Memories of Wars Past : Days as WWII POW Still Vivid for Downed Flier

Bob Barney had bailed out of a B-17 Flying Fortress over Berlin in the spring of ’44. Hitting the ground hard, he’d been attacked with garden tools. He’d been interrogated and shunted to Stalag 3, the German prisoner of war camp that became the basis for “The Great Escape.”

Later, he’d been evacuated by box car to Stalag 8D, then evacuated again, marching south in a line of prisoners seven miles long. One rainy night, he and a partner named Tex had dropped out of the line into a canal to begin what they hoped would be a long hike home.

But they made a risky mistake--skirting a small village outside Nuremberg, they were spotted. They pretended to be French--protesting ingenuously (in English) that they were French. Then they were running, the town was chasing, a shot ran out.

“We stopped,” Barney, 67, of Lakeside, recalled Monday. “Here they come, women, children, the whole bit. Then a little girl about 11 years old ran up to me and stuck a gun, a little pistol, right in my stomach. And I said to Tex, ‘Oh my God, after all this, I’m going to get killed by a little girl!’ ”

Names of the Dead

Barney is retired from a second career as a stockbroker that came after he retired as lieutenant colonel with 21 years of service.

The World War II bomber pilot celebrated this Memorial Day by pulling out the diary he kept at Stalag 3--a tattered Red Cross notebook encased in a cover fashioned out of powdered-milk tins and filled with poems, sketches and the names and home towns of men with whom he spent part of World War II.

There, in blunt pencil, Barney had copied the POW camp dog tags of men from Lindsay, Okla., East Point, Ga., Dundalk, Md., and Piggott, Ark. There were the names of the crew of his B-17, including the radio operator killed moments before the others bailed out.

“It makes you focus your attention on your friends, you know, that you lost,” said Barney, musing about Memorial Day. “And I lost a lot of them. When I stop and think about it, I’m about the only survivor of so many people who were in my flying class every day.”

Yet Barney claims to have been unchanged by his experiences in the war--an intriguing pastiche of tales he might divulge, if pressed. They are tales of bombing missions and prison camps and brushes with death, from which Barney says he emerged relatively unscathed.

Asked why, he answered with some amusement, “I sometimes think it’s lack of intelligence--too dumb to be scared!”

Barney was a greenhorn from Parma, Mo., fresh from a job as a guide at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair. He enlisted at age 21 in the Army Air Corps and went to Hawaii as an aerial gunner at Bellows Field on the windward side of Oahu.

Guarded Downed Plane

Those five months before Pearl Harbor were “like a country club”--flying submarine patrol around the Hawaiian islands and lolling on the beach. There were weekends for combat crews at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel costing a mere 25 cents--the price of laundry.

The morning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Barney woke up with a hangover. There was an American aircraft flying overhead with Japanese fighters on its tail. Suddenly, Bellows Field was in chaos. Over at Pearl Harbor, ships were in flames and sinking.

Barney was dispatched that night to a field off the base to guard a downed B-17 in case the Japanese returned. He spent the night alone there, in terror, armed with a Springfield rifle he’d never shot, hearing officers yell from the distance, “Be alert! Be alert!”

“It was dumb. Chaotic. But fear!” marvelled Barney, a big man with a bemused smile and a thick thatch of gray hair. “I’ve never known such fear. Even when I bailed out over Germany, the fear wasn’t like this was. Because you’re sitting there, waiting to die.”

The Japanese, of course, did not return.

Barney later became a pilot with the 8th Air Force’s 285th Bomb Group, flying out of England. He flew 19 missions in just a handful of months in early 1944. He recalled Monday, “We never went up without losing planes. But there were a lot of us.”

On April 29, he and his crew were on one of the first daylight raids over Berlin. They’d hit the target five times in as many days. But this time, the plane was knocked out of formation. Twenty-two thousand feet above Berlin, two of the four engines were ablaze.

“Pulling ‘em full power, I was going just about stall speed,” Barney remembered. “Then the planes shot us up real good. . . . When I gave the bailout signal, the tail gunner bailed out and his chute got caught on the tail of the plane and he got burned up pretty good.”

