The following Charles Elmer Crippen history was submitted by Blaine M. Barney (Nov 2007):

I am submitting a history about the experiences of my Uncle S/Sgt Charles E. Crippen during World War II.  He was a part of the 8th Air Force, 100th Bomb Group, 350th Bomber Squadron that flew bombing mission from Thorpe Abbotts, England to Germany during World War II. He was a Tail Gunner on Badger's Beauty, a B-17 Bomber.  On his 21st mission they were forced to make a wheel up landing near Caen, France in Normandy on October 4, 1943.  He was later caught and was a POW in Austria for about a year until the War ended in 1945.  During the early 1990s when my Uncle Charles came to visit our family I ask him to tell about his experiences during World War II.  The following documentation resulted.  Charles Elmer Crippen died about a year ago on November 29, 2006 at the age 83 at Oro Valley, Pima County, Arizona.... Blaine M. Barney

Record of My War Years, Charles Elmer Crippen

I, Charles Elmer Crippen, am of sound mind, I think, and a good heart.  To whom it may concern, the following is a little of what I experienced while in the Service of my country during World War II.  I went in at the age of 18 years old, in the Army Air Corps, which was a part of the Army at that time.  I enlisted June 16 of 1941, just about 6 months before Pearl Harbor.  Separation date was September 27 of 1945.  This is some of the places (where I served) and what I did.  I went from Medford, Oregon to Vancouver Barracks, Washington.  Just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon was my first stay.  As soon as we got there, we were booed!  "You'll be sorry!"  That did not help much.  Near as I remember we stayed overnight there and then most of the day, and then we were put on a train to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri that was at Saint Louis, Missouri.  This was the place of the Old Calvary base or jumping off place in the 1800's for the Army to fight the Indians, before that there was nothing but Indian Territory.  It was a very hot six weeks while there for my basic training.  I got a lot of drilling and guard duty there.  I remember I sure was homesick for a while, that is the farthest I had been away from home yet.

I remember from there we went to Sheppard Field, Texas.  It turned out to be an Airplane Mechanical School; I did not care for that kind of school.  I was a clerk for a while, but soon I was transferred to another Squadron or unit.  I got a lot of K. P.  duty and warehouse duty.  By the way, we were the first 500 men that were sent there when it was built.  While there, if you know how young kids are at that age of just 18, my buddies and I got talking together and made up our minds to go over the "hill. "  That is what it was called then – or being A. W. O. L.   We headed for Old Mexico, but as we got down to Southern Texas, my buddy's home was in Lake Charles, Louisiana so we decided to go to his place.  In those days, hitchhiking was a pleasure.  I do not think we ever walked over ten miles at one time.

I remember we stayed at his mother's place, but she persuaded us to go back to our base.  As we headed back, we tried to dodge the military police, as we did not want to be picked up.  Totally, we were gone about nine days, lost time.  The Corporal took us over to the company Commander to report to him.  I remember as we went into his office, he had his legs laid up on his desk as we came to attention and saluted, he let us stay there for a while.  He finally told us at ease.  The first thing he said was, "You boys have a good time?"  "Yes Sir," we said and talked a little more.  At the end, he said or asked us, "Do you want corporal punishment or company punishment?"  He explained if you took corporal punishment, we would have to spend our time in the guardhouse.  If company punishment we would take what ever he would dish out to us.  Naturally, we said company punishment.  "Okay," he says, "go and you'll hear from me soon. "  We had to make six by six holes in the hard, tramped-on ground.  One a day for seven days, they had to be up and down square, and dug and covered up each day until the seven days were up.  Our Corporal would check up on how we were doing, he came by every hour, and by the time it was five o'clock, boy were we glad when that was over.

