January 26, 2025 • 39 mins
Mike Croissant, a retired CIA officer, set out on a mission to learn more about his uncle. His uncle was an a bomber crewman that survived World War II without of scratch but was then killed in a plane crash shortly after returning home. Drawing from his uncle’s letters home, along with dozens of interviews with surviving Veterans, Mike produced “Bombing Hitler’s Hometown; The Untold Story of the Last Mass Bombing Raid of World War II in Europe." It describes the April 25, 1944 mission to bomb Linz, Austria. Hitler spent many of his early life in Linz, Austria. He intended to make it the cultural capital of Europe after the war. Strategically, it was also a key location for Nazi Germany. As a transportation hub, tons of war materials flowed through the rail yards. It was also defended by more than 164 anti-aircraft batteries, one of the most intense defensive concentrations in 1944. Given the fact that Russian troops had already entered Berlin on April 16th, we discuss whether this risky mission was even necessary. Hitler committed suicide on April 30th. Mike’s book puts the readers right in the cabin with the aviators that flew B-24 and B-17 bombers on the April 1, 1944 mission. Readers will experience the cold, the terror of flying through the flak barrages and the heartbreak of seeing fellow aircrews get shot down. He also does an excellent job of taking us through the experiences of the crews who were shot down and some of the residents on the ground that captured or helped them. Croissant tells us about one crew member was captured by Russian troops who, despite being our allies, tortured him for several days after accusing him of being a German spy. In one bizarre incident, an Austrian Commandant tried to draft crew members into joining a guerilla war against the Nazis. TAKEAWAY: “I did it for the men because they deserve it and I did it for their kids. Their kids need to know, and indeed, all Americans need to know what those men did for us right at the very end of the most destructive conflict in human history.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
We all owe them, but very few of us know them.
They of the men and women of our military and
first responder communities, and these are their stories. American Warrior
Radio is on the air.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to American Warrior Radio.
This is Ben Bueler Garcia, American Warrior Radio broadcast for
the Silencer Central Studios. They're the nation's largest suppressor dealer.
They're ready to make your slencer buying journey as simple
and painfully as possible. Call them today at eight sixty
six six four zero three two seven zero to get
the process started, or visit Silencercentral dot com. Be sure
(00:46):
to check Silencercentral dot com to confirm if owning a
silencer is legal in your state. In the earliest stages
of the European Campaign during World War Two, bomber crews
were required to complete twenty five missions before rotating home.
On April first, nineteen forty four, the threshold was raised
to thirty missions, and in June of the forty four
it was once again raised, this time to thirty five missions.
(01:08):
Now there are missions and then there are missions. Some
commanders would assigned Cruis to milk runs, a less threatening
target as they approached their thirty fifth mission. Today, we're
going to talk about one single mission. It took place
on April twenty fifth, nineteen forty five, and it was
about as far away from a milk run as one
could possibly get their assignment to bomb Adolf Hitler's hometown.
(01:29):
Join us today to tell this story of Mike Wassant.
Mike has retired from the CIA in twenty twenty one
after serving twenty years as an analyst and a targeting officer.
In twenty eleven, Mike set out on a quest to
learn more about his uncle, a World War Two veteran
who survived the entire conflict without a scratch, but perished
to a tragic plan crash shortly after returning home. The
result is his book, Bombing Hitler's Hometown, The Untold story
(01:52):
of the last mass bomber rate of World War II
in Europe. Mike, Welcome to American Warrior Radio. I've been
glad to be here. Thank you well. I tell you
I've I've been waiting a while for this. I apologize
it took so long. I truly truly enjoyed your book, Mirket.
I'd highly recommend that everybody read it. It's very well researched,
very well written, and I think it enlightens us to,
(02:14):
particularly for my generation, things that we just did not
know about that conflict. But tell us briefly, how did
this labor of love come about? It came about through
a family mystery, and as you mentioned, my uncle survived
the war, but unfortunately passed just a few weeks after
it ended in a military plane crash in Wisconsin. My
(02:36):
family was never given an answer from the army that
was satisfactory to them about why that crash happened. So
in two thousand and seven or eight, I started my
own kind of investigation into the accident, using the documents
that I could find, and I concluded that the accident
was entirely preventable, and it was probably a combination of
(02:59):
Quean era and poor maintenance that gave my family a
bit of peace of mind, I think, But for me
it just.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Kind of lit a fire. I wanted to learn as
much about my uncle as I could, so I began
talking to my aunts. It was a family of eight children.
I talked to all of the ants. You all have
a photographic memory, and eventually they gifted me the letters
that he wrote home, and I used those two to
(03:29):
learn more and more about him, including which combat missions
he was on. And as I came across a mission
that he went on, I would study it. I would
study the target, the area that they bombed, and if
there was anything significant historically or culturally about the target
and why the air force went to that particular city
(03:51):
or target that particular day. So I'm going down the list.
He went on twenty one combat missions. I'm going down
the list, and I come to the last one and
it's Linz, Austria. Well, I didn't know it at the time.
I didn't know the Hitler connection, so that really caught
my attention. Then we can talk more about Lenz as
(04:12):
we go, if we want to. On that particular mission,
the men faced an unbelievable anti aircraft barrage, far eclipsing
anything that they had experienced up to that point. And
according to the accounts that I read on the Internet
by several veterans, it was just a barrage that literally
(04:34):
blotted out the sun. So as I dug more and
more into it, and I began conducting interviews at the
point where these men were in their late eighties, and
early nineties at that point. So when I began conducting interviews,
most of the men had not spoken of it, but
most of them were ready to. So I caught them
(04:56):
at just the right point in their lives where they
took this thing was so horrific that they locked away
in their minds and finally opened up about it. So
I was a great beneficiary of that. I interviewed eventually
about fifty five men who survived the mission, and combined
with both on the ground research and lens and in
(05:17):
other places, and documentary research primary source research, I put
together this story of the last mission and let the
men who were shot down went through to get home.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
So Russian troops entered Berlin on April sixteenth. This mission
was on April twenty fifth. Hitler committed suicide on April thirtieth.
The Nazi capital fell on may TEWI as I wasn't
too far into your book, Mike, before I started to
wondering myself, was this mission really necessary?
Speaker 3 (05:50):
You know, that's a question that I thought of often,
and having spoken with these men who literally risked their
lives to do this, and unfortunately twenty four men lost
their lives doing it, That's not something I wanted to
talk to them about, you know, It's something I debate
with myself about and what people that I've met. That's
(06:11):
the book came out. The reason we went on this
mission was because Linz had a massive rail system and
at this point in the war, with the news closing
around Nazi Germany, this was the last remaining major rail
system available to the Nazis. And we know in hindsight
(06:34):
that the so called National Redoubt was a myth, that
this idea that the Germans would retreat to the Alps
and conduct the guerrilla war against the Allies, that was
still very much thought of as a possibility at the time.
So we for the reconnaissance airplanes detected some two thousand
(06:57):
railcars full of presumed war materiel. In late April or
forty five. It was decided that these not only did
the rail system need to be cut, but those rail
cars needed to be destroyed. So at the eleventh hour
of the war, this mission was launched, and it was
(07:19):
a big one. It was about five hundred and fifty
bombers at about two hundred escort fighters, so we're talking
about a very very big force and something by the
way they would never again be done over the European continent.
This would be the li very last time, and there
had been previous missions, but they had been bemed ineffective.
So this was kind of a plan to be sort
(07:41):
of a knockout ball. We're not going to miss this
time because we're just going to inundate the sky with bombers.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Maybe absolutely correct.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
And then the bad news is that the capital of
Austria had fallen too, the Soviets on April twelfth and thirteenth,
so just a couple of weeks earlier. But before that happened,
the Germans were able to withdraw a great many of
their anti aircraft guns and they placed them in lens.
