RETURN TICKET  – My Diary as a POW Airman in WWII

by Carl R. Carlson

The author enlisted in the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor, and was soon in England as waist gunner on a B-17, on bombing runs over occupied France and German. On his 25th mission, his plane, “Return Ticket”, was shot down in France, and he spent the next year as a POW in German Stalags.

This is a story of hunger, misery, and homesickness, all of it recorded by Carlson inside cigarette package covers which he obtained from the Red Cross. For a farm boy from Central Texas, spending his 22nd birthday behind barbed wire was the worst experience of his life.

Their prison camp on the Baltic Sea was liberated by the Russians on May 1, 1945, but it was June 12 before Carlson boarded a ship at Le Havre and late July before he was released from a Norfolk hospital and headed home to Texas. His story is a telling description of what war is like, and a vivid story of the courage of young Americans who went to battle, endured, and survived.

6 x 9, paper, xvi, 140 ISBN 0-934955-45-X        

Order from author at:

caruranch@earthlink.net        

or 6 Clermont Court, San Antonio, TX 78218