By Carol P. Bartold

Nov. 11, 2015:  "I either won or lost on the flip of a penny, depending on how you look at it," said Bronxville resident George Palmer, a World War II combat veteran.

The flip of that coin on September 1, 1944, decided who would fly the next mission, stated Palmer, a navigator in the 456th Bombardment Group, an air combat unit of the United States Army Air Force within the 746th Bombardment Squadron. "Our squadron's losses were so heavy," he said, "that either a bombardier or the navigator would go on missions and the other one would stay behind."

Palmer boarded a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber for that day's mission to strike oil fields in Hungary.

Palmer had arrived at the 456th's base in southern Italy in August of 1944. A senior in high school when the war began, he joined the Army Air Force in February of 1943 and took his basic military training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. He completed navigation school in San Marcos, Texas, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in April of 1944.

"We picked up our airplane on Long Island and flew overseas via the Azores and North Africa to southern Italy, where we were based," Palmer said. "We flew several combat missions in August."

On his September 1 mission, his tenth mission, the plane was shot down from the ground as it flew over Debrecen, Hungary. "Our aircraft was not on fire but its controls were disabled," Palmer said. All nine men on the plane's crew were captured. Palmer spent eight months as a prisoner of war in Germany.

"The first camp I was in," Palmer said, "had about 10,000 people." It was a prison camp for Air Force officers, he explained, saying many of the men in that camp had been shot down over Schweinfurt, Germany, during the October 1943 attacks on Nazi anti-friction and roller-bearing manufacturing plants. Palmer was in that camp for five months.

Palmer recalled that the second camp he was in, Stalag VII-A, housed approximately 100,000 Allied troops, soldiers of all ranks from many countries. He was a prisoner there for three months.

Palmer had his 21st birthday in a prison camp where the cook made him a birthday cake. "For flour he used ground-up crackers that came out of a Red Cross parcel," Palmer recalled. "To make it rise he used tooth powder, and then he frosted it with melted Hershey bars from a Red Cross parcel."

Although a 45 pound weight loss during his imprisonment left him too weak to play sports, Palmer said that he and his fellow prisoners walked around the compound many times each day for exercise. "I knew we would win the war," he said. "I was always positive about that and it was important to keep that in mind."

Palmer was liberated when the war ended in April of 1945. He stayed on active reserve through the Korean War and left the military in June of 1953. He studied at Harvard Business School on the GI Bill and graduated in June of 1954. After ten years as a securities analyst for a mutual fund in Boston, he and his family moved to Bronxville. Palmer has been a village resident for 51 years.

A member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Palmer is also active in the American Former Prisoners of War Group at the Bronx Veterans Administration. Last month he and his daughter attended the Last Hurrah, a reunion for the 456th Bombardment Group, in Omaha, Nebraska.

Pictured here:  George Palmer

Photo by A. Warner