Memories Reunite WWII Pilot With His Rescuers

The village of Douillet-le-Joly perches on sloping farmland in one of those quiet corners of France where families still sit for hours-long Sunday dinners and people kiss each other four times on the cheeks.

In this bucolic setting, Loic Chaumont picks up the telephone to place a call that he hopes will solve a mystery.

Across the Atlantic and across North America, Riverside, Calif., is a wedge between the big-city sprawl of Los Angeles and the rolling brown dunes of the Mojave Desert.

Here the phone rings, and John Balcunas picks it up.

“Hello.”

“Were you,” a French-accented voice begins hesitantly, “a pilot during the war? Did you fall in the region near Le Mans?”

“Yes.”

Despite miles and years and the fact that they are strangers, Balcunas and Chaumont talk at length about a story both know well. It’s the story of a downed American pilot in World War II who depended on courage, luck and the kindness of strangers, and a young French boy who grew up hearing tales of the American, a mysterious hero.

*

It was May 21,1944--two weeks before D-day--when pilot John Balcunas, then 28, took off from an airfield in England in his P-47 Thunderbolt.

He had arrived only weeks earlier with “The Bumble Bees,” the 36th Fighter Group, 22nd Fighter Squadron. Their assignment: “target of opportunity” missions--destroying bridges, trains, anything that could help the German war machine in occupied France.

That day, Balcunas led five planes across the English Channel. Four hours into the flight, he caught a break in the low clouds and spotted a troop transport train chugging through green fields.

Lining it up in his gun sights, he attacked. The train returned fire. Black puffs of smoke exploded all around him. Suddenly the antiaircraft fire found its mark: He was hit.

In the cockpit, Balcunas thought: This is it. He forced the sputtering plane to climb and, at 7,000 feet, slid the cockpit hatch open and rolled the plane over to bail out. With the wind ripping through, he dropped into the air, then jerked the rip cord.

*

Andre Bertrand spotted it first, a billowing white cup emerging from the clouds, its strings tapering down to the figure of a man.

The youth was on his way home from Sunday Mass, cutting through the fields of Mont-Saint-Jean, a village near Douillet-le-Joly. He watched the man crumple to the ground, untangle himself and gather up the parachute in his arms.

“After a minute he noticed me, and we exchanged a few words,” said Bertrand, now 74. “I didn’t understand . . . except for the word ‘Resistance.’ He was looking for people to help him. Then he left.”

In Douillet-le-Joly, the Chaumont family had just sat down for their Sunday afternoon meal when their farmhouse shuddered.

They rushed outside. In their pea patch lay a mangled and smoking airplane.

*

Balcunas dug a hole and buried the parachute.

He got out a map from his pilot escape kit, a tin box containing vitamins, chocolate, currency and a phrase card. He remembered from training: If shot down, get to neutral ground. In this case, Spain. He did not know it, but the border was more than 400 miles away.

He’d have to walk. But first he’d have to change out of his aviator suit, which bore squadron patches and an American flag.

Alone, Balcunas spent that first night hiding in a patch of trees.

*

German soldiers went farm to farm, house to house, searching for the pilot. They got no help. Occupation had brought rationing of food and clothing, the requisitioning of horses and cars, and networks of defiance.

“My father was a veteran of World War I,” recalled Bertrand, the youth who had spoken to the parachutist and confided in his family. “So it was a pleasure for him to hide what he knew.”

From the Chaumont farm, the Germans carted away wreckage. But they left behind a cylinder-shaped piece of landing gear--precious metal that the family hid in the barn.

Shortly after dawn, Balcunas left his hiding place.

Eight-year-old Gustave Chartier spotted him walking through the fields.

“American. American,” Balcunas said.

The boy waved for him to follow, to his family’s farmhouse.

The Chartier family gave him a disguise of peasant’s clothing--though the pants were too short, exposing Balcunas’ military boots. They gave him a sandwich, lard spread between two pieces of bread, and homemade wine.

In thanks, Balcunas left behind some chocolate, his uniform and a silver whistle.

The Chartiers were the first of several French families that took the risk of aiding him. Next came the Peans, who fed him and showed him the route to Le Mans.

Balcunas followed country roads, sleeping in a haystack, woods, even a roadside ditch.

A few days into his trek, he awoke to fog. Two men were walking toward him. They wore uniforms and helmets and carried guns.

Turning, Balcunas followed a path to a clump of trees. He waited. One minute. Two. Three. His heart pounded. Finally he crept back toward the road.

The Germans saw him.

Now, if he ran, they would surely shoot. He had no choice but to walk on.

As he passed the soldiers, one pointed to his short pants and military boots and said something in German. The other shook his head. Balcunas felt their eyes on him until he reached the top of a hill. Then he ran.

