Michael Darter
95 th BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2001 Reunion, Las Vegas, NV
This is Janie McKnight interviewing Michael Darter for the Legacy Committee of the 95th Bomb Group. Michael, can you state your name and the date and where we are?
MD: Michael I. Darter, October 2nd , 2001 and we’re in Las Vegas, NV at the 95th reunion.
JM: What brought you to this reunion?
MD: My older brother, Eugene Francis Darter was a radioman in the 412th Squadron of the 95th Bomb Group in 1943 in Horham, England. I have recently in the last year and a half discovered what happened to him. Prior to this, he was missing in action and no formal record of what happened to him had ever been made.
JM: Were there any specific things that got you into the process of this search?
MD: Well, ever since I was a little boy my father had told me that I had an older brother that was shot down in WWII. He was MIA but that he definitely had never been – he wasn’t dead, he was still alive, he was somewhere in Europe, but he was certain that he was not dead.
So, I grew up hearing about this and my father knew a little about what happened to him. There were a couple of letters from the Army Air Force stating that he was on a mission to Bremen, his first mission, on December 16, 1943. The aircraft was hit going into the target – Bremen, Germany. The plane was hit badly with antiaircraft fire and then one engine was hit. It then dropped out of formation, dropped its bombs and then was hit hard by enemy aircraft right after leaving Bremen area. The letters stated that three chutes were seen coming out of the aircraft and that the aircraft then disappeared from sight into some clouds some 30 miles west of Bremen.
That was the only information that we knew about. I had read these letters many, many times over the years and had always wondered what happened to him. Over time as our newspaper articles about other WWII veterans come out every year this continually was of interest to me. I never had the time or resources or even imagined that it was possible to find out what happened to him.
JM: Tell us about the process of actually finding out what happened to your brother.
MD: Well, over the years I had actually found an old B-17 on an Air Force base where I was on another project. So, I’d always had this in my mind. I knew it was a B-17. One night in February of 2000 I was at the office at night and was surfing the web and decided I would do a search on B-17s and see what I found. The thought came into my mind to do that. I did that and up comes a whole bunch of books and websites related to different units that flew in WWII. I logged onto a couple of them and started reading e-mails. There were literally hundreds of e-mails of people searching for relatives, loved ones and so on. I thought, my goodness, this is amazing. It sounded like some of them had found. So, I went home that night and got his serial number and the aircraft serial number which was in the 3 letters that I have. These letters are dated 1945, 46, 47. The next day typed out an e-mail and sent it to about a dozen names that sounded like they knew something about it.
Within 3 days, I guess, I got back an e-mail from a person named Fisher. I think it was Jim Fisher that said his father had flew in the 95th and that my brother was a crew member on the LONESOME POLECAT, aircraft 42-30255 and he sent me a page out of Paul Andrews book that had the whole history of that aircraft. Sure enough on December 16 was the last flight of that aircraft with the pilot, the co-pilot and 8 crew members – all their names and their home towns in 1943. This was, of course, absolutely amazing to me – and my brother’s name was one of them - KIA - and it had 4 of them that were killed and 6 POWs. I immediately called up my son and told him about it. He said, well, let’s enter all of them into white pages.com and we’ll see if we can find any hits on their telephone numbers. Which I did, and I did find several hits. The next Sunday morning I decided I would try calling every number that I had.
