Fortress and Fortitude: “Lassie Come Home” a story of wartime resilience

Author Jerry Krassner

One day in late 1943, while in final training prior to their deployment to Europe, B-17 Flying Fortress bombardier Lt Harry Jensen and some crewmates went to the post theater at Langley Field, VA. The movie “Lassie Come Home”, a story about the soon-to-be-famous collie finding her way home against long odds, was playing.

Lt Jensen had a thought he shared with his crewmates – maybe by naming their aircraft “Lassie Come Home”, their airplane would get them home against long odds, just like Lassie. Many decades later, Jensen recounted saying:

“If our bomber will try as hard to come home from a mission as that dog did to get home, we ought to be a cinch to finish our twenty-five missions. Let’s name our plane ‘Lassie Come Home’“.

His crewmates agreed and the airplane was so named.

[Harry Jensen interview in Den Danske Pioneer (The Danish Pioneer), June 10, 1991 (http://www.dendanskepioneer.com/)]

For 18 missions, despite various “injuries”, “Lassie Come Home” fulfilled Lt Jensen’s hopes. On May 13, 1944, on its 19th mission, “Lassie Come Home” was assigned to a large (749 bombers) raid on aircraft factories in Poznan, Poland. As they approached the target, the weather was uncooperative so the raid split into two parts, with the group including “Lassie Come Home” re-vectored to their secondary target- Stettin, on the north coast of Germany. After dropping their bombs, the planes headed back to Kimbolton, their home air field not far from Cambridge, England.

On their way home, the B-17s were attacked by a large number of German fighters. Nearly half century later, Jensen described the situation:

“Everything seemed fine until we looked out at the right wing. One of the Luftwaffe had gotten a burst across the wing between the engines and an incendiary bullet was lodged in the wing. We were on fire.

… We knew we couldn’t make it back to England and so we decided to try for Sweden. The navigator gave us a heading to reach there. But as we neared the Baltic coastline the Flight Engineer said, “Look at the fire now”.

It was decided to abandon the plane and the crew was ordered to bail out.”

Pilot Lt Robert Dunn Jr had headed the plane toward the Baltic Sea, where he expected the aircraft to sink and not be retrievable by the enemy. Although he gave the signal to bail out, three of the nine-man crew were not strong swimmers, and alerted Lt Dunn to their concern about bailing out over the water.

Lt Dunn then made a heroic and life-saving decision. Despite the dangers to himself and the crew, he turned the plane around, allowing the crew to bail out over land, then re-directed the plane back toward the water. As Jensen later wrote:

“The pilot and I were the last to go… We shook hands and went out the open bomb-bay doors.”

They expected the plane to explode in mid-air, and the debris to fall in the water. But all did not go as planned.

[Der Danske Pioneer, op cit]

When asked by his son, decades later, why he bailed out, George Krassner, the navigator, shrugged very matter-of-factly, and said “the plane was on fire”- as if his action was self-evident. When then asked what happened to the plane, his answer was “it blew up in mid-air”, to which his son said (not quite as matter-of-factly) “well, I guess you made the right decision”. Krassner lived the rest of his life never knowing that the plane did not explode, and that there was more to the story.

Tail-gunner Sgt Jim Miller’s experience was recounted in a local newspaper interview in 1993:

Miller had to exit at a small door near the back of the plane, at an altitude of about 14,000 feet.

“I was scared,” he said. “I had to crawl to the door, dangle my feet outside and push off with my elbows.”

Again, neither Miller nor Jensen knew the aircraft didn’t explode in mid-air… until over forty years later.

From a contemporaneous Army Air Corp post-mission report:

“1st Lt Robert M Dunn Jr. was flying as High Squadron leader southwest of Stettin when “Lassie-Come Home” at 15:30 hours was attacked by German fighters and a fire broke out in the left wing. Dunn left the formation and ordered the crew to bail out.

Tail gunner S/Sgt James T. Miller left through the tail hatch while Waist gunner S/Sgt Edwin G. Ayres and Ball turret gunner S/Sgt John Fode left through the rear door. Bombardier 2nd Lt Harry D. Jensen, Navigator 2nd Lt George Krassner, Co-pilot 2nd Lt William H. Churchill Jar., Engineer T/Sgt John T. Whitelaw, Radio operator T/Sgt Evar W. Anderson and Pilot 1st Lt Robert M Dunn Jr. left through the bomb bay.”

The crew parachuted into enemy territory near the coastal village of Gingst, Rugen in northern Germany. Luckily for them, as later recounted by several of the crew, they were met by the Luftwaffe police and quickly taken into custody. According to Jensen and Krassner, as separately told to their children decades later, they would have been immediately killed if met by the local populace. If met by the Gestapo, they would have been tortured and then killed. But they were picked up by the Luftwaffe police, where there remained some semblance of “chivalry and professionalism” which saved the crew’s life. But not by much.

prior to their POW experiences in Barracks A66 of Stalag Luft III.

The officers eventually were sent to the large Stalag Luft III. Afficionados might remember this large POW camp as the location adjacent to a British POW camp that was the scene of the March 24, 1944 “Great Escape”, as depicted in the 1963 movie. In fact, coming home from watching that movie in the theater, navigator Krassner told his young sons “He was there” (actually across the street) and he heard the shooting, though he didn’t know what was happening at the time.

