It's not very often a person accidently finds an article about their dad in the news paper...
As a little girl I grew up hearing my Dad tell his WWII stories. He talked many times about how his life had been miraculously been saved. He was the co-pilot of a B-17 bomber. On their final flight, they were shot down over Munich, Germany. The pilot who was sitting next to my dad, was killed in the resulting crash.
In February of this year, one of the other surviving cewr members had an article published in the newspaper. In it he talks about my dad. I've included his story below. Harold Gividen is my dad, Clinton Norby is my dads friend...
Veteran finding fewer comrades to talk with about crash
SALT LAKE CITY — The story is told in part by two large black and white photographs that rest on the floor of Clinton Odell Norby's living room. They show a B-17 bomber wrapped around a tree in an otherwise open field. It looks like an angry giant grabbed the plane out of the sky, yanked off a few pieces, crushed it in his fist and hurled it to the ground.
The reaction to the photo is always the same: "How could anyone survive that?"
And yet Norby did survive that crash in Switzerland, along with seven other members of the bomber's nine-man crew…
He has thought a lot about that crash over the years, but never more than when Feb. 25 rolls around each year. Last Friday marked the 66th anniversary of getting shot out of the sky by the Germans in the last days of World War II.
Over the years he celebrated the day the same way: By calling another member of his B-17 crew, Harold Gividen, the co-pilot who also happened to be from Utah. On each anniversary they would visit and catch up and talk about that long-ago day. But then Gividen, of Mapleton, died in 2003, just hours before his wife also died after telling him for years that he wasn't going to leave without her.
Harold Gividen
It was Gividen who visited Switzerland and found those photos. They were taken by the Swiss government and archived. Gividen obtained copies and brought them home to Norby.
Now that Gividen is gone, Norby can no longer call him and talk about the day they cheated death. The other crew members are dead or their whereabouts unknown. Norby remembered the day last Friday by pulling out photos, old letters and histories of the crash. A model of a B-17 hangs from the ceiling of a back room, adjacent to a large drawing of the airplane. He tells his story as if it happened yesterday, rather than six decades ago.
When the war broke out in December 1941, he was 19 years old, newly graduated from West High. He was eager to sign up for military duty, but it was a long process. He flunked his first test to be a pilot, then passed the second test and that began years of schooling. He went to preflight school in Texas, then pilot training in St. Louis, where he washed out.
(After training)...
They finally entered the war on Feb. 23, 1945, flying a night mission to Czechoslovakia. They got lost in the dark while trying to form up with their squadron, but dropped their bombs and returned home without any other incident.
Two days later they flew their second mission and encountered heavy flak as they bombed railroad yards in Munich, Germany. The bomb bay doors wouldn't open, which meant Norby had to climb into the bay and manually open them with a crank. As he was cranking them open at 27,000 feet, suddenly he heard "a puff" and realized he was surrounded by thick black smoke. He thought the plane had blown a fuse until he felt someone grab him. He turned to look into the eyes of the plane's navigator, whose faced was covered with blood.
The blood was cascading over his face from a slice across his forehead then freezing on his skin as it came in contact with the high-altitude air (the thermometer read minus 67 degrees).
"As soon as I saw him I knew we'd been hit," says Norby.
Anti-aircraft guns had taken out many of the plane's controls, which meant the pilots had to ease the plane out of the sky as they continued west, hoping it wouldn't spin out of control. Their plane was not on fire, but one by one their four engines were shutting down. They knew they were going to have to crash land, so Norby and other crew members climbed into the bomb bay and began unloading bombs manually.
Around the same time they noticed the approach of fighter planes. Norby climbed into his turret to defend the crippled plane. He test fired the machine gun – and nothing happened. "That was when I was the most scared," he says. To his relief, he realized that the fighters were Swiss planes, not Germans, and they were there to escort them to their home. He looked out the window and saw the wings knifing through the tops of trees.
They broke into a clearing just as the plane touched down and eventually were stopped by a large tree, with the fuselage broken in half. All but the pilot survived. Gividen had a severe concussion. The rest of the crew had various wounds but none serious. Norby lost some of his hearing from the percussions of the flak, and throughout their childhood his children developed a habit of talking loudly for his benefit.
A half-hour later the Swiss army arrived and the crew's war was finished just as it started. "We had done all that training exercise, supposedly so we could run away from a crash, and we didn't get a chance to run," says Norby. They were given a doctor's exam, a room in town that included down pillows and comforters, and sumptuous meals. They stayed in Switzerland for 10 days before they were returned to England. Six weeks after the crash, Norby was back in Salt Lake City.
(My dad had received a sever concussion and had to stay behind. In the meantime his mother and father had received a telegram saying that Harold was missing in action. It wasn't until several weeks later that they learned their son was safe.)
Last Friday he thought about something one of the Swiss pilots told him after escorting him into Swiss territory. "He had circled the crash shortly after it happened," Norby recalled. "He said he thought to himself, 'There are nine men wasted. No one could survive that.'
