If you follow my articles on The Southern Voice, you know how much I love to read. Almost every article is tied to a book I have read or recommends that you read one to get more information. I read and review many books from popular fiction authors, history and memoirs, and local and regional authors. The best books entertain you with a story and also teach you something. One of the last books I read was from one of my favorite genres, World War II history, and memoirs.
Today we are losing many of the last survivors of the Greatest Generation; efforts are being made to preserve their history for readers and those who love history thru the lens of a movie camera. I just finished reading a re-publication of a great book by a man from Atlanta, Georgia, named Frank Murphy.
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Frank Murphy was part of the Greatest Generation. Like many of that era, he dreamed of being a fighter pilot. He left college to pursue that dream as the war in Europe began to heat up. He became a navigator for the 100th Bomber Group, better known today as “The Bloody One Hundredth.” They earned that title due to the many losses they incurred in aerial combat. The book is titled Luck of the Draw. The odds were against these young men who had to fly twenty-four combat missions to finish their commitment. Many were unable to complete it. The pilots and crews were either killed when they were shot down in aerial combat and crashed or had flight failures or circumstances that caused them to bail and be taken as prisoners of war. On that twenty-first mission, Frank Murphy eventually became one of the latter.
These young men flew in the massive aircraft, the B-17 Bomber. They had a pilot, copilot, bombardier, and several aerial defensive gunners, as well as the position Murphy himself held as navigator. They flew in groups against the more experienced and better-trained German pilots. They did considerable damage to Hitler’s army, paved the way for the Allies to win the war in Europe, and served gallantly in the Pacific.
A small-town boy becomes a hero in the skies. Click here for the story.
On Frank’s twenty-first mission, the B-17 crew of his plane was hit by massive flak from ground fire. The aircraft was disabled, and he and several crew bailed out over Germany. Their B-17 crash-landed in a farmer’s field with two crew members who were still onboard killed. The others were taken prisoner and held captive but had relatively easy confinement until a year later when the Allies began to overtake the area around the prison camp. They were force marched and hauled on cattle cars in one of the worst winters on record to Stalag VIIA outside Mooseburg, Germany. There the horrors of confinement became even worse, and the long winter dragged on until their liberation by American Forces in April 1945.
Frank Murphy’s account of his time with “The Bloody One Hundredth” of the 8th Army Air Force is not the first account I have read of their exploits. Chattanooga, Tennessee resident John Lucado published his memoirs written by Kevin Maurier last year in an excellent book called Damn Lucky. John “Lucky” Luckadoo’s story was published here in The Southern Voice. Murphy passed a few years ago, but John Luckadoo celebrated his one-hundredth birthday last year and is blessedly still with us.
Murphy’s account of the horrors of Stalag VIIA is not the first account I have read of it either. Lightening Down by Tom Clavin also outlined the horrors of Buchenwald and Stalag VIIA from a fighter pilot named Joe Moser. I also have a personal interest. My dad, Charles Stephens, an infantry soldier in World War II, was interred there and liberated along with thousands of others in April 1945. The horrors of Stalag VIIA remained with every soldier interred there for their lifetime.
