After surviving POW camp, Wheaton man built a family life in the suburbs

The events of Carl Groesbeck's life were the kind you might find in a World War II movie.

In fact, aspects of his war experience showed up in two of them: “Twelve O'Clock High,” starring Gregory Peck, and “The Great Escape.”

The Wheaton resident who died March 31 at the age of 101 is being remembered not only for his war heroism, but as a loving father and man of faith whose varied interests ranged from jazz music and Scottish terriers to growing roses and playing golf.

Born December 29, 1918, in downstate Ottawa, Groesbeck enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in December 1941, the day after he learned that his best friend, Marine Cpl. James McCarren, died aboard the USS Arizona in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Groesbeck was a second lieutenant navigator serving on a B-17 Flying Fortress, based at Thurleigh, England, when his plane was hit by German gunfire in October 1943. The plane was dropping over the Danish island of Samso, when he and fellow crew members bailed out.

He later was taken prisoner by the Germans, spending his first night in captivity in a chicken coop on a farm. He eventually was moved to Stalag Luft 3 in Sagan, Germany, the camp that was the model for “The Great Escape.”

He spent nearly 16 months in the camp before the Germans, facing bombardment by the Russians, moved the prisoners in a brutal march in subzero weather during one of the coldest winters in Europe. They walked 500 miles to another camp in Moosburg, in southern Bavaria.

“My dad forever suffered in his hands from what was probably serious frostbite,” his daughter, Delia Nau, said Sunday,

The only relief, she said, came from churches along the way where the prisoners were allowed to sleep.

After being liberated by Gen. George Patton's troops in April 1945, Groesbeck returned home to Illinois and studied mechanical engineering at Bradley University. He later received his MBA at the University of Chicago, before being hired at Peoples Gas as an industrial sales engineer. He remained there until his retirement, when he was director of marketing and sales.

Groesbeck settled in Wheaton with his wife Mary Lu, who was also from Ottawa, and their five children.

He continued to serve his country in the reserves until 1978, taking part in training missions and, in 1961, experiments in weightlessness in preparation for Project Mercury. His tests paved the way for Mercury Seven astronauts like Alan Shepard and John Glenn.

His son Carl said that among his many other interests was jazz music.

“I learned about Erroll Garner before I learned about the Beatles,” he said.

The senior Groesbeck also was involved in Democratic Party politics in heavily Republican Wheaton, at one point meeting John F. Kennedy.

It was later in life that Groesbeck revisited the sites of his wartime experiences, including Samso.

In Hamburg, he met with Heinz Philipp, a member of the German flight crew that had shot down Groesbeck's plane. With the help of the U.S. military, Philipp had tracked down the B-17's crew members and wrote Groesbeck a letter reading “Do you remember those dark and evil days of 1943?”

“He went back to Munich when (Philipp) was dying,” Nau said, “He was his friend for the rest of his life.”