ANTRIM, N.H. -- Nine American G.I.s boarded a B-17 bomber leaving Grafton Underwood Air Force base in Northamptonshire, England, on Nov. 30, 1944.
They were the 384th squad with the U.S. Army Air Corps, a specially trained bomb crew ordered to the next target: Nuremberg by way of Wintersdorf.
It was more than five months since the Allies push for Normandy and the assault on northern France to smash the Axis stranglehold on Europe. The Battle of the Bulge, where more than 80,000 Americans were killed or wounded, was only weeks away.
Shortly after the plane was airborne, the crew noticed one of the engines was not working properly and they slowly fell to the back of the squadron. The pilots were already starting with one hand tied behind their back as they passed 30,000 feet above Germany.
While over the town of Zeitz, the aircraft took a direct hit by flak just after it released the last seven bombs on the target. The plane immediately fell from formation and smashed into the cold German ground outside the small town of Rebgeshain.
Despite orders from the pilot to bail out, the crew decided to go down with the B-17.
All nine of the men survived the crash. One of those men was Staff Sgt. Lester H. Russell, Jr., trained as an aerial photographer but who found himself serving as tail gunner that mission.
A 1942 graduate of Brattleboro High School, Russell would become a decorated war veteran and longtime photographer and illustrator
Russell, who was best known for his sense of humor and inspirational artistic style, died on Oct. 16 at Monadnock Community Hospital surrounded by his family. He was 86.
Finding Russell
Wayne Shearsmith is a major World War II buff.
Living in Kettering Northants, England, Shearsmith has studied the
"I've always been interested in military history, and what with half a dozen former WWII 8th Army Air Force bases within a 20-mile radius of Kettering, I have always been interested in the 8th AAF role in the UK," he said in a letter correspondence with the Reformer.
Grafton Underwood is three miles from his town; the air base and the men who left from its runway has always sparked a special interest. "I have attended reunions of the group both in England and the USA. In 1989, I traveled to Savannah, Ga., to attend a reunion there."
Through his research, Shearsmith goes back to that grave November day at the Grafton Underwood base.
A brash, cocky 21-year-old Russell remembered that gray English morning.
By that time, "Russ" had 32 missions under his belt as an aerial photographer. Like many soldiers flying with him at the time, he felt superhuman, untouchable in the air.
"I was ready to take them all on," Russell told the Reformer in an August interview. "I was trained as an aerial photographer, gunner, but most of this was just based on getting you to volunteer to fly. As soon as you volunteered to fly, they put you where they wanted you."
So the youthful photographer took to the sky once more, not knowing it was his last mission.
Flying over the village of Zeitz, the plane was struck and started to fall out of formation. Having a plane go into a nose dive is a risk all the airmen knew about before joining the ranks.
"The air force took more casualties than any other service, except submarines. And of those, it's reckoned that 60 percent of the tail-gunners were killed," said Russell.
The pilot executed a "belly landing" in a deep snow (which aided in the crash) around a thickly forested area behind enemy lines. All they had were the clothes on their backs and a small rations kit containing a few candy pieces and some German currency.
None of them spoke any German.
Since Russell was the last to exit the wrecked aircraft, he watched as most of his fellow crew ran into the woods. Only two others waited for him.
For three long days, the men trekked through the snow and ice. Temperatures dropped well below zero during the night. Finally, on Dec. 3, the soldiers thought they located an abandoned barn, but an armed local man walked in just minutes after their arrival.
Their captor took the Americans to the nearby village of Gonterskirchen and they were housed with a number of local women and children. Russell said what happened next is a testament to humanity -- the townspeople were very friendly toward the tired and hungry prisoners.
The women brought them water and started to prepare meals for the Americans. Russell, in return for their kindness, gave the candies from his ration kit to their children.
But before they had an opportunity to eat, the police arrived on scene, chained the prisoners together and marched them off. Although the men did not understand German, they were under the impression the police were to lead them to the cemetery on the outskirts of the village to be shot.
According to Russell, the women begin to cry, pleading with the officers to spare the lives of the American strangers. The image of those women crying haunted Russell's dreams for decades. However, the tactic worked.
Instead of being executed, the air crew went to a prison camp. While the men may not have known it at the time, those townspeople in Gonterskirchen saved their lives.
Russell and the others spent the next six months in the Stalag Luft I POW camp at Barth.
It was an officers camp, he remembers, so none of the Americans did any work other than signing in at roll call in the morning.
There was plenty of down time, he said, giving him the opportunity to fashion his drawing skills.
"I don't remember how, but somehow I had a drawing pad and some stencils," said Russell. The Germans were not fussy about the sketches, so there was no reason to hide them.
"I didn't attempt to do anything derogatory to the Germans. My interest was expressing my feelings about where I was and who I was with. It's sort of always been that way," he said.
As a young boy living in upstate Vermont, Russell said an aunt and uncle lived in nearby Stowe and his family would take the horse and buggy to visit them. At that house, he remembers two scrapbooks with some of the earliest American cartoons at the time.
