And spent the remainder of the war as a POW
I think he was fairly typical of all the tens of thousands of young American men who enlisted in the Army and Navy aviation programs in the year following Pearl Harbor with the dream of becoming a pilot. He was a big farm boy from rural Henry County in Iowa, the grandson of Swedish immigrants.
20+ years ago, he sent me a couple clippings of stories that ran in The Hawk Eye newspaper in Burlington, IA. I have typed up an excerpt from a story that ran in 1995 (interviews with local veterans on the 50th anniversary of V-E Day); and the entirety of a story that ran in the 1996 about a reunion of five members of Crew 3084 a half century after the war. (See below) And I've thrown in some photos, for good measure.
Lt. Glenn F. Hultquist, USAAF
15th Air Force / 464th Heavy Bombardment Group / 777th Squadron / Crew 3084
Back row, l-r:
2 Lt. Charlie Martin (bombardier); 2 Lt. Glenn Hultquist (pilot); 2 Lt. Jasper Davis (co-pilot); 2 Lt. Floyd Haupt (navigator);
Front row, l-r
SSgt. Wilbur Tri (waist gunner); SSgt Clarence L. Kilarski (Tail Gunner); SSgt John E. Rodgers (Ball Turret Gunner); SSgt Carl J. Zkiab (Nose Gunner); SSgt Donald Hayden (Radio Operator/Waist Gunner); SSgt William R. Droschkey (Engineer/Top Turret Gunner).
This photo was taken at Peterson AFB near Colorado Springs, where my uncle's crew completed their advanced training before transferring to Europe. They flew B-24 Liberator heavy bombers (similar to the one parked in the background of this photo). Their squadron was based in Foggia, Italy.
With the exception of SSgt Rodgers, all of the men pictured here survived the war. My uncle and SSgt Rodgers were flying with a different crew when their bomber was shot down over Yugoslavia on or about May 29, 1944. Rodgers was critically injured during the attack and later died.
A news story that ran in the newspaper in
Mount Pleasant, IA, after my uncle was
reported as being MIA ...
My mom remembered the day they received the MIA
telegram as being one of the worst days of her life.
I think he was fairly typical of all the tens of thousands of young American men who enlisted in the Army and Navy aviation programs in the year following Pearl Harbor with the dream of becoming a pilot. He was a big farm boy from rural Henry County in Iowa, the grandson of Swedish immigrants.
20+ years ago, he sent me a couple clippings of stories that ran in The Hawk Eye newspaper in Burlington, IA. I have typed up an excerpt from a story that ran in 1995 (interviews with local veterans on the 50th anniversary of V-E Day); and the entirety of a story that ran in the 1996 about a reunion of five members of Crew 3084 a half century after the war. (See below) And I've thrown in some photos, for good measure.
Lt. Glenn F. Hultquist, USAAF
15th Air Force / 464th Heavy Bombardment Group / 777th Squadron / Crew 3084
Back row, l-r:
2 Lt. Charlie Martin (bombardier); 2 Lt. Glenn Hultquist (pilot); 2 Lt. Jasper Davis (co-pilot); 2 Lt. Floyd Haupt (navigator);
Front row, l-r
SSgt. Wilbur Tri (waist gunner); SSgt Clarence L. Kilarski (Tail Gunner); SSgt John E. Rodgers (Ball Turret Gunner); SSgt Carl J. Zkiab (Nose Gunner); SSgt Donald Hayden (Radio Operator/Waist Gunner); SSgt William R. Droschkey (Engineer/Top Turret Gunner).
This photo was taken at Peterson AFB near Colorado Springs, where my uncle's crew completed their advanced training before transferring to Europe. They flew B-24 Liberator heavy bombers (similar to the one parked in the background of this photo). Their squadron was based in Foggia, Italy.
With the exception of SSgt Rodgers, all of the men pictured here survived the war. My uncle and SSgt Rodgers were flying with a different crew when their bomber was shot down over Yugoslavia on or about May 29, 1944. Rodgers was critically injured during the attack and later died.
