Oral history interview of Frank DeSales Murphy

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Frank DeSales Murphy
Creator:: Roseman, Malcolm
Murphy, Frank DeSales, 1921-2007
Date of Original:: 2003-07-10
Subject:: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Flight navigators--United States
B-17 bomber
Submarines (Ships)—Germany
Browning Automatic Rifle
Messerschmitt Bf 109 (Fighter plane)
Prisoners of war--United States
Prisoner of war escapes--Germany
Prisoners of war--Germany
Cruikshank, Charles B., 1917-2010
Maertz, Charles
Gasper, August H., 1917-2007
Graham, Glen
LeMay, Curtis E.
Lay, Beirne, Jr., 1909-1982
Eaker, Ira Clarence, 1896-1987
Harding, Neil Bosworth, 1905-1978
Bixler, Robert L., 1924-2009
Goodrich, C. G.
Emory University
Marist College (Atlanta, Ga.)
United States. Air Force. Air Force, 2nd
United States. Air Force. Air Force, 8th
Boeing Aerospace Company
United States. Army Air Forces. Air Transport Command
American Red Cross
United States. Army. Armored Division, 14th
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation
Stalag Luft III
Stalag VI-A Hemer
Location:: Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, Goose Bay, 53.333333, -60.416667
Canada, Ontario, Ottawa, 45.421106, -75.690308
Denmark, Bornholm, 55.14320545, 14.9225721494518
Denmark, Copenhagen, 55.6867243, 12.5700724
France, Brest, 48.3905283, -4.4860088
France, Saint-Nazaire, 47.2733517, -2.2138905
Germany, Bremen, 53.0758196, 8.8071646
Germany, Frankfurt am Main, 50.110922, 8.682127
Germany, Regensburg, 49.0195333, 12.0974869
Germany, Regierungsbezirk, Mu¨nster, 51.9665572, 7.6542081
Germany, Schweinfurt, 50.0499945, 10.233302
Iceland, Reykjavík, 64.145981, -21.9422367
Morocco, Casablanca, 33.5950627, -7.6187768
Morocco, Marrakech, 31.6258257, -7.9891608
Norway, Trondheim Fjord
United Kingdom, England, Lands End, 50.0662633, -5.7148222
United Kingdom, England, Southampton, 50.9025349, -1.404189
United Kingdom, Scotland, South Ayrshire, Prestwick, 55.48333, -4.61667
United Kingdom, United Kingdom, England, Bedford, Podington, 52.24968425, -0.618203906410393
United States, Alabama, Montgomery County, Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, 32.38266, -86.35502
United States, Florida, Highlands County, Sebring, 27.49559, -81.44091
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Dougherty County, Albany, Turner Army Airfield
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Fort McPherson, 33.70733, -84.43354
United States, Idaho, Gowen Field, 43.557875, -116.22517983792
United States, Iowa, Sioux City, 42.4966815, -96.4058782
United States, Maine, Penobscot County, Bangor, 44.80118, -68.77781
United States, Massachusetts, Suffolk County, Boston, 42.35843, -71.05977
United States, Michigan, Macomb County, Harrison, Selfridge Air National Guard Base, 42.60833, -82.8355
United States, Nebraska, Kearney Army Air Base
United States, Utah, Tooele County, Wendover Field (historical), 40.718, -114.03222
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
vhs
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Frank Murphy gives a detailed account of his experiences as an Army Air Corps navigator in Europe during World War II. He describes his training, living in a tent city, learning Morse code and other preparations for war. Additional training included air-to-air gunnery and submarine patrol. He reports that travel to England was by the northern route or the southern, which depended on the weather. He describes life in the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress, including Tokyo tanks, formation flying, flak, and mechanical problems encountered. He tells of hearing lectures from experienced pilots, the dark humor of the parachute riggers and explains a maximum effort mission. He and his crew flew bombing raids over railroad yards, aircraft factories, ball bearing factories and submarine pens. He describes the downing of his plane, his capture, and life in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He recalls his prisoner of war time, including interrogation, escape attempts, lack of food and hygiene, the forced winter march at the end of the war, and liberation by the U.S. Army. He describes his recuperation at Camp Lucky Strike, his return to the United States in a hospital ship, his arrival back at Fort McPherson and reunion with his parents. After the war, he finished his education, passed the bar and worked for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
Frank Murphy was in the U.S. Army Air Corps in Europe during World War II.
MAL ROSEMAN: Today is July 10, 2003, and I have the honor of interviewing Frank Murphy. Frank, can you tell me where you were born and when you were born and a little bit about your family life early on. FRANK MURPHY: All right. Yes, my name is Frank Murphy. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia on September 9th, 1921 at St. Joseph's Infirmary, which was at the corner of Courtland Street, and I think Harris Street. I was the second of three boys born to my mother and father. I had an older brother, Michael, who was 16 months older than me, and I had a younger brother, John, who was five years younger than me. I was born and we lived in the Grant Park area of Atlanta, and I lived there for the first five or six years of my life. In fact, I started to school at Hill Street School in kindergarten about 1926 or '27. My dad was a tailor; he worked for his father who owned a tailoring shop down on Decatur Street just off Five Points in Atlanta. My dad had been born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1896, and he came with his family to Atlanta in 1906. My mother was born in Atlanta in 1899 over – not too far from where we lived when I was born. She was born on Georgia Avenue in Atlanta. And she grew up in Atlanta, and she went to Commercial High School. My dad had an interrupted high school career, I would say. He left school at about the tenth grade to work with his father in his tailoring shop downtown and then he went back to school about 1915, I guess, and graduated in 1917, so he was 21 years old when he graduated from Tech High School in Atlanta. My mom and dad met over in Grant Park and they were married in August of 1919. My older brother, Mike, was born in 1920, and I was born in 1921. We moved over to Morningside about 1927 and we spent many years living over in that area. In fact, we essentially grew up in Morningside in Atlanta, although during the Depression, about 1929, my dad had a hard time. My grandfather closed his store, not because business—well, it was because of business I suppose, because what happened in those days is that men usually went to tailoring shops to buy their clothes until the 1920s, but then all of the sudden the ready-made suits were generally available and they could just go in and buy a suit off the rack, and that pretty much spelled the end of tailoring shops. So, when that happened during the Depression, which was a very difficult time for most people in those days, my dad did get a job in Cleveland, Ohio, and we moved up there for about 18 months. And while we were up there in 1929, 1930 I went to St. Rose's Catholic School because we were a Catholic family. When we came back to Georgia in 1931 I entered Sacred Heart School, downtown in Atlanta. I finished there and then I entered Marist College, which was—they called it a college, now it's a high school, but in those days many high schools were called colleges. And I went six years to Marist and graduated from there in 1939. In the fall of 1939 I entered Emory University, and I was in Emory from that time until the war started in 1941. And when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor I immediately thought about going into the Army and a lot of people did and a lot of people did not. Some people wanted to wait and see, and others like myself said “Let's go in.” MAL ROSEMAN: Let me interrupt you for a second. FRANK MURPHY: Yes. MAL ROSEMAN: You were in your third year at school at this point? FRANK MURPHY: I was in my third year at Emory. MAL ROSEMAN: And you put a hold on that. FRANK MURPHY: And I put a hold on that and I went down to the—what had happened is while I was at Emory I had a friend who talked me into going out to Candler Field in Atlanta and taking flying lessons. And I did that. And I played in the Emory University dance band while I was in college, and so I was—I played almost every weekend, and so I had enough money— MAL ROSEMAN: What had you played? FRANK MURPHY: I played saxophone and clarinet. MAL ROSEMAN: Okay. FRANK MURPHY: I had taken clarinet lessons when I was at Marist and was a clarinet player and it happened I was lucky enough to get into the Emory University dance band and we had quite a good band actually. And we played for most of the high school and sorority dances around Atlanta. They had college fraternity dances too at Emory and Georgia Tech. So, I had spending money that I earned playing in the band, and as I said, my friend talked me into going out to Candler Field and taking flying lessons, which I did. And I remember my instructor, Johnny [Lowens?]