July 21st, 1944.
“Flak was intense that day,” said Army Sgt. John Connelly, 93. “They seem harmless, these black puffs…but it’s hot iron coming at you.”
He was aboard a B-24, on a bombing run to Munich. It got cut short when flak tore through the fuselage and brought the plane down.
“We all jumped out,” Connelly said.
The bomber crashed in the distance. He drifted slowly away from his crew.
“There’s no sensation of falling,” Connelly said. “You feel like you’re just hanging up there. There’s no sound up there, completely silent.”
He landed in enemy territory, just miles from the safety of the Swiss border.
“Terrible,” Connelly said. “Anxiety sets in.”
What happened next is something he tried to forget.
“For 50 years I never gave it a thought,” Connelly said.
Connelly told his story on-camera for the first time to First Coast News. For decades he wouldn’t even tell his family.
During the interview, he pulled a mysterious bag from a tea box and promised to show it to me when the time is right.
First he wanted to show me a picture.
“This is our crew,” Connelly said of the aged and yellowed photograph.
All of the men in the photograph are dead,” he said.
The Jacksonville resident is the only one left who remembers the broken English of the villagers who rushed toward the crash with rifles.
“You now, German prisoner,” Connelly remembered.
He’s the only one left who remembers the threats of the Nazi interrogators.
“We have ways of making people talk,” they said to him. “I gave him my name rank and serial number then I said to him, ‘I’m an ordinary soldier just like you and I don’t know anything,’ and he dismisses me.”
The bold response got him out of the interrogation room, but onto the haunting train tracks to an inescapable place,
The Germans called it Stalag Luft IV. It’s a prison camp in modern day Poland.
A violent gauntlet of torture awaited as soon as Connelly and a hundred other prisoners got off the train.
“Men were getting bayoneted,” Connelly said. “There were dogs, biting at your heels. It was a bloody mess.”
Months went by and rations dwindled.
“You’re always thinking about home,” Connelly said.
Then in February, the Germans abandoned the prison as Russian forces advanced from the east.
The Nazis forced hundreds starving and tired prisoners to trudge through the snow in freezing temperatures.
“We were on the road 52 days,” Connelly said. “We were marching, sleeping in barns.
They arrived exhausted at prison camp Stalag 11B in north Germany where for a moment, Connelly was treated like a human being.
“They deloused us and gave us a hot shower,” Connelly said.
That was April 4 of 1945, his first shower in almost nine months. To this day, Connelly still remembers the exact date…because as a prisoner… the smallest comforts make the biggest differences.
Another date he’ll never forget is April 16, when he heard the roar of the British tanks rolled in to liberate the prison camp.
A few weeks later he was on a ship headed back to the states. The first thing he saw was the statue of liberty.”
“There it was, shining,” Connelly said. “There were a lot of hurrahs.”
The parades faded, but Connelly’s memories didn’t. He dealt with them on his own. Weeks became months, and months became years. For half a century he kept the story to himself.
“What changed my mind was coming down here to Jacksonville,” Connelly said.
Here, in a town full of service members, he opened up to other veterans, but before long he found his circle getting smaller.”
“As the years go by, there aren’t that many World War II men left,” Connelly said.
And that he says, is why now, he’s ready to show me what’s in the mysterious bag. He opens it slowly to unwrap a piece of his B24 bomber, found by a German historian, where it crashed 74 years ago, dug up from a dark place, because much like his story, some things shouldn’t stay buried, and some things shouldn’t be forgotten.