So Linz was known to the men of the fifteenth
(08:11):
Air Force as a tough target, but it was even
more so now half again. His many guns were protecting
Linz on April the twenty fifth, as before, So what
was yesterday's tough target is today's brutal target. And the
men were absolutely shot the pieces above the city.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
I've got to imagine here, you've seen the scene in
the movies where they're in the briefing tant or the
quantset out whatever it is, and they roll open the
curtains there so that the crews can see their target
for the day. And I gotta imagine there were some
pretty audible groans and base slapping going on when they
saw that they were being assigned to fly to Lenz.
(08:52):
I talked to if you guys who remember that brief thing,
and one of them was a rookie, and he didn't
understand why so many men were cussing and besides themselves
and others, we you know, we're sick to their stomachs
and so forth. Thinking that, you know, the war is.
Nobody knew the exact end date of the war, but
they knew it was coming up, and to learn that
(09:12):
they were going into the mouth of the beast was
enough to fill them with dread at the very least
time we come back. One thing I loved about your
book is we actually got to know so many of
these crew members. I felt like I knew some of
them personally by the time I was done with your books.
When we come back, I want to talk about a
couple of them that really jumped out, you know, at me.
(09:34):
And we'll do that, ladies and gentle if you want
to know about Mike's work. More about Mike's work, you
can visit Mike Croissant dot com, c R, O, I, S, S,
A n T dot com and don't forget sharing these
important messages. We've got over six hundred proadcasts at American
Warrior Radio dot com. There's your host, Bendula Garcia will
be right back. Welcome back to American Radio. Ladies and gentlemen.
(10:14):
There's your host, ben Buora Garcia. We're talking with Mike Rossant.
Mike's retired CIA officer, and he's written just a fabulous,
fabulous book called Bombing Hitler's Hometown. I definitely recommend you
get that book and read it. It's the untold story
of the last mass bomber rate of World War Two
in Europe. Mike, it's important. So I briefly just talk
about why Lynz was We talked about the tactical reasons
(10:38):
for this bombing raid, but I can't help that maybe
you know, somebody also wanted to focus stick in the
eye of Hitler too. Why was this considered his hometown?
Hiller as well, that was born just inside the Austrian
border with Germany and his father was a civil servant,
so the family didn't move around a bit, and when
Hitler was nine years old, they relocated to a suburb
(11:02):
of Linz and for the next nine or ten years
they would live in or near the city of Lenz.
Linz was then and is still today, the third largest
city in Austria. Back then, the population was about sixty
thousand people, most of them ethnic Germans, and it was
also a hotbed of German nationalism. So Hitler as an
(11:25):
adolescent enters middle school and he's exposed to German nationalist ideas,
which is one major thing that happens to him in
this timeframe. A couple of others are you know both
of his parents die. We know that he had a
frop relationship with his father, to say the least, but
he was very close with his mother. When his mother died,
he would shortly thereafter move to Vienna and the rest,
(11:49):
as they say, is history. He also lost his baby
brother while they lived in Lenz. Hitler would drop out
of high school at age sixteen, I believe, and would
become kind of a vagabat. He would spend his days
strolling around the city. He carried a sketch book where
he would write poetry or draw. He loved Linz. He
(12:11):
loved many parts many things about Linz, but some parts
of it he didn't like. And he would draw in
his sketch book what he would do to the city
if he had the power to do so. So the
Yeadow Wessel Dreamer of you Know nineteen oh five nineteen
oh six would come back thirty years later as its conqueror.
(12:33):
In March of nineteen thirty eight, Hitler entered Austry at
the head of a conquering army. They stopped to pay
respects at his parents grave, and then they made a
bee line for Linz, and there were so many people
in the streets to greet him that it took much
longer to get there than needed. According to I witness account,
(12:55):
there were probably more people on the main square Lens
than there were living in the entire city. Everybody came
from everywhere to greet the prodigal son. He went into
the balcony of the town hall, and after being introduced,
he gave a short speech, and you can find the
(13:15):
transcript on the internet and even some audio clips of it.
It's pretty chilling. He portrays himself as the prodigal son
come to reunite his homeland with the fatherland. So the
crowd goes wild, and in fact so much so that
Hitler and Gurring decided then and there that they should
(13:39):
go ahead and just annex Austria. So one could argue
that history's course was changed by that crowd that day.
In Lynn's Austria, he immediately begins turning his dreams into reality.
He commissions a study to begin transforming Lends into the
(14:00):
cultural capital of Europe. He plans to be buried there
with his parents. He plans to remake large parts of
the city in his own image and turn it into
kind of a Rome on the Daniebreer. It will be
encased in marble and will be a tremendous cultural capital.
Among other things, there would be an art museum in
(14:22):
which all of the artwork that his minions would soon
begin stealing from private families and museums across Europe and
would all go into this museum and Lenz. In order
to pay for that, he had to raise tax revenue,
so he begins to industrialize the city, and that results
(14:43):
in the creation of the Herman Gering Steel Works, which
produces steel and some chemicals, and then later armaments as
the war turns against the Germans. And in addition to that,
the rail system has greatly expanded. So take all of
that together and it makes lens and military target. Well
what I'm here, it's not just a syop. Clearly this
(15:04):
was a valid military target. It was a valid It
was absolutely a valid military target.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
And in fact, in all of my documentary reading reports
from the time, I didn't even get the sense that
we knew the Hiller connection to Lin's.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Okay, fair enough. I'm curious the I'm wondering because we
experienced this as well, Mike, And you know, if there's
ever a World War Two a Korean era veteran, I mean,
they go right to the front of the line for
American Warrior Radio because it's so important, so important to
make sure these stories get told and recorded. You know,
as they get to their later years, I do see
(15:42):
them open up a little bit. I'm curious if you
ever got a sense that part of the reason that
they were willing to talk to you was because of
your uncle, because you had a personal connection. I think
it was partly that.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I think it was also that I had, clearly, hopefully
in their eyes, prepare I spent a long time studying,
learning what they wore, how their equipment worked, what they
did at each position on the aircraft. I didn't go
in as a rookie interviewer, and between my empathy, my
(16:18):
showing my desire to know what it was actually like,
and to show that I had prepared in advance pretty well,
I think showed some of them that I was worthy
of their time. And I had repeat interviews with a
number of them, and they indeed became quite close with
a handful, And there was just a life changing experience
(16:40):
for me to get to know these men so well
and have them unburdened themselves to me they carried so
much inside for so long, and to finally see maybe
some peace come about through talking about it was a
tremendous blessing and it's a period of my life that
I will always look back on very fondly.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
But I use the word, you know, labor of love,
because that's that's a sense I got about your writing
this book. Michael got to getting close to another break
just about a minute. But I'm curious. I saw an
interview where you mentioned that you don't only write this
book for your family, but for the families of all
those other veterans as a way of closure for them.
(17:23):
And I just think that's that's a very powerful statement.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Well, I appreciate that, and indeed it was it was
exactly that. You know, then all around the country promoting
the book, and I've talked to hundreds of people at
this point, and the children of veterans that approach me,
it's heartbreaking. Then they say, my dad never talked about this,
and oftentimes they're in tears. Sometimes I am too, because
(17:49):
they didn't know what their dads did. And then that's
just it's heartbreaking, as I said, And I hope that
this book helps people to understand a little bit or
why they didn't.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
And maybe even couldn't talk about it. Well, at the
end of the book, there's some you do, some kind
of some reason you just talk about. You know, nowadays
we call it PTSD with just how some of these men,
you know, a car backfiring, or they just they couldn't
attend a fireworks show anymore. They're just there was all
these things and they kept it inside themselves. Where I think,
(18:22):
you know, nowadays we're a little bit better about getting
that out and understanding that. Mike, when come back, I
Mike to introduce our listeners to some of these air
crew members, some some really fascinating stories that are that
are told exceptionally well. Ladies and gentlemen, again, I encourage
you to get the book by Mike Rosant. It's called
Bombing Hitler's Hometown. You can learn more at Mike Croissant
dot com. Croslana spell just like you probably think it
(18:44):
is c R O I S S A n T.
