The third time was not the charm for Jack Bennett.
During World War II he survived two crash-landings in shot-up B-17 bombers. But on his 23rd mission over Nazi Germany, a shell smashed into his plane and the aircraft plunged into a death spiral.
Jack’s situation, recounted in this November 2010 audio interview with Barbara Benedict for Acorn Hall’s exhibit, Over Here & Over There: Morris County’s Role in World War II, grew more dire by the second.
He removed his oxygen mask to help a crewmate and blacked out. When he snapped awake, he was alone. Everyone had bailed out. He jumped from the plane just before it exploded.
Remembering his training, Jack waited as long as he could before opening his parachute. Landing in trees may have saved his life; he said his unlucky pilot broke both legs when he came down in a German’s backyard and was beaten dead by townsfolk with garden tools.
As a prisoner of war, Jack saw scores of prisoners starve to death every day. He was thankful to be an American; as the war wound down he became a more valuable bargaining chip than Russian prisoners, who were distrusted by the Germans and more likely to be executed.
Jack’s odyssey included a stint in a cave, and an entreaty to a tank crew to give him a weapon for protection as the area was liberated.
After the war, Jack settled in Madison. He died shortly after this interview.
Scroll down for more about Jack’s exploits. Over Here & Over There: Morris County’s Role in World War II runs through March 2012 at Acorn Hall in Morristown.
World War II exhibit at Acorn Hall. Please click icon below for captions.
FROM ACORN HALL:
JOHN A. BENNETT II
PRISONER OF WAR
John “Jack” Bennett II was born at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair on April 20, 1925. After his graduation from College High School in Montclair in late May 1943, he was drafted, not long after his 18th birthday. After basic training he went to armament school. As an armament gunner, he would be responsible for seeing that all the guns on the plane were operational, as well as firing in defense of the plane.
In December 1944 he went overseas, spending Christmas and New Year’s in England. He flew his first mission over Germany in January 1945, as the war in Europe was winding down. Bennett’s plane was a B-17 Flying Fortress with a crew of between nine and eleven men.
On his third mission, the Germans took out three of the plane’s four engines. The pilot had to crash-land in France. Bennett spent a night in a haystack, getting frostbitten. The crew was discovered by French citizens who turned them over to the British, who in turn returned them to the Americans who flew them back to England so they could start touring again.
On another mission, three of four engines were again shot out, but the crippled plane made it out of German territory into Belgium, which was occupied by the British and the Americans.
When Bennett was 19, he took part in a major raid on Berlin.
“I think it was primarily for the publicity but they threw everything they could get into the air. I think there were 1,200 B-17s or 1,200 bombers or B-17s and B-24s…. They just dumped everything they could get into the air and bombed Berlin. [They had] bombed it several times before but this was a concentration that was meant to bring them down and that’s what it did.” Berlin was flattened.
Bennett had flown 23 of his required 35 missions when he was shot down by the Germans a third time.
“I felt the shell hit the plane and … the pilot told the crew to prepare to bail out.” Bennett, in the nose of the plane, disconnected his oxygen line to go help the navigator get ready to jump. Then he passed out from lack of oxygen. When he came to – the plane had dropped to a more oxygen-rich altitude – he was alone.
As he jumped out, the plane blew up. He remembered his jump training: “You don’t pull your ripcord until you’re within 3,000 feet of the ground. They tell you you can see the windows in houses but I was over a forest and you couldn’t see anything. I saw the leaves in the trees and I pulled the ripcord.”
At that time, the Germans would shoot parachutists on sight. Bennett later heard– he never saw any of his crewmates again – that his pilot landed in somebody’s back yard and broke both legs; the Germans beat him to death with garden tools.
Bennett landed in the trees, unharmed. He wondered how he’d get down – until he fell out. Removing his parachute, he walked until he came to a small town. Somebody asked him a question, and since Bennett spoke no German, he answered using his high-school French. He was taken into custody by a group of German civilians and soldiers.
He spent about two weeks in a small jail in what was essentially solitary confinement. There an officer aggressively, but unsuccessfully, interrogated him. He was then taken to Stalag 6G Bonn, Prussia. The camp had some 20,000 or 30,000 people in it, although by this time, there was nothing for them to actually do. The Germans had a choice of turning them loose in Germany or killing them.
“It was mostly Polish … where I was,” said Bennett, “but now the French people got themselves more or less working jobs in the camps … the Germans trusted the French more … nobody trusted the Russians. … I think they took a lot of them out, put them up against a wall, and shot them.”
Starvation was another terrible problem at the camp; Bennett recalls that perhaps 200 people a day died of it. A dozen prisoners might have to share a loaf of bread for their day’s rations.
In March 1945, a German announced that Roosevelt was dead, to taunt the Americans. The Americans never left the premises because they feared what might happen to them if they did; they were safer in prison than being among the German people.
Bennett was only there for a couple of weeks before being relocated to the town of Hemer. At one point, the American prisoners were moved to a cave; their captors didn’t want anything to happen to them when American troops attacked the camp.
“They wanted to be able to give us back … it would have made a better impression.” During that time, the Germans disappeared one day. Shortly after that the Americans arrived and liberated the camp.
“[They] just came through and unlocked the doors and said ‘Go!’” Bennett had nothing with which to protect himself, so he stopped a tank from the 86th Division and asked for a weapon, as the area was still full of German snipers.
“And the guy reached down inside the tank and came up with a folding M1 Carbine that paratroopers used. And he handed this to me and it was nothing like they had, but it had six shots and so I carried that home after the war.” The troops were then off to more battles.
Bennett and a few others commandeered a car and started driving west. They soon ran into a group of Americans who took them to a former slave labor camp near the French border now run by the Allies. From there they were taken to an airport and flown into France.
They remained at a rehabilitation center there until they were taken by trucks to a shipping port and loaded onto a ship bound for New York. His family had already received a telegram listing him as missing. On the day he got out of prison, he dropped a letter home in the mail at the American base in France. His letter and the telegram from the War Department verifying that he was alive arrived at his home the same day.
Mr. Bennett eventually settled in Madison. He died soon after this interview.