The very second call that I made a lady answers the phone and I said, I’m Mike Darter looking for Doral Hupp who flew in a B-17 out of England. She said in a great southern accent, “Why, you came to the right place, boy. He’s sitting right over here on the sofa.” She put Doral on the phone and Doral said, “Darter, Eugene Darter, you’re his brother?” You could tell he was absolutely dumbfounded. I said, “Yes, I’m his brother. Do you know anything about him?” He said, “My God, we were on the same crew, we were on the same mission together and I was ordered to get out of the ball turret, check the plane and I found Eugene on the floor of the radio room bleeding badly. He was hit by aircraft guns up the right side of his body, his right arm, his leg was hit. And I started applying tourniquets to him to try to stop the bleeding. I gave him a shot of morphine. I got his parachute on and then I realized it was a chest pack and he couldn’t pull it with his right hand. The pin – there was no way he could pull it with his right hand, so I clipped it on upside down and flipped the chute over and clipped it on to the harness upside down. He was fairly lively then. The shot of morphine must have really roused him up and killed the pain. We could see instantly that the plane was on fire, #2 engine was burning, and I told the guys in the back of the plane, ‘We have to get out.’ The pilot came out of the cockpit and he was looking like he was badly injured. His face was black – Fred Delver – he was holding his arm. He saw what we were doing. I told him what I was doing. He said, ‘Fine, go ahead.’ and he closed the door and went back into the cockpit. I immediately told the other guys in the back of the plane, ‘We gotta get out’ and so as we were getting our chutes on. Gene went to the back of the plane, smiled at me and waved and said, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry about me and leaped out of the back door of the aircraft. We immediately got our chutes on 2 or 3 minutes later and everyone of us then bailed out. The first guy out froze in the doorway and there was a time period there of at least 2 or 3 minutes. We had to kick him out through the door – named Bob McKeegan – to get him out of the plane. He went out next and then 2 other men went out after him. So five men went out of the plane.”
Of course, I was just dumbfounded at this whole story of what happened to him. I started crying and, you know, I couldn’t believe my ears – what I was hearing. I was so fortunate to be able to find a crew member that was on the flight on this one day of a mission to Bremen. So Doral went on and told me, yes, there are 2 other men who are still alive. He’s corresponding with them. One of them was listed as KIA. He was NOT killed. He lives south where you live in Champaign IL. He lives in Carrollton? IL. Named Loren Dodson. Another, Charlie Schriner, lives out in Burbank CA. I got all their phone numbers from Doral. I called the other men after that and talked to them. They were totally shocked. Loren and my brother were close friends that palled around together throughout the 6 or 9 months of training. They knew each other. Charlie was in the back of the plane. He actually saw Gene get hit. He was shooting his machine gun out of the top of the plane at a German fighter that was coming in on them. He was hit and knocked down on the floor of the plane. Charlie actually saw that happen, surprisingly. Charlie was hit too at the same time in his wrist. Many of them were injured on the plane.
So three of them bailed out near Oldenberg and Leers? Germany and then 5 others bailed out as they crossed the Dutch coast over the Wadden Sea. And 4 of them - my brother landed just off the coast of Texel Island and these four other men landed just on the island. Just barely before - 60 seconds - if they’ve hesitated another 60 seconds they all would have drowned in the North Sea. The plane what we’ve discovered it went over the island and crashed in the North Sea. Perhaps even as much as 1000 feet off the coast of the island. I was stunned by all this. Just started really after that. You know I had never really thought about his death. My father had pounded into me, He’s not dead. Gene’s mother also, she died after the war and my father remarried. We had different mothers. I met her and she never believed that he died either. It was one of those cases of denying reality. They never knew what happened to him. My father died long before – many years ago – so he never did find out what happened. This then started me on to an investigation of what really happened to him and the crew. I interviewed the three survivors two or three times each. I visited with them, their wives. These three guys had all been married 50 years. They all had long careers, had families and were some of the Greatest Generation. If there ever was one, those three guys belonged to it. They all became prisoners - seven of them actually survived. Three died - the pilot, co-pilot and the radioman, my brother. The other seven became POWs and were in prison for 16 months. Five of them were forced on this 260-mile march across Austria at the end of the war when the Russian army was closing in on them. They survived that and then they were liberated. I started collecting all this information and corresponding with people on the internet and they said, you should get the MACR Report. You should get the operations of the 95th on that particular day, which I got. It’s over 200 pages - detailed all the navigation, the weather, the bombings, the fighter attacks, all of the interrogation reports from every crew that came back to Horham that night.
JM: Where did you get that report?
