Shot down May 8, 1944 in B-17 #42-97220 called 'Kickapoo Joy Juice'. Prisoner of War (POW) in Germany for just a week short of a year. [Kickapoo Joy Juice was the beverage drunk by the Indians in the Al Capp cartoon "Little Abner."]



Herbert Becker was a second-generation Swedish immigrant born into a Swedish speaking household. His parents had attended school and his father had completed compulsory military service in Sweden. Herb attended public school and graduated. He liked music--he whistled anywhere, played clarinet and other horns in bands, and listened to the radio always. When he enlisted, he was engaged to Norma Peterson of St. Paul, who was just finishing high school. He was 5 years older than she. After the war, he worked for others as a carpenter and a foreman, then began his own construction company. Later, he went to work for the Veterans Administration as a foreman in the carpenter shop at the Minneapolis hospital. He retired from there in the early 1980s and died May 27, 1997 of a terrific heart attack.



Among Herb's activities in P.O.W. camp were beekeeping (he had captured a swarm in summer of 1943), designing dream houses, and studying books about construction. He described being the volunteer who helped the Germans unload the food trucks: potatoes, bread. This way, he could sometimes get an extra bit for himself and his roommates. "Linny, if anyone thinks communism is a good thing, they should try living in a place where you have to share everything." He resented those opportunists who ate others' food without sharing with others themselves. He said that the Germans provided pewter water pitchers, but their group melted theirs accidentally on the stove. Once in my childhood when the family was camping, he looked at the ham-shaped canned ham metal container (the kind with the key to open it) and said "We just throw that away but you can see how useful that would have been in prison camp." Norma says that Herb never went camping for years after POW camp, but then discovered it and asked her "why haven't we done this before?" Norma says, "I knew why but I didn't say anything. He wanted to go first class when he got home from the war."



Herb's pilot was named Moorehouse. Herb told stories about this man being inept, including one terrible B-17 landing in England when the tires tore off the landing lights on the landing strip. The pilot bought the whole crew steak dinners in apology for that trip.



The co-pilot was "Fitz" Fitzgerald. Herb liked him very much. Later in life, this man visited St. Paul and took Herb and Mom and me and my husband out to dinner. I couldn't believe that anyone could have such good humor about those war years--Herb sure didn't find them at all funny. It was as if the two men had been in two different wars. It's too bad that Fitz was the co-pilot and the other man the pilot--Fitz saved the day more than once.



There was a crew member (radio man?) named Danny. He would see the enemy planes approaching and say into the intercom radio "they're cummin', they're cummin', they're cummin'" (Herb's wife Norma still quotes Herb saying this about Danny.)



Herb always wanted to apply for recognition for an event that occurred on one return trip, but he died before he got the letter "just so" and it was never sent. He felt that he should have been recognized for saving the plane. There was a bomb that got hung up in the bomb rack, preventing the bomb bay doors from closing. The plane turned around without dumping all the bombs because of this and over the English Channel, Herb walked out on the catwalk alongside the bombs and held the hand-hold (an overhead rope I think) while kicking at the bomb ... over the _open_ bomb bay. (My hands are clammy as I type this--I went to see a B-17 and saw how harrowing this must have been.) Finally a kick shifted the bomb in the bomb rack and it straightened out sufficiently. Herb was able to release the bombs over the ocean and then the doors could be closed so that the understory would not be a problem when the plane landed and there would be no loose explosives under it.



Many of the bombing missions were over Brunswick, Germany. I think there was a ball bearing factory there.



Herb was a PTSD victim because of the war. He was never treated for it. Norma bore a lot of the abrasion from that affliction. Herb did not drink alcohol and he was a good father, although he had a sharp tongue and a terrible temper. Much of his war-related trouble happened in his sleep--he shouted and dreamed of situations in which he had no control (the worst times, he kicked out the foot board on the bed in an attempt to brake a car and at another time fell completely down a stairway in the night while searching for something; at another time he pulled a bookshelf down on himself in the night). In some ways, I believe that my parents' marriage and my father's mental health were sacrificed to the war effort. Herb also had back trouble that he attributed to the parachute landing and tooth troubles. He received some disability money each month. The government assumed that his death from a heart attack was the result of beri-beri.