Reflections

(Our father pondered the fate of the men lost on May 17, 1943 though at this time he had no real idea of the full extent of the loss. He digressed in his own thoughts at this point and thought of the tragedy of his friends, the Mathis' brothers, separately described in this Blog at "Interlude" http://warandtime.blogspot.com/2009/03/interlude.html

Jack Mathis was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for the events our father thought back upon that day at Gulag Luft, when he first started to learn of the details of May 17, 1943 Ijuidmen Misson. He is pictured in the back row at the far right of this picture. Here are our father's reflections in his own words.)

One day one of our bombardiers in my squadron, Rudd "Mathis", called his brother who was a bombardier on a B-17 in England. His air base was very close to ours. His brother, Jack, said, "Come over tomorrow afternoon and I'll see you then". Well, that probably meant he was going out on a mission that day.

So Rudd went over there that afternoon and it was protocol for any B-17 (or any airplane) coming in for a landing, that first priority went to crippled airplanes that were ready to crash, and they would fire a red flare out of the airplane and then they would come to the head of the formation to land.

Planes with wounded men aboard also sent out red flares to tell the crew on the ground that they needed second priority. Well anyway, a flare went out from the plane that Rudd "Mathis'" brother Jack was flying on. It landed and Rudd went out to the airplane and helped carry his dead brother off the airplane.

What had happened was they were making their bomb run and he was in the lead airplane. It was characteristic that the lead airplane was the one that used the bombsite to locate the target and the drop point and then when all the airplanes behind him saw the bombs falling, they would drop their bombs. Well, shortly before they hit the drop point, the bombardier, Jack Mathis, was hit with a burst of flack and he was grievously wounded. Nevertheless, he stuck with his bomb site and dropped the bombs on the target and died. For this, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Well, Rudd was all upset about this, obviously, and he requested of our Commanding Officer that he be transferred into that B-17 group. They accommodated him. And several days later, he went out with that group and the B-17 he was flying on radioed "May Day" as it was returning over the English Channel. May Day means, we're in trouble, we're going down. That was the last that was ever heard of Rudd "Mathis" and the airplane. Evidently, it crashed into the North Sea and no debris was found, which meant it probably just kept on going to the bottom of the sea. Both brothers were dead.