Don't forget to share these important messages. We're everywhere. We
can find our most current episodes on your favorite streaming platform.
Of course, all of them are ARKI at American Warrior
Radio dot com. We'll be right back. Welcome back to
(19:13):
American Radio. Ladies and gentlemen. There's your host, Ben buor Garcia.
We're coming to you from the Silencer Central Studios. Adding
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Central today at eight sixty six six four zero three
(19:36):
two seven zero or visit slencercentral dot com. We're talking
with Microsoft. Mike has written just a very very powerful
book called Bombing Hitler's Hometown's about the last mass bomber
rate of World War Two, which took place on April
twenty fifth, just before literally five days before Hitler committed suicide. Mike,
(19:56):
I'm going to have to congratulate you from reading your book.
I often felt like I was in that bomber with
those crews. I felt like I could I could hear
the sounds, like I could smell the smells, and it's
just a really Again, I can't recommend it enough that
people really should read this book. There's a couple there's
too many stories of telling. Of course, we want people
(20:17):
to buy the book, Mike. We don't want to give
it all the way here. But you know, there's a
couple of names that jumped out. But one of them
that struck me right off the bat is I'm kind
of into politics. But George McGovern, who would eventually become
a presidential candidate, was on this mission.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
He was he was on his last mission. As you
noted in the intro, the men had to complete thirty
five combat missions in order to get to go home.
And this was mcgovery last. There were a couple of
men in that situation on this day, and there were
a couple of men, including men that I talked to,
who were on their first mission today. So for mcgovernor
(20:54):
it was and for all of them there was a
very tough day. His aircraft was literally filled with holes
from front to back, very heavy damage. One of his
men was wounded. I did speak with him. He was
the last surviving member of the crew, Bill Ashlock. The
mission was so horrific that it caused his flight engineer
(21:17):
to have a I guess you were calling a nervous
breakdown and have to be hospitalized. The aircraft he lost
hydraulic power, so they had to deploy parachutes out the
windows in order to stop when they made it back
to base. It was a survival story and for many
of the men, in fact, it was that way. This
(21:38):
was a mission that if if you came home, you
were more than just a veteran, you were a survivor.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah. I found it interesting in the book you talked
about this was my government's last mission. It should have
been a milk run, but he and this is a
sign of his leadership. He actually put it up to
a vote among his crew about whether they wanted to
go on this mission. If they didn't, he would he
would go with another crew, right. But I thought that
that was pretty pretty powerful as well. There's another fascinating character,
(22:08):
Jack Taylor, fascinating to me because of his background. He
was you say that he was could have been considered
one of the original I don't think it's original Navy seal,
but certainly one of their predecessors.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
Jack Tigler was a Navy officer naval officer who was
recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, which of course
was the predecessor to the CIA. He was inserted into
southeastern Europe on a secret mission to gather intelligence for
the Allies and after It's a long story, but his
(22:45):
communications gear was lost during the parachute insertion, so he
collected a bunch of intelligence but had no way to
pass it on, and eventually his small group was discovered
and captured. He was tortured and who eventually was sent
to Matthausen, which is of course the most notorious concentration
(23:08):
camp in Austria, just some sixteen miles I believe from Lenz,
and he was there when one of the crews that
were shot down over Lenz that final mission was brought in.
This crew suffered free members killed in action above the
target or on the descent and parachutes. They were all
shot at on their way down, and they were dragged
(23:30):
inside the concentration camp where the deputy camp coming abused
them physically and verbally for quite some time. They were
at the end of the night. They were brought into
cells and they could, with great effort, poke their head
up above to get a view of the outside. There
(23:52):
was sort of a barred cell window above, and they
heard a man whistling Yankee doodle, So they quickly got
one man up on another man's shoulder so they could
look out the window, and they saw Jack Taylor. And
of course they didn't know who it was at the time,
but that was Jack Taylor. Jack remained in the camp.
(24:16):
The flyers were released to a different camp in the
closing days, but Jack was there for the liberation and
uh a very emotional part of the book. The liberators
of the camp, who were part of Padden's Third Army,
came in to find that Jack Taylor had organized the
band and taught them how to play the national anthem,
(24:37):
so they were they were greeted with that, and it
was there were There was not a dry eye in
the house, as they say. And uh Taylor was he was.
He was obviously liberated that at that point and nursed
back to health. It was only in the camp for
less than a month.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
I believe, but he survived it and went on to
testify against several people in the Nuremberg trials. And unfortunately
he passed away at a very young age in just
a few years after the war ended in a plane crash.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Mike, I'm guessing, are any of these crew members still
with us?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Are they all gone now? I have lost contact with
all of them. I did speak to about fifty five survivors.
I maintained close relations with a handful of them. One
did survive until I got my book deal. This is
hard for me to talk about, but I of course
called him and told him I got the book deal.
(25:35):
He was very happy. I believe he was about ninety
eight at the time. He was wounded and bled and
nearly died for his country. That day he called me back.
I was enjoying an adult beverage with my buddies to celebrate,
and he called me back and he thanked me. And
(25:55):
I said, why are you thanking me? What have I
possibly done? Maybe I didn't see it, I was probably
thinking it, But he said, now the children of US
veterans will understand why we couldn't talk about it. They
will understand what we did, and they know that packed
an emotional wall, needless to say. And that was the
last time I spoke with him. He passed away.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I believe in twenty twenty two. Well, I think it's
you know, kudos to you, or I mean, fifty five
interviews is a ton and I feel fortunate, Mike every
time I'm able to find one of these veterans and
get them on the air to tell their story. And
of course we all know that they're they're becoming fewer
and fewer from that generation. You know, we mentioned Jack
(26:40):
Taylor's experience. There's another thing you touch on in your
book about you know, the Soviets were supposedly supposed to
be our allies, but they didn't always quite fulfill that
very well highlighted. And then the story of Dale. See
if I got this right, Shabilsky, Yes, Sabilski, he is playing.
He had to the bail otter did his plane crash remindment,
(27:06):
his plane crash landed in Hungary. He was wounded in
two places. Dale was on his thirty third mission, so
the finish line was in sight, but they didn't quite
make it.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
He and his tail thenner were wounded. A crowd of
friendly Hungarians rushed to the aircraft and spirited away the
healthy members of the crew, and they took the two
wounded members in different directions, but they prevail Lepondal to
destroy his uniform and his identity papers, which was a mistake.
(27:39):
He had only his dog tags and his forty five
caliber pistol in his underwear. Accused him of being a
German spy.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
And Mike paused there because there's much more of this story,
but we do have to take another break, and I
want to want to give Dale all the credit he deserves.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's your host Ben Bla Garcia here
on American Warrior Radio. We're talking about Mike was Sant
about his book Bombing Hitler's hometown. I highly highly recommend it.
You can find that at Miccroissant dot com. A crossan
is spelled just like you would think ciss an t
(28:11):
dot com. There's lots of other great stuff, background photos,
and lots of other things you'll find at that website.
