Charlie
Mary Jo at Memorial dedicated to KIA crewmembers
Charlie
and Farmers Daughters in 1965 in Italy
Last
Name: LYON
First
Name Middle Initial:
CHARLES T
Nick
Name:
'CHARLIE'
Street:
306 STATE ST.
City
& State: ANTHON, IA
E-Mail:
Zip:
51004
Phone:
(712) 373-5358
Spouse:
MARY JO
Conflict:
WW II
Service
Branch: Army Air Corp
Unit:
15 AF 301 BG 419 BS
Theater:
ETO
Where
Captured: ST. ANDRA, ITALY
Date
Captured: 12/29/44
Camps
Held In: NURENBURG, STALAG 13D; MOOSBURG, STALAG 7A
How
Long Interned: 121 days
Liberated
/ repatriated:liberated
Date
Liberated: 04/29/45
Age
at Capture: 23
Medals
Received: PURPLE HEART MEDAL, AIR MEDAL W/4 COMBAT STARS (4
COMBAT ZONES)
Military
Job: GUNNER
Company:
SELF EMPLOYED
Occupation
after War: HONEY PRODUCER AND PACKER
Bio:
Charlie Lyon has met the enemy three times, the first time they were
friendly, the second and third times they were friends. The Anthon, Iowa
native whose B-17 Flying Fortress was shot down in the Italian Alps
during World War II returned with his wife to the crash site where four
of his 10-man crew perished. Not only did the natives of the small
Italian village of St. Leonhard grandly host him and Mary Jo, but they
were guests of honor at the education of two memorials to American
airmen who died nearby while fighting against Italy and its German
allies.
One memorial was to honor those from Lyon’s 301st Bomb Group who died
near St. Leonhard on December 29, 1944. The second was dedicated to the
12 crew members of a B-24 who died when that aircraft was shot down a
couple of miles away near St. Andrea February 28, 1945. The dedication
was at Brixen, a larger town near the crash sites.
Lyon 76, is amazed by the generosity of spirit Prader ha shown. ‘Maybe
it’s not unprecedented, to put up monuments to the enemy dead…but
they have their own dead,” he mused. However, the shooting down of
Lyon’s particular B-17 is a story with a history of unusual
circumstances. “We got a direct hit and I knew we were going down,”
Lyon recalled. “I was trying to get to the door to bail out. The plane
blew up.” Lyon a waist gunner regained consciousness mid-air and
opened his parachute. His navigator, Arthur Frechette, was not quite so
lucky, or maybe he was luckier. He slammed into the steep side of a
snow-covered mountain seconds after regaining consciousness with no
parachute. He survived his injuries and went on to have a long civilian
career teaching mathematics in Connecticut where he still resides. Even
with that, the crew’s luck did not run out. Lyon’s co-pilot, Sam
Wheeler, was blown out of the plane at 25,000 feet without a parachute.
As he was falling he was struck in the face by a loose object which he
grabbed reflexively. He quickly donned the captured chute and pulled the
ripcord. It belonged to Frechette. The event was recorded in the Stars
and Stripes of the day as “one of the more unusual” occurrences of
the war, Lyon recalled. In addition to the recent formalities in Italy,
Lyon was able to meet casually with the son and three daughters of the
farmer who had rescued him.
Josef Frener had gone to look for Lyon three times that day, finally
finding him just before dark stuck in a tree and bleeding from minor
injuries. Lyon said Frener saved his life, given the deadly mountain
weather. After ensuring Lyon was unarmed, Frener took him to his home,
gave him a hearty meal and a featherbed to sleep in. Lyon in turn gave
the little girls pieces of chocolate from his survival kit. The next
morning Lyon helped Frau Frener churn butter hoping to garner her favor
and thus her aid in getting to nearby Austria where he would be safe.
His effort had no effect. Soon German soldiers came taking him to the
prison camp at Nuremberg. But the three girls, now middle-aged adults,
remembered “the handsome American airman” and his chocolate. Through
an interpreter they also told Lyon that they were the envy of every girl
in school after the bomber was shot down; their mother had made silk
dresses from them from the remnants of his parachute. In the meantime,
Lyon had stayed only three months at Nuremberg when he was sent on a
forced march to another camp about 100 miles south near Munich. There
the Germans had hoped to negotiate for the American prisoners.
The events of those months so affected Lyon that in 1965 he took Mary Jo
and their family to visit Germany. “I kept a diary on the march. I
kept track of every place I’d slept,” Lyon said. On his return trip,
following his diary, they found every single spot. Also on that trip,
the Lyons were befriended by a German, Martin Braun, who knowing English
helped them negotiate the countryside. Braun, a former enemy soldier,
has since made16 trips to the United States visiting the Lyons. “He
was in anti-aircraft” Lyon said. “We always kidded that he shot my
plane down. He said, no they never could hit anything”, Lyon
recounted, laughing.
Touched by the 1965 trip, Lyons’ son Tim, now 45, made an individual
pilgrimage to the crash site in 1971 when he graduated from high school.
He now runs the family bee-keeping business in Herrick, S.D. a
third-generation apiarist.
In 1998 Charlie Lyon himself has now gone from being a prisoner in enemy
territory to being among the first Americans ever entertained by
officials of Brixen town since its founding 901 AD. Both monuments will
be blessed there by the church, a requirement in Italy, then set on
footings at the rural sites. And Lyon, who once again found his
plane’s crash site, brought back a lot of memories and a small bag
filled with a few dozen pieces of rust-encrusted metal. “It’s just a
bunch of junk,” he explained, “But to me it’s history.”