News-Info-Alerts

Re: Former POW Honored

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 22, 2003

"Former POW, others honored at Nellis ceremony

Fifty-eight years after he was held captive in Nazi Germany, World War II veteran Roy Pease received his Prisoner of War Medal.

"I never knew about it. I didn't realize I had to apply for it,"said Pease, who received the medal during a ceremony Friday at Nellis Air Force Base in honor of National Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Recognition Day.

Pease, a gunner from Spokane, Wash., was captured Aug. 17, 1944, when his B-17 bomber was shot down over Austria.

Pease and nine others bailed out, but he was shot in the foot and his parachute became snagged in a tree. On the way down, he managed to make a tourniquet for his foot using his belt and a knife.

"I shimmied down and built a fire out of my oxygen mask,"he said.

Found by a peasant, he was turned over to a soldier. He was transported to a jail at the Vienna airport, and then a hospital, where a cast was put on his leg.

All 10 from the B-17 crew were then taken by train to Budapest, Hungary.

"They were ready to amputate my left leg, but they obtained some penicillin from the British Red Cross,"said Pease, who now lives in Las Vegas.

After staying in the hospital for four months, he was put in a boxcar with 40 Russian soldiers and taken to Moosburgh, Germany. There, they lived on a daily diet of overcooked, watered-down turnip soup and a small potato"that was practically like mush,"he said.

He was eventually rescued by an Army unit under Gen. George S. Patton.

During Friday's ceremony at Nellis'Freedom Park, Brig. Gen. Gregory Ihde talked about the numbers of Americans still missing and unaccounted for: more than 1,800 in the Vietnam War; 8,100 in the Korean War and more than 75,000 in World War II.

"I don't want you to walk away today focusing on numbers. I'd rather you remember that these numbers are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends,"he said."The families remember. We all must remember, too."

Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal

© Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett Co. Inc. Newspaper"