POW flies again

A veteran of the air war over Europe during World War II returns to the sky today in a B-17G Flying Fortress.

However, Dick Wessel of rural Vallonia hopes his landing will be a bit smoother than it was nearly 65 years ago on Sept. 13, 1944.

That's when Wessel, then a 21-year-old bombardier and navigator in the U.S. Army Air Corps, leaped from his B-17G - identical to the plane he'll fly in today - after a bombing run on an I.G. Farben Industries plant in Ludwigshaven, Germany, in a daytime bombing run out of England.

Wessel, now 86, spent eight months as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft 1 at Barth, Germany.

"I'm excited," Wessel said about today's flight on the Liberty Belle, which will leave from the Mount Comfort Airport east of Indianapolis. "It's going to refuel so many memories."

Wessel only started to talk about his service in the war and time as a POW in the past 10 years or so.

That came at the urging or perhaps nudging of his children, and a "realization the Lord had saved me," he said.

"They were interested," Wessel said of his children "They mentioned I hadn't told them much. It was hard at times. It's still emotional.

"I also had the realization that I had a chest pack tied to my harness because an angel or the Holy Spirit was prompting me to do that," he added.

"We were told to have the chest packs near us, but that day I had it on," Wessel said. "That's why I was saved."

Only Wessel and his plane's pilot, Albert Davis, escaped alive when their B-17 was shot down all those years ago.

"It didn't surprise me that no one else made it," Wessel said. "When I was on the ground, I could see the cigar-shaped part of the plane from the tail to the wings coming down in just a flat spiral."

He later learned that his brother, also serving with Air Corps in England at the time, was told that day that one of the plane's wings had been shot off.

Wessel, however, said he took comfort a few years ago when learning that the five crew members who perished that day were buried together at a cemetery in Germany.

"That brought some closure," he said. "It made me feel some peace."

The plane had dropped its load of bombs and was back in formation when German anti-aircraft guns shot it down. He landed in a plowed field near a German army camp and marched to Worms.

Complications with the bomb bay doors contributed to the plane being nailed.

"That was the cause of our problems," Wessel said. "We couldn't get them to close, so we lost altitude in order to try to keep up with the squadron. But we were low enough that anti-aircraft guns could hit us."

Wessel's son, John, tipped him off about the B-17G flights out of Mount Comfort today. The flights are on the Liberty Belle, part of the Tulsa, Okla.-based Liberty Foundation.

During World War II, the plane completed 64 missions over Europe.