The Blister Club

Shot down into enemy-held territory, many of our airmen have walked through incredible hardship and danger to safety. Here are the stories of some charter members of the Blister Club who were recently repatriated from Switzerland

BY CAPT. LAWRENCE P. BACHMANN

Air Force Magazine Overseas Staff

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley—which was packed with cheering, half-hysterical Americans on their way home. It slowed down as it neared the Swiss-French border and the Americans jumped out doors and windows before it stopped rolling. Waiting for them at the barbed wire that marked the frontier were an American brigadier general, many high-ranking Swiss, and a cover of U. S. colonels.

The whistling and cheering died down—the American uniforms seemed to remind our mufti-garbed flyers that they were still in the Army. A tall rangy captain, pilot of a B-17 that had been shot down months before, called them to attention and they fell in in double line. He called roll, about-faced, saluted the general, Brig. Gen. R. B. Legge, and reported that his escapees were all present and accounted for.

General Legge, in turn, checked the roll with the Swiss representatives and there followed a great deal of muttering and head-wagging—there were 60 Americans but the rolls listed only 59. While the Swiss counted and recounted and checked through papers, the U. S. colonel on the French side of the border grew increasingly nervous.

"They come along slow to arrange for the release of the AAF aircrew members and no one wanted to see negotiations break down now. The Swiss had amply demonstrated that they had no intention of risking their neutrality— which many Swiss consider their most important national industry—and never would have consented to the release of any Americans were they not sure it was completely legal and super-neutral.

The Swiss scrupulously observe those articles of international law which provide that belligerents who land in neutral territory will be interned for the duration. Thus all crew members who brought their crippled planes down on Swiss soil—or parachuted onto it—are being held and probably will be until the war in Europe is officially over.

However, men who escaped from the enemy and sought safety in Switzerland — who walked unmarked into the country—are considered escapees rather than internees. According to a law which probably goes back to medieval times, escapees are entitled to sanctuary and are treated like tourists—perfectly free to leave. This was purely theoretical until we had liberated some of France touching on Switzerland and could effect the rescue of the escapees. The 60 airmen standing at attention on the French border were the first escapees thus released from Swiss custody in this war.

As soon as Lt. Gen. Alex M. Patch's ground troops had reached the Swiss border international negotiations were begun through General Legge, our Military Attache in Switzerland. He asked Lt. Gen. Ira C. Eaker, commanding general of MAAF, to send a party up to the Swiss border to arrange the details and take care of the men. Thus on one side of the border there was an organization of the 15th Air Force called ACRU— Air Crew Recovery Unit—which boasted a 2½-ton truck, a bus, and some bilingual officers.

Their local negotiations in the Haute-Savoie section of France had been conducted through the head of the FFI in the area—a semi-legendary individual always spoken of as "Nivenu." He turned out to be an American officer, raised in France, who had been dropped by parachute in Haute-Savoie in June, 1944. A round-faced man in his late twenties, he alternated between American Army uniform and the clothes of a French Frenchman—and by his contacts and knowledge materially helped ACRU make preparations.

The preparations had seemed foolproof— but there were the Swiss looking unhappy and rechecking the roll. Finally it was found that the error was purely clerical; the missing name was added to the list, and the men started passing through customs. As each had only one small bag the examination went quickly and soon they were all in France.

En route to the small French town where ACRU and Nivenu had arranged quarters for them, they were given some rations as a snack. Those they devoured as though they were seven-course turkey dinners, relished with nostalgia rather than hunger.

For they had been well taken care of in Switzerland. Put up at some of the best hotels in world-famous resorts, they had the freedom of the villages, learned to ski, ate well, received full pay—and grew unbearably bored of listening to radio reports of the war and having no part in it. Some of the boys got so angry at Swiss prices that they took to making their own insignia rather than pay $1.75 for a single lieutenant's bar or $7.00 for a pair of pilot's wings. This was an important item because most of them had been helped into Switzerland by members of the underground of Belgium, Holland or France who had collected all available AAF insignia as souvenirs.

