Prisoner of War (POW) crashed at Pfalz on 2 Jan 45 in B-17 42-97846 'Belle of the Brawl'

Henry (Hank) Plume 
Pilot, 390 Bomb Group, Eye, England 

Hank was flying a mission to Kaiserslautern when his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. A fire broke out on the B-17’s right wing, which he couldn’t see because it was in a blind spot. “It was right where nobody could see it, and I went back to the radio and everyone was yelling, ‘Your right wing! Your right wing is on fire’! So I put my head up against the window and I could see that it was going to explode any minute. I switched over to the intercom and called for everybody to bail out,” Plume said. 

Plume was captured shortly after he landed. “They were waiting for me,” he said. A few days later, he was taken to a small village, where he was interrogated by a German officer who placed a 390th Bomb Group book in front of him, hoping to make him crack. Plume lost an entire crew in a mission in November of 1944. “I hoped that they would be pictured in that book, but I did not give in to satisfy my intense interest,” Plume wrote in his re-telling of the event. 
He spent four days in solitary confinement and was then moved to a P.O.W. camp in Wetzlar. He finally arrived at Stalag Luft I in Barth, Germany, on Jan. 17, 1945. “Our camp was right next to the Baltic Sea, about as far north as you could get and still be in Germany,” Plume said. “It was cold”. 
Being held captive, he said, “was one day of boredom after another day of boredom”. And contending with the cold was difficult. “We had 24 men in one room, with two blankets and a sack of straw, no heat and very little to eat,” Plume said. “We didn’t have anywhere to take a bath, so we would use our soap to light a fire to heat a pitcher of water”. 

Plume and the rest of the soldiers relied on Red Cross food parcels for meals, but at one point went six weeks without them, surviving instead on the meager rations the German soldiers fed them. They wouldn’t be prisoners for long, however. 

“We went to bed on April 30, 1945, and woke the next morning and the German guards were gone,” Plume said. “So we were supposed to be restricted to our campsite, but we weren’t. Guys wanted to go to town, so they went to town. The Russians came in on May 2. Some of them were on horses, others were in cars, trucks. We weren’t prisoners anymore,”. Plume said he stayed with the Russians for two weeks, and was then flown to France. 

Source: Conversations at chapter meetings and an interview printed in the Wise County Messenger 11/8/14 

Awards: AM, POW, American campaign, EAME, WWII Victory.