'Mission 34 to Politz'
A tragic day for the 492nd Bomh Group
Earlier this month, Kevin Hymel, the Arlington National Cemetery historian, posted a story about the burial of a World War 2 airman whose remains were only recently identified.
Dale Danneker was only two months old when his uncle, U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. John “Jack” H. Danneker, was killed in the skies over Europe during World War II. On June 20, 1944, Danneker was serving as the left waist gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber, attacking enemy facilities in Politz, Germany, when the bomber collided with another in the same formation. Danneker’s B-24 spiraled into the Baltic Sea near Langeland Island, Denmark. Two men from its 10-man crew survived the crash and were taken as prisoners of war. The others, including 19-year-old Danneker, could not be recovered.
Like many Gold Star families, the Danneker family felt the pain of loss through generations; conversations around the fallen are often difficult to have. “I heard a couple of stories about him but not in any detail,” Dale said, who grew up thinking, mistakenly, that his uncle had been shot down over the English Channel. “My parents would just say to me, ‘You have an Uncle Jack who was killed in the war.’”
In 2019, 75 years after Danneker’s death, Danish divers discovered the wreck of a World War II aircraft in the general vicinity where the bomber had gone down. They contacted the Royal Danish Navy, which removed the undetonated bombs from the wreck in 2021, rendering the site safe for investigation. The Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the Royal Danish Navy and other groups then conducted an underwater survey, which found evidence of human remains. Further excavations, from 2023 to 2024, found additional human remains, material evidence and the identification tags of two crew members.
Two things from the story jumped right out at me. 1: “Enemy facilities at Politz.” This was a synthetic oil refinery, and would be the target of multiple missions. And 2: The bomber crashed into the Baltic Sea.”
In 2010, when I visited Kassel Mission veterans John Ray Lemons and Jim Baynham in Dallas, Ray arranged for me to meet another veteran, Bob Cash, who was also a prisoner of war. Bob’s B-24 was shot down on a mission to Politz and, after bailing out, he landed in the Baltic Sea, where the water was so cold that if he wasn’t dragged to his death by his sinking parachute the freezing water would have measure his life in minutes rather than hours. He was rescued by a German patrol boat that was out picking up German fighter pilots who were shot down.
I wondered if this was the same mission, so I went to the web site of Bob’s unit, the 492nd Bomb Group, figuring the group might have taken part in more than one mission to Politz. There were two, but one was in May, before Bob’s first mission, which was in June, and the second raid was on June 20. This is the site’s description of “Mission 34” from 492ndbombgroup.com:
A maximum effort was called for by the Supreme Command. The 492nd was to participate in the two missions planned for the day. On the morning mission they dispatched 35 planes for the attack on the oil refineries at Politz. The Group was led by Major Losee, the 856th Squadron Commander. The Group formed in three squadrons. The lead squadron was led by the J Harris Crew 707, with Major Losse aboard. The Kehoe Crew 613 led the low left section, while the Johnson Crew 903 led the high right.The 14th Wing led the 2nd Air Division. The 44th BG led with the 392nd BG on their right and the 492nd BG on their left. The Group didn’t have any aborts until they crossed over the Danish Peninsula, well over the Baltic Sea. The plane flown by the Velarde Crew 615 blew an engine. The hardest part of their return trip was flying back across the peninsula, but they were able to get back without incident. What seemed to be bad luck turned out to be good luck. Of the 12 ships and crews sent out by the 856th Squadron that day, they were the only crew to return.
I remembered some of the things Bob said and thought about how easy it would be for such a disaster — an entire squadron of B-24s wiped out, with only a few survivors to provide the details of the story — to be lost to history, as the Kassel Mission so nearly was. This is the account of the Politz raid that I recorded in my interview with Bob:
Bob Cash: I got to fly D-Day.
Aaron Elson: Did you!
Bob Cash: Yes.
Aaron Elson: That makes you a D-Day veteran.
