SSgt Lester Schrenk, U.S. Army Air Forces, WWII, POW

Veterans Chronicles

Lester Schrenk joined the U.S. Army Air Forces on his 19th birthday in November 1942. Even though he still sees perfectly today, he was told he could not become a pilot due to poor eyesight. So this Minnesota farm kid was assigned as a ball turret gunner on a B-17 bomber crew. At 5'11", he was much bigger than most men tasked with squeezing into that very tiny space. Roughly a year later, he was deployed to Europe.
In this edition of "Veterans Chronicles," Schrenk tells us what the missions were like for a ball turret gunner and he describes a harrowing mission in which his damaged bomber barely made it back to England but not all the way back to base.
Then he shares the story of his bomber being badly damaged over Denmark in February 1944, bailing out and being immediately captured. He describes the very intense interrogation he endured from the Germans and life inside a prison camp in Lithuania
He tells us how the Germans forced him and other prisoners on an 86-day death march as Soviet forces closed in on the prison from the east.
Finally, Schrenk explains his diligent search to find the German pilot who crippled his plane and find out why his crippled bomber wasn't blown out of the sky before the men had a chance to get out. Decades later, he found the pilot and got his answer.