CAMANO ISLAND — When World War II ended, U.S. Army Air Corps*
Lt. Paul Moll returned home to his wife, Connie, and his studies at Purdue University. The couple eventually had two daughters and a son. Moll ran a machine tools business.
“We went on with life,” Connie Moll said. “That’s what people did.”
Perhaps because the veteran didn’t want to burden his kids, Moll rarely talked about what happened during his service in Europe.
Moll’s daughter, Camano artist Molly LeMaster, until recently had never heard her father’s entire war story, one held quietly, close to the vest.
“When we were growing up no one ever talked about it,” LeMaster said. “We never asked him. We just assumed that his memories were so horrific that we didn’t want to bring it up.”
“To finally hear it all was difficult.”
From the fall of 1944 to the war’s end in the spring of 1945, Moll was a prisoner of war in a string of Nazi Germany’s infamous camps.
His family back home did not know whether he was dead or alive, and there were days when he probably didn’t know either.
Now, 65 years later, Moll, 88, tells the story matter-of-factly. Sometimes, though, memories of long-dead comrades, the smell of rotting flesh and the sounds of exploding bombs force his throat to tighten and his eyes to cloud with tears.
* * *
Paul Moll was a sophomore in chemical engineering at Purdue when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
“People were joining up,” Moll said with a shrug. “It sounded adventuresome.”
After training two years to be a navigator, he was sent to a small air base north of London, England. He and Connie married two days before he shipped out. They had grown up together in the suburbs of St. Louis and were best of friends.
Moll learned to guide his pilots despite the constant English fog. As they flew blind in circles up to the sunshine at 5,000 feet, they encountered other planes headed out on bombing missions over the mainland.
“We were like hummingbirds, all trying to get up into the sky,” he said. “It was a problem trying not to hit the other guys.”
With only one more mission scheduled before he was to go home, Moll volunteered one morning for a bombing run over an oil refinery on the Baltic Sea coast.
“We didn’t come in right at first, so we had to retrace our steps to do it again. Then there was a tremendous explosion.”
The pilots were gone.
Moll, wounded, was thrown across the cabin. In seconds he tore off some of his gear and jumped from the crashing plane. Parachutes were strapped to their chests, but the plane’s bombardier never wore his.
“It was uncomfortable,” Moll explained. “He jumped without a ‘chute.”
Moll remembers the jump, passing out and coming to in mid-air.
“It was silent and beautiful. I was falling about 120 mph. At 2,000 feet, I pulled the rip,” Moll said. “When it opened, they fired at us with rifles. One of the guys was shot coming down.”
Moll hit the ground not far from the men with the rifles.
“What I remember is beyond fear.”
* * *
Put on a crowded prisoner train stinking with human waste, Moll was taken to his first camp where he was kept in solitary confinement for a month and routinely interrogated. After the war, the Nazi commandant at this camp was tried and executed for his treatment of Allied airmen.
At the end of October 1944, Moll was moved to Stalag Luft 3, a camp in east Germany where just six months before a band of Allied troops had dug a tunnel in an escape attempt.
The story later became the basis for the movie, “The Great Escape.”
Around Christmas, the Russians began closing in on the POW camp. About 5,000 prisoners were given an hour before they were herded out into the freezing weather on a long march to a Nazi camp at Moosburg.
The group walked 70 miles in two days.
Most did not have shoes. Those who stopped were shot.
“They gave us a piece of mutton tallow to eat,” Moll said. “Instead, I rubbed the fat on my feet to keep them from freezing.”
Moosburg was a huge camp with thousands of prisoners. As the Allies approached near the end of the war, Adolf Hitler told the camp officials to execute all prisoners.
Fortunately, “the commandant knew better,” Moll said.
On April 29, 1945, American troops liberated the stalag.
“They sprayed us with DDT to kill the lice and fleas. I borrowed a camera and miraculously found some film.”
He asked one of liberating soldiers to take his picture behind the barbed wire. He keeps that photo and others of the camp, in bleak black-and-white, in an old album.
Moll and many of his fellow prisoners got on a ship headed home from Marseille, France.
For the rest of her life, Moll’s mother always left a little food on her dinner plate thinking of her son starving in Germany.
* * *
Paul and Connie Moll were in Florida during a particularly bad hurricane about 10 years ago when they decided to move to Camano Island to be near their daughters.
At dinner one evening with the LeMaster family, Molly’s father-in-law, Clyde LeMaster and Paul Moll figured out they had been at Moosburg at the same time. LeMaster had been with the Army troops who freed the POWs.
It’s just part of history, Moll says.
“War is stupid. It just gives people the chance to make money,” he said. “However, it will never stop.”
Though her father is a brave and patriotic man, he saw so much death and destruction, LeMaster said, that war is senseless to him.
In his study, Moll displays photos of his World War II airplanes, his Air Medals, his Purple Heart and dog tags.
And the identification tags issued by the Nazis.
Occasionally his daughter sees him picking tiny bits of shrapnel from his leg.
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com
* This article has been corrected since it was first posted to correctly identify the U.S. Army Air Corps, the precursor to the U.S. Air Force.
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