One time in December close to the Seventh of the month of that year; I got a furlough for a couple of weeks, and went looking around for a pair of oxfords in Wichita Falls, Texas to wear home.  My home was in Grants Pass, Oregon at the time.  As I was looking around the stores, I heard a radio really talking away, but did not stop to listen to newscast.  I saw one woman crying on the street and I asked her what the matter was, and she asked me, "Haven't you heard Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japs?"  I was a little surprised, but kept looking and the military police stopped me and said, "Soldier, get back to the base. "  I showed him my furlough papers and he said, "all furloughs were cancelled," and he told me again, to get on the bus and head for home to the base.  Naturally, I did; what else could I do?  I did not get to go home until another year.  I got tired of this monkeying around.  I wondered what I was doing.  So one day one of my buddies came to me and said, "Look what's on the bulletin board. "  Three things were open for our inspection: Flying Cadets, Aerial Gunners, and Glider Pilots.  I did not have enough education for Flying Cadets, and I did not like being a Glider Pilot with no engine in them, so I joined up for the Aerial Gunner training.

I passed the test they had for me.  We went the next week to Las Vegas Gunner School at an Air Base Training Center there near as I can remember.  I was there in training for about three months; you had to learn all about machine guns and other things; you had to know your Jap and German planes by looking at the silhouettes.  The last test was to go with a pilot in a training plane and shoot air to air at a tow target; each person had a different color bullet.  It would leave a color in the wax tow target.  The color would show up in the target, and we would know the score we made.  You had to make a certain score.  After the shooting was done, the pilot would dog fight with one of his buddies.  After the flip-over dives, and different stunts we would go back to the field.  The pilot asked me if that was my first plane ride.  I said, "Yes, my legs just wouldn't cooperate with the rest of me. "  He said It would be better next time.  We finally went to McGovian Field at Boise, Idaho.  Oh!  I graduated as a Buck Sergeant. At Boise, Idaho, this is where we would know who our crew of nine men was to be: tail gunner, which I was, two waist gunners, ball bottom turret gunner, and radioman gunner, engineer, or top turret gunner, bombardier and a gunner, navigator and a gunner, pilot and co-pilot. This was the typical crew for the B-17 Bomber.  From there we went to Ainsworth, Nebraska, Sioux City, Iowa, Salt Lake Air Base, and to Wendover, Utah practicing bombing there; a place that is not very good; also Kearney, Nebraska and several other places.  I got to one place in Kansas.  One time we went over to San Francisco and out into the Pacific, and came back about eleven o'clock p. m. for a landing and missed the runway; the tail assembly of the airplane broke-off from the rest of the airplane with me inside.  I just skinned my knee when we landed the plane - it slowed down to a speed of 80 miles per hour, and I was tumbling all over the place.  We were just given another plane after that incident.

In the spring of 1943, we left the U. S. A. , landed in Gander Lake, Newfoundland, stayed overnight, and took turns guarding the plane, because there was suppose to be some Nazi spies out there somewhere. Being as I was in the 100 Bomb Group and 350 Squadron, Lord Ha Ha, we heard on the radio being told the 100 Bomb Group not to come over, because they would destroy us, but we didn't listen.  We landed in Prestwick, Scotland and the next day went on down to Thorpe Abbotts, England, which would be our new base of operation.  I was in the 8th Air Force.  Scotland and England is a very pretty place.

One day we were scheduled to fly, we got up about four o'clock a. m. and this was to be our first flying mission.  We did not see any enemy aircraft or much flak.  About the third mission, we did see a lot of action.  I had twin 50 caliber machine guns back there, and that was the best place to be on the plane.  Lots of people said that was not the safest place to be, but that is not what I think.  I had a lot of gunfire power there.  I was credited with shooting down at least one enemy aircraft.  I have seen lots of air battles in the skies, lots of bombers going down and enemy fighters, lots of "ack-ack" or flack; our boys did a good job, but lost a lot of planes and good men.

We had to bomb Germany and enemy territory to defeat Hitler and his henchmen.  Hitler was no good; he was killing Jews, and other people. In battle we, or I, did have some close calls.  One mission we had a full bomb bay of bombs and were over Kiel, Germany.  We had a runaway prop, and it pulled us out of formation and we dropped about 8,000 feet in about seven seconds.  We finally pulled up okay and then dropped our bombs in the English Channel; we then returned to our base in England.  I had a lot of close calls, lots of flak and fighters to contend with.

