World War II flier recalls bomber shot down, months as POW

  • Walter Kuchinos, 90, at his Wescosville home. Kuchinos was a flight engineer/gunner on a B-24 during World War II. He was shot down over France in June 1944.
Walter Kuchinos, 90, at his Wescosville home. Kuchinos was a flight engineer/gunner… (Harry Fisher, THE MORNING…)
May 26, 2013|Of The Morning Call

First of two parts

Walter Kuchinos was the second youngest of eight sons born to Ukrainian parents in Bath. His father worked at the Lehigh-Portland cement mill and died when Walter was 5.

Kuchinos graduated from Northampton High School in 1940, studied mechanical engineering at night and got a job as an auto body repairman at Lentz Motor Co. With World War II raging in 1942, he joined the Army Air Forces and became a flight engineer/gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber.

Staff Sgt. Kuchinos was 21 when he went on his first mission — over Normandy on June 6, 1944, to bomb German targets as part of the D-Day assault. Eight days later, he went on his third and last mission — to bomb a German airfield at Laon, France.

The 90-year-old Wescosville resident remembers what happened that day and some of his other experiences through the end of the war.

They took the Joker away from us and made the lead plane out of it. The Joker was the best plane. The guys always admired me because of the way I took care of it. So now we were flying 472, which was a joke to begin with. I said right away to the pilot that I didn't think it was fit to fly.

When we were taking off, we were hardly getting enough manifold pressure to skim over the housetops, but we did. I looked down right into the chimneys. We made it to our rendezvous and dropped our bombs.

Then hell broke loose. We got hit. Flak, evidently. The back end and the front end were wiggling and waggling. There was a big hole in the back, but we were not on fire. We were at 10 or 12 thousand feet and losing altitude real fast because we were losing gas, and some of the engines were whining.

I knew right then and there we were going to go down.

Probably what happened is we couldn't keep up with the squadron, because 472 was a lousy plane, so we got to be what they called tail-end Charlie and the Germans focus on your one plane. Everything happened so fast, and I was concerned about getting gas to the engines so we could get out of there.

I quickly went up to the top, like going up to the attic, the spot where the wings come together. You have to crawl there. The co-pilot was with me and we took whatever gas was in one of the tanks and transferred it over to the engines we could still keep going. I was up there long enough and realized the co-pilot had left me.

When I came down, I went to the pilot's compartment, and he was there and the other guy sitting down there was the radio operator, Don Miller. I could see the pilot was trying to get the plane stable. By that time, the guys in the back were gone. They'd bailed out.

I went to the nose gunner and said, "Get the hell out of here." He said to the pilot, "Kooch told me to jump out. Should I?" Pilot said, "Yeah."

The pilot was changing colors just like the automatic pilot — green, purple — and he said, "Bailllllll out!" I got Miller out and put my chute on — I'm lucky it was there because the wind could have sucked it out. I exited the plane at the first bomb bay door, just sat down and slipped out.

It was 12 to 1 o'clock, a cloudy day. Cold, too. The Germans were shooting up at me. I could hear the guns, and when the bullets went through my chute, they went pik, pik. I couldn't get down fast enough.

Miller was already on the ground. I could see the German trucks going for him, picking him up. He'd landed on land. Me, I'm looking down and it's water, oh my God!

I landed in a lake, couldn't touch bottom. My chute bloomed up and the wind took me like a surfboard through the water. I was facedown and the water was coming into my mouth and I was gagging. So the good Lord says turn over, and I turned over onto my back and could breathe again. The only thing that stopped me was a bank.

There was a young kid there, 12 or 13 years old. He picked up the chute with me still strapped in it, and I'm soaking wet. He took me to his house, and I saw two elderly people. They didn't say anything. They were just nice people who were going to give me food and hide me and get me to the underground and back to my troops.

The kid took me into a bedroom way in the back. I was just about ready to take my clothes off so I could get cleaned up and two Germans came in, side by side. They pointed rifles at me: "Komm!"

They'd probably threatened the kid, grabbed ahold of him and said, "Where is this guy? If you don't tell us, we're going to shoot your mother and father."

The Germans threw me in a truck. Miller was in there, and the pilot happened to be in the front seat.

They took us into a place — it looked like a big office building — and put me in solitary confinement for two weeks. They kicked the hell out of me and threw me in this dingy room with nothing more than a place to sit and a small pot.

They interviewed me twice, a nice officer, spoke better English than I did. The first time was name, rank and serial number, then they threw me back in solitary.

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