News-Info-Alerts

Re: Brother lost brother in WWII -
Family waited 50 years to learn what happened over Germany that day

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 16, 2002

"Friday, March 15, 2002
Brother lost brother in WWII

Family waited 50 years to learn what happened over Germany that day
BY SHAWN A. HESSINGER
Tamaqua Bureau Chief
shessinger@republicanherald.com

It took them more than 50 years to learn the truth:

Tamaqua native Carl W. Forster died instantly when his B-24 bomber was hit by enemy fire on Sept. 27, 1944, during a bombing raid over Nazi Germany.

In the late 1990s, the plane's tail gunner, Raymond Ray, Timel, Ohio, who survived the crash and subsequently became a prisoner of war, recounted for the family how he had been thrown from his position in the rear of the plane to land atop the bodies of Forster and another waist gunner.

"He knew they were dead. They were laying in a pool of blood," said Tamaqua's William J. Forster, Carl Forster's brother.

William Forster was on his way to chow at a base in Scotland when a man from his brother's airfield gave him the news.

"He walked over and he said, Bill, I'm sorry about your brother.' Just like that," Forster recalled.

Frantic, Forster rushed to the base chaplain, but could get little more information than the fact that his brother, five years older and a waist gunner like himself, was missing in action.

"Boy, I got so shook up and excited," Forster said.

After returning stateside and for years afterward, Forster could get little detailed information on his brother's fate.

"I must have been home a month or more when he was declared dead," he said.

But four years ago, when Forster joined an area veterans group, the I Was Shot At Club, a fellow member, Harry Thocksy, Bethlehem, who had been part of the 445th Bomber Group, 702nd Squadron, 8th Air Force the same as Carl Forster, was able to help fill in some of the blanks.

On their way to a raid on an airplane factory near Kassel, Germany, the 445th became separated from the main bomber stream and its fighter escorts due to a navigational error.

Alone and without protection, the bomb group was easy prey for waves of FW-190 and Me-109 German fighters, which shot down 30 planes, including Carl Forster's, with a total loss of 112 men.

It was the highest loss for a group on a single mission during World War II.

It was not until more than 50 years after his brother's death that William Forster finally got in touch with Ray, who gave him the details.

Ray also wrote a letter to Carl Forster's widow, Theresa, the couple's only son, Dr. Carl J. "Butch" Forster, McKeansburg, said.

Dr. Forster, now a general practitioner in Pottsville, was only 2 years old when his father died at age 27.

"I remember reading the letter and he had indicated that my dad had no idea what hit him," Dr. Forster said.

Dr. Forster also later had a chance to view a 20-second film of the battle shot from one of the German planes.

"I said to my wife as we watched the video, You know, that could be my dad's plane being shot at and there's no way to tell'," he said.

His country called

It was William Forster who went to war first.

Both brothers were at the time working in a munitions plant run by Atlas Powder Co. near Ravenna, Ohio.

"There's quite a few people from Tamaqua went out there to work," said Forster, who was drafted in September 1942 and sent to Fort Indiantown Gap, Annville, for indoctrination.

A week later, he went to Miami, Fla., for two weeks of basic training, followed by a year of training as a radio operator for the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

From there, Forster was transferred to Hammer Field, Fresno, Calif., where he spent about a month in a radio tower helping to unscramble incoming code.

"We were going batty with dots and dashes," he said.

So when the opportunity came to get into aerial gunnery school, Forster and a few friends were quick to sign up - requiring 10 months of training in Kingman, Ariz.

Most of aerial gunnery school involved skeet and trapshooting with a shotgun from the back of a moving pickup truck along a 12-mile track.

Forster also trained with a 50-millimeter machine gun, the same kind he would later use in his bomber.

He was assigned to the 391st Bomb Group, 574th Squadron, 9th Air Force at Godman Field, near Fort Knox, Ky., where he stayed two months until activated for overseas duty.

The route he took to Europe was roundabout: south to Puerto Rico, over South America and then out over the Atlantic with a refueling stop at Ascension Island before reaching England.

Forster was a waist gunner on a twin-engine B-26, a smaller bomber than the four-engine B-24 in which his brother Carl would eventually serve.

Some missions 'rough'

Stationed at Matching Green Airbase in southern England, Forster immediately began flying missions to bomb railroad yards and the sites in France from which the Germans launched buzz bombs.

"Some of them were rough. You'd see your buddies go down," Forster said.

In a turret on the side of the aircraft, Forster sat behind his 50-millimeter machine gun, where his job was to fend off attacking fighters when they came close enough.

He does not recall shooting down any enemy aircraft. He said an instructor in gunnery school told him to forget marksmanship.

"He said, Tell you what. When you get over there, there's two things to remember, spray and pray'," Forster recalled.

On a total of 72 missions - the last two entailed only dropping leaflets over France - Forster can recall the sensation of flak from antiaircraft guns on the ground like the sound of a coal shovel striking the side of the airplane.

On two occasions, flak knocked out one of the bomber's two engines. On another, damaged landing gear forced a belly landing in which Forster's plane slid into a cornfield.

Forster was so unnerved by his precarious position in the glass turret that once he convinced a friend to help him take the armor off a plane in a nearby junkyard and install it in his turret. However, the excess weight made the plane tail-heavy when it landed, so Forster had to remove the armor.

On his 20th mission, a piece of flak about the size of a thumbnail flew through the turret's aluminum skin catching Forster under his left arm between the folds of his flak jacket.

The plane's co-pilot dragged the wounded gunner into the radio room where he listened closely for a wheezing sound in Forster's breath that might indicate a punctured lung. The injury kept Forster in the hospital for five days.

On another occasion, vibrations from the flak striking the side of the aircraft ruptured balsa wood markers that were dropped so rescue crews could locate planes that had ditched in the English Channel.

Red, blue and yellow dyes from the markers covered Forster and the rest of the crew.

"I thought I was dead," he said.

On D-Day, Forster and his crew flew four missions targeting concrete and steel German bunkers on the beaches of Normandy. Flying at between 100 and 500 feet, Forster could see waves of American troops being mowed down by relentless enemy fire.

"We could see them dropping those guys like flies," he said.

Brother ignores advice

During the time he was flying combat missions, Forster corresponded with his brother back in Ohio trying to discourage his desire to join him.

But Carl Forster, having always wanted to be a pilot, could not be dissuaded. He enlisted in 1943, but washed out of flight school because of a lisp that made it difficult to understand him over a plane's intercom.

Instead, he followed his younger brother's example by enrolling in gunnery school. Also assigned as a waist gunner, he was stationed at Tibenham Airfield, about 80 miles away from his brother.

The two visited each other about 15 times over the next year, sometimes at Matching Green Airfield, sometimes at Tibenham and sometimes in London.

In particular, William Forster remembers the two of them meeting at a pub called the Whale Bone Inn in the English countryside where the innkeeper took a liking to them and saved a special bottle of vodka exclusively for their visits.

In early September 1944, when he was scheduled to go home at last, William Forster hopped a training flight to his brother's field. He stowed his bicycle in the bomb bay so his brother could keep it after his departure.

On that visit, he even tried to accompany his brother on one of his bombing missions, but was not permitted to go.

It was the last time the two would see each other.

Though, today, Forster can talk about his brother's fate, it was not always so.

"I know when he used to talk about it, it used to bring tears to his eyes," Dr. Forster said of his uncle.

It is a story 50 years in the telling, but both Forsters say they are glad to finally know the truth. "