Maurice Braswell, a former judge who lives in Fayetteville, wrote a book about his experiences in World War II.
Posted on 11/09/2003 8:16:12 AM PST by snippy_about_it
A frightened World War II tail gunner jumps from his airplane as flames engulf it.
Maurice Braswell, a former judge who lives in Fayetteville, wrote a book about his experiences in World War II.
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He survives the fall into enemy territory, finds an Allied sympathizer and organizes an escape.
Instead of escaping, he is captured and thrown into a POW camp. There, he meets a European princess who becomes a lifelong friend.
Mark Walter Braswell could hardly believe the events he was reading about. "It read like a movie,'' he said.
The experiences were real, recorded in a book titled "Flaming Arrow: WWII as seen from a B-17'' by Edwin Maurice Braswell of Fayetteville. Mark's father.
After years of shutting out the war, at age 78 Edwin Braswell collected his painful memories for his children and grandchildren.
The book inspired his son, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and playwright, to create a musical chronicling the events. The show, called "Paying the Price,'' debuts Nov. 17 at the National Theater in Washington.
In my youth at age nineteen I volunteered for the United States Army Air Corps in World War II...I flew in combat as a Tail Gunner on a B-17 "Flying Fortress.'' I parachuted from a burning airplane. I spent two months behind barbed wire in a Romanian prisoner of war camp. I survived. I came back.
- from the first chapter of "Flaming Arrow.''
Edwin Maurice Braswell, now 80, still dislikes talking about World War II.
He never considered writing about his experiences, until his oldest son, Edwin, talked him into it.
"My children would get on me, and it was something I did for them and my grandchildren,'' Braswell said. "I wouldn't talk about it for years and years. It's still not easy. I wrote the book so I wouldn't have to talk about it, but it didn't work out that way.''
Braswell, a retired superior court judge, lives on a quiet street in Haymount with his wife, Ruth. Besides Mark, they have two other children, Edwin, a lawyer in Kinston, and Susan, who lives in South Carolina. Braswell and his wife have seven grandchildren.
He started the book early in 2001 as a record for them.
"I wrote a couple of pages, then I couldn't go back to it for months,'' he said. "I saw it up close. I'm happy my children can read about it and know the experiences that I went through. They can know something firsthand about war itself.''
Braswell self-published 25 copies of the 72-page book in November of 2001, just for family and friends, and later printed 15 more. He's now down to just one, which he lends out.
"People who were in the Air Force or in World War II and had similar experiences, it's meaningful to them,'' he said. "It really brings it back for them. It triggers their memories, and then they want to tell you their stories.''
Edwin Braswell's story started in Rocky Mount and took him all over the United States and Europe.
He was trained as a radio operator, but the Army thought Braswell's keen eyesight made him a good candidate for a flight crew. He cycled through numerous training stops, including Fort Bragg, before shipping out to Italy in February 1944.
He and his crew were based in Tortorella in southern Italy. They flew a B-17 bomber nicknamed the "Flaming Arrow.''
He was a tail gunner, kneeling in the rear of the plane manning a .50-caliber machine gun.
The crew members were quickly involved in aerial combat. They bombed railroad, oil field and factory targets in Austria, Romania, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia and other parts of eastern Europe while fighting through attacks by German fighter planes. Braswell saw B-17s and American fighters shot down while his own plane endured damage from deadly flak, shrapnel from airborne shells launched from the ground. On his first mission, he helped shoot down a German fighter.
For months, his life consisted of early-morning wake-up calls followed by harrowing bombing runs. Several of the crew were killed in action. On their 22nd mission, a bombing run over northern Italy, they ran into fierce resistance, engaging in a running air battle that lasted for 80 miles. He shot down a German fighter, then had to crawl into the belly of the plane to fix a malfunction. On the way home, a hit to one of the plane's engines forced a crash landing. The plane was destroyed, but the crew survived. Braswell was burned, bashed and bruised, but was soon up in the air again.
He was part of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, flying support bombing missions, and was injured in another mission. Although the missions frayed Braswell's nerves, he continued to fly.
July 9, 1944, started in the usual way. We had an early H-hour, and at 8:45 a.m. we had just crossed the Danube River and were headed to Ploesti, Romania, for a fifth time to bomb the oil fields. It is still painful to recall the events of that day.
Over the Ploesti oil fields, an engine on Braswell's plane burst into flames. Smoke flooded the cabin, and with the bay still filled with bombs, much of the crew decided to bail out. Braswell could not communicate with the pilot, and saw several crew members parachute toward the ground. He crawled through the interior of the plane, where he saw the radio operator preparing to jump and motioning for Braswell to follow.
He crawled back to his escape hatch in the rear of the plane, dangled his legs over 20,000 feet of empty air for a moment and jumped.
The plane eventually made it back to base. Another crew member, Tech. Sgt. Homer Wilkins, fought the fire and manually released the bombs. Wilkins won a Silver Star for his actions.
Braswell, having watched fellow soldiers die when their parachutes were hit by flaming debris, waited and waited to pull his ripcord. As he floated toward the ground the thought went through his head that the mountain terrain reminded him of Chimney Rock, North Carolina.
He landed in a tree before tumbling 30 feet to the ground. He landed on a log, which hit him square in the back. In incredible pain, he pulled himself off the log.
Almost immediately, a man approached, making friendly gestures. He was an Allied supporter. The man helped hide Braswell's parachute and went to get help.
