Montana Wing - Jun 2006

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(Cover Photo, Wingspan Magazine, Summer 2006;

Official Publication of Montana Wing Civil Air Patrol)


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(Facing Page)


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Major Jim Brown: His StoryAs told to State Director Joe Macklin

#2 in theMontana Wing Heritage Series

At the recent 2006 Montana Wing Conference, we had a

special guest at the head table. Major Jim James

Benjamin Brown, a member of Skyhawks Senior Squadron,

Great Falls, Montana, for 34 years, is a WWII veteran. His

story, as rendered by State Director Joe Macklin, lent

special poignancy to the moving ritual of the POW/MIA

table. The entire room was rapt as attendees heard of Major

Jim Browns WWII Prisoner of War experience. Here, as

told to Joe Macklin, is Major Browns story:

James Benjamin Brown was born Feb. 5, 1920, in Maze,

Kansas. Jim has one brother and one sister; his father was a

wheat farmer who went broke in the 1920s and moved the

family to Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles,

California. His dad became a cement worker and buildingconstruction worker. Jim lost his mother when he was but a

young boy.

After graduating from Lincoln High School in 1940, Jim

enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps on July 10, 1941. He told

the recruiter he wanted to be a pilot or a mechanic, but after attending boot camp in Ft. McArthur,

California, he was assigned to Moffett Field, where he worked in supply for the next couple years.

After applying to be an aviation student, he took his primary flight training at Ryan Field, California.

There, he flew the PT-22, Ryan ST open cockpit trainer. He continued training at Lamore, California,

flying the PT-13 tandem trainer. Finally, he attended advanced training in Arizona, spending four months

flying the AT-9 (an all-metal heavy trainer) , AT-17, and AT-18 (Cessna fabric aircraft). Jim earned his

pilot wings and was commissioned as a flight officer in April 1943.

His first operational duty station was Biggs Army Air Field outside of El Paso, Texas, where he flew the

Consolidated B-24 Liberator as a copilot and aircraft commander. Transferred to Langley AAF, Virginia,

he flew the B-24 with the 455th Bomb Group. While at Langley, Jim took a crew to Willow Run factory in

New York to pick up a brand new B-24. He flew the plan from New York, over the Statue of Liberty, and

delivered the bomber to Langley. As he passed over the Statue of Liberty, he said, he dove down and flew

under the great ladys right arm. What were they going to do to me? he asked. I was already going into

combat.

Deployed to Casino Ascea, Italy, in February 1944, he landed in South America and Africa to refuel the B-

24 enroute to Italy. In Europe, he made bombing runs over Germany, Czechoslovakia, and several other

Axis countries.

The day he was shot down, they were bombing the Moosbierbaum oil refinery on the outskirts of Vienna,

Austria. It was June 26, 1944. Jim said he remembers looking down earlier in the flight, seeing the GIs

fighting on Anzeo Beach, Italy, and thinking, Im glad Im up here at 20,000 feet. 1st Lt Brown was shot

down on his 41st combat mission.

I lost all four turbos while cruising at 20,000 feet, he recollected. They were smoking, and I had to head

back to the base. I got down to 3,000 feet and everything was back under control. I overflew a runway on

the way back and was chased by 16 Focke-Wolf 190 fighter aircraft. I made a sharp right-hand turn directly

into the oncoming formation (a defensive tactic designed to misalign the fighters weapons), and the


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Number 2 engine took the full blast and caught on fire. I dropped my (landing) gear as a sign of surrender,

and ordered four officers and six enlisted crew members to bail out.

Jims B-24 aircrew consisted of an aircraft commander, copilot, navigator, flight engineer, radio operator,

two wastegunners, ball turret gunner, and tail gunner. They called the ball turret gunner the suicide

gunner because he was in a bubble underneath the belly of the aircraft, he explained.

Jim Brown was the last one out. He pulled his ripcord and

ultimately landed in a cherry tree. His back injured in the

shootdown; he was awarded the Purple Heart for his actions in

combat. After discarding his parachute, he was walking down a

trail in a field of grape vines and trees. An Austrian man and his

son came up to Jim and said, Come, come. Jim replied, No

way. Then some men started yelling at him. Armed with rifles

and sporting white arm bands, they were German soldiers. He

then surrendered to them, yielding his Colt 45 pistol.

