As March arrived, it was not so much a question of how to escape but
why.
The American and British prisoners knew from the broadcasts they heard on their secret radio that the war would be over in a few short months, if not weeks. Why risk it?
You were more likely to get home sooner by waiting to be liberated than by wandering through the Alps. Of course, there were wounded prisoners who might not hang on until the Allied troops arrived, but those men were in no condition to think of escape.
One British officer saw things differently. Many of the other prisoners knew of his plans and respected his courage and cunning, if not his reasoning. The man dyed a uniform and modified it to look like civilian clothing. Somehow, possibly by trading with a guard, he obtained some German currency. Local civilians often visited the camp on business. In broad daylight, the British officer, dressed in his new clothes, fell in behind one group of civilians and walked right out through the front gate.
If any of the civilians were suspicious, the Brit had a story prepared and he spoke fluent German. When he had been gone for two weeks, the happy speculation among the prisoners was that their comrade had made it. However, a day or so later, the escapee was brought back into camp and thrown into solitary confinement. Although his plan to get out of the stalag had worked perfectly, the British officer had been unable to get out of the Alpine valley. The Germans had simply bottled up both ends of the only road traversing the valley, leaving him only one route of escape—over the impossibly high and rugged mountains.
No one else would attempt escape from Stalag 18, but day by day the prisoners saw signs that indicated they might soon be free. P-47 Thunderbolts were venturing into the valley looking for targets, and then one April morning, Art spotted about thirty airplanes approaching the town of Spittal. A fellow prisoner asked him what they were.
“Those are B-17s,” Art replied. His first thought was that the Fortresses were returning home from a mission, but then, noticing the tightness of the formation, Art came to another conclusion:
“I think they’re on a bomb run!” The words had just left his lips when bombs began to fall on Spittal, causing great excitement among the German guards. Art doubted the prison camp was in very much danger. He guessed the target was Spittal’s small train yard. If the P-38s and P-47s had not attacked the camp, there was not much reason to think the B-17s would do so. Apparently the Allied authorities were aware of the camp’s location and had placed it out of bounds in their strike plans.
The bombing of Spittal was a good sign, Art concluded. If the American Air Force was hitting targets of such little importance, it had to mean most of the major targets had already been destroyed. The war was nearing its end.
Art was walking along the inner fence of the American and British compound when he first heard of the German surrender. A normally stone-faced guard, who had never spoken to him, said, “Well, the war is over.”
“If it is, I haven’t heard about it,” Art replied.
“Yes, the war is over. We will all be going home soon.”
Art had seen the trains rolling past the prison camp, each overloaded with wounded and dispirited German soldiers fleeing the advancing Russian army in the east. They were a beaten-looking bunch, Art thought. And more of the prison guards were disappearing each day. Still Art found it hard to believe he would soon be going home. Later, on the same day that he spoke with the guard, the Americans and British of Stalag 18 received word that the news of the surrender was real.
By monitoring their radio, the prisoners knew the British army was very close, but their first liberator was an American Air Force doctor who parachuted out of a B-24 and landed near camp. There was not a single German guard left to greet him.
The doctor had been sent ahead to treat what prisoners he could and to prepare the worst cases for swift evacuation. He also brought the happy news that plenty of food was on the way.
The following day, Art watched four B-24 bombers approaching the area. The citizens of Spittal were also watching, and as the Liberators’ bomb bay doors began to open, most of the villagers scurried for cover. It was not bombs that fell that day, but canisters filled with food and medical supplies. The majority of the canisters landed just outside the stalag and were easily retrieved by the prisoners.
A few of the canisters landed in Spittal; but instead of opening them, the local civilians reported the locations to Allied officers at the prison camp. The villagers wanted the victors to know they were cooperating completely. They were also nervous about the thousands of Russian prisoners who were now unguarded. Their fear was well grounded.
