“Last seen with No. 3 engine on fire heading back into France with two enemy fighters following.” — from the War Department’s Missing Air Crew Report, Dec. 7, 1943. T his summer two friends, both veterans, began a remarkable project. Stewart Day of Bath and Chris Gutscher of Brunswick met several times in Day’s South Bath home to talk about Day’s experiences during World War II.

Gutscher and Day got to know one another through a mutual interest in local history and archaeology and had become friends over the last few years. Later this summer, Day and Gutscher were able to relive some of Day’s past by visiting some of the historic World War II aircraft that flew in to Mid-coast air shows, actually boarding a B-17 bomber like the one he served on.

Day, a wonderfully youthful, active and engaged 89-year-old, who is sparing and precise with his words, had rarely spoken about his experiences in the nearly 70 years since he served. Gutscher’s chance comment about Day’s Former POW license plate started the conversation going and as the breadth and significance of his war experiences became clear, Gutscher asked Day if he could make audio recordings of their conversations, as a kind of oral history for future generations.

Since Day had recently reread a collection of Civil War letters left by his great-grandfather and recognized their historical importance, he eventually donated them to the Maine State Museum. He then began to realize the value of his own recollections and agreed to make an audio record of them.

Day’s striking recollections are captured on Gutscher’s recordings, beginning with his enlisting and training at age 19. He details the day-to-day life of a tail gunner on the fabled B-17 Flying Fortress, setting out the procedures and dangers involved in completing 19 bombing missions over wartime Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa.

In terrifying detail he recounts being shot down over Biscay Bay, near the coast of Bordeaux in France, and finally he describes the deprivations and defiance of his year-and-a-half as a prisoner of war in, and eventual evacuation from, Stalag 17B.

In plain contrast to the instant communication of today’s social media era, it is satisfying to consider Day and Gutscher meeting throughout this past spring and summer to slowly, deliberately record Day’s memories of war’s life and death moments, and history lived or observed.

As a 19-year-old in 1942, Day sensed that he might be drafted into the Army. Rather than wait for that to happen, he joined a group of his South End friends who were taking the train to Portland to enlist in the Navy. But Day, having spent a yearand a-half in the tin shop at the Iron Works, had no intention of spending the war on a ship. When his friends rushed into the Navy recruiter, Day ducked into the office of the Army Air Force; and so began his career.

Day’s training took the relatively untraveled Bath native to Massachusetts, Florida, Utah, Washington state, Montana and Nebraska. He went through basic, gunnery, armament and flight training in quick succession and, as Day humbly says, he “came out of each training with more stripes.” After several months of training, he was a staff sergeant with the position of tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress, one of the largest, long-range bombers of the time.

Growing up with guns

Day had always been fascinated by guns and shooting. Growing up on his grandfather’s farm on Merrymeeting Bay in Brunswick, he had hunted everything from deer to ducks. For years as a member of his high school gun club and the Bath Gun Club, he had done target shooting, so this assignment as a B-17 tail gunner was a perfect fit.

He talks with obvious passion about the twin 50 mm machine guns on the bomber and how the tail guns worked and were fitted out.

Each phase of his service had its brushes with danger. After arrival at his base of operations, the newly constructed base at Great Ashfield in Suffolk, England, Day settled into an almost constant flying schedule, saying that “when I wasn’t flying I was sleeping.” His was the 385th Bomb Group, Crew 35, and the crew called their plane the Mary Pat.

During his very first mission, Day remembers that his position in the tail of the plane, with a limited, backward view, presented some alarming sights. Half-way through the mission he was shocked to see a four-foot section of wing fly by. He found out later that while in close formation, another plane had mistakenly tipped its wing into the propellers of an adjacent B-17.

What followed that first mission was six months of nearly continuous action over France, Belgium, Norway and Germany. During this time his childhood experience on Merrymeeting Bay paid off. He downed three attacking enemy fighters, by official count, and a fourth according to another member of the bomb group.

