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Charles Graham
Survivor, Kassel Mission
Florida, April 19, 1999
Aaron Elson: Let’s start with the Kassel mission.
Charles Graham: First of all, are you married Aaron?
Aaron Elson: I’m divorced.
Charles Graham: Ah, I was wondering if you had the wife with you. That’s why you’ve got time to do all this.
Aaron Elson: This is vacation time.
Charles Graham: I see. You’re still working then.
Aaron Elson: Yes. I work for a newspaper. But when I go to the McDonald’s or the Shoneys on the road, they keep offering me the senior discount. And I’m only 49.
Charles Graham: Oh, my God. I’ll be 80 in November.
Aaron Elson: Where were you from?
Charles Graham: Originally I was a railroader, and I moved 18 times. I was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. But I was only there about six months, and my dad and mother moved on. He was a railroader too. He was from the old Southern Pacific then; he was moved up to Sedalia, Missouri.
Left to Right: S/Sgt Bridges(Eng)-KIA, Sgt. Imhoff (Armorer)-KIA, Sgt. Miller (G)-POW, Lt Stewart(B) replaced by Lt Dent-KIA, Lt Kronig (CP)-KIA, Lt Sollien (P)-POW, Lt Huddleston (N)-POW, Berrier (R/O) replaced by Lt MacGregor-POW, S/Sgt Graham (G)-POW, S/Sgt Stephens-KIA
Aaron Elson: Were you working on the railroad when the war broke out?
Charles Graham: Yes. I was what they called a special apprentice. And I was also a play-by-play broadcaster of basketball games of the Decatur High Reds in Illinois and a disc jockey at station WSOY. I did that at night, and then the railroad work during the day. And on the weekend, I had my pass, I’d run up to Chicago on the Bluebird and see my wife Betty – she wasn’t my wife then; we didn’t get married until after the war. She was in Chicago taking her nurse’s training. I’d stay overnight and come back and be ready to go back to work Monday.
Aaron Elson: What was the Bluebird?
Charles Graham: The Bluebird was the name of the Wabash between St. Louis and Chicago.
Aaron Elson: Did you enlist or were you drafted?
Charles Graham: I was drafted. There was a whole big story there, too. What happened, Aaron, was by being on the radio station, WSOY in Decatur, Illinois, I had to read the news also during the breaks, and one day it was in the news that anyone classified 2B should report to the draft board. I said, look, if I’m going to put that on the air I’d better do the same thing because I had a 2B classification, having worked on the railroad. My father at that time was superintendent of the car shops at Decatur, and everyone thought that he was keeping me out of the service. My brother-in-law was a brakeman on the railroad also, and Harold hadn’t gone in either, and never did go in, but when I read this on the radio, I went immediately to the draft board the next day, and they said, “Where in the world have you been?”
Well, what I did, I had worked on a Shell pipeline prior to going to the railroad, and I was at Kankakee, Illinois, when I signed for the draft, and they apparently lost my papers from Kankakee to Decatur. I said, “I registered in Kankakee.” I said, “Would you have realized, or let anyone know, that I had not reported?”
“No,” he said, “we would have never told anyone.”
But anyway, they had lost my papers. Well, two weeks later I got my greetings from the president. So it wasn’t my dad that kept me out of the service at all. In fact, the joke went that I was born in 1919, and Dad said he always nicknamed me Weatherstrip because I kept him out of the draft.
Then I went to [an official] of the Wabash Railroad, and he got me letters from majors and colonels that they wanted me to stay in a railroad shop battalion. I went to Keesler Field, Mississippi, for my basic training, and there a little Pfc interviewed me after I had my code test for the Air Force, and said he’d never heard of the transportation corps; they’re going to put me up in the air because I did so well on my code test.
I was born with flat feet. Extreme flat feet. So when I got to Keesler Field the captain of the barracks there said, “Son, there’s no doubt that you would be better off for your country and yourself if you stayed in a railroad shop battalion. But we’ve got a big block of Air Corps unassigned.” He said the only way I could get out of the Air Corps would be by OCS [officers candidate school] or paratroops.
