“I didn’t know where I was or how I got there”

Eighty years ago this month, the dust was still settling from the conclusion of the war in Europe. This story from the war's closing days, which, unfortunately, did not make it into Bombing Hitler's Hometown, came to me from Tim Early, the son of Bennett Early, and the great staff at the Schlossmuseum in Freistadt, Austria.

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Corporal Bennett Early had no memory of Linz, of being shot down, of bailing out, or of landing on 25 April 1945. He flew the mission, his nineteenth, as a substitute ball turret gunner on the 99th Bomb Group's Dick Schwarz’ crew, and he didn’t know any of the other men onboard. His last recollection was of the togglier calling for an oxygen check from the nose of their B-17 Flying Fortress, “Old Folks,” just as the bomb run was beginning.

The next thing Early knew, he was slowly regaining consciousness in a dark room, laying on a cot, naked. “My head hurt, my legs hurt from groin to knee,” he recalled. “My dog tags were missing. I didn’t know where I was or how I got there.” Early tried to sit up, but his head pain greatly worsened, and he grew dizzy. “I think I went back to sleep,” he recollected.

When Early came to the next time, it was light enough for him to notice that his vision was badly blurred. There were two women in the room, probably nuns or nurses, Early deduced, and he was clothed in a white night gown. “I tried to talk with these ladies but got only silence in return,” he related. “They looked at each other and left the room”. A man came and went throughout the day, and Early’s efforts to speak with him were also for naught, but he did manage to communicate his need to go the latrine.

Days passed. Early nursed his blurred eyesight and dined on egg noodles in warm water. He also dealt with a great sense of loss after realizing he had lost a prized possession. Earlier in his tour, Bennett had removed the standard grips on his service pistol and replaced them with grips he’d fashioned from Plexiglass. He’d placed a black and white photograph of his sister under one of the grips so he could look at it through the Plexiglass. She’d posed under a maple tree on a hill in the back yard of the family home in McComas, West Virginia. Now, like his memories of being shot down, the pistol was gone.

The Freistadt hospital in which Bennett Early was treated.

One morning, a fighter flew low over Freistadt, the Austrian town in which Early was hospitalized, and circled the area several times. Bennett caught a glimpse of the aircraft out the window, but he couldn’t see well enough to identify it. After it departed, a man with a straight razor came into the room and signaled that he was to give Early a shave. “It was a dry shave,” Early recalled. “No water or lather was used. I don’t know how good the shave was. I do know I was diagnosed as having been given a severe ‘Barber Itch’ infection soon afterward.”

Suddenly, a sense of tension came over the hospital personnel. The barber left in a hurry, followed quickly by all the other staff. “They seemed to disappear,” Early related. Abruptly left on his own, Bennett walked to the window and, though he still couldn’t see well, made out the unmistakable shape of an American jeep coming up the road. Within minutes, a young US Army officer and two enlisted men walked into the room.

“Can you make it down to the jeep?” the officer asked after inquiring about the corporal’s health.

“Yes, sir, but I need some clothes,” Early replied.

The officer left the room and soon returned with one of the female staff, who gave Early his GI pants, shirt, and heated flight shoes. “I put these on over the night gown, and we made it down to the jeep,” he remembered. The jeep delivered Bennett to a field ambulance manned by two enlisted men who told him that the war was all but over. “They had nothing to eat, but I smoked a lot of their cigarettes,” Early noted. The trio passed the night at a checkpoint, where Early was introduced to something he had never seen before, a self-heating ration can. He dined on wieners mixed with beans and found them delicious.

Early carried four half-moon-shaped scars on his head when he returned to the States in June 1945. Suspecting that civilians or enemy soldiers had beaten the GI with a rifle butt or some other blunt object, causing his amnesia, Army medical staff at a convalescent hospital in Macon, Georgia, subjected Bennett to questioning using sodium pentothal. “In the beginning, the questions were simple, and I could answer them,” Early recollected. “After a time, I felt intoxicated.” Past that point, Early retained only a vague memory of having answered questions, but an Army psychiatrist told him during a follow-up appointment that the staff had concluded, based on his responses, that he had likely been beaten by Austrian civilians after landing. There wasn’t enough information to proceed with war crimes charges, however.

Early never regained his memories of being shot down and bailing out on 25 April. After returning to the United States via Camp Lucky Strike, Early spent six months in an Army hospital in Georgia, where his vision slowly returned to normal. He was honorably discharged in January 1946 and began a career in pharmaceutical sales, retiring in 1985 to care for his ailing wife. Bennett Early fought a brief battle with cancer and passed away in 2002 at age 76.

Sources:

- Bennett Early letter to Karl Affenzeller, 16 July 1996, and a letter to “Chuck and Ed,” 6 July 1996. Both are used with the permission of the Schlossmuseum, Freistadt, Austria. - Tim Early interview with Mike Croissant, 29 October 2019.

Photo used with permission of the Schlossmuseum, Freistadt.