80 years later, a North Dakota POW's story reflects the horror of one of WWII's darkest days

Oct. 14—VELVA, N.D. — Chelveston, England, 60 miles northwest of London, was cold and rainy at 7 a.m. on Oct. 14, 1943. But it wasn't the temperature outside that sent a chill up the spines of American airmen during their morning briefing.

It was news of what they were about to do. The 305th Bomb Group, made up of three squadrons of B-17s, would take off in just three hours for the Second Raid of Schweinfurt.

Hearts beat faster as the men heard that word — "Schweinfurt." They knew the name well. Factories in and around Schweinfurt accounted for a significant amount of German ball bearing production — ball bearings used in tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines and heavy artillery. Bombing those factories could cripple the Nazi war effort.

They didn't just know Schweinfurt for its factories, but for what had happened just two months earlier during the First Raid in Schweinfurt: 60 U.S. bombers were damaged or destroyed and more than 550 crewmen were killed, missing or wounded. Memories of that devastating day hung as heavy as the rain clouds surrounding them that autumn morning.

And they were about to try it again.

What kind of day did the men, including one young man from a small town in North Dakota, have in store? Their nerves wouldn't have settled if they knew the raid they'd undertake that day would prove even more devastating than the first.

Arthur Linrud was born in Velva, North Dakota, in 1920. When the fun-loving, handsome Linrud wasn't working on the farm, he was playing sports — just about all of them — at Velva High School.

By October 1942, he was drafted onto Uncle Sam's team. After months of training at Fort Snelling, he was certified as an engineer for the B-17 Flying Fortress. At 22, he was promoted to sergeant and sent to England in late August 1943 with the 364th squadron of the 305th Bomb Group. According to George Kuhl's book "Wrong Place, Wrong Time," it was a time of fierce air battles and high losses of American heavy bombers.

The losses came in part because of the B-17s' size and weight. With a crew of 10 men, 3,000 gallons of fuel and 6,000 pounds of bombs, it could only fly about 150 miles per hour and was slow to respond if an enemy fighter approached.

So, the B-17s were assigned escort planes. However, those escort planes often didn't have the fuel capacity to follow the bombers from England deep into enemy territory, so after a few miles they had to fly back and leave the Flying Fortress vulnerable to German gunfire.

Linrud picked up the story from here in a first-person story he wrote for The Forum in 1979.

"Almost immediately after our fighter escort left, enemy planes were seen in the distant sky, climbing for altitude and readying for the attack," he wrote.

From his position in the upper gun turret, the North Dakota farm boy started shooting into a sea of German planes.

"Unless a plane blew up in the gun sight view or smoked badly, a gunner never really knew if the plane was damaged or shot down. There wasn't time to watch. Smoke poured from an engine on a plane behind and to our right. It pulled away from the formation and was heading down in a dive, on fire and out of control. Whenever I turned the turret to fire at an enemy plane I could see the action everywhere."

Linrud's plane would be struck next.

"Suddenly our plane shook violently from the impact and explosion of a cannon shell or rocket as it smashed into the rear part of our No.2. engine, ripping a hole in the leading edge of the wing and leaving the engine a smoking mass of ruin."

Fortunately, Linrud recalled, at that point, no one was hurt and pilot Lt. Dennis McDarby was able to get the plane under control. But the damage was too severe.

"I felt a hand on my head. I looked up to hear McDarby say 'Bail out! The wing is going to break off soon.' I hung my feet out the door and sat on the edge. Glancing into the nose section I saw navigator William Martin and bombardier 2nd Lt. Harvey Manley ready to follow me out. With a quick departing wave I gripped the D-ring of my parachute and tumbled into space," Linrud wrote.

Linrud didn't know this would be the last time he'd ever see them. While they were just seconds behind him, Martin and Manley didn't make it out of the plane.

At first, floating in the sky in his parachute provided a welcome calm and quiet for the young airman compared to the chaos in the plane. But when Linrud hit the ground, things were about to get even worse.

He later wrote in The Forum, "After freeing myself of the parachute and getting to my feet, I heard a statement that was to be heard often for the next 18 months. Spoken by a German soldier with a pistol pointed at me and interpreted by a civilian, it was: 'For you, the war is over. You are now a German prisoner of war.'"

Linrud noticed four of his crewmembers were also taken captive but he wasn't sure what had happened to the others.

The prisoners were loaded in the back of a truck and taken away.

"Our supper was a thick red bean soup ladled into a tin basin with a chunk of bread. Even though it was the first food since breakfast I didn't have much of an appetite," he wrote in The Forum.