When they were greeted by ACRU most of them wore civilian clothes of every shape and form. Some were as smart as Bond Street Beau Brummels; others looked like Mickey Rooney characters, but all had one thing in common—the silver boot insignia of the Blister Club proudly worn on their lapels or their chests.

This strange looking but happy crew was quartered for the night in a little town near the Swiss border and Intelligence officers went to work interrogating them about their escapes from enemy territory.

An Air Force second lieutenant, copilot of a B-17, was on his fourth mission. The Ludwigshaven. It was his fourth mission and force that knocked them up in force that day and one of the fighters came in close enough to knock out one of his engines. The plane lost speed, fell out of formation and German fighters closed in—knocking out another engine. The pilot dove through clouds to shake them off, diving from 25,000 to 1,000 feet, and broke out right over a German airdrome which welcomed them with a hail of light flak. The tail gunner was badly hurt and could not bail out, so they decided to crash land near the Belgian border.

The pilot ordered the crew to split up into pairs and make for the Swiss border while he remained with the wounded tail gunner. Some months later the copilot and his companion, a waist gunner, learned that the wounded man died 14 days later. The pilot left only after burying his man in a French cemetery. Later, when their only mail came from home, they learned that the pilot and the rest of the crew were safe in America.

The lieutenant and the sergeant, though dressed in fur-lined, leather flying clothes, walked through occupied territory unmolested for three days. Finally they reached a farm where the French owner gave them some clothing, although he could speak no English and they no French. After that they walked for an additional two days and still saw no sign of the enemy. They were exhausted and their feet were blistered when a French family, where they stopped to ask for water, put them up for two days.

Only an hour after they left this family they were stopped by a French policeman who demanded their papers. Believing it was all up, they confessed to being Americans and the policeman shepherded them toward town—but turned them into a small house on the outskirts where he lived a member of the underground. The French were very worried for the area was filled with Nazis, but they kept the Americans hidden for eight days.

The two flyers were put under the charge of a 21-year old Frenchman who spoke no English. He boldly marched them right out down the main street of the town, past the Nazis and into the railroad station. Here he bought tickets and they rode the train to Sedan.

"I scared hell out of us," the copilot explained. "We were among passengers with ferries all around us. We got to Sedan and our guide took us to another house. We stayed at Sedan three weeks, changing houses every day or so. There were over 40,000 Nazis in the city but the French took us for walks in daylight. It was exciting all right, but not very comfortable.

"We wanted to get to Spain for we knew that we could then go on to Lisbon and home. We explained that to the French but they kept shaking their heads and telling us it couldn't be done. Seems our own planes were bombing too well and the railroad between Sedan and Nancy was out. Finally we had to agree to go to Switzerland.

"Fortunately, a couple of the French knew English and were able to explain what we were to do. Again we were escorted by the 21-year old Frenchman who took us by train to Paris where we rode the subway across town to another railroad station pretending to be Polish workers on the way to another job. The French every now and then eyed us and all the way through I had a feeling—and I've talked to a lot of the other boys and they agree—that the French generally knew who we were but never let on.

"Finally, we got on a $1 train going south to the French Alps. We stayed in this very village for two and a half days. Then we were led to within a short distance of the frontier where we remained another 24 hours. The next night the French motioned us to get into a truck that was filled with empty wine barrels. We couldn't see where we were going as we had to keep well out of sight. Finally, the truck stopped, someone jumped on the barrels and we looked out.

"The driver jerked his thumb and we looked in that direction—the truck was next to a barbed wire fence. As we climbed out of the truck, the driver whistled and a Swiss guard came down and opened a gate. We shook hands with the driver and walked across into Switzerland."

A sergeant engineer of a Fortress was in the second Schweinfurt raid of October 14, 1943, when the 8th Air Force sustained its greatest loss of 66 heavy bombers but heavily damaged the target. Two engines were knocked out by flak and they dropped behind the formation waiting at their guns as the fighters came in to finish them off. They didn't have long to wait—soon they called for them to bail out. The sergeant was one of the first out and he watched the others leave by the smoking plane. He counted seven people, two of whose chutes did not open.

Not until he hit the ground did the sergeant realize that the tip of the chute opening had jicked his right shoe off. He looked about but the wind had separated him from the other four men. Knowing he was on the German border near Nancy, he went into a forest and spent the night.

