George Gruber

Military

According to Gerhard E. Lenski [306th cryptographer]:







The most interesting experience we had was a request sometime in 1944 for one of us enlisted men to volunteer for an unspecified assignment. Having been well trained, all of us initially declined but as time was running out, S/Sergeant George Gruber, the oldest and most senior of us decided to use his rank and take the assignment himself. He had been at Thurleigh since the Group first arrived and at that point it looked like the war might last forever. He decided he wanted a change of scene-no matter what it might entail. George disappeared and was not heard from again until after VE Day when he appeared back at Thurleigh. Needless to say, my buddy and I who had remained behind wanted to know where he had been and what the assignment was. He told us that he had been in the Soviet Union working at the base at Poltava, which served the shuttle bombing raids over the oil fields in Romania. Naturally we asked him if he was glad he had taken the assignment. He said that if he had known what would be involved he would never have volunteered. But he also said that now that it was over he was glad he had taken the assignment. The story he told was that he had gone by ship down to Gibraltar and then through the Mediterranean to Palestine. There he and those he were with were loaded into buses and trucks and taken across deserts, etc. To the southern border of the Soviet Union in the Caucasus. There they boarded a train which took them to the first river where the bridge was bombed out. They crossed the river on rafts or something of the sort, then boarded another train on the other side. This was repeated numerous times until they reached Poltava. George said that as a result of carrying so much equipment, he developed a hernia. But this was only the beginning of his troubles. While his group was in Poltava it was hard to tell who the enemy was. When the GIs dated local girls they would find when they next revisited their homes that they were all boareded up and none of the neighbors seemed to know where the family had gone. The GIs soon concluded that these families had been encouraged y the friendly militia or NKVD to move to sunny Siberia for their health. Making matters worse, for many months the airfield was bombed by the Luftwaffe. German bombers would arrive shortly after dark andas they approached the airfield fires would suddenly be lighted around the perimeter by the local population which was pro-German, or at least anti-Soviet. All in all, not a very pleasant experience.

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Units served with

Official insignia of the 306th Bomb Group, approved 6 January 1943, and updated 2 October 1951.
  • Unit Hierarchy: Group
  • Air Force: Eighth Air Force
  • Type Category: Bombardment

Places

Revisions

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Sources

Drawn from the records of the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, Savannah, Georgia