. We were flying in the little Pied Piper Cub and with it—it had a J60 engine as I recall. And I took enough lessons to solo and then I would go out when I had time and I would rent an airplane and I would fly—go flying. And so, I didn't get a lot of time. I think I had overall, before I went into the Army, maybe 30 hours, but I really loved flying, and when the war came along I thought, well, the place I'd like to go would be in the Army Air Corps. So I went down to the Army recruiting office—it was in December of 1941—and made an application to go into their aviation cadet program, with the idea that like everybody else that was going in in those days, I would be an Army pilot. I would say that until the war really got underway most everybody who went in the Air Force wanted to be a pilot first and a fighter pilot second because we'd seen the Battle of Britain and it was very dramatic and the Royal Air Force had done a wonderful job, and so fighter pilots were a very glamorous lot to us in those days. So I made the application for the aviation cadet program and I passed the physical, which was more of a perfunctory physical than it was a strenuous physical, and they accepted me and said they would call me. And in January, it wasn't long, just two or three weeks later in January, they did call me and I reported to the Army All Recruiting Office in Atlanta. It was at the old post office in downtown Atlanta, and I was sworn in as an Aviation Cadet and immediately sent to Maxwell Field, Alabama, which was a receiving station for new Aviation Cadets. And we rode the train all that night. There was about six or seven of us. We were all in civilian clothes and, somewhat unlike today, every one of us had on a suit and a tie. People dressed a little bit more formally back then, and we all—all of us, who had never met each other until we were sworn in together at the old post office—we went over to Herron's Restaurant on Luckie Street next to the old Rialto Theatre and we had dinner, and then we walked down to the Terminal Station, the old Terminal Station in Atlanta and we got on the train and we went down to Maxwell Field, Alabama. When we got there it was a mob scene. There were thousands of people from all over everywhere. Mostly the East Coast, of course, got there that night and they were in the same boat we were. They were just inducted. They were all coming to be involved in the Aviation Cadet program, and so we were assigned to a group of maybe 150 or 160 people that they called—I think they called it the squadron. When you're in the Air Force I think it's “company.” And they took us to our barracks, they issued all new clothing, they shaved our heads, which was standard. I think that's still standard for the military. We would work pretty hard. It was mostly drill and we didn't have a whole lot to do, but they had some educational programs that, you know, particulars for the Air Force, like we had to study Morse Code. I remember that, which was mind boggling listening to all the dots and dashes and trying to figure out what the message was. I enjoyed it except everywhere we went it was so crowded, there were so many people, and I'd only been there a couple weeks when they moved us into a tent city. There were about – just a field covered with tents, and they put, I think, maybe eight or ten of us in each tent, and the tent had a wooden floor that they had put down, and they had a walkway between. Because it seemed like in Montgomery, Alabama, in January of 1942 – February – all it did was rain everywhere. It was a quagmire everywhere you went. And we had to get used to a lot of togetherness and an absolute lack of privacy. When you took a shower you took a shower with 50 other guys and if you went to the bathroom, you know. So that was the way it was, but, you know, one gets used to that. But part of the program there at Maxwell was to get us ready to go to primary training with whatever we did. And in those days the Army Air Corps was essentially set up to train pilots because the other air crew positions that would become so important and so prominent very early on in the war had really not been given much attention pre-war. MAL ROSEMAN: You're talking about training? FRANK MURPHY: I'm talking – before the war most of the training for flying was to train pilots and in the mid to late ‘30s the pilots performed all of the essential functions even on a bomber. The pilots were trained as pilots and they were secondarily trained as bombardiers and navigators. There was no full-time job as a navigator or a bombardier in the Air Force in the late 1930s. But by 1940 they [reorganized] the U.S. Air Force as a result of what they learned from watching and coordinating with the British Royal Air Force. They realized that if you were going to fly a long-range mission with a large bomber it was absolutely impractical to expect the pilot to do it all. You had to have a crew and you had to have people trained in the different specialties. A pilot couldn't fly the airplane, do the navigating, drop the bombs, and fire the guns by himself or even with a couple of other pilots. So just before the war the U.S. Air Corps developed training schools to train specialties. The result was, while they had plenty of facilities for training pilots and while they had plenty of pilots, there was a severe lack of people trained in the other disciplines and particularly the navigators and bombardiers. So what they did is as they would send people off to the flying schools to be trained as pilots. They would watch for those who were what they called “washed out,” who were dropped out of pilot training for one reason or another. Usually it had something to do with physical coordination because, of course, before you could go into the Air Force you had to meet certain basic health and physical requirements. You had to be in good health. So most of the guys that were eliminated from pilot training were dropped because of some motor coordination problem, but there they were, and of course the Air Force had to make a decision. Would they send them back to be relieved from the Air Force, maybe go in the Army, or would they use them as a pool for navigators and bombardiers? And that's essentially what they did. Well, I had a series of physical examinations at Maxwell Field, which they gave to all of us, and I had an eye problem with depth perception. Now my eyes were good, I wasn't color blind, I had 20/20 vision, but I had problems with depth perception, and they kept putting me aside for a couple of weeks. And finally one day the tactical officer of my squadron called me in and he said, “It's up to you and you're going to eventually make the decision for yourself, but we're putting together a group of cadets . . .” —we were all Aviation Cadets— “. . . to send to Turner Field, Albany, Georgia to navigation school, and we're in desperate need of navigators.” He says, “Now, everybody wants to be a pilot but it's just as important to us that we have navigators. Navigators are just as important as pilots. You get the same commission, you get the same pay, you get the same rank and we'd like to have you go. Your tests show that you can handle the type of work that navigators do.” So I thought it over for overnight and then I told him yes, I would go. So they moved me out of the group that I was in, which was a group of cadets getting ready to go to primary pilot training. They sent me over to another group of boys who had washed out of pilot training but who were going to navigation school at Turner Field in Albany, Georgia. So that's what happened to me. And that was in March of 1942, and they sent me to the navigation school at Turner Field, Georgia. The course was 16, 18 weeks. I don't remember exactly, but in any case I went through that and I finished it up, and I finished and graduated from that school on July 4th, 1942, and I was commissioned to 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Corps and rated as a navigator and immediately assigned to the Army Air Force's combat crew school at Sebring, Florida, which was a B17 training school. So after a couple of weeks or a week or so of leave, which they gave all of us, I reported to Florida, Sebring, and I entered the combat crew school, and I was there—it wasn't very long of course. It was only five or six weeks, but the idea was to introduce us to how air crews were to work together on the B17 bomber. MAL ROSEMAN: How many were in a crew on a B17? FRANK MURPHY: B17 crew at that time was 10 people. There was a pilot, co-pilot, navigator, a bombardier, a flight engineer, a radio operator, and four gunners. They had a ball turret gunner, two waist gunners and a tail gunner and that was the case for all crews for the Second World War. I believe, however, that towards the end of the war they may have dropped it to nine instead of ten, and they had one gunner operate the two waist guns in the airplane, but at that time, when I went to Florida, it was a ten man crew. But we didn't operate as a full ten man crew because we were essentially working to develop our air crew skills from a flying, navigation, and bombing standpoint. So it was essentially training for the four officers on the crew. And what they did was assign you to a crew where you had two pilots, bombardier, and navigator, and you were just that crew. You lived together, you did everything, you were with the same people all the time, and you were to learn to work as a team and get to know one another and do all the things that you have to do to be an effective team. And so I was there, and that's pretty much what we did. There wasn't a whole lot of navigation for me to do the first couple of weeks and I thought I was wasting my time actually, because they were mostly having the pilots, who were fairly new to the B17, work with an instructor pilot doing mostly take offs and landings. But then we had – in those days we had a very severe problem with German submarines. The U.S. Navy was virtually, I wouldn't say destroyed, but it was very badly damaged at Pearl Harbor. And there was an incredible submarine menace off the Atlantic Coast, I think, they said in the first several months of the war. I saw it just the