During World War II, my father, Rufus Ward Sr., was a B-17 tail gunner in the 337th Squadron of the 96th Bomb Group based at Snetterton Heath, England. His first combat mission was to Berlin. His last ended 72 years ago this week on May 12, 1944, when his plane, Smokey Stover Jr., was shot down over Frankfurt, Germany. He was captured and held as a German POW until he was liberated on April 26, 1945.
Like so many other members of the “Greatest Generation,” my parents reacted immediately when Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. My father was living in Washington, D.C., where he was attending George Washington University and working as a clerk for the FBI. He immediately enlisted in the Army Air Corps. My mother was attending Virginia State Teachers College (now Longwood University) and came back to Columbus to attend MSCW (MUW) and work at the base hospital at Columbus Army Air Field.
My father would seldom talk about his war time experiences, and when I would ask him about them he always just said “there were so many stories of heroism that were unknown outside of the POW camps because those stories could not be passed along and were thus lost to time.” It was not until after he died that I found out his story was one of them.
It was only about a month after he died that I started learning his story. A letter from a member of his crew appeared in the 96th Bomb Group Historical Association newsletter describing what he had done. Several years later I heard from Chief Justice Sharon Lee of the Tennessee Supreme Court, whose father, Charles Lee, was waist gunner on Smokey Stover Jr. In 2002, Manuel Van Eyck published “Silent Heroes,” a book about American Air Crews lost in air operations over occupied Czechoslovakia, my father was included in the book’s acknowledgments.
On May 12, 1944, Staff Sergeant Rufus Ward, Sr. was the tail gunner on Smokey Stover Jr. That day his bomb group was sent on a mission to bomb oil refineries at Brux, and Zwickau, Czechoslovakia. The plane was assigned to fly in the “Tail End Charlie” slot of the bomber formation’s “Purple Heart Corner.” Near Frankfort, Germany, the squadron was attacked by about 50 German ME-109s, FW-190s and even some ME-210 jet fighters. Smokey Stover Jr. was heavily damaged — its left wing was almost shot away and two engines were on fire. A lost aircraft report description stated, “left wing destroyed and went down out of control.” Communications had been cut to the tail, and Ward did not hear the pilot’s orders to bail out. He was still firing his 50 cal. guns at a German fighter when he suddenly saw his pilot and co-pilot parachute past his window. He went to his escape hatch to bail out but saw the waist gunner and the ball turret gunner lying wounded further inside the plane. He crawled into the waist of the burning, out of control plane and assisted each of them with their parachutes, helping them out of the aircraft before he bailed out.
Justice Lee related what her father had told her happened when Smokey Stover Jr. was shot down: “The pilot rang the bell and ordered everyone to bail out of the plane but he (Charles Lee) lay unconscious. The tail-gunner of the plane, Rufus Ward, would not leave him and worked with him as the plane was going down. He saved Charles’ life by placing a parachute on him and getting him out the door.” Twelve of the 26 aircraft from Snetterton on the May 12 mission were shot down. Ten aircraft had been lost on a bombing mission on May 8. In that five-day period the air base at Snetterton had lost half of its aircraft and crews. The survival expectancy of an air crewman at the base was six missions, and my father had been on his sixth mission. The month of May had seen the 96th Bomb Group suffer almost 125% casualties. Men and planes were being lost almost faster than replacements could be brought into action..
Ward was captured and sent to Stalag Luft IV, a German POW camp which was located in present day Poland. The camp had opened in May of 1944 and was designed to hold up to 6,400 air corps POWs. However, more than 10,000 American, British and Canadian airmen were sent there. Conditions there were anything but good. Charles Lee, the Smoky Stover’s waist gunner, told his daughter, ” …food was very limited. It was mostly a soupy mixture of rotten cabbage and bread made from saw dust…The barracks were made for 16 but usually contained 25 men.” He also recalled horrible infestations of lice in the barracks. Red Cross documents confirm Lee’s descriptions, even mentioning that the bread was made from rye and beets but contained about 30 percent sawdust and straw.
As the war neared its end and Russian troops were fast approaching from the east, the Germans decided to abandon Stalag Luft IV. On February 5, 1945, in the midst of one of the century’s coldest winters, 10,000 POWs were marched out of the camp with limited supplies and little warm clothing. It was a 500 mile forced march, in often blizzard conditions, across Germany that became known as “The Black March.”
On April 26, 1945, my father was liberated at Bitterfeld, Germany, by a unit from the U.S. 104th Timberwolf Division. Near the front lines that April, Dorothy Stout (of Vicksburg) and two other Red Cross workers were on a German road in a “clubmobile” providing coffee, doughnuts and cigarettes to “combat soldiers.” There they encountered 1,500 newly liberated Americans. Among the former POWs was my father, with whom Stout had mutual friends in Mississippi. She wrote a letter that day to Mae Puckett in Columbus and described him as dressed “in various parts of Jerry (German) uniforms” and having “quite long hair” and a “sort of Robinson Crusoe” appearance. Records show that when Ward was liberated he only weighed 91 pounds. He has been honored by Columbus Air Force Base naming a street after him.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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