Well, I wasn’t going to be a paratrooper – I didn’t think, anyway – so, consequently, I had to take my physical, and with my feet, they failed to pass me for OCS. I had nothing else to do except just stay in the Air Force unassigned. Which I did. Then I got into Scott Field Air Force Base up around St. Louis. It was close of course to Decatur, and I had my railroad pass, so I could go home when I got my code work up, and I was able to keep my code up to the point where I could get off on weekends. So I’d get home, until, of course, I was sent to other places.
I went to Tindall Field, Florida, for my flying hours. And there they had the second lieutenants going through OCS, coming out as a second lieutenant; I was doing the same thing on the obstacle course as they were doing, but I couldn’t come out a second lieutenant.
Then I went to an RTU – replacement training unit – at Westover Field, Massachusetts, and that’s where I met my crew.
We went overseas on the Queen Elizabeth, and we landed in Scotland on the 6th of June. The day of the Normandy invasion. We were all disappointed because we thought the war was going to be over before we ever got any part of it. Then they sent us [elsewhere in Scotland] for an additional month’s radio and navigational training.
Aaron Elson: Were you a radio operator?
Charles Graham: I was a radio operator-machine gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber, and I never fired a gun in combat. My particular squadron wanted us on the radio. I was in the 702nd Squadron of the 445th Bombardment Group.
The first trip I made was over to France, and one of the captains that had been there for some time flew as a co-pilot with my pilot, because my pilot was only a second lieutenant; they trained them also. Consequently, in the act of putting the flak suit on my pilot I pulled my oxygen hose loose. The next thing I knew I’m laying on the deck of the ship, and the co-pilot, who was a captain, didn’t offer to do anything, so the pilot got out of his seat, got back and recovered my oxygen tube onto me and got me back in my seat. Then he went back and flew the ship, we bombed some part of France, came back to our base in England, and the captain told him that he wouldn’t have done anything for me. Anybody that dumb, why … so my second lieutenant almost got court-martialed, he didn’t like that at all. But he held his temper.
Aaron Elson: Your pilot was Sollien?
Charles Graham: Carl Sollien. He was a professional photographer in Hamilton, New York. And my bombardier was a boy by the name of Huddleston, he was from California, and my top turret gunner was Ammi Miller, he was from Blackfoot, Idaho. And my engineer was Stephens, and he was from Detroit. One waist gunner was Jimmy Briggio, he was from Boston. And the other waist gunner was – actually, what happened, Stephens and Briggio were pretty good buddies, so Stephens instead of flying the top turret, which the engineer’s supposed to have done, wanted to get back in the waist to fly opposite his buddy Briggio, so consequently Ammi Miller was in the top turret and Stephens was on the waist.
Aaron Elson: What was Miller’s first name?
Charles Graham: Ammi. Today he’s a preacher in New Mexico. And the tail gunner was Tommy Imhoff, he was from Spokane, Washington, so you can see we were from all over. I was from Decatur, Illinois. And five of the crew were killed in the battle and five were prisoners of war. Tommy Imhoff from Spokane just turned 21 that day that he was killed. And Briggio in the waist and Stephens in the waist were killed, the nose navigator was also killed, and the co-pilot was the only one that had on a back-type chute, and we feel that his clips must have clipped over because the chute never opened when he bailed out.
We got hit about 9:30 in the morning, after we had bombed Kassel, Germany, and it looked like a milk run. It was our 24th mission, and our P-51 fighter escort left us for a secondary target.
Well, we were the first group of the 8th that took the Sperry ball turret off underneath the belly of the plane, prior to getting more gas supply I guess to go to Berlin. We were never told why they did it, but the Jerry interrogators knew more about that than what we did, and so the fighters – the ME-109s and FW-190s – they came up underneath us and just riddled us.
I bailed out at 19,000 feet.
Aaron Elson: Before you bailed out, what was the first indication that there was any trouble?
Charles Graham: On my plane, the No. 4 engine was on fire, and as I looked from my position up towards the pilot I saw Carl Sollien pull the control back and it all came right back in his lap. So he had no control over the ailerons or rudders. At that time, he blew the thing for bailing out.
Aaron Elson: Did you see the fighters going past?