other day. It was an unbelievable amount of tonnage of American shipping that was sunk by German submarines who were working right off of our coast. So they sent us out, as part of our training, on submarine patrol, and that was mostly what we did the last two or three weeks I was there. We would get up at three or four o'clock in the morning and our bomb bays would be loaded with depth charges and we had a search pattern out over the Atlantic or the Gulf, and we'd go out and we had to be on station before daylight because the German submarines generally stayed surfaced and stayed up all night on the surface to charge their batteries. And then they would submerge and they stayed submerged all day. I never saw any submarines, but we did have one airplane from Sebring, while I was there, that did see a German submarine and they did drop the depth charges and indications were that they'd actually sunk it. They saw some debris and some oil slicks on the surface that was indication that they had hit it. After Sebring I was assigned to the Second Air Force in Salt Lake City and we drove out there. The crews that I worked with in Sebring, we all went together to Salt Lake City, but we would not stay together as a crew. Our training had been completed in Sebring. MAL ROSEMAN: How did you get out there? FRANK MURPHY: We drove. One of the guys had a car and the four officers on the crew all drove to Salt Lake City. And we reported to the Second Air Force. MAL ROSEMAN: Did you expect to be separated afterwards or – FRANK MURPHY: We expected to be separated. MAL ROSEMAN: So you knew that was going to happen? FRANK MURPHY: We knew that was going to happen. Yeah, we knew it was going to happen. When we got out there they sent me to Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho, and up there, of course, I went through some more training with different pilots and different crews while they got organized. But then in November of 1942 I was assigned to a newly established bomb group, the 100th Bomb Group that was just being formed, and when the crew postings were made I was the navigator on crew number 31 of the 418th Squadron. And I remember going to the operations room to meet the other officers on the crew. None of us had laid eyes on one another before, and I met them. The pilot was a boy named Charlie Cruikshank from Everett, Massachusetts. Our co-pilot at that time was a guy named Chuck Mercks [phonetic]—Charles Mercks from Omaha. And the bombardier was August Gaspar—Augie Gaspar from Oakland, California, and of course I was the navigator. And that was the crew that I stayed with for the next year practically, before we were shot down over Germany almost a year later. Except that Mercks, the co-pilot, after several months with us was pulled out and sent back to be trained to be a first pilot and have his own crew. And when that happened we got a guy from Freedom, Pennsylvania, named Glen Graham. And Glen was about 26 years old, so he was the old man on the crew. The rest of us were any where from 19 to 23, and so when he came in he—we called him the old man even though he was 26. But he had joined the Army Air Corps about three years before the war and had been an enlisted man serving in Panama and Puerto Rico and some of those places as a radio operator, and when the war came along and they relaxed the rules for pilots – when the war started, to be eligible for pilot training in the Air Force you had to have two years of college and meet all the requirements. Well, they dropped that rule. You did have to be a high school graduate. But he immediately applied for pilot training and they accepted him and he was trained as a pilot and he came as co-pilot on our crew, and this was early part of 1943. We trained at Wendover, Utah – MAL ROSEMAN: Wait, how long were you in Boise? FRANK MURPHY: I was in Boise until about the first of December. MAL ROSEMAN: So what is that about? FRANK MURPHY: 1942. MAL ROSEMAN: No, how many months would you say that was? FRANK MURPHY: I would say that was three months. MAL ROSEMAN: Okay. FRANK MURPHY: Three months from September – MAL ROSEMAN: So there you trained as the new crew? FRANK MURPHY: I trained with different people as kind of a pickup – not pickup – but you know, random, which we did. But then when I was assigned to a bomb crew and to an actual crew as a unit then I trained only with the crew that I was assigned to, which was the Cruikshank crew, crew number 31. We did all of our training from then on as a single crew, and that was November. And then in December we went to Wendover, Utah—the entire crew and we trained. . . MAL ROSEMAN: How large of a group would that be? FRANK MURPHY: The – an Air Force bomb group in those days would be 17 crew at four squadrons. Each squadron had nine airplanes and nine crew so you actually had 36 crews in a bomb crew. So that was it. MAL ROSEMAN: And in that group there would have been mechanics, there would have been people for the upkeep of the – FRANK MURPHY: Oh, of course, yeah. [OVERLAPPING CONVERSATION] FRANK MURPHY: Yeah. So you would see them in a bomb group in those days and the people who actually were on the air crews, who actually flew the missions, ten men per airplane or per crew you had 360 airmen as such, but then you had several times that many on the ground in support, who took care of the airplanes, who did all the functions. MAL ROSEMAN: And they would travel as an entire squad group? FRANK MURPHY: Oh, absolutely. All of the people in the squadron, like the 418th squadron I was in, we would have nine airplanes so we would have 90 airmen, but we'd have four or five hundred [support personnel], air craft mechanics with different skills, you know, people who were engine mechanics, air frame mechanics, electronics so that we – and of course we had a squadron commander who was in charge of everybody, who was in charge of the airmen but he was also in charge of all of the – MAL ROSEMAN: What would that commander's rank be? FRANK MURPHY: He was a major. MAL ROSEMAN: A major. FRANK MURPHY: He was a major. So we had four squadrons so we had approximately 2,000 men in the program. They were permanently assigned. Every person in there was permanently assigned to the group and everywhere we went we went as a group, both the air crews and the ground support people all went together. And that was the way it operated. We were in Wendover in December. We moved to Sioux City, Iowa in January and we moved to Cassville, Wyoming in February. MAL ROSEMAN: You really got a chance to see the country. FRANK MURPHY: We did get a chance to see the country. We also got a chance to freeze to death because it was so cold, particularly in – it's cold enough in Wendover, because Wendover Air Base was right on the state line – the border between Utah and Nevada, and it was out in the middle of nowhere. It was absolute desert. There was nothing of any kind for miles around, which made it a wonderful place to train bombing crews because we could practice bombs everywhere and without any danger of hitting anything or hurting anybody. But Sioux City was also unbelievably cold. We had temperatures there once or twice in January that were 20, 30 below zero, and it was so cold we couldn't fly because even putting heaters on the engines we couldn't get the oil – MAL ROSEMAN: Coagulated. FRANK MURPHY: Coagulated. It couldn't circulate in the engine. So it was very cold. And of course, it was cold in Wyoming, too. We were not that – you know, in February. So we had plenty of cold weather. MAL ROSEMAN: The purpose of these different places – it was obviously more training. Why did they keep moving you, though? Was there a purpose in this? FRANK MURPHY: If there was a basic plan for moving us from one base to another I really couldn't say that I know exactly what it is, except at Wendover. At Wendover we had good practice – good bombing ranges – practice bombing ranges where we could fly and it was – you know, it was like a regular target with a bull's-eye and concentric circles around it, and we used practice bombs that had – it was about a hundred pound bomb and it had something, whatever it was in there, to create a little puff of smoke when it hit the ground so that when the bombardier practiced we could tell whether or not he had hit what he aimed at. And we also had gunnery ranges there that were particularly good for navigators and bombardiers, because while our air gunners on our air crews were given very specific training using the Browning 50 caliber machine gun that we had, which was standard equipment on a B17, the navigators and bombardiers who fired—who also fired guns—were not given gunnery training at a gunnery school. We had to pick up this – you know, pick up what we could about learning about gunnery after we had been assigned to the [crew]. But they had round targets that we could shoot at using the 50 caliber guns, and once the points – we had air to air gunnery where, with a pulled sleeve, where airplanes would pull a sleeve, which is kind of like the signs they pull when they go over Atlanta and we would have a chance to fire at the sleeve and get some little bit of air to air gunnery. MAL ROSEMAN: Was Wyoming your last stop before overseas? FRANK MURPHY: Wyoming was essentially our last stop because we went to – we went back to Wendover for about three weeks in April of 1943, but there we were just – we were just there while awaiting disposition. Waiting orders to see what would happen to us. We had no earthly idea where we would go, whether we would go out to the Pacific or whether we would go to Europe. And finally in early May they told us that we were going to Europe. We were going