LLOYD MOKLER
Age: 87
Hometown: Paramount
Residence: Palm Desert
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; B-17 bomber pilot; 379th Bombardment Group
Years served: February 1943 - December 1945
Rank: First lieutenant
Family: Wife Jerry; six children — Mike Mokler and Scott Mokler of Huntington Beach, Greg Mokler of La Quinta, Jim Mokler of Fort Collins, Colo., Pete Mokler of Reno, Nev., and daughter Marty Banks of Colorado Springs, Colo.; 17 grandchildren; and 7 great-grandchildren.
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Navy veteran Jack Berquist of Cathedral City.
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U.S. Army Air Corps pilot Lloyd Mokler jumped out of a flaming B-17 bomber into enemy territory, was captured by the Germans and spent seven months in a POW camp before escaping captivity with three fellow prisoners.
Mokler and his crew were shot down during a bombing run over Magdeberg, a city about 40 miles south of Berlin.
“I was shot down on my 13th mission,” Mokler said.
The plane was hit at 31,000 feet, where the temperature was about 71 degrees below zero.
At about 16,000 feet, Mokler, who was hit in the buttocks and right leg with shrapnel, ditched the battered bomber.
“When three of the engines caught fire, we bailed out,” he said.
Miraculously, all 10 crewmen survived. Lloyd was the only one seriously injured.
“I landed in a tree and broke my leg between my knee and ankle,” he said.
The men were shipped to an interrogation center outside of Frankfurt, where Lloyd spent six weeks without receiving medical attention.
Lloyd was finally able to convince one of the interrogators, who spoke English, that he didn't know anything other than his rank and serial number.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Mokler's mother, family and fiancee received a telegram informing them the pilot was Missing In Action.
“Then his mother got a telegram telling her he was in a prison camp,” said Mokler's wife, Jerry Mokler. “Her other boy (also a pilot) had already been killed in the war.”
But Mokler's mom was strong and courageously endured, despite losing a son — and possibly another — within the span of a year, she said.
Jerry Mokler said she didn't doubt for a moment that her beloved would soon be back in her arms.
“I was young and dumb,” she said. “I knew he was going to come home. I was terribly, terribly in love with him. I knew he was coming back.”
After six weeks, Mokler was transferred to a POW hospital in Meiningen, where a German doctor, whose family had been killed by American bombers, operated on the pilot's disfigured leg.
Jerry Mokler was awed by the doctor's professionalism in the face of personal tragedy.
In spite of the devastating loss of his family, he provided her husband-to-be with the medical attention that allowed his leg to heal properly, she said.
The escape attempts begin
While Mokler was recuperating at the hospital, he attempted his first escape.
As the prisoners were collecting buckets of coal one morning, Mokler walked away from the group and made it through a couple of towns before falling through the ice while crossing a river.
Wet, freezing and scared, Mokler walked back to the hospital and tried to convince a guard he had gotten lost.
Unconvinced, the guards threw him into solitary confinement for 30 days, where he lived in a 6-foot-by-6-foot concrete box in the basement of a building — without light, blankets, bedding or a toilet — and just meager amounts of food.
Surviving that horror, Mokler was later sent to Stalag Luft III, a prisoner of war camp run by the Luftwaffe — the German air force — that housed captured air corps servicemen.
In March 1945, Mokler said the men were moved, on foot, to another location, away from the Soviet Red Army's advance.
One night — the men were marched under the cover of darkness to avoid detection by U.S. pilots — Mokler attempted his second escape.
“The guys were walking four abreast and I told the guys (near me) that I was going to make a break for it,” Mokler said.
The three other guys said they'd join him.
“We got a little ways off the road and hid in some trees,” he said.
The men wandered off into a swampy, forested area where the water was up to their knees. They sat in the water and waited — for about six hours — while the last column of POWs passed by.
The men wandered the countryside for the next 25 days, scavenging food, avoiding people and trying to move toward the direction where they thought the advancing U.S. troops would be approaching.
After some close calls with guards and German shepherds, out of food and desperate, they considered surrendering.
On April 14, they attracted the attention of a couple living at a house near their hiding place.
The man, a Mr. Pretscher, who happened to own the largest department store in Nüremberg, had heard Americans were killing the German men and raping their wives.
The terrified couple offered to hide the men in the third floor of their barn in exchange for protection when the Americans came through.
For a week, the men hid behind large bolts of cloth and had to keep very quiet as the first and second floors were occupied at night by German soldiers, Mokler said.
On the morning of the seventh day, the men heard the sound of tanks. Mokler and one of the men climbed out the window onto the roof and waved a white towel.
The American tanks turned toward the farmhouse and the men would soon be on their way to freedom.