Charles Graham: Oh, yes. I saw this one fighter coming in. I could see the fire coming from his wings, coming right at us. We were flying deputy lead that day, and our lead ship blew up in front of us, so then we had to take over the lead, and for some reason or other, the lead navigator was about 25 miles off his course. So we did not hit the target that we were supposed to have hit, and that was the disappointing part of it.
Aaron Elson: Were there any radio communications?
Charles Graham: Not during that battle, because it came so fast that you didn’t have a chance to, only the communication between the members of the crew, and that was just to point out fighters and so forth. But I could see this one ME-109 coming in and the fire coming out of his wingtips just before Sollien blew the blast to evacuate.
I’d never used a parachute before, so I got down, preparatory to getting on the catwalk to bail out the bomb bay doors, and something hit me in the back. It was my top turret gunner Ammi Miller’s flak suit; he had loosened it and it fell out of the top turret. When he got down, I put his chest type chute on. I already had mine on, and we both bailed out about the same time. Ammi and I were the only enlisted men that were prisoners of war, whereas the pilot and the navigator and the bombardier were the only other three members of the plane that were prisoners of war and saved.
Ammi and I ended up in Stalag Luft IV, and the pilot and the bombardier and the navigator ended up in Stalag Luft No. 1, where most of the officers went. Stalag Luft IV was about 30 miles south of the Baltic Sea and 100 miles northeast of Stetin, Germany.
Aaron Elson: What happened when you hit the ground?
Charles Graham: I really didn’t hit the ground. I don’t swim, and I had my Mae West on, and I thought, if I go in the water I’ll drown, and I’d probably forget to pull the Mae West anyway. I passed over this little body of water, and then all wide open fields and one tree. And I lit right in the middle of that darn tree.
I undid my parachute and dropped to the ground. It was only about four or five feet. Now, if I had crossed my legs as we’d been told by the paratroopers to do, I’d have broken both of them probably, because the crotch of my legs was only about six inches from the big branches of the tree. But at that time, there was a man and his wife, they came out, buried my parachute, and took me into their home.
At that time, we’d seen everything all around, black parachutes, white parachutes, and we didn’t know at the time that the German fighter pilots had black parachutes, and we wore the white. They got us into the house and there were several other American boys in there, and they were getting a meal of fried apples ready for us when a knock came on the door, and here stood two great big German officers and they were on big white horses. They came in and said, “For you the war is over.” And that’s all. Then we were divided into different parties. I went into a party going around checking on the wounded, and my pilot was on one going for the dead; that’s the reason, as I found out later at the Dulag Luft transit camp, Sollien was wearing Briggio’s overseas cap. Sollien always was immaculate with his uniform and always wore the visor type officer cap, so when I saw him with this little overseas cap, I knew that he was trying to relay something to me, and he finally got to me and told me that that was Briggio’s cap, and he had been killed in the battle as well as the tail gunner and the other waist gunner and so forth.
He told as much as he could before we were separated, and then I was in this Dulag camp for about five days. They knew more about us than we knew about them. We didn’t realize it, but the German child had to take a lot of English when they were in school, and of course we didn’t know any German. They spoke German and they could speak fluent American, but they didn’t use the English any more than they needed to.
The next thing we knew, we were in the 40-and-8 boxcars, heading for our camp. They put us in a marshaling yard at Frankfurt, and the RAF would bomb at night. The engine left our cars out there and we were at the mercy of the RAF bombing. Fortunately, we weren’t hit.
Then they moved us up to Stalag Luft IV. Prior to that, we didn’t realize it at the time, but some boys had been brought by boat from some other camp because they were too close to Berlin at the time, and that was when they had to walk or run between the columns of soldiers and German dogs, called it the Heydekrug run. They were in our camp also, and several of them were still in the hospital when we left there. I think one boy said they had about 42 dog bites and about 18 bayonet wounds. So I fortunately wasn’t in on that. But they treated us okay while we were in prison camp. What potatoes we peeled, why, that was what we got to eat. At night, there were 24 of us in the barracks, 24 in a room, and there were Australians and English, Americans, New Zealanders. All different nationalities. And the English were smart. They would parade and exercise during the day around the compound, and we’d lay in their bunks and read books, because we had to sleep on the floor at night. And we got soft, not realizing that one of these days we were going to be liberated, and maybe forced on a march. Nothing like that crossed our mind.
