Those who saw the fireball never stopped wondering what happened to the injured man who parachuted.
REBECCA SVEC / For the Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, February 8, 2009 12:00 am
The newspaper articles and military reports shared the facts of the 1944 accident in emotionless terms.
How a group of P-47 fighter planes based at the Bruning Army Air Field intercepted a group of B-17 bombers from the Sioux City Army Air Field and how the routine, simulated attack went wrong and two of the planes collided in mid-air.
The accounts told who survived.
Who did not.
But for people on the ground and in the plane, there is much more to the story.
The crash crossed the paths of people who never would have met.
People in Milligan and Tobias who witnessed the accident never forgot it.
It became the story they recounted again and again — about the fireball in the air and an unconscious young man, drifting limp in his parachute to the ground.
The accident made a boy a man, a man who still chokes on his words when he remembers talking to the family of a boy who did not make it out of the plane.
The boy who did would also survive 23 combat missions over Europe and marry a girl in a wedding dress made from the parachute that saved his life.
Sixty-five years later, the work of a Milford author and historian is connecting the paths of the airmen and the witnesses once again.
The lone living survivor of the crash plans to travel from his home in Beloit, Wis., to Fillmore and Saline counties this spring. He’ll visit the site where one of the planes landed and the approximate site of his landing.
And he’ll meet some people who helped save his life.
So much time has passed.
But the survivor wants to say thanks.
The witnesses want to say, “We never stopped wondering what happened to you.”
On Sept. 8, 1944, Merle Buzek pushed through the doors of Milligan High School and into the warm, late afternoon sun.
Above him planes flew in formation, a routine sight at the time. Bruning Army Air Field, one of 11 created in Nebraska during World War II, was home to more than 3,000 military personnel and 500 civilians.
Buzek watched the planes dog fight until they were out of view.
“All of the sudden, there was a big ball of fire in the sky.”
The high school junior hollered to a friend and ran to his car parked on Main Street. They drove in the direction of the fireball until they reached his family’s farm nine miles south of Milligan.
One of the planes had crashed in a pasture nearby.
Buzek is 80 now, but the memories of that day stand out from his youth.
He remembers seeing a six-foot hole in the hillside.
The volunteers walking fields looking for a body.
The medics looking for body pieces.
The military personnel who cleaned it up and paid for the crop damage.
All that remained were a few artifacts and pieces of metal.
About 10 miles away, Tobias High School had just finished classes, too.
Ed Rut, 17, was only a few days into his senior year. He invited friends to ride in his green 1929 Model A.
They had no particular destination, until one of the girls in the car spotted a sky full of parachutes.
Near Tobias, like Milligan, planes and even the occasional parachute were a common sight.
“When we came to school in the morning, we could hear the planes revving up at the Bruning Air Base and pretty soon the sky would be full of them.”
This day, though, they saw a figure parachute from the plane and drift down.
The car full of teens followed the parachute’s path and found the man unconscious, his parachute dragging him over a field toward a ditch.
“At first we thought he was dead, but then we saw him breathing,” Rut said.
The teens’ adrenaline wasn’t enough to unhook the parachute.
The girls — Emilye (Dlouhy) Dunn, Jean (Nicholson) McCord and June Slepicka — sat on the parachute to collapse it, while Rut ran to a nearby farm and called the base.
McCord said she thinks they tried to keep the parachute from his neck, and they waited.
By the time Rut returned, a Jeep from the air field had arrived and the kids were shooed away.
“We didn’t even know if he made it,” McCord said.
Rut learned the man was taken to a hospital.
The man in the parachute was only a few years older than he. Rut has often thought about the difference a few years’ time in the 1940s made in their lives.
He got to stay in the States, assigned to the Signal Corps for 19 months.
Rut knew if the man survived, he likely was sent right back up in another plane, and then to war.
“We all thought of that man from time to time — always wondered how he came out.”
The man’s name was Walt Divan, a Freeport, Ill., high school graduate who enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces cadet program and ended up on a B-17.
He served as a waist gunner, responsible for the gear, the loading of bombs and other crucial details. He was assigned to Sioux City for overseas training.
On the day of the crash, he had climbed into the bomber with boys from Atlanta, Chicago, New Jersey, Georgia and more — a plane full of buddies.
“It doesn’t take long for you to become very good friends. It’s paramount that you’re a team, so you bond.”
