War Stories: Gene Harmon

from bmonthly March 2020

Hoover Teacher Update: Fight For His Life

Gene Harmon

A Look at a WWII Prisoner of War from Bartlesville by Joe Todd

Gene Harmon was born in Wayside, Oklahoma March 18, 1924. The family moved to Ramona, and after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he moved to Long Beach, California in 1942 and worked in the Douglas Aircraft Factory on the C-47 until he joined the Army in December of that same year.

Harmon joined the Air Corps in Bartlesville and was sent to Fort Sill for Basic Training. He was then sent to Shepherd Field in Wichita Falls, Texas for a six-month school as an aircraft mechanic. After the school, he was sent to Davis-Monthan Base, and was assigned to the crew of a B-24. They flew to England and based at Cheddington, north of London.

Harmon was the flight engineer on the B-24, and while bombing Germany on his first mission, they were hit by flak and crash landed in southern England. He just wanted go get his 25 missions and go home.

His second mission was to bomb Garth, Germany. They had dropped their bombs and were returning to base. Flying over Brussels, Belgium at 18,000 feet, the whole nose of the plane was shot off. He bailed out of the left waist window. When he landed, there were two German soldiers pointing their rifles at him. He was taken at gun point to the train station and he noticed the Belgian children would try to run up and shake his hand but the Germans ran them off.

Harmon was sent by train to Frankfort and interrogated. The Germans already knew where they were stationed, about the bombing mission to Garth, and even the names of the crew members in the bomber. He said the Germans knew more about us than we did.

After he was interrogated, he was sent to Stalag Luft VI in Lithuania. They had barracks with bunks stacked two high, with two prisoners in each bunk. The bunks were just boards covered with straw and infested with lice. They were fed twice a day with boiled potatoes and a little cabbage. There was a curfew and they were not allowed out of the barracks after 5:00 in the afternoon until 8:00 in the morning. If you broke curfew, you were shot. He was there from February until July 1944. Harmon was moved to Stalag Luft IV, north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea. He said both camps were about the same. He was at this camp until February 6, 1945, when all the prisoners were marched out because the Russians were approaching. They went on what he called the Death March. They were marched from February 6 until the end of April 1945, staying between the American lines. The Germans did not want to give up, and as they marched the prisoners between the lines, many were dying.

“At night, we slept in barns or in a forest and they kept us on the move every day,” Harmon said in an earlier interview. “We marched, and when the Germans heard gunfire, they would turn us around and march the other direction.”

In late April, the prisoners woke up in the morning and the German guards were gone — they were on their own. Some Americans saw them and put them on trucks and took them to Camp Lucky Strike at Le Havre, France. By then, Harmon weighed 95 pounds and said he was lucky to be alive.

Harmon was standing by himself one morning and General Eisenhower came over to him, talked to him and told him that he was proud of him. He was sent back to England, put on a ship, and landed at Norfolk, Virginia. When he was discharged, he came back to Bartlesville.

Harmon passed away in Bartlesville in June of 2018. He was 94 years of age at the time.