to England to join the Eighth Air Force. And they then sent the whole crew to Kearney, Nebraska, where they had new airplanes. They assigned each crew its own airplane and they gave us all of our equipment that we were to take, flying suits and even mosquito netting and things that we never would need in England, but they loaded us down with those sorts of things. And then the last week in May of 1943 we flew – we started our flight to England and we flew our own airplanes. We flew from Kearney, Nebraska, to Selfridge Field, New Port, Michigan, and because weather was bad across the northern U.S. that day, we flew from Selfridge Field across southern Canada to Bangor, Maine, and that was the first time I had ever been outside of the United States. And I couldn't see a whole lot because we were in bad weather. But we did, we flew over Ottawa and – I don't remember the exact route, but we ended up in Bangor, Maine. We spent the night in Bangor, Maine, and then we took off for England, and they told us we were going to fly over, what they call the northern route, which meant that we would fly from Bangor to Goose Bay, Labrador and from Goose Bay, Labrador to Reykjavik, Iceland and from Reykjavik down to Prestwick, Scotland. MAL ROSEMAN: So the range those bombers had obviously could not have made the Atlantic crossing in one – at one time. It had to do kind of an island stopping. FRANK MURPHY: It would have been a stretch to do it at one time. Even though our airplanes had out-of-wing tanks called Tokyo Tanks, which gave some extra fuel over what was normally built in at the factory by the Boeing Company who built the airplane. But because they knew we had to have an extended range, they designed some extra tanks to go into the wing tips, outer wings – I've forgotten the amount of fuel they carried, but they did add to our range and as I said they were called Tokyo Tanks. But it would have been a stretch to try to make it non-stop. Now, they did, on the southern route, go to Newfoundland and from Newfoundland they flew non-stop to England. But flying the northern route, we took it in legs. We really didn't have any problem fuel-wise with the airplane. But it had – the routing that you took depended on weather forecast and really didn't make any difference. We were prepared to go either way but because of weather they sent us the northern route. So we did – we flew up to Goose Bay, we refueled, we spent the night. We flew to Reykjavik, Iceland, and we spent two or three days there because the weather there was good, but the weather in Scotland was not good, so they held us up. And about all I can remember about Iceland was – it was early June or late May and it was daylight until one o'clock in the morning. We had to pull the shades down to go to sleep at midnight while we were in Iceland. But we did, after several days, fly on down to Prestwick, and as soon as we got to Prestwick they told us that we would only have time to refuel, that we were going on to an RAF base. And they refueled us and sent us on to the RAF base at Pottington, which is in the central England. And we were there maybe a week, because the field that we would eventually go to, which was at Thorpe Babbotts in East Anglia in Suffolk was not ready. It was in the final stages of construction and completion. So we had to spend a few days at Pottington until we could get into our permanent air base. And we did, and I think it was on June 9, 1943 that the whole group flew from Pottington to Thorpe Babbotts, which was Station 139, which was in Suffolk near a little town called Diss [phonetic]. Thorpe Babbotts was a crossroads but most of East Anglia in England in those days was farm land, partially populated, but that's where they put all the air fields. We got there and settled down and we began then to get lectures from guys from the other groups who had been there before. They came and talked to us and we didn't practice any gunnery because we didn't have a gunnery range, but we the pilots primarily practiced formation flying because the key to success for American bombing in those days was to fly very tight formation of the three squadrons. That was the plan that they had finally worked out after almost a year of operations in England so that we had a very, very developed formation of three squadrons that were more or less like the fingers and staggered. So you'd have a lead squadron, you'd have a high squadron above them; you'd have a low squadron under. And the idea was to fly as tight a formation as you could so that when we released our bombs, and bombs were to be released together, you would get a good, tight, concentrated bomb pattern on the target that you were aiming for. That was one reason. The other reason was the formation had been devised and set up so that we had good defensive fire power. Everything was staggered so that no matter what direction we had an attack by German fighters from we could bring a good number of machine guns from all our airplanes to bear on that attacking airplane. So the formations that we flew, you know, were very important to our bombing success and to our ability to defend ourselves. So we practiced that – those formations, which was mostly pilots doing that, because the rest of us were just along for the ride until we actually went on a real, live mission. MAL ROSEMAN: How did you feel at this point? I mean, you've been in the Army Air Force for a year and a half, been trained. You have to be anxious to want to go and get – this is the first time that – FRANK MURPHY: It was a feeling, I was excited and then I was apprehensive because we were aware that other groups had taken – had been involved in some very heavy fighting, and while we were anxious to go I would say that it was – I had some misgiving, and mainly I was concerned about whether or not I would perform well. I think most of us were more concerned about how well we would perform than we were about the dangers that we were going into. And I think that's true. But you see we were young. It makes a big difference. I was 20 years old. MAL ROSEMAN: You were 20 at that point. FRANK MURPHY: Right. MAL ROSEMAN: So you went in – FRANK MURPHY: No, at that point I was 21. MAL ROSEMAN: So I have to ask you this question. Obviously you always wore a parachute. FRANK MURPHY: Always wore a parachute. MAL ROSEMAN: Had you ever jumped out of a plane prior to – FRANK MURPHY: No. MAL ROSEMAN: -- combat. So there was not training with that? FRANK MURPHY: There was no training for parachute jumping. They just gave you a parachute and the parachute riggers all had to stand – an expression – the joke that they would say when we climbed in the airplane to go, they'd hand you the parachute and they'd say “Well, if it doesn't work bring this back and we'll give you another one.” That was the standard comment, crack, or remark they would make. But we had no training at all. We weren't even told what we were supposed to do, just to open it up, although it was obvious. You know, you have a pack and you had a little, what they called a D-ring, which was a metal handle that you pulled, and of course that opened up the parachute pack. And it had a little pilot shoot that could come out. MAL ROSEMAN: How long was it before your first mission? FRANK MURPHY: I flew my first mission on July the 28th of 1943. We had been in England maybe close to four weeks. We had gone through our practice flights and – the crew had flown one mission before I flew my first mission because the practice was, in those days, to have – to send out three squadrons on one mission and hold one squadron back and they would be standing down and then they would rotate. So you only flew – you stood down every fourth mission, your squadron did. And so, on the first mission the 100th Bomb Group flew, which was on the 25th of June to Bremen. The 418th squadron that I was in did not fly. We were standing down. But the reality of what we were getting into came home to us after that first mission because we had three airplanes that didn't come back. And we didn't know it, but all but one man on those three crews perished, died. So the 29 men that we had trained with were gone on their first mission. All we knew was that they didn't come back. Later on we knew that they were all killed. But that was, I wouldn't say a wake up call, but it did bring home to us that it could be a very dangerous undertaking. But my first mission came on the 28th of June. We were going down and bomb in an aircraft engine overhaul plant in France at Le Mans where the big races take place, and we got up and we got in formation and we – [END SIDE TAPE 1 – SIDE A] [BEGINNING TAPE 1 – SIDE B] FRANK MURPHY: -- assembled with the other groups and we went out in the bomber stream. We went over to France. We could see as soon as we got into northern France that the weather was very bad and the target we were after was obscured and we would not be able to bomb. So the wing leader, which was of three groups not just one decided that we would go back to England. We wouldn't even attempt to bomb, so we turned around and went home. But I do remember the feeling I had the first time we flew over France because although we didn't come under attack, it was really an uneventful day, it was strange to be flying over a country that we knew was entirely occupied by the Germans. If, for any reason we had to go down we were essentially in enemy territory. And I had what I describe as a little fluttery feeling that I had every time that we went out from then on. I always called it my “sitting duck syndrome” because – and it never went away, you know, when you're flying over there. It wasn't anything