The party headed to the village. Walking into the village,

children would come up to him and hold his and talk to him. Jim

was housed in a cellar that normally housed goats. Several of the

children looked into his cell and spoke with him. Then, Germansoldiers came in trucks, picking up Jims entire crew; that was

the first time he was reunited with his crew.

They took Jim to the Wiener Neustadt train station just south of

Vienna. He was surrounded by a bunch of civilians who Jim

thinks saved his life that day, as the two German guards were

likely going to shoot him if it werent for the crowd around him.

Then, he was transported via train to Stalag Luft III, near Sagan,

Germany, the backdrop for the book and movie The Great Escape.

Stalag Luft III was located 100 miles southeast of Berlin in what is now Poland. The POW camp was one

of six operated by the Luftwaffe for downed British and American airmen. Compared to other prisoner-of-

war camps throughout the Axis world, it was a model of civilized imprisonment. The Geneva Conventionof 1929 on the treatment of prisoners of war was complied with as much as possible, but it was still war,

still prison, and still grim. With a madman on top, there was the ever-present threat that authority above the

Luftwaffe could change things on a whim. Kriegies always

new that they were living on the razors edge.

Stalag Luft III was all officers. Jim Brown was imprisoned

there for seven months from June 1944 until January 1945.

On January 27, 1945, at his 4:30 staff meeting in Berlin,

Adolf Hitler had issued the order to evacuate Stalag Luft III.

He was fearful that the 11,000 Allied airmen in the camp

would be liberated by the Russians. Hitler wanted to keep

them as hostages. A spearhead of Soviet Marshal Ivan

Konevs Southern Army had already pierced to within 20kilometers of the camp.

In the barracks, there was a frenzy of preparationof

improvised packsacks being loaded with essentials,

distribution of stashed food, and of putting on layers of

clothing against the Silesian winter. As the men lined up

outside their blocks, snow covered the ground six inches

deep and was still falling. Guards with sentinel dogs herded

them through the main gate. Outside the wire, Kriegies


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waited and were counted, and waited some more, as for two hours icy winds penetrated their multilayered

clothes and froze stiff the shoes on their feet. Finally, about midnight, the South Camp moved out.

The nearly 11,000 prisoners of Stalag Luft III forced to march for interminable miles in minus-20 degree

weather. Hour after hour, they plodded through the blackness of night, a blizzard swirling around them and

winds driving well below zero. Those who survived were put on railroad cars and transferred to other

stalags. Jim was interred in Stalag Luft VI near Munich.

In general, the camps were segmented by barbed wire into Compounds, each of which contained several

Lagars, or barracks. These were divided into rooms which held upwards of 40 men in triple-tier wooden

bunks. From the prison camp, the internees could see the Nazi flag flying above. They also saw the flag

coming down and the Stars and Stripes going up. It was a moment when 10,000 men cried, Brown said.

On April 29, 1945, the Third Army arrived and Jim and his colleagues were repatriated.

Jim returned to the United States on board the SS General Gordon troop carrier enroute to New York.

Then, he boarded a train and traveled to his home in Los Angeles. The Army gave him 60 days leave after

the war; during that time, he had pneumonia and was hospitalized in Pasadena, California.

When he was well enough, he was sent to Ft. George Wright in

Spokane, Washington. While there, Jim met his wife-to-be,Alice Provost from Sidney, Montana (near the North Dakota

border). He continued to serve in the U.S. Army and Air Force,

retiring as a Major in 1962. One of his mission involved flying

around the world in a C-124 Globemaster to support the KC-97

which was plotting the magnetic equator. After retiring from the

Air Force, he worked at the Malmstrom Air Force Base (Great

Falls) Commissary for 27 years.

He and Alice were married on June 29, 1946, and will celebrate

their 60th anniversary this summer. They had six children, four

of whom survive, seven grandchildren, and one great-

grandchild. Alice remembers traveling alone with their six

children, all under age nine at the time, to join her husband inJapan, where he was stationed. After marrying, she was, as she

puts it, a domestic engineer. The couple still resides in Great

Falls.

Jim Brown in 2006

Montana Wing - Jun 2006

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