Linrud would eventually be taken to Stalag 17, just outside Krems, Austria. More than 4,000 airmen lived there in barracks made for 240. (Later, it provided the inspiration for the 1953 film "Stalag 17" starring William Holden.)

It was a life of deprivation and hardship. The men slept in burlap sacks filled with wood chips in barracks with no insulation. They had no toilets inside the barracks and a spigot for drinking water that was only available for one hour a day. In winter there was no heat and little food. Lice and poor living conditions led to a typhus epidemic that killed many men from other countries. The Americans were spared because they had been inoculated before being sent overseas.

Linrud said relief came from the Red Cross in the form of food and books. For Christmas, he received a boiled potato, a boiled beet and a piece of black bread.

Linrud called Stalag 17 home for 18 months until liberation came in April of 1945.

From Stalag 17, Linrud and the others probably ached to know what had happened to the other men in the squadron. They would later find out that half of the men on their plane didn't make it out alive. Many more in the 305th Bomb Group also perished.

Oct. 14 became known as "Black Thursday" — the day the Eighth Air Force lost air superiority to the German Luftwaffe in a continuous air battle that lasted more than three hours. Many refer to it as the greatest one-day air battle of WWII.

According to the National WWII Museum, "By the time the Americans returned home, they had lost 60 B-17s, another 17 were no longer airworthy, and an additional 121 received minor damage. That was only the material loss. The number of aircrew killed, wounded, or missing in action was more than 600, totaling almost 20 percent of the men sortied."

After the war, Linrud returned home to the farm in Velva where he married his high school classmate Adela Gliege in 1946.

The couple had four daughters: Lynette, Peggy, JoAnn and Donna.

In a recent interview, Peggy recalled that her father didn't speak much about his war experiences. However, it was obvious the books the Red Cross provided during his time as a POW had an impact.

"Growing up, that was one of his favorite activities. He loved reading, he loved history. And around our dinner table, we had conversations about history, and he wanted us to read newspapers, read magazines, be aware of what was going on in the world," she said.

He eventually became active in POW groups and attended reunions of others from the Schweinfurt raids. That led to presentations at schools around Minot.

"He would sometimes have a restless night of sleep after doing those speeches," Peggy recalled. "So that was the downside of telling his story and having to relive some of that again."

Arthur Linrud's experience during "Black Thursday" and in the POW camp might have languished in history had it not been for a twist of fate 4,000 miles away.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, Peggy says her mother (who was born to German immigrant parents in Max, North Dakota) had extended family in Canada and Germany who expressed interest in holding family reunions. They eventually held reunions in Berlin as well as Minnesota. (Peggy says her dad couldn't "reconcile himself to going back to Germany.")

In 2016, Peggy's distant German cousin Martina stumbled upon the name of Arthur Linrud when reading a newspaper story about Black Thursday. After some research and overseas phone calls, they connected the dots to realize he was a member of their family.

When another Gliege reunion was held in July 2018 in Germany, the four Linrud sisters traveled to the site where their father's plane went down.

They met Wim Slangen, who grew up in Eygelshoven, Netherlands. His great-uncle had witnessed the crash and seen the five American airmen parachute and land across the border in Finkenrath, Germany. He had always been curious about the day and sought to learn more.

Slangen gave the Linruds a tour of the crash sites of Eygelshoven and Finkenrath, and the American Netherlands Cemetery in Margraten, Holland, where three of the McDarby crew are buried. A fourth crew member's body was returned to the U.S. for burial in Kentucky.

"I was just in awe and sort of overwhelmed. It took me a little while just to process some of it. When you see those 8,000 graves, those white marble graves, it's just more than your heart can handle really. It was a lot," Peggy said.

Peggy and JoAnn became so interested in the Margraten cemetery over the past few years that they've helped Slangen find photos of American soldiers buried there, some men their father might have known. The photos were set to be placed on the grave markers for a 75th anniversary celebration of Dutch Liberation in May of 2020 before it was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. Peggy had hoped to attend the 2020 ceremony at Margraten and she says if they reschedule it she hopes to attend.

In the meantime, Arthur Linrud's four daughters want people to remember "Black Thursday" and the men who didn't come home.

Arthur Linrud died in 2012, but the story he told of surviving that day — and now the stories his daughters tell — might help create a lasting legacy for those who gave all.

"It was a day unlike anything they could have imagined," Peggy said. "There was fear that morning when they talked about the mission. The fear must have been so high, knowing what they were facing. But they soldiered through with courage and fortitude and did their best. They gave their lives for their country. They didn't look back. They were interested in ending the war and doing their part."