Each service man or woman has a unique story to tell, and I found Nelson's story particularly intriguing. The following information is compiled from my notes made during a personal interview with Nelson on November 12 and 13, 1999 as well as correspondence with Forrest S. Clark, member of the the Swiss Internee Association, and information shared by researcher Roy J. Thomas of Monroe, WI, author of a self-published book, Haven, Heaven and Hell: The United States Army Air Porce Aircraft and Airmen Interned in Switzerland during WW II .

Nelson was called to service on December 3, 1941, before Pearl Harbor.  He reported to Jefferson Barracks with about 20 others, including his buddy Forrest Huff.  On December 7 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was at Jefferson Barracks.  His parents were visiting, and they had just had lunch.  They were getting ready to leave, and some MPs said that the servicemen must immediately return to the barracks.  They then got the news about Pearl Harbor.

Forrest Huff and he went on to Fort Knox together.  They volunteered for carpentry work.  It kept them busy and out of trucks and detail.  Eventually, they split up, and Nelson was sent to a light-truck outfit at Bowie, Texas.  A sergeant once told him, "Never stand when you can sit down.  Never sit down when you can lie down, and never miss a chance to go to the bathroom." It was good advice.

Nelson had done some air training prior to service.  He passed a test he took at Fort Worth and was then sent to Waco, Texas.  The facilities were not yet ready.  Love Field was nearby, and he would go to there on off times and fly with friends he met there.  Cimarron, Oklahoma was the next stop.  He worked with civilian instructors.  For half the day he received schooling, and afternoon was flight line training.  The primary training lasted about four months. 

Nelson found flying much to his liking. "Flying is an addiction.  It is like alcohol." 

At Garden City, Kansas, he received secondary training.  Much of the flying was done at night, and this was in the winter of 1942.  A tragic accident occurred, and two guys were killed when they flew into the group at night.  The next day, the whole group was ordered to play softball.  It was 18° below zero.

“They did things by the alphabet,” he recalled. “I was in the W's, so at Jefferson Barracks, when they handed out uniforms, by the time they got to me, I got a WW I uniform.  That coat was about an inch thick!”

Nelson graduated at Fort Sill Oklahoma, and on May 18, 1943 he got his wings.  After this, in May of 1943, he made his first trip home since joining the service.

On June 8, 1943, he was sent to Boise, Idaho. And it was snowing when he got off the train (in June!)  Boise was where he first saw a B-24.  It was the biggest operational combat aircraft at that time.  He was later transferred to Pocatello, Idaho, and assigned to a crew.  The co-pilot was originally a fellow named White, replaced later by Nelson.  The pilot was Capt. Kale. With this crew, they flew to Barksdale Field, Louisiana, a 1000- mile overland trip. 

Something happened with the aircraft, and they made an emergency landing at Nacogdoches,Texas. It was a dirt airstrip, still under construction.  They blew a tire on landing, requiring them to stay overnight until repairs could be arranged. A civilian came along, a man named Leon Aaron, and invited the whole crew to his house for supper.

“Well, want do you want to eat, boys?” he asked.

Nelson answered, "Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy,” and that’s what they got. It turned out that Mr. Leon was a local man who supported the building of the airport, and the news headlines in the next day’s paper read, "Airfield saves B-24."

At Barksdale Field, Louisiana, they did a 1000-mile hop overwater on a triangular course.  They then returned to Pocatello.  The tail gunner later wrote that a crew chief at the time had bet that the plane would not come back.

The crew was assigned to go to Herrington, Kansas and picked up the B-24 they would take overseas.  Their route took them to Kellogg Field, Michigan, where they refueled.  Then on to Goose Bay, Labrador, where they again refueled.  Next, to Iceland, where they saw two German prisoners, pilots who had been shot down.  From there, they headed to Scotland.  At 10,000 feet, the aircraft started icing up.  To melt the ice buildup, they had to get lower, descending until they were finally about a few hundred feet above the water.

On the way overseas, the crew opened their orders after leaving Goose Bay. They were directed to report to Land’s End, England, and from there to Marrakesh, Africa near Casablanca.  This was in July 1943, and Nelson was about 24 or 25 years old.  They were sent to Algiers, where plans were for them to replace men lost in the raid on Ploesti in August of 1943.  They knew they were going to an airfield near Benghazi.  The Germans sent one plane over while the crew was off watching a Bob Hope show.

The 98th Bomb group in a desert field was the next stop, where they had a mockup of the Ploesti oilfield, and the pilots practiced.

They flew several missions out of Benghazi -- 6 or eight missions.  Tunisia was next, then Sfax, Algeria, where they operated out of a dry lake bed with oil lamp flares marking the runway at night.  In the fall, heavy rains came, and for two or three days straight the planes sat in a few feet of water.

They left Africa, and went to Bari, Italy, where they were the first B-24 group to go into Italy.  There was little danger from German paratroopers then, who were mostly in northern Italy.

Nelson's crew flew several missions out of Bari, including one on Wiener-Neustadt.  "It was really a bugger!"

The crew was then transferred to England, where they were part of the 392nd Bomb Group at Wendling.

On 18 March 1944, the 392nd Bomb Group flew a mission to Friedrichshafen, to attack a plant which made aircraft frames.  On this mission, they suffered their heaviest losses of any individual raid ever flown during their combat experience. Before their mission was completed, the bomb group lost 15 aircraft and crews, and 9 other ships were damaged by fighters and flak.

