When John Fitzgerald turned 18 in the summer of 1942, the country was already entrenched in World War II. But the Boston native had no hesitation about joining the military. His father and uncles had served in World War I and he, like most kids of his generation, had impatiently waited until the time when they could serve, he said.
So when Fitzgerald turned 18, he enlisted in the Air Force with no qualms about joining the war effort.
“We couldn’t wait to get out of high school,” the current Salt Pond resident said this week. “We were gone.”
Fitzgerald received combat training in Oklahoma and attended navigation school in Louisiana before joining a 10-man crew on a B-17 bomber bound for an Eighth Air Force base on the eastern coast of England.
“We got a brand new B-17 and they told us to take it to England. We thought that was our airplane,” Fitzgerald said. “We couldn’t wait.”
Fitzgerald was stationed as a navigator on a bomber crew with the Eighth Air Force, on a base between the two English towns of Norwich and Ipswich.
At that time, during the bomber assault on Germany, the Air Force was losing 50 B-17 bombers every day to enemy fire. Some 26,000 Eighth Air Force fighters died in the war — more lost than the Marine Corps — and Fitzgerald estimated that up to 150,000 others had been injured in combat.
Fitzgerald’s 10-man crew had already flown two missions by November of 1944 and was set to have a day off after celebrating the 20th birthday of one of the two pilots when they were ordered to take over a mission. His crew was to continue bombing an oil refinery in Merseburg, a town in central Germany, in an attempt to slow any German vehicles or technology that ran on oil.
Cruising at 31,000 feet in the B-17 that day, Fitzgerald said, flack coming from enemy rounds made the clear sky below look black and almost solid enough to walk on.
“All of the shells were exploding all around you,” he said. “There’s no way around that.”
The next thing Fitzgerald knew, though, he was waking up while receiving resuscitation from a fellow crew member. Flack coming from one of the estimated 600 anti-aircraft guns below had crashed through the nose of the plane near his station, through a table and into his helmet, knocking him unconscious.
After enemy fire dismantled two of the bomber’s four engines, and the better part of the third, the crew bailed out of the escape hatch — one with his already-released parachute in hand — and prayed, Fitzgerald said.
Parachuting American soldiers, he added, were “sitting duck” targets for hostile civilians below who were armed with shotguns and rifles.
“I just prayed and I prayed and I prayed,” said Fitzgerald, who eventually landed between two trees. “I was stuck between two monstrous trees. I was like a kid in a swing.”
Fitzgerald eventually cut himself down and held civilians off with a pistol that he later surrendered to German military men, who took him as a prisoner of war.
After being solitarily interrogated and spending time on a train and in an interim camp, the Germans placed him and other war prisoners in a permanent prison camp on Dec. 8, 1944.
Fitzgerald then lasted a year with more than 20 others in a small room, sleeping head-to-toe, eating only bread and a stew consisting of water and dried vegetables. They were not physically tortured but by the time he was freed, Fitzgerald said he could fit his waist in his hands.
Fitzgerald and the rest of the POWs at the camp were liberated in late spring 1945 by a roaming group of Mongolians riding donkeys, horses and bicycles. Fitzgerald said they would steal the watch off your hand and “only ask you first because you are an American.”
The Russians handed the liberated prisoners back to the Americans after holding Fitzgerald and others for several weeks. Fitzgerald arrived home in late June of 1945.
Donald L. Miller, who recently published a book called “Masters of the Air,” about the Eighth Air Force in World War II and held a signing for the book in Bethany this weekend, told Fitzgerald on Saturday that the Russians had traded him and the prisoners for a Russian general who was in American custody after working with the Germans.
Fitzgerald went on to fly rescue missions out of Saudi Arabia, attend Boston University and work as an engineer with the New England Telephone Company. He now lives with his wife of almost 60 years in the Salt Pond Community.