You definitely want to pay a business, stick around and
we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
You know.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
For over a decade now, it's been my privilege to
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(28:53):
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Speaker 2 (29:14):
Welcome back to American Warrior Radio. Lasion, gentlemen, there's your host,
Ben Bula Garcia. We're talking to Mike Wasson about some
of the stories he tells in his book Bombing Hitler's Hometown.
Just a great, great book written as a result of
extensive research, fifty five interviews with actual survivors of this mission,
just this horrific mission, and what happened to some of
these crew members afterwards, one of which was Dale Shabilski,
(29:38):
Mike your sanat The Soviets thought he was a German,
thought he was a spy, and that I mean he
had to endure all kinds of deprivations and torture while
just trying to get someone to get him in front
of an American consulate official.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
That's some of the most graphic and horrific parts of
the book. They always, within moments of giving himself over
to the Soviets, they began to beat him to humiliate him,
and then they turned him over to some thugs essentially
who interrogated him and tortured him. The timeline is unclear,
(30:13):
but it from you because of his recollection, you know,
and perhaps burying these memories away. But I surmised it
went on for several days. They essentially tempted to get
Dal to confess to being a German spy. He didn't
speak any German. They applied various means of torture to him.
(30:35):
He gave only his name, rank and serial number as required,
and he demanded to be handed over to the American consulate,
while eventually the Soviets did give into that and they
turned him over in what is now the Ukraine in Kiev,
and he would be put on a train there and
(30:56):
eventually to Odessa, Odessa on the Black which is a
major port in there he would be reunited with his
crew and repatriated through the Black Sea to Italy and
then eventually home.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Well, you talk the hypocrasy is not the right word,
might but you know, basically, the Russian officer threatened him
just before the meeting. Of course, they get him clean
clothes to try and clean him all up, and he says,
but if you tell people how we treated you, that's
not going to go so well, I mean, And then
they throw him back on the cell and take away
the clothes and he's back in his gi issued underwear
(31:32):
for another night and just some tough stuff. The other
part of it they fascinate is and also you tell
the stories of the people who were underneath the bombs.
And there was one very bizarre that the Truthman crew
where the Austrians actually tried to recruit them. They put
them in and German costumes, snuck them into this castle
(31:54):
and then tried to recruit them to join them in
a gorilla war against the Nazis. I mean that sounds
like some lout of a weird movie.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
It is, and I don't deny having some reservations about
that story initially from the sources I had domestically for that,
but I took two research troops to Linz, one in
twenty twelve and then more in depth one in twenty nineteen.
And in twenty nineteen I was sitting in a museum
(32:26):
in rural Austria and a small town, and I was
given a huge binder, probably three or four inches stick,
that a lovely Austrian man had compiled. He had spent
the latter part of his life trying to locate not
only the crash sites of all American bombers in Austria,
(32:46):
but to connect with men who were on them, and
the Toothman crew was one in which he did so.
He'd exchanged letters with a couple of members of the
crew who survived, and the letters were in the binder.
So I learned more about that story. I learned the
name of the Austrian commandant, and the story kind of
took shape from there. It's just as you said, you
(33:08):
can't really believe it as you're reading it. But these men,
the Austrians tried to draft them into a guerrilla war,
but the war ended before that could really get underway,
and they declined anyway. But before all that could happen,
the SS captured them. And it was just one of
many remarkable stories. And you know, more than once, over
(33:31):
the decade or more that it took to write the story,
it felt like I had to pinch myself.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
You said, there's a common thing there. Of course, anybody
knows anything about that history, whether you're Austrian or German
or whatever. If you're on the wrong side of that war,
you definitely would rather turn yourself over to the Americans
than the Russians. And so that seemed to be the
goal of a lot of these folks encouraged people to
read this. There's one kind of a snippet at the
end of your book there, Mike, that really struck me
(33:58):
about the power of that added with hal Millet, who
was part of these bomber crews, and of course he's
dropping ornans from you know whatever, thirty thousand feet twenty
thousand feet. But then later on they were giving tours
of the bomb targets for ground crews, and so he
was flying a lot lower and a lot closer up,
and he started to see the damage up close and personal,
(34:21):
and he just it really changed his heart when he
started thinking about, you know, before it was a military target,
I'm just bombita. But now he's thinking about, well, in
that class building, was there a mom was or a
dad or their children exactly?
Speaker 3 (34:34):
You know, when the war ended, the ground crews, the
men who serviced the aircraft, were in the war for
the duration there was. There was no time frame set
on the end of their service, unlike the air crews.
So as a gesture to them, the air crews took
the ground crewmen up for essentially low level aerial tours
(34:54):
of the target areas. And that's when Hell and many others,
the Norman Lear as well, who was in the books,
they saw very close up the damage their bombs did
and it completely destroyed how I mean, how was a
changed individual When he got home from the war. He
(35:15):
did have PTSD. He had to and this is told
in the book. He had to leave a movie theater
when he was watching one of the more well known
World War two movies about the bomber war because it
affected him too badly. It got so bad that for
how he had to take all of his memories of
the war and lock them away in the back of
(35:36):
his mind. He was a computer guy, and he described
it to me as placing his memories on a part
of the computer hard ride that couldn't be easily accessed.
And it took the intervention of his daughter, who read
on the internet a posting by his pilot seeking to
reunite the crew, that he finally opened himself up again.
(35:59):
And the memories came out rather slowly at first, but
by the time I got to him in his late eighties,
he was ready to, you know, uncork the bottle, and
I was the beneficiary of that. He did write a
little bit about his experiences, but most of what's in
the book about him is from our personal interviews. I
(36:21):
spent many hours with hol and he became my friend.
And this is not in the book, but I did
talk to him in the last hours for days of
his life. And I called him on the phone and
he was in hospice care and I could tell as
he was picking up the phone that he had been
revealing an audience in his hospital room with hottails from
(36:43):
the war. So it was really nice to know that
my friend seemingly had found peace because he had confided
in me that he carried a lot of regret and
guilt throughout his life, and to see him release that
was good.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Lesson, Mike, We're our time here is just about done?
Is it always happens with a great guest? We run
out of time quickly at I'd love to get your
wrap up thoughts, but I want to leave the listeners
with a quote, and this is from Achilles Kazakas, who
was one of the crew members on that mission, and
he said, together we cry today, and tomorrow we all laugh.
There's a room full of brothers in love. What else
(37:22):
are you hoping to achieve with this book? Like or
we get mission accomplished. I want to achieve a lasting
memory of these men. This was so close to being
lost to history, this mission and everything that happened surrounding it,
and that's just something I can live with. I couldn't
(37:43):
live with myself not having tried to tell this story.
So I took more than a decade of my life
to put the story together. I did it for the
men because they deserve it. And I did it for
their kids. Their kids need to know, and indeed all
Americans need to know what the men did for us
right at the very very end of the most destructive
(38:03):
conflict in human history. These men went on a mission
and when they came back, they were changed forever. The
book is a love letter to them and to their children,
and I hope you will read it.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
Well.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I definitely like said, congratulations, Mike, it's it's one of
the better. And we get set a lot of books,
you know, from folks that would want to come on
this show, and I have to say, honestly, it's it's
one of the better ones I've e've ever read. So
thank you very much, thank you my pleasure, ladies and gentlemen.
The book is called Bombing Hitler's Hometown. You can learn
more of a micro Croissant dot com C or I
(38:39):
S S A N T dot com. But please please
share these important stories because as Mike mentioned, it's more
it's really important that more and people hear about these
sacrifices that going back to previous generations, current generations, and
probably unfortunately future generations will make on our behalf. Remember
everybody who volunteered and real quick. My, all these guys
(39:00):
you interviewed, they didn't wait to get drafted, right, They volunteered.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
One percent of them volunteered.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
There you go, well, Mike, thanks again. Best wishes to
you for well. Write another book I'll be looking forward
to we'll see.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Ben, Hi, sir, take care of yourself. Don't forget ladies
and gentlemen. You'll find over six hundred podcasts at Americanwarriorradio
dot com. The most recent podcasts are on iTunes, Spotify, Apple, Pandora, iHeart.