On my 21st, mission the head navigator that lead us over Frankfurt, Germany got lost, and messed up a little [could not find the target]. And then our gas tank got hit (which we did not realize at the time), and was losing gas so we dropped our bombs in the Channel.  But we hit the widest part of the English Channel and had a 10-minute supply of gas left which would not get us back to England, so we had to decide weather to ditch in the Channel or crash land it with the wheels up. Anyway, we decided to crash-land it back over the coast of France about 20 miles inland.  We made a beautiful crash landing.  We separated into twos and threes, and took off in different directions. The bombardier destroyed the bombsite, which was a secret thing at that time.  The fellows that were with me watched the plane burn about a mile from where we were, and the Germans tried to put it out.  We had a few things to eat from the items we salvaged from the plane.  We stuffed items down in our pockets like an escape package you carry in your front pocket, which would sustain you for a couple of days.  We went down on October 4, 1943 and we lived off the orchards of Normandy France, also we asked for food a couple of times at a French farm. The German dogs got after us one morning, but we lost them by going up a small stream of water.

About the fourth or fifth day out, we were walking through brush land and came to a road, and we saw a Frenchman riding his bicycle and we hailed him.  It surprised him and he stopped.

While we were hidden in the brush beside the road, he acted like he might be fixing his bicycle, and asked if we were Americans and of course, we told him we were, then he told us to stay there until that night and he would return.  We were hiding and talking among ourselves and all a sudden about twenty men with Tommy guns had surrounded us before we could say cat.  They belonged to the French underground fighting against the Germans.  They put us in two different families with the French people.  They put Joe and me with a schoolteacher, which taught grade school children in another part of the house.  We were hidden in the attic of the house.  While I was there, a little six-year-old girl taught us how to count to 10 in French.  While I was there, I had a bad case of sinus and almost died with it.  They finally moved us to another family and we stayed there about a month. The French people are nice people.  They hated the Germans.

Finally, a fellow came one morning and said he would come to get us to take to a meeting they had prepared for us; of course, we were dressed like French people.  And at this meeting, they said their duty was to put us in their Guerilla Camps in the mountains, so they took us in pairs and finally put us onto a passenger train, and gave us French papers for us to show with our description and picture.  We of course had to show our papers at a certain place.  I was supposed to be a bricklayer going to work in Southern France.  I passed that inspection place ok, and went on down to Lyons, France and a man met us and took us on a long hike up into the French Alps.  He took us to their camp. We stayed there for a while.  I witnessed or saw it after it happened; they shot a man because they said he was a German spy among them.

They took us on up higher in the French Alps to another camp with a bunch of teenagers, but they were a real rough bunch, they would go out destroying German installations, railroads and bridges of all sorts and anything they could hurt the Germans with.  I celebrated New Years' Day of 1944.  They really celebrated for about a week.  The Germans were scared of them, the French, because they just could not get them out of the place, they were well entrenched at this place. This camp was nothing but a French Guerilla Camp for the support of the French Underground.  There were I would say about twenty men armed with sub-machine guns and hand grenades.  They held up a German warehouse and brought back kegs of wine, cheese, bread, and other kinds of food.  They would drive by trucks and meet up with mules and horses, and pack them in to us.  They were well armed, but on their raids, they would loose about three or four men.  They would strike them with a quick hit and be gone, and kill about 60 Germans.  I guess we had sixty men there, you could see them talking back, and forth with mirrors on each mountain peak, you could see flashes in the sunlight.

Two of us Americans stayed there in January, February, and March of 1944.  We were up around 10,000 feet in the French Alps.  I was very cold.  We lived in a makeshift barn.  There would be German Mountain Police to venture up that way, but they would never be heard of again.  The French would bring back parts of their uniform and weapons.  They did that while I was there.  They also helped an Englishman get by air to us while I was there.  He had something to do with the underground.  We were about to go to Switzerland.  We could see the mountains in there where we were.  They decided to take us through Spain which was a neutral country; then on from there to England by submarine.  At the end of three months, they took us to Lyons, France and connected us with a guide to get out of there.  So finally, they put us on a train to Toulouse, France, which was not too far from the border of Spain. We got off there and the guide took us into a place to eat and then after that he took us up an alley way and a carload of German Gestapo came rushing down on us with Tommy¬-guns and hollered at us, "Hands Up!," and we put them up real fast.  It was as if someone paid off the Germans so that some of us could go free.  We were the fall guys and got caught by the Germans.  I was shaking like a leaf in the wind. They took us to Gestapo headquarters and interrogated us.  We were in French clothing.  They took us then to the Toulouse Jail, or better yet a dungeon, a medieval one at that, which went underground a ways. It was not a very good place.  When we got there, first we went into a largest place like an office.  This is the first time I saw them through the door, and German soldiers said "Heil Hitler," to his picture.