Some of Day’s experiences during this period include: running out of ammunition during a firefight, his flight suit catching fire, sudden and extreme drops of altitude, and being thrown around the aircraft during evasive moves. One close encounter with death was when the Mary Pat’s engine was hit by faulty ordnance that miraculously didn’t explode.

Deep into enemy territory

One of the most famous missions Day took part in was the massive and strategic Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission to cripple the Nazi aircraft industry by bombing a ball bearing works in Schweinfurt and the Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Regensburg. The targets of the mission, more than 500 miles into Germany, marked the farthest the Allies had penetrated into enemy territory and many bombers were lost during the mission.

Day’s career as a tail gunner came to an end when he was shot down over Biscay Bay off the coast of Bordeaux, France. Separated from the rest of the group because of engine trouble, Day’s plane was a relatively easy target for Nazi fighters. Two Messerschmitt 109 fighters came out of the sun and, as Day says, “the minute I turned my guns on ’em they fired.”

The bomber was riddled by machine gun fire, wounding several crew members and setting the bomber on fire. Day, himself hit by shrapnel, was still able to help put out the fires, ditch the bombs, deploy the life rafts, help free the pilot and co-pilot, and prepare the plane for ditching in the ocean.

Once in the life rafts, the crew immediately took rifle fire from snipers on the shore, killing the pilot. The gunfire forced them to bail back out into the water. Day speaks of the futility of his attempts to hang on to the severely wounded and to keep the riddled rafts afloat, while being shot at and doubtless suffering the effects of his own wound and hypothermia.

Rescue came in the form of a German search and rescue aircraft and at the price of capture. Unable to walk on his own, Day was carried to transport to an enemy hospital in Paris. Only three of the 10 crew members survived the ditching.

After his wound and hypothermia were treated in Paris, he was interrogated in Frankfurt and then loaded into the infamous cattle cars the Nazis used to transport prisoners. Day calls them “40 and 8s because they held eight horses and 40 men.”

He spent the next 19 months as a prisoner of war at Stalag 17B, in Krems, Austria. While describing his delousing on entry to the camp, Day remarks: “I thought sure they were gonna to put the poison gas to us, like we’d heard.”

Day suffered all the same death threats, deprivations, and abuses as the thousands of prisoners held there.

But at the same time Day and his comrades were able to find ways to defy their Nazi captors. Although no one ever successfully escaped from Stalag 17B, planning for escape and digging of tunnels was an ongoing job, and Day was charged by the barracks chief to secretly draw escape maps. In Stalag 17B Russian prisoners were especially targeted for abuse by their German captors. When on a nearly daily basis they executed Russian prisoners and unceremoniously buried them nearby, the GIs in Day’s barracks would always stand at attention, in defiance of German orders.

As it became obvious that the Allies were closing-in and the war in Europe was coming to an end, the Germans started evacuating the camps in Austria. On their forced march out of Stalag 17B, they met a couple hundred Hungarian Jews being driven out of the Mauthausen concentration camp by their SS guards.

Day says, “They were in bad shape, carrying each other down the road.” The GIs, who themselves had been malnourished, and abused for years, pitied these prisoners, and offered them what little food they had been able to forage, until the SS guards threatened them with machine guns.

Further down the road, Day’s group came upon a group of 26 dead and dying Jews lying on the side of the road — summarily shot just a short time earlier.

Day returned stateside where, more than two years after being hit, the shrapnel was finally surgically removed. He returned to Bath, reclaimed his job at the Iron Works, married Teresa and had two boys — Gary and Joe.

He was awarded the Purple Heart, Presidential Unit Citation, and the Air Medal. He and his wife lead active retired lives in Bath.

CHRIS GUTSCHER and Paul D’Alessandro are presently considering the options for making Stewart Day’s complete interview and photos available. Comments and inquiries should be addressed to stewartdayoralhistoryproject@gmail.com.