Wherever you listen to your podcast, you can find us there.
If you can't find us, please send us a note.
I'll be sure to gets out there. Until next time,
all polishes and procedures are remain in place. Take care.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
If you've been listening to American Warrior Radio, archived episodes
may be found at Americanwarriorradio dot com or your favorite
podcast platform
We all owe them, but very few of us know them.
They of the men and women of our military and
first responder communities, and these are their stories. American Warrior
Radio is on the air.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to American Warrior Radio.
This is Ben Bueler Garcia, American Warrior Radio broadcast for
the Silencer Central Studios. They're the nation's largest suppressor dealer.
They're ready to make your slencer buying journey as simple
and painfully as possible. Call them today at eight sixty
six six four zero three two seven zero to get
the process started, or visit Silencercentral dot com. Be sure
(00:46):
to check Silencercentral dot com to confirm if owning a
silencer is legal in your state. In the earliest stages
of the European Campaign during World War Two, bomber crews
were required to complete twenty five missions before rotating home.
On April first, nineteen forty four, the threshold was raised
to thirty missions, and in June of the forty four
it was once again raised, this time to thirty five missions.
(01:08):
Now there are missions and then there are missions. Some
commanders would assigned Cruis to milk runs, a less threatening
target as they approached their thirty fifth mission. Today, we're
going to talk about one single mission. It took place
on April twenty fifth, nineteen forty five, and it was
about as far away from a milk run as one
could possibly get their assignment to bomb Adolf Hitler's hometown.
(01:29):
Join us today to tell this story of Mike Wassant.
Mike has retired from the CIA in twenty twenty one
after serving twenty years as an analyst and a targeting officer.
In twenty eleven, Mike set out on a quest to
learn more about his uncle, a World War Two veteran
who survived the entire conflict without a scratch, but perished
to a tragic plan crash shortly after returning home. The
result is his book, Bombing Hitler's Hometown, The Untold story
(01:52):
of the last mass bomber rate of World War II
in Europe. Mike, Welcome to American Warrior Radio. I've been
glad to be here. Thank you well. I tell you
I've I've been waiting a while for this. I apologize
it took so long. I truly truly enjoyed your book, Mirket.
I'd highly recommend that everybody read it. It's very well researched,
very well written, and I think it enlightens us to,
(02:14):
particularly for my generation, things that we just did not
know about that conflict. But tell us briefly, how did
this labor of love come about? It came about through
a family mystery, and as you mentioned, my uncle survived
the war, but unfortunately passed just a few weeks after
it ended in a military plane crash in Wisconsin. My
(02:36):
family was never given an answer from the army that
was satisfactory to them about why that crash happened. So
in two thousand and seven or eight, I started my
own kind of investigation into the accident, using the documents
that I could find, and I concluded that the accident
was entirely preventable, and it was probably a combination of
(02:59):
Quean era and poor maintenance that gave my family a
bit of peace of mind, I think, But for me
it just.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Kind of lit a fire. I wanted to learn as
much about my uncle as I could, so I began
talking to my aunts. It was a family of eight children.
I talked to all of the ants. You all have
a photographic memory, and eventually they gifted me the letters
that he wrote home, and I used those two to
(03:29):
learn more and more about him, including which combat missions
he was on. And as I came across a mission
that he went on, I would study it. I would
study the target, the area that they bombed, and if
there was anything significant historically or culturally about the target
and why the air force went to that particular city
(03:51):
or target that particular day. So I'm going down the list.
He went on twenty one combat missions. I'm going down
the list, and I come to the last one and
it's Linz, Austria. Well, I didn't know it at the time.
I didn't know the Hitler connection, so that really caught
my attention. Then we can talk more about Lenz as
(04:12):
we go, if we want to. On that particular mission,
the men faced an unbelievable anti aircraft barrage, far eclipsing
anything that they had experienced up to that point. And
according to the accounts that I read on the Internet
by several veterans, it was just a barrage that literally
(04:34):
blotted out the sun. So as I dug more and
more into it, and I began conducting interviews at the
point where these men were in their late eighties, and
early nineties at that point. So when I began conducting interviews,
most of the men had not spoken of it, but
most of them were ready to. So I caught them
(04:56):
at just the right point in their lives where they
took this thing was so horrific that they locked away
in their minds and finally opened up about it. So
I was a great beneficiary of that. I interviewed eventually
about fifty five men who survived the mission, and combined
with both on the ground research and lens and in
(05:17):
other places, and documentary research primary source research, I put
together this story of the last mission and let the
men who were shot down went through to get home.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
So Russian troops entered Berlin on April sixteenth. This mission
was on April twenty fifth. Hitler committed suicide on April thirtieth.
The Nazi capital fell on may TEWI as I wasn't
too far into your book, Mike, before I started to
wondering myself, was this mission really necessary?
Speaker 3 (05:50):
You know, that's a question that I thought of often,
and having spoken with these men who literally risked their
lives to do this, and unfortunately twenty four men lost
their lives doing it, That's not something I wanted to
talk to them about, you know, It's something I debate
with myself about and what people that I've met. That's
(06:11):
the book came out. The reason we went on this
mission was because Linz had a massive rail system and
at this point in the war, with the news closing
around Nazi Germany, this was the last remaining major rail
system available to the Nazis. And we know in hindsight
(06:34):
that the so called National Redoubt was a myth, that
this idea that the Germans would retreat to the Alps
and conduct the guerrilla war against the Allies, that was
still very much thought of as a possibility at the time.
So we for the reconnaissance airplanes detected some two thousand
(06:57):
railcars full of presumed war materiel. In late April or
forty five. It was decided that these not only did
the rail system need to be cut, but those rail
cars needed to be destroyed. So at the eleventh hour
of the war, this mission was launched, and it was
(07:19):
a big one. It was about five hundred and fifty
bombers at about two hundred escort fighters, so we're talking
about a very very big force and something by the
way they would never again be done over the European continent.
This would be the li very last time, and there
had been previous missions, but they had been bemed ineffective.
So this was kind of a plan to be sort
(07:41):
of a knockout ball. We're not going to miss this
time because we're just going to inundate the sky with bombers.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Maybe absolutely correct.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
And then the bad news is that the capital of
Austria had fallen too, the Soviets on April twelfth and thirteenth,
so just a couple of weeks earlier. But before that happened,
the Germans were able to withdraw a great many of
their anti aircraft guns and they placed them in lens.
So Linz was known to the men of the fifteenth
(08:11):
Air Force as a tough target, but it was even
more so now half again. His many guns were protecting
Linz on April the twenty fifth, as before, So what
was yesterday's tough target is today's brutal target. And the
men were absolutely shot the pieces above the city.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
I've got to imagine here, you've seen the scene in
the movies where they're in the briefing tant or the
quantset out whatever it is, and they roll open the
curtains there so that the crews can see their target
for the day. And I gotta imagine there were some
pretty audible groans and base slapping going on when they
saw that they were being assigned to fly to Lenz.
(08:52):
I talked to if you guys who remember that brief thing,
and one of them was a rookie, and he didn't
understand why so many men were cussing and besides themselves
and others, we you know, we're sick to their stomachs
and so forth. Thinking that, you know, the war is.
Nobody knew the exact end date of the war, but
they knew it was coming up, and to learn that
(09:12):
they were going into the mouth of the beast was
enough to fill them with dread at the very least
time we come back. One thing I loved about your
book is we actually got to know so many of
these crew members. I felt like I knew some of
them personally by the time I was done with your books.