MD: That comes from the National Archives in College Park, MD. It costs very trivial - $40 or $50 for 200 pages. The Missing Aircraft Crew Report 1558 - it all comes from there - the National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Rd, College Park, MD 20740. You can get all this from there. I figured out how to get his individual deceased personnel file, IDPF, from another source. The e-mail is Tom Jones, I got his e-mail, and I got that in a few months. That had everything that’s in that person’s file from the day they started training until the day, well, forever. I applied for a headstone after my father died and I got his headstone and put it in the cemetery where his father is buried, as a memorial stone. Everything all the way through - all the records - and I discovered there was an investigation done in 1947 for those 3 men. They did search and they compared their remains to 23 unknown remains in North Holland that were unknown bodies that were washed up and none of them matched any of these matches. I found all of that and then read a lot of books - Ian Hawkins book on the 95th ; the Contrails, of course,
and Rendezvous With Destiny. Got a lot of ideas and it just sort of evolved into a documenting what happened here. Until you do that if you just talk to somebody you don’t really learn much. You have to document it. You have to write it down. You have to ask them to write it down. I did. Finally, these guys wrote me out 20 pages of text. Two of the crew members were able to do that. I have that. That was a lot of detail that never came out in the interview with them. It was really interesting to see what they wrote. I put all that together into that mission because there was a lot of mystery to this. What happened on this thing? Why didn’t these men bail out? Why did they stay on the airplane? They flew for 45 minutes after the fighter attack stopped. They didn’t know why the fighter attack stopped. They were about to be killed. There was aircraft coming in on them every minute. As I read the operational record of the 95th , all of a sudden discovered that the American escort at that moment found the bombers. They had missed them and they didn’t know where they were. Exactly at that moment, they found the bombers and drove off the German attack. All these guys survived in that airplane. It’s a precise moment, so I told these guys that’s what happened to you. That’s why you are alive today. Your escort located you and drove off the enemy or you’d have all been killed. They would have definitely wiped you out. They had lost altitude, they were straggling. A lot of the flight crews along the way saw them get hit, saw the parachutes come out over Germany. Three of the guys bailed out 30 miles west of Bremen. Then the plane flew on. It didn’t explode amazingly. The engine was on fire - one engine was feathered - so two engines were gone and a big hole in the wing. The bomb bay doors were wide open. There was a lot of drag on that aircraft. It kept losing altitude all the way. The pilot appeared to be determined to make it back to England. It was just like the movie - if you’ve seen the movie - MEMPHIS BELLE. They did make it back to Horham on their 25th mission. They just barely made it back not to Horham but to another base in England. I think the pilot was just bound and determined to try to get back and he flew that plane until it crashed into the ocean. The only thing - he failed to order the men in the back of the plane to bail out. Five men were still back there. We don’t know the whole story of why he didn’t order them all out; why he didn’t try to ditch the plane. We just don’t know the last minutes of the flight. Putting that whole sequence of events together was a real challenge.
But, I think we did it. We documented it very carefully into a very nice record. I went to Horham and to Texel Island twice. I was able to meet people there. We actually found a farmer who saw the men come through the clouds and land on the ground. The Germans jumped on them and he took their parachutes. They remember him. He had wooden shoes on. I met him. We went to the location where it happened. The North Holland TV followed us around for 2 days. Took pictures of everything. Made a special that was there the next day in Holland. That was really nice. We went out into the Wadden Sea where my brother came down. They got us a boat. We went out and had a memorial service for the 3 crew members. This whole thing absolutely was meant to happen because it’s phenomenal that these men would be alive. One of the crew members that I had not been able to find - one night I said, I’m just going to try again.