But after about seven months had gone by, they started to have rumors going around that there was going to be a forced march, and some of the boys were in such condition that they wouldn’t be able to walk. Ammi Miller was one of them, his feet and legs were real bad. So he went by train with I don’t know how many others to Barth. And I never saw Ammi after that until I got back to the States.
I was issued an English RAF uniform, which was very wooly and sticky. I wear a 10½ shoe and they issued me a 9½ boot. Then, prior to that, they had dropped a soldier where he could be captured, because he had been trained to take over a camp to keep from using all the Red Cross parcels. I’m getting ahead of my story. We got one Red Cross parcel a week, between four men. So like if you got 48 prunes, you got 12 prunes for the week. And we would take those four prunes, say, for three days and peel them from the seed and then use the klim milk and the water and make like a little syrup like with it, and that was our breakfast, along with the millet, which was birdseed, but it was good. It was good at that time.
Outside of that, and the potatoes, once in a while we would get Jerry jam; that was just about all of the food that we would get. And again the Americans were dumb. We would trade the English our D-bars, the chocolate bars, for their cigarettes. And the English were quite ready for a march. We weren’t. And on the 6th of January, when we left on the death march – we didn’t know it was a death march – it was snowing outside, and we were given a complete Red Cross parcel per man. But it was so doggone heavy that then you’d see the boys just throwing the pieces out into the ditches. You kept what you could carry and it didn’t last too long that way.
We ferried across the Oder, and we would stay at night in barns, and about 10,000 of us they figure started out on the road march. We got to the Elbe and we crossed the Elbe River on the bridge and stayed at a camp between Hanover and Amberg for about a week. And then Patton started his drive on the south and Montgomery on the north. Well, when Patton got to the Rhine, we didn’t know it at the time but he was supposed to have held up and let the Russians come in and finish the war. But when he didn’t meet the resistance he thought he would, he went across, and Montgomery hearing that, why, he went across in the north, but the Germans had moved us back into Germany away from Montgomery and blew up the bridge. So it was four or five days later that we were liberated by Montgomery’s 2nd Rangoon Division on the road. And the night before, we could hear small arms fire in the distance, so it was definitely a violation of the Geneva convention that we were that close to the front lines.
Aaron Elson: What specific things can you remember about that march?
Charles Graham: Probably about halfway through the march, the fighter escort of the Americans would fly over and they knew where we were, but we didn’t know where we were. I guess they kept word going back to the different air force bases. But on the second pass one of the fighters made, this road pillbox opened up on him, and of course the third pass he made he came in to get the pillbox, and with those tracer bullets going all around we were digging in; that’s when I got hit with some shrapnel and received the Purple Heart.
After we were liberated and we started to walk as a group into another transit camp to be deloused, we had on the German helmets and their guns and all that that they had given us the night before, and here come our fighter pilots and they thought it was a German column, and they started strafing us. So we threw everything in the ditch and got rid of it, and they realized what was going on.
The night before we were liberated, I had two German guards with me on the march – I can’t think of their names right now, but one used to be a doorman at the Palmer House in Chicago, and the other one used to make road maps for Shell Oil Company in Toledo, Ohio. They had gone back on vacation and they got stuck over there and they had to go into the German army. They knew where Decatur was, they knew it was the soybean capital of the world and all that, they were very familiar with the States. And they said, “We’ll do anything in the world we can for you, but if we’re told to shoot you the next minute, we’ve got to do that. When we get to this barn, we’re going to go up and get our orders.” And here comes old Fritz back, I said, “Fritz, what happened?”
Oh, boy, I never saw such a man so dejected in my life.
He said, “They told us to get to the Berlin section as fast as we can, and that was our reward for getting you people as far as we did.” He was really dejected. I felt sorry for him. And they were in their sixties. The guards were in their sixties.
Aaron Elson: Now what about this guy that was dropped in specifically to be captured?