When he finally reached Le Mans, the wail of air raid sirens greeted him. He followed a crowd into a house until the all-clear sounded. Taking a chance, he showed a woman his phrase card--”I’m hungry,” “I’m tired.”

She fed him and introduced her husband, Edmond Pavard, who spoke English and had connections to the Resistance. He also worked for the railroad and had timetable information Balcunas needed to get to Spain.

“We told him to play dumb on the train, and we gave him a newspaper to pretend to read so it would cover his face. He still looked like a foreigner, even in peasant’s clothes, because he was very tall, with very blue eyes,” said the Pavards’ daughter-in-law, Denise.

The next day, a member of the Resistance arranged false identity papers, essential for Balcunas’ ride to the Spanish border town of Irun, which had an American consulate.

The Pavards took Balcunas to the station, then did him another favor: They wrote a letter home.

“Dear Mrs. Balcunas,” it began. “We have seen your son. . . .”

*

Aboard the train, the U.S. pilot was carrying fake papers and was in plain sight of German soldiers. If caught, he feared, he would be shot as a spy.

He always sat in the middle of a car so he could watch how other passengers responded to officials checking tickets and papers. He sat near a window, to jump if necessary.

The train rolled south, from Bordeaux through Bayonne, the border getting closer. But what then? Balcunas smiled at a couple sitting across from him and, when they smiled back, he confided his identity.

Get off the train, the woman said in panic. The Gestapo would check the train at the upcoming stop at Hendaye, on the French side of the border.

When the train pulled up outside Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Balcunas leaped from the window. He hid in bushes until nightfall and then started walking toward the Pyrenees.

This time, help came from some men herding cows. The exhausted pilot grabbed a cow’s tail and let the animal pull him across the mountains. Finally, stumbling over rocks, he crossed into Spain and made his way to the lights and smells of a bakery in a Spanish village.

He asked the baker for sanctuary, gobbled some fresh bread, then curled up in a giant bread basket and slept.

He was awakened by police.

Placed in the town’s jail, he waited days for a representative of the U.S. embassy.

When the diplomat finally appeared it was a fateful day, and not just for Balcunas. At a hotel in Irun, he listened with other Allied soldiers to the BBC announcing the D-day invasion of Normandy. It was June 6, 1944.

*

D-day, of course, began the liberation of France. As the country rebuilt, villagers in Mont-Saint-Jean and Douillet-le-Joly did not forget the pilot.

“[My parents] tried to get news of him,” said the now 63-year-old Chartier, who as a boy invited Balcunas home for a meal and for years afterward carried the pilot’s silver whistle.

But through a misunderstanding the American embassy told the family the pilot was dead.

Later, young Loic Chaumont heard the story of the crash from family members.

“What about the pilot?” he asked.

“Nobody knows,” his grandfather replied.

Four years ago, Chaumont decided to reinvestigate.

“I started asking lots of questions, annoying everybody,” he said. He interviewed villagers and World War II buffs.

One of the latter, Gerard Cerizier, asked if there was anything left of the plane. From the farmhouse, Chaumont retrieved a rusted yard-long metal cylinder that had served to weight the family’s plow.

“It’s the left leg of the landing gear from a P-47 Thunderbolt,” Cerizier said.

With the date of the crash and the make of the airplane, they found the pilot’s name in U.S. archives: John Balcunas.

After an Internet phone book search, Chaumont called the United States and spoke with the pilot. Chaumont’s family gathered around him with tears in their eyes.

*

Last May 9, the people of Mont-Saint-Jean and Douillet-le-Joly wore their best clothes and carried bouquets for their visitor.

The lost pilot was back.

After his long trek to Spain, Balcunas had been sent to England and returned to action as a pilot for the rest of the war. Like most who survived, he put his war experience behind him to focus on the business of living. He married and reared three children. He continued to fly, retiring from the Air Force in the 1960s and taking a job at a California car dealership.

But on this day, the clock turned back. Balcunas was a celebrity, hugged and kissed by strangers.

“We adored them,” said Bertrand, referring to the American liberators. Today, as France’s highways are dotted with McDonald’s and American movies crowd the box offices, some French people have come to resent the United States’ cultural and economic domination. But things were different then.

“The Americans were a hope,” Bertrand said.

As Balcunas spoke to the townspeople, his eyes welled with tears. He had done nothing but try to survive all those years ago, he told them; he was not a hero.

“The real heroes,” he said, “are the people who risked their lives to help me.”

Then the Mont-Saint-Jean band put flutes and horns to lips for “La Marseillaise,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

*

This story is based on interviews by AP writers Chelsea J. Carter, based in Orange County, Calif., and Angela Doland, based in Paris, and on archived U.S. Air Force reports.