Eugene George:: Yes. I would like a cup of decaf, black.

Aaron Elson: Regular.

Eugene George: I had a little pocket Bible, and with it a New Testament with psalms, and I just opened it up, it was about ten o'clock in the morning, and it fell open to the 91st Psalm.

Aaron Elson: Is that "May ten thousand fall to your left..."?

Eugene George: Yes, that's the one. So, that was very reassuring. That was a miracle. I mean, the foxes and the psalm. I waited for quite a while. I did see three, they could not see me but ME-109s flying low over, they were in formation, probably returning to base. Also, there was a path not too far away and I heard some people talking, there were three men, all senior citizens of sorts and they had a little fox terrier dog with them, and I was really worried about that. But I was downwind from them. I was enough of a Boy Scout to know about this sort of thing, and the dog never caught me, but they were sort of talking to the dog, the dog was looking up at them, they went right on by. But my plan was to walk all day, head for Switzerland, walk all day, I mean walk all night and sleep all day, and I would find before the sun came up I would find a place to dig in. I ran into Corman Bean, and we were together on that first night, or maybe the second night, I don't remember. It was the 27th of September it was snowing(?), the 28th it was pretty chilly, and he slept all morning and he kept talking in his sleep about Millie, his wife, he would talk about her and it was quite a touching encounter. And then somehow, he decided to take off and we got separated and I don't know, I don't know how it happened.

Aaron Elson: The next day he decided to take off?

