World War II veteran Richard Mickens (right) with a comrade. / Provided photo
World War II veteran Richard Mickens (right) with a comrade. / Provided photo
RICHARD MICKENS
Age: 84
Born: Sept. 1, 1924
Hometown: Los Angeles
Residence: Palm Springs
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Force; 15th Air Force; 484th Bomb Group
Years served: 1944-1946
Rank: Staff sergeant
Family: Wife Doreen; three children, Roxanne Davis of Palm Springs, Mark Mickens of Napa and Brett Mickens.
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 vet Ben Stevens of Rancho Mirage
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 Force veteran Richard Mickens crammed nearly a lifetime of drama into a little more than two years.
“I entered the service, got shot down, was a POW and was back in the States by the time I was 20,” Mickens said.
Mickens enlisted in the Army Air Force when he was 17 and eventually became a nose gunner.
He sat in the middle of the clear, Plexiglass nose turret situated at the front of the B-24 bomber, positioned behind 50-caliber machine guns.
“I had the best seat in the house,” he said.
The men were stationed at Torretta Airfield near Cerignola, Italy.
“We put our tents up in-between olive trees,” he said. “There was no water, no heat, snow on the ground.”
Two months later, Mickens would find himself behind barbed wire as a prisoner of war.
“We got shot down on our third mission,” Mickens said.
The crew made it back in one piece after the first two missions — over Czechoslovakia and Austria — under heavy anti-aircraft fire.
The crew's next mission was a bomb run over a marshaling yard in Linz, Austria, on Jan. 20, 1945. “At that time it was the largest railroad yard in the east,” he said.
“We caught all kinds of hell 10 minutes before the target and the plane was shot to pieces. We lost three engines. That B-24 won't fly on one engine.
“The pilot said, ‘Prepare to bail out,'” Mickens recalled.
They were supposed to go out the nose wheel door, but it wouldn't fully open because the hydraulics were out.
“The bombardier tried to get out that door and got stuck. The navigator and I were stomping on both of his shoulders to get him out.”
The two men decided to exit through the bomb bay doors.
“We were in a slight, 2-degree turn going down so we had a good, solid platform to bail out from,” he said. “We all got out satisfactorily. I counted the other nine parachutes as I was going down.
“We bailed out at 25,000 feet. It was 55 degrees below zero. At that altitude, you don't pull your chute or you'd freeze. When I could breathe again, I pulled my chute.”
He landed in a lumber reservation in the Bavarian Alps.
“I landed in a 100-foot pine tree. I crashed through it.”
He removed his parachute, climbed down the tree and was intercepted by German lumberjacks. After walking with his armed captors for three hours, he came to a mess hall where people were preparing for dinner and had a roaring fireplace.
One of the women who spoke excellent English said, “Sergeant, get in front of the fireplace and strip down to your long johns,” Mickens said. “Boy, that fire felt good. She hung my wet clothes over a chair, and I was given a steaming cup of potato whiskey. I drank that cup and had another and by that time I didn't care what happened to me. I was feeling no pain.”
He was taken to Frankfurt for interrogation.
Mickens, who was sitting on a bunk with an officer, said he gave the officer his name, rank and serial, but refused to answer any other questions.
“I gave him that and he says, ‘Sergeant, you can do better than that,' and he pulled out a Luger and set it on the bed. I said, ‘What do you want to know?'”
The Germans, through their excellent intelligence operation, knew his squadron and group number. They just didn't know what time the squadron took off on their mission.
Later, Mickens was piled into box cars with other POWs and sent by railroad to Stalag 13A. Two hours outside of Frankfort, an Allied P-51 fighter plane strafed the train, shooting out the engine.
The blast killed two men in Mickens' box car. Mickens spent time in several prison camps. His last stop was Stalag VIIA in Moosburg, Germany.
“There was nothing to do,” he said. “We stood around all day long talking about food and making up menus in our head.”
Mickens passed some of the time by taking French lessons from a fellow POW.
The camp was liberated on April 29, 1945, by the 14th Armored Infantry Division of Gen. George Patton's Third Army.
Some of the men were standing near the barbed wire fences when the American tanks rolled down the road.
“It was a beautiful sight. The tank commander ran the tanks right through the wire.”
Mickens said the first thing the tank commander did was open up the hatch and hand the men an American flag.
They quickly pulled down the German flag that had been flying over the camp and replaced it with Old Glory.
“The next day Patton came through,” he said. “We got to talk to him, shake his hand. He shot the breeze with us and said, ‘We're going to get you guys out of here as soon as we can.'”
