Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (2 page)

“Hey, Herb!” Dick yelled.

One of the pilots turned, and said, “Dick! Come on over!”

Someone lifted the rope for us. The Blue Angels pilot named Herb, it turned out, was a navy buddy of Dick’s. The two men shook hands, and Dick introduced me. I looked up, wondering how Herb could fit inside a cockpit. He looked eight feet tall. A lieutenant’s gold double bars were pinned on a foldable khaki cap that sat smartly on his head, and he wore aviator dark glasses.

“You want to sit in the cockpit?” Herb asked me.

I answered quickly before he could change his mind, and he led us down the row of planes. We stopped at the one that had his name painted under the open canopy: “Herb Hunter LT. USN.” On the tail was number 3.

A new pilot was now in my life, and I read stories, wherever I found them, about the Blue Angels, always looking for a picture of number 3—which of course became my lucky number—and any reference to Herb
Hunter, who flew with the navy’s elite demonstration team for three seasons (1957–1959).
^*

I joined the navy reserve while still in high school so I could go out to Alameda Naval Air Station for monthly drills and be around airplanes. After a restless year in college, I volunteered for two years of active duty. That is what brought me in June 1965 to the aircraft carrier
Ranger
(CVA-61). And while I was serving aboard ship as a weatherman (aerographer’s mate)—taking observations, plotting maps, and launching weather balloons—another pilot came into my life.

Things started off badly for
Ranger
pilot Lieutenant ( j.g.) Dieter Dengler, however. He was shot down over Laos; there was a violent crash in the jungle; the wreckage of his plane was found deep in enemy territory but there was no sign of his whereabouts. For long months we heard nothing of him. I well knew that aviators could be lost just that way: falling to the ground or sea, never to be seen or found; no corpse; gone forever; only distant memories for those who knew them. Emotionally, those unfulfilled hopes of finding my lost uncle had followed me to the fleet. And in 1966 off the steamy coast of North Vietnam, there were many pilots who went missing. Most, like Uncle Bob, did not return.

The fate of Dieter Dengler, however, was to be different. Already a legend in the navy for his escape and evasion skills—amply demonstrated during training in the California desert—he would initiate, plan, and lead an organized escape from a POW camp, becoming the longest-held American to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. Caught in a desperate situation, imprisoned not only by the enemy but by the jungle itself, Dengler was impelled not only to get himself out but to help free the other POWs—American, Thai, and Chinese—some of whom had been held for years.

In a surreal scene of brotherhood and celebration, Dengler returned to
Ranger
six months after being shot down—emaciated, ravaged with several tropical illnesses but very much alive and joyous to be so—only two weeks before we were due to leave the Gulf of Tonkin and return home.

The author aboard
Ranger
off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1966.
Family photograph.

True, Dieter Dengler was but one lost pilot and hero found. Yet for his fellow fliers and shipmates, and for me personally, his story of unending optimism, innate courage, loyalty, and survival against overwhelming odds remains our best and brightest memory of our generation’s war.

WARTIME GERMANY

On February 22, 1944,
in the Black Forest village of Wildberg, a small peaceful town nestled between rolling green farmlands and wooded mountains, an SS officer in a dove-gray uniform arrived at the home of the widow Maria Dengler and her three young sons. When she came to the door, the officer told her that the fatherland was confiscating her late husband’s bookbinding machinery. Metal was so scarce in Germany that residents had been ordered, “under penalty of death,” to remove and turn in all brass door hinges, which were to be melted down into shell casings for ammunition.

“You must not take the machines,” Maria protested. “One of the children might become a bookbinder.”

“I have my orders. A truck will be here in the morning.”

Maria said she would be speaking to Wildberg’s mayor about the matter. A local
Bürgermeister
, or mayor, held such authority over his township and its residents that the SS officer seemed unsure what to do or say next.

At that moment, the town’s air raid siren went off.

“We have to get out!” Maria yelled to her sons.

“Don’t worry,” said the SS man. “They don’t bomb small villages.”

Wildberg, Germany, in the 1930s.
Family photograph.

“We’re leaving,” said Maria, gathering her boys to her side.

The oldest, Klaus, eight, serious-minded and a loner, showed a bent for academics and music. Dieter, six, a tousled-haired rebel, was always into so much mischief that Maria worried her middle son was “born a Gypsy.” The youngest, Martin, four, was a good-natured boy who idolized Dieter and tagged after him.

