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thedrifter
04-10-04, 08:06 AM
Honored POWs recall ordeals during war

By STEFANIE MATTESON
Staff Writer


BERNARDS — Edwin Hays was the tailgunner on a B-17 — named “Just Elmer’s Tune” after a Glenn Miller hit of the era — when his plane was shot down over Denmark on Feb. 24, 1944, by a German Messerschmitt that he, in turn, shot down.

It was his 13th mission, and he was 19 years old.

Hays, now 79, was one of 40 members of the New Jersey chapter of American Ex-Prisoners of War who turned out Thursday for a ceremony in their honor at the Department of Veterans Affairs New Jersey Health Care System, Lyons Campus, in the Lyons section.

The chapter’s state commander, Charles Susino, reminded them that of the 116,000 American POWs who returned from World War II (130,000 had been held), only 36,000 are still alive.

“You are history, and history is disappearing,” Susino told the gathering.

On that cold day in Denmark 60 years ago, Hays, who now lives in Paramus, was thinking about his girlfriend, not history. Thinking that he had bailed out over Germany, he said, the first thing he did was bury her photo to prevent it from getting into enemy hands.

He and his crewmates had actually touched ground near the Danish village of Logumkloster. A 16-year-old Danish boy named Johannes Ulrich, who had seen the men bailing out at 10,000 feet, headed out on his bicycle to the field where they landed.

After convincing the men that they were in Denmark by showing them a Danish coin, the boy carried the injured Hayes on his bicycle to a nearby farmhouse, where a birthday party was in progress. Hays remembers being served coffee and layer cake with cream.

“Ten minutes after I was shot down, I was eating birthday cake,” he said.

A Danish doctor took him to a hospital, where he was treated for a skull fracture and a broken ankle. But after recovering, he fell into German hands and was taken to the first of three prison camps he would be held in over the next 15½ months.

The worst times were when he was moved from one camp to another, he said. In one such transfer, on July 10, 1944, he and his fellow prisoners were crammed into the dark hold of a ship for 2½ days, then loaded onto the boxcars of a train.

When they reached their destination, some 2,500 handcuffed POWs were forced to run the three miles to camp, while many were being beaten, clubbed, bayoneted and attacked by police dogs, Hays said. The route was lined by machine gun emplacements.

“We started at a slow trot and ended up running for our lives,” Hays said. “The Germans were hoping we would break ranks and try to make our escape, which would have given them an excuse to shoot. But we were too smart for that.”

The incident, which came to be called the “Heydekrug Run” after the prison camp in Heydekrug, East Prussia, that they had recently left, was classified as a “war crime event.” The perpetrators were later tried at Nuremberg.

The third prison in which Hays was incarcerated —in Kiefeheide, on the eastern border of Germany — was one of the last to be liberated. When he was freed May 12, 1945, the 5-foot-8-inch Hayes weighed 80 pounds — 65 pounds less than when he was captured.

“We had youth on our side,” he said. “To be 18, 19, 20 is an advantage when you are treated like that.”

Hays returned home, married Joan, went to college on the GI Bill, pursued a career in the textile and graphics businesses and retired in 1985.

Fifty-one years to the day after he was shot down, Hays received a phone call from Denmark. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Johannes Ulrich, the boy who had found him in the field that day. Ulrich had tracked Hays down, in hopes of a reunion.

Hays returned to Logumkloster and visited not only with Johannes, who is now a successful pig farmer with 3,000 pigs on 70 acres, and his wife, Karen, but also with the Lunds, the family that was in the middle of the birthday party when Johannes showed up on their doorstop with Hays draped over his bicycle.

He has now been back to Denmark four times, the last time with his wife, his daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. On that trip, Hays met another ghost from his past: Lt. Gunther Sinnecker, the German fighter pilot who shot him down, and whom he had shot down in return.

Fritz, the son of Johannes Ulrich, tracked Sinnecker down from Luftwaffe records. It had taken him 2½ years, but Hays said he was aided by the fact that the B-17 was the only American plane shot down in Denmark that day.

The two airmen who had shot each other out of the air met at Berlin’s Tegel Airport after 54 years.

“He had survived,” Hayes said. “Not too many Luftwaffe pilots did.”

Despite the initial awkwardness of that meeting — “a little touchy,” Hays said — he and Sinnecker now speak regularly, by phone and via e-mail.

The day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sinnecker’s wife, Ilsa, called to express her sympathy and to say that their sons in Germany had volunteered to adopt children who had been orphaned in the attack.

Hays has also made many friends in Denmark from his four trips there and said that he may go back again this summer for 60th anniversary of being shot down.

“Things change,” he said. “There was all this hatred, but after 50 years, things have changed. I came full circle.”


Stefanie Matteson can be reached at (908) 707-3136 or smatteson@c-n.com.

from the Courier News website www.c-n.com

http://www.c-n.com/news/c-n/story/0,2111,941018,00.html


Ellie