of Saarbrucken in Germany; that’s just on the border with France. Our plane took a thumping that you wouldn’t believe from flak; we must have taken five or six damn near direct hits. You could see the red interior of the shell. Our radio operator, J.G. Weddle, had a piece of his foot blown off.
We lost one engine over the target, and another one was windmilling. We couldn’t feather it, and we dropped like a wounded bird. The group had us going down in France. They had us down in the English Channel. They had us down in England. They gave up on us. We were badly wounded and we were all by ourself, and we fired off some flares, and within thirty seconds we had an escort of P-51s. They would circle us and talk to us, and no German plane would go near us. We went all the way across the Channel. We ended up throwing stuff out of the plane into the Channel; we even threw our parachutes out to lighten the plane because we were down too low to jump. We threw everything out except the bombardier, he was next. And for one reason or another, we didn’t make it, and we crashed. The pilot again did an inspirational job; how he did it I’ll never know. But we crashed and it was quite an experience; we bounced around, very traumatic. The next day I was so stiff and sore I could hardly move.
On that particular mission, George Collar had been taken off our plane, and we had this guy Omick as our bombardier. And in the nose turret we had a first lieutenant, Richard Aylers, and he’d only flown on two missions. Now let me explain what happens; sometimes men get sick and they can’t fly a mission, or the train was late coming from London or they slept in with some babe overnight and forgot to get up or some excuse, and most of them were tolerated, but they may miss a mission or two; whereas the rest of their comrades finished or got shot down or something, and there they sit. That’s what happened to this guy. He had two missions to go, and actually he outranked all of us. He was a first lieutenant. We were still second lieutenants, although our promotion was in but we didn’t know it.
He was in the nose turret. And the pilot said to me, "Give me a heading for the closest airport, quick!" I looked out right in front of us and there was a runway, and I said, "Straight ahead!"
He said, "Clear the nose and get out of there!"
I opened the nose turret door and tapped that guy on the shoulder and tried to pull him out. He got mad at me; he didn’t hear the conversation. He was gonna take a swing at me because I jolted him. I got him out and got him in back, and I didn’t quite make the bomb bay when we hit the ground. I was still in the bomb bay and got thrown out of the bomb bay into the waist. I kept bouncing around like a rubber ball; all the other guys were braced for a crash-landing. And Miner brought us to a safe, healthy conclusion.
Years later, the third navigator we picked up – the pilot’s navigator, Jackson – claimed that he was on that mission with us. And I sure couldn’t place him, because he was a pilot’s navigator, and that’s what this Lieutenant Aylers was. But Jackson insisted he was on the mission. He sure knew enough about it, because it was quite a thrill that day. So I found out where you could write to get some records. I wrote to the U.S. Air Force archives and asked if it was possible that on Lieutenant Miner’s crew, flying a certain date which was Aug. 15th, I think, that you could get the crew members. Lo and behold, about three weeks later here it comes with the date, all the crew members – and this is the funny part: They did not have Jackson in there. So I knew I wasn’t losing my mind. Aylers was flying that day, and Jackson wasn’t there at all. But they did not have our tail gunner listed, and now they had me wondering if our tail gunner flew that day or maybe Jackson flew in the tail.
I thought, God, these guys are sharp after all these years, that they would have these records, so I wrote them back and asked for the disposition on the Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944, and I never heard a word. Not a word. And someone else, I believe it was Lieutenant Ira Weinstein, had once before tried to find out, and I did too, and they stated that the files have been missing since 1950. Someone took them out. They don’t know who, but there’s not a thing regarding that mission back in their archives. So there’s another reason that this thing should be down in some history book somewhere. Plus it was really a bad day, the worst day our group ever had. Every day was a bad day for some groups, but not like this one. It’s funny how the mind works. I know in my case a lot of these things I don’t even think about but once I get into it, it just keeps coming back and you’re living it over and over.