Maria and her sons ran from the house. She prayed she was doing the right thing to keep them safe, as she had promised Reinhold on his last leave home before he returned to the Russian front. As the drone overhead grew deafening, they ran past the butcher shop and across a narrow bridge, then disappeared into the long shadows of pines and firs. For some time now she had been taking the boys into the dark forest to show them how to survive in case they were ever homeless and on their own. She taught them which wild berries to pick and which mushrooms were safe to eat, how to
pick stinging nettles that could be boiled, and how to burrow into the ground at night and cover themselves with branches and leaves for protection from the elements.

The formation of planes appeared as countless black dots stretching from one horizon to the other. Such massive overflights were on the increase as Allied air power hammered Stuttgart, an important German industrial center thirty miles away. Although up to now Wildberg had been spared, sometimes at night distant fires burned so intensely that it was bright enough on the village’s unlighted streets to read a newspaper. Today, for the first time, a flight of heavy bombers dropped out of formation and circled overhead.

As the siren wailed, bombs began dropping on the small village which had on its outskirts a glider school where new Luftwaffe pilots were trained.

Maria Schnuerle and Reinhold Dengler, ages twenty-eight and thirty-one respectively, were married in 1936. Shy and religious, Maria, the daughter of a baker in Calw—ten miles north of Wildberg—had never been courted. Reinhold, however, had “an eye on her for a long time,” as Maria was a member of her church choir, which occasionally visited Wildberg, where he sang in the local choir.

For years, Reinhold had been unable to look for a wife. His father had died when Reinhold, the oldest of four children, was sixteen. On his deathbed, the father asked Reinhold to support his two sisters and brother until they were on their own. That time had arrived—with one sister married, another a schoolteacher, and his brother having completed training as a notary.

One spring day after the church choir from Calw sang in Wildberg, local families were asked to take a visiting choir member home for lunch. To Reinhold’s delight, the Denglers hosted the rosy-cheeked blonde he had eyed: Maria, the baker’s daughter. After lunch, Reinhold and Maria went for a walk. Along a meandering trail through woods carpeted with wildflowers, he showed off his impressive skills as a gymnast with handstands and backflips.

“Maria Schnuerle, I have something for you,” he announced. “This is the first present I can give you.”

He pressed into her hand several bright blue forget-me-nots.

An embarrassed Maria smiled, although she wondered if the dashing Reinhold Dengler “talked to all the girls” in such a pleasing manner.

Reinhold was a man of many talents. He had taught himself the bookbinding business and photography, and he was also a skilled artist who created detailed landscapes in pencil and water colors. He was admired by those who knew him for his kindness, creativity, and devotion to family.

The couple made a plan to meet midway between Calw and Wildberg the following Sunday. They both bicycled to the rendezvous, and after pedaling for a couple of miles they left their bikes inside a small factory and walked along a well-worn path. That afternoon they encountered numerous passersby, most of whom greeted Reinhold warmly. Maria was struck by how many people knew her suitor and how well liked he seemed to be.

After a while, Reinhold said, “Maria, I have to say something to you.”

“What is it, Reinhold?”

“I want you to be my wife.”

Surprised and overwhelmed, Maria did not immediately respond.

Reinhold was undeterred. “When you get home, I want you to tell your mother and father about our walk today. Tell them that I would like to meet them next Friday. I will come to your house.”

When Maria delivered the message, her father was outraged. “Who the hell does he think he is, coming into the family like that?” He sat down and wrote a stern letter to Reinhold, rejecting the idea of a family visit.

Hermann Schnuerle the baker was a famously stubborn and principled man. Although he was a member of Calw’s town council, he had refused to vote in the 1934 plebiscite that served as a referendum for Adolf Hitler. Nationwide, 95 percent of all registered voters had gone to the polls, and 90 percent of them had approved of Hitler becoming the
Führer
. The baker’s wife and others beseeched Hermann to go to the town hall and at least give the appearance of voting. He refused, explaining that he believed Germany was headed in the wrong direction and that Hitler was not the man to lead it. Later that day a group of men came for Hermann, telling him to accompany them to the town hall. After they rounded the first corner they
tied his hands and hung around his neck a placard declaring him to be a traitor. Marched through town in a solemn parade, Hermann was cursed and spat upon by some of the same people who came to his shop every morning for his fresh bread. Many thought the baker would simply disappear. Instead, he was sent for more than a year to a “rock refinery where they cut rocks.” When he returned home to his family and baking business, he was steeled rather than broken by the ordeal.

When Hermann read his letter to Maria and her mother, Maria said, “Now I have something to tell you. Reinhold was sixteen when his father died and he had to support his family. He is thirty-one now. Many people know him. He is liked and admired. He is a good man and a hard worker. He is a bookbinder and photographer, and people from as far away as Hamburg hire him.”

