Top
of Page
Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland 26 DEC 1944
It was the day after Christmas, 1944 and we knew the night before that we had been scheduled to fly today. I was happy that we didn't have to fly on X-Mas day, because I thought of it as a day of peace, regardless of what was happening in the world.
We were up long before daybreak and it was a cold morning. As we entered the briefing room there was a lot of excited conversation. I looked at the briefing map and the course line went through Austria, Czechoslovakia into Poland. The target was the synthetic oil refinery on the Oder River, at Oswiecim. It was going to be rough for more reasons than one. We would be over enemy territory for a long time and the distance was about the limit of our fuel supply. We would be in the air over eight hours, a longer time than I had spent in the classroom in my school days.
Our group formed and we headed north, making landfall at the north end of the Adriatic Sea. Austria was blanketed with snow and looked cold. I was cold and I looked at the thermometer and it was at minus sixty degrees. It was usually around minus forty or fifty, so now we had to put up with the unusually cold weather. I had on long wool underwear, my wool shirt and pants, covered by my heated flying suit, and my flying jacket and pants on top of the rest. Heated gloves and boots made it bearable, but not comfortable. On all our missions I gave the request for oxygen checks about every fifteen minutes. In the cold weather you had to make sure your oxygen mask had not frozen up. When I asked for the check, the entire crew responded with an OK starting with the tail position forward. The reason for the oxygen check is to give us a chance to check on anyone not responding, as death comes quickly and silently at the higher altitudes.
Happy day, there was no fighter opposition and we silently thanked our escort fighters because they did a good job. The flak was heavy, intense, and accurate. Twenty one planes attack the refinery and nineteen were headed home. Somewhere out there were the twenty airmen we left behind. I hope they parachuted to safety, but that wasn't usually the case. We survived the flak and returned safely.
I never had the idea that I was invincible and didn't ask my God to spare my life. I did ask him if I got hit not to do it halfway because I didn't want to linger for the usual two to three hours it usually took to get medical assistance. I did pray nightly as I was brought up to do, and a woman from the Lehighton area, by the name of Hawk, did send me the 91st Psalm, which I read every night at that time.
Why target Oswiecim? That haunted me for many years until I learned that Oswiecim is another name for Auschwitz. I believe the raid was to tell the people in that murder factory, to hang on because the war would be over soon. I have to believe that some of them smiled when the bombs hit the refinery. RWR - 31 Dec 92.