Charles Graham: He was apparently schooled to keep the boys on their toes and to keep them from getting too many Red Cross parcels ahead because he knew what was going to take place. And the day we were liberated, he went out with a jeep and came back and he said, “You’re free. You’re liberated. But if you’re caught pilfering, you’ll go immediately into the guardhouse.” And they made him a captain on the spot. That was what he was dropped there purposely for. And it’s a good thing, because if we had demanded to eat more of the parcel, we would probably have starved to death, like some of the Polish soldiers did.
Aaron Elson: At any point on the march, did you think of giving up?
Charles Graham: I never did have the feeling that I’d be liberated. I always had the feeling that they’d line us up and mow us down before they’d let us be liberated. But we didn’t realize at the time that we were considered hostages more than we were prisoners. We didn’t know that. When we were captured, they took our Bibles away from us, which we always carried in our flying suit, and threw them in a pile like they were going to burn them. But when the attempt on Hitler’s life at Berchtesgaden failed, they gave us our Bibles back. So we had those with us when we were on the road march. But we had very poor medical facilities. We had doctors with us but they didn’t have any facilities of their own to do much. And then when I was liberated, I went to Brussels, Belgium to a hospital and I was there for a month, and all I got, as I can remember, was champagne and milkshakes, so I was bloated. I had lost 30 pounds on the road march, because the only thing actually that we got on the road march after we had used up what Red Cross parcel we had, we just sort of picked spuds and things that we’d dig out of the dirt going into the barnyards, because they didn’t have any facilities to feed us.
One day they told us that if we marched 30 miles, we’d get a warm meal and a place to sleep under cover. Well, we walked the 30 miles and we got to an open field, and they had sort of like a supply wagon there, and with our little klim cans around our neck that we had for water as we’d go through the villages, we got a little can of soup, and we slept in the open fields that night. That was when Ammi left us because he couldn’t make that 30-mile march. Most of the time we walked 12 to 14 miles a day. But what was bad with the march was about every hour they let you rest about five minutes, and that just got you stiff and you couldn’t hardly get back up.
That was about the end of it, Aaron. After the hospital thing I went to Le Havre and waited for my orders to get back to the States, and I got onto a Coast Guard cutter, I can’t think of the name of it now but the chief petty officer was Victor Mature, and he gave us a show every afternoon on board the ship.
He was real good. In fact, one of the sergeants – at that time I was a staff sergeant, of course after I was discharged we got our grade, I actually was discharged as a tech sergeant. But this one tech sergeant, he was a higher grade than I was, he tried to get myself and the prisoners to clean up the decks, and Mature came down and told him, “These boys have been through this. They’re not going to do that. You get your group and you do it.” So I thought quite a bit of Victor Mature.
Then, when we got back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we were sent to Fort Sheridan outside of Chicago, and I caught the Bluebird in Chicago down to Decatur, and my poor mother, she had the feeling that anything she didn’t eat I would get, so she had lost even more weight than I had, and she looked like a little peasant lady there standing on the platform as I got off the train.
Meanwhile, Betty was in nurse’s training in Chicago, and when they got word that I was a prisoner of war, she had hepatitis and she was in the hospital and her mother and father and my sister went with them up there, and the head nurse and doctor advised them not to tell Betty at the time, because we were engaged. We were engaged six years before we married. Four of it of course while I was in the service. So consequently, they didn’t tell her anything but she knew something was wrong.
Then they sent me to San Antonio, Texas, at the camp there, and I was discharged on the first of October of 1945. She got out of nurses’ training on the 12th of October as a registered nurse, and we were married on the 25th of October. So today, why, we have been married over 53 years. We have two boys, one Robert who is in the park with us here now, he retired at 52 years of age from Monsanto Chemical Company, and the other boy Gary is in Blackstone Virginia with a large correctional institute, next to the warden. He’s in the criminology part of what I went through. And that’s it. We have two boys.
Aaron Elson: Do you ever discuss prisons with him?