He was from a little town called High Point, NC. He was the bombardier on the flight. I searched NC again. I thought I had done this. Up pops the name James Wallin. The same last name but a different first name . I immediately called James. He said, My God, my brother Ed Woollen was the bombardier on this flight,. He was my older brother. "You’re kidding," I said, No. Yeah. I told him everything I’d found. He said, yeah, Ed just died about 15 years ago. He was a career military. He went through Korea. He was in Turkey. He died just 69 years old or something. He had two children. Oh, what’s their names? I’m sure they’re interested in this. So he gave me their names and their phone numbers. He only had the daughter’s name. I called the daughter and she was in San Antonio. Oh, yeah, wow. We talked about it and she said, my brother would be real interested in it. Where’s your brother? Louisiana; he’s a civil engineer.
Ha, I’m a civil engineer too. I’d sure enjoyed talking to John Woollen. I called him. I told him. He said, My God, yeah. I have my father’s diary, POW diary, I have what he wrote about his crewmates and your brother was one of them. We started talking and he was amazed by all this. I hear you’re a civil engineer; where did you go to school? University of Texas. Texas, hell, that’s where I went to school, John. What year’s were you there? 71-2-3-4. I was at the University of Texas during those same years. Who did you work for? I said, Professor Hudson.
He said I worked for Professor Hudson. You’re kidding. No. We must have crossed in the hallway coming and going. I must have known you. He just couldn’t believe it. He found his father’s POW journal and in his journal, I’ll read this to you. When his father was in the POW camp the first page of his Red Cross diary they gave them. They kept a diary. His father, I don’t know how his father knew that the 3 men died but I guess the Germans told them that their plane crashed in the North Sea. So the Germans knew that plane went down. They must have discovered that. He must have figured that all 3 of the men were on the plane and died in the plane. He wrote this. This must have been during 44 or 45 in the POW camp. He said, In memory of my combat buddies who on that certain day set aside for them by Him went far and high beyond the heights of the great airplanes in which they flew over Germany; far and high to the place where we pray their cherished silver wings shall keep them flying and the constant memories of their great and heroic sacrifices for peace to the world over shall forever remain in the eyes and hearts of we who flew with them safely to victory; to Fred Delbert, Jr. Don Neff and Eugene Darter. Isn’t that beautiful? John has helped me a lot. The other sons of some of the others - Rod Hupp has helped me read the whole manuscript. We had a memorial service for those guys out in the Wadden Sea where they all died just last June. That’s the story of how this all came to be. None of these guys wrote anything. They never imagined anyone was interested in them. They never told their families. They knew the wife of another crew member named Bob McKeegan. We called her and she was absolutely shocked by all this. She said, Bob never told his family anything hardly about his WWII. They had 3 sons in their 40s. I have yet to give her a copy of this whole book that is now written but I talked to her 4 or 5 times on the phone. Her children, they’re all just dying to - I’ve sent them some pieces and things. She’s amazed. She just can’t believe it. Her husband never told them what he did and what he went through here. He was in this POW, you know. Bailed out of this burning aircraft, just barely - froze in the doorway, couldn’t jump, had to kick him out through the doorway. A lot of families are now involved in this. They’re just waiting to get this whole story. When I get back I will have the book printed. We’ll print about 40 copies and they they’ll get copies of all the stories. It’s very well documented. It’s not a Steven Ambrose - it’s not written like he can write, but it’s a good story of their training, the mission, their POW camp and their return to the US and what they saw.
JM: How did you find out about this reunion?
MD: Once I found they were in the 95th , then I found the 95th website. Started calling Ed Charles. I’ve been in contact - he’s read this whole thing and gave me a whole list of corrections. Stuff like that. Then I was able to find out much more about it. I think I called Drix; talked to him and so on. That’s how.
JM: Can you tell me if any of these crew members have been to them?
MD: No, they haven’t. Two of them have never gone to any. One goes all the time to the Stalag 17B POW camp. He wants to join and his kids and his son want him to join the 95th and come to this reunion. I think next time, next year, he will come Darell Hupp. Darell’s had 5 strokes and a heart attack. He’s still very alert, very alive and doing everything. He helped me the most - a lot. He and Warren Dodson - he’s doing very well too, but his wife is in a wheelchair, can’t leave the home. He couldn’t come. He lives near St. Louis. I don’t know where the next 95 th is going to be. Do you know?