Eugene George: I think we would have been together for a day or so, or more even. And we tried, we didn't have any food. He didn't seem to have an escape kit. We did have, well, he must have because we both had these little plastic water bottles that folded up and we purified our water, we had plenty of water. We tried eating raw potatoes. He or I, I don't know whether we were separate, you'd go into a little farm stand, it was the fall and there was fruit on the trees, but the German (unintelligible) dogs were really friendly, but the were (unintelligible) they would start barking, you know, and we didn't want to risk that. So we didn't eat. But there were two things, now Corman's stories may match up here some, but I think most of what I'm going to tell you now was solo on my part. Somehow we got separated. We didn't dare make a fire, or even if we had I don't think we had any matches or anything to make it with, but the raw potatoes were just not possible, but at any rate, I found myself alone, still headed south. I was, uh, out about six days before I was picked up. I lost count. I knew it was into October some. The, uh, then there were about three or four encounters that would be interesting. One is that, it's amazing how your senses sharpen up under these circumstances, and I realized walking in the dark that I was not alone, and, the, you freeze. And I had made shoes for myself out of part of my heated flying suit, I had a very sharp pocket knife and I used the wires in the heated suit to tie them, tie my shoes together, so I could move very quietly, so I just froze and there was two lovers, and I was very close to them. They never knew I was, they were focused on each other. Another time, and I found an autobahn, the main autobahn south, and headed toward Switzerland, and of course everything was blacked out but you get, when you know a large, concentrated area, you get a feeling, you know, even though it's blacked out, you get a feeling for the place. I could hear a railroad train (unintelligible) up the autobahn. I was very concerned about bridges, because I didn't want to get caught in the middle of a bridge, and, there was practically no traffic, and any traffic there was would have been military traffic, but I would often instead of walking the bridge I'd go down and try to cross over the creek or something like that, not to get caught on the bridge. So I would walk all night and hide out all day. And there was one time when I encountered a railroad going the same way as the autobahn, and the train, and I knew it's moving very slowly and I thought, well if I can get onto this train I can hitch a ride for a while if it's going in the right direction. It was going north. And so it was coming, I was in timber, and I was on the edge of this forest by the railroad track, and I was secure behind a tree, it's pretty dark, but I could make out, it was hauling something, and I could see cigarettes on the, these flat cars, and it was a, an armored division, and it had tanks on this train and the crews were riding on the flatcars, now this was in the dark of night, so I thought, it was going in the wrong direction so I didn't take that train. But those were two of the situations that I ran into, there was a third one, I can't quite fill it out right now. One thing, the German forests of course were planted, and the trees were not at random. You could look down rows and rows of trees, and I think they could see you, you know, if you weren't, so you really had to be cautious. But I was doing this at night. About the sixth day, I ran out of cover, and what happened was I was down in a valley, there were no trees, an agricultural area, and there was bridge, and I thought if I could get under that bridge I could stay there all day. And so I did get under the bridge in some high stuff, but what I didn't, I didn't reconnoiter at all, there was a path under the bridge also on the other side of the stream, and the Germans went to bed fairly early but they got up very early, and there were agricultural workers walking on this path. I knew they'd see me. I knew I was burned about the face and looked horrible, but I didn't have a mirror, I didn't know what I looked like, so I thought, well, my best plan is to just get up on the road act boldly, and if I can find a bunch of bushes somewhere I'll go in there, but surely they've seen me, and I think they were so-called slave labor, I don't know that they would have said anything, they were strange looking people. But I got up on the road and walked. A couple of cars, military cars, went by, didn't stop. And I was getting into central Germany, I'd been walking like crazy, and, the, I put myself down as four miles per hour, because I was used to that pace, I conditioned myself to that pace. But I ran into a, an overseer of these laborers, and he saw me and he looked very stern and said "Englishman!" I said, "Nein, nein, Amerikanische." I was pretty hungry and tired by this time. My eye, my right eye was really hurting and I was afraid I might lose it from the burn. I could feel my face, and part of my oxygen mask had melted on my face, and, uh, you know, he looked at me and looked horror stricken. And we had been told that the SS were dangerous, to never give up to them, that the Hitlerjugend were kids and they were dangerous, but to give up to the Wehrmacht. So I asked if he could take me to the Wehrmacht. He said yes, he would. He took me into this little town, I don't know where it was, or what it was, I really would like to know the name of that town. He took me into what would be the equivalent of the administrative office, and I had an o.d. uniform with insignia and stuff under my flying suit which had been burned in places. I took off my flying suit to show that I was in uniform. They rustled(?) Around in German and finally they sent for someone who spoke English. So he came up and he said, "Are you from Chicago?" And I said, "No, I've never been to Chicago." And I told him I had walked for six days without food, did he have anything to eat? He said, "Oh, you'll get food." They never did.
I said, when he asked this question about Chicago I thought he was thinking about gangsters, American flyers were gangsters. So I told him, name rank and serial number, that I was a student, an architectural student, and he was, they were amazed at how old I was, they thought I would have been much older. And I was from Texas. Now these, you're just supposed to tell name, rank and serial number, but, uh, he said, "Well, I lived in Chicago."
And I said, "Well, you must not have liked it because you're here in Germany."
He said, "Oh yes," he said, "I'm going to go back there as fast as I can when this war is over."
So they put me in their hoosegow, which was the top of their church, a little room in the top, the belfry of their church. And I was so exhausted. And they sent for a Wehrmacht guard and a truck to take me to the railroad station. And, that little room was so filthy I slept, in the church, I slept on the floor. But I was dead to the world, you know, after, I was so tired. So I got on the train in the baggage car headed for Frankfurt. I didn't know where it was going. And they had a guard in the baggage compartment, it had bicycles and baggage and things, and he was a Wehrmacht (unintelligible). Do you remember the Milton Caniff cartoons? You remember that he was very accurate in his drawings, and he would show Germans with Mauser rifles and actually in training, his drawings of Japanese landing craft were so accurate that those were used as training aids, they used a lot of Japanese training aids from Milton Caniff cartoons. But one of the things he was very accurate with was his weapons, and the Mauser, the German Mauser, was one of them. And this guard was a young guy, I looked at him, he was very curious about me, and I think they had, the word had gotten through to him that I was from Texas and that I had been without food for six days and had walked all this distance. I did ask him how far I was from Switzerland. He said about 50 kilometers. And I went back and checked that distance after from Bad Hersfeld to see if it was possible, and it was plausible at a four mile per hour pace. Now I, I don't know whether I'm exaggerating or not exaggerating, but at any rate, that's what I believe I heard him say. Another two nights I could have done it. And Switzerland wasn't blacked out, you knew when you were over the border.

Aaron Elson: Wouldn't you have to climb a mountain to get over the border?

Eugene George: No, no. I was in, my plan was to get a boat and go to Lake Constance and go across there, if I could get a sailboat. See, I was a sail, I used to sail sailboats and I was thinking to do that. That was my plan, if I had hit the lake. Now, I didn't know what sort of patrols they would have but I didn't think they would be very severe because that was not a war zone. But anyway, I saw his rifle and I said, "Mauser?" And I looked at it, not trying to get too close, and he handed it to me. And I looked out the window, and I lifted his rifle and very carefully handed it back to him, and he realized what he had done, and then he was a little uptight. I was whistling which I think just passed the time, and I was whistling the Marseillaise. He asked me not to do it. He didn't speak English, and he asked me not to do that, so I tried Lili Marlene and asked him to sing Lili Marlene. So we got into Frankfurt eventually. I still hadn't eaten.

Aaron Elson: You must have been starved.