He remembers what a great flying day it was as he took his place with others at the back of the plane.
He’s not sure what exactly happened that day. He was later told a fighter pilot “just got too close.”
“I only remember the impact of the other plane, which immediately ignited the fuel that was in our wing tank. Everything went red.”
Four men in the back and middle sections parachuted from the plane, and he was the only one among them to be seriously injured.
His next memories are hazy: the shock of the parachute opening, the way it jarred his body.
He has one clear memory of looking down, seeing that only his arms were buckled into the harness.
“I immediately folded my arms tight.”
He doesn’t remember the impact, the full extent of his injuries, or the concussion and days in the hospital.
One or more of his friends who landed safely retrieved his parachute, packaged it up and sent it to his mother.
Someone in the hospital told him a couple of young women had helped save his life.
What he does remember vividly is the people who did not make it out of his plane.
After he recovered, he went to Chicago to talk with the family of a deceased crewmate.
The phone is silent when he gets to this point in the story. He swallows hard.
“That was a hard thing for me to do,” he says finally.
He knows the ones who lost their lives saved his.
“I think the reason I got out of there was training. Every single time, in training, when we landed and taxied up to the parking area, the pilot or co-pilot would always press the bail-out bell. It was ingrained. Without thinking, we would go to the side door.”
The remaining four spent the rest of their service together, with a new crew built around them. They went overseas, part of the 457th Bombardment Group, Squadron 751, and finished 23 missions over Europe with the 8th Air Force.
“We encountered the normal amount of what goes with the job, enemy aircraft fire and such.”
Did he ever parachute again?
“No, ma’am,” he says with a roaring laugh. “I did not.”
He earned an Air Crew Member Badge, Air Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters, a Good Conduct Medal, a European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three Bronze Stars, and Aerial Gunner Wings.
Back in the States, he went to the University of Illinois, the site of the “best two things that happened to me.”
He got a degree.
He met his wife, June. When they married — 60 years ago — she and her bridesmaids wore dresses made from the silky parachute that had saved his life.
Divan went on to a career as a manager of industrial engineering for Ohio Medical, which manufactured medical life support products.
The couple had a son and two daughters.
He thought from time to time about how he would like to go back to Nebraska and meet the young girls who helped him that day.
But decades passed.
About 18 months ago, he got a call from Jerry Penry of Milford, a 42-year-old land surveyor who grew up in Atkinson listening to stories from WWII veterans in north-central Nebraska, some who became close friends.
Penry started writing about the veterans’ experiences, mainly following those from the 8th Air Force. His writing turned into a short book and magazine articles. He now is completing a book — “Nebraska’s Fatal Air Crashes of WWII” — detailing each of the fatal crash sites in Nebraska. It’s scheduled to be completed this spring. It will include accounts from military reports, eyewitness statements, historical crash site photos, stories from survivors, maps and more. The book also gives civilian accounts.
“Since most crashes were rural, the farmers were the first on the scene,” he said.
According to Penry, there were 243 deaths in Nebraska from 60 WWII training accidents.
“I never originally intended this project to get as large as it did, but then I realized the time-sensitive nature of it all . . . I decided that every crash needed to be told . . . The key was finding the older generation before they were all gone.”
He has found artifacts at nearly 40 of the sites, even this many years removed.
The list includes a recent trip to a farm south of Milligan, where searchers were able to turn up pieces of the P-47 lost in the 1944 crash. Its pilot was among the seven who died in the training accident.
Penry’s conversations with Divan and witnesses from Nebraska tied their stories together.
“When I got the call from Jerry (Penry). I couldn’t believe it,” Buzek said.
“I wish it had been 10 years ago. There would have been more people around to talk about it.”
But there’s still time.
“Just to see him and talk with him will be interesting,” Buzek said.
Divan is eager for the same thing. Maybe a spring trip, he said, when the weather is a little nicer. He’ll shake hands with the people who helped him so long ago.
Maybe it’s closure they seek, or a chance to talk about the accident with 60 more years of wisdom.
When you are a high school senior, Emilye Dunn said, you don’t always realize the gravity of a situation.
“We didn’t think about it as though we were saving someone’s life. We just knew he needed help.”
And they all wondered, in the back of their minds, whatever happened to the stranger in the parachute.
“We knew almost nothing. Did he survive?” Dunn said. “It’s nice to know what happened.”rebecca.svec@doane.edu
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