Roy Livingstone's Story

By Roy Livingstone

The following was taken from VA News and I can state all is true. Clyde D Willis

Here was Roy Livingstone, in snappy blazer and sharp POW cap, going back in his mind to April 17, 1943, when he was flight engineer on a B-17 leaving a base in England for a bombing run over the ball bearing works at Bremen, Germany. He was only 18, and already had flown a dozen missions for the 306th Bomb Group. In the predawn darkness, behind the runway fence, Brits cheered their takeoff and shouted, "Go get 'em, Yanks!" -- a tableau that still gives Livingstone goose bumps. Then came the revelation.

The plane had a faulty oil tank and got separated from the squadron, which made it an easy target for German Messerschmitt 109s. When the first enemy fire hit, Livingstone fell to the turret floor. He pulled himself up just as another round pierced the metal. His flight gloves were drenched in blood. He thought the back of his head had been blown off; a piece of plexiglass had embedded in his neck. Nine men on the plane and seven already dead. Time to bail. Livingstone jumped headfirst from 22,000 feet and immediately blacked out. The Germans were waiting for him when his parachute thudded to the ground.

He spent the next two years in prison camps, ending up at Stalag 17-B in Krens, Austria. What is the reality of war? To Livingstone, it was when he became infested with scabies, and the tiny mites burrowed into the skin of his penis, which developed a scab that he had to peel off, with excruciating pain, each time he urinated.

Decades later, through the network of veterans treated at Bay Pines, Livingstone met another airman who had been a prisoner of war at Stalag 17-B. It was Fred De Rolf, who learned his own hard lessons about war when he was 18. On the morning of Oct. 17, 1943, his B-24 was shot down over Paris on his way to Germany -- one of 90 Allied planes lost that day, which became known as Black Thursday. De Rolf, an aerial gunner from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., somehow survived the blast to his plane. He parachuted from 28,000 feet and crashed through the tile roof of a home on the outskirts of Paris, where he lodged on the rafters, his leg broken. This was not the war he had been told about. De Rolf was taken by jammed cattle car -- 80 men to a car, one slop bucket in the corner -- to the same prison as Livingstone. Amid the unending misery of his days at Stalag 17-B, he ate soup that crawled with beetles. Two other events could not be erased from his mind. One was of an American prisoner from De Rolf's barracks who tried to escape and was shot and killed on the barbed wire, his body stuck hanging on the fence, where the Nazis left him to rot for three days. The other image: a one-legged German commander forcing De Rolf and other prisoners to stand at attention outside in the freezing rain for 18-hour stretches two consecutive days because he suspected them of hiding an escaped airman somewhere in the compound. (see note below)

( I Remember this time but I believe we stayed out in that weather for three days and two nights. I believe I told this story back in my writing of Stalag XVII-B. That is where I nearly got my feet frozen and came close to a bad case of frost bite. It was the whole barracks of 35-A and B )
Clyde D. Willis WWII POW at Stalag XVII-B.