Charles Graham: Not too much. But it never did bother me talking about it. We went to Fort Wayne, Indiana, pretty quick after I got back to Decatur I finished up my apprenticeship and became a mechanic, and then the general superintendent of motor power called me in his office and sent me to Stanbury, Missouri as roundhouse foreman, and then of course that was a union part of the railroad. Then I bid on a job at Vandeventer roundhouse in St. Louis, Missouri. Then he called me back again to his office in Decatur and made me an assistant engineer, and from assistant engineer I went to assistant master mechanic at Mt. Free(?) Ohio on the Wabash Railroad. I was with the Wabash 27 years, and then when the Norfolk Western took over the Nickelplate and merged with the Wabash in ‘64, why, I was sent to Fort Wayne, Indiana, as assistant master mechanic, and from there I went to Wassa(?) Michigan as master mechanic of the Ann Arbor Railroad, that was a subsidiary of the Wabash, and then I went to Mobium(?) as assistant master mechanic. I’m getting confused now. Let me start again.
I finished my apprenticeship and got my card as a machinist in the back shop. That was on steam engines. And then we started to work on diesels, and the general superintendent of motor power called me over and asked me if I wanted – see, on the railroad the son cannot work in any department that the father was in, so my dad was in the car department, I was in the motor power, and my sister was transportation. So when he called me in there and gave me the job of roundhouse foreman of Stanbury, Missouri, I was there for a while and then I bid on the job in St. Louis. And then from St. Louis, why, I went as assistant master mechanic to Mount Freedom Ohio, where I had the territory from Peru Indiana to Detroit Michigan and the Canadian division, and then I was sent to Moberly, Missouri, as assistant master mechanic, and from there I went to Owasso, Michigan, as master mechanic of the Ann Arbor Railroad. Then from there, they brought me back to Crew, Virginia, as road foreman of engines because when the N&W took over the Wabash and Nickelplate, they put the mechanical department in the transportation department and the transportation officials in the mechanical. So when I was in the mechanical with the Wabash I wasn’t allowed to run any trains or anything, but then when you go into the transportation department of the Norfolk Western, why, you have to run them because you’re road foreman of engines and you’re over the engineer, firemen and conductors. So I guess I was smart enough, I knew I didn’t know as much as those engineers and firemen did, so they went ahead and did their job and as long as they didn’t do anything out of line, why, I went along with everything they did.
Aaron Elson: Were you an engineer on trains or in the yards?
Charles Graham: I was on the road. We were taking 100-car trains of coal up to Norfolk, Virginia, from Roanoke. I was with the Wabash for 27 years and with the N&W for the balance making 39 and a half years on the railroad.
Aaron Elson: What was the Wabash Cannonball?
Charles Graham: That was the cannonball between St. Louis and Detroit.
Aaron Elson: Were you ever involved or witness any railroad accidents?
Charles Graham: Well, as a master mechanic I was in charge of all the wreckers. I had to go out and pick up all the wrecks and stuff like that. I had my wreck master and general foreman and so forth, but I was in charge of telling them what cars we want, I had to get the damage figures and all that stuff. Then I had to be able to call back into the headquarters and tell them what damage was on certain cars and all that.
Aaron Elson: What kind of wrecks would you see?
Charles Graham: Well, for example, up around Otumwa, Iowa, we had a bad wreck up there, like a (?) and maybe 15 or 16 cars of trilevel automobiles, and automobiles thrown all over the place and things like that. And then of course you were in charge of getting crews in there to transfer commodities from one car to another car.
Aaron Elson: Any with fatalities?
Charles Graham: No.
Aaron Elson: I’ve read where trainmen who were involved in accidents where people were killed...
Charles Graham: There were accidents of course, but by the time I would get there why they would have been picked up and taken to hospitals.
Aaron Elson: Oh, one thing I wanted to ask, if you landed in Belgium, you must have flown for a little while, you didn’t go right down?
Charles Graham: Oh, no. We had bombed Kassel and made the turn, and then were in occupied Luxembourg, that’s where we were. I’d say we made the turn and were heading back, but by that time is when the fighters hit.
Aaron Elson: After you were hit then, you still must have flown another 15 or 20 minutes.
Charles Graham: I don’t think that long Aaron, we went down pretty quick. After the lead ship blew up, we were on fire pretty quick after that. All bailed out except of course the ones that were killed in the plane. The bodies were still in the plane, Sollien said, when he got there.
Aaron Elson: Now you had never seen fighters before?
Charles Graham: Never had seen fighters before, that was the first time. We seen plenty of flak.
