A Most Difficult Love Series

WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

THEY MET AS ENEMIES IN WWII AND BECAME FRIENDS 50 YEARS LATER

[excerpt taken from The Des Moines Register by Daniel P. Finney]

The day was May 19, 1944, and the world still burned from the death and destruction of World War II. Howard Linn, then a 21-year-old from Radcliffe, took off in a B-24 Liberator bomber from an Allied airbase in England. The destination of the 10-man crew was munitions plants in Brunswick, Germany.

Linn worked a gun in the waist of the plane. Anti-aircraft flak buffeted the bomber groups as they got closer to Brunswick. A group of German Focke-Wulf 190 fighters attacked their bomber "from 12 o'clock high," said Linn, now 94 and living in Iowa Falls.

"I fired a few rounds from the left waist gun, but the German fighters went by like a streak when they came at us head on," Linn wrote in his self-published memoir "World War II and My Prisoner of War Experience."

Yellow paint coated the hubs of the German fighters. They were called Göring's Yellow Noses after Hermann Göring, the Nazi leader in command of the German air force. Linn heard machine gun rounds hit his plane as the Yellow Noses made their second pass. The Liberator's No. 3 engine burst into flames.

Shortly, Linn saw fire coming from the edge of the left wing. He called on his throat microphone to the pilot. The commander asked him if he could get to the flames with a fire extinguisher.

It was impossible, Linn said. The fire was inside the wing.

"In moments, it was like a blowtorch coming back … and it was as hot as an oven," Linn wrote. "I called the pilot again and said we have to get out."

Linn ripped off his throat microphone and oxygen mask, unplugged his electric flying suit and grabbed his chest pack parachute, snapping it to his harness. He opened a door in the floor of the plane and jumped out.

Linn laid on his back during his free fall and spun wildly. He finally got control of his spin. His ears popped as he plummeted from about 20,000 feet. He passed through the clouds and craned his neck to see fires on the ground, likely from downed aircraft. He pulled his ripcord when the trees seemed to be coming up fast. He landed in a clearing and slipped out of his parachute but made a critical mistake.

Linn stuck to the timber and used his compass to make his way west.

He eventually spotted some Dutch windmills in the distance and wondered if he was lucky enough to have landed in territory where the underground would hide American and British flyers.

At noon the next day, he came to a small village. Shortly after he walked into the village, a 15-year-old boy noticed Linn walking down the street in his flying boots. The boy spoke a little English. Linn asked him if he was in the Netherlands.

The boy told him he was in Germany. The boy took him to his house, where his mother and grandmother made coffee and sandwiches. Linn ate the sandwiches while the boy and his family decided what to do about the American airman. They decided to turn him in. The boy flagged down a passing German police officer riding a motorcycle. The policeman pulled up next to Linn.

"That was it," Linn said. "I was captured."

Eventually, Linn was taken to an interrogation center in Frankfurt, Germany, with other captured Allied fighters. They interrogated Linn and his fellow prisoners for about two days, but he only gave his name, rank and serial number.

The Germans forced some 2,000 Allied prisoners to march for 87 days in a row. They received minimal rations. Maggots often crawled over their meat. Linn estimates about a quarter of the men he marched with died of dysentery and other ailments.

When they finally reached the prison camp near Hanover, Germany, they lived in barracks built 2 feet off the ground to prevent prisoners from burrowing out. Linn remembers many men worried they would not survive the experience.

"I never worried if I was going to survive," Linn said. "I don't know why. All I can say is the Lord has been very good to me."

On May 8, 1945, a Jeep with four English soldiers rolled into the camp. The prisoners were free men again. Howard Linn, the farmer from Iowa who became an airman shot from the sky and marched 87 days in a row, was finally free after nearly a year.

"Freedom is so precious," Linn said. "People don't realize."

Linn returned to Iowa after the war and resumed life as a farmer, first renting a farm, then buying one of his own.

In May 1994, a man named Russell Ives contacted Linn. Ives was the grandson of one of the men in Linn's bomber group. He was researching his grandfather's history, tracing his steps through Europe. Linn told Ives his story. Ives, who worked with military historians in the U.S. and Britain, contacted a man named Wilfried Beerman, who was 65 years old.