Bob Cash: M-hm. That was about our third mission, and fortunately, we didn’t have any air to air combat with anything. There were very few fighters at that time. That was the only mission that we didn’t come into direct combat.
Aaron Elson: Really. Did you see the armada?
Bob Cash: Oh yes. Oh yes. And that was the grandest thing you could ever imagine. And as an 18-year-old I was very proud to be a part of it. And I could see those, we were bombing targets where it would impede the Germans from fleeing, we were bombing bridges and everything like that. So we came back, it was such a short mission we almost made two missions that day but they called it off. That was the 6th of June, and we’d fly every day, or every other day, at that time, and on our 12th mission, or our 13th mission, we were supposed to go out and hit an oil refinery in northern Germany here [pointing to a map on his wall] by the name of Politz. This point here is where they nailed us, 50 miles from the northern coast, out in the Baltic, between the island of Rugen and, there’s another island over here. But they nailed us right here, and about 40 Messerschmitt 410s, that was a twin-engine, high performance aircraft that had replaced the JU-88, the old Juncker, which had a ton of armor on it, but they took all that armor and put it into this Messerschmitt 410, so we had never even seen them before. But they could fire 20-millimeters all day at you. And they also had the capability of firing some 50-millimeters. And you’re sitting there defending yourself with a .50-caliber, which is one of those, in the right corner, and these 50-millimeter rockets that they were hitting. They made two passes through our group and took 14 airplanes down. Two planes made it to Sweden. Of course I had a little difficulty getting out of that thing because we were immediately on fire, I mean they were pumping these 20-millimeter cannons and a few 50-millimeter cannons at us and in the right place that’ll blow up a 24 like that because a B-24 has the swivel bellies that open up for the bomb bays, and that’s just laced with hydraulic fluid lines and so forth, which was just as flammable as hundred octane gasoline.
They hit us so fast, and we didn’t have any fighter protection so they could have their way with us, and we were trying to fight them off. And my engineer was in the turret. He and I would, on these longer missions, I would get in the turret and take it back to the base and he’d take it from the base to the target, which made it a little easier. He was in the turret at that time ...
Aaron Elson: Had you dropped the bombs?
Bob Cash: No, no. We still had our bombs. Our flight path was to take us this way, and our IP [initial point] was about in here, and then we’d fly on an even keel; once you got on the IP you didn’t vary yourself too much. But here’s where our target was, and we were to come down like this and come in to Politz like that and go back the way we came. But we were here and still had our bomb load. We were carrying 500-pound general purpose bombs, and the minute they started firing at us, we were on fire. And it was just like standing in a bunsen burner. My engineer dropped out of his seat. I’d heard him getting hit. I was standing right beside him, but he was up here, and they had some 3.5 millimeter small arms fire, machine guns that they’d squeezed off, I think just kind of testing us. But they caught him right at the base of the neck. He took about four .30-calibers I guess is what you’d call it. He instinctively pulled that release under the seat and it dropped him right there at my feet, and then I was rolling him over trying to find out where he was hit, and I realized just about the time I rolled him over I could see where he was hit, and bless his heart, I mean he was, instant death because they just nailed him perfectly right back there, the base of the neck. So I grabbed my chute — I kept it right down there by my heater — I grabbed my chute and picked it up and we routinely did this on the ground, pick up your, the chutes that we wore were chest packs, pick ‘em up, and they hooked on a couple of hooks that you wore on your, this big harness that you wore that had some hooks, and you just, the hooks were on the back of the chute and the rings were there. I picked this thing up and I couldn’t get the right one hooked, and I kept trying to ... by that time I could see that my engineer was gone and I had better get out of that thing because any nanosecond it was gonna blow. And I looked out there and I don’t know, I guess the Lord opened the right side of the bomb bay about this far ...
Aaron Elson: About six feet, or five feet?
Bob Cash: Oh no, it was ...
Aaron Elson: Oh, about three feet.