The man never returned. Braswell, fearing capture, stumbled toward the Danube, where he planned to make his way to Yugoslavia.
Instead he met another Romanian, who gave him food and shelter in a cabin. They communicated through a phrase book, and hatched a plan to get Braswell to Yugoslavia. Still in intense pain and using a rough walking stick, Braswell set out with the Romanian. After three hours of walking, near midnight on the same day that he bailed out of a burning airplane, Braswell stumbled into a trap. He was surrounded by Romanian soldiers, who knocked the walking stick out of his hands and took him prisoner.
I thought they were about to kill me on the spot, until a lady came in who spoke French. With my two years of high school French, I learned enough from her to understand what was happening, and what they were going to do with me.
The Romanians took Braswell into custody, where they argued with a German officer over who would keep him. The Romanians won, and provided Braswell with food and medical care.
He was interrogated, beaten by some Romanian solders and taken by train to a POW camp in Bucharest. The camp was set up in an old school house, with a separate building for the injured.
Braswell found members of his crew, and even a friend from North Carolina. His captors forced him to carry heavy loads, until one sympathetic guard let him take rest breaks to ease his back.
The POWs spent months sleeping on boards and hay, eating dwindling supplies of bread, soup and rotten meat.
Visits by Princess Catherine, a member of the Romanian royal family, brightened Braswell's captivity. The princess advocated treating enemy prisoners fairly and humanely. She became internationally famous as the "Angel of Ploesti'' and a crusader against the Nazis. She left Romania during the Communist era. Braswell made contact with the princess after the war, and she visited Fayetteville several times throughout her life.
POW camp officials allowed Braswell to write postcards to his parents in North Carolina, although he was home by the time they arrived. He and his friends drew up elaborate escape plans, which became moot when Romania's King Michael announced in August 1994 that his country was joining the Allies.
Braswell and his fellow prisoners were free, but German forces immediately bombed the camp. He cringed in a foxhole while German bombs screamed overhead and buildings exploded around him. For years similar noises, such as an ambulance or police siren, gave Braswell the shakes.
He and other soldiers negotiated the chaos of Bucharest to a temporary camp. He again used his high school French to translate as best he could for several hundred American troops trying to get back home. After three days a fleet of B-17s arrived. Even that trip was stressful, as the men stood on trembling boards laid across the airplane's bomb bay.
Upon landing in Italy, Braswell took off his shoes and danced a barefoot jig on the airport tarmac. A photographer snapped a photo, which ended up in the pages of Newsweek and Collier magazines.
Braswell left the Army with an Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, a Purple Heart, a presidential citation and 11 campaign and battle Bronze stars.
"I don't consider war romantic,'' he said. "Other people, people who haven't been in war, consider it an extended adventure. But war is terrible. The consequences of it are terrible.''
"We did make it on to Rocky Mount successfully. The war was over"
After the war, Braswell attended law school at the University of North Carolina, moving to Fayetteville in 1950. He opened a law practice and eventually became an assistant district attorney, then district attorney. In 1962 he was elected to the Superior Court and then the North Carolina Court of Appeals. He retired in 2000.
Mark Braswell, who is 45, grew up in Fayetteville not knowing much about his father's experiences in WWII. He remembers Princess Catherine's visits, but never asked his father directly about the war.
"We knew bits and pieces,'' he said. "I was curious, but I didn't want to cause my father any discomfort. I didn't want to bring up bad memories.''
Mark was musically inclined from an early age, picking out songs on the piano with his sister and later learning from a teacher in the neighborhood.
He went to law school at Campbell University, where he would relieve stress by playing the piano, and is now a legislative counsel for the administrative office of U.S. Courts in Washington, D.C.
Since 1995 he has pursued a career in music as a sideline, writing several musicals.
After reading his father's book, he wrote a short play with one song, "Freedom,'' and presented it to a playwrights group he belongs to. They wanted more. Eventually he composed seven songs, including "Mother Dear,'' "The Princess Song'' and "Coming Home,'' and expanded the show to one hour.
"I wanted to blend songs in to add another dimension,'' he said. "Songs can be a very powerful way to tell a story. It helps strike a chord with people.''
The story follows Braswell entering the Army Air Corps and takes him through bombing runs, parachuting out of the plane, becoming a POW and getting back home.
"I had to treat it as if the play was about someone else and keep my distance a little bit, emotionally,'' he said. "I wanted to tell Dad's story, the facts of what he went through. The first time I saw it performed I had a flood of emotions when I realized, 'This is my dad.'''
Edwin Braswell did not attend the first performance of an early version of "Paying the Price,'' but he will be in the audience at the National Theatre. At least for a little while.
"If it gets too dramatic I might have to leave,'' Braswell said, laughing. "I'll need a seat near the exit. It's not embarrassment. It's the memories rolling over and over as I relive the experience. When you really go through combat, it works on you. You get over it outwardly, but the events still linger.''
Mark Braswell hopes to one day turn "Paying the Price'' into a touring production. For now he looks forward to his father seeing the work for the first time.
"I hope Dad is comfortable with it,'' he said. "I told him he lived it once, he doesn't have to sit through it again if it's too much. I am thrilled he wants to see it. If nothing else, just to have him in the theater and see how people react to his story. To see people come up to him and say, 'thank you' or 'you're amazing.' Having him feel people's appreciation.''
Staff writer Jim Washington can be reached at washingtonj@fayettevillenc.com or 323-4848, ext. 384.
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