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USA Edition | Today Is Wednesday, June 19, 2013 |
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Serving The Public Interest Without Fear Or Prejudice
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Newsroom Magazine's principal mission is to credibly and responsibly inform readers about the world in which we live.
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In fulfillment of our mission we pledge to be responsible, credible and journalistically sound so that we might deliver newsworthy information and materials including that which reveals government in its own words absent fear or prejudice.| Browsing American Experience Section | Organized In Date Order | [ 40 items ] | |||
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B-17 Flying Fortress Over Europe
Like so many of his countrymen, Shaffer’s life was interrupted by official invitation from the Denver draft board. After boot camp he was sent to Graften-Underwood RAF Base in England to become part of the 384th Bomb Group. Given his size, Shaffer became waist gunner on a crew assigned to a B-17 named Dark Angel.
Denver
This Great American Remembers
You may not know the name of this great American, but he is known well among his fellow Newsroom Magazine Contributors. His name is Gordon Shaffer, and he’s one of those brave young men who put on a uniform during World War II to fight for his country. He was small of stature at 18 years of age, weighing in just under 120 pounds.
Greetings From The President Of The United States
Like so many of his countrymen, Shaffer’s life was interrupted by official invitation from the Denver draft board. After boot camp he was sent to Graften-Underwood RAF Base in England to become part of the 384th Bomb Group. Given his size, Shaffer became waist gunner on a crew assigned to a B-17 named Dark Angel.
Gordon’s a native Coloradoan — a man’s man who knows his way around the mountains, fields and streams west of Denver. Like other young airmen of his era, Gordon’s B-17 bomber, part of the 545th Bomb Squadron, was swept up in the calamitous events of World War II.
That’s How It Was
Dark Angel made a dozen or more bombing runs over Germany that winter. On nearly every mission some of the B-17s returned to England with wounded, or crashed over the target, or ditched into the English Channel on the way home. Nobody liked it, but that’s how it was.
March 17th, 1945, Dark Angel was assigned to a raid on Erfert, Germany where it was hit by anti-aircraft fire near Emden. The moment the ship was hit pilot William Schauer gave the order to abandon ship. In little more than a minute everyone had bailed out.
The little waist gunner, Gordon Shaffer, a kid far from his Colorado family, had to extricate himself from the belly turret in an aircraft already in a flat spin. By the time he attached his parachute line and pulled himself to the emergency exit, the plane was heaving earthward — everyone else was gone — floating to the fields below.
The Missing Man
One of Dark Angel’s crew, Sgt. Vernon Cooksey, perished. He is still remembered today.
After meeting up on the ground, Gordon and crew made their way to a small church near Emden where they were captured. The most painful part of the Dark Angel crew experience wasn’t the bail out and landing, but their transport to a POW camp that included a two-day long march without food or water.
Knowledge of events in distant lands is essential to preserving our own freedoms and way of life. Shaffer’s is only one such story in an ongoing epic that continued in Korea, exploded into the hot jungles of Vietnam, and spread eastward to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gordon Shaffer’s incarceration experience, and release at the end of the war a few months later, are part of the American Experience. War service drove home the truth few may fully understand today — that freedom always has been and always will be paid for in blood and sacrifice.
When summer arrived in Germany in 1945, American troops were racing east to meet the Russian Army. It was their fellow Americans who released the Dark Angel crew at war’s end in June, 1945.
Distant Echoes
Most of those who served in World War II are gone today. Only the youngest airmen of the 387th still survive. Shaffer, now 87, no taller and no heavier than when his life was interrupted by the second world war, still carries the memory of those with whom he served and his own struggle to exit a pilot-less four-engine aircraft whaling through the air in a sickening flat spin.
Shaffer served his nation for reasons he still cherishes today. Freedom was at the top of his list, but love of family, and his Colorado home, were never far from mind.
Eventually, the Dark Angel crew came home to a free country — one he and his crew-mates had fought for and suffered to make secure and keep free.
Their countrymen welcomed them home, for everyone back stateside knew what they had done.
Being An American Is An Honor
Best we remember those who have secured and protected our freedoms by their sacrifice for it is not the paper nor the principles enshrined in the U.S. Constitution that makes us a nation of free citizens.
It’s the men and woman who take the risks, make the sacrifices and make the enemy die for their country that make possible all that we know, have — or shall ever enjoy.