We stayed there for a few days, and then they put us on a train for Paris, France.  We were there in prison for about a month – infested with lice and very poor food, they gave us hardly anything to eat. More interrogations followed, and threats that they could and would kill us soon.  They were saying we were spies.  Finally, they took me, put me on a train, and said we were going to Frankfurt, Germany. While on the train, I was sitting by an open window and this German next to me took his gun out and laid it between us, and something said to me "NO!  NO!  Don't do it!"  He acted like he went to sleep, so I played it smart.  When we got to the Wiesbaden,  Germany, we got off and they took us again to another jail; on the way, the people would spit at us and the German guards would holler at them and shove them back.  They kept on asking questions.  I would only tell them my Rank, Name, and Serial Number.  They did a lot of threatening wanting to get rid of me.  I told them to check with Geneva, Switzerland and they would find us as soldiers.  They must have, because after being there in prison about a month they said we were going to a prison camp, then we would be treated good and given good food, and what a laugh that was.  At a Luftwaffer or German Air Force place, they asked us more questions to no avail.  They read to us what they wanted us to say, but I do not know how they found out, unless somebody informed or talked to them.

We were led finally to a camp and stayed there for a week and then they took us by box car down in Austria, Germany close to Kraus, Austria which, was situated about twenty miles west of Vienna, Austria.  As soon as we got there, they deloused us, shaved our hair off, and then assigned us to a building, like a barracks.  This P. O. W. camp had guard-towers every so often and barbed wire around us.  It was March or April of 1944 and we were there for the duration of the war; that is where I stayed.  I met friends and men I knew; they had gone down before me.  Some of them I saw when they went down.  The planes had been hit and very shot up, and I thought they could not survive, but here they were again; some died of course.  There must have been about 2,000 Air Force prisoners there.

Some times, we would get Red Cross packages, but most of the time we would not get any.  The Germans would give us for breakfast a dirty looking drink like coffee and a piece of prison bread with sawdust and bits of wood in it.  For dinner was soup, like cabbage soup, and on the bulletin board it would say, "Boys, we got soup today with meat in it. "  Oh!  What a treat, at first I would give mine away, but the rest of the boys would say, "You'll get use to it. "  But the Red Cross packages did help out when we would get them.  We were all non-coms, non-commissioned officers, so they could not really make us work, so here they did not.  Some prison camps forced them to work more than we did.  The prisoners had made tunnels to escape from, but most of the time they would find them.  They had a dog that was pretty well trained for that.  I think a couple did escape from there, though.

With Red Cross parcels, we could save up cigarette to be used like a barter thing with the guards.  We would get them to bring things to us, they would not know why.  We wanted all kinds of parts.  We made crystal radios where we would have the news every day.  There would be a newsman gather the news and write it down, and come read it to us, of course we would have a guard at each door.  All we had to do was have three roll calls a day.  We would line up outside to be counted. They had a makeshift library there, where you could read.  The Germans liked that.  I learned the French language and German.  We would have classes on that, it could have been worse.  We had American bombers come over the prison camp while I was there, and bombed the oil storage place there, and also had about four P-38s come over and strafed the town.  They would come over us and wiggle their wings at us; they knew we were there.  We had cold water to wash in and outside toilets, and they had us dig trenches in case they accidentally bombed our camp.  We did have playing cards and different things to do.  We would kill time and talk about the life we were going to have when the war was over.  The dreams kept us alive while I was there.  We had one fellow about five o'clock in the morning that hollered at the top of his lungs, and went through the window and tried to go over the fence; they shot him.