The next day he found a small road and limped into a town where the French, who had watched the plane crash and the chutes open, were expecting him. He didn't speak the language, but by simple gestures signified what he wanted and they directed him to a shoe store where he purchased a new pair. After receiving clothing and food he explained that he wanted to reach Spain. The villagers pointed out the general direction and he started to walk.

In ten days of walking his feet were so badly blistered he could go no farther, had a mixed feeling of dismay and relief when French police stopped him and took him in custody. They turned him over to the underground who put him in a canal boat for a week until his feet were partially healed, and then he was taken to Verdun.

There he met three other AAF flyers who had been shot down on the same mission. After waiting four days at Verdun the underground took them in pairs to Belfort where they were turned over to a couple of French who guided them across the border and turned them over to the Swiss police.

Blood poisoning had begun in his feet and the sergeant was put in a hospital at Porrentruy where in the next few days he was the radio operator from his crew who was hospitalized with him after a 20 cal. bullet in his left leg. After four days the engineer's feet were healed and he went into town where one of the local people he listened to his copilot. This officer had broken some toes on his left foot in landing after his jump but refused to go to a hospital until he'd checked in at the Military Attache's, saying he had made up his mind in that condition.

A month later another officer of the crew showed up—the navigator. He told them that he had gone out to the wreckage of the plane with the French and had been with them when they buried the four crew members found in the craft. The people of the town of Toul had made a collection and put up headstones for the dead flyers.

One of the escapees, a lieutenant from a 15th Air Force Liberation, spoke fairly good French and made rapid progress through the underground. Within a week he was across the Swiss border without ever having been bothered by Nazis. Only one thing occurred that he thought worth mentioning:

"At one small house where I spent a day, the woman told me that her husband had been in the French Army, having been taken prisoner four years ago. She'd heard less than a year ago that he was still alive.

"She was a very nice lady and must have been pretty good looking before the war. Now her hair was pulled straight back from her forehead and tied in a knot behind her head and she would look at me with her large gray eyes not as if she saw when she just stared me over but as if she was seeing all the crying she could do behind them. It was just as if she had stopped all the things she described.

"She was fixing me something to eat when there was a rap on the door. I guess I just froze. It was too late to do anything. The door was thrown open and there were a couple of friends outside. The woman walked over to them and I were part of the furniture. The Germans just pushed a piece of paper into her hand and slammed the door behind them. She came back to the table where I was sitting. I always will remember the way she moved. She didn't seem to walk, but to glide along as if on wheels.

"We both bent over the sheet the Germans had given her. I could understand it easily. The Germans were offering a large reward for any enemy flyers turned in to them. They'd also release a Frenchman from prison camp for every Allied flyer they got. I guess I read slowly, for she was finished reading before I was. I looked at her. This time her eyes seemed to be focused on me as if she was seeing me for the first time.

"Then, with her eyes still on me, her hand reached out and picked up the paper. She crumpled it and threw it in the kitchen fire and went on fixing me something to eat."

Not all of the men traveled by themselves. A group of nine flyers from four different crews got together after being shot down in formation. They openly walked into Nancy and skirts of Paris were getting bombed and the roads were full of refugees, many of them laborers from other countries.

Of that nine men seven got through and became part of ACRU but two were caught by the Germans and both seem to have been put into the average percentage for escapees. They were kept in Liege, Belgium, for almost two months and say it was like Chicago at the height of the Prohibition era with the Belgian Maquis operating exactly like movie gangsters.

The Americans went to football games, sports events, movies and cafes. They learned that each of the Belgian Maquis had a woman with him all the time. Generally at that time a large woman with a Mae West figure. The one type that is so popular in the United States was sneered at. "What use would she be?" one of the Belgians asked. "Can she hide a gun in her bosom? Some of our women can carry two guns there and the Nazis never search women for us."