Her father tore up the letter and wrote a new one, telling Reinhold Dengler, “Since I only hear wonderful things about you we are looking forward to meeting you next Friday.” Reinhold made his visit, and won over Maria’s family: not only her father, but also her mother and siblings, including her brothers, Harold and Theo. Maria and Reinhold’s wedding soon followed.

Three years later, in 1939, Reinhold was drafted into the German army and went away for a year. When he came home on leave, he told Maria he was in charge of a library in Poland, and for her not to worry, as he was out of danger. “I’m not fighting,” he explained, “and nobody bothers me.” But as the war continued and the situation grew more desperate, Reinhold did become involved in the fighting. When he returned home in the summer of 1943 on his last leave, Reinhold told Maria that Germany was losing the war. She was shocked, since the only news the civilian population received told of great victories for Germany and crushing defeats for the Allies. “I may not be back,” he said frankly. Reinhold made out his will. Expecting difficult times ahead—including food shortages—he implored Maria not to “tie the boys to her apron” but rather to teach them self-sufficiency. Near the end of his leave, he told Maria, “Let’s take a picture. It will probably be the last one we have of us.” That winter, Reinhold’s prophecy came true when the Soviet Union recaptured Kiev in the Ukraine and pushed the Germans into retreat. Reinhold was killed when his bunker was hit by an exploding grenade. He was thirty-eight years old.

Reinhold Dengler.
Family photograph

After receiving notification of Reinhold’s death, Maria proclaimed her life “now in God’s hands.” She kept her pledge to Reinhold to show their sons how to survive on their own, but she believed that whatever happened to her and the boys was preordained by God. In an opposite reaction, Maria’s brother Theo, who had come to love Reinhold like his own brother, threw away his Bible because “there cannot be a God if a man like Reinhold is killed.”

The war came to Wildberg not long afterward. At the precise moment it arrived, Dieter and Martin were at home, peering out a third-story window. A single-engine fighter with a big white star on its fuselage swept so low and so close to the house that the boys could see the pilot in the cockpit. The canopy was open, and they clearly saw the pilot’s goggles atop his head and the white scarf around his neck. The plane roared past, aiming for the train station down the hill, its loud guns spitting out yellow flashes. The aircraft then pulled up abruptly in a steep climbing turn, and was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

For Dieter, the close encounter would be unforgettable and life altering. He had never seen anything so exciting. Not at all fearful, he had been mesmerized by the flying machine that soared above the earth with the freedom of a bird. Years later he would describe it as “like an Almighty Being that came out of the sky.” He decided then and there that he would grow up to fly a plane just like that one. From then on, he later explained, “little Dieter needed to fly.”

Attacking Allied planes would return on other days, making quick low passes over the town’s train station. Railroad workers learned to keep only
the older locomotives on the tracks, while parking the newer rolling stock inside a nearby tunnel. The children came to regard the flyovers more as amusement than as danger, for they lasted such a short time and inflicted no casualties or damage on homes and shops. Before the smoke and dust cleared, older boys would be eagerly running along the railroad tracks picking up spent bullets, and, if they were really lucky, “an entire cartridge belt to wear proudly.”

For the youth of Wildberg, their enjoyment would be short-lived.

Maria and her sons neared the top of a steep hill when the “ground erupted.” Never before had they heard the high-pitched whistling sound of bombs dropping or the “deafening booms from their explosions.” They scrambled under the cover of old, fallen timber, and hugged the ground. Covering their ears, they prayed as the earth shook beneath them.

They did not emerge until after the bombers were gone. When they did they looked anxiously in the direction of Wildberg but could not make out anything through the dense foliage. All around them was silence, not even the chirping of a sparrow. On their way back they met a group of armed men with leashed German shepherds. They said they were looking for an enemy pilot who had landed nearby in a parachute, and asked Maria if she had seen anyone. Maria said no, and hurried on with her boys.

As Maria and her sons left the woods, they entered a sunlit meadow where they came upon a stunned villager standing with two tethered cows.

“Everything is gone,” said the woman. “Everything.”

At the outskirts of Wildberg, the first dead bodies they saw were those of horses and cows lying stiffly on their sides or backs. The heat and smoke grew intense as they entered town. Many structures were flattened and in cinders; others were ablaze, including the shoe repair shop, which filled the air with the pungent smell of burning leather. Wildberg’s seventeenth-century castle had burned to the ground, and the village church and school were also destroyed, as were rows of houses and shops.