Barney dropped into a residential neighborhood. He remembers women and children surrounding him and attacking him with tools. Then an older woman was “tugging on me, hollering and screaming.” She took him in, fed him coffee and called the Luftwaffe.

Barney was taken to an interrogation center in Frankfurt, where he says he was cajoled with cigarettes, swigs of whiskey and talk of baseball. After repeating his name, rank and serial number for days, his guards cranked up the heat in his cell to 85 degrees.

After the ‘Great Escape’

From there, he was taken to Stalag 3 in the town of Sagan, 100 miles southeast of Berlin. Just months before, Barney said, the Germans had discovered the impressive network of tunnels dug by the British and later made the subject of “The Great Escape.”

The Germans had retaliated with a massive manhunt for the POWs who had slipped out through the tunnel, Barney learned through the camp’s intelligence grapevine. They then executed many of those they caught, Barney said.

“We weren’t working fervently, because we knew what had happened to the British,” Barney said of the tunnel-digging activities during his tenure. Nevertheless, he did serve for a time as a “penguin”--going into the tunnels in an overcoat and filling it with bags of dirt to be scattered discreetly around the compound at opportune moments.

Barney recalled the ingenuity with which the prisoners fashioned tools and toys out of the powdered-milk cans--blowers for ventilating the tunnels, even a small steamboat powered with oleomargarine to operate in the pool used to put out fires.

After about 10 months, the camp was evacuated as Russian soldiers were reported to be approaching from the east. Crippled by an infected toe, Barney stayed behind in a hospital for two weeks listening to the Russians “so close you could hear the guns.”

Then the hospital had to be evacuated, too. For five days and five nights, Barney and the patients traveled by boxcar into the unknown. Arriving outside Nuremberg, they were placed in Stalag 8D. Each night, they could hear the British bombing the city, uncomfortably nearby.

Again Barney was evacuated, this time one of a seven-mile-long string of prisoners heading south. The day they learned that prisoners at the end of the line had been strafed and killed, Barney said he and his friend, Tex, resolved to escape.

The night was rainy and cars were passing on the road, their headlights hooded to prevent visibility from above. The hoods made the light concentrated and intense. In the second or two of collective blindness after one car’s passing, the men slipped unnoticed into the canal.

Waited in Water

They waited in the waist-deep water for three hours. The next morning, they headed for Nuremberg. They had heard that Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army was moving in, so they hoped to reach Nuremberg in time for liberation.

But they were discovered just west of the city, when Barney found himself facing an 11-year-old girl with a gun in her hand. Her father removed the gun and Barney and his partner were turned back to German soldiers to join another forced march south.

The next time, they handled their escape differently. Fleeing one night, they sought shelter in a German farmhouse. There, a woman and her two daughters had been listening to British Broadcasting Corporation radio and knew the end of the war was near.

According to Barney, the woman gave the two men an upstairs bedroom, hoping they would serve as “insurance” on the property when American troops came through. There they spent two weeks, Barney dazzling the family with card tricks.

One year to the day after he was shot down, Barney was liberated.

That morning he rose to see an American liaison plane flying low overhead--an odd echo of the plane flying overhead years earlier on the morning of Pearl Harbor. This time, the plane meant there were troops nearby. Soon, he was at the 14th Armored Division headquarters.

From there, to Camp Lucky Strike at Le Havre, France, where Barney was reunited with many of the crew from the B-17. They returned to the United States by ship. Three months later, Barney married his wife, Donna.

Unlike most, Barney remained in the military, flying in the Pacific. He says he was the second Air Force man to fly an Air Force C-135, the equivalent of a Boeing 707. He retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1961.

A year ago on Memorial Day, Barney drove down to Brown Field to see an old B-17 that was on display. People were paying $3 to go inside. But when the man managing the show heard that Barney had flown a B-17 in the war, he summoned him up to the cockpit.

After a little conversation, the man turned out to be another graduate of Stalag 3.