that would cause you to be unable to function but it was a feeling that you had that didn't go away, that danger of some kind was lurking out there somewhere. MAL ROSEMAN: What was the first mission where you were attacked? FRANK MURPHY: The first mission that we had was that really brought home what we were involved in was the very next day we were sent to bomb a German submarine pen at St. Nazaire in France, which was a very prominent target for both the Royal Air Force and the Eighth Air Force because it was the home base – it was the operating base for German submarines that were out prowling in the Atlantic and attacking Allied shipping, both American and British. These were huge docks that were totally covered by concrete bunkers, I guess you could say. All of the dock works were at water level, and above that they had six feet of concrete to protect the facilities against just what we were trying to do. And we were sent out and we were carrying our heaviest bombs, which were 2,000 pound bombs. That was the heaviest ordnance we had. And we went out and it was a beautiful day and we were attacking from the sea, because we did have the long-range airplanes with the Tokyo Tanks, so we didn't have to go over France, we could go out from England at land's end and then fly down around the rest of the Peninsula and then go into the Bay of Biscay and attack from the sea. So that's what we did. Our attack, our bomb run began out over the water. But the Germans, because it was a vital target, had it very heavily defended with anti-aircraft guns. And I remember that when we went in, the groups ahead of us, they went in before we did, and all of a sudden I saw this thick black cloud out there. And on a beautiful cloudless day, just to see a dark cloud up ahead of you that they were flying into. Well, of course, we began our bomb run and when it went into the target I saw that that black cloud was very heavy anti-aircraft fire. It was really anti-aircraft flak with the black smoke. And it was absolutely terrifying. I couldn't believe we were going to fly into it, but of course we did. We had to. But it was just everywhere bright red explosions and black smoke and a certain amount of noise and some buckling of the airplanes, and it was a terrifying experience. I was very frightened. MAL ROSEMAN: There were no aircraft, no fighters at that point that you had to deal with? FRANK MURPHY: No, there were no fighters. MAL ROSEMAN: So it was just the anti-aircraft? FRANK MURPHY: It was just the anti-aircraft. MAL ROSEMAN: But you were able to make your bombing run? FRANK MURPHY: We made the bombing run and we survived. But I will say this, that our airplane, as a result of this anti-aircraft fire, was very badly damaged. And although we made it back to England the airplane was out of service for a couple months while they made repairs. MAL ROSEMAN: So in those couple of months did they assign you to a different plane? FRANK MURPHY: Well, they had— MAL ROSEMAN: They had spares— FRANK MURPHY: Right. MAL ROSEMAN: [unintelligible] FRANK MURPHY: Right. MAL ROSEMAN: You went on how many bombing runs totally? FRANK MURPHY: I flew 21 missions. MAL ROSEMAN: And were there any other remarkable runs prior to you becoming a POW? FRANK MURPHY: Well, there were really several. The first one probably was in latter July of 1943 when we flew from England to Trondheim, Norway to attack some harbor installations and some other things up there that we didn't think—British and American intelligence wasn't quite sure what they were. But that was a very dramatic mission because I'd never seen Norway before and it was a very—it was one of the longest missions of the war for the Air Force. It's a long way from England to Trondheim, Norway and back, and it's all over water. So it was a bit of a navigation challenge. But we did— that was a dramatic mission. And we did have both anti-aircraft fire and fighter attacks on that mission. But we survived it. The other one, which was probably one of the more famous missions ever flown by the US Air Force and certainly by the 8th Air Force [in the] Second World War was a double strike, a shuttle mission. It was a double strike. At that time, we were in the Fourth Air Division – Fourth Air Wing, I'm sorry, Fourth Combat Wing that was headed up by Colonel Curtis LeMay who went on to become, of course, very, very, very famous. He was my wing commander. And then they had the First Bomb Wing, which was under the command of – who was the General? I can't remember his name. But anyway, the idea was that the Fourth Wing would take off first and we would fly all over across Germany and we would bomb an aircraft factory at Regensburg, Germany and we would turn and we would fly to North Africa and land there. After we started, the First Wing was to take off and follow us in and attack an important place where they were making ball bearings at Schweinfurt, Germany. But we ran into weather trouble, you know, right at the beginning. We were supposed to take off at about six o'clock in the morning and fly into Germany and attack our target and then turn for Africa. The First Bomb Wing would come in immediately behind us. They would bomb Schweinfurt, and then they would turn and go back to England. The idea was we would fight our way into Germany and make our bomb run, the First Wing would come after us, they would bomb their target and then they would fight their way out. In other words, the – that was the idea except that although we got off almost on time, the First Wing didn't. And we came under intense fighter attacks over Germany. We had continuous heavy attacks for almost an hour, which was unbelievable. I mean, to get fighter attacks for five or ten minutes was a lifetime, but to be under heavy attack for a full hour was an eternity. And we had, out of group, from our – we lost nine airplanes before we got to the target. And by the time we got to Africa only five. only five airplanes in our group got to Africa. MAL ROSEMAN: Out of? FRANK MURPHY: Out of 16 – actually 18 left our base but two turned back for mechanical problems. Sixteen actually went into Germany. MAL ROSEMAN: So you were one of the five obviously that – FRANK MURPHY: I was in one of the five. That day between the First Wing and the Fourth Wing the Eighth Air Force lost 60 bombers. We had 60 B17s go down. And out of our little group of 148 airplanes that went to Regensburg we lost, I think it was 24 airplanes. And we left something like 20 airplanes in the desert in Africa. The airplane that I flew in, we left it in Africa. It was so badly damaged that the engineering officers told us that it wasn't flyable. So of course that was quite a harrowing mission. MAL ROSEMAN: Do you remember what mission number that was for you? FRANK MURPHY: Number 11. MAL ROSEMAN: Number 11. FRANK MURPHY: Number 11. MAL ROSEMAN: How did you get back to – FRANK MURPHY: Well, the way we got back -- in my story I go into some detail, but the air transport command came and picked us up and took us to Marakesh where we spent a couple days there at the Lamonia [phonetic] Hotel. It was quite an experience for a bunch of young guys on an air crew. And then they took us back to England. We stopped at Casablanca and then they flew around Portugal and Spain and France and took us back to England. And we have several other missions. One was the very next mission after that. Colonel Benney Lay, who was one of the officers who had been sent to England to start the Air Force, and he wrote a book before war called “I Wanted Wings” and after the war he wrote a book “Twelve O'clock High,” which was made into a very famous motion picture. But he was flying with our group at the time. He was sent up from London to fly with us, and the next mission after Regensburg we went to bomb an installation across the channel in France at Watten, and Colonel Lay was assigned to fly with us. Well, he was just along as an observer. He was up in the nose of the airplane with Augie Gaspar [sp?], the bombardier, and myself. And when it came time to start engines they always fired a green flare. We maintained radio silence so they did everything by fire and flares. They fired the flares, nothing happened, and Colonel Lay was there and he kept saying “We're going to miss our rendezvous with our other group,” you know, “we've got to get moving.” And I remember Augie Gaspar, the bombardier, saying to him “Don't worry, you'll get there soon enough.” During the first week in October, General Aker, who was the Commander of the Eighth Air Force, was told that we were going to get a spell of very good weather over the continent of Europe during the second week of October. So he decided to make a series of maximum effort missions right in a row, one after another. A maximum effort mission was one that every airplane that could fly went. Everything that we could get into the air went. The first mission was on Friday, October 8, 1943, and the target was Bremen, Germany, and I flew that mission. We took off from our base and we were headed into Germany, but we had mechanical problems. The engine-driven generators on the airplane were acting up and we were losing electrical power so Charlie Cruikshank, the pilot, decided to go home, which we did. But it was a bad day. Those from our group who went in were involved in a dreadful fight and we had eight airplanes that did not come back to our air base. The next day, October 9, 1943, we were alerted very early and we were sent on a mission to Marienburg in Poland. This was the longest mission that the Eighth Air Force had flown. Marienburg was 200 miles east of Berlin, and at that time that was a very, very long