A World War II B-17 Crew Prisoner of War Reunion: An Extended Conversation

— [Someone in the PoW camp] said, ‘Look down there at the main gate!’, and the American flag was flying! We went berserk, we just went berserk! We were looking at the goon tower and there’s no goons there, there are Americans up there! And we saw the American flag, I mean—to this day I start to well up when I see the flag."
-Sam Lisica, former prisoner of war, WWII

It’s always been my philosophy that history is best understood when it is related by those who were actually there on the front lines. I was lucky enough to recognize this early in my career as a public high school history teacher, which began at a time when America was waking up and beginning to notice the deeds of the men and women who had saved the world only a generation before.

In the summer of 2001, I sat down to interview three World War II buddies, Earl Morrow of Hartford, NY, Sam Lisica of Pennsylvania, and Jerome Silverman of Long Island, all formerly of the 457th Bomb Group of the US Eighth Army Air Force during World War II. All of them had been taken prisoner on November 2, 1944 near Volkstedt in Germany when their planes were shot down; Earl was the pilot and Sam was the bombardier on the B-17 'Delores' #4337766; Jerry was aboard the lead plane for the mission that day and was picked up on the ground by enemy forces, winding up in the same German transport vehicle as Earl, where they met for the first time.

This meeting was the first time in seven years that Earl and Sam had seen each other; Sam, who had bunked with Jerry in the PoW camp, had not seen Jerry since the end of the war. It would turn out to be their last time together.

This interview will become a focus for a much wider forthcoming work on the WW II air war over the skies of Europe, the next installment in my 'The Things Our Fathers Saw' series.

Earl Morrow, pilot, 80
Sam Lisica, bombardier, 80
Jerry Silverman, navigator, 82