Daniel Rubin: Shot down, survivor ever dutiful to crew

Bill Giambrone plants 75 little American flags around his apartment building every Memorial Day in the hope people will remember what he cannot forget.

Every time he walks through his front door in Norristown, past the photograph by the light switch, he's reminded of the most harrowing moment of his life - how lucky he was, how the others weren't.

The picture is of the Sparta/Wilkins crew. Giambrone is one of the 10 young men, all laughing at some now-forgotten joke. Except the pilot, James Sparta.

It was Sparta who had spoken up for his men after they blew off calisthenics one morning back in training. Those few minutes of shut-eye had nearly cost Giambrone his sergeant stripes.

Two or three weeks after Giambrone was discharged, in August 1945, he and his wife, Cecilia, drove to Flint, Mich., to pay a condolence call to his pilot's parents.

This is the story he told them of the Sparta/Wilkins crew's final flight:

"The Germans came at us at 12 o'clock," he begins, sitting at his living-room table, his wife of 66 years hanging on his words. "I saw them come right out of the clouds."

Their B-24 was the last heavy bomber in a formation flying 20,000 feet over Giurgiu, Romania. Their target was the marshaling yard where trains would be shipping oil to fuel the Nazi war machine.

The date was July 3, 1944. Giambrone was 23. He'd flown 21 missions. He was operating the bomber's radio and manning a gunner position in the waist of the plane.

"I heard a boom boom, and saw one of our propellers was on fire. I called to the pilot, but I couldn't get anybody. Then the tail started to wobble."

What saved Giambrone was a balky radio. At about 15,000 feet he'd been sitting in the tail when the pilot called for him to fidget with the switch, so Giambrone moved forward to figure out what was wrong.

When he was done, instead of squeezing back to the tail, he switched places with Bill Freiling, who'd joined up at 17 and palled around Italy with Giambrone like a kid brother.

So Giambrone was sitting four feet from the open camera hatch when the plane took on the fire and spun out of control.

"Your mind goes crazy at a time like that," he says. He grabbed a parachute from the wall, harnessed it to his chest, and grabbed the edge of the hatch for support as the bomber started bellying up.

"I poked my head out, and the wind took me right out."

Giambrone had never practiced a jump. But there he was, hurtling through the air, managing to avoid the hail of bullets exchanged between a German fighter and one of his escorts.

He pulled the chute, and it yanked him. Somewhere along the way, both his boots fell off, and he floated down toward the Romanian farmland, unharmed and unaware of the fates of the rest of his crew.

He didn't find out until a day later. He was a prisoner, held at a local police station. A German officer led him to the crash site.

What he saw there he sees to this day, especially at night when his dreams can be so disturbing that his arms flail.

A farmer handed him the dog tags from his eight dead friends, men he'd trained with and flown with for more than a year. His jailer let him scavenge another man's boots.

Weeks later, in a Romanian prisoner-of-war camp, Giambrone learned that one other crew member had survived, his friend George Morrison, the one who'd encouraged his buddies to sleep through calisthenics.

Morrison broke his ankle parachuting to safety, and was taken to a hospital before the Germans jailed him in the camp.

Back home in Norristown, Cecilia, who'd married her beau before his induction, knew something had happened, but wasn't sure what. She hadn't heard from him for weeks. One night she had a dream that when she went to visit her husband in South Dakota, his buddy met her at the train. Bill was in the hospital.

"He held up his hand. It was all black."

When she awoke, she marked the date on the calendar. It was July 3, 1944.

Bill and Cecilia Giambrone spent a lot of time on the road the summer he was discharged. After visiting his pilot's parents, the couple called on the family of the copilot, Howard Wilkins, in Delaware. They drove to Steubenville, Ohio, to see Bill Freiling's parents, unaware that both of them had died.

For a few years, Giambrone visited Morrison in Dayton, Ohio, where his fellow survivor made armatures for the auto industry. Morrison had trouble getting disability payments for his bum ankle - he had no way to prove he'd been wounded - so Giambrone sent him a newspaper article written after his discharge in which he mentioned Morrison's injury.

Morrison was so happy to get a larger government check that each Christmas he sent the Giambrones a two-pound box of chocolates.

Morrison's gone, too, now.

All that's left of the Sparta/Wilkins crew of the 515th Squadron of the 376th Heavy Bomb Group is Bill Giambrone, a retired barber, father of three, grandfather of seven, and great-grandfather of two, who each year at this time hammers little American flags into the ground in the hope that we slow down and remember what's been sacrificed to let them fly.