mission. Now, we didn't fly over land; we flew over water. We went up over the North Sea, we crossed Denmark just north of Copenhagen, we turned into the Baltic and went south of and in to attack our target. We had very good bombing results, among the best of the war, according to General Aker. And I was privileged to be the lead navigator for the 100th Bomb Group on that mission flying with our Group Commander Colonel Harding. But as soon as we got back we were put on alert. We got back about six o'clock and we were put on alert to fly the next day, which meant that we all had to turn in and go to bed. Now, fortunately at Marienburg we didn't lose any airplanes, everybody got back. But we had airplanes that were beginning to show some wear and tear. The following day we were permitted to sleep until about eight o'clock, which was unusual for us, and then they got us up and we were sent to a briefing and told that we were going to fly that day to bomb the railroad junction at Munster, Germany. And so we took off. And we left the English coast about one o'clock in the afternoon and we were in full formation with the 13th Combat Wing. By that time, things had been slightly re-organized and we were then in a new Combat Wing, the 13th Combat Wing, which was really three groups. But the 13th Combat Wing was leading the Air Force into Munster that day. We crossed the German border about quarter till three and hit our IP and started our bomber. We had very heavy anti-aircraft fire because unknown to us the Germans had brought in several batteries of heavy railroad flack that were positioned almost directly underneath our flight path, and so we came under intense anti-aircraft fire. We didn't lose any airplanes but it was a frightening experience. But as soon as we reached the outskirts of the city the anti-aircraft fire stopped and we were hit by the largest force of fighters we had ever seen. Upwards of 200 German single and twin engine fighters had been warned and were waiting for us. And I remember looking out the window of my – as I was getting ready to fire my gun, one of the machine guns that I fired—and I counted over 70 German fighter aircraft climbing up to intercept us. But that was—and I hadn't even finished counting before they began to attack. So we had probably the heaviest fighter attacks I had ever seen. They came out in wave after wave firing, came in head on. It was—it was just a dreadful experience. We did manage to drop our bombs and we made a left turn, sweeping left turn to leave the city and to go and rendezvous with the other groups at what we called a rally point, which is where we re-assembled to fly back to England. We had just made our turn when two German M2-109 aircraft came in behind us and really worked us over with their 20mm cannon. I was firing the gun in the left cheek of our airplane when there was a big explosion behind me. And all of a sudden I was knocked to the floor and it felt like somebody hit me with a baseball bat and threw a bucket of hot water on me. And I knew that I had been hit by some kind of a shell – piece of a shell. And I was on the floor, and of course as the machine guns are fired the empty shell cases are ejected from the gun, so I was crawling around in a pile of shell casings. And at that I turned around to Gaspar, the bombardier, who looked down at me and I was trying to get up and he told me to stay down. And about that time Glenn Graham, the co-pilot, he came down—I saw him come down from the flight deck. He pulled the emergency handle, the forward escape door that we had up at the front part of this B17, and he motioned for me to follow him and he jumped out. And I remember being, among other things, you know, just frozen watching him fall and tumble over and over as he went down. But I knew that I had to go so I clipped on my chest pack. We had chest packs. And I went back to the door and I knew that—I'd seen so many people pull the parachute rip cord before they jumped out—I'd seen that. MAL ROSEMAN: [unintelligible] FRANK MURPHY: Well, they lost their lives. They got tangled up in the airplane. So I consciously avoided that. We were at about 21,000 feet. And at 21,000 feet on a clear day the ground looks a million miles away. But I shut my eyes and pushed myself out of the airplane. I had no choice. And then all of the sudden I was out and I was thinking, you know, what am I involved in? I pulled the rip cord on the parachute and it slipped up in front of my face and it was a loud thunder cracking sound as it popped open. And, of course, then I realized I was dangling up there. And I was still probably five miles up in the air. And I remember was it was very, very cold. It was so cold, and I had taken off my gloves to fire my gun and, you know, my hands were freezing. And on top of that, because I had been hit by fragments of the cannon shell that exploded, my left arm was numb. It was in shock. It didn't hurt but it was—I couldn't use it. A shock of some kind had taken effect. A German fighter flew straight at me, and I thought he was going to shoot me while I was hanging in the parachute, but he didn't. He just pulled up and went away. It took me about 20 minutes to reach the ground but as I got very close to the ground I realized how fast I was falling, because with the parachutes that we had, which were the chest packs, the rate of descent was 17 feet per second, which is pretty fast. That's like jumping out of a second story window. And as I got closer to the ground I could see that two men were running over to where I was. Well, I did hit the ground. It was in the country. There was no – I was well outside the city. It was farm land, farm country, and I had hit the ground. And because I had tensed up slightly before I did I sprained my right foot very bad. And of course my left arm was numb and practically useless, and I was trying to extricate myself from my parachute when these two men came up to me. The first thing they said was “Deutsch,” and I knew that what they were asking was in German. And I said “No, American.” And then they backed off a little bit. They were probably as frightened of me as I was of them. MAL ROSEMAN: They were civilians? FRANK MURPHY: Yes, they were civilians. They were farmers. They were just in farm clothing, or like jeans, rough clothing, and I'm sure they wondered if I had a weapon of some kind. I did not. I never carried a gun, a pistol. I had one. They were issued to all of us, but I had flown enough combat missions to know that if I went down in Germany I could not take on the whole German nation with one 45 caliber pistol, besides I was not a very good shot. I probably would have been more effective throwing it at them than I would have shooting it at them. But they didn't know that of course. Finally, I managed to get out of my parachute and to get to my feet although it wasn't that easy and they motioned me to follow them, and I started to walk off, and they got very angry and pointed at the parachute and insisted that I take it. And here I was, I picked up this parachute that I used and was walking down and we came across two women and one of them said in English—very good English, “For you the war is over.” And then she said “You're hurt.” And I said “Well, a little bit.” And the two women took me to a farm house and they took me inside, and just inside the front door there was a water pump. And they filled a porcelain basin with water and set it down, and then they brought some cloths for me, because I was bleeding, to clean up with. And of course I did. And they were—I'd have to say, you know, they weren't antagonistic, they weren't sympathetic particularly, but at the same time they didn't do anything that I would consider belligerent towards me. But the two men, in the meantime, that had come up to me, had gone out and they found a local policeman. So by the time I got through sort of cleaning up there was a policeman in the room with a pistol and he pointed it at me, and, of course, I raised my hands as best I could. So he took me outside. There was a group of people gathered out there and they were basically just standing, and I will say that they were just watching, gawking more or less. They didn't make any hostile move toward me, except that one woman was very emphatic and, you know, cursing me in some way, and they insisted again that I pick up my parachute which I had dropped outside. And I later understood that she said to me, “There's your cross, pick it up and carry it.” Which I had no idea— Anyway, we started down the road and we hadn't gone very far when a big open touring car came along, and who was in the back seat but Charlie Cruikshank, the pilot on my airplane, and the car was driven by two of the home guards in military uniforms. They were older men, and he yelled at them, they stopped and they picked me up. Well, they took us then to the town of the—the home of the burgermeister. It was some distance from where we were captured, and that was a collection point for American prisoners. And we had probably 25 American air men in there, you know, that they had picked up from all over the countryside. And we were collected there and later that afternoon about five o'clock they came up in private automobiles and they put each of us in—they put us, you know, grouped us into these cars and they drove us down to the German Luftwaffe air base at Munster Handorf and we were turned over to the German air force and they had a detention building that obviously was a brig sort of a building with bars on the windows and doors, and they put all of us in there. So that's where we were. That evening— MAL ROSEMAN: Before you go on, any other