Eugene George: Well, actually with water you can last a long time. But those peaches I had back several days before had to last a long time. At any rate, I was taken into where there were a lot of German enlisted men, and they had all known that I had walked this distance and had been without food, and that I was from Texas. And being from Texas was a, uh, it really turned them on. One or two of them spoke English, of course, and they said, "Did your father fight Indians?" And I said, "No, my great-grandfather did. Not my father." And that I grew up on horseback, and with cows and oil wells. So they got, we talked about things like that. The big question on their minds, "When is the war going to be over?" And I said, "We think it'll be done by Christmas." And they were overjoyed at that. Everyone was sick and tired of war. And one who could speak English, one of them said, "How could you do what you did?" I said, "Well, I'm an American," and that, from what I've heard (unintelligible) Marine said when they were being brainwashed. At any rate, that just came out. And they seemed to be satisfied with that answer. I was taken into the hospital for my burns, and I watched the German officers how they behaved, I didn't see many German officers, but how they looked at enlisted men, their bearing, that sort of thing, and I decided I would do exactly the same thing, and I did that. And they responded to that. The doctor, I had very good medical care. I asked the doctor if he went to school in Heidelberg. He said he did, and he said, When is the war going to be over? And I said, Well, that's one of the best medical schools in the world. I said, "Some of our best physicians went there before the war." And always, I think, because I was in a hospital bed, and because I behaved like an officer, these orderlies would come in, I did get some potato soup finally, and they would salute before they would ask a question or anything, and I think this really paid off. So, we went to a place called Dulag Luft, which you've heard about. I was there a couple of weeks and put on a train with one other person, an Australian radio operator in a Lancaster, and we headed for Stetin.

Aaron Elson: At Dulag Luft, were you interrogated?

Eugene George: Not much. You see, I looked like Frankenstein. I was all bandaged up. I was not much interrogated.

Aaron Elson: Okay, so you were put on a train to ...

Eugene George: Stetin. I didn't know where it was going.

Aaron Elson: And there was an Australian.

Eugene George: An Australian. We were locked up in a compartment of a passenger car. We went through Berlin on the way, and we were locked in the car and there was an air raid on Berlin, and the German officer said that the Geneva Convention says I'm supposed to warn you that I will shoot you if you try to escape and I'm now warning you, and he went to the bomb shelter. We stayed locked up in the train, and the bombs didn't fall near us. We thought they would (unintelligible) in the marshaling yard and we were afraid they would, but uh, we could see out the window and see the German countryside, go through towns. We had a box of prunes which lasted us almost, in that compartment, about a week. We had toilet facilities, of course. But, uh, I looked him up in Australia when I went there later on, his name is Johnny Murray and he went to the College of England after the war, he studied dentistry, and we had a little correspondence. We would go through places and there would be F-51s or P-51s in the area, they would stop the train, they'd leave, running, and all the passengers would go to the woods or something, we would stay locked up, and we eventually got to Barth. Stetin, then to Barth, and we did do some walking with a large group of prisoners. There were very vicious dogs and guards, and we got into Stalag Luft 1 near Barth.

Aaron Elson: How did you learn what happened to Brent?

Eugene George: I never knew really what happened to Brent. To me, he was MIA, and I thought probably he was killed in the jump or he got caught by civilians who shot him and killed him on the spot or something. I never knew. He was just straight MIA. I had an inquiry from a, it may have been a telephone call, and he asked if, he said he was from Oregon and he asked if I was Walter E. George who had been a pilot in the Air Force. And I said yes. And he said, "Well, did you fly with Donald E. Brent?" And I said, "Oh yes, he was my pilot."
And he said, "Well, I'm his great-nephew."
And I said, "Well, if you want to know what happened to him I don't know. I saw him, I think I was the last one to see him alive, he went out of the airplane before I did, but I don't know what happened to him after that."
He said, "Well, he was killed and he was buried in Germany and reburied in an American cemetery." And he said, "I really would like to talk with you. My family would like to talk ... my grandmother would like to talk with you."
And I said, "Well, I'd like to talk with you."
So I've always wanted to see Oregon, so I said, "I'll come to Oregon." So my wife and I went, now Brent was, I was not sure where he was from, I knew he was associated with Eugene, Oregon, and he had a wife in Bellevue, Washington, I believe. So, we went to Eugene. Now I'd never been in either, I'd been in most of the states but never Washington or Oregon, and I wanted to see the trees and other things. So it was like going to a funeral. All the relatives, two of them military, high up, colonels, who came from the Washington, D.C., area. There was another retired Air Force person. There was the family, his former wife, of course, was remarried, his sister, the grandmother of this nephew, and her daughter, and these people really rolled out the carpet but I told them all I could.
Brent was a good pilot. He was well-coordinated. He thought ahead of the airplane, and he was interested in railroads. He wanted to be a railroad engineer and he'd worked on the railroads for a while, and he was mechanically inclined.
We were in harmony as a team, as pilots. I knew what he was thinking before he said, and he knew what I was thinking, and the way we worked, reacting on the airplane. But he was a good pilot, and I've flown with pilots who are dangerous. In fact, I refused to fly with two pilots because they, they just weren't with it. And they were trying to be macho.
So we had a good visit. I gave Brent's, well, I gave his sister's daughter the Bible that I'd had in my pocket when I bailed out, and she broke into tears. I said, "This rode next to Brent on 17 missions."
So that's about it. I stayed in the Reserve. I flew B-25s, I never flew a B-24 again. When we were evacuated from prison, for a lot of prisoners, B-17s came in and picked us up, and I was up near the pilot and I said, "Can I fly your airplane?"
He said, "Sure."
So I flew back to an airfield in France at very low altitude in Germany, the low altitude being, oh, 1,500 feet, just looking at the countryside.