"Every time we went there, that [scrapbook] was my target, and then I would attempt to draw cartoons when I got home again," he said. "I think I sold my first cartoon when I was 12, I didn't sell another one until I was 30."
Many of his prisoner sketches are on display at the United States Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Others, such as his famous "Kriegie Humor" cartoon, are available online.
Additionally, Russell provided several drawings to the Reformer for publication, most of which have never been reprinted publicly.
Several months later, the Russians liberated the POW camp and Russell was shipped to France before returning home to Vermont. He again set foot on American soil on June 20, 1945. It was his mother's birthday.
But what of the other crew members who went their separate ways following the crash landing?
Four of the men were spotted by two farmers hunting rabbits in the woods and brought to the local authorities in the town of Grunberg-Beltershain. The leader was a hardened Nazi Party member and quickly had them executed.
Russell, along with other survivors from the crash, found that out after the war ended. "One of the forced laborers witnessed what had happened and he told the Americans about it, and that's how it was discovered."
Tied together at the elbows, the four prisoners were marched outside of town, killed and buried in a trench-like grave one on top of the other.
"They found their bodies some distance away buried in the woods, the four that were shot -- the two pilots, the engineer, the ball turret gunner ... they took the four out to a field someplace and shot them. First they shot them in the back, and then, two head shots to each one," said Russell.
In April 1945, the U.S. Army exhumed the bodies, slowly identified each soldier and then returned the remains to their homes for proper burial. Only one of the perpetrators received the death penalty for his role in the killing of the four Americans.
Fast forward to early 2009 -- Shearsmith was surfing the Internet, looking for information about the 384th when he saw an article about one of the crews shot down over Germany.
The story intrigued him further when he read all the crew had safely escaped from the downed aircraft, however four of the Americans were listed as killed in action. For the next nine months, Shearsmith attempted to pinpoint the survivors, including Russell, to learn more about their valorous story.
"So began my research ... I was just fortunate to locate some of the men's families quicker than others. I have lost count of how many letters I've written."
In his quest to locate the sergeant, Shearsmith took a chance and send a letter to Jane M. Russell in Brattleboro. His research found Sgt. Russell's mother lived on Brook Street and so he rolled the dice that Russell's relatives were still in the region.
"Firstly, I located the Missing Aircrew Report (MACR), which listed the next of kin of all the crew. So, I looked at the relevant phone directions of where the crew men came from to see if there was any surnames the same as the crewman I'm looking for," he said. "I have been quite successful with this ploy."
While Jane Russell was not related to the sergeant, she did bring that particular letter to her local newspaper, prompting a closer investigation into the World War II veteran's history.
Lester H. Russell Jr. was born into a Waterbury Center farming family in 1923. The family moved to Brattleboro when he was a teenager, where he graduated from high school in town before enlisting in the army.
After returning home from Germany, he trained in animation for the Air Force in New York City and later served as a news photographer and illustrator at the Pentagon for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 22 years in the Air Force, he moved on to the Navy, where he was chief animation artist in Washington, D.C.
He and Giffin, his wife of 33 years, moved to New Hampshire in 1981. The couple became well-known in the region for their art exhibits, even painting the murals on the Antrim Town Hall together in 1994.
Finding Russell alive brought to the forefront what Shearsmith knew all along.
"I knew that Sgt. Russell had survived and been imprisoned in a P.O.W. camp, and again, through the Internet, I discovered that he had been imprisoned in Stalag Luft I," said Shearsmith. A little more digging brought him the Web site merkki.com, displaying several of the cartoons attributed to Russell.
Through the assistance of the Reformer, the two were able to communicate shortly before Russell's death.
Fallen, not forgotten
This is not the first time researchers have sought Sgt. Russell for his story.
German researcher Horst Jeckel had searched for him for more than 10 years, looking for information regarding the fateful incident in the village so many years ago. Jeckel was with "Fallen but not Forgotten," a German filmmaking group documenting the lives of American servicemen killed during World War II.
By retracing many of the steps from the plane crash, he was able to finally locate not only Russell, but the women in the town who harbored the Americans at great risk to themselves.
Jeckel was also able to reunite Russell with Else Klaus, one of the young women in Gonterskirchen who assisted the American prisoners shortly before they were taken to the camp. On that cold December day, Klaus ran up to Russell and gave him a bag of bread and butter to eat -- a gift the sergeant never forgot.
"Atrocities in war are a dime a dozen. When something good happens, it really shines," he said. Russell and Klaus remained in contact via e-mail for many years after they reconciled.
"This story should be told, the crew deserve it to be told, the families of the crew would be proud if this story is told, even though it might still be painful for them," said Shearsmith, half a world away. "Of the families of the three crewmen that I have traced, none of them have objected, and in fact all have said how proud they are that I am bringing their story out."
Chris Garofolo can be reached at cgarofolo@reformer.com or 802-254-2311, ext. 275.
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