Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
6:17 | They evaded the Germans for months, hiding with families and in a church, but time ran out for the downed airmen. Louis Breitenbach and several others awoke one morning to see German soldiers setting up a sweep of the area. They knew there was no escape.
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Louis Breitenbach was drafted in 1942 and trained as a flight engineer on a B-17 crew. His training before he crossed the Atlantic was in gunnery, but once the crew arrived in England, they practiced emergency procedures, like bailing out over the frigid North Sea.
He was on his thirteenth mission, on the way to bomb an aircraft factory. Louis Breitenbach tells how the B-17 was pummeled by flak and enemy fighters and turned to try to make it home to England. They didn't make it, but they managed a crash landing in Holland without casualties.
It was every man for himself. The order for downed airmen was to split up and scatter and that's exactly what Louis Breitenbach and the rest of his crew did after crash landing in Holland. Soon he was picked up by the Underground and hosted in family homes, eventually moving into Belgium in a hidden compartment in a peddler's truck.
After his capture, B-17 Flight Engineer Louis Breitenbach was punched by a German officer who was angered by the air war his side was losing. Settled into a prison camp, he witnessed the cruelty of a particular commander who mistreated prisoners. The advance of the Russian Army caused the Germans to move the prisoners to different camps.
The camp had several barriers, mostly different configurations of barbed wire, but the inner barrier was a simple small wooden rail. If you crossed that, you got one yell and then it was machine gun fire. Louis Breitenbach describes the routine of the prisoners and the stern old Commandant, a strict military man.
They were always hungry. Former Prisoner of War Louis Breitenbach details the food situation in the German camp for downed flyers. There were ingenious desserts made from Red Cross parcel items, but the dinners served by their captors were much less appetizing. Since he did not smoke, the cigarettes from his share of the parcels gave him plenty of the local currency.
Sixty bombers were shot down that day, with ten men apiece on board. Louis Breitenbach was in one of those planes, the last in the formation with leaflets in the bomb bay instead of ordnance. He describes how they used aluminum chaff to throw off the German radar and how a captured P-51 paced their B-17.
How does a Prisoner of War occupy his time? Louis Breitenbach did a lot of wood carving, mostly of kitchen implements. There was occasional baseball or football and many men wrote on paper made from cigarette packs. In winter, the main activity was trying to keep warm with their tiny ration of ersatz coal.
There was Russian artillery fire getting closer when the German guards disappeared in the middle of the night. The freed Americans had to convince the Russians not to knock over their barracks and they had to scramble to find black armbands to satisfy their liberators. Soon, they were on their way, but before they could board flights to Camp Lucky Strike, they had to take care of an itchy problem.
Freed Prisoner of War Louis Breitenbach enjoyed some R&R in the bars of Miami Beach when he got home, but the stress of his experience finally caught up with him. Fifty years after VE Day, he looks back on those times and then ahead to the future.