JM: I think it is St. Louis.
MD: St. Louis? Whoa, I’ll drag him down no matter what. Darell will come too. We’ll get two of them there. Yeah, they’re very excited about this. In fact, on the way here, I stopped near St. Louis and dropped off the first copy of this book to Loren. He was just thrilled. He started crying. He just couldn’t believe that we would locate where that aircraft went down; where his crew members are. I mean, they just can’t believe that somebody’s interested in them and that they’re heroes. “I’m no hero. I just did what I had to do.”
JM: We hear that from all of them.
MD: Yeah, I’ve asked them that. They won’t even begin to accept that title. It was unbelievable. Just came home and went back to their lives. I’m sure they were never the same human beings after that. They were skinny as hell. 80 pounds they were down to when they were freed. You know I learned a lot about history because as I read all these books, none of them hardly focus - really focus in on what really happened. You read about the Muenster raid. This plane was shot down and this plane, that plane. You never focus on what happened to everybody on one plane and their whole mission from beginning to end. There’s so much unwritten history, it’s unbelievable. That just shocked me. Then I heard Steven Ambrose say that the WWII history is just now beginning to be written. He just said that somewhere. I thought, my God, after all these books are written on WWII and he’s one of the best historians of WWII saying that the history of WWII is just now being written. Of course, this whole legacy thing is just helping historians have access to these documents for some decades to come. To really rewrite the history of WWII and what happened in all these detailed things and missions that these men went on. It has been portrayed in the big sense; like the Bremen raid is hardly mentioned. It was 641 aircraft and at least 10 of them were destroyed. A hundred men died. But that’s not a big raid. That’s not mentioned hardly at all in history. Obviously, there’s a lot that’s left unsaid and thank God that you’re recording these things today.
NM: What has been your experience here at the reunion?
MD: Well, I found for example the crew chief that worked on the LONESOME POLECAT aircraft. It went on 23 missions so it had a lot of history by December of 43. It was one of the early planes.
NM: What’s his name?
MD: Art Watson. Arthur Watson. He was there at Horham the whole time. He remembers the markings - what a lonesome polecat was - was from Lil Abner. The Indian with the feather on top. We have no pictures of the aircraft. As of now, we still haven’t located anything. He said the name was written on it and the Indian was on it. That’s really amazing. The LONESOME POLECAT II. This was the second one. The first one, I don’t know if it ever went on combat missions. I don’t know who named it. That was one of the flight crew. I found also John Story who flew this aircraft 7 or 8 times. He’s not here but I have his name and address now and I’m going to call him very shortly and talk to him about that aircraft. There are men that went on this mission; I’ve met 3 or 4 men here that went on this mission and they were on that same time period and knew all the details of life at Horham; the runway they took off on al kinds of stuff like that.
JM: How many planes went on this mission?
MD: There were a total of 631. There were many Groups. The 95 th had 40 planes in the air on this mission. Only one of them was shot down - it was the LONESOME POLECAT. I think 7 of them failed to return to Horham, but they landed at other bases. They were shot bad, hit bad, and landed - crash landed - at different bases in England or in Belgium - I’m not sure where they all landed. For every day of every mission there is a very comprehensive set of documentation. Maybe 200 pages on this one day in history of one Group. There must have been a dozen Groups on this mission like the 95 th , the 390 th , the 100 th , the 96 th , the 91 st and so on. They must have their own set of interrogation reports, attack reports, weather reports, bombing reports, navigation, on and on, you just can’t believe the records on one day. All that’s available. I hear that it is the original documents are at Maxwell AFB; the base library gives you access to these original documents. I’ve got to get over there and see if I can find them. That’s basically the story.
JM: What’s next for you?
MD: The only thing that really remains is trying to find where his remains might be buried. We searched Texel Island and we found 10 unknown graves but they’re all RAF graves. We think they’re RAF. The dates don’t match when his plane went down. There’s a sign there that says “All Americans were reinterred in Margratten American Military Cemetery in South Holland.”
