Good morning. My name is Paul Zarbock, a member of the staff of University of North Carolina Wilmington's Randall Library. Today is the 9th of September in the year 2003. This interview is located at Johnson City VA facility. Our interviewee today is David Purner.

We're going to start off the interview in a historical context. David's bomb group took off from England and was heading towards Berlin on a bombing run in 1944. Flying in a Liberator as navigator, the following situation took place...

We formed up and took off as part of an armada of four engine bombers, some from England and some from Italy, scheduled to bomb the same target: Berlin, Germany. This involved perhaps a total of some 2,500 four-engine bombers that filled the sky in formation. That formation was never broken, although we look ahead and see tremendous flak knowing that we were going to fly straight through it. The ship would bounce, the flak would pierce the plane, but we never broke formation.

Now flak is antiaircraft fire, is that correct?

That is correct. On this particular mission, my group, the 392nd Bomb Group, was attacked by Luftwaffe fighters just as we were prepared to turn on the final leg into our target. Fifty-four fighters each with machine guns mounted in the wing and firing a 20mm cannon anti-personnel munitions out the nose. Fifty-four fighters thusly armed presented an awesome fire power as they roared directly through my group. As a result, 8 of the 16 B-24's the 392nd put up that day were on their way down at the same time.

My ship was hit hard. We had two engines out, the third caught fire. Tail assembly was nearly shot away. My crew reported fires throughout that aircraft. The bomb bay with its full load of bombs was a roaring concern. The pilot dropped the landing gear as a sign of surrender.

We were hit at 28,000 feet nearly six miles in the air. When we had dropped to about 15,000, the ship suddenly jerked into a tight spin. At the same time the copilot hit the bail-out bell. My escape hatch was the nose wheel door, but since the pilot had dropped the landing gear, that nose wheel is now in my way. For the bombardier and I, that was the only way out and so out I went.

I wound up straddling the nose wheel, sitting on a little metal mudguard directly above the wheel, with my head and shoulders still in that aircraft. Almost immediately with tremendous force the slipstream rushing up the belly of that airplane ripped the boots off both my feet. Now I remember that as a frightening experience and a bit painful. I'd been wounded in the air battle and now I had shrapnel in my left leg and left foot.

How old were you at that time?

Twenty-four. My left foot was broken. Well I knew that all I had to do was lay back and fall off that wheel and pull the ripcord on my chest-pack parachute. Couldn't do it. I tried, but the slipstream was still working against me and now with the ship's spinning in, centrifugal force had me pinned against the side of the plane. I couldn't move a muscle.

Sitting over a hole every time the plane went around, I could see the trees. They got closer and closer and they were there. I knew I was going to crash with that B24, I gave up. I knew I was going in. Then at something under 1,000 feet, the aircraft exploded and I was blown clear and I felt myself free. I began to scratch for that ripcord, I panicked momentarily until I glanced up and I saw that my chute was already open. It was swinging loudly all but spilling amidst this billowing black smoke and all this flying debris.

Now for nearly 60 years, I've lived knowing full well that on April 29, 1944, at precisely 11:30 in the morning, the Lord saved me. He pulled me from a spinning aircraft and he opened my parachute. Some people have a problem with that. They find it hard to believe, but I know, I never pulled my ripcord.

Without even seeing, I hit the ground and I hit it hard. I saw German troops scouring the landscape looking for downed parachuters like myself. So I dropped to the ground and I wiggled out to the center of this large field. I laid there afraid to move, afraid to breathe. I was scared to death. In a few moments, I spotted Staff Sergeant Arthur M. Smith, one of the waist gunners from our crew.

I called his name. He wiggled out to where I was and we lay there together. In a short while we watched the mighty 8th Air Force flying in formation back to England. Now without exception that has to be the most depressing moment in my 83 years of life. Get the picture? Five hundred miles behind enemy lines, wounded, in my sock feet, surrounded by the enemy, watching my friends fly back to England. That is not a good picture.