Aaron Elson: Well, the flak was just like they say, you could almost walk on it. The worst one we had on flak was Karlsruhe, and on that mission, why, one 150-millimeter shell went through our catwalk, and it was my job on flying back over the Channel to assess the damage of the ship. So when I started back to the catwalk and saw that big hole in there, I didn’t make it to the tail. So we were very fortunate to get that ship back to base, and the ship that flew above us told us at the interrogation that if it had gone off on impact that would have been it for us but as it was it went off underneath their wing up above us. It went through the plane and it didn’t go off on impact, it went off at altitude. And blew up underneath the wing of the ship above us.
That was hairy too, but we didn’t realize that at the time. Now what George said in his thing was about the octane. I never experienced any of that at all. I never experienced any fumes from octane at all. I never experienced that. The navigator, Huddleston, of course he was up around the nose, why, I did see him when he was coming back with the chute wadded up this way, and fortunately it opened up and he was a prisoner.
But I guess beating on the nose door trying to get it open probably opened up his chute and he just had to wad it up in his arms. But I think that’s what it was because they were supposed to go out the nose door, but if the nose door was jammed some way in the battle, why, trying to beating on that would open the chute, why, he would have no alternative than just to wad it up and hope it would open when he got out.
Aaron Elson: Did you see planes to your left or in front of you or elsewhere in the formation?
Charles Graham: What we were told was so many of our boys you know lost their lives by opening their chute too soon and being consumed by fire from their ship, so I was very particular and careful that when I did bail out, before I pulled my ripcord, I saw my ship go clear over and there was no ship in my immediate area when I pulled my ripcord. But then the fighters were around there, and then there came a P-51 and a P-51 that came back from the secondary target when they heard this on the radio, they all came back and they claim they got all the fighters before they got back to base, I don’t know about that. Anyway, he circled me all the way down until I lit in that tree. He kept the fighters away from me. But they did shoot the boys in the chute, there’s no question about that.
Aaron Elson: They did?
Charles Graham: Not intentionally possibly, but the pattern of the bullets, they had no control over that.
Aaron Elson: What did you see as you were coming down?
Charles Graham: I started to manipulate my shroud, and it was like it was going to lose the, so I just left that thing alone. And then I spotted this little body of water, and I thought oh my God, I can’t swim, and if I do go in I probably won’t be able to stay up with the Mae West, or forget to pull it, but as I say I went over the water and then wide open fields, and then right into this little tree.
Aaron Elson: What can you tell me about the other people on your crew, the five who didn’t make it.
Charles Graham: Well, the tail gunner, Tommy Imhoff, he was killed. The pilot told me that Imhoff and Stevens were decapitated with the same shell, it went right through the side of the ship. And Koenig, the co-pilot, his chute didn’t open and they found his body almost intact but broken of course. And then the navigator, Dent, we didn’t know him too well, that was the first time we’d used him, why he was burned and killed in the nose turret. And then, let’s see, the bombardier was saved, the navigator, Ammi and I, and Sollien’s five, that’s it.
Aaron Elson: Nine-man crew?
Charles Graham: No, ten. Five were killed and five prisoners.
Aaron Elson: And had you socialized with any of them?
Charles Graham: The only thing I’ve done is MacGregor ...
Charles Graham: What city is that that McGregor lives in?
Mrs. Graham: Park City, Utah.
Charles Graham: Park City, Utah. McGregor lives there. And we went out – well, my son lives in Green River, Wyoming, so we were flying out of Salt Lake, so the last trip we had a rental car, well, we stopped by and we saw Mac and his wife, and his wife’s name is also Betty, and we went to lunch with them. And then he was up here at Sarasota, probably about eight years ago. And while they were there he called and they drove down here and saw us here in Florida.
Amy Miller was out of Blackfoot, Idaho, and with the kids being in Wyoming, well, we all got together in Pocatello, and we got to see them at one time. That’s where I learned that he and his wife, Pearl, are quite religious and he’s a minister in New Mexico. I have written him several times, even e-mail, but I don’t get any reply from him like I did McGregor. McGregor and I are probably the closest ones. Sollien has since passed away, and Huddleston has passed away.