We had a Russian P. O. W. camp connected to our camp, one day they threw a couple of dead horses or carcass inside their compound, and they actually fought over those horses' bodies.  It did get bad on some P. O. W. 's.  It could have been worse.  I weighed 160 pounds before and when I was released from prison, I weighed around 120 pounds. Afterwards, I could not keep anything in my bowels, because I was not use to the rich food.  After the war was over, I ate raisins, which help get my digestive system back in order.  I had one Indian friend in there, he got TB while in there; he died when the war was over in a Denver, Colorado hospital.  He was a good friend.  His name was Eagle; his dad was Chief of the Sioux in around Rapid City, South Dakota.  I did have a hatred of the Germans for a while, but I got over it as there are good people, there was just a wicked man that was the head of the German dictator government.

One early morning in March of 1945, we kept on hearing shells pretty close.  The Russians had circled Vienna, Austria and the Germans got us up and told us to take a pack of some kind to take food mostly. They issued us Red Cross parcels and we were on our way toward the American lines.  They, the Germans, did not want to give up to the Russians.  This was around March of 1945.  Next April I turned 21 years old, on April 21.  They marched us day and night for two days to get away from the Russians.  Their shells were exploding in the mountains around us.  Austria is a beautiful country.  The Germans were retreating right along with us for a while.  One day we met German SS Troops marching the Jews towards the Russian line, some of them were being shot right before our eyes.

"Thank you Father in Heaven for helping us to win the war," because if we did not we would be in real trouble now.  Now all of this is history; I am glad we did win.

As we got close to the American lines we could hear American guns, they sounded like thunder off in the distance.  It would be a week or two, and the war would be over.  They bedded us down in a farm place, and I found out where the rabbit hutches were.  I got two rabbits and fried them and it leaked out, and then there were no more rabbits and the farmer called the Gestapo and they lined us up and we thought we were going to be shot.  They said we could be shot for doing something like that.

We moved on that night.  They bedded us down in some timber.  They had us, which numbered about 2,000 P. O. W. 's, and then they had Russian P. O. W. 's too.  One evening about five o'clock my buddies and I were bedded down, and all of a sudden there was like hell broke loose; we were bedded down between the Americans and a town.  Anyway, the artillery shells were screaming overhead.  They were shelling the town; in about half an hour it subsided down.  The next morning we could hear tanks coming our way, the guards had left and we were left alone.  They sent an emissary ahead with an American Flag.  We were liberated this day, about the first week in April of 1945.  We went to different farms to gather up food, but because we were on this diet, as a P. O. W. , we got the runs.  We had to be careful what we ate.  Oh! Our troops looked good.

We were moved to France to a staging area for us to go back to good old U. S. A.  Some of them went by airplane to England, and then home. There were some miscommunications, and some of us did not get on an airplane for the flight back to the U. S. A.  I was put on a liberty ship and thus traveled back to America.  This ship was transporting the remains of servicemen who had been killed in the war back to the U. S. A.  We hit a bad storm going back home.  Lots of the guys got sick.  It did not bother me any.  I started to get cysts like red boils under the armpit.  They were so painful.  One morning about five o'clock in the morning we saw the Statue of Liberty, so many of us cried.  They had girls greeting us on a tugboat, then dancing and going around.  I was put on a train at New York City and got off at Fort Lewis, Washington and was there for a while trying to get rid of the boils.

I was finally discharged there September 27, 1945.  As I got on the bus to go home, someone sat down beside me.  It was a surprise; it was one of my old school friends I use to know.  He lived pretty close to me, so we got off at different places.  My father met me at the bus depot.  Oh!  What a time that was.  I was home on leave about a month, and then had to go to Santa Monica, California to get my records ready for me to get discharged.  I reported back to Fort Lewis and then got my discharge there.

Now this is my story of my war record as near as I could get it.  I am writing this about 50 years later.  It is all history.  Now I hope I did not leave out too much.  I came home maybe a better, more matured man than when I left, a little less cocky, and ready to live a better life than what I was doing.  This is my war record for anyone that would like to read it.