A Visit to Czech Republic

Allan Ostrom, Chuck Sassa, and Jaromir Kohout at Christensen crew memorial

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I knew quite a bit about my father's early life, his marriage to my mother, a little bit about his stateside Air Force training, but had almost no information about his war time experience. Then in April 2005 we had a breakthrough that led us to the 398^th Bomb Group Memorial Association and to the monument to the Christensen crew near Slany in the Czech Republic. Allen Ostrom put me in touch with some Czech friends who urged us to come to a memorial service scheduled in Slany in June.

On that first trip to the Czech Republic in June 2005 I met Jaromir Kohout who handed me a booklet he had written with Jaromir Kveton entitled 398th Bomb Group a Česká Republika, first published in 2000.

In the early 1985, Jaromir and his brother Martin, then both in their 20’s, formed a group called SLET Pilsen, dedicated to finding and commemorating USAAF crash sites in their country. Jaromir wrote, “We do this so that people know of young boys who flew and were shot down over our country.” They were soon joined by several others with similar interests including co-author Jaromir Kveton and another friend, Jan Zdiarsky. Jan is the founder and director of the Museum of the Air Battle Over the Ore Mountains On September 11, 1944, at Kovarska, near the German border. Jan’s museum is dedicated to that single air battle, known as “Black Monday,” in which over 50 aircraft were shot down including large numbers B-17s from the 100th and 95th Bomb Groups, as well as over 50% of the German fighters sent against them. Jan is also involved in other WWII research projects and contributed some of the photography to Jaromir’s book.

Members of Christensen crew:  Top left Elmer Gurba, Radioman.  Top right Robert Dudley Flight Engineer, Ken Plantz Gunner, Elmer Gurba Radioman, Selmer Haakenson Tail Gunner,Sgt. Carlisle Gunner.

In The 398th Bomb Group and the Czech Republic Jaromir Kohout wrote about the history of the 398th Bomb Group and the airfield at Nuthampstead, some of the group’s early missions into Germany, and most of their missions over Czech territory, including the accidental bombing of Prague on Feb 14, 1945, and their final mission of the war against the Skoda production facility at Pilsen on April 25. A good portion of their work concerns the fate of Christensen crew after their damaged plane disappeared into the clouds on March 2, 1945. It contained information and photos I had never seen, and included several eyewitness accounts of the plane crash, and accounts of the burial of crew members and their recovery by the American Graves Registration Service after the war. Sixty years after that event my Czech friends simply handed me this valuable key to some of the information I had been seeking for decades. They have my undying gratitude.

Allan Ostrom and Jan Zdiarsky

Surviving Tail Gunner Selmer Haakenson with Jaromir's book.

This booklet is written in Czech of course, When I got home I showed it to a couple people from the Czech Republic to get some translation, but with little success.  Then my daughter-in-law Vanessa, who has a translation business -- mainly English to Spanish -- secretly took the booklet and paid an excellent Czech translator to do the job.  She never told us what it cost her but I value my English copy as much as the original.  Thank you, Vanessa!

The Search

My father lost his life in combat on March 2, 1945, when his B-17 was shot down by enemy fighters over Czechoslovakia. He was 27 years old; a member of the 398^th Bomb Group, 603^rd Squadron. It was only his fifth mission. It was also his wife Jocile's 24^th birthday and she was pregnant with their second child, my brother Steve, who would be born three months after my father's death. I was 2 ½ -years-old and my father was the biggest thing in my life. Growing up in his physical absence, and among other members of “the greatest generation,” I understand what Tom Mathews calls “the tidal pull of WWII,” especially for those of us who were born were born in its turbulence and grew up in the shadow of its heroes, living or dead.

I wrote something about my dad's childhood, which can be read here. My dad joined the Army Air Corps in June 1943, and graduated in Class 44-F at Pecos, Texas a year later. For the next seven months my mother and I joined him, living on bases at Roswell, New Mexico, Sioux City, Iowa, and Lincoln, Nebraska. I last saw him as he shipped out in January 1945, two months before his final mission. Since then I have only seen him in dreams and memories, but his effect on me has been inexorable.

I inherited a box of photos, letters, photos, documents, mementos, and a couple of medals.  I learned a good bit about his early life and his Air Force training in the states but only a sketchy story of his service and death. I knew he flew out of England, his plane had crashed in Czechoslovakia, and the tail gunner was the only survivor. His papers and documents revealed few clues about his service. War Department correspondence from 1945-46, indicated that he had flown from a base at Nuthampstead, England, and that the target that March 2 was Bohlen, Germany. There was a 1945 letter to my mother from tail gunner “Sam” Haakenson, written soon after his release from a POW camp, and another from someone named “Ridge.” (I now know that was Lawson Ridgeway, my father’s navigator who was on another plane that day.) Both expressed hope that my father and his crew would be found alive. For sixty years that was as much detail as I had.

I wrote to the Air Force, the Pentagon, and the National Archives seeking his military records and other information—to no avail. They told that a 1972 fire in St. Louis had destroyed many WWII records including his. I insisted that there must be a MACR (Missing Aircrew Report) somewhere, or at least a record of which unit he served with, but no one seemed interested in looking any further. I had hit a dead end.

Then in March, 2005, with the family gathered following our mother’s funeral, Steve and my son Jeff suggested we try a Google search on his computer. Starting simply with “B17 Bomb Groups,” we found a list of English air bases indicating that Nuthampstead was home to the 398^th Bomb Group. This linked us to the 398^th website and to their Flak News, with articles about the surviving tail gunner, Selmer Haakensen. We were stunned to learn there was a memorial to our father and his crew at Slany, Czech Republic; a website for the Slany Aeroklub had photos of the memorial! After 60 years, with a few keystrokes, the stone was rolling away!

Tribute to My Father

Lt. Donald R. Christensen

This is a tribute to my father's life and his war.  His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II.  He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron.  He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia  (today's Czech Republic.)  Tail gunner Selmer Haakenson was the sole survivor. I was two and a half years old.

I have been haunted by the loss of my father all my life, and after 70 years I still grieve.  For the last 25 years or more  I have been sporadically combing through old papers and photographs, military records, books relating to the 8th Air Force, and talking with many veterans of the 398th BG. I have been wanting to tell his story for a long time, and the 70th anniversary of his death seems like an appropriate time to get off my duff and  honor his memory in words and pictures.

The title "Carrying Fire" is taken from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, in which Sheriff  Ed Tom Bell talks about his own father. “I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen that he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”