Crashed at Anno-Tower on 11/26/44 in B-24 'Idiots Delight' #42-51530, Prisoner of War (POW).



Harry H. Pollak was born in Passaic, N.J., on 12 March 1921. He was the son of a Jewish dry goods retail merchant who had immigrated from Romania in 1909. He was inducted into the Army on 7 January 1943.



He told friends that prior to his induction into the Army, he had no middle name, but when filling out the paper work, he felt he had to come up with a middle name. He chose "Hamilton" after Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. He served in the Army Air Force as an enlisted man and rose to the rank of Tech Sergeant before flying his last mission on 26 November 1944.



Mr. Pollak earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions on 26 November 1944 as the crew chief and radioman/gunner on the B-24 known as "Idiot's Delight." Before reaching the target area -- the Misburg oil refinery -- Mr. Pollak's plane was the lead bomber in the high group of nine bombers, all from his squadron. After their P-51 cover was goaded into chasing some German fighters, the B-24s were attacked by approximately 100 German fighters. The high group took the brunt of the 491st Bomb Group's casualties as all 9 planes were eventually lost. But Idiot's Delight survived the initial wave of fighters long enough to drop its bombs on its target.



Mr. Pollak was captured by a Luftwaffe unit and sent to a Luftwaffe-run prisoner of war camp, Stalag 091. He frequently commented to friends that a German guard in the POW camp told him that, as a Jew, he was fortunate not to have been caught by the SS, as he would have been sent to the Jewish death camps. He was liberated on May 31, 1945.



Mr. Pollak was a 1948 graduate of Rutgers University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a master's degree at the University of Chicago in 1951. He became an authority on international labor affairs. He worked for the Congress of Industrial Organizations -- the labor union association that eventually became the AFL-CIO -- and with the Federal Government, mostly the State Department.



At the time of his death in 1980, Mr. Pollak was a special assistant to the secretary of state, coordinator of the State Department's international labor affairs office, and director of the agency for International Development's Office of Labor Affairs.



Prior to that, he had spent three years as the State Department's deputy coordinator of international labor affairs. He also had been a delegate to the International Labor Organization's convention earlier this year and had been a labor adviser to the Peace Corps in the early 1960s.



He began his government career as a labor adviser to this country's embassy in Tokyo in 1962. He held that post until beginning a two-year stint as labor editor of the Voice of America in 1965. From 1967 to 1973 Mr. Pollak was labor attache and political officer with the U.S. Mission to the European Economic Community in Brussels, Belgium. He then spent four years as labor attache and first secretary with the American embassy in London before returning to Washington in 1977.



Mr. Pollak died on September 27, 1980. His survivors included a wife, and an adult daughter and son.