Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
6:19 | His first semester at Kansas State University was going fine. Then came Dec. 7, 1941. Clayton Nattier knew that, if he had to go into the military, he wanted to fly airplanes, so he went to the airfield where Kansans could take the tests for cadet training.
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Having successfully passed all the tests for cadet training, Clayton Nattier arrived in Santa Ana for preflight classes. The next step was primary training where he flew the Stearman trainer, a bi-plane. The site had been a private aviation school and was fairly luxurious compared to the next stop which was an actual military base.
The second phase of pilot training was called basic training. You flew a more powerful aircraft and you did acrobatics, which taught you how to recover from bad situations in the air. Clayton Nattier knew he wanted to fly the big planes, the bombers, so when he moved on to advanced training, he flew multi engine aircraft.
Transition training is the part of pilot training where you move from trainers to the actual aircraft you will be flying in the military. For Clayton Nattier, the move was a significant one. He would be flying the mighty B-17. The last training stop was crew training, where the men who trained in different disciplines leaned to jell as a unit.
It was the last test. Clayton Nattier's crew was aloft in a B-17 for their check ride, after which they would be assigned to a bomb group in England. The testing officer took them up to a higher altitude than they'd ever been and this contributed to an unfortunate situation which would separate pilot from crew.
B-17 pilot Clayton Nattier had a great crew assembled as he readied to join the air war against Germany. He goes through the roster and describes all the men who would be joining him in the skies over Europe.
He picked up a new B-17 loaded with freight for some bomb group in England, then Clayton Nattier flew the first leg of the trip up to New Hampshire. That's where the weather got nasty and he and his crew had to wait out several delays.
A new B-17 pilot was required to fly two missions with an experienced crew before he flew his own missions. The first of these for Clayton Nattier had him over one of the most heavily defended targets in Germany. He would return more than once.
The 306th Bomb Group flew in very tight formations. This greatly lessened the losses from German fighters, which faced withering fire from multiple aircraft if they got close enough to attack. B-17 pilot Clayton Nattier also had the luxury of his own fighter escorts, which were not available earlier in the war.
It was his sixteenth mission and, once again, it was Merseburg, site of a synthetic fuel plant. Clayton Nattier's plane had a mechanical failure so a substitute B-17 was brought to the flight line. Everything was fine until, as the flight neared the target, an engine went out. This was only the beginning of a disaster. Part 1 of 3.
Tail Gunner Richard Edwards was one of the first to bail out. When he landed, he was beaten by a German worker swinging a lunch pail. Pilot Clayton Nattier was trying to stabilize the plane while the flight engineer tried to put out the fire. Finally, they, too, plunged into the sky over Germany to face an uncertain fate. Part 2 of 3.
It was a long descent for B-17 pilot Clayton Nattier, who was barely conscious in his parachute. He heard a German fighter circling above him as he landed near a Luftwaffe training school. After the students worked him over for souvenirs, he was taken to a jail cell where a medic from the school bandaged him up. Part 3 of 3.
When he got to the interrogation center, he was placed in solitary confinement, interrupted only by repeated questioning. Downed B-17 pilot Clayton Nattier was determined not to reveal anything, not that he really knew much. After a week of this, he was taken to a train station where he was reunited with the surviving members of his crew.
Clayton Nattier was headed for Stalag Luft I on Germany's Baltic coast. His first three weeks were spent in the camp hospital, where he was treated for burns received when his B-17 was brought down by flak. The original bandaging of his wounds, which was done by a German medic near the site of the crash, proved to be a first rate job.
The room in the POW camp barracks was small but it housed eighteen men, including downed pilot Clayton Nattier. It had a tiny stove which was much improved with a little American farm boy ingenuity.
There were radios in the camp, built with bartered parts that the guards traded for D-Bars and cigarettes from Red Cross parcels. Clayton Nattier didn't have a radio in his barracks, but he saw the typewritten rundowns of the latest news from the BBC. He well remembers when the Germans stopped distributing the Red Cross parcels. It was just after the best meal he'd had as a prisoner.
Col Hubert A. Zemke was the senior Allied officer among the POW's at Stalag Luft I. When the Germans stopped delivering the Red Cross parcels that were keeping bellies full, he negotiated with the camp commandant until they were restored. Clayton Nattier remembers that, after three months with little food, he couldn't eat without getting sick.
There was no friendly interaction with any of the German guards, recalls downed pilot Clayton Nattier. They were just plain mean. As the end of the war neared, Col Hubert A. Zemke again negotiated a deal with the commandant which guaranteed the safety of both prisoners and guards as the Germans withdrew.
The German guards had fled in the night. The next day, a Russian tank was at the gate of the POW camp and, soon, a Russian general to go with it. Downed pilot Clayton Nattier recalls that the Russians wanted to remove the men to Soviet territory, but the senior Allied officer wasn't having it.
Newly liberated POW Clayton Nattier arrived at Camp Lucky Strike, where thousands of men like him waited for passage home. When his turn came, he rode in a Liberty ship, fighting seasickness all the way. He was soon in a luxury hotel in Miami Beach.
B-17 pilot and former POW Clayton Nattier reflects on the possibilities of escape and also on the psyche of the German people. Before he joined the 306th Bomb Group, there was some controversy in the unit because of heavy losses and the new commander brought in to solve the problems. Those events became the basis for the movie Twelve O'Clock High.