I’m paying for it now. The knees in particular gave me a bad time for years, and the back, the last three years, it’s just been getting worse every day, and all they can find is fused vertebrae at the base. But for many other guys it happened a lot worse. It was a good 40 years before I learned what happened to our co-pilot, Virgil Chima, and he was my best friend at the time. His body was not found until November 15th. Walter Hassenpflug dug this up, and what he found was that some women were looking for beech nuts up in the forest and ran across him, so he must have been laying there for six weeks, and yet, the mystery is, his parachute was missing. The shroud lines were cut. He was laying in the fetal position. But his body had decomposed so much by the time they got to him, I don’t imagine that they ever figured out just what happened to him. But obviously, someone got the parachute, which was silk and was very valuable over there at the time. All you can do is surmise. I know what it was like coming through those trees. He could have made a worse landing than me and maybe broke his back and couldn’t move and just died there. It’s very doubtful that someone had beaten him because it was so far up in the hills where nobody would go for any reason, and no one had gone up there prior to these ladies going hunting for beech nuts for food. So I’m inclined to think he badly injured himself, although why would he be in the fetal position? Of course he could have just drawn into that, knowing he was dying, trying to keep warm. Poor little guy. Nineteen years old. And the most meticulous guy on the crew; man, he checked everything to make sure his parachute and harness and instruments were perfect. He had two brothers. One of them was a major in the 91st, which was the one with the Triangle A, the group that was in "12 O’Clock High." And then he had another brother who was a bombardier with the Third Group over there. There were four boys and three of them were in the Air Force and Virgil was the only one who didn’t make it. And his mother never did get over it. He was the baby of the family. The same thing happened with our radio operator, Joe Gilfoil, who lost his leg and bled to death. He was the only child of an Irish family right outside of Boston. I guess his mother and father were at that time in their late forties or early fifties when he got shot down. Joe was 19. Joe and I had gone to communion that morning, as we did before each mission.
He was a good Catholic boy. I was a Catholic boy. And we had one other man in our crew, Alvis Kitchens – Cotton was his nickname – a very quiet kid, never said boo. Did his job. He’d go with the guys but he never smoked, he never drank, he was very religious. Very soft-spoken, just a good Christian lad, and do you know, 54 years later, he’s still the same. All these other guys, including me, would go out and just raise all kinds of ruckus, drink and chase women, do all kinds of crazy things. Not him. Never.
When I went over and met Walter Hassenpflug in 1986, he introduced me to Ernst Schroeder. The guy shot down two of our planes that day, and I don’t know how many he shot down during the war. He was the father of seven boys. He didn’t speak a word of English, but he’s very well-known in German circles as an expert on military fighters at that time. He was an expert on the FW-190 and the Messerschmitts. He had nothing but the greatest admiration for the Mustang. He said if it wasn’t for the Mustang we’d still be fighting over there. He said that airplane changed the war; after they developed the drop tanks and they could protect the bombers going in. That changed the complete air battle situation. Actually the German production of aircraft was greater in September 1944 than at any point up to that time. The big problem was the lack of manpower and the shortage of petrol. But as far as planes, they had them. And they were good. The Germans were very, very brave people. And what I noticed, they just could not believe how friendly I was, and others were towards them. They acted like we should hate them because of what happened 40 years ago, which I didn’t even think about. I mean, you were just people; they just did their job and we did our job.
Walter Hassenpflug is one in a million; the hard work he’s put in and what he’s done. Not just this particular mission but primarily this one and other air battles that took place near his hometown, because he was orphaned by some bombs that dropped on his parents’ home, and raised by his aunts.
The first time we were over there, I thought, Jeez, Walter has been investigating this for maybe five or six years now, which would take you back to about 1980, and I thought, why, after all these years, is he all of a sudden looking into this particular mission? This is a personal opinion – and I saw it over there when the newspaper came out on the anniversary of this particular air raid – this had nothing to do with our mission, but I think it’s the one that took place in November 1944 in which his folks were killed, I think that is what set him off on this quest. And when you think of what it took to go back 35 or 40 years and to go to where all these planes had crashed, get all the information on those that survived, those that didn’t. Walter did all this on every plane that went down. He could tell you exactly where it landed, who got out, who didn’t get out, and generally what happened to them. Carl Lepper, his interpreter, told me he’d go back dozens of times, the least bit of a lead he had of anything, he would go there and photograph and talk to people, look it up, and go through records, and he did this for eight or ten years.
I can’t think of anything else. I probably got a few things mixed up. You’ll have to dig deep on this one. I don’t know how long you were over there when you met Walter, but didn’t you find that a nice little area? I thought it was great. I really enjoyed Bad Hersfeld, the little park they had there, and that old church, that old ruin there. I just found that area fascinating. The only thing bad about Germany was the driving. Probably if I was younger I wouldn’t mind a bit, but boy, now it’s scary.
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