Aerial photograph of Stalag Luft III, POW camp for about 10,000 Allied prisoners, including the officers of ‘Lassie Come Home’. The enlisted crew were sent to a more primitive POW camp in Moosburg. Each group endured various hardships. After a year as POWs, as Soviet forces approached from the East, POWs from Stalag Luft III were suddenly forced to embark upon the “Death March”, in brutally freezing blizzard conditions and with little warning that might have enabled them to grab items such as additional clothing and food. They marched from Stalag Luft III to Nurenburg, and then by overcrowded railcars to the POW camp in Moosburg. Cold, hunger, insufficient clothing, prior injuries, disease, general weakness, and Nazi guards, all took their toll, and many prisoners did not survive. This event has been described elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_March_(1945)

Again, as recounted by Miller to his local newspaper:

The worst part of Miller’s experience as a POW, he said, was the final 80 days before his liberation. With American and British forces advancing against the Nazis from the west and Russians from the east, German troops removed thousands of their Allied captives from prisons and began marching them from place to place in an attempt to prevent them from being rescued.

Miller said that during this “black march” many prisoners in ragged clothing walked and slept in barns or on the ground during “the coldest winter in Germany for 50 years.”

(Eventually)… Miller and other prisoners, with their German guards, stopped at a bridge, with American troops on the other side. The Germans allowed the prisoners to cross and went no further themselves.

Those that survived the March, including the entire Lassie Come Home crew, were liberated by Gen Patton’s army on April 29, 1945. After a difficult year “as guests of the German government”, as Krassner later described it, the crew was repatriated back home, and went on with their lives across the USA.

Meanwhile, Lassie Come Home had an interesting story of its own. The crew’s expectation, that the heavily damaged airplane would explode in mid-air, turned out to be incorrect. Unknown to the crew, until some found out many decades later, the airplane flew on until running out of fuel and crashing in Store Heddinge, Denmark- a coastal village near Copenhagen. The plane skidded across a field and came to a rest with its nose jutting into the village hospital. Nobody on the ground was injured, but it was a close call. Several young children in the hospital with scarlet fever were evacuated through windows by Nurse Inga Skov and other staff. The head nurse Ms. Christiansen was in her bedroom, and left to go to the bathroom. When she returned to her room, there was a B-17 engine in her bed.

The local townspeople (and the Germans) came to inspect. They were unable to find any crewmembers, leading to the flight’s local description as “the Ghost Flight”. The Germans initially thought the townspeople were hiding the crew and instigated a house search and rough interrogation, which included one of the hospital nurses. Interestingly, a week later one of the German interrogation leaders came to the same nurse with an intestinal problem. She made sure to provide him a sufficiently strong medicine that incapacitated him for a week. One took revenge as one could.

A Danish language You Tube video showing archival film of that day, and eyewitness accounts recounted many years later, can be accessed online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj8W2WIGVsI

Speaking as the navigator’s son, it is an interesting experience to see your father’s B-17 crash 70+ years after the fact!

Lt Dunn’s crew named their airplane in the hope that it would get them home no matter what. However, war doesn’t always follow Hollywood scripts. Lassie Come Home protected its crew as long as it could, and eventually all nine of the crew were liberated from their POW camp by the approach of Gen Patton’s army. All survived their ordeals many with various long-lasting effects. The memories of extreme hunger affected some of them for the remainder of their lives. Some had life-long physical ailments from their parachute jump or subsequent harsh treatment. Most were reticent to describe their experiences- a common characteristic of many World War II veterans. But they all did survive, and went on to live “normal” lives… including over two dozen children between them.

In the early 1990s, a much older Jensen and his wife had an opportunity to visit Store Heddinge, where they met a half dozen older villagers who remembered the incident- including Head Nurse Christensen. In a case of life coming full circle, one of them provided him a piece of his bombardier’s instrument panel that had been taken from “Lassie Come Home” so long ago. So almost 50 years later, one could say both the crew, and finally Lassie, came home.

Instrument panel from Lassie Come Home, presented to bombardier Jensen- in the early 1990s

THE CREW. Pilot: Bob Dunn Flight engineer/top turret gunner: John Whitelaw. Co-pilot: Bill Churchill Radio Operator: Evar Anderson

Navigator: George Krassner Ball turret gunner: John Fode, Bombardier: Harry Jenson Waist gunner: Edwin Ayres, Tail gunner: Jim Miller

Like “Lassie Come Home”, the crew are all gone now. But they all survived hardships and came home to lead successful lives. The resilience and fortitude exhibited by the Lassie Come Home crew was not unique. They provide one example of what “the greatest generation” endured. Their children are now the caretakers of their stories- but eventually, those children, now themselves approaching later years, will disappear, and the details of the individual stories will vanish with them. This article is an attempt to document one crew’s descendants’ combined effort to not let their father’s stories vanish.

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Acknowledgements: This article was written by the son of the navigator, who located and met (virtually in our COVID world) with a number of children and grandchildren of the crew. All were generous in sharing their memories and memorabilia of their father’s wartime experiences. Also, thanks to the archivist at Store Heddinge, Erik Mouritzen, for providing local historical reports and documents.

[Submitted to the National WW2 Museum in November 2022 by Jerry Krassner.]