Wreath Laying at 303rd BG Memorial Commemorates WWII Airman

  • Published
  • By Peter G. Park, JAC Commander's Action Group
  • JIOCEUR Analytic Center
ROYAL AIR FORCE MOLESWORTH, England --  "The crew's first mission was on December 20, 1943, to drop bombs over Bremen, Germany. Unfortunately, it was also our last mission, as we were shot down."

Sergeant Stewart G. Hall, U.S. Army Air Corps, was memorialized on 29 May when Mr. John Cook of Houston placed a wreath on the 303rd Bomb Group (Heavy) Memorial on behalf of his co-worker in Texas, Ms. Megan E. Guerra, granddaughter of the sergeant.

Sergeant Hall, badly injured when his B-17 was shot down, spent 10 months in German prison hospitals before he was repatriated to the U.S. - one of a very few prisoners released during the war.

In an account of his experiences written after the war, Sergeant Hall wrote: "After parachuting from the burning plane, I landed in a frozen plowed field. Having passed out on the way down because of lack of oxygen, I came to in time to turn around to land on my back as I had a broken leg at the time. Those who came to meet me were children. They surrounded me with sticks. At first I thought they were all from Holland because they had on wooden shoes. It wasn't long before the soldiers came on bicycles with rifles over their shoulders.

"I had a compound computed fracture above my knee. I was operated on at the German Naval hospital where they drilled through my leg above the knee to place a pin. I wasn't out cold and it felt like they were sawing my leg off when they drilled through the bone.

"During the time I was at Stalag 10B my captors talked about an exchange of prisoners. The Red Cross came to look at our wounds and decide who was going to be exchanged. The group of two each of the German Red Cross, the Swedish Red Cross, and the Swiss Red Cross didn't tell us anything and I didn't know until the day it happened over three months later in the middle of August, 1944, out of the blue, that I was to be part of a prisoner exchange.

"They shipped me to Stalag 17B at Nuremberg for about two weeks before I was exchanged on September 9, 1944. I came out through Sweden on the Swedish Hospital Ship the Gripsholm - a white ship that ran lights all night so it could be seen by the submarines so it wouldn't be torpedoed by the German subs. My ordeal as a P. O. W., which lasted almost ten months, was over." 

Sergeant Hall passed away in April 2007.