Aaron Elson: What was it like in Stalag Luft 1?

Eugene George: Well, it varied. I kept my officer's stance with the Germans, and this was the way to go. We had, we were very crowded, we had 16 to 20 men in a room. We were stacked up in berths that were too short or worked well for Italians. We had Italian blankets which were too short. And remember, this was wintertime in Germany. We had two or three briquets of coal and a little heater, but actually our best, our warmth was from the fact that we had 20 people and we had body heat. But we had Red Cross parcels, and we were fairly well, we didn't have a lot to eat, we were on very small rations but we weren't making them, but when we got off Red Cross parcels it was pretty rough. We lost a lot of weight. I really got angry with these television programs about Air Force prisoners, all of these healthy guys who obviously ...

Aaron Elson: Hogan's Heroes?

Eugene George: Hogan's Heroes. To me this is the biggest farce I ever saw. It's ridiculing the situation. I mean, these people, for what they did they would have been shot. And we had a fellow shot for chasing a baseball under the warning wire, and another fellow shot when he opened a window during an air raid. The German guards varied greatly. We had cigarettes in the Red Cross parcels and these were trade goods, and as I told you, I have photographs, because we got, I traded for goods to make photographs of the prison. I thought the stalag, the channel, the web site that covered that prison would like to see ...

Aaron Elson: Did you have any contact with a guard Henry the Butcher?

Eugene George: No, I don't know about him. That name doesn't ring a bell. Sometimes a horse would get killed and we would get horsemeat.. I think we were all quite congenial. We were all Air Force officers and I think we behaved ourselves pretty well.

Aaron Elson: Did you keep a diary?

Eugene George: No. I didn't have anything to write with. Some did and kept a diary, and they probably traded to the Germans for cigarettes. But I didn't keep one. When people are gonna write books, and things like that. (Unintelligible) France. One thing that had happened, we were so out of shape if you got a scratch, it took so long healing. And then we walked around kind of bent over. In Hogan's Heroes, you know, these people straight and doing things, it wasn't like that. The Germans kept their civilian group late in the war pretty well informed about where the Russians were. We knew the Russians were coming, but we didn't know what form this would take. And we didn't know what the Germans would do. There was a lot of ideas and there was a lot of digging, the Germans started, and we would hear explosions and the Germans were blowing up motorcycles and things like this they didn't want to fall into Russian hands. And we knew there was an airport nearby, there was an airport very close to us, and I think our prison was put close to that airport to protect the airport. And we, as pilots, we were watching these Germans fly, they were flying JU-88s mostly, and they were so uncoordinated. And we thought they were throwing (unintelligible) into hot airplanes with very very low flying time, and they'll kill themselves in these planes let alone do anything to the Russians. But the Germans pulled out, grabbed a lot of Red Cross parcels, pulled out, they were headed we heard for the English lines, and the German civilian population was very agitated. And the first Russians I believe we had was a boy and a girl on horseback just sort of scouting out the territory, and they came into the area and left. And we knew the Russians were coming. And the Russians came in the form of a lot of drunk Mongolians and Orientals, I don't know where they were from but some of them were driving very skinny horses and pulling a cart full of loot, they were dressed in parts of German uniforms and they all had German machine pistols, and they were drunk. And they terrified the whole, not us, I mean they were, and mostly they came in wearing black armbands and we said, "Why are you wearing black armbands?" And they said, "Why aren't you wearing black armbands? Roosevelt is dead." The Russian army was wearing black armbands to honor Roosevelt. And so they got us some black cloth and that was our identification.

