Survivor of war, veteran of life
Retired lieutenant colonel recalls time as a POW
Donathan Prater Ź/ŹSTAFF WRITER
Long before Richard Dean Anderson was entertaining television audiences skirting danger using little more than a paper clip, a piece of chewing gum and a rubber band in the television show "MacGyver," another man had already redefined what it meant to be resourceful.
And while it was only acting for Anderson on TV, for Auburn resident Harold ŌHalÕ Decker, 91, the script from which he took his cues was real life.
That life took an abrupt turn one day during DeckerÕs military service as an U.S. Air Force pilot while he was flying a mission over Gabes, Tunisia, in northern Africa in 1943.
"I was flying and looking for various things to shoot at," Decker said. The Iowa native was piloting a P-38 Lightning, a twin-engine, single pilot aircraft used extensively during World War II. "ThatÕs when someone I didnÕt see shot me."
His aircraft crippled, Decker, in his early twenties at the time, was forced to make an emergency landing on the desert sands of the Sahara.
"It was a beautiful landing," Decker recalled. "I made the landing without putting my gear down."
But it turns out that his landing was shaping up to be the least of his problems.
The plane that shot him down was still hot on his trail.
"By the time I got my plane stopped, I could see a small German aircraft circling me," Decker said. "I knew they were looking for me."
ThatÕs when he clutched the .45-caliber service weapon he had with him.
As the plane circled him and landed, Decker could see one man piloting the plane while the other had a sub-machine gun pointed in his direction as the pair approached him.
"ThatÕs when I decided that trying to shoot it out with a .45 versus a sub-machine gun wasnÕt too smart of an idea," Decker said.
ThatÕs when Decker officially became a prisoner of war.
The pair of German soldiers placed Decker in their plane and transported him to their squadron headquarters a short distance away. He was questioned in what he remembers as a compound of trailer-like buildings.
"They gave me a drink of Cognac, and it was good, but then I started thinking that they were going to try to get me drunk and get me to talk," Decker joked. "I was a little disappointed that they didnÕt offer me another drink."
After a brief and unsuccessful escape attempt, Decker was then flown across the Mediterranean Sea into Germany to a POW camp in Frankfurt that served as a collection point for prisoners of the war.
A short time later, he was moved again, this time to a POW camp about 100 miles northeast of Berlin.
There, Decker encountered various POW airmen who had flown under the British flag.
"There were about 10,000 British, Norwegian and French prisoners in the camp there," Decker recalled.
After spending time at that POW camp, Decker wound up at his final prisoner camp: Luft Stalag III, near Munich, Germany, where he would spend about two years and pull of one of the most daring and heroic acts of his military career.
At Luft Stalag III, prisoners were separated so that Americans, Brits, Polish and Czech airmen were kept with their respective groups.
However, the prisoners were allowed to receive packages about every six weeks, Decker said - packages that were heavily screened by the campÕs guards.
"All the mail was censored, but with the volume of mail, there were ways to get things by the guards," he said.
What Decker managed to get by the German guards was a radio - one piece at a time.
Items as inconspicuous as cigarette carton-sized boxes proved to be the means by which Decker kept the parts of his crude radio.
Starting out with a small, shortwave heterodyne radio receiver, Decker kept the batteries that powered the radio in one box, and a small transformer rectifier that could convert the electrical power of the building he was housed in in another.
"The biggest concern was finding opportunities to listen to the radio without the German guard finding it and confiscating it," Decker said. "Then, what they (guards) might do to me for having a radio in the first place was something on my mind, too."
Decker was well-versed in shorthand, and he would listen to radio broadcasts from the NBC or BBC networks, transcribe them and routinely share information about the war with his fellow POWs. As a result, he said, Decker was actually aware the war was over before his German captors were.
Listening to news reports on an illegal radio when prisoners at the camp should have been working was risky business for Decker. But he and his colleagues came up with creative ways to protect themselves.
"We organized a group of about 14 to 16 very reliable people that could keep secrets," Decker said. "They were positioned in various locations in our complex doing rather innocuous things like whittling, reading and talking."
When the guards made their rounds, Decker would get a signal from his fellow inmates and quickly put away his radio.
Decker and his fellow POWs would even practice their drill on how to put away their radio when a guard was in the vicinity.
"We had the drill down to a few seconds," Decker said.
In addition to the radio broadcasts updating the progress of Allied Forces, Decker was also able to pick up coded messages on how POWs should resist their German captors.
On April 29, 1945, Decker, a second lieutenant at the time of his capture and detainment, was finally freed after spending a total of 810 days as a POW
When the war was over, there was an order given to American POWs to destroy any equipment theyÕd been using to gather intelligence or resist their captors.
And although Decker was the kind of soldier that always followed orders, that was the one order he didnÕt follow.
Instead, he kept the radio, replacing its batteries and occasionally listening to it during the years that followed.
Decker went on to serve for many more years in the Air Force before serving at his final duty station at Maxwell-Gunter AFB near Montgomery. He retired as a lieutenant colonel.
At a POW conference Decker attended in 1980, a call went out to World War II veterans to donate items related to the war.
ThatÕs when Decker found the perfect place for his radio.
It is is now on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at the Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio.
Decker later settled in the Auburn community and taught aerospace engineering at Auburn University for 14 years before retiring.
He now spends his days at Camellia Place in Auburn with his wife of 60 years, Lura Ann.
The two have three adult children.
For his actions as a POW at Luft Stalag III, Decker was awarded a Bronze Star, but as this Memorial Day came and passed, his thoughts were with his fallen comrades.
" Memorial Day is about celebration, but as I celebrate, I think of the guys that werenÕt as lucky as I was to make it, and there were a lot of them," Decker said.
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