Liege was the clearing point for all escapees from Belgium. Every one of the Allied soldiers who received wonderful treatment and it was almost like being at a rest camp. It has been called with some excitement they went along on some of the Belgians' expeditions to get fresh supplies and money from the Germans. One day the Belgians gathered the boys together, got them places on advantageous spots in a corner cafe, and, after ordering drinks for them and being certain they were all right, left them there in half an hour a German armored money truck rumbled down the street and stopped in front of the bank across the way. The whole thing was perfectly timed. They permitted they left as if they were seeing one of the early Cagney pictures. Without any fuss a couple of their Belgian friends sauntered up to the driver and guard, pushed guns in their sides, and in a moment the Germans and the Belgians were racing back in the truck.

They drove out to the country where the patriots removed the money at their leisure.

"You must not consider us unlawful," one of the Maquis was careful to explain. "I am an attorney and nothing pins me more than breaking the law. But we did not set up this war or our government and the Germans do not belong here, handling our money and our property. We take the money from them and use it to buy guns to shoot them so that we can again have our own government and be law abiding."

After a good deal of planning the Belgians explained their next job to the men. It was to be a large factory and storage point in the outskirts of the city, so that the men all the Belgians' plans literally went up in smoke. A large formation of AAF planes wiped it out. The patriots were highly annoyed at this wanton destruction of German property when they had planned to do it in a much neater manner.

The next day travel began—marching in caravan. Not only were there nine flyers but they had a Canadian, an RAF pilot, and a U.S. Engineer who had been captured on D-Day in Normandy. The Germans had marched him and

600 other Allied troops through Paris on D plus 22 and French collaborationists had hissed and slapped them. The Engineer escaped by jumping out of a box car with some English and Free French. He'd been with the FFI for two months as a caravan.

Their guide was a 50-year-old Belgian woman who was making her second trip with escapees all the way across France to the border. As decoys she had a Belgian couple and an old Belgian man. The flyers and the other escapees just tagged along, letting her do the talking for all of them.

By the time they reached the border they had added more—two German deserters, and a paratrooper who'd been shot down over placed around when he was hit and had been moved about it. The biggest scare they got was when our own planes came over and strafed factories near them. This occurred several times and the men agreed they never realized what bombing really meant until they were on the other end of it. Although the trip to the border had been interrupted and not without some amusement, the destination was tragic. They were brought to the border at night and given careful instructions—the main thing for them to remember was that there were three barbed wire fences in this point. Singly they started out in the dark. But either the French were mistaken or the Germans had suddenly done something with the barbed wire fences when they ran into another. An alarm was sounded. Most of them then scrambled back to the French soil and had a precarious rendezvous.

At dawn there were only able to count up the barbed wire fences. There were five. A few of the newcomers were missing and one of the original nine was gone. The pilot who was the leader of the party decided that someone had to do something to see if they could make it before the sun was too high and would expose no one but himself to the pilot. They watched helpless when he was caught only 20 yards from them by a German patrol. Later they heard that he and the other man were prisoners. Finally the men found some French who told them about a better border that night.

Without exception all the airmen who had escaped the Nazis talked about the magnificent aid they had received from the men and women of France, Belgium and Holland, whether the Maquis, FFI, Belgian partisans, Dutch underground, or just ordinary patriots. The escapees could not pin down the names and addresses of those who aided them for fear of reprisals in the event of their capture, but they remember almost every one.

For instance, the day after the men were brought out of Switzerland one of them—the first copilot mentioned in this article—was seen walking out of the village carrying all the chocolate, cigarettes, soap he could find. When he returned, he couldn't stop grinning he was so happy.

"Just 400 yards from here," he said, "is a house where a lady hid us for two and one-half days after a horse guard ski train and were waiting to cross the border. Just now I walked down the road to thank those people. You should have seen the welcome they gave me! I told them about the others who got through. The woman and her son smiled I'm unable to be back and thank them for those who helped me. I'm going to at least thank once a day—and maybe some day I will."

The next day they were taken to an airfield where they paid no attention to the 40 German prisoners working under the stern eyes of the FFI. They were too busy staring at the C-47 that stood waiting to take them out. Slowly several of them walked around the transport, and then one of them ran his hand along the underside of the wing the way a man does when he touches something he loves. Another escapee looked at him and nodded. "We're home," he said.

The Blister Club

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