Almost immediately the wounds became a big source of worry. They didn't look good, they were painful and I didn't have any medication with which to treat them. Having been in retailing prior to the war, I knew there was a white lining inside the collar and cuffs of my officer's shirt and I ripped these out. I found some chlorine pills in my escape kit and purified some water from an irrigation ditch in that field and I washed down the wounds as best I could.

But that foot would swell to three times its size and turn every color in the rainbow, and I was greatly concerned about the possibility of losing it. Sgt. Smith and I had to have a plan. We couldn't lay in that field for the rest of the war. I was a navigator, knew precisely where we were. After some discussion, we decided to head north, try to reach the Baltic Sea. There we would look for a ship flying a Swedish flag, steal aboard, stow away, and sail off to neutral Sweden.

About how far away were you from the Baltic Sea?

About 200-250 miles.

A long walk.

Yes, but it was just as far to the western low countries in France. We also didn't know a thing about the Maginot or Siegfried lines that we'd have to somehow get through. We decided to head for the Baltic Sea and get on a neutral ship. That's pretty wishful thinking, but we had to have a plan and that's what Smitty and I decided to do.

So for the next three days we evaded capture. We traveled at night and hid during the day.

Sir, how could you walk?

I had a walking stick that I leaned on. It wasn't easy, but it was the only way to go.

Slow and painful.

Yes, but we made surprisingly good time in spite of that fact.

Was Smitty injured?

Smitty was not injured. The third day we were hiding in a little wooded patch covered with what brush we could find. Most of the woods in Germany look like they're swept clean. People are gleaning firewood, but we were covered with what little brush we could find waiting for it to get dark enough to travel.

Have you eaten in three days?

No. About dusk, German children from nearby houses came into that woods to play. A little girl hid behind a tree directly above my head. It wasn't long until she glanced down and spotted me, ran off screaming, spreading the alarm. Smitty and I got up and got out of there and we tried to hide again in a nearby wooded patch, but by this time the entire German populace was out looking for us.

They criss-crossed that woods, and it wasn't long until they flushed us out. Now we're faced with a large group of about 200 German civilians, very vocal, very angry German civilians, armed to the teeth. They had guns, pitchforks, clubs, rocks, spit, dogs. You name it, they had it. Smitty and I were beaten. We were expecting to be hung. They had a rope around my neck. They were pushing us towards a tree when two older German men, both armed with Luger sidearms, finally manage to persuade the younger hotheads in charge of that mob that we should be held for military interrogation. They saved our lives.

Smitty and I were pushed down to a little village and thrown in a barnlike structure, obviously their town hall. And here we were questioned, roughed up. They were trying to find the rest of our bomber crew and they thought we should be able to help them. This went on for several hours and we were finally turned over to some Luftwaffen personnel.

These people took us to a nearby slave labor camp. We spent our first night there. The men in that camp had been brought in from the low countries to work the surrounding fields as slave labor. We spent our first night there. The following morning as we prepared to leave, those men lined up to bid us farewell. One of them placed a pair of cheap felt house shoes in my hand. He noticed I was barefoot and wounded. Under the circumstances, that man gave me a fortune and I've always regretted the fact that I was never able to thank him properly. I don't even know his name.

Smitty and I were placed aboard a German troop train under guard.

Had you received any medical care whatsoever?

No, none. We stood between the feet of three German troops on either side of this little Continental train compartment. These troops were in full field pack headed for the western front, anticipating the coming invasion. They weren't exactly thrilled with their assignment. We all knew that when that invasion came, it would be a real bloody affair.

They were not at all happy to have Smitty and I standing between their feet. So this made for a long train ride from Celle, Germany, south to Frankfort on the Main. As we approached the city of Frankfort, I recall looking out the train window and I was exposed for the first time to the complete devastation of aerial bombardment. I tried to find a complete building. I saw rubble and I saw walls, but I could never find a complete building.

