May 5-6, 2024
I’m sorry for missing a day but getting to Frankfurt has been an experience in itself. Getting the car rented and finding the hotel has been a task in itself. But yesterday we got started with a visit to the Dukag Luft.
Dulag Luft was the first stop for all U. S. airmen after being captured. Vic, my father was shot down in his seventh bomb mission, while bombing ball bearing factories in Steyr, Austria. When he and his crew bailed out they were scattered over the Austrian countryside. Vic and Len, the left waist gunner, Vic fired the right side waist gun, bailed toughether and were captured together.
They were soon captured in the town of Waidhofen, Austria and then travelled by train to San Polten, Austria and then to Frankfurt and Dulag Luft
We were excited to know that the room where all POWs were first interrogated was still intact, though in a vastly different form; an after school program resource room it was our first emotional connection to our father’s of the trip, but surely not our last.
The young airmen were traumatized from the stresses of the air battle, fear of the unknown and weakness from no food and little water since being shot down. It was their first in a succession of ever increasingly mental and physically stressful events, over a fifteen month POW ordeal
Our afternoon began with a search for Laura’s father’s plane crash (Laura Edge, author of On the Wings of Dawn, the story of her father’s POW experience.)
Searching for crash site
We had gps coordinates and little hope to find; but we did. A “forager” who lives in the area joined us with a metal detector and after an hour or so he detected metal and we dug up metal fuselage parts and two 50 caliber machine gun cartridges.
Film crew working crash site
Amazing finds for all of us and special for Laura, it was her dad’s plane.
Four men died in the plane at the site and we paid our respects as best we could.
Our day ended with a group dinner in a Frankfurt neighborhood restaurant. Jim