On the flight to Friedrichshafen, Nelson’s B-24 developed difficulty and struggled to stay with their group. Their orders were “Do not let the Germans capture you.” Returning members of the Bomb Group reported that the plane was “straggling off to the left of the formation for 20 minutes before the target and that they salvoed their bombs and went to the right under the formation, toward Switzerland.”

The bombardier later gave this account:  “Our crippled ship landed at a field at Dübendorf, Switzerland, on 18 March 1944. Our number one engine had gone out because of mechanical failure, and fifteen minutes short of the I.R., the number two engine ran away up to 3500 RPMs. We were interned upon reaching Swiss territory and myself [Jimmy White] and S/Sgt. [Milt] Haaland, a gunner, were treated for frozen toes. When I left, all the crew were interned in Switzerland and were well, with the exception of Sgt. Haaland who had T.B. and was in the hospital.”

Upon landing, the crew was met with some hostility from civilians, but they were taken into custody by the Swiss military, who did not mistreat them. The plane was scrapped, and it was the last they saw of their Liberator.

The crew was held with other Allied soldiers for nearly a year in Switzerland, first quarrantined at Chaumont and then later transferred to Camp Moloney at Adelboden, where the Swiss lodged Allied internees in 10 hotels. They were not mistreated, but it was no resort life either. Because their official status was neither prisoner nor free, there was no timeline for their return. Inactivity, homesickness, boredom and hunger were their greatest miseries. They were fed meager rations, but it wasn’t much worse than what Swiss citizens were enduring at the time. “They did the best they could,” Nelson recalled.

(Note: this was not the case for the treatment of all Allied personnel held by the Swiss during WW II. Soldiers were assigned to camps depending on their classification. Prisoners were classified as escapees, people who had been caught by the Germans and escaped; evades, soldiers who were never caught by the Germans; and internees, soldiers who landed on Swiss soil. The Swiss had three internment camps or holding camps where around 100,000 Allied soldiers, including more than 1,500 American soldiers were held. In addition, there were prison camps and concentration camps. Prisoners and high-ranking officers were usually placed in concentration camps. One of the prison camps, Wauwilermoos, was a place where particularly grave injustices and cruelty occurred. For more information, two books are recommended: The Black Hole of Wauwilermoos by Dan Culler and Haven, Heaven and Hell by Roy J. Thomas.)

Nelson and his fellow crew members were eventually released in an arrangement where about 500 Allied air men were exchanged for about 1,000 Germans.  During his internment in Switzerland, men held at Adelboden helped recover bodies of 18 airmen whose planes had gone down in Lake Konstanz. Funeral services were conducted for them, and they were laid to rest at a cemetery in Munsingen. Nelson volunteered to make wooden markers for their graves, and he received permission to go with the detail which erected the crosses. Later, Switzerland ceded the land on which the cemetery rests to the United States, and Nelson made a return visit to Munsingen as part of a spontaneous detour with a tour bus group in 1972. It was an emotional return to a place where he was so many years before.

Nelson and other Allied crew were repatriated on 17 February 1945 and taken to Marseilles via Geneva and Annamasse, France. Nelson recalls that as they headed through a tunnel and into France, someone handed him a minced ham sandwich on white bread and some fruit.  "I never tasted anything in my life so good as that sandwich!"

They were returned to England on C-47's, and by March or February 1945 Nelson was back in his Quonset hut barracks.  He was classified as a POW, and was later returned to the US on a hospital ship.

On the trip across the Atlantic, he stayed below deck for two days as they cross the Irish Sea.  As the threat from German submarines still loomed, their ship was escorted by destroyers. On the third or fourth day out, the men were served a special dinner.  This ship had been an ocean liner, but it was converted to a hospital ship. The seas had been rough, and many of the men were seasick. As a result, most could not enjoy the fine dinner served to them.  When dessert was served, many men were no longer at the table but instead out on deck, sick and unable to finish. The seasickness hadn’t affected Nelson, so he made the most of it – moving from place to place around the dining room, scarfing up the cherry pie and ice cream the others could not touch.

The ship landed in Boston, and Nelson was sent on to Florida. He was allowed one week leave to go home, and then returned to Florida.  He was later sent to Pampa, Texas, and became an instructor on the B-25.  He was in New Orleans (on the way to Pampa) when he heard the war in Europe was over.  He was in Antoine's restaurant when someone came in and said the war in Europe is over.

From Pampa, he flew to Bryan's Station, Texas, and visited friends and family.  Here Colonel Durst had dinner for them.  Durst asked where he would like to be stationed, and Nelson said he wanted a California hospital ship station at Mesa Field, California, where he could get lots of flying time.  He was assigned to an engineering test station.

"I don't think we ever flew a mission where something didn't go wrong mechanically."

At the end of his military training, Nelson flew the B-29 a little ways on route to Tulsa, Oklahoma, after getting out of the service.  It was the only time he flew the B-29.  When he got to Tulsa, he was unable to get a train home because so many men were going home and the trains were full.

"Being in the service helped me.  I grew up.  I sure learned a lot about people."

Question: the war didn't really change your plans?

"I didn't have any plans."

And then, when I turned off the tape recorder and we closed the interview, Nelson turned and looked up from his chair at me and said, “Molly, I flew that plane every night for 40 years.”