When we come back, I want to talk about a
couple of them that really jumped out, you know, at me.
(09:34):
And we'll do that, ladies and gentle if you want
to know about Mike's work. More about Mike's work, you
can visit Mike Croissant dot com, c R, O, I, S, S,
A n T dot com and don't forget sharing these
important messages. We've got over six hundred proadcasts at American
Warrior Radio dot com. There's your host, Bendula Garcia will
be right back. Welcome back to American Radio. Ladies and gentlemen.
(10:14):
There's your host, ben Buora Garcia. We're talking with Mike Rossant.
Mike's retired CIA officer, and he's written just a fabulous,
fabulous book called Bombing Hitler's Hometown. I definitely recommend you
get that book and read it. It's the untold story
of the last mass bomber rate of World War Two
in Europe. Mike, it's important. So I briefly just talk
about why Lynz was We talked about the tactical reasons
(10:38):
for this bombing raid, but I can't help that maybe
you know, somebody also wanted to focus stick in the
eye of Hitler too. Why was this considered his hometown?
Hiller as well, that was born just inside the Austrian
border with Germany and his father was a civil servant,
so the family didn't move around a bit, and when
Hitler was nine years old, they relocated to a suburb
(11:02):
of Linz and for the next nine or ten years
they would live in or near the city of Lenz.
Linz was then and is still today, the third largest
city in Austria. Back then, the population was about sixty
thousand people, most of them ethnic Germans, and it was
also a hotbed of German nationalism. So Hitler as an
(11:25):
adolescent enters middle school and he's exposed to German nationalist ideas,
which is one major thing that happens to him in
this timeframe. A couple of others are you know both
of his parents die. We know that he had a
frop relationship with his father, to say the least, but
he was very close with his mother. When his mother died,
he would shortly thereafter move to Vienna and the rest,
(11:49):
as they say, is history. He also lost his baby
brother while they lived in Lenz. Hitler would drop out
of high school at age sixteen, I believe, and would
become kind of a vagabat. He would spend his days
strolling around the city. He carried a sketch book where
he would write poetry or draw. He loved Linz. He
(12:11):
loved many parts many things about Linz, but some parts
of it he didn't like. And he would draw in
his sketch book what he would do to the city
if he had the power to do so. So the
Yeadow Wessel Dreamer of you Know nineteen oh five nineteen
oh six would come back thirty years later as its conqueror.
(12:33):
In March of nineteen thirty eight, Hitler entered Austry at
the head of a conquering army. They stopped to pay
respects at his parents grave, and then they made a
bee line for Linz, and there were so many people
in the streets to greet him that it took much
longer to get there than needed. According to I witness account,
(12:55):
there were probably more people on the main square Lens
than there were living in the entire city. Everybody came
from everywhere to greet the prodigal son. He went into
the balcony of the town hall, and after being introduced,
he gave a short speech, and you can find the
(13:15):
transcript on the internet and even some audio clips of it.
It's pretty chilling. He portrays himself as the prodigal son
come to reunite his homeland with the fatherland. So the
crowd goes wild, and in fact so much so that
Hitler and Gurring decided then and there that they should
(13:39):
go ahead and just annex Austria. So one could argue
that history's course was changed by that crowd that day.
In Lynn's Austria, he immediately begins turning his dreams into reality.
He commissions a study to begin transforming Lends into the
(14:00):
cultural capital of Europe. He plans to be buried there
with his parents. He plans to remake large parts of
the city in his own image and turn it into
kind of a Rome on the Daniebreer. It will be
encased in marble and will be a tremendous cultural capital.
Among other things, there would be an art museum in
(14:22):
which all of the artwork that his minions would soon
begin stealing from private families and museums across Europe and
would all go into this museum and Lenz. In order
to pay for that, he had to raise tax revenue,
so he begins to industrialize the city, and that results
(14:43):
in the creation of the Herman Gering Steel Works, which
produces steel and some chemicals, and then later armaments as
the war turns against the Germans. And in addition to that,
the rail system has greatly expanded. So take all of
that together and it makes lens and military target. Well
what I'm here, it's not just a syop. Clearly this
(15:04):
was a valid military target. It was a valid It
was absolutely a valid military target.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
And in fact, in all of my documentary reading reports
from the time, I didn't even get the sense that
we knew the Hiller connection to Lin's.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Okay, fair enough. I'm curious the I'm wondering because we
experienced this as well, Mike, And you know, if there's
ever a World War Two a Korean era veteran, I mean,
they go right to the front of the line for
American Warrior Radio because it's so important, so important to
make sure these stories get told and recorded. You know,
as they get to their later years, I do see
(15:42):
them open up a little bit. I'm curious if you
ever got a sense that part of the reason that
they were willing to talk to you was because of
your uncle, because you had a personal connection. I think
it was partly that.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I think it was also that I had, clearly, hopefully
in their eyes, prepare I spent a long time studying,
learning what they wore, how their equipment worked, what they
did at each position on the aircraft. I didn't go
in as a rookie interviewer, and between my empathy, my
(16:18):
showing my desire to know what it was actually like,
and to show that I had prepared in advance pretty well,
I think showed some of them that I was worthy
of their time. And I had repeat interviews with a
number of them, and they indeed became quite close with
a handful, And there was just a life changing experience
(16:40):
for me to get to know these men so well
and have them unburdened themselves to me they carried so
much inside for so long, and to finally see maybe
some peace come about through talking about it was a
tremendous blessing and it's a period of my life that
I will always look back on very fondly.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
But I use the word, you know, labor of love,
because that's that's a sense I got about your writing
this book. Michael got to getting close to another break
just about a minute. But I'm curious. I saw an
interview where you mentioned that you don't only write this
book for your family, but for the families of all
those other veterans as a way of closure for them.
(17:23):
And I just think that's that's a very powerful statement.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Well, I appreciate that, and indeed it was it was
exactly that. You know, then all around the country promoting
the book, and I've talked to hundreds of people at
this point, and the children of veterans that approach me,
it's heartbreaking. Then they say, my dad never talked about this,
and oftentimes they're in tears. Sometimes I am too, because
(17:49):
they didn't know what their dads did. And then that's
just it's heartbreaking, as I said, And I hope that
this book helps people to understand a little bit or
why they didn't.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
And maybe even couldn't talk about it. Well, at the
end of the book, there's some you do, some kind
of some reason you just talk about. You know, nowadays
we call it PTSD with just how some of these men,
you know, a car backfiring, or they just they couldn't
attend a fireworks show anymore. They're just there was all
these things and they kept it inside themselves. Where I think,
(18:22):
you know, nowadays we're a little bit better about getting
that out and understanding that. Mike, when come back, I
Mike to introduce our listeners to some of these air
crew members, some some really fascinating stories that are that
are told exceptionally well. Ladies and gentlemen, again, I encourage
you to get the book by Mike Rosant. It's called
Bombing Hitler's Hometown. You can learn more at Mike Croissant
dot com. Croslana spell just like you probably think it
(18:44):
is c R O I S S A n T.
Don't forget to share these important messages. We're everywhere. We
can find our most current episodes on your favorite streaming platform.
Of course, all of them are ARKI at American Warrior
Radio dot com. We'll be right back. Welcome back to
(19:13):
American Radio. Ladies and gentlemen. There's your host, Ben buor Garcia.