Allied headquarters had sent word that General Eisenhower advised all prisoners to remain in their camps until troops arrived to evacuate them. The Americans, British and French stayed put, but the Russians would not. Many of them invaded the little town of Spittal, hung its gauleiter (the local Nazi leader) from a lamppost, and went on a spree, vandalizing and harassing the local population.
Order was quickly restored when the British Army arrived a few days before May 8, the date set for the official overall surrender of German forces in Europe. Art was given a new British uniform, placed in an ambulance with several other wounded prisoners and driven to an airfield near the Yugoslav border. Allied aircraft were awaiting the POWs’ arrival. Art had awakened in a German prison camp that morning, and by the early afternoon he was resting comfortably in an Allied hospital in Italy.
The Army doctors, nurses and staff treated the former prisoners with kindness and understanding. Art received a complete
physical examination, and his condition and medical options were carefully documented. The doctors informed him that his feet and legs were healing nicely and that he could expect to regain almost unrestricted mobility. His right elbow joint, however, had been severely damaged and would require an operation. Their opinion did not surprise Art. While the injury to his elbow was not causing him great pain, he had only a few degrees of motion with his right arm.
He was given a choice. The doctors told him they could conduct the operation in Italy or it could be done when he reached the United States. The young navigator wanted to go home. By the third week of May 1945, Art was on board a hospital airplane bound from Naples, Italy, to the United States. He was an alarmingly thin twenty-year-old combat veteran who carried home memories that would remain vivid for the rest of his life.
Many of the memories were painful to recall—awakening in midair, the bone-breaking impact on the mountain, the sense of being dead and the reality of seeing the lifeless body of one of his crewmates beside the smoldering wreckage of his airplane. But there were also good memories—the reunion with four of his buddies at the antiaircraft battery, a German New Year’s party, a pretty nurse who brought her enemy a book to read, Hans and Hanslow, and a little Austrian girl with the gift of an apple.
Only days before his departure back home to America, something happened that would become one of Art’s most cherished memories. One morning during his stay at the Allied hospital in Italy, Art was escorted along with dozens of other wounded American airmen, sailors, and soldiers to the building’s lobby. No one would tell them where they were being taken. When the frail patients arrived in the lobby, they found almost the entire hospital staff there applauding them. Then a team of Army officers moved down the line—stopping, saluting, and placing a medal on the chest of each man. More than a few of the onlookers
wiped away tears as each of the battle-wounded veterans stood at attention on his crutch or cane, or sat as erect as possible in his wheelchair. These young Americans, like tens of thousands of others, risked their lives and shed their own blood for their country.
Somehow they had survived in foxholes, on beaches, at sea or in enemy skies. Each would have a story to take home. Some would hold their stories deep inside them for decades after the war. Some would take their untold stories to their graves. Others would share their stories with family and friends and allow them to be handed down to unborn generations. They were remarkable men with remarkable stories.
The presiding officer stepped in front of Sergeant Arthur Frechette Jr., saluted, and then pinned the Purple Heart medal to the airman’s shirt. The few spectators who had heard how Art earned his medal knew that his was one of the most amazing stories of survival of the war. He was the man who fell fifteen thousand feet, without a parachute, and lived.
After the War
Arthur Frechette Jr.
was admitted to a hospital immediately after his return to the United States. In June 1945 he was pleased to learn the Army was transferring him to another hospital in Massachusetts, not a great distance from his parents in Groton, Connecticut, who had only recently learned their son was alive. Art would remain a patient at the hospital until January 1946, during which time he would undergo two operations on his right arm. Recovery was augmented by daily physical therapy sessions that returned almost normal mobility to his injured arm and knee. Occasional pain in his extremities would be a lifelong reminder of the day he fell in the Alps.
In March 1946, Art was released from military service. He once again enrolled at the University of Connecticut, changing his major to business. In the summer of 1947 he decided to attend a semester at the University of Vermont, where he had done part of his military training. There on the Vermont campus, the former airman met an attractive and wholesome young coed named Doris Barnard, who was a teacher taking summer classes. Art and Doris were married in 1948.
