re: POW’s/Vietnam

I was fortunate enough to take a WW2 and a Vietnam war class at my high school in Georgia. Both classes were customized curriculums that each teacher needed permission from the state to teach and they weren’t found anywhere else in Georgia. I spoke with a POW from both wars in each class. The WW2 veteran was a ball gunner in a B-17. He told us that he was in the ball for about 10 minutes firing at various planes that were attacking him when he blacked out. When he woke up he was falling through the sky but he had his parachute on his back as he always did crawling into that death trap. He proceeded to land in southern Germany with a broken leg and was picked up by the SS and transferred to a POW camp where he spent the remaining 2 years of the war. He was treated pretty well although he did go hungry towards the end of the war. He went back to Germany and met one of his captors in the 80s and they shared a meal at his home.

The Vietnam veteran who was a POW was shot down outside of Hanoi from his F-4. He went to the Hanoi Hilton like so many others and was held there for 5 years if my memory is correct. He talked about how the prisoners communicated with each other by tapping their cell walls in a manner that mimicked the alphabet so they could figure out what each other were saying. He knew John McCain well and like McCain he couldn’t raise his arms above his shoulders due to the torture he received. His experience as very different from the WW2 I spoke with.