Bob Cash: When you stand on the catwalk, which goes from the front to the back of the plane, that gives you about this much room to get out of there. But it stopped right there, and I was fighting the fire. I couldn’t see much of anything, and one of those 20-millimeters came by, and I had an old pisspot that your dad knows what those were, I put that down over my flight helmet, and it came down about like that, and one of those 20-millimeters went by and knocked it off of my head. And I used to be burned clear out to my ear here -- I’ve gotten a little hair back there -- but it just about knocked me out, and about that time I was standing, I was down on the catwalk, getting ready to go, to bail out, and I felt somebody nudge me and it was my pilot because he was a shorter man than the co-pilot. I couldn’t see his face but I knew it was him, there wasn’t anybody else there, but he was getting ready to go too, and he had trimmed the ship up the best he could before he left his seat, and I was setting there still trying to get that parachute hooked on the other side, I think it was on the left side, and I told him I wasn’t ready, to go on and go out, and he had gotten down in a squatting position, he had to roll out of the thing. And several things to contend with when you’re going down over water. First off, you want to go out where you’re safe enough that you won’t be blown back up into the rear end of the plane; you want to kind of free fall for a while to get away from it. But he was down ready to go and I was standing over him, and about that time the plane curled over to the left and it threw both of us over into the left hand side of the bomb bay which was closed, banging around with those bomb loads, and he fell on top of me.
I managed to get him up off of me and push him up to a vertical position where he could get back in the position to go out, and then I managed to get up there, and we were going down like this, so if you’re pulling any G’s that’s about as close to a G as I ever, trying to get back up on that catwalk to go out. Well, he was up there and he was just frozen, he wouldn’t go on. I finally told him to “Go on! Go on!” And he was still sitting there. And I finally just took him and shoved him out. He had on a back pack, all the officers wore a back pack. We had to go from the front to the back of that catwalk, and we did that without a parachute except in our hands. The catwalk’s about that wide ...
Aaron Elson: About eight inches?
Bob Cash: It separates the right from the left bomb bay. Anyway, out he went, and that was the last he was ever seen. And I got down there and got in a squatting position to roll out after I pushed him out, and I’m fighting this fire and my clothes were on fire, and a fire’s worse than anything else, anything, because I took a, one of these small arms fire that hit my engineer as I was down like this getting ready to go out, it came right under my shoulder here and through the fleshy part of my leg ...
Aaron Elson: Your right leg?
Bob Cash: Yeah. And went in here and came out down there, and didn’t hit the bone. But anyway, I got up there and tried two or three more times and you know, you’re in a state of anxiety anyway when you’re burning up and you know you’re going out over the sea, so I just held that side, the left side of that, and I had my ripcord over here, and I rolled out, and I was going right straight down. I got out, and as I jerked that cord, all parachutes have a pilot chute that pulls the main chute out. Well, that thing came out first and cold-cocked me as I was going right straight down, and that addled me for a few minutes. This eye had been burned shut and this one I could just barely see out of but I could see. The last thing I saw was my group, or the flight was going off, and they were about ready to make their turn to the IP, and I thought, “What is a kid like you doing over here, in this circumstance?” Well, I talked to the Lord a few times, but I was falling at a pretty fast rate because I was hooked to one side of that parachute, and it didn’t have an opportunity to get all the air under it, since I was pulling it down on one side. And I was falling fast, and I couldn’t see much of anything at that time, and I was in and out of consciousness, but I came to at maybe two or three hundred feet, I don’t know, but I had a soft landing going into the water. And it was wet, too. I imagine it kept my clothes from burning.