Frankfort had been bombed repeatedly. On the outskirts of the city was a POW camp called Dulag Luft, and its primary function was for the military interrogation of captured allied flyers like myself. At Dulag Luft, I was placed in solitary confinement. My cell was very small, very confined. I had no window, no running water, no toilet facility. One naked light bulb. It was furnished with a single, uncomfortable cot. Period. The door was solid steel. There were no bars which made it all the more confined.

Every morning I was given a cup of water and a slice of bread and then plenty of time to think and worry and ponder my fate. I was concerned about my wife. I knew that she'd be receiving a telegram that I was missing in action and I knew she'd be worried. I was concerned too about the crew. At this point I wasn't sure what had happened to them. I was also greatly concerned about myself, what was going to happen to me.

As the hours passed, the walls of that little cell began to press in and the silence became a deafening roar. I began to crave to hear a human voice, even my own, so I began to talk out loud. I recited everything that I had ever learned in school, in Sunday school, over and over just to hear my own voice.

I found a little piece of paper, brown wrapping-type paper, not a very big piece, had no idea where it came from, but I tore it into 52 pieces about the size of my thumbnail. Broke a lead wire off that cot, and using that as a pencil, I created a deck of playing cards and I played solitaire. Game after game after game of solitaire. Couldn't shuffle, just messed them up. Just to keep from going nuts.

I can say this about solitary confinement, military interrogation. It can be a very traumatic dehumanizing experience. You feel very much alone and surrounded by well-trained experts who knew exactly how to apply with pressure, both physical, psychological. But I survived that and I was informed that I was being sent to a permanent prisoner-of-war camp in Sagan in Selasia, now a part of Poland.

That would require a four-day train trip clear across Germany. We were placed in 40 and 8 boxcars built to hold 40 men or 8 mules. They would cram as many as 150 of us into one of those little cars. We were packed in so tightly that we couldn't all sit at the same time. We took turns sitting and standing. We were locked in those cars without food, without water, and with no toilet facility.

My wounds had not been treated, and they were now showing signs of infection and I was greatly concerned. Some of the men were sick and vomiting. With no toilet facility, that four-day train trip became a real traumatic nightmare, horrible. We arrived at Stalag Luft III.

Were you traveling day and night or would you stop occasionally?

No, we stopped once in the marshaling yards at Leipzig while the Allies bombed Leipzig. We were locked in the cars. The guards left to seek shelter, and we would have been, all that we had, that marshaling yards would have been hit, we expected to be wiped out. That was the only stop I recall.

We arrived at Stalag Luft III, and here I was placed in a so-called hospital. Actually it was a POW barracks set aside for this purpose. It was staffed by doctors that were themselves POW's. They had been picked up from North Africa, Dunkirk, wherever. They were using very meager Red Cross supplies, medical supplies, no wonder drugs. Here my wounds were probed to get foreign matter out and then my leg was elevated. And for seven weeks, they applied saline compresses, no wonder drugs.

But salt water is rather healing and after seven weeks, my wounds had healed sufficiently that they could transfer me to the permanent camp. Here I was assigned to a cooking combine. At this point early on we were fortunate enough to have a meager supply of Red Cross food parcels. A food parcel wasn't very big, 14 inches square, 4 or 5 inches deep. They were doled out very carefully. One-eighth of a parcel per man per week. So that eight of us in a cooking combine could control a complete parcel.

Using water in making stews and soups, we tried to stretch that food and make it last a full week and that was pretty tough to do. I might add that once that supply was depleted, we'd see no more food parcels for the duration of the war. That's when things really got rough. That's when the starvation diet set in. I remember eating barley soup that didn't look good, didn't taste good, but it was hot and filling. Had little black specks floating on top. The German word for prisoners of war was Kriegsgefangenen. We called ourselves "Kriegies."

