Kim let me know about an article in the New York Times today, about a B17 (43-38150) pilot from New York City, who bombed the Nazis, outwitted the Soviets and invented the artificial Christmas tree... thanks Kim!

His crew was a motley collection of leftovers.  “We had five Catholics, two Jews, and a Mormon, too.”

 Mr. Spiegel said the only WASP was a ball-turret gunner who had gotten into trouble with the law in Chicago. “And a judge said, ‘You have two choices,’” he recalled. “‘You can go to jail or join the Army.’”

Mr. Spiegel has outlived all of his crew members but still holds their stories. His bombardier and first real friend in the service, Danny Shapiro, was later shot down on another plane and held as a prisoner of war for a year. Dale Tyler was the Mormon tail gunner from Utah who came from a family of 13. “Harold Bennett was my top turret gunner, from Massachusetts. Killed in a training accident on another plane. His chute never opened.”

They were assigned to the U.S. Eighth Air Force, and their base of operations would be in an English town called Eye, near the coast about 100 miles northeast of London.

He flew either 29 missions, or 35, depending on the source, but after a direct bombing of Berlin, and with one dead engine, and one taken out by flak, he couldn't return to England, against a headwind and through flak, so he landed in Poland, in a frozen potato field in the village of Reczyn. No one was injured, although the aircraft would never fly again.

http://www.americanairmuseum.com/aircraft/12156

The Americans were not prisoners, but they were not allowed to leave until Moscow approved — and they had no means to leave anyhow. Mr. Spiegel met the another crew, with a fiery Illinois officer named George Ruckman, whose plane had lost one engine to flak and had blown a tire in its landing.

The other pilot soon devised a wild escape plan. They would send a team to the Giddy, (43-38150)  70 miles away, and collect an engine and a spare tire and return. It would require stealth, courage and bribery.

Both American crews bartered with the Soviet soldiers. Several revolvers and a $10 fountain pen paid for the gasoline for their secret flight; a $75 wristwatch given to a Russian officer secured a Ford tractor to haul the second engine back. According to war records, with the $30 Mr. Ruckman had in his own wallet, he bribed Russian MPs to overlook the cutting down of two telephone poles needed as hoists.

Using salvaged tools left by the Nazis, the crews worked in plain sight of the other Russians, who seemed more concerned with random artillery fire and the possibility that German snipers were still in the area. The Americans feared too much attention, though, and Mr. Spiegel made sure to drink with the Russian officers in Torun, toasting Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, the day Mr. Ruckman had villagers hoist the plane in the potato field.

Early on St. Patrick’s Day, 1945, the Americans jumped into the jury-rigged plane and began to taxi along the frozen ground. A single Soviet guard waved frantically to stop. But the Russians never chased them as they cleared the field and lifted off. “Maybe they were relieved they didn’t have to feed us,” Mr. Spiegel offered.

After the war, he joined Pete Seeger's bunch, and remarried, a woman that had been stuck in the Japanese Internment Camps in Wyoming. He got a job as a machinist, and due to a fad product the company made, in the 1950s, he was given the management of a division of the company, and invented the artificial Christmas tree! 

By the mid-1970s, Mr. Spiegel’s company, American Tree and Wreath, was producing about 800,000 trees a year, one off the assembly line every four minutes. After expanding and starting his own artificial tree company, he finally sold that business and retired in 1993 as a multimillionaire.

Read the whole story at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/nyregion/bomber-pilot-christmas-trees.html  or if you read Polish, at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1747548692230127&type=3