Centralia man’s WWII service remembered as Veterans Day approaches
By Tom Seagraves
ABC 17 News
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Ronald Grove lived in Centralia for many years.
He worked there and he raised a family there. Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2014. But before he died, he spoke about his military service during World War II.
Gerald Grove – Ronald’s son – was willing to talk about his dad’s service. His dad was one of many young men at the time that was willing to take the risk of serving in the war.
Ronald Grove enlisted in the military in 1942 at 19 years old.
After several long months of training, he found himself attached to a 10-man crew on a Boeing B-17 Bomber as a tail gunner. He was part of the 95th bomb group, which was based in Horham in the United Kingdom.
Known as “The Flying Fortress,” the B-17 was armed with up to 13 machine guns and could carry a 9500-pound bomb load.
Grove and his fellow airmen were tasked with daylight bombing raids that were met by German fighters. Nearly 13.000 B-17's were built during the war, and thousands of them were damaged or destroyed. Grove would have looked out over the skies of Europe for enemy fighters from his position in the tail of his bomber.
History teacher and author Rob Morris -- whose many books include “The Wild Blue Yonder and Beyond: The 95th Bomb Group in War and Peace” -- which is the history of the 95th Bomb Group, said there were many dangers if you were part of a B-17 crew.
“First of all you’re at about 30,000 feet, it’s about 60 degrees below 0, so it’s extremely cold up there,” Morris said. “The plane is not pressurized so there’s no oxygen, and you have to constantly be on oxygen at altitude or you’re going to die fairly quickly of hypoxia. Throw into that the fact that these guys are fighting off enemy fighters, especially in 1943, and early 1944, and also hoping these big puffs of flak don't blow up right next to them and throw shrapnel all through their aircraft."
In April 1944, while on a mission over Germany, Grove’s B-17 had to make a crash landing after experiencing an overheated engine, bullets from an enemy fighter and flak from German guns. The lead pilot of Grove's B-17, Max Wilson, was able to limp the airplane across the Switzerland border before making a crash landing.
In 1990, Gerald Grove was able to find the video of that scene.
“They were a little bit high and Max pushes down on the control stick and as soon as they touch the left main landing gear, which was probably damaged by the 20 mm cannon of that Focke-Wulf, that left main landing gear collapsed and the left wing dipped, hit the ground quite hard, knocking No. 1 and No. 2 engines completely loose from the wing,” Gerald Grove said. “That sent the airplane into a lefthand, or port turn, with no control by Max or Felix. That skidded them over toward their left, over toward a radio tower, which was not going to move. And it didn’t. And their B-17 ultimately slammed into that radio tower and a radio shack that was next to it, and that’s how they stopped.”
Even though Switzerland was a neutral country, any soldiers or airmen that ended up there were taken out of the war and put into internment camps. These camps were located high in the Swiss Alps in ski resort towns. The resorts were empty because of the war, but because of their location, escape was difficult.
While being an internee at one of these camps was not the same as being a Prisoner of War in Germany, boredom was plentiful and food was scarce.
Gerald Grove described his father's weight loss while he was in a Switzerland camp.
"Dad went from about 145 pounds- 150 pounds, when he returned to the states after his escape, he was down to about 105 pounds,” Gerald Grove said. “So, he lost some 40 pounds that he probably didn't have to lose, just due to lack of food. The Swiss people weren't hoarding it, there just wasn't a lot of food to be had.”
After seven months, Grove, along with another man in the camp, Joseph Piemonte, staged an escape. After two days on the run, they finally made it to France.
Grove finally returned to his unit in England, but because he had escaped custody, he was no longer eligible to fly missions in the European theater of operations.
He returned to the U.S. to train as a gunner on a B-29. But before he could be deployed to the Pacific Theater, the war ended.
While Grove’s story is one of heroism, at the time, there were young men from all over the country that were doing similar things.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 16.1 million Americans served in World War II. Today, there are only about 119,500 of them still alive. That is less than 1%. Only 2,415 World War II veterans are still living in Missouri.
In a few short years all of these veterans will be gone. It was their heroism that allows us the freedoms we have today, and their stories must be remembered.
Projects like The Veterans Story Project, whose mission is to preserve their accounts and heroism, look to document their stories.
Veterans can also be honored through memorial groups. The 95th Bomb Group Memorial Foundation is one of many groups that work to educate the public and preserve the history of its air campaign over the skies of Europe.
