South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Stuck in Nazi-held France, soldier pretended he couldn’t speak, hear
Growing up near Poughkeepsie, New York, Joseph Owens loved to sing and, at 98, he still does.
“He’ll be sitting at a table of friends and he’ll just suddenly break out in song,” said Dee Lore, 82, a friend who persuaded Owens to join a choral group she organized at the retirement community where they both live, The Glades at ChampionsGate near Disney.
Though tethered to an oxygen tank, he’ll solo “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on Friday wearing felt antlers.
Lore also prodded the widower recently into telling how he survived World War II by pretending he could not speak.
Owens is one of two WWII veterans living at The Glades who survived wartime plane crashes.
The other, Navy veteran Hugh McNaughton, 97, listened as Owens recounted his ordeal.
On June 14, 1944, Owens was a ball turret gunner beneath a Boeing B-17, an American bomber and flying gunship. His job was among the war’s most dangerous — shooting twin machine guns at enemy fighters from a supine position in a cramped, rotating sphere.
The B-17 was among 60 deployed that morning to hit fuel sites and supply depots used by German troops occupying France.
Their intended targets, Owens said, were around Le Bourget
Field, the airfield in the Parisian suburbs where American aviator Charles Lindbergh had landed “The Spirit of St. Louis” in 1927 after completing the world’s first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight.
Two hours and 45 minutes into the mission, Owens, an Army Air Corps sergeant, felt the concussion of a German attack.
A Messerschmitt 109 had intercepted the squadron, crippling the B-17 that Owens was in.
The pilot ordered the 10-man crew to bail out.
A parachute didn’t fit inside the claustrophobic ball turret so while the nine other soldiers jumped, Owens had to rotate the mechan
ical sphere into the plane’s belly, force open a hatch, crawl into the smoking fuselage, find a parachute, snap it on and leap.
“Praying seemed to be all I could really do,” he said.
Plummeting from 20,000 feet, Owens yanked the ripcord, uncertain whether the parachute would open.
He recalled the “beautiful silk” of the chute unfurling above him. But relief was momentary.
“Off in the distance I could see the German patrols,” he said. He feared he might be shot drifting to earth.
Owens said he smacked the ground hard and next remembered being lugged into the woods over the shoulder of a big man.
“I had no idea if he was friend or foe,” Owens said.
The man offered him bread and wine then walked him at dark to a farmhouse where two crewmates were waiting.
Germans searched house-to-house for survivors from the American bomber. The pilot, Owens learned, was dead.
Owens said his protectors were part of the French Resistance. He said they gave him a beret and dressed him like a farmer.
Resistance members risked torture and death to provide Allied forces with intelligence on German defense positions and carried out acts of sabotage to frustrate and disrupt the Nazi war machine, according to the website for the National World War II Museum.
For weeks, they shuffled Owens and other soldiers from place to place, sometimes hiding them under bags of mail in a truck.
They gave him a French ID that said his name was Jean Martin. He was not to speak or acknowledge anyone who spoke to him.
The ruse was necessary because Owens spoke no French.
They hid Owens and other soldiers in homes, a farm silo and, for two days, a hotel with a bar where German soldiers drank.
“It was intimidating to have them so close and so loud,” he wrote in “The French Resistance Saved Me from Capture,” a self-published memoir. “If they had found us, the Germans would have killed the people who helped us and either killed us or taken us prisoner.”
He said he missed singing and his mother’s stuffed pasta.
Back home in Wappinger Falls, New York, his mother had received a telegram from the U.S. Department of War in late June 1944 listing him as missing in action. The Poughkeepsie Journal reported the
20-year-old soldier “might have been on his first mission.”
That’s all she knew about her son until September
1944, shortly after Allied Forces liberated Paris.
The Poughkeepsie Journal reported Owens sent his mother a telegram. It read:
“Well and safe. See you soon. Have raviola ready.”
McNaughton served in a squadron based on the Hawaiian island of Oahu that patrolled the Pacific Ocean for Japanese submarines. The squadron flew 149 flights before crashing into Kāne’ohe Bay while returning to base in dense fog Christmas night 1944.
Rescued from the bay, McNaughton said he spent a month in the hospital recovering from burns to his face, hands and legs.
Half of the 12-man crew died in the crash.