If a new Kriegie came into the cooking combine and started to pick out those little black specks, the older Kriegies would get on them like a bird on a June bug. They'd say, "Don't pick them out. If you don't like them, don't eat them, but don't pick them out." That black speck was the head on a little white worm. I've been told that once cooked, it made a pretty good protein, but I wouldn't recommend it.

As the war progressed, we would get down to grass soup. Sometimes it had horse bones in it. Now I've been asked, "How did you know they were horse bones?" Well at one point we got the jawbone and it still had the teeth, and it's pretty easy to identify the jawbone of a horse. Never saw any meat on those bones. I have no idea where the meat went. We cut cards for the bones, so the lucky man would break the bones and eat the marrow in an effort to survive. And that became the name of the game, survival.

When you're first captured and you lose control of your very life, this feeling of utter helplessness, hopelessness sets in, but that gives way to extreme anger, extreme anger at your situation. Then this motivating desire to survive sets in and you tell yourself over and over again, "I will survive. I'll eat anything, I'll do anything. I don't know whether this is for one year or five years or ten years, but I'm going home with my wife." Without that motivating desire, under certain circumstances, there could be no survival.

Well Adolf Hitler had promised the German people on almost a daily basis over German radio, he kept promising that the allied flyers who had unmercifully bombed German cities, the terror "fleugers," would never leave those camps alive. So we lived in fear of an attempt to annihilate.

We knew that the Russian troops were approaching from the east. We had high hopes that they'd be able to reach our camp and liberate us. When they got close enough, we could hear the gunfire. We were put on a forced march in the middle of the night in the middle of the coldest winter in Germany in 100 years with temperatures reaching 20 to 30 degrees below 0. Snow and ice on the ground. We marched for the first 72 hours without food, without water, without shelter, running from the Russians. Our casualties were heavy. Frozen extremities were commonplace.

What would happen if you fell out?

I never experienced that. I heard some horror stories. One of my combine had his feet frozen. In the space between the toes was a mass of gray blisters, and he was placed with a group of people in an empty barn under guard. However, I saw him later as we got to our camp in Nuremberg, so apparently it worked out alright.

What were the guards like on this march?

At this point they were beginning to be more docile. The war was winding down and we began to see the end. They weren't aggressive. As a matter of fact, there was a... the caliber wasn't the same. There wasn't the wounded German soldier as much as it was the old _____ from World War I, that type of guard.

More experienced, more adult? Experienced with life, I mean?

Well actually it was not the SS type who were gung ho along with the Hitler youth and the brown shirts and this type thing. These were more stable like the general German people from World War I vintage. They weren't as aggressive towards us. I survived that march using some lump sugar and some dried prunes and one chocolate concentrated D-bar ration that I saved from the time we had the food parcels for just such an occasion. Drank snow.

We finally reached our second camp in Nuremberg, Germany, Stalag-15D. This was a real hell hole. Nuremberg had been a Nazi hotbed. This camp, the filth of the camp was indescribable. We had no soap, very little water. We tried to keep clean. We shaved the hair from our bodies in an effort to keep clean, but we became vermin infested. I had the fleas, bedbugs, lice, body lice. At night when you'd try to sleep, vermin would begin to eat. My ankles and hips and wrists were eaten raw.

Were the barracks heated at all?

No, I had scars from that for a long time after coming home from World War II. We knew that now allied troops were approaching Nuremberg and our morale went sky high. We knew this time these were our people. They undoubtedly would be able to reach us and liberate our camp. To soften the city up for those troops, the allies bombed Nuremberg 15 days in a row--the British at night, the Americans during the day.

So I was exposed to the receiving end of aerial bombardment. The camp had been built within a half a mile of the ____ point, the railroad marshal yards, a beautiful place to build a POW camp. We almost bombed the railroad marshal yard. Four barracks in that camp had been wiped out.