Of course I didn’t have any shoes or anything; your shoes are the first thing that pops off of you. I knew, too, that we were trained, if you’re going down over water, undo the chest strap and the two leg straps of your harness and get away from the chute because once the chute gets in the water if you have any wave action at all, it’ll take you to the bottom. So I managed to undo both of my, I couldn’t lift this leg because I’d been shot in it. I did get out of this left hook and my chest hook before I hit the water. I’m just hanging in the chute with this one the only hook that was, I had to worry about, but I went into the water that way and they were right, it will take you to the bottom, because the minute it got into waves and everything it was taking me down, so I managed, the first thing I did was undo this right hook and pull my Mae West which I was wearing. And I always left about six inches of play in the crotch of that thing because you have so much stuff on that, but anyway, when I activated the Mae West it rose up like this, and when I got to the surface it was trying to drown me. I managed to control that and, I don’t know, I’ve had people ask me many times, “How long were you in the water?” Because the Baltic even in June is cold. I would guess that I was in there maybe 15 or 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, I don’t know. Hard to read your watch at that time in those conditions.
I knew that I needed help. I was bleeding like a stuck pig from this wound in my leg and losing a lot of blood, but thank the Lord, here came a launch. The German marines were out picking up some of their guys that we’d managed to nail, and they came alongside of me and threw me a rope, and so, my hands had been burned pretty badly, and I grabbed ahold of this rope naturally, and so they were screaming at me, I couldn’t tell what they were saying but they were telling me to hurry up because they needed to go pick up some more people. But I got aboard finally after, my hands just peeled off that rope ...
Aaron Elson: Because they were burned?
Bob Cash: Oh yeah. I didn’t have any gloves or anything on when I was trying to get out of that durn airplane. I got aboard and they had two guys in there. One was the pilot that was flying on our right wing, and he had taken a rocket between the No. 1 and the 2 engine, and his wing just snapped like a cracker. Well, his right wing came over and almost wiped us out. We were flying in the lead of the element of three, and he couldn’t, he tried to get out but he couldn’t get anything to work, and so he sat back in the seat and ... I guess just gave up ... but about that time the plane blew up, blew him right through the canopy, opened his chute, and he hit pretty close to me because he was already in the boat when I got aboard. Fifty years later I met him in Kentucky when we had a reunion. He was an educator, and his name was Goodrich. And he still lives. I hope to see him in St. Louis.
Aaron Elson: He was the only survivor of his plane?
Bob Cash: Yes. Yes he was. But they had also picked up another guy that, down to his shorts, and I imagine that he, the plane did blow up. I never did, I couldn’t visualize the plane, I never saw it blow up, but it undoubtedly, he was a waist gunner from our crew, and he, I guess he was blown out of the ship. His clothes were off, he was down to his shorts ...
Aaron Elson: They were burned off?
Bob Cash: Yeah. And they managed to get him and take him aboard and he was dead, and they asked me if I knew who that was and I said no, I didn’t, but I did know who he was because he was one of my waist gunners.
Aaron Elson: His name was?
Bob Cash: He was from Trotwood, Ohio. Bill Mendenhall was his name. And, fortunately, we were with these marines when we landed right up here, probably right in here (pointing to the map on the wall) is where we docked. There were people that were standing there ready to string us up.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Bob Cash: Oh yeah. And they had to fight ‘em off. And there happened to be a truck nearby that they threw us in the back of and took us off, and got us out of the civilians. And Mr. Goodrich was kind enough to help me in and out of the boat and into the lorry that was picking us up and taking us to try to find a hospital. We finally did find one after, this was 9:30 in the morning when we got hit, and it was midafternoon before they had a hospital that would take us in. And it was a Luftwaffe hospital, I didn’t know it at the time, but the little town of Greifswald here, and I was once again blessed. Mr. Goodrich and I were taken in there and they tore off the rest of my clothes and gave me some others, and started treating my burns. Goodrich went in another direction, I don’t know, he was still in the hospital, but we ended up both of us in a big bay there that several pilots were in that were prisoners. American fighter pilots were in there recovering, and they treated their Air Force, their Luftwaffe, with kid gloves, and they gave me the same respect, so I was double fortunate. And I was in there about six or eight hours. They tried to feed me something and I didn’t feel like eating, I was running a temperature, and they realized I had scarlet fever.
Aaron Elson: Scarlet fever?
