UNITY, Maine — On Oct. 10, 1943, Sgt. Ted Converse plummeted unconscious through the sky from 23,000 feet above northwestern Europe.
His B-17 bomber had been shot up badly by a German flying ace after a raid on Munster, Germany, and the 20-year-old tail gunner heeded the order to jump from the doomed airplane. He’d lost his oxygen bottle and remembers wondering if he should jump out head first or tail first. Then everything went dark.
“I don’t even remember pulling the ripcord,” Converse, now a salty 92-year-old whose eyes, memories and humor remain undimmed by the passing of time, said last week from his home in Unity. “I passed out. When I came to, all I saw was blue. I thought I died.”
He started looking around for his relatives who had passed away, and saw none.
“They lied to me!” he said, remembering he thought the afterlife was a disappointment. “All it was was blue.”
Instead of heaven, the young tail gunner found a different kind of salvation as he floated toward the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The day the B-17 got shot down marked the beginning of an ordeal of survival behind enemy lines that lasted until Converse made it safely to England, 13 months after he landed hard in a heap of parachute silk and cords somewhere in the countryside.
It was the height of World War II, at a time and place when it seemed as if anyone could have been a German collaborator — or in the underground, fighting against the German occupation. Converse was one of 10 Americans aboard the B-17 “Flying Fortress” that was named Pinky, after the pilot’s wife. The men had flown from England on a mission to disrupt rail traffic in Munster, located in northwestern Germany, and one of them was killed when the plane got shot. The eight others were taken captive and became prisoners of war. Only Converse was able to evade capture.
Nowadays, walking doesn’t come as easily for Converse, who broke his hip not long ago and uses a cane. But the baseball cap he wears tells the tale of his survival. “We walked to freedom,” it states, bearing the logo of the Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society.
“Well, it was a little more than that,” Converse said.
After he hit the ground, his watch and compass broken in the impact, he hid his parachute and tried to assess the situation. Things didn’t look so good. He didn’t know where he was, or what direction to go.
“I said, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’” he recalled. “I heard dogs. Oh, boy. I was at the edge of a pond, and I walked in the edge, lost my scent in the water.”
Then Converse had a small stroke of luck. He found a cement road marker that pointed the way toward the Netherlands and away from Germany. He was cold, wet and scared, but at least moving in the right direction. Then he saw a man coming toward him on a bicycle carrying a scythe on his back. Converse hid on the side of the road, then decided to take a chance on the stranger.
“I whistled, and he dropped the bike and the scythe. He came to the side of the road, and I showed myself,” he remembered. “I said, ‘American, American.’ He said, ‘Stay where you are. In the morning I’ll come back.’”
Converse, nervous, waited through the night. In the morning, the man did return, and he wanted to help. He asked the American how much money he had, and then told him something that proved to be prophetic.
“He said, ‘We’ll get you to England, but it’ll take awhile,’” Converse said.
The Dutchman, named Joop, brought the American to a Dutch town, where he gave him civilian clothes and lent him a bicycle. The duo pedaled 20 miles to a place near the Belgian border. The next day, they got on a bus to Antwerp and from there, a train to Brussels. Converse said he blended in, although he didn’t speak any Dutch, and his high school French classes served him well when he got to Brussels. Once there, he went with a woman who belonged to the resistance, who brought him to her mother’s house.
“I stayed there for a long time,” Converse said.
He was in hiding there for months, during which time he was treated for pneumonia and also managed to survive the British bombing raids of the city. It was impossible for Converse to get word of his situation to his family back home in Greenwich, Connecticut. His mother had received a telegram from the War Department when Converse’s plane got shot down, telling her he was missing in action. In March, five months after that, she received another telegram.
“Report received from the German Government through International Red Cross states your son Sgt. Theodore G. Converse who was previously reported missing in action was killed in action on 10 October in European Theatre. Secretary of War extends his deep sympathy. Letter follows,” the telegram stated in bold capital letters that left no room for hope.
Meanwhile, back in Europe, Converse knew his survival was not guaranteed. This was brought home to him one day when the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, banged on a door just a couple doors down from where he was hiding. A couple lived there with their baby, and the husband was wanted by the Gestapo.
“The Gestapo came and brought the baby out,” he said.
The men took the baby and smashed it against their truck, killing it in front of horrified bystanders. Also watching secretly through a window was Converse, who was terrified that their next stop would be the apartment where he was hiding.
“The SS and the Gestapo were really bad people,” he said.
When the D-Day invasion began in June 1944 and Allied troops started to battle their way across France, it was a big relief, he said.
“We were all happy to hear about the invasion,” he said.
But still Converse bided his time while he waited for the Allied troops to draw closer. The family he stayed with procured books for him to keep him busy and he practiced his French. By late summer of 1944, it was safe enough for him to get to the British lines, and from there he was taken to the Americans. That’s when he was flown back to England and when he was he able to make it to England and to finally let his family know he was alive, via yet another telegram. This time, the operator in Connecticut warned his mother not to believe it, telling her the Germans were lying about the fate of soldiers in an effort to confuse Americans and lower morale.
“They cried, but they didn’t believe it,” he said of when his mother and family members got the latest news.
In England, Converse was debriefed by the American Office of Strategic Services, where officials asked him how he had evaded capture for so long. Then he made it back to America, where he finally provided his mother and family members irrefutable proof of his survival.
The years after he came home have been full and busy ones. He married and had four children, became a salesman and then a financial planner. Converse moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then, a few years ago, to Unity to live with his son, Todd Converse. He never went back to Belgium or the Netherlands, but if he could, he’d like to tell the Brussels family which helped him evade capture one thing that has remained true for more than 70 years.
“I’ll never forget you,” he said.