CLINTON HAAS
Age: 86
Born: Sept. 24, 1923
Hometown: Adrian, Mich.
Residence: Cathedral City
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; 12th Air Force; 17th Bomb Group; 34th Bomb Squadron
Years served: Dec. 12, 1942-Oct. 6, 1945
Rank: Tech sergeant
Family: Wife Marti; two children, Melanie Obrenski of Stevens Point, Wis. and Paul Haas of Beaver Dam, Wis.; one grandchild; one great-grandchild.
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 Airborne veteran Ted Hahn of Palm Desert.
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
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Clinton Haas stood over the open bomb bay doors of a B-26 bomber at 12,000 feet when the aircraft was nailed by enemy fire over Heidelberg, Germany.
“We were on our 24th mission when we were ‘kaputed,'” Haas said.
On March 23, 1945, Haas was flying in the lead plane of a three-plane element whose task was to drop strips of tinfoil (called “chaff”) into the sky to confuse enemy radar.
“The bomb bay doors were open and I was throwing out chaff when we were hit,” he said. “They were right on us — three bursts (of flak). We were immediately ablaze and we got the bailout signal.
“Because I was in the bomb bay, I went out first,” he said. “I delayed my jump until I was right over the tree tops.”
The rest of the crew bailed out later, landing about 2 miles away from Haas.
“I was alone as a prisoner for 10 hours,” Haas said. “That was spooky. It's only because I could speak German that I'm alive today.”
“They thought I was a paratrooper,” he continued. “I convinced them I wasn't a Canadian paratrooper.”
The German soldiers had a “shoot-on-sight” order to kill Canadian paratroopers, he said.
“They saw me come down,” Haas said. “I landed at the edge of a peach orchard. I got halfway across it and I heard, ‘ping, ping, ping' over my head.”
When the bullets started flying, Haas stopped running.
“I threw my .45 in the air, which indicated I was giving up,” Haas said. “That's when all the fun started. That's when I had to talk my way out (of getting killed).”
“I was interrogated first,” he said. “(Then) they walked me around. I was taken by car to the municipal jail — the German army headquarters — where I was interrogated again.”
He was soon reunited with his buddies — all seven crewmen aboard survived and all were taken prisoner.
“We were a week getting to the prison camp,” he said. “Riding trucks and walking. We were strafed and bombed by our own planes. They didn't know who we were or where we were.”
Haas injured his right knee escaping from the burning plane, hampering his mobility.
“It was hard, hard, hard with all that walking,” he said.
The group was briefly imprisoned in Ludwisburg, Germany.
“We were only there a week and were put on the road with all the other prisoners, totaling 3,100,” Haas said. “Walking across southern Germany we were (again) strafed and bombed by our own planes. We went days without food or water or shelter we were on the road more than three weeks. Some dropped out due to sickness, some were shot trying to escape, some were killed by our own planes, others died of malnutrition and illness.”
More than half the men died during the ordeal.
“When we were liberated, there were only 1,300 left out of 3,100,” he said.
Haas said the Germans didn't physically torture their captives, but the POWs were constantly tormented with threats of execution.
“They stood me on the edge of a slit trench and told me this was my grave and I surely believed it,” he said. “They laughed — it was a joke to them.”
Another time, “We stopped under this tree and they pointed. I thought they were pointing where they were going to string me up.”
The Germans scared the prisoners into thinking they were going to be shot and killed when they lined the men up against a wall in a courtyard.
In prison, “Yugoslavian partisans were taken out every five minutes — one by one — and were shot and we thought, ‘This is our fate,'” Haas said.
He later realized the partisans had not been killed.
“This was all a ploy to get us to talk,” he said.
Which was ironic, he added, because the Germans knew as much about Allied operations as the prisoners knew.
“There were no real secrets,” Haas said.
The men were liberated on April 28, 1945.
“We were in barns, we were in a farm complex,” Haas said. “The SS had come through the night before and they had orders to kill all the prisoners. We got some guy out,” to get word to the American Army, “and they came the next morning and liberated us when they came in shooting.”
At the time, however, “We were not aware of the order to kill prisoners,” he said.
“I was milking a cow when the fireworks started and I dove into a concrete feed box,” he said.
“It was like deliverance,” when they were liberated, he said. “I felt it was a matter of time.”
As a former POW, “My tactic was to forget it as soon as possible — in whatever way possible,” he said. “I had migraines for eight years afterwards. That was the unpleasant aspect.”