Bob Cash: Hah. Which takes about two weeks to germinate. I can’t imagine where I got it because I was on the base the whole time. But anyway they hustled me out and got me in another ward where it was, you know, it’s highly contagious, and I spent the rest of the time in the scarlet fever ward and managed to get my leg healed up. I guess I was in there maybe three weeks, and during that interim the 8th Air Force was flying over every day to some target up there, probably Politz again, and they’d start scrambling around and sirens were going off, and a couple of little guys, older fellows, would come in there with a hammock type litter and put me on it and carry me down three flights of stairs to the basement. And these old boys were, I learned a little bit later, they’d been on the Russian front for a couple, three years, and they did that two or three times. Like I say, I spent, oh, three, four weeks in the hospital.
Aaron Elson: Even though your leg was healing you were not ambulatory?
Bob Cash: No, this leg wouldn’t allow me, I couldn’t walk on it. That went through that main muscle, and I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t move, I wasn’t ambulatory at all, so I was at their mercy.
Aaron Elson: Now when you say they had been on the Russian front ...
Bob Cash: Well, I found that out from a young guy that was a German fighter pilot who got shot down, and he was about my age and he’d been flying for two years.
Aaron Elson: So did you kind of bond with the German fighter pilot?
Bob Cash: Slightly. Slightly. He could speak English and I couldn’t speak German.
Aaron Elson: These ones who were like the ward boys, were they like shellshocked?
Bob Cash: No, I don’t think so, they were just survivors, because that was a bloody mess over there you know. Each side lost millions of men.
A couple of guards came up one day and my leg was healing up fairly well, and they came up and told the nurse that they were there to take me to the interrogation center. This is our marching path (pointing to map)
Aaron Elson: Why did you go in a circle?
Bob Cash: That’s what we wanted to know, because they told us after we, when they alerted us that we were going to do a little marching, the Russians were blazing in from this direction, but we, through the grapevine, we found out that that’s the reason that we were getting ready to go, and there were 10,000 men up here. Most of them were American crewmen who’d been shot down. They said to prepare ourselves for a 16-day march, and there wasn’t much preparing because we didn’t have anything except, they did open up the larder and handed out a lot of the things that we could carry with us. And of course every can of anything had had a bayonet stuck in it, and had been sitting there for several days. A lot of the guys that took a lot of that canned goods stuff got sicker than a dog a day or two after we had gotten on the march. But as it turned out we were 16 days doing this ...
Aaron Elson: Going in a circle ...
Bob Cash: And finally, the Russians were getting so close that we had made this circle and then we went up to Schweinemunde and got on a cattle boat and stayed close to the, they put us in the hold down there where the pigs and everything else had been, we weren’t too happy, but we came over into this area where we got off that thing and we were glad to get off of it because that’s where we started our death march, right there. We went in that direction. When those guards came to get me, we came from here and went through Berlin from the hospital. They’d given me some clothes because my clothes were burned off, and they gave me one of these fighter pilot’s clothes, with the green shirt and pants, and he must have been about this tall because ...
Aaron Elson: He came up to your chin ...
