A B-24 GUNNER’S SURVIVAL IN ENEMY TERRITORY

Alex Antanovich Jr.,

As told to David Scott Beveridge

Alex Antanovich Jr. was fortunate to safely return to his hometown of Cokeburg in Washington County, Pennsylvania, after serving in Europe during World War II. Antanovich parachuted to safety before his B-24 bomber crashed in Germany on a mission to cripple Nazi supply lines.

Allied air assaults over France and Germany during World War II were seeing their greatest successes in the spring of 1944. The daylight bombing raids were targeting strategic German-held railroads to cut off enemy supply lines, while others were pounding the French coast to drive back enemy forces. Nearly one thousand heavy bombers were flying missions that were also aimed at airfields and chemical and fuel stations. The B-24 Liberator, affectionately named LONI and carrying a crew of nine, did not fare so well. It crashed on May 30, 1944, near Rheine, Germany, after three of its four engines failed and the entire crew had bailed from the plane. Eight crew members were captured and held by the Nazis as prisoners of war. Incredibly, U.S. Army Air Force Sergeant Alex Antanovich Jr. evaded capture. Despite landing in enemy territory, he would be led by civilians to members of the resistance movement in Holland, where he was fed, clothed and sheltered for the next ten months. “I was in constant fear,” said Antanovich, recalling his story that had all the makings of a suspenseful war novel.

His plane had taken off that day at 6:53 a.m. from Mendlesham, England, carrying fifteen 500-pound bombs. Thus the weight of the payload alone was 7,500 pounds. More than eighteen thousand B-24s, their wingspans spreading 110 feet wide, had been produced in Detroit, Michigan, by Consolidated Aircraft Corporation for the war effort. This company created the largest air fleet of its kind at the time. Antanovich, who was then twenty-one years old, had been trained to fire all of the plane’s ten machine guns. World War II bombing crews faced some of the worst dangers in combat. “They were shooting at us,” he says, while discussing his military experiences when he was eighty-two years old. “You could lose your life on takeoff. You’re loaded down to capacity. There’s no place to hide.”

Antanovich received his training at Blythe Army Air Base in California. His crew used LONI to fly to England, following a route over Florida, South America, Africa and finally to Great Britain. Because the crew members all hailed from different ethnic backgrounds, they called themselves the League of Nations, Incorporated, and gave the plane the acronym LONI as its name. Antanovich entertained himself on the flights to England by watching the lights in the cities at night. “I was going to fight a war,” he said. Little else was on his mind.

Antanovich had only been in England for a month and had flown four previous missions to Germany when his plane crashed. It dipped from formation with two of its engines smoking and one out of commission prior to reaching its intended target. Other members of the Thirty-fourth Bombing Group flying in nearby planes then lost sight of LONI, and no one reported seeing any parachutes. The sixty-six-foot-long plane’s legacy was cut short before an artist had time to paint its name on its side, as was customary during the war.

“When the pilot said to bail out, I was in the tail of the plane,” Antanovich says. “The pilot said to throw stuff out to lighten the load. A short time later, the tail gunner who stayed on the intercom said, ‘Bail out,’ and away he went.” Antanovich was afraid to jump from the plane, having never done so before during his military training. “Why jump if you may never have to?” he thought. Being the last one left in the tail of the plane, Antanovich looked over the bomb bay to see what the pilot and co-pilot were doing, hoping they were regaining control of the aircraft. The co-pilot was readying for his jump, and Antanovich knew he had no choice but to do the same thing. “I went to the Lord,” says Antanovich, who believed in God but was not an especially religious man at the time. “I asked the Lord for help. I got a warm feeling over my body. I walked right over to that escape hatch and away I went. I lost my fear.”

Over the course of the next several days, nearly everything Antanovich did went against what he was taught to do in the event that he became missing in action. When he regained his bearings on the ground, he realized he was separated from his crew. He had been told to run in such a situation and to keep on the move for twenty-four hours. “I went deeper into the woods and covered my parachute and started running,” he said. He came upon a house and went in another direction, only to spot another. At that point, he went into the thicket and decided to attempt sleep. “I thought, ‘Where am I going to run to?’ If I kept running, I could have gotten killed.” Several hours later, he awoke to the sound of a boy pumping water and decided to start walking again. Antanovich found himself back where he had hit the ground. He made the right move because he stumbled upon a friendly stranger while walking across a bicycle path. He whistled to get the man’s attention, asking him in French if he spoke that language. The man shook his head no. Antanovich then asked him if he spoke English, and again, the man shook his head no. Antanovich pulled out a pocketbook that was part of his survival kit and designed to translate English phrases into the German language. He used it to inform the stranger that he was hungry and, in exchange, was given a handful of sugar. He also learned he was near Rheine, Germany, after showing the stranger one of the maps from the gear he carried. He was forty miles west of his B-24’s target and twenty miles east of Germany’s border with Holland. “I said, ‘I’m American,’” Antanovich recalls. The stranger, who turned out to be a Prussian, flapped his arms in the air as a signal that he understood Antanovich was an airman. The man then pointed Antanovich in the direction of Holland, which was still in German hands. Antanovich set his compass and walked the remainder of the day and into the night. Tired and weary, he decided to make a bed of pine needles under a tall evergreen tree, where he slept his first night in Germany.

Antanovich was unarmed. In England, he had heard rumors that German troops were killing American soldiers on sight rather than taking prisoners because the Germans barely had enough supplies to care for their own soldiers. He had no idea just how much danger he was facing on his first full day in enemy territory. That same day, one of Hitler’s shadow men, the Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, approved criminal combat methods under a German lynch law. By doing so, Bormann gave his seal of approval to mob justice, instructing German civilians to kill any Allied soldiers they encountered.

