MORTON GOLLIN
Age: 87
Born: Aug. 8, 1922
Hometown: Milwaukee
Residence: Cathedral City
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; 15th Air Force, 459th Bomb Group, 756th Bomb Squadron
Years served: August 1942- December 1945
Rank: Second lieutenant
Family: Wife Alice; five children, James Gollin of Milwaukee, Lisa Gollin Evans of Marblehead, Mass., Kimberly Gollin of St. Simon Island, Ga., Chris Cooper of Phoenix, and Mark Cooper of Vidalia, Ga.; eight grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Annibale Muscolo of Palm Desert
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at www.mydesert.com/WWII
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U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Morton Gollin, a navigator on a B-24 bomber, was captured on his 22nd birthday and spent nine months as a POW during World War II.
Gollin, stationed at an air base in Foggia, Italy, took off on a mission to the Blechhammer oil refineries in Gleiwitz, Germany on Aug. 7, 1944.
He planned to spend the next day, his birthday, with his older brother Norm Gollin, who finagled a three-day pass from his air base in Naples, Italy.
Gollin let his brother know the approximate time he'd be returning.
“He said he would be on the flight line waiting for me,” Gollin said. “What a wait he had in store.”
Gollin and his crew made the bomb drop under heavy enemy fire.
After turning to start the flight home, the crew felt several loud thumps — and shouts on the intercom from the waist gunners that the plane had been hit.
Losing altitude, the plane limped homeward for about the next half-hour — alone and out of formation.
With gasoline pouring into the waist section of the damaged aircraft, Gollin and the other officers decided to get everyone out before the plane blew up and killed everyone aboard.
Gollin, as navigator, took over, informing the crew of their approximate location, altitude and reminded everyone about their survival kit, which included, “a hard chocolate bar, beautiful maps printed on silk and American money — $50 — which was worthless” where they were going, he said.
“Everyone wished the others well and we prepared to abandon ship,” Gollin said.
Gollin was in the nose section of the plane with the gunner. Gollin opened the nose wheel doors and jumped.
He didn't make it far. His parachute harness caught on the door pins.
Gollin was unable to get back up inside the plane or release himself from the pins.
The gunner pulled him back into the plane, saving his life.
“I bailed out again, dropping feet-first into Nazi Germany,” Gollin said.
Soon after he hit the ground, some Czechoslovakians helped Gollin hide out and warned him to only travel at night on the long trek to the closest Allies — the Russian front lines — about 150 miles away.
Gollin, too antsy to sleep during the day, decided to take his chances and walked during the daylight hours.
Although wearing civilian clothes the Czechs had given him, he was spotted and arrested by the Gestapo.
Gollin underwent questioning at Gestapo headquarters — “I had four different interrogations in four different cities over the next three weeks,” he said.
At a Gestapo headquarters in Kattowitz, Germany, he went through the same interrogation, only offering his name, rank and serial number and refusing to answer all other questions.
“They handcuffed me, blindfolded me and escorted me to a cell in their basement,” Gollin said.
The 15-by-15-foot concrete-floored basement, which he described as ‘dungeon-like,' contained nothing more than a wooden bench about a yard wide as the bed, with a sloping wooden pillow on one end.
Gollin was eventually shipped off to Stalag Luft III, where the Red Cross parcels were reduced by the Germans from one parcel per man per week to one-half per man per week.
“I soon learned what hunger was,” he said. “In no time, all I and everyone else could and did think about was food. It dominated every waking hour and was the topic of almost every conversation.”
“Late in January of 1945 in what was said to be the coldest winter Germany had experienced in 50 years, the entire camp was made to evacuate and marched west to avoid being liberated by the Russians,” he said. “I made a serious tactical error before the march started and took a new pair of boots from a storehouse the Germans let us ransack.”
The shoes were the wrong size, making each step an agonizing one.
“That problem together with the snow and bitter cold gave me and everyone else I knew frostbite,” he said.
After about a four-day march, the men were loaded into cramped railroad boxcars for a trip to Stalag VIIA near Moosburg, Germany.
“We must have had a hundred men in each car and all one could do was stand,” he said. “A great many of the prisoners had dysentery and the several-day trip to the new camp was indescribably horrendous.”
At the new camp, Stalag VIIA, there were no Red Cross parcels.
“We existed solely on German staples, mostly kohlrabi (German turnip),” he said. “Happily, we were only there until April 29, 1945 when Patton's Third Army liberated us.”
