Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
4:24 | POW Hugh Lee Young helped stand watch as more able prisoners dug a tunnel and made plans to escape. On the fateful day, the Germans set up guns at the end of the tunnel. Someone had turned traitor for 2 bottles of wine. What happened to that guy?
Keywords : Hugh Lee Young B-24 Prison Camp Tunnel
Hugh Lee Young was working in Mobile when he decided it was "his time" to join the war effort. He enlisted in the Air Corps so he "would not have to walk" and started out as a waist gunner on a B-24.
B-24 gunner Hugh Lee Young shipped out to Egypt where the big bombers were helping turn the tide to the Allies. The targets ranged Northward all the way to Austria and he said of his first mission, over Crete, "It was fun!"
B-24 Gunner Hugh Lee Young moved from the waist to the ball turret and his first mission there was memorable. On the low altitude run, they were so close to the ground that when a ammunition cache exploded, it nearly brought down the plane.
No one would take credit for downing fighters, according to gunner Hugh Lee Young. With so many gunners firing, no one wanted to take the ribbing over the perceived bragging. He didn't mind being in the ball turret because, "I was already crazy."
On a bombing run, Hugh Lee Young and the B-24 crew saw a man on the targeted bridge waving at them. Hugh "always wondered where he went." He also wondered why they were told not to bomb a gas field. Later he found out it was English owned.
"You knew you might not come back," said Hugh Lee Young about bombing missions. He had been giving away his nightly ration of whiskey, but the doctor told him if he did not start drinking it for his nerves, he was grounded.
B-24 gunner Hugh Lee Young remembers that the mission was supposed to be a milk run. Then the flight was swarmed by over 200 German planes and he was shot down and had to bail out, barely making it out through a window.
Captured B-24 gunner Hugh Lee Young was first put in solitary confinement for 6 days, then interrogated by his German captors, who became upset at the lack of information. He gave up nothing because he knew nothing. "All I do is fly."
The most daring escape attempt seen by POW Hugh Lee Young involved a tape measure and a notebook. "They measured their way right out of camp." When the Germans tried using an electric fence, the Americans ran wires to it and made a hot plate.
After nearly 18 months in a prison camp, Hugh Lee Young was sent on a forced march ahead of the advancing Russians. The marching prisoners soon encountered piles of corpses alongside the road. Most of them were executed Jews.
Near the end of the war, Hugh Lee Young was one of 500 men encamped in the woods after a forced march. Food was scarce and he learned he, "could eat dandelions pretty well." Then there was the time he cut his hair into a mohawk.
Liberated POW Hugh Lee Young and his fellows were stopped from entering nearby Mauthausen concentration camp by Allied guards because they feared that the freed men would massacre the Germans. No reserve duty for him after, "I had about all I could do."
