Thanks to David Arnett of the 492nd Bomb Group Association for the information that Bob Cash passed away on April 23. Bob was a radio operator on a B-24 and a former prisoner of war. Ray Lemons of the Kassel Mission Historical Association set me up with an interview with Bob when I visited Ray in Dallas in 2010. Here's an audio excerpt from that interview with a transcript of that section:
Bob Cash: We had marched, as I
say, to the little community of Mehlbech and were starting back east again, and
most of our guards, most all of them had abandoned us. And we were in a barn,
and I couldn't go another mile. I was, my stomach was just killing me, and it
was a combination of eating sugar beets and raw potatoes and everything raw,
and I guess if I hadn't been so damn young, most of us would have died. But we
marched out, three sets of German guards, and most of those old boys were older
than we and maybe in their forties, up in their fifties, they were conscripts,
they were just suiting up anybody, kids from 15 years old up, but we had
marched to Mehlbech, and I told Ed, I said, "I can't go any further. I'm
gonna just have to take my chances and if they push us on, they're just gonna have
to shoot me, because I can't go any more."
Well, he was, this was
the day, about the day before we were liberated, and he was out foraging for
food. And he'd gone to a farmhouse and they'd given him a little bread and
turned him out, and he saw a chicken hatch over there and he went over there
and thought maybe he could get some eggs or something like that, and he heard
this tank fire. It was Monty's 11th Armored Division coming over the hill and
they lowered that 88, you know, and he managed to jump out of that chicken
shack just in time because they leveled it, they just blew it to pieces. And he
rushed back and told me about that and I said, "My god, I wasn't that
hungry." He was looking for something to eat. But when they did come over
the hill and down into this little village, that was a second coming. I don't
know how, how the guys spent five, six, seven years in the Pacific, there
weren't any that long too in Europe, but I don't know how in the hell they
stood that. Of course they were stationary most of the time, and if you're not,
if you're dormant, you can last a long time. But put you out on a 800-mile
march ... I'm sorry, it's been 64 years
ago ... 65 years ago ...
Aaron Elson: It's got to be like yesterday when you think about
it.
Bob Cash: Well, the thing that, the thing that got me, you
wondered how come you got through something like that, and why the Lord allowed
you to come home and get to your family and start your family and so forth, and
so many of those kids never had a chance to do that.
Aaron Elson: You must think about that ...
Bob Cash: I think about it every day. Every day. And mainly
my crew. A couple of years ago we were in, someplace up in Ohio, close to
Trotwood, where my gunner that I saw laying there dead, his sister, he had two
sisters and a brother that came to this, I invited them to come over and have
dinner with us and so forth, I got their names, and we had a nice chat with
them, you know. I couldn't tell them anything about Bill except that he was in
the back end of the plane and that I did see him and that he must have died
quick. And he rests in Liège.
Aaron Elson: And his name was ...
Bob Cash: His name was Bill Mendenhall. He was from Trotwood,
Ohio, I think it was. We were in Dayton, that's where we had our, he wasn't too
far from there, it was on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio.
Aaron Elson: Who else was on the crew?
Bob Cash: My crew members were Bill ... lord ... my tail
gunner, the reason I think that plane blew up because it was hard for him to
get out of that, he was a pretty chunky guy anyway, and when he got in that
tail turret, you almost had to help him out. But he was from Denver, and his
body was recovered almost three months after we were shot down, he had washed
ashore in Osterdorp, Sweden, and he was identified and buried over there. And
Osterdorp is right on the Baltic coast there. The other gunner, my nose turret
gunner, he was a boy from Myrt, Mississippi, he was a country boy, too, and
he's unaccounted for. My co-pilot's name was John Bronson, he was buried over
there on the island north of, he was recovered and was buried over there on the
island of not Rugen, but it was out off the north coast of Germany. This is
between, an island, pretty good size island, that we had to fly over, it's not
on that map, it's off the map, but it's a pretty good size island out there by
itself and then you've got Sweden to the north.
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