Naperville ex-POW says holiday is to honor others

Memorial Day isn't Glenn King's holiday. The 91-year-old World War II veteran from Naperville survived getting shot down and ending up as a prisoner of war under the Nazis. King says Monday's holiday honors his friends who never made it home.

Not that King didn't come close to giving his life for his country.

“I don't think I ever had a mission that we didn't have flak,” says King, describing the exploding German anti-aircraft shells he experienced as a bombardier on a B-17 bomber. “The greatest concern I had was whether or not I could take it mentally. You wondered if you could stand to be shot at and seeing other planes go down.”

King didn't “crater” to that pressure, even when he jumped from his burning plane.

Born in the tiny hamlet of Woodworth, North Dakota, King grew up in Midwest, Wyoming, a company camp town where parents Leslie and Alice King moved the family to take advantage of the oil boom. He graduated from high school in 1942 and began studying engineering at the University of Wyoming. That qualified him for a full deferment from the military draft — until the president changed the rules.

“While I was at the university, Roosevelt signed the order to draft 18-year-olds — me,” King remembers.

Instead of waiting to be drafted, King enlisted in the Army Air Corps, which sent him to Denver and then to basic training in Missouri, where he studied at the University of Missouri. He trained in San Antonio, Texas, and passed all the mental and physical tests. He did well during officer training at Ellington Field near Houston.

“I was given wings and gold bars on my shoulder, and they started calling me lieutenant,” King says, adding that the Army was treating him well. He did his radar training in Florida while living at the Boca Raton Yacht Club, where he enjoyed maid service. From there, he went to Tampa for training to be on the crew of a B-17 bomber with the 385th Bomb Group.

“They were losing crews so fast in England, they cut back on training,” King says. “The news wasn't that good. Hitler was moving.”

At the end of that summer, King was scheduled to depart for the battlefields of Europe. His last stop in the states was in Bangor, Maine. “Whiskey sours were only 25 cents, and they served an excellent ham-and-cheese sandwich,” remembers King, who happily partook of both.

Beginning in October 1944 from his station at the Great Ashfield Royal Air Force base in England, King had flown almost two dozen bombing runs over Germany by the time his 21st birthday rolled around. He needed 35 missions before he could return home. Just fitting under the 6-foot-3 height limit, King squeezed into the nose bubble of the B-17, where he had access to a turret with two 50-caliber machine guns. The B-17 wasn't pressurized and flew at 25,000 feet, so the men wore oxygen masks, which itched.

“If you took it off, you'd pass out,” says King, adding crew members always looked forward to the plane's return to a lower altitude. “One of the great joys is when it was safe to take off that oxygen mask and have your first cigarette.”

His 23rd run was unexpected. A bombardier on another crew missed briefing on the morning of March 2, 1945, so the veteran King was pulled in at the last minute as a substitute on a rookie crew with orders to bomb the German town of Oschatz.

He got to the plane after the propellers had started, blocking his usual entrance and forcing him to enter through a rear door — an ominous omen. “The superstition was that you couldn't make it if you went in through the back,” says King, who soon experienced that bad luck.

“We were south of Berlin, and I started seeing a little flak,” he remembers. He realized it was a full-out attack when a Focke-Wulf 190 German fighter plane exploded in front of him.

“The plane shuddered, and I knew we were in trouble,” King says. “Engines one and two were soon on fire.”

The plane was melting around him when King informed the pilot, “I don't know how long you're staying in this damn thing, but your bombardier is leaving now,” King said. Parachuting for the first time ever, he kicked open the escape hatch and dropped until he was out of immediate danger.

“I grabbed the handle and said, 'I better see if this damn thing works,'” remembers King, who immediately blacked out. When he came to, he was floating in clouds.

“Everywhere I looked, it was white. I thought, 'By golly, I made it. I'm in heaven,'” says King. His chute carried him over a river, where he feared he might drown. But a strong wind pushed him beyond the banks and over a rail yard where he thought he might collide with a speeding train. He finally came down in forest, where his chute snagged on a pine tree. Exhausted, in pain, and scared, King found himself dangling about 10 feet off the ground. He wriggled until he fell to just a foot or two off the ground. He wouldn't get another attempt to free himself.

“Three soldiers came up with rifles trained on me,” says King, who was hoping the soldiers were friendly Russian Allies. One approached and pulled out a switchblade to cut King's parachute straps.

“I looked over at his cap and could see a swastika. So I knew where I was,” King says. “I was a prisoner of war.”

Picked up by the Wehrmacht, the regular German armed forces and not the SS — the elite Nazi squad infamous for killing would-be prisoners — King was jailed and interrogated at Frankfurt before being forced to march to Stalag Luft XIID, a prisoner-of-war camp in Nuremberg. Food was almost nonexistent, and the prisoners scavenged from farms along the way. Someone found an old coffee grinder that was used to mash wheat into porridge. King still has the wooden spoon he carved using a flattened nail.

After a month, the prisoners began a 100-mile march to a second camp in Moosburg. “In two months of captivity, I lost 50 pounds,” King says.

A Red Cross food truck out of Switzerland came by during the second march.

“My share was a can of tuna fish,” King says. Some starving prisoners ate the handout right away,

“I know I can make it today. I'm going to save you until tomorrow,” King said, as he slipped the can into his pocket. “It ended up that I brought it home with me.”

On April 29, 1945, exactly one year to the day he earned his wings, King and his fellow prisoners were liberated by Patton's Army.

King soon was on a ship back to the United States and a flight to Denver and his parents. Earning his petroleum engineering degree from the School of Mines, the civilian King worked in the oil fields of the Rockies, in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. He and his wife, Dottie, raised sons Larry and Steve in New Orleans before moving to Naperville in 1975. Even in retirement, King found a new career and was named Arbitrator of The Year in 1992 by the Better Business Bureau. King's story has been captured in a biography, “No Ordinary Life: Memoir of a World War II Bombardier,” written by author Sue Johnpeter, who got to know King through their mutual memberships in Naperville's Knox Presbyterian Church.

King lost his son, Larry, to cancer at age 29. Dottie died three years ago after 63 years of marriage. But King smiles as he tells of his grandson, three granddaughters and one great-grandson. Pondering the meaning of Memorial Day, King takes a breath.

“Three of my best friends in school didn't come back,” says King, who wipes a tear from his bright blue eyes and politely leaves the room. “Excuse me. I need to take a walk.”

His high school buddy, Bobby Cooke, boyhood chum Charles Townsend and college roommate Ed Shyne were killed in the war. King says he realizes those friends and their families would have gladly been part of his POW ordeal.

“That's really the thing I think about the most,” King says. “And what their parents went through. So many people had it a lot worse than me.”