members of your crew? FRANK MURPHY: Yes. There was Charlie Cruikshank and Augie Gaspar from my crew were in there. They were the only ones. I didn't see any of our enlisted men or Graham, the co-pilot. I don't know what happened. MAL ROSEMAN: Do you know what happened— FRANK MURPHY: He did fine. He came through. He survived and ended up in the same prison camp that I ended up in. MAL ROSEMAN: Were they enlisted men? FRANK MURPHY: No, he was an officer. MAL ROSEMAN: No, but— FRANK MURPHY: The enlisted men—we had two men on our crew killed. The radio operator was killed, the tail gunner was killed. One of our waist gunners was very seriously injured. He lost a leg. I had shrapnel wounds and another one of the other men had similar wounds to mine. So we lost two men. We had one grievously hurt, and Bob Bixler, the ball turret operator, had a chest wound where he was—I think he had a lung collapse, something like that. And so, we had a number of injuries on our crew, but two deaths. That night they took me to the base hospital where a German doctor kind of cleaned me up but he didn't do a whole lot for me, and then they sent me back to this detention building. The next day we were put on a train and we were taken to Frankfurt, Germany and a place which was an interrogation unit. It was where they did nothing but personal interrogation. I was put into a little cell. I'd say it was probably five or six feet wide, maybe a few feet long. It was a smaller room. There was only one window there and it was frosted glass at the top near the ceiling. I couldn't reach, I couldn't get to it, but it didn't make any difference, it was frosted glass. They had a wooden cot with a straw mattress and they had a stool and then they had a jar, but they took our shoes, they took my flying clothes, my jacket. So really all I had was just the shirt and the trousers that I had. And I was there a week, and I was interrogated by the German interrogation officers several times. MAL ROSEMAN: From the Luftwaffe? FRANK MURPHY: From the Luftwaffe, right. MAL ROSEMAN: They spoke English? FRANK MURPHY: They spoke perfect English. And it was amazing how much information they had. They knew the group I was from, they knew the squadron, they knew the names of all our commanding officers. And the truth is they were trying to get information from me on subjects that they knew more about than I did. [LAUGHTER] Except there was one thing, we had a new navigation device, the G-System that the British had, but again, at the time they were questioning me they had already captured—shot down about 20 RAF bombers with this equipment. They thoroughly investigated and analyzed it. They knew exactly what it did and what its capabilities were and they started talking to me about it and they said, you know, tell us what you do. And the truth is I had never used it. I said, “I never used it.” And they kept insisting that I did. And I said, “Well, okay, you can insist all you want to, but I never used it; there's nothing I can tell you about it.” That sort of thing. That lasted about a week, and they took us out and they put us in boxcars and they sent us all the way across Germany to Stalag Luft III, which was— MAL ROSEMAN: When you say boxcars, freight trains basically? FRANK MURPHY: Freight trains, freight cars. Yeah. Not passenger cars, freight cars. And, unfortunately, they moved a lot of animals in them before they moved us. It wasn't the greatest environment in the world. We got to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, which was about 90 miles east of Berlin and that was a prisoner of war camp for American officers. And that's where we were. And I was there for the next 16 months from October 26, 1943 until January 27, 1945. The initial camp was not that bad because it had been built for about a thousand people and they only had about 1200 in there, so we were not terribly crowded. Eventually, as the war went on and as more and more American airplanes were shot down they kept bringing people and we became very, very crowded. And although our treatment initially was what I would call proper, that is that they didn't do anything brutal to us, they didn't do anything for us. I never got any clothing of German origin. For six months I only had the clothes on my back when I was captured. Our meals were very, very sparse, I mean, because, see, we were given the same ration as the German civilian population that were old and disabled, which was the lowest food ration in Germany. We had some Red Cross parcels that would supplement German food from time to time, so I would say for the first year I was a POW—nobody likes to be locked up night and day and confined, but so far as physical punishment was concerned, I didn't get physical punishment, but we were hungry all the time. I did lose a lot of weight. I lost probably 25 pounds during our first year. MAL ROSEMAN: Was there any communication with home? FRANK MURPHY: We could send letters home and they could, our families could write us. MAL ROSEMAN: So they knew you were alive and relatively well? FRANK MURPHY: They did. I was shot down October the 10, 1943. My mother got a telegram from the war department that I was missing in action. I think she got that about ten days later. And then it was another five or six weeks before she heard through the International Red Cross that I was a prisoner of war in Germany. So she had a little over a month when she had no idea what happened, other than I was MIA. And of course, you know, after the war she and my brothers and my father told me how anguished she was during that time and all. And I knew that she was distressed because in her last letter that I got before I was shot down she told me how worried she was about all the missions we were flying and she'd be so glad when I came home. And, of course, you know, I knew that she was distressed, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. MAL ROSEMAN: But there was communication? FRANK MURPHY: There were communications, although I didn't get my—I was captured in October of 1943. I didn't get my first letter from home until June of 1944. MAL ROSEMAN: Oh, boy. FRANK MURPHY: So, see, I didn't hear anything from home until I'd been a prisoner for eight months. So I had no idea what was happening at home. And my letters to them usually took three months. So we had communications but it wasn't that good. MAL ROSEMAN: Were there any escapes? FRANK MURPHY: Yes, I was in—the camp I was in, you probably heard of “The Great Escape.” That took place in the prison camp I was in while I was there. Some 76 British prisoners tunneled out of the compound that they were in, which was immediately adjacent to the compound I was in. And it happened in March of 1944 and we—although we were separated from the British prisoners, there was only barbed wire fence between us and we used to talk to each other through the fence. Now we had to shout because we weren't—we were about 30 feet apart, but you could—after the escape we woke up and there was a great commotion over in the British camp. It looked like the entire German Army had descended on the camp. And one of the British airmen who managed to get near the fence told us what had happened, that they had had the big escape and the Germans were really cracking down on them. And as everybody knows, the Germans executed—they recaptured virtually all of the prisoners. Only two of those men who escaped eventually got back to England. The rest of them were captured and 50 of them were executed by the Germans. And, of course, when that report came back to us everybody in there was outraged that they would murder these 50 men who were military people. They were prisoners of war. They weren't—you know, they—you're not supposed to do that. And we were told by our senior officer not to cooperate with the Germans during the next event. They counted us twice a day. Morning and evening we had to line up on our parade ground and the Germans came and counted us to make sure I guess, well, to make sure everybody was there. And we normally would line up without any problem, but Colonel Goodrich, who was our senior officer, told us not to do that, not to cooperate with them. So when they came to count us we began to move around and mingle and make it impossible for them to count us. Well, they, with that done they descended on us like the whole German Army, and they pointed machine guns at us and said “Now line up!” and of course we did. The upshot of that episode was that there were very strained relations between the American and British POWs and the German guards from then on. We were always told that we were not to have any relations with them. The moment we arrived in the POW camp we were told by the senior American officers to remember that we were still American soldiers and we were expected to operate that way. We were not in any way to cooperate with the Germans. And we had several German-speaking POWs who handled all of our relations with the German guards. But after that episode, there was a lot of bitter feeling between the American and British prisoners and the Germans. And there were a couple of episodes where Germans went over for no reason at all, German guards fired in and killed prisoners who they said were doing something wrong when they really weren't. So all of those things made it very difficult. And then of course as the war dragged on and came to an end in late 1944 and early 1945 the Germans were not able to really take care of themselves so they really didn't do anything for us. Our food became very meager. We were in central Europe and it can be extremely cold in the winter time in Poland and— MAL ROSEMAN: This