Aaron Elson: What about during the war? Did you go into London with any of these guys?
Charles Graham: I never saw them again. Never saw any of them except like I say McGregor and...
Aaron Elson: But I mean before you were shot down, during those 24 missions, when you had like a three-day pass, would you...
Charles Graham: Yeah, we went into London. I was in bed in the Knightsbridge barracks one night the V-bomb came over and knocked me out of bed.
Aaron Elson: That must have been an experience.
Charles Graham: Yeah, that happened. We’d go by train, by Ipswich, and get to London, I think I got about three passes like that. We were stationed at Norwich, England, and we got some leave but not very much while we were over there. But I missed the Ploesti raid. They had just returned I’d say probably about two weeks before we got over there.
Aaron Elson: About from the time you got there until the Kassel raid, it seems like there were no disastrous missions. A lot of the people, like yourself, this was the first time they’d seen fighter planes.
Charles Graham: Yeah.
Aaron Elson: But before, on the early missions, the fighters were there constantly.
Charles Graham: Oh yeah, the ones that were shot down earlier, you know, they saw a lot of fighters. But I think generally they realized, about the time that we were shot down, it was about the end of the fighters, because they’d lost so many.
Aaron Elson: Now, I’ve got a request. George Collar said to ask you if you have a picture of your crew.
Charles Graham: No. I sure don’t. No, sir, I sure don’t. I would love to have one. I’m in Chapter 100 down here, with the ex-POWs, and I’m in charge of the publicity down here of the chapter. We’ve got about 60. Now you’re familiar with where our camp was?
Aaron Elson: No.
Charles Graham: Let’s see if I can show you here. Here’s Hanover right here, Hanover, and here’s Kassel – we bombed Kassel, right here. Now my prison, Stalag Luft IV, let’s see, I never did put it down, here’s Berlin ...
Aaron Elson: Was it in Germany or in Poland?
Charles Graham: No, it was in Germany. It was 30 miles south of the Baltic Sea and about 100 miles northeast of Stetin, Germany. I should have probably highlighted that, but I never did do it.
Aaron Elson: That’s okay. I’ll be able to find it on a map at home.
Charles Graham: That’s funny. I was going to show you the route of our walk. Lubbeck, right here, is where I was liberated. I was liberated at Lubbeck. We’d just gone back over the Elbe River, see. ... Right here, I found this, I did have this marked, that’s Lubbeck, that’s where I was liberated, here’s Barth, right here. Now Stetin is D-9, here’s D, way down in here.
I bombed Karlsruhe, and I bombed Ulm, and Munich, and Strasbourg, Saarbrucken.
Aaron Elson: Did you see any planes blow up when they crashed in formation?
Charles Graham: I never saw that. See, a radio operator is pretty well covered. He doesn’t have a whole lot of vision out of those ships. Have you been to the prisoner of war museum at Andersonville?
Aaron Elson: No.
Charles Graham: We saw it coming down. Quite interesting. Here’s Andersonville right here. That’s quite interesting.
Aaron Elson: (reading) “report just received through the International Red Cross states that your son, Technical Sergeant Charles J. Graham” – what’s the J for?
Charles Graham: Joseph.
Aaron Elson: (reading) “is a prisoner of war of the German government, letter of information follows from provost martial-general.” Now this was November 18 ...
Charles Graham: 18th, yes, my mother’s birthday. It was on her birthday when she got word that I was a prisoner of war and not missing in action.
Aaron Elson: These were your missions?
Charles Graham: There’s my missions.
Aaron Elson: 6 July, 44. So 6 July was your first mission. To a tactical target.
Charles Graham: They called them tactical targets when they were in France, because you couldn’t bomb PFF in France, see, you didn’t know where you were bombing, you had to see your target.
Aaron Elson: So you flew the day before (Kassel) to Hamm.
Charles Graham: Yes.
Aaron Elson: You had Munich, Munich, Saarbrucken, Tactical, Tactical, Leipheim, Saarbrucken, Tactical, Tactical, Tactical, Brunswick, Harburg, Saarbrucken, Tactical, Brunswig, Eranienburg(?), Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Gustavsburg, Ulm, Ulm, Hamm and Kassel.