We're coming to you from the Silencer Central Studios. Adding
a silencer will make shootings safer and more enjoyable and
improve your accuracy. Begin the process by visiting slencercentral dot
com to see if only a silencer is legal in
your state. They can then walk you through the permitting
process and ship right to your front door. Call Silencer
Central today at eight sixty six six four zero three
(19:36):
two seven zero or visit slencercentral dot com. We're talking
with Microsoft. Mike has written just a very very powerful
book called Bombing Hitler's Hometown's about the last mass bomber
rate of World War Two, which took place on April
twenty fifth, just before literally five days before Hitler committed suicide. Mike,
(19:56):
I'm going to have to congratulate you from reading your book.
I often felt like I was in that bomber with
those crews. I felt like I could I could hear
the sounds, like I could smell the smells, and it's
just a really Again, I can't recommend it enough that
people really should read this book. There's a couple there's
too many stories of telling. Of course, we want people
(20:17):
to buy the book, Mike. We don't want to give
it all the way here. But you know, there's a
couple of names that jumped out. But one of them
that struck me right off the bat is I'm kind
of into politics. But George McGovern, who would eventually become
a presidential candidate, was on this mission.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
He was he was on his last mission. As you
noted in the intro, the men had to complete thirty
five combat missions in order to get to go home.
And this was mcgovery last. There were a couple of
men in that situation on this day, and there were
a couple of men, including men that I talked to,
who were on their first mission today. So for mcgovernor
(20:54):
it was and for all of them there was a
very tough day. His aircraft was literally filled with holes
from front to back, very heavy damage. One of his
men was wounded. I did speak with him. He was
the last surviving member of the crew, Bill Ashlock. The
mission was so horrific that it caused his flight engineer
(21:17):
to have a I guess you were calling a nervous
breakdown and have to be hospitalized. The aircraft he lost
hydraulic power, so they had to deploy parachutes out the
windows in order to stop when they made it back
to base. It was a survival story and for many
of the men, in fact, it was that way. This
(21:38):
was a mission that if if you came home, you
were more than just a veteran, you were a survivor.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah. I found it interesting in the book you talked
about this was my government's last mission. It should have
been a milk run, but he and this is a
sign of his leadership. He actually put it up to
a vote among his crew about whether they wanted to
go on this mission. If they didn't, he would he
would go with another crew, right. But I thought that
that was pretty pretty powerful as well. There's another fascinating character,
(22:08):
Jack Taylor, fascinating to me because of his background. He
was you say that he was could have been considered
one of the original I don't think it's original Navy seal,
but certainly one of their predecessors.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
Jack Tigler was a Navy officer naval officer who was
recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, which of course
was the predecessor to the CIA. He was inserted into
southeastern Europe on a secret mission to gather intelligence for
the Allies and after It's a long story, but his
(22:45):
communications gear was lost during the parachute insertion, so he
collected a bunch of intelligence but had no way to
pass it on, and eventually his small group was discovered
and captured. He was tortured and who eventually was sent
to Matthausen, which is of course the most notorious concentration
(23:08):
camp in Austria, just some sixteen miles I believe from Lenz,
and he was there when one of the crews that
were shot down over Lenz that final mission was brought in.
This crew suffered free members killed in action above the
target or on the descent and parachutes. They were all
shot at on their way down, and they were dragged
(23:30):
inside the concentration camp where the deputy camp coming abused
them physically and verbally for quite some time. They were
at the end of the night. They were brought into
cells and they could, with great effort, poke their head
up above to get a view of the outside. There
(23:52):
was sort of a barred cell window above, and they
heard a man whistling Yankee doodle, So they quickly got
one man up on another man's shoulder so they could
look out the window, and they saw Jack Taylor. And
of course they didn't know who it was at the time,
but that was Jack Taylor. Jack remained in the camp.
(24:16):
The flyers were released to a different camp in the
closing days, but Jack was there for the liberation and
uh a very emotional part of the book. The liberators
of the camp, who were part of Padden's Third Army,
came in to find that Jack Taylor had organized the
band and taught them how to play the national anthem,
(24:37):
so they were they were greeted with that, and it
was there were There was not a dry eye in
the house, as they say. And uh Taylor was he was.
He was obviously liberated that at that point and nursed
back to health. It was only in the camp for
less than a month.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
I believe, but he survived it and went on to
testify against several people in the Nuremberg trials. And unfortunately
he passed away at a very young age in just
a few years after the war ended in a plane crash.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Mike, I'm guessing, are any of these crew members still
with us?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Are they all gone now? I have lost contact with
all of them. I did speak to about fifty five survivors.
I maintained close relations with a handful of them. One
did survive until I got my book deal. This is
hard for me to talk about, but I of course
called him and told him I got the book deal.
(25:35):
He was very happy. I believe he was about ninety
eight at the time. He was wounded and bled and
nearly died for his country. That day he called me back.
I was enjoying an adult beverage with my buddies to celebrate,
and he called me back and he thanked me. And
(25:55):
I said, why are you thanking me? What have I
possibly done? Maybe I didn't see it, I was probably
thinking it, But he said, now the children of US
veterans will understand why we couldn't talk about it. They
will understand what we did, and they know that packed
an emotional wall, needless to say. And that was the
last time I spoke with him. He passed away.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I believe in twenty twenty two. Well, I think it's
you know, kudos to you, or I mean, fifty five
interviews is a ton and I feel fortunate, Mike every
time I'm able to find one of these veterans and
get them on the air to tell their story. And
of course we all know that they're they're becoming fewer
and fewer from that generation. You know, we mentioned Jack
(26:40):
Taylor's experience. There's another thing you touch on in your
book about you know, the Soviets were supposedly supposed to
be our allies, but they didn't always quite fulfill that
very well highlighted. And then the story of Dale. See
if I got this right, Shabilsky, Yes, Sabilski, he is playing.
He had to the bail otter did his plane crash remindment,
(27:06):
his plane crash landed in Hungary. He was wounded in
two places. Dale was on his thirty third mission, so
the finish line was in sight, but they didn't quite
make it.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
He and his tail thenner were wounded. A crowd of
friendly Hungarians rushed to the aircraft and spirited away the
healthy members of the crew, and they took the two
wounded members in different directions, but they prevail Lepondal to
destroy his uniform and his identity papers, which was a mistake.
(27:39):
He had only his dog tags and his forty five
caliber pistol in his underwear. Accused him of being a
German spy.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
And Mike paused there because there's much more of this story,
but we do have to take another break, and I
want to want to give Dale all the credit he deserves.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's your host Ben Bla Garcia here
on American Warrior Radio. We're talking about Mike was Sant
about his book Bombing Hitler's hometown. I highly highly recommend it.
You can find that at Miccroissant dot com. A crossan
is spelled just like you would think ciss an t
(28:11):
dot com. There's lots of other great stuff, background photos,
and lots of other things you'll find at that website.
You definitely want to pay a business, stick around and
we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
You know.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
For over a decade now, it's been my privilege to
share these important stories of those who protect us at
home and abroad. Our mission is to bridge the gap
of understanding among the civilian population by allowing them to
get to know the brave men and women of our
military and first responder communities. One of the main reasons
we've been able to expand these broadcasts and outreach to
more ears around the country is a generous investment of
(28:53):
our advertisers. Please consider giving them your business, or just
let them know you heard their message on American Warrior
Radio and thank them for their support. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Welcome back to American Warrior Radio. Lasion, gentlemen, there's your host,
Ben Bula Garcia. We're talking to Mike Wasson about some
of the stories he tells in his book Bombing Hitler's Hometown.