The following year, Art graduated from the University of Connecticut and soon after went to work for Sears, Roebuck and Co. In 1959 he joined Doris in the teaching profession. His first assignment was a fifth-grade class in Haddam, Connecticut. The early sixties brought a move to the Cheshire school system, where Art was promoted to supervisor of curriculum. He spent four rewarding decades in education before retiring in 1986.
Art and Doris Frechette were still living in Cheshire, Connecticut, when the author first met them. They had raised three sons: Mike, Tom and Bill, and they spoke proudly of their three grandchildren. Art was active as a guest speaker at area high schools and libraries, where he related his World War II experiences to a new generation of young Americans.
In 2003, Art Frechette Jr. passed away, fifty-nine years after he had cheated death on an Austrian mountain.
Lyle Pearson
, Art’s wartime pilot, had been forced to march from Brixen to Bolzano, and from there he was transported to Frankfurt, Germany. During eight days of interrogation at Frankfurt, the American pilot was not physically abused by his captors, but he was repeatedly threatened with death. At one point, a rifle muzzle was shoved into the back of his head and the weapon was cocked.
When his interrogators finally determined they could not intimidate the American aviator, he was sent by train to a prisoner of war camp in northern Germany. During a midnight stop in
Berlin, the guards allowed their prisoners out of their boxcars to relieve themselves. Civilians at the train station began to hurl rocks and gravel at the prisoners, and the soldiers hurriedly herded the men back on board the train.
Pearson weighed 190 pounds on the morning of his final bombing mission. Less than five months later, at the time of his liberation from a German stalag, the pilot had lost fifty pounds. Like thousands of other ex-POWs, he was transferred to Camp Lucky Strike in France, in preparation for his return to the United States. It was at Lucky Strike that Pearson enjoyed his first reunion with a crew member. Another thin but cheerful airman walked up to him and asked, “So, Lyle, do you still think you’ve got it made?” It was his copilot, Sam Wheeler.
After his discharge from the Army in December 1945, Pearson returned to his wife and his home state of Minnesota. For the next five years, he was in and out of various hospitals, seeking relief from continuing knee and back problems. The war injuries would nag Pearson for the rest of his life—and inspire him in a lifelong dedication to help other disabled American veterans.
In 1954, he went to work for the Mankato, Minnesota, Probation Department. Six years later, he became head of the Nicollet County Probation Department. Pearson spent almost thirty years serving Nicollet County, retiring in 1983 as Director of Court Services. Even more fulfilling to Pearson was his membership and leadership in the Disabled American Veterans organization. He rose to the office of Minnesota State Commissioner, and in 1975 he was elected national president of the DAV.
At the age of seventy-seven, he was invited back to the town of Brixen (Italian: Bressanone), Italy. The occasion was the 1998 dedication of two monuments constructed by local citizens to honor the dead airmen of two separate bomber crashes on nearby mountains. Pearson went to pay tribute to four of his crewmen
who had perished on December 29, 1944. He was accompanied on the trip by his wife, Katherine, and his lifelong friend and former right waist gunner, Charlie Lyon, and Lyon’s wife.
After the dedication ceremony, the former pilot was approached by a man who had been only eleven years old when the fuselage of Pearson’s bomber had fallen near his family’s farmhouse. The man gave the former aviators and their wives a tour of the site and later took Pearson to the basement of the farmhouse, where the man’s father had saved a few pieces of the downed Fortress.
Today, one of the propeller hubs of B-17 number 44-6652 is displayed on a shelf in Lyle Pearson’s den. It is a precious reminder and his own little monument to his bomber crew—the survivors and the four boys who never made it back.
Lyle and Katherine Pearson are the parents of seven children (Colleen, Lyle Jr., Rosemary, Lloyd, Ann Marie, Gail, and Kurt) and have ten grandchildren. Pearson continues to serve his country as a member of the National Committee for POW and MIA Affairs and the Disabled American Veterans.