The next morning, Antanovich came upon railroad tracks and decided to follow them toward Holland. That could have been a mistake because German soldiers were guarding the rail lines. Upon spotting a man in the distance, he ducked for cover in the woods. That was when he stumbled upon a man and woman milking cows, a couple who helped him to reach safer quarters. “I said I was an American and I was hungry,” he says. The couple gave him a sandwich, his only food in two days. They took him to a house and introduced him to an English-speaking woman. “She said, ‘I know a man who knows a man who knows where to find the underground.’” The woman made a telephone call before escorting him by bicycle to a crossroads to meet another contact. “She said she didn’t want to see him or for him to see her.” This was designed to protect the identity of her contact, thus preventing the Nazis from unraveling the underground network through torture or other means.

Among other things, Antanovich’s U.S. Army survival kit contained silk maps of Holland, France, Spain and Belgium, as well as three cigarettes. At his base in England, he had been advised to hold onto his belongings. But instead, he gave everything away to those who helped him along his way, except the maps of Holland and Belgium. “Anything I had that they asked for, I gave to them,” Antanovich says. “I had a full pack of Camels. They told us not to smoke American tobacco because it was sweeter smelling and [the enemy would] recognize it.” He even shed his army air force uniform for civilian clothes as a disguise after reaching the underground. That was a dangerous thing to do. Antanovich would be treated as a spy if he were caught, but he thought his chances were better in civilian clothes. He guessed that he would be even more noticeable in uniform and, if captured, he would be shot whether in uniform or not.

Antanovich’s journey eventually took him to the home of Otto and Elisabeth Montagne on the outskirts of Hengelo, Holland. They were among many anti-Nazi couples in that area who secretly shielded Allied soldiers who had become separated from their units. Their visitors usually stayed in their home for three or four days until plans were made to return them to England, via France, Spain and Portugal. Spain temporarily held such MIAs as illegal immigrants before sending them to Portugal and from there to England, Antanovich was told. That escape route, however, was closed after Allied forces stormed Normandy, beginning June 6, 1944.

Antanovich’s parents, Alex and Mary, received word on June 16, 1944, from the War Department that their son was missing in action. They were devastated. His younger brother John was then part of an army air force B-17 flight crew serving in the United States. While his family dealt with the news, Antanovich was being hidden in sixteen different houses, some for a few hours and others for a month or two. He found himself sandwiched under trapdoors on some occasions when German troops searched from house to house, looking for railroad workers to help them reopen supply routes. The Montagnes shared their home with him and three other soldiers for seven months. Mrs. Montagne provided them with clothing from a nearby textile factory, giving them identical dark blue shirts with vertical stripes to identify them to others involved in the resistance. The men even wore wooden shoes and distinguishing hairstyles and mustaches to appear as local residents.

Mrs. Montagne often walked with a cart great distances to gather enough food to feed her guests. Food was being rationed, and each house was permitted to use electric lights for only one hour a day. Two rabbits from the barn provided Christmas dinner, a meal that also included cheese, crackers and pudding. Antanovich and his companions lived out their long days in boredom either reading, holding conversations or learning to speak Dutch. They sometimes occupied their time by playing games of Battleship, using scraps of numbered paper as game pieces, or singing songs around a piano.

By March 1945, the Dutch liberation effort began to intensify. Resistance fighters ambushed Nazi General Hans Ratter on March 6, 1945. More than one hundred Dutchmen were killed in retaliation two days later. Antanovich spent that month hiding in a hut in the woods with an armed member of the Canadian Royal Air Force. Hitler’s army was under attack on all fronts. “You could hear the gunfire getting close,” Antanovich says. By the end of the month, Allied forces were racing across collapsing German defenses. On April 1, 1945, they had German troops surrounded in the Ruhr basin, while British troops rolled into Hengelo that same day. Antanovich was rescued by members of the Welsh Guard after walking arm in arm to freedom with a young Dutch woman. He could hardly believe it was actually happening after ten months of evading capture. He was taken to the guard’s headquarters in Brussels before being sent to a U.S. military facility in Paris, France. “I had no identification,” Antanovich says. He was later returned to England to be identified by members of his bombing group, only to find all of his possessions gone. To his relief, he was told the other members of his aircrew had survived German prisoner of war camps. On April 24, 1945, his mother was told by the military that he was returned to active duty and was being rotated back to the United States. Antanovich did not say whether his family had given him up for lost, but their relief at the news of his rescue was boundless. They were one of the lucky families whose son returned alive and unhurt.

Following the war, Antanovich went home to rural Washington County and married the former Betty Porter. The couple had two sons, Alex and David, who died in childhood, and a daughter, Yvonne. He worked as a coal miner in Beth-Energy Corporation’s Cokeburg Mine, from which he retired in 1985 after working in the coal fields for twenty-four years. He says it was amazing to be part of such a great generation, one that witnessed serious hardships and major triumphs. “The men of today will never compete with what we went through,” he said. “We went through the Great Depression. We saw the TV come in. When I was a kid, farmers were working with horses. The doctor would come in a horse and buggy.”

Workers at a Pittsburgh mill celebrate V-E Day by making the “V for Victory” sign made famous by Winston Churchill. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

Over 400,000 Americans gave their lives in World War II. The city of Pittsburgh mourned its losses at a 1945 Memorial Day exercise in Calvary Cemetery. A statue of a Civil War soldier presides over the scene, commemorating losses from that war. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Antanovich also began attending church after returning home from the war. One day while reading the Bible, he came upon a verse in Psalms that states, “I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.”