Glen Arbor daughter strives to bring home airmen MIA from World War II Kassel Mission

A Memorial Day story honoring the Greatest Generation

Photo: Air Force Captain William Dewey at the controls.

By Linda Alice Dewey

Sun contributor

This story published in our May 13 edition of the Glen Arbor Sun.

My father, pilot Bill Dewey worked to steady the severely damaged B-24 Liberator, code-named “Wallet-855.” He and copilot Bill Boykin had already shut down Engine number 3. Unable to keep up with the few U.S. bombers left in the air, they had dropped out of the formation heading back to England.

Alone now over central Germany, with two and a half hours to go, he radioed Colgate (an emergency radio station in England) for a heading across the English Channel, then sent Boykin to the rear of the plane to assess the situation. From the way she was flying, #855 was in bad shape.

Dewey prayed like he never had before. Then suddenly, all the fear and anxiety disappeared, and a huge wave of peace came over him, almost as if someone else had come in and was flying the plane through him.

Boykin returned with the report— cables frayed to the breaking point, tail shot up, rudders barely holding. Wind rushed in through a three-foot hole in the waste, buffeting the bomber. As for the crew, the tail gunner’s face was covered in blood, and both waist gunners might be dying.

By this late date in the war—27 September 1944—the struggling Luftwaffe had planes, but few pilots. The Allies had declared air superiority over Europe. As a result, very few of this batch of American flyboys had ever seen— much less shot at—a German fighter.

Dewey’s crew was on its eighth mission. Kassel was supposed to be an easy assignment, but the group’s lead plane had unexpectedly veered from the division, taking the rest of the 445th Bomb Group with it, and dropping its payload near Göttingen, 30 miles away, instead.

German ground control saw Dewey’s lone group of 35 stragglers, which would be easy to pick off. Four groups of elite German fighters—Sturmgruppen—were directed for the kill, including 150 Me-109s and FW-190s which attacked, wing-to-wing in waves of 10-15 abreast.

Dewey’s earphones came alive with action reports from his crew. He felt the first hits, then the rudder pedals became mushy. A blow on the right, and the Liberator jumped left then began to bump around heavily in the air. The plane vibrated from his own gunners shooting at five fighters on their tail.

The “lightning strike,” lasting a mere six minutes, ended when American fighters arrived, pulling off the enemy into spectacular dogfights. One American fighter pilot died; another became an “ace-in-a-day” by downing five Germans. But only four of the 35 bombers made it safely back to England. Of the 336 men flying in them, one-third died and more than one-third became prisoners of war. The rest eventually straggled to the base at Tibenham, near Norwich.

It would go down in history as the worst loss for a single group in a day’s battle ever. The German toll was 18 pilots and 32 fighters lost. In some ways, the burden was worse for them. They didn’t have more pilots, whereas the United States had plenty of replacements.

That day, Bill was flying a Ford- made B-24 Liberator made at Willow Run near Ypsilanti. The war effort in southeast Michigan bore the term the “Arsenal of Democracy”. For him, flying the B-24 was flying a piece of home. Bill’s family had relocated to Detroit from Chicago when he was nine. He attended the Leelanau School in Glen Arbor during his sophomore year, graduated from Detroit’s Redford High School, then followed his dream and worked for the railroad until he joined the service.

Reunion with former enemies

I am the oldest of Bill and Marilyn Dewey’s three children. Born in 1948, my first memory of hearing about the Kassel Mission is when he told us the story one night at bedtime; I never forgot it. When I was four, our family began to summer in Glen Arbor; Dad commuted every weekend from Detroit.

As I was growing up, Dad never joined any veterans’ groups. Then, 40 years after the war, he attended a few reunions, and sought out other survivors of that harrowing mission, which had been so pivotal for him. He had entered the Air Force as a soft private and exited a captain and group assistant operations officer, a.k.a “briefing officer.”

At a 1987 reunion in England, Dad finally met someone else who lived through the Kassel Mission—navigator Frank Bertram and his pilot, Reg Miner. The three walked the tarmac at Tibenham, sharing their stories. Bertram and Miner, had both gone down and were captured as prisoners of war. They planned to fly to Germany to meet Walter Hassenpflug, who together with a friend had witnessed the lead 445th bomber crash. A group of local Hitler Youth had found and captured Bertram the next day. Dad was entranced; the war was more than four decades old, and he had always wanted to meet the men who flew against them. He felt they were just doing their jobs like he was just doing his.