In that cemetery there are about 3 or 4 thousand missing names on the wall. 106 unknown grave sites in Margratten in South Holland. There’s many buried there. There’s 7000 buried there.
Many 95th are buried there or on the wall of the missing. The co-pilot is on the wall of the missing in Margratten. We haven’t searched there yet. We have yet to be able to figure out how to find the records on unknown burials. There’s 24 unknowns in Cambridge. On the wall, my brother’s name – that’s another interesting thing to put in the record – there’s a website called “The American Battle Monument’s Commission Website” that has records of every American buried or on the wall of missing in every cemetery overseas. There's even a cemetery in NYC. You can log onto that website. You type in Eugene Darter’s name and up will pop his webpage. It has his name, from Long Beach, CA, his serial number 95th 412th Squadron and then where he was MIA on December 16, 1943. Every person on those walls and in those gravesites overseas - it’s a huge data base from WWII, Korea, Viet Nam every war we’ve ever fought is there. It’s a fantastic website. It’s called www.abmc.gove or .com. I think it’s .gov. You just log onto that and enter the name. You go to the WWII new data base so an so and you find everyone of these guys names. Some women that are buried overseas on that website. It’s amazing to see it. They take care - there’s a whole branch of the government that takes care of all these cemeteries overseas. Somebody pointed this out to me right in the very beginning I found his website. I about flipped over; the first day I sent out that e-mail this lady said, well try this website. Maybe you can find out more about him. His name came up and there it was. That’s when I found out it was the 95th , 412th Squadron. That’s a very valuable website. We’re searching. We know that I’m almost certain that he could have inflated his life vest after he hit the water. He would have undone his parachute, with one hand I think he could have unsnapped it.. All he had to do was jerk one of the cords and it would have inflated his Mae West. He would have floated. His body would have carried, who knows the whole Wadden Sea area. There’s no current but he probably washed ashore somewhere and was buried and then perhaps reinterred in Margratten or Cambridge or, who knows, maybe fishermen picked him up in the water. Saw his body floating and picked him up and his dog tags must have been ripped off, who knows. His body may have been out there a long time. You just don’t know. He lost his dog tag and so he’s probably one of those unknowns. There’s 106. There’s an unknown or two on each of the islands from the chain of islands, the Frisian Islands. Unknown nationality. Unknown name. There’s one or two - the site will have all the cemetery records from there. The Dutch Red Cross, I contacted them. They promised to do an investigation. Who knows? With enough pressure now that this is done, the book is done, we will start putting pressure on them. The Dutch founded what’s called North Holland Foundation for Aircraft Recovery. They bring up a lot of aircraft and they find crew in some of them. They help repatriate; find the relatives. These guys are helping now. They think we’ll find somewhere - we’ll find him. It’s worth searching at least to the point where we find some potential sites. Whether we can go beyond that I don’t know. That will require a lot of political pressure to ever have a gravesite exhumed, DNA testing and that kind of thing. But, who knows, this thing goes on all the time. The Navy has whole teams of people that do this. We’ll see where it leads us. It’s been an exciting adventure for a year and a half. Beyond my wildest imagination.
JM: Do you have other siblings?
MD: No, I was the only other one. He had a sister from his mother. She died many years ago. I’m the only one. I have children now and they’re interested. They’ve been over to Horham- one of them with me. They’ve met these crew members. They’re excited about it. We’ll see where it takes us. Maybe we’ll find him; maybe we won’t. It doesn’t really matter. I mean, at least we found out that he is no longer totally missing. A little more of what happened to him.
JM: Thank you so much for sharing this story.
MD: OK, you’re welcome.
JM: I hope that your experience with these reunions is fulfilling and offers some possible leads.
MD: Oh, yes, very definitely. These guys know a lot about the whole situation. Just very helpful to meet these people. It’s amazing to me, as a matter of fact.
Editor’s Note: Michael has since written a book, Gone With the Wind, He Said, chronicling the search for his brother.