We still had high hopes that our troops would be able to reach us, but again it was edict hell. We were placed on the road in a second forced march. Now this time we were in absolutely no condition to make that march. We had had no medical care, no dental care. If you had a toothache, you toughed it out. If you got sick, you prayed.

We had been on a starvation diet, prolonged starvation diet. At this point, my body weight had dropped to 95 pounds. Normal weight was 165, but we made that march. This time our column was straffed on three separate occasions by our own fighters. The pilots couldn't tell from the air that we were a column of POW's. They had orders to fire on anything that moved. Fortunately only three POW's were killed, some were wounded.

We arrived at my third camp, Stalag 7A, Moosburg, Germany, just north of Munich very close to Dachau, which if the wind was right and the weather was right, we could sometimes smell. That little camp had been built to hold 10,000 POW's, but by the time we got there, they had crammed into that little camp 127,000 POW's. It was chaotic. Food and water were all but nonexistent, as was shelter. We slept on the ground.

Fortunately in a matter of days, General George "Blood and Guts" Patton and the 3rd Army, with those beautiful tanks, managed to overtake us at Moosburg. And after a battle with SS troops, General Patton managed to liberate my third camp. Now that has to be one of the highlights of my 83 years, liberation day.

What date was that?

That date was April 29, 1945, a year after I'd been shot down. We didn't leave the camp immediately, but he came in on April 29, 1945. Liberation day, freedom. I remember standing in that POW camp looking out toward the town of Moosburg. In the immediate distance was a little white church and it had a steeple. GI's had raised Old Glory over that church. They had had a nest of SS soldiers and once they blew them out of there, they raised Old Glory over that little white church.

Now I'd been separated from my flag for a year. All she stands for and the protection she gives. I remember that flag fluttering in the breeze and as I watched it, I began to cry. I guess I stood there and cried like a baby, but I wasn't ashamed. Every time she passes me in a parade today, oftentimes I cry. I guess it took the combat missions and the POW experience to make me fully realize what my flag really means to me.

It's never my intention to try to glorify war, God forbid. But I go into the schools with this story in an effort to keep public awareness up, especially in the young people, to a respectable level so that they never ever forget the many sacrifices it took to guarantee those American freedoms that they enjoy and take so much for granted.

After the American forces got to your camp, you were at the verge of starvation. Well having a big steak dinner and a baked potato would be the worst thing in the world. So how was nutrition brought to you, what about medical care?

That's one of the tragedies of the whole thing. Today, thank goodness, the field of psychology, psychoanalysis, and what have you has progressed so much since that time. Then I guess they really didn't know how to treat us or what to do. We were not debriefed. We had no therapy. Our families were not exposed to therapy. Today when we reclaim POW's or hostages, the first thing we do is debrief them.

We start the therapy, the necessary medical efforts and including the families and support groups. That makes a world of difference. If that had happened in our case, so many lives would have been different. As a result, we ran into thousands of broken homes, divorces. Alcoholism and workaholics became a common thing because these were crutches.

It was 1981. That's a long time after the end of the war in Europe in 1945. Congress passed a public law 9737, which allowed former prisoners of war to go to the VA for health care. Congress mandated the VA to go seek us out and bring us in for protocol examinations. I had not been able to talk about World War II and my experiences. My sons grew to maturity never even knowing what kind of a plane I flew.

Once I was given the protocol examination and then I started eight years of therapy and it was magic even after that length of time. I was amazed. They got me to the point that I feel a responsibility to go into the schools and present a prepared program for young people. I've been doing that now since 1982. It wasn't easy, still isn't easy, but to me, it's necessary. I would never turn down an invitation to speak at a school classroom as long as they have a flag on display. No flag, no talk. If my calendar is free, I never turn down that opportunity. As long as there's a breath of life in me, my crew will never be forgotten.

Sir, anything that I'd say would sound a little shallow, but out of the bottom of my heart, I must say how much I admire your courage and your contribution. Thank you sir.

Thank you.