Edgar "Ed" Fergon, 87, holds his service coat at his Bermuda Dunes home. Fergon joined the Army Air Corps at age 19, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. / Crystal Chatham, The Desert Sun
Lt. Edgar Fergon was captured by German troops and held as a POW for 21 months. Descriptions of Fergon listed on his information card from Stalag Luft 3 include Physique: slim; Nose: Small; Teeth: Good. / Courtesy of Ed Fergon
Ed Fergon
AGE:87.
HOMETOWN: Bermuda Dunes.
MILITARY BRANCH: U.S. Army Air Corps, 8th Air Force, 367th Squadron, 306th Bomb Group
RANK: First lieutenant
MEDALS: Purple Heart, Air Medal, POW Medal.
FAMILY: Wife JoAnn; six children; nine grandchildren; nine great-grandchildren.
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Ed Fergon battled the Germans in the skies over Europe in the summer of 1943.
“On the fifth mission, we got shot down. We were flying over Kiel, Germany. The (German fighter planes) came right at us, firing their guns,” Fergon said, mimicking the rat-a-tat-tat sound of machine gun fire.
The Germans shot out the engine of the B-17 that he navigated, killing two crew members.
“So, we had to bail out. My problem was I didn't have my leg straps on,” the 87-year-old Bermuda Dunes resident said.
Fergon had his own personal parachute while training in the U.S., but when he arrived at the air base in England, it was taken from him, he said.
Just a hair under 6-foot-4, Fergon instead wore a parachute he borrowed from another, albeit shorter, airman. He wore the straps up around his chest so he could maneuver easier at his post in the bomber.
“When the chute opened, it forced me back,” he said. “It tore me up.”
His body simply hung as the parachute descended.
“I thought I was dead.”
The Germans captured the remaining crew and took them to a small hospital for treatment, he said. They were then sent to Frankfurt to be interrogated, where they spent 10 days in solitary confinement.
Fergon said the interrogators wanted their squadron number — they refused to give it to them — but finally, he and a buddy gave a false number. They were released and transferred to Stalag Luft 3.
The Luftwaffe — the German air force — treated the prisoners well, though Fergon ran afoul of the guards once during his 21 months in captivity.
“I made a big mistake,” he said, shaking his head.
While standing in line with other prisoners one day, they heard the Allies bombing Berlin.
“When one of the guards went by, I said, ‘Berlin kaput,' and I got thrown in the cooler (solitary confinement) for 10 days,” Fergon said.
Life inside Stalag 3
Although he suffered no physical harm, he called imprisonment maddening.
“I went crazy over there, really,” Fergon said.
He said he tried to keep himself busy. There was a library, athletic field, baseball, basketball — the POWs even built an ice rink.
He slept in a barracks with 12 men to a room and bunk beds three stacks high.
Fergon slept on the bottom bunk. The beds were simply boards with straw, no springs.
Food was limited. The men received Red Cross parcels containing food like Spam and sugar flour.
“We were on one box a week for each man,” he said.
Later, it was cut to half a box per week.
When the American troops finally freed the POWs, “we raided the office and I found my file and was able to bring it home with me.”
The horror of Fergon's experience followed him stateside, tormenting his mind and greatly stressing his relationship with his wife, JoAnn, to whom he proposed a day after returning home.
“I was a mess,” he said. “I wasn't a normal person.”
He was quiet — like most World War II vets were — and found it hard to communicate to his family about his experiences.
“I never talked a thing about it when I got home,” he said.
After years of suffering, he visited the Veterans Administration in 1990 and was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder — a type of anxiety disorder that occurs after seeing or experiencing a traumatic event.
With counseling and the help of daily antidepressants, he's faring better, he said.
Fergon's story appears in the pages of Tom Brokaw's 2001 book, “An Album of Memoirs: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation.”
It's one of his proudest accomplishments, he said.