Bob Cash: Like that and they gave me his flight boots, I had no shoes, and they marched me through Berlin and I looked at the devastation there; they showed me all that good stuff, it was a real mess. And we got on the subway there and there were thousands of people down there, and I had this, they were looking, I knew I was looking pretty scroungy because they had shaved my head in order to let those burns heal, and it’s a wonder they didn’t put a shiv to me. And finally I looked down, and this little guy, this fighter pilot’s shirt had a big 8th Air Force patch on it. I quietly removed that, and got down to Wetzlar after we left Berlin, and Wetzlar is located right here, that’s where they did most of the interrogation. Then about three days in the hole there, solitary, and then they woke me up and they had about, I don’t know how many hundreds of people to interrogate there. But they told me everything that they wanted to know, and they keep asking me questions when I was there and the guy could speak better English than I. He had been educated in the States, and he asked me what I was doing. What was my position. I’d just keep answering him with my name, rank and number, and he finally barked some orders to one of the gefreiders, the privates, and he came back with a big book, he flipped over to the 492nd, and he had a full roster of everybody there. And he said “Well, I’ll just tell you if you’re not gonna tell me.” He said, “Did you know that your mess sergeant is on leave right now in London?” Of course my eyes kind of swelled up, and I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” Well, they knew I wasn’t gonna tell them anything so they kicked my ass out of there and got me back in a cell. And a day or two later they put us on a train and sent us down to, here’s the Rhine River, sent us down to St. Wendel and they had determined that would be Stalag VI. Well, they forgot that they already had a Stalag VI up here in Poland, close to Auschwitz, but they called this Stalag VI, and what the deal was at that time, they were just, this is very small and they had us, they were putting us everyplace, they had so many of us. If they had a giant barn they’d stick us there, or some building that hadn’t been leveled. They had enough troops to still patrol around on us, so we were staying in a big old barn type facility there, and we could hear tank fire. Old Blood and Guts was right over here, close by, and he had been stalled, they’d taken his gas from him and sent it up to ...
Aaron Elson: In September.
Bob Cash: Yeah, that’s when it was.
Aaron Elson: Yeah, they spent a month.
Bob Cash: I don’t have a date on that.
Aaron Elson: I do. They spent a month ...
Bob Cash: He was mad as hell because it went up to Monty.
Aaron Elson: “Montgomery that glory happy bastard.” That’s the way one of the tankers described him.
Bob Cash: That’s right.
Aaron Elson: They could have crossed the Moselle River and the fortresses at Metz were empty.
Bob Cash: Yeah.
Aaron Elson: And during that time they reinforced the forts and they had to fight their way across.
Bob Cash: That’s right, and that was a bloody mess too. I have a friend that went across there.
Aaron Elson: Was he in the 90th Division?
Bob Cash: I don’t know. He’s a lawyer in Oklahoma City, we took the Rhine River cruise with him, and he got out there where that bridge was and he was telling us all about it. But anyway, the Russians were making such good time over here on the East, and here was Patton over here and he didn’t take too many prisoners either, and they got nervous as hell with me settin’ right here, and they put me and about 200 other guys on ten 40-and-8 boxcars and shipped us out. The first night was in Frankfurt, which was a target of opportunity every day. They’d get out and lock, of course we were locked in, and they’d get out and hopefully the 8th would kill us all. And we made another stop at I think it was Saarbrucken, and that was another target that they liked to hit, they were building ball bearings and everything down in here, there were many targets that they liked to hit. And then, along the way, we came this way, and we stayed I think in Leipzig which was a hot one, I never did get that far over, but we spent the night in Berlin and the British liked to hit that at night. So we got to hear them come and go, and then this is down here, that’s the rest of the story. From Berlin on up to our camp up there. This is Berlin right here (pointing to map). Up here, close to Stargard, a P-47 came down and strafed the train, and it wasn’t marked in any way, and the engineer must have been a daredevil because they liked to start at the engine and sweep a train like that to the back, and they killed about 12 of our comrades there, and we were stacked up like cordwood in there when of course we have any strafing going on.
Aaron Elson: You would hit the ground?
Bob Cash: No, I hit the floor. We never got off the train in eight days.
Aaron Elson: I meant the floor.
Bob Cash: Yeah, that was about the toughest eight days I ever spent, because we never got off the train, and guys had dysentery. You couldn’t even sit down all at once. There wasn’t that much room. It was a pitiful sight.
Aaron Elson: How about food?
Bob Cash: Oh, there wasn’t any food. If we got a bucket of water, we were glad to get that. I guess maybe we got one food stop, and it was nothing but soup, but there wasn’t any food. Anyway, that was our train trip. And then on the 6th of February, 1945, we evacuated Stalag IV and started on our march.
My full interview with Bob Cash is included in my book “Prisoners of War: An Oral History,” along with 18 other full and partial interviews.