Just a great, great book written as a result of
extensive research, fifty five interviews with actual survivors of this mission,
just this horrific mission, and what happened to some of
these crew members afterwards, one of which was Dale Shabilski,
(29:38):
Mike your sanat The Soviets thought he was a German,
thought he was a spy, and that I mean he
had to endure all kinds of deprivations and torture while
just trying to get someone to get him in front
of an American consulate official.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
That's some of the most graphic and horrific parts of
the book. They always, within moments of giving himself over
to the Soviets, they began to beat him to humiliate him,
and then they turned him over to some thugs essentially
who interrogated him and tortured him. The timeline is unclear,
(30:13):
but it from you because of his recollection, you know,
and perhaps burying these memories away. But I surmised it
went on for several days. They essentially tempted to get
Dal to confess to being a German spy. He didn't
speak any German. They applied various means of torture to him.
(30:35):
He gave only his name, rank and serial number as required,
and he demanded to be handed over to the American consulate,
while eventually the Soviets did give into that and they
turned him over in what is now the Ukraine in Kiev,
and he would be put on a train there and
(30:56):
eventually to Odessa, Odessa on the Black which is a
major port in there he would be reunited with his
crew and repatriated through the Black Sea to Italy and
then eventually home.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Well, you talk the hypocrasy is not the right word,
might but you know, basically, the Russian officer threatened him
just before the meeting. Of course, they get him clean
clothes to try and clean him all up, and he says,
but if you tell people how we treated you, that's
not going to go so well, I mean, And then
they throw him back on the cell and take away
the clothes and he's back in his gi issued underwear
(31:32):
for another night and just some tough stuff. The other
part of it they fascinate is and also you tell
the stories of the people who were underneath the bombs.
And there was one very bizarre that the Truthman crew
where the Austrians actually tried to recruit them. They put
them in and German costumes, snuck them into this castle
(31:54):
and then tried to recruit them to join them in
a gorilla war against the Nazis. I mean that sounds
like some lout of a weird movie.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
It is, and I don't deny having some reservations about
that story initially from the sources I had domestically for that,
but I took two research troops to Linz, one in
twenty twelve and then more in depth one in twenty nineteen.
And in twenty nineteen I was sitting in a museum
(32:26):
in rural Austria and a small town, and I was
given a huge binder, probably three or four inches stick,
that a lovely Austrian man had compiled. He had spent
the latter part of his life trying to locate not
only the crash sites of all American bombers in Austria,
(32:46):
but to connect with men who were on them, and
the Toothman crew was one in which he did so.
He'd exchanged letters with a couple of members of the
crew who survived, and the letters were in the binder.
So I learned more about that story. I learned the
name of the Austrian commandant, and the story kind of
took shape from there. It's just as you said, you
(33:08):
can't really believe it as you're reading it. But these men,
the Austrians tried to draft them into a guerrilla war,
but the war ended before that could really get underway,
and they declined anyway. But before all that could happen,
the SS captured them. And it was just one of
many remarkable stories. And you know, more than once, over
(33:31):
the decade or more that it took to write the story,
it felt like I had to pinch myself.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
You said, there's a common thing there. Of course, anybody
knows anything about that history, whether you're Austrian or German
or whatever. If you're on the wrong side of that war,
you definitely would rather turn yourself over to the Americans
than the Russians. And so that seemed to be the
goal of a lot of these folks encouraged people to
read this. There's one kind of a snippet at the
end of your book there, Mike, that really struck me
(33:58):
about the power of that added with hal Millet, who
was part of these bomber crews, and of course he's
dropping ornans from you know whatever, thirty thousand feet twenty
thousand feet. But then later on they were giving tours
of the bomb targets for ground crews, and so he
was flying a lot lower and a lot closer up,
and he started to see the damage up close and personal,
(34:21):
and he just it really changed his heart when he
started thinking about, you know, before it was a military target,
I'm just bombita. But now he's thinking about, well, in
that class building, was there a mom was or a
dad or their children exactly?
Speaker 3 (34:34):
You know, when the war ended, the ground crews, the
men who serviced the aircraft, were in the war for
the duration there was. There was no time frame set
on the end of their service, unlike the air crews.
So as a gesture to them, the air crews took
the ground crewmen up for essentially low level aerial tours
(34:54):
of the target areas. And that's when Hell and many others,
the Norman Lear as well, who was in the books,
they saw very close up the damage their bombs did
and it completely destroyed how I mean, how was a
changed individual When he got home from the war. He
(35:15):
did have PTSD. He had to and this is told
in the book. He had to leave a movie theater
when he was watching one of the more well known
World War two movies about the bomber war because it
affected him too badly. It got so bad that for
how he had to take all of his memories of
the war and lock them away in the back of
(35:36):
his mind. He was a computer guy, and he described
it to me as placing his memories on a part
of the computer hard ride that couldn't be easily accessed.
And it took the intervention of his daughter, who read
on the internet a posting by his pilot seeking to
reunite the crew, that he finally opened himself up again.
(35:59):
And the memories came out rather slowly at first, but
by the time I got to him in his late eighties,
he was ready to, you know, uncork the bottle, and
I was the beneficiary of that. He did write a
little bit about his experiences, but most of what's in
the book about him is from our personal interviews. I
(36:21):
spent many hours with hol and he became my friend.
And this is not in the book, but I did
talk to him in the last hours for days of
his life. And I called him on the phone and
he was in hospice care and I could tell as
he was picking up the phone that he had been
revealing an audience in his hospital room with hottails from
(36:43):
the war. So it was really nice to know that
my friend seemingly had found peace because he had confided
in me that he carried a lot of regret and
guilt throughout his life, and to see him release that
was good.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Lesson, Mike, We're our time here is just about done?
Is it always happens with a great guest? We run
out of time quickly at I'd love to get your
wrap up thoughts, but I want to leave the listeners
with a quote, and this is from Achilles Kazakas, who
was one of the crew members on that mission, and
he said, together we cry today, and tomorrow we all laugh.
There's a room full of brothers in love. What else
(37:22):
are you hoping to achieve with this book? Like or
we get mission accomplished. I want to achieve a lasting
memory of these men. This was so close to being
lost to history, this mission and everything that happened surrounding it,
and that's just something I can live with. I couldn't
(37:43):
live with myself not having tried to tell this story.
So I took more than a decade of my life
to put the story together. I did it for the
men because they deserve it. And I did it for
their kids. Their kids need to know, and indeed all
Americans need to know what the men did for us
right at the very very end of the most destructive
(38:03):
conflict in human history. These men went on a mission
and when they came back, they were changed forever. The
book is a love letter to them and to their children,
and I hope you will read it.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
Well.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I definitely like said, congratulations, Mike, it's it's one of
the better. And we get set a lot of books,
you know, from folks that would want to come on
this show, and I have to say, honestly, it's it's
one of the better ones I've e've ever read. So
thank you very much, thank you my pleasure, ladies and gentlemen.
The book is called Bombing Hitler's Hometown. You can learn
more of a micro Croissant dot com C or I
(38:39):
S S A N T dot com. But please please
share these important stories because as Mike mentioned, it's more
it's really important that more and people hear about these
sacrifices that going back to previous generations, current generations, and
probably unfortunately future generations will make on our behalf. Remember
everybody who volunteered and real quick. My, all these guys
(39:00):
you interviewed, they didn't wait to get drafted, right, They volunteered.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
One percent of them volunteered.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
There you go, well, Mike, thanks again. Best wishes to
you for well. Write another book I'll be looking forward
to we'll see.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Ben, Hi, sir, take care of yourself. Don't forget ladies
and gentlemen. You'll find over six hundred podcasts at Americanwarriorradio
dot com. The most recent podcasts are on iTunes, Spotify, Apple, Pandora, iHeart.
Wherever you listen to your podcast, you can find us there.
If you can't find us, please send us a note.
I'll be sure to gets out there. Until next time,
all polishes and procedures are remain in place. Take care.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
If you've been listening to American Warrior Radio, archived episodes
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