In 1989, the Eighth Air Force News magazine published two issues full of accounts from Kassel Mission veterans—both German and American. Dad suggested the editor compile it all into a booklet. The editor replied, “Why don’t you do it?” and sent the material to Dad, who was now living in Birmingham, Michigan.

One letter to the editor asked about erecting a memorial to the battle. The Americans liked the idea, and Dad wrote Hassenpflug to see if the Germans wanted to collaborate and asked if Walter could think of an appropriate location. He knew just the spot.

It would be the first time in history—as far as we know—that former enemies would collaborate to create a war memorial dedicated to all who died in a battle—and it had been Dad’s idea. To raise funds, the Americans created a new 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, the Kassel Mission Memorial Association (KMMA), now the Kassel Mission Historical Society (KMHS). They published that booklet of first-hand accounts collected by the Eighth Air Force News and sold it for $10 apiece.

Then in November 1989, the wall dividing East and West Germany fell. Kassel was near the border between what after the war would become East and West. Half the planes from the Kassel Mission fell on each side.

The next summer, more than 500 people gathered at the crash site of the lead 445th bomber, now a newly created park, to dedicate the memorial. Seven German and U.S. Kassel Mission veterans pulled aside the drapes covering the monuments, then shook hands. Finding themselves in a circle, they spontaneously joined hands and raised them in triumph, in enemies becoming friends, and in a salute to their fallen comrades.

The next day, Sturmgruppen pilots, German civilians, and their American guests toured many of the 25 crash sites in the area, all mapped and researched by Hassenpflug. At each stop, those involved met one another and told their stories. When they crossed into the former East Germany, town bells rang as villagers turned out to welcome the first Americans they had seen since the war.

At home later, I watched Dad’s tapes of these trips, and I was struck by the magnitude of what had occurred. In 2004, he stepped down from running the organization, and I became president of Kassel Mission Historical Society. Two years later, I accompanied Mom and Dad back to Tibenham and to a rededication of the memorial in Germany, which was again attended by 500.

That was his last summer. Dad passed away the following March, having accomplished so much, though he never wrote his intended book about the Kassel Mission. However, over the last five years of his life, I interviewed him many times about the experience.

Things have heated up for the KMHS since January, when I renewed a campaign to bring back the suspected remains of our eight Kassel Mission airmen who went missing in action.

From Glen Arbor this winter, I conducted Zoom meetings that matched family members of the missing in action with an international team of researchers and archaeologists.] Not only Americans, but Russians, Italians, Canadians, and British are buried at a POW burial ground in Germany where one navigator’s remains may lie, so those governments are involved, too. The graves are unmarked—a situation oddly similar to our recently reacquired cemetery here in Glen Arbor, where Civil War veterans lie. Both endeavors require ground-penetrating radar to locate the graves. Remains of two more suspected MIAs from the Kassel Mission battle are buried as Unknowns at the American military cemetery in Tunisia, where the political situation also hampers recovery. The remains of five more MIAs from the mission were recently disinterred in Germany.

Across the Channel

Dewey lowered #855 through light cloud cover over the English Channel. Straight ahead lay those wonderful White Cliffs of Dover and that long emergency landing strip just beyond.

Now came the moment of truth. Dewey gave Boykin the order to lower the landing gear; the hydraulics worked beautifully. Even with all the bumping around in the air, they touched down smooth as could be. The landing gear held; the tires stayed inflated. It was his best landing ever, “like landing on feathers,” as he would later describe it. Ambulances ran alongside as the Liberator slowed, then stopped.

Dewey went back to check his wounded, who were lifted out on stretchers through the hole in the waste. As the rest of the crew disembarked, an Air Force photographer ran up, saying he’d never seen such a damaged plane stay together through a landing. He begged them to disembark again for the camera. Dewey didn’t want to, but his copilot said, “Aw, c’mon Bill,” so they did. Then they walked around the ravaged Liberator, surveying the damage—bullet holes everywhere, rudders hanging by threads, the ragged shot-up tail. But his gunners all lived. One was sent home; the others returned to fly with him again.

We never did see those pictures, but all those original letters and pictures forwarded by the Eighth Air Force News—and more—are safely packed in a climate-controlled facility right here in Traverse City; and a piece of #855 sits in my Glen Arbor home, where I paint and write his story and work to bring home those MIAs.

Read accounts and learn more about the Kassel Mission at www.KasselMission.org.