camp was in Poland? FRANK MURPHY: It was in Poland. And they only gave us enough fuel, we had little more or less pot belly stoves in our rooms, and once again, we were terribly crowded because of the number of prisoners they crammed in. We were only able to heat our little room for about two hours a day. The other 22 hours we had to just stand around and shiver. And so, it was pretty grim. But on the night of January 27, 1945, we were told by the Germans that we were going to be evacuated within an hour, to be ready to move. And we had expected it because we knew—we could hear the heavy artillery of the Russian Army that had reached the point only about 16 miles from us. So we knew the Russians were not far away. And so, it was not a surprise that the Germans would want us to move. But they ordered us to go and to march. They came and called us about nine o'clock that Saturday night to be ready to go in an hour. So we were outside and we hastily put on all the socks we had, put on two pairs of pants. I had an overcoat, I put it on, and gloves, and I had a little wool cap, and I put on everything I had and we went outside about eleven o'clock and started marching. It was very cold. It was 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit, well below freezing. The wind was blowing. The snow was about knee deep. It was just a bitterly cold winter night. We walked all that night in the snow. We stopped about five in the morning for about a half hour, then we walked all the rest of that day until four o'clock that afternoon, and then we came to a little town where they had some barns. They let us go inside and at least we got off of the ground and there was some hay on the ground that we could— MAL ROSEMAN: How many men are you talking about? FRANK MURPHY: Two thousand Americans. MAL ROSEMAN: And what was happening with the British? FRANK MURPHY: The British came behind us. We left first and the British came after us. There were 2,000 Americans. And we were there for several hours and then they got us out and we marched again all of that night. Well, we had had no food, no water, and of course people began to fall out from exhaustion, and so we had a number of men who just collapsed by the side of the road, and we would go up to them and we'd say, “You can't lay here and die, you've got to get up and go with us, and if you have anything we'll carry it if we can help you.” And as often as not they'd say, no. So it was a grim situation. But we finally reached a factory— MAL ROSEMAN: And the Germans just left them on the road? FRANK MURPHY: Left them on the road. I don't know what happened to most of them. We finally got to an abandoned factory where they let us go in, and they were going to let us stay there a few hours and go on. And our senior officer, Colonel Goodrich, told the Germans we wouldn't go. They had to give us a chance to recover some strength. And I understand that they threatened also things like shooting us, but he knew they wouldn't shoot 2,000 American prisoners, and they didn't. And so we stayed there overnight and then we walked all the next day—the details are available. I don't remember them right off hand. But inside of something like 35 or 36 hours we walked something like 60 miles in the snow. Then they put us on—again, we came to a little town called Spremberg and they had these railroad cars lined up. They put us on these little— [END TAPE 1 SIDE B] [BEGINNING TAPE 2 SIDE A] FRANK MURPHY: —these little European size freight cars. They'd put 60 men to a car and we could hardly stand up. We couldn't sit down, and of course the guys were sick and—anyway. And we were on there for two days and three nights and we finally got to a place where they opened up the car and let us off—we were at Stalag VIIA in Moosburg, Germany, and we were there for about three months, February, March and April of 1945, and it was a dreadful place, a hell hole. They eventually crowded—the camp had been built for 14,000 prisoners. They had 115,000 POWs in there. It was very bad the last three months. But on April 29, 1945 a spearhead of the American 14th Armored Division came in and knocked the gate down and turned us loose. So we got out. MAL ROSEMAN: The Germans had already evacuated? FRANK MURPHY: The German guards ran away and they had some elements of the German SS military unit that made a token attempt to fight off the American forces, but the fire fight only lasted about an hour. It was very intense firing of machine guns and weapons of all kinds, but it didn't last very long. And finally it all became quiet and the Germans were gone, and the American tanks came in. And that was what happened. MAL ROSEMAN: Now, when the Americans got there, there were 100,000-plus soldiers. FRANK MURPHY: Yeah. MAL ROSEMAN: How did they— FRANK MURPHY: Well, a lot of them, we had like, they were not nearly all Americans. Only about 10,000 were Americans. We had British. We had over 40,000 Russians including seven Russian generals who were in that camp. We had Indians and Gurkhas from the British Fourth Indian Division out of Africa and Italy. We had a lot of French prisoners that had been there for years. We had every—practically every nationality that was involved in fighting the Germans that were in there. There were probably 10,000 Americans. MAL ROSEMAN: So what happened to you immediately after? FRANK MURPHY: Well, for several days not much of anything happened. Some of the guys were saying, “Bring back the Germans. You're not giving us anything to eat.” That was a joke. But that was because the American army was moving so fast and the support troops who were following up just hadn't had time to catch up with the combat units that came in and released us. But eventually they came in and they took us and they picked up all our old clothes and the clothes I was wearing when I was captured, and they burned them. And they deloused us with DDT, which everybody is afraid of nowadays, but that was what they used in those days to delouse you, because we had lice. I mean, I was covered with lice and bed bugs and all of it. I didn't have a single hot shower the whole time I was a POW. And that was more than 19 months without a hot shower. So when they were able to rig up some things where we could finally get a shower and get on new clothes it was incredible. But then they took us up to, they trucked us up to Regensburg where we had bombed, they put us on American airplanes, and they flew us to France and they put us in a hospital at LeHavre, which was called Camp Lucky Strike, which was a rehabilitation place for prisoners of war there in Europe. In fact, we were called RAMPS rather than POWs. They said you're now a RAMP, which was Recovered Allied Military Personnel. And eventually I was put on a hospital ship because they determined that I had pneumonia and I had lost, I weighed about 120 pounds. I'd lost a lot of weight. I had dysentery and some other problems. They put me on a hospital ship and we called at Southampton in England and then I sailed and we crossed the Atlantic and landed at the Boston Tea Pier in Boston, Massachusetts, I think it was June 12, 1945. MAL ROSEMAN: The war was over at this point? FRANK MURPHY: The war was over in Europe. Still going on in Japan but it was over in Europe. Then they put me on a troop train and I ended up at Fort MacPherson, Georgia. And although they say there were banners and big parades when we all came home, when I got off the train at Fort MacPherson here in Atlanta, I got to a pay phone and I called home. I had not heard or talked to my mother and father for almost a year. MAL ROSEMAN: So you didn't speak to them when you were still in England. You had to wait until you were— FRANK MURPHY: No, no. I did send them a telegram. The Army let us send them a cable saying “I'm free and I'll be home soon,” something like that. So they knew, but I had had no direct conversations with them. Anyway, so I called home and my mother [LONG PAUSE] they came and got me. So that was it. MAL ROSEMAN: And you were out of the Army after a few weeks? FRANK MURPHY: I stayed in for about, you know—they were going to send us out to the Pacific. Now, I did cover that, but in some support role. But then they dropped the atomic bomb and the war was over. And I had enough points to where I could be discharged so I said I better not. MAL ROSEMAN: Okay, just briefly, you eventually got married? FRANK MURPHY: I eventually got married. MAL ROSEMAN: You went back to school? FRANK MURPHY: Went back to school. MAL ROSEMAN: Emory? FRANK MURPHY: Emory. MAL ROSEMAN: Graduated? FRANK MURPHY: Graduated. MAL ROSEMAN: Degree in? FRANK MURPHY: It was general science actually, because at one time I thought I might go into pre-med. MAL ROSEMAN: And you went to work for? FRANK MURPHY: I went to work for Crawford and Company in Atlanta, which was an insurance adjusting firm. I worked with them and I went to law school at night. And when I passed the bar I was offered a job at Lockheed in Marietta and this was 1954, so I worked for Lockheed until I retired in 1987. MAL ROSEMAN: And you have how many children? FRANK MURPHY: I have three children. We had four. Our youngest daughter died when she was 34-years-old of cancer, but we have three children. MAL ROSEMAN: How many grandchildren? FRANK MURPHY: Seven. Seven grandchildren. MAL ROSEMAN: It has been an honor to speak with you. Thank you very much. FRANK MURPHY: Well, thank you.
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Extent:: 1:42:39
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Holding Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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