A news story that ran in the newspaper in
Mount Pleasant, IA, after my uncle was
reported as being MIA ...
My mom remembered the day they received the MIA
telegram as being one of the worst days of her life.
After the war, he returned to rural Iowa, married a local girl, and took up farming. They later got divorced during the 1960s, by which time he had quit farming and had gone to work as an electronics welder for General Electric. He remarried in 1970, and lived very happily with his 2nd wife for the 38 years left to him. In 1996, he hosted a reunion with some of the surviving members of Crew 3084 ...Quote:
V-E DAY + 50 YEARS
The Hawk Eye / Sunday, May 7, 1995
[EXCERPT]
A Strange Person in a Strange Place
Glenn Hultquist's boyhood hero was Charles Lindbergh and when, after several tries, he made into the Army Air Corps it was the realization of a dream.
It was also the realization of a nightmare because Hultquist was shot down over Yugoslavia and spent 11 months in a German prisoner of war camp.
Hultquist was sworn into the Army in June 1942, but it was almost two years of training before he went into combat.
His 464th Bomb Group crew was issued a brand-spanking new B-24 Liberator in Topeka, Kan. They flew a circuitous path to Trinidad, Brazil and Africa before landing May 27, 1944, in the heel of the Italian boot.
On May 29, Hultquist got what was known as his "Dollar Ride." New pilots flew a mission as co-pilot with an experienced crew.
The target was Vienna, Austria. Hultquist said the veteran pilots feared the air defenses there almost as much as the Ploiesti, Romania oil fields, the toughest air target of the war.
"Of course, they didn't tell me that until afterward," Hultquist said with a laugh.
As the Liberators approached the target, flak bursts began to appear outside Hultquist's window. But the crew dropped its bombs with little problem.
"But just as soon as we dropped them, the plane was hit with a flak burst right in the bomb bays," he recalled. "It severed the rudders."
Without rudder control, the plane drifted out of formation and the safety of numbers. Almost home, three Messerschmitt fighters appeared. One put a burst of 20-mm cannon fire into the middle of the plane.
The pilot lowered the landing gear as a sign of surrender and the crew abandoned ship. Hultquist went through the bomb bay.
"I just leaned forward and out I went," he said.
The airman blacked out, coming to in a Yugoslavian field. He opened his eyes to see some peasants staring at him.
"You take an Iowa farm boy about 10 days out of the States and put him there," Hultquist said. "I was a strange person in a strange place."
He had come down only a few miles from a German garrison. As he was burying his parachute harness, three heavily-armed German soldiers on horses came up and made him surrender. A few weeks later, Hultquist was in Luft Stalag 3 in the pine forests of what is now eastern Poland.
"We were lucky we got better treatment because we were with the Luftwaffe. You got better treatment because of the kindred spirit among aviators," he said.
Nonetheless, Hultquist lost 50 pounds while interned.
"They had two kinds of soups: Green Death and Grey Death," he said. "The only thing that saved us were the Red Cross packages."
In the camp, there were two main psychological problems: anxiety and boredom. The boredom existed because there was nothing to do. The barracks' one deck of cards were played with until they fell apart in the prisoners' hands.
The anxiety came because they didn't know what was going to happen to them.
"We thought we were OK until things started to get worse for Germany," he remembered. "People lived on rumors. Some thought the SS would take us out in the woods and just shoot us."
In January 1945, the Russians began closing in. At 10 p.m. one night a bugle blew. It signaled the beginning of a three-day march.
"I can remember walking all night kind of hypnotized watching the feet of the guy in front of me," he said.
A few months later, as Western Allied forces began moving, they were moved again to the east. In April 1945, a small American scout plane appeared over the horizon. Shortly thereafter, an American tank.
Hultquist's fondest remembrance is watching a Nazi flag being lowered from the flagpole and replaced with an American flag.
"That was the memory of memories for me, because as far as I was concerned that meant we were with the United States," he said.