Aaron Elson: Had you not heard about Roosevelt?

Eugene George: We had not heard about Roosevelt being dead. But at any rate, we had numerous incidents in the camp. One of them was there were prisoners, I suppose they were officers but they were painting a stripe down the street, have you heard this story?

Aaron Elson: No.

v And they painted right on up to the guard opening, they painted their own way out. They painted as long as their paint would last, and they were out of prison. But the Orientals just had a reign of terror. And they were very fond of German children, and you'd see one with a little blond kid on his lap and just as happy as could be, they treasured these children. And you'd see children holding onto the harness of a trained German shepherd dog. Then there were civilian suicides in places, and the Russians didn't bury anything. This was a problem. But finally, more regular, disciplined troops came in behind them.

Aaron Elson: Did they do anything to the children?

vOh no, they didn't harm the children at all. The parents I'm sure were terrified. I don't know that they would have harmed the parents if they were the parents of the children. The German children were extremely well fed, they were healthy. The, uh, they drove in, and we told them we hadn't had beef for quite a while. And their ration was alcohol and they had little tins of sardines. They lived off the land. And we told them we hadn't had beef, and they drove in a very fine herd of Holstein cattle, and you know, to get a cow from a cow to a steak takes some in-between work, and that was attempted but it didn't work, and we were trying to get the cows back to the owners. But their troops came in and they were a crack outfit. And we had seen their reconnaissance planes, which were like 1930s biplanes coming over. Their vehicles were all worn out, their land vehicles, on the units we saw. They encountered SS and the SS had a unit somewhere around there, they went down to a little town called Zingst and made a last stand and I think the Russians killed them all. The Russians were fishing with hand grenades and things like that, they were kind of dangerous to be around. They came in, when the first ones came in they were line troops and they wanted us to tear down our barbed wire enclosures and things like that. We didn't have any techniques to do this, and we didn't have any tools to do it with. They sent a lot of them over with, I don't know how, maybe a hundred vehicles, and they wanted us to demonstrate things. And they sat in squads or patrols and a lot of individual cars. I was worried about their fires because I was thinking any German reconnaissance would pick them up, but they were doing their dances and they had their little squeeze box, they were very musical, and they wanted us to join in, and they wanted us to join with them and go on and keep chasing the Germans. But it was, they also brought in a USO, the equivalent of a USO show, and they brought in a lot of banners commemorating dead soldiers, you know, large photographic banners. They said, we heard they said "We'll take you out to the Ukraine" or Georgia, and we said, "We'll stay right here, our people will come and get us." They couldn't believe that uh...

Aaron Elson: If you had gone with them you never would have been heard of.

Eugene George: Probably. At any rate, we waited there on the ground for I don't know, two or three weeks, and things got settled down and B-17s came into this little airport. It had been mined. We had gone over there, I got, went out, I was curious about the time I got shot at, I learned that you hear the whine of the bullet before you hear the report. You know, and things like that, and so I went back in and stayed pretty much put. There were corpses, things like that, which was very unpleasant.

Aaron Elson: Not in the streets?

Eugene George: No, we were in an agricultural area. And there was a smell that was pretty bad.

Aaron Elson: Were you married at the time?

Eugene George: Yes I was married. I was married for about two years. I was married before I, just before I went in. When I got my wings I got married. She was about the equivalent of Hedy Lamarr in appearance, if you ever knew what she was like, she was a beautiful young woman. She was a graduate student in nutrition. To be an architect with a lot of time in front of me, our marriage just wasn't in place. I finished up at Texas and then later got my graduate degree at (unintelligible)

Aaron Elson: And then you got divorced?

Eugene George: No, I got divorced early on, while I was a student at Texas. And I didn't get married again for quite a while. My current wife is my third wife, and we've been married for 21 years.

Aaron Elson: Even though the two sides, you were trying to kill each other?

Eugene George: And I've read, of course I've read a lot about aviation and aviation history, I've read that during World War I the French pilots and the German pilots used to be at air shows together before they were enemies, and developed great friendship during this time.

Aaron Elson: It's a very strong bond.

Eugene George: And I don't think as a pilot you can describe flying, the feeling of flying, to a non-pilot, and I've flown B-25, C-47, AT-6s, I've flown several different aircraft. I like the B-25. I never wanted to fly four-engine bombers.

Aaron Elson: You never flew a B-29?

Eugene George: No.

Aaron Elson: Those were huge.

Eugene George: That was a huge airplane. It had a lot of creature comforts too, like pressurized cabins.

Aaron Elson: When you were flying the C-47 did you fly overseas?

Eugene George: No, no no. I just flew just putting in time in the Reserve.