Hultquist repeatedly said he was lucky during his internment.
"What I have to say is I want to thank the ground troops, because they really went through hell," he said. "I want to thank those guys who liberated us."
Quote:
Crew Meets After 52 Years
The Hawk Eye / Thursday, June 27, 1996
For nearly 50 years, Floyd Haupt was sure Glenn Hultquist was dead.
Hultquist was the pilot of Crew 3084 of the 464th Bomber Group of the 777th Squadron. Haupt, an Arizona boy who served as Hultquist's navigator, was part of the 10-man squad on its way to finish off World War II.
They'd gotten together in May 1944, training to fly a B-24 Liberator in Colorado. After picking up the plane, they took the scenic route through South America where radio operator/gunner Don Hayden picked up the monkey before heading to an Italian air base, where someone swiped their plane. They were split up in the first week for what was supposed to be indoctrination flights.
But Hultquist's plane was shot down. The 23-year old farm boy from Swedesburg, north of Mount Pleasant, spent the rest of the war in a POW camp; another member of Crew 3084 was killed in action that summer day.
The war ended. They're still amazed and incredibly thankful that all but one of the 10 came back alive.
Tuesday, the survivors of Crew 3084 met again for the first time in Hultquist's Burlington living room. By one of those twists of fate Haupt had seen an article in the Phoenix, Ariz. newspaper in 1993 with a quote from a member of the 777th Squadron. It was then he found out that the group held reunions. He got a list of other Squadron alumni.
They got in touch. Glenn and Lois had been in touch with other crew members already. The reunion evolved.
They started talking as soon as they hit the door. The monkey stories, the crash stories, the injury stories. They wives had all heard the stories before and were in Lois Hultquist's kitchen trading stories of their own.
Larry Kilarski made it back. A 19-year-old tail gunner from Chicago, he returned there after the war and worked as a tuck-pointer. His wife Leona stayed home, though.
Co-pilot Jasper Davis, a 24-year-old who returned to Thomasville, Ga., to run the family business, came up with his wife Marthaline. She was in the kitchen with Marge Hayden, the wife of 18-year-old radio operator Don Hayden, now of Rockford, Ill., (who retired from the phone company) and Shirley Droschkey of Cove, Ore. She married Bill Droschkey after he took his G.I. Bill and went to pharmacy school. Droschkey was a 19-year-old farm boy from Orafino, Idaho, when he was assigned engineer/gunner of Crew 3084.
Haupt, the 23-year-old navigator of the crew, came by train from Provo, Utah, where he had taught math at Brigham Young University after the war. He lost his wife, Marian, 19 years ago.
They were a diverse group then, but that common thread of surviving the war has stitched them together. The stories they've told have been told before, but seldom with such passion and detail. And even though they were split up after Hultquist, their pilot, was captured, they were almost always with another guy from the crew. So as the stories continued to flow Wednesday morning, there were more details being added that hadn't been there before.
Like the crash. Davis, Haupt, and Kilarksi had all been on a mission that ended with a less-then-desirable landing. The intercom system had been shot out early in the emergency, so they guys up front didn't know what the guys in back were going through. Now they know.
Three of the enlisted men made it back for the reunion, as did three of the officers. Three members of crew 3084 have died. A fourth enlisted man could not make the reunion.
They looked at old medals and scrapbooks. They shared memories. They remembered being young and cocky, a flight crew about to take on the skies.
There's a picture of them, right out of training, young and handsome in their leather jackets. Don Hayden pointed out members of the crew for a visitor.
"See that good-looking fellow in the front row?" he asked.
"That could be any of them," his wife Marge said.
They're still a good-looking group now, 52 years later, but that cockiness is gone. They came back in 1945 with something some people never learn. A reverence for life. Nearly 30,000 airmen died in the skies over Europe during World War II.
"We were placed together in front of a rather considerable obstacle," Hayden said. "We're certainly cognizant of the fact that some of us gave their lives and their limbs. That certainly binds us together."
